‘Chaplain’s on his way,’ Kasteen voxed, as the last of the panicking civilians cleared the room. ‘Can you keep it pinned until he gets there?’
‘We can try,’ I said, with an eye on the door, careful not to say anything which sounded like a promise. So far as I was concerned we could pin it down just as well from the corridor, or, better still, from one of the shuttle bays.
‘It’s still growing,’ Jurgen said, and with a thrill of horror I realised he was right. The metal floor was softening around the daemon, lapping against its bulging calves like the swell on a beach, the very fabric of the ship itself becoming fodder for the warp-spawned monstrosity. He fired the melta again, and this time I saw the flesh bubble and spit, like over-cooked stew, before scabbing over an instant later with a carapace of metal.
The daemon laughed, an ugly sound, all the more sinister for being filtered through the mechanical larynx which had once belonged to the mindless servitor now entombed at the heart of the living cancer swelling before my eyes.
‘Take out the cables!’ I shouted, seeing a new, more insidious threat. The waving mechanical tendrils which had snared and electrocuted Jaren were now snaking their way towards the control lecterns: even as I watched, the nearest began burrowing into the station Kolyn had manned. I had no idea what the monstrosity before us would do if it gained control of the ship, and had even less desire to find out.
Powering up my chainsword to its maximum speed, I sheared through the cable in a shower of sparks, feeling a jolt in my arm like a kick from a Space Marine as the current it carried discharged itself through the weapon. Fortunately the hilt was insulated for just such a contingency, and most of what sparked across the gap was taken care of by my glove. I can’t pretend it was an enjoyable sensation, but I had no doubt that I’d be feeling a good deal worse if the daemon managed to carry out whatever plan it had in mind.
‘The cables. Right you are, sir,’ Jurgen agreed, as imperturbable as ever, and set about reducing the ones he could see to slag with a series of well-placed melta blasts, while I gritted my teeth and sliced through another one, with results as uncomfortable as before.
Disconcertingly, the daemon continued to laugh the whole time, as though it was finding the whole thing a tremendous joke; a moment later I discovered why. The cable ends I’d severed were still moving, instead of having the common decency to lie still on the deck the way they should have done.
My first intimation of the unexpected danger was the sudden strike of the metallic serpents, which coiled themselves around me while my attention was on the swelling mound of flesh and metal that had spawned them. I fought for breath as the tentacles contracted, my ribs creaking, expecting to feel them crack at any moment, while I struggled fruitlessly to free the arm holding my chainsword. At least the daemon could no longer discharge electricity down the wires, apparently needing a physical connection for that, but as the grey mist hovered in front of my eyes, that was scant comfort. Dimly, I felt myself drawn towards the hideous entity, inchoate terror pounding at my temples, as it prepared to devour my very soul.
Then, abruptly, I felt the constricting bands of metal falling away, and discovered I could breathe again; a mixed blessing, as my gasps brought with them a strong and familiar odour.
‘It’s all right sir,’ Jurgen said, pulling the last coil away, and dropping it on the floor, where it lay reassuringly inert. ‘They come off easy enough.’ Which indeed they had, although I doubted whether anyone else could have managed it, devoid as they were of his peculiar talent29. Just to make sure, he reduced them to a puddle of slag with a quick melta blast, before turning to face the ghastly mound of flesh and metal again.
‘Fall back,’ I said, seeing our path to the door clear at last, and cracking off a couple of shots as I made for it. The daemon moved swiftly to cut us off then, as I’d hoped, flinched back at the last moment as it came within range of whatever it was about Jurgen so many denizens of the Cursed Realm found so disturbing. As it did so, he fired the melta again, and this time the damage he did remained, an ugly cauterised scar across its flesh, the softened metal licked by the beam glowing red in the dimly-lit bridge. For the first time it stopped laughing, and a roar of anger and revulsion echoed around the chamber.
‘Stick close to it,’ I said, seeing the tiny pockmarks left by my laspistol bolts remaining on the distended skin, instead of fading as they had done before. The same thing had happened when we’d fought the daemon on Adumbria, I recalled, with a faint flicker of hope; but then we’d had the massed firepower of an entire company concentrated on the abomination, with Jurgen somehow nullifying its ability to heal itself, and even then it had been a close run thing.
