It seemed so simple on the surface – all he had to do was get from here to there, with Cyrene in tow. The reality of the matter was that the damn ship was coming apart at the seams, and he was already exhausted from murdering his way down the crew-choked corridors. The killing had become farming, no different from the heft of a scythe and the reaping of wheat, day in and day out, from dawn until dusk. Except Eshramar’s power scimitar, those newly-forged blades given to each Vakrah Jal warrior, was harvesting life.
He incinerated his way through the densest corridors, but after the corpse-smoke had almost asphyxiated the Blessed Lady, he’d learned to temper that response.
Half the raving packs of humans they came across were trampling each other in feral panic to reach the escape hangars. The other half rounded on Cyrene and shrieked for her favour, believing touching her would grant the fortune to spare them death in the void. Eshramar killed both creeds of crowd, caring little whether they shouted for mercy or cried the Blessed Lady’s name as they died. Getting them out of the way was all that mattered.
‘This way,’ he said to her, pulling his sword from the last body in the hallway. She was struggling to walk, half-climbing over the piled, split-open cadavers. Horror widened her eyes, but that wasn’t Eshramar’s concern. He was bathed in gore, covered from helm to boots in the blood of his own flagship’s crew, but that wasn’t at the fore of his thoughts, either.
Ships died slowly – first in fire, then in silence. Eshramar knew they didn’t have long left before the Lex crumbled around them, becoming powerless and fully open to the airless void.
‘This way,’ he said again. ‘My lady, hurry.’
Cyrene scrambled over the slain, her robes slathered with their blood, her hands red to the wrists from where she kept falling. She’d been on warships for most of her life, but never on one being torn apart.
Eshramar led the way through the corridors, his wet boots thudding on the deck grilles. He was half-dragging her by the wrist, careful not to break her arm or pull it from its socket, but she still grunted with the stabs of pain as he manhandled her.
She knew where he was taking her. The Vakrah Jal had several of their Chapter’s own gunships aboard, but she sincerely doubted they’d still be there by now. It had taken them almost half an hour to cross the ship so far. Elevators were inactive, leaving hollow tube-tunnels between decks. Ventilation access crawlspaces glowed orange with distant fire in the ship’s veins. Entire swathes of decks were thick with bodies and debris.
Why even abandon ship? What was down there on Nuceria but a death delayed by a handful of hours?
That only made her run harder. She was a daughter of the Perfect City, and the Confessor of the Word. She wouldn’t die here if there were even a shred of hope.
Eshramar dragged her to a halt before a sealed bulkhead. She could see from the cant of his head that it shouldn’t have been sealed, even in an emergency lockdown. There was no handle, no transition bar, nothing.
‘I don’t…’ he said, but never finished the thought.
‘Can you burn through?’ she asked, catching her breath. Her throat tasted of blood.
His wrist-flamers were more than capable of liquefying metal, but time wasn’t on their side.
‘It will take too long.’ Eshramar turned away from the dead-end, meaning to double back and take another route. ‘Come.’
He said nothing more. His helmeted head cracked back with a dull, ringing clang, sending him staggering against the wall behind. The silver faceplate was a mangled crater around his left eye lens, and Cyrene heard the dim sound of a flatline playing from inside his armour as he slumped to the deck.
At the end of the hallway, where she and Eshramar had run in, she could make out three robed Legion thralls through the smoke. One of them lowered a heavy, long-necked rifle. The other two started running towards her.
She’d have taken Eshramar’s bolter if she’d had any hope of lifting it. Instead, Cyrene drew the qattari knife for the second time since her rebirth and ran at the men that had murdered her last guardian.
She didn’t scream or shriek or laugh. She met her attackers in fierce silence, knuckles white around the ritual knife. The same way she died a year ago.
The first of them deflected her strike with his forearm, batting the dagger from her hands.
‘Cyrene,’ he said. ‘Cyrene, wait, please.’ Damon Prytanis pulled back his hood, looking into her eyes as he had an hour before. He was absolutely untouched by the fire that had destroyed him. ‘Will you listen to me this time? Come with us.’
