Sevatar turned to the Master of Vox, in the dark robes of a Legion serf. ‘Hail them,’ he said, gesturing to the flashing rune.
The slave tapped at his console, mechanical fingers a blur. ‘Done, sire.’
‘This is the Nightfall. Excoriator, report. Why have you killed your engines?’
The seconds ticked by. ‘No reply, sire,’ said the Master of Vox.
‘Thank you,’ Sevatar sneered. ‘I can hear that myself. Var Jahan, do you read me?’
Silence, again, was the reply. Sevatar drew his thumb across his throat, ordering the link’s end. He had a feeling he knew what caused the Excoriator to halt, and the idea wasn’t a pleasant one.
The Nightfall’s strategium bustled with slaves, serfs and servitors doing their duty, emotion rising from their skin with the stench of sweat. The tension was a palpable thing, something Sevatar could almost savour. Training and familiarity shielded them from the kind of fear he’d feel as a tingle on his tongue, but the anticipation still soured their collective breath. Hundreds of hearts – and surrogates of clockwork and chrome, simulating vital organs – melded into something almost operatic.
‘Time until maximum weapons range?’
‘Twenty-nine seconds, captain.’
‘All hands, brace for incoming fire. Cripple every ship we pass, but be ready for the flagship. I want everything, everything, aimed at the Invincible Reason when we pass her. Kill her, and we can leave Thramas with our heads held high.’
A desperate brutality had both sides ignoring every convention of void warfare. The Nightfall and the Invincible Reason knifed through space to reach one another, abandoning their strengths as long-range weapons platforms in favour of mauling each other face to face. Imperial void battles were usually fought at breathtaking distances, with mathematics and logistics as vital as a captain’s instinct.
The Nightfall ploughed through the opposing fleet, its shields revealed in swirling, iridescent light under the onslaught. It burst past the Star of the First Legion, scattered the cruiser’s escorts, and killed its way through the enemy outriders to plunge into the heart of the enemy fleet. The VIII Legion warships roared in pursuit, running for the hole in the enemy formation punched by their wounded, crumbling flagship.
Rage ruined all need for subtlety and tact. The two flagships, among the largest and most heavily-armed creations ever to rise from the collective genius of the human race, speared closer with no regard for their support craft.
Sevatar watched the spread of occulus screens, each one alive with an image of ships dying in the dark; black steel breaking apart, ghost-fire vanishing into the void. Sensitive Nostraman eyes winced closed across the bridge, as one of the screens showed the warship Tenebor die under the guns of seven Dark Angels cruisers. Its prow wreckage, still haemorrhaging debris and crew, lanced through the rear of the Pridemark, igniting the Dark Angels vessel’s warp engines and killing the entire ship in a migraine of foul light.
The fifty Night Lords vessels dived straight and true, never deviating, never diverting. Dark Angels cruisers banked and veered to avoid collisions – the heavy warships rolling with ponderous grace, the smaller destroyers accelerating aside, apparently effortless.
Sevatar kept wincing, struggling to focus on the brightness of every ship’s death, or even the eye-aching streams of massed lance fire. The void surrounding the VIII Legion formation was bitter with the flaring rage of three hundred firing solutions. Ship after ship dissolved under the First Legion’s fire, their hulls pockmarked by laser batteries and sliced open by lances.
A voice rasped over the shaking deck, sighing a single word. ‘Nightfall.’ There might have been more, but static swallowed all trace.
Sevatar knew the voice. His glance flicked to the relevant screen, just in time to see the Blade in the Black die surrounded and crippled in a storm of Dark Angels destroyers.
We’ll need a new fleet admiral, he thought with a smirk. Another ship, a Dark Angels vessel, went critical off the Nightfall’s port bow. This one was close enough to hammer the ship with shockwaves, and bleach several occulus screens with distortion.
The lights did more than hurt his eyes. The pain acid-danced back along the nerves in his skull, flicking at his forebrain. He wiped his mouth on the back of his gauntlet, the sudden nosebleed barely showing against the red glove. Now, of all times. Typical.
