Soon they would be amongst the minefields the Arbitrators had seeded in the ruins around the courthouse and after that they would be within range of the heavy flamer units that were the Arbites fortress’s last line of defence. And it still wouldn’t be enough to stop them. The blindly obedient servitors now manning the wall defences would perform their final duties well enough, Korte knew, but it would only be a matter of minutes before the cultist horde was inside the compound.
Or perhaps in even less time than that. “Vehicles!” reported a voice on Korte’s helmet vox-cast link, coming from the Arbites pilot of one of the shuttles that had just taken off. From the air above the fortress, the pilot had a clear view of the cultist lines. “They’re bringing up vehicles. Armoured tractor rigs, a whole column of them coming along Regent’s Boulevard from the north.”
Korte cursed. He knew the kind of rigs these would be: huge behemoths used in the forge works of the city’s northern industrial fringe to haul extra-heavy loads of steel and adamantium alloy. At full power, one of those monsters could smash through the courthouse main gates with ease.
Yes, definitely time to be leaving, he grimly surmised.
“Mahan! Where’s Mahan?” he yelled, standing at the foot of the last shuttle in line and counting heads as the last few Arbitrator stragglers boarded.
“Here!” The shout from across the compound echoed over Korte’s helmet radio, and he saw the young Arbitrator commander racing with his squad across the open ground of the landing area. Shells landed around them, chasing them, almost as if the cultist gunners could see them. They had stayed behind longer than ordered, checking that all the servitor gunners were functioning properly in order to buy the final evacuation wave as much time as possible. Running through the falling hail of rain and shellfire, they charged up the loading ramp, taking their places amongst the other Arbitrators now strapping themselves in for take-off. Korte took one last look round the now abandoned courthouse compound. A shell landed a direct hit on one of the macro-cannon turrets, tearing a hole through that section of the wall. From beyond the walls came another howl of triumph from the cultists. Korte spat in contempt into the bloody mud.
“Definitely time to be going,” he murmured, turning and walking up the ramp. The nervous pilot had his craft airborne even before the ramp had slid shut, the shuttle pirouetting at speed into the skies above the fortress, riding a path through the storm of small-arms fire that poured up at it from the ground. Opening its lifter thrusters, the craft accelerated upwards to join the rest of the shuttle formation.
The last Imperium forces had left the surface of Belatis. As of now, the planet had been officially abandoned to the Despoiler.
Inside the cockpit of the lead shuttle, the Arbites pilot took a last look out over the vista of the city. Other than the rocky peak of the governor’s palace and the soaring spires of the Ecclesiarch cathedral to the south of it, there were no other familiar landmarks remaining that he could see. The city generarium had been destroyed by sabotage weeks ago, and, as the gloom of night descended on the city, all that was visible were great dark patches spread out across the face of the blacked-out city, interspersed by the random blazes of burning buildings and the scattered constellations of cultist and refugee camp-fires amongst the rains. Occasionally, stuttering bursts of las-energy or phosphorous tracer fire arced up into the sky, although it was impossible to tell whether the fire was directed at anything specific or was just part of the heretics’ spreading madness as they celebrated victory amongst the burning ruins of the fallen capital city.
Suddenly, bright light splashed across the pilot’s photochromatic helmet visor. He looked up in alarm, thinking that his shuttle was being targeted by anti-aircraft fire, but seeing nothing.
“There! Over there!” urged his co-pilot, pointing out towards the blank darkness. And then, suddenly, there it was again, emanating from somewhere amongst the thickly forested hills to the north of the city. Brilliant, angry fingers of laser energy stabbing up into the night sky. Reaching up to grasp and pull down the bright, star-like lights of the ships orbiting overhead.
The planet’s orbital defence laser batteries were opening fire.
ELEVEN
The first volley of lance fire from the planet’s surface struck the Graf Orlok on its underside, just fore of its main engine array. Like many officers of his kind, Titus von Blucher mistook a maniacally strict adherence to every rule, regulation and tenet as being marks of the true worth of a vessel’s captain, and drilled his crew rigorously and continuously. It was this blind obedience to navy regulation, ironically, which was to save his vessel from catastrophe.
