Distracted and angered, the creature had broken off from its appointed mission of destruction, pursuing Zane into the honeycombed maze of machinery and pipeways that spun off from the central sub-chamber.
Now it was hunting him through the place. Zane could sense it somewhere close nearby, sense the living taint of the thing souring the air around it. He saw a faint, familiar glow of light around the corner of the passageway ahead of him and ran towards it, drawing the creature after him. He blindly fired the laspistol behind him as he ran, drawing more angry hisses from the pursuing daemon-thing. He rounded the corner, seeing the ghostly aftermath of the light fade away, seeing only the bulkhead wall dead end at the end of the short passageway.
It was hot in the passageway, condensation forming from the thick, humid atmosphere, drops of water falling hissing onto the thick power conduit pipes that ran along the passage, disappearing through the bulkhead wall. Whatever damage the creature had done back in the main chamber, it had spread at least this far. The metal of the pipes glowed with heat, burning away the heat-resistant protective material that surrounded them.
Zane turned, seeing the daemon-thing gallop round the corner behind him, mercilessly bearing down on him. He barely had time to set his laspistol to full charge, raising and firing it not at the creature now almost upon him, but into the weak, heat-softened metal of one of the nearby pipeways.
The pipe split open with a screaming gush, filling the passageway with fire, enveloping Zane and the creature in the pure, white light of burning plasma. In that split-second before the blinding brilliance wiped away his sight, Zane beheld the glowing-armoured figure of the warrior angel in amongst the roaring light, her arms held open towards him in welcome. Zane gladly let the light consume him, bringing him into her embrace.
Many decks above, on the bridge of the ship, a low-ranking logistician tech-priest—just one of hundreds connected into the Macharius’s ancient and mighty logic engines and monitoring the non-stop passage of information through the ship’s arcane machine-mind—detected damage to one of the generarium sub-levels. It was a relatively minor problem affecting the area responsible for regulating the flow of residue energy from the ship’s plasma reactors, pipes that carried away the gaseous waste from the generarium and emptied it out into space from bleed-vents along the ship’s hull. One of the pipes had fractured, although the fire appeared to have quickly burned itself out, the ship’s auto-systems already closing down those pipeways and diverting the waste gas away to another bleed-vent. There had also been signs of potentially far more serious malfunctions in a nearby generarium sub-chamber controlling the flow of power to the void shield generator capacitors, but these too seemed to have somehow been contained.
The logistician routinely catalogued the information, adding it to the growing list of damage reports coming in from all over the ship as it came within range of the advancing Chaos fleets gun batteries and attack craft squadrons.
Neither incident had inflicted any serious, lasting damage on the ship or its operations, and both were deemed non-critical.
Only when the battle was over, and other more urgent repairs had been dealt with, would there be time to investigate and make good the damage in these two areas.
The convoy of shuttles ran the gauntlet up out of the planet’s gravity well, gratefully falling into place amongst the lines of Fury Interceptors that formed up to escort it. From the cockpit of his Eagle craft, Byzantane beheld the spectacular sight of the battle now taking place in orbit above Belatis. Fiery shards of light glittered all through space. A myriad of minor explosions and las-blasts, evidence of the dozens of different duels taking place between dog-fighting Imperium and renegade attack craft. Ahead were the reassuring and imposing shapes of the Macharius and the Inviolable Retribution, their void shields flaring with burst after burst of angry light as they came under intensive fire from the vanguard of the Chaos fleet. The gun batteries of both vessels spoke back in reply, and the Chaos warships, clearly mindful of the fate of the Charybdis, were keeping a wary distance, out of range of the Retribution’s bombardment cannons, but it was obvious to Byzantane that neither ship could sustain such punishment for very much longer.
