Salvation's Reach

ELEVEN The Clear Shot

Everybody was down on the deck, the women sobbing, the children bawling. Elodie was holding on to Juniper to stop her throwing herself at the man who had seized Yoncy. He had a gun, and he was shooting it wildly. Anyone who waved a gun, and was prepared to fire it in a crowded room, anyone who was prepared to snatch a little girl as a shield, that was someone you didn’t try to tackle.

Elodie wrestled Juniper down, slapping her pawing hands aside. Elodie was moaning. Everyone was making some kind of sound: distress, fear, desperation.

Everyone except Yoncy. Elodie saw that Yoncy was still and expressionless. Trauma had clearly conquered her. She was like a doll in the crook of the gunman’s arm.

The man rattled off a few more shots to keep them all ducking. More screams came from the womenfolk. He was backing towards the hatch under the portside walkway, coming right down past them. Elodie wished she could work out what was wrong with the man’s face. It was twisted, distorted. It wasn’t a proper face at all.

‘Drop her! Drop the girl!’

More panicked screams. Elodie glanced around and saw three Ghosts rushing into the transport deck from the far end, rifles at their shoulders, covering the man and his hostage as they prowled through the rows of cowering retinue personnel.

The man who had shouted the order was a Belladon, Cardass. To his left was Bonin, the Tanith scout, weapon up and sighted. To Bonin’s right was Gol Kolea.

Kolea’s lasrifle was at his cheek. The expression in his eyes tore Elodie in half. It was part hatred, part anguish.

His daughter. His little girl.

‘Drop her!’ Cardass yelled again.

The gunman answered with some inarticulate noise as though his mouth wasn’t working properly. His face seemed tangled.

Elodie felt her heart fluttering. She so wanted to get up, to tear the girl out of the maniac’s grip.

She saw Captain Meryn. He was cowering right beside her, next to one of the cots. Costin was nearby too, his head in his hands, the documents he’d been carrying scattered around his knees. One of the gunman’s wild shots had clipped his shoulder, leaving a grazed burn.

Meryn’s eyes were bright with fear, like those of a cornered animal. He wasn’t carrying his rifle, but Elodie could see the laspistol holstered at his waist.

‘Shoot him,’ she hissed, holding Juniper down. ‘Captain, shoot him!’

Meryn ignored her.

‘Shoot him!’ Elodie repeated.

There was a clear angle. The gunman was side on to them, and he hadn’t seen Meryn or his comrade. Any half-decent shot could have put a las bolt through his head or his torso, missing the girl entirely.

‘Are you mad?’ Meryn rasped back.

‘You can take a clear shot!’

‘Shut up!’

‘Captain, shoot him!’

‘Shut the feth up!’ Meryn snarled.

‘Put the girl down,’ Kolea ordered. His voice cut the air and the panic like a scythe. It was toneless, as if the light had gone out in his heart.

‘Back off! Back off!’ the gunman yelled back, the words clawing, imperfectly shaped, out of his deformed mouth. The strain of his efforts had finally overcome the Sirkle’s face-shifting abilities.

Kolea, Bonin and Cardass had him triangulated, all aiming straight for his head. They were squinting down the top sights of their weapons, shoulders hunched, trotting forwards with short, hurrying steps.

Elodie wondered if any of them would dare take the shot.

‘Put the girl down!’ Cardass demanded.

‘Forget it,’ Kolea said. ‘Judd, forget it. He’s got nothing to lose any more. He’s not going to let us take him.’

He lowered his rifle to his chest, though he still kept it pointing at the gunman.

‘Are you?’ he asked. ‘You bastard. You’re going to make us kill you, and you’re going to make us kill the girl to do it.’

The gunman said something. His lips were too slack and misshapen for the words to be intelligible.

The ship shook. It was violent and abrupt. There was no sound, and no light came through the sealed port shutters, but the ship juddered as though it had been dropped.

A moment’s distraction.

