Echoes of the Long War

by David Guymer

  Thane had no frame of reference for it.

  A contemptuous slice from an axial beam weapon sheared through the aft of the rearmost Black Templars cruiser. Some kind of gravitic conversion beam, it crushed the entire aft section as though it were parchment scrap. The sudden spike of hypergravity flipped the warship nose to stern, torsional stresses cutting through what was left like a gladius through a ration can and spilling its contents into space.

  Thane had never seen a weapon like it. Nothing the Imperium could produce came close. A sail-like array of adjusting fins, turning wheels, shivering wires and enormous copper rods rose from the ork carrier’s bloated hull. A wash of strange, green-tinged energy sparked through the array towards its vertex and seemed to radiate into space. Thane’s throat clenched.

  Witch.

  ‘All Black Templars identifiers are in,’ said Auspectoria. He spoke quietly, mournfully, eyes on the on-screen tableau. ‘Nine ships, and debris mass-equivalent to about fifteen more.’

  Thane counted quickly.

  ‘I see ten ships.’

  ‘Nine ships, my lord. There’s a delay. The feed is being relayed from Excelsior. Our systems can’t penetrate the interference.’

  The carrier fired again. A full spread of crude but devastingly effective torpedoes blasted another cruiser to pieces.

  Nine.

  ‘Can she relay a hololith signal? Can she get me Obsidian Sky?’

  ‘I… I think so.’

  ‘Then do it!’

  Shipmaster Kale moved purposefully towards the strategium board. Another impact to the forward shields almost threw him the final metre, forcing him to steady himself against the metallic rim of the console’s bulk housing. An armsman in grey carapace bodyplate and with a pump-action shotgun hanging from a shoulder strap hurried to help him. Kale thanked him with a curt nod, then gestured him back to his post.

  ‘Should we also attempt to raise the…’ the shipmaster looked uncomfortable, ‘other ship, lord?’

  ‘No!’

  Thane practically spat the word. The idea alone was abhorrent.

  ‘When circumstances change, my lord…’ said Kale. His wish to recite his Guilliman vied with awareness of his position relative his superhuman Chapter Master. He restricted himself to just that opening line, and a poignant arch of his eyebrow.

  ‘Some circumstances don’t change,’ said Thane. ‘Some walls can never come down.’

  ‘Sir. My lord.’

  They both turned. It was Teal.

  ‘I have the Venerable Dreadnought-Marshal Magneric on vox.’

  Six

  Vandis System – Mandeville point

  The image within the wire hoop of the cable-fed, spring-mounted hololith projector was dark. Had it not been for the drizzle of static and the occasional side-to-side flicker of the shadow shapes within it, then Thane might have concluded that Excelsior had lost the signal. The cold blue glow of the frequency-tether bulb confirmed otherwise. Primary power aboard Obsidian Sky was out. Even bridge lighting was down.

  Illuminated under periodic fountains of sparks, he could make out Magneric. The hard, angular definition of his armour shone like a faceted work of jet. Silver cuneiform picked out the edgework of black, battle-scarred ceramite plates. But this was not the moulded plate of a battle-brother. It was the immense armour housing of a Dreadnought’s sarcophagus.

  ‘Do I address the Venerable Magneric?’ spoke Thane, forgetting for a moment, in his reverence, where he was. ‘I studied your actions in the defence of Terra as a neophyte. The sally that silenced the Fourth Legion’s guns is legendary, even if it cost you your life.’

  ‘The Emperor lights our true path!’ the Dreadnought thundered, shouting Thane down as he still spoke as though he had not heard, or had listened and deemed it irrelevant. His speakers were pitched to a frightening volume, his words stretched and distorted by the interlink as though delivered through a pipe. ‘Not once but twice. Twice!’

  The image dissolved into drizzling static and the audio went with it. For a moment, ork gibberish pushed hard onto the line, and then the hololith returned, albeit for several seconds without sound. The Venerable Dreadnought must have been similarly affected by the break in the link but, judging by the flutter of the scriptural parchments that lay over his speakers, he spoke yet.

  ‘Praise be!’ the Dreadnought boomed, rising to full volume in a grind of static. ‘Praise be!’

