Zane levelled out of the power climb, searching for and finding the next string of falling drop-pods, and guiding his prophetically-named Fury Interceptor towards them. More of the Emperor’s enemies still lived, and his holy work was not yet done.
Bulus Sirl watched as another of the troop transports exploded. Even with his cataract-clouded vision, he could see the firefly specks of enemy bombers dancing round the wreck of the burning ship. They were losing this battle, he realized, and losing it badly. The invasion of Helia was over. Forget the transports and the slave-stock scum inside them, he told himself. All that matters was that warships such as the Virulent survived to fight another day. With warships, another world could be subjugated, another army of slave troops could be raised, another fleet of transports could be constructed.
Yes, the invasion of Helia was over, he told himself. At least for the time being.
“Break off,” he ordered. “Bring us about and take us out of orbit.”
“Our orders are to stand in orbit and offer close support to the drop-pod assault on the planetary surface,” warned his second-in-command, a mere stripling with less than half a century’s service to the pestilent glories of the Creator of Corruption.
Sirl hissed in irritation, the gill-like slits on the sides of his neck opening in reaction and releasing a stinking spray of mist redolent with drifting viral spores. He lashed out with his tumour-tentacles, picking up the upstart and smashing him against a nearby bulkhead wall. A swarm of chittering Nurgle-spawn fell on the corpse, eagerly lapping up the mess leaking from its smashed skull. Sirl reached out again, appointing another officer as his new second-in-command, and with one touch of his tentacles he bestowed the blessings of the plague-kiss upon the chosen recipient.
“Our first loyalty is to the Plague Lord. Our first duty is to avenge the death of his servant. Set a course and prepare for battle. Our target is the Macharius.”
The Macharius shuddered under the impact of another blast against its void shields. A dull boom reverberated through the command deck, indicating an internal explosion somewhere below decks. Semper cast an anxious glance at his vessel’s Technis Majoris.
“Magos Castaboras, damage report!”
The gold-masked figure of the Macharius’s most senior tech-priest paused for several seconds, mind-impulse implants allowing him to commune with other Adeptus Mechanicus servants of the Machine God aboard the ship, and with the arcane workings of the machine-spirit mind of the Macharius itself. In seconds, he was able to receive and interpret detailed information from all over the ship.
“There has been an explosive hull breach on the starboard underside, penetrating several lower decks. The affected sections have been sealed off and the oxygen fires in those sections allowed to burn themselves out. There has been some interruption to the atmosphere systems of lower decks four through eight.”
Interruption, thought Semper, knowing that conditions on the lower decks could confidently be described as approaching hellish at the best of times: an endless warren of cramped and ill-lit passageways and compartments, the air thick with toxic fumes and burning vapours spilling out from the ship’s churning, mechanical guts. What must it be like down there now, he wondered, with whole sections in flames or exposed to the vacuum, and what little circulating air supply there was now cut off.
“How will this atmospheric ‘interruption’ affect the crew on those levels?”
The magos hesitated, seemingly caught by surprise by his captain’s question. Semper often had the impression that, to the haughty servants of the Machine God, the presence of a human crew aboard the vessels under their charge was viewed as merely a necessary inconvenience.
“Casualties will be medium to heavy, captain, but almost all of them from amongst the lowest class of crew ratings, and hence easily replaced by non-skilled conscripts from other decks.”
Semper nodded in acknowledgement. Battle raged all around the Macharius, and his ship, together with the Drachenfels, had been first to feel the full fury of the enemy guns, and had now taken several damaging hits. Two of its portside launch bays and one on the starboard side were out of action; one of its forward portside gun decks had been gutted by a direct hit from a deadly vortex missile; its long-range surveyors had been disrupted by a series of damaging radiation bursts against the void shields, and the Generarium tech-priests were now reporting damage to the coolant systems of two of the ship’s five massive plasma-core reactors. None of this damage was critical yet, Semper knew, and every hit the Macharius took was instantly sent back to the enemy by the Imperial ship’s own gun batteries. Surging forward into the midst of the disordered enemy fleet, surrounded by enemy targets, the Macharius’s guns spoke without interruption, carefully combining their fire patterns with those of the Drachenfels; the Macharius’s massed salvoes stripping bare an enemy vessel’s void shields and leaving it vulnerable to follow-on blasts from the Gothic class cruiser’s fearsome batteries of lance turrets. Two enemy destroyers had been obliterated in this way, and the infamous renegade vessel Heathen Promise had been driven off after a pounding from the two Imperial cruisers, retiring from the battle with one entire flank of its hull laid open and trailing a cloud of debris and energy vapour.
