‘Take down the remaining Engine,’ Ingvar voxed Callia. Jorundur was still fighting it, and the duel was an unequal one.
Then Ingvar set off, sprinting out from the throne and towards the shocked figure of Nuriyah. She stood motionless, her flamer-arm held limp, staring at the ruins of the throne.
It was all the time Ingvar needed. He streaked across the bridge deck, his blade lashing with energy, and threw himself through the air towards her. By the time she saw him come at her, the chance to defend herself was gone. She spun round, lifting the blackened muzzle of her pyromaniac augmetic, but Ingvar had already whipped dausvjer round at her neck.
The blade sliced clean through, cutting precisely between gorget and helm. With a snap of released disruptor-essence, Nuriyah’s head flew through the air, tracing a line of blood in its toppling wake, before thudding heavily to the marble and rocking to a standstill.
Ingvar hit the ground hard, cracking the deck beneath his feet before whirling to face the remaining defenders.
‘Enough!’ shouted Callia over the bridge-wide vox.
The balance of power had shifted. De Chatelaine’s Penitent Engine was still busy smashing the last pieces of Delvaux’s throne into molten scrap. The other Engine had been disabled by Jorundur with the assistance of Callia’s squad. The rest of the Battle Sisters were now leaderless and divided, since many had come over to Callia’s side already.
The last of the incoming fire faded away in a series of banging echoes. The bridge’s defenders began to emerge from behind devastated sections of cover, hands raised.
‘This is still an Ecclesiarchy vessel,’ announced Callia, taking control with all the resolve she had displayed in Hjec Aleja. ‘Resume your stations, remove the bridge lock-down. Transmit messages to all decks that Cardinal Delvaux has been relieved of command and Vindicatus is now under the control of the Fiery…’ Callia glanced over at de Chatelaine’s rampaging Engine. ‘Of the Wounded Heart.’
Ingvar looked over at Jorundur. The Old Dog gave him a weary nod from amid the ruins of the second Penitent Engine. He looked as battered as Ingvar had ever seen him, with his armour carved half open by the war machine’s chainfists, but he still stood and still held a weapon.
That only left de Chatelaine. Her movements were becoming increasingly jerky. Delvaux’s throne was now nothing more than a pile of bloody fragments, and still she hammered away at it. Her mechanisms, damaged by bolter-fire, began to overheat. The cantilevered arms flailed wildly. Something like a howl issued from her clamped-open lips, and the whole edifice of her iron exoskeleton began to totter.
Ingvar raced over to her just as the Engine fell, crashing onto its back amid the ruin of the throne dais. Columns of spark-filled exhaust twined up from her awkwardly twisted limbs. Her mortal body, shackled to the instruments of agony, twitched and bucked in its bonds.
Ingvar crouched beside her and pulled back the scrap of linen that covered her face. De Chatelaine’s everlasting scream stared back at him. Blood ran from her eyes across scourged cheeks – the machine was pumping pain-amplifier chemicals into her body at a wildly punitive rate.
She was somehow defying it. With self-command bordering on the superhuman, de Chatelaine had overridden the dreadful straitjacket of the Penitent Engine’s psychosis-inducing mechanisms. She had resisted the entire battery of control devices implanted into her shriven body, and, almost impossibly, turned the tools of the Ecclesiarchy against its own representative.
In a lifetime of combat across a thousand worlds, Ingvar had never seen mental strength quite that acute. Even now, as her body arched with pain, de Chatelaine was still fighting.
If Ingvar could have saved what remained of her, he would have done, but there was no living extraction from an Ecclesiarchy machine. He rested his bolter gently against her sweat-streaked temple.
‘Be at rest, battle-sister,’ he said. ‘Your saga shall be sung in the Halls of Fenris.’
De Chatelaine’s face remained contorted in agony, but something like understanding flashed momentarily in her eyes. For a second, gratitude mingled with the pain.
Then Ingvar fired. The spasms ceased immediately. The nerve-impulse units in the Penitent Engine registered the death of the host, and the last of its generators sputtered out. The chainfists wound down, the flamethrowers coughed out.
