[Battlefleet Gothic 02] - Shadow Point

by Gordon Rennie - (ebook by Undead)

  “Not bad,” judged Maxim grudgingly, careful not to give away too much of his interest in the offer. “Got any shells for it? They’re worth more if you have a full mag of shells.”

  “Funny you should mention that…” grinned the customer, reaching casually into his heavy, kevlar-quilted engineer’s jacket.

  As he did so, there was the beginnings of a minor commotion at the back of the queue. Kolba, distracted by the customer, missed it. Galba caught it, but a split-second too late. Maxim, who had survived dozens of ambushes in the tunnels and caverns of his brutal hiveworld home, and who had planned dozens more, saw it coming a split-second before it happened.

  He roared in anger, hurling the girl off his lap directly into the line of fire. Shots rang out, and a volley of bullets and las-blasts intended for him struck her instead, tearing her apart. The front-man still sat there, his numbed mind racing to catch up with what was happening. It was a race he would never win. He keeled over, dead before he hit the ground, as the engineer customer levelled the autopistol secreted inside his jacket and fired two closely grouped bursts of shots into his face and chest.

  Maxim was moving now, reaching for his own holstered weapons while keeping one eye on the progress of the mayhem around him. There was more gunfire from the back of the disintegrating queue, more quilt-jacketed engineers emerging out of hiding to join the fray.

  Sejarra’s crew, Maxim knew. Looks like the sneaky little runt was trying to expand his business ventures beyond the limits of the enginarium sections, using the cover of the imminent battle as an opportunity to make his move.

  He saw Kolba spin and fall, shots punching into the carapace-armoured vest he wore on such occasions. He saw Galba shout in fury and return fire on his twin/cousin/lover/ganger-brother’s attackers, stray shots from his stuttering autopistol slamming into the bodies of the panicked customers.

  Maxim saw one of the shots lift off the top of the skull of a junior tech-priest, and uttered a typically harsh Stranivar curse to himself. The tech-priest was a valued and regular customer, and a useful source of all kinds of valuable little tech-devices which he used to pay for his secret obscura habit. That was one source of supply which would be closed to Maxim now.

  The fall-guy for the ambush was coming at him now, kicking aside the body of the front-man and charging straight at Maxim, keeping up a continuous stream of fire with his autopistol. Maxim rolled, reaching out for and missing the holster belt hanging nearby, as autopistol shells chewed apart the crates around him.

  Instead, his scrabbling fingers found the hilt of his chainsword. He drew the weapon in one smooth motion, searching for and activating the power switch. The weapon roared into hungry life. The assassin was almost on top of him now, and Maxim felt an autopistol shot take away some of the meat from the top of his left shoulder. From the ground, Maxim swung the chainsword in a low horizontal arc.

  A second later, the assassin fell to the ground, landing beside him, the stupefied expression on his face showing that he was still trying to wonder what had happened to his legs from the knees down. Maxim didn’t give him a chance to work out the answer, and shot him in the forehead with his autopistol.

  He stood up, emptying the remainder of the clip into the chest and stomach of the next stupid bastard to fancy their chances against Maxim Borusa, then did a quick head-count as he discarded the spent weapon and successfully retrieved his bolt pistol.

  Bodies littered the floor, most of them customers caught in the crossfire. Maxim recognised the forms of three of his own men amongst them, and, even as he watched, he saw that useless Balaamite yokel Gorgakor hit the far wall of the chamber, his body dancing idiotically under the impact of the bullets pummelling into it. No big loss to his organisation, Maxim judged. The lazy agri-worlder had been a dead weight for a while, and there would be any number of potential replacements for him coming aboard the next time the re-supply shuttles arrived with their press-ganged cargo at their next port of call. Still, his death meant one gun less against Sejarra’s crew, so Maxim figured that he needed to do something to even up the odds.

  He tracked targets, his aim hesitating as the running forms of non-combatants passed through his field of fire. Not that he cared much about causing a few friendly fire casualties amongst non-combatants, but it was bad business to gun down your customers without good cause. Finally, his aim settled on a clear target. A group of Sejarra’s gunmen, clustered together and metres from the nearest cover.

