Sarro looked to his first minister and the commander of his planetary defence force for answers, but Kale and General Brod could only stare at the display flickering defence laser beams in confused incomprehension.
“I… I don’t understand, your lordship,” stammered Brod, unable to tear his gaze away from the lines of flickering laser beams that continued to knife upwards, piercing through the cloud cover towards their targets in orbit. “The enemy must have seized the batteries, using them to fire upon the vessels in orbit.”
“How could this be allowed to happen?” shrieked Sarro, apparently forgetting the fact that his entire world had now almost completely descended into anarchy and disorder. Suddenly, a second, more immediately vital, point occurred to the governor-regent.
“These weapons, could they be used to fire upon the palace?”
It was Semper, pushing his way towards the governor-regent through the crowd of panicked nobles and retainers, who answered.
“They are orbital-aimed weapons, your lordship. Their elevation is too high to fire upon surface-based targets, but that is not the issue. The issue is that we cannot delay our departure any further. The safety of the evacuation fleet is paramount. If the orbital defence batteries have fallen into the hands of the enemy, then the area of space around Belatis is no longer secure. The commanders of the navy escort vessels will order an end to the evacuation operation and the immediate departure of the convoy fleet from Belatis, no matter if all the Emperor’s servants—even one as significant as the planetary governor—have not yet been safely evacuated. That is what any vessel commander would order under such circumstances.”
Including myself, without any hesitation whatsoever, Semper thought to himself bitterly, if I were where I belong on the command deck of the Macharius instead of down here pandering to a weakling idiot like you.
“What the captain says is correct, brother,” said the Lady Malissa, taking hold of Sarro’s hand and comforting him by holding it against the smooth, pale skin of her face. “You have already done all you can, and none will ever doubt your bravery or your devotion to our beloved homeworld, but now it is time to leave this place and take up your duties in the service of the Emperor elsewhere.”
“Yes, yes, of course. You are always so right, always so good at knowing the correct thing to do, dear sister,” murmured Sarro, allowing his sister to guide him away from the balcony and towards his waiting attendants.
The milling crowd of nobles and servants followed him, knowing that he was their sole remaining lifeline to safety. An eruption of light and sound, greater than anything that had come already, suddenly made them turn back towards the scene on the hills, where they saw solid lines of fire fall down through the cloud cover to envelop the hillsides where the defence laser batteries lay hidden. A thrill of fear ran through the assembled watchers, many of them crying out in terror. Even Semper, who had stood on the bridge of a warship and watched the phenomenon from high orbit, felt a clutch of fear as he witnessed first hand the tremendous energy now being hurled down from space by the orbiting warships of the Imperial Navy. The energy blasts and cannonades of shells and missiles tore through the veil of clouds, impacting deep into the bedrock of the hills and sending powerful blast waves rippling out over the city below.
Looking up through the swirling-edged rents in the cloud cover, Semper could see the tell-tale flashes in the night sky firmament that signified the massed firing of a warship’s weapons batteries. He saw also the unmistakeable flickering glow of a ship ablaze in orbit, and scattered comet trails of fire emanating from another damaged or destroyed vessel as debris from it fell, burning, down through the planet’s atmosphere.
Which one was the Macharius, he wondered? Which one of those flashing broadsides was his vessel? Or could it even be that doomed vessel which appeared from the surface as only a glowing ember of light, beginning to dim now as the fires that raged through its broken hull consumed the last of its atmosphere gases? He cursed the futility of his presence here on the planet’s surface. His vessel was in combat—in danger—and meanwhile he was trapped on this world, a helpless bystander to events that by all rights he should be participating in, perhaps even to the extent of being able to influence the final outcome.
