‘It’s desperate,’ said Miletus.
‘Not alone in that,’ said Dalbract. Around them the Highness Ser Armaduke shivered. ‘The older sister can feel it, doesn’t want to die again – not like this. Geller field generatorium is just a little further, sir.’
Miletus nodded, trying to ignore the ozone-and-iron reek as he breathed.
‘Go,’ he said, and they began to run.
Spika blinked. In his mind, he was flicking through fire yield and distance calculations. All approximate, all filled with wild errors from the fact that they were within a semi-stable bubble of reality tumbling through the warp. He didn’t need to be precise, though; the approximation was clear enough. They had seconds before the first shells loosed from the Lights Excelling, then minutes before those shells struck the Highness Ser Armaduke.
There was something wrong, too, a summation of facts and possibilities that did not add up. There was a bigger threat. He could feel it, the way an old pugilist could sense the hidden punch as it uncoiled from nowhere to crack his skull.
‘Light our guns,’ said Spika. ‘Shift course, get the Cold Steel between us and the Lights Excelling.’
Kader’s gun was out of her holster and aimed at his head. Her gaze was rock steady behind the dark mouth of the muzzle.
‘Belay that order,’ she said.
‘Shipmaster,’ came another call. ‘The unified Geller envelope is distorting. We don’t have space to move and maintain reality integrity.’
He held his gaze on Kader. The data connections to the Highness Ser Armaduke were fizzing with migraine pain and fever as the ship fought whatever was trying to burrow into its guts.
‘The Cold Steel has readied to fire on us,’ he said. ‘That’s the protocol, but she’s not. That sound and pulse we heard – that sounded like a call. Coordination. That to me suggests–’
‘That the Cold Steel has already fallen,’ said Kader.
‘If we let ourselves die, then the Lights Excelling is alone with a ship that is truly compromised, without help, without aid. The enemy wins, and the mission fails. By the God-Emperor and the Throne of Terra, while I can command this ship, I am not going to see that happen.’
Kader took a breath, then began to lower her gun.
‘Shipmaster!’
Spika turned as an armsman staggered onto the deck. The man was breathing hard, shaking with more than fatigue.
‘Report,’ he called.
‘Word from Lieutenant Cern, sir – one of the…’ The man swallowed. ‘One of the machines is active and loose, we… The lieutenant thinks it has gone to the Geller field generators.’
‘The other woe machines?’ snapped Kader. ‘The guards?’
‘The guards are dead. The other machines were not active.’
‘But not secure,’ said Kader.
‘Armsmen to the hangar deck and the generatorium decks,’ called Spika, pivoting his chair up into the air above the command deck. ‘If in doubt, they shoot.’ He looked at the panting armsman. ‘Go with them.’
‘Aye, shipmaster.’ The man started to move.
‘We could open the hangar doors, sir,’ said a deck officer.
‘No,’ said Spika. ‘Our job is to get those cursed things to their destination.’
Kader turned and made after the armsman.
A single high ping sounded through the bridge. Spika felt its echo over his data-links. Half the bridge crew stopped, looking up, as though the sound was the first flash of lightning in an oncoming storm.
Kader paused for a second, looked back. Spika looked at her, his voice calm.
‘The Lights Excelling is firing on us,’ he said.
The blast doors had been bored through. The hole was smooth-edged, silver. Dalbract paused beside the opening and looked around at Miletus and the other two armsmen.
‘Once we have it in sight, get it into the open. Fire at it and hit, no stray shots. We damage the field generators and we might as well put a bullet in each other now. Once we have a clear shot, open up and keep firing. It’s damaged, like the lieutenant said. All we have to do is to give it more than it can cope with, push it over into the abyss where it came from. Do not turn your backs. The serpent and the sisters are watching us, and they can’t stand a coward.’
There were nods, some hesitant, but all clear.
‘Good.’ Dalbract looked at Miletus. ‘Your melta charge, if you wouldn’t mind, sir.’
Miletus frowned. The sergeant-at-arms’ tone had become almost casual, as though they were talking about the correct way to coil chains or stow personal gear.
