‘I… I don’t… Please repeat that order, sir.’
‘I said “land your fighter”. At once.’
Sevatar was waiting for them, his armour streaked with scorch marks, and his chainglaive in hand. The calm at the eye of the storm; around him, the chaos of the hangar rattled and raged on, with serfs extinguishing fires, debris crashing down from the ceiling, and amber flashing lights warning of a depressurisation threat.
He watched the Wrath fighter come in at speed, most of its painted hull bleached down to the gunmetal grey beneath, scored away by the clattering pebbles of debris that always filled the space between battling warships.
Vespera, it was called. Yes, that was it.
The fighter fired the retros beneath its wings, and by the lascannons mounted at the nose. Its vented thrust screamed out into the hangar, sharper than a condor’s shriek. Sevatar’s left eye twitched once, before his helm’s auditory senses adjusted to compensate.
Taye didn’t use the runway to touch down; she killed all thrust with timed bursts from her retros, and brought the fighter down in a tight spiral. Sevatar was moving the moment the landing claws crunched onto the deck. He jumped up, grabbed the edge of one slicked-back shark-fin wing, and pulled himself up with one hand.
‘Go,’ he voxed.
There was no answer, and a glance at the cockpit showed Kyven staring back at him wide-eyed from the rear-facing seat, with Taye hunched round in her throne, trying to see what was going on. He could hear them breathing over the vox.
‘You… you can’t be serious,’ she said softly.
Sevatar stalked along the back of the fighter, mag-locking his boots to the Wrath’s dark skin a few metres behind the cockpit. He shook his head at the naviseer’s moronic expression of shock.
‘I said go.’
He crouched low, taking three punches to smash a deep dent in the fighter’s hull, just enough to grip the edge. He kept his spear held behind his back, angled away.
The fighter thrummed beneath his boots, coming alive again.
‘Sevatar, this is insane.’
He rolled his black eyes behind the red eye-lenses. How tiring it was, to hear those words yet again. Sometimes, he wondered if ‘duty’ was just a word to other people, and they never truly grasped its meaning.
Without a launch catapult, the fighter lifted off slowly, gliding away from the deck towards the wide maw leading into the void. The castle battlements of the enemy flagship were drifting by, tantalisingly close, but impossibly far.
‘Get me to the Invincible Reason,’ he voxed. ‘My men are fighting aboard, and I’ll die before I send them into a battle I wouldn’t join myself.’
He could hear the grin in her words, the smile breaking through her disbelief. ‘You’re taking that oath of First Company brotherhood far too seriously,’ she said.
Sevatar didn’t reply. He was Atramentar. His brothers were Atramentar. There was nothing to say.
Kyvan spent the next three minutes looking directly at the crouched form the of the VIII Legion’s First Captain, mere metres away. Sevatar’s crested helm remained fixed forwards, the skull-painted faceplate staring ahead at the Dark Angels warship. Kyvan kept wondering what expression was behind the slanted red eye-lenses.
Taye, for her part, leeched everything Vespera could give, burning the engines dangerously hot, engaging no one, rolling in spirals and pitchbacks to shake loose any of the black Furies that tried to latch onto her. She was all too aware of the g-force her ‘passenger’ would be suffering, but had to keep the engines flaring for maximum manoeuvrability.
When she pulled close to the Invincible Reason, Taye angled to cut alongside the hull, weaving between the battlement towers.
‘Where do you need to be?’
‘Close to the bridge.’ Sevatar’s vox-voice had all the warmth of a wolf’s dirge-howl.
Close to the bridge would bring them in range of a hundred and more defensive turrets. Taye swore under breath.
‘Watch your language, wing commander.’
She gunned the engines harder, switching to the squadron’s general link. ‘Peritus and Electus, form on my wing, at once.’
‘Copy, commander.’
‘On my way, ma’am.’
Taye swooped closer to the hull, almost close enough to lose a wing if she rolled. Her heart kept rhythm for her as she dived into the most foolish attack run of her military service.
