by C. L. Werner
As Antares digested the problem of what the blips might represent, the crewmen at the communications relays suddenly clapped their hands to their ears, swiftly turning down the volume of the vox-implants bolted to their skulls.
‘Captain Antares!’ one of them shouted. ‘We’ve tried hailing the blips. Every frequency is being overwhelmed by some kind of strange intercept.’ The comms officer reached down to his terminal. As he depressed an activation rune, vox-casters began to broadcast the weird chatter. It was a confusion of deep grunts and croaking laughter, a bedlam of gruff, brutal vocalizations.
Antares listened to the chatter, a feeling of dread crawling up his spine. He glanced again at the display of the starboard quadrant. The objects were quickly gaining on the Stardrinker. There was no question of them being meteors or any other stellar phenomenon – to maintain their position, the objects had made a deliberate course correction. Only something with awareness could pursue a ship.
‘Raise the defence fleet,’ Antares ordered the comms officer. Tell them we are being menaced by unidentified craft.’
The officer shook his head. ‘We can’t raise anyone, captain. The chatter is across the board. On every frequency.’
Antares stared once more at the display. At their present speed, the unknown ships would intercept the tanker within a matter of a few minutes.
‘All crew to battle stations,’ Antares ordered.
‘Keep trying to break through the interference. Find an open channel. Spread the alarm.
‘We are under attack.’
Bodras curled his gnarled hand around the jug of caff and took a long pull of the fiery drink. It was an old mixture he’d picked up from some gunrunners on the Eastern Fringe, back when his vessel had been an Imperial patrol ship – caff mixed with fermented vespid jelly and twenty grams of cordite. On a ship like the Vulture, it was smart to have a drink none of your crew would touch.
Wiping the treacly residue of the drink from his beard, Bodras shifted in his command throne, staring down into the crew pits flanking the captain’s bridge. The pits were so filled with scanners, relays, exchanges, comms hubs, fire control systems and observation-slates that there was scarcely room for the crew to breathe. The original complement of machinery the frigate had been fitted out with when it left the shipyards of Calth had been greatly augmented in the decades since she had entered the thraldom of the Iron Warriors. Every vessel the Vulture had captured had contributed something to her conqueror’s improvement, augmenting her far beyond the frugality imposed by the Imperial Navy.
Bodras smoothed the front of his brocaded jacket as he rose from his throne. The jacket was two sizes too big for him, but the smoothness of its virgin scand-wool and the jade-studded epaulets were too fine for him to worry overmuch about the garment’s fit. The jacket had belonged to the deputy governor of Galar IX, right up until five seconds before Bodras blew his head off. Such a noble heritage, he felt, was bound to have rubbed off on the jacket – and by extension to himself.
Aristocratic pretensions notwithstanding, Bodras bellowed down at his junior officers, ‘Any sign of that damn scow?’ and punctuated his shout with a cordite-scented belch.
‘Negative, captain,’ called back a hook-nosed lieutenant, the mechanical eye set into his scarred face whirring and buzzing as it focused upon Bodras. ‘We’ve picked up no sign of the Stardrinker.’
‘Did you try raising her?’ Bodras growled. He didn’t care for patrol duty to begin with – any interruption to routine only made it worse.
The one-eyed lieutenant jabbed a thumb over his shoulder to one of the frigate’s comms relays. ‘All we’ve been able to get is a bunch of noise. It’s across all frequencies. Probably solar interference.’
Bodras glared down at the lieutenant. ‘Did that shrapnel take out part of your brain as well as your eye? We’re sixty-four AU from the sun! Any solar activity that could interfere with us here would also burn Castellax to a cinder.’
The lieutenant ran his thumb along his scarred cheek. ‘My… my apologies, captain. I will have the arrays examined for malfunctions.’
‘All six of them?’ Bodras growled. He was beginning to wonder why he’d made this idiot an officer. Something about two kilograms of fire-emeralds if he remembered right. He was reconsidering that bribe right now. What good was all this equipment if the man in charge of it was a moron?
