Talos counted silently, bracing when a single second remained. The pod’s guidance thrusters kicked into life with a jolt almost as bad as the impact that came a moment later. The pod smashed into its target with hull-breaching force, echoing within the pod itself like a dragon’s roar.
A rune flickered on his retinal display in twisting Nostraman script, and in the shuddering aftermath of impact, Talos hammered a fist onto his throne’s release pad. The restraints unlocked and disengaged, and the four Astartes of First Claw moved from their seats without hesitation, weapons clutched in dark fists.
The pod’s hatch opened with a grind of tortured metal and a hiss of escaping air pressure. Talos spoke into the vox, his voice smooth and assured as he looked out into a steel-decked arching corridor: his first view of the interior of the Sword of the God-Emperor.
“Covenant, this is First Claw. We are in.”
V
SWORD OF THE GOD-EMPEROR
“Poison will breach any armour.
When faced with an invincible foe, simply bless his bloodstream with venom.
His own racing heart will carry the poison faster throughout his body.
Fear is a venom just as potent.
Remember that. Fear is a poison to break any foe!”
—The war-sage Malcharion
Excerpted from his work, The Tenebrous Path
Lieutenant Cerlin Vith listened in on the vox-net, from his position on the bridge.
Orders had come from the highest authority: repel the boarding party currently rampaging through the operations decks below the bridge. Cerlin knew there were other boarding parties moving elsewhere across the ship, but they would be handled by other squads of armsmen. Vith had his orders, and he intended to see them through. His men guarded the bridge, and he had a host of reinforcements on the way.
He wasn’t worried. The Sword of the God-Emperor, his home for the past twenty years, was as grand a ship as any in His Majesty’s Holy Fleet. Over 25,000 crew called the warship home, even though a sizeable chunk of those were slave labourers and servitor wretches working their lives away in the sweathouse enginarium decks. You didn’t board a vessel this big.
At least, Vith amended, not if you intended to survive.
It was true enough that the Sword wasn’t in front-line service, anymore. Equally true, the glorious ship had been sidelined from the major battlefleets, but she still stood as the invincible jewel in the crown of Battlefleet Crythe. It was a sign of the times, that was all. The Avenger-class was a brawler, a close-range battler, designed to rage into a maelstrom of enemy ships and give out a beating twice as bad as any it took. It had the firepower to do it, but fell out of favour with admirals over time, when such blunt tactics were frowned upon by an increasingly defensive Imperium.
This is what Cerlin told himself. This is what he believed, because the officers said it so many times.
Cerlin’s beloved Sword wasn’t out of the running forever. She was just out of fashion. He’d told himself this time and time again, because although he was just a soldier in service to the Golden Throne, he took great pride to be serving where he was. Above all, Lieutenant Cerlin Vith ached for front-line service once more. He burned to gaze out of a porthole and see the blackish bruise of distorted warp space that made up the Great Eye—the nexus of the Archenemy’s influence.
So he wasn’t worried now. The Sword of the God-Emperor was unbreakable, undefeatable. The shaking of the ship was the endless vibration of its own guns unleashing hell upon the accursed Archenemy. When the shields had fallen a short while ago, they’d been raised again within a single minute. And even if they fell again, the hull wreathing them all in protective, loyal armour was as strong as a righteous man’s faith.
Nothing but nothing would ever kill the Sword.
He repeated these words within his mind, not a trace of desperation in his silent voice. The fact they’d been boarded was… Well, it was madness. What sane enemy would ever attempt such a thing? He literally couldn’t conceive of the tactics at play? What fool of a commander wasted the lives of his men by hurling a handful of them into a ship that boasted over twenty thousand souls ready to defend it?
It was time to teach the first boarding party the error of their ways.
Apparently their vessel had pulled some nice stunts to get them here, if the vox-talk from the strategium was anything to go by.
Well, whatever the truth, they’d managed to come aboard a ship that hadn’t seen invaders in over a dozen years, so maybe the admiral—blessings upon his name—was right. Maybe this was serious.
