by Ben Counter
Sarpedon joined the three survivors of Squad Vorts as they sprinted after Volis and into the heavy weapons emplacement the tech-guard had been trying to set up. Two lascannon and an autocannon with six crew and about thirty tech-guard were crammed into a flak-board emplacement built around columns of cogitator-memory blocks.
'Lygris!' voxed Sarpedon as he ran. 'Does this platform run from the ship's machine-spirit?'
'Yes, lord.'
'Find out how it communicates with the crew. If it's verbal, I want a sample. You have twenty seconds.'
'Yes, lord.'
It took him fifteen.
By the time Sarpedon had vaulted over the flak-board behind Squad Vorts, he knew how the machine-spirit sounded over the vox-casters scattered throughout the platform and the Mechanicus ship itself. It was a cultured male voice with a hint of the aristocratic - reassuringly confident, calm and intelligent. Perfect.
He went deeper still. He hardly registered his force-staff swiping off the arm of a heavy weapons crewman about to fire. He was occupied wim the Hell, going deeper still.
What did they fear?
'Die.' boomed the voice of the machine-spirit. 'Die. Die. Die.'
Most of them probably knew it was a trick. It didn't matter. They froze anyway, shocked to the core by the possibility that the beloved machine, the one thing in the universe that they could trust without question, was turning on them.
'Die.'
And they did. Volis's bolters chewed through dozens, the chainswords of Squad Vorts cut down more. Sarpedon must have bludgeoned and carved up a score of tech-guard as they fired blindly into the air or ran screaming. In the thick of the fighting they linked up with Graevus to form a body-strewn corridor into which Soul Drinkers poured and spread outwards, surrounding knots of panicking tech-guard and butchering them.
But even if they killed every single one of them, the battle-fleet surrounding the platform could destroy them as soon as it was apparent the platform had been taken. It was time they were buying, nothing more.
ABOVE THE MUSTER deck, in the dark and cold mem-bank complex Graevus had captured in the assault's opening minutes, Tech-Marine Lygris and a dozen-strong Marine guard were pulling a cogitator stack apart. The complex was a tangle of cogitators and mem-banks, linked by metal-dad conduits and endless snaking lengths of cable. The moans of the dying and sharp cracks of gunfire filtered up from the muster deck below, echoing and eerie in the dim shadows of the complex. The Marines' hands tore a tarnished metal plate away from the four metre-high obelisk of the cogitator stack, revealing a multi-coloured tangle of cables. Lygris reached in and hauled a bundle of them out of the housing.
'We'll do this the old-fashioned way,' he said grimly, and the shears of his servo-arm cut through the waist-thick primary cable.
Electricity flashed violently and a hundred lights on the tangle of wires and cogitators above him went dark. The machine-spirit was cut off from the Geryon, for now at least.
Lygris drew the interface from his backpack - a snaking bundle of cables tipped with a sharp silver spike. He used it rarely, but knew it intimately. It was difficult to explain for someone who had not seen the machine-cult's teachings - this was something only the higher echelons had the right to do, and though he was a Soul Drinker and the best of men, he still recoiled at the horror the tech-priests would feel at his transgression. But it was the surest way. The only way.
He pulled down a likely-looking knot of mem-cables, pulsing with the information than ran through their filaments. He found a socket and snapped another cable into it, feeling it come to life in his hand.
'Cover me.' he said, glancing at the Tactical Marines. 'I'll be unconscious for a couple of minutes.'
'Yes, lord.'
Lygris took the interface cable and jammed the spike into the back of his head. His eyes must have rolled back and his arms flopped by his sides, but he didn't notice. His mind was full of the white light of knowledge - a standard mind-impulse unit link would disorientate an untrained man but this was anything but standard. The information from the Mechanicus craft and the platform was coursing through him, too much to filter, too fast to read.
He knew he couldn't interface directly. No one could - if such technology had ever existed then it had been lost tens of thousands of years ago. He had to focus, find the systems he was looking for, do his work and get out.
