[Battlefleet Gothic 01] - Execution Hour

by Gordon Rennie - (ebook by Undead)

  “Engine Quintus has suffered a disabling strike to its coolant coils. Main drive now operating at sixty-two per cent capacity,” reported the infuriatingly calm voice of a servitor, uncaring that it was announcing the Macharius’s slow but almost surely certain destruction.

  Semper shared a glance with Ulanti, both of them facing the same harsh truths. That damned Slaughter class cruiser had come through hell and high water to pursue them and was still closing, sending blast after blast of weapons fire into the Macharius’s engine array. At this rate, the ship’s main drive systems would be crippled in a matter of minutes. Both the Macharius and the Inviolable Retribution were in the same desperate straits. If they continued on, they would be destroyed, unable to outrun the faster Chaos vessel, unable to withstand many more strikes into their vulnerable stern sections. If they turned to face their attacker, they would almost certainly still be destroyed, presenting themselves to the massed fire not only from the Virulent’s prow armaments but also from its formidable side-mounted batteries as they manoeuvred round in a ponderous turning circle.

  Both Imperium vessels had already taken serious damage in the recently-ended engagement with the Chaos fleet. The Retribution’s entire starboard gundecks had been gutted by fire, the Macharius had no attack craft capability left to launch as the surviving remnants of its Starhawk and Fury squadrons. No, Semper realised, there would be little chance of surviving another battle at present.

  “Captain?” prompted Ulanti, knowing that a command decision was called for.

  “Prepare to come about, Mister Ulanti. According to the damage reports, we’ve still got a few gundecks operating on the starboard side, so we’ll favour our enemy with that side as we turn. Signal the Retribution. Thank her for her companionship and tell her to keep on making for the system’s edge. No sense in us both going down here, and we’ll buy her time to make her safe escape. That Slaughter class seems to be solely gunning for us, anyway.”

  Ulanti nodded wordlessly and turned away to give the necessary orders, only to be interrupted by a shout from the surveyor section.

  “New surveyor contact appearing ahead of us. A warship. It’s powering up weapons and drive systems!”

  “Identify!” barked Semper, angry that he had fallen into a Chaos trap. Somehow, another enemy vessel had outflanked them, cutting off their retreat. Now even the Arbites ship would be unable to escape to the system’s edge.

  “Welcome back, Macharius. Good to have you amongst us again,” rasped the voice of Erwin Ramas over an open, ship-to-ship comm-channel.

  Its systems powered down so as to render it invisible to surveyor senses, the Drachenfels had lain patiently in wait for its prey. Now, at last, its patience had finally paid off. Powering up, it surged forward towards its target, closing on it with near reckless abandon.

  “Lock on,” reported the Gothic class cruiser’s master of ordnance.

  “Launch torpedoes. Close spread,” came the reply from the occupant of the armoured strategium sanctum.

  The torpedoes blazed towards their target, passing between the Macharius and the Retribution in a bravura show of marksmanship. Aboard the Virulent, Sirl was still trying to absorb the surprise of the Imperial cruiser’s sudden appearance when the command deck alarms screamed in warning as the torpedoes’ lock-on signals bounced off the hull of their target. Knowing that the Macharius could not launch any more bomber squadrons and needing to urgently replace crew losses elsewhere, Sirl had drawn heavily on the crews of his ship’s defence turrets. Now, all over the Virulent, caught by surprise by the torpedo attack, men and other, lesser, things scrambled to crew the undermanned turret defences.

  Whatever defensive fire they could throw up around the ship would be too little, too late.

  The Virulent’s prow exploded apart. One of the torpedoes struck the command tower, blowing away the top of it. The ship’s engines stuttered and died as power feeds ruptured open, sweeping the main hull’s internal compartments with a burning flood of energy, immolating the greater part of the ship’s crew.

  Dying and powerless, the Virulent blindly tumbled away through space, falling into the gravitational pull of the remains of Belatis. There, it would be either mercifully smashed apart in collision with any of the massive, continent-sized planetoid fragments or would drift forever amongst the rest of the detritus of the planet’s destruction.

