The Warmaster

Seven: The Line

Ezra was still laughing at his own doom when fury burst into the compartment. The slap of the shock wave threw him onto his side. The air filled with billowing smoke.

Huge figures emerged out of it.

Sar Af, the White Scar. Holofurnace, the Iron Snake. Eadwine, the ­Silver Guard. Full armour. Full weapons.

Three warriors alone against the mass of raiders flooding the vast compartment.

‘Kill them all,’ Eadwine said, a growl of sub-vox.

The Archenemy troopers, dazed and dismayed by the breaching blast, began firing. Las-bolts and hard-rounds pinged and slapped off the armoured Adeptus Astartes. In unison, they raised their bolt weapons and returned fire.

Bolter shots mowed down two rows of Archenemy foot troops. Explosive horror threw shredded meat and debris into the air. The enemy mass reeled back, recoiling as its leading edge was blown apart.

Ezra watched in disbelief as the three Space Marines charged the bulk of the foe. As they met the line, the impact threw bodies into the air. Eadwine’s chainsword flashed, roaring. Archenemy troopers collapsed like harvested corn, their armoured bodies torn apart. Particles of flesh, blood, tissue and metal showered out of the carnage. A wet red fog began to cloud the burning air.

To Eadwine’s left, Holofurnace hacked his way through the shrieking raiders. They were turning on each other, frantically fighting to get out of the giant’s path. The Iron Snake reached a stalk-tank and split open its belly with his lance. Fluid, blood and toxic water spewed out of the sliced control bubble. Holofurnace stabbed the tip of his lance inside the wreck to impale the huddled body of the hard-wired pilot.

Another tank began firing, auto-tracking its target. Holofurnace was jarred back by the scorching impacts, but remained on his feet and hurled his lance like a javelin. Impaled through its core, the stalk-tank shivered, spasmed and collapsed, venting bio-fluid.

Holofurnace wrenched his lance out. Fluid spattered.

‘For the Emperor!’ he yelled.

At Eadwine’s right hand, Sar Af pounced and landed on the back of another stalk-tank. It thrashed under his weight. He punched through the top of the main body to haul the driver out, and hurled the writhing body aside as he threw himself off the collapsing machine. Milling foot troops broke his fall. He killed them with his fists as they tried to scramble out from underneath him. More fled. Sar Af howled and followed them, cutting them down with his bolter.

Eadwine was murdering the foot troops too. Chainsword in one fist, storm bolter in the other, he was simply striding into the fumbling lines of the raiders like a man walking determinedly into a brisk gale, head down and unstoppable. Sparks flashed as hard munitions pinged and glanced off his armoured mass. He fired, selectively and methodically, toppling groups at a time, slashing into any bodies that came too close as though cutting back undergrowth.

Ezra left cover and cautiously followed in their wake. The Adeptus Astar­tes giants had cut a swathe down the engine house, littering the broad deck with burning wreckage and tangled corpses. The deck was awash with blood.

Ezra crouched, and pulled a lasgun from the dead grip of a fallen enemy. This time, he took spare clips too.

It was time to stop dying. It was time to win back the ship.

Ornella Zhukova led a portion of Pasha’s company along the ventral tunnel that approached the engine compartments from the bow of the ship. She could hear the rattle and boom of fighting from the chambers ahead, and she could smell burn-smoke. Every few seconds, the deck shook.

Everything had a glassy feel, a slightly out-of-focus softness. She didn’t know if that was the smoke getting in her eyes or her own mind. Something had happened. An accident. Something distressing that involved the physics and processes of shiftship travel, and it made her feel sick.

The company had been prepping for secondary orders. Then everything had gone to hell. Had they been hit, or was it something worse than that? She’d woken with a grinding headache, and many of her troopers had been sick, or complained of nausea or nosebleeds.

‘Vox?’ she hissed.

‘Nothing!’ the caster-man replied. Wall-mounted units wheezed nothing but static, and the squad’s voxcasters coughed and crackled.

‘Keep it tight!’ she ordered. The men were in disarray. Confusion did that, confusion and fear. They didn’t know the situation, and they didn’t know what they were facing. Worse, they had so little ammo. There had been no time to send carts down to the munition stocks, and even if there had been, Zhukova knew the racks were almost bare.