As if on cue, he saw and heard roaring rocket trails shoot up skywards from amongst the conflagration of the burning hills. “Orbital torpedoes!” muttered Judda Kale in stunned disbelief, standing beside Semper and looking in naked terror at the lines of fire now tracing a path up into the space. “Emperor’s mercy, we’ve been betrayed! I never knew, I never—”
“Quickly, to the shuttles!” called the Lady Malissa urgently, drowning out whatever else the governor-regent’s first minister had to say. The panicked mob of courtiers needed little encouragement, and stampeded for the doors from the chapel. Fighting against the surging movement of the crowd, Semper looked around for the familiar dark blue uniforms of Battlefleet Gothic, spotting with relief the bulky figure of Maxim Borusa pushing towards him, followed by his other three petty officer bodyguards, all of them using fists and weapon butts to clear a path through the milling, panicked herd of Belatis nobility. Reaching him, the four armsmen formed a protective shield around the Macharius’s captain.
“I’d say it was high time we were getting back to the Mach, sir,” said Borusa, with the casual and contemptuous indifference to matters of rank and formality that Semper already realised was the distinctive mark of the man.
“Agreed, petty officer,” said Semper, removing a vox-caster from his cummerbund sash, talking into it through the heavy crackle of static interference still emanating from the palace defence shield. The personal vox-caster’s signal could not penetrate the shield and allow him to make contact with his ship, but it could still certainly reach the ship’s shuttle waiting in the landing bay several levels below.
“Semper to Macharius shuttle. We are on our way back to you now. Stand by to take off as soon as we are aboard.”
“The mood’s turning ugly down here, captain,” warned the voice of Milos Caparan. “We’ve got some of their ground-pounder troops guarding the entrances to the bay, but they look like they’re thinking about bailing out on us or perhaps even trying to storm aboard before we can take off. What orders?”
In the cockpit of the shuttle, there was a pause, and then came Semper’s answer.
“Clear the landing bay, by force of arms if necessary, and secure the entrances using your own crewmen, commander. If it comes through the doors and it isn’t wearing a Battlefleet uniform, then by all means feel free to shoot it on sight.”
Dozens of kilometres overhead, doom descended on the governor’s palace. Launched out of synch with the other retargeted missiles, the first orbital torpedo reached the apex of its upwards launch trajectory. Internal gyros revolved and changed, manoeuvring thrusters fired, and the missile tumbled back towards the planet’s surface, its simple logic engine machine-mind finding and zeroing in on its new target. Its main drive spluttered and died, its fuel cells exhausted by the arduous climb up into the upper fringes of the atmosphere. Now only gravity, and a few well-timed, final bursts of manoeuvring thrusters, would carry it to its target.
The first missile hit the palace at tremendous speed, passing harmlessly through the defence shield as it was designed to, just as if the energy screen were the void shields of a target space vessel. By chance, it crashed through the roof dome of the governor-regent’s throne room, completely obliterating the chamber. Designed to penetrate through adamantium hulls and thick bulkhead walls, the densely-armoured warhead cut through the comparatively light stonework structure of the palace, ploughing on down through the building, before finally exploding in the kitchens and stockrooms levels, some twelve storeys below.
The impact and detonation of the missile rocked the palace rock to its core. Ceilings and passageway roofs collapsed onto the heads of the palace’s screaming inhabitants, killing them or burying them alive. Fire and blast wave damage
roared through combat-filled stairways and elevator shafts, killing everything in their path. An entire surface section of the rocky spire that the palace was built on gave way, raining hundreds of tons of rock down onto the mobs still milling about at the base of the palace rock. In the generarium level, buried deep within the rock itself, the impact destroyed or interrupted many of the power feeds to the shield projectors studded across the outer surface of the rock. The shimmering defence shield suddenly stuttered and then vanished.
Not that it was needed any longer, anyway. High overhead, the remaining three missiles were even now reaching the apex point of their own upwards trajectories before turning back down towards their shared target on the planet’s surface.
The impact of the blast threw Semper to the ground, dust and debris raining down upon him from the collapsed passageway ceiling behind him. The main palace lighting cut out, to be replaced by the dim radiance of glow-globes set low into the passage walls. One of his armsmen bodyguards helped him to his feet, the man even respectfully and ludicrously taking the time to brush some of the coating of dust from his captain’s uniform. All around him, Semper heard screams of panic and groans and cries of the injured buried in the rubble behind him. From somewhere close came the bark of gunfire. Either the battle in the lower levels had spilled up to the upper palace, or the nobility of Belatis and their servants were turning on each other in maddened panic to secure themselves a place on the evacuation shuttles. What had already been a confused rash to the landing bays now turned into a blind stampede.
