Battle for the Abyss

by Ben Counter

  ‘Meet me on the bridge at once.’

  Cestus sighed deeply at the admiral’s curt response. He had intended to patrol the lower aft decks with Antiges. In the wake of the officer of the watch’s death, together with all of his most experienced armsmen, the ship was short-handed. The Astartes captain had taken it upon himself to make up the shortfall and ensure that no other unforeseen difficulties arose for whatever time remained of their warp passage.

  Given Admiral Kaminska’s tone, the patrol would have to wait, so Cestus and Antiges headed for the bridge.

  KAMINSKA KEPT A lean bridge when not in combat. Crewmen at the sensorium, navigation and engineering helms were all that were present. The admiral was standing at a table illuminated by a hololithic star map. She looked ragged as he approached her, with dark rings around her eyes and a greyish pallor to her complexion.

  Cestus couldn’t help think how long it had been since she had slept. An Astartes could go for several days without, but Kaminska was merely human. He wondered how long she could keep going.

  ‘My lord,’ she said, acknowledging the giant Astartes.

  ‘Admiral. What is it you wish to bring to my attention?’

  Kaminska indicated the star map in front of her. It showed the sector of the galaxy around the dense galactic core. The core was impassable, and so much of the map was taken up with a blank void. Notations and calculations were scrawled in the margins. Beside the map was a printout from one of the sensorium pict screens. It was a close-up of the Furious Abyss’s hull.

  ‘See this?’ said Kaminska, indicating a white plume issuing from the side of the Word Bearers ship. The grainy resolution made it look like gas was being vented.

  ‘They have an air leak?’

  ‘Better than that,’ said Kaminska. ‘It’s damage to the coolant lines. If they push the engines, the plasma reactors will burn up, and, pursued by this ship, if they want to stay ahead of us, they’ll have to push the engines.’

  Cestus smiled grimly at the sudden turn in fortune. It was small recompense for all they’d lost.

  ‘So the Furious Abyss will have to make dock to effect repairs,’ the Ultramarine guessed.

  ‘Yes. They’ll also be reloading ordnance and using the time to service their fighters after the battle outside the Tertiary Coreward Transit.’

  ‘Show me the location, admiral,’ said Cestus, assuming that Kaminska had already planned their strategy in part.

  Kaminska laid her finger on the hololithic display in triumph. ‘Outside the Solar System there aren’t many orbital docks that can support a ship that size.’

  The Bakka system was already circled on the map.

  ‘Bakka,’ said Cestus. ‘My Legion mustered there for the Karanthas Crusade. It’s the Imperial Army’s staging post for half the galactic south.’

  ‘It has the only docks between the galactic core and Macragge that could handle the Furious Abyss,’ Kaminska told him. ‘I’d bet my commission that this is where they’ll head.’

  Cestus thought for a moment. A plan was forming.

  ‘How long before we break warp?’

  ‘Several hours yet, but delay or not, we can’t beat the Furious Abyss in a straight fight.’

  ‘Tell me this, admiral,’ Cestus said, looking into Kaminska’s eyes. ‘When is a ship most vulnerable?’

  Kaminska smiled despite her weariness.

  ‘When she’s at anchor.’

  Cestus nodded. Turning away from the admiral, he raised the other Astartes captains on the vox array and told them to meet him in the conference room immediately.

  ‘WHAT NEWS HAVE you, Brother Zadkiel?’ mouthed the supplicant.

  Somehow, the creature’s lolling mouth formed the words in such a way that Kor Phaeron’s short temper and self-confidence were perfectly enunciated.

  ‘We are on our way, my lord,’ said Zadkiel, bowing.

  Kor Phaeron was one of the arch commanders of the Legion, foremost in Lorgar’s reckoning. He was the primarch’s greatest champion and it was he, this ancient warrior of countless battles, that would command the forces to attack Calth where Guilliman mustered and destroy the Ultramarines utterly. It was a singular honour to be in Kor Phaeron’s presence, albeit across the infinity of warp space, and Zadkiel was at once humbled by the experience. It was not an emotion he had great affinity with.

