Cadia Stands

by Justin D Hill

  General Grüber stiffened. ‘There has to be a way.’

  The Navigator put his hand on the shoulder of one of the ratlings. ‘I cannot see one.’

  Grüber snapped. ‘Do I need another Navigator?’

  ‘They will tell you the same. Or they will fail.’

  There was silence as Grüber paced up and down, punching one fist into his other palm. After a long pause, he started again. ‘Lord Navigator Fremm. It is death to stay. If the Black Fleet does not kill us, then the creatures of the warp will.’ He paused to collect his thoughts. ‘I have millions of fighting men that must reach Terra. They must get there before the enemy does. The future of the Imperium of Man depends on this. We have to reach Terra.’

  The Navigator nodded. His sunken eyes were shot with blood. He appeared genuinely sorry, the bags under his eyes heavy with fluid. ‘I must rest, General Grüber. I promise you this. I will look again. But I have to warn you that I do not hold out much hope. The Immaterium is breaking. There are warp creatures following us. I have seen them. They are but pale reflections of what awaits us in the warp. While a Geller field might hold them off, I do not know how long it would last under a sustained attack.’

  Fourteen

  Pax Imperialis

  Captain Berger banked, turning his Fury void fighter sunwards. It was a standard patrol, six fighters of squadron zeta doing a sunwards sweep.

  The blue plasma of the engines of the evacuation fleet powering out of the system drifted through his viewport as his fighter turned. Far beyond them, the golden light of the Phalanx shone out, like a distant moon.

  Squadron zeta kept banking sunwards till the Cadian sun filled their vision.

  The star was now a dull glow in a miasma of red, like a bloodshot eye. Berger accelerated, sixty thousand pounds of thrust pinning his hands to the controls, the pressure of his void suit responding, the constant pulse of the blood-pump flushing his system through with oxygen-rich blood starting to strain against the effort. As he pulled out of the turn he felt the pressure lessening.

  ‘Arming weapons,’ his gunnery officer, Bettan, reported. She sat in the nose turret, beneath his feet. They’d been in the same crew for six years. She was one of the best gunners he’d flown with. Small, efficient, calm under pressure – and when there was no pressure, she liked to joke.

  It made her good company. Helped the long hours of patrol tick by.

  There was a brief pause as Bettan powered up the battery banks for the craft’s impressive linked array of fixed-wing and turret Cypra Mundi-pattern lascannons. Power runes lit up inside Berger’s helmet array as the systems went live. She even engaged the pair of Stalker anti-Starfighter missiles and fired off a brief salvo of red las-bolts to double-check the targeting matrixes. ‘All weapon systems armed and ready.’

  ‘Not taking any chances?’

  ‘Nope,’ Bettan said. She sounded cheerful.

  How long, he wondered, till she told her first joke.

  The last time they’d had contact was a week earlier, at the height of the battle over Cadia. Their flagship, the Emperor-class battleship Pax Imperialis, had followed the Phalanx on its relief mission to Cadia. The planet was ringed with Black Fleet craft, like a corpse covered with the black carapaces of carrion beetles – so thick that the planet could barely be seen. What could they do, he had wondered, against such weight of numbers and hatred?

  There had been twenty Furies in their squadron that day, on escort duty to a similar number of Starhawk bombers. While the Phalanx went after the Blackstone, Navy captains picked their own targets, and the crews of the Pax Imperialis had a personal vendetta with the Exorcist-class grand cruiser formerly named Kingmaker.

  The Kingmaker had a proud eight-thousand-year history of service with Battlefleet Scarus, but had gone missing on patrol around Agripinaa five years earlier. It had been presumed lost until a year ago, when a ship matching its description had been spotted as part of a Black Fleet force that wiped out a convoy between Cadia and Belis Corona.

  The Pax Imperialis had been sent to hunt it down and destroy it, and after a two-month pursuit, they’d brought the ancient craft to ground around the asteroid belts of the Crinan System.

