Halji stood beside her, saying nothing, sunken into an expectant silence.
Ilya turned to her own screens. Ships were still moving out of the deployment pattern. The Qo-Fian had withdrawn to the far side of the planet. Two smaller frigates had broken off contact entirely after a series of strange vox-bursts.
She ran an augur sweep, and it was then that she first saw them. Four ships, heading in-system fast. They looked to be just minutes out of rematerialisation, and their auspex profiles still scattered the feed with interference.
‘Have you seen this, Halji?’ she asked, pointing to the rune-glyphs.
Halji nodded. ‘Incoming vessels.’
‘They have no identifiers,’ said Ilya, frowning. ‘They’re big. Throne, they’re battleships.’
‘It is under control.’
‘It’s not bloody well under control!’ Ilya felt like hammering her fists on Halji’s armour. He was so calm, so unconcerned. ‘You’re sitting around like you’ve…’
She did not say ‘arranged it yourself’.
She glanced up at Hasik again. He was surrounded by two dozen White Scars in heavy battleplate, stationed around the edge of the observation deck like an honour guard. The noyan-khan showed no signs of surprise, nor did anyone around him.
‘We have to raise shields,’ she said firmly.
‘That is the noyan-khan’s decision.’
‘It’s procedure.’
Halji avoided looking at her.
Ilya thumped her fist into the pict-feed and felt it flex. ‘Damn you, Halji! What’s going on?’
Halji shook his head. ‘Calm yourself, szu. All will become apparent.’
He was like a rockcrete wall. With a sudden lurch of realisation, she realised that Halji was not her ally and her guide; he was her chaperone. She could no more have escaped his attention than she could outrun a jetbike.
She whirled back to the nearest screen, her cheeks burning with anger. Runes swam across the console before her, each one indicating a ship shifting out of position.
‘Where is the Khan?’ she muttered, her fingers dancing across the controls.
The four ship-signals kept tracking across the void, heading with remorseless efficiency towards the White Scars formations. Just as at Chondax, the entire fleet seemed incapable of responding to them.
She ran an augmented sweep on the signals, pulling them to a different monitor. Grainy images resolved. It was hard to tell from the distorted profiles, but the ships looked grey. Pale grey, like the images of Luna she had seen so many times on propaganda picts.
She killed the feed, despairing of making sense of it. Then, just as she was about to look away, she detected a familiar signature edging towards the Swordstorm. The Kaljian, one of the smaller attack-frigates, one of the last she had pulled into muster before the Alpha Legion had attacked. It was not so much drifting into range as… sidling.
Ilya glanced up at Halji, whose attention had shifted to Hasik again. He didn’t notice her, and was not checking the pict-feeds.
She almost said something, then changed her mind. The Khan was still out of contact and matters were clearly being run by others – it was up to her to decide who was acting in whose best interests.
She kept her head down. She said nothing. Carefully, trying to remain as calm as possible, she started to work. One by one, the Swordstorm’s defensive schematics began to scroll down the console.
Qin Xa hunkered down in the rubble. His targeting system still gave him nothing. The rest of the squad crept through the darkness, hugging close to the twisted heaps of debris. Above them, Prospero’s unquiet skies cracked and grumbled.
He could already see the column, standing like a sliver of bone amidst the swirling dust. Just one more barricade to clear, and they would be back in the square.
‘In position?’ he voxed to Arvida.
‘Whenever you’re ready,’ replied the Thousand Sons legionary.
Qin Xa checked the location of his battle-brothers. Eight runes blinked on his retinal display, each within five metres. Bolters were no use, he had decided, so his warriors went into battle with tulwars or glaives or lightning claws, all of them wreathed in the crackling discharge of electric-blue energy fields.
‘Stay close,’ he warned, slowly turning his two curved blades. ‘Secure the pillar, then I will try to get a location reading.’
He broke from cover, loping over the broken terrain and skirting the worst of the wreckage. His squad did the same, streaking out into Prospero’s eternal night. They went low, silent, like wolves on the scent.