  Amateurs, he thought. They wouldn’t have lasted five minutes on Stranivar, never mind the hiveworld’s notorious Lubiyanka prison moon. Really, he was doing the Emperor a favour, he told himself as he pulled the triggers on his bolt pistols. Halfwit fools like them didn’t deserve a place in His Divine Majesty’s glorious Imperial Navy.

  The gunmen blew apart in a scattering of shattered limbs and viscera under the impact of the bolter shells. Maxim checked his remaining shell-count and scanned for further targets.

  Kolba was back on his feet now, blood flowing through at least one of the bullet holes punched through his chest-plate as he scattered shotcannon rounds into the ranks of Sejarra’s men, showing far less discretion in his choice of targets than Maxim had. Galba was with him, partially supporting him as his twin/cousin/lover/ganger-brother’s legs threatened to give out from under him, and their combined fire was enough to drive the enginarium gangers back into cover.

  Maxim was moving forward now, firing his twin bolt pistols, keeping up a steady litany of shots, adding his firepower to that of Kolba and Galba, boxing in their targets with streams of fire from two simultaneous directions at once, keeping them confused and off-balance. Maxim grinned. Sejarra’s crew had lost the initiative now. With every moment that passed, he could feel the direction of the battle swinging in his favour.

  A shape rose up from behind an equipment stack. Maxim swivelled towards it, raising one bolt pistol in readiness, but before he could fire, the figure tumbled to the ground, a knife hilt buried in its throat. Maxim looked round, and saw a man—no, more of a boy, really, barely old enough to know the feel of a shaving blade on his face—crouching nearby. Maxim nodded his unspoken thanks at the lad—a powder-monkey from one of the starboard-side gun bays, he hazily recalled, who liked his kalma cut with a little cloudy obscura resin—and made a mental note of the boy’s quickness and ability for future consideration. Maxim had no doubt that he would have dealt with the threat in time, if the boy’s knife hadn’t got there first, but that kind of resourcefulness and skill with a knife could surely be put to use somewhere within his little business operation.

  Besides, he thought, stepping over the dying, groaning body of another of his men, there seemed to be a few unexpected openings in the organisation at the moment.

  Sejarra’s boys had had enough. The gunfight should have been over by now, and the lookout pickets Maxim had posted to guard the approaches to the gallery would be pulling back now, threatening to cut off their escape, while others would be summoning reinforcements from nearby.

  They tried to make a break for it, the less experienced of them going first. The first three were cut down in the crossfire from Kolba, Galba and the others, unintentionally creating a distraction which allowed the rest of them to run for the exit passage. Maxim had been waiting for them. Two went down hard, bolter shells exploding into their retreating backs.

  Maxim smiled as he drew a bead on the next one, a short figure with a familiar limp. He fired, his pistol clicking on empty. He brought his other pistol up to bear, but it was too late, and his target had already disappeared round the corner. Maxim wasn’t stupid enough to follow, not when the chances were that Sejarra would have left a man there waiting to plug a few rounds into the first warm body to come round that corner. That would be what Maxim would have done under the same circumstances, and he rarely made a mistake of crediting an enemy as having any less intelligence than himself.

  So that was twice he’d had Sejarra in his sights, and the little r
unt was still alive. Maxim swore. His enemy wouldn’t get that lucky a third time, that much he was sure of.

  From the passageway beyond came the sound of the vox-callers.

  Two chimes. All crew to battle stations. Galba shot a nervous glance at his gang leader.

  “Battle time, boss. What we going to do about all this?” he asked, gesturing at the carnage around them.

  “Relax, if I know old Semper, then he’ll be taking the Mach right into the thick of things.” He grinned. “So, if we’re all still alive at the end of this, no one’s gonna notice a dozen or so extra bodies in amongst all the others the clean-up crews sling through the airlocks.”

