Ba’birin sighed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sure he is loyal, or at least that he believes himself to be.’
‘Meaning?’
‘In leaving the flesh behind, he is forgetting that he is not a machine, and that he should not be thinking like one. If he loses all connection with the fact that we are, all of us, however much we have been transformed, human, then he will make decisions that will take nothing human into account. In the field, those decisions could have terrible consequences.’
‘I see.’ Neleus’s tone was neutral, non-committal, and Ba’birin couldn’t tell if he agreed or not. But at least Neleus was following the thread of his logic. ‘And we are about to embark on a mission that will require Ha’garen to immerse himself in machinery of xenos design,’ Neleus said. ‘If he should lose himself in the inorganic, he might act only in its interests.’
‘And we will be in his hands,’ Ba’birin finished.
The torpedo deck opened up before them. Nestled low in the hull, it was an immense temple consecrated to the destruction of enemies. Row upon row of tubes lined walls that rose dozens of metres. Gantry cranes and gangways fed servitors and ordnance to their positions. At the forward end, a colossal bas-relief sculpture of Vulkan dominated the space. The primarch’s hammer was smashing an anvil, and flashing outwards from the blow were the streaks of torpedoes, bound on their missions of righteous punishment.
The squads were assembled. The parchments of new oaths of moment hung from the armour of the Space Marines, fluttering slightly in the light breeze of the ventilation system. The Salamanders were gathered to pledge unity and duty. In their reptile-green armour emblazoned by the snarling profile of their namesake, they were the most honourable of paradoxes. They were both drake and knight. They were self-reliance and devotion to brotherhood. And at their gathering, Ba’birin’s chest never failed to swell with pride and humility.
Ha’garen was standing in the shadows cast by a lume-strip shining through a walkway. He was motionless, his servo-arms folded behind his back. He might have been an empty suit of armour but for the intensity of the red glow behind his eye lenses. He was standing beside the access hatch to a boarding torpedo. Ba’birin felt another wave of unease as he regarded his old friend. Then he felt shame. Not because of his suspicions, but because they made him a hypocrite as he entered into the rituals that bound the Salamanders to each other and to their cause.
It was almost a relief when, with the blaring of klaxons, war came early.
Chapter Two
There were glories to war, and there were curses. The greatest curse, as far as Mulcebar was concerned, was the madness that attended it. It was not battle itself that was madness. What was mad was the contingencies of action and perversities of fate that forced a commander to issue orders that he knew to be foolish. So it was now. He was going to close with the orks. He was committing himself to an action he would decry as the height of stupidity in any other circumstance. And he was hurling his company into a suicidal confrontation in order to rescue a single eldar. Some of his more mystically inclined fellow officers might see the compounding ironies as a sign of fate. Perhaps they were right. He had no interest in working out the philosophical niceties of his war. But as he launched an assault that had nothing to do with pragmatism and everything to do with an idealistic, death-or-glory charge, he took solace in the fact that it was not naïveté but duty that forced his hand. He would not mourn any warriors who fell in the performance of duty. He would honour their deaths, and accept his own, but regret and sorrow were the province of the weak and the faithless. This battle, here, now, in all of its madness, was the new anvil upon which Fifth Company would be tested, and if this were the path drawn by Vulkan that would lead the company to its destiny, then Mulcebar welcomed it. He also blessed the efforts of the White Scars and the Raven Guard that had lured the Overfiend into the open, and so made this test a reality. The task that loomed was formidable; without the blows struck by the other Chapters, it would have been impossible.
But though the Salamanders would be shaped against the anvil, they would also be a hammer themselves.
‘Full ahead,’ Mulcebar ordered. ‘Prioritise fire on the escorts.’
The Verdict of the Anvil lunged forwards from the darkness of the void, plasma engines flaring, their nova brilliance a roar of challenge to the ork ships. The greenskins responded in kind, and war rushed to meet the strike cruiser. The Verdict closed at a right angle to the course of the squadron. On the tacticarium screens, Mulcebar had a last look at the flank of the kroozer, a massive target begging for the judgement of the nova cannon, and then shifted his focus to the escorts. The smaller ships were peeling away from their charge. There were six of them, their guns already flashing though they were not yet within range.
