Battle for the Abyss

by Ben Counter

  THE SAVIOUR POD deck was situated next to the hull, a hemispherical chamber with six pods half-sunk into the floor. Two had been launched and another was damaged beyond repair, speared through by a shaft of steel fallen from the ceiling.

  Mhotep pulled himself down into one of the remaining pods. Contrary to naval tradition, he would not be going down with his ship. In his chambers, just prior to docking at Vangelis, he had seen a vision of himself standing upon the deck of the Wrathful. This was his destiny. The hand of fate would draw him here for some, as of yet, unknown purpose.

  Mhotep engaged the icon that would seal the saviour pod. It closed around him. There was room for three more crew, but no one was alive to fill it. He hit the launch panel and explosive bolts threw the pod clear of the ship.

  He watched the Waning Moon turning above him as the pod spiralled away. The aft section had burned out and was just a black flaking husk, disappearing against the void. The main section of the ship was tearing itself apart. The fires were mostly out, starved of fuel and oxygen, and the Waning Moon was a skeleton collapsing into its component bones.

  In the distance, thousands of sparks burst around the Furious Abyss, as if it were at the heart of a vast pyrotechnic display.

  Mhotep was as disciplined as any Thousand Son, and Magnus made the conditioning of his Legion’s minds the most important part of their training. He could subsume himself into the collective mindset of his battle-brothers, and as such was rarely troubled by emotions that did not serve any immediate purpose.

  He was disturbed. He very much wanted to exact the hatred he felt on the Furious Abyss. He wanted to tear it apart with his bare hands.

  Perhaps, Mhotep told himself, if he was patient, he would find a way to do that.

  THE FIGHTERS HAD come from nowhere.

  With the violent death of the Waning Moon, the remaining escort ships, the Ferox and the Fireblade, were locked in a deadly duel with the massive enemy vessel. Even with the Boundless in support and the Wrathful inbound they would not last long against the Word Bearer battleship. The frigates would have to use their superior speed to endure while aid arrived. That advantage was summarily robbed with the appearance of crimson-winged fighter squadrons issuing from the belly of the Furious Abyss in an angry swarm.

  It was impossible for such a ship, even one of its impressive size, to harbour fighter decks and the weapons system that had destroyed the Waning Moon. This fact had informed every scenario the escort squadron’s captains had developed for any reaction to their attack runs. The Furious Abyss, however, was no ordinary ship.

  The destruction of the Waning Moon, appalling as it was, had at least given the escort ships the certainty that the Word Bearers would not have the resources for attack craft. That was before the launch bays had opened like steel gills down the flanks of the battleship, and twinkling blood-slick darts had shot out on columns of exhaust.

  Captain Ulargo stood in a corona of light on the bridge of the Fireblade. The rest of the bridge was drenched in darkness with only the grainy diodes of control consoles punctuating the gloom. Arms behind him, surrounded by the hololithic tactical display and with vox crackling, the terrible choreography of war played out with sickening inevitability.

  ‘Ferox engaged!’ came the alert from Captain Lo Thulaga. ‘Multiple hostiles! Fast attack craft, registering impacts. Shutting down reactor two.’

  ‘Shield your engines, for Terra’s sake!’ snapped Captain Ulargo, watching the grim display from the viewport.

  ‘What do you think I’m doing?’ retorted Lo Thulaga. ‘I have fighters port, aft and abeam. They’re bloody everywhere.’

  The Ferox spiralled away from its attack run on the underside, pursued by a cloud of vindictive fighters. Tiny explosions stitched over the hindquarters of the escort ship, ripping sprays of black debris from the engine housings. Turrets stammered back fire from the belly and sides of the Ferox, but for every fighter reduced to a bloom of plasma residue there were two more pouring fire into it.

  It was like a predator under attack from a swarm of stinging insects. The Ferox was far larger than any of the fighters, which were shaped like inverted Vs with their stabiliser wings swept forwards. Individually its turrets could have tracked and vaporised any of the enemy before they got in range, but there were over fifty of them.

  ‘I cannot shake them,’ snarled Captain Vorgas on the Ferocious, his voice ragged through the vox.

  ‘They’re bloody killing us!’ yelled Lo Thulaga, whose voice was distorted by the secondary explosions coming from the escort’s engines.