The regiment was in no position to fight another war.

One of her scouts appeared from a transverse duct and hurried to her.

‘Spetnin?’ she asked.

‘In lateral two, advancing, ma’am,’ the scout replied. He looked out of breath. His face was filmy with soot and grease. Spetnin had taken half the company to shadow Zhukova’s mob along the parallel hallway in the hope that, between them, they could block any forward movement along the aft thoroughfares. That’s if they’d remembered the deck plans right. Zhukova’s head hurt so much, she could barely remember her own birthday.

‘What does he report?’ she asked.

The scout shrugged.

‘A shrug is not an answer,’ she snapped.

‘Same as here,’ the scout replied, wary of her famous anger. ‘Fighting ahead.’

The hallway had been damaged by frame stress. Wiring in the walls was shorting out and crackling with white sparks that floated like snowflakes onto the deck. Oil dripped from the ceiling and ­dribbled from ruptured pipes. Some of the deck’s grav plates had worked loose or become misaligned, and they shifted uneasily underfoot, like boards floating on a lake. In one section, an entire twenty-metre portion of deck plate had broken away and slammed flat against the ceiling, held there by its own, un­secured antigravity systems. The exposed underdeck was a mass of wires and stanchions, and cables trailed from overhead like vines. Blood dripped down. Someone had been standing on the plate when it had snapped free, and had been sandwiched against the roof by six tons of rapidly elevating metal.

The blood was the first sign Zhukova had seen of any of the ship’s crew.

Up ahead, Trooper Blexin raised a hand. He had stopped. She knew that tilt of the head. He’d heard something.

She was about to say his name. Blexin buckled and fell, sprays of blood gouting from his back as shots tore through him. Gunfire cut down the three men with him.

The company hit the walls, scrambling into cover behind bulkheads and hatch frames. Shots whined past. Zhukova hoisted her carbine, leaned out and snapped off return fire. Some of the men around her did the same. They had no idea what they were shooting at, but it felt good to retaliate.

The gunfire coming at them fell away.

‘Hold! Hold it!’ Zhukova shouted. ‘No wastage!’

She risked a step forwards, keeping to the wall. The first squad followed her, shuffling down the hallway, hunched, their rifles to their shoulders, tracking.

She edged past the bodies of Blexin and his mates. The deck plates quivered restlessly. She took another step. There was a sharp pistol-shot bang, and one of the plate’s restraining pins sheared. A corner of the plate lifted from the underfloor, flexing, straining, like a tent sheet caught by the wind, wanting to snap its guy wires and fly away.

Zhukova swallowed hard. Sliding her feet rather than stepping, she worked along the trembling plate. She guessed three or maybe four heavy duty pins were all that were keeping the damaged section down, all that stood between her and a grotesque fate squashed like a bug against the ceiling.

She stepped onto the next deck plate. It was firmer. Gorin, Velter and Urnos followed her. She could smell the garlic sausage stink of Urnos’ fear-sweat.

A shape moved in the drifting smoke ahead of her. She saw the enemy. Some robed heathen monster with a slit for eyes.

‘Hostile!’ she yelled, and snapped off two shots. The enemy trooper caught them both in the chest and slammed backwards. Answering gunfire raked out of the smoke, hard-round shots that swirled the smoke into plumes and weird spirals. She hit the wall, willing it to swallow her up. A bullet ripped open the musette bag on her hip. Velter went down, head shot, and Gorin toppled backwards, hit in the shoulder and chest. Urnos dropped on his belly and started to fire and yell.

The angle of the enemy fusillade altered, raking the deck, trying to hit Gorin and the yelling Urnos. Zhukova saw plating buckle. She saw the edge of the damaged plate she’d slid across taking hits.

‘Back! Back! Back!’ she yelled at the rest of the company behind her.

A deck pin blew out. No longer able to anchor the restless plate, the other pins sheared explosively under the strain. Unstable gravitics slammed the loosed deck plate into the ceiling like a flying carpet. It fell up the way a boulder falls down. There was a terrible, crunching impact. Zhukova had no idea how many of her trailing first squad had been standing on it when it broke free. All she saw was Gorin, who had been sprawled on his back across the join. The plate swept him up like a hoist and crushed him against the roof, crushed his head, arms and upper body. His legs, dangling clear, remained intact and hung, impossibly, like a pair of breeches strung from a washing line.

