‘Captain, we can’t get too close or we’ll be pulled in too,’ warned Cassen.
‘Do as I order, Mister Cassen,’ said Larousse, in a tone that left no room for argument. ‘We’ve got more fire in our arse than she has. We can break free. She can’t.’
Even before Cassen could carry out his order, Larousse saw it was too late.
Blade of Voss came apart in a sucking implosion as it was crushed to fragments by the nightmarish forces at work in the Halo Scar. Strengthened bulkheads split apart and the ship’s structural members blew away like grain stalks in a hurricane. In seconds the ship’s remains were scattered and drawn into the corpse-star’s mass, each piece compressed to a speck of debris no larger than a grain of sand. Larousse watched the death of the Blade of Voss with heavy heart, the honourable escort vessel dissolving as though constructed of sand and dust.
‘Captain, we have to turn back to our allotted course,’ said Cassen, as alarms began ringing from the various auspex stations and the edges of the storm that had destroyed Blade of Voss reached out to claim another victim.
Larousse nodded. ‘Aye, Mister Cassen,’ he said slowly, as though daring the storm to try and fight them. ‘Bring us back to our original heading.’
‘Captain!’ shouted the junior officer stationed at surveyor control. ‘I have a proximity contact!’
‘What?’ demanded the captain. ‘Which ship is it?’
‘I don’t know, captain,’ said the officer. ‘Auspex readings are all over the place.’
‘Well what in blazes do you know? Where is it?’
‘I think it’s right behind us.’
The first volley from the Starblade’s prow pulse lances struck the rear quarter of the Cardinal Boras with deadly precision. Guided not by any targeting matrix, but rather by Bielanna’s prescient readings of the skein, the Eclipse cruiser’s guns were more accurate than ever before. Three engine compartments were vented to space and entire decks were cored with searing wychfire. The eldar ship kept station above and behind the Imperial warship, pouring its fire down onto the shuddering vessel. Though the Starblade’s launch bays were laden with fighters and bombers, none were launched as they would be exposed to the withering fire of the warship’s close-in defences, and Bielanna was loath to risk eldar lives when there was no need.
Caught without shields and unable to outmanoeuvre its attacker, the Cardinal Boras suffered again and again under the relentless battering of lance fire. Crews fought to contain the damage, but against repeated hails of high energy blasts they had little chance of success. Captain Larousse attempted to turn his vessel to bring his own guns to bear, but no sooner had the heavy, wedged prow begun to turn than the Starblade darted away, always keeping behind the heavy warship.
A sustained burst of fire took the Cardinal Boras’s dorsal lances, tearing them from their mountings as incandescent columns of light penetrated sixty decks. Vast swathes of the fighting decks were immolated as oxygen-rich atmosphere ignited and filled the crew spaces with terrifying fires that burned swiftly and mercilessly. Gun batteries pounded out explosive ordnance at as steep a rake as possible, but none could turn enough to target the merciless killer savaging them from behind. Torpedoes were spat from the prow launch tubes, their machine-spirits given free rein to engage any target they could find.
It was a tactic of desperation, but Captain Larousse had no other options open to him.
The enormous projectiles arced up and over the eagle-stamped prow and circled in lazy figure of eight patterns over its topside, the spirits caged in the warheads bombarding their local environment with active surveyor blasts in an attempt to locate a target. Most were quickly dragged off course and destroyed by the powerful gravity waves buffeting the warship, but a handful managed to lock onto the ghostly auspex return that flitted around the engines of the Cardinal Boras.
Yet even these solitary few flashed through a phantom target, a shimmering lie of a contact generated by the Starblade’s holofields. What appeared to the war-spirits as a target worthy of attack turned out to be a mirage, a transparency of capricious energy fluctuations, rogue electromagnetic emissions and trickster surveyor ghosts. Only one torpedo detonated, the others flying on for a few hundred kilometres before being torn to pieces by the gravitational forces.
