It had not escaped the sergeant's notice that both of the boys fit the profile for Chapter aspirants, and the fact that they faced the horrors of the darkness and the monsters who lurked in the shadows without crying out, without wavering, suggested that they were made of just the stuff that the Blood Ravens sought in an initiate. Growing up in the lower-habs had made them that way, Thaddeus knew. They had already seen things in their young lives that the cosseted sons of the high-hab nobility might never experience in their long lifetimes, even before the coming of the tyranids. The underhives and lower-habs were hard places, in which only the hardiest souls survived to adulthood.
Phaeton's hands balled into fists at his sides. 'But when will we get to fight?'
A slight smile played about the corners of Thaddeus's mouth, a shadow of the grins he once wore into battle.
'Perhaps one day you'll wear the armour of the Blood Raven,' Thaddeus said, rapping the raven-and-blood-teardrop emblazoned on his chest, 'and with bolter and chainsword can exact revenge on the kin of your mother's killer, and all xenos like them.'
Little Phoebus raised his chin, expression brightening. 'Yes!' he said. 'I want to be a Blood Raven and fight, too!'
Yes, Thaddeus thought, the Chapter could do far worse than to accept these two as initiates. If Thaddeus could only deliver them safely through the countless tyranid that swarmed on all sides.
'Contact!' Brother Takayo shouted, firing his bolt pistol at the warrior who came scuttling across the ceiling towards them.
At the moment, though, it remained to be seen whether any of them survived at all.
SERGEANT ARAMUS REGARDED the data-slates stacked on the table before him, each of them containing reports on the readiness of the city to withstand a full-blown tyranid attack.
He had established a command post in the Blood Ravens outpost-monastery at the heart of Zenith. It was within these same walls that Aramus had fought in the Blood Trials, and when he and Thaddeus had been the last two aspirants left standing they had been taken from the amphitheatre, and led here, to the heart of the outpost-monastery.
Aramus looked up from the data-slates to the altar that dominated the far side of the chamber, dedicated to the Undying Emperor. Behind the altar the walls were covered with intricate carvings, depicting images from the sacred lore of the Blood Ravens, some historical, some legendary, and some a blending of the two. Here were the great Missionary-Chaplains Elizur and Shedeur, planting the Blood Ravens' standard on a jagged mountain peak, representing the countless worlds to which they had brought the light of the Emperor, and on which they had established Chapter monastery-outposts. Here, too, were the great Librarian Fathers, the Chapter Masters from the dim and distant past, back to the Great Father himself, Azariah Vidya, the earliest known Librarian Father in the broken annals of the Blood Ravens.
The Chapter was led now by Secret Masters, their names and faces known only to one another, chosen from amongst the great Librarians, Chaplains, and captains of the Blood Ravens, a legacy of secrecy passed down over the millennia. There was some irony, perhaps, that a Chapter whose battle cry held that knowledge was power should keep so closely guarded information that other Chapters shouted from the rooftops, but if knowledge was power, then perhaps it was not so ironic, at that. Power must be marshalled, and protected, lest it be lost, and the knowledge of who at any time served as Master of the Blood Ravens was perhaps the most precious knowledge that the Chapter possessed.
Aramus did not know what the enemies of the Chapter might do with that secret knowledge, but he could guess. He had heard whispered rumours of the secrets that lay hidden in the forbidden pages of the Grimoire Hereticus or the Tactica Adeptus Chaotica, kept under lock and key within the Librarium Sanctorum on board the Chapter's fortress-monastery the Omnis Arcanum, and if only a fraction of those rumours were correct, then the Blood Ravens were right to keep secret the identities of their masters. There were forces in the universe, and beyond, who would do evil to the Chapter otherwise.
'Sergeant Aramus!' Scout Xenakis came running into the chamber, his bolt pistol drawn, his sniper-rifle slung over his shoulder.
Aramus stood up from the bench. 'What is it, scout?'
'The tyranids, sir,' Xenakis answered. 'They've begun to attack the city.'
Aramus was already on his way out the door. 'With me, scout.'
