Crowl had waited patiently for the moment, silently glanding a burst of motovine. When he moved, the stimulant kicked in, reacting to the interface chemicals in his armour and making his movements blistering. He swept Sanguine out of its holster and loosed a bullet into Arjanda’s shoulder, sending the man tumbling to the deck even before he noticed the acceleration. While the captain roared in pain, Crowl got to work on the crew, ducking under the panicked shotgun discharges and punching out with his armoured fist. Two of them rushed him, firing wildly. He swerved around the bullet-lines and crunched his fist into a face, then jabbed an elbow back into an exposed neck.
Then the rest were running, scrabbling for the rear doors. Crowl caught one of them by the neck and slammed him down onto the deck, breaking his back. Sanguine accounted for another — a single shot through the back of a head, an explosion of blood and a scatter of falling bone fragments.
He swirled around, his black armour glinting, and faced the rest of them. Cut off from escape, their terrified hands now clutched at their weapons again, and they backed away, trying to get an angle to fire. Crowl gave them no opportunity — the motovine made him terrifyingly fast, and he leapt into the air, his armour’s systems boosting him, reloading as he flew.
He crashed into the last knot of them, kicking out to crush the sternum of the closest, grabbing the hair of another and smashing his face into the cogitator bank, firing with ruthless precision to end another two. He tore apart the remainder like a vengeful spectre of the Old Dark, his cloak twisting around him as he moved, ending the screams one by one with heavy, punishing strokes. The very last of them tried to run, to leap down at the sloping armourglass viewportals as if he could somehow shatter them and tumble into the void, but Crowl caught him, hauled him back, seized his head and neck in an armlock, and twisted. The sick crack echoed around the bridge, followed by the thud of the broken body hitting the deck.
Once done, Crowl took a breath. The blood drained slowly down over the cracked bridge stations. Only the servitors still worked on, slaved to their terminals, their slack-jawed expressions never altering.
Crowl looked Sanguine over, brushed the ivory clean, reloaded it, and moved over to where Arjanda still writhed in pain. He crouched over the prone captain, placed a balled fist on the man’s wound, then pressed down.
‘Say nothing, listen with utmost care,’ Crowl told him in a low voice. ‘You are condemned to die, you know this, but it can yet be painless. Your name need not be entered into the rolls of the damned. You have family? They need not suffer. I can take you from this place, protect you. Work with me, and it can be a good death.’
Arjanda began to laugh, and bubbles of foam spilled from his agonised mouth. ‘Even if I… believed you…’ he blurted, wincing from the web of pain.
His eyes went bloodshot, and his body began to twitch. Crowl pulled back, watching the captain’s face turn purple. His gunshot had not caused that level of damage — the captain had ingested something to end his suffering. That, above all other compromises he had made, was detestable.
‘A name,’ said Crowl, gazing down at the jerking body. ‘Just give me a name.’
Arjanda managed a final, contorted expression of regret. ‘He’ll know. Even on. the other side. He’ll know.’
And then he gasped up a slug of vomit, arched his back, veins stiffly protruding, and messily died. As his body finally went limp, something clanked against the metal. Crowl saw the captain-general’s cane rolling across the deck. He reached for it, and noticed that clustered jewels at its tip were flashing softly, just like a transmitter.
Then the bridge lumens suddenly plunged into a cloudy red, klaxons went off, and the pict-screens began to flash up warnings.
Crowl moved towards the nearest monitor, pulled up a diagnostic readout, and saw just how long the freshly overloaded plasma drives had before they blew the ship apart.
He shot the dead Arjanda a withering look.
‘You contemptible bastard,’ he said.
Spinoza sprinted up the corridor, feeling the decking flex under her boots. The walls were shaking down, and rivets slammed out of their housings like bullets. One winged Gorgias, sending the skull crashing into the far wall and blurting out confused High Gothic curses.
‘Lord Crowl!’ she voxed again, more urgently this time. Aneela hadn’t been able to raise him, and the ship was coming apart. From somewhere a long way off, a dull rumble gathered pace, vibrating up the deep shafts to the enginarium and sounding like a distant roar of massed bovine herds. It would only get worse — she’d seen a plasma breach on a major freighter before, and what was left of the hull didn’t leave much for the salvage teams.
She reached an intersection and swung around the corner, running hard, feeling the air heat up behind her. The vibrations underfoot became more severe, cracking the pressed-metal decking and sending hairline fractures snaking up the walls.
When she finally reached the bridge level, the entire structure around her started to sway, and lumen-units blew apart in showers of plastek. The doors were closed and locked, so she swung Argent heavily into the join, crunching through the bolstered ironwork and searing it with disruptor-flares. Three more swings smashed the left-hand panel back onto its hinges, and she shoved it aside and broke in.
Bodies lay all across the deck, slumped across terminals and thrown down into servitor pits. Much of the roof had already collapsed, and hung in a tangle of girders from a disintegrating dome-ceiling. Cogitators were destructing in sequence, gibbering wildly out of control and then exploding in gouts of black smoke. Amid it all was Crowl, hunched over a stillfunctioning terminal and clattering intently on a runeboard.
‘Lord Crowl!’ Spinoza shouted, racing over to him. ‘The ship is primed to annihilate! We must leave now!’
‘A moment, Spinoza,’ Crowl said, never taking his eyes from the screen.
Spinoza stared at him for a moment. More echoing cracks resounded from the decks below, building up to the crescendo that would finally compromise the ship’s immense substructure.
She hastened over to the bridge’s prow, above where the decking sloped sharply towards the single line of armourglass real-viewers. ‘Aneela,’ she voxed. ‘Report position and status.’
Nothing but static hissed over the comm-link. The energies boiling away in such close proximity had blown what remained of her receptive range.
‘Lord, we have to-’
‘A moment.’
An explosion burst out from behind the broken doors, sending both tumbling through the air. The far end of the bridge decking rumpled up like thrown cloth, exposing a gaping void beneath, soon filled with the rush of kindling fires. The roar from below ramped up in volume and proximity, tracing a path of destruction from the deeps up to their level. Only seconds remained.
Spitting a curse under her breath, Spinoza seized two micro-krak grenades, primed them and hurled them at the armourglass panes below. Then she stowed her crozius, strode over to her master and prepared to physically haul him from the terminal. By the time she reached him he was finally moving, reaching for his mag-locked helm and twisting it into place.
‘You look agitated, Spinoza,’ he said, just as another blast rocked the rear wall, bulging it into a lattice of cracks and provoking secondary fireballs all down the right flank of the bridge-space.
‘Now, lord,’ she insisted, pulling him towards the downward slope. The micro-krak charges went off in sequence, smashing the armourglass into a welter of fire-flecked shards. The bridge’s atmosphere immediately blew out of the breach, hurling both of them down the slope, through the glass and the curtains of guttering flames, and out into the void beyond.