Remember what you are fighting for. For the Emperor. For Dorn.
He thought he would drown in the torrent of information. Finally he found a shape - a great shape of power and brutality, massive and terrible. Lygris could feel its intelligence burning as it loomed out of the hot white overload of information, could hear the deep throb of its virtual heart, taste its reek of old iron like blood in his mouth.
He looked for a name, and found it: Geryon.
He knew the machine-spirit would be furiously seeking a way through its secondary and redundant systems, trying to find a way in to challenge the interloper. Already a black beam like a searchlight was scouring the depths of the platform's mem-systems, hunting. Lygris had a few seconds here before the massive amorphous darkness of the machine-spirit found him, and knew also that it would all be over if it did. No one outside the Mechanicus had any idea of what a truly ancient and powerful machine-spirit could do to an intruder in its systems. Lygris could only be sure that he would be lucky if he got away with his mind wiped.
The Geryon yawned before him, huge and dark. Lygris scrabbled faster through the pale crystalline thought structures he had made to depict the mem-bank files, tore through the endless loops of cables that were control interfaces, battered down the plasteel doors his mind made from the hardwired barriers. He sank imaginary fingers into the hard metal of the command program, forcing it to yield beneath his hands, feeling the vast machinery as great thrumming shapes against his skin. He felt immense ammo-haulers and forced them to move, slamming disruptor shells the size of tanks into the breech. The coolants, the recoil compensators, the propellant tanks - he rammed them all into position.
It was too late. The Geryon was upon him, powering up an information burst of such magnitude it would fill Lygris's mind to bursting and then drain away, leaving a brain scoured of all memory and intelligence. It was over. He was effectively dead.
He did the last thing the machine-spirit would expect. He dived right into it, down the black-smoke throat of the Geryon, feeling its reeking hot breath blistering his skin. He had to be quick, quicker than anyone could reasonably hope to be, before the Geryon caught him and crushed him with coils of information.
Lygris swept through the darkness of the Geryon and hurtled upwards, skimming the roiling black madness of the neural circuits that formed its brain. He sought out the tiny pinprick of light that was the link between the machine-spirit and the platform's sensoria, the conduit through which information about the outside void poured into the Geryon's brain.
Faster, so fast Lygris thought he would die of the effort. But the Geryon was behind him, breath hot on his back, teeth gouging at him even as he dived into the glowing portal and into the sensoria systems.
Lygris looked out onto space through Geryon's great eye. He spotted something, focused. The definition grew: conning towers and gun emplacements, the aquiline prow, the bright wash of its engines. An Imperial battleship, proud and strong, a large and tempting target.
He was locked. He was loaded.
He fired.
THE GERYON-CLASS had several classes of ammunition. One was a single titanic shell that had an immense starburst area, which would create an instant zone of interdiction through which attack craft and even lighter cruisers would be unable to travel.
Another contained a half-dozen void charges, which would spread electromagnetic chaff and pulse waves in all directions and create the equivalent of stellar minefields across a wide area.
Still another contained over a hundred disruption canisters, which would rain interference over an entire
battlefleet, causing a temporary sensor-blackout. It was one of these that belched from the huge metal throat of the Geryon and burst just orbitwards of Chloure's sub-battlefleet.
One canister struck the underside of the Hydranye Ко and its momentum barged it through a full seven decks before it exploded, sending rivers of chaff-filaments rushing through corridors and pooling in cargo holds. More than thirty crew died in the explosion, and a further seventy or so from inhaling the filaments and fragments that flooded the lower decks. Half the light cruiser's air filtration system was clogged and the ship issued an all-points life support alert.
Several erupted between the star fort and the ships of the battlefleet. The Diligent and the Deacon Byzantine were in themselves relatively unaffected, but their view of the star fort was covered in a thick gauze of interference. Two scout craft on routine patrol from the Deacon became hopelessly lost as their unprotected servitor-guidance and comms failed completely. Several hours later they finally ran out of fuel and their crews froze to death.
