The Revenant was picking off pilgrim ships, exploding them like paper targets on a circus showman’s stall. Some started to run. That just gave the Revenant moving solutions. Its guns raked through the translucent skein of the upper atmosphere. Ships exploded and burned.
A flurry of torpedoes from the closing heavy cruiser unsettled the Revenant’s shields, and it swung up to meet the Imperial warship.
The heavy cruiser was a third again as big as the gold-laced enemy ship. Its fighter screen puffed out from it like a cloud of dust, and was met immediately by the rival’s own screen. As the massive vessels closed, spitting beams of light and sprays of plasma, the tiny fighters billowed around each other, cloud into cloud, dust particles whirling away to infinity.
The Laudate Divinitus fired a full volley of lances and torpedoes. The Revenant gunned away, shields flaring flat white. It fired its own cannonade broadside as it fled across the Laudate’s bows.
The Imperial heavy cruiser shook. One of its shields ruptured. It fired back.
The Revenant brought its hind part in tight, turning in a forty-five degree angle on its prow. It came up facing the Laudate, facing the railed shield.
It fired its main lances.
The Laudate Divinitus didn’t explode. It came apart in a series of coughing, jerking seizures. The final shudder kicked off the enginarium, and sent out a Shockwave that destroyed nine pilgrim ships at anchor.
The Revenant dipped low into the thin reaches of the upper atmosphere, and began to disgorge drop-pods and landing craft.
Hundreds of them.
The Glory of Cadia hit the Cicatrice so hard and with such sustain it began to burn. Esquine was savouring the victory when he saw the enemy ship turn.
The Cicatrice, immolating, spent the last of its reactor power pushing itself forward. It rammed the Glory amidships and the two vessels locked together, burning like a small star in close orbit space.
The Harm’s Way and the massive Incarnadine were pummeling the Omnia Vincit with their batteries. Esquine felt the pain from the shields.
“Target the main ship, Velosade,” he gasped.
Shumlen hit thrust and came in at the open and lit port of the Incamadine’s starboard launch deck. He felt himself pressed back in the grav seat as the thrusters kicked in. His heads-up locked in at the hangar bay mouth.
One missile left.
Something flew out at him.
A bat, yes. But really like a bat. A dark, hooked shape. Small, fast, not a Locust-pattern ship, he was certain. Something xenos. Very xenos.
He banked, hunting. The bat zipped around and was behind him. Shumlen tried to turn, tried to get an angle so he could loose his last missile. The bat wouldn’t let him be.
Shumlen turned hard again, and again. He couldn’t lose it.
He turned for one last time and the stall siren howled.
Fuel out. He was drifting.
The bat zipped past him and then turned back, sliding up and coasting up alongside him.
Shumlen looked at it. His pattern recognition systems bleeped out confirmation.
A Raven.
A dark eldar Raven attack ship.
It hovered beside him for a second, and then flitted away.
There was no power left in his Lightning. Shumlen looked round, dead in space. The vast superstructure of the Incarnadine ploughed towards him.
And met him like a cliff face. His tiny craft burst and flared for a second as it was run down against the massive prow of the battleship. The Incarnadine didn’t even feel it.
The Raven, circling nearby, dipped its barbed wings once to acknowledge the fall of a fine pilot, and then turned and burned towards the pallid glow of Herodor.
The control console of the sleek Raven reflected yellow light up across the features of Skarwael. He was grinning, a rictus of bared fangs and tight white flesh.
The bloody game was on.
Every alarm and klaxon in the Civitas Beati was blaring. Even the great prayer horns at the city quarter-points were wailing terrible rising notes. Storm shields began to close on all the windows, decks and apertures in the hive towers, and through the inner precinct of the Civitas. Segmented plating slid up to protect the glass domes of the agriponic farms.
There was uproar on the streets. Citizens fled en masse to the sub-level bunkers, to the storm cellars, to the lower levels of the hive towers. Technically, there were appointed shelters for all, but the protocols were old and hadn’t been used for generations. Citizens ignored them, or had never known them, and fled hysterically to the nearest shelter.