‘You’re not rated to use it yet. Best not carry something that can put a hole in something vital until you really know how not to use it.’
Still frowning, Miletus unhooked the heavy charge and handed it to Dalbract.
‘Thank you, sir. Everyone ready – let’s go.’
Then they were up and through the hole bored in the door, into the dark beyond.
The beams of the stablights slid through the dark and across the faces of machines. Pipes and clusters of cables wove across them, like vines grown over the stones of a deserted temple. Some of the machines were cylinders, others cubes or octahedrons of dull, black metal spinning in gimbal frames. Brass and silver, iron, glass and crystal gleamed under a soft layer of white dust. The air tasted sharp and cold. Miletus’ skin pinched inside his pressure suit. He had never been this close to Geller field generators, and the presence of these engines was unsettling. He found himself wondering how different these devices were from the woe machine – how far into something terrifying and sanity-breaking both reached.
He came around the corner of a pillar of crystalline discs. His helm light panned across a row of cylinders each the size of a tank, set on their sides and linked to trunks of copper piping. He turned. Then felt the cold jolt in the back of his brain. He froze and, more slowly, swept the beam back.
The woe machine had changed shape. It had spread across the surface of the machine, its cogwork and levers formed into flat tentacles. The cogs were turning slowly, biting into the material of the cylinder, like a predator slowly feeding on a dying animal. Tiny sparks arced along its form, pulsing. It did not respond to the beam of light. Miletus turned to look to Dalbract and the other armsmen.
A hiss like an unwinding chrono filled his ears. He spun. The woe machine reared into the air, cogwork tentacles pulling free of the generator. Its shape boiled, shifting, pulling and extending like a starburst of golden dust in the dark. Miletus felt the dead silence flow from it again. Frost glittered in the beam of his light. His finger froze on the trigger of his pistol. A whip tentacle of brass lashed out.
Miletus fired.
‘Turn seventy by thirty, hard,’ shouted Spika. ‘All stations, brace!’
Alarums began to sound as crew shouted the brace order into vox-horns.
‘Brace!’
‘Brace!’
‘Brace!’
The helmsman was already spinning his controls. The hull juddered. Decrementing data spun across the consoles in front of Spika’s eyes.
The Armaduke was still turning as the macro-shells struck it across the prow. Explosions blossomed. Chunks of armour tore free, burning and scattering in a smear of fire as the ship dragged itself through the flame. Inside the hull, the shockwave ripped through compartments and internal spaces. Supports in forward holds crumpled. Hundreds of crewmen died as the walls crushed them. Displaced atmosphere blew through old hatch seals and flung bodies into walls. Wiring shorted. Gas vented from conduits and fire burst into being, howling down passages as it ate the air. The screams of the burning echoed through the intra-ship vox until the feeds were shut down. In the chambers where hatches had not been sealed in time, or where ageing seals gave out, more slid down into death, the air stolen from their lungs by a blaze they could not even see.
The Highness Ser Armaduke continued to turn, undaunted. Time and battle had threaded her bones with cracks, and the tide of f
avour had stolen the gilding from her name, but she had outlived wars and outfought those who had tried to kill her. She kept turning into the fire; debris scattered in her wake, tumbling to the edge of the Geller envelope and unravelling into ash and paradox in the tide of the warp.
On the bridge, Spika felt his ship burn as a flare of sympathetic pain at the base of his skull. He could taste metal. His heart was hammering, the world was the wail of alarms and the growl of stressed metal. His skull was ringing as though he had taken a blow to the forehead. He blinked, grinned. This was the war that his ship had been birthed to: point-blank, a contest of who could take damage and give back more.
The shadow of the Cold Steel blotted out the Lights Excelling in the gunsight data-feeds.
‘The Lights Excelling is getting ready to fire again,’ called the deck officer.
‘Sir, all guns ready to target.’
‘Shipmaster, reading multiple weapon energy signals on the Cold Steel,’ said the Officer of Detection.
‘Targeting us?’
‘Negative.’
