There was the scream of tortured metal from all around them, and the whole ship shook under a continuous series of violent, pounding impacts.
Klaxons and warning alarms reverberated from dozens of points throughout the ship. Leoten Semper climbed to his feet, wiping away the blood from his face from a flying metal sliver thrown out by the falling machinery. There was a dry, foul taste in his mouth, and a sensation of sick dread in his heart. His ship, he knew, was now in the deadliest of perils.
The internal comm-channels were filled with panicked damage reports from the intolerable strain now being put on the ship’s innermost structural integrity.
“Hull breach… gun-deck three. Requesting permission to evacuate.”
“Fires on decks eighteen, nineteen and twenty-one.”
“Got a hull breach here on forward compartment, deck sixteen. Sealing blast doors now.”
“Enginarium… serious coolant failure on Reactor Tertius… engaging emergency coolant systems.”
“Open the blast doors… We’re trapped in here! Emperor’s mercy, we can’t get out!”
Semper gathered his wits. His ship was in pain, and could be destroyed any minute. “Mister Ulanti, what’s our situation?” he barked.
Ulanti’s face was grim. “Definitely still some life in Sabretooth, sir. It’s sunk its teeth in, and now it’s trying to take a bite of us. A large bite, it would seem.”
Semper cursed. A tractor beam, one of the few high technologies which the orks had managed to master for their own use. And, being orks, that use was as a weapon, of course.
The Macharius was caught in the invisible grip of a huge and powerful ork tractor beam weapon mounted in the Sabretooth’s mouth-like prow. The tractor beam wasn’t powerful enough to bodily drag or hurl the Macharius through space, as the orks had done with the asteroid missiles which had been directed at the Graf Orlok and which had smashed apart one of Vanguard squadron’s Cobra destroyers, but it was still easily capable of destroying the ship. The powerful gravitic forces of a tractor beam, recklessly manipulated in the right way, could be used to crush or tear apart a target, or at least a portion of a larger target.
This was what was happening to the Macharius now. The tractor beam had seized a large hull section, and was attempting to tear it free from the rest of the ship. Less than half an hour ago, Semper and the crew of the Macharius had seen the Fearsome ripped apart by Sabretooth’s savage tractor beam jaws. Now the same thing was happening to them.
Semper could sense his ship starting to tear apart. Metal buckled. Armoured hull plates ruptured. Power conduits exploded or failed. The Macharius screamed in torment at the intolerable strain being put upon its metal body.
Maxim Borusa heard the deep, echoing boom from somewhere deep within the ship’s interior, and felt the decking lurch beneath his feet. He uttered a coarse Stranivar curse as the unexpected and violent movement threw off his aim. A bolt shell which should have taken off the head of the figure at the other end of the catwalk instead ruptured a steam pipe several metres wide of its target.
The man, one of Sejarra’s thugs, turned and began to bring his own weapon—a battered old stub pistol, Sejarra had a tendency to skimp on arming his boys with the proper heavy stuff, Maxim knew—up to bear, aiming it at Maxim.
“Dumb bastard,” sneered Maxim, putting a bolt shell through his chest, “should have run when you had the chance.”
Another violent impact shook the ship. Maxim had to grab onto the handrail to prevent himself keeling over the side of the walkway and into the guts of the lower enginarium levels, several decks below. Someone a few decks above wasn’t so fortunate, and a screaming body plunged down the metal chasm, which ran almost the full height of the ship, through twenty-two decks of machinery-crammed engineering sections. There was an explosion from somewhere down below, followed by the fiery rush of released plasma and the screams of several men caught in the blast.
Maxim grinned. The ship was clearly taking a pounding from something, but he wasn’t worried. Whatever kind of scrap they’d got into, old Captain Semper would see them through it, of that Maxim had little doubt.
And, besides he thought, still grinning, all this internal damage meant casualties, and casualties meant plenty of opportunity to cover up the evidence of his own private little battle right here.
There were shouts—he recognised the voice of Galba amongst them—and the sound of more gunfire from through the maze of machinery ahead of him. Maxim checked the load on his bolt pistol and moved off towards the location, homing in on the familiar and welcome sounds of conflict.
