THE WARMASTER

by Dan Abnett

  In all honesty, Dalin Criid wished he could work out what it was that drew him to Felyx Meritous Chass so strongly, and hoped in his heart of hearts that it wasn’t a psychological need to impress his beloved commander.

  He found the cabin and banged on the door.

  ‘Felyx? Felyx, it’s Dalin.’

  After a short delay, the hatch opened, and Dalin stepped in.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he began.

  Felyx was sitting on the cot, his jacket pulled around his shoulders. He looked pale and ill. Nahum Ludd had opened the door for Dalin.

  ‘Sir, what are you doing here?’ Dalin asked.

  ‘I came to check on Felyx,’ said Ludd. ‘The ship’s under attack.’

  ‘I know,’ said Dalin.

  ‘It’s serious, trooper,’ said Ludd. ‘I knew the colonel-commissar would want to make sure Felyx was all right, and comms are fethed.’

  Dalin nodded. He felt annoyed. He and Ludd were not far off in age, and like him, Ludd had gone out of his way to bond with Felyx. They had become almost like rivals feuding over a girl. It was stupid, but Dalin felt somehow jealous finding Ludd here. He was sure, damn sure, that Ludd was motivated by the same urge Dalin feared in himself. A desire to cover himself in acclaim and ingratiate himself to Gaunt. It had been remarked before that Ludd and Dalin represented the new generation of Ghosts, that one day Ludd might be senior commissar of the regiment, and Dalin a full company officer. One day, if the fates proved kind, and the regiment lasted that long. They were emblematic of the future, of the campaigns to come, Ghost commanders in the making. And as such, both wanted the approval and notice of Ibram Gaunt, who would make the decisions and recommendations that would shape their careers. Gaunt was a father figure to them both, and here they both were, sucking up by trying to be the man who ‘looked after’ Gaunt’s son.

  Ludd had the rank, of course. He was more like the father they were both trying to impress.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Dalin asked Felyx.

  Felyx nodded, but it was clear he was hurt.

  ‘He was knocked off his feet by the violence of the retranslation,’ said Ludd. ‘I found him unconscious. That locker had fallen on him.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Felyx. ‘Just dazed.’

  ‘He was out cold,’ said Ludd.

  ‘We should get him to the infirmary,’ said Dalin, worried. ‘Gaunt would–’

  ‘The ship’s overrun,’ said Ludd. ‘We have no idea which decks the enemy has seized. Movement without decent force strength would be a bad idea. I decided it was better to look after Felyx here until the emergency passed.’

  ‘I have E Company on hand–’ Dalin began.

  ‘Good. Then secure the aft hatches and cover the rear hallways. That’s the direction they’re coming from.’

  Dalin hesitated.

  ‘Come on, trooper,’ said Ludd.

  ‘Was that an order?’ asked Dalin.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ludd. ‘Meryn not with you?’

  Dalin shook his head.

  ‘Then it’s your day of glory, trooper – you’re in charge. Get those hallways blocked. Barricades, if you can. The main spinal here runs straight down to the retinue holds, and there are women and children there who need protecting.’

  Dalin nodded.

  ‘If you’re sure you’re all right?’ he said to Felyx.

  ‘Yes. Go.’

  Dalin nodded, and went out.

  Ludd closed the door behind him and looked back at Felyx.

  ‘You’re not going to tell him, are you, Nahum?’ asked Felyx.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What you saw when you found me–’

  ‘I didn’t see anything,’ said Ludd.

  ‘I’m serious, Nahum. No one can know. No one knows except Maddalena. No one can know–’

  ‘Calm down,’ said Ludd. ‘I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘We should check it,’ said Baskevyl. ‘Shouldn’t we? We should check it.’

  Shoggy Domor shrugged.

  ‘I suppose so, Bask,’ he replied.

  Baskevyl and Domor had advanced their companies – D and K respectively – into the vast hold and cargo spaces of the Armaduke’s low decks. The ship’s intervox was dead, but patchy back and forth using the company vox-sets had established that they’d been boarded, and that the boarders were coming in through the aft quarters, especially the engine house. A few unreliable sources said that a massive firefight was already under way in the engine house block, and from the smell of smoke on the dry air, Baskevyl tended to give that story some credence. Other sources had suggested the boarding forces were cannibals. Void monsters, hungry for flesh. Bask was happy to dismiss that as scaremongering, though he had been alive long enough to know that the horrors of the galaxy usually exceeded a man’s worst imaginings.

