The Warmaster

Six: Pick Our Bones

Gaunt reached the bridge of the Armaduke about thirty seconds after Shipmaster Spika died.

Trailing the A Company command squad, with Criid on one side of him and Maddalena lurking on the other, he entered the bridge via the main arch and saw the crew gathering in a mob around a fallen figure.

Some of the bridge personnel – and there were an awful lot of them – had not left their stations or posts. Indeed, many could not because they were jacked and wired into their positions.

But even those who could not move were staring. Some were beginning to wail. Others had tears in their augmeticised eyes.

As soon as he saw that it was Spika, Gaunt pushed through the huddle, shoving robed bridge seniors and masters aside.

‘What are you doing?’ Gaunt asked them. As far as he could see they were all agitated and upset, but no one was offering any treatment.

‘He fell!’ one of the officers declared.

‘He fell down! The shipmaster fell down!’ moaned another.

‘I think it is his heart,’ said the officer of detection. ‘I think our proud ship is mortally struck, and the sympathetic pain has–’

Gaunt ignored him. He looked at Maddalena.

‘Get Curth!’ he cried.

‘But–’

‘I said get her!’ Gaunt yelled. Maddalena scowled, and then turned and ran from the bridge. Gaunt knew she was fast, faster than Criid, probably. Besides, he needed Criid and her authority.

Gaunt dropped to his knees and listened to Spika’s heart. The ship­master lay on his back, his skin as white as wax and his eyes empty.

‘Feth,’ Gaunt murmured. He knelt up and began compressions.

‘Criid!’ he yelled as he worked.

‘Sir?’

‘Secure the bridge! Get these people away from the shipmaster! Get them back to work, dammit!’

Criid looked dubious. The senior officers and high-function servitors of the Armaduke seemed fearful and outlandish creatures to her. They were staring at Gaunt and the other newcomers with puzzlement and distaste, as if they were invaders or zoological specimens.

‘What if these good persons of the Imperial Navy do not recognise the authority of the Astra Militarum, sir?’ she asked.

‘Then see if they recognise the authority of a bayonet, Criid. Improvise.’

Gaunt kept working. Spika’s body didn’t betray the slightest hint of vitality.

Gaunt had saved lives before. His trade was taking lives, and he was miserably good at that, but he had saved a life or two in his time. Battlefield aid, trauma procedures. He had pumped lungs and hearts, bound up fast-bleeds with fieldwire tourniquets, and plugged gouting wounds with his fingers until the medicae arrived.

He was better at death than life, but the latter counted now. They needed Spika. More than that, Spika didn’t deserve this end.

‘Come on!’ Gaunt snarled as he worked.

‘We have been boarded,’ a man said.

Maintaining the compressions, Gaunt looked up. A stout, sandy-haired battlefleet officer was looking down at him. Silver brocade decorated his dark blue tunic. He was command branch, not a master of anything or an officer of any specific department.

‘We anticipated that,’ Gaunt replied, his hands working steadily.

‘You must clear the bridge,’ the officer said.

‘Can’t you see what the feth I’m doing?’ Gaunt asked.

‘Our beloved shipmaster, may the Throne bless his soul, has departed this life,’ said the officer. ‘Stress. He had been fairly warned. His health was an issue. We will mourn him. Now he is gone, the life of the ship is all that matters. You will clear the bridge.’

‘Like feth!’ Gaunt answered.

‘I am Subcommander Kelvedon,’ the officer said. His voice was light and dry, like long grass at the end of a summer season. ‘I stand second to the shipmaster in line of succession. At this hour of his death, I have command of the Armaduke. Its welfare is my business. You will clear the bridge.’

‘He isn’t even cold!’ Gaunt snapped. He regretted his words. ­Spika’s flesh, where Gaunt had torn open his frock coat and uniform shirt, seemed as cold as the void. Spika looked forlorn and forgotten, his chest a scrawny, shrivelled knot, like the belly of a fish. He had seemed a commanding man. Death had diminished him mercilessly.

‘Clear my damned bridge, sir,’ Kelvedon said. ‘Have your meat-head troops gather in their appointed billets and stay out of our way. This is a fighting ship. We will secure all decks and drive out the enemy.’

