“I wonder, Mister Nyder, would it be a court martial offence to aim our torpedoes at the face of the good lord admiral?” asked Semper, with a half-smile.
Nyder returned the joke. “If I recall correctly, sir, from what I can remember of the history classes at the academies on Cypra Mundi, the lord admiral was supposed to be a fearsome old ork-hater. I think he’d probably thank us for taking his face off the side of that thing.”
“I concur,” smiled Semper. “Fire when ready, Mister Nyder. We’ll dedicate this kill to the lord admiral’s memory.”
Flame wreathed the prows of the Imperial ships once more as they launched another torpedo wave at the target roks. They were close now, close enough to be within range of the ork batteries, and energy bursts erupted around the Macharius and its sister ships as the first ork fire impacted against their void shields. The ork fire was still sporadic and uncoordinated, but would soon grow in strength.
The Imperial strategy had been to hit the orks hard and fast, stunning them into a state of helpless panic with a sudden and ferocious assault. The swift destruction of the two large rok-fortresses and the chaos and confusion it had caused amongst the greenskin line had done much to achieve this end, but now the human battle force had to ensure that they maintained the pressure of the attack and that the initiative remained on their side of the engagement.
The second and final wave of rock-busters struck home. Two more roks, considerably smaller than the first two targets, explosively fragmented apart. A third remained mostly intact, but the weapons fire from its batteries slowed to an ineffectual trickle, and it began to drift out of position, its engines and steering systems apparently knocked out of action. Minutes later, its erratic and rudderless course would bring it blundering helplessly into the field of fire of several other roks. A combined salvo of mass-reactive howitzer fire—each shell the size of a Fury interceptor fighter—and traktor beam-launched plasma meteors smashed apart the crippled rok, finishing the task begun by the Imperium torpedoes.
Three more down, twenty-three more to go.
Semper felt a strong impact shudder run through his ship as enemy fire landed its first direct hit on the Macharius, stripping the cruiser of one of its void shields. The deck beneath his feet lurched under the shock, and he fought the urge to lean onto his lectern for support, knowing that many eyes would be casting nervous glances at him right now. In many ways, he was a captain of the old school, and firmly believed the old naval collegium maxim: a vessel’s strength lies not in its armour or its weapons, but in its captain, and the will of its captain must be stronger than the densest adamantium armour.
“A minor hit on our forward starboard side,” reported Ulanti, consulting the information scrolling across his screen. “Void shield generators are fully operational, and shield integrity is already regenerating itself.”
“I hope the greenskins can do better than that,” noted Semper. “We came a long way for this fight, so they’d better not let us down now.”
There was the expected ripple of polite laughter from his officers, but Semper felt the atmosphere on the bridge around him relax a little, his crew reassured by their captain’s modest attempt at humour. He looked out at the scene ahead of them, as the cluster of roks loomed ever closer, the tactician in him noting their clumsy attempts at formation change and the likely weaknesses in their incoming gunnery fire patterns, while the warrior in him secretly exulted at the thought of the battle to come.
Their battle plan had worked so far, he reminded himself, and the orks had obligingly taken the bait offered to them earlier on. Would they now fall for the same trick again? The bait was here right in front of them, the Macharius and its sister cruisers, so would it be enough to draw out the true prize the Imperial battle-force had come here to engage and destroy?
SEVEN
Like the orks themselves, the battle which followed was savage and relentless, chaotic and unpredictable.
Two more roks, smaller than any of the previous targets, fell victim to massed salvoes of torpedoes. After that, the Imperium vessels were in amongst the enemy, able to bring their side-mounted weapons batteries to bear and using torpedoes for target of opportunity fire on any ork rok foolish enough to drift across their bows.
The orks, in their own way, fought back furiously and without respite.
An ork torpedo struck the Mannan midship. The light cruiser staggered under the impact, but limped on, trailing debris and burning gases in its wake, making it that much easier a target for the ork gunners.