  Ulargo wore a disgusted expression. In his entire career, he had never backed down from a fight. He hailed from the militaristic world of Argonan in Segmentum Tempestus, and it was not in his nature to capitulate. Clenching his fists, he bawled the order.

  ‘Squadron disengage!’

  Fireblade pulled away from the Furious Abyss, followed by the Ferocious. The Ferox tried to pull clear, but the enemy fighters hounded it, darting into the wake of the escort’s engines, risking destruction to fly in blind and hammer laser fire into its engineering decks.

  One of the reactors on the embattled frigate melted down, its whole rear half flooding with plasma. The forward compartments were sealed off quickly enough to save the crew, but the ship was dead in the void, only its momentum keeping it falling ponderously away from the upper hull of the Furious Abyss. The fighters circled it, flying in wide arcs around the dead ship and punishing it with incessant fire. Crew decks were breached and vented. Saviour pods began to launch as Lo Thulaga gave the order to abandon ship.

  The Furious Abyss wasted no time sending fighters to assassinate the saviour pods as they fled the stricken Ferox.

  The Ferocious pulled a dramatic hard turn, ducking back towards the enemy battleship to fox the fighters lining up for their attack runs. It strayed into the arcs of the Furious Abyss’s ventral turrets, and a couple of lucky shots blew plumes of vented atmosphere out of its upper hull. The fighters closed and targeted the breach, volleys of las-fire boring molten fingers into the frigate. Somewhere amidst the bedlam the bridge was breached and the command crew died, incinerated by sprays of molten metal or frozen and suffocated as the void forced its way in.

  The remaining turrets on the Furious Abyss targeted the fleeing Fireblade, the last vessel of the escort. Most of the battleship’s attention was away from the frigate, representing as it did a mere annoyance. Its vengeful ire was focused squarely on the Boundless.

  ‘THE FEROX AND the Ferocious are gone,’ Kaminska stated flatly, watching the blips on the tactical display blink out. ‘How on Titan can that thing support those fighter wings?’

  ‘The same way it has a functioning plasma lance,’ said Cestus, grimly. ‘The Mechanicum know more about what they’re doing than they are letting on, and are ignoring Imperial sanctions.’

  ‘In the name of Terra, what is happening?’ Kaminska asked, seeing the enemy battleship turn its cross hairs on the Boundless.

  For the first time, the Ultramarine thought he could detect a hint of fear in the admiral’s voice.

  ‘We cannot win this fight, not like this,’ he said. ‘Bring the Boundless in, we need to regroup.’

  Kaminska cast her eye over the tactical display. Her voice was choked. ‘It’s too late for that.’

  ‘Damnation!’ Cestus smashed his fist hard against a rail on the bridge and it buckled. After a moment, he said, ‘Contact your astropath, and find out what is keeping that message. I must warn my lord Guilliman at once.’

  Kaminska raised the astropathic sanctum on the ship-to-ship vox, even as Helmsmistress Venkmyer relayed disengagement protocols to engineering.

  Chief Astropath Korbad Heth’s deep voice was heard on the bridge.

  ‘All our efforts to contact Terra or the Ultramarines have failed,’ he revealed matter-of-factly.

  ‘By order of the Emperor’s Astartes, keep trying and you will prevail,’ said Cestus.

  ‘My lo
rd,’ Heth began, unmoved by the Ultramarine’s threatening tone. ‘The matter is more fundamental than you appreciate. When I say our efforts have failed, I mean utterly. The Astronomican is gone.’

  ‘Gone? That’s impossible. How can it be gone?’

  ‘I know not, my lord. We are detecting warp storms that could be interfering. I will redouble our endeavours, but I fear they will be in vain.’ The vox went dead and Heth was gone again.

  Antiges’s return to the bridge broke the silence.

  ‘We must return to Terra, Cestus. The Emperor must be warned.’

  ‘What of Calth and Macragge? Our Legion is there, and our primarch; they are in imminent danger and the ones who must be warned. I do not doubt the strength of our battle-brothers and the fleet above Macragge is formidable, as are its ground defences, but there is something about this ship… What if it is merely the harbinger of something much worse, something that can be a very real threat to Guilliman?’

  ‘Our primarch has ever taught us to exercise pragmatism in the face of adversity,’ Antiges reasoned, stepping forward. ‘Upon our return, we could send a message to the Legion.’