Elsewhere, the battle was slowly turning in the Imperial fleet’s favour. The Torment was a burning wreck, but so too was the enemy flagship Lord Seth, succumbing at last after receiving a total of eleven torpedo hits. Bombers from the Pluton had mercilessly pounced upon Vanguard squadron, but not before the Imperial Cobra destroyers ships had claimed two more troop transports with a close-range torpedo strike. The second wave of Macharius-launched Starhawks was even now attacking and destroying more of the transports, but reports were coming in that the first attack wave of Starhawks en route back to the Macharius had ran into trouble, coming under heavy attack from enemy fighters returning to orbit from the surface of Helia. The fighters were from the Lord Seth, and, with their home vessel destroyed and no space for them aboard the Pluton, they threw themselves at the Imperial bombers with suicidal frenzy, displaying an unmatched savagery remarkable even for the insane followers of the malignant powers of the warp.
Still, the current tally stood at nine of the enemy troop transports crippled or destroyed, with the second Imperial bomber wave likely to further add to that score. Of the enemy warships, the cruisers Pagan Voyager and Heathen Promise had already withdrawn from battle, and there were signs that others—including, significantly, Pluton—were also preparing to withdraw. Without their warship protectors, the remaining troop ships were doomed, and the invasion of Helia would be almost totally defeated.
Suddenly, the command deck was rocked by a heavy blast, knocking Semper to the ground. Alarms sounded, and an object—the body of a servitor drone—fell from one of the bridge’s high upper galleries, smashing into main deck and lying on the ground, its broken, mechanical limb-attachments still twitching with mindless cybernetic life.
“Slaughter class cruiser! It came in on us fast, using those wrecks for cover!” said Ulanti, helping the captain to his feet and pointing in warning towards the main viewing bay port. The blast shutters were sliding down in automatic response to the surprise attack, but Semper could still clearly see the distinctive viper-head prow shape of a renegade cruiser bearing down hard on his ship.
“Brace for impact!” bellowed Ulanti. “They’re coming in close to give us a full broadside!”
“No,” said Semper, countermanding his lieutenant’s order. The enemy Slaughter class ships were notoriously fast for capital vessels and, at first, Semper thought that the enemy cruiser meant to ram them. Then he saw it turn away a few degrees, rolling over to port to present its armoured underbelly to the Macharius. The surface of the warp-altered vessel’s underside was sickeningly organic-looking, and was pitted with blisterlike pustules. Even as Semper watched, he saw these pustules swell and open, revealing the metal prows of the craft inside them.
“Boarding action! Armsmen to
their stations,” ordered Semper. “Prepare to repel boarding assault.”
Spat out of the underbelly of the Virulent, the wave of boarding craft spanned the narrow distance between the two ships in less than a minute. Many were picked off by the Macharius’s anti-ordnance defences before they could attach themselves to the Imperial ship’s hull, exploding apart amongst the hail of las-cannon bursts and shellfire. Others misjudged their course trajectory or failed to fire braking motors in time, dashing themselves against the metal cliffs of the cruiser’s armoured flanks. Those that survived attached themselves limpet-like to the surface of the Macharius’s hull, using melta-charges to blow open airlock seals; powerful metal jaws to chew through thick armour plating; even ancient phase field generators to open up entryways through otherwise impenetrable bulkheads.
All over the starboard side of the Macharius, on deck after deck, strange, warp-altered figures emerged through raw-edged holes in bulkhead walls, howling in triumph at being here amongst their enemies and instantly falling upon the first of the Imperial vessel’s human defenders.
Maxim Borusa cursed, swinging his chainsword and shearing away the face of the beast-headed warp spawn that blocked his way. Another Chaos thing charged towards him, trying to impale him on the point of its pike weapon. Maxim cut it off at the knees with his return swing, pressing the barrel of his shotgun into its neck and pulling the trigger as it fell squealing to the ground.