The Macharius took a heavy cannon battery hit in its thickly-armoured prow, temporarily knocking out two of its torpedo tubes. The impact of the hit set off alarm klaxons throughout the ship. On the command deck, tech-priests redoubled their prayers in praise and reassurance of the ship’s troubled machine-mind spirit.
Launching from multiple roks, the orks finally managed to form something resembling an organised attack craft wave. The huge, sprawling wave of ork fighter-bombers targeted the Macharius and were immediately intercepted by the carrier cruiser’s own protective fighter screen. Too late, Semper remembered that orks, for all their mindless barbarity, were not without intelligence, and were easily capable of a surprising level of natural cunning. The attempted attack on the Macharius had been a feint, albeit a highly costly one from the orks’ point of view, drawing off the greater part of the Imperial formation’s fighter cover and leaving unprotected the two escort carriers at the formation’s centre.
A large splinter group of the main ork attack wave peeled away from the main dogfight and fell upon these two targets with gleeful abandon. Swarms of the small but heavily-armed ork fighter-bomber craft made daredevil attack runs on the two carrier vessels, neither of which had any of the armour, shield protection or anti-ordnance defences of a larger and true carrier vessel like the Macharius. In minutes, the Memory of Briniga was crippled and aflame, while the Vengeance of Belatis was desperately launching what was left of its own attack craft squadrons in a race against its own likely and imminent destruction.
Amongst the Imperial cruisers, the Graf Orlok was drawn into an unequal duel against the combined batteries of three different roks. Its captain, the notorious Titus von Blucher, owed his position mostly to a shared distant kinship with Lord Admiral Ravensburg, but Semper was surprised and pleased to note that von Blucher seemed to have developed something actually resembling a backbone over the last few years. The Graf Orlok mounted an effective fighting retreat, its own batteries of laser cannons and fusion beamers silencing the guns of one of its enemies. Still, the Lunar-class cruiser was in mounting trouble, its void shields stripped away and the explosive bloom of successful enemy hits erupting along the length of its hull.
Vanguard squadron came to its rescue, the group of three Cobra destroyers mounting a fast attack torpedo run on one of the roks. The rok shook under the impact of two successful torpedo detonations, but was able to attack in return. A powerful tractor beam was brought into use as a huge and primitive catapult weapon, seizing and ripping away parts of the role’s own asteroid body and hurling them into space at the Imperium ships. The weapon was typically orkish, barbaric and makeshift, and typically highly effective. One of the Cobras, turning too late out of its torpedo run, was smashed in half by the impact of an asteroid missile fully two hundred metres across. Graf Orlok and the remaining two surviving Cobras beat a hasty retreat, rejoining the comparative safety of the main Imperial line of battle.
The Imperium line wavered but did not break under the mounting toll of damage. Its vessels kept up their own withering rain of fire upon the enemy roks, and slowly, the pattern of the battle began to show in their favour.
Squadrons of Marauder bombers targeted one of the roks, seeking vengeance for the damage done to their escort carrier motherships. The Marauders—smaller, less well-armed and less well-suited for deep space combat—still excelled under the conditions of this battle, their atmosphere-capable configuration allowing them to manoeu
vre at ease amongst the asteroid field, skimming and gliding across the surface of the roks. They laid waste to one of the roks, making low-level bombing runs across its cratered skin, targeting and expertly picking off gun emplacements, torpedo silos, shield generators and engine thrusters with crippling precision strikes from their plasma bomb and armour-piercing missile pay-loads, and leaving the rok drifting helpless and defenceless, ready for the heavy batteries of an Imperial cruiser to later deliver the final coup de grace.
From its position in amongst the main cruiser formation, the Fearsome fulfilled its supporting role to devastating effect. Its massive, jutting, prow-mounted nova cannon wreaked havoc amongst the ork roks, firing explosive projectiles into their midst at near light speed. The Fearsome’s captain and gunnery officers were veterans in the effective use of the powerful but unpredictable weapon. The slow-moving and clumsy roks made for easy targets, and Fury fighters adapted to specialist reconnaissance duties were in close amongst the enemy target cluster, feeding back accurate and instantaneous telemetry data to the Fearsome’s gunners. So far, four shots had reduced two roks to just so much drifting and shattered asteroid debris, the last shot striking its target dead-centre and breaking it apart like a giant sledgehammer blow.