  Thane turned enquiringly to Teal.

  ‘There’s nothing I can do, lord. The interruptions are at their end.’

  The command deck shook under a series of escalating blows, and Thane gripped the handrail that encircled the hololith plate. Mass-explosions and slow disintegrations lit the screens of the main viewer as they cycled through shots of the Fists Exemplar fleet. An aegis frigate came apart under a sustained torrent of macro-fire, its hull flaking away like rust. An ork warship vanished in a ball of light. Another lost its shields in a spasm of current, then was engulfed and destroyed. The cruiser Angel Astra split down her centre, metal shearing and snapping and spinning into space, coming apart before the ork assault ship that was ploughing into her spine. Light attack craft burst and died, indistinguishable from static.

  ‘Magneric. Magneric!’ Static rippled through the loop-array like blast debris in a warpstorm. He waited for a response for as long as he felt he could keep his attention from the needs of his own ship. And then, half-buried in noise, like the blip of an emergency transponder to alert a searching friend that the debris hid survivors, came the voice.

  ‘The Emperor guided us to Dzelenic Four and showed us the way to victory. Seven centuries I pursued the traitor that calls me friend, and it was for a purpose. Praise be!’

  It sounded as though that final coda was carried by other voices in the background, but it was impossible to be sure. To add to the orks’ interference, there was a disconnect of several seconds between what Thane heard and what he saw. Holding a dialogue with the most considered of Fists Exemplar would have been difficult, but it was abundantly clear that carrying on a conversation with the Venerable Black Templar even under the most ideal of circumstances would have been a challenge.

  ‘Victory, Dreadnought-Marshal?’ he urged. ‘Victory over the orks? Is that why they pursue you in such numbers, for information that you carry?

  ‘Abhor the witch, deny the witch, destroy the witch!’

  Thane tightened his grip over the handrail, hung his head, closed his eyes, and let out an exasperated growl. The shiver of shield-diffused detonations ran through the metal and into his palms.

  ‘Our faith in Him is our armour,’ Magneric continued, unabated. ‘His divinity is the sword in our hands. Alas for the weakness of my Navigator’s faith, his mind was destroyed when the witch craft pulled us from the warp. Loathe the mutant!’

  Thane left the hololithic projection to its diatribe. The Black Templars’ fundamentalist beliefs were subject to hushed discussion among the Successor Chapters, but were nominally a secret nonetheless. To hear them declared so brazenly by a veteran of the Heresy War made Thane uneasy.

  Nonetheless. ‘Whatever the Venerable’s state of mind, shipmaster, it is clear to me that he has something of value,’ he said aside to Kale. ‘Anything that the orks work so hard to keep from me is something that I want. Release emergency power to main drive and forward shields. Ram the alien from our path if you must. Divert the necessary power to tractors and teleporters.’

  ‘No!’ Magneric’s time-delayed static-hiss rumbled from the array like thunder. ‘The Emperor protects.’

  ‘I do not understand. You sent out a signal for aid.’

  The Dreadnought’s bulk pivoted against the enshrouding darkness, turning sufficiently far from his hololith’s field of capture to boom something at a crew serf without Thane’s hearing. ‘I am sending your ship my sarcophagus’ vid-log of
the battle. May it lift your heart, brother. Use it gloriously.’

  Thane looked to Kale, who looked in turn to the vox-liaison, Teal. She frowned. ‘Data exload from Obsidian Sky confirmed but we’ve received nothing yet.’ A few tense moments passed. ‘Wait… Data packet received, not by us, but by the Interdictor.’

  Thane thumped the handrail. ‘Who did he think that he was talking to?’

  While he marshalled his frustration, Kale had crossed to the strategium and reformatted the viewer to a split screen. Individual screens on the left-hand side continued to flick between shots of the Fists Exemplar fleet.

  The frigate picket was coming apart under an intolerable weight of firepower. The Dauntless, Champion and Noble Savage were destroyed. The Grey Ranger was burning, backup generators spitting emergency power into space.

