Echoes of the Long War

by David Guymer

  ‘Deny the alien! Kill the alien!’

  More orks charged through the mist and onto the command deck, and by the strobing light men began to die.

  An axe split Franzek’s head like a gourd before the dazed man even realised he was in danger. Seated beside him, Merrel punched his belt release buckle and rose, drawing his sidearm. A thunderblast from a brick-like stubber dropped him back down, printing the ruined contents of his chest over the console. The ork belted its pistol, hauled Merrel’s remains from the station and, leaving its axe where it was buried in Franzek’s head, stabbed a wedge-like device with a blinking base into the unit. The surviving screens immediately went haywire. Cecillia was ripped, chair fittings and all, from the main drive station and hurled screaming across the chamber. Her body broke so hard against the stainless steel aquila mounted over the prow in place of a viewscreen that she put a dent in its wing. Flinching from the meat-slap sound, Kaplin screamed a homily ad-libbed with wild obscenities and nonsense as he backed up the steps. He pumped his shotgun, spitting out a pair of spent casings, and then fired, whizzing the air with shrapnel and exploding a lumen fitting in the ceiling.

  They were outmuscled, outgunned. The bondsmen of the Black Templars had never been so outclassed.

  Venerable Magneric advanced at a measured pace, stitching the air with short, ultra-precise bursts of assault cannon fire. He shredded an ork in identical, almost uniform checker-pattern body armour with a point-three-second salvo, then pivoted, tracked, locked – and fired. A point-seven-second burst chewed through armour and skin and riddled the main drive terminal with bone.

  With an implosive clap of displacement, an ork teleported directly into his path.

  Magneric did not know what manner of thoughts filled the mind of an ork. Words? Images? A deep, ancestral dream of destruction and slaughter? He had never considered it. He regretted that failing now, for whatever the creature had expected to encounter when it had stepped into its ship’s teleportation portal, a Black Templars Dreadnought in the throes of battle rage had not been one of them.

  The expression on its beast face was beyond price.

  Magneric’s power fist punched into the ork’s chest and lifted it from the deck like an eel on a spear. Concentric rings of adamantium teeth spun in opposing directions like propellers, blending the ork in its entirety and spraying its vaporised remains.

  The remaining orks took cover in pits and behind bulkheads, and fired back with noisy bursts of stubber-fire.

  Keeping low, Kaplin ran to Merrel’s blood-sprayed terminal and took cover behind the dead bondsman’s chair. He tugged at the blinking spike that the ork had left embedded in it. He could not move it a millimetre.

  ‘Some kind of denial shunt,’ he yelled, ducking onto his haunches behind Merrel’s chair as bullets flew overhead. ‘It’s opened the outer doors to the flight bays and disengaged the cohesion fields.’

  Torpedoes. Assault boats. Teleport commandos. An assault on all fronts, coordinated, and with overwhelming force. Magneric despised his enemy enough to be impressed.

  Obsidian Sky was not like the ships of his former VII Legion brothers. A vessel like the Fists Exemplar flagship was a mobile fortress, constructed for the projection of force and the holding of territory. Obsidian Sky was not built to be defended. She was a blade, a tool of incision and conquest.

  Stubber-rounds spanking off his metal skin, Magneric launched a full spread of grenades from his power fist’s underslung launchers. Primed for airburst, the withering frag-storm blew the orks’ improvised shelter open. The survivors, black-and-white bodyplate glittering with fragmentation shards, he mowed down with an almost hot-blooded relish.

  It was moments like these when it still felt good to be alive.

  His assault cannon wound down with a squeal, nitrogen condensate hissing to vapour on contact.

  ‘Um.’ Kaplin stared mutely at the console beside his. ‘Shipmaster Attonax of the Palimodes has been trying to raise us, Dreadnought-Marshal. They… express their intent to depart with the Fists Exemplar.’