One of the sleek, flat-hulled Chaos cruisers surged forward ahead of the others. Swarms of firefly lights—Starhawk attack craft, Byzantane realised, dwarfed against the gargantuan bulk of their target—flitted around it, pouring light-streams of missile volleys into it. Clouds of burning internal atmosphere gases billowed from a dozen places in the Chaos ship’s hull where the bomber attacks had blasted through its armour, but the giant cruiser continued onwards, its defence turrets spitting in irritation at the bomber specks still buzzing round it, its forward lance armaments lashing out at the Macharius.
Without warning, one of the shuttles in front of Byzantane’s exploded apart, struck by a blast of las-fire from a marauding Swiftdeath that had broken through the line of Fury escorts. Two Furies darted past in pursuit, aptly living up to their name as they vengefully blew the enemy apart in a torrent of las-fire.
“Message from the Retribution, marshal,” reported the shuttle’s Arbitrator co-pilot. “Its landing bays have been struck and are out of action. We are directed to dock with the Macharius instead.”
Byzantane nodded without word. As a senior lawkeeper of the Adeptus Arbites, he had commanded armies of Arbitrators, had crashed rebellions and uprisings on a planetary scale, but here and now he felt powerless and insignificant in contrast to the scale of the battle going on around him. This was a level of destruction almost unimaginable in its intensity: men and machines pitted against each other in the harsh and unforgiving void of space, where entire vessels—and the lives of their many thousands of crew—could be swept away in seconds, without any mercy or warning.
The Fury escorts suddenly peeled away from the shuttle convoy, leaving it vulnerable and exposed. Byzantane flinched as explosions and las-blasts filled the void around them, assuming at first that they were under attack again from more enemy fighters, realizing a second later that this was their own covering fire, the defence turrets of the Macharius throwing out a corridor of covering fire—much of it passing terrifyingly close to the incoming shuttle craft—to protect the shuttles from enemy fighter attack.
The pitted metal escarpment of the Macharius’s hull loomed large in front of the cockpit window, growing in immensity every second as they sped towards it. The Eagle pilot fired braking thrusters, but—to Byzantane’s eyes, at least—they were still coming in alarmingly fast, heading into the gaping maw of one of the gloomily-lit metal caverns that was actually the open entrance to one of the ship’s launch bays. The shuttle shuddered, wildly pitching forward for a second, as it passed through the mouth of the launch bay, ancient suspensor fields reaching out to catch it in their mysterious, invisible grasp, decelerating it and bringing it to an almost graceful stop as its pilot brought it under control and manoeuvred it into one of the many landing bay tunnels. Only when they had safely touched down in the landing bay did Byzantane begin to breathe easily again.
“Macharius bids you welcome,” said the voice of a flight deck controller over the cockpit’s open comm-net, affecting the dry, stiff upper lip and slightly mocking tone characteristic of so many Imperial Navy personnel when dealing with the servants of the other branches of His Divine Majesty’s martial forces. “Good to have you aboard again, marshal.”
Semper half-ran, half-staggered down the belly ramp of the shuttle, responding in kind to the smartly-executed salute of Officer of the Watch Styre, but little troubled by the lack of elaborate naval ritual that customarily greets a captain when coming aboard his own vessel. Judging by the rocky ride they had had on their way in here and the continuous, booming roar of the ship’s guns, Ulanti probably had more pressing matters to attend to than laying on a guard of honour for his captain’s arrival, thought Semper, with dour humour.
“What orders, captain?”
“To the bridge,” answered Se
mper, instantly reassuming the mantle of naval command once more. “Convey my orders ahead of us to Mister Ulanti. Tell him to recall all attack craft and disengage from battle without further delay.”
Semper looked around him, remembering his promise to a dying man, seeing the stream of pilgrim refugees, many of them wounded and malnourished, now exiting from the other shuttle craft. “The chief petty officer will accompany me to the command deck. Remain here and attend to these people’s needs. Make sure they receive whatever food, accommodation and medical aid they need.”
“The chief petty officer?” queried Styre, looking amongst the armsmen and crewmen for anyone of that rank. He stared in frank disbelief as Semper indicated the scarred, tattooed figure of the giant hiveworlder beside him.