On the primary occulus, the immense bulk of the Invincible Reason hove into view, scarred and burning from the VIII Legion’s own lance strikes. Sevatar could almost see the insectile buzzing of his fighter squadrons around the enemy flagship, thick as fleas on a mangy hound.
‘The moment we come abeam…’ he said, and went no further.
‘Captain?’ called one of the deck officers.
Sevatar breathed out, staring at one of the screens drenched in static. A faint image resolved, of a ship that should be anywhere else but here.
‘This,’ Sevatar said to no one in particular, ‘will not end well.’
‘Break!’ Kyven cried out.
‘A few more seconds,’ Taye hissed. She fired, streaming energy from the underslung lascannons, slicing through a Fury’s wing.
‘Break!’ Kyven yelled again.
Taye wrenched on her control sticks, pulling into a spiralling dive, and Vespera’s engines gave a draconic roar as the fighter strained to obey. Las-fire sliced past them, close enough to leave dancing afterimages across Taye’s vision.
‘He’s still coming,’ Kyven called back.
Taye breathed a Nostraman curse into her rebreather, pulling out of the dive too hard, too fast, leaning right into a brutal arc. Inertial dampeners kicked with enough force to slam all three of their helmets against the sides of their restraint thrones.
That’s when she saw the Excoriator. Dizzy, with the taste of blood on her tongue, she threw everything she had into rolling away from the oncoming tide of dark iron.
The warship burned past them, vast enough and close enough to make her shiver, fully eclipsing the rest of the battle as its battlemented hull sailed past in flames. The breakneck dogfight she’d been locked in simply ceased to exist. The Night Lords vessel slammed indiscriminately through space, far too huge to care about the dealings of the steel flies around its skin.
Taye’s earpiece surrendered to static as she lost contact with her wingman. She knew without a second’s doubt his fighter, Relinquo, was a smear on the Excoriator’s rippling void shields. Voices cried out – in pain, in fear, in frustration, all demanding the same thing. What do we do? What do we do? What do we do?
Taye needed to spit, but taking off her rebreather was hardly an option. She swallowed the rank, coppery slime her spit had become, and leaned back in her throne, bleeding power from the stabilisers back into the engines.
‘Whoever the hell is still alive, follow me.’
Kyven’s voice was strained behind her. He kept his words off the vox-web. ‘We just lost half the squadron, and only four of the Masquerade are showing up on my auspex.’
‘We’re still here.’ Vespera gave a smooth shiver as Taye kicked her back into attack speed. The Nightfall bloomed ahead, savagely damaged, still sucking up more than its share of enemy ordnance. ‘And we still have a flagship to defend.’
The Excoriator heeded neither friend nor foe. The VIII Legion ships demanding it fall into formation went as ignored as the Dark Angels cruisers drowning it in fire.
Sevatar watched it roll, wounded to the point of being held together by nothing more than spit and spite. He could tell from its trajectory that it wasn’t even aiming to ram one of the enemy ships. It was just… dying. A drawn-out, graceless dive through the enemy fleet, breaking the VIII Legion’s formation, and putting a blade to the throat of the late Admiral Yul’s first and final plan as void commander.
Sevatar sighed. Despite the tremors rattling the strategium, he ca
lmly sat down in the primarch’s throne, and rested his cheek on his gauntleted knuckles. A shame, really. It had been a good plan.
He wiped blood from his face again, this time from his jawline, below his ear. How very vexing.
The bridge vox hissed back into life with several false starts. ‘Sevatar,’ said a deep, distorted voice, bare of any emotion beyond the faintest, oily amusement.
‘Welcome back, father.’
‘We can finish this now. Join me.’
‘Let me guess,’ replied Sevatar. ‘You plan to teleport onto the Invincible Reason, don’t you?’
‘I have a fight to finish.’
‘Yes,’ said Sevatar, reaching for his spear. ‘Of course you do. Does it not matter that in a handful of minutes, we can punch out through the Angels’ rearguard and rip into the warp?’