The Deacon was quicker to respond to the sudden attack, firing several fragmentation torpedoes into the mass of interference discharge. The warheads malfunctioned as soon as they entered the electromagnetic fields and detonated piecemeal, adding more wreckage to the mess.
On the bridge of the Diligent, massive electrical feedback tore through the command systems and sent sheets of flame rippling up from the navigational consoles. For a few minutes all was black and hot and deadly - the screams of the dead and the roaring of flames mixed with the hiss of emergency saviour systems flooding the burning areas with fog and foam.
The damage control crew were there within three minutes, muscle-bound ratings with crowbars and rope hauling petty officers and nav-servitors from the burning wreckage. When the bridge was ordered enough for effective command, it had been established that the small craft tracked near the ordinatus platform were not obsolete fighters being used as maintenance craft after all, and that the platform was now under the control of the Soul Drinkers Space Marines.
It was also apparent that the Soul Drinkers had acted in a far more violent manner than Chloure had predicted. Chloure chose not to mention this.
Only the 674-XU28 was relatively unaffected, positioning itself to have a clear shot at the star fort and using its own jamming systems to counter the disruptive electromagnetic waves. Unfortunately its primary armament was currently under Soul Drinker control several thousand kilometres distant, and it had little more than defensive turret fire to boast in the way of firepower.
The tech-priests on board the 674-XU28 noted the puzzling fact that the defences on the star fort were powering down.
'GET ME DAMAGE reports! Now! And sensors!' Givo Kourdya hated letting things out of his control, and jumped from the deep leather upholstery of his captain's chair to bawl at the hapless petty officers and logisticians stumbling in the half-light of the bridge. Most of the lights had blown and the cogitator screens were flickering. Plumes of white smoke spurted from ruptured conduits and the viewscreen was full of ghostly static. The only sounds were sparks and steam, and the shouting of orders and curses. Otherwise there was silence, and this was significant because it meant the engines had stopped.
Lines of glowing green text chattered along the pict-slate set into the arm of the command chair. Damage reports - structural damage from the disruptor warhead was confined to a relatively small area, but the control systems for half the ship were haywire.
The engines had gone into emergency shutdown. Kourdya knew they wouldn't be back on-line for several hours, because priority for the damage control crews was the switching back on of the coolant systems before the plasma reactors overheated.
There were still no sensors. Sensors were the most delicate things on any ship and, annoyingly, the most useful. The Hydranye Ко was almost entirely blind. The most effective means of navigation, targeting and close maneuvering was currently to look out of a porthole.
'Front sensorium's down, sir.' said the tech-adept whose unfortunate task was to liaise between the Mechanicus personnel and the command crew. 'But the rearward facing arrays are in some kind of shape.'
'And?'
'We've got energy signatures, sir, from the planet's far side. Two of them, cruiser strength, heading-'
'How fast?'
'Very fast, sir. Faster than our top speed.'
'Space Marine cruisers.' said Kourdya, mostly to himself. Wonderful. His ship was temporarily blind and crippled, but it didn't matter.
The real effect of the Geryon shell had been to prevent co-operation between the three cruisers of the sub-battle-fleet. Between them they could have taken on the strike cruisers, which were probably light on weaponry to make room for attack craft bays. But one-on-one, the Hydranye Ко wouldn't have stood much of a chance even in full working order.
Kourdya sank back down into the command chair and pressed a control stud on the arm. If it still worked it would ring a bell somewhere below decks to indicate that a valet servitor should trundle up to the bridge bearing a decanter of eighty year-old devilberry liqueur and a shot glass. The Hydranye Ко wasn't going anywhere for a while, and in such situations Kourdya always tried to allow himself some little luxury to make sure it wasn't all bad.
'I wish I'd never won this ship.' he mused as he waited on the darkened bridge for his drink.