But Cerlin had a reputation for dealing with serious business. That was why more often than not, he was the one that saw duty defending the command decks.
Vith led the decorated platoon known as Helios Nine, with a record of distinction and superior marksmanship that wouldn’t have shamed an Imperial Guard sniper. He handpicked the men and women of Helios Nine, turning down promotion twice in the last ten years because he didn’t want to be raised above the station he felt best suited him. Commanding a dozen armsman squads would mean he had a lot of mediocrity in with his finest soldiers. Commanding Helios Nine meant he commanded nothing but the best of the best.
Helios Nine even dressed like they meant business. On the occasions they were tasked to descend into the depths of the Sword’s belly and bring some order to the criminals and scum labouring beneath the civilised decks, their sleek, dark carapace armour with its flaring sun symbol on the chestplate was a sign for every slave and serf to look busy and keep to the rules. Helios Nine—the “Sunbursts” and the “Niners” to the conscripted slave colonies in the ship’s bowels—were well-known for their ruthless demeanour. A famous predilection for a merciless eagerness formed the core of their reputation, brought about from many instances of executing slaves that dared hint at disobedience or dereliction of duty.
Helios Nine numbered fifty men and women, spread across the command decks, squad by squad. Forty-nine of Vith’s favourite killers standing ready for the enemy, and Vith himself with the lead squad, backing the admiral’s throne.
Every member of Helios Nine packed a shotcannon for maximum short-range damage without risking the ship’s hull. He didn’t need to look around to know his men were ready. They were born ready and had trained to be readier every day since. Nothing would take them down.
Lieutenant Cerlin Vith believed this without a doubt until the first reports came in over the vox. “…bolters…” one of the crackled cries had said. He’d swallowed, then. Bolters. That wasn’t good.
More reports crackled in his ears, flooding in now from armsmen squads elsewhere on the ship. The transmissions were broken and patchy, distorted by the running battles as well as the war raging outside the ship. But he was hearing more words he didn’t like, more words he didn’t want to hear.
“…require heavier weapons to…”
“…falling back…”
“…Throne of the Emperor! We’re…”
As he stood in the centre of the low-ceilinged chamber of the main bridge, Cerlin tapped the micro-bead vox pearl in his ear, adjusting the needle mic to the edge of his lips.
“This is Vith. Enginarium teams?”
“Affirmative, lieutenant,” the response from the squads defending the ship’s plasma drives crackled in his ear. The teams guarding the enginarium chambers were, if memory served, the Lesser Gods, the Death Jesters, the Lucky Fifty and the Deadeyes. Vith had no idea which officer he was talking to—the vox wasn’t clear enough—but they were all solid, dependable squads. Not Helios Nine standards, by any means, but good enough in a scrap. The reception was punctuated by violent shrieks of distortion that prodded at Cerlin’s hangover with cruel fingers.
“I’m getting vox chatter about bolters and all kinds of death breaking loose,” he said.
“Affirmative, lieut…” the voice repeated. “Be advised that boarders are…”
“Are what? That the boarders are what?”
“Command team? Enginarium defence command team, this is Vith, repeat.”
“…th… es…”
Wonderful. Just wonderful.
It was easy to immerse himself in his own world, removed from the larger battle. The bridge was a chaotic hive of activity: naval officers shouting and moving from console to console as they devoted their attention to the war raging outside the ship. Servitors chattered and droned as they obeyed the orders called at them. Almost a hundred crew, human and lobotomised slave alike, working to keep the Sword unleashing its full lethal potential against the enemies of the Golden Throne.
With a moment’s effort, Vith blanked it all out. His world was restricted to snippets of incoming vox chatter, and the immediate area around Lord Admiral Arventaur’s throne. Raised on a platform to look down upon the bridge below, the throne accommodated the admiral’s slender, jacketed form with apparent comfort despite the arching backrest made from the curving ribs of some strange xenos creature. Admiral Valiance Arventaur reclined in his bone throne, his temples thick with cables and wiring that bound him to the chair, and in turn, to the ship’s systems.
