His comrades feared him, he knew, and mocked him. “Zealot Zane” they used to call him behind his back. “Machine Zane” they more often called him now. More servitor than man, they whispered snidely amongst themselves. Zane forgave them. They did not understand the transformation which had happened to him in the events during the evacuation of Belatis. He had faced and vanquished an enemy of the Emperor, a daemon of the warp, no less. Protected by the holy aura of the Golden Throne he had survived the encounter, even if much of his body had been destroyed. The recovery had been long and painful, the mastering of a new body which was more machine than flesh even more so, but, throughout it all, Zane knew he would prevail. After all, the Emperor himself was with him.
His comrades saw the injuries he had suffered as a disability, a source of pity and secret horror. To Zane, though, they were a liberation. Only the flesh, the most superficial element of his humanity, had been burnt away in the all-cleansing fire. The most important part, his Emperor-given soul, remained, and his new machine-body freed him from the weaknesses of the flesh, allowing him to better carry out his holy work.
He brought the nose of his Fury up, sensing rather than seeing yet another new kill opportunity. Machine eyes allowed him to see and feel all his fighter craft saw. The distant shapes of two ork craft drifted into view. The ork fighters were difficult for his wing-mounted missile weaponry to lock onto, he knew. The orks’ primitive power systems and crude fossil fuel engines threw out unpredictable energy signals, confounding the Imperium’s more sophisticated scanning devices.
His machine-augmented brain judged the distance from him to the targets. Machine hands powered up his engines’ thruster power, pushing him forward towards the targets at an accelerated speed but which would not yet alert the targets to his presence. Machine patience, freed from the emotions of flesh, calmly counted out the seconds until the moment of interception.
A human soul, free and untainted, exalted in the expectation of the imminent deaths of the Emperor’s enemies.
The first target drifted into his cockpit screen’s targeting display. Flesh was weak. Flesh would have fired already. Machine patience still held sway, counselling caution, knowing that the target lock-on was never certain in the first few crucial moments.
Machine-mind gave the command. Machine hands moved calmly across the firing controls. The quad-cannons mounted in his Fury’s nose fired as one, spitting out a stream of laser energy. The brief storm of las-bolts found and pursued its quarry. The target broke apart in a sudden, fiery burst.
Machine mind calmly replayed the incident, satisfied at its choice of the correct course of action. Human soul offered up a silent prayer of rejoice.
The last remaining target peeled away, hitting its afterburners and tracing a long burning arc across the starfield. Machine mind and machine hands matched the target’s movements. Machine eyes kept the target fixed in sight, working with machine mind to calculate angles of fire and likely speeds and trajectories.
The target looped round and reversed its course, coming straight at them. The servitor navigator clicked and whirred in faint alarm. Machine mind did not panic. Machine hands did not waver. Human mind recognised the signs of an experienced and skilled enemy pilot. Human soul thrilled at the prospect of the death of such an enemy.
Human mind took over, doing what no mere machine could not. Flying straight towards the oncoming target. Skilfully jinking the fighter craft through the hail of autocannon fire now filling the void around it. A stray shell careered off the hull just in front of the cockpit. A stream of shells shredded part of his tailfin. Another stray blast blew away the cowling on his starboard engine.
Warning runes flashed across instrumentation panels. Machine mind made urgent calculations and counselled withdrawal. Machine hands longed to seize the control stick and steer them out of the path of imminent destruction.
Human soul ignored them. Human soul, and human mind bided their time, Human soul and mind had been here many times before in previous battles.
The Fury jinked aside at the last moment, unleashing two wing missiles at the target. The ork craft disappeared in an explosive rush. Zane’s Fury flew through the midst of the still-expanding debris cloud. Pieces of wreckage smashed off its armoured hull, adding to the chorus of warning runes going off within the cockpit.
Zane ignored them all. Machine was strong and efficient, but human was always better. Human was that part of us which belonged to the Holy Emperor, and so was in itself partly divine.