Chapter IX
The Prince of Crows
He had to admit, even if only to himself, that this was one of his less wise ideas. No amount of biological enhancement, nor even the most advanced suit of Maximus-pattern power armour, could shield him from the gravitational forces pressing against him. He felt nausea for the first time in over a century, which was novel enough to make him grin.
The pressure against his skull and limbs, however, was less entertaining. The suspensor-wire pressure flightsuits worn by Taye and her crew shared some basic functionality with one of the layers in his own ceramite armour, but it didn’t render him immune to physics. Having skinned and flayed countless humans, as well as warriors from five different Legions – including his own – he suspected the feeling of inertial forces threatening to pull his bones apart was fairly approximate on the continuum of pain.
Stark lascannon beams flensed his vision, each one a rapid spear that defied his eye-lenses’ attempts to fade and counter the brightness. Taye’s fighter swayed and swung beneath him; he could feel her doing her best to coax performance from the Wrath without shaking him loose or killing him with any wrenching manoeuvres. Even so, as the black towers slashed past either side, and the battlements below became a blurring, queasy road, he came close to cursing the idea as a rash move.
But then, that would be admitting he’d been wrong. Sevatar snorted at the notion. We can’t have that, now.
The stars tumbled across the sky as Taye rolled again. Sevatar’s one concession to the insanity of his plan was to grunt once, quietly, with his head aching from the acid of dizziness. That, also, was novel. His genetic implants had left him almost immune to disorientation these past decades.
He felt Taye ease back on the speed, winding and weaving to dodge the pyrotechnic storm of turret fire from below. He knew she’d never be able to reach a dead stop, but slowing enough to lessen his momentum would be more than enough. A few bruises and broken bones would be easier to bear than being pulped against the Invincible Reason’s armour plating.
But her arc carried him over the spinal castles, across the bow, and he finally realised what she was doing.
‘This is even stupider than my idea,’ he voxed to her.
Her voice was tight, tense, her attention anywhere but on him. ‘Your way will see you smeared across the hull. My way, you get to play hero.’
The fighter drifted into the landing bay, retros flaring to slow down. Servitor crews immediately stood straighter, dead eyes and refocusing eye-lenses tracking the craft’s approach. Scorch marks darkened the hull in place of paint, and its insignias were similarly bleach-burned into vague nothingness.
The closest munitions officer was a man by the name of Halles Korevi, and he was directing a loader team to rearm this latest in an endless stream of landing and redeploying fighters, when it jinked above the deck and shot him to pieces with a volley of roaring blue energy from its lascannons. Internal fire-teams opened up on the drifting Wrath, naval armsmen discharging wide-mouth shotcannons that had little hope of hitting a moving target.
An armoured figure rose from the fighter’s back, a bolter in one hand and a spear in the other. He fired down as he ran along the backswept wing, four bolts bursting in the chests of four armsmen, spreading viscera across their fellows. Shotcannon fire still clattered against his midnight-blue ceramite, leaving ignorable silver scratches on the dark plate. He reached the end of the wing and jumped clear.
The fighter’s engines whined louder, firing the moment his boots left the wing. In a burst of engine wash, she was gone, leaving a sonic boom and the alkaline stink of lascannon discharge in her wake.
The figure landed hard in a crouch, boots sinking twin dents into the iron deck. Atop the spear, a metre-long chainblade started chewing the hangar’s cold air. The armsmen, to their credit, moved into cover and kept firing, despite never training to face a warrior of the Legiones Astartes.
Sevatar twitched twice, flinching as the spreading flak rattled against his armour. Irritating bastards. Retinal warnings trailed and flashed across his vision, and his armour’s autosenses kept pulling at his left arm, trying to raise his bolter to fire at the humans in cover. He locked the boltgun to his thigh, and the moment he rose from his knees, he started running – not towards them, but heading for the massive open doors leading deeper into the ship. The temptation to waste yet more time and carve them limb from limb was almost too strong to swallow.
‘You get to live,’ he growled, ignoring their continued fire. ‘I have bigger prey.’ As he plunged into the siren-lit corridors making up the Invincible Reason’s hollow veins, he tuned into First Company’s vox-web, no longer denied access by distance.
