There was a long pause over the comm-net link. When Ramas spoke again, there was a new tone of slyly amused understanding in his voice. “Very well, marshal. I wish the record to show that I object in the strongest terms to your actions, but, that as a loyal servant of the Emperor and his law, I realise my hands are tied. Good hunting, Macharius. Bring your captain back to us safe and unharmed. Battlefleet Gothic is the poorer without a man of his abilities. Drachenfels out.”
Byzantane turned to Ulanti, seeing the look of confusion on the navy officer’s face. “This vessel is no longer part of Battlefleet Gothic, lieutenant. In the Emperor’s name, by the authority invested in me as one of the keepers of his sacred law, I’m commandeering this vessel and its crew.” Byzantane smiled, relishing the look of surprise on Ulanti’s face. “This vessel is now under the command of the Adeptus Arbites, at least for the time being. Issue your orders to your helmsmen, lieutenant. You may change course back to Belatis whenever you are ready.”
Kyogen stepped forward. At over two metres in height and wearing the imposing black uniform and silver-skull rank insignia of an Imperial commissar, Kyogen was used to putting the fear of the Emperor into just about every crewman aboard the Macharius; with Byzantane, who stood almost as tall in his bulky black-armoured uniform, he enjoyed no such advantage. The word of a ship’s commissar was law on a navy vessel, but the word of an Arbites marshal was immutable law on every world throughout the Imperium. Byzantane locked eyes with the commissar, the two servants of Imperial justice facing up to each other.
“You intend to force a way through the pursuing enemy vessels with just one ship?” asked Kyogen. “I have no qualms with your intentions, marshal, and I recognise that your authority is greater than mine, but as ship’s commissar I must speak if I believe that the security of this ship is threatened by foolish or suicidal orders which must surely result in its wasteful destruction.”
“I assure you that we will not be alone, comrade commissar. After all, the Macharius is not the only Arbites vessel in this convoy,” said Byzantane, gesturing again to the communications adepts.
“Open a comm-net channel to the Inviolable Retribution.”
Seconds later, the thick, hiveworld-accented voice of Marshal Secundus Korte sounded over the command deck vox-speakers. “I have been monitoring your communications, marshal. What orders?”
“Come about full,” instructed Byzantane. “Form up with your new Arbites sister vessel Macharius and make with all speed on a return course back in-system. Justice awaits, Marshal Secundus. We have unfinished business to settle back on Belatis.”
Linked into his ship’s surveyor senses, Ramas watched as the Macharius and the Arbites strike cruiser broke ranks with the rest of the Imperial convoy and set course back for Belatis. Reaching out with a fire-withered claw-hand, Ramas opened up an internal comm-channel to his vessel’s bridge. “Signal the rest of the convoy to proceed as planned,” he ordered his second-in-command. “We will fall back and take up the rearguard position vacated by the Macharius.” He paused, and then ordered, almost as an afterthought, “And instruct Magos Herihor to make good the damage done to our main drive systems.”
“Sir?” queried the voice of Ramas’s long-suffering second-in-command, confusion evident in his tone. “The main engines are fully operational. Those Infidel torpedoes caused only minor damage to our drive systems, all of which has now been repaired, according to the magos.”
“Then tell that blasted Machine God groveller to check the systems again,” suggested Ramas, a conspiratorial tone creeping into his voice. “I fear that not all the damage may have been found and repaired. It would be unfortunate indeed if we were forced to drop out of the convoy due to any kind of engine malfunction or the need to make urgent battlefield repairs.”
His second-in-command, by now used to the irascible captain’s often unpredictable ways, finally took the hint. “Most unfortunate, captain,” he smiled, realisation dawning in his voice. “I shall make the necessary arrangements without further delay.”
On the bridge of another warship, another captain and his underlings were in urgent conference.
“Two of them, commander,” reported the captain of one of the forward Infidel escorts from over the Charybdis’s command deck comm-net. “A Dictator class cruiser and another warship. Its configuration is unfamiliar, although we believe it is some kind of light scouting cruiser. They are both heading directly back towards us. What are your orders?”
