A great cheer rang out from the ivory-suited warriors. The Master of the Deathwing was still looking directly at Balthasar.
‘But although our fight here is at an end, our Grey Knight…’ Gabriel paused, probing for the right word. The air filled with pre-teleportation buzz. Winds whipped up from nowhere, billowing the robes of dead cultists. ‘…allies still require our aid to cleanse the Navy vessel of boarders.’
Already fading as he spoke those last few words, Balthasar swore that the company master nodded at him right before he disappeared.
766960.M41 / Revenge, Pythos blockade, Pandorax System
Driving the Titansword through the daemon’s midriff, Draigo did not stop until the hilt made rough contact with armoured hide. Corrosive black-green bile spilled from the thing’s guts and it let rip with a senses-shattering scream as it was torn back to the warp, leaving behind it an oily cloud of foul-smelling liquid smoke.
In all directions, Grey Knights were engaged with the servants of the Dark Gods, but direction was somehow meaningless on the lower decks of the Revenge, neither fully existing in the material realm nor completely claimed by the malign influence of Chaos. A daemonette stalked towards him across the part metal, part flesh deck yet, impossibly, it was suspended from the ceiling, lilaceous tongue wriggling loose from its jaw and tasting the battle on the air. Draigo and the Knight of the Flame fighting at his shoulder swung their blades in unison, reducing the androgynous beast to a rapidly fading heap of body parts. Still more daemons came at them, the warp portal above them, yet at the same time below them, vomiting forth more blasphemous specimens.
Flashes of psychic messages flashed across Draigo’s psyche from others of the Brotherhood in battle across the ship. Castellan Crowe and a dozen Terminators were locked down on the Revenge’s hangar deck, a Lord of Skulls and a near-endless tide of Khorne berserkers hampering their attempt to get the flight bays operational again and allow the Navy flyers to land. Justicar Amrythe and his strike squad, tracking a Tzeentchian daemon of no small notoriety, were caught in a localised time loop, reaching the end of the corridor they were advancing along only to find themselves back at the start. Despite being fully aware of their situation, there was nothing they could do about it while the daemon who had cast the spell still lingered on this side of the veil.
Gradually, the nature of the messages changed. Where situations had previously seemed desperate, hope now blossomed in the form of green, black and white armoured saviours. Using their mounts and flyers to full effect, forty brothers of the Ravenwing stormed the hangar decks, sweeping away the warriors of the Blood God in a hurricane of bolter fire and routing even the vast daemonic engine they dubbed ‘Crushing Death’. Freed from their chronologic trap, Amrythe and his Justicars discovered the physical shell of their daemonic tormentor and though they found evidence of their allies’ involvement in its banishment, the chainaxe wounds that criss-crossed its avian form were a mystery.
In the midst of their own melee, Draigo saw and smelled the tell-tale signs of teleportation, and in the blink of an eye twenty ivory-clad Terminators were in amongst the Purifiers and Paladins he had led into the depths of the Revenge. Without pausing to get their bearings, they opened up with their storm bolters, shredding daemon flesh and thinning out the maleficent horde.
‘I am Grand Master Gabriel of the Deathwing,’ said the Dark Angel alongside Draigo, who, up until moments ago, had not been there. Gabriel’s sword flashed through the air decapitating a leaping daemonette.
‘Well met, Grand Master. I am Supreme Grand Master Draigo of the Grey Knights,’ replied Draigo, his blade claiming the head of another daemonette in mimicry of the Dark Angel’s action.
‘No introductions are necessary, Master Draigo. Lord Azrael has briefed me well.’ There was more than a hint of sarcasm in Gabriel’s tone.
Another Deathwing Terminator moved within earshot, backhanding a nurgling into pulp while his storm bolter whirred as it automatically reloaded. ‘Can their witchminds close the breech or not?’ he asked bluntly.
‘Balthasar…’ Gabriel said, not in chastisement. The other Terminator moved away again, blasting away at the swarm of daemons now that his weapon had a full complement of ammo.
‘What Balthasar meant to say was, are you and your battle-brothers capable of shutting the warp portal?’ If any slight was meant by his question, his face, shrouded under the hood of his robes, gave nothing away.