  Pistons in the back of Magneric’s legs retracted with a hydraulic wheeze, and tilted him back to face the ceiling. What remained of his flesh body after the fall of Tranquility Wall floated in an amniotic sac deep within the metal behemoth that interred him. For centuries, fury alone had driven him on. It was a living thing, that fury, in a way that he no longer was, pure and unsullied. Immortal. Others granted the highest honour of service beyond death required prolonged periods of rest between deployments, but not him. His rage denied him. He had retained his rank. He had retained his name. His fury too had a name: Kalkator. But now it seemed that it had no further to take him.

  ‘You seek to escape me at the last, Kalkator? By the Emperor’s decree, never! As we agreed, traitor, we escape together or we die together.’

  His chassis pivoted towards Kaplin. ‘Status of engines?’ he demanded.

  Kaplin swallowed and hurriedly picked his way through the debris to the main drive station. It took him a moment to interpret the unfamiliar read-outs. ‘Partial thrusters only.’

  Magneric’s mind retreated to the cold space, that particular aggregation of cyborganic interfaces where his sarcophagus’ inscrutable machine-spirit met the quiet luminosity of his own immortal soul. The place where the Emperor breathed His will into his interred remains and gave them not just life, but spirit.

  ‘It will suffice. Set a collison course for the ork carrier and fire thrusters.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Are my speakers impaired?’

  ‘No, venerable lord,’ Kaplin answered crisply, setting down his shotgun to prod the new coordinates into the unfamiliar set of controls. An urgently blinking light back at the communications station caught his eye. He leaned across. ‘It’s the Palimodes again, I think.’

  ‘Ignore it. Forwards. Always forwards. Let the fireball destroy us all!’

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  ‘Then–’

  Magneric turned back to the blast doors.

  He could hear weapons fire. Not the dispersive blooms of the armsmen’s shotguns, nor the explosive noise-makers of the orks. It was the focused double-blasts of mass-reactive rounds.

  Space Marines.

  With a pneumatic hiss the blast doors slid open. The ten-centimetre-thick insulated barrier removed, the frozen air filled with the roar of bolter fire. Two Black Templars, firing from the hip, were covering each other’s withdrawal down the long corridor towards the command deck. At the far end, a mob of orks in neat black-and-white checked plate and horned helms advanced behind a bank of massive shields fitted with eye slits and what looked like heavy flamers.

  The auto-defence turrets were dead.

  The Space Marines’ shots blazed across the rank of shields. There was a deep-chested huck, like a cleared throat, and a launched grenade flew over the shield wall and went off under the Black Templar currently providing overwatch. The explosion peeled away his power armour and slammed him, broken, into the bulkhead. His comrade was thrown flat, but immediately pulled himself up on his elbows to rake the shield line on full-auto. The orks pushed on, impervious to anything lighter than a heavy bolter.

  Their slow advance revealed, squatting on the deck behind them, an abhorrence almost reminiscent of a orkish tech-priest. Except that was impossible.

  The orks had always possessed a native affinity for low technology, but nothing as specialised as this. The alien adept sat within a hulking ring of bodyguards, beside a maintenance hatch that it had clearly just blasted open using the plasma cutter grafted to its left arm. The panel’s internal controls were connected to a slate-like device in the ork’s hands and by a set of jump leads to the enormous power pack on its back. But even that abomination lost all power to offend beside the giant standing over it as a man would stand beside a dog.

  Its brute size and vibrating, pi
ston-driven fighting suit were impressive, but what struck Magneric at once was the realisation that the white and black plates bolted on as a dermal layer were ceramite. It was Adeptus Astartes power armour. Crusade Armour. Mark II. Magneric recognised the colours and the emblem that stamped them, though he doubted whether anyone who had not lived through those times now would.

  White and black. Like the orks in the command deck. Like these orks here. Likely, it was the progenitor design, a scheme that the orks had come to associate with power and strength.

  Luna Wolves.

  Magneric could think of only one world upon which an ork could have come upon so infamous a relic.

  With a battle cry last heard in the flesh at the gates of Holy Terra booming from his speakers, Magneric stamped forward, blocking the blast doors with his armoured bulk.

  ‘I am Magneric of the Black Templars. I denied the Palace of my God to His wayward sons. I deny it to you, xenos.’