Arvida took up position in the midst of them. He travelled more stealthily than the Terminators, knowing the terrain perfectly and not hindered by their massive armour-shells. His gauntlets were already glowing with slivers of warp-fire, lighting up his battered crimson plate.
Qin Xa was the first into the square. Its surface was more pitted and treacherous than it had been before, with ravines running across the pockmarked rockcrete and huge areas slumped down into smoking craters. He ghosted across the remains, keeping his blades raised the whole time.
As he went, his blood pumped hard around his system. There was nothing but silence surrounding him. It could have been the underworld itself.
Then, just as the central column drew into range, he heard the first trace of buzzing. He whirled around to see a psychneuein materialise over him, coalescing instantly as if sucked from the atmosphere itself. He saw the trailing limbs, the mandibles clicking, the swollen brain-parts. Just as before, the creature was translucent and glowing like corpse-gas. It swooped at him, plunging fast, wings blurring.
Qin Xa braced, waiting for the impact. At the last moment he struck upwards, aiming for the narrow waist between thorax and abdomen. The psychneuein blundered blindly into the path of his swords – both blades hit their target, sinking without resistance into aetheric matter. Qin Xa immediately felt the awful draining cold that made his muscles seize and his mind lock.
Then he heard Arvida cry out, and a bolt of something like lightning slammed into the insectoid body. The glowing exoskeleton instantly hardened, solidifying like ice freezing. Chitinous membranes clustered into being, membranes toughened, fluids pumped.
Qin Xa’s blades now bit, and he sliced them both crossways. The psychneuein screamed, and its body severed. Sticky residue slapped across Qin Xa’s helm. The buzzing became a strangled flail.
By then he was moving again, leaping away from the disintegrating creature’s carcass. Other psychneuein had spun into the square and were lurching towards the Terminators with the same eerie blindness as before. This time, when they latched on, Arvida was ready. Positioned in the centre of the squad, he opened his gauntlet and sent bolts of warp-fire crashing into them. When the bolts hit, the half-corporeal creatures crystallised into physicality. Once in that state, the White Scars could take them on.
Qin Xa ran quickly, spinning out of contact with a reeling psychneuein and charging towards another. Just as he crashed into contact, its shell hardened, ready to receive the cut of his energy field. The creature reeled, its abdomen slit open and leaking. Qin Xa pressed the attack, making his blades whirr. He eviscerated it in three savage cuts, snickering the swords in tight switchbacks, slashing the warp beast apart and leaving it in chunks.
He felt a cold rush of satisfaction. This was fighting he could undertake. He was faster than them. He was sharper.
More materialised; first a few, then dozens. The cluster above them became a swarm, all drawn by the presence of live souls encroaching upon their domain. Ever stranger creatures emerged among them: giant scarabs with glossy, outsize shells; towering mantids that scuttled across the rock; vespid-like beasts with engorged twin stings. Prospero’s bizarre menagerie of psychic fauna resurrected jerkily around them, shimmering with spectral evanescence. Bloated cranial mounds glowed, multi-faceted eyes glinted sightlessly.
Arvida worked hard, throwing bolt after bolt at the emerging horrors. The White Scars
kept fighting, hacking their way towards the pillar, their blades dripping with luminescent ichor. Qin Xa saw Garul plough straight through a newly-solidified psychneuein, his glaive whirring with incredible speed. Ro-Xian ripped a scarab apart with his claws, drenching himself in glistening liquids as the hard shell blew apart.
But the numbers began to tell. As Qin Xa reached the faint shadow of the column one of the wasp-like insectoids came right at him. Arvida was slow to respond, and Qin Xa’s blades whipped through nothing. He felt his soul tug agonisingly, and tried to withdraw. The thing pressed into him, sweeping its grotesque stingers around for the kill.
Qin Xa lunged, aiming at the closest curved spike. At the last moment, Arvida cracked a bolt into the wasp’s body – one of Qin Xa’s blades severed the solidified stinger, the other jutted deep into its thorax. He wrenched both blades outwards, ripping the creature open.
By then more were coming in. Kaghun was gripped by one of the mantids, his soul wrenched from his body before Arvida could react. The warrior’s unearthly screams lingered as the diminished squad fought on towards the centre of the square.
