by Paul Kearney
‘Torpedoes at four thousand kilometres,’ Gershon was saying. Sweat was pouring off his face as he scanned the readouts. ‘Countermeasures launched.’
‘Good luck, Clem,’ Massaron said. ‘Above all else, you must get through – do you–’
The vox link was cut with a squawk of piercing static. Massaron winced. ‘Miranich, what just happened? Get me linked to the Beynish again.’
The enginseer was curt and emotionless. ‘The vessel Beynish has been lost on augur, but there are now three sword-class signatures at its last known location. The new signatures do not possess Imperial codes. Energy readings from that area of space suggest that the Beynish has been destroyed.’
Massaron staggered slightly, and steadied himself by holding onto the console.
‘Torpedoes two thousand kilometres out, impact in fifteen seconds.’ Gershon sounded as hoarse as a crow. ‘Countermeasures away.’
‘Ogadai, this is Arbion – come in, flag!’
‘Yes, Diez,’ Massaron said, calmly, but with eyes shut.
‘Sir, a massive enemy fleet has come out of warp eighteen thousand kilometres from the Dardrek moon. I am seeing heavy cruisers, Mars class battlecruisers, and dozens of transports. It is a Punisher fleet, sir, an armada the likes of which I’ve never seen before.’
‘Save yourself, Diez. Get home if you can,’ Massaron said quietly.
And then: ‘Voidsunders, fire one and two.’
‘Torpedoes – brace for impact!’ Gershon shouted, eyes wide.
The Ogadai bucked under their feet, and there was a series of titanic echoing booms that carried clear through the four-kilometre-long hull of the ancient ship. All over the boards, the scarlet lights began flashing up, a constellation of disaster.
‘Voidsunders have fired, sir,’ Miranich said, as serene as ever.
Gershon studied the monitors. ‘One tracked on target. We have hit the enemy ship square on the bow – major damage. The other beam went clear.’
‘Recharge. I want every torpedo we have in the air. Fire every ton of chaff we possess, Miranich. I want a cloud around us.’
‘The flight deck took three torpedoes,’ Gershon was saying. It’s totally destroyed, sir. Damage control teams are sealing off the section.’
‘How’s our power?’
‘At sixty per cent. A lot of broadside batteries are out of action – we took eight direct hits.’
‘Enemy Voidsunder beams inbound,’ Miranich said.
‘Evasive action,’ Massaron snapped out, anger burning in his face now, doing away with the confusion, the fear, the beginnings of despair.
‘Sealing off sections thirty-six through forty-five,’ Gershon was saying. ‘Sir, there are fires in the manufactorium, and in crew quarters port side aft. Damage control cannot approach, and they warn that the munitions stores in the manufactorium are being destabilised by the heat.’
‘Seal them off and blow the hatches,’ Massaron said.
‘Yes, sir,’ Gershon’s voice was thick with the responsibility as he punched the necessary orders into the command frame. He was blowing many hundreds of crewmates out into the void to die, so that the ship might fight on.
Another almighty crash and jerk. Massaron was knocked off his feet and smashed his head on the corner of Miranich’s console. He rose streaming blood. ‘What was that?’
‘A Voidsunder beam has struck us directly amidships, shipmaster,’ the enginseer said. ‘Damage is extensive. Power-lines forward have been severed. Am attempting to reroute. Auxiliary systems are being brought online. There will be a minor interruption–’
The lights on the command dais flickered as though to lend credence to his words. Then they went out entirely, and for some three seconds the bridge crew of the Ogadai were in complete darkness, save for the stars glittering coldly in the viewports above. They might as well have been standing in some darkened metal sarcophagus adrift in the void.
Then the auxiliaries kicked in, and power was restored. But the lights were dimmer now, and many of the less vital systems had been shut down. The forward sections of the Ogadai were now running on battery power alone.
‘Damage control, I want all power conduits amidships repaired, as a priority,’ Massaron said, thumbing the shipboard vox.