Ingvar stood up slowly, gazing down at de Chatelaine’s body.
Callia walked up to him, followed closely by a limping Jorundur. Ahead of them all, glimpsed through the immense forward viewscreen, Kefa Primaris could now clearly be seen.
‘The plague-hulk is on the augurs,’ she said, checking her chrono. ‘It is less than an hour away. Can your brothers–’
‘They will kill it,’ said Ingvar, turning away from the carnage over the throne. ‘Have faith.’
‘What of the life-eaters?’ asked Jorundur.
‘I have already given the order,’ said Callia, moving to the sensor station just below the dais. She ran her fingers over the console. ‘The torpedoes have been withdrawn. They will soon–’
She broke off again. Ingvar and Jorundur joined her at the console. Runes glowed across a cracked screen.
‘This is impossible,’ she said, glancing up at the curve of Kefa Primaris in the forward real-view portal.
Ingvar scanned the runes. ‘They are still primed to fire.’
‘I shut them down!’ cried Callia.
Jorundur hefted his axe with fresh purpose. ‘Is there an override? Some way to control them directly?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Callia. ‘Where’s the ship’s commander?’
Harryat was already dragging himself towards the console, clutching at a bloody patch over his shoulder and wincing from the pain. ‘Ordnance control,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘You can override from there, but you’d need full clearance. The Cardinal has gone. He couldn’t–’
Ingvar looked at Jorundur, and the same thought flashed through their minds.
‘Klaive,’ he said. ‘Give me a location.’
‘Three levels down – I can shunt the coordinates to your armour. But you’ll never reach it.’
‘Do what you can from here,’ growled Ingvar, already moving. ‘Pull the ship out of orbit.’
Jorundur came with him, and the two Wolves broke into a run.
‘He’s the one you came for, isn’t he?’ Jorundur voxed as they sprinted back towards the bridge exits.
‘He is the target,’ confirmed Ingvar, picking up speed. ‘But I want him alive.’
‘That might be difficult.’
‘Alive.’
Jorundur didn’t reply immediately. When he did, his voice was dark.
‘We’ll see,’ was all he said.
‘You are afraid,’ said Baldr.
The Mycelite looked up at him. ‘Why do you say so?’
‘Time runs out for you. Njal is still on the ship, and he hunts for you.’
The Mycelite would not be goaded. Everything about him remained as it had been – sad, stooped, drenched in soporific heaviness. ‘He can destroy this ship,’ he said. ‘He can destroy me. It will only drag out the agony.’
He reached for his staff, and his fingers wrapped around the gnarled wood.
‘I show you mercy,’ he said. ‘You understand this? Your Apothecaries administer battle-rites, do they not? To end the pain of your fallen? This is the same thing.’
Baldr examined the Plague Marine. The sorcerer’s voice was weaker than it had been. Perhaps the effort of subduing Baldr’s will had beaten the strength out of it. He could still feel the collar around his neck, biting into his flesh. When Njal had placed it on him, it had felt like a humiliation. Now it felt like a token of fate – a fragment of galactic luck, just as the skull-totem had been on Ras Shakeh.
‘No more,’ snapped the Mycelite. He reached out his clawed
hand and rested it on Baldr’s forehead. ‘We do this again.’
The Frostaxe’s bridge shuddered away, and Baldr’s mind immediately fell into the pit of darkness. For an instant, he felt the clammy touch of the Mycelite’s skin on his, then nothing at all.
Colours swam out of the void, vivid and swirling. He sensed the movement of souls within his colossal body – the ship’s body – running hard for the outer skin. He felt their desperation, not to survive, but to make their sacrifice worth something.
He felt the burning presence of the Stormcaller raging up through the chambers below, and wondered if the Mycelite knew that he was now very close.
Then Baldr felt the pricks of pain at his heart – the cluster of charges buried in the fusion reactor cores, ticking down within their shielded shells, poised to rip him apart in a supernova of destruction.
‘Destroy them,’ the Mycelite commanded, his voice floating in his mind – urgent now, persuasive.
