Inside the torpedo rooms of more than two dozen Imperial vessels, crews sweated and strained to load more volleys of the huge, thirty-metre long missiles into their firing chambers. On the gun decks of every Imperium ship, and on every command deck, anxious gunnery officers checked their firing solutions over and over again and maintained a careful watch on the green-glowing lines of gun deck status runes.
The Imperious, leading the charge from the vanguard of the Imperial line, was the first to draw serious blood. Even before the other ships could launch off a second torpedo wave, the Mars-class battlecruiser’s nova cannon was firing with its deadly trademark accuracy. Its chosen target was the Murder-class cruiser Deathblade, an old and bitterly-hated adversary from several actions the Imperious and its crew had waged against the enemy in the Orar sub-sector. The front section of the Deathblade was consumed in a sudden and fearsome explosion. Broken and ablaze, the cruiser fell out of the Chaos formation, its sister vessels hurriedly manoeuvring to get away from it as its surveyor signature showed all the wild and tell-tale energy fluctuations from damaged and out of control plasma reactors heading towards imminent and explosive overload.
Cheers rang over the Imperial comm-channels at the fate of the stricken enemy ship. Then, in the roaring blast of launching torpedoes, the deck-shaking earthquake rumble of gun batteries unleashed and the incandescent scream of lance fire, the two fleets dashed together.
Ravensburg’s plan was simple. A mass front assault with waves of torpedoes would, and now did, split the enemy formation into two. The Imperial fleet, formed into carefully staggered lines, would then advance through this newly-formed breach, taking fire from enemy ships on both sides, but simultaneously bringing their own port and starboard batteries to bear on different enemy targets.
As a strategy, it was brutally direct. In execution, it was simply brutal. Ravensburg was well known for his jocular references to battle casualties as “paying the butcher’s bill”. The price of the butcher’s bill for the Battle of Gethsemane would be steep indeed.
The Imperial formation, passing through two lines of intersecting fire, was buffeted and blasted on both sides by the enemy gunners. The Tyrant-class vessel Zigmund, singled out by the gunners of four different enemy vessels, two on each side of it, was the first to fall. Its shields stripped away in seconds, it staggered under the impact of multiple simultaneous hits on both its flanks. Its engines destroyed, its gun decks reduced to burning wreckage, it lay stricken and helpless as its sister vessels mercilessly passed it by, abandoning it to its fate. Enemy torpedo destroyers and attack craft bomber squadrons, hiding nearby in the cover of the larger cruiser vessels, quickly closed in for the kill like schools of hungry barracuda.
The Lunar-class cruiser Excellent, famous for its defiant no-retreat stance in the face of an ork space hulk monstrosity two centuries earlier at the Defence of Platea, was set ablaze prow to stern by a series of devastating torpedo and lance hits from the grand cruiser Foe-Reaper and its phalanx of escorts. The last act of the Excellent’s captain, Leonardus Mathieu, was to bring his dying vessel up to ramming speed, sending it crashing catastrophically into the hull of the Foe-Reaper and bringing to an end the Chaos ship’s litany of atrocities against the Imperium, which stretched back for millennia. Captain Lagardo Mathieu, who had commanded the Excellent during its most famous action at Platea, would surely have approved of his descendant’s own final and very effective act of defiance.
The entire Omega squadron of Sword-class frigates was destroyed in a vicious duel with the Carnage-class cruiser Wanton Desecration and its squadron of Infidel escorts, finally succumbing when bomber waves from the nearby Styx-class cruiser Violator entered the fray.
The Firestorm-class frigate Europa fell prey to the guns of the Desolator-class battleship Nergal. For Lord Admiral Ravensburg, this particular item on the butcher’s bill would come at an especially heavy price. His son Mannfred, the youngest of his eleven children and one of his favourites, had been first lieutenant on the Europa.