‘Yes. It’s what we’ve been trying to do for hours. We just need to be close enough to the portal to enact the ritual.’
‘Allow us to clear you a path,’ Gabriel said, sweeping his sword in a wide arc and cleaving a pair of daemons who had got a little too close to him. ‘Deathwing! On me. The Grey Knights need to reach the portal to be able to close it. We will ensure they get there.’
By rote, the nineteen Dark Angels Terminators took up formation around their commander, despatching Chaotic horrors as they moved into position. Without further instruction, as soon as the last Deathwing was in place, they spread out, pushing the daemons back and opening up a protective envelope in their midst.
‘Grey Knights! Forward,’ Draigo called out, thrusting the Titansword aloft. He moved into the gap opened up by the Dark Angels. A dozen more silver armoured figures rallied around the Chapter relic, its blade blackened by daemon gore. Gabriel turned his head slightly to address Draigo.
‘Ready?’ asked the Dark Angel.
‘Ready,’ replied the Grey Knight.
As one, a mass of silver and ivory ceramite surged forwards, a blitzkrieg of bolt shells and blades tearing a route through the pressed mob of daemonettes, nurglings and other less identifiable monstrosities. Even corralled by the shield of Deathwing, the Grey Knights were still a potent fighting unit, the heads and deformed bodies of warp fiends exploding in blue flame at a mere thought from the psychically empowered Space Marines. Those few daemons that did break through the wall of Terminators, or leapt over their heads to get at the Grey Knights, soon met their doom on the end of a force sword.
In short order, the phalanx of Deathwing led Draigo and his brothers directly above/beneath the warp rift and the Dark Angels spread out, their escort mission now becoming one of perimeter control. Tirelessly, they held back the daemonic tide, waves of bloated and spindly bodies smashed apart on a shore of Terminator armour. Balthasar swung unstintingly with his power fist, smiting daemons with every blow, their wrecked forms tossed back against more of their kind. Balthasar’s squadmate, Barachiel, left gauntlet shattered and torn, two fingers bitten off at the knuckle, blazed away with his heavy flamer. Daemon-hide burned and shrivelled, greasy smoke billowing as they fled blindly back through the horde, igniting others as they went. Gabriel himself, his black Heavenfall blade rising and falling in ichor-streaked arcs, slew with a veteran’s poise, every swing or shot rewarding him with another kill.
At the Dark Angels’ backs, the Grey Knights were about their appointed task. Working symbols in the air out of conjured psi-flame, Draigo and two of the Purifiers chanted the Litany of Ensealment while the rest of his brothers vanquished those daemons that were still issuing forth from the tear or any that slipped past the attentions of the Deathwing. Finishing the inverted pentagram that signalled the commencement of the second phase of the ritual, Draigo noticed a change in the mood of the baying horde. The nurglings in particular seemed reluctant to get close to the portal, hanging back and letting the daemonettes get eviscerated on the end of Dark Angels weapons but they too became reticent to attack, forcing the Deathwing to engage them with ranged weapons. The rate of daemons pouring out of the rift slowed to a halt.
Unheralded, a skeletal hand loomed out of the eddies of the warp, bony fingers taking grasp in reality and dragging through the rest of its emaciated body. Five metres tall and entirely devoid of flesh and muscle, a daemon prince of Nurgle strode through into the materium. Wings, their span the equal of the thing’s height, unfurled from its back. Glassy orbs in its inhu
man skull regarded Space Marine and daemon alike, and its mouth parted in a grin, the stench of aeons’ old death emanating from a breathless exhale.
Draigo was the first to speak. ‘J’ian-Lo,’ he spat.
The daemon prince turned its head to face Draigo, the crack of bone against bone jarring to all who heard it. Its smile widened in recognition.
‘Kaldor Draigo. So good to see you again.’ J’ian-Lo’s voice was like the scraping of a sarcophagus lid being removed. ‘Mortarion sends his regards. He did so want to be here to kill you himself but as you made that an impossibility, he allowed me to have the pleasure instead.’
Moving with a speed beyond the ken of even a Space Marine, J’ian-Lo reached out with a gaunt hand and grabbed Draigo by the shoulder. Before anybody could react, both Grey Knight and daemon prince had disappeared.