  He did a quick headcount, coming up with himself, Galba, Kolba and four others, plus the knife kid, who still hadn’t run off along with the other non-combatants. “Okay, round up about ten others. I want Horke and Vannan especially, if you can find them. Any officers try to give you a hard time, tell “em they’re seconded to inspection tour duties with Chief Petty Officer Borusa, by order of Lieutenant Ulanti. That’ll shut “em up quick. And tell everyone to bring weapons.”

  “Inspection tour?” There was confused doubt in Galba’s voice.

  “As chief petty officer, I’ve got rights of access to just about every area of the ship. I take my responsibilities seriously, Rating Second Class Galba. I need to know that everyone’s carrying out their Emperor-ordained duties faithfully and efficiently, especially when we’re in battle.”

  Galba smiled. So did Kolba, despite the pain of his wound. Their smiles were like the hungry snarls of a predator. Eager understanding shone in their eyes. “Rights of access, boss… you mean like the enginarium?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” grinned Maxim. “So come on, let’s go find our old pal Sejarra and spring a little surprise inspection duty on him.”

  They moved out, leaving their dead behind him, Kolba first making sure that the scattered merchandise was safely gathered up and returned to a secure hiding place. Maxim turned round just before they left the gallery, seeing the knife kid still standing there, looking expectantly at him. Maxim hesitated a moment, and then nodded. The kid happily ran to join them, scooping a gun out of the hand of a dead man.

  They moved swiftly and purposefully along the gangway beyond, as the ship trembled under the impact of the first incoming enemy fire glancing off its void shields. Seconds later, the final warning chime sounded over the vox-callers.

  One chime. Battle commencing.

  Maxim grinned again. He loved a good battle. So useful for covering up so many different things, with no one the wiser afterwards about what you’d really been up to.

  SIX

  “Full ahead, battle speed. Helm—engage port-side manoeuvring thrusters and bring us around one point to starboard, on my mark. Maintain formation position and keep us within three unit distances of our wing vessels. Stand by, all stations. Mister Nyder, be ready to fire torpedoes at my command.”

  Leoten Semper stood in his customary position on the bridge, mindful of the newly-gleaming commodore rank bars on the epaulettes of his tunic; mindful too that, in the unspoken opinion of some under his command, including, most probably, some here on his own command deck, he had yet to prove his right to wear the new rank insignia. His promotion to the brevet rank of commodore-captain had been a battlefield necessity, made during the third Battle of the Moons of Pergamum several weeks earlier, when a lucky lance strike had struck the bridge of the battlecruiser Lord Huascar, killing its captain. Commodore Haruna had been the commander of the battle-squadron, and Semper, named in the mortally-injured man’s dying words, had assumed command of the Imperial forces and driven the opportunistic Chaos raid back out towards the system’s outer fringes. Battlefleet Command had allowed the temporary promotion to stand, but Semper was all too aware that his sudden elevation had been at the expense of several other ship’s captains within the battle-squadron, all of whom had greater seniority than him in terms of years of service.

  If any of this troubled him, he never allowed it to show externally. He stood there, the calm and steady centre of the vortex of activity which filled the command deck of His Divine Majesty’s Ship, the Lord Solar Macharius. Brightly-robed tech-priests communed together, whispering secret Machine God words to the machine-mind spirit within the ship’s mighty logic engines, assuring it of its survival in the battle just about to begin. Choirs of servitors droned in chaotic unison, relaying the streams of information flooding in from all sections of the ship, and from the other vessels in the battle group. Gunnery officers bustled amongst themselves, checking and rechecking likely target patterns and firing solutions. Ensigns and junior officers received reports from duty stations on every deck of the ship, and relayed them to senior officers who, in turn, reported in to Lieutenant Hito Ulanti.

  The ship’s second-in-command digested the information and communicated its summary to his captain with a single nod, and a few brief words.

  “All stations standing by and ready to commence battle.”

  Semper nodded in acknowledgement, and looked out through the command deck’s front viewing bay. Through the metre-thick armoured glasteel, and still thousands of kilometres distant, but magnified by the viewing bay’s inbuilt augur systems, he saw the wide scattering of targets ahead.

