Salvation's Reach

NINE The Fight at Tavis Sun

Kabry fell backwards into the pheguth’s cell, the back of his skull blown out. A sticky sheen of blood and tissue coated the wall and floor surfaces behind him. Cant forced his way into the cell, laspistol drawn.

It had all happened in a second. Chained at his seat, Mabbon Etogaur looked up, saw Kabry twist over dead, and dropped the trancemissionary text he was reading.

The other guard on duty inside the cell that shift was Varl. He screamed at Mabbon to get on the floor, and threw himself at the open hatch door. His lasrifle was still strapped around his body.

Varl’s weight hit the hatch and swung it hard into Cant. The impact staggered Cant halfway back out of the hatchway, but his chest and shoulder prevented the hatch from fully closing so that Varl could bolt it.

Varl put the full yield of his augmetic shoulder into keeping the hatch pinned on the attacker, but with his body wedged against the door, he couldn’t unship his rifle. He yelled a few savage curses as he rammed the hatch repeatedly.

Cant had his right arm and shoulder inside the cell. He was pushing back, his left hand and cheek pressed against the outside of the hatch.

His laspistol was in his right hand.

He raised it and fired into the cell, shooting blind. Shots smacked off the rear wall and the floor. One grazed the ceiling. Two of the bolts ricocheted like cometary fragments off the dull metal surfaces. One punched clean through the back of the pheguth’s seat. Mabbon was face down on the floor, as far out of the firing line as the chain would allow.

Cant fired again, intent on filling the interior of the cell with sizzling, rebounding las bolts.

Calling Cant a name that would not have impressed his poor, dead mother, Varl stabbed him through the forearm with his warknife. The blade cleaved through muscle and bone and bit into the steel liner of the cell, staking Cant’s right arm against the wall inside the hatch, so he was pinned like a specimen. Pain forced Cant to drop his pistol.

Varl redoubled his efforts to shove the door, hoping to crush or crack bone. Cant growled in discomfort.

‘You like that, you bastard?’ Varl shouted. He stepped back and threw the hatch wide so he could gun the assassin down.

Cant faced him.

Varl hesitated, seeing the face of a friend and comrade. He didn’t hesitate long, but it was just enough for Cant to form a beak with the fingers of his left hand and smash Varl in the chest. Varl was thrown clear across the cell.

Alarms started to shriek. The bracket lamps in the approach corridor began to flash and cycle. Battle stations. There was a strong ozone whiff as the void shield generators lit up.

Cant yanked Varl’s warknife out of the wall and freed his pinned arm. Blood ran down his wrist and dripped off his fingers. He took a step forwards.

Varl was trying to get up, gulping in air as he tried to fill lungs that had been pressed empty. His face was bright red, his eyes wet with tears.

Lasfire ripped up the approach hallway and spanked off the hatch and the hatch surround, causing Cant to duck in alarm. Cowering, he turned. At the far end of the hallway, Kolea was approaching, firing his rifle from the hip.

The assassin threw himself flat, rolled close to Mktally’s corpse outside the hatch, and tore the lasrifle away from the dead Tanith. Sitting up, the assassin returned fire down the approach. Kolea dived behind a bulkhead to avoid the hail of bright las rounds.

‘Varl!’ Kolea yelled. ‘Varl, close the hatch.’

The assassin was no longer wearing Cant’s face, nor Rawne’s. Pain, and the necessity of redirecting his strength into the fight, had obliged him to revert to his own face. It wasn’t the one he’d been born with, but it was what amounted to his true identity. It was the face of Sirkle. All of the rogue Inquisitor Rime’s minions had the same visage.

Kolea fired again, two or three loose bursts. The shots spattered around the hatch end of the approach. Sirkle fired back, full auto, his rifle lighting up with bright petals of muzzle flash. The barrage caused Kolea to duck back into cover. Sirkle turned around to unload into the cell and finish his mission.

He was just in time to see the pained, red-faced Varl slamming the cell door in his face.

The hatch locked. Sirkle roared in frustration. He turned back and began blasting down the hallway again, walking forwards, preventing Kolea from getting out of cover or returning fire.

Head down behind the bulkhead rim as shots hammered against it, Kolea yelled into his microbead.