The spectres kept on materialising, bursting into ghoulish life from all directions, spilling out of the air. Arvida worked frantically, lighting up the skies with his sorcery, but it was not quick enough. Still there was no signal – no location reading for the Khan.
Qin Xa moved with all the speed of his heritage, driving the Terminator plate hard and making the servos whine. His blades plunged and darted, evading the glowing forms of the ethereal and stabbing unerringly into the solidified flesh of the corporeal. His mind fixed into a tight vice of concentration – all he saw was the movement, the strikes and the angles, bleeding out of the night like iridescent nightmares.
The warriors of the keshig withdrew into a tight huddle, protecting Arvida even as his witchery allowed them to fight. The broken column reared up at their backs, severed and implacable.
‘We cannot hold for much longer,’ Arvida voxed coolly.
‘Stay where you are,’ grunted Qin Xa, scything his blades into the path of a scuttling mantid, slicing its limbs open and sending it crashing to the ground. ‘He must be close.’
He heard a buzz and spun to his right, decapitating a psychneuein streaking in just above waist height. The blow was judged expertly, but Arvida’s warp-craft had not completed properly, and before Qin Xa could pull the swords away he felt the icy pull of the aether.
He jerked away, but too slowly. Another psychneuein came out of the dark, as translucent as smoked glass. It swerved in on Qin Xa.
He had no time. Arvida was now occupied with his own fight, his warriors could not help. With a sudden lurch, Qin Xa knew that he could do nothing to protect himself.
‘Khagan!’ he roared defiantly, bracing for impact.
The creature blasted apart, spinning into a thousand fragments that sailed high across the ruins. Wing fragments and body parts burned like stars before blazing out, sending a shockwave screaming across the square and making the dust dance. The air itself seemed to rip apart, scattering psychneuein and sending them tumbling.
A tall figure stood on the far side of the annihilated phantasms, silhouetted against the dull burn of Prospero’s long death-agony. His sword glowed with aetheric residue, as though dipped in molten iron. His fine armour was crusted with dirt and dust, much of it smouldering red-hot.
The spectres hung back then, their will suddenly wavering. The swarm fell away, rising clear of the new blade in their midst.
For a second, lost in shock, Qin Xa just stared at the newcomer, breathing heavily. Then the armoured figure spoke, and all became clear.
‘Leave them, Xa,’ growled the Khan, striding after the retreating horrors, his long dao blade shimmering, his armour’s trim glinting like newly-mined gold. ‘You can’t hurt them. I can.’
The Kaljian pulled into strike range, and the shadow of the Swordstorm rippled over it. Waiting just inside the open hangar doors, Shiban looked up at the vastness of the hull as it slid through the void, blotting out the stars beyond. He observed the engine housings, the ventral shield generators, the flank lances, all embellished with ornate las-emplacements and close-range cannons.
His brotherhood were mounted and ready. They lined up in ranks on the hangar deck. Five hundred bikes growled and spat as their engines revved to their full pitch.
Sojutsu-pattern voidbikes were larger and more brutal than the Scimitar-class machines, with enclosed thrusters and a far more potent power source. They were more like one-man fighters than speeders, and an armour-sealed White Scars legionary could use them for short bursts in the void just as other Legions used their speeders for atmospheric work.
Shiban leaned back in his saddle, running final checks on the bike’s system. Its centre-mounted heavy bolter keyed up and the bracing clamps slid back. He rose above the rockcrete, buoyed by a thrumming layer of grav-repulsion. All around him his brothers did the same, and the hangar filled with the oily stink of thrusters belching smoke.
‘Think they will fire on us?’ voxed Jochi, bobbing alongside him.
‘We find out now,’ replied Shiban, before pressing the throttle down.
His bike leapt forward like a living thing, growling down the long hangar exit ramp, streaking out through the atmospheric shield and into the silent void beyond.
His brotherhood followed close behind. Five hundred bikes shot clear of the Kaljian’s hull and dispersed into the vacuum, each one trailing a line of sooty backwash.