The answer was several seconds in coming, preceded by the muted shouts of dying humans aboard a burning ship.
‘Come with me. Bring the Atramentar. Finish this at my side.’
Sevatar looked out over the bridge, elevated above the crew on a raised dais. The officers and serfs not frantically engaged at their stations or down on the deck with concussion and blood loss were looking up at him with the expressions of lost, moronic mongrels.
‘Is that an order, sire?’ he asked, already knowing the answer, already reaching for his helm.
‘You know it is.’ The link blanked in another wash of static.
‘This is why the Imperials always win,’ Sevatar mused aloud. ‘They don’t get in each other’s way. Discipline may be dull, but it has undeniable military application. How long until we can fire boarding pods?’
‘We’ll be abeam of the Invincible Reason in just under ten minutes.’
Ten minutes. Every Night Lord on the flagship was already at battle stations, ready to repel boarders. The Atramentar would be within a stone’s throw of their teleportation chambers, and those that weren’t would be close to at least one boarding pod launch bay.
Sevatar rose from the throne, momentarily glanced at the waterfall-spill screed of Nostraman runes on the damage report data-feed, and stalked from the bridge with only one final command to the crew.
‘I may be gone a while,’ he said. ‘Try not to get my ship killed.’
Chapter VIII
Unwanted Battle
The ships were abeam now. He could tell without needing to see, discerning it purely from the Nightfall’s distinctive shivers. Lance fire didn’t rattle the decks the same way impact damage or las-batteries did. Every tremor of torment had its own sensation. This was the grinding vibration of massed broadsides against unshielded steel, the void-war equivalent of pulling in close to your prey and knifing them in the ribs.
If they ever made it through this, the Nightfall would need to be drydocked for an eternity. They might as well commission a new flagship – Sevatar suspected it’d be finished faster than repairing the damage. He could smell the smoke of dying machinery all around; the chemical stink of burning cables and melting metal. People were screaming on decks above and below.
The First Captain made his way down the shaking hallways, immersed in the darkness so common on VIII Legion ships. Crew members passed him with lamp packs and photo-visors to penetrate the gloom, giving him a wide berth. He paid no attention to them; he knew in a vague sense that they loathed him, but he wasn’t sure why, and couldn’t bring himself to care. Their hatred or regard never made any difference to his existence, either way. They obeyed when he wanted them to obey. The rest of the time they scrambled to get out of his path whenever they saw him. The perfect balance.
As he ran, he spoke a steady stream of orders into the vox, coordinating the Atramentar first and his sub-captains second. Of the nine companies berthed on the Nightfall, he’d only risk one. His own. The Atramentar were coming with him; the others, despite their captains’ protestations, would remain aboard the Nightfall and make the run to Terra.
Sevatar was under no illusions that they’d be coming back from this assault, and he had no compulsion to drag thousands of warriors to inevitable, unnecessary deaths. Let them live their lives to their own ends, in pursuit of more purposeful deaths.
He was still running when Atramentar squad leaders started reporting teleportation ignition flares. Each report ended with a Mechanicum adept bleating out an addendum in monotone: ‘Translocation process complete.’
The ship gave another shake, this one brutal enough to throw several crew from their feet. One of them – a female in a technician’s overalls – broke her head open on the deck when she fell. Sevatar vaulted them all as he kept running, smelling the blood from their injuries.
The next shiver was an echo of the last. What little light existed on the Nightfall flickered and died for several seconds. It made no difference; his eye-lenses presented everything in prey-sight monochrome, and he was almost at the nearest translocation platform.
A sound made him stop dead. A straining, yearning whine of protesting metal – a whale’s mournful song as it was gored by hunters’ harpoons. The lights died again, leaving him in the familiarity of absolute darkness.
‘Reactor death,’ the vox droned. ‘Reactor death. Reactor death.’
Clutching his chainglaive, he started sprinting again, his armour’s systems answering his need by opening an automatic channel to the bridge.
‘Report,’ he voxed.
