‘Speak, human.’
‘My lord, Exalted of the Dark Gods… This attack vector will bring us within the Sword’s firing solution for fifteen seconds.’
‘Thirteen,’ the Exalted corrected with a death’s head grin. ‘And that is why as soon as we fire our prow weapons, the ship will execute a Coronus Dive, full burn on the engines with port thrusters overloaded by seventy per cent. We will roll while holding maximum sustainable negative yaw and pitch for ten seconds.’
The officer went paler, if such was even possible for a man who hadn’t felt sunlight on his skin in decades.
‘Lord… we’re too large a vessel for–’
‘Silence. You will coordinate this attack run with main armament weapons fire from the vessels Ironmonger, Vengeful Spirit, and the Blade of Flame. Align with their strategiums and inform them of our intent.’
‘As you say, lord.’ The officer swallowed. His eyes, the Exalted noted, were a particularly rich brown. They did not flicker here and there in his nervousness, as did most mortals’ in the presence of the Exalted, but he was still reluctant to speak his mind in the presence of his liege. The reasons for this were fairly obvious, of course. Arguing with the Astartes always, always ended in blood and pain.
The ship moaned a long, agonised heave as it passed through the forward fire arc of another sizeable cruiser. Again, the Night Lords ship declined to defend itself, letting its shields take the impacts while it stormed to its chosen target.
‘Speak, human,’ the Exalted repeated. ‘Entertain me with your thoughts in these moments before our victory.’
‘A Coronus Dive, lord. The g-forces alone are likely to kill us, and the attitude thrusters will be offline for weeks with the burnout. The risks–’
‘Are acceptable.’ The Exalted nodded to the officer. ‘The Warmaster is watching, mortal. And so am I. Bring my wishes into being, or you will be replaced by one more capable of doing so.’
The officer should have known better. When he turned back to his station and whispered under his breath ‘This will destroy the damn ship…’ he should have known the Exalted would hear.
‘Bridge attendant,’ the Astartes smirked.
The man didn’t turn around. He was too busy working his console, sending binary orders to the minds of the strategium servitors to prepare for the madness to come. ‘Yes, lord?’
‘If this is not flawlessly done, I will feed you your own eyes, and you will die tonight, skinless and howling for mercy that will never come.’
The bridge fell quiet, and the Exalted grinned wetly.
‘I do not care about overhauling the attitude thrusters, nor the slaves that will die in the repairs. A Coronus Dive, as close as this vessel can come to such a manoeuvre, timed with weapons fire from the three named ships.
‘Do it now.’
It was beyond audacious.
The Ironmonger, Vengeful Spirit and the Blade of Flame pulled into position, supporting the Night Lords’ manoeuvre by firing their weapons in a coordinated burst, though from a significant distance. The Exalted suspected their own captains aligned with his plan out of amused curiosity rather than the belief it would actually work, but then, their lack of courage was their cross to bear.
Almost every fleet captain on both sides stared – at least for a moment – at the Covenant of Blood, the only vessel of the Warmaster’s fleet to run the gauntlet of enemy lines, as it sliced past the massive Avenger-class grand cruiser Sword of the God-Emperor. Many captains also recognised, to their disbelief, that the ship was in the initial movements of a wrenching, spinning, maddened Coronus Dive.
It began its attack run in the face of incredible firepower. Ghosting through the great ship’s fire arc, the Covenant suffered the rage of the Sword’s forward lances and weapons batteries which were already spitting torrents of fury against the enemy ahead. The Night Lords vessel endured the assault of supreme weapons fire that had been destined to hit other Chaos ships, and its shields first cracked, then shattered, within a matter of moments.
To all observers, it seemed the Covenant of Blood was sacrificing itself in a ramming run. And it would succeed, too. That much weight, inertia and explosive capability would burn out the Sword’s shields and gut the ship to its core.
But the Covenant didn’t ram its prey.
It returned fire just as its shields died, unleashing a blistering barrage of lances, solid shells and plasma fire from its prow weapons batteries, as well as a precisely timed single magma bomb warhead, principally designed for surface attack, from its bombardment cannon.
