He’s not even thinking about Neve. Not at all.
She’s just there, suddenly. Right there in front of him, as though she stepped out of the smoke.
She smiles. She’s never looked more beautiful to him.
‘I’ve been looking for you, Bale,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d never see you again.’
He can’t speak. He goes to her, his arms wide, eyes wet.
By the tanks, Krank looks up. He sees Rane, down the boardwalk. He sees what he’s doing.
‘Bale!’ Krank screams. ‘Bale, don’t! Don’t!’
He starts to run to help, but there are suddenly men in his way. Men on the jetty. Men looming out of the smoke. They are hard and dirty, dressed in black. They are scrawny, as if they’re underfed. They have guns, rifles. They have knives made of black glass and dirty metal.
Krank’s rifle is leaning against the tank. He backs away. There’s no hope of him reaching it.
The knife brothers laugh at him.
‘Kill him,’ Criol Fowst tells the Ushmetar Kaul.
Suits sealed, kill squad six exits the Port 86 airgate. Thiel has command. Empion has personally given him the responsibility, even though there are several captains among the assembled shipboard survivors who would have seen the duty as an honour.
Forty squads move through the hull of the Macragge’s Honour. Forty kill squads, each of thirty men. They carry bolters and close-combat weapons. Three brothers in each squad lug mag-mines.
Thiel’s squad emerges aft of one of the main port-side attitude thrusters. It’s a giant, solid mass like the tower of a habitat block, mounting exhaust bells on each aspect that could form the domes of decent-sized temples.
Calth rises above the thruster assembly: bright planetrise above a haunted tower. Calth has the look of Old Terra: green landmasses and blue seas, laced in white cloud.
But Thiel can see its terminal injuries, however. A spiral of soot-brown stormcloud caps part of the sphere, and other areas look like bruises on the skin of a fruit. The atmospheric discolorations are immense. Behind the curved shadow of the daylight terminator, sections of the southern continent are suffused with a luminous orange glitter, like the hot coals at the bottom of a furnace grate.
Mag-locks in his boots keep him on the hullskin. Advancing, he extends his view. He can see across Calth nearspace with extraordinary clarity. He can see the orbitals glowing with wildfire energy as they are consumed by conflagration. He can see the closest of the planet’s natural satellites blackened and stippled with fire-spots.
Nearer at hand, there are ships. Thousands of ships. Ships on fire. Ships drifting, spilled and butchered, shredded and ruined; slow swarms of wreckage, silent clouds of glinting metal debris. Beams of energy lick and flicker through the void.
The starfield, the vast unending spread of the galaxy, looks down on it all, unengaged and unimpressed.
The starlight is cold. It is like a sharp, clear evening of tremendous luminosity. There is nothing to interrupt the cool blue-white brilliance of the Veridian sun. All shadows are hard-edged and deep. Around him, it is either painfully bright sunlight or pitch black shadow.
All legionaries are trained for hard-void and zero gravity combat. This is strictly neither. The flagship supplies a limited gravity source, and a skin of thin atmosphere – the atmospheric envelope – clings to the ship’s hull, maintained by the gravitic field generators to facilitate the function of open launch hangars and docking bays.
There is, still, little sense of up or down. The landscape of the ship’s port-side opens before them like a hive’s skyline. It is a dense and complex architecture of pipes and towers, vents and arches, blocks and pylons. The scale is huge. The kill squad advances in giant bounds from one surface to the next, extending down the side of the ship as though they were acrobats moving across an urban sprawl from rooftop to rooftop.
The low gravity amplifies their strength. One firm step becomes a bound of ten metres. The practical takes a second to master, despite the hours of theoretical and drill. It is too easy to overstep, to push too hard, to fly too far. Across the wider gulfs, the ravines of the port-side cooling vents and the immense canyons of the interdeck crenellations, members of the kill squad switch to quick burns of their void-harnesses, clearing the divides of adamantium and steel chasms.
The Word Bearers cruiser Liber Colchis, a vast scarlet beast, has clamped itself to the aft port-side of the Macragge’s Honour like a blood-sucking parasite. The hullspace between the two ships is solid black, all light from the star blocked.
There are, however, lights within the blackness. Advancing with his team, Thiel resolves the spark and glow of cutting tools and clamped floodlights. Evac-ready squads of Word Bearers are surgically opening the flagship’s hull in order to attach bulk airgates and allow their storm forces to cross directly.
Kill squads Four and Eight are supposed to be arriving from other evac points to combine against this invasion, but Thiel sees no sign of them. How long should he give them? In Thiel’s opinion, the threat of boarding has remained unaddressed for far too long.
He glances at Anteros, his second in command.
He makes the signal.
They go in.
They hard-burn with their void-harnesses, following the wide canyon of a brightly lit heat exchange channel, and passing under the stark shadow of a power coupling the size of a suspension bridge. Their tiny black shadows chase them along the hull.
One half of their target group stands on the flagship’s hull itself. The other half stands on the side of a docking tower at ninety degrees to the rest. Melta-tools are being used on the hull plates. Bulk cutting heads are being extended from the open cargo hatches of the clamped cruiser. From Thiel’s orientation, the cruiser is above them, and the extended cutters are hanging down from it, biting into the flagship’s hull. Plumes of white-hot sparks are sheeting off the cutting heads into the darkness.
Thiel fires his boltgun, and the shells burn away ahead of him on trembling blowtorch tails. There is no sound. They explode the chest plate of a Word Bearer who was standing guard on a heat exchange port but looking the wrong way. His torso erupts in a ball of flame, expanding shrapnel and globules of blood. The impact convulses him, and sends him tumbling backwards, end over end. Thiel streaks past the spinning corpse, firing again. His third shot misses, gouging a silent crater in the hull. His fourth takes the face off a Word Bearer, turning him hard in a spray of flame and sparks. Blood balloons out from his ruined skull, wobbling and squirming in the near-void.
The rest of the kill squad fires. They streak across the target area like a strafing pack of Thunderbolts, and Word Bearers die as the bolter fire drums across them and punches through them. Bodies tumble and bounce. Some disintegrate, releasing clouds of blood beads that ripple like mercury. One Word Bearer is hit with such force his body flies away at great speed, dwindling as it leaves the flagship behind. Another is hit by a blast that causes his own void-harness to malfunction, and he lofts on a fork of fire, colliding brutally with the armoured hull of the cruiser above them.
Four Word Bearers die without breaking the magnetic anchor lock of their boots, and they simply remain standing on the hull, arms limp, like statues, or like bodies sunk to a seabed with their feet weighted.
The environment is full of drifting, swirling blood masses. They splash against Thiel, burst into smaller blood beads, slicking across his armour. For one second, his visor is awash and visibility is lost.
He brakes hard, jets back, makes a landing.
He clears his vision in time to see a Word Bearer bounding at him across the hull. They are both on the side of the docking tower, their ‘ground’ at ninety degrees to the level of the ship. The Word Bearer’s motion, assisted by the light gravity, seems exaggerated, almost comical. He fires his weapon. A bolt burns past Thiel. Thiel fires back. Silent, streaming shots blow the enemy’s right leg off and shred both of his shoulder guards. The impacts immediately and violently alter his course, turning his forward leap into a severe backwards tumble and spin. He cannons off a thruster mount and rebounds at a different angle.