The Renard was shaking itself apart as conflicting thrusts placed intolerable loads on its superstructure. Steel girders the thickness of Titan legs were twisting like heated plastic, and precision-machined panels were bursting from their settings as the ship warped under stresses beyond what even the most exacting inspector might demand.
‘Lateral distance to Speranza is closing,’ said Pavelka. ‘Remember, she’s in a downward spiral and our closure rate is increasing.’
‘Compensating,’ said Emil, his fingertips dancing over the control panel to apply an insistent thrust to keep them a more or less constant distance from the Ark Mechanicus. The mountainous bulk of the Speranza began shifting over the Renard as the smaller ship slid past below. The controls were fighting him all the way as the rogue gravitational forces surrounding the mighty vessel slammed into the Renard.
Scads of the upper atmosphere shimmered around the Renard, evidence of the descending spiral track of the Speranza. Striated bands of gaseous colours were bleeding into the black of space and Emil read a sudden and alarming spike of heat on the Renard’s ventral surfaces as he was forced to factor atmospheric friction into his course corrections. Gravity had the Speranza in its grip, and it wouldn’t be long before that grip became unbreakable.
Emil dragged his eyes from the view through the canopy. What he was seeing out there didn’t matter for now. Instead, he kept his gaze focused on the slender route he had mapped towards the Renard’s shuttle, a hair-fine parabola that only a lunatic might think was possible. He wasn’t even aware of the adjustments he was making to their course, an innate skill and feel for the motion of a starship informing his every action. The structure of the Speranza flew over them, titanic manufactories and enormous processing plants slipping past silently as the two ships passed at what was, in spatial terms, point-blank range.
The gravity fields sought to pull the two ships together, but Emil kept them apart with deft flares from the dorsal vectors and an unimaginably delicate hand on the controls. At such differential speeds and at such close range, even minute alterations in pitch meant kilometres of space between the two ships would vanish in seconds.
‘There, up ahead,’ said Pavelka.
Emil risked a quick glance through the canopy and saw a glint of reflected light from the shuttle’s hull. The term shuttle was misleading, as that vessel was itself over two hundred metres long and thirty wide. The tether holding it in place was invisible, but that the shuttle wasn’t being buffeted from side to side by the Speranza’s gravity envelope was enough to tell Emil it was there. Its perceived motion was caused by the Renard’s erratic movement, which – minute as it was in relative terms – was still hundreds of metres to either side.
All of which would make scooping the shuttle up in the Renard’s forward cargo bay… tricky.
‘Captain,’ said Emil. ‘We see you and are closing on your position.’
‘Understood,’ came Roboute’s voice over the vox. ‘You still reckon you can make this work?’
‘Please. This is me you’re talking to. It’ll be like threading a needle from the back of a racing land speeder while blindfolded,’ said Emil. ‘Easy money if you fancy a wager.’
‘You think I’d bet against you?’ asked Roboute. ‘You’re as insane as Rayner.’
‘Rayner couldn’t wipe his own arse without a map and a servitor,’ said Emil. ‘Now shut up and fire the rig’s drives when I give you the word.’
The shuttle steadily grew in size through the canopy, becoming a vaguely rectangular smear of light, then an identifiable silhouette of a trans-orbital ship, and finally a unique vessel. Emil fought to keep the buffeting movement of the Renard to a minimum, knowing that even the tiniest movement out of place would see both ships torn apart by a collision at towering closure speeds.
‘Emergency depressurisation of frontal cargo hold,’ said Pavelka. ‘Opening frontal cargo doors.’
Emil felt the change in the Renard’s flight profile instantly. Aerodynamic properties that were irrelevant in space were suddenly of vital importance now that they were skimming the upper atmosphere. A winking light chimed on the panel.
‘Now, captain,’ said Emil. ‘Fire those engines for all they’re worth.’
The evacuation of Brontissa had been a nightmarish race against time, a countdown to extinction faced by billions of people with no clue as to the horror of what awaited them. A trading hub in a prosperous arc of the Melenian Dust Belt, Brontissa squatted at a confluence of trade routes and military channels, supplying both staple and exotic goods to the surrounding sectors, as well as providing a haven for weary captains to rest and recuperate while seeking out fresh contracts as their fleets were refitted in the web of orbital dockyards.