He continued moving forward, cutting and blasting a path through the scram of bodies, following in the wake of the figure in the navy blue uniform with the gold epaulettes. Maxim enjoyed life on the command deck of the Macharius, away from the filth and squalor of the ship’s lower decks, where he had begun his erstwhile career aboard the carrier ship, slaving away on a gunnery deck work crew as just another piece of convict-conscript hivetrash. He enjoyed the feel of his crisp clean new uniform, and his private berth in the petty officers’ quarters, and the many luxuries and indulgences that often came his way now. He enjoyed all this, and he realized that his continued enjoyment of all these pleasures depended totally on the continued well-being of Flag-lieutenant Hito Ulanti.
Something that smelled of open charnel pits and spat out a stream of acidic bile rose up in front of him, barking incoherently. Maxim fed it the pommel of his chainsword, feeling the studded ridges of the hand-guard smash through gangrenous flesh, rotted teeth and bone. The thing staggered back, mewling loudly, and Maxim shot it three times in the face and throat with an autopistol that he did not remember picking up from one of the many corpses lying at his feet on the floor of the passageway.
He pushed on, stomping his heavy boots down on the face of something on the ground that tried to stab up at him with the bone-skewers that grew out of its hands. Disembowelling a renegade who still wore the remnants of the uniform of the Imperial Guard regiment he had deserted from to join the cause of Chaos. Tearing the rebreather mask from the face of a carapace-armoured warrior and watching the disease-bloated features of the once-human thing underneath as it asphyxiated on the relatively clean and unpolluted air of the Macharius.
This was the third such battle that he had followed his patron officer into since Ulanti had volunteered to personally lead the defence against the enemy boarding assault, and Maxim soundly cursed all ambitious and over-keen young flag officers. Ulanti would go far, Maxim suspected, and hopefully his faithful petty officer companion and protector Maxim Borusa would go far along with him, but only if he managed to keep his meal-ticket alive in the meantime.
Maxim saw the aristocratic officer artfully gut an enemy boarder with his sabre, but another renegade crewman nearby raised his boltgun towards Ulanti. The big hiveworld ganger lunged ahead, savagely kicking an Imperial armsman forward into the renegade’s line of fire. The armsman was torn apart in the burst of bolt shells intended for Ulanti and Maxim emptied the rest of the autopistol clip into the renegade before he could fire again.
Ulanti turned, nodding in silent thanks to his bodyguard protector. Gunshots rang out along the passageway as a second wave of enemy boarders advanced towards them. Maxim pulled Ulanti back into the cover of a recessed maintenance conduit, snatching up the dead renegade’s bolter as he did so. Ulanti drew a master-crafted laspistol from his side holster and began firing off a series of carefully-aimed las-shots. Maxim, born and raised in the tunnels of the Stranivar underhive, knew that what counted in situations like this was heavy firepower, and plenty of it. He hefted the bolter, its feel and weight familiar to him from a thousand bloody ganger battles in those same tunnels, and checked its ammo load, pleased to see that he still had almost a full clip of shells. He raised the weapon and began firing, methodically panning it back and forth and pumping shell after shell across the full width of the passageway, whining ricochets zigzagging off metal bulkhead walls and further increasing the chances of any one shot finding a target.
The boltgun’s heavy chatter was soon joined by the dull roar of shotguns, a squad of naval armsmen advancing down the passageway to support Maxim and Ulanti. The bodies of enemy boarders began to pile up on the decking but any possibility of retreat was cut off by a second group of Macharius defenders seizing and holding the passageway junction to the enemy’s rear. The renegade troops were quickly cut down in a withering crossfire, their dying screams of devotion to their Plague Lord master lost in the roaring chorus of shotgun blasts.
The midshipman commander of the armsman squad stood to attention before Ulanti, saluting smartly at the sight of his flag officer rank insignia. “More of them, sir. Perhaps another three dozen or so, down on the next level. Commissar Kyogen’s got them pretty well boxed in, but there’s a chance they could try and storm through towards the central magazine.”