‘There is only one other target out here. Lock our guns on the Cold Steel, main mass, core it to its reactors before it can fire on the Lights Excelling.’
A beat of quiet in the crew as the hull shook and the alarms shouted on. Spika felt cold, the breath still in his lungs. He wondered how long the other ship had been compromised – what had become of her crew, and what manner of devilry the Archenemy had worked into devices that could do such things.
‘Guns primed and locked,’ called an ordnance officer.
On the sensor screens he saw the positions of the three ships shift in the battle volume.
‘The Lights Excelling will have clear fire on us in twenty seconds,’ called the Officer of Detection.
He opened his mouth to speak the order.
The half-electronic shout from the Master of Materium stopped the words before they could form.
‘Shipmaster, the Geller field is destabilising. It’s going to collapse.’
In that second, the Cold Steel fired.
Blast shots slammed into the woe machine. Showers of cogs and levers tore free. Black abscesses opened in the air around it, swimming like tar on water. The armsmen went forwards, guns firing. The woe machine folded on itself like the changing image of a kaleidoscope. The cylinder of the generator spool behind it was flickering. Arcs of pink and orange light whipped the air. There was a smell of hot metal and burning dust.
Miletus did not need to be an initiate of the tech-mysteries to know that when these generators failed the thin skin of reality keeping the warp back from the ship would flood in. The great ocean of nightmares would swallow them. He could almost feel it, the true fear of all who sailed the stars, to fall into the depths where the ghosts lurked and the dead ships of ages past rolled on dark tides.
He fired again, going forwards, closing, and the woe machine was shrinking and fragmenting under the hammer-rolling blasts. He felt the beginning of a thread of relief tug at him. They would do this. The enemy was weak and getting weaker, and they would kill it and then this would be over, just another story to wander the Highness Ser Armaduke as a ghost of its past.
His pistol clicked empty. He froze. The armsman closest to him paused to look at Miletus as he fumbled for a magazine. The woe machine lashed forwards. Miletus had the impression of a glittering arc flashing within half a metre of him.
The armsman came apart. Blood and gut fluid burst across the deck. The lash of cogwork flicked through the air and the sound of metal teeth spinning through bones was a shriek as it sawed through bodies. The woe machine flowed forwards. Darkness boiled from its churning centre, ink-thick, curdling light. It might have been damaged, it might have been weakened by what it had done to break free, but Miletus realised that it was still going to kill them all. He felt his hands slam the magazine home. The woe machine expanded in front and above him, a glittering eight-pointed star, folded in its own darkness. All he could hear was the clicking of turning wheels.
A hand yanked him back. He stumbled, falling, shouting out. Dalbract stepped into the space where he had stood. The sergeant-at-arms fired. The blast from the gun vanished into the dark. Miletus saw the two melta charges hanging from the weapon loops at Dalbract’s waist, saw the arming lights blinking on them. The serpent on the crest of Dalbract’s helm was looking back at him. He thought he caught the ghost of a roar of defiance before the woe machine enveloped the sergeant-at-arms. Then came a sound like thunder caught under a god’s glass, and the darkness surrounding the woe machine split.
Miletus dived to the deck. The blast bellowed into being, weaving with a noise like the cry of dying birds. Then it was gone, and the only sounds Miletus could hear were his own gasping breaths and the sound of thousands of tiny cogwheels falling to the deck.
The Cold Steel’s guns were not functioning as they should. Suborned by the malignancy of the awoken woe machines, the cannons and plasma bombards loosed in a ragged broadside. In the open void, at range, against a void-shielded target it would have done no more than irritate. In a pocket of space a handful of kilometres across, it was deadly. The shots hit the Lights Excelling in its belly. Fire and explosives burned into its decks. Macro-ammunition ready to drop into cannon breeches cooked off. Explosions ripped from its mid-section and into its stern compartments. It faltered in its course.
On the bridge of the Highness Ser Armaduke, Spika gave his own order as the first shots loosed from the Cold Steel.
‘Fire,’ he ordered.
