Battle for the Abyss

by Ben Counter

  ‘A few more minutes, my liege,’ Malforian replied. ‘We are encountering some problems with the torpedo apertures.’

  ‘Inform me as soon as we’re ready to fire the cyclonics,’ ordered Zadkiel, his tone betraying his impatience at the unforeseen delay.

  ‘My lord,’ Helmsmaster Sarkorov interrupted, ‘the Wrathful is coming abeam. They are priming weapons.’

  Zadkiel exhaled his annoyance. He should have excised this thorn from his side long ago.

  ‘Malforian,’ he barked into the vox, ‘send all targeting solutions to the bridge once the Imperial lap dogs are in our sights. The Wrathful does not deserve the honour of dying as a part of this history, but we shall grant them that honour nonetheless.’

  The Wrathful appeared on the left viewscreen. She had lost half her guns down one side and was followed by a tail of wreckage tumbling out of her ravaged engine and cargo areas. Her hull was weathered and pitted by the lashes of the warp, covered in the tooth marks of empyrean predators.

  Zadkiel smiled maliciously when he saw the wrecked ship. He would derive great pleasure from this.

  ‘Let us finish her.’

  THE WRATHFUL LIMPED from the warp and went immediately to battle stations. Aft thrusters burning as hot as they were able, the once formidable Imperial vessel drove head on towards the waiting form of the Furious Abyss. Diverting power to its port side, the great ship turned grindingly slowly on its aft axis until its still-functioning broadsides were presented to the foe.

  Beams of azure light lit up all the way down the Wrathful’s flank, and in seconds the blazing fury of her lances was unleashed. Explosions rippled down the armoured hull of the Furious Abyss, together with the immense blast flares of shield impacts. These wounds were a mere sting to a beast such as this and the Word Bearer vessel responded with a devastating salvo.

  As the crimson light rays of the Furious’s broadside cannons spat out, the Wrathful was already moving, trying to bring the enemy vessel’s prow abeam of their lances. The shields of the Imperial ship disintegrated against the assault and the aft decks were raked by deadly fire, explosive impacts sending out chunks of debris and spilling swathes of crew. Still, the Wrathful endured, its last ditch manoeuvre bringing it away from the deadly barrage. Torpedoes soared from the vessel’s prow, followed by a second volley from the lances. Again, the Furious was stung and dorsal cannons swung in their mounts to bring their munitions to bear. Incendiaries crumpled against the Wrathful’s swerving prow, fully extended broadsides punching ragged holes through its hull armour.

  Annoyed at the tenacity of this little wasp, the mighty Furious Abyss turned to present its full armament against their aggressor. The damage sustained by the Wrathful had slowed it, but even still it could have fled if it had wanted to. Instead, the Imperial vessel stood its ground, making a defiant last stand. Lances flashing, the Wrathful poured everything it had left at the Word Bearers. It wasn’t enough. The Furious Abyss had turned, and, now, it unleashed devastation.

  ZADKIEL OBSERVED THE short-lived battle from the bridge. The Wrathful was in their sights. The might of his ship was at his disposal. ‘Crush them,’ he snarled.

  Malforian replied his affirmation. Light and fire filled the viewscreen a moment later as the Furious’s guns wrecked the Imperial vessel. Its engines died, and great fissures were rent in its hull as it slowly drifted, pulled by the gravity well of Formaska. As the Wrathful fell away, sparks flashed sporadically, rendering it in a grim cast, as vented coolant pipes billowed in hazy plumes.

  ‘I had expected more from a son of Guilliman,’ Zadkiel admitted. ‘How could such a desperate plan ever succeed? The Ultramarines are deserving of their death warrant.’

  ‘Lord Zadkiel.’ It was Sarkorov again. Zadkiel turned to face him. ‘What is it, helmsmaster?’ he snapped. ‘Shuttles, my liege,’ he explained, ‘heading for the port side.’

  Zadkiel was nonplussed. ‘How many?’

  ‘Fifteen, my lord,’ Sarkorov replied. ‘Too close for lances.’

  Zadkiel paused for a moment, still confused as to this latest Imperial gambit. The answer came swiftly.

  ‘They seek to gain entry through the torpedo apertures,’ he said.

  ‘Should I give the order to close them, Lord Zadkiel?’

  ‘Do it,’ Zadkiel snapped, ‘and engage dorsal cannons. Bring them down!’

