The destroyer Lachesis lost half of its superstructure in a reactor explosion, cut apart by the Covenant’s forward lances. Half a minute later, the strike cruiser rammed its way through the frigate’s spinning wreckage, pounding into the remaining hull section, batting it aside with its cracked prow as if merely swatting an insect.
Even limping, her legs broken and her skin aflame, the Night Lord warship clawed at the prey within her reach.
The cruiser Labyrinthine, now deprived of its last support ship, dived its ponderous way down onto the slowing Covenant. A volley of plasma cannon fire twinned with a knifing cut from its lances to rain devastation on the ship below. Too crippled to escape, the Covenant rolled with what little momentum remained, preparing for a final lance burst in spiteful retaliation.
The Labyrinthine fired again.
And missed.
Its entire payload splashed harmlessly across the rippling shields of another vessel – a warship twinned in size and lethal elegance to the dying Covenant. The intruder ship raced between the two cruisers, forcing them apart with proximity alarms wailing on both bridges.
After taking the kill-shot and letting it bleed across its shields, the newcomer lashed back with a withering hail of laser battery broadsides. The Labyrinthine’s shields burst, and the ship rolled hard to starboard, desperate to avoid another barrage.
On the Covenant’s bridge, a voice rang out over the hissing, spitting speakers.
‘This is Talos of the Eighth Legion, warship Echo of Damnation.’
The reply crackled back on a wave of ravaged vox. ‘Very amusing. But you should have stayed away from this battle, prophet. No sense in the Legion losing two ships this night.’
Xarl and Uzas listened to the newest slice of madness coming down the vox. The Bleeding Eyes, several of them at least, were filling the communication channel with the most annoying, piercing shrieks.
‘What’s your location?’ Xarl was asking, and not for the first time. ‘This is Xarl of First Claw; what’s your location?’
The shrieking fell silent again. This had happened several times now, with each bout of eagle-crying rage preceded by talk of ‘hunting those who would become hunters themselves’ and ‘stalking the prey with the broken soul’.
Xarl hated the Raptors.
‘I hate those things,’ he said. This, too, was not for the first time. ‘I hate the way they talk, I hate the way they think and I hate the way they tell that tale about being first on the walls at the Emperor’s Palace.’
Uzas didn’t reply. He was trying to listen to the Raptors, as well.
‘Their hunt is not going well,’ he mused.
‘Thank you for the translation, brother.’ Xarl reached for his hand-held auspex, thumbing the activation rune. ‘Wait here. I’ll be back soon.’
Uzas tilted his head. ‘Talos ordered us both to remain here.’
‘You are lecturing me on appropriate reactions to orders?’ Xarl made a show of looking around. ‘Are you possessed, brother?’
Uzas didn’t reply.
‘I’ll be back soon,’ said Xarl. ‘I want to join in the Bleeding Eyes’ hunt for… whatever it is they’re hunting. It sounds as if it’s ripping them to pieces, and I like those odds.’
‘I wish to hunt, as well.’ Uzas grunted, sounding particularly petulant. ‘You stay here. I will hunt with the shrieking idiots.’
Xarl shook his head. ‘I think not.’
‘Why?’ Uzas asked. ‘Why should I stay while you go?’
‘Because even on my worst days, I’m the best with a blade. You, on the other hand, run around with an axe, screaming about gods while you butcher your own servants.’
Without waiting for a reply, Xarl strode off down the corridor, boots thudding on the deck.
Vandred was one of the few still alive on the Covenant’s bridge. Flames coated the walls in a second skin, beginning to eat into the bodies of those who died doing their duty. He was half-blinded by the light of too many fires, and he could smell his ship’s last breath in the acrid smoke.
Despite this body’s raw strength, blood loss from several vicious gash wounds made it difficult to get back to his throne. The blood itself smelled foul, and dripped from his wounds in thick, adhesive clumps, barely liquid at all.