  The supplicant chamber of the Furious Abyss was bathed in darkness, but the presence of the astropathic choir behind the supplicant was powerful enough to remove the need for light. The choir consisted of eight astropaths, but the Furious’s astral cohort differed from those on any Imperial ship. The fact that there were eight of them suggested their instability. The Furious Abyss’s route through the warp, and the forces brought to bear on it, eroded the mind of an astropath with dismaying speed, and while such creatures were all blind, they did not have the heavy ribbed cables running from each eye socket attaching them to the macabre contraption clamped around the supplicant’s swollen cranium.

  ‘How goes your progress?’ asked the mighty champion of the Word Bearers.

  ‘Half a day longer in the warp, until we reach the fringes of the galactic core. We must make vital repairs at Bakka, before heading onwards to Macragge.’

  ‘I recall no such deviation in the mission plan, Zadkiel.’ Despite the fact that Kor Phaeron was doubtless aboard the Word Bearers battle-barge the Infidus Imperator, in deep communion with its own astropathic choir and speaking through a flesh puppet, his tone and manner were still dangerous.

  ‘During a brief sortie with a fleet of Imperial ships we sustained minor damage that could not be ignored, my lord,’ Zadkiel explained more hurriedly than he liked.

  ‘A military action?’ Kor Phaeron’s disdain was clear. ‘Did any survive?’

  ‘A single cruiser pursues us yet through the warp, liege.’

  ‘So they do not seek to raise a warning back on Terra,’ mused the arch champion, his considered tone at odds with the slack-jawed, drooling visage of the supplicant. ‘A pity. I suspect Sor Talgron is itching in his traitor’s shackles.’

  ‘I trust that Brother Talgron would have acquitted himself with distinction, Kor Phaeron.’

  In the eyes of Zadkiel, Sor Talgron’s mission was not a desirable one. The lord commander was to remain in the Solar System, his four companies ostensibly guarding Terra, in order to maintain the pretence that Lorgar still sided with the Emperor when in fact, he had been instrumental in the Warmaster’s defection.

  ‘It matters not, my lord. The prospect of word reaching Terra should not concern us. The warp’s disquiet would prevent any warning getting to Macragge.’

  ‘I disagree.’ The supplicant sneered in an echo of Kor Phaeron’s idiosyncratic expression. ‘Any deviation from the plan as written holds the potential for disaster. The entire Word could go disobeyed!’

  ‘We will be a few hours at Bakka at the most, exalted lord,’ said Zadkiel plaintively, wary of his master’s wrath. ‘Then we will be on our way. If our pursuer catches up with us, she will be destroyed as her sister ships were. In any case we will not be late; our passage through the warp was swift. But what of you, my lord?’

  ‘We’ve joined up with the other elements of the Legion and all is proceeding as written.’

  ‘Calth has no hope.’

  ‘None, my brother.’

  The supplicant lolled back, drooling blood as the connection was broken. The astropathic choir sank into silence, only their ragged breathing suggesting the great effort required to maintain the link across the immaterium.

  Zadkiel regarded the dead supplicant with detached interest. It was interesting to him to see how easily their physical forms could be destroyed when their minds were so strong. He considered that he would like to test that theory.

  ‘All is well, my lord?’ asked Ultis. The novice was standing behind Zadkiel.

  ‘All is well, novice,’ said Zadkiel. ‘You will join Baelanos at Bakka, Ultis. Take the Scholar Coven. They w
ill know to obey you.’

  Ultis saluted. ‘It will be an honour, admiral.’

  ‘One you have earned, novice. Now, be about your duties.’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  Ultis turned smartly and headed for the cell deck where the Scholar Coven would be undergoing their scheduled meditation-doctrine training.

  Zadkiel watched him go and smiled darkly. Such potential, such relentless ambition; the upstart would soon learn the folly of overreaching.

  Soon, Zadkiel told himself, forcing down a thrill of excitement. Soon, Guilliman will burn and Lorgar will rule the stars.

  Zadkiel could feel that time approaching. That age was in its infancy, but it only needed time to come about. Zadkiel knew this as surely as he had ever known anything, because it was written.

  THE WRATHFUL BROKE out of the warp, almost gasping in relief as it slid back into real space.

  The vessel’s hull was torn and scorched, and chunks of its engine cowlings were ripped out. The winds of the warp had carved strange patterns into its armour plate around the prow and all over the underside. Claws had raked deep gouges all over the upper hull and torn turrets from their mountings.

