by Andy Hoare
The interior of the pod was sparsely appointed and illuminated with a blue light that Brielle assumed was the equivalent to the low, red glow the Imperium’s vessels utilised in similar circumstances. The bulkheads were covered in crash padding, and the deck consisted of an arrangement of ten grav-couches radiating from a central command terminal.
Now what? Brielle stepped over the couches and peered out through a porthole. The glowing orb of Dal’yth Prime filled the circular viewer, the arid surface clearly visible. It was day below, but Brielle knew that the battle at Gel’bryn was currently being fought at night. That meant she was half a world away from where she wanted to be.
She studied the world’s surface for a moment, half entranced by the intricate patterns of mountain ranges, coastlines and the sparkling reflections of Dal’yth’s star cast from the pristine turquoise oceans. The other half of her mind was committing the world’s topography to memory, tracking trajectories and calculating the flight path she would have to take to reach the Imperium’s forces at Gel’bryn.
There were so many other risks and variables there was simply no point worrying about them all. What if the pod would only take one path, directly to the surface below? What if it was programmed to make for tau territory? Even if she could control the descent, what if it landed her in the midst of a battle instead of near friendly forces?
She cast all such things from her mind and lowered herself into the nearest grav-couch.
As she settled into the couch, the padding expanded to grip her body, holding her firmly in position. Only her bare feet were left loose, for they were too different from the tau’s reverse-jointed lower legs to be accommodated. As she leaned back, giving in to the unfamiliar loss of freedom of movement, a command terminal lit up on the bulkhead above her. Its screen displayed a single, flashing word in the angular tau script.
She struggled to decipher the text, recalling the lessons Aura had conducted weeks ago as she had been transported across the Damocles Gulf. Tree? No, that made no sense. Nostril? Come on, concentrate… Propel, perhaps… Launch!
But she did not want to launch, not yet at least. She wanted to enter a flight plan, to ensure the saviour pod took her where she wanted to go. If it took her to the surface by the most direct route, she would be dumped in the middle of the desert, to be picked up by the tau, or starve to death in the arid wastes. She hated arid wastes. They played havoc on the pores.
There must be some way to…
A voice outside the hatch, raised in question.
Brielle’s breath caught in her throat. She was trapped in the grav-couch, barely even able to move her head. She looked down the length of her body to the access hatch, and heard the voice again. What she had taken for a question was in fact a statement. Something like… ‘Safe to come out.’
Whoever was out there, he thought that Brielle was a tau crewman who had fled to the saviour pod at the sound of the alarms, assuming the fire raging through the communications bay would engulf the entire deck, perhaps the entire ship, and necessitate escape.
The voice came again, this time more insistent. She was being ordered out of the pod.
She looked back to the blinking text on the screen above as a thud sounded against the hatch. Whoever was out there was now pounding on the outside, evidently losing patience. She knew it was only a matter of time before a crewman with the sense or authority to override the lock arrived and dragged her out.
She had no choice. She would have to worry about plotting a course to the crusade’s ground forces once she was in transit.
‘Launch,’ she said out loud, as it occurred to her that there was no lever or command rune to activate to set the pod in motion. The terminal over her head beeped loudly, and the text changed.
Confirm launch order.
So it was voice activated, she realised. Another thud came from the hatch as she struggled to recall the pronunciation of the tau word for ‘confirm’. Then she realised that she had said ‘launch’ in Gothic, and the pod’s systems had understood her. Clearly, the tau had extensive knowledge of the Imperium, and had disseminated that knowledge throughout their empire.
‘Confirm,’ she said.
The blue illumination inside the pod dipped, then came back, assuming a pulsating rhythm. A siren started up as the pod’s systems cycled into life, the air pressure change causing her ears to pop.
There was a grinding sound as an unseen launch cradle disengaged, accompanied by suddenly frantic knocking at the hatch. A low, subsonic machine hum started up, rising through the audible range to a high-pitched whine that made the hairs on the back of Brielle’s neck stand on end.