‘Narrow the range of the frequency sweep. If they are using unsecured transmissions on Impex V, we might be catching echoes.’ Bodras stepped down from his throne, passing between the pair of armed bodyguards flanking the raised dais. It was astounding what the threat of two shotguns could do to enforce morale in a confined space.
The captain loomed over the sunken crew pit, watching as the comms men adjusted their equipment. Bodras tapped the holster of his laspistol, growing irritated at the delay.
‘Captain, we’re detecting a vapour cloud one hundred kilometres starboard,’ another officer reported. Bodras favoured the communication section with a last menacing look, then turned his attention to the long-range scanners. The crewmen shifted aside to allow Bodras a clear view.
‘The molecular scan identifies a high oxygen/hydrogen content,’ the scanner officer said. ‘It could be water vapour. The tanker might have had an accident.’
‘If the idiot dumped his cargo, he’d better hope it was a serious accident,’ Bodras said. Even that probably wouldn’t save the tanker’s crew from the ire of the Iron Warriors. Men seldom lived to disappoint the lords of Castellax twice.
Studying the screen, Bodras pointed at a large blotch a few thousand kilometres from the vapour cloud. ‘What is that?’ he asked.
‘Asteroid,’ the officer replied. ‘High metal content. They will be happy to hear of such a find back on Castellax.’ The man’s face spread in a steel-toothed grin. ‘The ship who reports this discovery will be well favoured by the Iron Warriors.’
Bodras shook his head. Something wasn’t right. Castellax needed water more than metal – any captain who dumped his cargo so that he could race back and gain the dubious gratitude of the Iron Warriors for discovering a new asteroid was too stupid to be believed. No, there was something very wrong. An asteroid loaded with metal ore just sitting right next to the most travelled space route in the system…
The vox-casters on the bridge suddenly broke out in a chaotic din of savage growls and grunts. Bodras spun around, his eyes bulging as the hideous cacophony struck horror in his heart. The comms men had narrowed down their scan to isolate a very narrow frequency range, then filtered it further to a single transmission band. Now that he heard it, Bodras almost wished he hadn’t. The interference had been caused by a bedlam of crude vox-transmissions scattered across a range of frequencies, their erratic and unstable nature causing them to bleed across each other. In effect, their very primitiveness, the obsolescent inefficiency and instability of the transmissions had overwhelmed the frigate’s sensitive equipment. The Vulture’s sharp ears had been deaf to the howls of the worst predator in the galaxy.
Bodras knew those voices. He’d heard them before, on the Eastern Fringe.
Now he understood why there was an asteroid lying just off the trade route between Impex V and Castellax.
‘Battle stations! Battle stations! Battle stations!’ Bodras roared, storming across the bridge and smashing his fist through the glass casing of the alert signal. Claxons wailed as harsh crimson lights flashed from the ceiling.
‘Hail all gun crews,’ Bodras snarled down at his officers. ‘I want every battery trained on that asteroid! I want torpedoes at the ready! I–’
‘Captain, we are picking up thirty… no… forty energy discharges from the surface of the asteroid,’ one of the officers shouted. ‘Captain, it’s firing at us!’
Bodras raised the jug of caff and took a quick swig. They were too late. The enemy had gotten off the first salvo. All they could do now was hope their void shields could withstand the barrage.
Because
what was out there, lurking off the space lane, wasn’t an asteroid any more. It had been hollowed out and turned into a space-faring fortress by the most murderous species in the galaxy.
The orks.
Chapter II
I-Day Minus 14
It came lumbering out of the void, a great darkness that blotted out the stars with its advance. A leviathan from space, a behemoth that roared between worlds like a vengeful devil. It had been born in the cauldron of an angry cosmos, a slab of rock and metal seventy kilo-metres in diameter, a fledgling planet that had never found its place and so had been cast into the emptiness between galaxies.
There, in the darkness, savage intelligences had found it, had descended upon this abandoned almost-world and through their barbaric technology had given it purpose, a place in the cosmos. A place of horror, havoc and destruction.
The Vulture was like a fly buzzing about the wings of a hawk, the disparity between the patrol ship and the rok was so immense. The rok was vast enough to exert its own gravitational pull on the ship, dragging her slowly towards it, affording the terrified crew an increasingly clear view of their mammoth adversary.
