The Warmaster

Ten: Visiting Death

Immense, the Archenemy battleship slid towards the helpless Imperial wreck. The real space engines of the Tormageddon Monstrum Rex pulsed lazily in the stellar twilight, growling circles of red light that flickered and wavered like dying suns. The battleship’s vast form, flaring back to jagged bat-wings, was almost entirely unlit, and the blackness of it blotted out the stars, as if the void, reflecting and emitting nothing, had become a living thing.

Its battery cowlings retracted like eyelids. In the opened gun-ports, weapons lit and began to shine like lanterns along its edge as power charged the feeding cables and generator ducts of the guns. Red volcanic light throbbed as it illuminated the ship from within, a ruddy glow within the charred black skin and bone of the monster’s hull.

It was still murmuring its name, like the distant ragged breathing of some oceanic behemoth.

‘Enemy vessel weapon banks have armed!’ sang out the adept manning data-acquisition.

‘Do we have weapons?’ Gaunt demanded.

Darulin shook his head.

‘All fire control systems are defunct,’ he replied. ‘We cannot arm or aim–’

‘Shields, then?’ Gaunt asked.

‘Stand by,’ said Kelvedon. He had taken station at a nearby console with the Master of Warding and three tech-adepts. The techs were attempting some kind of bypass, their augmetic hands fluttering over the banks of controls. Noospheric exchanges hissed between them as they frantically exchanged data. Gaunt could hear the squeaks at the very edge of his hearing.

‘Some port-side shielding may be viable,’ said Kelvedon. ‘Artifice has re-routed through secondary trunking.’

‘That won’t hold,’ warned the Master of Artifice. ‘The power ratios are too significant for secondary branches to conduct them.’

‘But we’re trying it anyway?’ asked Gaunt.

The Master of Artifice looked at him, the delicate metal iris of his optics dilating wide with a tiny whir.

‘Of course, Guard soldier,’ he said, ‘for there is nothing else left to try.’

‘Power in three!’ Kelvedon announced.

‘Ignite the shields,’ ordered Acting Shipmaster Darulin.

‘Shields, aye!’

There was a deep, low groan, a cthonic bass note, deeper than any a ­templum organ could have produced. The bridge vibrated. The lights dimmed.

‘Shields!’ cried Kelvedon.

The screens around the central bridge area turned red, alive with amber warning runes.

‘Shields failed,’ Kelvedon sighed.

The Master of Artifice checked his board.

‘Power fluctuation was too great,’ he said. ‘We could not sustain shield integrity. Shields are dead.’

Felyx rose to his feet. The lights were coming and going.

‘What the hell’s happening?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ludd, ‘but it can’t be good.’

Eszrah Ap Niht sat on the walkway platform overlooking the main engine house. He’d climbed up the metal ladders to escape the worst of it. Fires were blazing in the compartment below, and the decks were littered with dead. The battle had been ferocious. He’d lost sight of the Adeptus Astar­tes warriors. The fighting had driven through the main house and into the secondary compartments behind it. He could still hear small-arms fire and the sporadic boom of bolter weapons.

He had no clear sense of victory or loss. The ship seemed to be dying anyway. He could hear the mighty system wheezing and coughing.

Instinctively, he knew that whatever path they had been following, it was about to end.

The Tormaggedon Monstrum Rex spoke. Three of its charged batteries lit and spat, lancing white-hot energy at the crippled Highness Ser Armaduke. The strikes hit the aft section, bursting out in huge cones of light and debris.

Streaming vapour and burning gas, the Armaduke began to tumble again.

Gaunt got up off the bridge deck. The chamber was in uproar around him.

‘Are we dead?’ he yelled.

Most of the displays had gone blank, including the light show of the strategium. Servitors were hosing several consoles with plumes of extinguisher gas as officers dragged injured crewmen back.

‘We’re blind! No data!’ called the Master of Artifice.

‘Well, clearly, we’re not dead,’ said Criid. ‘Not actually dead.’

She’d cut her chin when she’d been knocked to the deck. She wiped the blood away.

‘We took three strikes,’ said Darulin. ‘At least three.’

‘Aft strikes,’ agreed Kelvedon.

‘To cripple the drives?’ asked one of the data officers.

‘Are they toying with us?’ Gaunt asked. ‘Darulin, are they playing with us? Is this sport? Drawing out our demise?’

‘I do not have any information, sir,’ Darulin replied helplessly. He barked orders to the adepts around him, and they moved to the strategium to repair and restart.

Over the bridge speakers, the Tormaggeddon Monstrum Rex spoke again. It was no longer chanting its name.

‘What does that mean?’ asked Curth. ‘Is it making demands?’

‘It’s hard to translate,’ said Mabbon Etogaur.

‘Really try,’ suggested Varl, holding the headset out to him.

Mabbon glanced at the Ghosts surrounding him in the brig. It was impossible to gauge his expression.

‘Roughly then, it said, “That which is born must live”,’ he said.

‘What is that?’ asked Rawne.

‘It’s unclear,’ replied Mabbon. ‘The word “born” can also be used in the sense of “made” or “manufactured”, and the word-forms for “live” can also mean “survive” or “endure”. So… it could equally be understood as, “That which was constructed must remain whole”.’

‘Was that it?’ asked Hark.

‘No,’ said Mabbon, pressing his ear to the ’phones Varl was holding out. ‘It’s repeating it, like another chant. “That which was made must remain whole… the offspring of the Great Master…”.’

‘Offspring?’ said Hark, stepping closer.

‘Again, that’s open to interpretation,’ Mabbon told him with an apologetic shrug. ‘The word “offspring” can mean a thing made, or a child, or something spawned. It is the female noun…’

‘What, like a daughter?’ asked Oysten.