With a jolt, the saviour pod propelled itself from the launch tube. The grav-couch enveloped Brielle’s body even tighter, pressing in around her so that only the extremities of her legs, torso and arms were visible. Then a dampening field powered up around her, entirely cancelling out any sense of acceleration. The view through the porthole changed as the globe of Dal’yth Prime swung away, to be replaced by the white, cliff-like flank of the Dal’yth Il’Fannor O’kray. The now-empty tube that the pod had launched from was revealed as one in a line of dozens, and yet more were visible on every deck of the vessel.
A plume of silent flame, flaring as if in slow motion from a black wound on the warship’s side, drew Brielle’s attention. She smiled wickedly, proud of her work in wrecking the communications bay. She guessed that the flame was the result of the entire bay being voided, so as to starve the fire of oxygen since she had disarmed the suppression systems.
The pod’s manoeuvring jets flared, the hissing sound especially loud in such a small vessel. The tau warship spun around as the pod changed attitude, and Brielle caught sight of a point defence weapons blister nearby. The blister sported a twin-barrelled weapon, which swivelled around to fix on the pod. Brielle’s heart almost stopped beating as she fixed on the gun turret, willing it not to fire. Now would be a damn stupid time to die, she thought… Please, don’t fire.
It didn’t, the weapon lingering on the pod for a moment before tracking back in the opposite direction.
The manoeuvring jets flared again and the pod swung around so that its base, which consisted of one, huge retro jet, was pointing directly towards the planet below.
The terminal above Brielle’s head bleeped and the display changed from the tau text, to a graph plotting the craft’s insertion, descent and landing. The three stages were shown in simple graphics, each labelled with the time it would take to complete. The chart showed a direct descent, lasting twenty-two minutes from now to landing. The craft would be in position to begin the descent in less than six minutes.
‘No you don’t…’ Brielle said under her breath, another manoeuvring jet firing.
Repeat instruction, the text blinked, superimposed over the trajectory chart.
‘What?’ Brielle muttered.
Repeat instruction, the text flashed again.
‘Erm…’ Brielle said, feeling at once foolish and guilty. She had grown accustomed to the tau’s use of thinking machines, but actually talking to one dredged up the teachings of the Imperial Creed in no uncertain terms. ‘Alter, er… landing point?’
Input new landing point, the screen flashed. A moment later the text was replaced by a flat representation of the surface of Gel’bryn, overlaid with a fine grid. Brielle understood the system straight away, and recognised it as intended for use under the considerable pressures of an emergency evacuation from a stricken spacecraft. She searched her memory for a rough idea of the location of Gel’bryn, and scanned the area where she estimated it would be found. That stretch of the main continent’s eastern seaboard contained a dozen cities. She recalled the conversations with Aura, and the scenes she had witnessed in the command centre. It must be the eastern-most of the twelve cities, the one nearest the ocean.
There it was. ‘Nine, nine, seven, zero
two, er…’ she read off Gel’bryn’s coordinates from the grid, ‘by, er, two, nine, two, five, zero.’
The graphic changed, the flat grid replaced by an image of the globe. A line traced the course from the pod’s current position to its interface point, then almost straight downwards towards the surface.
Confirm course change, the text blinked.
‘Confirm,’ Brielle said, swallowing hard at the finality of the statement. The manoeuvring jets flared again as the saviour pod came around to its new heading. Brielle forced her breathing to a calm rate, and tried to relax her body, but she could not rid herself of the mental image of the vessel being transformed into a streaking meteor as it plunged towards the surface of Dal’yth Prime.
The voyage to the interface point took less than an hour, and Brielle watched through the porthole as the saviour pod crossed directly over the terminator line where day turned into night. Throughout that time she was gripped by a feeling of helplessness; that her life was in the hands of a machine that appeared to be able to think and hold, albeit rudimentary, conversation. She was entranced by the patterns of light glinting from the serene seas far below, and the faint, wispy cloud formations gracefully whirling over them.