“Show me,” said Ulanti, drawing his sabre again and moving off at the head of the squad. Behind him, Maxim spat in disgust, scrabbling about in search of fresh bolter clips amongst the already putrefying bodies of the enemy dead before hurrying off in pursuit of his patron.
The master of the Virulent turned away from the auspex screen, pleased to see the distant shapes of the Imperial fleet falling away to the rear of his vessel. Accompanying the Virulent were the Pluton, the Pagan Voyager and a handful of surviving escort vessels. The Heathen Promise limped off on a different course heading, offering itself—Sirl was delighted to see—as an obvious, alternative target for the wrath of any pursuing enemy ships. Ahead of the fleeing Chaos ships was open space, and the promise of escape into the warp.
It had been Sirl’s intention to launch a second wave of boarding craft at the Macharius, but, before he could do so, he was beaten off by the marauding beams of the Drachenfels’s deadly accurate lance turrets. Sirl was a loyal servant of the true powers of the warp, but he was no rage-possessed Khornate madman. He had served Grandfather Nurgle for centuries, and fully intended to serve him for centuries more yet. The ways of the Grandfather were slow and methodical, differing from those of the other Chaos powers, but in the end, all things fell to decay and corruption. The Macharius and the Virulent would cross paths again, he knew, and, when they did so, he would have his revenge.
After all, he mused to himself, had he not already taken steps to ensure that it would be so?
The Chaos thing shuffled through the darkness, leaving the lights and shouts of the enemy search parties behind it. There had been others like it amongst the boarding assault, it knew, others bearing the captain-champion’s plague gifts, but somehow it sensed that it was the only one to survive this far.
The cold, metal vaults and passageways of the enemy ship were unfamiliar to it, not at all like those of its own vessel, where the rich, humid atmosphere was thick with the stench of rot and decay, and the decks and walls marked with bright patterns of rust corrosion and weirdly beautiful sprays of poisonous algae and fungi. Still, it knew enough to head downwards into the bowels of the enemy vessel in search of what it needed. Or, rather, in search of what the thing stirring to life inside it needed.
To fester.
SEVEN
Tiredness and exhaustion filled every particle of Leoten Semper’s being. He had been on his feet for over thirty hours now, the last ten of those overseeing the aftermath of victory. The Battle of Helia IV was won. The boarding assault on his own vessel had been repulsed, and the honour of the final shots to be fired in anger had gone to Scipion as it put four torpedoes into the engine reactors of the retreating Violator, bringing the Chaos ship’s ran of luck throughout the battle to a sudden and spectacularly explosive end.
Yes, the battle was over, but there was still much to be done. Without their warship protectors, the Chaos troop transports fell easy prey to the Imperial gun batteries and torpedoes, but there was a considerable enemy invasion force already on the planet’s surface and digging in hard. The ground war would continue for months yet, and Imperial Guard reinforcements would have to be brought in from elsewhere within the Gothic sector to finally dislodge the enemy presence on Helia IV.
Amongst the surviving Imperial ships, both the Macharius and the Drachenfels had taken damaging—but not debilitating-hits, while Scipion had taken a crippling hit to its warp drive and would remain in orbit above Helia for weeks to come while it underwent vital repairs, in the meantime putting its firepower to use against the Chaos positions on the planet’s surface. Of all the Imperium capital ships, only von Blucher’s Graf Orlok had survived more or less undamaged, and Semper would well imagine what Erwin Ramas’s scathing opinion on that particular subject would be.
Rescue shuttles were still bringing in life-pod survivors from the Torment and the other destroyed Imperium ships, although the diligent search for these survivors was less a mission of mercy and more an act of necessity: Macharius and its sister ships all needed fresh blood to replace their own crew casualties suffered during the battle. Meanwhile, repairs to all vessels were already underway, while the Firestorm class frigate Vengeful had been despatched in high-speed pursuit of the retreating Chaos fleet, tracking them to the edge of the Helia system where it was hoped that its on-board psyker navigators and astropaths would be able to pick up prophetic hints of the Chaos fleet’s eventual destination as it made the jump into warp space.
[Battlefleet Gothic 01] - Execution Hour Page 13