by Ben Counter
Velthinar’s many eyes narrowed. ‘If you think, warsmith, that a lord of the Silver Towers will be cowed by your anger…’
‘Anger?’ replied Shon’tu. ‘Why do you think I am angry?’
It was normally impossible to read expressions from the daemon’s alien face, but the waggling of its mandibles and flexing of its forelimbs might well have indicated confusion.
‘The lords of my Legion care only that a blow is struck against the sons of Dorn,’ continued Shon’tu. ‘But what glory is there in watching their corpses tumble through the void? What pleasure can be gained from giving the kill to a creature such as you? Now, the Iron Warriors can face the Imperial Fists as it should be, face to face! The iron within us, and the iron without, will crush their entreaties to their Corpse-Emperor, and prove with whom the strength of the warp lies! Perhaps we need some humanity in us, daemon, to understand. Whatever I now am, I was once a human being, a man, and still I possess the jealousy and rage of a man faced with an enemy whose inferiority he cannot demonstrate. Now I can sate that anger with the blood of Imperial Fists! I give thanks to all the gods that you have failed, Velthinar. It is a gift from the warp! I am not here to remonstrate with you. I am here to tell you to stay out of our way until the killing is done.’
Velthinar was silent for a moment, limbs folding and unfolding as its various eyes came to focus on the Iron Warrior. ‘I begin to understand,’ said the daemon, ‘why this task was given to you.’
The apothecarion of the Endeavour of Will was kept dark, the patients illuminated by the spotglobes that trained their lights on the prayer book over each bed. Automated manipulators turned each page at regular intervals, to make sure that if no one else was reading a prayer over the wounded, the eyes of the Emperor at least were looking on their words of devotion.
The Endeavour of Will had an apothecarion large enough for the wounded of an army. Now, however, it only had one patient – Techmarine Hestion, stripped of his armour and surrounded by medical servitors patiently weaving artificial skin over the wet red expanses of his burnt body.
Lysander watched the servitors work. Hestion was unconscious, kept in an induced coma by the autosurgeon pumping chemicals into his system. He could die then and there, or he could hold on for a long time. But Hestion was most certainly dying.
‘His sacrifice will be remembered,’ came a voice behind Lysander. Lysander turned to see another Imperial Fist in the doorway of the apothecarion. He walked into the ward, the dim light revealing him to be a lot younger than either Lysander or Hestion, a sergeant by his markings of rank, fresh-faced and relatively unscarred by the years of battle a Space Marine veteran endured. Young, thought Lysander, to have his own squad. Five Imperial Fists, wearing the same squad markings, followed him in.
‘It is our duty,’ replied Lysander, ‘to see that someone lives to remember.’
The sergeant held out a gauntlet. ‘Sergeant Rigalto,’ he said. ‘It is an honour, First Captain.’
Lysander remembered the name. Every Space Marine in a Chapter at least knew of every other. Lysander remembered Rigalto as a line trooper, bright and respected, but not an officer.
‘Those campaign badges,’ said Lysander. ‘Agripinaa subsector.’
‘You are correct, captain. Storming of the Basilica Pestilax.’
‘Then that explains it,’ said Lysander.
‘Explains it?’
‘Heavy losses at the Basilica. Your sergeant died and you took his place. Am I correct?’
‘You are,’ said Rigalto. ‘My honour and my despair. I saw him die, and could not stop it. One day he will be avenged.’
‘Such things must be known by a captain of the Chapter without asking,’ said Lysander. ‘We are spread so thin, we can die without our brothers knowing of it.’
‘They will all be remembered, just like Techmarine Hestion,’ said Rigalto. ‘In time, their names will be written down, when the enemy is driven back into the Eye.’
Lysander nodded. ‘That at least I can promise. Well, we have you and your squad, and myself. Who else holds the Endeavour of Will?’
‘Scout squad Menander,’ replied Rigalto. ‘They are on their tour of service, in preparation for elevation to full brotherhood. The station crew under Enginseer Selicron, and Astropath Vaynce.’
‘And my command squad,’ said Lysander. ‘Seventeen Imperial Fists, including myself. Quite the army, is it not?’