I hesitated, wondering whether we should make the best of the tiny advantage we had, and hope to the Throne we could find a way to exploit it, or simply make a run for it while we still had the chance. Before I could make up my mind, however, the clatter of boots in the corridor and a resonant voice chanting arcane gibberish in High Gothic did it for me; I could hardly let the troopers see the legendary Ciaphas Cain heading for the saviour pods, and expect them to watch my back in the future, so as the chaplain and whichever squad had been unlucky enough to be found by him on the way up burst into the bridge I turned back to face the looming pile of flesh and mechanica, flourishing my chainsword in an appropriately heroic manner. By great good fortune I happened to catch a lump of flesh protruding from between two chunks of metal, and severed it in a suitably dramatic spray of ichor.
‘Commissar! Get down!’ Chaplain Tope bellowed, in a voice accustomed to carrying to the far corners of a chapel without the benefit of a magnavox, and I complied at once, Jurgen following my lead as always. Several small objects arced over my head, bursting against the daemon, which shrieked in a most satisfying fashion; as I rose to my feet, I could see great swathes of it hissing and bubbling, the flesh liquefying, and the metal subliming into froth.
‘Acid?’ I asked, perplexed, wondering where he could have found so much of the stuff, and Tope laughed, in what sounded like honest amusement.
‘Holy water,’ he said. ‘Blessed it myself. Good, eh?’
Well, I could hardly argue with that; I’ve little enough time for Emperor-botherers in the normal course of events, but I can’t deny they have their uses at moments like this. Before I could thank him, the screaming daemon lashed out in our direction, ripping a couple of the lecterns from the floor, and battering a handful of the newly-arrived troopers against the wall with them.
‘Look out!’ I warned, ducking again in the nick of time as a flailing tendril of melting flesh hurtled in our direction. I caught it a good one with the chainsword on the way past, but the whirling blade simply tore a gash along the length of it; despite my best efforts it struck Tope full on, with enough force to dent a Chimera, and sent him skidding away across the deck.
‘It can’t do that to a man of the Emperor!’ Jurgen said, in tones of outraged piety, letting fly with the melta again, this time managing to punch a hole the size of his head deep into the daemon’s guts. I don’t know how much of the damage was due to his own ability, and how much to the chaplain’s spiritual assault on the thing30, but in any event it looked like the coup de grace; the towering abomination staggered, and crashed to the deck, assisted on its way by a volley of lasgun fire from the assembled troopers.
‘Flamers!’ Tope bellowed, scrambling to his feet with the aid of the nearest lectern, and adjusting the Guard-issue helmet he’d adorned with his rosarius to an incongruously jaunty angle31. Not for the first time, it seemed, his badge of office had protected him where lesser, or less pious, men would not have been so fortunate. ‘Finish it!’
Since I couldn’t argue with that, I stood aside, while a trio of troopers with incendiary weapons hosed the fallen giant down with blazing promethium, blistering the air in the suddenly smaller seeming chamber. The flames roared up, burning with an unhealthy bluish tinge, which reminded me once again of witchfire. The daemon
’s bellows were growing weaker, and it thrashed about futilely, making even more of a mess of the bridge controls if that were possible.
‘It’s shrinking!’ I said, hardly daring to believe it, and shot a couple more pistol rounds into the spasming inferno, more for the sake of appearances than because I expected it to do any good.
‘Losing its grip on the material plane,’ Tope said, advancing, and beginning to recite the Rite of Exorcism. So far as I know he’d never had to perform one before, but he threw himself into it with rather more relish than I would have expected. Jurgen helped it along with a final melta blast, and the hideous thing suddenly vanished, with a sharp crack! of imploding air.
I looked around at the wreckage of the bridge, which had suddenly fallen silent, except for the groans of the wounded, and the faint crackle of the small fires scattered here and there, where spilled promethium from the flamers was slowly burning itself out. Hardly a control station seemed left intact.
