'Appears to be?'
'Full confirmation is impossible,' he admitted.
Khalybus hadn't expected otherwise. This was the new reality of war in the Imperium. He couldn't trust anything to be what it appeared.
Still, this might what they had been seeking. 'Where is it?' he asked.
'The Cyzicus System.'
That was a piece of data hard to ignore. Close enough to the Harmartia System to be convincing. Khalybus had not spoken with Atticus since they had conferred along with Plienus and Sabenus by remote lithocast, but a short time ago there had been a signal burst from him. It had been linked to a mine, set to be released upon detonation. It was a proud curse directed at the Emperor's Children, but it had been received by the Bane of Asirnoth as well. It was Atticus's way of telling his brothers that he was still in the war without jeopardising his location.
There had been no word from Atticus since, and no detection of the enemy.
The immense storms that had surged through the immaterium made communication almost impossible and travel perilous. The risks needed a high prize. The Tharmas might be it. The vessel's location made sense. Khalybus could picture it limping just that far from Harmartia.
Levannas joined them. 'What do you think, captain?' he asked. Levannas had become the liaison between the Raven Guard and the Iron Hands. His qualifications for the role appeared to be an instinctive diplomacy, since he was not an officer by rank. There were none who had escaped with Khalybus.
'It is clearly a trap,' Khalybus said. It was difficult to speak of strategy with the Levannas. The Raven Guard and the Salamanders had not betrayed his primarch, Ferrus Manus, but they had not marched with him as they should have either. He knew Levannas believed in the decisions of Corvus Corax. He knew that there was nothing to be gained in shunning the warriors of the XIX Legion.
Trust, though, that was different. He could not trust.
Yet he had to, or at the very least not refuse to hear what Levannas had to say. What was left of the Iron Hands must now engage in a new form of warfare. As much as he resented having to admit it, even to himself, this was a form with which the Raven Guard was more familiar.
'Yes,' Levannas said. 'It is a trap. That does not mean it will be a successful one.'
'The Emperor's Children do not do things by halves,' Raud said. 'It will be a good trap.'
'I would be insulted otherwise,' said Khalybus. 'Even more insulted than I am by the methods we must use.'
Raud muttered, 'Strike from the shadows, then scuttle back.'
Levannas smiled to show that he was not offended.
'The only dishonour,' he said, 'belongs to the traitors. The shadows are true, brothers. If you understand them, they have an honesty that is missing in the light.'
As the Raven Guard spoke, it seemed to Khalybus that the crepuscular light of Galeras dimmed around him. He was standing in the open, as they all were, but he became harder to see. His hard features became difficult to make out behind the ashfall. His stillness took on the characteristics of an absence. He was in and of the shadows, and that, Khalybus saw, was indeed a truth. In withdrawing from sight, Levannas revealed his core reality to them.
Khalybus looked at his own right arm. He moved the fingers that had not been flesh and blood for over two hundred years. He considered his own truth the truth of the Iron Hands that he must safeguard more jealously than ever before.
'We are not you,' he said to Levannas. 'And we will not become you.'
'I would never suggest that you should,' Levannas answered.
'We still can't attack directly,' said Raud.
'I know. We all do.' He eyed the central block of the base. 'So we must find a new way to fight that is still true to our primarch.'
'Then we will head into the trap.' The upper half of Raud's skull was metal. There was still flesh on his lower jaw, though, and he could just about form the approximation of a smile.
'Well, they're hardly going to come to us, are they?' asked Khalybus.
THE LOGICAL MOMENT to spring the trap would have been at the Mandeville point of the Cyzicus System. Khalybus had the Bane of Asirnoth at full battle stations, ready to open fire the second after transition to real space. He would not let the Emperor's Children have an easy kill. He had no illusions about such a battle's outcome, though. If the Asirnoth were unable to flee back into the warp, it would not survive a prolonged encounter. The strike cruiser had been damaged over Isstvan. Some repairs had been made, but there were limits to what had been possible. The void shields were some way from full strength. There hull had been compromised, and the sites of those wounds were painful weaknesses.