The sounds of his ship’s distress continued, coming to him both over the command deck’s comm-channels and reverberating through the very substance of the ship. Semper knew the Macharius was only moments away from suffering irreparable damage.
“Helm—all ahead full. Channel all available power to engines and get us out of this thing’s grasp.”
“No!”
It was the voice of Magos Castaboras, the most senior servant of the Machine God aboard the Macharius, who had just arrived on the command deck, surrounded by his customary train of tech-priest acolytes. Even with destruction looming, the officers and crewmen present stared in complete disbelief at this unforgivable challenge to a captain’s authority here on his own command deck.
Semper stared at the impassive gold-masked face of the senior tech-priest. He had little fondness for the cold and aloof Castaboras. Few aboard the Macharius did, but he had no doubt of the man’s abilities, or his unsurpassed knowledge of the workings and capabilities of the vessel to which he had so far dedicated more than eighty years of his Machine God-extended life.
“Explain!” snapped Semper, as the sound of the ship’s torment grew louder all around them.
The tech-priest spoke quickly but calmly, his voice offering little in the way of accent or human emotion. “If we engage the engines, we will only hasten our own destruction, struggling in one direction against the force pulling at us from the other, and tearing the ship apart in the process. However, there is another way…”
The tech-priest’s last words were almost drowned out by the tortured shriek of metal on metal. Semper didn’t hesitate, knowing they likely only had seconds.
“The Magos has command,” he told his officers, doing what many captains would consider the unthinkable, even under such dire circumstances.
Castaboras set to work immediately. “Engage port and starboard thrusters—anchor us in space. Channel all available power to the defence shields and set the shield frequency to four points above the norm.” He broke off, favouring the officers of the Macharius with a rare explanation of his methods. “Studies have shown that changes in shield frequency can interfere with the gravitic fields of tractor beam weapons. I have never seen it done myself, but the great Magos Technicus Sulpicius the Precise proved in his studies in M.39 that—”
Remus Nyder exploded in anger. “Look at the shield output readouts, man. You’re overloading the generators! And now you talk of ‘studies’, and tell us that we’ve put the safety of the ship in the hands of the theories of some long-dead damn Machine God prayer babbler who none of us have even heard of!”
Castaboras looked at Semper, directing his reply to him and ignoring Nyder. “The shields will hold, captain. I know this vessel. I tend to its workings. I commune with its machine-mind. I offer prayers to its sacred spirit. I have faith in its strength, and so too should you and your men.”
The violent shaking took on a different timbre now. A tone of slightly anxious relief crept into the tech-priest’s voice.
“It’s working. The shields are interfering with the tractor beam. They’re boosting the tractor beam’s strength, trying to keep their grip on us.” He stepped back, taking firm hold of a nearby instrumentation panel. “I recommend you and your men hold onto the nearest fixed surface, captain. The venerable magos’s studies suggest that the final moment of uncoupling may be hazardous to a vessel’s h
uman crew components.”
There was a final scream of metal, matched by the shriek of energy generators overloaded to near destruction. Then, suddenly, the ship was moving, tumbling through space, rolling almost thirty degrees on its portside, its artificial gravity field crucially lagging several seconds behind in adjusting to the ship’s radical change of orientation as the Macharius was brutally expelled free of the tractor beam’s deadly grasp.
Castaboras’s warning was well-founded. For a second, Semper found himself in freefall, falling laterally across the command deck, before the firm grasp of Remus Nyder found him and pulled him to safety. Semper nodded his thanks, and hauled himself to his feet. The command deck was still filled with the sound of warning alarms and comm-net distress calls. If anything, the flood of damage reports and distress calls had increased, as the ship took stock of the cost of that last near-disastrous manoeuvre. Still, Semper knew that at least now his ship was safe from imminent destruction.
His ork opponents, however, had different ideas.
The augur screen was cracked, the image on it temporarily flickering and indistinct, but Semper could still make out the flame-wreathed shape of the ork cruiser as it laboriously swung round in space in pursuit of them, presenting its lethal tractor beam maw towards them once more.