‘Con, give us all the speed you can. Take her away from the planet.’ They could do nothing here now except die. The Ogadai was badly hurt, facing a foe twice its size. There could be no victory here, and the survival of his beloved ship itself was at stake.
‘Gershon, try and get me Kerne on the vox.’
Gershon beat his knuckles on the console. ‘We’re being jammed, sir.’
‘I don’t care if you have to write a letter on parchment and throw it to him, lieutenant, but we must warn the ground of what is happening here. Put a despatch in an escape pod and fire it off if you have to, but you will contact our ground forces. They have to know what they are facing.’
‘Aye, sir.’ Gershon lifted a ship-intercom and began barking orders and information down it, never taking his eyes off the screens for a second.
‘Under way, engines at forty per cent,’ a servitor grated in rusty Low Gothic.
‘Lasburners firing. Sixteen torpedoes away,’ Miranich said. ‘Those are our last, shipmaster. All other torpedo banks have been destroyed.’
‘Voidsunders?’
‘Attempting a targeting resolution. Voidsunders will fire again in eight seconds.’
Massaron wiped blood out of his eyes.
‘We hit them – we hit them hard, sir,’ Gershon exulted, teeth bared in triumph, the intercom forgotten. ‘All torpedoes impacted. We’ve lit the bastards up.’
‘Enemy Voidsunder beams inbound,’ Miranich said.
‘Brace for impact. Gershon, I want you to–’
Then there was a white light, soundless, filling up the world, swamping every sensation. Massaron felt his feet leave the deck. There was no pain, only an instant’s regret before the light died, and the void claimed him.
I am so sorry, he thought. I failed you.
And then he was gone.
The Ogadai broke up under the repeated impact of the massive energy lances, the forward third of the great ship shearing free of the rest, spinning through space and trailing a wake of wreckage behind it.
Fires flared and then died as the vacuum snuffed them out, but the molten scars of the Voidsunder blast glowed in the darkness, liquid metal streaming from them in brilliant rivers, to cool and harden and wink out.
The rear section of the ship yawed, out of control, a leviathan sinking into death’s oblivion. The lights flickered along the hull, and here and there a lasburner battery fired wildly at the stars, its crew venting a last moment’s impotent rage.
The final Voidsunder salvo struck the drives in the stern, the energy beams slicing through armour and dying shields and spearing into the bowels of the ship. The powerful lances burned through and through those compartments deep in the maimed cruiser which still possessed atmosphere and light and warmth, and laid them open to the void. The Ogadai rolled, spewing wreckage and hundreds of bodies, here and there a solitary escape pod shooting out of the ruined vessel.
Then the main drives, bereft of coolant, open to the vacuum, overloaded and exploded.
A white nova, soundless, savage as the heart of a birthing star. It tore the remnants of the Ogadai to pieces, and sent those ragged remnants of the ancient ship careering into space. Many were sent flashing and spinning towards the planet Ras Hanem. Others were propelled out into the void, to sail through it for all eternity, broken relics with frozen corpses drifting inside them.
The ship-explosion hovered there above Ras Hanem, the energies of the vast detonation consuming themselves, darkening moment by moment as though reluctant to quit the universe. But they died at last, and all that remained was darkness, a debris-field of fragments and flotsam and jetsam of every size and degree spinning outwards, all of it so broken and shattered as to be unrecognisable
.
Thus ended the Ogadai, the flagship of the Dark Hunters, whose decks had once been trodden by the Primarch Jaghatai himself.
Four thousand years of history and endeavour and service were gone, and with them, the lives of some twenty thousand men and women for whom that venerable vessel had been home.
The huge Punisher battleship powered through the debris, pieces of its adversary clunking and scraping against its hull. It moved implacably towards the bright planet ahead with fires still sparking and flaming along its hull, and at its leisure, it took up station in high orbit, a dark looming giant peering down upon a world now at its mercy.
And upon the battle-bridge of the immense ship, a creature stood in the pale-painted power armour of the Adeptus Astartes, that holy armour now out of place amid the Chaos symbols and grotesque battle-trophies which surrounded it, and the thing smiled.