Vith knew the admiral—eyes closed and seemingly lost in meditation—was allowing his consciousness to swim within the ship’s machine-spirit. He knew the admiral felt the hull like his own skin, and the racing efforts of the crew within the steel halls like the blood that beat through his own body.
And again, Vith cared little for it. Keeping the old man alive was all that mattered. The admiral had a war to fight, and it looked like Vith did, too.
The thunder of the ship taking hits was still audible, but the hull itself was stable for the moment. Several of the armsmen shared glances.
“Sir,” one of the ones closest to the front of the column said to Cerlin: “I know that sound. I served on the Decimus, and we did several boarding actions with the Astartes. The Marines Errant Chapter, sir.”
Cerlin didn’t turn. His gaze remained fixed on the sealed and locked double doors in the starboard side of the chamber. The thunder was coming from there, and he knew the sound, too. It had taken a moment to recognise, because he’d never expected to hear it on board his own ship.
There was no mistaking the distinctive boom of bolt weapons.
They’d been boarded by Astartes. Traitor Astartes.
Finally, confirmation of the enemy was coming from all angles. Naval ratings relayed to each other that the enemy ship diving past them was a confirmed Astartes vessel, excommunicated for heresy, registering as the Covenant of Blood.
This was really information that would have been more use to Vith before he’d been comfortable on the command deck with only fifty men.
“Helios Nine,” he voxed to the soldiers scattered across the outer ring of the chamber. “Enemy nearing the starboard doors. Show no mercy.”
He spared a glance at the lord admiral, seeing the old man sweating, teeth clenched, eyes closed as if in the grip of some strenuous nightmare.
The starboard doors exploding inwards stole his attention right back to where it should have been.
When they had first come aboard, Talos had disembarked from the twisted wreckage of the hull where the pod had impacted, Aurum in one hand, Anathema gripped in the other. Despite ten minutes of infrequent fighting since then, he’d barely fired his bolter once. The same with Cyrion or Xarl. The squad was conserving its ammunition for when it really counted—once they reached the bridge.
Their pod had struck the enemy ship in the densely-populated upper gunnery decks, and the resulting slaughter was a time-consuming annoyance that had grated on all their nerves.
Except Uzas. Uzas had loved every moment of ploughing through the terrified crew as they put up what defences they could with tools and personal sidearms. The bark of his bolter was like a hammering in Talos’ head, unwelcome and aggravating.
At one point Talos had slammed his brother against the arching wall of one passageway. Under fire from a retreating rabble of gunners ahead, he had thudded Uzas’ helm against the metal wall and snarled through his speaker grille.
“You are wasting ammunition. Control yourself.”
Uzas writhed out of his brother’s grip. “Prey.”
“They are unworthy prey. Use your blades. Focus.”
“Prey. They are all prey.”
Talos’ fist cannoned into the other Night Lord’s face, denting his helm’s faceplate. It slammed his head back into the wall a second time, louder than gunfire. From the cluster of mortal crew at the end of the passageway, a solid round clanged from Talos’ shoulder guard. He ignored it, blinking to clear his visor display of the flashing warning runes.
“Control yourself, or I will end you here and now.”
“Yes,” Uzas had finally said. “Yes. Control.” He reached for his fallen bolter. Talos could see the reluctance in his brother’s movements as Uzas clamped the weapon to his thigh plate and drew a chainsword.
His restraint had not lasted long. As the squad came to another chamber that housed one of the grand cruiser’s weapon turrets, he’d opened fire on the servitors that hadn’t received orders to flee when the human crew had run moments before.
Talos led on, no longer caring if Uzas fell behind. Let him gorge on his need to instil terror. Let him waste his efforts on mindless servitors, just for the hope of seeing a flicker of fear in their eyes before the end.
They moved with speed, slaughtering the ill-equipped crew that were foolish enough to stand before them. Most lacked the courage to remain, or had the good sense to flee, but not all of the mortals ran.