Several times throughout the journey to the interface point, the pod’s vox system had blurted into life, only to cut out after delivering several seconds of distorted garbage. She had no doubt that the Dal’yth Il’Fannor O’kray’s main communications banks would be out of action for quite some time, and guessed that these transmissions were coming from vessels further away, or from less powerful, secondary transceivers on the warship. She could just imagine the confusion and concern the tau must have experienced as the saviour pod cleared the ship. Perhaps they imagined it to contain an over-reacting crewman convinced the ship was crippled. After her failure to make any attempt to reply to the hails, they had probably concluded that the pod had malfunctioned and been fired in error, and would just let it slip away. After all, they had far more pressing concerns.
The pod had been over Dal’yth Prime’s dark side for twenty minutes when its manoeuvring jets fired for the last time. The view through the porthole shifted, the world gliding out of view to be replaced with the star-speckled blackness of the void. The pod’s interior lighting dimmed, then started to pulsate as it had when it had first launched from the Dal’yth Il’Fannor O’kray. Brielle looked straight up at the pict screen, and guessed that the descent to the surface was due to begin.
Again, that feeling of utter helplessness came over her. She had made planetfall countless times, but always, she had been in command. Although she had only rudimentary piloting skills and was no drop-ace, she had always been in charge. The pilot of whichever vessel she had rode had invariably been her servant, and that, she realised, was the root of her unease. She hated not having someone she trusted to rely upon, or if it came to it, boss around.
As the saviour pod began its descent, Brielle realised that she did have someone to rely on. She closed her eyes, not wishing to watch the blinking icon on the screen above her as it rode the trajectory line in a hell-dive to the surface of Dal’yth Prime. Someone very far away. Forty? Fifty thousand light years? Certainly, half a galaxy at least…
‘Imperator,’ she began, sacred words she had not spoken in years coming unbidden to her lips as a shudder ran through the pod. ‘From the cold of the void, we beseech your protection. From the fire of re-entry, we implore you to shield us, from the…’
The saviour pod began its dive, surrendering to the inexorable pull of gravity. For the first few minutes, not a lot seemed to happen, but Brielle could feel the slow build-up of gaseous friction on the outside of the pod. Then she realised she was sweating, and not from the tension of her situation. The temperature inside the pod was rising, even with the life support systems cycling at full power. A foolish notion appeared in her head: what if the tau’s biology was more resistant to the trauma of re-entry than a human’s, and the pod’s tolerances designed with that in mind? Nonsense, she told herself. Those of the air caste might be more comfortable in zero-g, while tau of the earth caste were better suited to hard work, but the pod would have to accommodate them all.
A fluttering tremble passing through the hull cast the thought from Brielle’s mind. She looked towards the porthole, and saw ghostly flame dancing across the black void beyond. In any other circumstance the effect would be quite entrancing, she thought, but being strapped into a lump of alien tech plummeting at Emperor-knew-what speed through the sky above a warzone took the edge off it.
Another tremble, and the whole pod started to vibrate. The craft was entering Dal’yth Prime’s upper atmosphere. While still incredibly thin, the air was still dense enough to cause friction on the pod’s outer hull, though the energy shield projected below was absorbing the majority of it. The Imperium’s military drop-pods and emergency saviour pods were only rarely fitted with such a feature, the utilitarian planners regarding it as a luxury in most cases. By all accounts, planetfall in one of those junk buckets was almost as dangerous as taking your chances on a burning assault ship.
Despite the energy shield protecting the pod from the worst of the turbulence, the whole interior was shaking. The effect increased to a violently quaking crescendo as the pod neared terminal velocity and the heat in the interior rose still further. Brielle squeezed her eyes tightly shut, wishing only that she could free her arms to clamp her hands over her ears to deaden the screaming rush of burning air consuming the pod.