‘Holding level. This is Major Kolea in the holding level. I need security here now! Security and medicae. Urgent!’

Kolea couldn’t hear if there was any reply. The fury of the gunfire coming at him, combined with the shrill of the alarms, filled the boxy hallway.

Sirkle advanced, firing as he came.

The interdiction flotilla didn’t wait to be fired upon. There was no mistaking the intent or allegiance of the howling daemon ships that streaked in towards them from the disintegrated stretch of realspace fabric.

The Aggressor Libertus lit off first, rolling out of its line position ahead of the massive Sepiterna. Advancing at a crawl, it delivered a series of punch-fire barrages with its main batteries, which surrounded its steepled, armoured flanks with a corona of fire.

Benedicamus Domino also commenced firing. It began to come about out of its rendezvous heading with the Armaduke and retrained on the attacking group. Its turrets began to spark and crackle as it directed its fire forwards across the gulf. It was attempting to screen and support the decelerating Armaduke, which was all but aft-end on to the attack.

The other escorts, holding their places in the gunline relative to the capital ship, began their own rates of fire.

The range was considerable, but the Archenemy ships were closing rapidly, and they seemed to drink in the Imperial barrage. Firefly darts of light crackled around the ruddy glow of their shields. Even the formidable main weapon fire of the Aggressor Libertus flashed off their shields like rain.

They continued to howl out their names, throaty and malevolent, scorching out the Imperial vox systems, drowning their audio traffic, distorting their auspex returns.

Ominator! Ominator!

Gorehead! Gorehead!

Necrostar Antiversal!

Behind them all, the doom-voice of the daemon monster.

Tormaggedon Monstrum Rex!

‘Have you located Cybon’s launch?’ Gaunt demanded.

‘I’m trying to,’ replied Spika. With the vox system compromised by the daemon ships’ relentless aural assault, the bridge crew of the Armaduke had switched to voice relay, shouting commands, instruction and data from position to position. Gaunt realised that the shipmaster was doing a thousand tasks simultaneously. Spika was watching every single bridge position, and the main board of his station, plus the strategium’s tactical plot. He was listening to every shouted relay, every nuance of dialogue, and chipping in with orders that sent crewmen rushing to obey. He had both hands on his master systems, operating dials and power-modulation levers without looking. He was feeling the soul and motive energy of the Armaduke as it spoke to him through the deck, the seat, the metal controls.

‘Coming about,’ he said.

‘You’re turning to face them?’ asked Gaunt.

Not even looking at Gaunt, Spika manipulated another control and reeled off a string of corrective heading numbers. Below, the steersmen hurried to obey his command.

‘How do you usually fight, colonel-commissar?’ Spika asked. ‘With your back to the enemy?’

Gaunt didn’t reply.

‘I can mark more of my batteries as status effective if I present head-on or broadside,’ said Spika.

‘Side-on makes us a bigger target,’ said Gaunt.

‘Only while we’re turning.’

‘Shouldn’t we run in alongside the Sepiterna?’ Gaunt asked. In truth, he had very little idea of the fight’s comparative geography. The three-dimensional strategium displays were moving too swiftly, and the type of detail they were processing was far removed from the tactical flows he was used to reading. They made the essentially flat plane of a battlefield seem elegant and pure.

But he knew enough to know that the Armaduke was turning into the line of fire, and that, along with the Benedicamus Domino, they were placing themselves ahead of the flotilla’s main strength and directly in the path of the howling daemon ships.

‘I’m not going to leave the Domino alone to face this,’ said Spika, working his controls. ‘Two frigates, side by side. They can harm a lot of hull between them.’

‘But–’

Spika looked at him for the first time. It was just a brief glance, but Gaunt was struck by the singleness of purpose he saw in Spika’s eyes, the fortitude and, in a tiny measure, the anticipation.

Shipmaster Spika had been too long away from fights worthy of his talents. He wasn’t going to run or back down.

Gaunt raised one hand in a gesture of submission.

‘You don’t come down to the surface and tell me how to deploy my men,’ he admitted.

‘I certainly do not,’ replied Spika. ‘I imagine I would be tremendously bad at it.’

‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Wouldn’t you?’ asked Spika. ‘Now keep quiet or I’ll have you ejected from my bridge.’

He stood up.