The Graf Orlok was orbiting at fifty per cent full void shield capacity, as prescribed in navy regulations. In practice, few commanders maintained this “minimum half power” rule. Void shields were a heavy drain on a ship’s energy resources, and constant operation of the complex and often temperamental void shield generators greatly increased the risks of them failing when they were most needed, during battle. Here, in orbit above an Imperium world, with other navy vessels patrolling out-system and able to provide ample warning against enemy attack, many naval commanders would have quietly satisfied themselves with running void shield generators at minimum power.
The volley of defence laser fire impacted against the cruiser’s void shields, burning through them in seconds but expending the greater part of its energy in the effort. What was left struck the Imperial ship’s underbelly, scoring through the armoured hull and into the mechanical innards of its engines’ power feeds. Had the void shields been at any lower level, the lance beams would have punched through into the ship’s generarium core, erupting amongst its volatile plasma reactors and possibly destroying the entire vessel in a catastrophic chain reaction.
On the Graf Orlok’s command deck, Titus von Blucher screamed death and damnation at his crew, threatening them with the direst court martial and summary execution offences if they didn’t get the void shields up to full power immediately. If they didn’t restore full power to the engine systems. If they didn’t give him a complete damage report. If they didn’t locate the exact source of the enemy fire coming at them from the planet’s surface. Despite their captain’s haranguing and often contradictory commands, his crew were able to able to accomplish the most immediately vital of these tasks. When the recharged defence batteries struck again less than a minute later, their deadly beams exploded harmlessly against the Lunar class cruiser’s now fully-restored void shields.
Elsewhere amongst the orbiting fleet, vessels fired up main drives and manoeuvring thrusters, seeking to escape the batteries’ high orbital reach. Aboard warships, gunnery officers shouted angry instructions to surveyor officers and tech-priests, demanding target co-ordinates for their batteries to zero in on, while in the generariums of almost two dozen transports, armies of sweating engineers encased in bulky, heat-resistant suits struggled to divert power from aged reactors to weak and unreliable void shield generators.
Meanwhile, on Belatis, in command bunkers buried below the planet’s surface, cultist gunnery commanders cursed their foolishness in targeting their first shots at a large and well-armoured warship vessel, and frantically dialled in new target co-ordinates.
There were, after all, many other more vulnerable targets to choose from.
The Arcona was just another aged, decommissioned transport hulk that had been hurriedly refitted and called back into active service at the outbreak of the war, but for Lito it was the first spacecraft he had ever been on, and consequently the grandest thing he had ever seen. The shuttle journey up from Belatis had been a voyage of marvels; the final embarkation aboard the Arcona another such world of discoveries. Lito was confined to the lower chambers of the passenger decks along with the other novice acolytes, but what little of the vessel that he had been allowed to see seemed to him to be an endless source of wonders and mysteries. The ship echoed with strange sounds and vibrations, and while at first they filled the im
pressionable young novice with great fear, he soon became accustomed to these strange, apparently meaningless phenomena that rang up from the depths of the ship’s mechanical bowels. This was the realm of the strange and terrible Machine God, he knew; the unknowable—and false, the preachers and confessors of the Ecclesiarch thundered mightily from their pulpits—deity worshipped by the tech-priests. Lito secretly wondered if the sounds he heard were not the Machine God calling out in anger at the presence aboard one of his vessels of the rival priests and adepts of the Imperial Faith.
So it was that, when he and the rest of the congregation of Ecclesiarch evacuees were gathered in the immense cavern space of the ship’s main hold for a service of thanksgiving, Lito at first thought little of the faint but insistent sound of klaxon alarms which could be heard emanating from the other decks. Then there came a thick booming ramble from somewhere deep below their feet, and the definite sensation of movement.