The full horror of the tyranid race was not yet appreciated by the people of the Imperium. Few could believe that such an unimaginable threat could exist within the Emperor’s dominion, and fewer still had heard anything more than scare stories told third or fourth hand. Only when planet after planet of the Dust Belt went dark was something of the terrifying nature of these extra-galactic predators understood.
System monitors sent to investigate were never heard from again, and only when a demi-fleet led by an ageing Apocalypse-class battleship encountered the vanguard of the tyranids was the scale of the threat understood. Only two ships escaped to bring warning back to Brontissa, but by then it was already too late for the majority of the populace. Regiments of Imperial Guard from adjacent systems and in-transit forces of Space Marines from the Exorcists, Silver Spectres and Blood Angels were diverted to blunt the threat.
An entire Titan Legion walked the surface of Brontissa, and as the military might of the Imperium assembled, its populace fled in their billions as worldwide panic finally took hold. Every ship that could be lifted into orbit took flight, their holds and corridors packed with refugees, and thousands were killed in the stampede to flee their doomed world. Many more died as the skies above Brontissa filled with colliding ships attempting to thread a path through the orbital architecture without heed or care.
A screaming horde of starships blasted into high orbit, but the tyranids were not some mono-directional mass of unthinking drones. They had devoured Imperial worlds before and had learned from each slaughter. The volume of space around Brontissa was seeded with billions upon billions of bio-organisms. Some were lethally intelligent hunter-killer creatures as vast as Imperial battleships and formed like frond-mouthed conches. Others were little more than organic mines, billowing in dense, spore-like clouds to cripple fleeing craft to be devoured at leisure.
Space around Brontissa became an orbital graveyard, a spinning, metallic wasteland of crippled starships. The fortunate ones died swiftly when their ships lost atmosphere and oxygen, but some survived long enough to be boarded and overrun by chittering hosts of flesh-eating monsters.
Roboute had brought the Renard to Brontissa to refresh his contacts in one of the system cartels, a diverse organisation that ran everything from absurdly overpriced luxuries to illegal narcotics and underground relics of dubious provenance. He kept his dealings with its potentates to a minimum, but there had been a passing of a long-lived patriarch, and the proper obeisance needed to be made to the newly appointed scion.
It had been an excruciating week of enforced formality and overblown theatrics, but Roboute had endured it for the sake of the vast sums these particular clients brought to his coffers. But when rumours of the impending alien threat began circulating, Roboute knew better than anyone the truth of this rapacious xenos breed. Everyone in Ultramar knew of the tyranids and the unimaginable scale of the devastation they could wreak.
Warning everyone he knew to leave Brontissa, the Renard lifted from the planet’s surface amid a panicked armada, surviving several near-misses and once being clipped by the void array of a system monitor in blatant contravention of shipping rights of way. It had been a danger
ous escape requiring some deft flying from both Roboute and Emil, but they had broken into open space before the unsuspected englobement of the planet was complete.
Just before breaking through the closing trap of bio-organic ships and orbital spore mines, Roboute had witnessed Captain Makrus Rayner of the Infinite Terra attempt a rescue of a beleaguered vessel he believed was carrying his wife and daughter. Roboute knew Makrus only tangentially, as a conveyor of goods thrice removed, but he had liked the man’s spirit and his willingness to fly anywhere.
Already trailing a hull’s worth of parasitic polymer fronds from a detonated spore mine, the Infinite Terra was in no state to manoeuvre. Its vectored engines were clogged with frothing biomass, and its void arrays were snapped after the impact of dozens of burrowing beetle-creatures with teeth like underground drilling rigs. The ship Rayner believed his family to be aboard was much smaller, a cargo lighter that could just about break orbit, but little else. Without inter-system capability or warp engines, there was no way it could escape the darting, bullet-nosed devourer beasts on its tail – Rayner knew it.