Baldr knew that he could. Just as he had summoned fire to purge the interlopers from the inner enginarium, he knew he could douse the incipient inferno buried in those chambers of plasma. He could take each one in turn and shift them all into the void, where they would explode in silent puffs.
He wanted to do it. The instinct was as natural as plucking a thorn from one’s flesh.
He reached out with his mind, delving into the plasma chambers. He saw the irritants, swimming in a luminescent mass – little dark spheres, glittering with heat shielding and ready to ignite. The urge to absorb them, to gather them up and fling them clear of danger, was virtually overwhelming. He cupped the closest of them in a ghostly hand, watching as the plasma around it slipped and slopped from invisible fingers.
‘No,’ he said.
He felt the power in Mycelite’s voice immediately. ‘You are the ship.’
It was difficult not to obey. It was crushingly, agonisingly hard.
But he could do it.
‘No,’ he said again, fighting to break free of the visions. He heard the other voices murmuring in half-aware fury, all of them struggling to drag him in with them, to consign him to the same incorporeal life they endured. They were mad, locked in debates of which they had no understanding.
Amid the struggle, the Mycelite’s voice softened further.
‘This gift is unique,’ he said. ‘It is new. Think on that. In ten thousand years there has been no one like you. The stars fade, and still such magnificence is created. Do not spurn this. You will be a god. You were always marked out for it, right from birth. The daemons of your ice-world knew it. They could feel it. You could feel it.’
Baldr remembered the wolf, the one that had stood before him in the dark, dripping wood. He remembered the amber eyes.
Why doesn’t it move? Why doesn’t it pounce?
He wavered. He felt the soul of the ship assert itself, surging up to swallow his own. He felt dizzy. Nausea piled in, welling up from the nigh-infinite volume of matter pressing down around him.
He reached for the charges again. He grasped them, enclosing them in an aura of suppression. All he had to do now was cast them away, scattering them into the void like a child throwing stones into the waves.
‘Do it,’ urged the Mycelite.
He would have done. The Mycelite’s words had performed their work, and the last strands of Baldr’s resistance flaked away. Given a free hand then, he would have nullified the threat from the devices before turning his wrath to those of his brothers still fleeing from the reach of his multifaceted mind. It would have been over, and all within the blink of an amber eye.
But then, just as Baldr’s thoughts crystallised, the Mycelite’s hold broke.
Baldr came around, snapped roughly back into reality. His eyes flickered open, watering from the harsh light. The Frostaxe’s darkened bridge danced with corposant, stirring up the dust of aeons and making the corpses shiver. Baldr shook his head, blinking hard and trying to shake off a crippling wave of nausea.
Bodies were moving ahead of him – huge bodies, wreathed in light and swaying amid a blur of torn reality. For a second Baldr thought he might have somehow died, and that his soul had been translated into an afterlife of insubstantial wraiths and spectral energy-flows.
Then his vision compensated, focus returned, and he saw the truth of it. The Mycelite had turned away from him, suddenly distracted by a new threat. Beyond the stooped and twisted form of the Plague Marine, Njal Stormcaller loomed dark and tall, his staff crackling and his armour-runes blazing.
‘Ready your soul for damnation, Traitor,’ Njal growled, summoning rune-fire to himself in iridescent streaks. ‘Hel is upon you now.’
The impact sites flickered up on Gunnlaugur’s helm-display. He gave the order, and the packs peeled away, each one heading for the loc-reading of a different Caestus assault ram. They had been forced to make calculations on the run, seeking out strong signals from undamaged vessels.
Given their losses, only three of the Caestus rams were needed. Gunnlaugur had run scans as the outer rim approached, and five had responded with live signals – four of them reporting battle-readiness. Each was sealed and locked down, their heavy ceramite armour protecting them from the predations of all but the most well-equipped and determined enemy.
Two packs of five split off, haring down the plunging tunnels towards the signals. The remaining four came with him, pressing ahead to the most distant of the loc-readings.