Shiban increased speed, and the looming shape of the Swordstorm wheeled above him. The bike swayed as he pulled it round, aiming for a run along the near hull-edge and towards the ventral shuttle bays. Huge sensor towers, hanging from the battleship’s underside like stalactites, raced by as he reached full velocity.
The brotherhood tore towards the ingress points, spread out wide, just as if they were horsemen tearing across open grassland. Shiban saw the first set of bay doors race noiselessly towards him, and ran a sensor sweep on the entrance-zone.
‘Blast-shielded,’ he voxed, drawing closer to the hull.
He hurtled further down towards the battleship’s stern, veering between communication nodes and jutting weapon housings. The brotherhood swept past the first docking bay and powered on to the next.
‘They will all be protected, khan,’ remarked Jochi calmly. ‘Are we going to have to fight our way in?’
Shiban tilted to avoid a massive lance-barrel. ‘If we have to.’
He shot downwards, aiming for the Swordstorm’s keel. A thicket of sensor-vanes hung vertically, barring his path, and he picked up speed to clear them.
They did not have long – the sensorium officers on the flagship would already be tracking them, frantically voxing the Kaljian to demand why so many flyers had been launched. The window of operation between them taking off and Hasik taking precautions would be measured in seconds.
He pulled under the keel-point, missing the tip of a sensor-vane by a helm’s width and hauling the bike around hard. The far side of the Swordstorm yawned away above him, vast and precipitous.
‘Seven hundred metres,’ he voxed, locking on to the next docking bay. ‘Full throttle.’
The brotherhood streaked towards it, hugging the battleship’s hull-plating and swerving between the hundreds of protuberances and snaking trenches.
The first flickers of las-fire blazed past them like shooting stars – barely visible at such extreme velocities. Cannons further up the battleship’s cyclopean flank opened up first, swung back tight against the ship’s side to target the hurtling speeders.
Several found their mark, sending bikes careering into the hull-plating or spinning, thrusters blazing, into the void.
‘They dare!’ voxed Jochi, outraged.
Shiban poured on more power, cleaving to the underside of the Swordstorm as close as possible. He had hoped, deep down, that his Legion-brothers would not have used their weapons to prevent them from boarding. I
f they were truly serious, it would take them just a few minutes to obliterate the entire brotherhood.
They cannot mean to do that. Even now, with all that has happened, they cannot mean to do more than warn us off.
The next bank of docking bays was shielded and closed, all of them too heavily buttressed to be blasted through quickly.
‘Spread out,’ he voxed, scanning ahead for a way in. Only seconds remained until the situation would become irretrievable. ‘Use full hull-width, maintain speed.’
He pushed his bike even closer to the ship, grazing the underside of an exhaust vent and nearly clipping a power conduit. The las-fire picked up, finding its range and growing in density. The gunners were good, and well used to tracking objects at high velocity. More bikes exploded, tumbling through the void before crashing in silent streaks of igniting promethium. His helm-display flashed red, stabbing at him with the call-signs of the dead.
‘Faster,’ he snarled, unwilling to pull away. There would be no second chance.
His brothers knew it, and followed his lead tightly. Their engines flared in the dark, burning almost beyond their tolerances.
‘Khan,’ voxed Jochi through gritted teeth. For the first time, he sounded unsure. ‘When do we–’
Then Shiban saw it on his helm-display – a single docking port, un-shielded, un-barred.
‘That’s it – follow me in,’ Shiban ordered, swinging his bike upwards and kicking on towards the signal. He tore through the oncoming hail of las-fire, jerking and ducking to avoid the beams, sweeping past a whole row of angled torpedo launchers and streaking towards the signalled port.
He had no idea why it was unprotected, but it saved them the ruinous task of trying to blast an entrance. Its marker lights were on, strobing into the open jaws of the docking chamber, beckoning them in – as though someone on the flagship actively wanted them to break the cordon.
Shiban kicked the retros at the last moment, skidding around in zero-gravity then powering into the Swordstorm’s inertia bubble. His bike’s grav-plates whined instantly, adjusting to the rapidly moving environment, before locking on to the docking bay floor and righting him.
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