  EIGHTEEN

  Gauntlet

  Infiltration

  Dark dreams

  BRYNNGAR SMILED AS the shuttle shuddered, spirals of flak and countermeasures hammering against its hull.

  Rujveld and the Blood Claws sat in the tight crew compartment with him. They were strapped down in their shuttle couches, braced across the shoulders, chest and waist. The engines were screaming, and intermittent flashes from the explosions outside threw sharp light into the compartment. The small vessel was armoured, but it wasn’t designed to take this punishment. Every bolt and stanchion was straining with the speed.

  ‘Do you hear it, lads?’ he roared above the din, utterly at ease.

  His Blood Claws, even Rujveld, looked back perplexed.

  ‘It is the call to combat,’ he told them proudly. ‘Those are the arms of Mother Fenris! That’s the embrace of war!’

  The Wolf Guard howled and the Blood Claws howled with him.

  Beyond the vision slits, it and several other shuttles soared through the void towards the Furious Abyss. Deployed before the suicide attack, the Wrathful’s feint had given them the time they needed to close the gap. It had provided a chance to reach the gaping apertures of the vessel’s torpedo tubes before being scattered into debris by its guns.

  DORSAL GUNS PULSED and rocked in their turrets as the Furious Abyss sought to obliterate the attacker’s force. In the third shuttle, Cestus saw three of his sister vessels explode under a hail of flak. They broke and split apart, their desperate speed abruptly arrested as if they were a sail boat breaking up on the rocks of some ragged cliff line. The bodies of naval armsmen spilled from the crew compartments, frozen in spasms of pain as they were exposed to the void.

  Three of his battle-brothers were alongside the Ultramarine captain: Lexinal, Pytaron and Excelinor helping to fill up the compartment with their armoured bulk. They stared impassively into space as the flash of explosions was thrown through the viewports, and the armoured hull shook. Their lips moved as they swore silent Oaths of Moment.

  Cestus did the same, watching three more shuttles shredded apart by heavy turret fire.

  ‘Come on,’ he urged through gritted teeth, the gaping maw of the torpedo aperture getting ever closer. ‘Come on.’

  ‘IMPACT IN ONE minute!’ said the vox from the shuttle’s pilot.

  ‘One minute from mother’s love!’ shouted Brynngar, taking a firm grip on Felltooth. Embarkation would need to be swift; there could be enemy forces already in position to repel any boarders. For a moment, he wondered whether or not Cestus had made it through the fusillade. Putting the thought out of his mind, he took up the battle cry once more. They were almost in.

  ‘She’s waiting for us there! Mother Fenris, mother of war!’

  ‘Mother of war!’ yelled the Blood Claws. ‘Mother of war! Mother of hate!’

  A few feet from the aperture, a stray round struck the left aerofoil of the shuttle and it spiralled wildly out of control. Exploding shrapnel shattered the front viewing arc; the sound of breaking armourglas could even be heard in the troop compartment. The pilot died with a shard of hot metal in his neck, before the icy cool of space froze him and his desperate co-pilot to their flight couches. Brynngar’s shuttle dipped sharply away from the aperture and downward into another void entirely.

  A SHUTTLE EXPLODED, its nose sheared off by a shell casing thrown out of the Furious Abyss’s gun decks. The remaining craft looped up beneath the battleship’s ventral surface, the valleys and peaks of the city-sized ship streaking past.

  Cestus saw another vessel explode, the bursting shrapnel shredding much of
its frontal arc. It dipped, engines blazing ineffectually, and fell downward until it was lost from view behind a slab of crimson hull.

  Ahead, the torpedo apertures were closing.

  ‘More speed!’ Cestus roared into his helmet vox.

  The blazing shuttle engines screeched even louder.

  A snatched glimpse through the viewport showed a third shuttle, banking sharply in an attempt to avoid the flak fire and arrow back towards the battleship. Its retro engines flared as it braked. It didn’t slow fast enough and slammed into the hull beside the torpedo aperture. The fat metal body crumpled under the impact and split. Broken bodies were cast into the void. They were wearing the blue armour of the Ultramarines.

  Saphrax and Amryx are dead, thought Cestus bitterly.

  Twisting sharply, the shuttle found a way through the rapidly diminishing aperture. As the Furious Abyss swallowed them, Cestus thought he heard the explosions of the shuttles following them as they crashed against the sealed hull.