The rok was pitted and scarred, pockmarked with the impacts of smaller asteroids against its surface, gouged by the crude excavations of the orks. Towers and bunkers projected from the asteroid’s surface, hangars gaped in the walls of its canyons, gun emplacements bristled from its jagged mountains. Cyclopean engines, their exhausts a hundred metres wide, projected from the rok’s sides, spitting streams of atomic fire as the orks inside the asteroid struggled to direct its trajectory, to exert some measure of control upon the elemental force they had attempted to enslave.
It was a futile effort. The best the orks could do was cause the rok to revolve, to spin on its axis as it hurtled through the void. For the xenos, however, it was enough, allowing them to adjust the position of their heaviest guns and bring them to bear against those victims unfortunate enough to encounter the rok.
The crew of the Vulture was almost upon the rok before they were aware of their peril. The deranged array of guns and missile batteries the orks had fitted to the hollowed-out asteroid opened fire in a savage burst of destruction. An armada of alien craft exploded from the canyon hangars and from launch craters littering the surface. The rok had provided shelter to a ramshackle flotilla of smaller ork ships, an ugly assortment of scrap metal that somehow managed to be space-worthy. What the ork ships lacked in grace, they made up for in firepower. Some of the weapons they boasted were so massive that the ships which carried them fairly disintegrated the moment they fired.
It was punishment the frigate’s void shields were never meant to handle. More and more of the alien barrage was getting through, ripping Bodras’s ship apart.
The Vulture reeled as another broadside smashed into her. The ship’s artificial gravity struggled to compensate for the rolling vessel, creating a wild confusion of forces upon the bridge. Bodras watched as one of his bodyguards hurtled forwards, then was grabbed and dragged by a malfunctioning inertia dampener. The screaming man smashed into the wall as though he’d been fired from a torpedo tube, his ribcage collapsing as the dampener tried to pull his body through the bulkhead.
The captain took another pull of his jug and shuddered. Squashed like a bug wasn’t a pretty way to die.
‘Damage report,’ he snarled at the bloodied men down in the crew pits. Between overloaded circuits, dislodged machinery and debris from the ship’s infrastructure, not a man in the pit had escaped some sort of injury. The dead had been unceremoniously dumped onto the walkway where the inertia dampener grabbed hold of them. The worst of the wounded had been similarly disposed of until Bodras ordered the practice stopped. Even if they were in the way, the wounded had to be shown some consideration. It was bad for morale if they weren’t.
Lieutenant Collorus studied one of the flickering pict screens and cried back to the command throne. ‘There is a hull breach aft, exposing three decks to vacuum. The gravity generators can’t compensate, so we’re vacillating between a seven and ten degree list. Alpha and Beta batteries have been obliterated by direct hits. Gamma battery is still firing but we’ve lost all communication with the gunnery crew.’
‘Send runners,’ Bodras snapped. ‘We need to maintain fire control. The only way we’ll survive is by concentrating our fire!’
Even as he gave the order, Bodras wondered if it would really make any difference.
‘Only one macro-cannon still operational,’ an ensign with a raw gash across his forehead reported, cringing back as his terminal spat a shower of sparks at him. ‘Vox communications have been lost throughout the lower decks!’
Bodras groaned. That would be those filthy missiles the rok had fired into them. The moment they had struck, the crew had breathed a sigh of relief, thinking they were duds. Then the electronic pulses had started, gradually increasing in scope and intensity. Somehow the missiles were both absorbing and projecting energy. The effect was like a massive haywire grenade, shorting out machinery close to the point of impact and utterly severing the lines of communication passing through that part of the ship.
‘Fires in the kitchens, crew barracks and officers’ deck!’ another ensign shouted.
‘Get a fire control team down there,’ Bodras ordered. If a fire was allowed to go unchecked in that part of the frigate, the ship would be effectively cut in two.
‘The team assigned to that area was killed by a hull breach,’ Lieutenant Collorus reported. ‘We’re trying to redirect another team there now.’