They were moving, Lito realised in thrilled terror! The ship’s mighty engines had been activated, and they were moving! Perhaps they were even about to ascend into the empyrean itself, he thought to himself with an even greater rash of fearful excitement. Others obviously had similar thoughts, and a hubbub of nervous and whispered excitement broke out amongst the ranks of the assembled adepts. Angry lector-priests armed with whipping canes moved swiftly to quell the disturbance, but even the cardinal astral himself had broken off in confusion from his droning sermon of thanksgiving as the rumblings and klaxon sounds grew even louder.
Suddenly, a tremendous impact threw Lito and all around him to the ground. From the far end of the chamber came a blinding flash, and he heard the voices of the adepts rise in one single choir of screams. For a moment, he wondered if all ascensions into the empyrean were as dramatic and terrible as this, and then he saw the wall of flame gushing along the hold towards him, immolating all in its path. For reasons that Lito would never now understand, his last thoughts were somehow of his blind astropath master, left behind on the world below. Seconds later, the stricken Arcona blew apart as the deadly focused streams of energy lancing up from the surface of Belatis cut it in half.
Further out-system, Erwin Ramas, master of the Drachenfels, tried to make sense of the first confused reports coming in from the evacuation fleet orbiting the doomed world. The Belatis system was not a large one—scarcely a third of the size of the Terran system—but the Drachenfels, maintaining watch over the outer system approaches, was still several light minutes distant from the rest of the Imperial force. The subsequent delay in normal communication channels—at this distance, it would take almost quarter of an hour to receive and send back the simplest vox message—necessitated the use of astropaths to instantaneously relay vital battle orders and communiqués between vessels in the same star system. Ramas could only wait as his ship’s astropath received word from his brethren aboard the other Imperial vessels, communicating to the Drachenfels’s command crew who would in turn feed it through to their incapacitated captain inside the strategium shell which was both his prison and nurturing shelter.
Partially linked into the pulsing machine-mind of his vessel, Ramas sifted through the streams of data fed to him not only by the crew of the command deck, but also by the ship itself. From the reports from his astropath and bridge officers, he knew that the evacuation fleet was under attack, but the ship whispered to him of a threat closer and more immediate than that. From the very edge of its surveyor senses, the ship sensed something amiss, whispering the first word of it in soundless electronic murmurings too faint for the vigilant but dull-witted surveyor monitor servitors to yet pick up. Only Ramas heard it. More than any other vessel commander within Battlefleet Gothic, aboard the Drachenfels captain and vessel truly were as one. Ramas heard the ship’s warning, and was already reacting even as the first spoken confirmation crackled over the command deck’s comm-net link with its patrolling escort craft.
“Pegasus reporting. We are in surveyor contact with five or more enemy vessels, including one capital ship. Emperor knows where they came from, but they’re moving in-system at speed, heading for the evacuation fleet. We’re directly in their path, and after that they’ll be coming your way. We’ll try and hold them as long as we can. Good hunting, Drachenfels. Pegasus out.”
Ramas said nothing, knowing that the Pegasus was already doomed, and respecting the frigate commander’s decision to go down fighting rather than retreat, buying time for the rest of the Imperial fleet. Ramas turned his attention to checking his ship’s status and issuing orders to his crew. One of the Emperor’s ships may already be lost, but his vessel and crew were still very much alive, and soon they would have a battle to fight.
Emerging from its hiding place amongst the gas giant’s upper atmosphere, the Chaos flotilla swept in-system, the Charybdis at its centre, shielded by the protective fan of its Infidel class torpedo ship escorts. Faster than their Imperial equivalents, and armed with longer-ranged weapons batteries, they were moving in attack formation, intent on destroying any enemy vessel in their path.
