Malodrax

by Ben Counter

  ‘To your duties,’ said Lysander. ‘Prayer and wargear rites. Make your souls ready today, for tomorrow the killing begins.’

  The Imperial Fists saluted their captain and filed from the cathedral, the mist of their breath forming a pale haze in the refrigerated air. The cathedral was consecrated not to a god, as the common people of the Imperium conceived of the Emperor, but to the Imperial Fists themselves – to the spirit of their Chapter, the responsibility and power of a Space Marine. To the example of the Primarch Rogal Dorn, figurative and literal father of the Chapter.

  Some would call it arrogant, Lysander thought as he looked up at the Chapter’s fist symbol covering one wall, Dorn’s gilded statue standing before it. Those who said it, though, would have failed to understand the place the Space Marines occupied – at the pinnacle of the Imperium, and the front line against extinction.

  Rogal Dorn’s statue shuddered as an impact rang through the ship. Lysander felt it through his feet, running up the segments of his armour.

  ‘Report,’ he said into his vox-link, opening a channel to the ship’s bridge.

  ‘We’ve taken an impact,’ came the reply from Commander Langeloc, the captain of the Shield. Lysander did not know her well, but she was valued by the Chapter as a dependable, if unimaginative, spaceship captain. ‘Starboard ventral. I have dispatched damage crews.’

  ‘Was it a meteorite?’

  ‘There was an accompanying energy signature. Could be a weapon hit.’

  ‘Bring the ship to battle stations.’

  ‘Already under way, captain.’

  Lysander felt himself shifting into the state of readiness, the physical and mental routines, of battle. The Imperial Fists of the First Company were doing the same, breaking off in squads to man the sections of the ship allotted to them in the event of an attack – important defence points like the apothecarion and the bridge, the fighter deck in case of evacuation or deployment on a boarding mission. Though it would be difficult to explain, it was a good feeling, a sense of purpose. A Space Marine knew battle. It was where he was designed to be.

  Drevyn, Skelpis, Halaestus and Vonkaal were his command squad, his honour guard. Lysander had chosen them from the men of the First because they were solid and trustworthy. They made their way through the other Imperial Fists to join him before the image of Dorn.

  ‘We may be under attack,’ said Lysander as they approached, ‘so we will act as if we are. Halaestus! Lead us in the prayer.’

  Halaestus bowed his head. Lysander did not insist on any one of his squadmates leading the rest in prayer, and instead selected them all equally. This time it was Halaestus’s turn.

  ‘The eve of battle burns bright,’ began Halaestus. For this occasion he had picked a lesser-spoken prayer from the corner of one of the Chapter’s works of collected battle-lore. ‘The sword and the bullet burn brighter. The shadow of the enemy looms dark. Our wrath and our sorrow rise darker. When the enemy soars above us, we will stride over him. When he goes far, we go further. When he kills we kill more, when he lives we live…’

  The next impact threw Lysander off his feet. Rogal Dorn fell too, the golden statue snapping off at the ankles and crashing into the front rows of the cathedral’s pews. Slabs fell from the ceiling, the artificial stone falling away to reveal the chill steel of the ship’s structure.

  ‘Langeloc!’ yelled Lysander into the vox.

  ‘That was a lance strike,’ came Langeloc’s voice. Over the vox came sounds of commotion as the bridge crew reacted to the sudden impact. Someone was yelling for a medical team to attend the bridge. ‘We are pursued. Sensorium teams are trying to identify the enemy.’

  ‘What is our integrity?’

  ‘Major damage to the ventral weapon bays. Geller field fluctuating. We may have to drop out of the warp.’

  ‘Keep me updated,’ said Lysander. ‘We’re heading to our post.’

  Lysander and his squad were slated to take up position where the main body of the spaceship met the engine block. The engines were one of the principal weaknesses of the Shield of Valour in the event of a boarding, for its plasma reactors were an eminently sabotagable design that could be the target of a suicidal boarding party. Enough damage to the reactors or their coolant systems could cause them to breach and vaporise half the ship. Lysander might be the commander of this mission but when the ship came under attack he and his command squad had their defensive duties just like everyone else.