  ‘Brace!’ yelled the pilot.

  Tortured metal boomed. Cestus was thrown against the restraints of his grav-couch and felt them stretch and pull against his cuirass.

  A terrible twisting, howling sound, like a metal earthquake, filled the Ultramarine’s ears.

  ‘Umbilicals away!’ said the pilot’s voice.

  The hatch in the roof of the passenger compartment slid open. White vapour filled the shuttle. ‘Pressurising!’ shouted the pilot.

  Cestus knew what was next and hammered the icon on his chest that would disengage the harness. It came apart quickly and he was on his feet, his battle-brothers beside him. Excelinor, Pytaron and Lexinal, two with bolters low slung and another carrying a plasma gun: they would have to be enough. Cestus checked the load in his bolt pistol and unsheathed his sword, thumbing the activation stud that sent frantic lines of power coursing through the blade.

  ‘Courage and honour!’ he yelled, and his battle-brothers returned the battle cry.

  Explosive bolts detonated like gunshots. The second hatch was flung open, and the long dark throat of the torpedo tube opened up above them.

  Cestus stormed through the short umbilicus, through the hatch and into the tube. It sloped upwards and was wide enough for an Astartes to walk with his head bowed. Its ribbed metal interior was caked in ice. The shuttle had pumped air into it, and the vapour in that air had frozen instantly.

  ‘Move!’ ordered the Ultramarine captain, and headed upwards.

  As Cestus led the way up the torpedo tube, the sounds of thundering guns and shell impacts echoed dimly through the structure of the Furious Abyss, a terrible chorus welcoming them onto the ship.

  Cestus saw light ahead: the fires of a forge. He had his bolt pistol up in front of him, ready to fire. The light was coming through a thick armourglas window in a heavy hatch, sealing the far end of the tube.

  ‘Charges!’ he ordered.

  Excelinor and Pytaron reacted quickly, planting a cluster of krak grenades around the weak points of the hatch. Charges primed, the Astartes retreated as one. A few feet from the entrance, Cestus bellowed, ‘Now!’

  A muffled explosion radiated through the tube, echoing off the concave interior, and the hatch fell away in a shower of sparks and fire.

  Combat protocols and stratagems learned when he was a neophyte and honed in countless conflicts throughout the Great Crusade cycled through Cestus’s battle-attuned mind. Bursting onto the ship, the Ultramarines found themselves amidst the massive workings of an ordnance deck: torpedo cranes, ammunition and fuel hoppers; cavernous spaces criss-crossed with gantries and crowded with gangs of sweating menials were all in abundance.

  With tactical precision, the Astartes fanned out. Cestus drove forward with Lexinal, the punch of his battle-brother’s plasma gun backing up the ferocity of the Ultramarine captain at close quarters.

  A group of deck hands came at them with a clutch of heavy tools. Cestus swept low through their clumsy attacks and rose quickly, cutting through two with a savage criss-cross strike and killing a third with a head-butt. Barking fire from his bolt pistol put paid to two more. An actinic flash sent the temperature warnings in his battle-helm spiking as a beam of plasma ignited a fuel hopper. Fire blossomed in plumes of orange and white, twinned with billowing smoke. A squad of rushing armsmen were incinerated in the blaze and the heavy stubber mount, hastily erected above, was thrown to oblivion.

  Left and right, Excelinor and Pytaron let rip with their bolters, creating a deadly crossfire that shredded anything that dared to advance through it. They surged steadily into the deck, despatching targets with brutal efficiency, but these were only ratings and armsmen. Cestus knew that the Astartes of the Word Bearers would be coming. They had to act quickly and disable the cyclonics before the real threat arrived. Without the destruction of Formaska, the Word Bearers could not fulfil their plan and get close enough to Macragge to unleash the viral strain.

  His super-advanced mind skipping ahead to the tactical tasking to come, Cestus almost missed the scarred-faced officer flying at him with a power mace.

  This one was Astartes, although he wore a half-armour variant of full battle-plate. Most of the bottom half of his face was destroyed and had been replaced with a metal grille. Deep pink scar lines ran like fat veins up his jaw and across his cheek bones.

  ‘Quail before the might of the Word,’ he bellowed, voice metallic and resonant through the augmetics.