“Captain Semper!”
Semper turned, seeing Byzantane and a squad of fully-armed Arbitrators shouldering their way through the press of bodies towards him from along a side passage. Gunfire chased them along the corridor, and the troopers at the rear of the Arbites squad turned to fire roaring shotgun broadsides into the darkness behind them.
“Your shuttle is closer than mine. Get to it, and get this fat fool and his companions out of here.” Byzantane gestured to the huddled group of Sarro and his retinue. Semper saw the cringing, terrified figure of Hyuga with them, although there was no sign of the Munitorium adept’s two scribe assistants, no doubt lost or abandoned somewhere in the confusion.
“Get moving. That was a torpedo hit, and apparently there’s more of the same already on the way,” continued Byzantane. “My men and I will hold this junction and herd the rest of these wretches to the other bays on the next level down.”
The Arbites commander grinned in mirthless humour, seeing the questioning, doubting look in the eyes of the Imperial Navy captain. “Don’t worry, captain. I have no wish to sacrifice my men or end my service to the Emperor today, or any other days in the foreseeable future. Now get moving, and we’ll see each other again in high orbit.”
“I look forward to it, marshal,” said Semper, offering his hand to Byzantane, “and to seeing this world disappearing from view behind me on my ship’s rear scanners.” The two men clasped hands again, Byzantane pulling Semper close. “Watch them. Watch them all, captain. Do not turn your back on any of them,” Byzantane hissed urgently into his ear. Semper looked in surprise at this strange Imperial lawkeeper, and then nodded in unspoken understanding. And, with Byzantane’s warning still ringing in his ears, Semper led his group off down the main corridor to the shuttle bay.
Twice on their brief journey, they encountered resistance. Once, a bank of elevators had spilled open to disgorge a terrified mass of humanity: servants and mutineer PDF troopers fleeing the destruction and battle that now filled the levels below. Semper had hesitated to give the necessary command to clear a path through them, but Borusa had not.
“Open fire!” he yelled, even as the armed mob surged towards them.
The four armsmen’s shotcannons, designed for use in the target-packed close confines of a space vessel’s corridors and airlocks, were perfect for this kind of butchery, and several combined blasts from them sent the remainder of the mob fleeing away up another corridor, leaving the shrapnel-torn bodies of their dead and dying behind them.
Further ahead, at the entrance to the shuttle bay, they ran straight into an ambush, black-garbed cultists firing upon them from the top of a nearby stairway, or from amongst the cover of the pillar-lined antechamber hall to the shuttle bay. A volley of shots cut through the group of fleeing navy men and Belatisite nobles as they ran the gauntlet across the open space towards the bay entrance. Semper saw two of Sarro’s aides cut down by a burst of autogun fire, one of the shots also catching General Brod in the shoulder.
A las-blast felled the armsman beside Semper. The captain grabbed the man as he fell, intending to drag him into the bay, but then found himself staring into the excavated crater of the man’s skull, where the las-shot had blown half his head away. Semper let the corpse drop, but snatched up the dead man’s shotcannon, sighting it at the nearest black-cloaked figure hiding behind a stone pillar. He may have hesitated to fire upon panicked Imperial subjects just a few moments ago, but he had no such qualms concerning the servants of Chaos. He fired, seeing his target disappear from view in a burst of exploded flesh and shattered stonework. Before he could find another target, he was shoved brusquely from behind, Maxim Borusa propelling him out of the firing line and into the relative safety of the shuttle bay. The others scrambled in behind him, one young nobleman pausing in the entranceway to return fire at the cultists, only to be instantly gunned down in a blast of lasfire.