  ‘Someone wants a fast death,’ said Brother Skelpis as the squad moved from the damaged cathedral sternwards. ‘And one they don’t deserve. Attacking the Imperial Fists in the warp is a very special kind of suicide.’

  ‘Is it the Vorel?’ asked Halaestus. ‘Can they do this?’

  ‘Unlikely,’ said Lysander. ‘But they have hurried their extinction if it is.’

  The whole ship shuddered. Lysander braced an arm against the cold steel of the wall. Crewmen were running in every direction, damage teams with fire extinguishers, engine-gang men running to supplement the engine crews who must have already sustained casualties as loose gear and coolant leaks made the block a lethal place. ‘Report!’ voxed Lysander.

  ‘The sensorium crew has a profile,’ came Langeloc’s voice. She sounded in pain. ‘There’s only a forty per cent…’

  ‘Who is it?’ demanded Lysander. Up ahead a crew member supported another, almost dragging her along the corridor, trailing blood as he headed for the sick bay.

  ‘It’s the Carnage,’ Langeloc replied.

  If you were to ask a spaceship crewman what was the worst thing that could happen on a ship, his answer would be ‘fire’. Unless he was one of the old guard, the voidborn veterans, ancient by Naval standards, who had indeed seen just about everything that might happen on board a spaceship and heard tell of everything else. In that case, his answer would be ‘the warp’.

  A human mind could not properly describe the dimension that surrounded the Shield of Valour as it hurtled through the warp. No human tongue could describe it. The Geller field around the Shield kept it intact from the insanity of that endless ocean, but when that field failed (as happened in countless sailors’ yarns) the warp took the ship, plunging its crew into the sea of madness and warping the ship, its inhabitants and their souls into something different and awful.

  The concept of attacking another ship in the warp was as impossible to comprehend as the warp itself. Time and space did not mean in the warp what they meant in reality – that was why the warp could be used for faster-than-light travel in the first place. But legends were passed between the old guard of the space lanes of opponents who would try just that, to dive from the warp’s black maelstrom to maul their prey when they were most vulnerable.

  As impossible as it was, as insane as anyone attempting it had to be, that was happening to the Shield of Valour.

  The enemy was a tarnished, age-pitted shark, its long nose knife-like as it sliced through the thunderheads of the warp and broke through the Geller field envelope around the Shield of Valour. The enemy ship was longer than the Shield but narrower, a sleek, acute-angled predator. Its flanks were serrated with sloping banks of gun batteries. Dorsal vanes crackled with power, drawing in the surrounding warp energies to power the nova cannon slung beneath the ship’s armoured prow.

  The symbol carved into its flank, scored deep into the steel of its hull armour, was an open gauntlet. The heraldries of a hundred commanders covered the hull around it. Banners of segmented steel flowed from the sternwards batteries, etched with battle-honours in the languages of the warp.

  The Imperium’s older battleships had machine-spirits that remembered old foes. The Shield of Valour was one of them. It recognised that profile, the prow coolant vents like narrowed eyes, the triangular flare of its stern engines like the fins of an undersea predator. It was known as the Carnage, and the Imperial Fists fleet had a particular re
ason to hate it.

  The rear-firing guns of the Shield opened up, spraying the prow of the Carnage with enough fire to shred a smaller ship. The Carnage rode the fire, turning the denser armour on the side of its prow to absorb the worst of it. Explosions stripped off sheets of armour, throwing out a glittering cloud of debris. The enemy ship rolled onto its side, bringing the sternwards section of the Shield into the arc of its nova cannon.

  The Shield responded, venting a great cloud of frozen gas from its coolant systems to lend strength to the thrusters that bucked its stern upwards, bringing the engines out of the firing arc.

  The nova cannon fired. The dense yellow-white beam, as hot as the heart of a star, hit a glancing strike against the Shield’s stern. In the void it would have been silent, but in the warp the sound was a very human scream, a sound of anger and jubilation, as if the Carnage were crying out in ecstasy to see such destruction brought to bear.