  On paper, there was no match. An Emperor-class battleship outmatched the Exorcist in all respects. She was bigger, faster, out-ranged the enemy, and carried twice as many void craft. But the grand cruiser had been changed. The Exorcist was no longer just a vessel. It was a thing alive, and after a brief and inconclusive firefight, the captain of the Pax Imperialis, Vice-Admiral Chanke, had brought her in close, so that his flights of bombers could deliver the coup de grâce.

  It was only as they reached visual range that the true extent of the changes to the Kingmaker was apparent. Her metal skin was bulged and pock-marked. Along her underbelly a row of red tentacles searched, like the arms of an anemone. The chill of heresy had sobered them all and prayers were broadcast over the vox-systems. The first wave of bombers was halfway to the craft when the auguries had suddenly lit up as six other Chaos cruisers powered up.

  The Pax Imperialis had been hopelessly out of position and surrounded. All she could do was disengage and make for the nearest possible Mandeville Point. It had been a tough decision that involved abandoning the crews of the entire first wave to their fate.

  Void-death was something they all feared.

  Berger, Bettan, all of them had friends in that first wave. So, when they’d met again in the space above Cadia, that attack had been personal. Berger had volunteered to be in the first wave. Almost all the Pax Imperialis’ crew had. The destruction of that turncoat was personal. They were determined to finish the job they had started in the asteroid fields of Crinan.

  It had been a furious dogfight, punctuated by the exultant shouts of the bomber crews as they delivered their torpedoes at close range, the tense conversations of fighter pilots and the death screams as they were picked off. Berger’s crew had taken out six of the enemy craft, but the bombing run had proved unsuccessful: the Kingmaker had retreated, limping and burning, into the safety of the Black Fleet, and again, it seemed that the pride of the Pax Imperialis had been their undoing, as the vast ruins of the Blackstone had drifted towards Cadia.

  All this played through Berger’s mind as he brought his fighter round, letting the monotone voices of the engine and gun servitors, intoning their mind-slaved procedures, wash over him.

  When they were far enough away from the Pax Imperialis he diverted power to the scanning systems, and he could hear the tap-tap-tap as the course-planner, Federi, started to key in the scanning protocols. ‘Sweep coordinates set,’ Federi reported, and then, ‘Augury on full power.’

  Berger felt the pressure of his suit lessen as the Fury straightened up. Behind him his squadron fanned out in close formation, each craft a mile apart.

  One by one squadron pilots reported in. Every minute there was a bleep as the scanner completed its full scan of the space around them. The Black Fleet was out there, somewhere.

  It couldn’t be long until they showed themselves. Of that, Berger was sure.

  The scout patrols ran elliptical flights around the evacuation fleet. It was a constant rotation. Berger’s crew were sleeping for six hours then flying again. Behind them there was a wall of swirling red clouds, and from that, tendrils reaching towards them. Each time Berger went out it seemed the fingers of the warp were drawing closer.

  On the third scouting flight, Berger ordered his squadron to fly within a hundred miles of the foremost warp-cloud. The dull red light of Cadia’s sun gave a ruddy sheen to a pair of old wrecked Gothic-class cruisers, floating in a gas cloud of their own vented atmospheres.

  There was a blip. Federi’s voice was controlled but urgent. ‘Contacts. Sunwards, bearings 889-384.’

  Berger conveyed the directions to the rest of his squadron. He voxed back to the Pax Imperialis. ‘Contacts.
Squadron zeta going to investigate.’

  He powered forward, looking for visuals. ‘Ready, Bettan?’

  She ran a check on the weapon systems. ‘Ready to burn.’ There was a long pause. Space could be so empty, Berger thought as he scanned back and forth through his viewport.

  ‘I think I feel sick,’ Bettan said.

  Berger had felt the same. ‘Don’t look into the clouds,’ Berger told her.

  ‘I’m trying not to,’ Bettan said.

  ‘Federi. Anything?’

  ‘There was,’ he said. ‘The scanners have lost the contact.’ There was a long moment of silence, then Federi corrected himself. ‘Wait. I think there’s something. Can you get closer?’

  Berger turned the craft sunwards once more, getting as close to the growing warpstorm as he could. ‘Got a visual?’

  Berger stared forward. All he could hear was the swish of the blood-pump flooding oxygen-rich fluid through their systems.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. Then, ‘There’s a light.’