Dust and flames billowed along the tunnel. The firing stopped for a moment. Zhukova grabbed Urnos and hauled him up to the wall. She couldn’t see any part of her company in the tunnel behind her. All she could see was Gorin’s heavy, slowly swinging legs.

‘We’re screwed, captain,’ Urnos whined.

She slapped his face hard.

‘Get on your feet, Verghast!’ she said.

Gripping her carbine, she started to edge forwards. Urnos got up and followed her. She could hear the hoarse gulps of his rapid breathing.

‘This is madness…’

‘Just shut up, Urnos. Operate like a soldier.’

A few metres beyond, two bodies lay against the wall. Arch­enemy boarders. They were dirty and roughly armoured, patchwork soldiers that reminded Zhukova of the scratch companies that had hunted the Zoican Rubble. She had no idea who had cut them down. It could have been her or Urnos. She fumbled with their webbing, and found some hard-round clips, but nothing that would suit her carbine or Urnos’ rifle.

She heard movement from ahead. She pushed Urnos against the wall, then clamped her hand around his mouth and nose to dampen the noise of his frantic breathing.

Trapped smoke made the tunnel air thick and glassy. She saw two of the enemy picking their way towards them out of the haze. Two more followed. They were shrouded in heavy, filthy coats and their body-plate was dull and worn. Their faces were covered by blast visors or mesh hoods. Red light glowed from the visor slits, suggesting enhanced optics or even dark-sight systems.

But she’d spotted them before they’d spotted her. Verghast eyes were strong, and beat corrupt tech enhancements. Because Vervun was strong, built to endure and survive, its youth born strong into freedom, healthy and vital, in the image of the God-Emperor…

Zhukova swallowed. It was all so much bull. She’d been listening to Major Pasha’s patriotic speeches too long, listening to the crap spouted by the commissars as they conditioned the fighting schools.

The enemy hadn’t seen her because she and Urnos were cowering behind a wall strut. Another few seconds, and their optics would pick up their body heat through the ambient fuzz of the smoke. Optic enhan­cers didn’t necessarily mean heat-readers too, but Zhukova’s experience told her that the universe took every opportunity it could to be as cruel as possible.

They had to move, or they’d be dead in seconds.

She slowly withdrew her hand from Urnos’ mouth. She held up four fingers, then tapped herself and indicated left with two fingers. Then she tapped his chest and forked two fingers right.

Urnos nodded. He was scared out of his wits.

She made a fist he could see, and bounced it, one… two…

Three.

They came out of hiding together, firing. It was a simple, effective play, one the company had done in drill many times. She’d take the two on the left, he’d take the two on the right. Surprise was in their corner.

Their disadvantage was that Urnos, damn his garlic-reeking hide, didn’t know his left from his right.

The two boarders on the left went straight down. Zhukova had tagged one with a headshot, and the other had been slammed over by las-bolts from both their weapons. Urnos was in her way, jostling her, trying to occupy the half of the tunnel he thought she’d told him to be in. Her next shot went wide, and he put two precious bolts into the floor.

She never got to ask him if he was just plain stupid, or if the fear and tension had scrambled his wits.

The two raiders on the right returned fire immediately, before their comrades had even hit the deck. Muzzle flashes leapt and flickered in the closed space. Hard-rounds spat at them. Urnos took a round in the forehead and another in the cheek, the impacts twisting his face into a gross cartoon of itself. He rotated away from her, blood jetting from his ruptured skull, hit the far wall and slid down, his legs kicking.

Zhukova turned, unflinching, and dropped the raiders with single shots, pinpoint. She ran into the smoke, ducked into the shadows, and shot at the next wave of raiders as they pushed forwards, hitting them in the ribs and the sides of their heads.

She risked a look. More raiders were advancing on her. She snapped off a shot or two, and a hail of gunfire came in reply.

There was no one with her, no one behind her, not even close.