‘And the Siege of Malebruk,’ said Rigalto. ‘And the weapons of the star fort. Thanks to Hestion, the machine-spirit still has some of the weapons on-line.’
‘Enough to kill Shon’tu,’ said Lysander. ‘He banked on us being slain by his virus attack without his traitors having to raise their guns. Now he must give us a fight that we can win.’
‘I have heard tell,’ said Rigalto, ‘of the Shield of Valour. Of Malodrax. To us, those who were recruited after the event, it is told like a parable. But to you, it was real. It is memory. To fight alongside one who–’
‘Malodrax is in the past,’ said Lysander, holding up a hand to silence Rigalto. ‘A battle is to be fought now, and it is to the present that I would have us turn our thoughts.’
‘Then it is enough to say that we shall help you make the Iron Warriors pay for the Shield of Valour, and all that followed.’
Lysander’s vox-link chirped. ‘Chrystis here,’ came the transmission from the Siege of Malebruk.
‘Speak,’ said Lysander.
‘Captain, we are under attack.’
From the glare of the system’s sun, the waning red star Kholestus, the Ferrous Malice dived through sensor-baffling bands of solar radiation.
The Siege of Malebruk turned to face it, presenting a broadside which brought as many of its guns to bear as possible. In its tactical orrery, Chrystis and the ship’s battle-cartographers used holographic void-maps and rulers and compasses alike to build up an arsenal of manoeuvres the Siege could execute depending on the actions of their enemy. On the Ferrous Malice far less natural things, crewmen possessed with daemons of cunning and corrupted machine-spirits, were doing the same.
Naval battle proceeded at its own pace, as if time meant something different when it came to ship-to-ship murder in the void. Torpedoes and broadside shells proceeded not at the speed of gunfire, but lazily, spiralling through space to intersect with the likely locations of the enemy. It was war in which geometry and helmsmanship counted for more than aggression and fearlessness, cold-blooded and removed compared to the thunder of face-to-face battle.
That cool detachment broke as the first shells hit home. The barrage from the Ferrous Malice’s nose cannons speckled the hull of the Siege with silvery explosions, and inside, crewmen were shredded as metal deformed into bursts of jagged blades. Air shrieked out of hull breaches and damage control teams stationed beyond the inner hull died as the void boomed in to strangle and freeze them. Fires broke out, cutting off teams of crewmen with walls of flame.
The return fire from the Siege took its toll, hammering into the armoured prow of the enemy ship. Hull plates were torn free, and ribbons of frozen blood billowed out as the strange, half-living physiology of the ship was breached. The Ferrous Malice passed under the Siege, both ships battered by the first exchange of fire.
The Ferrous Malice was the larger ship, a grand cruiser of a design long forgotten by the shipyards of the Imperial Navy, and it sported more firepower covering every angle of attack. But the Siege of Malebruk was a Space Marine strike cruiser, with far greater agility and a quick-witted machine-spirit that calculated thousands of attack solutions every moment at the same time as fending off the virus attacks from the mind of Velthinar Silverspine. The two spiralled around one another, the Chaos vessel in one moment seeming lumbering and slow, and in the next making the strike cruiser seem massively outgunned and outclassed.
But this was just the overture. In a plume of purple black flame, alchemical rockets flared along the spine of the Ferrous Malice and slowed it down sudden
ly, twisting it into a reverse manoeuvre far beyond any Imperial-built ships of its size. At the same time its prow split open, revealing folds and tendons of vulnerable muscle, already torn and bleeding from the opening fire. From this biomechanical mass emerged the snout of a nova cannon. Few Imperial shipyards could forge such a weapon now, and none knew the secrets of creating the nuclear flame that now flared around the barrel as the weapon charged.
The crew of the Siege of Malebruk responded to this unexpected change in the battlefield by turning every effort towards evasion. The machine-spirit charted a crazed, jinking path that wrapped itself around the Ferrous Malice, too far for defensive turrets to open up against the strike cruiser but too close for the nova cannon to be brought to bear.
The nova cannon stayed silent. The Siege of Malebruk moved out of its arc of fire, even as the Chaos ship’s alchemical rockets fired again to turn it back on itself again.
