00:05
Noctua, he suspected, could outlast them all.
Aximand almost smiled as he wondered how long it had taken before Ezekyle broke the vox-silence protocol. Not long. He’d be too full of hubris to resist letting his mouth run away from him.
Aximand remembered the tales of the moon’s fall.
00:02
He remembered chimeric monsters of the Selenar cults; gene-spliced bioweapons, killing machines of flesh and acid and gibbering insanity. He remembered tales of slaughter. Unrestrained, wild, savage and yet to be tempered by Lupercal’s discipline.
But most famous of all was the cry of surrender.
Call off your wolves!
00:00
‘Speartip,’ said Aximand. ‘Light them up.’
‘Contacts!’ shouted the deck officer.
Panrik had seen them no more than a fraction of a second before, but had disregarded them due to their position behind and below Var Sohn. They were faint, no more than flickers.
They couldn’t possibly be hostile.
But they were growing stronger with every passing moment.
‘Malfunctioning mines?’ suggested the auspex master. ‘Or hyper-accelerated debris caught in the flare of a surveyor sweep.’
Panrik didn’t need cognition-enhancing drugs to hear the desperate hope in the man’s voice. He knew fine well what these returns were. He just didn’t know how the hell they’d gotten there.
‘Tomb ships! Throne, they’re tomb ships!’ said the auspex master. ‘I’ve heard of the tactic, but thought it was just a myth.’
‘What in the name of Hellblade’s balls are tomb ships?’
‘Tomb ships,’ repeated the auspex master. ‘Vessels shot into the void and then completely shut down, emptied of atmosphere and left to fly towards their target. There’s no power emissions, so they’re virtually impossible to detect until they fire up their reactors. It’s also next to impossible to pull off.’
‘Clearly not impossible enough,’ said Panrik, each dart of his ocular implant shifting fire-priorities. ‘Retask batteries Theta through Lambda to low orbit echelon fire. Atmospheric bursts only, I don’t want any of our munitions hitting the surface. Ventral torpedo bays recalculate firing solutions and someone get me the Lord Admiral.’
Two ships were right on top of him, a dozen more spread behind the network of orbital platforms. They’d appeared from nowhere, the surveyor returns from their hulls growing stronger as dormant reactors were quick-cycled to readiness and targeting auspex trawled his platform for weak points.
He felt the shudder of point-blank torpedo impacts on the hull through the mind impulse unit link with Var Sohn’s surface systems. He grimaced in sympathetic pain. Armour penetrators, not explosive warheads.
The sensorium came alive with hull-breach warnings and system failures as the newly-revealed ships lashed them with terrifyingly accurate gunfire.
Var Sohn’s defence systems blew apart, one by one.
‘They mean to board us,’ he said with a sick jolt of horror.
This was just the fight he was bred for.
Head hunched low behind a breacher’s shield, moving forward, Mourn-it-all’s enhanced edge cutting through meat and bone and armour with ease. The boarding torpedo smoked and howled in the splintered underside of the orbital plate. Melting ice streamed from its superheated hull, and Sons of Horus breachers poured from its interior.
The rapid reaction force sent to intercept them were dead. Exo-armoured mortals. Highly trained and well armoured. Now nothing more than offal and butcher meat scattered like abattoir refuse.
Yade Durso, second Captain of the Fifth Company, together with five warriors in heavily reinforced battleplate and shields formed a wedge with him at its point. Tactical overlays appeared on his visor; schematics, objectives, kill boxes. Another timer. This one even more crucial than the last.
Remember the moon, Grael Noctua had said.
Aximand threw back his head and howled.
And let raw savagery take him.
A flicker of ignis fatuus was the first warning. Crackling blue teleport flare arced between the primary stanchions of the Var Zerba orbital plate’s command centre. Ear canals crackled in the seconds before a hard bang of displaced air shattered every data-slate within twenty metres of the transloc point.
Ezekyle Abaddon, Kalus Ekaddon and six Justaerin stood in an outward facing ring, their armour glossy and black, trailing vapour ghosts of teleporter flare. A hooded priest of the Mechanicum stood in the centre of the ring of Terminators, a hunched thing of multiple limbs, glowing eye lenses and hissing pneumatics.
The junior officers barely had time to register the presence of the hulking killers before a blitzing storm of combi-bolter fire mowed them down.
‘Kill them all,’ said Abaddon.
The Justaerin spread out, spewing shots that looked indiscriminate, but were in fact, preternaturally exact. The Warmaster’s orders had been unambiguous. The defence platforms were to be captured intact.
Within moments, it was done.
Abaddon marched to the throne at the heart of the control centre. A mewling wretch sat there, soiled and weeping. His eyes were screwed shut. As if that would save him. Abaddon broke his neck and wrenched the limp sack of bones from the throne without bothering to undo the neck clamp. The Platform Master’s head tore off and bounced over the deck before coming to rest by an armaments panel.
‘You,’ barked Abaddon, waving the Mechanicum priest forward. ‘Sit your arse down and get this thing shooting.’
The fight through the Mausolytica had been bloody, but its outcome had, knew Grael Noctua, been a foregone conclusion. The fight through the heart of Var Crixia was just the same. Its defenders were well trained, well armed and disciplined.
But they had never fought transhumans before.
The Warlocked were eternal, a squad never omitted from the 25th Company’s order of battle. Death occasionally altered its composition, but a line of continuity could be traced from its current makeup all the way back to its inception.
Noctua fought along the starboard axial, a gently curved transit way that ran from one tip of the crescent shaped station to the other. Herringbone passageways branched from the main axial like ribs, and it was from these raked corridors that the exo-armoured mortals were attempting to hold them off.
It wasn’t working.
Breachers went in hard and fast, running at the low-crouch. Shields up, heads down, bolters locked into the slotted upper edge. Braying streaks of miniature rockets rammed down the main axial, killing anything that dared to show itself. Automated gun carriages pummelled the advancing legionaries, but were quickly bracketed and shredded by bolter fire.
Static emplacements unmasked from ceiling mounts and hidden wall caskets. Grenade dispensers dumped frags and krak bombs. Battleplate withstood the bulk of it. Legion warriors stomped on through the acrid broil of aerosolised blood and yellow smoke.
Noctua advanced behind the wall of shields, bolter pulled in tight to his shoulder. Ahead, a barricade of hard plasteel and light-distorting refractors extruded from a choke point in the corridor. Bulky shapes moved through the haze.
Sawing blasts of autocannon fire punched into shields. Ceramite and steel splintered. Other weapons fired. Louder, harder and with a bigger, more lethal muzzle sound. A legionary grunted in pain as a shot found a gap in the shields and blew out his kneecap.