“Chief Petty Officer Borusa,” snapped Semper. “More men like him, and we might even stand a chance of winning this damn war. My congratulations, chief petty officer. We’ll attend to the official rituals of your promotion and possibly some kind of decoration when we can, assuming we’re not blown to oblivion in the immediate future.”
“If you say so, sir,” grinned Maxim. Promotion to junior officer rank and a medal, just as that hive-witch had prophesied. Battlefleet Gothic may not yet be winning this conflict, but Maxim Borusa was having himself a splendid war so far.
Ulanti watched anxiously as the remnants of the Macharius’s attack craft squadrons returned to the safety of the launch bays. They had acquitted themselves well, driving off the enemy fighter attacks on the shuttle convoy, intercepting a bomber attack aimed at the Macharius and, in return, crippling or forcing into retreat two Idolator escorts and subjecting the still-oncoming Virulent to relentless missile bombardment, but all this had only been achieved at great cost to their own numbers, and he knew that Nyder and his staff were keeping a grim tally count of the mounting losses as each squadron returned to the ship. “Paying the butcher’s bill” was the famous quip used by Lord Admiral Ravensburg for the task of counting battle losses, but Ulanti, in his first action in full command of a warship, felt none of the morbid elation inherent in the Lord Admiral’s flippant words.
“What is the word on Captain Semper?”
“Still en route to the command deck,” answered a junior officer, his reply suddenly drowned out by a shout from a surveyor section crewman. “Enemy attack craft squadrons are disengaging… The escorts and capital class warships, too. Emperor’s oath! They’re all on the retreat!”
Ulanti looked for himself, scarcely able to believe what he saw. Both the Macharius and the Retribution had been taking a pounding, and he had only expected that pounding to increase in intensity as they began the near-impossible task of trying to successfully disengage from the Chaos attack. Now, instead of pressing on with their attack on vulnerable, retreating targets, the Chaos ships were retreating, turning away and moving at increasing speed away from the planet and the Imperial vessels.
Suddenly, even as the second shout came from the surveyor section area of the bridge, Ulanti realised with a sense of sickening dread what it was that had caused the Chaos ships to break off from battle on the point of victory.
“Power spike! Throne of Earth, the readings are right off the scale… The Planet Killer, it’s opening fire on Belatis!”
In a torrent of energy that overwhelmed ships’ surveyor senses and transformed hundreds of tactical screens into blank-faced displays of howling static, the Planet Killer unleashed its power on the world below. A roaring storm of destruction descended on Belatis, passing through the atmosphere and increasing the temperature there a hundredfold in seconds, partially igniting it in a fiery borealis that swept out across the circumference of the planet.
The energy blast struck the planet’s largest ocean on its eastern hemisphere some two thousand kilometres south-west of Madina, sending up a huge cloud of steam clearly visible from space as millions of tonnes of sea water were instantly vaporised, boiling away into the burning, super-heated atmosphere. The blast struck and cracked open the ocean bed, unleashing a super-tsunami tidal wave over three kilometres in height which would drown the two nearest continents and island chains and compete with the fiery borealis overhead in its race round the globe.
The Planet Killer’s gunnery priests had not chosen this spot on the surface at random. Surveyor scans of the planet’s geologic structure and daemon-voiced augurs had guided their aim. The planetary crust was weak and unstable here and the all-consuming energy beam ripped it asunder, setting off a series of cataclysmic underwater earthquakes, igniting chains of long dormant volcanoes into fiery, explosive life and causing new ones to thrust up through the splintering, broken crust. The seismic Shockwaves rippled through the core of the planet, setting off disasters on the far side of Belatis long before the tsunami or firestorm would reach the continents there.
And, all the time, the Planet Killer kept firing into an open wound now almost a hundred kilometres across in the planet’s crust, the coruscating lance of otherworldly energy burning a hole deep into the planetary core, bursting open the planet’s molten heart.