The Ferrous Malice had no machine-spirit. In place of an artificial intelligence roosted a host of data-daemons, insubstantial warp creatures that flocked to serve their master, Velthinar. They squabbled and fought faster than the speed of thought and, through the sheer bedlam that went through their inhuman minds, wove battle plans that no enemy could predict. Their pronouncements were passed on to the crew and the strange unwholesome creatures that writhed through the oil sumps of the engine decks. The insane command structure of the ship, with the Iron Warriors overseeing multiple castes of mind-slaves, possessees, daemons and mutants, should never have permitted anything so complicated as a warship to function – but the Ferrous Malice was a construct of Chaos, transformed into a voidbound asylum by millennia in the warp, and by some incomprehensible process all the madness produced a ship that could think and act faster than should have been possible for its size.
And so the Ferrous Malice rolled on its side, presenting a scarred expanse of hull to the enemy. The broadside guns mounted there did not fire, and the crew of the Siege of Malebruk took advantage of this unusual good luck to hammer out a broadside of their own, stripping away hull plating and ripping charred craters along the length of the enemy. Fires billowed out into the void as ammunition and fuel stores cooked off. The wounding was terrible, with laser turrets boring holes decks deep and vast areas of the Ferrous Malice depressurising and throwing struggling handfuls of crew into space.
Then the hull peeled away of its own accord. Coils of muscle unravelled, whipping across the closing gap between the two ships and wrapping around the extremities of the Siege of Malebruk. The tentacles reeled in the strike cruiser, even as armoured beaks, like the mouthparts of some sea-dwelling kraken, emerged from the ruination of torn flesh and metal inside the Ferrous Malice.
The machine-spirit of the Siege of Malebruk had not factored in this turn of events. The ship had nothing to fight off the grand cruiser’s predations. Up close it had its defensive turret fire, which was designed to shoot down approaching torpedoes and bombers, and would have scarcely any impact on the mass of the Ferrous Malice. It had the option to board, but aside from the few spare crewmen it could arm it had only the single command squad who had accompanied Captain Lysander to the star fort. The Ferrous Malice, meanwhile, was guaranteed to be brimming with mutants, psychopaths and worse.
The Imperial Fists on board, offensive as the presence of the Ferrous Malice was, would not throw their lives away boarding it and accepting certain death. They would do more good opposing the ship’s undoubted intention to take on the Endeavour of Will. The order was given for the Siege of Malebruk’s crew to abandon ship.
The Ferrous Malice had no intention of letting all those fleshy morsels go. Tendrils snapped out from its ruptured hull, snaring saviour pods and shuttle craft as they fled the Siege. Dozens of men and women died as their escape craft were smashed open, or were forced alive down one of the gullets that opened up within the biological mass beneath the hull of the Ferrous Malice. The armoured shuttle carrying the Imperial Fists weaved between spinning wrecks and the biological growths trying to ensnare it, the survival of five of the Imperium’s finest warriors now down to nothing more than the encoded skills of a servitor-pilot and a hefty dose of fate.
The Ferrous Malice reeled the Siege of Malebruk into a close embrace. Beaks armoured with bone crunched into the strike cruiser’s hull, ripping through decks and shearing off one of the ship’s engine sections. Plasma coolant billowed silver-black into the vacuum, and the reactors discharged their power load in a storm of blue lightning. The shockwaves tore apart more escape craft, or shredded their guidance systems to send them tumbling without power in all directions.
The Chaos ship dismembered the strike cruiser, forcing massive chunks of spaceship into its many jaws. The machine-spirit of the Siege of Malebruk survived until the last, moving from one stack of datamedium to the next as parts of the ship were crushed or torn away. The strike cruiser was a gutted shell by the time it ran out of places to hide, and its existence winked out in the closing maw of the Chaos ship.
The Ferrous Malice let the remains of the Siege of Malebruk drift away. One side of the strike cruiser was gone completely, the rest hollowed out like a carcass abandoned by scavengers. The Chaos ship had a bloated appearance, an insect gorged on blood, squatting in a haze of debris. Only a few silvery specks remained of the Siege’s crew. The Ferrous Malice, sated for now, ignored the fleeing escape craft, and the escapees clung to life for a few hours more as their craft headed for the relative safety of the Endeavour of Will. Among them were the five members of the Imperial Fists First Company, seething with eagerness to get to grips with the enemy who had just handed them such a total defeat.
