Battle for the Abyss

by Ben Counter

  High above the sprawling bridge was a decked clerestory where the astropathic choir of the mighty warship were slaved. The vaulted space was shared by the Navigator’s sanctum, concealed in an antechamber so as to be secluded whilst traversing the perils of the warp.

  The command throne, raised upon a hard-edged pentagonal dais, was the seat of a god.

  Zadkiel was that god, looking down upon a city devoted to him.

  ‘Listen,’ Zadkiel bade those kneeling before him in supplication. The dulcet roar of the Furious Abyss’s plasma engines, even dulled by the thick adamantium plating surrounding the ship’s hull and interior, was like a war cry.

  ‘Listen and hear the sound of the future…’ Zadkiel was on his feet, sermonising, ‘…the sound of fate!’

  Three warriors, true devotees of the Word, heeded Zadkiel’s rhetoric and stood.

  ‘We pledge our service to you, Lord Zadkiel,’ said the tallest of the three. He had a voice like crushed gravel and one of his eyes was blood-red, surrounded by a snarl of scar tissue. Even without the injury, his granite slab of a face would have made him a figure of fear even among his fellow Word Bearers. This was Baelanos, assault-captain and Zadkiel’s private terror weapon. A potent warrior, Baelanos lacked imagination, which made him the perfect follower in Zadkiel’s eyes. He was obedient, deadly and fiercely loyal, all fine qualities in an underling.

  ‘As do we all,’ Ikthalon interjected blithely. Another Astartes, Ikthalon was a company chaplain, demagogue and expert torturer. Unlike Baelanos, he wore his helmet in the presence of his commander, a skull-faced piece of armour with a pair of discreet horns on either side of the temple. Even through it, Ikthalon’s thinly veiled contempt was obvious. ‘Perhaps we should address the matters at hand, brother,’ he counselled, lingering sarcastically on the last word.

  Zadkiel sat back down in the command throne. It was sculpted to accept his armoured frame, as if he had been born to take command of this bridge, to be the god of this warship.

  ‘Then let us tarry no further,’ he said, his viperous gaze lingering on Ikthalon.

  ‘Sensorium reports that the Fist of Macragge was destroyed and all weapon’s systems tested successfully, sire.’ It was Reskiel who spoke. He was a youth compared to the other Astartes on the command dais, gaunt of face with a keening hunger in his black eyes, a strange quirk of his birth. Reskiel was a veteran of many battles, despite his age, and he wore the newly fashioned studded armour of his Legion proudly, keen to baptise it with the scars of war. He was widely regarded as Zadkiel’s second, if not in an official capacity – that honour fell to Baelanos – and made it his business to know all the happenings aboard the Furious Abyss and report them to his master. Where Baelanos was the dutiful lap-dog, Reskiel was the eager sycophant.

  ‘It was as expected.’ Zadkiel’s response was terse.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Ikthalon, ‘but our astropaths also suggest that the stricken ship, though smitten by our righteous fury, managed to send out a distress call. I would not like to think that all our caution at commissioning the vessel’s construction in the Jovian shipyards has been undone so swiftly and needlessly.’

  Zadkiel allowed a flutter of emotion to cross his features for a moment at the news. He considered drawing his power mace and staving in Ikthalon’s skull for his persistent insubordination, but in truth, he valued the chaplain’s council and his Word. Though he was a barb in Zadkiel’s side, even since the Great Crusade had been in its infancy, he did not couch expressions with sycophantic frippery as Reskiel was prone too, nor was he so singled-minded that he was unable to convey subtlety and the need for delicacy when required like Baelanos. Zadkiel did not trust him, but he trusted his Word and so he was tolerated.

  ‘It is possible that a message reached a way station, or some isolated listening spire at the edge of the segmentum, but we are well underway and there is little that any vessel can do to prevent our destiny. So it is written,’ Zadkiel said at last.

  ‘So it is written,’ the assembled commanders intoned.

  ‘Reskiel, you will maintain a close watch on the sensorium. If anything should stray into surveyor range, I want to know immediately,’ Zadkiel ordered.

  ‘It will be done, my lord.’ Reskiel bowed obsequiously and retreated from the dais.