‘Approaching ork escort ships,’ a servitor intoned. It was slaved to the long-range augurs. ‘Three pairings. Designations: Onslaught, Ravager, Brute.’
Technical data appeared on Mulcebar’s screens. It was unnecessary. The names had told him what he needed to know, and the comparisons between the ork forces and the Verdict’s strength were clear in his mind. The Verdict was faster than all the enemy ships except the Brutes. It had better shields. It was so much more manoeuvrable than the kroozer that it could dance circles around its foe. But it could not do the same to the escorts. The Onslaughts and the Ravagers were clumsy ships, but they could still turn faster than the Verdict. Then there were the Brutes. They were fast, agile, and they rammed.
Still, it was the kroozer that represented the orks’ biggest advantage. Not because it was solid as a greenskin’s skull and could absorb horrific damage, but because Mulcebar could not attack and destroy it.
‘Ten seconds to range,’ the gunnery officer reported.
Ten seconds had left Mulcebar to decide his opening strategy. He didn’t need them. There was only one path to follow. The Salamanders had to board the ship. Now. So the attack would be as risky as it would be savage: blast through the escorts, launch the boarding torpedoes on a near approach to the kroozer, then withdraw and shadow.
Simple.
He doubted the orks would cooperate.
‘Maintain full ahead,’ Mulcebar ordered. ‘Prow cannons, fire on Ravagers. Port and starboard batteries, prepare for flanking attacks.’
The ships reached firing range. The flashes from the enemy were now true threats, and the Verdict of the Anvil answered the orks with its own fury. The forward bombardment cannons opened up. The ram ships were already swinging wide for their attack runs, but the other ork ships flew into the teeth of the Salamanders’ monstrous ordnance, either trusting in the strength of their shields, or too single-minded to think of evading. The leading Ravager was the first sacrifice on the altar of war. It was in the process of launching a massive torpedo salvo when the Verdict’s fire hit. The chain of explosions was immense. For a few moments, the ship became a comet, its momentum granting the flaming mass a strange coherence. Then even larger blasts from what had been ammunition bays spread the wreckage wide, forcing its companion ships off their direct course.
One of the Onslaughts had been coming on too hard on the Ravager’s heels. The attack ship was an awkward beast: merciless in a direct assault, with formidable forward shields and batteries, but with the manoeuvrability of a sauroch in mud. It rose up, flying above the worst of the boiling gases, exposing its vulnerable belly to the Verdict’s guns. The strike cruiser’s bombardment raked the Onslaught, tearing through useless shields and cracking the ork ship open like an egg. The Onslaught disintegrated, littering the void with metal fragments and tumbling, flash-frozen corpses.
The second Ravager swerved to port, then returned to its course. Its racks of torpedoes fired. They came at the Verdict of the Anvil in an undisciplined swarm. Mulcebar saw premature detonations, erratic flight paths, even outright collisions. But there were so many, too many. The orks were geniuses of quant
ity. It didn’t matter how imprecise their technology was. If they hurled enough spears at their target, some were bound to hit.
The Verdict’s side batteries lit the void with a hellish shield of explosions. They created a net of plasma and las, missiles and beams, a net of destruction to catch and exterminate any ship or projectile that dared approach. But there were too many.
‘Port, thirty degrees,’ Mulcebar called, and the Verdict began its turn into the torpedo salvo, reducing its profile. The impact warning sounded, whooping through the four-kilometre length of the ship. Three torpedoes slammed into the prow. The first was a dud, flattening itself against the shields. The other two exploded within less than a second of each other, embracing the bow of the ship in a blossom of flame. The void shields crackled, flaring bright with the overload, and flickered. The weakness was brief, but it was just long enough. Another torpedo struck the port side. The hull shook. Crimson runes cascaded across the tacticarium screens. Mulcebar took them in, seeing cause for both relief and concern. There were no breaches. But an entire rack of port batteries had taken a direct hit and been destroyed. There was a gap in the ship’s defences now.
The remaining turrets blazed hell at the Ravager, while the prow cannons sought out the remaining Onslaught. Mulcebar looked for the Brutes, and saw the two ramming ships beginning their attack, one on each flank. He couldn’t evade or outrun them. There might have been a slim chance of foiling the charge of one, but now an inescapable pincer was closing around the Verdict. The hope was to shatter the claws before they could meet with the flesh of the ship.