‘We fight better than you,’ replied Gaunt. ‘Imperial Guard. Astra Militarum. Best damned fighting bastards in the universe. Stop talking crap and collaborate with me, Acting Shipmaster Kelvedon. Spika knew our worth and how to profit from coordinated responses.’

‘Spika made decisions that I would not have made,’ replied Kelvedon. ‘This entire run was not battlefleet business. It was some kind of undistinguished smoke and mirrors blackwork by your Commissariat masters and–’

Kelvedon suddenly made a curious sound, the sound that a ­cargo-8’s tyre makes when it blows out. His eyes watered, his cheeks ballooned, and he sank to the deck, doubled up.

‘Knee in testicles,’ Criid announced to Gaunt as Kelvedon flopped onto his side in a foetal position. ‘That the kind of thing you had in mind?’

‘Superb work, Captain Criid.’

She half turned, then looked back.

‘You what?’ she asked.

‘I’ve been meaning to tell you,’ said Gaunt pumping at Spika’s chest with the balls of his palms, ‘there just hasn’t been a moment. Promotion, Tona. Captain. Company command, A Company. I want you to run my company.’

‘For kneeing some void-stain in the knackers?’ she asked.

‘I may have taken a few other factors into account. Your peerless combat record, for example. Now, Captain Criid, if you don’t mind, would you kick Acting Shipmaster Kelvedon in the testes a second time?’

Criid frowned.

‘Why?’ she asked.

Gaunt stopped compressions and sat back on his heels.

‘Because it would make me feel better. This isn’t working.’ He rubbed his hands together. The cold radiating from Spika’s corpse had seemed to leech into him, numbing his hands, his wrists, his forearm.

‘He’s fething dead,’ Gaunt sighed.

He rose slowly, stepped away from Spika’s pathetic corpse and over Kelvedon’s blubbering mass.

‘Who’s actually in charge here?’ he asked the bridge around him. ‘Not this blowhard runt,’ he added, gesturing back at Kelvedon. ‘Who is next in line? Come the feth on! This is an emergency!’

‘I am,’ said one of the robed figures waiting at the edge of the bridge platform. He stepped forwards. He was tall, as tall as Ezra Night, and just as rake-thin. His floor-length robes were blue, trimmed with an odd fabric that seemed opalescent. His eyes were gross augmetic implants, and one of his hands was a bionic spider. Input plugs and data cables threaded his neck, throat and chest.

‘Darulin, Master of Ordnance,’ he said to Gaunt, with a slight bow.

‘Ordnance has precedence over artifice and helm?’ Gaunt asked.

Darulin nodded.

‘A ship is its weapons. Everything else is secondary.’

‘Is it true that we’ve been boarded?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Available data says so. There is fighting in the engine houses.’

‘Who’s fighting?’

‘I misspoke,’ Darulin replied. ‘There is killing in the engine houses.’

‘Who has boarded us?’

‘The Archenemy,’ said Darulin.

‘How did they find us?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Consult the chronometer,’ Darulin invited, with a whirring ­spider-gesture. ‘A moment passed for us, but we are missing ten years. We are adrift. The Archenemy had time to detect and triangulate.’

‘What did you say?’ asked Gaunt.

‘The Archenemy had time to detect–’

‘No, before that.’

‘We are missing ten years. We have lost ten years because of the temporal distortion of the translation accident.’

Gaunt and Criid looked at each other.

‘We were only unconscious for a moment,’ murmured Criid. ‘A moment.’

‘Are you sure?’ Gaunt asked the Master of Ordnance.

‘Yes. Such time-loss is rare and troubling, but not unheard of. You are not void-experienced. You do not know such things.’

Gaunt regarded the deck for a moment, collected his thoughts, then looked back at Darulin.

‘We must coordinate a counter-assault,’ Gaunt said. ‘My regiment. Your armsmen.’

Darulin was about to respond when Ana Curth entered the bridge. A ­couple of Tanith corpsmen followed her, and behind them came Maddalena Darebeloved. Larkin, Beltayn and the rest of A Company gathered in the doorway behind, looking on grimly.

