He raised his splinter pistol and aimed it up into face of the avatar, but was stopped in his tracks as he saw the god staring down at him, the cold fury in its burning eyes holding him in a paralysing stasis more compelling than any poison or nerve toxin.
Slowly, helplessly, he watched as the giant warrior laid down its sword and reached up with two massive hands to unfasten the bindings of its helm.
Slowly, helplessly, he watched as the giant warrior removed its helm and turned its naked face towards him.
The burning god looked upon the dark eldar. Kailasa looked up into the god’s terrible, beautiful face. He tried to scream, but the flesh of his face was already melting away as the unbearable light and heat radiating from the visage of the burning god’s unmasked face fell upon him.
All that was left of Kailasa of the Kabal of the Poison Heart fell to the ground in a smouldering ashen heap, which the avatar trod unnoticed into the dust as it strode over to Kariadryl.
The farseer bowed in awed abeyance before the burning god, not daring to look up into its forbidden face.
“My lord Kaela Mensha Khaine, what would you have me do?” he asked, trembling.
He felt the burning god lay one fiery hand upon him. Its touch did not harm him, even though the air around its skin shimmered with the searing heat radiating from its iron skin.
Kariadryl understood what was required of him. Slowly, helplessly, he raised his head and looked into the god’s face. Light, bright and unbearable, washed over him, obliterating everything.
He gazed into the true face of the burning god. And at last he understood.
Everything.
Still sick with pain, Freyra of the Striking Scorpions climbed groggily to her feet, slowly taking in the details of the carnage around her. The stump of her severed arm still burned with pain, but, as one who walked the warrior path, she knew mental incantations and secret body disciplines to numb the pain and staunch the life-threatening flow of blood from the wound.
She remembered being struck down by the druchii warrior, and, dimly, as she lay semi-conscious, she remembered a burning giant looming up over her and looking down upon her with a face that blazed like the heart of a star. She was still trying to remember what had happened, when she saw the body of the farseer. She ran towards it.
The bodies of two mon-keigh lay nearby. Both were alive, although the one in the uniform of those who manned the warships of the humans’ corpse-god emperor had been struck by a druchii agoniser round. He had mercifully passed out from the effects of the venom, but the toxin was still in his blood, and it would require a rare anti-toxin to fully flush the poison out of his body. From the marks in the dusty ground and from the attitudes of the two unconscious humans, Freyra could tell that both had been struck down while trying to defend her honoured kinsman. She would see that the human received a plentiful supply of the antitoxin.
She knelt by the body of her farseer kinsman, knowing already that he was dead. The ground around him was blackened, seared as if touched by a great heat, but, strangely, Kariadryl’s body had been left completely untouched by whatever force had been unleashed here.
Stranger still was the look of utter calm and even the hint of a contented smile on the face of the aged farseer.
Freyra knew there were things that needed to be done. Kneeling over the corpse of her kinsman, she began to recite the necessary incantations of honour and mourning to mark the passing of her craftworld’s most venerable seer, stopping only briefly when she heard sounds in the sky overhead.
It had begun with screaming, and now it ended with screaming: the screaming of thruster engines as a trio of human shuttle craft came into land nearby. Given all that had happened since she arrived on this forsaken world, she did not find it strange at all when the landing ramps of the craft opened to disgorge mixed groups of human troops and eldar Guardian crewmen from the Vual’en Sho.
The search party from the Macharius found Maxim’s unconscious form at the bottom of the gully. He was covered in so much dried blood from the slashes across his neck and chest, as well as the numerous other minor wounds, that at first they had assumed him to be dead, but he had stirred groaning to life when they began to roughly haul his body back up the rocky slope.
Stretcher litters were brought down, to carry Maxim and the corpse of Kyogen up from the bottom of the gully. Maxim watched as the commissar’s body was lifted onto the other stretcher. The bolt pistol was still gripped in the corpse’s hand, but, as the stretcher bearers hauled the body into place, Maxim saw the small, gilt-edged book slip out of the dead man’s other hand and fall to the ground.