  ‘Baelanos, Ikthalon, you have your own duties to attend to,’ Zadkiel added, dismissively, not waiting to watch them depart as he turned to regard the viewscreens before him.

  ‘Engines,’ said Zadkiel, and at once the central viewscreen blinked into life, the bridge lights dimmed and the image on the screen lit the miniature city in hard moonlight. It showed the Furious Abyss’s cavernous engine room, the prostrate cylinders of the plasma reactors dwarfing the crewmen who scrabbled around them in their routine duties. The crew wore the deep crimson of the Word Bearers; they were servants of Lorgar just as the Word Bearers were, devoted to the primarch’s Word and grateful for such a certain place in the universe.

  They did not know the details of the Word, of course. They were ignorant of the web of allegiances and oaths that Lorgar had created among his brother primarchs, or of the mission that would seal the inevitability of the Word Bearers’ victory. They did not need to know. It was enough for them that they laboured under the wishes of their primarch.

  Amongst the piteous menials, a tall figure stood out. Looming from the darkness, he was swathed in black robes and bore the cog symbol of the Mechanicum around his neck on a chain of bolts.

  ‘Magos Gureod, you are to keep us at a steady speed, but be ready to increase our plasma engines to maximum capacity.’

  ‘It will be done,’ the magos replied, his artificial voice relayed through a series of synthesisers. Gureod’s face was hidden by the massive cowl over his head, but a pair of blinking red diodes was vaguely discernible in the void where his eyes should have been. Odd protrusions in the sweep of his long robes suggested further augmetics, and his withered hands, crossed over his abdomen, offered the only clue that Magos Gureod was indeed human. At the order, he withdrew into the shadows again, doubtless heading for the sanctum and deep communion with the machine spirit.

  Turning to another screen, Zadkiel uttered, ‘Ordnance.’

  The crowded munitions deck was displayed there. Weapon Master Malforian was in residence, barking harsh commands to crews of sweating orderlies and gang ratings, toiling in the steam-filled half dark of the cluttered deck. Full racks of torpedoes stood gleaming, fresh from the Martian forges. The ordnance deck stretched across the breadth of the Furious Abyss beneath the prow, and like the rest of the ship it was wrought in a bare industrial style that had an elegance of its own.

  Realising he was being summoned, Malforian attended to his captain at once.

  ‘Keep broadsides primed and at ready status, Master Malforian,’ Zadkiel instructed him. ‘The test against the Fist of Macragge was to your satisfaction, yes?’

  ‘Yes, my lord. Your will shall be done.’ The lower portion of the weapon master’s face was supplanted by a metal grille and he spoke in a tinny monotone as a result; most of his jaw and chin had been destroyed during the early years of the Great Crusade while he was aboard the Galthalamor, fighting the ork hordes of the Eastern Fringe. The vessel, an ancient Retribution-class battle cruiser, was all but annihilated in the conflict.

  Zadkiel dismissed the weapons master and blanked the pict screens. Coding a sequence into his command throne, Zadkiel felt the hydraulic pistons at work in the dais as he was slowly, majestically, raised above the bridge and brought level with the massive viewport overlooking the vessel’s prow. The endless expanse of real space stretched beyond it. Somewhere within that curtain of stars was Macragge, home world of Guilliman’s Legion. It was the stage of his destiny.

  ‘Navigator Esthemya,’ said Zadkiel, staring into the infinite.

  ‘My lord,’ a female voice chimed through the vox set into the command throne.

  ‘Take us to Macragge.’

  ‘Vec
tors are locked, captain,’ Esthemya informed him from the secluded cocoon in the clerestory, a hard-edged blister that was surrounded by spines of data medium like the spires of a cathedral.

  Zadkiel nodded, turning to face the viewscreen in front of him as the Navigator went to her duties.

  The infinite gaped before him, and Zadkiel was acutely aware of the power that lay beyond the veil of real space and the pacts he had made to harness its limitless strength. Before the countenance of his enemies, aboard this mighty vessel, he would be god-like. There was no other ship in existence that could do what the Furious Abyss was destined to do. It alone had the power to achieve the mission that Kor Phaeron had charged them with. Only the Furious Abyss could get close enough, could endure the awesome defences of Macragge to unleash its deadly payload.

  Icons in his command throne lit up with the acquisition of their new heading, bathing Zadkiel in an aura of his own personal heaven.