“It’s still after us!” shouted a young surveyor adept in near panic. “It’s powering up its tractor beam for another attack!”
“No, it’s not,” said Semper in determination, looking towards Remus Nyder. “Mister Nyder, what do we have in the way of torpedoes?”
Nyder checked the information on the data-slate handed to him by one of his junior officers. It made for grim reading. “Only two in the pipe, captain. It’s a hell of a mess down there, I’m told. That last jolt really shook up our torpedo room. I’ve got two tubes out of action, half my loading crews dead or injured and Emperor only knows how long before we can get the other two tubes loaded and ready to fire.”
Semper looked at the auspex screen, checking the telemetry data scrolling down the sides of the screen and making his own personal calculations about the angle of fire, the closing distance between the two vessels, the current battle status of each of them and the likely outcome of any head-on battle between them. The answer he came up with was not much to his liking, but he was a captain in His Divine Emperor’s Navy, and so it was not in his nature to show any sign of fear or weakness on his own command deck and before the eyes of his expectant crew.
“Two torpedoes will be more than enough,” he said, in a voice filled with more confidence than he felt. “Helm—bring us around. Ordnance—prepare to fire as soon as you have a good angle of shot.”
The ship’s manoeuvring thrusters fired again, bringing it round to face the oncoming Sabretooth. To the watching crew on the command deck, it seemed to take the prow an eternity to swing through the sixty degree angle which would bring the ship round towards the enemy ship.
All the time, the Sabretooth came on. In the minds of some of the more nervous crewmen aboard the command deck of the Macharius, the ork cruiser’s open maw with the tractor beam weapon hidden inside seemed to gape open to swallow up the entire ship.
Light flared within that maw. “Power levels are building,” reported a surveyor adept. “They’ll be activating that thing any second now.”
“In position. Target in range. Angle is good,” reported an ordnance officer a second later.
“Fire torpedoes!”
The words were barely out of Semper’s mouth before he held the dull roar of the torpedoes’ release from their prow silos. The missiles streaked through space towards their target. Light flared stronger between the Sabretooth’s jaws. Aboard the Macharius, they felt the first shifting lurch as the tractor beam’s gravity field once again took hold of the ship.
The torpedoes shot between the metal jaws. For a moment, it almost appeared as if the Sabretooth had actually swallowed them, and even the most resolute of veteran navy officers watching felt a moment of sickening fear, as it seemed that almost nothing could destroy the vessel.
Sabretooth’s head exploded. It keeled over, tumbling away through space, a series of secondary explosions gutting what was left of its shattered innards.
“Double impact. Target destroyed,” recorded the surveyor adept.
“Scan the area,” ordered Semper. “Surveyors and augurs to maximum. Search for any remaining enemy vessels.” He waited impatiently while his orders were carried out, servitors and tech-priests attuning themselves to the massive flood of information gathered by the ship’s electronic senses and sifting through it in search of any further threats. Finally, the answer came back from Hito Ulanti, the second-in-command confirming the scan findings relayed onto the screen of his control lectern.
“No enemy vessels found within surveyor range. The garden is clear, captain.”
For the first time in hours, Semper allowed himself to relax. The battle for the Mather system was over.
NINE
The Macharius lay inert in space, tending to its wounds. Vacuum-suited work crews crawled across the outside of its hull, inspecting the most recently-inflicted battle damage, and making what immediate repairs they could. Hull breaches were resealed, using whatever materials were available, including the salvaged remains of other vessels destroyed in the battle. Molten metal salves were applied to the wounds in the ship’s armoured flanks, adding further to the ancient patchwork of scars which criss-crossed its centuries-old hull.
Inside the ship too, the necessary post-battle rituals of damage assessment and repair were well underway, as was the grim task of recovering and counting the dead and wounded. Ships’ surgeons and their orderlies were at work throughout the vessel, operating a strict and merciless triage system on the wounded men brought to them. The walking wounded would have to wait until after the battle for any kind of attention, and the crew decks and dormitories were filled with the moans and screams of the injured. The only relief from the pain at present would be whatever quantities of illicit narc-stimms they had hidden away or could beg from their comrades.