SARPEDON GLANCED AROUND him - he was in the flak-board corridor they had carved through the middle of the muster deck, daring the tech-guard around to attack, sending out counter-assault parties when they did. The Hell still burned all around - chains of glowing numbers formed equations in the air that fragmented and dissolved, and snakes of rust slithered along the bloodsoaked floor. The shock was dimmed by now but tech-guard still lost it here and there, screaming for machine-spirit's mocking voice to shut up. And the ordeal was taking the edge off even the stoutest of them, their aim thrown by shaking hands.
A voice came over the vox, strangled with static. 'Commander Sarpedon, this is the Unendingly Just. We are clear for pick-up.'
It had worked. Lygris had done it. If the Tech-Marine survived - and the Marines set to guard him said the interface had a taken its toll on him - he would be rewarded.
'Acknowledged, Unendingly Just!' replied Sarpedon, raising his voice to be heard above the static on the vox-net. 'Preparing to move out.'
Sarpedon had the majority of the Soul Drinkers with him, with the rest around Lygris's position. He loosed off a snap shot at a head that poked above a heap of wreckage, missed, guessed the position of the rest of the body and fired through the cover. Something screamed.
Treachery can never hide.
'Soul Drinkers!' he yelled. 'Prepare for withdrawal! Graevus, Vorts, meet up with Lygris's position and secure a route. The rest, fall back with me!'
THE GUNDOG AND the Unendingly Just swept in from the other side of Lakonia's orbit, where they had hung in the planet's sensor-shadow while the star fort and, later, the platform had been won. Their engines, overcharged for speed, were tagged as a larger-than-cruiser signal by the sensors of the closest ship, the Hydranye Ко.
The Ко made no move to intercept as they swept over the battlefleet, through fire arcs that would have destroyed even the tough Marine strike cruisers had the battlefleet been able to see them. Only the Adeptus Mechanicus craft tried to stop them, offering token turret blasts from its macrocannon batteries. The dark purple paint on the Gundog's hull was slightly scorched, nothing more.
The strike cruisers were ran by serf-crews under the command of small Soul Drinker retinues who knew when to let their charges make the decisions and when to rein them in. Both ships had been refitted extensively for close-order maneuver and they tumbled elegantly towards the top of the platform, which was still wreathed in propellant wash from the Geryon's firing. Few of the defensive turrets were still functioning - the close-range lance batteries and light torpedo waves ensured that none continued to do so.
> The Unendingly Just launched a wave of twenty Thunder-hawks towards the docking emplacement that Graevus had assaulted less than an hour before. Marines were already gathering amongst the docking clamps and refuelling junctions, holding the landing sites against attack.
The Gundog's belly was empty, having held the corvus pods now dotting the hull of the star fort. Lacking a means of moving large numbers of troops it docked directly with the star fort, latching on to a wide ship-to-station thoroughfare through which millions of shackled feet had marched in the decades before. Chapter serfs made the docking secure and the Soul Drinkers withdrew from the star fort's weapons emplacements and muster points onto the strike cruiser.
Chaplain Iktinos, nominally in command of the two hundred Soul Drinkers left on the star fort, ensured that as per Sarpedon's standing orders, the personnel embarked upon the strike cruiser Gundog included the prisoner-priest Yser and the three dozen members of his flock.
WHEN THE SOUL Drinkers withdrew into the waiting Thunderhawk gunships from the ordinatus platform, it turned out there was more than enough room in the transports. Only sixty-three Marines of the original hundred were still alive.
The Unendingly Just, receiving its brood of Thunderhawks back into its flight decks, turned gracefully and gunned its primary engines, sprinting towards the system edge where it would meet up with the Gundog and escape into the warp. It left behind nearly forty dead Soul Drinkers, and uncounted thousands of Mechanicus tech-guard.
BY THE TIME the Diligent had recovered its wits and managed to focus its sensors beyond the interference field, the two strike cruisers had long since disappeared with the three company-strong Soul Drinkers' force, Chloure could do was sit back in his command pulpit, and watch the star fort die. The viewscreen was full of the ugly swollen bulk of the Van Skorvold star fort. It flashed like lightning as the first charges went off across its metal skin.