  ‘Like a god,’ he whispered.

  EVERY EMERGENCY KLAXON had gone off at once in the control hub of Coralis Dock at Vangelis space port. Cestus could barely hear the thoughts in his head. Light flickered sporadically from the warning readouts on every command surface, casting the darkened control hub like some monochromatic animation. The astropathic choir bucked and kicked, and spat blood beneath the psy-skin in a collective seizure.

  ‘Station captain, report,’ bellowed Cestus.

  Falkman was reeling, trying to tear the cables from his skull as they pumped a screaming torrent of information into his mind.

  Brynngar went to the side of the human at once, preventing Falkman from ripping out more cables, determined that the station master would do his duty.

  ‘The hub reactor is overloading,’ the station captain snarled through gritted teeth, trying desperately to hold on. ‘The psychic jolt must have started a chain reaction in our electrical systems. The reactor must be shut down or it will destabilise.’

  Cestus’s face, lit up intermittently in readout flares and the bursts of warning strobes, held a question.

  ‘The resulting explosion will vapourise the station, this dock and all of us.’

  The Ultramarine captain turned to the assembled Astartes in the control hub.

  ‘Saphrax, stay here and maintain control over the situation,’ he ordered with a meaningful glance at Falkman. ‘Try to salvage whatever you’re able to from the astropathic choir.’

  ‘But my captain—’

  ‘Do it!’ Cestus would not be argued with, even with a battle-brother so seldom disposed to querying orders as Saphrax. ‘Whatever was in that message was important; I can feel it in my very marrow. It must be recovered.’

  ‘What of the rest of us?’ asked Antiges, barley registering the flying embers of sparks spitting across the chamber.

  ‘We’re going to save the dock.’

  ‘YOU ARE NO Techmarine. How do you plan on shutting down the reactor?’ Brynngar shouted against the din, sparks showering him from cogitator cables above.

  Although the Space Wolf’s face was almost next to Cestus’s ear, the Ultramarine could only just hear him. The droning reactor was a thunderous pulse in the subterranean access tunnels. After verbally guiding the Astartes to an antechamber below the control hub and a reinforced access portal that would lead them to the reactor, Falkman had neglected to provide them with the necessary instruction to shut the device down, the fact of his passing out from shock a major contributing factor to the oversight.

  Usually, this area of the dock would be thronging with menials and engineers, but the rapid outflow of escape reactor radiation had prompted an evacuation alert. The Astartes had passed a number of fleeing tech adepts as they’d made their way down to the reactor. Those that were left were either dead or critically injured. The Astartes ignored them all, immune to their pleas for help with the safety of the entire dock at stake.

  ‘I am hoping a solution will present itself,’ Cestus replied as they made their way through the cramped tunnel. The corridor the Astartes were in spiralled around the main reactor shell down to the power source at the base of the station.

  ‘To think the Legion of Guilliman are regarded as master strategists,’ said Brynngar with bellowing laughter.

  ‘Directness is a valid strategy. Space Wolf,’ Antiges reminded him, shouting to be heard above the horrendous noise of lurching metal, as if an inner storm was at play within the conduit. ‘I would have thought one of the Sons of Russ would find it familiar.’

  Brynngar’s amused response was raucous and deafening.

  Shouldering past the last of the surviving crewmen and panicked tech adepts as they fled, Cestus led the Astartes to the reactor chamber. Only one of the Emperor’s Angels, replete in his power armour, could hope to survive the reactor’s intense radiation at such close range. Like his battle-brothers, Cestus had donned his helmet before entering the tunnel. Extreme radiation warning icons flashed insistently in the lens display. Time was running out.

  Atmospheric pipes fractured and sprayed freezing gas across a pair of gargantuan blast doors closing off the interior of the reactor shell from the rest of the station. Doubtless, they’d been activated as soon as the psychic power surge from the astropaths had hit. The servos on the massive door had shorted and were a tangled mass of wires and machinery.

  ‘Prepare yourselves,’ cried Cestus, ignoring the subzero gas. He seized the edge of the blast door in an effort to prise it open.

  ‘Stand back,’ snarled Brynngar, using his bulk to muscle the Ultramarine aside. He hefted Felltooth with practiced ease, sweeping the rune axe around in a lazy arc.

