CHAPTER FIFTEEN: ASCENSION
As the Thunderhawk blasted out of the atmosphere, Gabriel’s eyes widened at the scene that greeted them in orbit. The vacuum was riddled with las-fire and spiralling dogfights. Torpedoes flashed through the combat zone, exploding into brilliant stars. It was a mire of space combat, the like of which Gabriel had not seen for decades.
“Captain Angelos,” crackled an unknown voice through the vox. “We are here to escort you back to the Ravenous Spirit.”
Gabriel clicked the view screen to a portside orientation and saw a detachment of Cobra gunships drop into formation alongside his Thunderhawk. The Thunderhawk may pack a considerable punch as a planetary assault craft, but it was slow and cumbersome in space—little more than a sitting duck.
“My thanks, pilot,” replied Gabriel.
Clicking the view screen back to a forward view, Gabriel watched the battle unfolding. There must have been nearly a dozen of fleet, eldar Shadowhunters, flashing and rolling in elegant formations, unleashing las-fire and torpedoes in vast numbers. He had seen such craft in action before, and he knew that they were easily a match for anything that the Imperial Navy could field against them. Just off to the side of the main battle, Gabriel could see the glorious, glowing shape of a wraithship, its cannons flaring and pulses of warp energy flaring from its beautifully curving wingtips. There was also a second eldar cruiser—part of the so-called Dragon-class, thought Gabriel. It was slightly withdrawn from the battle, but its weapons were working hard in support of its smaller escorts.
For a moment, Gabriel was struck by a sudden horror that there were so few Cobra gunships in the fray. It looked as though the eldar were winning. But then the glorious shape of the Ravenous Spirit loomed into view, with an almost complete complement of Cobras hanging in space off its starboard side. They appeared to be utterly uninvolved in the fight.
Gabriel affected a double-take, looking back into the quagmire of combat and trying to resolve his confusion. If the eldar were not fighting the Blood Ravens, who were they fighting? He could hardly make out an enemy at all, although it was clear that something was moving through the void at incredible speeds, making even the Shadowhunters look pedestrian. Whatever they were, they were small, manoeuvrable and extremely fast, flashing through the mire like shimmering flecks of shadow.
“What are those things?” asked Gabriel, vocalising his question without thinking about it as he squinted into the light-flecked darkness.
“I do not know their name or class, captain,” said Jonas, standing beside Gabriel at the view screen. “But the Imperium has confronted them before, though only rarely, and never with much success. They are necron vessels, Gabriel,” he added, as though sharing a secret.
“That’s not very reassuring, Jonas,” replied Gabriel dryly.
“Sergeant Kohath,” said Gabriel, clicking the channel on the vox. “Sergeant Kohath—why are you not assisting the eldar in this fight?”
There was a long hiss of static and then silence. For a moment Gabriel wondered whether the vox was still not operating properly, but then a reply came.
“Captain Angelos—good to hear your voice again.” It was Kohath. “We have only just disengaged from battle with the eldar, captain. I had not anticipated your preference to join them at this time.” There was a note of scepticism in his voice. “Sergeant Saulh of the Ninth is here with the Rage of Erudition, captain. He came with a request from Captain Ulantus that we should make speed for the Lorn system—it seems that the green-skins have invaded. I thought that we might make our way there now that the eldar are otherwise engaged, captain.”
Gabriel smiled. He liked Kohath—he was a straightforward military man and always spoke his mind. Saulh was a different matter, but his opinion was of no concern to the Commander of the Watch. “We will not be going to Lorn just yet, sergeant,” he replied. “And I will receive your report on the fight with the eldar later. For now, you will direct your Cobra gunships to assist in the battle against the necron. Do you understand me, sergeant?”
There was another cackle of hesitation. “Necron, captain?” Kohath’s voice betrayed his surprise.
“Do you understand me, sergeant?” repeated Gabriel.
“Yes, captain. It will be done. Preparations are already underway for your return aboard the Ravenous Spirit.”
“Very good, sergeant,” replied Gabriel, clicking off the vox and turning back to the battle outside. As he watched, a line of Cobra gunships streamed into the fray, engaging the impossibly rapid Dirge Raiders as best they could.
