“The question answered,” Noxx said with a nod. “Our Chapter’s starfleet is small. It was difficult enough to detach the Gabriel for this duty. But in order to hobble Zellik, two ships are needed. One to close to point-blank range and rake the platform with its guns—”
“And another to sweep in and bracket the Archeohort, aye. I see.” Rafen nodded back. “You have this… construct’s location?”
“Beyond the Holda and Precipice systems, out on the lip of the void before the Ghoul Stars.” Mohl’s answer was immediate. “Zellik returns there frequently to sift the corpse worlds along that axis.”
Turcio and the others listened as Noxx went on, outlining his plan to attack the Archeohort. There were a few times where Brother Rafen offered observations, largely points of finesse where the blunt, unchained approach of the Flesh Tearers could benefit from the more aloof viewpoint of Blood Angel thinking; but as the meeting drew to a close, he saw a slow hunter’s smile forming on his commander’s lips, the mirror of it on the faces of the other Astartes.
It was a good plan. It would work. And for the first time in what seemed like forever, the black mood that had gripped the Blood Angels on their return from the tau colony lifted a little. The distant call of battle was coming, and Turcio felt it in his hands as they itched to hold a weapon.
At last, Rafen stepped up to the viewer table and stared into the depths of the image turning above it. “Let us find this Magos Minoris Matthun Zentennigan Eight-Iota Zellik,” he said carefully. “Let us find him and put him to the question.”
Inside the boarding torpedo, the only light came from the sickly yellow-green glow of biolume sticks. Tethered to the pod’s support stanchions with lines of wire, they drifted back and forth like dull leaves caught in a breeze. Rafen’s occulobe implant had tightened the orbs of his eyes to allow him to see better in the near-darkness, but even so the interior was a landscape of greys and blocky shadows. He moved with care between the Space Marines in their acceleration webs, towards the bow. His enhanced hearing caught the peculiar low yowl that echoed into the capsule’s hull from the tethers outside. Pulled like a lure on a line, the boarding torpedo moved in the shadow of the warship Gabriel, largely occluded by the vessel’s mass. The cables snaked back to the cruiser through open space, servitors working the reels at their far ends in careful coordination; the machine-helots puppeted the capsule, they shifted and tacked it as waterborne sailors might do the same to a sail, helping it to maintain all of the precious velocity it had accrued since they had entered the system.
Rafen used a series of iron handholds welded to the inner hull, moving from ring to ring, hand over hand, drifting in the null gravity. Each ring had a rime of frost on it where ambient moisture in the air had chilled far below freezing, and every exhalation that escaped the Blood Angel’s mouth emerged in a puff of vapour. The biting cold gathered on his bare face, stiffening the flesh over his cheekbones and his chin. The craft’s internal heating mechanisms—in fact, practically all of the torpedo’s energy-dependent systems—were inoperative. It was all another facet of the ruse, to cloak the capsule in the cold of space to make it appear like any one of a million other pieces of frozen, lifeless debris. It was the only way they could chance to launch a boarding operation against Zellik’s Archeohort. Teleporters would not work; the construct was possessed of some kind of arcane dispersal field generator that would scramble any incoming matter signal into something unrecognisable. An approach towards any of the heavily defended airlocks, or docking bays bristling with autonomic guns, would be suicide. A forest of sensors turned mechanical eyes to all points of the aetheric compass. The only way in was the brute-force approach, and Rafen had seen the brief flash of relish in Noxx’s dead eyes at the thought of that.
Arriving at the tapered prow of the capsule, Rafen pulled himself to one of the few windows in the torpedo’s hull, a circular porthole little bigger than his clenched fist. He brushed away a layer of ice crystals and peered out into the dark.
What he saw there gave him pause. The Archeohort was rising above the bow of the Gabriel, and at last he understood the size of it. The construct was easily the mass of a city-sprawl, and the spider-like impression presented by the image viewer was cemented as he watched kilometre-long gantries cluster from the complex’s main core around the drifting remnants of a slab-sided space hulk. They were closing the distance to the Archeohort with every passing second, and as the thing loomed, Rafen picked out bright sparkles of hard light along the places where the gantries brushed the derelict’s hull.