  Cestus parried a deft swing of the mace with his power sword. Arcs of miniature lightning danced across the two weapons as they were locked in a brief, pyrotechnic struggle. The Ultramarine broke away and brought up his bolt pistol, only for the grille-faced Word Bearer to smash it out of his grasp. Pain lanced through Cestus’s fingers, even though his armour bore the brunt of the blow, numbing his shoulder.

  ‘Lorgar will guide us to victory,’ snarled the Word Bearer, allowing his fervour to fuel his swings, though they dulled his accuracy.

  Cestus wove out of the death arc from an overhand smash designed to finish him and brought his blazing blade onto the Word Bearer’s bare head. Slicing through flesh, bone and, eventually, armour, he sheared the warrior in two, the corpse flopping on either side of the blow.

  ‘Know that Guilliman is righteous,’ Cestus snarled, gritting back the pain to reclaim his fallen pistol. Rearmed, he drove on into the building firestorm, focused on the killing.

  ‘WHERE ARE THEY?’ demanded Zadkiel.

  ‘All over the gun decks,’ came the reply from one of Malforian’s subordinates. In the weapon master’s absence, Zadkiel assumed that he was dead or otherwise incapacitated. ‘Reports say they’re Astartes.’

  ‘They’ll be going for the torpedo payload,’ said Zadkiel, mainly to himself.

  The admiral turned his attentions to his helmsmaster. ‘Sarkorov, are we in position to launch?’

  ‘Yes, my lord, but we cannot deploy the torpedoes while the deck is contested.’

  Zadkiel swore beneath his breath.

  ‘Reskiel,’ he snarled into the throne vox with growing annoyance.

  The sergeant-commander responded after a moment’s pause.

  ‘I’m calling off the hunt for our interloper. Gather your brethren and head for the ordnance decks at once. Destroy any Astartes you find on that deck. Do you understand?’

  Reskiel replied in the affirmative and the vox link died.

  ‘If the attack is to be delayed, I will return to my sanctum,’ said Magos Gureod, already blending away into the darkness.

  ‘Do as you must,’ Zadkiel muttered, his agitation obvious, the veneer of calm ever slipping. ‘Ikthalon,’ he snarled into the vox, a plan forming in his mind.

  ‘My lord,’ the sibilant voice of the chaplain replied.

  ‘Wake the supplicants.’

  THERE WAS NO need to spare the supplicants. The Furious Abyss had reached its destination. The mission was over. Their role had been to help with the manipulation of the warp and fend off attacks against th
e ship. Zadkiel’s order meant using them to destruction.

  The streams of nutrients were replaced with psychoactive drugs. Restraints snapped apart and cortical stimulators crackled, waking the supplicants from their comatose state to halfway between sleep and waking, where sensations and nightmares alike were real. Some of the supplicants, the ones whose mouths and throats still worked, moaned and mewled as they slithered out of their restraints onto the floor. Some convulsed as unfamiliar impulses flooded their muscles. One or two died, their hearts finally giving out.

  As part of his chaplain’s attire, Ikthalon drew a heavy scarlet cowl over his battle-helm to prevent excess psychic energy from staining his mind, and moved carefully among the waking supplicants, inspecting readouts and checking for swallowed tongues. One by one, he switched off the inhibitor circuits, the loops of psychoactive material that kept the supplicants’ minds from feeding back into the Furious Abyss. The cogitators hooked in to the debased creatures’ consciousness fed them the image of the ship’s prow, the engineering works behind the plasma lance and the ordnance decks below.

  Finally, the supply of stupefying narcotics and soothing brain-wave instigators was cut off and the supplicants were given their last silent orders.

  CESTUS SPRAYED A gantry with bolter fire. Bodies plummeted and crumpled against his fury. The Ultramarines had gained a foothold on the primary ordnance deck, but Cestus could still see no sign of the Space Wolves. He hoped that they had not shared the same fate as Saphrax. The schematic as witnessed in the vision bestowed upon him by Mhotep filled his eidetic memory. The cluster of cyclonics destined for Formaska was at the end of the deck, doubtless in mid-transit to the torpedo apertures. The viral payload was secured in a drop chamber in the hull. There was no way to get to it.

  They would have to hobble the Word Bearers’ plan at its first juncture.

  Barking fire from a pair of pintle-mounted cannons set up on a loading platform above had the Ultramarines pinned for a moment. Cestus’s battle-brothers regrouped behind a pair of empty fuel bowsers and the housing of a torpedo crane.