Gershon beat his knuckles on the console. ‘We’re being jammed, sir.’
‘I don’t care if you have to write a letter on parchment and throw it to him, lieutenant, but we must warn the ground of what is happening here. Put a despatch in an escape pod and fire it off if you have to, but you will contact our ground forces. They have to know what they are facing.’
‘Aye, sir.’ Gershon lifted a ship-intercom and began barking orders and information down it, never taking his eyes off the screens for a second.
‘Under way, engines at forty per cent,’ a servitor grated in rusty Low Gothic.
‘Lasburners firing. Sixteen torpedoes away,’ Miranich said. ‘Those are our last, shipmaster. All other torpedo banks have been destroyed.’
‘Voidsunders?’
‘Attempting a targeting resolution. Voidsunders will fire again in eight seconds.’
Massaron wiped blood out of his eyes.
‘We hit them – we hit them hard, sir,’ Gershon exulted, teeth bared in triumph, the intercom forgotten. ‘All torpedoes impacted. We’ve lit the bastards up.’
‘Enemy Voidsunder beams inbound,’ Miranich said.
‘Brace for impact. Gershon, I want you to–’
Then there was a white light, soundless, filling up the world, swamping every sensation. Massaron felt his feet leave the deck. There was no pain, only an instant’s regret before the light died, and the void claimed him.
I am so sorry, he thought. I failed you.
And then he was gone.
The Ogadai broke up under the repeated impact of the massive energy lances, the forward third of the great ship shearing free of the rest, spinning through space and trailing a wake of wreckage behind it.
Fires flared and then died as the vacuum snuffed them out, but the molten scars of the Voidsunder blast glowed in the darkness, liquid metal streaming from them in brilliant rivers, to cool and harden and wink out.
The rear section of the ship yawed, out of control, a leviathan sinking into death’s oblivion. The lights flickered along the hull, and here and there a lasburner battery fired wildly at the stars, its crew venting a last moment’s impotent rage.
The final Voidsunder salvo struck the drives in the stern, the energy beams slicing through armour and dying shields and spearing into the bowels of the ship. The powerful lances burned through and through those compartments deep in the maimed cruiser which still possessed atmosphere and light and warmth, and laid them open to the void. The Ogadai rolled, spewing wreckage and hundreds of bodies, here and there a solitary escape pod shooting out of the ruined vessel.
Then the main drives, bereft of coolant, open to the vacuum, overloaded and exploded.
A white nova, soundless, savage as the heart of a birthing star. It tore the remnants of the Ogadai to pieces, and sent those ragged remnants of the ancient ship careering into space. Many were sent flashing and spinning towards the planet Ras Hanem. Others were propelled out into the void, to sail through it for all eternity, broken relics with frozen corpses drifting inside them.
The ship-explosion hovered there above Ras Hanem, the energies of the vast detonation consuming themselves, darkening moment by moment as though reluctant to quit the universe. But they died at last, and all that remained was darkness, a debris-field of fragments and flotsam and jetsam of every size and degree spinning outwards, all of it so broken and shattered as to be unrecognisable.
Thus ended the Ogadai, the flagship of the Dark Hunters, whose decks had once been trodden by the Primarch Jaghatai himself.
Four thousand years of history and endeavour and service were gone, and with them, the lives of some twenty thousand men and women for whom that venerable vessel had been home.
The huge Punisher battleship powered through the debris, pieces of its adversary clunking and scraping against its hull. It moved implacably towards the bright planet ahead with fires still sparking and flaming along its hull, and at its leisure, it took up station in high orbit, a dark looming giant peering down upon a world now at its mercy.
And upon the battle-bridge of the immense ship, a creature stood in the pale-painted power armour of the Adeptus Astartes, that holy armour now out of place amid the Chaos symbols and grotesque battle-trophies which surrounded it, and the thing smiled.
‘Brothers,’ it said, ‘it has been a long time.’
Part Four
The Stand
EIGHTEEN
Dereliquit
A meteor shower was what it appeared to be at first. They looked up at the sky to see streaks of red and white come searing across it, contrails in their hundreds filling every gap between the clouds. Most of the wreckage burned up in the outer atmosphere, but a few of the larger fragments came streaking down all the way to the ground with the shriek and roar of inbound artillery.
Jonah Kerne watched the light-show from the summit of the citadel, where he had summoned all the senior officers of the Imperium who still survived on Ras Hanem. They stood behind him, human and Adeptus Astartes, their faces as grave as his own.
It was the death of a great ship they were watching. They all knew that, though few among them had seen it before.
‘It is the Ogadai,’ Kerne murmured, his voice burned into a low ember by grief and rage.
‘I heard them. They sounded out in my mind like a scream in the night – all those lives.’ Brother Kass touched the psychic hood which hovered over his skull.
‘I cannot believe it,’ Dietrich said, shaking his bullet-head. ‘What could have happened? What could have so quickly overcome such a great vessel?’
‘The Punishers have returned,’ Jord Malchai said, gripping his crozius as though he were trying to strangle the truth from it. ‘I can feel the filth of their presence like a dead rat in an empty room.’
Elijah nodded. ‘Brother-captain, the directing intelligence I felt when we first entered the system, it has returned. It is close, now – it is above our very heads. Out of nowhere–’
‘They must have dropped out of the warp right on top of us, and smashed up the Ogadai before Massaron could respond,’ Fornix said. He clenched and unclenched his power fist and the fingers of the weapon crackled and snapped with blue-white energy.
‘All vox transmissions and augur sweeps have been floored by massive interference these last two hours and more,’ Commissar Von Arnim said. ‘We thought it might be solar activity, or just the power drain of all the new systems coming online across the city. It would seem we were… complacent.’
‘We have been played,’ Kerne said. He turned around to face them, and his black eyes were as lightless as pits.
‘When we were first sent here, the Chapter Master suspected that there might be more to this conflict than met the eye, but I do not think even he expected anything like this. There must be very heavy metal indeed up there, to destroy a ship like the Ogadai, and a man like Massaron in the space of minutes.
‘Officers of the Guard, my brothers, we must assume the worst. The enemy must now be in orbit above us in massive force, and our own fleet has been obliterated. This is no mere raid. This is out and out conquest.
‘More than that, it is a settling of old scores. The Punishers drew us in here so that they might deal the Dark Hunters a heavy blow. They mean to destroy the Imperial hold on this world, that much is obvious – but I believe what they really want is to kill us.’
‘Let them try,’ Fornix growled, his red ocular gleaming like a hot coal. ‘We beat this filth once before, and we will do it again.’