  ‘A message that would never reach them, Antiges,’ Cestus replied with anger. ‘No, we are the Legion’s last hope.’

  ‘You are letting your emotion and your arrogance cloud your judgement, brother-captain,’ said Antiges, drawing in close.

  ‘Your loyalty deserts you, brother.’

  Antiges bristled at the slight, but kept his composure.

  ‘What good is it if we sacrifice ourselves on the altar of loyalty?’ he urged. ‘This way, we at least stand a chance of saving our brothers.’

  ‘No,’ said Cestus with finality. ‘We would only condemn them to death. Courage and honour, Antiges.’

  Cestus’s fellow Ultramarine saw the vehemence in his eyes, remembering his conviction that he knew some terrible peril was creeping towards Macragge and the Legion. His brother-captain had been right thus far, and suddenly Antiges felt shamed that his dogged pragmatism had so blinded him to that truth.

  ‘Courage and honour,’ he replied and clapped his hand upon Cestus’s shoulder in an apologetic gesture.

  ‘So, we follow them into the warp,’ Kaminska interrupted, assuming that the matter was settled. ‘We feign flight and get on the ship’s tail as soon as it readies to go into the Tertiary Core Transit,’ she added.

  Cestus was about to give his assent when Helms-mate Kant delivered a report from the sensorium.

  ‘Impacts on the Boundless.’

  THE BOUNDLESS TOOK longer to die than the Waning Moon.

  Another volley of torpedoes sailed out from the Furious Abyss, this time in a tight corkscrew like a pack of predators arrowing in on the prey instead of spread out in a fan.

  High explosives tipped the torpedo formation. They penetrated shields and used up the first volleys of turret fire from the Boundless.

  The main body of the torpedoes were the same kind of bore-header cluster munitions that had ripped into the Waning Moon. A few magnetic pulse torpedoes were part of the volley, too. They ripped through the sensors of the Boundless and blinded it. There was no longer any need to conceal the full arsenal of the Furious Abyss.

  Cluster explosions, like flowers of fire, blossomed down one flank of the Boundless. Shock waves rippled through the fighter bays, throwing attack craft aside like boats on a wave. Refuelling tanks exploded, their blooms lost in the torrents of flame that followed the first impacts. Fighter crews that had survived the madness of the attack runs were rewarded by being shredded by shrapnel or drowned in fire. The flank of the Boundless was chewed away as if it were ageing and decaying at an impossible rate, holes opening up and metal blackening and twisting to finally flake away like desiccated flesh.

  The final torpedo wave had single warheads that forced enormous bullets of exotic metals at impossible speeds. They shot like lances from their housings, shrieking right through the Boundless and emerging from the other side, sowing secondary explosions of ignited fuel and vented oxygen, transfixing the carrier like spears of light.

  Finally, the Furious Abyss took up position at medium range from the Imperial ship. It paused, as if observing the wracked vessel, sizing up the quarry one last time before the kill.

  The plasma lance emerged, the energy building up and the barrel glowing. The surviving crew of the Boundless knew what was coming, but all their control systems were shot through. A few thrusters sputtered into life as the Boundless tried desperately to limp away from its would-be executioner, but the carrier was too big and badly wounded.

  The plasma lance fired. It hit the Boundless amidships, at enough of an angle to rip through to the plasma reactors. The entire vessel glowed, the heat of the fusing plasma conducted through its structure and hull.

  Then the plasma overspilled and, spitted like prey on the solid beam of the plasma lance’s light, the Boundless exploded.

  FROM HIS IMPERIOUS position on the bridge of the Furious Abyss, Zadkiel watched the burning wreck of the enemy cruiser flicker into lifeless darkness.

  ‘Glory to Lorgar,’ said Reskiel, who was standing behind him.

  ‘So it is written,’ Zadkiel replied.

  ‘Two vessels remain, my lord,’ added his second, obsequiously.

  Zadkiel observed the tactical display. The remaining cruiser was intact, and the final escort being pursued by the Furious Abyss’s fighter wings would probably also escape.

  ‘By the time they get to Terra, it will be too late for any warning,’ Zadkiel said confidently. ‘The warp is with us. We risk far more tarrying here to hunt them down.’

  ‘I will instruct Navigator Esthemya that we are to enter the warp.’

