The Warmaster

Five: V’heduak

‘The shipboard vox is down,’ said Maddalena Darebeloved.

Ibram Gaunt nodded. He’d tried several wall outlets, and heard nothing but a death rattle of static. The quiet was unnerving. No transmitted throb of the engines, no purr of power conduits. There was just a slow, aching creak of metal moving and settling, as though the ancient tonnage of the Armaduke were begging for mercy.

Even the deck alarms had fallen silent.

Gaunt felt sick. His mind was numb and refusing to function clearly. He felt as though he’d been frozen and then defrosted. He was covered in bruises where gravity had smashed him back into the deck, but it was the slowness of his thoughts and the clumsiness of his hands that really bothered him.

From the look of her, Maddalena was suffering too. She was blinking fast, as if stunned, and her usual grace was absent. She was stumbling around as badly as he was.

Gaunt checked the load of his bolt pistol, holstered it and made off along the companionway. Maddalena followed him. There was a thin sheen of smoke in the processed air, and curious smells that mingled burning with the reek of spilled chemicals, and an odour that suggested that long stagnant sumps had been disturbed.

‘I’m going to find Felyx,’ Maddalena said.

Gaunt paused. He had expected as much. It was her primary duty, and he could hardly fault her for observing the orders of her House Chass masters to the letter.

He looked at her.

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘But Felyx is in no more or less danger than any of us. The welfare of the ship as a whole is at stake. For Felyx’s sake, it should be our priority to secure that first.’

She pursed her lips. It was an odd, attractive sign of uncertainty that Gaunt associated with Merity Chass. The duplicated face mirrored the expression perfectly.

‘He is my charge. His life is mine to ward,’ she said.

‘He’s my son,’ Gaunt replied.

‘You suggest?’

Gaunt gestured forwards.

‘We need to assess several key things. How dead this ship actually is. What the level of injury is. How long it will take – if it’s possible at all – to restore engineering function. On top of that, whether we’re at external risk.’

‘From boarding?’

Gaunt nodded.

‘The longer we drift here helplessly…’

Maddalena smiled.

‘Space is, forgive me for sounding simplistic, very large. To be prey for something, we’d have to be found by something.’

‘You were the one prepping your gun,’ Gaunt reminded her.

‘I’ll come with you to the bridge,’ she said.

They moved as far as the next through-deck junction and stopped as they heard footsteps clattering towards them.

‘First and Only!’ Gaunt challenged. He didn’t draw his weapon, but Maddalena had a tight grip on hers.

‘Stand easy, sir!’ a voice called back.

Gaunt recognised it.

‘Criid?’

‘Coming your way,’ Tona Criid called back. She came into view, las­rifle ready. With her came the command squad from A Company, which included Larkin and the company adjutant, Beltayn. Their faces were pale and haggard, as if they had all just woken up from a bad night’s sleep.

‘We were just coming to find you, sir,’ Criid said, ‘when it all–’

She hesitated, and gave a shrug that encompassed the ship around them.

‘–when all this happened.’

‘What have you seen?’ Gaunt asked.

‘A few injured crew, not much else,’ she replied. ‘Everyone’s been knocked around. I think grav was off for a moment.’

Gaunt nodded and looked at Beltayn. The adjutant was carrying his voxcaster set.

‘Is that working, Bel?’ Gaunt asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ Beltayn replied, nonplussed.

‘All ship-side comms are dead,’ Gaunt said. ‘We’re going to need our own field vox to coordinate. Set that up, see who you can reach. The regiment should have been at secondary order, so anyone still on his feet should be vox-ready.’

Beltayn unslung his voxcaster, set it on the deck, and lit it up. The power lights came on, and he began to adjust the frequency dials. Swirls of static and audio noise breathed out of the speakers.

‘All companies, this is Gaunt. Report location and status, confirm secondary order. Send that by voice and voxtype, and tell me what you get back.’

Beltayn nodded, and began to set up to send the message. He tapped it into the caster’s small keyboard, and then unhooked the speaker horn to deliver the spoken version. He was having trouble adjusting the frequency for clarity.

‘What’s the matter, lad?’ asked Larkin.

‘Beltayn?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Something’s awry,’ Beltayn replied, working with the dials.

‘Such as?’

‘I’m getting interference,’ the adjutant replied. ‘Listen.’

He turned the dial again very gently, and noise washed out of the speakers. It was a mix of pips, squeals, electromagnetic humming, dull metallic thuds and an odd, cackling signal that sounded like multiple voice recordings being played at high speed. The cocktail of sounds came and went in a haze of white hiss.