The Conqueror heaved again, its overburning engines bringing it deep into a slowly-scattering enemy formation. Its shields were dead. Its battlements burned with the dissipating flash-flame of void wounds. Half of its guns had fallen silent. They would never fire again.
Lotara pushed her loose hair back from her face, sucking in air through her rebreather. The ventilators were struggling to cope with the smoke hazing the bridge.
‘Come about to three-sixteen,’ she called.
‘They’re running past us,’ Tobin yelled back. ‘Captain, the Nova Warrior and the Triumph of Espandor are cutting past. Weapon batteries firing.’
‘Will it kill them?’ Lotara asked.
‘They’re damaged, but not dying. This will push them closer to the edge. Don’t hold out hopes for anything more, ma’am.’
Lotara touched a grisly, gushing slash on her temple, not remembering when she’d earned it. Her fingers came away red. Almost in a daze, she limp-ran to Lehralla’s console. The Scrymistress hung slack and dead, slouched over, held up only by the cables and wires snaking between her head and the ceiling.
Lotara reactivated the central hololith, staring through its flickering indecision and tracking the runes of enemy ships. Blood of the Emperor, how could so many of them still be alive? Surely they’d killed the whole armada and more besides.
The Conqueror turned at the heart of a spreading sphere of enemy warships. Its remaining weapons spat wrath into the void, bruising, breaking, burning the Ultramarines vessels clinging to it.
The Nova Warrior and Triumph of Espandor blinked on the ethereal display, pulsing their way past the embattled Conqueror. But Tobin was wrong. They weren’t cutting past quickly, they were making attack runs as they flew by. Given the enemy fleet’s resources, that was exactly what she’d have done, too – they couldn’t afford to keep their heaviest cruisers entirely out of the firefight, no matter the risk.
‘Move us closer,’ she called out across the bridge. ‘Get me within range for the ursus claws. It doesn’t matter who we hit in the turn, but those two barges aren’t firing their drop pods onto Nuceria while I still draw breath.’ Her smile was all white teeth in her sooty face. ‘No one runs from the Conqueror.’
‘If the Chronicle changes course…’ Tobin warned.
‘It will or it won’t, but no one runs. I want the engines howling loud.’
The World Eaters flagship leapt forwards, engines roaring hotter and harder. Beyond manoeuvring speed. Beyond attack speed. Beyond pursuit speed.
Lotara, and all the surviving bridge crew, stared at the image blooming on the oculus. She heard Feyd curse in the same moment Tobin shouted, ‘Brace, brace!’
The rising Conqueror met the descending Chronicle, both ships changing their heading along unpredicted arcs, and crashing together without void shields to cushion the impact. The strategium shook hard enough to throw everyone from their feet. Lotara’s teeth clacked together – she felt several of them break.
The shriek of tormented, agonised metal lasted almost a full minute. The two warships slid against each other, and there was almost something shark-like to how they coupled in the dark. The Chronicle came off worse, far outclassed in size, armour, momentum and weight. Its entire port side disintegrated in a tidal tear of scrap metal, exposing thousands of crew to Nuc
eria’s upper atmosphere. When the two ships slipped free of their grinding slide, the Chronicle rolled into a powerless fall, snatched by gravity, spearing groundwards and catching fire as it knifed through the world’s atmosphere.
The Conqueror fared better, but earned black scarring across its entire port side. Entire fortresses of cannons and crew were raked clean off the hull. At her instinctive guess, Lotara estimated they’d lost several thousand crew, and were lucky it was so few.
But they were free, and bearing down on the running cruisers. Despite being forty kilometres away from her prey, in terms of void war Lotara was practically on their backs.
She gave the nod to Tobin.
Vel-Kheredar’s finest work was arguably the weapons array he’d spent over two years installing in the refitted Conqueror, soon after she first changed her name from Adamant Resolve. The flagship of the XII Legion outgunned practically any other vessel of comparable size, even with its standard armament. What really made the difference were the pursuit talons. The harpoons carried by the Warhounds of Legio Audax served their purpose well, but the Conqueror’s ursus claws were an extension of Legiones Astartes savagery on a scale unseen anywhere else.