766960.M41 / Red Six. Adamantium Fields, Pandorax System
Debris clanked against Shira’s Kestrel, every tiny impact from planetary and spacecraft debris pocking the hull. She leaned over to peer out of the cockpit. The kill markings she had fought so hard to attain were patchy, many already obliterated by the tiny rocks. Shira cursed. The way things were going she was unlikely to get the chance to repaint them, let alone add to the tally. The large asteroid she was skirting around lit up in the reflected light of balefire, an unnecessary reminder that the Heldrake was still on her tail.
More red lights lit up on her console as she weaved between two more of the enormous rocks before dipping under the wreck of a Navy frigate. Behind her, her pursuer matched the movement of her craft, its wings swinging backwards and forwards in a rowing motion. A chunk of asteroid separated from a larger body, spinning towards the Heldrake. Without deviating from its course, it engulfed the tank-sized splinter in blue flame, utterly vaporising it.
Shira’s plan was a simple one. Kranswar’s assertion that the fighter-interceptors could cope within the asteroid field had been sound and so she had led the Heldrake into the Adamantium Fields where its greater speed would be negated. It was far more manoeuvrable than the capital ships of the Chaos blockade but the daemon-flyer was bigger and more cumbersome than a Kestrel and, in theory, should not find it easy to navigate through the mass of cosmic flotsam. That theory had been disproven thus far.
Regardless of whether the Heldrake made it through with her, the final stage of Shira’s gambit was to land on Pythos. Despite being in the clutches of an enemy occupation force, she would rather take her chances down there than run out of power in the depths of space and be eaten by a metal dragon or suffocate once her oxygen supply was depleted.
Another ruined ship loomed large in front of her, an enemy destroyer broken apart by a ferocious broadsides attack. Its entire starboard flank was open to the void and an explosion, likely caused by the sub-warp engines taking a direct hit, had gouged through the superstructure right through to port. Seeing the gap, Shira dived sharply and entered a barrel roll, corkscrewing through the hole in the destroyer with barely a metre to spare on either side. The Heldrake once again copied the Kestrel’s route, tucking its wings in as it glided through the opening but, being larger than Shira’s craft, barely made it. Its sharpened wingtips tore through armoured panels in a shower of grotesquely coloured sparks but momentum drove it through and it emerged on the other side still in one piece. Enraged and still hungry for the hunt, it unfurled its wings and resumed the chase. There was now clear distance between it and Shira.
The rate of impacts against her hull slowed, signalling that she was coming to the edge of the asteroid field. Gently banking around an erratically drifting slab of rock, Pythos, for so long obscured to her, was revealed, the blue and green orb hanging benignly against a backdrop of black. Behind her, the Heldrake broke free of the Adamantium Fields, tiny rocks sliding off its hide like a seabird’s feathers repelling water. Shira checked her instruments trying to ascertain the distance left before she would enter Pythos’s orbit, but the auspex, like so many of the Kestrel’s gauges and sensors, had automatically shut down to preserve power.
Not daring to open the throttle to its full extent but wary that the Heldrake would soon catch up to her if she maintained her cautious asteroid field speed, Shira pointed the Kestrel towards the largest landmass she could see and coaxed a little more pace out of the engines.
The Heldrake, responding to the brightened flare from the Kestrel’s rear, followed in her wake at full pace, long strokes of its wings seemingly pulling at the blanket of space and reeling her in. Without instrumentation to rely on, Shira did a quick mental calculation. If she maintained this speed, and provided the daemon engine could not call on its nefarious patrons for an injection of pace, she should just about make it down to the surface before the Heldrake. Just.
On the threshold of the planet’s atmosphere, preluded by a flurry of alarms and warning lights, her engines finally ran out of power.
766960.M41 / Merciless Death, Adamantium Fields, Pandorax System
Malgar Irongrasp had fought enough space battles to know when one was lost. Standing before the occulus on the bridge of Merciless Death – literally an eye styled after the Eye of Horus – and looking out over the Fourth, and final, Battle of Sunward Gap, he knew that this time he would be on the losing side.