On every ship involved in the engagement, surveyor screens swarmed with target icons. On both sides, members of gunnery crews simply dropped to the decks in exhaustion, overwhelmed by the heat, noise and toxic off-spill from weapons overheated to the point of catastrophe. On flight decks, ground crews worked numbly and robotically on a seemingly endless number of attack craft, prepping them for launch just as previously-launched craft, battered and missing many of their wingmen, returned to their carrier vessels for refuelling, re-arming and urgently-required repairs. The void around the giant cruisers was filled with a bewildering, swirling maelstrom of attack craft, fighters and bombers, Chaos and Imperial craft alike, all caught up together in one vast, straggling dogfight, spread out over tens of thousands of kilometres of space. Unable to distinguish friend from foe under such conditions, turret gunners on both sides often simply opened fire at any attack craft which came within striking distance, and more than one bomber or fighter pilot, having managed to survive the lethal gauntlet of the battle, found himself coming under fire from the defences of his own mothership.
In a final, deadly series of salvoes, the dual Imperial formations broke through the Chaos lines, the Divine Right brutally ramming and smashing apart a damaged and powerless enemy frigate which drifted into the battleship’s path. As Ravensburg’s flagship pulled away from the enemy fleet, ships on both sides still exchanging lethal bouts of weapons fire, the punishing damage taken by both sides quickly became apparent. If the Lord Admiral cut his losses now and fled back into the warp, then he would do so without three of his capital ships and five of his escort vessels. Some badly damaged vessels would be unlikely to survive the dangers of the immaterium, while several more, including the Lord Daros and the Dauntless-class light cruiser Guardian, would surely face many long months or even years of repair work in orbital dry dock.
Still, despite the damage his fleet had suffered, Ravensburg’s plan had succeeded. As his ships continued to put distance between themselves and the enemy, gaps in the Chaos battle line quickly became visible.
The Foe-Reaper was gone, reduced to a tangled mass of burning wreckage from its collision with the dying Excellent. The Malignus Maximus and the Murder-class cruiser Steel Fang had been similarly reduced by concentrated salvoes from the Imperial formation, while Steel Fang’s sister ship Krotos had been the victim of wave after wave of combined attacks from the bomber squadrons of the Macharius and the Imperious, and was now little more than a gutted hulk. Similar massed bombing waves from the Divine Right had relentlessly harried the Styx-class cruiser Corpsemaker and its escorts, crippling its launch bays and effectively knocking it out of the fight. Elsewhere, a wide ring of expanding super-heated gases and wreckage fragments was all that remained of a nameless Slaughter-class cruiser which had explosively succumbed to combined fire from three different Imperial cruisers, while the Nergal, flagship of the Chaos Warmaster admiral, Baal-Hierophant Lokkis Vanama, bled out a telltale plume of burning plasma from its rear section, indicating the probable loss of one of its reactors from the numerous torpedo, lance and weapon battery attacks which had been directed at it during the battle.
Aboard the Divine Right, Ravensburg watched the progress of the injured enemy battleship with his trademark cold, remorseless gaze. He would not learn until after the battle about the destruction of his son’s ship by the guns of the enemy flagship, but it would add little to his already firm determination to see the notorious battleship mercilessly hunted down and destroyed today. Once he learned of the vessel’s presence in the Gethsemane system, then its destruction and the death of one of Abaddon’s chief lieutenants immediately became one of his main aims in this conflict.
“Our fleet?” he asked without looking away from the enemy positions.
“Still battle worthy,” answered one of his adjutants, thinking of the number of crippled and seriously damaged ships in the Imperial line, and tempted—but only briefly—to add the word barely to his report.
“Good enough,” nodded Ravensburg, turning to his waiting command staff. “Signal the ships and tell them to come about and re-engage the enemy. Tell them we’re going back through the gates of hell to finish the job properly this time.”
At Ravensburg’s command, the lines of Imperial ships swung ponderously round, presenting their prows once more to the enemy. As they turned, flank-mounted batteries were able to open fire at the distant enemy, which dutifully returned the favour. The void between the two battered fleets was filled with sporadic weapons fire, as both sides steeled themselves for the second round of battle.
