by Ben Counter
‘Sixty per cent!’
Three out of every five enemy fighters were within the kill-box created by the broadside weapons. When the Imperial fighters were gone, the enemy would break formation and loop out of that zone to attack from the stern. If, that was, they were still flying.
‘Broadsides fire!’ ordered Sheherz. ‘Everything! Everything we have!’
The Tempestus rocked under the force of its scores of lasers and turrets erupting at once. The viewscreen filled up with firing angles, illuminating the void with a cross-hatching of light.
‘We’re going to lose reactor nine!’ said damage control.
‘Shut it down and seal it off!’ ordered the shipmistress.
Another volley shuddered through the ship. The enemy fighters were caught in its web and ships were sheared in two or spitted lengthways by blades of las. The survivors broke and fled, weaving through the firestorm, all formation gone.
The Imperial fighters were caught in it, too. They fared better, for they had a few seconds’ warning before the broadside was launched. But many were simply too close to break out of the kill-box. They spiralled to destruction as their hulls were punctured or their fuel cells ripped open.
Sacrifices. They all had to make them, Imperial Navy crewman and Space Marine. The fighter crews had known that the moment they first strapped themselves into a trainer’s cockpit. Sheherz acknowledged the winking of the viewscreen icons from green to black, and put them out of his mind.
‘Bring us back on course,’ he ordered. ‘Full power.’
‘Nine is down,’ said damage control. ‘Fires in the generatorium chamber. Sealed off.’
‘How many inside?’ asked the shipmistress.
‘Twenty-three,’ said damage control.
There were twenty-three men and women locked up in the chamber where reactor nine was burning. The shipmistress should not have asked the question, thought Sheherz. Their sacrifice was no different to that of anyone else on the Tempestus.
The ship’s attitude pitched and its main engines flared again, putting it back on course for the World Engine. The World Engine itself was turning to catch the Tempestus in the arc of its main weapon. Even without making all the calculations, Sheherz could see it was close. Pausing to break up the fighter assault had cost them enough time for the World Engine’s controllers to react.
The enemy fighter force had been cut in half. It was regrouping now, individual fighters wheeling around to adopt formation before making another assault. The assault would hit and this time there wasn’t much the Tempestus could do about it. Sheherz left that question in the hands of the Emperor.
‘My lord,’ said Sheherz into the Astral Knights vox-link. ‘Are we in good order?’
‘It was rough,’ replied Chapter Master Amhrad from the muster decks, where the companies of the Astral Knights were gathered. ‘But we report no losses.’
‘Impact in nine minutes,’ said Sheherz. ‘I wish I were there with my brethren, Chapter Master.’
Sheherz was technically the captain of the Sixth Company, but his duties as Master of the Fleet meant he rarely fought alongside them. Most such titles were ceremonial, and their holders bore arms aside their brethren like any other Space Marine, but the Astral Knights Master of the Fleet had always stood apart. Sheherz had always assumed, through his earning of his power armour and his career in the Sixth Company, that however far he rose he would do it shoulder to shoulder with his fellow Astral Knights. But he understood the Tempestus as few could, and the captaincy of the Sixth Company took him further from his brethren, not closer to them.
Sheherz left command of the Sixth on the ground to First Sergeant Kypsalah. His company was gathered alongside the rest of the Chapter in the cavernous muster decks, waiting for whatever might happen when the Tempestus broke through the veil around the World Engine and crash-landed on its surface. None of them knew what they might find, whether the ship would be annihilated in an instant or whether they would find themselves surrounded by a horde of enemies. A captain should be with them at such a time, preparing their souls for whatever ordeal they were to face. Sheherz told himself he would rush to join them as soon as the ship was down. The battle-brothers of the Sixth would take heart that he had descended from the distant bridge to pound through the mud with them.
‘Your duty is there, captain,’ said Amhrad. ‘The Tempestus needs guidance as much as your brothers. Lead her well.’