Rawne dropped from the portside walkway onto the gunman’s back. The impact felled the gunman and took Yoncy over too. Rawne’s straight silver blade plunged into the killer’s right shoulder. His weapon went off, spraying las bolts into the air.

All three of them tumbled. Rawne lost his grip on the warknife. The gunman kept his grip on Yoncy. With a bellow that made the civilians sheltering around them shriek, Rawne got hold of Yoncy and wrenched her out of the killer’s grasp. He simply hurled her into the air, perhaps out of desperation, perhaps in the belief that a fall injury would be preferable to letting her stay in the killer’s reach a moment longer. The killer lashed out and clubbed Rawne in the face with the edge of his rifle.

Hoisted, Yoncy tumbled. Elodie sprang forwards, her arms outstretched, and managed to catch her before she bounced off the sheet metal deck. The little girl was heavy. The impact tore muscles in Elodie’s forearm. She kept her grip, rolling, trying to shield Yoncy from the landing. They crunched down onto Elodie’s right shoulder, Yoncy cushioned against Elodie’s breasts and stomach. The back of Elodie’s head struck against the leg of a cot and she blacked out for a second.

There was blood in her mouth, in her nose. She blinked. Yoncy was yelling and thrashing on top of her, squirming, kicking her heels. Pain flooded Elodie’s skull and her right arm.

The gunman was back on his feet. The warknife was still wedged into his shoulder blade. Rawne was down, flattened on the deck by the clubbing blow. The killer pointed his lasrifle at Rawne to cut him apart.

Kolea’s first shot blew the gunman’s right arm off at the elbow, causing the dismembered limb and the lasrifle it was aiming to spin like a slow propeller. Kolea’s second shot blew out his chest in a splash of burned blood and splintered ribs.

Kolea’s third shot traumatically deformed his head far more significantly than anything the face-slip had achieved.

The killer went down, full length, felled like an old straight nalwood, leaving blood mist in the air behind him.

Elodie’s shoulder was busted. The pain speared into her so sharply she couldn’t move.

Meryn took Yoncy off her and turned to Kolea.

‘She’s all right,’ Meryn said. ‘She’s safe, Gol. She’s safe.’

The Ominator’s attack ships, ugly, cackling arrowhead craft, came in around the dead Domino. They were like miniature versions of their sire, a litter of squealing, ravening whelps.

‘Shields?’ suggested Spika, overcome by a terrible, analytical calm.

‘Repairs still underway!’ sang out an artificer’s junior.

‘Track them. Deterrent fire,’ Spika ordered.

The Armaduke’s smaller, more nimble batteries and gun stations woke up, streaming beams and ripping, stuttering lines of las bolts up into the black. Barrels pumped in their arrestor sleeves as the gun mounts traversed hard, chasing the fast-moving attack ships. Through multiple viewers via multiple pict feeds, Spika watched the enemy pack rip over, darting along the flanks and underside of the Armaduke, banking between crenellated surface towers and engraved armour buttresses, hugging the lines of the ribbed prow, like aircraft flying low-level through the streets of a hive. Battery fire pursued them. Spika saw one attack ship engulfed in flame, tumbling like a firework wheel under its own momentum. He also saw a battery go up, strafed into oblivion. Lights began to go dark across his master console, tiny individual lights among the thousands of system indicators. Prow battery 1123. Prow battery 96 (starboard). Keel battery 326 (centreline). Port tower 11. Environment hub 26 alpha (portside). Detection relay nine beta.

A wave of target strikes rippled down the Armaduke as the enemy squadron raced aft, jinking, evading, gunning for weak spots.