The orks retaliated, mounting another feint attack on the Macharius, one part of the assault wave splitting off towards its real intended target of the Fearsome. As they had already illustrated earlier in the battle, the orks were neither wholly without intelligence or a certain cunning, but ultimately their mindless animal nature triumphed in their assumption that the same trick would work twice in the same battle against the same opponent. Easily able to anticipate the repeat tactic, several squadrons of Furies and Thunderbolts intercepted the attack aimed at the Fearsome, and the ork attack wing was annihilated en masse.
A multitude of attack craft dogfights erupted around the Macharius as what was left of the desperate forces in the feint assault pressed forward their attack on the carrier for real this time. The cruiser was surrounded by a halo of tiny, flickering lights, the flashes of fighter-mounted laser cannons and the detonations of exploded fighter craft, as the attack craft battle raged around it. A determined thrust by the orks opened up a breach in the fighter screen, two Furies from Hornet squadron falling victim to a combined hail of ork rockets and cannon fire. From his commanding position on the bridge of the Macharius, Semper had a clear view of the incident as a flight of four ork fighter-bombers broke through and sped directly towards him, blazing a trail right up the dorsal spine of the ship’s main hull and bearing down fast on the ship’s command tower. The ork craft were ugly, threatening-looking things, garishly coloured and decorated with outlandish and primitive ork rune-markings, bristling with combined fighter and bomber armaments and powered by crude and outrageously large chemical-reaction engines mounted on their wings and tail.
One of them was clipped by a strafing line of las-fire from a pursuing Fury, and was instantly transformed into an exploding fireball. The other three opened up with their afterburners, and threw off their pursuer, flying with almost suicidal recklessness amongst the thrusting peaks and spires of the ship’s upper superstructure.
Semper studied their progress with detached calm, despite the fact that the command deck where he was now standing was almost certainly their intended target. Crude but no doubt all too effective bomb-missiles hung beneath their wings, their warhead nose-cones painted with savage and grinning orkoid faces. Anti-ordnance fire reached up from the defence turrets studded along the Macharius’s dorsal spine, but the angle of fire was poor, and the ork craft hugged the sheltering cover of the superstructure.
They were in the last stages of their attack run now, forced to finally leave the cover of the hull and arc upwards towards the command tower. Their trajectory brought them within reach of the anti-ordnance defences mounted on the command tower, and up into the arc of fire of the hull defences. They were suitably punished for their reckless final manoeuvre. Lascannon fire and exploding flechette-missile detonations hammered into them from two different directions. The starboard side attacker blew apart, followed seconds later by his portside wingman. The centre fighter, one engine ablaze and one shredded wing trailing fire, continued on towards it target.
Semper stared down the attacker, locking eyes with the grinning, bestial image painted across the fighter’s blunted nose: the face, no doubt, of some typically savage and unknowable ork war god. The ork fighter was two hundred metres away, a second later and it was one hundred and fifty metres away. The time to lower the thickly-armoured blast shields over the command deck’s vulnerable viewing bay windows was minutes gone.
The fighter opened fire, heavy cannon shells striking the reinforced glasteel of the window and forming cracks in it centimetres deep. Semper wondered why the pilot had not yet launched his primary missile armaments, and could only guess that the damage his craft had sustained had somehow disabled his payload launch mechanisms.
A suicide run then, he thought, wondering if a bomb-laden ork attack craft crashing through the viewing bay and exploding into the interior of his command deck would indeed be enough to cripple his entire ship.