‘For glory, my lord.’
‘For glory, Master of the Fleet.’
Reactor nine was shut down but fires were burning right up the spine of the ship. Damage control teams were tied up keeping them from spreading. The Tempestus accelerated towards the World Engine trailing wreckage and burning plasma fuel.
‘We’re within the target’s gravity horizon,’ said the shipmistress. ‘Your orders?’
‘All stop,’ said Sheherz. The ship didn’t need its own power any more – the gravity of the World Engine would propel it fast enough. The engine drone lowered to a whisper and the ship was suddenly abnormally quiet.
Men who were born on a spaceship could be driven mad when they set foot on a planet and were suddenly without the engine noise they had heard their whole lives. They thought they had died. Sometimes their hearts stopped and they really did die.
‘Reactors four and eleven are failing,’ said damage control.
Sheherz ran the calculations in his head.
‘We won’t have enough power for the landing,’ said Shipmistress Gereltus. Sheherz had come to the same conclusion himself a moment earlier.
‘Then it will be rough,’ replied Sheherz. If there was any question of turning back, Gereltus did not voice it. ‘All reverse thrust. Brace for collision.’
Klaxons sounded through the ship. New engine notes rose as the prow thrusters burned again, slowing the ship down. It would not be enough for even a crash landing. The Tempestus was tough, but even she might not be that tough.
‘There is nothing more now that I can do,’ said Sheherz quietly. The shipmistress and her crew could not hear him. ‘Chance alone will decide. I pray I have stacked our odds high enough, but the outcome is out of my hands.’
He paused. Perhaps a reply could come through the engines and the chiming of the bridge cogitators, or formed from the static on the vox-net. He did not hear it.
‘If there is anything you can do, Tempestus,’ he continued, ‘if you can still guide us, then the helm is yours. I cannot claim to be your master now when I have put our survival at the whim of fate. And if either of us should not survive, it has been an honour.’
Perhaps the prow thrusters altered pitch a little. Perhaps the alarms going on every deck hit a higher or lower note for a moment. But Sheherz could not make out any reply from the Tempestus.
He did not even know if the machine-spirit was aware, in the way that a human mind was. Perhaps it was just a set of commands to be fired off when the sensors received the right information. His words probably meant nothing to it. But they had to be said.
‘Atmospheric breach!’ said the crewman at the tactical helm.
‘All brace! All brace!’ ordered Shipmistress Gereltus again.
With insufficient input from the Imperial fighter craft, the viewscreen had switched back to the prow sensors. The image was patchy and stuttering. It was full of the World Engine, its surface cloaked in silvery cloud. The image shook as the Tempestus breached the upper reaches of the World Engine’s atmosphere. The ship decelerated alarmingly, catastrophically, and a hundred warnings blared out as turrets and other extremities were ripped off by the sudden air resistance. The friction flared in orange tongues of fire around the edges of the prow. Hull plates stripped off, torn like paper.
The bridge crew were thrown around. Sheherz kept his footing as the mag-locks on his boots anchored him to the deck.
The prow sen
sors died. The last image the viewscreen ever showed was of the clouds streaking by, burned away just enough to reveal a jigsaw of soaring steel below, a world-spanning alien city.
‘Thrusters correcting!’ gasped Gereltus. She was clinging to the tactical helm. A loose piece of equipment had struck her and blood ran down her face. ‘We’re… we’re coming down ventral-first…’
The Tempestus had turned herself so she would crash belly-down instead of spearing into the World Engine prow first. It was the best she could do in the circumstances. She had ratcheted the chances of success a few per cent higher.
Chance. That was all it was.
The din was awful. Hull plates were being torn off to expose the decks beneath, and they were being stripped by the shrieking wind and washed with flame. Sheherz heard a plasma reactor going critical, the boom of its vaporising coolant almost lost in the howl.
There was only room in his mind for one thought.