This payload struck the Sword just as massed fire from the three other Traitor Astartes vessels coordinated their prow weapons on the same target. It was as close to the shark-like unity of the black sea sharks as the Exalted could have imagined, but that was hardly foremost in the Night Lord commander’s mind.
All of this unleashed punishment was enough, barely, to achieve the Exalted’s desires. The colossal Sword of the God-Emperor, pride of Battlefleet Crythe, flagship of Lord Admiral Valiance Arventaur, no longer shimmered behind an invincible screen of rippling energy.
Its shields were down, overloaded by the sudden savage assault of the Astartes strike cruiser.
The Exalted was not a fool. He knew void war, and he knew the capabilities of his foes, the strength of their weapons, and the power of their vessels. He knew the Sword of the God-Emperor was bristling with failsafes and auxiliary generatoriums, and his attack had inflicted no real damage to the enemy flagship beyond temporarily overloading its shields by giving them too much to absorb at once. They would be back online within moments – a minute at the very most – multi-layered and strong once more.
The Covenant of Blood veered sharper than a cruiser of its size had any right to do, throwing itself into a potentially terminal rolling dive alongside and past the grand cruiser it had almost rammed. Alarms hammered the senses of all her crew across the ship. The bladed spear of a vessel roared down into its dive, taking secondary fire from the Sword’s broadsides as it plunged past. It didn’t return fire. A single volley from the mighty Imperial flagship pounded the Covenant’s port weapons batteries into nothingness.
Still twisting as it slid past, the Covenant trailed a path of shed debris. Halfway through its plunge, the Exalted felt that one perfect moment of connection with the battle.
Here.
Now.
Even as his ship was being torn apart by Imperial guns, he felt the moment with unbroken clarity, and growled a single word.
‘Launch.’
‘Three,’ the servitor’s voice had said.
‘Two.’
‘One.’
‘Launch.’
Talos felt his world lurch from under him, every muscle locking tense. It wasn’t a feeling of falling, exactly, nor one of dizziness. His altered senses were resistant to matters of unbalance and unreliable perception. Where a human would have been painting the pod’s interior with vomit and passing out from the pressure of launch, the Astartes on board merely suffered mild sensations of discomfort in the pits of their stomachs. Such was the blessing of biologically reconfigured perceptions.
‘Impact in five seconds,’ the pod’s automated voice chimed from everywhere and nowhere at once. Talos heard Uzas wheezing into the vox, gleefully counting down the seconds.
Talos counted silently, bracing when a single second remained. The pod’s guidance thrusters kicked into life with a jolt almost as bad as the impact that came a moment later. The pod smashed into its target with hull-breaching force, echoing within the pod itself like a dragon’s roar.
A rune flickered on his retinal display in twisting Nostraman script, and in the shuddering aftermath of impact, Talos hammered a fist onto his throne’s release pad. The restraints unlocked and disengaged, and the four Astartes of First Claw moved from their seats without hesitation, weapons clutched in dark fists.
The pod’s hatch opened with a grind of tortured metal and a hiss of escaping ai
r pressure. Talos spoke into the vox, his voice smooth and assured as he looked out into a steel-decked arching corridor: his first view of the interior of the Sword of the God-Emperor.
‘Covenant, this is First Claw. We are in.’
V
SWORD OF THE GOD-EMPEROR
'Poison will breach any armour.
When faced with an invincible foe, simply bless his bloodstream with venom.
His own racing heart will carry the poison faster throughout his body.
Fear is a venom just as potent.
Remember that. Fear is a poison to break any foe.’
– The war-sage Malcharion
Excerpted from his work, The Tenebrous Path,
Lieutenant Cerlin Vith listened in on the vox-net, from his position on the bridge.
Orders had come from the highest authority: repel the boarding party currently rampaging through the operations decks below the bridge. Cerlin knew there were other boarding parties moving elsewhere across the ship, but they would be handled by other squads of armsmen. Vith had his orders, and he intended to see them through. His men guarded the bridge, and he had a host of reinforcements on the way.