The Imperial force advanced in a rag-tag formation, its original line of battle broken by the rigours of the first encounter and the losses sustained then. The Chaos fleet, split apart by the first Imperial charge, was in even greater disarray.
Torpedo launches streaked from the prows of various Imperial craft, seeking individual targets of opportunity within the confusion of the enemy ranks. Other ships, damaged or with their torpedo payload already fully expended, were unable to launch anything. Aboard the Tyrant-class cruiser Incendrius, its captain screamed vicious, bloody obscenities into his internal comm-net, threatening death, damnation and the worst punishments allowed under naval regulations if his loading crew didn’t get their fingers out and fire off some damned torpedoes, all the time unaware that his entire torpedo room had been transformed into a derelict morgue. A lucky melta missile hit had struck that section in its weaker flank side, opening up a catastrophic breach in the cruiser’s hull. Those torpedo room crew not fortunate enough to be immolated in the initial blast had instead been sucked screaming out into space through the giant molten hole in the chamber’s wall.
Aboard the Macharius, Leoten Semper faced the prospect of his probable and imminent extinction with all the aplomb expected of a product of Cypra Mundi’s thousands of years of breeding officers for the Imperial Navy.
“What’s our status, Mister Ulanti?”
“Two starboard gundecks ablaze, captain. We have a minor conflagration raging in the secondary rear arsenal, and a larger one in the upper portside launch decks, but that perhaps doesn’t matter so much, since we’ve accounted for and recovered rather less than half of our attack craft squadrons, and we really have no more need for those decks any more. External communications are shot half to hell, but that doesn’t perhaps matter so much either, since there’s so much battle interference and comms babble going on out there that no one can hear anything anyway. Crew casualties are currently running at almost twenty per cent and expected to rise even without any further battle damage. Our void shield generators are dangerously overloading, and I believe Magos Castaboras is down in the enginarium now, in the process of performing the last rites on our number three plasma reactor.”
Semper almost smiled. Ulanti could make the second coming of the Traitor Warmaster Horus sound like nothing more than a petty inconvenience. “What’s your opinion of our current battle status then, Mister Ulanti?”
Ulanti’s answer was immediate and unblinking. “I think there’s a damn good chance we’ll all be getting reacquainted with a few long-dead old comrades before the day’s out.”
Semper looked shrewdly at his second-in-command. “Did you think you would end your days back home on Necromunda, Hito, telling bored grandchildren tales of your glorious exploits amongst the stars in the service of the Emperor’s navy?”
“The thought had occurred to me, sir, but only in a pleasing if somewhat abstract sense.”
This time Semper did smile. Laugh, in fact, as he clapped his second-in-command on the shoulders. “A fine daydream, Hito, but you’re Battlefleet Gothic now. For us, and all those like us, this is always how it’s supposed to end.”
The Macharius, along with the other ships in what remained of the Imperial line, drew closer on their targets. The bridge rocked as the first enemy weapons hits impacted against the ship’s beleaguered, failing void shields.
“Torpedoes, Mister Nyder?” asked Semper.
“Six in the pipe, six more on the shelf, captain,” reported the Macharius’s ordnance officer, the strain of the engagement showing on his face. Semper knew that the loss of so many of his attack craft crews had affected the man deeply, even if he would never openly admit it. “That’s all I can give you for the time being, sir. The loading track from the forward arsenal is smashed, and I can’t release anything from the rear arsenals until those fires back there are under control.”
“Very well. Twelve it is,” nodded Semper. “No sense letting them go to waste. Find a target and fire when ready, Mister Nyder.”
The Macharius shook, and shook again as it fired off two salvoes, sending three missiles apiece streaking off towards two different targets. Semper studied the surveyor screen closely. At first he thought the ships within the Chaos fleet were simply manoeuvring to evade the many individual torpedo salvoes from the Imperial line, but then, even before the shout from one of his helm officers, came understanding about what was really happening.
“Their fleet’s breaking up! They’re attempting to disengage!”