‘Enhance the strength of the port voids as we turn. Artificers, power to the primary batteries. Bombardiers, load up. Detection, find us a target we can burn. And find the thrice-damned lord militant so we can screen him!’

Gaunt had seen Spika’s spirit before. It was an old warrior’s lust to achieve one last hoorah, to prove he was still worthy of the uniform. It was a desire that often manifested in suicidal decisions.

Given what was bearing down on them, a man prepared to take potentially suicidal risks might be their only hope.

The Armaduke began to turn. Once fully executed, the manoeuvre would put it in a modest gunline formation with the eager Benedicamus Domino, which had slowed to a dogmatic attitude of confrontation and was blitzing with all weapons. Huge volleys of main battery fire were ripping past and above both ships from the main gunline thousands of kilometres astern.

The Sepiterna had begun to spit huge, ship-killing bolts from its primary batteries.

The onrushing daemon ships wore the fusillade. Their shields wobbled like wet glass as they soaked up the punishment. They were half a million kilometres out, closing at a sharp angle to the system plane, as if they intended to perform a slashing strike down and across the Imperial gunline.

Then the black shape proclaiming itself Necrostar Antiversal began to glow brightly from within, a red glare that started in its heart and spread through its tracery of red veins, straining with light and heat like a charred volcanic cone about to split and blow open under pressure from within.

A vast froth of red corposant enveloped the daemon ship’s prow, chained lightning that crackled and coiled like live snakes. With a sudden flash, the lightning boiled over and lanced a jagged red bolt out ahead of the ship, a whiplash discharge of immense aetheric energies.

The bolt wasn’t even a direct platform-to-target strike like a main plasma or laser weapon. The lash of it flew out sideways, wild and frenzied, untamed and unaimed. It coiled madly out into void space and only then whipped back towards a target, like a lightning strike jumping as it hunted for something to earth itself against.

The jagged, blinding discharge struck the Benedicamus Domino like the vengeance of a displeased god, blowing out its forward shields and exploding its upper decks. There was no sound. A snap shockwave of heat and debris ripped out from the impact, followed by a slow, widening ball of white light that was too hard to look at. Bridge viewers dimmed automatically. When the glare died, the Domino was revealed on fire and listing, sections of its upper structure and hull architecture annihilated or left glowing gold along burned edges.

Spika maximised the magnification to get a look at the frigate. The pict image jumped on the bridge screens, fuzzed, and then steadied and resolved.

‘By all that’s sacred…’ Gaunt breathed.

Screaming its name again, like a child driven to raving madness by a fever, the Necrostar Antiversal bled more corposant and unleashed another shot.

The second bolt of jagged red fury hit the Armaduke as it turned.

Gol Kolea realised he might have actually passed out for a few seconds. He hoped it had only been seconds. Something had made the ship shake like a toy rattle, and he’d bounced off the hallway wall and deck.

It was dark as he came round, apart from the emergency lighting and the flashing hazards. The air was full of smoke, and it wasn’t just the heat discharge from the fire fight. There was dark fuel smoke in the ship’s air circulation system, like blood in water.

They’d been hurt.

He snapped awake and got up, clutching his lasrifle. There was no sign of the assassin. He could hear bewildered and rapid vox chatter coming out of every duct and wall-link as the crew tried to re-establish control of the pole-axed ship. He felt as if he were standing at a slight angle to the horizontal, as though the deck were tilted. That suggested the inertial systems had been damaged. Kolea didn’t know much about warpships, but he was sure it wasn’t a terribly good sign.

The main lights blinked back on as power was restored. It made the smoke seem thicker. Kolea hurried down towards the cell hatch, keeping his aim up and wary. There was still no sign of the killer.

‘Varl,’ he yelled ‘Varl, open up!’

He knelt down. Mktally looked like he was asleep, but he was stone dead, a warknife transfixing his heart. Cant was a mess of blood, so much blood it was hard to look at. What appeared to be a noose of wire had almost decapitated him.

‘Oh, Throne,’ Kolea whispered.

Cant was alive.

‘Varl! Open the door!’ Kolea yelled, clamping his left hand around Cant’s throat to try to staunch the blood-flow. Cant was unconscious, but he was trembling with pain.

‘I’m not falling for that again,’ Varl yelled from behind the hatch.