The target was almost open to the void – lodged in a vertical gouge in the hulk’s flank the length of a starship comm-vane.
Gunnlaugur checked the chrono as he sprinted.
Sixteen minutes, and still ticking down. This was too close.
Hafloí’s voice crackled over the comm, breathless and panting. ‘Targets incoming.’
Gunnlaugur blinked to tactical, and watched the proximity markers crowd across his forward scan-field.
‘Skítja,’ he breathed. They were already clogging the tunnels ahead. Gunnlaugur’s helm worked to give him numbers – two hundred, three hundred…
‘Break them!’ he voxed, slamming a fresh magazine into his bolter. It was his last.
The corridor echoed with the snap, thud and slide of ammo being replenished. Power weapons crackled into full-burn, sending neon flickers out across the dark.
Ten metres.
He spied the first pair of enemy eyes, glowing marsh-green.
‘Allfather!’ he roared, whirling his thunder hammer in one hand as the bolter kicked out shells with the other.
His brothers thundered their own battle-cries, tearing along in a tight knot of grey steel and ceramite. Then they crashed as one into the barricades, and the tunnel dissolved into fire and annihilation.
Olgeir burst into Annarovea’s chambers. The governor turned to face him, her face flushed with anger.
‘You knew,’ she accused. ‘It wasn’t just you – there were other ships.’
Olgeir looked wearily around the chamber. The rest of the governor’s staff glared back at him with censorious expressions – as far as they dared.
This mission was proving impossible to balance. There was no one to fight with honour, and no story to spin that would convince doubting souls.
‘Nothing has changed,’ he said.
‘We cannot speak to the Ministorum vessel,’ Annarovea said. ‘Why is that?’
‘You have a location fix?’
Annarovea pushed clear of her throne and strode over to a sensor station. Olgeir followed her. A glassy pict lens showed a rune-filled depiction of the immediate orbital zone. Troop-carriers making slow progress out of the system, hauling the precious human cargo beyond destruction’s reach.
And then there was the Cardinal’s ship. It was approaching deployment range, skirting the limit beyond which life-eater torpedoes would become unstoppable.
‘S
can it,’ he said.
Annarovea nodded towards an aide, who directed an augur-sweep towards Vindicatus.
‘What do you see?’ asked Olgeir.
‘Extensive surface damage,’ reported the aide. ‘Its course is erratic. Engines seem slow to correct.’
‘That ship took on the plague-hulk,’ Olgeir told Annarovea. ‘You can see the results. If it tries to do so again, it will be destroyed.’ He studied the data scrolling across the pict screen. ‘Run a weapons analysis.’
The aide adjusted the scope of the scan. ‘There is a power build-up along the lower hull. Sporadic, but growing.’
Olgeir nodded grimly. ‘Torpedo batteries.’ He turned to Annarovea. ‘The commander of that ship has the power to erase all life on this world. He will do it if he sees the plague-hulk reaching deployment range. Better to strip a planet of life than risk it supplying soldiers to the enemy. That’s the calculation.’
Annarovea went pale. ‘I do not–’
‘There is no help, governor. Launch your fighters at it, if it will make you feel any better, but that is an Ecclesiarchy Grand Cruiser, so do not fool yourself they will do more than scratch its shields.’
Annarovea seemed to shrink in her armour. Fatigue, and hopelessness, were catching up with her, and she struggled to find a reply.
Just then, an alarm sounded from one of the watch-stations on the far side of the chamber. An officer leapt up.
‘First signal, lords,’ he reported.
‘Put it through,’ said Annarovea.
The pict screen updated. A new icon appeared on the extreme edge of orbital space, moving slowly but purposively. Unlike the troop carriers and Vindicatus, it had no standard fleet-identifier.
‘So that is the hulk,’ said Annarovea, quietly.
Olgeir nodded.
‘What do we do?’ she asked. Her self-possession had left her. She was no longer angry, no longer defiant. In the space of a single day, her armouries had been stripped bare, her citizens were rioting, and two vessels with the power to destroy every living thing on the planet were powering steadily into strike positions.
Stormcaller Page 32