  The right-side screens had been combined to run a single, near-real-time feed of the second Black Templar crusade group, crudely overlain by a black grid showing the divides between the screens. They were barely moving at all now, held up in a mass of ork warships. Dantalion and her accompanying cruisers were just sliding into field, enveloped in an oil-on-water pattern of void-shield discharge as the three massive ships sailed into the orks’ heaviest ordnance. Arriving from the opposite direction, the ork carrier crunched into the rear of its escort fleet, spitting out a volume of fire equivalent to an entire Navy battlegroup, weird power squirming over its ramshackle sail. Another black cruiser blossomed into fire. From the vid-feed alone, Thane could not be sure that it was not the Interdictor.

  ‘Zerberyn gets himself into the right place at the right time once again. Can we get a message to him?’

  ‘No, lord. The carrier’s blanket denial broadcast grows exponentially more severe as you approach.’

  ‘Do we have any ships unengaged?’

  ‘Paragon is more-or-less intact and has drive power restored.’ Kale consulted a display. ‘And Excelsior and her escorts.’

  ‘Transmit new orders to those ships. Intercept Dantalion with orders to escort Interdictor from the battle and prepare for immediate translation: return to Terra with all speed, it is nearer than Phall, and hope that Magneric carries information of worth. Dispatch Guilliman to accompany them.’

  ‘Respectfully, lord, she’s the second most powerful ship in the fleet.’

  ‘I expect a degree of insubordination from my First Captain, shipmaster, I do not expect it from you.’

  The old shipmaster clipped his heels. ‘Aye, lord.’

  ‘Use it gloriously, brother,’ came Magneric’s voice through the distortion. ‘Praise be.’

  ‘Hold firm, Dreadnought-Marshal. Your brother, Bohemond, saved my Chapter from my stubbornness on Eidolica and you can expect the same today. Whether the Emperor wishes it or no. Magneric? Magneric!’

  The projector emitted an angry hiss. A whiff of ozone. Gabbling voices. The detector picked up the orks’ gibberish frequencies and reconstituted the random noise in eerie repeat patterns and oscillating waves.

  The link had been severed.

  They had lost Magneric.

  Seven

  Vandis

  The lighting on the command deck of Obsidian Sky plinked on and off, on and off. Half-second flashes of artificial light slid across machine-smooth black metal and the stiff, liveried corpses that lay across them. Plastek console frames stuffed with broken glass flashed back, each jagged piece a lens showing a reflected snapshot of a dead ship. Coolant gases spumed into the chamber from a damaged radiator assembly in the ceiling, filling the area with a vaporous, sub-zero froth.

  At the aft section there was a raised platform, above which flew a white banner bearing the Sigismund cross and a blood splatter in the lower left corner. It was ringed with displays and terminals, all dead. Castellan Ralstan had taken an exploding oxygen pipe in the face. He lay on his front on the steps down to the main bridge, armour cracked and burned, arm drawn up as if to conceal the ruin of his head. Light and shadow came and passed: on, off. Shipmaster Ericus was fetched up against the aft bulkhead as though someone had shoved him against it and put a bullet through his forehead.

  Down a level, into the main deck, the bodies lay more thickly. Some had been crushed under falling panels or buried under shattered glass, and now lay staring up like dead men frozen under thin ice. They had been electrocuted, burned, cut by glass shrapnel and bludgeoned by high-mass debris, most while still strapped into work station chairs. One had been reduced to a carbonaceous smear on the seat leather by a catastrophic overload of his auspex. The console was still sputtering, sparking and fizzing into the nitrogen mist.

  ‘Boarding torpedoes incoming,’ mumbled the Master Ordinatum, Franzek, as though drawing each word one at a time from his head. Blood matted his hair and ran down the side of his neck. His eyes were glazed. The harsh lighting intermittently exposed his blanched face. On, off. On, off. ‘I’ve never seen so many at once.’

  ‘Faith is the first victim of thought. Keep firing,’ Magneric answered with a metallic rumble, stepping back from the hissing hololith projector.

  Dead too.

  ‘Firing… aye.’

  Targeting grids were dead. Auto-loaders were dead.

  The gunnery chief was arming whatever had been already loaded and launching it manually, as fast as his shell-shocked nervous system could still manage. Each shot sent a shudder through the ship, a nail recoil-driven into the hull. Inertial stabilisers were dead too, but the crew, what remained of it, no longer even recognised the shaking. By sheer mass, Magneric stood immovably in the middle of the command dais.