‘Open the fething hatch, Varl. It’s Gol!’

‘Right, and last time it was Cant! I’m not an idiot. Suicide Kings, Gol. I’ve got a job to do! If you are Gol, you’ll know I’m right. If you’re not, go feth yourself!’

Kolea heard movement. He kept his left hand clenched around Cant’s neck, but hoisted his lasrifle in his right.

‘Identify!’ he yelled.

Figures appeared in the approach hallway, moving towards him through the smoke wash. It was Bonin, with Cardass, Nomis and Brostin. Their guns were up.

‘Kolea?’ Bonin called.

‘I need a medicae!’

Coughing, Zweil pushed past the B Company men and lowered himself beside Kolea.

‘Oh, the poor boy’s gone,’ Zweil said.

‘Are you a gakking medicae?’ Kolea snapped.

‘Not this week, major.’

‘Then could we get a real medicae before we resort to last rites?’ Kolea snarled.

‘Just let me give the poor lad some consolation in case,’ mumbled Zweil, fishing out a pocket icon of the Saint and a silver aquila on a chain.

‘Let me through,’ said Dorden. He looked down at Cant.

‘Gol, I’ve got it,’ Dorden said as he bent down and put his hand over Kolea’s. ‘On three, let me take the compression. Two, three.’

Kolea took his hand away. It was wet with blood.

‘Will he live?’ he asked.

‘He shouldn’t even be down here,’ said Zweil. The old priest glanced at Dorden. ‘Oh, you mean the boy. I get you.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Dorden. He began working at Cant’s throat, pulling back the neckline of the jacket. ‘Where’s my pack?’

Bonin ushered Kolding through. The albino was lugging a medicae supply kit.

‘I need wadding and some sterile gauze,’ said Dorden.

Kolding nodded, opening the kit and taking items out.

‘Sacred feth,’ Dorden murmured as he worked. ‘Look at this.’

Kolding peered in.

‘What?’ asked Kolea.

‘The badge,’ said Kolding quietly. ‘The Suicide Kings badge. This man had it fixed to his collar. It hooked under the garrotte. If it hadn’t got in the way, the wire would have gone clean through to the spine.’

Kolea looked up at Bonin.

‘Small mercies,’ said Bonin.

‘It’s still a damn mess,’ said Dorden. ‘We need to release the wire, but it’s pinching the carotids. If they’re torn, taking the wire away will make him bleed out.’

‘We can’t patch him without taking the wire off,’ said Kolding quietly.

‘Damned either way,’ said Dorden. ‘I’m not even sure how we’re going to patch the wound anyway.’

‘Tape and carbon bond,’ said Kolding.

Dorden looked at him.

‘Not a procedure I’ve heard of, Doctor Kolding.’

‘Not a medicae one,’ admitted Kolding, ‘but in the mortician’s trade it works well. I suggest it because once we take off that wire we’ve got to move quickly.’

‘You’re not serious?’ asked Kolea.

‘It’s the best suggestion I’ve heard,’ said Dorden, ‘and I’m senior medicae here.’

Kolea got up and looked at Bonin and the other troopers.

‘The killer’s got to be close by. He’s hurt. He fled when everything went dark.’

Bonin nodded. He had already started to search the hallway.

‘I’ve got a blood trail. Let’s go.’

‘Why did everything go dark?’ asked Kolea. ‘Did we hit something?’

‘Something hit us,’ said Judd Cardass. ‘I think we’re in some kind of battle.’

Kolea looked up at the ceiling. The superstructure of the ship was creaking and groaning.

‘Seriously?’ he asked. Apart from the bump, he wasn’t sure how anyone could tell.

‘Report,’ Shipmaster Spika was yelling through the smoke. ‘All departments report!’

The main lights of the bridge chamber stuttered and came back on. Damage klaxons were whooping. Some of the ornamental glass shades on the platform lights had been dislodged, and had shattered on the deck.

Voices peeled off reports from every direction. Spika listened, trying to adjust his console. The main display had frozen. He thumped it, and it hiccupped back into luminous green life.

‘Shut up. Shut up!’ he yelled above the conflicting voices. ‘Artifice, do we have shields?’

‘Negative, master. Void shields are down.’