“It’s funny,” Maxim grunted, gratefully accepting the tajii stick offered by one of his own stretcher bearers, who he knew to be a long and valued customer of his, and a useful source of pharmaceutical supplies from the ship’s medical stores. “Me and that silver skull bastard, we hated each other. There was probably nothing he’d have liked more than to send me to the Emperor with an execution round to the back of the head, but in the end he still saved my life.”
Pain and the effects of the drugs he had been administered—and those others he had earlier self-administered—might have dulled his senses, but he still caught the look shared amongst the apothecary crewmen.
“You must be mistaken, chief petty officer,” one of the surgeon’s assistants said in a tone reserved for politely humouring those whose brains had been scrambled by serious head wounds. “The commissar’s been dead for hours. He must have died before the battle even began.”
Maxim painfully hauled himself out of the stretcher litter, angrily shrugging off the attempts by the stretcher bearers to restrain him, and staggered over to Kyogen’s corpse. He bent down and picked up the small book the dead man had been clutching.
It was no book of naval regulations or Imperium political doctrine, which was what he had assumed it to be. It was an Ecclesiarchy prayer book, of the standard type issued in their billions to the officers and men of the Imperium’s armed forces. The fake gold-embossed aquila emblem of the Holy God-Emperor winked up knowingly at him from the book’s scratched and battered cover.
Somewhere far on the edge of the Stabia system, the last remaining dark eldar cruiser made its escape, unscathed and undetected. Its crew knew that their mission’s failure would not win them a warm welcome from their kabal lord back on Commorragh, but the vessel’s captain was quietly confident that the greater part of the blame would settle on the dead shoulders of Lord Kailasa and on the unworthy nature of their Chaos allies.
And, besides, her holds were filled with slave-fodder taken from the attacks on two of the vessels belonging to the mon-keigh and their weakling craftworld allies, so she would not be returning home to face her lord’s displeasure empty-handed.
Down in the suite of rooms assigned to him by his dark eldar hosts, Siaphas of Eidolon was plotting the details of his continued survival in the face of the recent disastrous events.
By now, with the escape of the Despicable back into the warp, the Despoiler would know what had happened here, so Siaphas knew the folly of even thinking about returning to the Warmaster’s court to attempt to give his version of events. He was irrevocably tainted with failure now in the unforgiving eyes of the Despoiler, and not even the patronage of his protector Zaraphiston would shelter him from Abaddon’s wrath.
No, the Chaos sorcerer decided, he would remain here amongst these dark eldar creatures. As he had realised before, they could easily be fashioned into a powerful and effective force by one with the imagination to see the unique possibilities they represented. Of course, their ridiculous and self-destructive kabals and their love of intrigue and in-fighting would have to be done away with, but, given time, Siaphas was certain that a being of sufficient guile, intellect and mystic power could easily manipulate events so as to ensure their rapid rise to a position of command over such a force, and was he not just such a being?
Siaphas was still considering the pleasant details o
f his future empire-building over his unwitting hosts, when his reverie was interrupted by the sound of the door to his chambers sliding open.
One of the creatures known as a haemonculus stood there. Several more lesser members of the same kind stood in the shadows behind him. It was only when the lead one started to speak that Siaphas noticed the cutting tools and restraining devices in their hands.
“A pity that your master’s plan has come to nothing, Chaos-thing,” it snickered, “but do not fear, for if you cannot serve us in one way then you can still do so in another. The voyage home is a long one, and our commander requires we provide her with some form of diversion to pass away the time. It should be an interesting experience for us too, for never before have we been gifted with such exalted, Chaos-altered flesh to work with. When we are finished with you, Chaos-thing, there should be enough of you left to fashion some new and novel kind of pet to present to the Archon himself. He keeps a large menagerie of such things, and you will enjoy your new home amongst them in the kennels of his citadel.”
Siaphas was still trying to frame the words of a spell as the gaunt figures of the dark eldar flesh-sculptors glided silently forward towards him.