He wasn’t worried. The Sword of the God-Emperor, his home for the past twenty years, was as grand a ship as any in His Majesty’s Holy Fleet. Over 25,000 crew called the warship home, even though a sizeable chunk of those were slave labourers and servitor wretches working their lives away in the sweathouse enginarium decks. You didn’t board a vessel this big.
At least, Vith amended, not if you intended to survive.
It was true enough that the Sword wasn’t in front-line service, anymore. Equally true, the glorious ship had been sidelined from the major battlefleets, but she still stood as the invincible jewel in the crown of Battlefleet Crythe. It was a sign of the times, that was all. The Avenger-class was a brawler, a close-range battler, designed to rage into a maelstrom of enemy ships and give out a beating twice as bad as any it took. It had the firepower to do it, but fell out of favour with admirals over time, when such blunt tactics were frowned upon by an increasingly defensive Imperium.
This is what Cerlin told himself. This is what he believed, because the officers said it so many times.
Cerlin’s beloved Sword wasn’t out of the running forever. She was just out of fashion. He’d told himself this time and time again, because although he was just a soldier in service to the Golden Throne, he took great pride to be serving where he was. Above all, Lieutenant Cerlin Vith ached for front-line service once more. He burned to gaze out of a porthole and see the blackish bruise of distorted warp space that made up the Great Eye – the nexus of the Archenemy’s influence.
So he wasn’t worried now. The Sword of the God-Emperor was unbreakable, undefeatable. The shaking of the ship was the endless vibration of its own guns unleashing hell upon the accursed Archenemy. When the shields had fallen a short while ago, they’d been raised again within a single minute. And even if they fell again, the hull wreathing them all in protective, loyal armour was as strong as a righteous man’s faith.
Nothing, but nothing, would ever kill the Sword.
He repeated these words within his mind, not a trace of desperation in his silent voice. The fact they’d been boarded was… Well, it was madness. What sane enemy would ever attempt such a thing? He literally couldn’t conceive of the tactics at play. What fool of a commander wasted the lives of his men by hurling a handful of them into a ship that boasted over twenty thousand souls ready to defend it?
It was time to teach the first boarding party the error of their ways.
Apparently their vessel had pulled some nice stunts to get them here, if the vox-talk from the strategium was anything to go by.
Well, whatever the truth, they’d managed to come aboard a ship that hadn’t seen invaders in over a dozen years, so maybe the admiral – blessings upon his name – was right. Maybe this was serious.
But Cerlin had a reputation for dealing with serious business. That was why more often than not, he was the one that saw duty defending the command decks.
Vith led the decorated platoon known as Helios Nine, with a record of distinction and superior marksmanship that wouldn’t have shamed an Imperial Guard sniper. He handpicked the men and women of Helios Nine, turning down promotion twice in the last ten years because he didn’t want to be raised above the station he felt best suited him. Commanding a dozen armsman squads would mean he had a lot of mediocrity in with his finest soldiers. Commanding Helios Nine meant he commanded nothing but the best of the best.
Helios Nine even dressed like they meant business. On the occasions they were tasked to descend into the depths of the Sword’s belly and bring some order to the criminals and scum labouring beneath the civilised decks, their sleek, dark carapace armour with its flaring sun symbol on the chestplate was a sign for every slave and serf to look busy and keep to the rules. Helios Nine – the ‘Sunbursts’ and the ‘Niners’ to the conscripted slave colonies in the ship’s bowels – were well-known for their ruthless demeanour. A famous predilection for a merciless eagerness formed the core of their reputation, brought about from many instances of executing slaves that dared hint at disobedience or dereliction of duty.
Helios Nine numbered fifty men and women, spread across the command decks, squad by squad. Forty-nine of Vith’s favourite killers standing ready for the enemy, and Vith himself with the lead squad, backing the admiral’s throne.