  Trapped amongst the smashed wreckage of the bridge, his plague-swollen body gruesomely burst open by the effects of explosive decompression as the torpedo detonation ripped apart the Virulent’s command tower, Bulus Sirl remained hideously alive by virtue of his Chaos-altered form. He could survive for months, he knew, his body feeding off the plagues that would hatch out amongst his ruined flesh. Bile bubbled from his lips as he soundlessly mouthed words into the cold vacuum, praying to Grandfather Nurgle to bring him swift and merciful deliverance. If the Plague Lord was listening, he gave no answer.

  Hours later, aboard the Macharius, damage control teams attended to the aftermath of battle, conducting whatever makeshift repairs were necessary, giving what aid they could to the wounded and clearing up the dead. Stacked in heaps in airlock holds, the best the dead could hope for was a hurried prayer from a ship’s preacher before they were flushed out into space along with all the other unusable wreckage of battle.

  Now a work crew of naval ratings methodically sifted through the crematorium scene inside one of the generarium sub-levels. The rest of this part of the ship had been untouched by the battle, but it was not the task of men such as these to wonder why this chamber alone had been swept clean by fire.

  “Over here!” shouted one of the ratings, bending over one of the fire-blackened corpses that filled the floor of the chamber. “There’s one of them still alive!”

  His companion looked down in disbelief at the figure huddled on the ground. The man’s face and hair were gone, and he wore the charred remains of what looked surprisingly like a flight suit which had been horribly heat-fused to his skin over much of his body. Like the man’s face, any name and rank insignia on the suit had been burned away by the fire. Nearby was the twisted, fire-consumed remains of something else. Something organic—several bodies fused together, surely, for it was too large to be the remains of just one man. Unconsciously, instinctively, both men gave the blackened mass a wide berth.

  Looking at the burned man’s injuries, the second rating reached for the blade he kept tucked into his boot. “Best to put him out of his misery now. He won’t want to live, not looking like that, and those apothecary bastards don’t care what happens to the ones that are messed up too bad to fix. They’ll sling him into the airlock while he’s still alive and flush him out along with all the other stiffs.”

  “Leave him be,” commanded the other rating, gently taking the burned figure’s raw-fleshed hand, bending down to speak gently into his ear. The rating had been raised a loyal, Emperor-fearing servant of the Imperium, and there was something about the dying man that struck a distant chord in him. “It’s alright, friend,” he reassured the faceless stranger. “We’ll get you to a surgeon. Emperor alone knows what you’re doing down here, but we’ll get you back to where you belong.”

  The stranger groaned, trying to form words from a mouth reduced to a lipless hole. The rating leant in close, straining to listen to the burned man’s mumbled words, then looked up in puzzlement at his companion.

  “What did he say?” asked the other rating.

  “Nonsense, mostly. Reckon he must be from the flight deck after all, maybe ground crew on one of the fighter squadrons. All he could say was something about avenging furies…”

  Moving in formation with the Retribution and the Drachenfels, the Macharius moved toward the jump point on the system’s edge, homing in on the comm-net chatter of the convoy ahead. Before them was the darkness of interstellar space. Behind them was a fading red glow that marked where the world of Belatis had recently been. In time, the drifting remains of the planet would spread
out to form an asteroid belt halo around the system’s sun, and future generations of Imperial statisticians and map-makers would mark the planet as Mundus Perdita, a world now lost to the Imperium.

  At the rear of the command deck, Semper, Ulanti and Byzantane stood together in silence, watching the residue of fading, burning light that had once been a world inhabited by several hundred million of the Emperor’s subjects. Semper wore a fresh duty uniform in place of the filthy and bloodstained items that he had worn during his sojourn on the planet’s surface. At his side, in place of the customary navy sabre, hung the heavy, scabbard-sheathed blade of an Imperial Guard power sword.

  “A gift bequeathed to me by a brave and loyal servant of the Emperor,” he said in response to the querying look from Ulanti. “I wear it in remembrance of him, and of the promise I made to him.”