Then, the pod’s retro thruster kicked in. The grav-couch cushioned the worst of the violent arrest in downward momentum, but every cell in Brielle’s body felt as if it were being squeezed, flattened and compressed, all at once. Brielle felt at that moment that the pod really was a small compartment bolted onto a huge jet thruster, which belched and roared just below her supine form. She could feel the incredible energies being unleashed in that terminal burn, and abandoned herself to them.
Quite suddenly, the roaring inferno that had raged outside was replaced by a shrill whistling. Brielle opened her eyes and looked towards the porthole. The view outside was of the dark-jade, night-time skies of Dal’yth Prime.
In the last few minutes of the descent, the manoeuvring jets kicked in one final time, and the pod altered attitude. The stars swung upwards and the distant horizon hove into view. An anti-grav generator powered up, guiding the pod towards its final crashdown.
According to Imperial Navy doctrine, as well as sound military principle, a fleet undertaking offensive operations should maintain an extensive counter-penetration defence screen. A network of picket vessels, of every displacement from interceptor to frigate, should provide three hundred and sixty degree, three-dimensional surveillance before, during and after any engagement. The fleet of the Damocles Gulf Crusade was not particularly large by naval standards, especially given its losses at Pra’yen, and its carrier capacity was woefully short, but nonetheless, no enemy vessel should have been able to get within five thousand kilometres of its flagship, the Blade of Woe.
Thus, it was something of a surprise when Admiral Jellaqua’s vessel was hailed by an unknown vessel from less than a thousand kilometres away, and well within its picket screen.
‘Blade of Woe,’ the unknown sender said, his voice relayed through the vox-horns on Jellaqua’s bridge. ‘This is theta-zero. Requesting immediate dock, over.’
‘Who the hell is it?’ Jellaqua scowled at none of his bridge officers in particular. ‘Who the hell dares…?’
‘Augur scan collating now, admiral,’ a crewman called out. Jellaqua crossed to the station, his eyes scanning the reams of scan data scrolling across the flickering pict screen.
‘Run it again,’ Jellaqua said. ‘That makes no sense. Run it again.’
‘Erm, admiral,’ the officer stammered. ‘I have, sir. This is the third run. Whatever that vessel is, it matches nothing in the registry.’
> Jellaqua turned from the augur station and crossed to the comms station, half a dozen aides trailing in his wake. ‘Well?’
Jellaqua’s Master of Signals was as much machine as he was man, a dozen snaking cables running from grafted terminals in his cranium to the cogitation array in front of him. The Master of Signals nodded, as if listening to something very far away, before replying. ‘A sub-carrier wave, admiral.’
‘What seal?’ Jellaqua said, guessing the answer before it came.
‘Magenta, my lord.’
‘Confirm docking and alert all commands,’ Jellaqua said, two-dozen staff officers rushing off to enact his orders as others started yelling into vox-horns. ‘Prepare to receive Inquisition boarders.’
The light infantry companies of Battlegroup Arcadius were advancing on foot through the streets of Gel’bryn, and Lucian could see the lights of the star port visible mere kilometres ahead. The tau were disengaging across the entire city, the last of their units falling back on the star port to be evacuated by huge, wallowing transports. The tau were still mounting a defence, but it was poorly coordinated and piecemeal, and the crusade armies were pushing them back on every front. By all accounts, the enemy’s command and control network had completely collapsed, and the tau leaders on the ground had proven ill-prepared to adapt. Lucian had no idea what had caused the collapse, and Gauge had claimed that it was none of the crusade’s doing. Whatever had caused it, Lucian and the other commanders gave silent thanks for this one nugget of good fortune.
It seemed to Lucian now that the tau were suddenly the lesser of two enemies, and that it might be Inquisitor Grand that defeated the entire undertaking.
The last hour had seen the tempo of Operation Hydra attain a new urgency, which Lucian impressed upon his subordinates as the other regimental commanders did on their own. Unlike the vast multitudes of the rank and file, the commanders knew the reason for the sudden haste. An operation that had previously been allowed an extremely tight twenty-four-hour window to achieve its objective now found even that deadline brought forward. The problem was, not even General Gauge knew exactly when that deadline would expire.