The remaining command deck crew were all servitors, their limited behavioural protocols keeping them bound to their duties no matter what external stimuli were at play. Two of them were burning, literally aflame as they stood at their stations: metal parts scorched, flesh blackening and bleeding. They keyed in commands to fire gun turrets that no longer existed.
Vandred hauled himself into the throne, and his wounds began to leak onto the black iron. The ship trembled again. Something burst in the occulus wall, venting pressurised steam.
‘Talos.’
The prophet’s voice came back choppy, but the fact it came back at all was close to a miracle.
‘I hear you,’ he said.
Vandred spat blood. It was difficult to speak with all these teeth. ‘The Covenant is gone, brother. They’re not even boarding us. They want us dead, and they’ll get that wish very soon.’
Talos snarled. ‘Run. We will cover your escape. The twin-jump will work this time, you have my word.’
‘Why is there this maddening devotion to lose both ships? The Covenant can barely crawl, let alone run. Save the worthless heroics for when you have an audience to appreciate them, prophet. That night may yet come, but it is not tonight. You run. I will cover your escape.’
‘As you command.’
‘Come about to these coordinates. Stay out of the fight, keep the enemy at bay with lance strikes, and be ready to receive survivors. Do not engage. Do you understand?’
A pause. ‘You will be remembered, Vandred.’
‘I would rather not be.’ He terminated the link with his bleeding claw, and switched to the shipwide vox, wondering just how many people remained alive to hear it.
‘This is the captain. Seek succour aboard the Echo of Damnation at once. All hands, all hands...’ He took a shivering breath.
‘Abandon ship.’
XXV
LOSSES
The first craft to spill from the Covenant’s burning form were the vulture silhouettes of the Legion’s gunships. They shot out into the void, their engines streaming with comet-tails as they raced to put distance between themselves and their doomed vessel.
Talos watched them bank and turn, no evidence of formation in their selfish flight, as they each adjusted their course to aim for the sanctuary offered by the Echo.
‘You have just inherited several Claws,’ Mercutian pointed out.
Talos could tell the gunships apart by the pinions painted on their wings. He wondered if Ruven had managed to beg his way onto one of them.
Serf civilian craft came next, drifting from the launch bays, laden with supplies and refugees, their slow progress nothing like the racing dives of the Legion transports. The one exception was Epsilon K-41 Sigma Sigma A:2, Deltrian’s armoured box of a ship, fattened by an expanded cargo hold and bristling with a ridiculous array of weapon turrets, as if it were a small mammal protecting itself with defensive spines. The Epsilon powered ahead of its contemporaries, fat-mouthed engines flaring. The automated turrets coating its structure like barnacles shot down any missile that came within range. Purely as a by-product of mechanical efficiency, the tech-adept saved more crew lives than any other evacuee.
All the while, the Covenant crawled on, its final volleys reaching out to strike home against the regrouping enemy fleet. The Red Corsair vessels returned long-range fire, setting more decks aflame, and several of the serf escapee shuttles had barely cleared the Covenant’s hull before they perished in the firestorm still tearing their mother ship apart.
Last came the escape pods – smallest and most numerous of all, and easily the most scattered. They spat into space, flitting on random trajectories, too small to attract notice but too slow to race for solac
e.
The Echo of Damnation ran as Vandred had ordered, withdrawing from the battle, absorbing these lost souls into its two functioning launch bays.
The prophet met many of the refugees on the primary port deck. His first concern was that he saw no sign of the Atramentar. His second concern wiped the first one away, stirring him from concern to outright anger.
Deltrian descended his vessel’s gangramp at the head of a servitor parade: a hundred of the lobotomised slaves dragging his equipment with them. Cargo loaders on anti-gravitic runners carried the disassembled pieces of his largest relics, and the prophet was certain he saw a Dreadnought’s arm on one of the transport pads. On another: a medical amniotic fluid cylinder, containing the drifting, sleeping form of the Titan princeps First Claw had offered Deltrian as a gift.