  At a casual glance, it looked like a field of large asteroids, but a closer inspection of the magnified augur screen images and the telemetry data being gathered by the ship’s surveyor showed that several of the asteroids were firing huge and crude thruster rockets in an attempt to manoeuvre into position, while the upwards-fluctuating energy signals surrounding many others showed them preparing to do likewise.

  Ork roks. Asteroids taken over and colonised by the green-skin creatures and turned into crude but highly effective mobile fortresses. Twenty-eight of them counted so far in this cluster, with Emperor knows how many others scattered throughout this, the Mather system, creating a deadly obstacle to any Imperial convoys attempting to traverse this area of space. Two years ago, the last time a small Imperial force had been despatched to Mather to scour the system of any greenskin presence, just four of the asteroid fortresses had been detected and destroyed. Now, as was so typical of the creatures, they had seemingly emerged from nowhere to multiply and fester in even greater numbers than before.

  “Weeds,” he murmured to himself, not realising at first that he was speaking aloud.

  Ulanti, standing nearby, caught the word but not its meaning. “Captain?”

  “Weeds,” Semper repeated, gesturing at the constellation of asteroid-vessels before them. “My grandfather was an admiral in Battlefleet Tamahl, and I remember a childhood visit to his estate on Cypra Mundi after he had been granted permission to retire. If the crew think this particular Captain Semper is a stern taskmaster, Mister Ulanti, then he didn’t know my grandfather. He was a holy terror amongst both the Emperor’s enemies and his own men, and my cousins and I were terrified of the old devil.” A hint of a smile crossed Semper’s face as his mind recalled the events of the past. “I remember one time, though, when he seemed almost human to me. He took me out to the fields of his estate—after a lifetime of warfare amongst the stars, he relished the quiet tranquillity of the countryside—to help him supervise the planting of next season’s crops.”

  Ulanti feigned polite interest, wondering where all this was going, especially with battle imminent. Also, as a hive-worlder, even a highborn aristocratic one, he had lived most of his life in a world where the open elements promised nothing but danger and toxic death, and so Semper’s talk of idyllic pastoral scenes meant almost nothing to him.

  Semper sensed his second-in-command’s slightly baffled impatience, and allowed himself another brief smile. “That season, my grandfather had been having some trouble with weeds amongst his beloved rakki-fruit crops. They’d had to replant the crop three times already, and I can remember seeing him getting down on his hands and knees amongst the servitor-workers and pulling the
weeds out of the earth with his own hands. ‘Damned greenskins!’ he called them, hurling them away as far as he could. ‘Always watch out for them, Leoten’, he told me. “Just when you think you’ve dug them all up, there’s always more of them popping up as soon as your back’s turned’.”

  Semper glanced at Ulanti, still seeing puzzlement in the younger man’s face. “My grandfather knew all about orks, Hito. He won his admiral’s spurs against the greenskins during the Caudium Campaign, and he took part in the scouring of the Achilla Reaches. I didn’t know what he meant then, but I’ve fought those savages since, and now I know exactly what he was talking about all those years ago.”

  He pointed at the asteroid cluster dead ahead of them, the details and numbers of the ork rok-fortresses there becoming more apparent the closer they drew to them. “Weeds, Mister Ulanti. No sooner do we wipe them out, than they grow back again.”

  Flashes of light from the pattern of roks signalled the commencement of hostilities. Ork munitions—massive, unwieldy and potentially devastating—flew through the void to detonate harmlessly in space well ahead of the advancing Imperial battle-line.

  “Typical greenskins, no real command ability to speak of,” grunted Werner Maeler, the Macharius’s efficient Gunnery Master. “We’re well out of range, and they still can’t wait to open fire. Still, at least the energy release from their weapons fire gives our gunnery surveyors an easier target to lock onto.”

  Semper signalled to a communications officer. A comm-net channel opened up, linking him to the bridge of every other ship in the Imperial Navy formation.

  “Semper to battle-group. To arms, gentlemen. Let us tend to the Emperor’s garden,” he ordered, knowing that he was about to prove once and for all his right to wear those new rank epaulettes on his shoulders.