Less than a hundred metres now. Semper could see the pilot inside the cockpit. The atmosphere inside it was on fire, the ork pilot wreathed in flame. He was shouting, his tusk-filled mouth forming sounds which Semper could only guess at. Some bestial ork battle-chant or prayer-words of dedication to yet another ork war god. The expression on his face matched the one of savage, animal joy painted on the nose of his craft.
Fifty metres. Semper resisted the urge to turn or look away. His grandfather may have survived to earn a peaceful and easy death on the family estates, but Semper’s father and two of his uncles had all died in the Emperor’s service, on the command deck of an Imperial warship. Semper had always imagined that their fate would one day be his too, and he was determined to meet that fate with the same stoicism which they too had faced it.
Thirty metres. A final, desperate burst of fire from one of the command tower’s defence turrets blew away the tail of the fighter. The ork craft corkscrewed down out of sight, crashing seconds later several decks down into the armoured front of the tower. Semper felt the impact of the crash as a tremor through the deck beneath his feet.
He turned, catching the look of mutual relief on the face of Ulanti, not realising until this moment that his second-in-command had been standing by him the entire time, facing the prospect of instant obliteration with the same stoic resoluteness.
“Make a note, Mister Ulanti,” remarked Semper, with as much arch reserve as he could still muster. “Extra target drill needed for the defence turret gunnery crews. And find out who the crew were on that last burst of fire, and send them a case of the finest and strongest grog we have in the ship’s stores, with the captain’s compliments.”
Elsewhere, the battle continued to rage. The Drachenfels’s lance batteries gored into the sides of another rok, blasting away or vaporising hundreds of tonnes of soft, porous rock. The asteroid material of the rok’s body was streaked through with deposits of a glittering metallic ore substance. Whatever the substance was, it was apparently highly fissionable. It ignited instantly when the star-hot power of the lance beams touched it, setting off an instantaneous chain reaction through the interior of the rock. The entire rok disappeared in a nuclear flash, lighting up the void like a second, short-lived miniature sun.
The sudden and massive energy burst overwhelmed the Drachenfels’s shields and temporarily blinded its scanner systems. Amongst the surrounding roks, the effects were much worse. One of them, the closest, was reduced to a burnt-out cinder by the flash, while two others were caught on the periphery of the blast and took varying degrees of damage. Two suffered more damage still, accidentally colliding into each other as their crews, panicked by the evidence of what they assumed to be some new and super-powerful human weapon, fired up crude and unpredictable emergency manoeuvring rockets.
In his armoured strategium shell deep with his ship, Erwin Ramas, captain of the Drachenfels and a Battlefleet Gothic legend in his own right, allowed a rasping chuckle to escape from his lipless mouth.
Who else, he laughed to himself, but the greenskins would build a fortress base upon an asteroid streaked through with deposits of enriched plutonium?
Reth Zane registered the nuclear detonation as a flash of buzzing interference cutting through the flow of information being fed into him through the mind-impulse link with his Fury’s onboard systems. The servitor navigator seated in the rear cockpit space behind him emitted a brief question in the form of a transmitted query-equation. Zane ignored the query, and the event which had prompted it. Whatever that distant explosion had been, it had no bearing on his divine work.
They were in amongst the main cluster of roks now, weaving in and out of the asteroids; a vast and chaotic dogfight melee, with Imperium Furies and Thunderbolts and a bewildering array of ork fighter-bombers finding and then losing each other amongst the deadly maze of drifting space debris.
He was flying lone wolf, without any supporting wing-men, without even a living human navigator, and that suited his purposes perfectly. Back aboard the ship, his fellow pilots shunned his company, and that suited his purposes too. He held no malice nor ill-will towards them. They were, as far as he could tell, good and conscientious servants of the Emperor, but they did not understand his divine purpose.
He was an Avenging Fury. He killed the Emperor’s enemies, and he did so under the Emperor’s direct guidance and protection.
He had been busy with his divinely-ordained business this day. Six more kills, six more enemies of the Emperor destroyed, six more blessings to be added to the holy shrine he maintained in his personal quarters.
[Battlefleet Gothic 02] - Shadow Point Page 9