  ‘No sport when the enemy stays still,’ he growled and split the blast door in two with one mighty swing, sparks cascading from the blade.

  Stowing the weapon, Brynngar peeled back the rent metal with both hands, making a space wide enough for the Astartes to enter.

  The reactor was a swirling mass of glowing blue-green energy, rippling in on itself as it drew in power from the plasma conduits looping around it like eccentric orbits around a star. It pulsed, streaked with black and purple, and chunks of scorched machinery tumbled into it. A hot blast of air, tingling with radiation, washed over them in a back-draught. More warning runes flickered against Cestus’s helmet lens, transmitted through onto the display from the acute sensor readouts on his armour.

  ‘Now what?’ shouted Antiges above the howl of the reactor.

  Cestus watched the writhing mass of energy, taking in the confines of the small chamber that housed it and the control console, all but destroyed by its wrath.

  ‘How many charges do you have?’

  ‘A cluster of fragmentation and three krak grenades, but I don’t understand, captain,’ Antiges replied, his perplexity concealed by his helmet.

  ‘A full belt of krak,’ Brynngar growled. ‘Whatever you are planning, lad, we’d best be about it,’ he added. Being blown to smithereens by a malfunctioning reactor was not the death saga he wanted for his epitaph.

  ‘We prime the chamber with set charges, everything we’ve got,’ said Cestus with growing conviction, ‘and bury it.’

  ‘That would cause catastrophic damage to the station,’ Antiges countered, turning to regard his captain.

  ‘Yes, but it would not destroy it,’ said Cestus. ‘There is no other choice.’

  Cestus was about to detach the grenades from his clip harness when the reactor abruptly collapsed like a dying star imploding into a black hole. In its place a glowing sphere of deep purple blossomed, flickering like an image on a faulty pict screen. Purple lightning licked from the surface, playing over Cestus’s armour. He took a step back.

  Yowling static flared suddenly into life and the Astartes were floored by the wave of noise. A bright flash lit the entire chamber, overloading their helmet arrays in an instant. There, amidst the intense flare of light, Cestus saw an image, so fleeting and indistinct that it could have been an illusion from the overwhelmed optics in his helmet. He blinked once,
seeing only white haze, and shook his head, trying to recapture it. The flare died down and when Cestus’s vision returned the afterglow haunted the edge of his retinas, but the image was gone and the reactor was dead. The core had turned dark. Cracks of static electricity glowed over its surface. It shrank and became abruptly inert. The warning lights inside the reactor shell dimmed and went out.

  Elsewhere on the station, secondary and tertiary reactors, registering the loss of the primary reactor, diverted power to the dock, allowing the tech-seers time to make the necessary repairs. The storm had howled itself out.

  ‘What in the name of Terra just happened?’ asked Antiges, a cluster of frag grenades still in his hand.

  ‘Mother Fenris,’ Brynngar breathed at what he had just witnessed.

  ‘Did you see that?’ asked Cestus. ‘Did you see it in the blast flare?’

  ‘See what?’ Antiges replied, relieved that they didn’t have to collapse the reactor chamber after all.

  Cestus’s posture displayed his shock and disbelief as sure as any facial expression disguised by his armour. ‘Macragge.’

  SHARDS OF BROKEN images flashed on the psy-receiver, what was left of the astropathic transference from the psychic scream.

  Falkman, looking gaunt and haggard from his earlier experience, but otherwise intact, pored over them, running analysis protocols and clarity procedures with what little machinery still worked in the hub. Saphrax stood pensively beside him, awaiting the return of his captain.

  ‘Brother-captain!’ he said with no small amount of relief as Cestus and the others emerged from the tunnel, their armour scorched black in several places.

  When Cestus removed his helmet, his face was ashen and a cold sweat dappled his brow.

  Saphrax was taken aback; he had never seen a fellow Astartes, certainly not his captain, look so afflicted.

  ‘The astropathic message,’ Cestus stated coldly, going to the psy-receiver before Saphrax could verbalise his concern. ‘What’s left of it?’

  ‘All is well, brother,’ said Antiges, following in his captain’s wake and placing his hand on the banner bearer’s shoulder, though his tone was anything but reassuring.