  ‘Do so immediately,’ confirmed Zadkiel, his mind on the transpiring events and their impending foray into the empyrean.

  Reskiel nodded and activated the ship’s vox-casters, transmitting Zadkiel’s relayed orders into the engine rooms and ordnance decks. ‘All crew, make ready for warp entry.’

  ‘Reskiel, have Master Malforian load the psionic charges,’ Zadkiel said as an afterthought. ‘Once we are in the warp, you will have the bridge. I will be inspecting the supplicants in the lower decks. Ensure Novice Ultis attends.’

  ‘As you wish, my lord,’ said Reskiel, bowing deeply. ‘And if the Ultramarines try to follow?’

  ‘Commend their souls to the warp,’ Zadkiel replied coldly.

  THE WRATHFUL WENT dark, to simulate the diversion of its power to the engines for escape. The entire bridge was drenched in shadow. The crew was stunned into sudden silence and, for a fraction of a second, stillness, as they struggled to comprehend what they had witnessed.

  Kaminska was as quiet as the ship. She gripped the arms of her command throne tightly. Vorlov had been her friend.

  ‘A saviour pod jettisoned from the Waning Moon before its destruction, admiral,’ announced Helms-mate Venkmyer at the sensorium helm, breaking the silence.

  ‘Can you tell who is on board?’ asked Cestus, alongside the admiral, watching impotently as the Word Bearer vessel grew farther and farther away as the Wrathful made its mock retreat.

  ‘Lord Mhotep, sire,’ Venkmyer replied. ‘He’s on his way to us. I’ve instructed crews to be ready to retrieve him when he docks.’

  ‘Antiges, have Laeradis join the dock crews. Mhotep might be injured and in need of an apothecary.’

  ‘At once, brother-captain.’

  Antiges turned and was about to head off again when Cestus added, ‘Disband the boarding parties and return to the bridge. Instruct Brynngar to do the same on my authority. Bring Saphrax and the Legion captains with you.’

  The other Ultramarine nodded and went to his duties.

  SAPHRAX ARRIVED ON the bridge with Antiges as ordered. Brynngar and Skraal joined them, feral belligerence and unfettered wrath increasing the already knife-edge tension.

  With this many Astartes present, the bridge of the Wrathful felt very small. Saphrax wore his cer
emonial honour guard armour, the gold of his armour plates glinting dully. Skraal, on the other hand, made do with little in the way of decoration. Cestus could not help noticing the kill-tallies on his chainaxe, bolt pistol and armour plates: a testament to violence. Killing was a matter of pride for the World Eaters and Skraal had several names etched on his shoulder pad, around the stylised devoured planet symbol of his Legion.

  ‘Battle-brothers, fellow captains,’ Cestus began as the Astartes present took position around the dead tactical display table. We are to enter the empyrean and give chase to the Word Bearers. Our Navigators have discerned that they are on course for a stable warp route. Following them won’t be a problem.’

  ‘Though, facing them will,’ said Saphrax, ever the voice of reason. ‘That ship destroyed two cruisers and the same in frigates. What is your plan for overcoming such odds?’ It wasn’t an objection. Saphrax was not given to questioning the decisions of his superiors. In his mind, the hierarchy of command was absolute, and much like the Ultramarine’s posture, it would brook no bending.

  ‘If we go back to Terra,’ said Cestus, ‘we could try to raise the alarm. If the warp quietened then we could get a message to Macragge and forewarn the Legion.’ Cestus knew there was no conviction in his words as he spoke them.

  ‘You have already decided against that course, haven’t you, lad,’ said venerable Brynngar.

  ‘I have.’

  The old wolf smiled, revealing his razor-sharp incisors. There was something stoic and powerful in the steel grey of his mane-like hair and beard, implacability in the creamy orb of his ruined eye and the ragged scars of previous battles. But for all the war-like trappings, the obvious martial prowess and savagery, there was wisdom, too.

  ‘When the sons of Russ march to war, they do not cease until battle is done,’ he said with the utmost conviction. ‘We will chase those curs into the eye of the warp if necessary and feast upon their traitorous hearts.’

  ‘The World Eaters do not flee when an enemy turns on them,’ offered Skraal with blood lust in his eyes. ‘We hunt them down and kill them. It’s the way of the Legion.’