‘Get them operational. At once!’ Spika thought hard. ‘Position? Inertial station, I want our relative now.’

Data zapped onto his screen, the figures echoed aloud by the voice of the officer at the Inertial desk.

‘Still side-on…’ Spika murmured. The hit had wallowed the Armaduke like a heavy swell and halted the starship’s lumbering turn. Not a good place to be, especially without an active shield system.

‘Steersmen! Complete that turn.’

At the long, brass- and wood-cased helm station, the hardwired steersmen cranked the attitude controls.

‘Shield status?’

‘Repairs underway, master!’

‘I want a two-minute corrective burn to these adjusteds. All plasma engines,’ Spika declared, following his order with a string of four-dimensional coordinates.

‘Plasma engine four reports fire. Output suspended,’ said the duty officer at Spika’s side.

Spika recalculated faster than his cogitator. He announced a corrected set of coordinates.

‘Cap engine three, and boost five and six to compensate,’ Spika ordered. ‘Bring us about. Bring us about!’

‘Corrective burn in five, four, three…’ the duty officer announced.

‘Tell the artificers to crack the whip!’ Spika told another subordinate. ‘The stokers must put their backs into it. Feed those damn furnaces. Death is the only excuse for not shovelling!’

‘Sir.’

The deck shuddered and the lights dimmed as the burn began.

‘Gunnery!’ Spika yelled, selecting another pict screen. ‘As soon as you have capacity, you may fire at will.’

‘Aye, master!’

Spika looked at the strategium, assessing the proximity of the Archenemy line. It appeared that one of the unholy escorts – Ominator by its wild animal screams – was peeling towards the shield-less Armaduke to finish the duel while the others gunned directly for the main line. It had lofted attack ships from its carrier decks.

Spika’s poor relic of a ship had survived the first knock, though the list rolling up the damage report display was chilling. Spika had a feeling it had been less of a case of their shields doing their job, and more a case that the Necrostar Antiversal had developed insufficient power for another blast so soon after crippling the Domino. The Armaduke had survived because the discharge had been underpowered.

Even underpowered, it had blown out their shields.

Spika could smell fear in the air. All of his young and inexperienced officers were ashen and shaken. The hardwired servitors twitched in their sockets and plug-racks, neural links pulsing. Even the more veteran crewmen, like the Officer of Detection and the Chief Steersman, looked frantic.

They were terrified. His ship was terrified. Spika could taste the wash of cortisone and other stress hormones flooding the ship’s neural and biological systems. There was a stink of terror mixing with the smoke in the air-circulation system. Thirty thousand souls, locked in a metal box, in the dark, under fire. Most of them had never known anything like it before.

He remembered his life as a bridge junior. It was the absence of information that really gnawed at you. Only the shipmaster and the officers with access to the strategium feed had any real notion of what was going on outside, and then only if the Officer of Detection was doing a decent job. In a void fight, realspace ports shuttered and closed, and everything became feed only. Even if the ports had remained open, there was nothing to see. You were brawling with – and being fired upon by – an object that might be thousands of kilometres away in the interstellar blackness, and moving at a considerable percentage of the speed of light. There was the shake and terror of impacts, the raging engines, the cacophony of voices and data-chatter, but everything else was blind and far-removed, separated from the realm of the senses. No wonder juniors lost their nerve, no wonder the helm servitors and data-serfs wept and moaned as they worked at their logic stations, no wonder the stokers wailed and lamented as they laboured in the fiery caves of the engine vaults. Every soul depended on the uniting perception, the singular view, of the shipmaster. He alone could appreciate the grand dance of a fleet action, the war going on outside the metal tomb inside which the crew toiled. Every man worked without even understanding what benefit his small contribution was making. If death came, it overwhelmed suddenly, utterly lacking in warning or explanation.

The world would come apart in light, and then fire and hard vacuum would annihilate you.

The Officer of Detection cried out. Spika checked the scope.

The monster Ominator had launched munitions at them. Deep-range warheads were rippling through the void at them on plasma wakes.

Spika swore. He expected some comment from Gaunt.

To his surprise, the colonel-commissar was no longer at his side.

Elodie tried to focus. She’d been doing something. Something really ordinary. That was it, she’d been signing something. The ship had just that minute shuddered, and a metallic voice had announced they were arriving at wherever it was they were supposed to be going.