  A torrent of assault cannon fire chewed across the orks’ shields and drove them back.

  ‘Magneric denies you! Kaplin! Fire thrusters!’

  Eight

  Vandis

  Gloriously unrefined firepower unfolded about Alcazar Remembered like butterfly wings, carving open ork ships, murdering their shields and leaving them to perish in her wake in puffs of fire. She had the look of an angel, but she was a gladiator. The void was her arena. The frigates Chastened and Unbroken were the first to shoot through in her wake. Explosions lit the debris field; lance beams and fighter contrails, shield flares and shelling.

  The orks’ mass carrier pivoted its main gun.

  It was a huge bronzed barrel the length of a capital ship, fed with masses of brightening plasma coils and finned by that sail-like radiator array. With a flash of energised plasma it fired.

  Thane’s data-display screamed an alert as an immense gravity spike crunched through Unbroken. The command deck shook, like a bomb shelter under sustained shelling. It was smoke and klaxons, shouts, squeals of metal pushed to the limits of tolerance. The main viewer crackled with static, showing ships and ordnance and flying debris screwing off-course and spraying out in all directions. Dutiful was snatched in by the pull of Unbroken’s suddenly swollen mass and slingshotted back. Following in on maximum drive, there was nothing that the cruiser Bastion of Arete could do to avoid her. Destruction was instantaneous and total.

  ‘Starboard void banks nearing saturation,’ said Weylon Kale, not shouting – never shouting – but terminally close. His voice was hoarse from breathing smoke and his eyes were raw. The old shipmaster had slotted in at the strategium to replace the section liaison, who lay spread out on the deck under a fire blanket, only hands and third-degree burns showing.

  ‘Increasing capacity with backup generators,’ the serf beside him screamed back.

  Kale turned to Thane.

  ‘They’ll hold a few minutes more, but against a shot from that…’

  ‘The Fists Exemplar do not leave their own behind.’

  ‘My lord, at what cost?’

  Thane stood tall as the deck around him trembled. It was a sense of duty, the stubborn grit that was so much a part of him, that stayed his course. Could anyone but a son of Dorn feel that overriding sense of obligation that the gene-seed of their primarch-progenitor imparted? The noble Ultramarines? The Dark Angels? Could they even understand it?

  Thane doubted it. He doubted it.

  ‘We are the Last Wall. There is no further to fall back.’

  ‘Still no response from Obsidian Sky,’ said Teal, voice wavering up and down with the hits to the shields and the shaking of the deck.

  ‘Keep sending.’

  ‘Aye. Lord, the Iron Warriors ship, Palimodes, is signalling. They’re expressing their… gratitude.’

  Thane gripped a little more fiercely to the handrail than the shaking of the command deck made necessary. ‘Acknowledge it. Order them to decelerate and come about on our heading. They can draw some of the fire off our flanks while we move in to recover the Obsidian Sky.’

  The subaltern keyed in the message and hit transmit. There was a tense pause.

  ‘Response,’ snapped Teal. Her face went pale, her eyes moving as though scanning a large block of text. She swallowed. ‘They respectfully say no.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘The essence of it, lord.’

  Thane mastered the tic of annoyance that threatened to break the resolute set of his jaw. ‘Then let them go. Any word from Zerberyn?’

  ‘No, lord, but Auspectoria reports Dantalion and a number of vessels breaking off and heading for the Mandeville point.’

  ‘Chapter Master. Come and take a look at this.’ Kale called Thane over to the strategium and directed his attention to the analytics at his station screen. The information was similar to that displayed in hololith over the chart desk, but more readily formatted into digestible data-scales, while the two-dimensional output was easier on unaugmented eyes. As of right then, it showed a fuzzy black cross surrounded by ship debris and power signatures denotive of bording torpedoes, updated every few seconds by a sonar-like sweep of code. ‘We’re approaching Obsidian Sky.’

  ‘Good. Now get these orks off my viewscreen and show me.’