There was a sudden electromagnetic crackle, a distort across most pict feeds, the fuzz-wash of serious las fire. As the pictures jumped and cycled back into life, Spika saw Furies. The Imperial void fighters, all of them from the poor Domino’s fighter screen, were soaring down the length of the Armaduke’s hull in the opposite direction, meeting the enemy squadron head-on. Spika tracked almost three dozen individual dogfights, acrobatic duels that were suddenly, bitterly in progress. Furies banked after enemy craft around shield pylons or detection towers, or harried them down around the flanks and around the keel line. Like ascending birds, Furies and foe-ships locked together, spiralling up and away from the Armaduke as they tried to out-turn each other and gain the kill shot. Some were tumbling. Others turned out in wide arcs, forced away from the frigate in an effort to lose a pursuer, sometimes as far as the glowing mass of the Domino. It was like an angry swarm of insects mobbing the old ship.

‘Shields in twenty seconds!’ an artificer announced.

‘Acknowledged,’ Spika replied. ‘Vox, do what you can to signal the Furies. Warn them we are relighting and they need to be clear when we do.’

‘Aye, master!’

Spika’s attention was on the Ominator. It had clearly not grown tired of saying its own name. Instruments estimated about nine minutes to firing point at their current intercept rate. Spika shook that off. More like seven or six and a half. The Ominator was hasty and hungry. It wanted to get a lick in before the Armaduke was shielded again, and before the storming bulk of the Aggressor Libertus came charging in from the rear line. The Aggressor Libertus was already trading long-range punches with the Necrostar Antiversal as it accelerated. Necrostar Antiversal, realspace drives burning orange-hot, clearly wanted to test its mettle against the Sepiterna.

‘Dammit, do we have any vox?’ Spika asked.

‘Routing available circuits to you, master.’

Spika pulled his silver speaker-horn close.

‘Hailing, hailing, Master of the Libertus. Hailing, hailing, Master of the Libertus. This is Spika, mastering the Highness Ser Armaduke.’

A crackle.

‘This is Libertus, confirm.’

‘Confirm, Libertus. Let the capital ship worry about that cruiser. We can crush this target with pinning fire and then turn together.’

A long pause, full of static.

‘Libertus, confirm?’

‘Agreed, Armaduke. You have guns effective and shields, confirm?’

‘Confirm guns effective. Maintain positions relative. Armaduke now accelerating to close. Be ready to turn wide, repeat wide, if he proves reluctant to run between us.’

‘Relative noted and matched. Acceleration matched. Let’s slay the bastard, Armaduke.’

‘Confirm.’

‘Shields at your discretion!’ the artificer announced.

‘Light them,’ said Spika.

There was a stuttering pulse as the void shield generators cycled into life. Deck lights dipped all the way into brown-out and back as onboard power was briefly refocused. Shielding crackled into being around the advancing Armaduke, forming blistering fields of immaterium distortion. Several Furies, late leaving the side of the Armaduke, tumbled, lights out and power gone, their systems temporarily blanked by contact with the defence fields. Four of the Archenemy’s small hunter-ships detonated, crushed against the expanding shields, their drive plants destroyed by some allergic, alchemical interaction.

Shields raised, the Armaduke began to power past the Domino towards the onrushing Ominator. Aggressor Libertus followed on, about sixty kilometres astern and twenty to starboard.

‘Clear the missile tubes!’ Spika commanded. ‘Main batteries, main mounts – firing solutions on the designated target now.’

He focused the primary rangefinder on the Ominator.

The air in the system still smelled of smoke. At least this disguised the Armaduke’s pervading odour of kitchen grease.

Gaunt walked back towards the bridge, through corridors empty of life. All of the passenger complement was stowed in the bunker decks, and the crew personnel were at their battle stations. Occasionally, a junior rating or a servitor rushed past on some errand.

Gaunt had started out with little sense of the void fight, and now he had none at all. He wondered if they were close to winning, or close to dying. The ship was peaceful. It wasn’t like being in a battle on the field, with the thump of guns, of artillery pummelling the skyline, with airborne overhead. Space was silent. There was no communication of nearby destruction.