Every member of Helios Nine packed a shotcannon for maximum short-range damage without risking the ship’s hull. He didn’t need to look around to know his men were ready. They were born ready and had trained to be readier every day since. Nothing would take them down.
Lieutenant Cerlin Vith believed this without a doubt until the first reports came in over the vox.
‘…bolters…’ one of the crackled cries had said.
He’d swallowed, then. Bolters.
That wasn’t good.
More reports crackled in his ears, flooding in now from armsmen squads elsewhere on the ship. The transmissions were broken and patchy, distorted by the running battles as well as the war raging outside the ship. But he was hearing more words he didn’t like, more words he didn’t want to hear.
‘…require heavier weapons to…’
‘…falling back…’
‘…Throne of the Emperor! We’re…’
As he stood in the centre of the low-ceilinged chamber of the main bridge, Cerlin tapped the micro-bead vox pearl in his ear, adjusting the needle mic to the edge of his lips.
‘This is Vith. Enginarium teams?’
‘Affirmative, lieutenant,’ the response from the squads defending the ship’s plasma drives crackled in his ear. The teams guarding the enginarium chambers were, if memory served, the Lesser Gods, the Death Jesters, the Lucky Fifty and the Deadeyes. Vith had no idea which officer he was talking to – the vox wasn’t clear enough – but they were all solid, dependable squads. Not Helios Nine standards, by any means, but good enough in a scrap. The reception was punctuated by violent shrieks of distortion that prodded at Cerlin’s hangover with cruel fingers.
‘I’m getting vox chatter about bolters and all kinds of death breaking loose,’ he said.
‘Affirmative, lieut…’ the voice repeated. ‘Be advised that boarders are…’
‘Are what? That the boarders are what?’
‘…st…’
‘Command team? Enginarium defence command team, this is Vith, repeat.’
‘…th… es…’
Wonderful. Just wonderful.
It was easy to immerse himself in his own world, removed from the larger battle. The bridge was a chaotic hive of activity: naval officers shouting and moving from console to console as they devoted their attention to the war raging outside the ship. Servitors chattered and droned as they obeyed the orders called at them. Almost a hundred crew, human and lobotomised slave alike, working to keep the Sword unleashing its full lethal potential agai
nst the enemies of the Golden Throne.
With a moment’s effort, Vith blanked it all out. His world was restricted to snippets of incoming vox chatter, and the immediate area around Lord Admiral Arventaur’s throne. Raised on a platform to look down upon the bridge below, the throne accommodated the admiral’s slender, jacketed form with apparent comfort despite the arching backrest made from the curving ribs of some strange xenos creature. Admiral Valiance Arventaur reclined in his bone throne, his temples thick with cables and wiring that bound him to the chair, and in turn, to the ship’s systems.
Vith knew the admiral – eyes closed and seemingly lost in meditation – was allowing his consciousness to swim within the ship’s machine-spirit. He knew the admiral felt the hull like his own skin, and the racing efforts of the crew within the steel halls like the blood that beat through his own body.
And again, Vith cared little for it. Keeping the old man alive was all that mattered. The admiral had a war to fight, and it looked like Vith did, too.
The thunder of the ship taking hits was still audible, but the hull itself was stable for the moment. Several of the armsmen shared glances.
‘Sir,’ one of the ones closest to the front of the column said to Cerlin. ‘I know that sound. I served on the Decimus, and we did several boarding actions with the Astartes. The Marines Errant Chapter, sir.’
Cerlin didn’t turn. His gaze remained fixed on the sealed and locked double doors in the starboard side of the chamber. The thunder was coming from there, and he knew the sound, too. It had taken a moment to recognise, because he’d never expected to hear it on board his own ship.
There was no mistaking the distinctive boom of bolt weapons.
They’d been boarded by Astartes. Traitor Astartes.
Finally, confirmation of the enemy was coming from all angles. Naval ratings relayed to each other that the enemy ship diving past them was a confirmed Astartes vessel, excommunicated for heresy, registering as the Covenant of Blood.
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