They ran towards the beckoning open belly of the shuttle, the rising scream of the shuttle’s engines drowning out the sound of gunfire from behind them. Blood maddened, the cultists charged after them into the open bay. Inside the craft, First Gunner Daksha swivelled round in his top turret, panning the barrels of his quad-mounted autocannon across the mouth of the bay entrance. At the press of a trigger, firepower intended to blow apart armoured starfighters in an unstoppable hail of armour-piercing shells was unleashed upon the Chaos followers, indiscriminately reducing them to a sprayed mess of pulped matter.
Maxim Borusa stood at the top of the ramp, screaming brutal-sounding Stranivarite obscenities at the ruling elite of Belatis as he hurried them on into the interior of the passenger cabin. He paused on the ramp, checking that there was no one else left to come. A cultist, maddened with bloodlust, made it unscathed through the hail of turret fire and charged up the ramp towards him, brandishing a blood-dripping chainsword. Maxim allowed him to get almost within striking range and then raised his bolt pistol and shot the madman through the face, dismissively kicking his falling corpse over the side of the ramp before stepping back into the shuttle cabin, hitting the ramp seal rune as he did so.
“All aboard. For Volkk’s sake, go! Go! Go!”
Upfront in the shuttle cockpit, Caparan needed little encouragement. He pushed forward heavily on the guidance stick as he fed power through to the main lifting jets. In a roar of blinding thruster fire, the shuttle touched off, blasting out of the open bay at reckless speed.
Beyond, in the darkness of the rain-soaked Belatis night, Caparan and Torr saw the running lights of a clutch of other shuttle craft blasting away from the palace rock. Above them, through the cockpit canopy, they saw the blazing engine trails of the three missiles now streaking down towards the palace. Caparan hit the main engine thrusters, sending the shuttle coursing away up out of reach of the torpedoes’ blast radius.
They almost made it.
The remaining three missiles hit the palace in close synchronisation, blasting apart the entire upper palace. One of the warheads, still unexploded, burrowed down into the living rock of the spire the palace was built upon, finally detonating near the generarium. The reactor, powered by thermal energy pumped up from deep below the planet’s surface, exploded immediately, cracking open the entire palace rock as the energy stored within it surged outwards at incredible speed.
From a distance, it looked as though the palace and the rock it was built upon simply erupted apart like a volcano.
The blast-
wave swept away everything in its path, levelling the centre of Madina and hurling huge pieces of flaming rock for kilometres in every direction. Caparan and his co-pilot fought for control of the shuttle craft as it was caught up in the initial blast-wave. For a moment, they thought they had succeeded in riding out the worst of it, and then the craft was struck by the hail of rock missiles thrown out by the explosion. One of the starboard engines exploded, struck by a rock chunk travelling with all the deadly velocity and impact of a macro-cannon shell. Instantly transformed into shards of shrapnel, pieces of the shattered engine workings flew off, peppering into the wing and fuselage of the shuttle and causing further damage. One of the shrapnel fragments, a jagged piece of engine casing as large and as flat as a manhole covering, tore through the side of the passenger cabin, spinning like a buzz-saw blade through the cabin and decapitating two of the governor-regent’s court advisors as they sat strapped into their acceleration couches. Sitting behind them, Semper felt the spray of blood strike him across the face, although it took him several seconds to realise that it was not his own.
In the cockpit, Caparan felt the craft begin to die around him. The controls were sluggish and unresponsive, and the panel in front of him was lit up with a rash of red, flashing warning runes. From the rear of the cockpit came the smell of burning flesh and wiring as one of Shanyin Ko’s servitors and the console system it was plugged into overloaded and caught fire. Caparan and Torr looked at each other, both of them sharing the same realisation.
“We’ll be lucky if we can even stay airborne another few minutes, never mind make it back up into orbit. We need to find somewhere to put it down onto the ground.”
“Where?” replied Torr, looking down on the darkened city below and seeing nothing but dense, built-up ruins, no doubt crawling with more heretic madmen. Caparan brought the shuttle round in a long, slow turn in an attempt to maintain altitude while they scanned the ground below for a landing place, instead seeing only ruins and burning buildings. Then, briefly, a tall, instantly recognisable spire shape stood starkly silhouetted against the night-time horizon.
[Battlefleet Gothic 01] - Execution Hour Page 23