Striding back onto the command deck of his strike cruiser, Gabriel surveyed the mess that Kohath had left him with. A number of the terminals were shattered and burnt out. There were stains of dried blood on the deck and at least three of the crew were missing.
“I see that you have been busy in my absence, sergeant,” said Gabriel, nodding his greeting to Kohath as the sergeant turned from the main view screen.
“It has not been uneventful, captain,” conceded Kohath, bowing efficiently.
Outside, the spiralling gyre of the space battle was still raging. No matter how many of the Dirge Raiders that the Shadowhunters and Cobras destroyed, dozens more flashed out of the planet’s ever-darkening atmosphere to replace them. It was as though there was an entire fleet hidden in the bowels of the planet, waiting to be born into the cold abyss of space.
The Blood Ravens Cobras were suffering more casualties than the eldar Shadowhunters; they were only just fast enough to deal with the eldar vessels, and these necron fighters put the other aliens’ vessels to shame.
“Loren, take us closer to the action,” snapped Gabriel. “And Krayem, tell the gunners to provide fire in support of our Cobras.” Gabriel paused for a moment. “Where’s Reuben?” he asked.
In the shadows of his command deck, Uldreth watched the Vampire Raiders flash out of the planet’s atmosphere and head directly for the effervescent form of the Eternal Star, skirting the edge of the combat with elegant accomplishment. He knew that Macha was on board one of them, and his soul was a curdling mix of relief and anger. He was naturally relieved that Biel-Tan’s farseer was still alive, but he could not dampen his resentment about his own conduct in this increasingly messy affair. Macha had been right from the start. Laeresh had been right. Even the old Fire Dragon, Draconir, had been right. The space battle at Lsanthranil’s Shield was here and now, in the present, where it had always been—waiting for the past to catch up with it.
A little while later, Uldreth also watched the ugly shapes of the Blood Ravens Thunderhawks roar out into orbit, ploughing their way clumsily into the midst of the battle on their way back to one of the strike cruisers that had ended the Reaper’s Blade and spilled its spirit pool into the atmosphere of the tomb world.
His lips curled into a snarl. The mon-keigh had always been thorns in the bubbles of space-time, ruining the perfect futures that the farseers had tried to sculpt for the sons of Asuryan. He hissed involuntarily, venting his disgust in a physical form as it boiled out of his mind: how could the farseer believe that these ignorant, clumsy fools could do anything other than harm? Disaster followed them like diseased rats.
A sudden convulsion pulsed through orbit, rippling out from the planet as another vessel started to push its way slowly out of the atmosphere. A tiny point of shimmering black was the first thing to break the atmosphere, like the tip of an iceberg. It grew slowly, with the atmosphere bursting into flames on all sides of it as the pyramid pushed out into space. A moment later, and the broad, crescent-shaped hull of the Shroud Cruiser pressed up into the troposphere, highlighted in an aura of burning ozone.
Macha! Uldreth’s thoughts were urgent and precisely directed. Macha! He has ascended!
The Avenging Sword disengaged its cannons from its support role in the dogfights and redirected them down towards the emerging Shroud Cruiser, knowing that the Yngir lord was encased within it. At exactly the same time, the weapons of the Eternal Star a
lso turned down to atmosphere, pounding it with tirades of violence.
Even as the Shroud pulled clear of the planet and into orbit, with lashes of fire and torpedoes bouncing off its hull, entire squadrons of Dirge Raiders zipped out of the atmosphere in its wake, flashing straight into the mire of combat with the Shadowhunters and the lumbering mon-keigh gunships.
Starting slowly the Shroud quickly gathered pace as it accelerated off towards the sun, apparently ignoring the continuous bombardment to which it was being subjected by the eldar cruisers.
“Sergeant Saulh—hold this position and provide assistance to the Cobras,” said Gabriel. “I assume that the Exterminatus array is still functioning aboard the Rage of Erudition, sergeant?”
“Yes, captain. It remains undamaged,” replied Saulh, his image crackling and snowing on the view screen.
