Part 16 (2/2)

*And you promised that you would cripple their machine-spirits and deliver them to us!' snapped Shon'tu. Velthinar's flesh rippled as it recoiled a little. *You will devour the Bastion Inviolate. That you have earned. But you did not deliver on your side of the bargain where the Endeavour of Will is concerned. The Iron Warriors will do with that star fort as we wish.'

Velthinar's many eyes narrowed. *If you think, warsmith, that a lord of the Silver Towers will be cowed by your anger...'

*Anger?' replied Shon'tu. *Why do you think I am angry?'

It was normally impossible to read expressions from the daemon's alien face, but the waggling of its mandibles and flexing of its forelimbs might well have indicated confusion.

*The lords of my Legion care only that a blow is struck against the sons of Dorn,' continued Shon'tu. *But what glory is there in watching their corpses tumble through the void? What pleasure can be gained from giving the kill to a creature such as you? Now, the Iron Warriors can face the Imperial Fists as it should be, face to face! The iron within us, and the iron without, will crush their entreaties to their Corpse-Emperor, and prove with whom the strength of the warp lies! Perhaps we need some humanity in us, daemon, to understand. Whatever I now am, I was once a human being, a man, and still I possess the jealousy and rage of a man faced with an enemy whose inferiority he cannot demonstrate. Now I can sate that anger with the blood of Imperial Fists! I give thanks to all the G.o.ds that you have failed, Velthinar. It is a gift from the warp! I am not here to remonstrate with you. I am here to tell you to stay out of our way until the killing is done.'

Velthinar was silent for a moment, limbs folding and unfolding as its various eyes came to focus on the Iron Warrior. *I begin to understand,' said the daemon, *why this task was given to you.'

The apothecarion of the Endeavour of Will was kept dark, the patients illuminated by the spotglobes that trained their lights on the prayer book over each bed. Automated manipulators turned each page at regular intervals, to make sure that if no one else was reading a prayer over the wounded, the eyes of the Emperor at least were looking on their words of devotion.

The Endeavour of Will had an apothecarion large enough for the wounded of an army. Now, however, it only had one patient a Techmarine Hestion, stripped of his armour and surrounded by medical servitors patiently weaving artificial skin over the wet red expanses of his burnt body.

Lysander watched the servitors work. Hestion was unconscious, kept in an induced coma by the autosurgeon pumping chemicals into his system. He could die then and there, or he could hold on for a long time. But Hestion was most certainly dying.

*His sacrifice will be remembered,' came a voice behind Lysander. Lysander turned to see another Imperial Fist in the doorway of the apothecarion. He walked into the ward, the dim light revealing him to be a lot younger than either Lysander or Hestion, a sergeant by his markings of rank, fresh-faced and relatively unscarred by the years of battle a s.p.a.ce Marine veteran endured. Young, thought Lysander, to have his own squad. Five Imperial Fists, wearing the same squad markings, followed him in.

*It is our duty,' replied Lysander, *to see that someone lives to remember.'

The sergeant held out a gauntlet. *Sergeant Rigalto,' he said. *It is an honour, First Captain.'

Lysander remembered the name. Every s.p.a.ce Marine in a Chapter at least knew of every other. Lysander remembered Rigalto as a line trooper, bright and respected, but not an officer.

*Those campaign badges,' said Lysander. *Agripinaa subsector.'

*You are correct, captain. Storming of the Basilica Pestilax.'

*Then that explains it,' said Lysander.

*Explains it?'

*Heavy losses at the Basilica. Your sergeant died and you took his place. Am I correct?'

*You are,' said Rigalto. *My honour and my despair. I saw him die, and could not stop it. One day he will be avenged.'

*Such things must be known by a captain of the Chapter without asking,' said Lysander. *We are spread so thin, we can die without our brothers knowing of it.'

*They will all be remembered, just like Techmarine Hestion,' said Rigalto. *In time, their names will be written down, when the enemy is driven back into the Eye.'

Lysander nodded. *That at least I can promise. Well, we have you and your squad, and myself. Who else holds the Endeavour of Will?'

*Scout squad Menander,' replied Rigalto. *They are on their tour of service, in preparation for elevation to full brotherhood. The station crew under Enginseer Selicron, and Astropath Vaynce.'