Several of the augmented servants had been fitted for industrial lifting work – these worked in small teams to bear the immense weight of mid-range machinery. Two packs of them carried ironclad coffins with eerie, dead-eyed reverence.
Talos watched the second team – and their burden – with narrowed eyes.
Before he could intercept the tech-adept, one of his brothers blocked his way.
‘I survived, Talos!’ Ruven was jubilant. ‘What more evidence do we need of fate’s hand at work? We shall both live to fight together again.’
‘A moment, please.’ Talos moved past, getting a second, better, glance at the burden being hefted by six of Deltrian’s servitors.
‘You traitorous bastard,’ he whispered. Deltrian, far across the chamber, heard nothing. The tech-adept continued to inventory his salvage.
The prophet’s vox crackled live, stealing his attention but lessening none of his anger. Xarl’s name rune flashed.
‘Xarl, you will not believe what Deltrian has done.’
‘I doubt I’ll care, either. This is much more important – brother, the Bleeding Eyes have found something down here. It’s already killed eight of them.’
‘What is it?’
‘I barely saw it myself, but I think it’s one of the Neverborn. And a damn ugly one, at that.’
Lucoryphus hunted with no regard for gravity. Denied flight in most of the confining corridors of shipboard pursuits, it made no difference to the Raptor whether he crawled along the ceiling, the walls or the floor. His jointed claws made all surfaces equally effortless.
As he clung to the roof of an empty serf refectory chamber, he tilted his head in aggressive, snapping movements, seeking any sign of motion below.
He could see nothing moving, and smell nothing bleeding. Neither of these things made sense. The wounded creature had fled into this chamber, and Lucoryphus had gathered packs of his Raptors to watch over each of the three exits. He’d entered alone, immediately rocketing up to the ceiling and sticking there.
‘I see nothing,’ he voxed. ‘I hear nothing. I smell nothing.’
‘Not possible,’ Vorasha snapped back.
‘It hides,’ rasped Krail.
Lucoryphus crawled across the roof, clicking quietly to himself in contemplation, his weeping faceplate staring at the deck below.
Caleb was slowly coming to terms with what his new form could do. The Pantheon had blessed his resurrected flesh with corporeal vitality, as they did for all of their servants, but with a twist of thought, a flash of concentration, the Corsair could reshape reality itself.
He knew a life of faith would be rewarded with great beneficence upon death, but this was no mere possession. He walked in the province of daemonhood now, mastering gifts no mortal should know.
The first thing he’d learned to do was to keep the flies quiet. They grumbled and droned in an ever-present cloud, hiving themselves within the cracked holes of his ceramite. The Night Lords had tracked him by the sound, until he’d learned to focus on it, rendering the insect host unheard with a flex of concentration.
They’d tracked him by smell, next. His veins bulged through his armour, as if the ceramite itself was a second layer of skin, and they writhed with his fluctuating heartbeats. The smell rose from this organic cabling beneath his skin, for his body couldn’t contain the sulphurous reek of his own blood. One of the Raptors had managed to strike him, ripping strips of his neck away with a flailing talon, and the blood had bubbled in contact with the air, hissing and boiling away like evaporating acid.
Outside of his body, his blood simply burned away to nothingness, unable to exist unanchored to the material universe.
He’d blessed and thanked the Raptor, before strangling it with a smile. The lesson had been learned. Caleb was no longer a creature of this realm. His powers were unnatural for a mortal; they were entirely natural for a warp-spawned avatar of the Pantheon. He obeyed laws of a different reality now.
The next thing he’d learned had been the most useful. In seeking to hide from the gathering hunters, he’d rendered them blind to his presence. Unlike the other instinctive powers, this took his full focus, chanting the names of the Pantheon and deeds he would perform in their honour, if they’d bless him with the chance to reach his true prey.
And it seemed they had. Caleb drifted through the ship’s walls, his boots soundless on the decking, until at last he felt his eyes, his fingertips, his beating heart all pulled in one direction, tugged by secret strings.