‘We’re dead in space, captain, but momentum is
carrying us forwards. Half the turrets are deactivated; the hangars are locked open; the primary and secondary lance arrays are silent; and most of the torpedo racks aren’t responding. Spinal battlements are still firing from reserve generators. Life support and artificial gravity are still feeding from their secondaries, but the void shields are down for good.’
‘Navigation?’
‘Dead. The arterials to the secondary power reserves are cut.’
His blood ran cold. Colder, at least, than usual. ‘Boarding pods?’
‘They won’t fire, captain.’
‘Teleportation?’
‘Dead.’
Sevatar skidded to a halt, breathing through his closed teeth. He was the only member of the First Company trapped on the stricken flagship. The others were already aboard the Invincible Reason, fighting for their lives, killing Dark Angels at the primarch’s side.
‘I will not abandon them,’ he whispered.
‘Captain? What d–’
He killed the link to the bridge, and started running again. This time, he descended through the ship, navigating corridors blocked by wreckage and running through hallways choked by smoke and fire. Dead crew lay everywhere he looked.
‘Taye,’ he voxed. ‘Taye, listen to me.’
‘There he is.’
‘I see him.’ Taye rolled between two spires on the Nightfall’s backbone, drawing closer to the Corsair she was chasing down. The battlements blurred past below, but she didn’t risk firing. There was enough firepower striking the flagship’s burning back; she wasn’t going to add to it with a misfired stream from her lascannons.
All the while, the curved Nostraman rune for Hollow pulsed in her heads-up display. She needed to land and reload. Vespera’s missile racks had been empty less than a minute after the fighter raced from the hangar bay.
‘Let it go,’ Kyvan warned her.
‘Not a chance.’ She chased harder, faster, rolling between another two armoured spires. ‘We’ve almost got him.’
The Corsair was an ugly thing, vulture-winged and fat-arsed – a back-heavy brute that Taye had never liked the look of. This one wasn’t going home to any victory parade, she’d see to that.
Hollow, Hollow, Hollow, her missile racks complained, again and again. She had her cannons, but…
‘Vensent,’ she breathed. ‘I’ll overshoot him once he passes the Travius Pylons.
Break his back when I do.’
‘Consider it done.’ He rolled his swivelling, pivoting throne back to face forwards, lining up his turret. ‘I can kill him now.’
‘His wreckage will hit the superstructure.’ Taye spoke through clenched teeth, eyes narrowed with effort. Sweat painted her back, making her spinal sockets sting. Turrets below them spat lascannon beams into the void, some aiming for enemy attack craft, others carving insignificant wounds in the skin of the Invincible Reason.
Taye risked a glance upwards, seeing the matt-black hull of the enemy flagship filling the roof of her cockpit. No amount of training could prevent a moment of disorientation. She blinked and refocused on her prey running ahead.
‘Plasma bombs,’ Vensent called back. Taye could see the detonations popping up along the Nightfall’s spine as the bomber’s payload started to rain down. Vespera was climbing, almost above the Corsair now, and she still had to weave around the sprayed streams of laser fire from the bomber’s frantic crew.
‘Just kill him!’
Vensent fired, carving down and severing the Corsair across the middle. The front half, with its hunched wings, tumbled onwards into the one of the two Travius Pylon towers, shattering the remote anti-aircraft defences on the spire’s battlements. The bomber’s bulky engines hiccupped blindly, spinning away into the void.
‘We’re engaged,’ Kyvan voxed. ‘Another Fury, chasing us down the spine. I think they’re annoyed at the eight Corsairs we’ve killed.’
‘I can lose him.’
‘Get away from the damn ship. We need to break off.’
She didn’t bother answering. The Nightfall’s shields were down and enemy bombers buzzed around with clingy, verminous tenacity, spitting plasma bombs into the flagship’s structural weak points. She was going nowhere.
‘Taye,’ her vox crackled. The voice was marred by sirens in the background. ‘Taye, listen to me.’
‘First Captain?’
Sevatar repeated her name, and gave her an order she didn’t understand.
Shadows of Treachery Page 30