Know no fear. The Battle of Calth hh-19

by Dan Abnett

  ‘I still don’t understand. It has no tactical methodology.’

  ‘Really? Really, Honorius? What if it does? What if there is an entirely other kind of warfare, one that extends beyond all practical techniques, one that defies and eclipses all the martial law codified by the Ultramarines and recognised by the Imperium? A ritual warfare? A kind of daemonic warfare?’

  ‘You say that as if you believe it,’ Luciel laughs.

  ‘Think about what I’m saying,’ says Tchure quietly. He looks around the chamber, at his men talking and drinking with Luciel’s. ‘Think of this… If the Word Bearers turned against the Ultramarines, wouldn’t that be the greatest betrayal of all? Not Lorgar turning on Guilliman, for they dislike each other anyway. Here, in this chamber, between two men who have actually managed to become friends?’

  ‘That would be the most atrocious deceit,’ Luciel agrees. ‘I concede it would have some power. As shock value in the Legion. We are immune to fear, but horror and surprise might unman us briefly at the unimaginable nature of the act.’

  Tchure nods.

  ‘And it would be the centrepiece,’ he says. ‘The sacrificial spark to ignite the ritual war.’

  Luciel nods gravely.

  ‘I suppose you’re right. It would be well to understand, and allow for, an enemy who carried such conviction in the power of infamy.’

  Tchure smiles.

  ‘I wish you understood,’ he says.

  [mark: -0.20.20]

  The Campanile crosses the inner ring, its codes accepted by the defence grid. The mass of the fleet disposition lies ahead of it, the yards. The bright glory of Calth.

  As it passes within the orbit of Calth’s moon, it begins an abrupt acceleration.

  [mark: -0.19.45]

  ‘Understand what?’ asks Luciel.

  ‘I was asked to join the advance,’ says Tchure.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I have to prove my commitment to the new purpose.’

  Luciel stares at him.

  For just a second. A second. And in that second, he finally realises what Sorot Tchure has been trying to tell him.

  That in order not to betray one impossible bond, Sorot Tchure is required to betray another.

  The goblet falls from Luciel’s grip. His hand is already moving, through instinct alone, for his sidearm. Only sheer, disfunctioning shock is slowing him down.

  Tchure’s plasma pistol is already in his hand.

  The goblet hasn’t even hit the tabletop yet.

  Tchure fires. Point blank, the plasma bolt strikes Honorius Luciel’s torso. The bolt is as hot as a main sequence star. It vaporises armour plate, carapace, reinforced bone, spinal cord. It annihilates meat, both hearts, and secondary organs. It turns blood into dust. The shot’s hammer blow impact knocks Luciel down, through the table, smashing the tabletop up to meet the falling goblet, spinning it into the air in a semi-circle of wine.

  Luciel’s men are turning, caught by surprise, not understanding the noise and motion, not understanding the weapon discharge or the violent collapse of their captain. Tchure’s men simply draw their guns. They are not distracted by the gunfire. Their eyes never leave the men they are talking to, men who are turning away in confusion.

  Luciel rolls on the deck, limbs thrashing, as the smashed table falls around him. The goblet bounces off the deck plate beside his head. His eyes are wide, straining, staring. The plasma shot has burned a massive hole clean through him. His body is cored. The deck plating is visible through his twitching torso. The edges of the gaping damage are scorched and cooked by superheating. His armour is likewise punctured, the cut edges glowing. Larraman cells cannot hope to clog or close a wound quite so catastrophic. Tchure is on his feet, his chair tipping backwards behind him, toppling. He swings the plasma weapon down, aims it at Luciel’s face, and fires again.

  Around him, the chamber shakes with a sudden storm of gunfire. Twenty or thirty boltguns discharge almost simultaneously. Armoured bodies, blown backwards, fall. Blood mist fills the air.

  The goblet lands on the third bounce, rolls in a circle, and comes to rest on its side next to Honorius Luciel’s seared and shattered skull.