  His company had formed up with Domor’s, more by accident than design. The plan, such as it was, was to move aft incrementally until they made contact with the enemy. As far as Bask knew, six companies were making their way aft from the billet decks. He and Domor had decided to take the belly route through the cargo spaces while Kolosim and Elam took theirs along the main transits of the upper decks. ‘Thorough coverage,’ Ferdy Kolosim had called it. It made sense. No point marching to the engine house only to find that the cannibal freaks had taken the bridge by moving through the holds. Elam had advised checking every compartment as they came to it. Boarders might be holding out in ambush squads. Worse still, they might have found other entry points and be swarming in unnoticed.

  Bask and Domor, spreading their squads through the massive and labyrinthine hold area, had checked each chamber and compartment they passed.

  They had reached hold ninety.

  ‘We should check it,’ Bask said, as if to convince himself. He and Domor looked at the security seals that Commissar Fazekiel and the shipmaster’s officers had placed on the hold’s locks. Hold ninety was where they had stored all the material and artefacts recovered from Salvation’s Reach during the raid, inhuman artefacts taken from the sanctum of the Archenemy. Fazekiel had compiled the inventory, and standing instructions were that the material remained sealed and untouched during the return trip, ready for immediate transfer to the highest authorities.

  That was before the ship had fallen out of the immaterium and rolled to a dead, hard, helpless stop.

  ‘Maybe we should just leave it alone,’ said Domor. ‘I mean, that stuff… It’s bad stuff, isn’t it? Fething evil Archenemy stuff.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Bask nodded, ‘but important enough for us to retrieve it all. Gaunt says it could be vital to the war effort. That’s why we brought it all back with us. If they’ve cut through an inner wall…’

  Domor shrugged.

  ‘Cordon here!’ he called out. ‘Rifles ready!’

  Chiria and Ewler brought a fire-team up close, aiming at the hatches.

  Domor pulled out his straight silver, and sliced off the first of the seals. Then he took cutters to the locks. Bask took a pry-bar from Wes Maggs. As soon as Domor was done, Baskevyl levered the hatch’s heavy locator bolts free.

  They opened the hatch.

  ‘No power,’ said Domor, looking in.

  ‘Yeah, but do you see anything?’ Bask asked. Domor’s eyes, a complex set of augmetic mechanicals, whirred and clicked as they searched the darkness.

  ‘I think some of the boxes have spilled,’ he said. ‘Some of the crates.’

  ‘Boss?’

  Baskevyl turned. Wes Maggs, his company’s lead scout, had found a junction box in a shuttered alcove nearby.

  ‘We got emergency lights here,’ he said.

  ‘Throw them,’ Bask nodded.

  The interior lights came on with a dull thump. Blue emergency light shone out of the open hatch.

  Baskevyl picked up his lasgun.

  ‘Let’s take a proper look,’ he said, ‘then we seal it up again.’

  He and Domor entered hold ninety, followed by Fapes and Chiria. The m
aterials had been packed into plyboard crates and lashed onto metal shelves. Each carton had a small label, an inventory number, and stamped warnings about tampering and removal. Fazekiel had been thorough.

  Two shelves had collapsed during retranslation, and their cartons were spilled out on the deck. Bask saw clay tablets, some whole, some broken, among the packing beads, along with data-slates, small statues and beads, and old parchment scraps. Just some of the unholy treasures they had risked their lives liberating from the Reach’s college of heritence.

  ‘We should clean this up,’ said Domor.

  ‘I don’t want to touch it,’ Bask replied.

  ‘Well, we can’t just leave it like this if it’s so valuable,’ said Domor.

  ‘I think we should. We don’t know what goes where. There’s no one in here, so I say we lock it up tight again. When this mess is over, Gaunt and Hark can come down here with the inventory and sort it out.’

  Domor nodded. He looked relieved.

  ‘Sir?’

  Bask turned. His adjutant, Fapes, had moved into the next bay.

  ‘Some more have come down in here,’ Fapes called. ‘I think you should see this.’