Starblade was merciless in her attentions, raking the Cardinal Boras from stern to bow with streaming pulses of lance fire. In a conventional fight, the Starblade would have had little hope of besting so powerful a warship. Imperial ships favoured battles of attrition, where their superior armour and unsubtle weapon batteries could transform the space around them into explosive hellstorms of debris and gunfire. But stripped of her void shields and without escorts to keep this rapacious predator from her vulnerable rear, there was nothing she could do but suffer.
And the Cardinal Boras suffered like few other ships of the Gothic sector had ever suffered.
Fires boiled through its giant hallways and cathedrals and those few saviour pods that managed to eject were destroyed almost instantly in the harsh physics of the Halo Scar. Fighting for her very survival, the Cardinal Boras went down hard, every scrap of firepower and speed wrung from her shuddering frame until there was nothing left to give. With the fight beaten out of her, the Cardinal Boras spent her last moments screaming out the nature of her killer.
Reduced to little more than a burned-out drifting wreck, the ancient warship finally succumbed to the inevitable and broke apart. Its keel, laid down over four and a half thousand years ago in the shipyard carousels of Rayvenscrag IV, finally split and the clawing forces of gravitational torsion ripped the vessel apart along its length.
The swarming riptides of powerful gravity storms finished the job, disassembling the remnants of the warship’s structure and scattering them in a bloom of machine parts.
Satisfied with the murder of Cardinal Boras, the eldar vessel set its sights on its next victim as a furious heat built in its belly. A silent procession of warriors trapped on the path of murder and war marched in solemn ceremony towards a shrine at the heart of the Starblade, a scorched temple of cold wraithbone that now seethed with molten heat and volcanic anger.
The brutally graceful eldar war-vessel knifed through the gravitational haze towards the Adytum.
Its guns retreated into their protective housing, for they would not be used in this attack.
The death of the Space Marine vessel would be a much more personal slaying.
The Swordwind was to fall upon the Black Templars.
Kul Gilad heard the shouted commands from the bridge of the Cardinal Boras cease, and knew the mighty vessel was dead. Even before he heard the dying ship’s tortured vox-emissions identifying the source of the raking gunfire that was killing her, the Reclusiarch had known who the attackers would be. Ever since the eldar wych-woman had slain Aelius at Dantium Gate and cursed him with her eyes, he had felt this doom stalking him.
It had only been a matter of time until she returned to finish what she had started.
Perhaps by facing that doom he might end it.
The bridge of the Adytum was a spartan, metallic place of echoes and shadow. A boxy space with a raised rostrum at the narrowed proscenium before the main viewing bay, it was laid out with the rigorous efficiency of all Space Marine ships. Chapter serfs manned the key systems of the ship, wolf-lean men plucked from the crew rosters of the Eternal Crusader. Each one was a fighter, a warrior of some skill and renown amongst the mortals who served the Chapter, but Kul Gilad counted none of them as being of any worth in the coming fight.
The ship’s captain was named Remar, a seconded Naval officer bound to the Black Templars for the last fifty years, and it was fitting that he had also fought the eldar above the burning cities of Dantium. As with any battle against the eldar, history had a habit of recurring with fateful resonances.
‘Captain Remar, seal the bridge,
’ ordered Kul Gilad.
‘Reclusiarch?’
‘Full lockdown. No one comes in and no one leaves,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘Only upon my direct authority does that door open. Do you understand me?’
‘I understand, Reclusiarch,’ said Remar and his fingers danced over the keypad on the command lectern to enact Kul Gilad’s will.
‘Ready the Barisan for flight.’
‘My lord?’ asked Captain Remar. ‘The Thunderhawk will be unlikely to survive an attack run in such a hostile environment. I respectfully advise against such a course of action.’
‘Your concern is noted, captain,’ said Kul Gilad.
He opened a vox-link to his battle squad and took a deep breath before speaking.
‘Varda, Tanna. You and every member of the squad, injured and battle-ready, are to make their way to the embarkation deck. Board the Barisan and await further orders.’
The hesitation before Tanna answered showed that he too shared the captain’s concerns regarding the chances of the Thunderhawk’s survival beyond the Adytum’s armoured hull.