“You are to fire on Rahe’s Paradise when you are ready,” directed Gabriel firmly. This was not the first time that he had ordered the destruction of a planet, but perhaps that was why it felt like such a weight of responsibility. “We can no longer leave it intact—its labyrinthine structure is riddled with slumbering necron. It must be destroyed.”
“But captain…” Saulh’s voice faded out, as though he wasn’t quite sure what to say. “Captain Angelos, what evidence do we have of contamination on such a scale? We cannot just exterminate entire planets, Gabriel.”
Gabriel sighed, looking out through another view screen at the tumbling, curdling space battle developing outside. “There is evidence enough, sergeant. And I myself am certain. The responsibility is mine,” he said. Just as is was on Cyrene, he added in his mind. “And you are quite wrong, Saulh. We can exterminate entire planets. It is the righteous wrath of the Emperor himself that we bring to bear against Rahe’s Paradise—and it is in his honour that we must do what we were pledged to do many millennia ago.”
“As you say, captain,” replied Saulh, not convinced but duty-bound to obey. “It will be done.”
“You are sure about this, Gabriel?” asked Jonas, standing at his captain’s shoulder. “The eldar witch is not to be trusted.”
“Can you doubt your own eyes, Jonas? Look out there! I am not doing this because Macha told me to, I am doing it because it is right! Look at the floods of Dirges. Even if we stop their reinforcements, the destruction of the planet will have been justified.”
Gabriel clicked the main view screen back to the scene of battle and watched the necron cruiser accelerating off towards the sun with the two eldar cruisers in pursuit. “We must assist her,” he said. “Loren—take us into the sun.”
The Shroud Cruiser closed on the star as hostile fire rained onto it from its eldar hunters. It was beginning to suffer under the onslaught and it started to rotate to face them. Even as he watched, Uldreth could see dark sunspots appearing on the red star behind the Shroud and thin solar flares lashing out from its burning surface like massive storms. He knew what was coming.
The sunspots grew and darkened as the solar flares lengthened and strengthened, reaching out towards the Shroud as it pitched up vertically in front of the star. Then in an incredible burst of power, a searing flare exploded out from the sun striking the central pyramidal structure on the Shroud, from where it was refracted into a constellation of beams that flashed through the other pyramid-prisms on its hull, lighting the vessel like a brilliant, geometric star of its own. Then, the beams reconverged on the central pyramid and combined into a single bolt, lashing out at the Eternal Star as a blinding lightning-arc.
The wraithship quaked under the impact, spiralling backwards, out of control.
No! yelled Uldreth into the warp, watching Macha’s cruiser tumbling uncontrollably through space.
Just as he screamed, his own vessel returned fire, throwing everything it had into the side of the Shroud.
At the same time, a flood of fire lashed into the Yngir cruiser from another side, and Uldreth snatched his head around to see the roaring engines of a Blood Ravens strike cruiser blasting into the blind side of the Shroud, throwing las-fire and torpedoes at the nearly impregnable hull. It was also firing some kind of bombardment cannon that was probably designed for planetary assaults, but its shells were punching into the armoured plates of the Shroud and detonating inside.
In a matter of seconds, part of the central pyramid on the Yngir cruiser exploded and cracked off, sending the concentrated beams of solar power crackling for uncontrolled targets. The lightning arcs lashed out into space, striking the Avenging Sword with a wild and crackling whip of power, but then turning back on themselves and engulfing the Shroud itself.
The vessel convulsed and shook, throbbing with an overload of power, and then detonated right in its core. The silvery black Shroud Cruiser erupted into flames of darkness and then blew apart, sending lethal shards and shadows hurtling out through the system. For a moment, silhouetted against the dying sun, where the Shroud had once been, there was the shimmering figure of a glorious humanoid—like a star god caught in his own inferno. And then it was gone.
The last of the Dirge Raiders spiralled down into the atmosphere of Rahe’s Paradise, flames pouring from its engine vents and armoured plates free falling from its hull. Beneath its fall, the planet’s surface was vaguely visible beneath the clouds of toxic smoke and viral contagions that roiled around in the atmosphere. The Exterminatus arrays had caused all of the volcanoes around the equator to erupt at once, spilling the planet’s core out onto its surface and effectively turning the entire world inside out. For good measure, the epic bombardment had continued, throwing viral and bacterial agents down into the mix to ensure that nothing could survive, even if it could swim in molten rock and breath sulphur. In a matter of minutes, the atmosphere had been completely eaten away and then, in less than an hour, the planet’s structural integrity collapsed and it simply fell apart, scattering itself into asteroids and meteorites.