‘Side batteries, target ram ships,’ Mulcebar said. ‘Helmsmaster, take us down.’ The strike cruiser began as sharp a plunge as a beast its size could manage. The prow dropped below the plane of the engagement. The Brutes adjusted and continued to close. The Onslaught was slower. It had been weathering the storm of the Verdict’s barrage through a combination of speed, counter-measures and sheer, brutal resilience. Its own firepower was pressing the Verdict’s void shields hard. Now its las and missiles passed over the Verdict’s prow. The hits were more glancing, over a wider area of shield, and for a precious second, Mulcebar’s gunners again had a direct shot on an ork ship’s weaker armour. They took it. The cannon gutted the Onslaught. The colossal ordnance slammed deep into the belly of the ship and exploded, tearing the vessel in half. Its pieces tumbled end over end through the void, trailing gas and wreckage.
The Ravager was passing port and aft. In the last second before it moved beyond the arc of the remaining batteries, a lance struck its engines. The port side of the torpedo boat flashed like the death of a sun, then gouted red flame and ugly smoke. The ship spun into a drunken spiral, and a few seconds later the glare of its starboard engines went dark. Intact but drifting, the Ravager fell into the dark of the void. The oily flames of its wound were the receding marker of its existence.
Four ships down, and the length of the war could still be counted in seconds. Four kills, but Mulcebar didn’t allow himself to feel any satisfaction. It was the nature of all war, and especially void war, for crushing victory to become final defeat on a second’s whim of fate. The ramming ships were still coming for the Verdict. The strike cruiser was injured, and it hadn’t even begun its run at the kill kroozer. ‘Kill those Brutes!’ he shouted. He could feel the fate of the mission, and then of millions of souls, balancing on the cusp of the next few moments.
The starboard batteries set the heavens ablaze with turret- and missile-fire. Lances seared the dark, reaching for their agile, speeding target. Brutes were vessels designed for but a single function, but it was an act so completely at one with the ork character that there was a raw, ugly brilliance to their design. The prow accounted for over a third of a Brute’s length. It was an enormous, serrated knife blade, and every bolt, every rivet, every scrap of metal of the ship was in the service of that blade. The vessels were armoured not to withstand enemy fire but so they could hit harder. Their engines were better than those of other escort ships. They were faster and more manoeuvrable. And all of these strengths were conceived so that the Brute could fulfil its simple, crude destiny: to smash into another ship at high speed and rend it asunder. It was a crewed torpedo a thousand metres long.
Its size, however, meant that it could not evade fire forever, no matter how swift and agile it was. The pincer closed, the ram ships barrelled in, and on the starboard flank, the lances reached out, grasped and burned. Their target had been acquired. Energy concentrated into beams of destruction incarnate sliced deep into its core. Its engines blew, and though it was as if a dwarf star had gone nova in close proximity to the Verdict of the Anvil, the wash of superheated gases over the struggling void shields was a soft caress compared to the blow the Brute had so eagerly promised. The shock wave slammed into the strike cruiser. The Verdict yawed like a log in an angry river. The hull groaned.
That was to starboard. But to port...
Even as the lances were striking their quarry, Mulcebar was calling for a hard turn to port. The portside Brute had found the gap in the strike cruiser’s fire arc and was storming forwards. The turn was a desperate gambit to change the Verdict’s orientation and bring weaponry to bear on the ork ship-killer. Mulcebar had seen grand cruisers have their backs broken by the blow of a Brute. Now the Verdict’s hull did not just groan, it shrieked the agony of torque as the roll, the turn and the drive forwards unleashed warring physical forces. The movement was fast for a cruiser, and it was tortuously slow.
‘Brace for impact,’ Mulcebar ordered. The shriek of the klaxons climbed in pitch and rhythm.
And there, with the seconds draining away, the Brute appeared in the sights of one of the port batteries. Missiles streaked to intercept the ram ship. It was so close, and so big, that its speed was no longer a factor. The rockets couldn’t miss.
They didn’t. Projectiles a hundred metres long struck the Brute head-on. The punch of their mass was fused with the fury of their explosives. On the bridge, the portside occuliport flashed crimson from the detonation.