‘As you will it, Reclusiarch,’ said Tanna.
The gunship’s lightweight hull would not last long without protection, but the idea of questioning his Reclusiarch’s order never so much as crossed the sergeant’s mind. The vox-link snapped off, and Kul Gilad moved to stand before the command lectern.
‘No pity, no remorse, no fear,’ whispered Kul Gilad.
‘Reclusiarch?’ said Captain Remar.
‘Yes?’
‘Permission to speak freely?’
‘Granted,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘You have more than earned that right, Captain Remar.’
The captain bowed his shaven, cable-implanted skull in recognition of the honour Kul Gilad accorded him.
‘What is happening? You have the look of a man staring down at his own fresh-dug grave.’
‘The eldar ship will come for us next,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘And as gallant as the Adytum is, it cannot hope to fight off so powerful a vessel.’
‘Maybe we cannot win,’ said Remar. ‘But we will die fighting. No pity, no remorse, no fear.’
Kul Gilad nodded. ‘Since Dantium they have been in my dreams, dogging my every step like an assassin. Now they are come, and they pick us off one by one like the cowards they are. I despise their weakness of spirit and their paucity of courage, captain. Where is the honour in striking from afar? Where is the glory in slaying your enemy without looking in his eyes as the last breath leaves his body?’
Remar did not answer.
What answer was there to give?
‘I think that was the Cardinal Boras,’ said Magos Azuramagelli, sifting through the electromagnetic spikes that cascaded through his station. The separated aspects of his brain and body matter flickered with dismay, and though it was often difficult to read the composite structure of the astrogation magos’s moods, Kotov had no trouble in reading the pain in his words.
The command deck of the Speranza was alive with warnings, both visual and audible. Floods of damage reports flooded in from every deck as the mighty vessel twisted, bent and flexed in ways it should never have to endure. Binary screeches of systems in pain filled the space, though Kotov had grown adept at filtering out all but the most pressing. His ship was tearing itself apart, and there was nothing he could do to prevent its destruction.
The death of the Blade of Voss had struck a note of grief through the magi on the Speranza’s command deck. The loss of so many machine-spirits and a vessel of undoubted pedigree was a calamitous blow, both to the expedition and the Mechanicus as a whole.
And now they had lost their most powerful warship, a vessel with a grand legacy of victory and exploration. A true relic of the past that had fought in some of the greatest naval engagements of the last millennium and explored regions of space that now bore the cartographer’s ink instead of a blank screed of emptiness on a map.
Anger touched Kotov and he directed his hurt at the machine hybrid thing that squatted on its malformed reticulated legs.
‘You said you could navigate us through the Halo Scar safely,’ said Kotov.
Galatea rose up, its central palanquin rotating as it brought the mannequin body around to face Kotov. The robotic form of the tech-priest twitched and the silver optics glimmered with amusement.
‘We did,’ said Galatea. ‘But we also told you that you should expect to suffer great losses before we reach the other side.’
‘At this rate, we will be fortunate to reach the other side.’
‘You have already penetrated farther than any save Magos Telok,’ pointed out Galatea.
‘A fact that will only become relevant if we survive,’ countered Kotov.
‘True, but the demise of the Cardinal Boras was not at the hands of the Halo Scar,’ said Galatea.
‘Then what happened to it?’
‘We sense the presence of another vessel, one that Naval xeno-contact records archived in the Cypra Mundi repository have previously codified as the Starblade, an eldar ship of war.’
‘An eldar ship?’ said Kotov. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Its energy signatures and mass displacement offer a ninety-eight point six per cent degree of accuracy in that assessment. From its movement patterns, it is reasonable to assume it destroyed the Cardinal Boras and now manoeuvres to attack the Adytum.’
Kotov spun to face Blaylock. ‘Order all ships to close on the Speranza. Spread out we will be easy prey for such a vessel.’
‘As you say, archmagos,’ said Blaylock, blasting the vox with his urgent communication.
Kotov turned his attention to astrogation.