He brought the fighter up tight and fast, skimming low-level across the rocky canyons and plains of a nearby rok. His eyes and the Fury’s augur senses scanned the rok’s surface, seeking suitable targets. Machine eyes saw the tell-tale heat trails from exhaust vents hidden amongst a cluster of needle-like stalactite rock formations. An extremely tempting and vulnerable target for a bomber run, but not with any of the lesser ordnance his fighter was carrying.
Light flashed out at him from the rim of a crater half a kilometre over. Zane directed his attention in that direction, and saw a cavern mouth set into the wall of the crater, protected by at least two small defence turrets, turrets which were now firing at him. Without the lines of tracer fire coming from them, he might not have noticed the hidden crater at all.
He gave praise to the Emperor for the stupidity and over-eagerness of some anonymous ork gunner as he hit his forward braking jets and guided the fighter down into the crater for a closer look at the potential target within it.
Defence turret fire zigzagged past him, ploughing the surface of the crater and throwing up chunks of rocky debris. He saw light flooding out from the cave mouth, and, within the light, the shapes of ork fighter-bombers sitting there in the wide cavern beyond. Squat, orkoid figures in some form of crude, gas-belching, armoured vacuum suits moved amongst them, and Zane saw fuel cables and power couplings snaking amongst the parked craft, and stocks of munitions piled up nearby. No matter how disorganised and ramshackle the scene, Zane still recognised an attack craft launch deck when he saw one.
One of the orks saw him, and, aggressively if futilely, raised a handgun to fire several shots at his cruising Fury. Zane hits the lift thrusters and pulled up, intending to turn round again and make a proper attack run on the launch bay cavern. A few missiles into the munitions stacks and fuel dumps at the back of the cave would quickly wipe the place clean of all trace of greenskin life.
Tracer fire from the defence turrets chased after him. He easily outran it, arcing up out of the crater. The view through his cockpit window rolled and yawed. Cratered and pitted rock fell away, to be replaced by a glittering starfield. He pulled on the altitude controls, rolling the fighter over as he prepared to dive back down on the target.
A shadow, huge and dark, fell over his fighter, blotting out the starfield above.
The servitor navigator gave an electronic squawk of alarm. Zane looked up, seeing the huge, gaping, brightly painted jaws of a giant creature looming above him in space. Metallic, jagged teeth gaped open, revealing a battery of rudimentary, ugly and deadly weapon barrels clustering within its mouth. A giant red eye, painted onto the side of a hull crudely patchworked together from great, thick slabs of ill-matched metals, glared balefully down at him.
The gargantuan ork cruiser rumbled past overhead, hiding within the cluttered surveyor shadow of the surrounding asteroids. Another ork cruiser vessel, different in outline and configuration, but identical in the same deadly, lumbering purpose followed along behind it, accompanied by a school of smaller and eager-looking escort craft.
Human mind and soul faltered, temporarily overwhelmed by the sheer savage scale and ferocity of the ork vessels. Machine mind took over. Machine hands opened up a comm-channel. Other than the whisper of prayer-words to himself, it had been several days since Zane had spoken aloud, and the sound of his own voice, harsh and machine-formed, almost came as a shock to him.
“Storm Four to Macharius. Have sighted two ork cruiser vessels and
escorts. They’re powering up engines and heading towards you. Be warned, Macharius: the bait has definitely been taken, and the prey is coming out into the open.”
EIGHT
“We’re sure that it’s really them?”
Semper stared at the hazy augur screen images being transmitted back by their forward reconnaissance scout craft. The squadron of ork vessels was just beginning to clear the final fringes of the asteroid field. The smashed and gutted remains of several roks drifted nearby, dead and derelict. The ork vessels moved past them, unheeding and uncaring. They had changed course since their first sighting, taking a vector which would take them away from the Imperial force and out towards the warp jump point on the system’s distant outer edge. The consensus amongst the captains of the Imperial battle-force was that the ork commander was cutting and running, abandoning the roks and their crews to their fate at the hands of the Imperial warships’ gun batteries.
“As much as we can be,” answered Ulanti, in response to his captain’s question. “The energy signals from ork vessels are notoriously unpredictable, and the greenskins have an irritating habit of tearing down and altering their ships’ superstructure at any apparent random whim. Still, as far as we can tell, based on the information from survivors of the ork pirate raids in this sub-sector, those floating junk-piles we’re looking at now are indeed the Wolverine and the Sabretooth.”
