Once within visual range, standard recorded vox-hails crackled over the Nighthawks’ consoles.
‘Citizen! You approach a Fortress Arbites. Power down and prepare for scrutiny. By authority Lex Imperialis Sector MCMXXXIII, Subsector LXIII, Sub-subsector IX–XII, Augmentario Juridicarum Urbis Terra Salvator. In His example are our deeds made pure!’
Several watcher-drones swooped in to intercept the oncoming ordo gunships, their bat-like wings sliding back to reveal electro-stun grapples.
‘Take those down and maintain full speed,’ ordered Crowl calmly.
The Nighthawks opened up with their rotary cannons, smashing the drones into scrap and roaring through the debris towards the cyclopean face of the spire. Moving in formation, they swept up towards the summit as the rockcrete neared. All too clunkily, the fortress’ bolter banks switched to track them.
Crowl checked the locator signal for Revus, and shunted the data to the Nighthawk’s machine-spirit. ‘Two support craft to keep those batteries occupied,’ he voxed. ‘Pilot, you have your coordinates.’
The secondary Nighthawks pulled in close, now aiming a hail of fire at the closest of the turret-mounted bolter banks. The sloping ablative plates of the fortress erupted into explosions, splashing blooms of static as the gunships found their mark. The batteries cracked back in response, hitting the Nighthawks and rocking them on their axes, but for the moment failing to penetrate the bulk of the vessels’ outer armour.
Crowl’s craft punched ahead, loosing forward fire at a metal-framed, stained-glass window high on the fortress’ north-facing edge. Blast shields were grinding their way across the ten-metre-wide orifice, but too slowly, and the armourglass shivered, buckled and imploded under the concentrated rain of rounds.
‘Take us in,’ ordered Crowl. ‘Escorts — get inside before you lose your armour.’
Crowl’s Nighthawk smashed clean through the tumbling mass of glass and plasteel, breaking into a large hall on the far side. Its two protectors followed in quick succession, both now badly damaged and listing from the bolter assault, but still aloft. Once inside, the transports opened up their crew-bays and released the storm troopers. Thirty grey-clad warriors slammed down to the hall’s floor, Crowl in their midst.
It was an avenue of remembrance — a long, shadowy nave lined with lists of fallen arbitrators and judges, their names accompanied with kill-tallies and records of justice delivered. Terra’s fire-flecked wind screamed in through the shattered window, making the parchment devotion-tracts flap and the candles gutter. At the far end was a graven image of a Magister Iudex carved from basalt, eight metres high, his face lowered as he wrestled with an idealised serpent of insurrection.
Already running, Crowl calibrated the location of Revus’ life-signal, calculated the optimal route, and shunted the tactical iso-schema to the storm troopers’ helm-buffers. Pain shot up his calves like hot spikes, and he ignored it. Gorgias bobbed alongside, its needle gun exposed, its eye blazing an excited crimson.
By then alarms were sounding, echoing down the fortress’ vastness and bringing its inhabitants racing towards the breach in their defences. The storm troopers travelled halfway along the hall’s length before breaking left and blasting their way into an antechamber. The first resistance arrived — a team of enforcers bearing heavy suppression shields and power mauls. Crowl picked off the leader with Sanguine, sending a single round smacking through an exposed neck joint, and Hegain’s squads disabled the rest, barely pausing mid-stride to select their targets, find the weak points and hit them with surgically aimed hellgun volleys.
They burned down two more levels before hitting the topmost cell-zones — the ones reserved for the most exalted prisoners. Retreating cell guards were swept aside at the entrance, their reactions and training no match for ordo-conditioned assault troops, and Crowl himself led the charge into the prisoner pens. Ignoring the rattling clamour of those in the long lines of cells, he strode towards the life-signal pinging behind a heavy plasteel door at the end of a long corridor. A lone storm trooper raced ahead, placed frak charges on the hinges and bolt-housing, then withdrew. Crowl and the others crouched down, and a heavy crump followed by the stink of cordite marked the destruction of the lock-bolts.
Crowl was first up and into the cell. The chamber was five metres square — bigger than some hab-units in the slum-zones — bare metal, but clean and lit with strip-lumens. Revus got up shakily from a bench as Crowl came in. He was clad in prison fatigues, his armour gone, an ugly weal across his grizzled face, but he did not look seriously harmed.
‘What happened?’ demanded Crowl, sweeping the cell for auto-weapons. ‘It’s not what you-’ started Revus, groggily, as if drugged.
He never finished. Booms shuddered along the corridor outside, as if piledrivers had been started up, followed by cries of aggression and alarm. Crowl turned to see the flash of lasfire reflected in the corridor’s polished walls. He reloaded Sanguine and hurried back to the cell door — just in time to see the body of a storm trooper fly across the broken doorway and crash into the wall beyond.
Gorgias flew through the gap, spun around and started firing, only to break off with a high-pitched shriek of surprise.
Then Crowl was through, ducking low and sliding across the corridor’s floor, firing two-handed.
The aim was good. Even given a split-second to pick his target, he’d found it with both shots. He might have laughed, though, had he had the time, and if the pain in his muscles weren’t so great, for it didn’t matter.
‘Oh, shit,’ he spat, just as his captain had done, and prepared to die.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Spinoza moved first, swinging the crozius as Chaplain Erastus had taught her — heavy enough to break bone, not so heavy as to leave her unbalanced.
The woman met the strike with her blade, and the two energy fields screamed together, spilling out a merged kaleidoscope of flying colour. They pulled apart, then crashed together again, maul against sword, the weapons snarling like beasts.
‘Submit now,’ Spinoza panted. ‘It will go better for you.’
The woman laughed. ‘Better for me? No, I do not think so.’ She swept back into the attack, whistling her blade low and flat, going for Spinoza’s legs.
Spinoza parried, and the two weapons blazed again. Spinoza pushed back, hurling the woman away, then went after her.
She is fast, but I am stronger.
‘You were shadowing us,’ she said, pulling Argent heavily in a loose figure of eight. ‘That is a dangerous game.’
‘Every game is dangerous,’ said the woman, giving ground, stepping back along the gantry’s length. ‘But you. You are blind and you are stupid. I will not be ended by stupid.’
The power fields whipped around them both, streamers of released energy like flails, dancing amid the blur of limbs.
‘Give me your name,’ said Spinoza, knocking her back another pace, and the closed doors beckoned. ‘The more you give me-’
‘The more lenient you are? Hah. I know your methods. Be watchful! You do not face me before.’
The woman suddenly switched gear, leaping over a crozius-swipe and barging into Spinoza. The two of them careened back to the gantry’s edge, their feet treading along the metal rim. Spinoza felt her boot slip over the lip, and shoved back hard, swiping out with her crackling weapon. Argent connected with the woman’s stomach, smearing plasma into her armour-plates and throwing her a pace back. Then she waded into close contact, driving, jabbing, using the maul as Erastus had always insisted.