  Bettan flipped her systems to live. ‘Engaging weapons.’

  ‘It’s small,’ Federi said. ‘Could be a tender or a light cruiser. Might be one of ours.’

  Berger saw the yellow light and brought the Fury in at speed, skimming through the red light-clouds of the warp. ‘Contact,’ he said, and then swore. What he saw was not a tender or a light cruiser, but a man, impossibly large, standing in the warp. The man was reaching out towards him. He had a beard of snakes that melted into flames.

  Berger blinked. The man had gone. ‘What the frekk?’ he hissed, as the targeting matrixes fixed upon a swirling cloud of purple eels.

  Bettan was firing wildly at something.

  Federi was groaning. ‘Get us out of here,’ he hissed through clenched teeth.

  Berger did not know which way was back. He banked sharply and tried to turn. Something hit his viewport. It was like flying through a flock of avians, but these were more slug-like, and they splattered against the glass, leaving an image of snapping jaws.

  Berger felt his fingers stretch. He looked down, and his fingers were now vines, reaching into the fighter. The blood pump was sloshing green fluid through his system. Suddenly the cockpit was full of lashing tendrils. He and Bettan and Federi were now one entity. They were one with the Fury.

  As the warp swallowed them, the blind thing that had once been Berger opened a fanged maw and screamed.

  Fortress World of Kasr Holn

  The evacuation fleet was reaching the smoking ruins of the fortress world of Kasr Holn when the ambush was sprung. From the warp-clouds demonic craft reached out a swirl of tentacles and impossibly fanged mouths that seized the rearmost ships and dragged them into oblivion. One of the daemons was so vast its suckered tentacle wrapped about Kasr Holn and the world began to come apart under the stresses of gravity.

  The ships of Battlefleet Scarus could do nothing but accelerate to full speed. And then, before them, the augury scanners suddenly lit up with contacts, and the massed ships of the Black Fleet appeared, weapon batteries loaded to fire.

  They were lost.

  But then, in the darkness, a golden light shone as the Phalanx appeared.

  It engaged Abaddon’s flagship and threw the enemy fleet off balance.

  There was a brief moment’s opening. Admiral d’Armitage sent the Delos, the Marquez and the Indomitable forward into the heretic lines. Their decks were packed with incendiary explosives, their skeleton crews steering them on ramming trajectories with the largest heretic craft, before abandoning them to their fate. The Delos hit the Chaos cruiser Mother of Hell in the aft and she detonated seconds after impact. Her plasma reactors went critical and the secondary explosion tore the neighbouring Scion of Hell in two, her decks voiding a nebula of smoke, oxygen and bodies.

  The captain of the Eagle of Terror, through a series of brilliant manoeuvres, managed to avoid the flight path of the Marquez, but she hit one of the escorts, a small pirate vessel of the Crimson Claws, and tore the smaller ship apart with her explosion.

  The Indomitable was on a trajectory towards the Vengeful Spirit, and her pilot, Captain Gregor Knox III, a Cadian of over three hundred years’ service in Battlefleet Cadia, insisted on remaining aboard his bridge to steer the fire-ship home.

  Defence turrets on the Vengeful Spirit pounded the small craft, but nothing could dislodge the Indomitable from her relentless approach towards the enemy flagship. Interceptors raked her flanks, and she was burning from a dozen wounds as she approached within fifty miles of Abaddon’s flagship, and Captain Knox stared in wonder and horror at the size of it.

  He knew enough of Naval history to recognise its core as one of the fabled Gloriana-class battleships, but thousands of years of heresy and mutation had twisted its shape, and bent it to an evil purpose. Where its turrets and buttresses and cathedral windows had once been a testament to gold and pride and honour of the Imperial Truth, it was now twisted, malevolent, and dark with arcane energies, the window ports glaring out with a dull, intense, furnace-red light.

  Captain Knox felt his hands shake as he steered his small frigate towards it. That his life was going to end, and that of the craft he had captained for the last hundred and ten years, seemed a fair trade to damage this expression of evil.