‘Brothers,’ it said, ‘it has been a long time.’
Part Four
The Stand
EIGHTEEN
Dereliquit
A meteor shower was what it appeared to be at first. They looked up at the sky to see streaks of red and white come searing across it, contrails in their hundreds filling every gap between the clouds. Most of the wreckage burned up in the outer atmosphere, but a few of the larger fragments came streaking down all the way to the ground with the shriek and roar of inbound artillery.
Jonah Kerne watched the light-show from the summit of the citadel, where he had summoned all the senior officers of the Imperium who still survived on Ras Hanem. They stood behind him, human and Adeptus Astartes, their faces as grave as his own.
It was the death of a great ship they were watching. They all knew that, though few among them had seen it before.
‘It is the Ogadai,’ Kerne murmured, his voice burned into a low ember by grief and rage.
‘I heard them. They sounded out in my mind like a scream in the night – all those lives.’ Brother Kass touched the psychic hood which hovered over his skull.
‘I cannot believe it,’ Dietrich said, shaking his bullet-head. ‘What could have happened? What could have so quickly overcome such a great vessel?’
‘The Punishers have returned,’ Jord Malchai said, gripping his crozius as though he were trying to strangle the truth from it. ‘I can feel the filth of their presence like a dead rat in an empty room.’
Elijah nodded. ‘Brother-captain, the directing intelligence I felt when we first entered the system, it has returned. It is close, now – it is above our very heads. Out of nowhere–’
‘They must have dropped out of the warp right on top of us, and smashed up the Ogadai before Massaron could respond,’ Fornix said. He clenched and unclenched his power fist and the fingers of the weapon crackled and snapped with blue-white energy.
‘All vox transmissions and augur sweeps have been floored by massive interference these last two hours and more,’ Commissar Von Arnim said. ‘We thought it might be solar activity, or just the power drain of all the new systems coming online across the city. It would seem we were… complacent.’
‘We have been played,’ Kerne said. He turned around to face them, and his black eyes were as lightless as pits.
‘When we were first sent here, the Chapter Master suspected that there might be more to this conflict than met the eye, but I do not think even he expected anything like this. There must be very heavy metal indeed up there, to destroy a ship like the Ogadai, and a man like Massaron in the space of minutes.
‘Officers of the Guard, my brothers, we must assume the worst. The enemy must now be in orbit above us in massive force, and our own fleet has been obliterated. This is no mere raid. This is out and out conquest.
‘More than that, it is a settling of old scores. The Punishers drew us in here so that they might deal the Dark Hunters a heavy blow. They mean to destroy the Imperial hold on this world, that much is obvious – but I believe what they really want is to kill us.’
‘Let them try,’ Fornix growled, his red ocular gleaming like a hot coal. ‘We beat this filth once before, and we will do it again.’
Kerne’s face tightened in a slight smile, though it was hard to read his features with the bright streaked sky behind him. He was in shadow.
‘We must hope that Massaron got word off to Phobian before he was destroyed. One of the ships may have made it away. In any case, we have two tasks before us now. We must warn the Chapter of what has transpired here, and we must prepare ourselves for defence.
‘Brother Kass, you must be able to do something which can get around this jamming.’
The Librarian bowed slightly. ‘I will do my best, brother-captain. But I am no astropath. And the passage of psychic emanations through the warp at present–’
‘Just do it, brother. The Punishers, if they take this world, will make it into a base, from which they will seek to conquer the rest of the sector, system by system. That is why they chose Ras Hanem – there are enough raw materials on this planet to resource an entire crusade.
‘The longer we deny them possession of those resources, the more time the Chapter has to come up with a riposte. But the Chapter has to know what we face here.’
‘We need to know what we face here,’ Dietrich rasped.
‘The same as you faced before, general,’ Fornix said with sour humour. ‘Only more so.’
‘But now there is a full company of the Adeptus Astartes fighting at your shoulder,’ Malchai told Dietrich. ‘You should be proud, general, to stand here in such company.’