After the horrors of Stabia, the interior of the dome of the crystal seers of craftworld An-Iolsus was a reminder of all that they had fought for and died to protect. The delicately perfume-scented mists dung like wisps of vaporous silk around the bodies of the trees, while the tiny jewel-carapaced insect-drones drifted from tree to tree in lazy pursuit of their endless, slow maintenance tasks. Peaceable musical-sounding chimes sounded from somewhere deeper in the crystalline forest, while the air gently pulsed with the soundless psychic whisperings of the minds which inhabited this place.
Freyra finished her task, planting the spirit-stone two hand reaches deep within the rich loam of the forest floor. She stepped away, still aware of the pain from her wounded arm, still aware of her awkward control over the new limb there. The healers had done their work well, but it would take much effort for her to learn how to master the movements of her new wraithbone-crafted prosthetic arm with anything like the dexterity she had previously taken for granted. She was unsure, and the healers were unable to make any promises, if she would ever be able to wield a weapon again effectively in combat. She had thought of abandoning the warrior path and finding other ways to serve her race and craftworld, but she knew what would soon be required of all of them on An-Iolsus and the other craftworlds, and she realised that soon enough the eldar would need every warrior they could find.
In honour of her fallen kinsman, and in recognition of the coming sacrifices that would still be required of them, she would persevere and regain the skills her injury had robbed her of.
She bowed silently to the trees around her and exited the dome.
The dome’s occupants waited until she had gone before linking minds with the new arrival. An invisible psychic breeze stirred to life amid the mists and bowers as the spirits of those who had gone before gathered to commune with the new mind amongst them.
It is good to be amongst you all again, my old friends, sounded the mind-speech voice of Kariadryl the farseer. I have much to tell you…
EPILOGUE
Ships of the line, they called them. Now, for the first time, Leoten Semper understood just what exactly that phrase meant.
In carefully manoeuvred formation, in wide, serried rows, the Imperial ships advanced into battle. Seventeen capital-class ships, including two battle cruisers and also two battleships, the fleet flagship, the mighty Divine Right, amongst them. Twenty smaller vessels, frigates and destroyers mostly, swept out across either flank of the formation or formed a rearguard, following in the wake of the lumbering but majestic cruiser squadrons.
It was a line of giant leviathans, the greatest ever force assembled in Gothic sector history, the cream of Battlefleet Gothic, under the direct command of Lord Admiral Ravensburg himself. It was an awesome sight, possibly the largest single naval force gathered together for battle since the long ago and almost forgotten days of the titanic struggles of Warmaster Horus’s treacherous rebellion against the Emperor. Looking out from the bridge of the Macharius at the lines of ships as they gathered prior to battle, Semper had turned to his second-in-command and smiled in grim humour at the vista before them.
“Vandire’s teeth, Hito, I don’t know what it’ll do to the enemy, but just the sight of all this is enough to scare the life out of me.”
And now the Macharius was there amongst them, moving forward with the rest of the fleet formation, taking its place alongside its sister ships. They were surrounded by illustrious names well known from Battlefleet Gothic history: the battleships Divine Right and Cardinal Boras, venerable old warhorses which formed the solid backbone of the Imperial line; the Mars-class battlecruiser Imperious, under the command of the near-legendary Compel Bast, whom even Erwin Ramas was said to be in awe of; the cruisers Iron Duke, Minotaur, Zealous, Hammer of Justice, Sword of Orion, Mjollnir, Legend of Romulus and Sinus.
Amongst them too were other, less familiar names. Newly-built ships which had come into service only in the last few years, to help replace some of the catastrophic losses suffered by Battlefleet Gothic in the earliest stages of the war. These ships may not have carried the same illustrious pedigree as some of their more venerable sister vessels, but already several of them—the Lunar-class cruisers Lord Daros and Jotunheim, the Gothic-class cruiser Invincible, the Overlord-class cruiser Cypra Probatii—had distinguished themselves sufficiently to have already assured their place in the annals of Battlefleet Gothic history.