The captain of the Murder class Chaos cruiser considered the question. He knew that he had already risked the Despoiler’s displeasure by his squadron’s failure to destroy the Drachenfels and attack the Imperial evacuation fleet as it lay in vulnerable orbit position above the Planet Killer target world. The Despoiler did not suffer failure, or even over-cautiousness, in his commanders, and the master of the Charybdis knew that he must throw caution to the wind if he were to regain the Warmaster’s favour. Death in space combat could come in many different forms, but any of them would be better than the kind of fates reserved for those who had displeased Abaddon the Despoiler. The Chaos captain did not know why two of the Imperial warships had broken away from the convoy, but he knew that in doing so they offered him a chance to redeem himself to the Warmaster.
“Charybdis to squadron,” he commanded. “Form up for attack.”
Through his mind link with the plague creature now worming its way through the Macharius’s metal innards, Sirl was aware of his prey’s change of course minutes before it registered on his vessel’s long-range surveyor screens. Reverberating through the pipeways and ducts along which his puppet creature now crawled, he felt and heard the rumbling boom of the enemy vessel’s main engine drive firing up to full capacity; he felt that strange, tell-tale, invisible tugging sensation that came as a vessel’s artificial gravity field shifted to compensate for sudden changes in its course and trajectory. The Macharius was radically coming about, he realised excitedly, turning away from the rest of the convoy and accelerating away on a return course back to Belatis.
Sirl did not know or understand why his prey was now hurrying back towards him, towards its doom, but he knew that this unexpected turn of events would only make his task all the easier. The Chaos captain smiled to himself. The powers of the warp were clearly with him; Grandfather Nurgle himself must be watching over the fortunes of his loyal servant.
“Faster. The Grandfather grows impatient,” he snapped to his crew, looking at the display on the command deck surveyor screen. Ship icons glowed in sickly shades of colour through the crystal cataract-clouded surface of the screen. The Charybdis and its escorts were already racing to intercept the Macharius and its still unknown companion vessel, but Sirl was not concerned, knowing now that the destruction of the hated Imperial ship was fated to him alone. Around the Virulent, in the vanguard of the Chaos fleet, other ships swarmed forward, their captains eagerly slipping free of their leashes as enemy targets of opportunity now presented themselves to their vessels’ surveyor senses.
And, behind them all, came the Planet Killer, its massive energy presence blossoming urgently across surveyor screens. Crackling bursts of seething energy flowed freely around the spires and turrets of the huge weapons platform as it drew power directly from the warp itself, powering up its terrifying armageddon gun weapon array in readiness for unleashing that energy, magnified many times over by the arcane technologies used in the vessel’s construction, on its chosen target.
For Belatis and all upon it, execution hour was here at last.
Alarm peels sounded through the many decks of the Macharius, calling its crew to arms. Armsmen and shouting petty officers roused men from what meagre rest they were allowed, kicking and cursing them as they herded them out of their bunk rooms to their appointed duty stations. Teams of sweating, straining gunnery ratings dragged colossal platform-mounted guns along wide metal tracks, locking them into position and making them ready for firing. Chain-gang crews of indentured workers ha
uled on pulley chains thicker than a man’s body, opening up gun ports in preparation for battle. Deep in the ship’s generarium core, armour-suited engineers and prayer-intoning tech-priests nursed the ship’s ancient plasma reactor hearts, bleeding additional amounts of energy through to feed the hungry demands of the vessel’s thousands of power systems.
In a small chapel shrine below the main crew decks, Reth Zane finished off his prayers, and hastily gathered up his collection of personal relics and charms, wrapping them in the woven prayer mat which he tucked inside the thick, padded jacket of his flight suit. It was uncomfortably hot and humid in the shrine room—thick energy conduits, humming with power, passed through the bulkhead walls around it—but Zane preferred to carry out his devotions here, in private, away from the main shrines on the busy crew decks above. Still, he would now have to hurry back to the flight deck in answer to the general alert signal now sounding.
“Zane.”