*And my command squad,' said Lysander. *Seventeen Imperial Fists, including myself. Quite the army, is it not?'

*And the Siege of Malebruk,' said Rigalto. *And the weapons of the star fort. Thanks to Hestion, the machine-spirit still has some of the weapons on-line.'

*Enough to kill Shon'tu,' said Lysander. *He banked on us being slain by his virus attack without his traitors having to raise their guns. Now he must give us a fight that we can win.'

*I have heard tell,' said Rigalto, *of the s.h.i.+eld of Valour. Of Malodrax. To us, those who were recruited after the event, it is told like a parable. But to you, it was real. It is memory. To fight alongside one whoa'

*Malodrax is in the past,' said Lysander, holding up a hand to silence Rigalto. *A battle is to be fought now, and it is to the present that I would have us turn our thoughts.'

*Then it is enough to say that we shall help you make the Iron Warriors pay for the s.h.i.+eld of Valour, and all that followed.'

Lysander's vox-link chirped. *Chrystis here,' came the transmission from the Siege of Malebruk.

*Speak,' said Lysander.

*Captain, we are under attack.'

From the glare of the system's sun, the waning red star Kholestus, the Ferrous Malice dived through sensor-baffling bands of solar radiation.

The Siege of Malebruk turned to face it, presenting a broadside which brought as many of its guns to bear as possible. In its tactical orrery, Chrystis and the s.h.i.+p's battle-cartographers used holographic void-maps and rulers and compa.s.ses alike to build up an a.r.s.enal of manoeuvres the Siege could execute depending on the actions of their enemy. On the Ferrous Malice far less natural things, crewmen possessed with daemons of cunning and corrupted machine-spirits, were doing the same.

Naval battle proceeded at its own pace, as if time meant something different when it came to s.h.i.+p-to-s.h.i.+p murder in the void. Torpedoes and broadside sh.e.l.ls proceeded not at the speed of gunfire, but lazily, spiralling through s.p.a.ce to intersect with the likely locations of the enemy. It was war in which geometry and helmsmans.h.i.+p counted for more than aggression and fearlessness, cold-blooded and removed compared to the thunder of face-to-face battle.

That cool detachment broke as the first sh.e.l.ls. .h.i.t home. The barrage from the Ferrous Malice's nose cannons speckled the hull of the Siege with silvery explosions, and inside, crewmen were shredded as metal deformed into bursts of jagged blades. Air shrieked out of hull breaches and damage control teams stationed beyond the inner hull died as the void boomed in to strangle and freeze them. Fires broke out, cutting off teams of crewmen with walls of flame.

The return fire from the Siege took its toll, hammering into the armoured prow of the enemy s.h.i.+p. Hull plates were torn free, and ribbons of frozen blood billowed out as the strange, half-living physiology of the s.h.i.+p was breached. The Ferrous Malice pa.s.sed under the Siege, both s.h.i.+ps battered by the first exchange of fire.

The Ferrous Malice was the larger s.h.i.+p, a grand cruiser of a design long forgotten by the s.h.i.+pyards of the Imperial Navy, and it sported more firepower covering every angle of attack. But the Siege of Malebruk was a s.p.a.ce Marine strike cruiser, with far greater agility and a quick-witted machine-spirit that calculated thousands of attack solutions every moment at the same time as fending off the virus attacks from the mind of Velthinar Silverspine. The two spiralled around one another, the Chaos vessel in one moment seeming lumbering and slow, and in the next making the strike cruiser seem ma.s.sively outgunned and outcla.s.sed.

But this was just the overture. In a plume of purple black flame, alchemical rockets flared along the spine of the Ferrous Malice and slowed it down suddenly, twisting it into a reverse manoeuvre far beyond any Imperial-built s.h.i.+ps of its size. At the same time its prow split open, revealing folds and tendons of vulnerable muscle, already torn and bleeding from the opening fire. From this biomechanical ma.s.s emerged the snout of a nova cannon. Few Imperial s.h.i.+pyards could forge such a weapon now, and none knew the secrets of creating the nuclear flame that now flared around the barrel as the weapon charged.

The crew of the Siege of Malebruk responded to this unexpected change in the battlefield by turning every effort towards evasion. The machine-spirit charted a crazed, jinking path that wrapped itself around the Ferrous Malice, too far for defensive turrets to open up against the strike cruiser but too close for the nova cannon to be brought to bear.