  ABSOLUTE // OVERWHELM

  ‘Battle is not a state to be entered into lightly. Battle is always painful and always comes at a price, so the astute commander never commits to battle unless no other options remain. Once that commitment is made, once the Phase of Execution, or primary condition, has begun, it must be done with the utmost efficacy: a rapid application of overwhelming force to obliterate your enemy as quickly and completely as possible. Do not give him the time or space to react. Do not leave him with any materiel or opportunity that he can use in a rallying phase. Eliminate him physically and psychologically so that his threat is entirely removed. Kill him with your first shot. Utterly annihilate him with your first strike. This may be considered the application of attack in its purest form.’

  Guilliman, Notes Towards Martial Codification, 4.1.ix

  1

  [mark: -0.18.43]

  An alarm sounds. A red hazard light starts to blink on a burnished copper console.

  The officer of the watch, at his station on the bridge of the Samothrace, reacts swiftly but with some confusion. Are the ship’s systems notifying him of a malfunction? It is a high-scale alert.

  He presses an ivory-cushioned key to access clarification. On the small glass screen, a phrase appears in luminous green characters.

  [Weapons discharge, company deck]

  That can’t be correct. Even if it somehow is, a weapons discharge must be accidental. The officer of the watch is, however, highly trained and well disciplined. He knows that answers, clarifications, corrections and explanations are secondary issues. They can wait. Even informing the captain can wait. He understands protocol. He reacts as he has been trained to react.

  He activates the vox systems and rouses deck protection. His hands move with rehearsed agility over the keys. He sounds general quarters. He starts to systematically close the bulkheads fore and aft of the company deck space, and to lock out the through-deck access points and elevators.

  Within four seconds of the alarm sounding, the officer of the watch has begun the procedure to cordon and secure the entire company deck, and to place deck troops at all access points. His response is exemplary. Within thirty-five seconds of the alarm sounding, a full, regulation lock-down would have been enforced.

  But thirty-five seconds are not available.

  The captain has heard general quarters sound, and has started out of his seat to join the officer of the watch and examine the issue. There is a frown on his face.

  ‘What’s going on, Watch?’ he asks.

  His words are drowned out by another alarm. Then another alarm. Then another. Klaxons, bells and hooters overlap, screeching and booming.

  The proximity alarm.

  The collision warning alert.

  The course defect advisor.

  The detector array.

  The passive auspex.

  The primary orbital traffic alert from Calth System Control.

  Something is coming at them. Something is moving into the dense and rigorously controlled shipping formations spread across the close orbit band. Something is sweeping through the orbital high anchorage without approval or authorisation.

  The officer of the watch forgets, for a second, what he was in the middle of doing.

  He looks at the main screen. So does the captain. So do the bridge crewmen.

  What happens next, though they are looking straight at it, happens too fast for them to see.

  [mark: -0.18.34]

  The Campanile accelerates. It lights its main realspace drives, delivering main extending thrust in a position where it should be almost coasting at correction burst only. It raises its void shielding to make itself as unstoppable as possible. It fires itself like a bullet at the planet Calth.

  The screams of its crew can still be heard, but no one is listening.<
br />
  Main extending thrust is a drive condition used for principal acceleration, the maximum output that takes a starship to the brink of realspace velocity as it makes the translation to the empyrean. It is a condition that is used as a starship moves away from a planet towards the nearest viable Mandeville Point, a distance that is roughly half the radius of an average star system.

  There is no such long run-up here. The Campanile is already inside the orbit of Calth’s satellite. There is not enough range for it to reach anything like maximum output or velocity. Even so, it is travelling at something close to the order of forty per cent of the realspace limit as it reaches the edge of the atmosphere. It is travelling too fast for anything physical, such as an eye or a pict-corder or a visual monitor, to see it. It is only visible to scanning systems and sensors, to detectors and auspex. They shriek at its sudden, savage, shockwave approach.

  Their shrieks are as futile as the unheard screams of its lost crew.

  It does not hit Calth.

  There is something in the way.

  [mark: -0.18.32]

  The Campanile streaks like a missile into Calth’s orbital shipping belt. It punches through the formations of ships in parking orbit, the rows of freighters, barges and troop vessels at high anchor, the precisely spaced lines of vast cruisers and frigates, the glittering clouds of small craft, loaders, lifters and boats attending the parent ships.