On surveyor screens and augur displays all through the Imperial formation, the truth quickly became evident. The enemy fleet was breaking off from battle, those vessels which could running for the warp jump point at the system’s edge and abandoning their damaged brethren to the mercy of the Imperial guns. Ravensburg’s attention was still almost solely fixed on the escaping fleet and the prize of its fleeing flagship, but he was not about to pass up the free opportunity now being presented to him.
“Open fire,” he commanded to his fleet, as they swept past the drifting clutter of damaged Chaos vessels, firing broadsides into them at something close to point-blank range. “We’ll gladly accept these scraps, but only as an appetiser for the rest of the feast.”
Many of the ships within the Imperial line channelled extra power to their engines, pushing ahead to catch up with the faster enemy ships. Speculative shots from lance turrets and torpedo tubes ranged out in pursuit of the escaping enemy, seeking to hit and hopefully cripple engines and power systems.
Suddenly, a Sword-class frigate, speedier than the larger capital ships and racing ahead of the main Imperial formation, exploded apart, its prow bursting open. At once, the alarm was passed through the Imperial fleet.
“Mines!” captains and surveyor officers shouted to helm crews, as emergency surveyor sweeps were made, and new courses urgently laid in to avoid this latest threat.
Aboard the Divine Right, Ravensburg cursed violently and volubly. The enemy had dropped mines in their wake, to cover their retreat. Scattered widely amongst the other debris of battle, they would be a real hazard to the pursuing Imperial fleet. By the time his ships had picked a safe passage through the drifting minefields, or had sent out attack craft squadrons to clear a path through them, the Chaos fleet would be long gone.
How many casualties could he afford, he wondered, if he simply ordered his already-weakened force to simply push on ahead and run the gauntlet of the minefield?
He was still pondering on the variables in that cold, harsh calculation when he heard the astonished shout from one of the bridge officers.
“Vandire’s teeth! Ships, a whole new fleet of them! Where did they come from?”
Aboard the Macharius, aboard every ship in the Imperial formation, the reaction was the same. Looking at the images on the augur screen, seeing the distinctive energy signatures of the new arrivals on the surveyor screen, Semper could only imagine the mood of consternation amongst his counterparts on the command decks of the enemy ships.
Ulanti confirmed what Semper already knew. “Eldar vessels, more than twenty of them, including a dozen or more capital-class warships. Emperor only knows where they came from, or how long they’ve been here watching everything.”
And Emperor only knows what they’re going to do next, Semper thought to himself, almost afraid to watch, but unable to tear his gaze away from the lines of ne
wly-emergent icons on the surveyor screen, their strange energy patterns shifting and fluctuating as they drew closer towards the Imperial and Chaos fleets.
The eldar ships were coming in fast on a tangent course intercepting the escaping Chaos fleet, but which, with a minor change of heading and brief burst of speed, could just as easily bring them into attack range of the Imperial ships. Everyone aboard the command deck of the Macharius knew all too well just how fast and manoeuvrable the alien vessels were, and how such a sudden but significant course change could be made effortlessly and without warning.
“Alien bastards, I’ve known their treachery before,” cursed Augustus Ortelius, captain of the Divine Right. “They’re going to attack us, admiral. We must open fire upon them now!”
“No!” It was the voice of Horst, standing on the command deck beside Ravensburg, the full weight of authority of his rank of senior inquisitor and envoy of the Council of Terra evident in that single word. “We wait. Let them act first. Then we will know what their true intentions are.”
Aboard the Macharius, the mood was equally tense.
“Damn it, we still can’t positively identify any of the eldar ships?”
The surveyor officer wilted before his captain’s impatience. “It’s notoriously difficult to identify an individual eldar vessel’s energy signature, even if you already have previous sightings of that vessel on record, captain. The fact that there are so many of them together only makes it—”
A shout from the communications section put the man out of his misery. “We’re being hailed, captain. By one of the alien ships!”
Semper and Ulanti exchanged quick, alert glances. “Open comm-net channels,” ordered Semper.
[Battlefleet Gothic 02] - Shadow Point Page 29