With his forward cargo bay wide open, he’d flown through the upper reaches of Brontissa’s atmosphere – already turbulent with insidious tyranid micro-organisms that were consuming the oxygen and nitrogen in the air – and attempted to scoop up the cargo lighter. With both ships moving at orbit-breaking speeds the resultant explosion was visible from the planet’s surface, flaring briefly as a miniature sun before fading into the distorting colour spectrum of the atmosphere.
The shockwave had swatted away a number of organisms turning their rudimentary senses towards the Renard, and though Roboute had not known Rayner well, he owed his fellow spacefarer a debt of gratitude.
Roboute later learned that Rayner’s family were on a different ship altogether, one that escaped the terror of the evacuation and had sought them out to pass on the heroic manner of the man’s death. Rayner’s daughter had returned to Anohkin with Roboute, entering into a mutually beneficial business arrangement that lasted until her ship brought back the Tomioka’s saviour pod and Roboute had seen the possibility of a life beyond the boundaries of the Imperium.
Thinking back to the moment he had seen the Infinite Terra vanish in a searing nuclear fireball and watching the approaching form of the Renard, he wondered if he’d made a grave error in having Emil attempt the same manoeuvre. Probably, but it was too late to change anything now.
Roboute flipped open the ship-wide vox.
‘Everyone hold onto something,’ he said. ‘This might get a little rough…’
Watching his own ship approach at speed while he was tethered in place was like watching a vast mega-organism approaching through the depths of the darkest ocean, its jaws wide to devour the tiny morsel before it without even realising it was there. This was going to be like a bullet flying back down the barrel of a gun and was just as risky as that sounded.
Emil’s voice came over the vox from the Renard: ‘Now, captain, fire those engines for all they’re worth.’
Roboute slammed the thrust controls out to their maximum deployment, applying a dangerous amount of energy within such close proximity to another craft. The shuttle lurched and the internal gravity wallowed as brutal acceleration strained to throw off the e-mag tether holding it in place. Roboute looked back through the rear-facing hull picters and experienced a moment of bowel-churning terror as the vast maw of the Renard filled the distortion-hazed screen and the pummelling bow wave of displaced neutron flow slammed into the shuttle’s hull.
The image vanished in a flurry of static as the Renard swallowed the shuttle in its forward hold.
Roboute fought to keep the controls steady as the vast bulk of the Renard snapped the shuttle’s tether and sent a squalling burst of feedback into the Speranza’s hull. The resulting explosion was lost to sight almost instantly. The shuttle’s engines filled the Renard’s cargo hold with a seething mass of plasma fire, and everything the servitor crews hadn’t removed was instantly incinerated. Only the instantaneous deployment of fire suppression systems kept the fire from burning through the rear bulkheads and gutting the rest of the ship.
Those same systems were themselves incinerated by the plasma, but by then they had done their job. The shuttle slammed into the rear bulkhead of the cargo compartment, and the heat-softened metal buckled like melted wax before the forward momentum of the Renard crushed the engines and empty rear compartments of the shuttle, folding them up like a concertinaing bulkhead door. Flames billowed from ruptured fuel lines, and what little air hadn’t already been vented from the systems caught light and pinprick fires burned phosphor bright for seconds until oxygen starvation killed them.
Roboute, pinned in place by the force of the impact, just barely managed to slam his fist down on the explosive release bolts holding the shuttle’s crew compartment rig to the cargo spaces. The rig’s manoeuvring boosters fired and the g-forces holding Roboute in place lessened as the absurdly powerful engines fired with short-burn force.
Ahead of him, Roboute saw the flame-wreathed outline of the Renard’s cargo bay and fought to keep the tapered prow of the rig aimed at its centre. Burning the boosters with such power was depleting their fuel cells at an alarming rate, but the mouth of the cargo bay was now racing towards Roboute and he let out a wild whoop as the smaller rig roared from inside the Renard, its forward velocity beginning to outstrip the larger vessel.
‘The rig’s loose!’ shouted Roboute. ‘Cut your speed, Emil!’