‘No, I think not,’ said Mabbon. ‘Things are female. Ships, for example, are referred to as “she”. The connotation is any significant creation.’

He paused.

‘What?’ snapped Rawne. ‘What else?’

‘It just said,’ said Mabbon, ‘it said, “All this shall be the will of he whose voice drowns out all others”.’

He looked at Varl and shook his head. Varl lowered the headset.

‘It has stopped speaking,’ he said.

‘I’m scared!’ sobbed Yoncy. ‘I want Papa to come!’

Elodie held her tight. She didn’t know what to say.

‘Come on!’ Gaunt yelled at the Navy adepts repairing the strategium. They glanced up at him, puzzled, their optics blank.

‘Barking orders may serve well in the Astra Militarum, sir,’ said the Master of Artifice, ‘but in the Fleet we favour a more effective system of encouragement and support.’

Gaunt stared at him, and then stepped back and shrugged.

‘The colonel-commissar has displayed the virtue of dynamism in this crisis so far,’ Darulin said to the Master of Artifice. ‘He has been by far the most controlled of any of us. And if this is my ship now…’

His voice trailed off, and he glanced over at Spika’s body on the deck nearby, where Curth was still tending him.

‘It is my ship now,’ he repeated. ‘In which case… get this damn strategium functioning!’

Startled at his rage, the adepts resumed work with increased vigour.

‘The primary optic relay is blown, master,’ one of the adepts reported.

‘Replacement parts are located in hold fifty,’ said another, reading off the manifest the noosphere was displaying in front of his eyes.

‘There’s no time for that,’ said Darulin. ‘Bridge it. Splice in! Now!’

The adepts hesitated.

The Master of Artifice pushed them aside. He extended his arms and held his augmetic hands over the open casing of the strategium table. Prehensile cables, as slender as twine and as fluid as snakes, curled out of recesses in his wrist-mounts and wormed their way into the complex mechanism, attaching and connecting.

‘Splice established,’ he said. ‘Temporary operational relay in place. You have approximately four minutes.’

Gaunt glanced at Darulin.

‘The Master of Artifice has bridged the relay,’ Darulin said. ‘His own bio-mech system has become a replacement component.’

‘Activate,’ the Master of Artifice ordered. Power was thrown. He ­trembled and shuddered, but remained standing. Gaunt could see a faint halo of heat-bleed surrounding him.

‘That looks dangerous,’ Gaunt said.

‘It has its limits,’ replied Darulin. He moved to the strategium, entered the access code, and the display relit.

They peered at it.

‘Resolution is impaired,’ said Darulin. ‘Data retrieval is a fraction of what we had before.’

He studied the display. Blocks of machine text and code swam hololithically around the three-dimensional representation of the Armaduke. It was the bones of the ship, a skeletal diagram. Gaunt could see three bright wounds around the aft section of the ship, damage points that glowed so brightly data was negated. The area around them was fogged with fragments of loose data.

‘Are those imaging defects?’ asked Gaunt.

‘No,’ said Darulin. ‘That’s the best the strategium overview can do to render the debris field.’

‘We’re hit badly then?’

Darulin frowned.

‘We’re not hit at all, sir,’ he said softly.

‘What?’

‘Those three impact sites… they are the remains of the three boarding vessels that had clamped to us. The enemy raiders have been burned off our hull.’

‘Are you being serious?’ asked Gaunt.

‘By that?’ asked Criid, pointing at the predatory shadow of the enemy killship that was looming over the Armaduke. It was so vast only a small portion of it appeared in the spherical display field.

‘Yes,’ said Darulin. ‘The enemy killship has annihilated our enemies. It… it has spared us.’

‘Saved us?’

‘With pinpoint accuracy. It would seem so.’

‘Why?’ said Gaunt. ‘Why?’

‘It is an attested fact that the logic and mindset of the Archenemy is alien to us,’ said Kelvedon.

‘I know that better than most,’ said Gaunt. He took a step back. He realised he was shaking. It was panic. He’d been running on adrenaline, the rush that had seen him through years of war and combat. But now he felt fear, genuine fear. Not a fear of risk or danger, or the desperation of warfare. It was horror. A terror of the unknown. A simple inability to comprehend and fathom the dark workings of the galaxy. He could fight a physical enemy, no matter the odds. A practical problem could be attacked and extinguished. But this was beyond him, and he despised the feeling. There was no sense. The harder he looked for it, the less sense there was.

‘Perhaps–’ Criid began. Everyone looked at her.

‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘it’s a territorial thing. Like gang versus gang. We’re the enemy to both, but they are no kind of friends. Perhaps the big brute wants us for itself.’

‘The notion is not without value,’ Darulin nodded.

‘We should anticipate, then, a further boarding action from the killship?’ said Criid. ‘I mean, re-form and stand ready to repel again?’

Gaunt nodded.

‘If that’s its intention,’ he said. ‘Yes, that would be wise. Whatever defence we can now muster–’

‘Sir!’ said Kelvedon.

Darulin turned to look.

‘The enemy killship has powered down its weapons,’ said Kelvedon, studying the tactical display. ‘It is retraining power to its drives.’

On the display, the giant shadow began to stir.

The Archenemy warship, black as night, began to move. Starlight glinted off the bare metal buttresses that lined its coal-black hull. Its prow rose like the beak of a breaching whale, then it banked silently and plunged back into the abyssal trenches of space.

The Armaduke’s bruised sensors retained a track on its heat-wake as it extended away from them by sixty, eighty, one hundred thousand kilometres.

Then the Master of Artifice had to be uncoupled from the strategium for his own safety. His flesh was starting to smoulder, and he could no longer form intelligible words. The strategium display shut down.

By then, the Tormaggeddon Monstrum Rex was a million miles away, vanishing into the starfield.