“Zellik’s savants are taking the wreck apart,” Noxx’s voice reached him. “Sifting it for anything of value.”
Briefly, Rafen wondered after the origin of the hulk. The diminishing shape didn’t have the look of a warship about it. The craft had probably been some ancient colonial transport, perhaps set off from Terra before the Age of Strife in search of new frontiers and a better life. But now, whatever death had befallen it, the old ship was suffering a second ignoble ending as the Archeohort picked at its bones.
He turned away from the port and found Noxx’s shadowed form in front of him. “This will be a challenge,” said the Flesh Tearer. “Zellik’s skitarii are trained in the use of exotic weapons. I’ll warrant we’ll get some exercise over there.”
Rafen accepted this and tapped his fingers on the hilt of his sheathed power sword. “I imagine so.”
Noxx studied him, and finally pointed to a circular design etched into one of his armour plates. “The Iron Halo. I had wondered if they would give you an honour for what you did at the sepulchre.”
“I was told I had earned it. But I was only there at the end. Others fought as hard as I, in other places, at other times.”
The other man’s flat, shallow smile flashed briefly in the gloom. “Such modesty. Only one as earnest as you could carry that off and not seem false with it.”
Rafen’s jaw stiffened. “I speak what I feel. I do not play at humility.”
“A commander never can,” came the reply. “And speaking of command. Before we are finally committed to this sortie, a point of protocol. We share the same rank, but one of us has to have the final word.”
“And you think you should be the one?”
“I am the senior battle-brother. It seems only proper.”
“I may not have as many service studs in my brow as you, Noxx…” It was the Blood Angel’s turn to show a dry smile. “But this is my mission. Perhaps I should best you for the privilege?”
“Hardly the place, don’t you think? And there’s no guarantee it would go in your favour, as it did last time.” Noxx inclined his head. “Very well, Rafen. I’ll defer to you. For the moment.”
Around them, the torpedo shifted as the tethers were let out. “Not long now.” He looked around and found Brother Mohl, his helmet still sealed, seated at a vox console. If not for the occasional twitch of his head, or a tic of motion from his servo-arm, the Techmarine could have been an empty suit of power armour. Enclosed in there, Mohl was conversing with the Archeohort’s crew, laying the keel of the lie that would get them aboard. Rafen briefly switched to the comm-channel Mohl was using, but the strident noise in his ear bead made him wince. It was nothing but an atonal rattle of binary code.
He switched out again and sub-vocalised into the general vox. “Brothers, be ready. Take your breaching stations.”
Turcio bent over an inert control console and spoke a prayer of activation, his thumb resting on the activation rune. “On your command, sir,” he said.
“Moment of truth,” rumbled Puluo.
Rafen nodded, shrugging into his own restraint harness. Without the function of the mechanisms usually employed to maintain them, the disposition of the boarding torpedo’s short-range thrusters was unknown. He glanced at the chronometer on the bulkhead, marking off the elapsed mission time. The capsule would be coming around now, the tethers playing out to turn it into a shot from a sling. The thrus
ters were supposed to double that speed, to bring them in too fast for the Archeohort’s gunnery cogitators to react. If they failed to fire, the capsule would move slowly and the guns would mark their range in short order.
The chronometer’s moving hand swept across the pinnacle of the clock face and Rafen dropped his hand like a blade.
Turcio stabbed the rune. A second ticked by, then another. Already, the pull of acceleration was tugging on all of them as the boarding torpedo was released. “Perhaps—”
The Blood Angel never finished the thought; instead a thundering roar sounded from the aft of the capsule, and every warrior aboard was forced into his harness as gravity fell hard upon them.
Rafen struggled to spy through the small porthole, glimpsing only the shimmer of starlight off hull metal, but nothing he could define; then there were stark, silent lashes of colour blazing through the windows as lances of energy lit the void with their brilliance. Outside, the Gabriel’s shipmaster had deployed his guns and fired on the Mechanicus construct at point-blank range. The boarding torpedo sailed among the unleashed maelstrom, masked once more by the salvoes as it made its terminal approach.
Mohl disconnected a mechadendrite from his helmet and spoke across the general vox channel. “Zellik broke contact,” he reported. “When the Gabriel refused to stand to and allow him to dispatch a lighter, he grew suspicious.”