‘Don’t try, do!’ Bodras roared. He stared at the view-screen beside him. The rok was slowly closing upon the frigate, rotating to bring an obscenely huge cannon mounted on its surface to bear on the Vulture. Some of the smaller ork ships were scattering, intimidated by the approach of their hulking comrade. Others, too lost in their mindless urge to destroy, continued to swarm about the frigate.
‘More hull breaches in decks nineteen through twenty-four!’
‘Fire control has been hit! Can’t raise fire control!’
‘Last macro-cannon has gone silent!’
‘Delta battery reports two plasma batteries have overheated!’
Bodras turned the jug upside down, draining the last few drops from the bottom. He tossed the empty vessel aside, watching as the inertia dampener caught it and smashed it against the bulkhead.
‘Report to Castellax,’ the captain said, his voice cold as he watched the rok rotate into position. ‘Tell them we’ve occupied the orks as long as we can.’
Bodras watched as a brilliant glow gathered in the mouth of the rok’s oversized cannon.
‘Tell our dread masters they can expect some company real soon,’ Bodras spat. He glanced down at his elegant jacket. It was such a shame that so fine a garment was going to be ruined.
Mummified husks of humanity, bound in sinews of steel and garbed in mantles of iron, mouths stretched wide in frozen screams, the Eternal Choir loomed from the vaulted heights, incense dripping from their desiccated chests, madness crawling in their shrivelled eyes. Each servitor was bolted fast to the face of a curved pillar, their broken arms wrapped about the obverse side. A low chant hissed from the throats of the automatons, a sibilance that somehow melded the harmony of song to the howling of beasts.
The monstrous chant swept across the grim chamber below. Promethium lamps cast an infernal glow, sending weird shadows slithering about the pillars and dancing along the heavily adorned walls. Bas relief battles raged anew as the play of crimson light and black shadow swept across them, once more igniting the ancient campaigns of Sebastus IV and Olympia. Power-armoured giants contested bloodied battlegrounds, their gilded bolters and chainswords glistening with reflected light. Stone Titans rained destruction upon screaming masses of humanity, thorny towers bristling with armaments wrought carnage upon Space Marines of the Imperial Fists Legion while gloating killers adorned in the heraldry of the Iron Warriors visited doom upon those striving
to escape the trap.
Everywhere in the frescoes, one terrifying visage was repeated. The glowering countenance of an Iron Warrior encased in baroque Terminator armour, wielding a storm bolter and a power claw encrusted with shining rubies. Half the Space Marine’s face was flesh, the rest was nought save a snarling skull of metal. Wherever the hulking warrior appeared, there the enemy lay heaped and torn about his feet. Always there was a sense of malignance and power in his piercing stare.
Seated in a throne of pure diamond, clear as ice and strong as adamantium, its legs shaped into clawed feet and its back carved into folded wings, the half-faced monster from the wall cast a steely gaze across the gloom. The flesh of his face was puckered and raw, scarred with hideous burns and the corrosive caress of things beyond human imagining. The metal of his exposed skull bristled with cables and power feeds, a nest of synthetic serpents that coiled about the Iron Warrior’s neck before sinking into sockets scattered across the bulky armour he wore. Even in rest, safe within the halls of the Iron Bastion, mightiest fortress-keep on Castellax, Warsmith Andraaz kept himself locked inside his ancient suit of Terminator armour. It was whispered that his body hadn’t stirred from the plasteel and ceramite shell in five millennia.
To either side of the throne towered the hulk of another Space Marine encased in Terminator armour, a member of the elite Rending Guard. Bodyguard to the Warsmith, the Terminators were veterans of countless campaigns, their armour studded with battle honours and draped in trophies torn from the bodies of their conquests. When the Terminators committed themselves to combat, it was only on the express command of Andraaz. They recognised no other authority short of Perturabo himself.
The Warsmith stretched out his hand, closing the armoured gauntlet into a fist and smashed it down against the immense table of obsidian which dominated the centre of the chamber. The crazed network of glowing wires and relays streaming through the semi-transparent rock blinked as the impact sent a tremor through the table.