But he could tell that a fight was going on. The deck creaked and the superstructure groaned, under tension. Every minute or so, the lights would dip and come back, or the engines would begin another frantic round of thrashing output. Static coated every surface; he presumed that was a side effect of the void shields. He’d seen it in buildings and ground vehicles close to active Titans.

Most of all he could feel the fight inside him, in his gut, his inner ear, his kinaesthetic sense. He could sense the soundless, invisible pull and twist and wrench of inertial compensation. The gravitic systems were fighting to maintain the environmental status quo as the ship lurched and came about. He felt as if he was standing in a quiet, swaying building: it flooded him with memories. Being in a high tower on Balhaut during the first firestorms. Being on the curtain walls of Vervunhive as the Heritor’s woe-machines lumbered in.

At least, he reflected, he hoped it was the gravitic stresses. He hoped it was not the turbulence of his restless soul, troubled by a distress it had never expected.

The hatchway to a grand chamber lay open. Inside, under gently swinging lamp rigs, the Iron Snake Holofurnace was performing a fast sword drill against hololithic targets.

The sword work was devastatingly swift. Holofurnace was using a cross-stroke and rotational style Gaunt had not seen before, switching from one hand to a two-handed grip depending on the attitude of the sword.

Helmet off, Eadwine was sitting to one side, watching the rehearsal.

He didn’t look up as Gaunt approached, but he knew the human was there.

‘I thought you’d be cowering somewhere,’ said Eadwine, his voice a machine rasp.

‘No, you didn’t,’ replied Gaunt.

‘No,’ Eadwine admitted. He kept watching the Iron Snake’s sword drill. The Iron Snake hadn’t even acknowledged Gaunt’s presence.

‘He is getting sloppy,’ said the Silver Guard warrior. ‘I don’t know what kind of blade-work they teach on Ithaka these days.’

‘Aren’t you concerned about the battle?’ asked Gaunt. ‘I thought you might have gone to the bridge.’

Eadwine turned to look at him.

‘What would that achieve? There’s no part for us to play. Not unless they board us. Are they likely to board us?’

‘I don’t think so.’

The Silver Guard shrugged.

‘Then all we can do is bide our time until we are faced with our kind of fight.’

‘You don’t need to know what’s going on?’ asked Gaunt.

Holofurnace stopped slicing his sword and glanced over.

‘Only if we live,’ he said. ‘If we die, why care about the detail?’

He went back about his training. The sword flashed fast, spinning and interweaving.

Gaunt realised that Eadwine was still staring at him.

‘I do not read your face well,’ said Eadwine. ‘I do not read human micro expressions. They are too weak, insignificant.’

Gaunt didn’t know how to reply.

‘But you seem concerned,’ the Silver Guard went on. ‘Clearly, there is the stress factor of this fight, but you are a man who has known battles. Where is your resolution? There is, it seems to me, another element troubling you.’

‘You read our faces well enough,’ said Gaunt.

Eadwine frowned and nodded, as if quietly please with his achievement.

‘So?’

‘I find myself distracted,’ said Gaunt. ‘Without expecting to, I find myself concerned for the welfare of another person aboard. That concern has surprised me to an extent I find dismaying.’

‘You question your focus.’

‘I worry about maintaining it.’

‘Is it a woman?’ asked Eadwine. ‘A woman? A sexual partner? I understand that can be very distracting for the emotionally compromised.’

‘No,’ said Gaunt. ‘I have recently learned that I have a son.’

‘Ah,’ said Eadwine. ‘Offspring. I know nothing about them either.’

He tilted his head, listening.

‘You hear?’ he asked.

Holofurnace had stopped drilling to listen too. Gaunt concentrated. He could make out a distant, repetitive thumping, masked by the engine throb, the steady chug of a machine rotating or cycling.

‘That’s the ship’s primary magazine delivering munitions at the fastest possible continuous pace,’ said Eadwine. ‘We are unloading everything we have at a sustained rate. We are trying to kill something very big.’