The old ship spoke. Her twin souls – the bones of the dead that had been laid into her keel and the golden promise of war, now faded – united. Macro-shells hammered into the Cold Steel’s aft, rolling in rhythm like the beat of a fist. The fire tore through the other ship’s engines and into its core. Plasma conduits ruptured. Bubbles of blue-hot fire tore through its structure.
Still the Armaduke hammered its blows home.
On her bridge the Master of Materium turned and called up to Spika, voice amplified over the thunder vibrating through the air.
‘Shipmaster, the Geller field control has stabilised, but the squadron envelope is going to collapse.’
‘The Lights Excelling?’
‘It’s falling to the edge of the envelope,’ said the Officer of Detection. ‘Its field is failing. Reading fires in two-thirds of its structure.’
Spika set his chair down and rose to his feet. The deck was shaking with the recoil of the guns. The alarms and calls muffled for a second.
‘Re-target our fire to the Lights Excelling. One clear volley.’ He paused, nodding. ‘May the Emperor forgive us,’ he said quietly, ‘and receive those who fall in His service.’
Across the bridge, the crew bowed their heads as the gunfire stilled for a minute and then roared again.
NIADORAL SYSTEM – ADEPTUS MECHANICUS ENCLAVE
Miletus watched as the two litters carrying the remains of the woe machines rolled from the hangar onto the docking limb. Battle servitors ringed them and spider-limbed tanks walked behind them. Incense folded through the air in great clouds.
The tech-priests who had come aboard the Highness Ser Armaduke held back a little from the procession. They had been a terse bunch even for the red priests. Miletus had heard Spika say that they were an enclave of the Urdeshi magi, exiled from their forges by the Archenemy occupation. He wondered what that did to such beings, to have their sacred places denied them? He thought of Hexil, another exile from the same world, all sharpness, like a blade made sharper by the hammer of existence.
The enclave itself was a small moon, orbiting a gas giant set amongst half a dozen of its massive kin in an otherwise lifeless system. The competing gravity wells of the planets had made translation a delicate matter, more so for the Highness Ser Armaduke’s recovering Geller field and warp engines. They had managed it, though, and exchanged layers of cypher coding with a Mechanicus system ship before being given the enclave’s location.
&
nbsp; Even once they arrived there had been little interaction except for a series of heavily encrypted messages between Kader and the enclave. A steersman had come aboard – cloaked in deep red velvet and trailing brass mechadendrites – who had guided the ship through drifts of mines and deadfall torpedoes to dock at the enclave. An armoured bridge had extended from the moon, and the priesthood had come aboard and taken possession of the two remaining woe machines. With them had been a cluster of Munitorum officers in the uniform of the Commissariat, who had exchanged words with Kader but no one else. He had noticed that they and a group of adepts with blank-visored masks had remained in the hangar while the rest disembarked.
Miletus had watched all of this quietly beside Spika and the other officers not on watch. He wore his pressure armour and stood with the newly refilled squads of the Wyrmyr armsmen.
He had come to after the fight in the Geller field generatorium with a gun pointed at his head. Kader and a section of armsmen had found him. He had been covered in blood. He had had to answer a stream of questions before Kader had lowered the gun and let him up. They had told him to get to the junior officer’s medicae bay, but he had refused.
He had crossed and recrossed the deck of the chamber even as the enginseers laboured over the machines. There had been no sign of Dalbract. No scrap of armour or shred of flesh. Just a shadow burned on the deck plating, like the spread wings of a ragged angel.
‘All officers report to the bridge as soon as we break dock,’ said Spika as the last of the tech-priests crossed into the docking limb. He looked grim, thought Miletus, but then they all did.
They all looked at the shipmaster as he finished. They had gathered in the small stateroom at the back of the bridge.
‘It’s not right,’ said one after the silence had settled.
‘It is not,’ said Spika. ‘It is also an order from the Commissariat, crusade high command and the Holy Ordos. Little to argue with.’ He sighed, and rubbed his eyes. For a moment, he looked as old as his ship. ‘We serve, we live, on the tides of the sea of souls or the cold void. We can hope for nothing else.’
SABBAT WAR Page 32