‘Azuramagelli? Could this eldar ship have been the source of the emissions you detected before we entered the Scar?’
The astrogation magos summoned his previous data readings in a bloom of light, and Kotov now saw the subtle hints that might have revealed the presence of an eldar ship had they but known what to look for.
‘Indeed it could, archmagos,’ said Azuramagelli. ‘I offer no excuses for my failure to recognise its presence. What penance shall I assign myself?’
‘Oh, shut up, Azuramagelli,’ snapped Kotov. ‘We don’t have any useful feeds from auspex, so find a way to shoot it down and we will discuss your punishment at a later date.’
‘You will not be able to shoot it down,’ said Galatea. ‘Even with our help.’
‘Then what? We let it pick the fleet apart, ship by ship?’
‘No,’ said Galatea, as though amused at Kotov’s seeming stupidity. ‘You cannot fight this vessel, but the Speranza can.’
It began as a shimmering haze that formed on the proscenium at the far end of Adytum’s bridge.
Kul Gilad clenched his fist, and an arc of destructive energy formed around the oversized fingers of his power fist. The ammo feeds of his gauntlet-mounted storm bolter ratcheted the heavy belt of shells into position, and he recited his Reclusiarch’s vow.
‘Lead us from death to victory, from falsehood to truth,’ he began as the half-formed alien gateway filled the bridge with an actinic crackle of strange light.
‘Lead us from despair to hope, from faith to slaughter.’
The bridge crew unplugged themselves from their stations, unholstering pistols and drawing serrated combat blades from thigh sheaths. A wailing moan of deathly wind issued from the swirling mass of wych-light that grew in power with the sound of clashing blades, howling cries of loss and a crackle of distant fires.
‘Lead us to His strength and an eternity of war.’
Captain Remar issued his last command to the Adytum, to take the ship in close to the Speranza, then disconnected himself from his command lectern and drew a long rapier that hung in a kidskin sheath from its side.
‘Let His wrath fill our hearts.’
With the Reclusiarch at its
centre, the bridge crew of the Adytum formed a battle line. Kul Gilad heard Sergeant Tanna’s voice in his helmet, but closed himself off to his warriors. Their crusade would go on without him, and he could not be distracted now.
‘Death, war and blood; in vengeance serve the Emperor in the name of Dorn!’
The alien gateway on the bridge shimmered like the surface of a glacially smooth lake and a lithe warrior woman stepped onto the Adytum. Clad in rune-etched armour of emerald and a tall helmet of bone-white topped with a billowing plume of vivid scarlet and antler-like extrusions, Kul Gilad knew her well from the battle at Dantium Gate. A cloak of multiple hues of green and gold hung at her shoulders and the slender-bladed sword she carried was etched with shimmering filigree that writhed with loathsome movement.
Behind her, a dozen warriors with bulbous helms and overlapping plates of scaled green stepped through the gateway. Crackling energies played between the toothlike mandibles attached to their helms, and each one – though slender – had the bulk of a powerful warrior.
‘You killed Aelius, the Emperor’s Champion,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘And now you come to kill me.’
‘I have,’ agreed the eldar witch. ‘I will not let you destroy their future.’
‘Is this all you have brought?’ said Kul Gilad. ‘I will kill them all.’
The witch woman cocked her head to the side as though amused at his defiance.
‘You will not,’ she said. ‘I have travelled the skein and seen your thread cut a thousand times.’
The gateway rippled one last time. Blazing light and heat like Kul Gilad had not felt since the Season of Fire on Armageddon blew out to fill the bridge of the Adytum.
A towering daemon of fire and boiling blood stepped though the howling gateway, its glowing body formed from brazen plates of red-hot iron that dripped glowing gobbets of molten metal to the deck. Its powerful body creaked and bled the light of wounded stars and the vast spear it carried wailed with the lament of a lost empire and the self-inflicted genocide of a million souls. Smoke from the bloodiest furnace coiled from its limbs, and a mist of glowing cinders seethed and raged like a dark crown about its horned head.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 36