Semper looked again at the ship images, seeing the clear evidence of the trademark primitive and brutish ork manufacturing process, seeing the rough patchwork of their thickly armoured skins, seeing the gun batteries bristling across their surfaces, seeing the outlandish greenskin markings and glyphs burned or cut hundreds of metres high into the vessels’ flanks.
He had no idea what those markings might mean. Perhaps such primitive pagan symbols actually spelled out the vessels’ true names, he supposed. There were Imperium adepts who could read and translate orkish writing, he knew; oddly-minded scribes within the Ordo Xenos or various obscure branches of the Administratum who dedicated their lives to the study of alien races. No captain of the Imperial Navy, however, would ever sully themselves with the knowledge of such things, and so the tacticians of Battlefleet Gothic had merely followed the traditional custom in such matters and assigned their own codenames to the ork vessels in question.
Wolverine and Sabretooth, two suitably feral and savage names for the two ork pirate vessels which, together with their attendant flotilla of escort vessels, had been preying upon unprotected Imperial convoys throughout this sub-sector for months now, each time evading retribution by retreating back into their rok-protected lair here in the Mather system. The cleansing and securing of this system was important, yes, but more important still was the destruction of the two ork cruisers. If they were allowed to escape, then no doubt in a few months’ time Lord Admiral Ravensburg would be forced to reallocate more precious resources to clear out the next empty star system to be occupied and quickly infested by these same ork pirates.
Open comm-channels hissed in empty expectation, as Semper’s fellow captains waited on him to decide the deployment of his forces for this next final and vital stage of the battle.
“Graf Orlok and Fearsome, with me. We’ll also need Triton and Vanguard squadron with us, to take care of their escorts and provide supporting firepower. Drachenfels, I need you here to keep these damn roks occupied. Mannan and Paladin squadron will assist you, and be seconded to your command. You’ll also have attack craft support from my Furies and the fighter and bomber squadrons from Belatis and Briniga. No heroics, Drachenfels,” he added, dryly, “just make them keep their distance. There’ll be plenty of time to deal with them properly after we’ve run Wolverine and its pack-mates to ground.”
The reply over the crackling comm-channel was typical Ramas: a dry, barking laugh, a scathing, impatient edge to his machine-modulated voice, hiding, for those who didn’t know the illustrious and irascible captain of the Drachenfels, a deep-held respect for those rare few he considered worthy of his friendship.
“Hah! I see you’re thinking like a real commodore already, Leoten. The youngbloods get to chase glory and promotion, while the old warhorses like me can only be entrusted to keep taking potshots at a few floating rocks. Good to see some things haven’t changed yet in glorious Battlefleet Gothic!” He laughed, the sound turning into a weird electronic whinnying sound as the Adeptus Mechanicus constructed voice-box in his rebuilt throat struggled to interpret the sounds of human laughter.
“Good hunting, Macharius,” the master of the Drachenfels added in a more serious tone, the traditional good luck message between brother captains of Battlefleet Gothic being too much of a sacred custom for even Erwin Ramas to ignore or make sport of.
“And to you, Drachenfels,” replied Semper, signalling for his helm crew to bring them around to their new battle course.
In normal terms, an hour does not seem such a long time. In terms of space combat, a lot can happen in a short hour. In a naval battle, an hour can seem an eternity.
Fearsome drifted somewhere in the mid-distance off the Macharius’s starboard bow. The Dominator-class cruiser’s command tower was gone, sheared right off by an ork ram ship attack, and a salvo of giant macro-cannon shells had stitched lines of catastrophic ruin across the cruiser’s flanks. Its main hull section was shattered and broken, with an area fully three-quarters of a kilometre long gouged away and missing, as if a giant pair of jaws had simply ripped away a portion of the vessel.