There was something chilling about it. Gaunt felt the back of his neck prickle.

‘Holy bloody feth,’ murmured Larkin.

‘Swear by the Throne, sir,’ said Beltayn, ‘I have no idea what that is.’

Eszrah Ap Niht, called Ezra Night by his Ghost friends, slipped silently along the vast, helpless carcass of the ship, reynbow in hand. He was a grey shadow, flitting through the gloomy depths of the ancient vessel.

He felt as though he had been turned inside out. He was not clear-headed. But years of fighting the silent war in the Untill had taught him that ­danger did not wait until you were feeling fit enough to face it. When danger came, you made yourself ready, no matter how wretched you felt.

His wits, sharply attuned thanks to his upbringing as a Nihtgane of Gereon, had identified threat sounds. He had isolated them from all the thousands of other noises drifting through the stricken voidship.

The Armaduke had become a prison, a reinforced, rusting, iron prison, its sensory systems blind and deaf. Acute human or transhuman senses were the only tactically viable currency.

Principal artifice and engineering formed the aft sections of the vessel, and comprised an echoing series of cavernous assembly chambers, stoking vaults and drive halls. There was a stink of grease and soot, a stink of promethium and the dull, zincy dust kicked out by the overheated extractors.

Gravity was abundantly wrong in the rear portion of the ship. Ezra didn’t really appreciate the concept of gravity. In his experience, drawn from the Untill of Gereon, the ground was that which a person stuck to, and to which all thrown or dropped objects returned. The same had proved to be true on the other worlds he had visited as part of the Tanith First retinue, and also true aboard the starships that carried them between battlefields.

Now that force, the authority of the ground, was gone. Ezra could feel the gentle, reeling tilt of the ship as it slowly spun end over end. It was like suddenly being able to feel the world turning on its axis. Starlight, filtering in through those dirty hull ports that remained unshuttered, slid like slicks of white oil across decks, up walls and across ceilings. Smoke glazed the air in uncomfortable swirls. For the most part, the deck underfoot drew him firmly as any ground should. But gravity wandered in places, where grav plates had failed, or mass-reactor rings had been misaligned by the violence of translation.

Ezra found himself walking down oddly sloping hallways and then, without warning, finding the vertical running briefly along the base of a wall. In one place, midway down a long loading hall, disrupted gravity fields took him off the deck, up one wall, over the ceiling until he was walking inverted, and then back down the other wall onto the deck again. All the while he had done nothing but stride in a straight line.

Ezra shook it off. It was disconcerting, but then, the galaxy was disconcerting. His life had, for all of his early years, been sheltered in the grey gloom of the Untill. Then he had joined with Gaunt and his men, and with them seen the marvels of the galaxy: space full of stars, cities and deserts, vistas he could not dream of and creatures he could never imagine.

Nothing surprised him. He had long ago accepted that anything was possible. Around any corner, anything might await. Including, he knew, death… from the least expected direction.

The disturbed gravity was disconcerting, but he refused to be dis­concerted. Let the floor become the wall, or then the ceiling.

Danger was the only thing that needed to occupy him.

Sparks fluttered from wall panels that had shorted out. Overhead lighting rigs, suspended on chains, bellied out and swung in slow, wide, oval orbits, betraying the strange, sluggish rotation of the vessel.

He reached one of the main access gates into the engineering core. It was a huge structure, like a triumphal arch, decorated with brass seraphs and cherubs. Steel rail tracks ran through the archway, allowing for the process of wagons carrying stoking ore from the deep bunkers to the ­furnace mouth. The iron blast-gates filling the archway were ominously open.

Ezra took an iron quarrel out of his leather quiver, and dropped it nock-down into the muzzle of his upright reynbow. He heard it clink into place, then felt the slight hum and tension as the magnetic fields generated by the magpods at either end of the recurve bow assembly activated and locked the bolt in place.

He stalked forwards.

Beyond the towering archway lay a huge turbine hall. Part of the ceiling had come down, layering the deck with sheets of metal panelling and broken spars. Other torn shreds of panelling hung down on fibres and tangled wires, exposing dark cavities in the roof-space where flames swirled and guttered. Small fires burned amid the debris on the deck too.

The great chrome-and-brass turbines lining the room were silent. Oil ran out of several of them where seams and seals had burst. The dark liquid ran like blood, pooling on the deck in wide, gleaming lakes, like the black mirrors the elders of the Nihtgane used for glimpsing the future. Some were raining drops up from the floor towards the roof.