Zane stopped short in the corridor outside, uncertain whether he had really heard the faint, whispering voice. Perhaps he had just imagined it amongst the dull throb of the ship’s engines and the distant but distinct clamour of voices from the decks above. And then, from out of the darkness, he heard it again.
“Do your duty, Zane.”
A spectral figure, encircled by a pale, dancing nimbus of light, stood at the turn of the passageway. Zane felt the eerie radiance play over his face. Within the light, few details were visible: only the shining face of the haloed figure and the sacred runes glow-etched into its archaic power armour. Zane had seen that face—so impossibly beautiful—before. Years ago. As a young Ministrorum novice acolyte. On Sacra Evangelista.
With a shock of recognition, he fell to his knees. “My lady,” he gasped, bowing his head, unable to look the blessed vision in the face.
“Do your duty, Zane. To your ship. To the Emperor. To me. Serve me. Be my Avenging Fury!”
The nimbus of light shifted from his face. He dared to look up, seeing the light fade away, disappearing round the corner of the passageway. From behind him came the sound of the alarm bell, calling him to his duty as a crewman aboard a vessel of the Divine Emperor’s Imperial Navy. Ahead of him was a summons to a far different, higher, duty. It had been almost a quarter of a century—a lifetime ago—since the warrior angel had appeared to him, changing his life forever. Now it had come to him again. He had obeyed its call once; what other choice did he have now?
Zane drew the short, snub-nosed laspistol from the holster-pocket of his flight suit and moved off up the dank passageway, following the nimbus of light in the distance.
Following it into the unknown darkness.
Jarra Kale wanted to sit up, but the pain from his torn belly and guts seared like white hot fire whenever he tried to move. With a newfound clarity that only comes too late to men such as himself, he realised that he had been tricked. There would be none of the pleasures and rewards which the one who had bewitched him had promised. He realised now that he had been played for a fool all along, that there would be no escape in death, that he had damned his soul to an eternity of suffering within the hungry coils of the things that waited for him in the warp.
With a trembling hand, he reached out to grasp the robes of a passing Sororitas nurse, pulling urgently on the hem. “Sister,” he gasped, “you must help me. The confessor or the navy captain, you must bring them to me. There is something… Please, I beg you. There is much they must be told.
The Sororitas sister looked into the face of the dying man. She had seen so much death and pain here amongst the infirmary’s inmates in the last few days. She was inured to the horrors of so many dying, suffering patients, to their delirious babbling and their begging cries for relief from the pain, and yet there was something in this one’s eyes—an unexpected, desperate intensity—that struck a chord within her. Had Korte been here, he could have told her what it was; the desperate need to confess at the moment of death, to be able to say one last truth after so many falsehoods and betrayals.
She clasped Kale’s clutching hand, squeezing it on a small but genuine gesture of assurance. “Wait, I will bring someone to you. One of the seraphim sisters or a preacher, if one can be found.”
Kale waited, drifting in and out of pain-edged unconsciousness. He was awoken again by a dark-robed figure kneeling over him. His vision was blurred and indistinct, his sight failing as the life ebbed out of him. “Father,” he began, “I must speak with someone. I must—”
A jewel-ringed hand clamped over his mouth, cutting off the words of his final confession. The figure leant down over him, hissing urgently into his ear. “Fool, did you really think I would let you betray me now?”
Kale tried to straggle, tried to cry out, but who would notice one more moaning, weakly thrashing figure amongst the hundreds of other seriously injured that filled the infirmary to overflowing? He felt the figure’s other hand close at his throat, felt the bite of a tiny cutting edge against his skin and remembered the crystal venom ring that his betrayer always wore.
A brief second’s straggle, as the coursing venom wracked his body with a final spasm of agony, and then it was all over. His killer knelt for a few seconds more over the body, touching a hand to its neck, satisfied that there was no pulse. To an observer, the dark-cloaked figure could have been any of the infirmary’s Ministorum attendants, conducting the rituals of the last rites over the body of a dead or dying man.
When the Sororitas sister returned a few minutes later with a sister superior—the nearest thing she could find to a preacher—she found that her efforts had all been in vain. Whatever First Minister Jarra Kale had had to say, he had taken the secrets of his deathbed confession with him to the warp.