  It is like a bolter round fired into a crowd.

  It misses the Mlatus, the Cavascor, the Lutine and the Samothrace by less than a ship’s length. It passes under the beam of the battleship Ultimus Mundi and skims the back of the gargantuan carrier ship Testament of Andromeda. Its shields graze the hull of the strike craft Mlekrus, vaporising the masts and arrays of its starboard detectors. It slices between the battle-barges Gauntlet of Victory and Gauntlet of Glory. By the time it crosses the bow of the grand cruiser Suspiria Majestrix, shredding the mooring and fuelling lines that secure the famous vessel to its bulk tenders, the Campanile has begun to swat aside small craft, annihilating them against the front of its shields. The small ships disintegrate, fierce blue sparks fizzle against the shield shimmer: cargo boats, lighters, ferries, maintenance riggers. The Campanile’s shield displacement hurls others out of the way like a tidal bore, swirling into each other, compressing them with gravimetric thrust, crashing them against the hulls of larger ships or the support cradles of the outer orbital yards.

  Then the Campanile reaches the main shipyard.

  The Calth Yards are orbiting islands, the fledgling beginnings of the planet’s first proper superorbital plate. There are a dozen of them orbiting Calth. This is Calth Veridian Anchor, the largest and oldest of them. It is a massive edifice of jetties and slips, ship cradles and docks, suspension manufactories, habitats, depots and docking platforms. It is a little over three hundred kilometres across, a raft of metal and activity and life.

  The Campanile hits it, creating light. Void shields moving at high sub-light velocities strike physical matter, and mutually annihilate. The tender simply vaporises the Ultramar Azimuth Graving Dock, shredding the superstructure of the giant berth cradle, and the cruiser Antipathy docked inside it. Cut in half, the nine kilometre-long Antipathy vanishes in a ripple of rapidly expanding heat and light as its drives detonate, and six thousand lives disappear with it. The blast incinerates the two manufactory modules adjoining the graving dock, instantly killing another thirty thousand artificers and engineers, and shears the superstructure away from arrestor silos A112 and A114, both of which collapse sideways, spilling the escort Burnabus into the fast escort Jeriko Rex. Both vessels suffer catastrophic hull damage. The Burnabus crushes and deforms like a spent shell case.

  The Campanile is still moving. As the Ultramar Azimuth Graving Dock disintegrates behind it, it punches on through Assembly 919, a hollow spheroid currently housing the Menace of Fortis, the Deliverance of Terra and the Mechanicum fabrication ship Phobos Encoder. All three ships are obliterated. The assembly spheroid ruptures like a glass ball. Propelled debris rips into attached habitat modules, voiding them to space. Part of the Phobos Encoder is flung out of the explosion and spins into the yard’s principal cargo facility, which buckles laterally. This secondary impact destroys forty-nine lift ships and one hundred and sixty-eight small lighters and ferries. Cargo pods and transportation containers spew out like beads from a snapped necklace, like grains of rice from a ripped sack. They spill, tumbling. Some start to glow blowtorch blue as they plunge into the high atmosphere.

  Calth Veridian Anchor shudders. Internal explosions propagate through it, driven along by the devastating trajectory of the Campanile. Habitats and depots blow out. Jetties collapse. Manipulator cranes buckle and fold like wading birds struck by a hunter’s buckshot. The Aegis of Occluda catches fire, all seven kilometres of it, in its ship cradle. The Triumph of Iax, secured in an arrestor slip, is crippled as a storm of debris penetrates it. Its secondary drives implode, ripping the massive ship through ninety degrees like a man being swung by his ankles. The bow, still encased in its slip housing framework, encounters the Tarmus Usurper, which is being fitted out in the adjacent slip. The collision mangles them, tears them, lacerates their hulls. Atmospherics void explosively from rent hull plates, aerosol jets filled with particles that are tiny, tumbling bodies.

