Salvation's Reach

TEN Shields

Spika stared at his comparatives for a second. His plasma engines were burning hard, and he could feel the grav torque pulling at the ship’s seams as it surged into the hard turn.

They were never going to make it. They were never going to turn in time. They were certainly not going to pull clear of the munitions spread rushing towards them. He had ordered counterfire to try to track and detonate some of the incoming torpedoes, but even with the detection systems on their side, it was like trying to hit an individual grain of sand with a bow and arrow during a hurricane. Another few moments and the enemy munitions would be sufficiently in-range to establish target lock and start to actively hunt them.

A warhead spread that large would demolish an unshielded hull like an eggshell.

Spika had one choice. In truth, he had two, but one of them was ‘die’, so there was little to discuss. Ominator, shrieking its name in grotesque pulses of noise through the void, like a wounded animal in a trap, was coming for them. Aggressor Libertus was racing away from the solid Imperial gunline to offer support, but it was six or seven minutes away from being any use.

Spika adjusted the heading values and added nineteen seconds to the burn duration.

The chief steersman glanced at him.

‘Execute!’ Spika yelled.

Through the glass, darkness.

‘I can’t see anything,’ said Felyx.

‘Get behind me,’ hissed Maddalena Darebeloved.

Felyx glanced at her.

‘You’re ridiculous. Simply ridiculous,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a street hit, this is a void fight. How is getting behind you going to protect me?’

He turned back to the realspace port. They’d found a stretch of hull-side hallway in the outer accommodation deck where the realspace shutters had failed to close properly. There was a limited view out into the blackness. Felyx was leaning close to the thickened armaglass to peer out, but he was seeing little more than his own reflection.

‘I can’t see anything,’ he whispered. There was nothing visible outside, just darkness. Not even stars. For all the commotion going on inside the Armaduke, there was apparently nothing to warrant it.

Dalin watched Felyx and his lifeguard. There was a tremendous noise coming from the transport decks behind them, a palpable edge of panic. Dalin was anxious, and very distressed by the great surges of engine noise, and the rapid shifts and sways in mass and gravity. He felt like he was on a boat in a heavy sea.

‘We should go to the bunker spaces,’ he said.

‘Someone speaks sense,’ said Maddalena.

‘Being in a bunker deck isn’t going to help much if we’re hit,’ snapped Felyx. ‘If the ship goes up, there’s nowhere to hide.’

‘Being in a bunker deck offers better chances of survival than standing beside an unarmoured window that could blow out to hard void at any moment,’ said Maddalena. ‘Don’t make me pick you up and carry you.’

The shipwide alarms were still sounding, and personnel were running past them. The smell of smoke remained intense, but it had been partly obscured by a rising stink of heat. The engines were running hot. Furnaces were seething.

‘My first void fight, and this is what I witness,’ complained Felyx, peering out again, bobbing his head to try different angles. ‘I suppose everything is too far away for us to see.’

‘Really?’ asked Dalin. He was honestly surprised. He’d never really thought about the scale in those terms. He understand that the void was big, but he’d never imagined a situation where ships the size of the one they were travelling aboard could engage without being able to see each other.

The ship was the size of a city! How ridiculous was it to fight something so far away you couldn’t see it? A lasman had to appreciate his enemy, or at least his enemy’s position, in order to fight. And what kind of gun could–

Somebody ran up to them, out of breath. Dalin turned, and suddenly stiffened. Maddalena also snapped around in surprise.

‘What in the God-emperor’s name are you doing here?’ asked Gaunt.

Felyx turned from the realspace port at the sound of Gaunt’s voice.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Gaunt snarled. Dalin blinked. There was something in Gaunt’s manner, an agitation, that he had never seen before. ‘Get to the bunker spaces. The shelter decks. Come on!’

‘I–’ Felyx began.

‘Shut up and move,’ Gaunt barked. He looked at Maddalena. ‘Some lifeguard you are! Do your damn job! Get him into a shelter cavity! There are standing orders for this kind of situation. I could have you all on charges!’

He looked at Dalin.

‘I’m disappointed in you, trooper. I thought you could be trusted to keep these people in line.’

Dalin stood to attention.

‘No excuses, sir.’

Gaunt looked back at Felyx and his minder.

‘No excuses, but they probably aren’t cooperating, are they? Did you tell them to go to the bunker decks?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Gaunt stared at Maddalena.

‘Do your job.’

‘What’s happening?’ asked Felyx.

Gaunt glanced at him.

‘We’re in a fight.’

‘I can’t see anything.’

‘Of course you can’t!’ Gaunt snapped.

‘How many ships? Are we winning?’ Felyx asked.

‘Go to the bunker, now!’

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Felyx. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere important?’

Gaunt hesitated.

‘Go to the bunker,’ he growled.

‘Holy Throne!’ Dalin blurted.

There was something to see outside. In the time they had been speaking, something had loomed silently, filling the realspace ports. They had indeed got the scale wrong, but in the opposite direction. The blackness they had been staring at had been the lightless shadow of another ship’s flank. Now it resolved as they surged past it. They saw where the hard-edged light caught the upper hull and gun towers, saw the glowing lines of fusion burning where vast sections of deck had been scoured away. Clouds of debris, like glitter, filled the void. Brutal ribbons of escaping energy licked and flared from ruptured power plants in the ship’s exposed entrails. Chunks of armoured hull wallowed past on slow, lazily spinning trajectories. They were right alongside another ship, but had been in its shadow and too close to see it before.

The other ship was stricken and all but dead. It looked like a burning hive, seen from the air.

‘I will escort them to the bunker right away, sir,’ said Dalin.

They all turned as they heard the same noise. A sharp, snapping report had come from the direction of the transport decks, a crackling chatter that for all the worlds of the Imperium sounded like gunfire.