Ezra could see the future. Another hour or two and the spreading slicks would reach the fires… or the fires would burn to the slicks. An inferno would follow, and it would consume the turbine halls.

Where were the stokers? Where were the men of Artifice? Ezra moved forwards, bow ready, stepping silently and cautiously across the piles of debris and broken panelling. He realised that several of the dust-caked objects at his feet were the bodies of engineering crew, felled and crushed by falling wreckage.

Too few, though. Where was everybody else? He had observed this part of the ship on several occasions during the long voyage, marvelling at the scale and industry. Ordinarily, hundreds of workers toiled here, in rowdy, straining work gangs.

He followed the rails. The trackway ran down the centre line of the hall, between the turbine arrays. Passing between the first leaking turbine structures, Ezra came upon a row of forty bulk rail wagons that had been physically thrown off the tracks. They lay on their sides, ore loads spilling out like black landslides, like a giant, broken centipede. The mass of them had crushed and destroyed a great many of the brass condensers and sub-turbine assemblies on the starboard side of the chamber.

Ezra heard movement. He tucked himself in behind one of the overturned wagons. There was a rush towards him: raised voices, thundering footsteps. Panic.

Engineering personnel began to flood past, heading up the tracks. They were running, some hauling injured comrades. Ezra saw master artificers, junior engineers, huge ogryn stokers black with soot, servitors and robed adepts. Dozens went past, hundreds.

Then the shooting started.

It came from the rear of the chamber, in the direction Ezra had been heading. It was a ragged mix of las-fire and hard-round bursts. Ezra saw some of the fleeing engineers turn to look, then run faster. Others dropped, struck from behind by searing blasts. A bulky stoker was cut down just as he passed Ezra’s hiding place. He staggered, turning awkwardly, and crashed against the side of the wagon, blood pouring from two hard-round exit wounds in his side.

The ogryn gazed at Ezra with uncomprehending, piggy eyes as he slowly slid down the wagon edge and thumped to the deck.

The firing became more fierce. A heavy stubber opened up. Looking from cover, Ezra saw dozens of the running engineers drop as the chewing impacts stitched across them. Men buckled and fell, or were knocked off their feet. Two, hit hard, were dismembered by the hefty rounds. Stray shots punched into the brass-work of turbine cylinders and copper venting kettles.

Ezra clambered up the end gate of the wagon, using the huge, oily coupling hook as a foothold, and bellied up onto the wagon side. He was about four metres off the ground. He crawled along to get a ­better vantage point.

The attackers were entering the turbine hall from the far end, where the hall opened into one of the ship’s principal stoking chambers. They were clambering over mounds of debris and wreckage, firing as they came.

They were human… humanoid, at least. Men, but not men. They were dressed in ragged combat gear that mixed ballistic padding with plasteel breastplates and chainmail. Most had their faces covered with featureless metal masks that looked like dirty welding visors. The ­single, extended eye-slits glowed soft yellow with targeting arrays.

Their weapons were old, but clearly well maintained and effective. They were of the general kind that had been carried by the Astra Militarum for centuries.

But the emblems displayed on the breastplates and foreheads of the attackers were unmistakably the toxic sigils of the Archenemy.

Ezra sighted his reynbow. He took down his first target with a quarrel to the head.

The reynbow made only the slightest metallic whisper as the magpods charged and spat the dart. It was inaudible over the roar of gunfire.

The attackers only noticed they were being hit when the second and third of them went down, iron barbs staked into their chests and throats. Yellow visor arrays flickered in confusion.

Suddenly, sustained gunfire hosed along the wagon, hunting for Ezra.

He rolled fast and dropped to the deck, slipping to another point of concealment. He let the heavy framework of the wagon absorb the hard-rounds and las-bolts. Several large calibre shots punctured the belly of the wagon, punching holes through which beams of dusty light speared.

Ezra reached the inter-wagon coupling, knelt down and tracked one of the attackers with his bow. Stock to shoulder, he fired, clean-sighted. The quarrel penetrated the warrior’s visor slit, and exploded the display reticule in a flurry of sparks. Gurgling and clawing at a visor that was now pinned to his face, the figure dropped to his knees.

Ezra reloaded. He tried a long shot at a bulky attacker with a heavy stubber, but missed. More gunfire spat his way, and he moved again, running back along the line of fuelling wagons, his feet crunching and slipping on the slopes of spilled ore.