‘I am proud,’ Dietrich retorted. ‘Proud of my men, who did the impossible once. Now they are being asked to do it again.’
‘They will obey orders,’ Von Arnim said crisply. ‘That is all we ask of them. It is all we ask of ourselves.’
‘Well said, commissar,’ Malchai said, with something approaching approval.
‘The Chapter Master will not forsake us,’ Fornix said. ‘And he will have planned for such a contingency.’ He looked at Kerne, but the captain’s face was unreadable.
‘We will hold,’ Jonah Kerne said quietly. ‘We will hold here until we are relieved or until we are all dead. Is that clear?’
They raised their faces to him – his brothers were unmoved. Fear did not come into their mental make-up. Fornix looked positively light-hearted. Kass was less ebullient. The young Librarian was the only psyker on the planet that they knew of, and he could sense currents and portents that passed the rest of them by.
But he nodded at his captain. He looked preoccupied, like a man with much on his mind, but he was a Dark Hunter, the most stubborn of all the Adeptus Astartes. There was no need to suspect his resolve.
Dietrich was resigned and angry. He had brought his command through weeks of hell, to what he thought was victory, only to have that victory slip out of his fist. But he would fight. Like Massaron, Kerne thought, this general of armour did not know how to do anything else.
And the commissar, Von Arnim – he held within him no reservations whatsoever. His narrow, white face looked carved out of marble. In some ways, he reminded Kerne of Jord Malchai. The commissar and the Reclusiarch had both expunged all doubt from their souls. For a brief instant, Kerne almost envied them their blind certainty.
And yet, there was another kind of faith and certainty too. It had to do with one’s place in the scale and portent of things. Strangely, Jonah Kerne felt a kind of unfettered relief within him. The news was bad – it would no doubt become worse. But he did not care. He was here, in this place with his brothers, about to do what all his long life he had been trained and bred to do. What could be wrong with that?
Better this, than to sit upon Phobian in the dark and the snow, listening to wars and rumours of wars pass me by, he thought.
He felt oddly light-hearted. If this be my last fight, then I will make it one worthy of memory.
He looked at his first sergeant. Fornix met his eyes and Kerne knew that they were wholly in agreement. They had always under
stood each other at times like this.
‘Whatever happens here in the days to come,’ Kerne said, ‘we will make the Imperium remember us.’
It rained that night, an unseasonal event that made the natives of the planet stare wonderingly at the sky.
The last bright contrails of the Ogadai’s wreckage were fading, fattening out into wide ribbons lit up by the red light of the sunset, so that it seemed all the sky was aflame. And they in turn seemed to catch hold of what moisture there was in the atmosphere, so that the cloud thickened about them, and boiled up in toiling thunderheads, slate grey and purple, flickering with lightning.
The thunder echoed about the ruined streets of Askai, and the rain hammered down out of it, settling the dust and rehydrating it into mustard-coloured mud.
And all through the night, the defenders of Askai worked in the rain, building booby-trapped barricades, excavating trenches, constructing strongpoints in the rubble, shifting munitions by the scores of tons.
The Dark Hunters were issued with cameleoline paint, and this they slathered over their armour, covering the midnight-blue livery of the Chapter and even the white axe that was their badge. The synthetic polymers in the paint bonded with the outer alloys of the power armour and took on colour from anything they touched or that surrounded them.
The giant warriors could now stand quite still in the broken cityscape and fade into the rubble, almost to invisibility in the right light.
It was a tactic that the Dark Hunters had utilised often down the years. In fact, there was a legend which held that it was how the Chapter had got its name; a predilection among certain companies of the White Scars Legion for stealth over the fast-flowing tactics of their brethren had seen these Adeptus Astartes peeled off into their own disparate organisation for special missions.
They had fought on joint operations with the Raven Guard Legion, and on their return, the tactics these White Scars had learned from their brethren had become part of the battle-code of their company.
And when the Heresy was over and the time had come for the great Legions to be broken up, the warriors of this singular company had held together, eventually recognised as a full Chapter in their own right.