As the Conqueror bore down on the running cruisers, it launched its talons right at their spines. Dozens of spears, each one the size of a frigate in its own right, burst from the warship’s forward fire arc. Many missed, as they always did at such range. And many hit, as they always did when Lotara fired them in anger.
She watched the massive spears drive through the cruisers’ spines, impaling them and digging deep. Great industrial drills at the head of every harpoon came alive, grinding and eating deeper into the struck ships. Electromagnetic seals charged. The spears, skyscraper-tall and skyscraper-thick, locked home in the puncture wounds they’d caused. The chains connecting the harpoons to their mothership were an alloy of Nostraman adamantium and Ferrekesian titanium, and each of them carried the same value as the annual tithe allowances of an average frontier world. The Imperium, in its sickening scale and ambition, spared no expense for its visionaries and warriors.
The harpoon chains straightened and grew taut. That was when the Conqueror killed its thrust. Massive Mechanicum-engineered pulleys – each one dwarfing a Titan in size and strength – began ratcheting the harpoons back.
Clawing a vessel was always a matter of complex calculation. The pursuit talons were designed for the most vicious, close-range breed of warfare, and if too many spears missed – or the enemy ship had too much power – it would be the Conqueror that suffered, losing its hold – or worse, being pulled along by the running prey. Neither failure had ever happened. Lotara knew the weapons array inside and out, from the names of the work shift leaders overseeing the slave population that manned the manual loading systems to the exact classes of ship she could bring down at different levels of thrust.
Both the Nova Warrior and the Triumph of Espandor were wounded, because every ship in the sky was wounded. Thanks to the Trisagion, they’d taken heavy fire along with the rest of the Ultramarines fleet, and suffered a massed broadside beating in their attack run past the Conqueror.
Weakened as they were, they were the perfect targets.
The claws had fired, sunk in, drilled deeper and bit hard. The chains had pulled tight, and the Conqueror fired everything it had into pulling back. Slowly, inexorably, the two Ultramarines vessels were dragged back in defiance of their thrusters, losing all forward momentum and leashed off-course.
Another cheer, this one much sparser, went up across the bridge.
‘Pull them closer and finish them with lances.’ Lotara limped back to her throne. ‘Ram our way through the wreckage when you’re done and come about to break the Glory of Fire’s escort squadron. Someone give me a status report on the Lex.’
‘Dead within minutes,’ Kejic called back. ‘They’re abandoning ship, marking twelve kills.’
Twelve. Lotara gave a small smile. A good showing from the fanatics.
‘Order them to rise to minimum safe distance,’ she said. ‘I don’t want them hitting earth while our forces are still fighting on the surface.’
Kejic relayed the order, but called back almost at once, ‘They’re going down, captain. Projected markers will have them strike the eastern ocean.’
Lotara swallowed, staring right at her vox-master. ‘How far from the coast?’
Kejic looked pained. ‘Seventeen kilometres. Twenty if we’re lucky.’
‘Everything depends on how they crash. It might be nothing, it might be everything.’
Lehralla’s corpse shuddered like a string puppet as the bridge gave its heaviest shake yet.
‘Captain!’
She turned to Feyd, overseeing the weapons teams and their army of consoles. ‘Officer Hallerthan?’
‘Three strike cruisers are running past the Lex.’
It had to happen. There was always going to be planetfall. Lotara knew that. And at least they’d stopped… who knew how many other ships?
She was still annoyed.
‘Warn the Legions,’ she said. They weren’t easy words to speak. Pulling teeth might’ have been less effort. ‘And start your intentions for phase two – I want your fighters shooting everything out of the sky. Drop pods, gunships – whatever they see, I want it dead. Any Mechanicum craft making it past the Lex?’
Tobin hissed a curse. ‘Aye, ma’am.’
‘Very well. Ensure the Legions are aware the enemy is landing Titans. Order the Trisagion to ensure no enemy vessels are allowed enough time for pinpoint orbital bombardment. And Kejic, make sure our warriors know to brace for the Lex going down offshore.’