A near-hit made the torpedo rock and the hull moaned. “And that’s not all,” muttered Puluo.
“The Archeohort has engaged the cruiser,” added the Techmarine.
“Clearly,” said Noxx. “Now, if all goes to plan, the Tycho should be making its approach from the far side.” He glanced at Rafen. “If your shipmaster is as good as you say, then Zellik will be too busy dealing with a pair of Astartes cruisers to direct his attention towards us.”
“Tycho will do its part,” said the sergeant.
Noxx was about to add something, but then the torpedo found its mark and struck the Archeohort’s outer skin. With a resonant boom of metal on metal, the capsule made impact and began its work.
As wolves would strike a bear, the two warships came close and circled the hulking Archeohort, making sweeping turns about the mass of the huge construct. Cannon fire, laser light and clouds of missiles flashed between the three combatants. The guns of Zellik’s scavenger machine were not sluggish—they threw out hard pulses of x-ray radiation that lashed at the Tycho and the Gabriel, the backscatter of the attacks throwing sheets of colour into the void like an auroral display.
In return, the Blood Angels and Flesh Tearers cruisers gave their guns freedom to rake across the hull of the enemy. At this close a range, even a blind man could not have missed the target; but like the bear against the wolves, the Archeohort took the bites and claw-scratches, slow and heavy, returning with massive sweeps of fire that could crack hulls if they chanced a solid hit.
Now free of the derelict hulk it had been feasting upon, the construct’s gantry-limbs began to coil inward, drawing to itself in a pattern of self-preservation.
The entire forward quarter of the boarding torpedo was a massive brass drill, hardened with a molecule-thin layer of cultured diamond and a sentanium tip. Spinning at furious speed, it chewed through the outer layers of carbide plating on the Archeohort’s dorsal hull and ploughed inward. Tracks with spike-tipped teeth along the flank of the capsule pulled it through ripped splines of metal, plastic and wood, atmosphere and fluids outgassing around it into the vacuum. Great phlegmy boles of vac-sensitive gel vomited from pressurised canisters, racing to seal the breach made by the Astartes—and all too quickly the boarding torpedo’s forward momentum was arrested.
Rafen was already tearing free of his restraints, his bolter in his hand. “Deploy, deploy!” he snarled. “Take the pace, brothers!”
Another of Noxx’s Flesh Tearers was at the prow, and with a grunt of effort, he slammed down the heavy iron lever that released the drill mechanism. The conical bow splayed open into four segments, giving the Space Marines their exit. In quick, ordered lines, the two squads exited into Zellik’s craft. Puluo, Kayne and a pair of Flesh Tearers were the last aboard, and Rafen glanced back at them in time to see the pod shake. The gelatinous matter ringing the capsule bubbled and spat, writhing as if it were alive; and then the torpedo jolted backwards.
“Get out!” shouted Ajir.
Puluo shoved Kayne hard in the back and the younger Astartes fell the remaining distance to the deck. The other warrior pivoted and jumped after him, one of the Flesh Tearers a heartbeat behind. The last man, slowed by the bulk of a heavy flamer, fared poorly. With a sudden belch of expelling air, the entire torpedo was ejected back the way it had come, the expanding wave of gel ballooning to form a wall before the atmosphere could go with it. Noxx swore a gutter oath.
“A cultured bio-form,” said Mohl dispassionately, probing the hardening matter with a finger. “Programmed to act like living tissue. Sealing wounds and ousting foreign bodies.”
“On a tyranid ship, perhaps,” said Turcio. “But here?”
“Perhaps the stories of Zellik’s contact with the xenos were not wrong after all.” Ajir made a sour face.
They were not given time to dwell on the question, however. A shout went up from the front ranks, a Flesh Tearer crying out over the concussion of his own bolter. “Contact!”
“Engage!” replied Rafen. “Sweep and clear!”
A spill of tech-guard troopers surged towards them from one branch of a curving corridor, in their haste the grey cloaks they wore flapping out behind them like the wings of raptor birds. A second rank of slow-moving gun-servitors followed on, lumbering along the wide passageway, weapons clicking as self-loaders spun up to speed.