  Sitting in her command throne, Admiral Kaminska looked out of the viewport and saw that the Wrathful had not emerged alone.

  Leprous and wretched with its pitted, rusting hull and disease-ridden ports, the Fireblade limped into existence alongside them.

  It was a ship of the damned, the thousands of souls aboard condemned to endless, torturous oblivion.

  Such a thing could not be allowed to endure.

  Kaminska gave the order to train laser batteries on the decrepit vessel. There was a few seconds’ pause when the Wrathful unleashed a blistering salvo of fire. Without operational shields, the Fireblade crumpled under the onslaught. A few seconds more and all that remained of the blighted escort ship was a scorched wreck and space debris.

  It was a duty that gave Kaminska no pleasure, but necessary all the same, much like the expulsion of their own dead. It was bad luck to keep the deceased on board, not to mention unhygienic. Bodies were never returned to their home port in the Saturnine Fleet. What the void killed, it kept.

  The tiny gleaming sparks that fell away from the Wrathful were corpses enclosed in body bags, reflecting the light of the star Bakka that burned in a magnesium spark a few light hours away. Much closer was Bakka Triumveron, a titanic gas cloud far bigger than the Solar System’s Jupiter, bright yellow streaked with violet and ringed with scores of shimmering bands of ice and rock. Bakka was a mystery, its gaseous form far too stormy and strange to admit any craft, while its rings were death-traps many times more lethal than the rings of Saturn. Bakka’s outlying moons, however, were habitable, each one almost the size of Terra and all of them heavily populated. Rogelin, Sanctuary, Half Hope, Grey Harbour: these hive cities were just fledglings compared to the teeming pinnacles of the Solar System, but they were still home to billions of Imperial citizens. The Bakka system was one of the most populated in the segmentum, certainly the largest concentration of human life this close to the galactic core.

  Bakka Triumveron’s fourteenth moon had no cities, but instead was enclosed within a thin black spider web that looked like some planetary disease. It was, in fact, the underlying structure of its orbital docks, held over the moon so that they could benefit from its enormous stores of geothermal energy. The moon was uninhabited, thanks to its relentlessly shifting tectonic plates and accompanying cataclysms, but the dockyards above Triumveron 14 were some of the main reasons why Bakka was populated at all.

  THREE ASSAULT-BOATS headed out from the launch bays of the Wrathful. They approached the farthest docking spike of Bakka Triumveron 14 and did so with stealth and subterfuge. It was imperative that they not be discovered by the enemy. It also meant that the troops on board would have a long trek to the Furious Abyss.

  Three assault-boats; three discreet combat formations. Skraal joined his Legion warriors in one. Their mode of approach was a central avenue between overlooking docking towers, decks sprawling out from jutting bartizans, and the World Eaters and their captain were to take the lead. Two flanks branched out from the central avenue and these channels would be taken by the Blood Claws, led by Brynngar in spite of the Space Wolf’s earlier altercation with Cestus, and a second group of World Eaters led by the only Ultramarine in the raiding party.

  Antiges sat bolt upright in the flight couch of the gloom-drenched troop hold of an assault-boat as they made their way closer to the gaseous expanse that was Bakka Triumveron and the moon that would support their embarkation. He was the only Ultramarine aboard the assault-boat, accompanied, as he was, by two combat-squads of Skraal’s remaining World Eaters. To Antiges’s mind they were brutal warriors, festooned with the trophies of war, crude kill-markings like badges of honour carved into their armour. Each and every one was possessed of a murderous mien, a faint echo of their primarch’s battle rage.

  Dimly, as if the infinite expanse of black space that existed between them had smothered it, Antiges recalled his last conversation with his captain.

  ‘STAND ASIDE, ANTIGES,’ Cestus barked, bedecked in a stripped down version of his honour guard regalia and battle-ready with short-blade, power sword and bolter.

  Adjusting to the half-light of the assembly deck, Cestus saw that his battle-brother was similarly attired.

  ‘I have told you before, Antiges. The sons of Guilliman will remain aboard ship in case anything goes wrong. I shall accompany the mission as its leader to ensure that it goes to plan.’