“They are coming,” gasped the dying astropath.
Sobek reached out, running his hands over Semper’s face as the navy commander leaned down to support him, one arm round his shoulders. It was the only means of “vision” the astropath had left. The mental effort of piercing the maelstrom of psychic energy thrown out by the Despoiler’s terrible exterminator weapon had been too much for the old man, and now the last of his psychic vision had deserted him as the numbing paralysis spread through his still-haemorrhaging brain.
“You are sure? You have received word from my ship’s astropath?”
“My senses are deaf to the voices of my brethren now, but I know that your vessel and another are coming,” Sobek replied. “I have seen it in the visions that have been granted to me. It is not the Emperor’s will that you die here this day, Leoten Semper He has other tasks in mind for you, perhaps.”
“What other tasks? Why would I be spared? Why not any of these others?” asked Semper, gesturing at the pathetic, heroic remnants of the frateris pilgrims around him. “Their faith and devotion is stronger than mine.”
Sobek’s reply was a sighing whisper, barely audible against the rising din of the heretic chants from outside. Semper lent in close, straining to hear the dying astropath’s last words. “We are all called to serve the Emperor as he sees fit, captain. Remember the sacrifice of those you see around you now. Remember it, for perhaps one day it will be your duty to avenge it.”
“Coming! They’re coming!”
Semper, with Devane kneeling close beside him, looked up sharply at the shouts of the young frateris brother as he ran towards them down the aisle of the cathedral hall, calling out the message sent back from the defenders outside. “They’re coming! The heretics are coming! In their thousands, they come!” When Semper and the Imperial preacher glanced back at the figure lying on the floor between them, they saw the lifeless and strangely peaceful features of the astropath looking up at them. The two men glanced at each other.
“If your ship is coming for you, it had better hurry,” noted Devane, bending down to perform the Blessing of the Fallen over the corpse, pulling the astropath’s hood down over his sightless face in a final gesture of respect.
“Destiny or not, I’m not planning on leaving h
ere just yet,” replied Semper, accepting and checking the ammo-load of the autopistol that Devane wordlessly handed him. Together, the two Imperial servants gathered up their troops and led them at a sprint toward the cathedral doors.
Seconds later, the first heretic artillery shells crashed into the ancient walls of the cathedral. Inside the building, the wounded and the families of the frateris defenders moaned in despair. The final, surely overwhelming heretic attack had begun. It was now only a matter of time before the place fell to the enemy.
FIVE
The Chaos fleet was unfamiliar with the design and capabilities of the Arbites Punisher class vessel, mistaking it for some kind of new variant of the Dauntless class scouting cruiser familiar to them from so many other encounters with the armed forces of Battlefleet Gothic. Aboard the Charybdis, the Chaos commander quickly realised the enormity of the mistake as the Macharius and the Inviolable Retribution smashed into his forward line of Infidel escorts.
Furies launched from the Macharius swept away the wave of torpedoes fired by the Infidels, immediately blunting the Chaos attack. Even as the crews of the enemy raider vessels’ torpedo rooms struggled to reload more of the titanic ordnance missiles into the firing tubes, the Imperial ships struck back. Four squadrons of Starhawks swarmed out of the Macharius’s launch bays, forming up into attack formation and quickly speeding towards the line of enemy escorts.
Even before they got there, the line had disintegrated. The Arbites strike cruiser’s formidable bombardment cannons opened fire, their linear accelerator systems hurtling a stream of lethal magma bomb warheads through the void at something approaching quarter light speed. The salvo of warheads exploded across the line of Chaos ships with terrifying accuracy. One of them disappeared in a white flash, a hundred thousand tonnes of metal and machinery simply vaporised out of existence. Another tumbled out of formation, already breaking apart into burning fragments. The last remaining raider manoeuvred away in panic, abandoning its attack as its captain frantically sought to disengage from the battle. The pursuing Starhawks fell upon it with gleeful abandon, crippling its main drive and detonating its reactor core in a blizzard of armour-piercing missiles.
[Battlefleet Gothic 01] - Execution Hour Page 29