‘Now get behind me,’ said Maddalena.

The plasma engines were exceeding the operational limit of their tolerances. Immeasurably old, and refitted more times than Spika cared to imagine, they were simply no longer able to develop maximum thrust from cold or low power at short notice.

The hull frame wasn’t up to it either. The Highness Ser Armaduke had never been an elegant or graceful ship, not even in the heyday of its youth, millennia before. It was dogged and robust, not agile.

The hull, wrenched by the extreme forces of the manoeuvre Spika was attempting, was crying out in pain. Crew members, especially hardwired servitors and serfs, were screaming as waves of techno-empathic pain gripped them. Several dropped dead. The steel and plastek cranium of a high-function servitor at the environmental station burst apart in a spray of firefly sparks, the pressure slap shearing the metal plates from the skull beneath, revealing the bone and organic traces of the Imperial human who had forfeited his life to the augmetic processes of Navy service many standard lifetimes before. Scorched rivets and yellow teeth scattered across the deck. An artificer’s assistant with a porcelain face lay down beside the manifold console as if to sleep. It scrunched into a foetal position and died without reopening its optics. A bulk servitor, a loader in the upper forward starboard magazine, suffered some kind of cerebrovascular crisis, and beat its reinforced head apart against a munitions silo wall. Hyper-strain triggered a convulsive fit in a precision drone serving the strategium, and its subtle haptic limbs began to thrash so rapidly they became a humming bird blur.

Spika ignored the losses. He disregarded the rupturing seams of the outer armour, the inner frame sleeves, the hullskin compartments. He paid no attention to the atmospheric failures on four decks, the brownouts and blackouts, the energy drain as available resources were re-routed to the realspace engines and the shield repairs. He took no heed of the rank of realspace windows that blew out along a distorting hull ridge and opened sub deck 118 to hard vacuum. He ignored the critical alert hazards that were flashing at the top of the engine console, warnings that the frantic, red-lining plasma drives were close to failure and shut down.

By the Golden Throne of Terra, he had never seen a master’s console alight with so many alarms at once. He knew he had a survival margin that could be measured in milliseconds.

The Armaduke could not outpace the free-running torpedoes delivered from the Ominator. It could only hope the warheads found something else first.

‘May the God-Emperor forgive me,’ said Spika.

The Armaduke, engines searing white hot, turned the ship in behind the listing bulk of the stricken Benedicamus Domino. The sundered hull of the wounded frigate eclipsed Spika’s ship.

Spika knew that there were likely to be ten or even fifteen thousand crewmen still alive on the Domino. But the Domino was past saving. The Armaduke was still alive.

The warheads, thirty of them, rained into the starboard side of the keeling ship, which had been knocked side-on into the path of the enemy by the first strike. Only wisps of shield remained. Two torpedoes detonated as they ploughed into the dense, glittering debris field that fogged the vacuum beside the Domino like a cloud of blood beside a floating body. Another triggered as it struck the hard, pressurised release of environment gases squirting through the Domino’s burst hull.

All three detonations, miniature starbursts too bright to look at, disappeared a moment later as the other twenty-seven warheads encountered the primary hull. Concentric rings of shockwave and overpressure criss-crossed, and twisted the fabric of the hull apart, like raindrops rippling the still surface of a pool. Light bloomed, a supernova, a ferocious pink-tinged white that scared away the blackness of the void like a sunrise and turned the Benedicamus Domino into a sharp-edged black silhouette.

The frigate perished. Disintegration crept through its structure from the blast point outwards, vaporising the hull’s armour jacket, chewing away the superstructure, sloughing away surface plating like fish scales. Tidal waves of liquid flame poured and gurgled through each deck level, and then ate away the deck planes in between. Firestorms surged up connective shafts and access wells, boiled through environmental systems, and torched the ship’s leaking atmosphere. Within a second of the main strike, geysers of fire and explosive shockwash were squirting out through the other side of the ship like exit wounds, blowing out shuttered ports, carrier deck doors, airgates and gun stations. Out flung debris, including several furies and cargo shutters washed out of the Domino’s bays, born along like flotsam in the blast, spattered against the Armaduke’s outer hull.

Then the shock pulse hit, a double hammer blow: first the electromagnetic punch then the kinetic rip. The Armaduke rode them out, shuddering, lurching.

The glare faded. The Benedicamus Domino was left as nothing but a blackened metal mass of fused and glowing scrap, an iron-rich asteroid fragment.

Shipmaster Spika fought back the urge to vomit. Adrenaline had spiked critically in his system: his augmetic neurides were overheating, and his vision had reduced to a grey tunnel. Dataflow assault was so intense his stomach was churning and he wanted to gag.

He yelled a new heading at the chief steersman. He entered the engine correctives manual at his master console, nursing the screaming plasma engines down to a more gentle roar, cooling and banking down their excessive output, swinging the Armaduke on a more gentle turn to avoid the Domino’s radioactive cadaver and square with the Ominator.

The Ominator’s jubilant, taunting shrieks had been briefly silenced by the electromagnetic pulse of the multiple detonation, but now it was back as the vox system recovered. It was crowing, almost laughing out its name in a voice scarred and scaled by vox distortion. The Ominator had direct-line speed, the proper momentum and attack rate of a charging predator. It had not been obliged to bleed valuable speed and energy through stumbling evasions and desperate antics, the way the Armaduke had.

‘Gunnery!’ Spika commanded. He used a haptic reader to communicate the munitions spread he desired. The Ominator’s attack squadrons were already rolling in on them, zipping over and under the smoking mass of the wrecked Domino.

‘Shields as a matter of urgency,’ said Spika, trying to clear his throat of rising acid. ‘We’re going at them, and we’re going to burn them all the way back to hell.’