‘Ladies,’ he greeted them, still sprinting.
‘Where in the hell have you been?’ spat back the first voice. Several others joined in, sharing the same sentiment.
‘You have no idea,’ Sevatar replied. ‘Where is the primarch?’
‘Engaged at the fift–’
Sevatar shoulder-barged through a crowd of black-robed menials, stumbling over their tangled limbs and carelessly shattering their bones beneath his boots. Up and running a second later, he swore across the vox.
‘Repeat that,’ he said. ‘Some fools got in my way.’
‘The primarch is engaged at the fifteenth concourse,’ Valzen replied. ‘Half of us are here with him.’
The fifteenth concourse. Sevatar knew the STC Gloriana-pattern battleship as well as he knew the contours of his own armour. The Nightfall was born of the same breed.
‘That’s madness,’ he voxed back. ‘You’ll be encircled by every Dark Angel left alive on the ship. There’s nowhere to run.’
Valzen’s answer was interrupted by a shriek over the vox, and the knocking grind of a bone-saw doing what it did best.
‘We’re aware of that, sir.’
‘I’ll be there in seven minutes,’ promised Sevatar. ‘Eight if there’s resistance. Nine if the resistance is carrying bolters.’
The resistance was carrying bolters.
Laying siege to an enemy warship was always a clash of contrasts. Corridor by corridor, chamber by chamber, an attacker could spend half an hour encountering no enemy presence at all beyond confused serfs and slaves, before promptly spending the same span of time needing to fight for every footstep of ground, killing through squad after squad of dug-in defenders. A Gloriana battleship was the size of a densely compacted city, and accordingly populated not only by officers and expert crew, but by a slave-caste numbering tens of thousands of souls. Most were consigned to live in the warship’s lightless bowels, breathing poorly-ventilated air and furnace fumes, but many still saw service on the upper decks.
Sevatar chewed through them with barely a hitch in his stride. His chainglaive ticked and stuttered, clogged with meat after only a few minutes. Those humans too brave or foolish to flee met their ends in a whirr of eviscerating machine-teeth, torn apart or left deformed and ignored in his wake.
A hundred of the VIII Legion’s best warriors had teleported aboard, in full Terminator wargear. The trail of their devastation was almost hilarious in its absolute severity. On more than one deck, Sevatar’s boots splashed through a marsh of shallow blood and carved human meat.
But the Dark Angels weren’t beaten. Not even close. Even with the Atramentar sweeping these decks clear, reinforcements were flooding in from other parts of the ship, storming their way to the strategium to defend their primarch. Not that he needs defending, Sevatar mused. Not if the last time they’d met was anything to go by.
He’d killed seven Dark Angels already. One of them ended life as a trophy, the warrior’s helm now chained to Sevatar’s belt. No higher honour for an enemy of the VIIIth Legion. In such remembrance, they paid respect to their fallen foes.
At the junction ahead, another three Dark Angels in pale tabards over their heraldic black held the line, bolters kicking in their fists. Sevatar crouched behind the relative cover of a corner, reloading his own weapon, lip curling as he crunched home his last magazine. He could kill them up-close easily enough, but putting a bolter in his hands evened the odds in a way he never enjoyed. He hadn’t lied when he told Trez he was Eighth Legion to his core. Just like his brothers, he’d never cherished a fair fight. Sport was one thing, but it hardly compared to hunting prey. In that, at least, he was made in his primarch’s image.
He risked a glance around the corner, pulling back as a shell detonated close to his faceplate, showering him in debris.
‘It’s Sevatar,’ he could hear them shouting to each other. ‘It’s the First Captain. I saw him.’
He grinned as he imagined the silhouette he cast in his armour, with the sweeping dark-iron wings rising from his helm. This accursed helmet crest, he thought. His enemies always recognised him by it.
The gunfire fell silent. He heard strangled grunts and the clanging wallops of weapons striking ceramite. Emerging from cover, he broke into a run, joining the melee.