PART TWO
Shon’tu stepped through the door of the Dreadclaw, and breathed in the ancient, stale air of a dying empire.
Behind him, a squad of Iron Warriors followed him out of the Dreadclaw’s jaws and into the interior of the Endeavour of Will. The Dreadclaw was a make of hull-boring assault capsule that the Imperium had long since forgotten how to make, but which still hung in their dozens over the assault decks of the Ferrous Malice. Its bronze-cased beak had torn through the star fort’s outer layers and come to rest in a maze of maintenance passages and superstructure supports, into which the Iron Warriors emerged already prepared for a fight.
Shon’tu went helmetless, for even a sudden vacuum could do little harm to his artificial skin and bionic lungs. ‘Dust and desolation,’ he said. ‘Like the inside of a tomb. Such a lifeless place.’
‘And we shall make it literally so,’ said Brother Ku’Van, one of the veterans accompanying Shon’tu.
‘As we have done so many times before, my brethren,’ replied the warsmith. ‘We shall leave this voidbound coffin as empty as the souls of those we kill. For they have no iron within!’
‘Iron within!’ shouted the squad in response. ‘Iron without!’
‘Warsmith!’ came a vox from somewhere nearby, among the webs of dark iron and cramped maintenance spaces that soared in every direction. The rune on Shon’tu’s retina told him it was Steelwatcher Mhul speaking. ‘My coven has made safe breach.’
‘As has the Choir,’ came another vox from Forge-Chaplain Koultus. Koultus’s voice was unmistakable, a brash growl of amplified bass and churning sub-tones. It had to be, or the Choir couldn’t have heard the prayers with which he drove them forwards.
‘Then converge on me, brothers,’ replied Shon’tu. ‘To you has been given the honour of accompanying me in this boarding action. Prove to me that you deserve my favour. Drive on, strike hard and without pause, and we will drive a spear of iron into the heart of this place!’
‘Well met, captain,’ said Brother-Sergeant Laocos, clapping a hand to the enormous ceramite barrel of his chest.
‘Well met, my brother,’ replied Lysander.
The star fort’s archive, a high-ceilinged room lined with cases of books and scroll tubes, was one of the few places Lysander and the Imperial Fists of his command squad could gather without being cra
mped. Like Lysander, the five-strong squad wore Terminator armour, a mark of the esteem in which the Chapter held the First Company, and the rarest and most advanced piece of wargear in the Chapter’s armouries. Each man was closer to a walking tank than a single soldier, close to three metres tall and not much less across. Most other suitable places on the Endeavour of Will were too small to accommodate them all comfortably. It was the first time Lysander had seen the men of his command squad since he had left the Siege of Malebruk to see to the star fort’s situation in person.
‘I so nearly lost you’ continued Lysander. ‘The Emperor’s shield was on you.’
‘Perhaps’ said Laocos. ‘But the Siege did not have such good fortune.’
‘I saw only via the tactical sensors here,’ said Lysander. ‘It looked bad enough from there.’
‘It was a horror such as I have rarely witnessed,’ replied Laocos. ‘All we knew of Shon’tu and the Ferrous Malice is but a fragment of the truth. We were–’
‘We were caught out,’ said Lysander grimly. ‘This is not an act of opportunism by the Iron Warriors. Scavengers they may be at heart, but Shon’tu knew the disposition of the star forts and the fact we could spare but few to defend them if their own weaponry failed. He had exactly the tools he needed to destroy them, and but for the valour of Techmarine Hestion he would have done just that. He made sure to bring a ship the equal of the best we could afford to spare from the front line. What we know – what I know – of Shon’tu is enough to tell me that he will have brought the means to destroy the Endeavour of Will now, even when his assault on the machine-spirit failed.’
‘Then what will he do next?’ said Brother-Scholar Demosthor. Demosthor, in training to attend the Reclusiam of the Chapter’s Chaplains, had passages of Dorn’s philosophy pinned to his armour, and to the casing of the squad’s assault cannon, which he carried.