As he burst from the darkened security of the outpost-monastery into the harsh light of day, Aramus knew what to expect. The latest action reports from Sergeant Avitus and his Ninth Squad put the ground forces of the tyranids nearly a hundred kilometres to the east. Avitus's team had yet to report in by vox, but it was anticipated that the advancing front of the tyranid forces would hit the first firebreak today, which was expected to delay their forward motion considerably. Even so, whether the firebreak held them or not, there was no chance that ground forces could have reached Zenith in so short a time.
Which was why, when Aramus rushed outside, he did not look out at the city which stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction, but instead cast his gaze skyward. And there, as he had anticipated, he saw the leathery wings of gargoyle broods darkening the grey skies.
'The fool!' came the voice of Sergeant Cyrus over the microbead in Aramus's ear.
'Cyrus?' Aramus replied, his eyes following the high-flying gargoyles, trying to judge where they would strike.
'It's the Emperor-forsaken governor, sir,' Cyrus voxed back. 'He won't listen to reason.'
The monastery-outpost of the Blood Ravens towered over the streets of Zenith, but even it was dwarfed by the bulk of the governor's palace to the north. In between the two buildings the streets swarmed with people, the city's population swelled by the countless thousands - even millions - of refugees who had fled to the capital city in recent days, ahead of the tyranid advance. The shouts and screams of the terrified crowd rose to slam Aramus like a solid wall of sound, as the huddled masses below pointed in horror at the hellbats which now wheeled high overhead. The gargoyles had not yet attacked, and in fact appeared to be surveying the area first before selecting a target, but Aramus knew that when they began to strafe the streets, the death toll would be tremendous.
'Scout,' Aramus said to Scout Xenakis who'd come to stand at his side. 'Pot a few shots at them with your sniper rifle, see if you can't clip a few wings.'
'Yes, sir,' Xenakis answered, and unslinging his rifle from his shoulder knelt to take aim.
'Now,' Aramus sighed, tapping his microbead and returning his attention to Cyrus, 'what's this about the governor?'
Aramus had expected trouble from the governor. As the tyranid advance had grown ever closer, Governor Vandis had appeared, at long last, to recognize the gravity of their situation and, having spent the first days of the Blood Ravens' presence on Meridian guided by the blind assumption that the Space Marines would quickly and easily put everything to rights, was now caught up in a full-blown panic, demanding immediate action from the Blood Ravens, insisting on personal protection for himself above all else.
In the face of the governor's constant demands, Aramus had been forced to dispatch Sergeant Cyrus, to prevent the governor's people from attempting to barge into the outpost-monastery and demand an answer themselves. He'd hoped that, if Cyrus could hear the governor's concerns in person, then perhaps they might get a small measure of silence from the damnable man and the space in which to work. But it appeared that those hopes had been unfounded.
'He… he's taking off, sir,' Cyrus voxed. 'I tried to stop him.'
'What?' Aramus looked from the skies overhead to the governor's palace to the north.
Atop the palace, Aramus could just make out what appeared to be a shuttle lifting off from the landing pad.
'Cyrus, who's in that ship?'
'It's the governor, Aramus,' Cyrus answered. 'He's in a complete panic, sir. Says that we betrayed him by sending the Aurelia Battlegroup away, and that we're not doing enough to safeguard the city. He says it's only a ma
tter of time before the tyranids overrun Zenith.'
Aramus didn't know that he could argue with the last point, but as for the others…
'Damn the man,' Aramus spat. 'So where's he going?'
'He's trying to contract a rogue trader to take him out of system, but in the meantime he's just intending to wait in orbit in his shuttle.' Cyrus paused. 'I think he's got something in the shuttle he doesn't want us to see. He was very concerned that I not follow him aboard.'
Aramus watched the shuttle arc away from the governor's palace toward the south. Whether the pilot had seen the gargoyle brood wheeling into his path, they would never know.
'Cyrus, take cover!' Aramus shouted.
The bio-plasma bursts of the gargoyle brood lanced into the shuttle's wings. As smoke began to curl up from the shuttle's hull, and debris rained down on the crowds below, the craft began to veer wildly out of control.
'Sir?' Scout Xenakis said, lowering the sniper rifle from his shoulder, his gaze drifting from the out of control shuttle to the crowds massed underneath, already whipped into a frenzy for fear of the hellbats overhead.