  Byzantane looked at the weapon, recognising it, and remembering the man whose hand he had last seen it in. “What promise?” he asked, suspecting he already knew the answer, suspecting that he made a similar promise to the same man not so long ago.

  Semper gazed out at the vista beyond, taking one last look at the funeral pyre glow of the ruins of Belatis as he signalled for the command deck blast shields to be lowered in preparation for their ascent into the warp.

  “That we stop running away. That we stop giving up ground and innocent lives. That we finally turn and fight. From now on,” he grimly vowed, unconsciously laying one hand on the pommel of the sheathed sword, “we take this war back the enemy.”

  Byzantane and Ulanti nodded in silent agreement. Behind them, the blast shields grated down into place, removing from view the last traces of all that had been the world of Belatis.

  EPILOGUE

  In his hologram chamber sanctum buried deep within the body of the Planet Killer, Abaddon the Despoiler watched in satisfaction as the projected image showed the last few burning asteroid embers of the now-vanished world of Belatis as they tumbled through space. The Despoiler was pleased, but the shimmering image displayed by the chamber was like a finely-carved gemstone that, under close inspection, revealed itself to be minutely flawed in some minor but ultimately displeasing way.

  The Despoiler turned his head, his attention drawn by something on the fringes of the star system. One of his lieutenants gestured in curt command, and the arcane device’s tech-priest operators hurried to change the settings in search of whatever the Warmaster was looking for. The holo-image shifted and changed, tracking through the star system, eventually zeroing in on a group of vessel shapes now making their way towards a nearby jump point. Abaddon frowned in disquiet, his gaze passing over the Imperial convoy line. It displeased him that some of the servants of the false Emperor had defied him and managed to escape the ordained destruction of their world, but there was something more here.

  His eyes passed once over the line of ships, stopping on one warship—an ungainly, battle-scarred carrier ship—near the rear of the formation. Again, the Despoiler felt a prescient disquiet, a whispering doubt that he had overlooked something potentially significant, but he angrily dispelled the notion. There was more—far more—at stake here than the fate of one miserable, straggling convoy, or even the destruction of an entire world.

  “Show me,” commanded the Warmaster, and the image changed again, showing once more the glittering panoply of stars and planetary systems that was the rich prize of the Gothic sector. And, hidden within this grand vista, were the six true prizes that the Warmaster sought to capture. His eye picked them out one by one, his mind reciting their names to itself.

  Fularis.

  Anvil 206.

  Fier.

  Rebo.

  Schindlegeist.

  Brigia.

  The six Blackstone systems, each home to one of the ancient and almost limitlessly powerful artefacts that the false Emperor’s servants had, like a colony of insects or vermin building their nest inside the workings of a Titan war machine, turned into bases for their space fleets, little realising the true capabilities of the objects that they foolishly believed to be theirs by right.

  Abaddon turned, sensing the approach of one of his lieutenants, the minion abasing himself in a pleasingly obsequious manner before the Despoiler. “Warmaster, the fleet is regrouped and ready to be underway. We await your orders.”

  Abaddon considered. This Planet Killer vessel had now achieved its intended purpose. Fear and confusion were rife amongst the ranks of the enemy. They waited in terror to see what world would next fall under the vessel’s shadow, and, as they waited, they did not see or understand the greater purpose of it all. It was time now, the Warmaster realised, to reveal that purpose. It was time to take this war to a level of calamity and destruction as yet undreamt of by an enemy that did not realize what was truly at stake in this conflict. They fought to repel what they assumed was an invasion of the Gothic sector. He fought to seize the six prizes that would in turn deliver the entire Imperium of Mankind to the forces of Chaos.

  “Rebo V,” he ordered. “We make for the Blackstone Fortress at Rebo V.”

  Let the galaxy burn, the Warmaster Horus had commanded. Soon, thought the Despoiler, so very soon.

  Scanning and basic

  proofing by Red Dwarf,

  formatting and additional

  proofing by Undead.