Yes, we’ll all see our names mentioned in the history books, thought Semper, taking his customary place on the command deck. Assuming any of us actually live through this day.
They had been hounding the Chaos fleet through the Gethsemane system for days, trying to bring it to battle. Now at last, spotted and flushed out of its hiding place in the surveyor shadow of the system’s second world, the enemy had been forced out into the open and made to stand and fight.
No man within the Imperial fleet had any illusions about just how critical this battle was. So far, Battlefleet Gothic had been slowly but inexorably losing the war. Barely won holding actions were falsely hailed as major triumphs, scattered retreats were disguised by Imperium propaganda as defiant withdrawals, worlds retaken from the enemy were trumpeted as significant milestones on the path to final victory, with no mention made of the dozens of Imperial worlds still under the yoke of the Despoiler, nor the stream of worlds which continued to fall to his endless attacks.
“We need this victory, gentlemen,” Semper had told Ulanti and the other senior officers of the Macharius in the private briefing in his quarters before the commencement of the battle. “This is the first time an enemy force of this size has been detected and identified, and the first time we of Battlefleet Gothic have been able to assemble a force of sufficient size and strength to bear on it and bring it to open battle. Have no illusions, gentlemen. If we win today, the war will continue, but we will have dealt the enemy a grievous blow, and we will have shown the Despoiler and our own people that we are indeed capable of defeating him.” His voice had lowered then, and he had looked his assembled officers in the face, repeating the same words which he had heard from Ravensburg himself just a few hours ago aboard the Divine Right, during the Lord Admiral’s final briefing to his fleet captains.
“But, if we lose, gentlemen, then we will have lost the greater part of our battlefleet’s strength, and the Despoiler’s final victory is all but assured. What we do here today determines the fate of the entire Gothic sector, and we can depend on none but ourselves to determine what that fate might be.”
Semper himself had looked up sharply at this last comment when he had first heard it, catching the eye of Ravensburg, and, more significantly, also that of Inquisitor Horst, standing anonymously and unnoticed amongst the scrum of scribes and Administratum and Munitorium officials that formed part of t
he Lord Admiral’s vast personal entourage. Horst held Semper’s gaze for a moment, and then glanced away, eyes downcast. To Semper, the meaning seemed unmistakable.
Everything that happened in the Stabia system, was it all for nothing, he wondered? Did we completely fail in our mission there?
Now, standing upon the bridge of his ship, Semper stood to attention, his officers and crew immediately following likewise, as the ship’s comm-net system crackled into activity, patching into a fleet-wide broadcast from the Divine Right. The distinctive voice of Lord Admiral Cornelius von Ravensburg, dipped and supremely confident, commanding and autocratic, echoed round the command deck of the Macharius, and round every deck level of every ship in the Imperial formation.
“Hah, here we go, gentlemen. Into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell. Damn his eyes, may the Emperor bless and bugger us all!”
At those semi-blasphemous words, which Imperium historians would subsequently alter to make sound a little more eloquent and noble, waves of torpedoes were launched at the Chaos armada, the combined energy signatures from their massed launching momentarily blotting out surveyor screens on many ships throughout the fleet.
The Chaos fleet, still manoeuvring for position, scattered wildly to avoid the menacing waves of torpedoes, in the process tearing apart their own lines of battle. Bright star-bursts of plasma detonations blossomed amongst the Chaos ranks, signalling at least a dozen or more successful torpedo impacts. Those Chaos ships which had avoided the first torpedo wave now brought their own superior-ranged weaponry to bear on the advancing Imperial fleet. Lance and battery fire, sporadic but deadly, reached out across the gap of still tens of thousands of kilometres between the two fleets, seeking targets amongst the Imperial line. Several vessels, the Drachenfels and Lord Daros amongst them, shook under the impacts of direct hits, but, able to present their heavily-armoured prows to the enemy, the Imperial line continued its advance into battle with only minimal damage.
[Battlefleet Gothic 02] - Shadow Point Page 28