  Baskevyl and Domor went to join him. In the second bay, three more cartons had shifted off the shelving and spilled on the deck. More scrolls and old books, and some noxious looking specimen jars. Baskevyl didn’t want to consider what might be in them.

  ‘What the feth?’ Domor began.

  Baskevyl took a step forwards. He could think of no ready explanation. Eight ancient stone tiles had tumbled from one of the cartons. They were arranged in almost perfect lines across the deck: a row of four over a row of three, with a single tile centred beneath.

  ‘They fell like that,’ said Chiria, as if trying to convince herself.

  ‘In rows?’ asked Fapes.

  The tablets were perfectly aligned, as though someone had painstakingly and carefully laid them out that way. Not a single one was out of true.

  ‘How does…’ Domor murmured. ‘How does that happen? How does that even happen?’

  Baskevyl knelt beside the rows. He stared at them. He remembered the frantic recovery efforts in the foul colleges of the Reach. He remembered Gaunt telling him that Mabbon had reckoned these stone tiles to be of particular significance. Xenos artefacts, of impossibly ancient manufacture. Each one was about the size of a standard data-slate, and made from gleaming red stone. They were all damaged and worn by time, and one had a significant piece missing. They were covered in inscriptions that Baskevyl couldn’t make sense of.

  ‘No one’s been in here,’ he said. ‘You saw the seals. No one’s been in here. They must’ve just fallen like this–’

  ‘That’s a bunch of feth,’ said Domor.

  ‘You got a better answer?’ Bask asked, looking up at him.

  ‘Not one I want to say out loud,’ mumbled Domor.

  Baskevyl reached a hand towards the tablets.

  ‘Don’t touch them!’ Chiria yelled. ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘I wasn’t–’ Baskevyl replied, snatching his hand away. But it was a lie. He had been about to touch them. He’d needed to touch them, even though touching was the last thing he wanted to do.

  He got to his feet.

  ‘They look like an aquila,’ said Fapes.

  ‘What?’ asked Baskevyl.

  Fapes pointed.

  ‘The way they’re laid out, sir. Like wings, see, then the body? Like an eagle with spread wings. Sir?’

  Baskevyl wasn’t listening to his adjutant any more. He stared at the tiles on the floor. They were laid out a little like an eagle symbol.

  He swallowed hard. He had a sudden, sick memory. The supply drop… the aborted supply drop on Aigor 991. There’d been a daemon there. Something. Something bad. They’d heard a voice. Well, he hadn’t, but Rerval had. Rerval first, then Gol. Gol had made a full report about it. The voice had claimed to be the voice of Sek.

  It had demanded they bring the eagle stones to it.

  They’d fought the… the whatever it was off, and aborted the drop. Gol had aborted the drop, and he’d made a full report to Gaunt. No one had been able to offer an explanation, and besides, it was warp-crap anyway. You never paid attention to warp-crap and the ravings of the Archenemy, because that was a sure route to madness.

  But this… Those stones on the deck. Stones they had been told by the pheguth were precious, laid out in the shape of an eagle.

  ‘Throne preserve us,’ he murmured.

  ‘Sir?’ Fapes asked.

  ‘Seal it up,’ Bask said. ‘Seal it up. Get a torch on the door bolts to weld them in place. We come back and deal with this when the crisis is over.’

  Domor looked at him, then turned and walked out, calling for a trooper with a metal-torch.

  Baskevyl looked at Fapes.

  ‘See if you can get the vox up,’ he said to the adjutant. ‘Raise Gaunt. Tell him what we found down here. Don’t dress it up. Just tell him straight what we found and what it looks like. Then ask him what he wants us to do about it.’

  ‘Gaunt?’

  Gaunt stepped away from the strategium display and went over to Curth. She was still working on Spika’s frail body, massaging his chest.

  He crouched at her side.

  ‘I’ve got a heartbeat,’ she whispered.

  ‘You have?’ Gaunt replied.

  She nodded. ‘I didn’t want to shout it out and give these men false hope. It’s weak. Ridiculously weak. And it may go again in a moment. But I have a heartbeat.’

  Gaunt nodded.

  ‘I want to see if I can sustain it for another five or ten minutes,’ she whispered. ‘If I can, I’ll risk moving him to the infirmary. He needs immediate surgery. A bypass. His brain may already be gone, though.’