'Keep firing at the gargoyles, Scout,' Aramus said, as he made for the steps leading from the monastery-fortress down to the street.
The shuttle plunged to earth, engines screaming but ineffectual.
'What about the people?' Xenakis said, gesturing to the street below.
'Some will die,' Aramus said flatly.
As if in response, the shuttle came crashing down into the street, the sound of its impact accented by the horrified shrieks of those innocents close enough to see the crash but not so close they were killed on impact.
'But if we don't stop those hellbats,' Aramus said, leaping down the steps five at a time, 'more will follow.'
CHAPTER NINETEEN
'DAMAGE REPORT!' ADMIRAL Forbes shouted from the command dais.
All around her on the command deck of the Sword of Hadrian the ship's officers were about their business, their attentions fixed on the crystal displays of their stations, monitoring the course of the battle raging all around them.
'We've taken a battery hit to our starboard side,' reported the midshipman monitoring the ship's hull. 'Damage from impact is minimal, with only minor hull penetration, but the resulting fire is raging on the starboard quadrant of deck twenty.'
Forbes scowled. Pyro-acidic batteries were among the most damaging weapons in the tyranid arsenal. Unless the battery were deflected on impact, the ship ran the risk of severe internal damage from the deadly bio-agents contained within. 'Damage control teams to deck twenty,' Forbes ordered. 'If they can't quell it, lock down the quadrant and flush to vacuum.'
'Aye aye, ma'am,' the midshipman replied, already keying in the commands to be transmitted below decks.
'She's coming about,' Commander Mitchels reported, monitoring the motions of the Razorfiend tyranid cruiser through the forward viewports.
'Prepare to fire forward lances on my mark,' Forbes ordered. She leaned forward in the captain's chair, hands gripping the armrests on either side.
'Admiral,' called the lieutenant at the port-side monitoring station, 'we're taking bio-plasma hits from a flight of drones.'
'Increase power to port-side void shields and return fire from the port battery at your discretion.'
'With pleasure, ma'am,' the lieutenant answered, his tone grim.
'She's preparing to launch feeder tentacles, admiral,' Mitchels reported, his attention still on the Razorfiend.
'Forward lances fire,' Forbes barked.
High-powered beams shot out from the energy projectors of the forward lance, searing into the main body of the Razorfiend cruiser.
'Direct hit,' Mitchels said calmly. 'But she's still bringing her tentacles to bear.'
Tentacles, digestive acids, and bio-plasma… Forbes wearied of the tactics of the tyranids, who fought with teeth, claws, and spines rather than thrown slugs and projected energy beams like any civilized foe. What she wouldn't give for an enemy who fought with guns, right about now.
'Starboard battery,' Forbes said, 'target rail guns on Razorfiend and fire when ready.'
'Aye, aye,' chorused the pair of officers who controlled the myriad of weapons housed in the starboard battery.
Forbes leaned back in her seat, as the crew on the command deck carried out her commands. It had been more than two years since they'd been in active combat, more than two years since they'd even encountered another ship in vacuum except for the odd rogue trader who refused to stand down for an inspection boarding party. But it was rare to find a rogue trader who wouldn't back down when a warship's weapons batteries were trained on him, and as a result the Sword of Hadrian had not exchanged live fire with an enemy the entire time they'd been stationed to Aurelia, a full two years. That her officers were rising to the occasion, now that they faced the tyranid fleet, only served as proof that Forbes's insistence on regular combat drills had not been time wasted.
So far, the damage sustained by the Sword of Hadrian had been relatively minimal, with only minor casualties suffered by her crew. She was sorry that the same could not be said of The Praetorian, one of the Hadrian's sister ships.
It wasn't as if Battlegroup Aurelia was a proper ''battlegroup'', not that that was any excuse. The name was just an informal tag for a convoy that was small by Imperial Navy standards to say the least, just three Dauntless-class light cruisers - her own Sword of Hadrian, Trajan's Shield under the command of Captain Grieve, and Captain Voronin's The Praetorian.
'Trajan's Shield reports minimal damage, admiral,' called the communications officer. 'Captain Grieve sends his compliments, and asks if there are any new orders?'