The nova cannon stayed silent. The Siege of Malebruk moved out of its arc of fire, even as the Chaos s.h.i.+p's alchemical rockets fired again to turn it back on itself again.

The Ferrous Malice had no machine-spirit. In place of an artificial intelligence roosted a host of data-daemons, insubstantial warp creatures that flocked to serve their master, Velthinar. They squabbled and fought faster than the speed of thought and, through the sheer bedlam that went through their inhuman minds, wove battle plans that no enemy could predict. Their p.r.o.nouncements were pa.s.sed on to the crew and the strange unwholesome creatures that writhed through the oil sumps of the engine decks. The insane command structure of the s.h.i.+p, with the Iron Warriors overseeing multiple castes of mind-slaves, possessees, daemons and mutants, should never have permitted anything so complicated as a wars.h.i.+p to function a but the Ferrous Malice was a construct of Chaos, transformed into a voidbound asylum by millennia in the warp, and by some incomprehensible process all the madness produced a s.h.i.+p that could think and act faster than should have been possible for its size.

And so the Ferrous Malice rolled on its side, presenting a scarred expanse of hull to the enemy. The broadside guns mounted there did not fire, and the crew of the Siege of Malebruk took advantage of this unusual good luck to hammer out a broadside of their own, stripping away hull plating and ripping charred craters along the length of the enemy. Fires billowed out into the void as ammunition and fuel stores cooked off. The wounding was terrible, with laser turrets boring holes decks deep and vast areas of the Ferrous Malice depressurising and throwing struggling handfuls of crew into s.p.a.ce.

Then the hull peeled away of its own accord. Coils of muscle unravelled, whipping across the closing gap between the two s.h.i.+ps and wrapping around the extremities of the Siege of Malebruk. The tentacles reeled in the strike cruiser, even as armoured beaks, like the mouthparts of some sea-dwelling kraken, emerged from the ruination of torn flesh and metal inside the Ferrous Malice.

The machine-spirit of the Siege of Malebruk had not factored in this turn of events. The s.h.i.+p had nothing to fight off the grand cruiser's predations. Up close it had its defensive turret fire, which was designed to shoot down approaching torpedoes and bombers, and would have scarcely any impact on the ma.s.s of the Ferrous Malice. It had the option to board, but aside from the few spare crewmen it could arm it had only the single command squad who had accompanied Captain Lysander to the star fort. The Ferrous Malice, meanwhile, was guaranteed to be br.i.m.m.i.n.g with mutants, psychopaths and worse.

The Imperial Fists on board, offensive as the presence of the Ferrous Malice was, would not throw their lives away boarding it and accepting certain death. They would do more good opposing the s.h.i.+p's undoubted intention to take on the Endeavour of Will. The order was given for the Siege of Malebruk's crew to abandon s.h.i.+p.

The Ferrous Malice had no intention of letting all those fleshy morsels go. Tendrils snapped out from its ruptured hull, snaring saviour pods and shuttle craft as they fled the Siege. Dozens of men and women died as their escape craft were smashed open, or were forced alive down one of the gullets that opened up within the biological ma.s.s beneath the hull of the Ferrous Malice. The armoured shuttle carrying the Imperial Fists weaved between spinning wrecks and the biological growths trying to ensnare it, the survival of five of the Imperium's finest warriors now down to nothing more than the encoded skills of a servitor-pilot and a hefty dose of fate.

The Ferrous Malice reeled the Siege of Malebruk into a close embrace. Beaks armoured with bone crunched into the strike cruiser's hull, ripping through decks and shearing off one of the s.h.i.+p's engine sections. Plasma coolant billowed silver-black into the vacuum, and the reactors discharged their power load in a storm of blue lightning. The shockwaves tore apart more escape craft, or shredded their guidance systems to send them tumbling without power in all directions.

The Chaos s.h.i.+p dismembered the strike cruiser, forcing ma.s.sive chunks of s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p into its many jaws. The machine-spirit of the Siege of Malebruk survived until the last, moving from one stack of datamedium to the next as parts of the s.h.i.+p were crushed or torn away. The strike cruiser was a gutted sh.e.l.l by the time it ran out of places to hide, and its existence winked out in the closing maw of the Chaos s.h.i.+p.

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