  The viewer blinked from split-screen to a single image of the bloated mass carrier. The sweep of its upper and aft sections were edged red, the sun eclipsed, its dark side lit by the fires and weapon lights of the dwarfed capital-class ships in its shadow. From the speed and angle of drift, it was clear that the image was unaugmented real-time. Rolling with the hits to his shields, Thane made his way back to the command throne and punched up a magnification of Obsidian Sky.

  The screen changed, zoomed, and suddenly there she was, gliding like a disguised backhand knife under the carrier’s side. Collision course.

  ‘Raise Magneric,’ Thane roared, voice-amplification pushing maximum and whining with feedback. ‘Now!’

  ‘No response,’ Teal cried back.

  ‘Cut power to main drive. Thrusters, full reverse.’

  Wordlessly, Kale carried out the command, liver-spotted old hands fluttering over the array of controls. Thane felt a g-force surge run through the already straining ship, but it was too late.

  Not with all the legendary stubbornness of Rogal Dorn himself could he fail to see what was to come next.

  The carrier had left the Black Templars vessel for dead until then, content to dispatch boarding torpedoes and assault pods, but now the few dozen kilometres between them erupted into a lava stream of shells and explosive rounds. The two ships were already too close together for primary weapons, but even under that restriction the volume of fire that the ork’s command ship was capable of putting out was staggering. Obsidian Sky’s armoured prow simply dissolved, as if the ork ship were projecting an energy field that was causing it to dematerialise on contact. But Obsidian Sky was just too much ship, even for the mass carrier, to completely obliterate with defence batteries alone.

  The space narrowed to under a kilometre.

  Her bow had been burned to a flat stump. There was a cauterising flare as ship met shields.

  ‘Venerable…’ Thane breathed.

  With sublime slowness, Obsidian Sky plunged into the carrier’s port side.

  It was not slow. Thane knew that. But the scales and distances involved made a nonsense of any human notion of speed. The shorn, void-exposed inner bulkheads of Obsidian Sky’s forward section were folded in and crushed, driven deeper into the carrier’s crust by failing thrusters. Her hull began to deform, ripples spreading back as her starboard thruster blew out. Drive plasma flaring out into space, Obsidian Sky tilted, ground in, and then finally crashed sideways into the larger ship.

  Thane winced from the first spark of the explosion, a pure white nucleus of destructive energy swelling up from Obsidian Sky’s drive core. It lasted
a fraction of a second, then rushed out in a flash that washed the entire viewscreen white. As if to compensate for the glare, deck lighting dipped. Terminals surged, arced and blew out in serial cascades of sparks. The blast front hit seconds behind the electromagnetic surge, and slammed Thane back into the command throne.

  Shaking his head clear of shield saturation alerts and the low whine of decompression warnings, Thane reached up for the command throne’s grip studs and pulled himself back up. His multi-lung took over his breathing as his chest filled with smoke and his blood acidity spiked. He felt the sudden burn of frustrated anger. They could still have seen the Obsidian Sky and her crew clear; instead Magneric had almost destroyed them all.

  ‘Report,’ he called out, but everyone was still pulling themselves together or nursing flickering consoles like primitives around a fire.

  A pair of serfs at auspectoria hurriedly shared notes and drew some quick adjustments to the pattern of curves and vectors on the scanner table. At the same time, the main viewer began to clear and a rough cheer went up from the command crew. The mass carrier was listing, a massive hole blasted out of its side. It was possible to make out distinct decks within the almost perfect hemispherical cutaway, lights twinkling behind the debris cloud and coherence fields like stars within a nebula.

  ‘Obsidian Sky is down,’ reported an auspex serf. ‘Two Black Templars ships still intact. Cruisers. One of them is the Interdictor. Dantalion, Bulwark, and Faceless Warrior are with them.’

  ‘The ork ships, my lord,’ said Kale, the swirling colours of the strategium chart desk like racing storm clouds across his face. ‘They’re assuming new headings, moving off from the carrier.’

  Thane sank back into the command throne and summoned a pared-back copy of the strategium read-outs to his data-display. The orks were disengaging, breaking for the system perimeter. But why? Why run? Even with their leviathan flagship crippled they had the Imperial forces grossly outgunned.