We must all make sacrifices. Every man’s will be different. But they will be made.
Sheherz was willing to die. He had even come to terms with the whole Chapter being lost. But it was hearing the Tempestus dying that was the worst. His body could take pain, he could mourn and avenge brothers he lost… but the ship was an icon, a home, a fellow warrior and a relic of a glorious past. Could he sacrifice that willingly? Or would it have to be torn from his hands by fate?
Doubt struck him. Was there something he was not willing to give up, after all?
The ship crunched through the tallest structures. Sheherz could hear the spires puncturing the lower hull and snapping off.
‘Ventral three is compromised!’ came a vox from one of the crew, screaming to be heard over the roar of tearing metal. ‘Pods deploying! Pods…’
The transmission was cut off. Some of the Astral Knights had been sealed in drop pods, in case the landing was such that it was safer for them to be deployed in the ten-man assault pods than to remain sheltered within the ship. There had been room for barely a company’s worth in the pods, and those Astral Knights were now plummeting from the crashing ship to land wherever fate saw fit to scatter them. The vast majority of the brethren would have to weather the landing on the Tempestus.
The ship’s thrusters were still firing, arresting her descent. She had slowed enough to make a collision potentially survivable. There was a chance. Not great, but it existed.
‘It has been an honour,’ said Sheherz, and he felt the machine-spirit slipping away from him, sinking into darkness. ‘Goodbye.’
The floor blistered up, tearing the helm cogitators from their housings. A great mass of dark grey steel ripped up through it, the point of an immense metal spear, its engraved surface hurtling past into the ceiling of the bridge and up through the decks above. The bridge of the Tempestus was sternward, towards the middle where collision and enemy fire would struggle to reach the command systems. Suddenly its armoured shelter seemed hopelessly fragile. The scale of the ship became apparent through the endless labyrinths of torn metal opened up by the forces of the crash.
The Tempestus let out a terrible dying scream of tearing steel. Exploding fuel tanks and ammunition stashes rose like a choir hitting a crescendo. It was the sound of a dying god.
The ship lurched to the side. The bridge was a ruin of twisted metal. The building that had impaled the Tempestus through the belly was being torn down by the ship’s weight. Sheherz could do nothing but stand on his island of deck, watching the magnitude of the destruction. The ruin tore through the ship like a knife through muscle and organs, laying open the hundreds of decks, the crew quarters and sick bays, shrines, mess halls, armouries, the brig and the shipmistress’s quarters, the grey expanse of the crew’s drilling-ground and the long dusty labyrinth of maintenance tunnels.
Even the forgotten places, where no man had walked since the ship’s construction, were ripped open and exposed like the raw nerve endings.
But he could not see the steel-clad caverns of the muster decks. They were further aft than the enormous wound in the ship’s belly. There the Astral Knights were weathering the crash, and the destruction had not reached them yet.
There was hope.
The Tempestus hit the ground. The lower decks, exposed by the great wound, flattened into crushed strata of steel. Fires burst there, and showers of sparks from severed power conduits. Sheherz watched it unfold as if in slow motion and the enormity of it filled his mind. Crewmen tumbled into the abyss of ruin. Burning fuel poured from conduit breaches like blood from an artery.
The deck beneath Sheherz gave way. He fell into that black canyon, into the mass of burning steel below.
His last thoughts were calm. A great weight had been taken off, for he had allowed fate to take the Tempestus from him. He had given the old ship permission to die in the name of victory, as Sheherz himself had accepted long ago. It was not just a Space Marine’s obligation to offer his life to his duty – it was his right, as well, and he had granted that right to the ship.
It was gratitude he felt, sorrowful but accepting.
Then through the burning darkness loomed a shape like a steel skull, stretched and featureless except for deep sockets with green flecks for eyes. Its hunched metallic shape came closer and it aimed a gun of the same grey metal at him, its details obscured by a sudden glare of green energy and an accompanying burst of pain.