  Cestus had gone over the plan several times since it was first broached in the conference room to the rest of the Astartes captains. If they were to make the most of the Furious Abyss’s current disposition, they would need to act in subterfuge and in secret. Even with that caveat in mind, the strike would need to be brutal and at close-quarters. The World Eaters and the Space Wolves had no equals in that regard, save for the sons of Sanguinius, but the Angels were far off in another part of the galaxy. These were the tools at their disposal; they had but to unleash them.

  The assault force was to infiltrate Bakka Triumveron 14, where the Word Bearers had made dock, in three teams in a classic feint and strike manoeuvre in order that they get close enough to scupper the ship at close-range. Incendiary charges, krak and melta bombs, were to be carried as standard. It was a faint hope, but it was hope none the less and all had embraced it. Even Brynngar, his demeanour sullen and belligerent, had acceded to the plan, doubtless eager to vent his wrath much like his brother captain, Skraal.

  ‘With respect, brother-captain,’ said Antiges levelly, purposefully standing his ground. ‘You shall not.’

  Cestus’s face creased in consternation.

  ‘I did not expect disobedience from you, Antiges.’

  ‘It is not disobedience, sire. Rather, it is sense.’ Antiges still did not move. His expression brooked no argument.

  ‘Very well,’ said Cestus, letting his battle-brother have this indulgence before he rebuked him for his insolence. ‘Explain yourself.’

  Antiges’s face softened, a trace of pleading behind his eyes.

  ‘Allow me to lead the strike,’ he said. ‘This mission is too dangerous and our plight too great to risk your life, my captain. Without you, there is no mission. Even now, we hold to our cause by a mere thread. Were you to be lost, then so too would be Macragge. You know this to be true.’

  Antiges stepped forward, allowing the light to fall on his face and armour. The effect was not unlike a bodily halo. ‘I entreat you, liege, let me do this service. I shall not fail you.’

  At first, Cestus had thought to deny him, but he knew his brother Ultramarine was right. Cestus was acutely aware of the other combat squads mustering on the deck behind him, readying to take to the assault-boats.

  ‘It would do me great honour to have you, Brother Antiges, as my representative,’ he said and clapped Antiges on the shoulder.

  ‘My lo
rd,’ the fellow Ultramarine intoned and bowed to his knee.

  ‘No, Antiges,’ said Cestus, grasping his battle-brother’s shoulder to stop him mid-genuflect. ‘We are equals and such deference is not necessary.’

  Antiges rose and nodded instead.

  ‘Courage and honour, my brother,’ said Cestus.

  ‘Courage and honour,’ Antiges replied and turned to walk away towards the assault-boats.

  THE WORDS WERE distant now, and Antiges crushed whatever sentiment they held as he intoned the oaths of battle.

  The World Eaters were similarly engaged, their lips moving in entreaty to their weapons and armaments that they should not fail them, and rather that they be covered in glory and speak with righteous anger.

  The warriors of the XII Legion were well-armed with chainaxes and storm shields. They bore side arms too, but Antiges suspected that they were rarely drawn. World Eaters fought up close, in face-to-face melee, where the force of a charge and the shock of their ferocity counted the most.

  Antiges steeled himself and mouthed the name of Roboute Guilliman as the assault-boat screamed towards its destination.

  THE DOCK-MASTER had demanded to know why prior notification had not been given for the arrival of such an enormous ship. His obstinate and imperious attitude had faltered and withered upon the arrival of the Astartes on his deck.

  Once Ultis had gained entry to the observation balcony, he had had the dock master put his deck crews to work to receive the Furious Abyss. Violence, at this point, was unnecessary. To the menials and underlings of Bakka Triumveron 14, they were still Astartes and as such their word carried the authority of the Emperor. No man of the Imperium would dare brook that.

  From the observation balcony overlooking the battleship dock, Ultis could see the automated coolant tanks picking their way through the docking clamps and other dockside detritus towards the towering shape of the Furious Abyss. The dock was a hive of activity, tracked-servitors and human indentured workers bustling back and forth on loaders, carrying massive fuel drums and swathes of heavy piping. The frenetic scene, fraught with activity, was as a mustering of ants before the towering hive that was the Word Bearers ship.