The wreck of the Might of Huron listed uneasily, its contents still being sucked out into the void hours after a Dark Angels battle-barge and the regrouped fighters from the Stalwart had pounded it into submission. With the Slaughter-class cruiser’s demise guaranteed, the Space Marine ship’s assault had been relentless ensuring there was not a scrap of the Red Corsairs’ vessel left salvageable. His own ships had fared no better.
Heartless Destroyer had attempted to engage the Dark Angels strike cruiser but, under duress from a trio of Hunter-class destroyers, the Grey Knights vessel had ghosted in on her blindside and crippled her. Steel Anvil, bearing massive damage suffered before the arrival of the Space Marine vessels, struck the final blow, its nova cannon cracking open the Heartless Destroyer’s spine and setting off a series of catastrophic explosions.
It was not the first time Irongrasp had lost a ship-to-ship conflict. Six hundred years ago he had tasted defeat in an engagement around Cadia, ironically, to the very fleet he now led. Bending his knee before the Warmaster in exchange for his life and swearing fealty, his new loyalty was soon rewarded when he slew Abaddon’s former admiral and ascended to command of the Black Legion’s primary fleet. If he survived this battle, it would be his last in Black Legion colours. Abaddon the Despoiler brooked no failure from those who served him and should Malgar escape with his life, the Merciless Death would need to find a new banner to fly under.
The opportunity to swear allegiance to a new master soon presented itself to the former White Consul.
‘Lord Irongrasp. The Deathblade is hailing us,’ a hooded acolyte seated at a vox-array called out. The Might of Huron was the only Red Corsairs’ vessel to have fallen to Imperium guns and the Deathblade, along with its sister ship, No Redemption, and the assorted raiders and destroyers Blackheart had brought to the battle, were keeping the Chaos forces in the fight.
‘Put them on loudspeaker,’ Malgar replied. Through the occulus two more of his ships disappeared within coronas of blinding light.
‘So near yet so far, Irongrasp. A victory so nearly complete turned on its head by the fickle whim of fate. Perhaps if Abaddon had favoured one of the Four, one of the Four would have favoured him in return. Delayed the Dark Angels flotilla in the warp a little longer? Translated them further out from the Pandorax System, maybe?’ It was Huron’s voice. Malgar had initially thought – willed – him dead in the destruction of the Might of Huron, but ever the wily operator, he had led his ships from one of the smaller vessels to make himself a lesser target.
‘The day is not entirely lost, Lord Blackheart. The Merciless Death is still fully operational and the ships in my fleet are not beyond repair. All are now at your disposal.’ There was no guile in Malgar
’s attempt to save his own skin.
Huron laughed. ‘But I need you to cover my escape, Irongrasp. And besides, your ship is no longer warp-capable.’
‘I don’t understand,’ replied Malgar. He soon did.
‘Deathblade is readying its plasma batteries!’ said a diminutive crewman, a bundle of cables snaking from his head and chest into the console before him.
‘Divert shields aft,’ Malgar ordered. With the Space Marine fleet attacking the Merciless Death head-on, all shield power had been directed fore. Chaos vessels to its rear, the back section of the ship was vulnerable.
Malgar’s order came too late. As crew and servitors frantically scrambled to reroute their defences, the weapon bays of the Gothic War veteran glowed white hot. Lances of superheated hydrogen speared through the void, melting the unprotected hull of the far larger vessel and rupturing its warp drives. The Merciless Death rocked under the detonations of multiple explosions, secondary blasts still ripping through it by the time Huron addressed the ship again.
‘See, Irongrasp? I am nothing if not merciful. Your sub-warp engines are still operational and if you’re quick, you can outrun the Dark Angels to Pythos. I’m sure the Warmaster will be pleased to see you.’
Malgar was about to recite a curse, taught to him hundreds of years ago by a Thousand Sons sorcerer, but the line to the Deathblade went dead before he could get the words out. Behind the Merciless Death, the remnants of the Red Corsairs’ fleet turned and fled, trying to put enough distance between them and Gaea before slipping into the warp. Malgar briefly considered following them to draw the Space Marine vessels after Blackheart but it would be futile. The Red Corsairs already had a head start and the Merciless Death would be presenting its vulnerable rear to the hunting Dark Angels. Instead, he opted to take Huron’s advice.
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