  The two ships were within close range now, within the kill-distance of their defensive guns. Prow-mounted gun batteries opened up on the Carnage, peppering the stern of the Shield with explosive rounds that ripped through the sections exposed by the glancing nova strike. Clouds of vapour and flame sprayed from the gashes, throwing out fountains of debris that burned brightly for split seconds in the void within the Geller field. The Shield’s turret-mounted guns replied, everything sternwards of the ship’s midpoint blazing directly into the prow of the Carnage.

  The Carnage did not care. She was built for murder up close.

  The Carnage weathered the fire, angling for another shot. The nova cannon recharged, spilling waves of supercharged particles from the glowing aperture beneath the prow.

  Every thruster on the Shield fired at once, tearing the ship around to bring herself out of the cannon’s arc. Debris rained against her, secondary explosions rippling through her hull. The Shield’s armaments were broadside laser batteries and torpedo arrays, and with a single decent broadside volley she could knock her assailant spinning into the warp, lost and out of control. It was her one chance, but thousands of years of naval doctrine said it would work.

  The nova cannon charged. Another thirty seconds and the Shield’s broadside would be unleashed, and even the armoured hull of the Carnage would be blistered and torn by the thousands of impacts. Those thirty seconds never happened as the nova cannon fired again.

  This shot was not glancing. It hit the Shield amidships, spitting her through on a bright lance of incandescent fire.

  ‘Brace for field collapse!’ came Langeloc’s voice through the din of the impact. ‘We’re coming out of the warp! All hands brace!’

  Lysander had felt the nova cannon hit home and he had heard the sound, like an impossibly loud tearing of paper, of the energy beam shredding the steel of the Shield’s internal structure. He knew war, space war included, and a hundred battles of instinct told him the damage was massive and catastrophic. It was a crippling shot, spearing the Shield right through and catching Throne knew what critical systems in its path.

  ‘We are brought low!’ yelled Lysander as warning klaxons blared from every direction. ‘But when our guns are called upon, we shall rise!’

  ‘What senseless animal hunts us down?’ snarled Brother Skelpis, dropping to a knee and grabbing on to a wheel lock to steady himself. ‘Do they not know what we are?’

  ‘When do we board them?’ said Brother Drevyn.

  Lysander had chosen his command squad because of their mix of aggression and discipline, the epitome of the Imperial Fists way of war. He also felt the urge to jump into the nearest saviour pod or shuttle and storm the enemy ship, and it took an effort to resist it. ‘Hold, brother,’ he said instead. ‘Man our post and do our duty. When the time for vengeance comes we will be the first in, that I swear.’

  ‘We shall hold you to that, captain,’ said Drevyn. ‘If it is as Langeloc says, if it is the Carnage…’

  The Shield of Valour changed as it shifted out of the warp and into real space, violently ejected by the helm crew before its fields completely collapsed. The colours became duller, the light less bright, even the chill of the refrigerated air less biting, as if the senses were covered by a frosted layer that removed the mind a single layer from its surroundings. Lysander’s stomachs jumped with the lurch from one reality to another.

  ‘We’re out,’ gasped Halaestus. ‘Now we can fight.’

  ‘Helm report boarding torpedoes in the void!’ came Langeloc’s voice. ‘Boarding imminent! All crews armed and make ready to repel boarders!’

  Spaceship crews dreaded boarding actions. There were few military actions that were more brutal, more unforgivingly random in the death they dealt. A Space Marine, however, was made for them – in once sense literally, for ship-to-ship combat was one of the roles the Emperor himself had in mind when he created the first generations of Space Marines for the Great Crusade. Drevyn whooped as Lysander led the way sternwards, through clouds of vented coolant vapour and gaggles of crewmen rushing to arms lockers and medical posts.

  If the enemy were indeed aboard the Carnage, and it was their intention to board, the Imperial Fists had a far better fight on their hands than the Vorel would ever give them.