  Light blossoms. The annihilation of matter is vast, and light is the only form in which it can escape. The battleship Spirit of Konor, seventeen kilometres long and one of the most powerful warships in the fleet of the Five Hundred Worlds, ignites, and then vanishes as critical damage compromises its power plants and vast munitions stockpiles. Huge, burning sections of the yard structure are ejected upwards, whirling, into space, or are spat down at the world beneath. The Ultramar Zenith Graving Dock suffers integral gravimetric failure and drops out, breaking and twisting towards the planet below. The grand cruiser Antrodamicus, supported by that dock, rips free of its moorings and begins to slide backwards out of the collapsing cradle, in some ghastly parody of a ship launch. Its drives are off-line. It has no power to prevent its slide or stabilise its position, at least nothing that can be lit or brought to bear fast enough. It is a huge ship, twelve kilometres long. It simply slips away backwards, like a vast promontory of ice calving from a glacier into the sea.

  The Campanile is still moving. Its shields finally fail and it is just a solid projectile, a mass of metal. It annihilates two more slipways, and the ships within them, cripples the anchored carrier Johanipus Artemisia, and then rams through the data-engine hub in the centre of the yard structure. All the data-engines are destroyed instantly. The automatics fail. The noosphere experiences a critical and fatal interrupt. Another thirty-five thousand individuals perish as the yard’s core is obliterated.

  Impact has virtually erased the unshielded mass of the Campanile. Its structure is atomised, except for the largest chunks of it, which punch onwards as the ship breaks up, still travelling at immensely high realspace velocities, communicating billions of tonnes of force. The largest surviving piece, a part of the Campanile’s solid-core drive section, spins out like a ricochet and kills the battleship Remonstrance of Narthan Dume like a slingshot pellet to the brainpan.

  The final pieces of the Campanile clear the far side of Calth Veridian Anchor and spray on out across the planet, scattering, dipping and burning like meteorites.

  This entire catastrophe has taken less than a second to occur. It has been entirely silent, a light-blink in the soundless void.

  All that any observers – either on nearby vessels or the surface of the planet – would have seen was a blinding flash, like a star going nova, that was instantly replaced by a propagating series of overlapping, expanding fireballs that consume the entire sky.

  [mark: -0.18.30]

  The lightshock overloads the resolution of the bridge screens aboard the Macragge’s Honour. They brown out, fizzling. Plugged servitors squeal and chatter. Automatic systems slam the blast shutters on every brid
ge window port, shutting them in a ruddy, armoured gloom.

  Marius Gage rises from his seat.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ he demands.

  No one answers.

  ‘Find out!’ he roars.

  The shockwave hits.

  [mark: -0.18.30]

  There is a blink. Ventanus knows what it is. Instinct identifies it in a fraction of the time it would take his conscious mind to explain it. It’s the electromagnetic pulse that precedes a major explosion.

  He has time to see that Selaton has sensed it. The seneschal has not. Her human senses are too modest to register the blink. She’s saying something.

  Ventanus grabs her and pulls her down. Arbute cries out, not understanding at all. He knows his armoured fingers are breaking some of her ribs. There is still a chance he can shield her with his body.

  A brand-new sun fills the heavens above Numinus starport.

  [mark: -0.18.30]

  Light sears, then fire fills the sky over the fields and the estuary at Neride like a roasting surge from god’s own flamer.

  Oll Persson flinches, though the heat and wind are still half a minute away. He’s seen ships explode in orbit. He’s never seen anything this big.

  The twilight flushes orange. Evening shadows stretch behind them. The crop workers look up, baffled, horrified.

  ‘Trooper Persson?’ Graft asks, unable to frame a more complex question.

  ‘God save us all,’ Oll says.

  The swartgrass stirs, swishes.

  The wind hits, hot, as though a furnace door has opened nearby.

  [mark: -0.18.30]

  A thunderclap. That’s what it sounds like to Hellock.

  ‘What the bastard shitfire is–’ he starts to say to anyone near enough to hear him, plucking his latest smoke out from between his lips. Trooper Rane is right in front of him. Rane is suddenly a silhouette, so are the stacks and spires of the city over the river: black shapes against a sky that’s turned white, like some excess of dawn, like sheet bastard lightning, but as bright as the forked stuff.