In Madina, crouching there in the ruins, the scattered followers of Khoisan the Faceless looked up in terrified incomprehension as the distant horizon lit up with what looked like the light of a second dawning sun. The light grew in intensity, and the horizon slowly turned into a line of creeping fire. There was a dull rumbling sound from the ground beneath their feet, gradually but surely growing in volume, and then the rains around them started to tumble down on their heads. Many prayed to the dark Gods of Chaos to save them. Others recanted and instead begged the Emperor for forgiveness. If any gods were listening, they gave no answer.
Barely twenty minutes after the Planet Killer first opened fire, Belatis exploded apart. Aboard the triumphant vessel, the gunnery priests held a service of thanksgiving, sacrificing five hundred specially chosen slaves to feed the hungry demands of the daemon spirits bound into the workings of the armageddon gun.
Word came down to them that the Despoiler was pleased with their efforts. To date, the destruction of Belatis was by far the Planet Killer’s most successful operation. The gunnery priests sacrificed another hundred slaves in celebration of the Warmaster’s approval, reading the future in the dissected entrails of the bound and still-living sacrifices. The auguries were good, they murmured amongst themselves. There would be many more worlds yet that would see the shadow of the Planet Killer fall upon them before the Gothic Sector War was over.
EIGHT
The Virulent weathered the storm of the planet’s destruction, riding out the violent waves of gravitational flux as Belatis broke apart. Jets of flaming magma splashed against its void shields, hails of burning meteors smashed off its hull, adding further to the damage caused by the armour-piercing missiles of the Starhawk bombers that had attacked the Chaos cruiser.
“Take it away,” slurred Bulus Sirl, pointing with a deformed, leprous hand at the broken remains of his second-in-command now staining the deck of his vessel’s bridge. Two Plague Marines moved wordlessly forward to drag the corpse away. Sirl glared in contemptuous challenge at his command crew, daring any of them to add to the former second-in-command’s querulous objections to Sirl’s current course of action.
“The Grandfather is with us,” Sirl told them. “He watches over us, bidding us to carry out his holy work while the servants of the other, lesser powers cower in abeyance behind us, fearing the wrath of the Warmaster.”
He pointed to the view out the command deck’s filth-encrusted viewing bays. While the rest of the Chaos fleet had withdrawn to cringe in the shadow of the Planet Killer, only the Virulent had carried on in pursuit of the retreating Imperial ships, its surging course carrying it recklessly through the rain of debris from the exploding planet. By the grace of the Grandfather, they had ridden out the worst of the storm, as burning planetary shards many tens of kilometres across spun past them, as the stress of the planet’s collapsing gravitational field threatened to tear the cruiser ap
art. Now only the clear darkness of open space showed ahead of them. “See? Did I not say that the Plague Lord watches over us. He has carried us safely through the maelstrom, and now at last we will deliver his vengeance on the destroyer of our sister vessel Contagion.”
Ahead of the Virulent were the twin light specks of the two Imperium vessels, both of them damaged, both of them retreating at full speed away from the Planet Killer fleet. The captains of the other Chaos vessels—craven lackeys of the Warmaster, every one of them—showed little inclination to pursue the two escaping enemy vessels; nor, in truth, did Sirl want them to. The destruction of the Macharius was his by rights alone. Damaged as it was, the Virulent could still outrun the Macharius, the Slaughter class cruiser’s superior engine array design pushing it forward at speed and rapidly closing the gap between it and the two limping enemy ships. It was a pity that his plague-child aboard the Macharius had been unable to complete its task, but its failure and subsequent death would make no difference to the final outcome now.
“Arm forward lances,” he hissed, settling his vast, vile bulk back into the bone-sculpted armature of his command throne. “Commence firing as soon as target is in range.”
Semper cursed as the Macharius shook under the impact of another damaging strike to its rear.
[Battlefleet Gothic 01] - Execution Hour Page 32