Forbes could well imagine what Grieve's ''compliments'' might sound like, in this hour. Grieve had been against this plan of attack from the beginning, and doubtless saw the loss of The Praetorian only moments before as vindication of his concerns.
'Inform the Trajan that losses had been anticipated,' Admiral Forbes answered, her tone level, 'and that the mission will continue as planned.'
'Aye, ma'am.'
Forbes scowled. It seemed an eternity already, but it had been only moments before that the forward sections of The Praetorian had been shorn clean off by the massive claws of a tyranid Kraken, like the pincers of an enormous crab tearing right through the cruiser's decks and gantries. There was little doubt that Captain Voronin and the rest of the command crew had died almost immediately, their blood boiling away in the cold vacuum of space in the slim chance that they survived the Kraken's claws themselves, but any hope that the crew in the rest of the ship might survive the attack was lost when the Kraken wrapped its mighty feeder tentacles around The Praetorian's bulk and then disgorged countless batteries of pyro-acid into the cruiser. Any that had survived the initial attack had found themselves burned alive, as the bio-agents flooded deck after deck.
'The Razorfiend appears to be listing, ma'am,' called Commander Mitchels.
'Don't let up,' Forbes answered. 'Keep punching until she stops hitting back, and then keep firing until she splits open. We can't chance a rearguard attack as we advance.'
Forbes had never quite known whom she had offended to be given this backwater posting. Seconded to a planetary governor, the admiral had originally assumed that she was merely to rattle the sabre, perhaps even to remind Governor Vandis exactly whence his authority flowed. But when she arrived in the Aurelia system Forbes found new orders from Sector Command waiting, informing her to assist the governor in whatever way possible until new orders were posted. For two years now that had meant acting as little more than a ferrying and messenger service for Meridian's governor, who was the Imperial authority over the entire Aurelia sub-sector. Some ''battlegroup'', she scoffed.
Still, the enemy they faced today might serve to balance the lack of action they'd seen these long months, if the last hours had been any indication.
'Admiral, we've got a lock on the hive ship,' called the officer monitoring
medium-range scans. 'We should close to firing range within the hour.'
'Keep monitoring, ensign,' Forbes answered. 'If she budges a centimetre I want to hear about it.'
In the end, it had proved almost ridiculously easy to find the hive fleet. With one ship, it might have taken ages, but with all three of the Dauntless-class cruisers at her disposal it had been a matter of surprising ease - though she doubted the battlegroup's astropaths would describe it in quite that way.
It was a well known fact among the Imperial Navy that the gestalt consciousness of a hive - the psychic contact that pervaded the area around a tyrannic fleet - had the effect of distorting warp space for light years in every direction. As a result, travel via the warp became increasingly uncertain the nearer one came to a tyrannic fleet, and astropathic contact became unreliable, sometimes even completely impossible. On the larger scale, this was the cause for the shadow in the warp that had interfered with astrotelepathy in the Aurelia sub-sector these last days and weeks. On the smaller scale, though, and in combat situations in particular, this distortion could have a profoundly unsettling effect on astropaths, many of whom had been known to lose their minds completely in battles with tyranids.
However, just as the astropaths of the Sword of Hadrian and the Blood Ravens strike cruiser Armageddon had been able to triangulate the general position of the fleet by measuring in which direction the interference was strongest, so too was Admiral Forbes with three ships able to do much the same kind of trian-gulation to steer the Aurelia Battlegroup physically towards the fleet itself. In essence - and in a move that many in her command considered foolhardy and unnecessarily dangerous, Captain Grieve chief among them - Forbes had simply ordered the three light cruisers to travel towards the direction of greatest distortion, reasoning that the greater the distortion, the closer to the hive fleet they would be.
When the battlegroup had emerged in normal space at the far edge of the Aurelia sub-sector, only days before, their long-range scans had immediately detected the vanguard drones of the tyranid fleet, proof positive that they were in close range of the fleet itself. To traverse the remaining distance by warp, though, was too foolhardy and dangerous, and so Forbes had ordered the ships to proceed at sublight speeds, making ready to engage with the fleet as soon as they made contact.
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