Alastor Rushal, clad in the same black as the Dark Angels he was killing, nearly died first. Sevatar’s retinal display locked onto him with the Nostraman rune for Threat blinking bright, registering his Raven Guard armour and the thundering meteor hammer spinning in his fists. The First Captain turned, lancing his glaive through the last Angel’s back, letting the hungry teeth do their work. He ended the downed warrior with a boot stamped onto the Angel’s throat.
The blood patterning his armour went ignored, as did the bodies at his feet. One of them reached a weak hand to scrape strengthless fingers along his boots. Sevatar drew his bolter and fired downwards, without even bothering to look.
‘You won’t believe how I got here,’ he said to Rushal.
The Raven didn’t reply. He hadn’t replied to anything since Isstvan V. It was difficult to speak without a tongue.
The vox devolved into a choking mess of cries as he drew closer. Decades of listening to overlaying vox-chatter and deciphering the stream of runic updates on his eye-lenses stole the mystery of what he was about to see, but the majesty of the moment still struck hard.
Breathless, his armour scarred, Sevatar tore through into the fifteenth concourse – one of many thoroughfare hubs on the upper command decks. Dead serfs had decorated the tunnels on his way here, but the scale of the massacre taking place invited a rare laugh from his lips. Digital figures and flat-line readouts had nothing on the reality. The Atramentar and the Night Lords from the Excoriator were knee-deep in the dead, fighting amidst the piling bodies of serfs, servitors, armsmen, Dark Angels, and their own slain brothers. They fought back to back in diminishing circles, fighting to the last against a tide of Dark Angels reinforcements advancing from adjacent tunnels.
He’d never seen a weaker last stand, in a less defensible position, but the reason was clear enough. Here the primarchs had met, so here the battle raged. The two sons of the Emperor duelled above the warring crowds, above the crashing of bolters and the thwarted screeching of chainblades against ceramite. Their embattled children, screaming and bleeding and dying below them, were shadows in the wake of gods.
For the first time since Isstvan V, Sevatar saw his genetic forebear rise to reclaim the glory he’d once possessed in abundance. No one could ever claim Lord Konrad Curze was regal, nor could they describe him as handsome, dignified, or even healthy. His
glory was starved and sickly; his majesty was cold and cadaverous.
Sickle-shaped silver claws scythed out from the tip of each armoured finger, every one of them dancing with coruscating energy-lighting. He moved not as some avatar of liquid grace, but as a jerking puppet controlled by an unseen, malicious sentience, forcing this cadaverous god to dance to a tune inciting spasm over joy. Sevatar had seen several primarchs fight, shedding blood in anger, and their raw lethality was beautiful to behold. Each one of them flowed through the dance of war – even Angron, in his uncontrolled theatrics of tormented rage.
Curze did not share that trait. His movements were faster, jerkier stutters too swift for the eye to follow, between moments of unnerving serenity. Each heartbeat of calm lasted just long enough to convince the witness it was real, before the laughing murderer moved back into his twitching, killing paroxysm.
This was Sevatar’s father as he’d been in the years after first taking the mantle of primarch. A creature of gaunt limbs, hollow cheeks, and sunken eyes, fuelled by some bleak energy brightening his gaze with the promise of dark fire. Lank black hair flowed across his shoulders, washed by the random spray of foes’ blood and never anything more. His smile was a gruesome flourish of filed teeth between the whitest, thinnest lips. Sevatar had seen Curze fight Corax on the killing fields of the Dropsite Massacre, when the Raven Guard primarch was exhausted by hours of battle and drained by the infecting truth of betrayal. He’d seen his primarch duel the Lion twice – first in the dust of a fortress’s foundations on distant Tsagualsa, and again only weeks before, fighting for less than sixty seconds in the rain of a world that held no value at all.
Here, for the first time, his father was locked in a fair fight. No low blows to begin with. No assaulting a weakened or demoralised foe. No attacking from surprise, with the gravity of a devastating ambush.
The Lion’s movements were clinical, a ruthless economy of muscle and motion, each thrust and parry executed to perfection without the audacity of dramatic flair. Curze’s jerked-string assault was a flailing of clawed hands, each potential embrace blocking the long blade one moment, and being turned aside by it the next.
Shadows of Treachery Page 31