Sergeant Undine of the armsmen squad Final Warning stood his ground, as did a total of seven of his men, their shotcannons firing a barrage down a narrow corridor at the advancing Astartes.
Talos’ slanted eye lenses flickered with dull threat warnings, and his helmet’s sensor muted the sound of their ammunition striking his war-plate to the sound of hailstones clattering to the ground. Undine’s courageous last stand, and that of the valiant members of Final Warning, ended several seconds later when Talos waded through them, swinging Aurum with several annoyed curses. These delays were getting on his nerves, and while shotcannons offered little threat to his armour’s integrity, this kind of massed fire might strike a vulnerable joint or socket, and slow him further.
And not all those who failed to flee offered any real resistance. Dozens of mortals stood in paralysed awe, locked in terror, as giants from mankind’s nightmares strode past them. They stood open-mouthed, muttering nonsensical benedictions and pointless prayers at the sight of Traitor Astartes in the flesh.
Talos, Cyrion and Xarl ignored these. As they moved on, the sound of a chainblade told them that Uzas was apparently not content to let the fear-struck wretches live.
Finally, Talos thought as he rounded yet another corner.
“The bridge is beyond these doors,” Xarl said, nodding at the sealed portal ahead. At the end of the wide thoroughfare corridor, the double doors stood closed and grim. Uzas pounded a fist against them, just once, resulting in nothing more than a small dent and the clang of ceramite against adamantium—a rock meeting an anvil.
“Prey,” Uzas said. The others heard his voice thick with saliva. He was drooling into his helm. “Prey.”
“Be silent, freak,” said Xarl. The others ignored Uzas as he started to claw at the locked bulkhead like a caged animal needing release.
“These won’t blow,” Cyrion said. “Much too thick.”
“Chainblades, then.” Xarl was already revving his up.
“Too slow.” Talos shook his head and hefted Aurum. “This has already taken too long,” he said as he advanced with his stolen power sword.
Helios Nine was ready when the Night Lords hit them.
Under Vith’s orders, they’d taken up positions around the bridge chamber. The sheer number of adjacent passages offered a wealth of cover and corners to shoot around. The bridge crew were too rapt in the orbit
al war. They had their duties to attend to, and although nervous glances were cast at the starboard door, every officer present needed his attention on the void battle, which kept them hunched over consoles and staring up at the wide vista offered by the occulus screen.
No one, least of all Helios Nine, had expected the reinforced doors to give way so easily. Over a metre thick, metal layered upon metal, the doors had stood unbroken since the ship’s construction almost two thousand years ago.
Vith cursed as the explosion sounded. The Traitor Astartes had cut their way deep into the doors in order to lay explosives at the point where conventional detonators could actually sunder the command deck bulkheads.
Throne of the Emperor, where were his reinforcements?
“Helios Nine!” he shouted over the vox, without any idea if they could even hear him over the echoing thunder. “Repel boarders!”
Unseen by Vith and any of the armsmen, the old admiral’s eyes opened. Bloodshot, intensely blue, and narrowed in rage.
The explosion, and the clutch of blind grenades that followed, was the signifying event that pulled the mighty Sword of the God-Emperor out of the close-pitched void war.
In many of the records that would come to be written on the Crythe War, the Avenger-class grand cruiser remained a powerful force in the Imperium’s defence until its eventual destruction. Admittedly, the storming of its bridge was the blow that crippled the ship, leaving it robbed of some of its former effectiveness, but it continued to fight with all honour.
History can be a humorous thing indeed, when written by the losers.
Curiously absent from Imperial records documenting the battle was that the Sword spent its final half hour of life in relative indignity, robbed of its glorious fury and its expected honourable last stand. Instead it unleashed its reduced rage, directionless and limping, while it was systematically torn apart by the Warmaster’s cruisers—among them, the Covenant of Blood, which was not shy about opening fire on a vessel even while its own Astartes were on board. A swift and decisive victory demanded no less, and Astartes engaged in boarding actions were trained to withdraw immediately upon completing their objectives.
[Night Lords 01] - Soul Hunter Page 8