‘Who’s hurt?’ Curth asked.

‘The shipmaster,’ Gaunt told her. ‘It’s too late for him.’

Curth elbowed past Gaunt, heading for Spika.

‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ she told him. She paused and glanced back at Gaunt.

‘Don’t send your bitch to fetch me, ever again,’ she said.

He didn’t blink.

‘Behave like a professional,’ he replied.

Curth knelt beside Spika, examined him, and checked his vitals.

‘Compressions!’ she ordered at one of the corpsmen, who rushed to oblige.

‘I tried that,’ said Gaunt.

‘Let’s see what happens when somebody knows what they’re doing,’ she shot back. She opened her case, lifted the folding layers, and selected a hydroneumat syringe. She loaded it from a phial, checked it, flicked it, then swabbed a place over the carotid on ­Spika’s neck.

The needle slid in and she depressed the cartridge release.

Spika did not stir.

‘Shit,’ said Curth, and began mouth to mouth as the corpsman applied diligent heart massage.

Gaunt turned back to Darulin.

‘My regiment. Your armsmen. You were saying?’

His route to the drive chambers had been blocked by a corridor that had suffered catastrophic gravity collapse. Scout Sergeant Mkoll had switched to service ducts and crawlspaces. He was edging his way down an almost vertical, unlit vent tube when the vox finally woke up.

A voice crackled, dry in the cold darkness.

‘Advisory, advisory,’ the voice said. ‘The Archenemy is aboard this vessel. Arm and prepare. The Archenemy is in the drive chambers and advancing for’ard.’

Mkoll braced himself on a welding seam, legs splayed. The vent duct was sheer. He let his rifle, now strip-checked and reloaded, hang off his shoulder and adjusted his microbead link. Cold air breezed up at him from far below, bearing mysterious sounds of clanks and bumps.

‘That you, Rawne?’ he asked quietly.

‘Identify?’

‘It’s Mkoll.’

‘Where are you?’ Rawne asked over the link.

‘Like I’m going to tell you that over an open channel. Report.’

‘We’ve been boarded.’

‘I know. I’ve met some. Not sure what they are.’

‘Intel says six storm-teams, which means about seven hundred hostiles. V’heduak.’

‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ Mkoll asked.

‘No time to explain in detail. The Archenemy fleet, basically. Ever wondered how the Sanguinary Tribes get around? How the Blood Pact move from world to world? V’heduak, that’s how. And when they’re not acting as ­drivers for the bastard ground forces, they stalk the stars, looking for ships to pick off and plunder. We’ve been hit by cannibals.’

‘Tech cannibals?’

‘Yeah, and the rest.’

Mkoll fell silent for a moment. He felt the sweat bead on his forehead despite the chill breeze gusting from below him.

‘Where are you getting this intel from, Rawne?’ he asked.

‘You don’t want to know, Oan.’

‘But it’s reliable?’

‘As feth.’

‘Where are you?’ Mkoll asked.

‘In the brig, securing the asset.’

‘Rawne, is anyone moving aft to the drive chambers?’

There was a long pause.

‘Mkoll, it’s all a bit uncoordinated. The vox is choppy. I think Bask’s company is moving in. No word from Kolea. Nothing from Gaunt.’

Mkoll sighed.

‘Feth,’ he whispered to himself.

‘Say again?’

‘Hold the fething line,’ Mkoll said. ‘I’m going to take a look.’

Toe-cap and fingernail, he resumed his descent.

Ezra Night threw himself headlong into cover. Enemy fire whipped at him, exploding the bulkheads and wall braces behind him. Sparks showered. Pieces of plastek and alumina whistled through the air.

Ezra rolled. He brought up his lasrifle and clipped off two solid bursts of fire. Varl would be proud of him. Varl and Criid. Those who had taught him.

The enemy dropped. The Archenemy.

Ezra had been fought back into the rear spaces of the drive chambers, vast as they were. He was just one man facing squads of hundreds.

He would fight and die. Fight and die. That was what Ibram always said. Better to fight and die. Do you want to live forever?

A little longer would be nice, Ezra thought.