The first hard reality of Khalybus's gamble: it was easily within the power of the Emperor's Children to annihilate any single ship that took the offered bait.
The second hard reality: he had no choice but to take that bait.
He stood in the lectern above the bridge of the Bane of Asirnoth. Nothing appeared in the oculus. The system was quiet except for the distress beacon of the Tharmas.
'Auspex?' Khalybus asked.
'We have picked up the radiation from the Tharmas' s engines,' Seterikus said. 'No other vessels within range.'
'Which doesn't mean they aren't here,' said Raud. He was at the weapons station, at the forward end of the bridge.
'Of course they're here,' Khalybus said.
But they hadn't attacked. They were remaining hidden. Why? Because killing the Bane of Asirnoth would be insufficient. The traitors had bigger prey in mind.
So do I, he thought.
'It would be disappointing if they were not. Set course for the Tharmas.'
The III Legion strike cruiser was about a third of the way from the Mandeville point toward the system's sun.
Czysicus was an old red star. It had swallowed up its inner planets hundreds of millions of years ago, leaving only the outer gas giants and the frozen planetoids of its Kuiper belt. Czysicus was as dead as Delium, though it was now alive with the anticipation of war.
Khalybus kept the first stage of the approach to the Tharmas slow and cautious. There was no point in trying to disguise the Bane of Asirnoth's presence. The Tharmas and whatever other Emperor's Children vessels that waited concealed in the system already knew that they were here, but he wanted time to detect the rest of the enemy force, if he could. He wanted a feel for the full nature of the trap.
Still nothing. Only the endless broadcast of the enemy cruiser's beacon.
Khalybus saw Levannas looking at him. The Raven Guard had taken up a discreet position on the bridge, near the back wall, just below and to the right of the lectern. He was out of the way, but visible if the captain wished to speak to him. 'Well?' Khalybus asked. 'What do you see in the shadows here?'
'I'm sure I see the same things you do, captain. They are waiting for us to engage.'
'At which point they will wound us, force us to retreat, and follow.'
'Yes.'
Which is what we've been expecting all along, he thought. The absence of an initial attack was confirmation of that theory.
Khalybus nodded to himself. 'We have no choice but to play their game,' he announced. 'But we will beat them at it.
Full speed ahead, full barrage. I want that verminous ship destroyed.'
The background hum that was the sum of the Asirnoth' s machinery of life increased. Its vibrations became more intense. Khalybus felt the ship's anger as though it were his own. Its life and his were on a continuum.
This was part of what it meant to be one of the Iron Hands not just to understand the strength of the machine, but to be the machine. When he was aboard the Bane of Asirnoth, when he commanded its course and its actions, there was no absolute demarcation line between his being and the ship's. The helmsmen of other Legions experienced that blurring when the mechadendrites fused them to their vessels. But every warrior of the X Legion walked the path towards the unbending power of the mechanical. The machine had a discipline, a focus and a
clarity that was foreign to the flesh. The Bane of Asirnoth was an extension of his will, a force multiplier of his own strength. It was his right arm reaching out to crush his foe. And he, and all the legionaries aboard, repaid the machine's gifts by moving closer and closer towards complete identification.
Ferrus Manus had shown them the way. He had not been given the time to complete his journey though he was not dead, he could not be dead and it was their duty to redouble efforts to complete the pilgrimage. Now, more than ever, they needed the rigour of the machine.
Standing a few steps behind Khalybus in the strategium, Cruax said, 'And so, as we expected, we will strike and we will run.' His machine voice sounded more cold and hollow than ever.
'Yes, Iron Father.' Khalybus did not look back. 'But more than that, as well.'
'I know. My concern remains. What will this strategy cost us? How much is it shaped by strangers to our philosophy?'
Khalybus glanced down at Levannas. Circumstances were forcing the Iron Hands to learn from the methods of the Raven Guard. But those lessons would not alter the core of the Legion. 'Do you doubt me?' he asked Cruax, quietly, keeping the exchange between the two of them.