Suddenly all that was around Roboute was empty space and the whipping bands of vapour in the upper strata of the atmosphere. He kept the engines sun-hot until he estimated that any projecting portions of the Renard’s prow were now behind him before hauling the control column up and to the side.
‘Come on, come on!’ said Roboute through gritted teeth. Silent acres of azure steel and adamantium slid by beneath him as the Renard ploughed onwards, trailing a halo of fire from its battered frontal sections. His ship had never looked so beautiful.
‘Holy Terra, I can’t believe that worked!’ shouted Emil. ‘You’re alive? Really? We didn’t blow up and this is all just my last moments in slow motion?’
‘We made it, Emil,’ said Roboute, letting out what felt like ten lungfuls of breath and feeling his heart rate slow from its current triphammer speed. ‘Wait. You didn’t think we’d make it?’
‘Sure, yeah, I always knew I could do it,’ said Emil. ‘I just didn’t know if you could.’
‘Your faith in my piloting skills is touching,’ said Roboute, turning the rig back towards the Speranza. The sheer scarp of its hull loomed before Roboute and the small craft was slammed back and forth by rogue gravity waves thrown off by the enormous starship.
‘I see why ships need an e-mag tether now,’ he muttered, finding the nearest embarkation deck’s lodestar signal. His vox and avionics panels lit up with warning sigils and blaring binary code waving him off, but Roboute shut them all down and angled his course towards the Speranza.
‘Hold on, Linya,’ whispered Roboute.
Tanna threw himself at the arco-flagellant, his fist arcing towards its skull.
The blow connected, but instead of tearing the arco-flagellant’s head from its shoulders, it merely rocked the cyborg killer back on its heels. Tanna followed up with a thunderous punch, but the arco-flagellant swayed aside and slashed out with its gleaming electro-flail arms. The strike would have cut Tanna in two, but Varda’s black-bladed sword swept out and intercepted the lethal whips and sliced them from its wrist.
Varda fired his pistol at the arco-flagellant at point-blank range, the bolt blasting a chunk of meat from the killer’s side, but, incredibly, it stayed upright as chem-stimms blocked out the pain and spurred its hyper-accelerated metabolism to heal itself. Fresh flails extruded from the arco-flagellant’s gauntlets as it threw itself at the two Space Marines. The red circle at it
s forehead pulsed like a heartbeat, and its gleaming fangs were bared as though it was relishing this chance to fight opponents capable of harming it.
Varda backed away, using the Black Sword to keep the arco-flagellant from getting too close. Tanna drew his own sword now that he had a foe he could legitimately kill. He came at the cyborg killer from the opposite side to Varda, slashing low for its legs. The creature leaped over his blade, slamming a fist into the side of Tanna’s helm. He felt bone crack and was driven to one knee by the force of the blow. He threw his left arm up in time to block another fist, but he was powerless to prevent the slamming head-butt crashing full into his visor. The impact was monstrous and would have caved the skull of a mortal man. Tanna rocked back, his nose shattered and one eye filled with blood as he toppled to the deck.
Tanna knew there was a scrum of desperate fighting going on all around him, but he could hear nothing beyond the ringing in his ears and his ragged breathing. His right eye lens was a cracked and static-filled mess. He felt the surge of power from his armour as the spinal plug blocked his pain receptors and released a burst of combat-enhancing stimms. He rolled, expecting a follow-up attack, but Varda was slashing his sword at the arco-flagellant’s neck.
Except the killer was no longer there, moving with preternatural speed thanks to the volatile concoction of potent and highly dangerous drugs coursing through its hyper-stimulated metabolism. The arco-flagellant ducked beneath Varda’s blade and spun around him to ram suddenly ramrod-straight flail-talons into the Emperor’s Champion’s side. The energised spikes punched through Varda’s plate and he loosed a guttural roar of pain.
But rather than let that pain master him, Varda turned into the arco-flagellant and put a bolt-round straight into its chest at a range of centimetres. The bolt punched into the killer’s chest and the explosive warhead detonated microseconds after, exploding from its back in a bloody exit wound.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 69