He aimed again, and fired a burst. Two attackers flipped over on their backs, their torsos blown apart.

He was aware of a little amber rune winking on the rim of the clip-socket above his thumb. Powercell low. He needed a reload. Why hadn’t he thought to take one off the corpse?

A series of heavy explosions detonated along the centre of the deck space, marching towards him. Debris showered into the air, whole deck plates and underdeck pipework.

The Archenemy had sent heavier units into the Armaduke.

Ezra spied the first of the stalk-tanks as it clattered along the drive hall towards him. Two more followed. He had seen such machines before. They were lightweight, with an almost spherical pod of a body just large enough to contain a single driver or hardwired servitor operator plus control packages and data sumps. Powerful quad-lasguns or plasma cannons were mounted on a gyro cradle beneath the body. The tanks walked on eight pairs of long, slender spider-legs.

These devices were heavier than normal. The body-shells were armoured against hard vacuum and heavy fire. The legs were more robust, and ended in flexible grab-claws. These things were designed to walk in the cold silence of the void, to scurry across the surface of starships, to find purchase as they sought to bite or cut a way inside. They were built to live like lice or ticks on the hull-skin of a shiftship.

The underslung gunpods were firing, the gyro-mounts turning each recoil slap into a fluid bounce. Deck plates erupted. Part of the chamber wall blew out in a dizzy gout of flame and sparks. One of the fueling wagons was blown to pieces.

An iron wheel squealed as it rolled across the deck.

Enemy foot soldiers, their visor slits glowing, advanced behind the stalk-tanks, firing as they came. Ezra felt a laugh building in his throat. He had survived the one-sided war by sticking to the hit-and-run resistance tactics of the Nihtgane. Stalk, kill, move, stay invisible. His situation was now beyond impossible.

Ezra knelt and took aim. He was partially shielded by the burning remains of a service crate. He aimed for the small, armoured window port on the nearest stalk-tank, and wondered if he could hit it. He was pretty confident he could. But could he penetrate it? Even if he poured on all the power left in the cell?

Yes. Yes, he could. He would kill it. It would be his last act as part of the Ghost regiment.

Ezra pulled the trigger. The gun did not fire. The rune was red. Power out.

Ezra allowed himself to laugh.

‘Is there any way of getting an external visual?’ Gaunt asked.

‘Are you commanding this ship now?’ Kelvedon snapped back.

‘Be silent, Kelvedon,’ Darulin commanded.

They had descended to the main tactical strategium, a broad projector well in the forward section of the bridge. Kelvedon was back on his feet, though his face was flushed. Other bridge seniors had followed them. Gaunt was surrounded by towering robed men who were only marginally organic, and angry, blue-uniformed command echelon officers. He was entirely out of place. This was not his kind of war, nor his area of expertise. He was Guard. Battlefleet and Astra Militarum, they were ancient rivals in glory, with entirely different mindsets. They always had been, since mankind first left the cradle of Terra and set out across the stars. One branch of humanity conquered worlds, the other conquered the void. They were allies, brothers… closer than that, perhaps. But they had never been friends. Their philosophies were too different. For a start, each one presumed that the other depended upon them.

But Gaunt put himself in the middle of it all. There were two reasons for that. The first was that all their lives were at stake and he was hardly going to sit idly by and let the battlefleet officers determine his regiment’s fate.

The second was that he had a sense of things. He had a sense of command. The thread of authority was the same in the Navy as it was in the Guard, and his years of service had left him with an instinct for it. The Armaduke was lost. It had lost its spirit. Spika was dead, and the confusion Gaunt had discovered on the bridge when he arrived was profound. These were high-functioning officers. They were brilliant and mentally agile. They should not have been frozen in shock and incap­able of decision. They should not have been gazing down at the corpse of their commander wondering what to do next.

They should not have needed a scruffy Guard commander to push his way in and administer futile chest compressions.

They were lost. Gaunt didn’t know why. He felt sure it was less to do with Spika’s death, and much more to do with the shredding violence and incomprehensible time-loss of their retranslation. The Armaduke was crippled, and its crew – linked to it in too many ­subtle and empathic ways to count – was crippled too.