  ‘I’ll ask Criid to get a stretcher party ready.’

  ‘Good,’ said Curth.

  ‘If you’ve brought the shipmaster back,’ Gaunt said, ‘you’ve done amazing–’

  ‘Don’t patronise me,’ she said, without looking up from her work. ‘This is my calling. A life needed saving. I was here.’

  Gaunt rose. There was a sudden commotion around the strategium display.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m assessing,’ said Darulin. ‘Something just…’

  ‘Something what?’

  ‘Roll it back,’ Darulin said to a tech-adept. ‘Thirty seconds.’

  The main display image flickered as it switched from real-time feed to recorded data. Gaunt saw no difference.

  ‘Look there,’ said Darulin. ‘The enemy flagship, lying seventeen thousand kilometres off us, approximate. A carrier vessel.’

  He touched the display, making a small haptic mark beside the dark dot of the enemy cruiser.

  ‘Advance by frame, one hundredth speed,’ Darulin told the adept.

  The data began to play. At the four-second mark, the dark dot was replaced by a point of white light. The light point expanded then vanished. There was no sign of the dot.

  ‘What did I just see?’ asked Gaunt. ‘An explosion?’

  ‘Sensor resolution is very poor,’ said Darulin, ‘but yes. The enemy base-ship just went up. Total disintegration.’

  ‘But it was bigger than us,’ said Criid.

  ‘It was,’ Darulin agreed.

  ‘So, what… a drive accident?’ asked Gaunt.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Kelvedon, reaching in to point.

  Another dark dot, a larger one, had appeared on the scope. It was moving past the point where the other dot had vanished. It was accelerating towards the Armaduke.

  ‘That’s a ship,’ said Darulin. ‘A very large ship.’

  ‘Time to us?’ asked Gaunt.

  ‘It’s on us already,’ said Darulin. He turned to the bridge crew. ‘I want identifiers now! Now!’ he shouted.

  ‘We have visual,’ Kelvedon called.

  Something was coming in at them, something so massive it was eclip
sing local starlight. It was casting a vast shadow across the crippled, helpless Armaduke. The light on the bridge changed as the shadow slid over them, throwing the external ports into blackness.

  ‘We’re in its shadow,’ said Darulin quietly. The bridge grew very still and very quiet. There was no sound except the rasp of the air scrubbers, the chatter of automatic systems and the occasional ping of the display system.

  Suddenly, the vox went live. A screaming noise shrieked from every speaker. Everyone flinched and covered their ears.

  The deafening noise became words. A voice that was not human. A voice that echoed from the pit of space.

  ‘tormageddon monstrum rex! tormageddon monstrum rex! tormaggeddon monstrum rex!’

  ‘The daemon ship from Tavis Sun,’ Kelvedon stammered.

  ‘The enemy battleship,’ Darulin nodded. He looked pale, resigned.

  Criid looked at Gaunt, aghast. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Do we have shields yet, or…’ Gaunt’s voice trailed off. The name was still booming from the speakers, over and over, like a chant. Gaunt could see the look on Acting Shipmaster Darulin’s face.

  ‘I’m sorry, colonel-commissar,’ said Darulin. ‘Whatever hope we might have had is now gone. We are caught, helpless, in the sights of an enemy warship that dwarfs us and outclasses us in every way measurable. We are dead.’

  NINE: BLOOD PRICE

  The only sounds were the crackle of flames and the sigh of the fire suppression system as it struggled to activate. The corridor section was in a low-power state. Torn cables hung like ropes of intestine from the buckled ceiling panels. Sparks drifted.

  The Archenemy raiders picked their way along, the soft glow of their visor slits flashing and darting. They were advance guard, the reavers who cut deep into a victim ship to kill any resistance ahead of the main force. They were more heavily plated across the chest, shoulders, arms and groin, the armour segments patched and las-scarred. Their weapons were clearance tools: shot-cannons, rotator guns, broad-snout laslocks and concussion mauls.

  They made remarkably little sound as they advanced. Their long, filthy robes muted the sway of their under-mail, and the metal mesh of their gloves had been over-wrapped with rags. They communicated by gesture, and sub-vox squirts, the tiniest whispers.