The Pegasus was the first to fall, advancing bravely into the face of the oncoming Chaos formation, but destroyed in a wave of Infidel-launched torpedoes before it could bring its own formidable but shorter-ranged laser battery armaments to bear. One of its sister Sword class vessels, the Achilles, fared only slightly better. Making a darting flank attack on the Chaos formation, it succeeded in crippling one of the Infidel raiders in a brief but withering storm of laser fire. But, before the craft could recharge its weapon batteries’ depleted energy reserves, an answering blast from the Charybdis’s enormous starboard plasma cannon batteries tore off the Achilles’s prow and destroyed its internal power relay systems. Drifting crippled and powerless, the Achilles was completely defenceless yet the Chaos ships contemptuously spurned the chance to complete its destruction, sweeping on past it in-system and towards a far more rewarding target. Towards the Drachenfels.
Erwin Ramas had heard the princeps commanders of the Legiones Titanicus described as “gods of battle”, linked into the living minds of their Titan war machines, striding across the battlefield like angry, vengeful gods, leaving armies of men and other, lesser machines crushed and broken in their wake. Those who had seen the terrifying spectacle of Titans in battle—and Ramas himself had—never forgot it, but Ramas laughed at the notion of such power being described as godlike. No, the power to traverse the warp and travel anywhere within the almost limitless bounds of the Imperium of Mankind; the power to rain fire down from the heavens on the heads of the Emperor’s enemies; the power to enter battle in command of an Imperial warship, to feel blows that would crush the greatest Titan war-machine deflect harmlessly off your armoured flanks, to send back volleys of fire that would destroy an entire Titan legion with one blast.
That was power, Ramas thought. Perhaps the greatest power any mortal could ever know. To be linked into the mind of a warship, as he was, was to have only the merest inkling of what it was to be truly godlike.
Ramas called his attention away from such blasphemous thoughts and back to the matter at hand. Checking the surveyor information being fed through to him, he saw the Chaos formation bearing down hard on his vessel like a pack of wolves, the faster-moving escorts ranging ahead of the slower but more powerful Murder class cruiser.
“All ahead full,” he ordered, feeling the surge of power ran through the ship as additional energy was channelled through to engine systems already burning with the heat of a miniature sun.
For a while, he allowed his mind to drift through the maze of information made available to him, checking status reports, issuing and clarifying further, lesser orders, and comm-net communing with his second-in-command on the ship’s bridge. Finally, when he shifted his attention back to the surveyors, he saw that the moment was almost at hand. The escorts were pursuing him like eager young wolf cubs, closing on the Drachenfels but surging too far ahead of the enemy cruiser.
“Burn retros,” he ordered, feel
ing the flow of power course through the ship in the opposite direction, towards its forward-firing braking thrusters.
“Hard to port, ninety degrees!” he ordered, feeling, even hearing, the ship’s ancient infrastructure groaning in protest at the strain being put upon it as the entire vessel swung ponderously round in space. A difficult and dangerous manoeuvre—vessels had broken in two or fractured their reactors attempting it—but Ramas knew his ship and he knew his crew, and felt sure that neither would fail him now.
The Drachenfels was now lying abeam of its pursuers, ceasing all forward movement and presenting its broad port side to the enemy’s sights. Ramas could imagine the simultaneous fear and excitement aboard the Chaos vessels. The Imperial cruiser had presented itself as an easy target, but at the same time it was now able to bring its fearsome portside batteries of lance turrets to bear on its pursuers. The next few moments would be vital, Ramas knew, and he intently studied the images on the strategium’s surveyor screens.
Overconfident, sure of another victory, the Chaos raiders surged onwards, closing to firing range. Had that eldar torpedo strike of so long ago left Ramas with any lips, he would have smiled with them right now.
“Lock on,” he commanded. “Open fire, portside batteries!”
Thick streams of energy blasted out from the Drachenfels’s lance armaments, flickering across the gulf of space to find the line of Chaos vessels. The lance beams played over two of the Infidels, exploding one apart, sending the other one drifting helpless and dying, its internal compartments and atmosphere set alight by the star-hot lance beams. Ramas did not allow himself any moment of pleasure or triumph; he knew what was about to happen.
[Battlefleet Gothic 01] - Execution Hour Page 21