  As he approached to within ten miles, he lost his void shields, and the craft began to judder with the damage she was taking. The enemy was pummelling her mercilessly. Fragments of her armoured ceramite prow were tumbling out as she drove forward, through the explosions of her own destruction.

  When he was within five miles, he felt the juddering impact of a boarding torpedo slamming into the crew quarters beneath him. He diverted all power to the engine drives, squeezing out the last seconds before impact. Within thirty seconds he could feel the tramp of power-armoured feet storming up the gantry towards the bridge. The armoured doors were three inches of locked ceramite, but he had no illusions as to how long they would hold the enemy back. A power-armoured hand hammered on the door, and then the melta charges blew, and he saw black shapes move through the smoke, their boltguns raised.

  The mass of the Vengeful Spirit filled his crazed view-portals, and then he began to laugh. He was going to make it, he saw. He was so close now, and he stepped forward to accept his fate.

  ‘Cadia stands!’ he shouted as the roar of boltguns filled the chamber.

  And then the Indomitable exploded.

  Fifteen

  Lord-Lieutenant Berwicke

  The Naval battle was just green dots within the holo-sphere display, with red runes flashing when a craft was destroyed. General Grüber watched the battle from the bridge of the Lord-Lieutenant Berwicke. The courage and skill of Battlefleet Cadia was demonstrable. Crew for crew, they out-fought the ships of the Black Fleet, but the Black Fleet outnumbered them almost two to one.

  It was only the Phalanx that saved them, drawing the Black Fleet onto its monstrous guns.

  As the evacuation fleet fled towards the outer system, they fought running battles with the pursing Chaos ships. And the longer this went on, the greater the toll. Battlefleet Cadia had been punished for the last hundred days. Her crews were exhausted. Her craft were damaged. One by one they threw themselves into the jaws of Abaddon’s wolves so that the troop transports could escape.

  It was a terrifying pursuit through the ruins of the Cadian System. The orbital defence arrays at Kasr Partox were silent, their vast bastions and power generators ripped open with melta bombs, their crews slaughtered and the systems left inoperable. The docking yards of Vigiliantum were a graveyard of Navy hulks, sitting like cold stars within the nebula of their own destruction: gas clouds of frozen oxygen and promethium, a pale green in the light of the distant sun. From the hive world of Macharia, a comet tail of destruction trailed behind it as its death spiral, which would see it impact the Cadian sun, began. And whe
re the prison world of St Josmane’s Hope had once kept watch on the outer rim of the system, there was nothing now except asteroids – and a dark, bloated, pox-ridden daemon ship, the Terminus Est.

  Waiting for them, as patient, poisonous and deadly as a spider.

  Grüber made his way to the top of the craft, where Navigator Hyppolytus had his chambers. The door was locked, and his twinned ratlings bowed to welcome the general, but would not let him in. Grüber ran a finger around his collar. ‘I need to speak to him, urgently,’ he told them.

  ‘You cannot enter,’ the ratlings said in unison.

  Grüber could not accept their answer. ‘We need to make the warp jump!’ he shouted at them. ‘Immediately.’

  ‘He is not ready,’ the ratlings said.

  ‘How do we speak to him?’

  ‘You cannot. The Lord Navigator is searching for escape. You should not question his work.’

  Alarms sounded throughout the craft. Grüber shook with anger. ‘We have to make the jump now! The Black Fleet have surrounded us. We have bare minutes! Do you understand?’

  The Pax Imperialis threw itself between the evacuation fleet and the Terminus Est and emptied her flight decks in one vast disgorgement of bombers and fighters. They swarmed out from the magnificent Imperial flagship like a flock of bees in defence of their hive. The crews knew that they were going to their deaths as the battleship turned her armoured prow around and her dorsal batteries began to rake the enemy ship.

  There was a brief flash of hope as the vast batteries momentarily overloaded the Terminus Est’s void shields. That was when the Lunar-class cruiser Heart of Light fired her nova cannon.

  The immense gun shot a vast, solid metal slug at almost the speed of light. It traced an incandescent streak of white light across the sky, and hit the Terminus Est a raking shot along its port side, before exploding amidships. The vast pox-ship lurched through space, trailing a nebula of gas and fluids as fires broke out where there was oxygen enough to support them.