  The Shield of Valour was battered and bloodied, but she was not dead yet. She was made of old stuff, structures and systems laid down in the millennia directly following the Horus Heresy, when the most powerful secrets of ship design had yet to be lost to time and ignorance. Her broadside guns, though off-centre of their target, blasted a fearsome volley into the forward sections of the Carnage, stripping away more hull armour and exposing silvery wounds underneath, where the spaces between hull layers were exposed. Raw, like bones with the skin stripped away, they bled vented atmosphere and torrents of wreckage like bright drops of chrome blood. This time the backdrop was real space, the bleak sanity of the vacuum and its speckling of stars.

  The nova cannon on the Carnage was charging again. The Shield of Valour continued its painful slow pirouette out of its killing arc, but the Carnage was executing a feint. Its main weapon, the one with which it sought to bring the Shield to heel, was not a gun or a torpedo tube at all. It lay deep inside the spaceship, in the minds of the thousands of souls who made up its crew.

  As one, a sacrifice was torn from their minds. Their memories, their loves and hates, the countless layers of their personalities, pledged to the dark gods of the Carnage’s masters. Five thousand cultists crewed the Carnage, with five thousand stories of sorrow, desperation and the promise of salvation. They had given everything they had to the gods to whom they had turned in their bleakest moments and pledged everything that was left, but none of them had truly understood what that meant. The sacrifice of their minds was guzzled up by the powers of the warp, syphoned through the ship’s archeotech according to pledges drawn up with countless petty gods of the warp.

  In return, the warp reached through into real space. It could only do so by burning away the greater part of the spiritual energy drained from the crew of the Carnage, but that was the deal.

  The space around the stern of the Shield bent and warped, forming a lens through which distant stars grew into wide smudges of cold light. Trails of debris were looped around and sucked back into the whirlpool sinking through spacetime behind the Shield. Glistening, slithering shapes writhed in the heart of the anomaly as the shape of the Shield itself lengthened and warped, a deeper darkness than the void spreading out to stain this patch of reality.

  The ship twisted violently and Lysander was thrown against the wall. A crewman fell past, the corridor he was heading for suddenly wrenched into a vertical shaft. He heard the man’s body breaking as he fell. Then the gravity shifted again and was gone completely, Lysander spiralling away without any force to hold him down. He grabbed the frame of a doorway as he drifted past.

  ‘Keep going!’ ordered Lysander. Brother Drevyn clambered up out of one of the side cor
ridors that had suddenly become vertical. The rest of the squad were behind Lysander, propelling themselves along in the zero gravity with whatever handholds they could find. The freezing mist intensified and visibility was almost gone, Lysander still navigating sternwards by instinct.

  He came up against a bulkhead door, large enough for two men abreast and solid enough to contain an explosion. It was set into the wall of the engine block, part of the reinforced cell separating the ship’s engines from the rest of the vessel. In times of crisis the engines and their crews were expendable, the requirement to contain leaks and fires from the reactors more important than the lives of those inside. It was the lot of the engine-gangs to be forsaken when the ship was in peril, and once the call went out for damage control stations they were on their own.

  Lysander put a hand against the door. It bowed and rippled under his touch, the steel becoming pliable. From beyond it came a groaning and crashing, the sound of metal and equipment torn free.

  ‘We’re too late,’ voxed Lysander. ‘The engines are lost.’

  ‘Saviour pods online,’ replied the ship’s captain. ‘Abandon ship, Captain Lysander. There is nothing more for you to do on board.’

  ‘Emperor be with you,’ said Lysander, but Commander Langeloc’s reply was lost in the static and din.

  It had happened so quickly. The Imperial Fists were ready to repel boarders, Lysander preparing to face anyone who tried to force their way into the engine blocks to destroy the reactors. Then, in an apparent heartbeat, the whole engine section had gone dark and the battle had transformed into something very different.

  ‘Brothers,’ said Lysander to the men of his squad. ‘The Shield of Valour is lost. Our duty is to get to the saviour pods and survive. Stay together and do not pause for anything.’