'I have doubts about where this path is leading us. The Legions who abandoned our primarch on Isstvan have nothing to teach us.' There was no tone in the voice of the guardian of the Iron Hands' soul. The anger was in the words.
Khalybus shared it. He wanted Cruax to understand that he had not made his decisions lightly.
'What choice do we have? If we wish to fight on, then we must adapt.' He looked back at the other warrior. Cruax's servoarms were folded behind his back. Of all the legionaries aboard the Asirnoth, he was the one most fully transformed. Khalybus wasn't sure if he had any flesh left at all. 'What we are about to do,' he said, 'is true to the Iron Hands. It will be precise. It will be rigorous. It will succeed on those merits.'
Cruax said nothing. Khalybus faced the oculus once more.
'IT'S THE BANE OF ASIRNOTH', Enion reported. 'Captain Khalybus.'
'Thank you, equerry,' Ariston said. Not the Veritas Ferrum. A shame. Revenge on Atticus would have been a pleasing, violent symmetry. But perhaps Khalybus would be the key to the other captain as well. Ariston watched the trajectories of the strike cruisers plotted on the tactical screens.
'We could take them apart now.'
'We could,' Ariston agreed.
Enion hesitated, expecting an order. Ariston amused himself by not giving it.
'There is no need to put the Tharmas at risk,' said Enion.
'The imperfection of Theotormon's command needs to be chastised,' Ariston told him. 'Emphatically. And more to the point, are we going to satisfy ourselves with a single strike cruiser? Not even the one that destroyed the Callidora?'
'No, lord commander.'
'No,' Ariston repeated. 'We will use these Iron Hands to take us to their brothers.'
'They aren't fools.'
'True. So our mistake must be perfect. They must believe they have thwarted us.'
THE TWO SHIPS went to war. They opened fire at virtually the same moment. They were as big as mountains, as long as cities. Their movements were too massive to reflect the urgency in the wills that drove them. They struck at each other with torpedoes and cannons. Their weapons had speed, but the wills were faster yet, the hatreds more furious. The ships turned on each other with majesty, with the grace of monuments. There would be no evading the wounds of the duel.
Instead, they engaged in the lethal, gradual dance of manoeuvring to be the first to strike the greatest injury.
The oculus flashed with the energy discharges of the void shields. Khalybus heard the damage reports. He saw, below him, the telltale red of the runes appearing on the screens monitoring the cruiser's health. He had little need to hear or see either. He could feel how his ship fared. Its body was his.
But it had his will, and it would not stop before it had torn the life from its enemy.
The Bane of Asirnoth was cutting across the prow of the Tharmas. The Emperor's Children ship presented a smaller profile, but Khalybus was able to strafe it with the full thunder of the starboard armament. The Tharmas fired forwards, and Khalybus saw the weakness most of its torpedoes and shells were coming from the port side.
'Get us around to their starboard flank,' he told the helmsman, Kiriktas. They don't want us there.'
Kiriktas complied. The Asirnoth began its turn, still at full speed.
The Tharmas tried to counter. It did not have to move as far or as fast to keep the Asirnoth away from its vulnerabilities. But its movements were hampered, and it revealed its second weakness.
'Their engines...' Raud began.
'I can see,' Khalybus said. He saw more than that. He saw the inevitable result of the dance. The Emperor's Children had already lost. They had lost the moment the nature of their wounds had become visible. There was nothing the traitors could do to stop what was coming. He hoped they realised this as completely as he did. He wanted them to experience the closing down of possibility, the unstoppable approach of execution.
They fought to the end, though. They fought hard to take the Asirnoth to oblivion with them. The Tharmas' s guns concentrated their fire on a single point amidships.
'Shields going down,' Demir called. 'Hull integrity compromised.'
'Vent and seal,' Khalybus ordered. 'Full energy to the starboard shields.'
'Contacts!' said Seterikus. 'Multiple signals moving in'
'From what direction?' Khalybus asked.
'All of them.'
'Brothercaptain,' said Demir, 'our port flank will be vulnerable.'