But it did not matter. His duty had been done. The sacrifice had been made.
Then Sheherz thought no more.
His Imperial Majesty’s ship Vengeant Aeternam
Varv System
Encryption Code Hemlock
Inquisitorial Eyes Only
Scrivened: Lord Inquisitor Quilven Rhaye
Loyal Medicae Helvetar,
I received your report and was pleased with your progress.
You are to maintain the highest standards of moral hygiene and information security during this autoseance. Pending a full survey of the Safehold Orbital Exclusion Zone, you must be prepared for the presence of a moral threat, whether from further psychic contact or from outside. I expect all biological systems, be they servitors or personnel, to be fully mind-wiped to prevent a leak of information that may be deleterious to the continued function and good name of the Inquisition.
I require particular attention to be paid to confirming the identity of the subject and ascertaining an exact timeline of events leading up to the conclusion of the Battle of Safehold. While this information is to be recorded in full, it must be treated as sacrosanct and Inquisitorial eyes only, and stored in a gene-locked vessel with void collapse failsafe to prevent unauthorised revelation.
In the name of the Holy Ordos of the Emperor,
– Lord Inquisitor Rhaye
Addendum personal:
Take care of yourself in there, Kalliam.
– Quilven
TWO
Techmarine Sarakos
Fear.
Techmarine Sarakos did not understand it. It was more than just a weakness – it was an offence to logic. A mental force that commanded action, or forced the body to be inactive, in complete ignorance of the circumstances. A man could freeze when he should run, or strike out when he should remain still, because a force called fear compelled him to do so. Fear fulfilled all the criteria of insanity.
And yet he saw it now on the faces of the crew who fell past him as the gravity on the muster decks completely failed. They were thrown about, bones crunching, some of them battering against the ranks of the Astral Knights who were anchored by their armour’s mag-locks to the deck. The crew flailed madly, though motion was useless and indeed made injury more likely. They cried out as if someone would hear and help them.
Some of them had been killed by fear. They had held on to a bulkhead door or stanchion to steady themselves even though fire and deformation of the chamber made it more prudent for them to let go. They had f
led secure hiding places seeking somewhere safer. They had just stood there, frozen by dread.
Insanity.
The stabilisers built into Sarakos’s armour engaged and docking clamps crunched into the deck plates underfoot to keep him locked in place. The ship spun around him and the din was appalling. A great section of the deck ahead of him was ripped upwards and several Astral Knights of the Third Company were thrown into the air. The lights failed. One end of the chamber was torn off as the ship’s belly was slit open by a structure on the planet below.
Sarakos felt the data being gathered, collected and submitted to his conscious mind by the cogitators built into the back of his brain. Statistics and probabilities were projected onto his retina by the auto-senses built into the armour he had forged himself.
His chances of survival fluctuated with every second. Twenty per cent. Seventy. Forty. He mentally extinguished them. Knowing the odds would make no difference.
An impact hammered up from below and Sarakos was suddenly free, the muster deck tumbling around him. He just had time to register yet more fear on the face of a young crewman as he flailed brokenly past, before his senses were overwhelmed and Sarakos was knocked out.
‘To me! My brethren, to me! We have arrived! Now only victory remains!’
The voice was that of Captain Sufutar of the Third Company. Sarakos had mustered between the brethren of the Third and Fourth Companies.
Sarakos opened his eyes and called up a physical damage assessment. He noted numerous contusions and instances of internal bruising, but nothing that compromised immediate efficiency. His armour’s systems were functioning well. His power axe, with its blade in the shape of the half-cog symbol of Mars, was still scabbarded on his back.
He was lying in a great canyon of torn wreckage. The Tempestus appeared to have come down on its side, with its uppermost hull ripped open to the sky. Fires dotted the twisted metal sides of the canyon, some of them spurting burning fuel. The ship had broken almost completely in two and it was in the gap between the massive sections of hull that Sarakos had found himself.