He let his focus slip free, and manifested in a corridor deep in the ship’s body. The corridor was darker than any other, because someone had recently shot out the overhead lighting strips.
He turned at a sound from behind, a sound he knew very well indeed.
The chainaxe roared as its teeth ate air. Uzas shifted his grip, holding the weapon with both hands, ready to chop the creature in two the moment it dragged its filthy-looking carcass closer.
‘Move,’ it laughed at him. Flies had made a nest of its mouth.
‘Protect the Navigator,’ he said. Septimus and Maruc both fled behind the bulkhead, sealing it shut.
‘Move,’ the creature said again, walking towards him. He didn’t comply. Instead, he gave the air an experimental hack, as if warming up his muscles.
Uzas expected a grand duel. Even with his consciousness torn, he sensed a battle he would remember with wrathful pride for the rest of his life. He didn’t expect the creature to care so little for pointless violence that it would smash him aside with one blow and vanish, but that was exactly what happened.
The thing’s claw took him in the chest, hurling him back into the wall hard enough to leave a two-metre long dent. Uzas had several seconds of consciousness, which he used to try and regain his feet. A broken skull, and the nausea it brought with it, denied him even that. A blow that could render a Legiones Astartes warrior out cold would be enough to kill a human, or put a hole in an armoured transport’s hide. Uzas passed out – still furious – without even thinking to vox for aid.
The humans heard the dull clang of something heavy hitting the wall. Then came the smell, and yellow smoke sifting through the closed bulkhead.
Octavia stepped around the pool’s edge, holding her pistol. The others were all armed, all ready, without knowing what they were ready for.
‘Where do we shoot it?’ Maruc asked.
Septimus didn’t answer at first, and when he did, it was only to shrug. ‘The head. I’m just guessing, though.’
‘Uzas will stop it,’ said Octavia. Even to her own mind, her voice held no sincerity. She sounded desperate to convince herself. She wanted to admit that she’d seen Uzas kill her warp-ghosts before, that she was sure he’d be able to kill this one as well, as long as it was still weak.
But that would mean admitting this was all her fault. She was the one drawing these restless dead upon them, and she was the one giving them strength every time she opened her third eye.
‘The Covenant cursed me,’ she said. It left her mouth as a strangled whisper. No one heard. They were all watching the smoke manifest into something loosely humanoid.
‘I think that clang was Uzas trying and fa
iling,’ said Maruc, backing away. He raised his lasrifle.
The Covenant had the advantage of size, speed and power over each ship in the enemy fleet, but it was alone, encircled, and wounded unto death.
One of the destroyers made to break past, disengaging from the burning hulk to make a run for the Echo of Damnation. The Covenant dissuaded them all from such a course of action, protecting its sister ship by jettisoning its warp core. The destroyer veered away, as nimble as any vessel of that size could be, arcing away from the tumbling machinery.
It almost made it.
The Covenant fired the last of its defensive stern turrets, clipping the volatile engine core and setting it alight. The explosion lit up the void with purple-white flames, riding a spherical shockwave, catching two vessels in its anger. The first was the Cobra-class Magnate, which found itself bathed in nuclear fire, hurled off-course, and depleted of a third of its crew who died over the course of the next several minutes, fighting the flames threatening to take the whole ship to the grave.
The second vessel was the Covenant itself. Facing the enemy fleet, it found itself drawn further away from the Echo, but its limping pace was no match for the Red Corsair cruisers. They picked at it with long-range weapons, outrunning its feeble attempts to charge.
Lacking the speed to initiate a suicidal ram by traditional means, Vandred’s only choice was to cheat.
The Covenant’s rear was fully immersed in the spreading detonation rising from its own purged and destroyed warp core. The shockwave smashed into the Covenant, breaking its rear half to pieces, powering the remaining hull wreckage forwards like a dying shark riding a wave crest.
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