  ‘We deny the alien this ship, until the Emperor gives us our leave to rest.’

  ‘Ave Imperator,’ they replied.

  It was inconceivable that Obsidian Sky could destroy every last torpedo, but they could thin their numbers. And miracles happened, Magneric knew. The hull squealed in torment, shaken, this time from without, as though being attacked with a drill.

  ‘We shall know no fear!’

  With a sudden lurch, the drilling stopped. Seconds elapsed without an explosion. The crew held their breath, and held onto their brace positions. They knew what a torpedo hit felt like.

  ‘Sound the general alert,’ boomed Magneric.

  ‘Aye.’

  The bondsman covering at the main drive station – Cecillia – staggered from starboard to port, thumbed open a transparent plastek cover to expose a red key in a slot, and then turned it. The flickering light was immediately shot through with red. The effect was bitty, hazard-striping the debris-strewn deck as dull red lights glowed from broken screens.

  Internal sensors were dead. Communications were dead.

  Without them, necessity had demanded the command crew be creative. Power utilisation profiles indicated active terminals in all sections. Oxygen saturations pinpointed signs of life at muster points on all decks. Kaplin, at Operations, had breathlessly suggested retrofitting a pair of servitors to link up as a two-way communicator, but there had been no time to implement it. Now, Kaplin was directing that reckless enthusiasm into the pump action of a Mk IX shotgun. He took position on the steps near the late castellan, a slightly crazed look in his eyes.

  Magneric stamped through an about-face. The assault cannon mounted on his right shoulder ran through a sequence of test cycles. His immense power fist rotated, clicked and reversed, like some kind of puzzle clock. He trained the spinning gun barrel onto the magnetically locked blast doors that sealed off the command deck from the rest of the ship.

  He could almost feel the xenos aboard his ship, the way a man of flesh and bone would feel the tasteless, textureless, odourless itch of a radiation dose. This new breed of greenskin was a dangerous foe. They fought tactically, acted coherently: if they had forces to spare to claim his crippled ship then he could only assume they would do so exactly as he would in their place. The command deck wo
uld be the priority target. Then the enginarium, gunnery control, the flight bays.

  It was useful however to remind oneself that they were not men. They were still orks.

  ‘Rolans,’ he voxed, attempting to raise the battle-brother barracked in the deck below with a squad of Black Templars and two platoons of armsmen serfs. ‘Sword Brother?’

  A light crackle of static filled his acoustic register.

  The carrier had somehow managed to kill off helm-to-helm vox. Until then, Magneric had thought that unblockable.

  Cold gases swirled. The lights rattled, and blinked. On, off. On, off.

  On…

  Time stretched, bloated. The blast doors seemed suddenly a yawning distance away, although his own triple-grid spatial positioning system insisted that their relative positions were unchanged. It was as if, in this chamber alone, the laws of the universe had been relaxed, the space between particles expanding even as the particles themselves remained exactly as they were. Making room.

  Off.

  There was a pop, like a broken vacuum seal, and an ork burst out of the vapour cloud as if it had been hidden there all along and slammed into the middle of the main deck. The flickering light made the sudden appearance of its gruesome mass even more unreal. It was the monster that stalked the unevolved lobes of the human brain, fear centres unchanged since Homo sapiens sapiens first emerged from the forests and onto the plains of prehistoric Terra. And now, two hundred millennia and half a segmentum removed, they still recognised a beast.

  The ork bared yellow fangs and roared.

  Kaplin roared back, mad with horror, and swung about, leading with his shotgun. There was a boom. Scatter shot from both barrels tore up the ork’s black-and-white body armour and riddled its heavy jaw with pellets. It bullied through, tusked mouth wide like a dog thirsty for the rain.

  Feet spread and mag-locked to the deck, Magneric’s torso swung one hundred and eighty degrees and obliterated the ork’s skull with a point-four-second burst of fire. Exit wounds and ricochets wasted the surrounding consoles, but the wellbeing of his ship was no longer a priority. Better to deny it to the alien.