As the vox-master relayed her warnings, Ivar Tobin looked at his captain across the central table.
‘What do you expect them to do, captain? We’ll be fortunate if they don’t all drown.’
‘A fact I’m well aware of, commander. Status on the ursus claws?’
Outside the ship, the impaled Ultramarines cruisers were dragged closer to the Conqueror’s eclipsing shadow. The much smaller cruisers rolled and strained against their chain leashes, engines firing into futility.
The Conqueror gave a judder as its lances streamed again, knifing through the captured cruisers, bisecting them first, then taking them to pieces with the second beam.
‘Retract the claws. Have the slave teams begin rearming lost spear chutes, on the miraculous chance we get to fire again.’
Kejic was about to confirm her order when Tobin interrupted.
‘The Armsman on an intercept run.’ He pointed at the rune on the display, looking for the closest weapons officer through the smoke. ‘Another battle-barge! Kill it before it comes abeam!’
Lotara knew, even as her first officer gave the order, that he was asking the impossible.
‘No time,’ she replied, feeling a surreal, sudden calm. She lifted the vox-thief built into her dark iron throne, sending her voice crackling all the way through the wounded ship. ‘All hands, stand by to repel boarders. Captain Delvarus, respond at once.’
Her heart kept pace with the passing seconds, as no answer came.
‘Delvarus,’ she said again. ‘Respond, damn you.’ If you made planetfall, I swear I will crash the Conqueror’s wreckage down onto your miserable…
‘This is Delvarus of the Triarii.’ The voice crackled back clear and strong, despite the interference with the shipwide vox. ‘I hear you, captain.’
The first drop pod hammered into the empty marketplace, scattering handcarts and wooden tables with the force of its arrival. Sealed doors unlocked with pressurised hisses, blasting open to unfold as ramps. The first Ultramarines to set foot on Nuceria poured forth, bolters raised, a sergeant leading the way with his gladius high. They moved in the perfection of well-trained unity, drilled to exact movements through thousands of hours’ training and hundreds of battl
es.
The World Eaters were waiting for them. Squads broke cover, sprinting from alleyways and nearby brick buildings, chainblades revving. Those not lost to the Nails at once had the presence of mind to note that these Ultramarines weren’t the pristine cobalt-blue warriors they’d faced on Armatura. The legionaries of the XIII wore cracked armour, still scarred and burnwashed from some horrendous battle weeks or months before.
Argel Tal saw it. Khârn did not. The World Eater broke cover with his men, laughing and howling, lifted by the adrenaline rush igniting his pleasure receptors.
Erebus, armoured for war and crouched in the alley with Argel Tal, offered his former protege a rueful smile.
‘You fear for him. I don’t judge you for that, Argel Tal. Your loyalty is a gift.’
Argel Tal hesitated, half-risen and ready to run. ‘What?’
Erebus rose as well, gesturing with his crozius. ‘I told you, did I not? Khârn dies on a world of grey skies, in the murky light of dawn. Where do we stand now?’
Argel Tal refused the temptation to look up. ‘Lies. Guesses.’
‘Prophecy,’ Erebus said softly. ‘He dies on this world, my son. He dies today, with a blade in his back.’
Argel Tal turned back to the fight, where Ultramarines drop pods were raining fiery steel from the sky, breeding groundquakes each time one hammered home. The daemon Raum stirred within his blood, awakening to the taste of anger.
Prey comes. Let us hunt and skin and kill and feed.
These are the survivors of Calth. The warriors Erebus failed to kill.
So let us finish the Deceiver’s failed work.
I have to save my brother.
The Slayer?
Khârn, yes.
Hunt and skin and kill and feed and save the Slayer. It is all the same game on this battlefield.
The beast was right. Argel Tal started running, his eyes on Khârn in the midst of the melee. With each step his wings stretched and grew, mangling free of the ceramite; horns rose from his helmet to form a crown of curling ivory; and his faceplate smoothed into the daemonic deathmask. Like something from the pagan nightmyths of the First Kingdoms, Argel Tal charged into battle to fight at his brother’s side.
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