The reaction time of Zellik’s men was to be commended; on the ship of an ally, Rafen would have done just that, but here the matter became a minor impediment. A chorus of bolters crashed and met the guards with lethal force, the mass-reactive shells from the weapons opening them in red flashes. Bits of human meat and metal implants were flung about the walls. Enemy fire from the front rank came past in a wash of laser light, beams hissing across the surface of ceramite armour, cooking off layers of protective sheathing. The strangled crackle of split air molecules sounded around the Astartes, and the corridor was suddenly filled with the acrid tang of ozone.
The shambling gun-servitors, the bodies of men remade with pistons for legs and great weapon tubes in place of arms, fired next, and Rafen ducked into the cover of a stanchion as Turcio took a glancing hit and spun to the deck. The machine-helots were all armed with close-range stubbers, fat ammo hoppers upon their bent backs feeding the weapons with frangible-tipped rounds. Close to the exterior hull of a starship, heavy bullet loads were a hazard—a single misplaced shot could breach a portal or even a wall, and cause an explosive decompression. Astartes, every one of them a marksman, did not concern themselves with such minor details.
Rafen heard the shattering of the bullet-tips as they rattled harmlessly off Space Marine armour and grinned. In their haste, Zellik’s soldiers hadn’t rearmed their guns, using the low-velocity, man-stopper shells more suited to dealing with pirates or common human foes. The candlepin-thick bolt shells of the Space Marines, on the other hand, were far more lethal, over-penetrating every target they hit. Turcio was already back up into a crouch, taking off the heads of gun-servitors with carefully aimed shots.
Noxx vaulted forward, and with a kick he put the last tech-guard down, clubbing him to the deck with his gun. The skitarii burbled something in machine-code, but the noise ceased when the Flesh Tearer stamped on its throat. “That will do as a down payment for the man this cost me,” growled the veteran.
The Archeohort began to rotate.
Slowly at first, moving with the lazy, inexorable pace of a moonrise, then gaining speed as the arrays of tiny thrusters hundredfold across its surface added power to the turn. Gun pods the size of habitat blocks spun and moved on thick
brass rails that ringed the outer hull, pausing to reload at the maws of static ammo hoppers before sliding back to seek the Astartes ships and barrage them.
Tycho’s shipmaster threaded his ship between a pair of towering gantries and let his forward tubes lay upon the closest of the gun-carriages. Spatial torpedoes leapt into the dark, crossing the distance on angry flares of thrust before transforming into fists of nuclear flame. Sheets of mobile armour plate raced to absorb the detonations and came too slow, some of them torn apart and tossed into the dark.
Above, the Gabriel supported its brother-ship with sheeting rains of superheavy las-bolts, burning away the brassy lustre that clad the hull of the Mechanicus construct.
Under the withering fire, the Archeohort turned, and as it did iris vents opened along its stern, disgorging engine bells woken from their dormancy.
Elsewhere, directed by cold machine anger, other hatches slid free to present new weapons to the fray.
“We need to locate and secure the command centre,” Rafen was saying, as the corridor opened out on to a vast open space in the middle of the Archeohort. “Where is it?”
Mohl shot him a look. “That will not be easy, lord.”
The Techmarine’s commander gave him a hard stare. “You told me you knew the configuration of this behemoth’s interior!” said Noxx.
“I do,” Mohl continued. “And that is why I know it will not be easy to find a single chamber in the middle of all… of this.”
Rafen stopped, and for a moment he felt a twinge of vertigo as his mind struggled to process the sight in front of him. Beyond the railed tier where the corridor had brought them out, the inside of the Archeohort was a hollow drum, and around it ran twisting ranges of staircases and ramps that defied gravity and sense, some inverted and connecting to one another in odd profusion, others looping like Mobius strips. And in the middle of this, shifting back and forward on complex systems of rails and vast, towering pulleys, massive wedges of decking as large as city blocks were constantly in motion. The noise was constant, a screeching of metal on metal, a hissing orchestra of working mechanisms as the wedges locked together, moved, unlocked, inverted, rotated and shifted. The motion was regular and fluid, lock-step-perfect.
Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Page 87