One of the attackers suddenly appeared between wagons in front of him. Ezra’s reynbow was loaded, and he fired instinctively from the hip. The quarrel went clean through the man’s plasteel plating and his torso, spraying blood and specks of meat in the air. He fell.

A second attacker was right behind him.

There was no time to reload.

Ezra hurled himself into the warrior, using his reynbow as a club. He knocked the warrior’s head sideways with the blow, but the man struggled with him. Ezra lost his grip on the bow. The warrior struck him, and Ezra fell on his arse. In a sitting position, he swung the reynbow again, this time more frantically, and managed to hook the warrior’s legs out from under him. They slithered and struggled in the sloping spill of ore.

The warrior tried to rise. Ezra got up first. He stabbed the warrior repeatedly in the throat with a quarrel from his pouch, using the iron barb like a dagger.

The warrior gurgled and convulsed as he bled out.

Ezra reached for his reynbow, but it had not benefitted from being used as a cudgel. Part of the bow frame was twisted, and one of the magpods was misaligned. With a mixture of desperation and reluctance, Ezra grabbed his enemy’s lasrifle. He had to tug it hard to free the sling from the dead man’s clutches.

The Ghosts had taught him the basic use of an energy weapon, even though he did not care for the technology. He checked the rifle. The power­cell was charged, and the firing lock was off. He hefted it to his shoulder, searching for a comfortable grip and slipping his finger into the unfamiliar trigger guard.

Two attackers clambered through the space between the wagons. One fired at Ezra, and the searing las-bolt missed the Nihtgane by the width of a splayed hand.

Ezra shot back. He had not checked the discharge setting of his captured weapon. It juddered in his hands as it spat out a flurry on full-auto, mowing down both the attackers in front of him with a squall of shots.

Ezra ran to find new cover. As soon as he was sheltered from view, he adjusted the dial on the side of his new gun to ‘single’.

The fight was escalating fast, but he knew it had only just begun.

Viktor Hark entered the brig area of the Armaduke. He was dazed and rattled. The vessel was clearly in a perilous state. Waking to find himself face down on the deck after the brutal retranslation, he had resolved to follow Gaunt’s last instruction, and then proceed to restoring some order to the regiment.

Secondary order. Even before the accident, Gaunt had been anxious to make the Ghosts ready for a fight.

The ship was making odd, plaintive noises, and it was heeling badly. Hark clattered down a flight of metal steps and approached the heavy shutters of the brig. He realised almost immediately that he was in someone’s crosshairs.

‘It’s me,’ he said, feeling foolish.

Judd Cardass appeared, lowering his lasrifle.

‘Just checking, sir,’ Cardass said.

‘As you should, trooper.’

‘What’s going on?’ Cardass asked. He was surprisingly blunt for a Belladon. That was probably down to him being part of Rawne’s mob for too long. Then again, the current situation was enough to breed tension and bluntness in anyone.

‘I need to see the major,’ Hark replied.

Cardass nodded, and led the commissar through the shutterway into the outer chambers of the brig, where security stations faced the inner hatches, and the walls were lined with cots for the guards.

B Company’s first squad, the so-called ‘Suicide Kings’, had been charged with protecting the regiment’s guest, an extremely dangerous military asset. They took their job seriously, and the outer chamber space had virtually become the company barracks. B Company had taken up residence in the brig after an attempt on the guest’s life during the outward journey had proved the initial holding location insecure.

As Hark entered, he saw the Ghosts of B Company getting things straight. Some were picking up chairs and kitbags that had tumbled during the grav-failure. Others were checking the security instruments. Two or three were patching minor wounds and abrasions.

Major Rawne was on the far side of the monitor bay with Varl and Bonin. They were grouped around Oysten, who was setting up the squad’s vox-set.

‘Shipboard comms are down,’ Rawne said to Hark without looking up.

‘I see you’re improvising.’

Rawne nodded. Only now did he glance at Hark.

‘Drive accident?’ he asked.

‘I’m guessing.’

Rawne nodded.

‘Is the asset safe?’ Hark asked.

‘He’s secure.’

‘I was coming down here to instruct you to come to secondary order,’ Hark said.

‘Done and done, sir,’ replied Varl.

‘Gaunt anticipated this. We’re adrift and crippled, I believe. We may be assaulted.’

‘Boarding action?’ asked Bonin.

‘He felt it likely,’ replied Hark.

Rawne kept his gaze on Hark.

‘Is the ship dead? Fethed? Are we going to die out here? Void-freeze? Like the damn space hulks they tell the old stories about?’