‘I’d better perform a full cleansing ritual before we let the crew back in,’ Tope said after a moment, and I nodded, still trying to take in the extent of the devastation.
‘If you think there’s any point,’ I said. ‘They can hardly fly the ship from here now.’
A cold knot of fear began winding itself tightly around my stomach as I finished speaking, and the full import of my own words sank in. Barring a miracle, the Fires of Faith had just become a coffin for us all.
FOUR
‘Nothing else for it. We’ll have to evacuate the ship,’ I said decisively. The weeks I’d spent aboard a saviour pod in the Perlia system hadn’t exactly been comfortable, but were infinitely more so than the attempt to breathe vacuum which had immediately preceded them. On the other hand, the saviour pods aboard the Fires of Faith were probably just as decrepit as the rest of the vessel: trusting ourselves to them would be an act of desperation, but right now I couldn’t see any alternative.
‘Can’t be done,’ Mires said, looking from me, to Kasteen, to Broklaw, and back, like a gretchin ordered to rustle up a snack for a trio of hungry orks and having to admit that the larder was empty. ‘We’ve got enough saviour pods for the crew, but–’
‘Barely a tenth of what we need for the regiment,’ Kasteen cut in, sounding perfectly happy to leave Mires and his people aboard the crippled hulk to suffocate or starve. Maybe she was: it was their incompetence which had landed us in this mess, after all. But that would still leave most of our own people flapping in the breeze, and the Guard didn’t abandon its own; we’d find a way out of this for everyone, or go down together. Or at least the Valhallans would; I’ve always found ‘every man for himself’ more to my taste. ‘What about the shuttles?’
‘Still standing by to take us off,’ Broklaw said, which sounded a little more encouraging. ‘The problem is, they were expecting us to make a stable orbit first.’ He turned back to Mires, who squirmed visibly. ‘And our chances of that are...?’
‘Not good,’ the captain admitted, with another horrified glance at the devastated bridge surrounding us. It was swarming with crewmen and artificers, conversing with one another in the clipped and incomprehensible dialect of the specialist, but they were completely out of their depth and they knew it. ‘We’re trying to get the manoeuvring system reconsecrated, but that’s really a job for a tech-priest.’
‘There’s a Mechanicus shrine in Primadelving,’ Broklaw said, having waded through the briefing documents like a good executive officer should, so Kasteen and I could get away with skimming them as cursorily as possible. ‘If they could get a party of tech-priests up here, could they restore the damage in time?’
‘They might,’ Mires said, looking a lot more hopeful all of a sudden. He pulled out a data-slate, and rattled through a series of calculations. Then his face fell again. ‘Couldn’t make the rendezvous,’ he said, holding out the tiny screen for us to read. Then, realising we couldn’t all see it, he transferred the data to the big pict screen, which, by some miracle, had survived the mayhem wreaked all around it.
‘What is this?’ Kasteen asked, frowning at the complex diagram.
‘Orbital mechanics,’ Mires said, a measure of his old cockiness beginning to return, until I let my hand rest lightly on the hilt of my chainsword. ‘This is us, see?’ A stylised silhouette of a starship marked our position, its projected course indicated by a green line, which intersected with the circle marking Nusquam Fundumentibus somewhere towards the corner of the screen. Another line showed the motion of the planet, forward and back, like a bead on an abacus32. ‘Anything coming out from the planet would have to shoot past us, turn around, and catch up. Can’t dock without matching velocities.’
‘We know that much,’ I said, trying not to sound too impatient with him. ‘We’ve spent enough time on shuttles transferring to starships. What’s the problem?’
‘Our speed,’ Mires said, looking distinctly uncomfortable again. ‘Even at full burn, a shuttle could never catch up with us.’
‘Then we need to slow down,’ Broklaw said, never afraid of stating the obvious. ‘How do we do that?’