The tacticarium screen to Mulcebar’s right displayed the pageantry of destruction. The Brute emerged from the heart of the explosion. It was battered and rocked by secondary blasts. It had been knocked off course, and was skewing towards the Verdict at an oblique angle. It had been slowed. As flames plumed from all parts of the ork ship, it was hard to tell if its engines were still working, or even if it were still being piloted.
In the end, Mulcebar was looking at minor blessings. The vicious prow, though damaged, was not gone. The ship had not been destroyed. Collision was inevitable.
The Brute hit. It dragged itself along the midship flank, gouging the Verdict open. The impact shook the entire length of the ship with the force of an earthquake. Mulcebar kept his feet, but servitors and human crew were thrown down. He felt the wound reach into the heart of his ship. Then the Brute revealed itself to be a dying beast and it was burst apart by an internal blast. Its end was its final curse on the Verdict as it fed its flames into the gaping breach, infecting the cruiser with an immolating disease. The fever raced though corridors, leaping past shredded bulkheads. Power flickered and wavered. The overloaded void shields collapsed.
The runes on the tacticarium screens tumbled over each other in a litany of disaster. Each was a different message of woe, but together they spoke a single word: doom.
Mulcebar cursed as the containment mechanisms failed and the fire spread its wings.
In the torpedo room, the battle was experienced as sound and movement, punctuated by fragmentary glimpses through occuliports. The sounds were an oratorio of machine rage. An immense choir of booms was punctuated by the strobing of energy weapons and the shrieks of metal. When the Brute struck, it was as if Mount Deathfire had erupted in the heart of the ship. Seismic pain shook the walls and floor, and the sound was so gigantic that it blotted out thought.
The initial impact passed, b
ut the hull continued to tremble with smaller explosions. A constant vibration hummed through the walls, and something distant but terrible murmured through the ventilation system. Ha’garen recognised the voice of fire. Beneath his feet, the injured ship quivered.
At the far end of the torpedo room was a maintenance console. Ha’garen ran to it. Mechadendrites extended from his neck and plugged themselves in beneath the screen. The console was designed to monitor and service the atmospheric conditions local to the room itself, and nothing more, but it was still a conduit to the entire nervous system of the ship. Ha’garen’s consciousness became one with the Verdict of the Anvil. He had been aware of the anguish of the vessel’s machine-spirit before, but now its wailing of anger and pain was overwhelming, and for a moment it filled his entire existence. A tiny portion of his mind noted that his body was uttering a litany of calming, and he channelled the power of the ritual directly into the ship’s soul. Though the machine-spirit’s agony did not diminish, its frenzy abated just enough for Ha’garen to see and think clearly.
He took in the damage and the growth of the fire, traced the path it would follow, and evaluated the options in the same fractions of a second that he had trained to read a battlefield. The wound along the port flank was long and deep, and its effects spread far beyond the actual gap in the hull. The integrity of electrical and life-sustaining systems was badly compromised. The ship could be saved. Power could be stabilised and routed to engines, shields and weapons. Most of the Verdict of the Anvil would still be able to support life. It could still be the Emperor’s might and Vulkan’s wrath, and it could still complete its mission. Could. But all these things would become possible only through immediate, drastic action. If the Verdict were not saved in the next few seconds, it would not be saved at all.
There was precisely one option: amputation.
The fire roared through the passageways of the ship, gorging on combustibles. Servitors were incinerated at their posts and as they plodded along their dutiful paths. Some writhed, their nerve endings reacting to the burn even while their brains remained as oblivious to their deaths as to their lives. The sentient crew – serfs, grunts, officers, technicians, priests – fled before the flames, but the fire outpaced them and ran them down, devouring the oxygen they needed to scream as their flesh blackened to crisp ash. Salamanders caught by the inferno survived inside their armour, but there was nothing they could do for the humans, some of whom turned, in their final moments, with pleading arms outstretched to the gods who had suddenly been found wanting. Bulkhead doors dropped, automatically triggered to seal off the damaged area. The attempt was failing. Too many frames had been twisted out of true. There were too many alternate paths for the fire to take. It found them all. It was a lightning cancer flashing through the arteries and organs of the ship.
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