Gabriel watched the planet die with confidence. This time he knew that he had done the right thing. It would, in any case, be only a matter of days before the local star would collapse in on itself and turn supernova. The necron lord had destabilised it enough, even in that short period of exposure. Emperor only knows what harm it could have done had it escaped the system.
Clicking the view screen, Gabriel watched the speeding form of the eldar Ghost Dragon flash after the tumbling wraithship. It had departed without a word only an instant after Gabriel had destroyed the necron cruiser. Not a single word, and certainly no thanks.
The Litany of Fury lurched out of the warp on the edge of the Lorn system, and its corridors fell into sudden silence. Ulantus punched the release on the great doors of the Implantation Chamber and stepped inside, letting gusts of noxious gases flood out into the pristine, brightly lit passageway outside.
Lying on the ceremonial tablet in the middle of the chamber, with the apothecary fussing around him with dull, dirty surgical instruments, struggled the scarred and horrified figure of Ckrius. He had survived the warp jump, it seemed. Walking around to the side of the adamantium table, Ulantus saw that the boy’s head had been cut open from ear to ear in order to expose the upper half of his brain.
The apothecary bowed slightly to the captain as he lay the flat, circular sus-an membrane into the neophyte’s skull, and Ulantus smiled at the irony. In a few years time, that membrane would enable Ckrius to drop into a state of suspended animation in the event of extreme physical trauma. It was the same technology as was used in stasis sarcophagi for Marines irredeemably injured in the course of duty—they could be kept alive almost indefinitely, until a dreadnought shell became available and they could be transplanted into a new, entirely mechanical body. For a moment, Ulantus wondered whether Ckrius might enjoy the irony of the trauma he was experiencing in order to enable him to survive even more trauma later on.
“Captain, we are entering the Lorn system now,” reported Korinth, bowing as he entered the sacred space of the Implantation Chamber. “You are needed on the com
mand deck.”
“Of course,” replied Ulantus, nodding and following the librarian out.
As he walked onto the command deck, Captain Ulantus cursed the Commander of the Watch once again. There was no sign of the Ravenous Spirit anywhere the in system. Not even Saulh was there in the Rage of Erudition. Gabriel had probably roped him in to some kind of fanciful scheme on Rahe’s Paradise.
But the system was far from empty. There was space trash and debris drifting all over the outer reaches of the system—sure signs that the foul green-skins had passed this way—and the fifth planet was a veritable blaze of activity. The Imperial Navy had vessels in orbit, where they had already engaged the ork fleet.
“Captain Ulantus,” reported a serf on the command deck. “There are incoming vessels.”
“Show me,” snapped Ulantus, flicking the view screen.
He watched the eldar fleet slip gracefully into real space and then accelerate towards him. If Gabriel had really wanted to confront the eldar, he should have come to Lorn where he’s needed, thought Ulantus bitterly, instead of running off to Rahe’s Paradise on some fanciful errand. Not for the first time, Ulantus cursed the cavalier Commander of the Watch.
“Prepare for battle,” he said calmly. “It seems that we must do battle with Gabriel’s eldar after all,” he added quietly, although not quite to himself.
“It was not a complete loss, captain,” said Tanthius, as Techmarine Ephraim tended to his damaged armour. “We did come away with a number of very able aspirants. Caleb managed to save a group of six local warriors, including a young psyker called Varjak, whom Jonas feels will make a fine librarian one day.”
“That is just as well, old friend. Our visit to Rahe’s Paradise was more expensive than I anticipated. We can afford no more losses on this scale. The Third Company is skating perilously close to the line,” replied Gabriel thoughtfully. The fact that Rahe’s Paradise was the third recruitment planet in a row that had cost more Blood Ravens than it had recruited was not lost on him.
[Dawn of War 02] - Ascension Page 32