‘Get the engines going again,’ Mires said. ‘Then use the manoeuvring thrusters to flip ourselves over. Burn the main engine along the course we’re following.’ He did something to the slate in his hand, and the starship icon (which looked a great deal more sleek and efficiently handled than its real life counterpart) dutifully did a backflip. He attempted a hopeful smile, which flickered and died again, in the face of our refusal to be mollified. ‘We can fire them up again from the enginarium, so we won’t have to wait for the control linkages to be reestablished from the bridge.’
‘Which leaves the thrusters,’ I said. ‘How long until they’re back in commission?’ I watched Mires’s face contort, as he tried to find an answer which didn’t immediately translate as ‘we’re frakked.’ ‘Never mind,’ I added, before he could speak. ‘Too long, obviously.’
‘What about the on-board shuttles?’ Kasteen asked. ‘You must have some, right?’ We’d arrived aboard heavy cargo lifters operated by the Munitorum on Coronus, and expected to be taken off again by whatever was available at our destination. But every civilian vessel I’d ever travelled on carried auxiliary craft of some kind. Surely even the Fires of Faith wouldn’t be an exception to that.
Mires shrugged. ‘We’ve got two,’ he said at last. ‘Utility boats. We could maybe cram ten or twelve people into them.’
‘That’s ten or twelve fewer,’ I pointed out, already determined to find a good reason to be among them if necessary. ‘If there’s time to make enough runs...’
Mires smirked openly at my ignorance. ‘They could get off all right. But they couldn’t get back, any more than the ones you were expecting.’
‘I suppose not,’ I said, my attention drawn back, despite itself, to the pict screen hanging over our heads. It may just have been my imagination, but the little starship icon seemed incrementally nearer to the bulk of the planet already.
I can’t pretend the next couple of weeks passed at all easily; the Fires of Faith continued to hurtle like a bullet towards Nusquam Fundumentibus, despite the best efforts of Mires and his crew to restore the damage done to the ship by the manifesting daemon. Their diligence was impressive, particularly after Kasteen had taken the precaution of posting armed guards outside the saviour pods and the shuttle bay, but futile for all that; every time they got one of the systems restored, it simply revealed another malfunction somewhere else.
The team working on the engines had the best results, probably because we’d let our own cogboys33 loose down there, but it was a Pyrrhic victory; until we were able to turn round, and use them to slow our headlong rush towards the surface of the planet, firing them up would simply make us crash faster.
‘Or would it?’ Mires asked, when I voiced the thought, becoming unexpectedly animated as he considered it. He pulled out his data-slate, and started fiddling with it again. ‘We’d be cutting it a bit fine, but...’
‘But what?’ I demanded.
‘I should have seen it.’ The captain handed me the slate, as much of his expression as I could see behind his beard appropriately rueful. ‘But we’ve been so fixated on finding a way to slow down I never realised. We can speed up instead.’
‘And ram the planet tomorrow instead of the day after?’ I asked sarcastically, trying to make sense of his diagram. It looked almost identical to the one he’d displayed on the bridge screen a fortnight before, except that the ship and the planet were unmistakably much closer than they had been. Involuntarily, I glanced up at the big pict, which was showing the view from outside again; by now the sun was a visible disc, and although I knew it was still impossible to make out from this distance, I somehow managed to convince myself that one of the pinpricks of light nearby was the world we were so close to colliding with.
‘Not quite.’ Mires did something to the slate. ‘If we accelerate enough, we might just reach that volume of space before the planet does.’ The green line denoting the Fires of Faith’s future course seemed to move a little, then broke free of the globe, grazing the edge of it.
‘And go sailing off into the void even more quickly than the rescue craft can get to us,’ I said.
Mires shrugged. ‘We’d have more time for repairs, at least. But if we juggle the thrust right we’ll graze the upper atmosphere.’
‘And incinerate ourselves,’ I said sarcastically. ‘Better and better.’
‘Ship’s tougher than that,’ Mires said. ‘You wouldn’t want to be in any of the outer decks. But the middle ones ought to be survivable.’ The green line bent, while I tried not to think too hard about the implications of ought to be. ‘It’ll take good timing, and even better luck. But look.’ The line had begun to curl back on itself, which ought to mean...’
The Last Ditch Page 4