The crews of the other vessels would not have believed it possible had they not seen it with their own eyes. The battle-squadron’s comm-channels had been filled with a babble of pleading, desperate voices from aboard the Fearsome: the voices of crew still trapped aboard her in airtight compartments, and begging for rescue before they suffocated to death, or before the wrecked and burning vessel exploded or began to break up. Semper had ordered that all comm-links to the Fearsome be cut, knowing the damaging effect such pitiful transmissions could have on the minds of a ship’s crew during time of battle. The survivors trapped aboard the Fearsome would have to wait until the battle was over until rescue craft could be sent to sift amongst the wreckage of the vanquished cruiser. In the meantime, only the Emperor would hear their pleas for help.
One of the Fearsome’s killers drifted not too far away. Wolverine was a fragmenting hulk, with little left to suggest the armoured and heavily armed leviathan it had been less than an hour before. The Macharius’s Starhawk bomber squadrons, held back from battle with the roks for just this moment, had relentlessly harried and pursued the ork monstrosity, targeting its drive systems and leaving it crippled and limping, unable to outrun the gunsights of the Imperial cruisers’ weapons batteries. The Fearsome’s nova cannon, combined with the prow lances of the Triton and the torpedoes and weapons batteries of Macharius and Graf Orlok, had reduced it to just so much scattered space debris.
The retaliation from the Sabretooth and its escorts had been swift and brutal. Triton lay somewhere far to the Macharius’s stern, the light cruiser’s engine drives pounded into slag by the Sabretooth’s macro-cannon batteries. Graf Orlok was closer, still nominally in the battle but with the metal-jawed prow of an ork escort vessel buried snout-deep into its forward portside. Ork warriors, huge and savage, wild and merciless, had poured into the interior of the Lunar-class cruiser in their hundreds, and the last comm-channel transmission from Captain von Blucher had indicated heavy fighting in his ship’s forward sections, with his gun batteries left unmanned as he was forced to withdraw their crews to join the shipboard combat.
Graf Orlok, for the moment at least, was out of the battle, leaving the Macharius to face the terrifying power of the Sabretooth on its own.
“Vandire’s oath! I don’t believe it. The bloody thing’s powering up and coming round again!”
Alerted by the incredulous voice of one of his gunnery officers, Semper looked at the image on the augur screen, sharing the man’s disbelief.
&nb
sp; The Sabretooth was a wreck, its hull riddled with blast craters and torpedo wounds. Somehow, though, it continued to fight. Semper could only secretly marvel at the very orkoid inability to admit defeat as, in complete defiance of all the odds, the vessel’s commander managed to fire up manoeuvring thrusters and to crew to man the gun batteries.
The vessel swung round in space, its side batteries sending out a wave of fire to crash explosively against the Macharius’s shields and hull. As it did, Semper could see the horrific damage so far inflicted on it. Through the gaping holes in its armoured skin, fires could clearly be seen burning inside its decks and compartments. As it continued to swing round, Semper could see the starfield behind it, visible through the holes blasted clean through its body.
“Vandire’s oath,” breathed Ulanti, standing beside his captain. “What’s keeping them going?”
“Sheer bloody-mindedness, Mister Ulanti,” replied Semper. “You can’t convince a greenskin that it’s truly dead until you hold up its severed head and show it its own bullet-riddled body.”
The Macharius’s own gun batteries replied, blowing away more fragments of the unshielded target’s hull, but still the monster kept on moving. The dark maw of its prow mouth gaped open in threat, and Semper had a sudden and terrifying vision of the fate of the Fearsome.
“Engage portside thrusters. Hard to starboard! Get us out of reach of that damned tractor beam!”
There was that familiar, sickening lurch in the pit of the stomach as the ship swung round and the artificial gravity generators lagged a second or two behind in readjusting to the vessel’s new orientation. A further, this time reassuring, shudder ran through the ship as its engines fired up, taking it out of harm’s way. The sense of relief amongst the command deck crew was almost palpable.
The elation did not last long. Semper was thrown to the ground as the deck beneath his feet vanished from under him. There was a crash from high above, and the jagged spear of a great, splintered stalactite of machinery crashed into the flag-stoned floor several metres away, crushing and killing a tech-priest and a junior ordnance officer.
[Battlefleet Gothic 02] - Shadow Point Page 10