The more seriously wounded lay piled up in corridors and compartments which now served as makeshift field surgeries. Surgeons and orderlies moved amongst them, dispensing crude and swift battlefield surgery with las-cutters, stimm-packs, damps and flesh-cauterisers. More than one surgeon also carried a chainsword, their blades already dotted with the gory evidence of the number of emergency battlefield surgeries they had already carried out.
The dying, the ones who were beyond help or for whom the surgeons could not spare the additional time needed to tend to their more grievous injuries, were handed silently over to armsmen wearing blood-soaked overalls, who carried them away out of sight of those other wounded still waiting to learn their own fate under the strictures of the surgeons’ system. A quick and mercifully-intended piece of knifework by the armsmen, and possibly a few mumbled words of prayer from their killers, and then the bodies were deposited amongst the growing pile of dead, where teams of sweating, gore-covered ratings carried them in relays to the nearest airlock chamber.
“Get a move on. We haven’t got all day!” cursed Petty Officer Vorshun, wondering why he always seemed to get detailed with this duty after a battle. His words, and the angry blow he casually directed at the nearest of them with the wooden haft of his billy club, spurred on the ratings under his supervision, and they heaved the last few bodies in through the open airlock door. Vorshun looked at the mound of corpses filling the airlock chamber, and decided that enough was enough.
“Right, that’ll do for this one. Stand back while I seal her up,” he warned, casually kicking a corpse’s dangling arm back over the other side of the rim of the airlock hatch. He reached for the manual release lever which would seal the heavy blast door, and, seconds later, release the outer door and expel the gory contents of the airlock chamber out into space.
“Hold on, Vorshun, you lazy whoreson! Time and room for a few more yet!�
��
Vorshun turned in anger towards the latecomers, ready to take out the worst of his temper on whoever dared to speak to him like that. The intended volley of curses died stillborn on his lips when he caught sight of the uniform and rank sash of a chief petty officer. The fury in him turned to fear when he saw the familiar and powerfully-muscled figure which filled out that uniform.
Maxim Borusa came up the corridor with a group of his picked cut-throats, all of them carrying bodies over their shoulders. “Chief Borusa!” said Vorshun, the surprise in his voice hopefully disguising the fear in there too. “I didn’t know you and your men were working this section.”
“You know me, Vorshun,” grinned Maxim. “Always willing to lend a hand anywhere I’m needed, and always willing to help our dear departed shipmates on their final journey to the Emperor.”
Maxim turned to his men, indicating the open airlock. “Right, lads, in they go, and be gentle about it and mind that you treat these fallen heroes with all the respect they deserve.”
His men laughed, and threw their burdens into the airlock to join the other bodies piled there. Maxim went last, lobbing the corpse he was carrying halfway across the airlock with a single shrug of his shoulders, and Vorshun tried hard to ignore the fact that the corpse made a distinct moaning, sobbing sound when it landed.
Maxim turned towards him, a dangerous glint of unspoken threat in his eyes. “Right, Petty Officer Vorshun, off you go now. Me and my boys will take care of this. I expect you’ve still got work to do on the next deck down.”
“Right, chief,” mumbled Vorshun, all too glad of the chance to get away from whatever it was the big hiveworld ganger was up to.
Maxim waited until the men were out of sight before he turned and looked into the airlock. The terrified eyes of Ship’s Engineer Second Grade Tyrrus Sejarra stared back at him, wide with fear and silent, desperate pleading. It had been a fine piece of work to capture his old rival alive, Maxim thought. Sejarra was gagged and had his hands and feet bound with wire, while the neat little paralysing cocktail of narc-subs which Maxim had mixed up for him had kept him quiet and subdued while they hauled him and the rest of his dead crew all the way from the enginarium to here, taking the longer sub-deck levels to avoid the prowling likes of Kyogen and his spies.
[Battlefleet Gothic 02] - Shadow Point Page 11