She could stay down and wait to die, or move and strike. It would cost her her life, but it was a chance to put a stop to the enemy advance. Scratch company tactics. She remembered Pasha’s lectures. Do the unexpected. Take the risk. Deal a wound to the enemy when you get the chance, even if you pay for it. Because it’s not you, it’s the fight entire. You do your part when you can. You don’t step back so you can enjoy reviewing the battle when it’s done, because the result you review will probably be a loss.

Zhukova swung out, firing. She had switched to full auto. Las-rounds kicked out of her carbine and ripped through the first rank of raiders. The next rank began to topple and collapse. Some got off shots, but they went past her, wild.

‘Gak you all to hell and back!’ she screamed.

Zhukova kept firing. Damn wastage. Damn aiming. Damn even seeing. Urnos’ blood was in her eyes and all over her face.

The boarders came apart like bags of meat. They fell towards her. Shaking, Zhukova looked down at her weapon. The alert sigil lit up, telling her the cell was out. How long had it been out? Had she emptied it making the kills?

The boarders had fallen towards her…

She blinked, and wiped blood off her mouth with a shaking hand.

Mkoll appeared through the smoke behind the bodies of the enemy. He raised his hand, and beckoned to her with a double twitch of his fingers.

On the company deck, the women of the retinue had gathered the children and the elderly into the storage rooms and set up barriers at the main hatches using cot frames. Ayatani Zwiel hurried around, helping the injured, and making reassuring speeches to dispel fear. It was going to take more than a few kind words.

Yoncy wouldn’t stop crying.

‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ Juniper soothed her. ‘We’ll be safe.’

It wasn’t all right. Juniper could smell smoke in the air, and every few minutes there was a thump or bang from aft, some of them fierce enough to shake the deck. Most of the children were crying or at least whimpering, but Yoncy’s sobbing seemed particularly piercing.

It didn’t sound like fear. It sounded like pain.

‘Juniper?’

Juniper looked around and saw Elodie.

‘What are you doing here?’ Juniper asked.

‘I was in the infirmary when it happened,’ Elodie said.

‘But what happened?’ Juniper asked.

‘I’m not really sure,’ said Elodie. She could see that Juniper was scared. ‘I thought I could help down here. Help with the kids.’

She took Yoncy out of Juniper’s arms.

‘Honne’s taken a knock to the head,’ she said, gesturing towards a woman sprawled in the walkway nearby. ‘Get her on a cot and see if you can fix a dressing.’

Juniper nodded and hurried to Honne’s side.

‘It’s all right, Yoncy,’ Elodie said. Yoncy was crying loudly, and it was setting off the younger children all around them.

‘Yoncy, calm yourself,’ said Elodie. ‘You’re a big girl now. Stop your sobbing.’

‘The bad shadow,’ Yoncy wailed.

‘What? What, honey?’

‘I want Tona. I want my brother. I want Papa Gol!’

‘They’re busy, Yoncy,’ Elodie said, stroking the girl’s hair.

‘Busy with the bad shadow because it came back,’ she said.

‘What’s the bad shadow?’ asked Elodie. She didn’t really want to know. Sometimes, the imaginations of children conjured horrors far worse than anything real. In the cot rows some nights, she’d talked small children down from nightmares that had chilled her heart.

‘I want my papa,’ said Yoncy, wiping her eyes clumsily on her over-long sleeve. ‘He knows what to do. He knows how things are meant to be.’

‘Major Kolea is a brave soldier,’ nodded Elodie. ‘He’ll be here soon, I’m sure of it, and he will chase the bad shadows away, Yoncy.’

The child looked at her as if she were stupid.

‘Shadow,’ she said, overemphasising the correction. ‘Papa Gol can’t chase the shadow away. He’s not bright enough.’

‘Oh, now! Gol’s a clever man,’ said Elodie.

‘Not bright bright, silly,’ frowned Yoncy. ‘Bright bright. When Papa comes, everything…’

She hesitated.

Elodie smiled.

‘Gol will be here soon,’ she said.

‘You don’t understand, do you?’ asked Yoncy.

‘I… No, not really.’

‘No one does,’ said Yoncy. ‘No one can see in the dark.’

Yoncy tilted her head and looked up at the broad, ducted ceiling of the company deck.

‘It’s almost here,’ she said. ‘The bad shadow will fall across us.’