Someone had to take the lead. Someone had to ignite some confidence. And that someone wasn’t Kelvedon, who saw only his own career path.

Gaunt remembered his time on the escort frigate Navarre, right at the start of his service with the Ghosts. There had been an executive officer, Kreff, who had been sympathetic. Most of what Gaunt understood about the battlefleet he had learned from Kreff.

The scions of the battlefleet, they were just men even if they didn’t look like men. And men were the same the universe over.

‘We need to get out of this,’ Gaunt said. He started speaking generally, casually. That was the first thing you did; you brought everybody in and acknowledged them. He hated to be so clinical, but there was no choice.

‘Can we light the strategium display?’ he added. Casual, just a side comment. Confidence.

The hololithic well started to light up around them. Hardlight forms and numeric displays painted their faces and their clothes.

‘I’m going to get my troopers ready,’ he said, still casual. ‘They’re going to protect this ship. They’re going to fight off anything that tries to get inside. I’ll welcome the support of your armsmen too.’

Be inclusive. That was the next step. Breed a sense of common action and respect. Now it was time for truth.

‘You’re hurt, and you’re dismayed. There’s no shame in that. What has overtaken us is terrible and it has hurt you all. But the ship is you, and you are the ship. It will not live without you. Spika loved this old girl. He would have wanted her to see out her days in safe hands.’

Gaunt looked at Darulin.

‘Externals?’

‘Processing now, sir,’ said the acting shipmaster.

‘How badly hurt are we?’ Gaunt asked. He aimed the question softly and generally.

The cowled Master of Artifice, flanked by his functionaries, sighed.

‘No drive. No main serial power. No secondary power. No shields. No weapon commit. No navigation. No sensory auspex. No scope. No intervox. No real space stability. Massive and serial gravitic disruption.’

‘I’m not Fleet,’ Gaunt said. ‘I take it that’s not a good list?’

The Master of Artifice actually smiled.

‘It is not, sir.’

‘Then enumerate the positives for me.’

The Master of Artifice hesitated. He glanced at Darulin and his subordinates.

‘Well… I suppose… we have environmental stability and general ­pressure integrity. Life support. Gravitics have resumed. We are running on tertiary batteries, which gives us six weeks real time, permitting use. We… we are alive.’

Now Gaunt smiled.

‘That, sir,’ he said, ‘is the basis for most Imperial Guard fightbacks. We’re alive. Thank the Throne. I never wanted to live forever, but a little while longer would be appreciated.’

‘Ten years longer,’ said Criid.

A grim ripple of laughter drifted around the strategium.

‘External view?’ Gaunt asked.

Darulin nodded and waved an actuation wand. The well filled with a massive data-projection map of the Armaduke. It presented nose-down like a drowning whale. Gaunt rubbed his mouth. He realised he’d honestly never known what the outside of the ship looked like. He was looking at something that had been the limits of his world for weeks.

He had known it was vast. He hadn’t realised how vast. The Armaduke was a massive structure, and now it was a helpless massive structure.

‘What are those?’ Gaunt asked, pointing to three blob structures visualised at the aft of the ship’s mass.

‘Enemy craft,’ replied Darulin. ‘Light warp vessels of a much smaller tonnage than us. They have secured themselves to us to facilitate boarding.’

‘Do they have a mother ship?’ asked Gaunt.

Darulin dialled the strategium view back with his wand. The Armaduke shrank rapidly. The revised view showed another vessel sitting off them at a distance of seventeen thousand kilometres. It was large, a cruiser perhaps.

‘Yes, there,’ said Darulin. ‘An Archenemy starship. No standard pattern discernible. A destroyer, I would imagine. Fast, agile, well armed.’

‘And it’s not firing on us because?’ Gaunt asked.

‘They want us as scrap. As prisoners, as raw materials,’ said Criid. ‘They want to pick our bones.’

Gaunt looked at her.

‘I supposed so,’ he said to her. ‘I was hoping the acting shipmaster here might admit it.’

‘Sorry, sir,’ said Criid.

‘Sorry,’ said Darulin. ‘That is… that is exactly what they’re doing.’