Some men from the regiment had come into the transport decks with yet more Munitorum paperwork for the retinue to sign. They’d circulated. Costin, the drunkard, had brought stuff to her when it was her turn. He just needed her to make her mark. It was another disclaimer, all part of the accompany bond.

Elodie had barely paid attention. The sustained quake of re-translation had disquieted her, and some of the children and younger women had become upset. When the metallic voice made its announcement, there had been cheering, and loud prayers offered in thanks to the Saint and the Emperor. Lay preachers and men of faith got up to lead the retinue in hymns of deliverance from the warp.

Then other things had happened very quickly. Things she didn’t understand. Sirens had begun to sound. Klaxons and bells. Sudden tension and fear had flashed through the hold habitats of the retinue company, an alarm born of ignorance. No one knew what was happening.

Realspace port shutters in the outer chambers that had only just begun to re-open after the immaterium transit were suddenly closing again. Old shutter motivators groaned at the sudden reverse. Members of the retinue had been waiting days to see out of the ship, if only to glimpse the brown darkness of space and the reassurance of distant stars, and now that solace was being denied them, all over again.

And the voice. The metallic voice. It was shouting words that sounded like battle stations.

How could they be in a battle? That seemed so unlikely.

Abruptly, as she was puzzling it out, something happened to the ship. Something hit the ship so hard everyone was thrown about, and the lights went out, and the air began to reek of smoke. When the lights began to flutter back on again, people were screaming. The children were wailing. Men and women had been hurt by the fall, bruised or bloodied by striking the deck or furniture fittings. Elodie struggled up, helping an older woman beside her. She was amazed at her fear. She’d never felt so numb and helpless. Costin had fallen too, spilling his papers all over the deck mesh. He was panicking. As she helped the older woman, Elodie glimpsed him taking a deep pull from a flask. The noise of panic in the chamber was almost overwhelming.

‘We’re in a fight! A fight!’ someone shouted.

‘We will perish in the void!’ someone else shrieked.

‘Be calm. Be calm!’ Elodie heard herself saying to the people around her. She had no calm of her own to share. She wanted to know why she could smell smoke. She wanted to know if the world was about to turn upside down again, and if the lights would come back on if they went out again. The screech of the alarms seemed designed to promote acute anxiety.

She saw Juniper. The woman was frantic.

‘Where’s my little dear?’ Juniper was crying. ‘Where’s my dear little girl? I lost her when the lights went out.’

Elodie put her arm around Juniper to steady her, and looked around, searching the seething crowd. People were rioting in every direction.

‘Yoncy?’ Elodie yelled. ‘Yoncy, come here to us!’

‘Where are you, Yoncy?’ Juniper called.

Elodie saw Captain Meryn, who’d been supervising the troop of men on paperwork detail.

‘Have you seen Yoncy?’ she asked.

Meryn had an ugly expression on his face, a sick look of fear. He glared at her.

‘Who?’ he asked.

‘Captain’s Criid’s little girl!’ Juniper blurted, crying. ‘The dear thing will be trampled!’

Meryn pushed past them. He said something that Elodie didn’t hear properly.

She was pretty sure it was something like, Do I look like I care? Or words to that effect.

There was a sudden rekindling of panic as the ship’s plasma engines began to thrash and rumble at an accelerated rate, making everything reverberate. Elodie clutched Juniper, who was sobbing and shaking.

‘We’ll find her,’ she insisted. ‘We’ll find her.’

Elodie assumed that the trauma couldn’t get any worse. But there was a sudden bark of cracking gunfire. Everyone flinched and ducked, and almost everyone screamed.

The crowd began scattering. Those who couldn’t flee threw themselves flat onto the deck or took cover behind cots, crates or bunk blocks.

There was a Tanith trooper barging down the central hold space aisle towards Elodie and Juniper. Elodie didn’t recognise him. There seemed to be something wrong with his face, as if it had become blurred. His right hand was soaked in blood and brandishing a lasrifle. As he advanced, the soldier was cracking off bursts of autofire above the heads of the crowd to scare them out of his way. The gunfire bursts pattered and sparked off the high hold ceiling.

His left hand was around the throat of the terrified child he had snatched up as a shield.

It was Yoncy.