‘I have no idea of our status, major,’ Hark replied. ‘I think we’d need to consult with the shipmaster to discern our viability.’

Rawne looked at Oysten.

‘Anything?’ he asked. ‘Gaunt? The fething bridge?’

Oysten pursed her lips. A Belladon vox-specialist from the new intake, she had been transferred to Rawne’s command after the death of Kabry, Rawne’s previous adjutant. It was clear she was still an outsider in the ranks of the Suicide Kings.

‘I don’t seem to be able to set up any kind of vox-net, sir,’ Oysten replied.

‘Balls to that,’ Varl snapped. ‘This is the Tanith First. We’re not arse-handed morons. Gods among men B Company may be, but we’re not the only unit who’ll have thought to go vox-live to coordinate.’

‘Your point is well made,’ said Oysten calmly. ‘I’m just telling you how it is. The vox feels like it’s being signal-blocked. Maybe it’s the super­structure of the ship. We’re pretty damn armoured down here.’

Rawne shrugged.

‘Maybe it’s you not knowing one end of a fething voxcaster from the other, Oysten,’ he said.

‘Maybe it’s an after-effect of the real space shift?’ Hark suggested quietly. ‘Maybe we’re flooded with energies that…’

His voice trailed off. He realised he was speculating in areas that even he, an educated and experienced senior officer of the Officio Prefectus, knew feth all about.

‘Wait please,’ said Oysten. ‘I’m getting something. Voice, I think. Voice signal…’

She wound one of the dials hard, then flicked two toggle switches, moving the audio to speakers rather than the headset hanging around her neck like a torc.

They heard a blend of squeals, hums, e-mag burbles and bangs, out of which emerged a crackling signal that sounded like overlapped voice recordings. The whole mix was bathed in a white noise hiss.

‘Can you tease that apart?’ Rawne asked, craning to listen.

Oysten made a few adjustments in an attempt to isolate the individual signals.

‘Just trying to clean it up,’ she said.

She stopped suddenly. The thread of voices had become very clear. It was vox back-chatter between multiple operators, a scratchy to and fro of orders, acknowledgements and advisories. They could tell that from the tone and flow.

The content was impossible to discern. None of the words were being spoken in a tongue they recognised as human.

‘Feth that,’ said Varl.

‘Archenemy transmissions,’ Bonin said.

Oysten nodded.

‘Shut it down,’ said Rawne.

‘Before we know what it means?’ asked Hark.

Rawne shot him an ugly look.

‘Seriously?’ he asked.

‘I think we’re in deep shit, Rawne. I think we can use all the intel we can get right now.’

Rawne looked at Bonin and Varl.

‘Bring him out,’ he said.

The pair of them moved swiftly, gathering LaHurf and Brostin as they advanced to the door of the primary cell. Their weapons were ready.

‘Open it!’ Varl yelled to Nomis at the security station.

‘Opening three!’ Nomis called back as he threw the levers.

The outer hatch slid up, and the inner interlock doors opened.

Bonin entered first to sweep the cell. Then he re-emerged and waved in the other three.

It was about two minutes before they appeared. Hark knew that time had been spent adjusting shackles, removing deck-pins, and doing a tight search of hands, hems and mouth.

The four Suicide Kings appeared, advancing at a slow pace determined by the hobble-chain on the prisoner’s ankles. They flanked him in a square formation.

It seemed to take forever for them to escort Mabbon Etogaur to the vox-station. Every man in the room watched the Archenemy prisoner as he shuffled along.

Mabbon’s face lacked expression and personality. His shaved head was a mess of old ritual scars.

‘What has happened, m–’ he began to ask when he was brought to a halt.

‘Don’t ask questions,’ Rawne replied bluntly. He gestured to the vox-set. ‘Answer them. What is that, pheguth? What does it mean?’

Mabbon Etogaur cocked his scarred head and listened for a few moments.

Then he sighed deeply.

‘V’heduak,’ he said. ‘Four or perhaps five storm-teams are on board. To aft of the engine house, I think. They are making ground.’

‘What was that word?’ Hark asked.

‘V’heduak,’ replied Mabbon. ‘You’ve been boarded by the V’heduak.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Literally? “Blood-fare”,’ Mabbon replied. ‘It is part of a longer phrase… Ort’o shet ahgk v’heduak… which means, “Those that will claim a price or fare in blood in return for conveyance”.’

He glanced at Hark with his eerily expressionless face.

‘What it actually means,’ he said, ‘is that we are, to use Sergeant Varl’s vernacular, spectacularly fethed.’