'We have time.'
Demir paused, then said, 'So ordered.'
They had time, Khalybus told himself. He would create it himself if necessary.
The Bane of Asirnoth completed the manoeuvre. The two ships were flank to flank. The distance between them became an irrelevance. The Tharmas was still fighting, but it was dead.
'Fire,' Khalybus said.
The Asirnoth struck with a full broadside, and then again. It hit the Tharmas with better than twice the force that the III Legion ship could summon. Khalybus grimaced as he felt the Asirnoth shudder.
The shields flared again, and even with the boost in power, some of them collapsed. Demir was calling out damage reports, but Khalybus tuned them out. He focused on the Tharmas. His concentration followed shipkilling ordnance across the void. He had committed the Asirnoth to this action, and by the Throne, this act of justice would be complete.
Under the bombardment of massive shells, the void shields of the Tharmas flared like suns, then fell into darkness.
The torpedoes slammed through the hull, and then there was a new light. It began as a pulsing crimson. That was the firestorms scouring the ship's corridors. It grew brighter, building in pain and intensity. It became the plasma cry of a dying ship. The Tharmas cracked wide open. Its fore and aft halves began to move independently even as they were swallowed by the growing fireball. The immense ship was dwarfed by its explosions. Cascading shockwaves reached out across the void.
'Get us clear,' said Khalybus, but Kiriktas was already altering course, putting the Asirnoth into a straight run, taking off on a tangent from the arc it had been making around the Tharmas. 'Redistribute shield energy, Brother Demir.'
Even as he spoke, the first torpedoes from the rest of the fleet hit the Asirnoth's port flank. The jolt was a big one.
Even before Demir spoke, Khalybus knew the injury was serious. The vibrations of the ship had carried the shock to him.
The pulse of the ship's life stuttered. Khalybus wondered if he'd been wrong. This didn't feel like an attack to wound. The Emperor's Children were coming to kill.
'We've lost two banks of port cannons,' Demir said. 'Secondary damage from exploding ordnance. There is a breach across the loading bay. Fires are spreading.'
'Do what is necessary,' Khalybus said. Demir did not need to be told what to do. The o
rder was confirmation that, as captain, he understood the losses that were occurring, and the further toll that would be paid. How many battlebrothers had been near the bay and had been propelled into the void? Had they lost any gunships? How many serfs had been incinerated by the fires? Questions whose answers were, in this moment, irrelevant. What mattered was the survival of the ship itself, and its ability to continue the war. Second by second, that was the only consideration, if there was to be any hope of reaching the end game of this campaign.
'Can we afford the greater loss ahead?' Cruax asked, as if reading his mind.
'If there is a way of avoiding it, I will take it,' Khalybus said.
The Bane of Asirnoth shuddered again. Tocsins wailed.
'There will not be,' Cruax said.
'The Emperor's Children will suffer worse,' Khalybus promised.
But only if the Asirnoth escaped this system.
'Helmsman Kiriktas, make course for the Mandeville point. Brother Seterikus, what are the positions of the foe?'
'Still on the outer edges of the system. The ships on the far side are closing. The ones closest to the Mandeville point are not advancing.'
'They know we have to come to them. Then let us do so. Full speed. All forward batteries fire.'
This was the hardest gamble he would make in the Czysicus System. It was also the one move that was open to him.
The Iron Hands could not evade the net being drawn around them, and they could not fight an entire fleet. There was a tremble in the Asirnoth's vibrations now. Khalybus doubted his vessel could fight a single enemy with any expectation of survival. There only flight or death now. And so the strike cruiser ran in the teeth of the trap.
'Brothercaptain,' Seterikus reported, 'we are making for the battlebarge Urthona.'
'Then let us give them cause to worry,' Khalybus said.
'This is desperate,' Cruax muttered.
'So is this mission. So is our war.'
'I understand, captain. But is the desperation one that is true to us?'
'It is,' Khalybus said. 'We knew this was a trap. The risk is a calculated one. That the odds are against us makes it no less calculated.'