The highways and principals of the mid-city and skirt districts were choked with road traffic. A lot of it had already been mobile at dawn, and it was swelled by private vehicles heading across town towards imagined places of safety. The traffic jammed up the routes, solid and nose-to-tail in places, and transports were quickly abandoned. In some outer streets, the roads were deserted but for rows of immobile vehicles, some with the engines still running, most with doors and hatches open.
The main barracks of the Regiment Civitas Beati was an imposing keep that overlooked Principal I in the high town area, between the gigantic stacks of hive towers one and two. In the main yard inside the walls, the regiment was assembling and breaking up into troop elements. Columns of APCs and light armour units were grumbling up the ramps from the garages under the keep, directed by marshals to embarkation points where in theory they would pick up their assigned squads. There was no time for briefing. Instructions would be delivered en route via tac logis. All anyone knew was that they were following GAR3 — Ground Assault Response 3 — one of Biagi’s pre-formed emergency strategies.
Timon Biagi himself stood in the open top of an armoured command vehicle, listening to the tac logis flow in his earpiece, watching the disposition. Troopers, some still buckling up armour, poured out of the keep and into the yard, filing past the armourers’ platforms to collect munitions and combat supplies. Biagi was the two hundred and fifth marshal of the Civitas. From this hour forward it would be his name, and his name alone, that historians would think of when considering the Regiment Civitas. For he would be the marshal that stood alongside Sabbat at her Returning. Would they think of him like they thought of Kiodrus, he wondered? A second Kiodrus. He liked the feel of that idea.
Biagi looked up at the sky. It was unseasonably clear, and the violet dawn was turning into a cool white haze In a corner of the sky, the future was making itself visible. Flashes and strobes of light, a thicket of twinkling stripes just visible in the growing glare, identified the monumental war now underway in orbital space. A war between gods, Biagi thought.
From down here where he stood, it looked like firecrackers.
The Ghost and life company elements moved out of the hive towers in rows of troop trucks and transporters, heading out into the skirt fan of the city. Life company tanks and tracked armour led the way, smashing rows of stationary, abandoned vehicles out of their path where they blocked thoroughfares and junctions.
Gaunt rode in a Salamander with Corbec and Hark. Hydra gun platforms travelled alongside them for a few streets, and then turned off to left and right to occupy good firing positions in open squares and plazas in the hilly inner reaches of the Civitas.
“This is Lugo’s plan?” Hark asked.
Gaunt shook his head. “He’ll take the credit, but it’s actually Kaldenbach’s.”
“I thought it was too smart for that feth-wipe,” said Corbec, and then glanced at Hark’s disapproving look.
“Did I say that out loud?” he smiled.
The plan was to assemble the main troop strengths in the city’s geographical centre, towards the bottom of the Guild Slope, and wait. Even combined, the Tanith, life company, Regiment Civitas and Herodian PDF had nothing like enough numbers to cordon the entire perimeter of the sprawling city. First Officiary Leger had even seconded the city arbites and the local civic militia forces to bolster the military presence, and still that left the
m lacking in numerical resources.
The Imperial forces would loiter in the city centre, from which point any part of the city extent was as near as any other, and wait to see what direction the ground assault came from. Then they would respond fast, using transports, and channel their efforts in that particular area.
It was impossible to tell where the first wave of assault would come from. Gaunt had been through too many assaults from orbit — as assaulter and assaulted both — to think otherwise. There were so many variables.
From the data, Gaunt had seen, there were at least four archenemy warships up above them. Unopposed, their combined firepower could raze the Civitas down to the bedrock: streets, habs, hive-towers, even the armoured shelters underground. If the enemy decided not to bother with the complexity and effort of a ground assault and simply went for the kill, this war would be over before it started.
There was one saving grace Gaunt was counting on—
“Sir!” Gaunt looked round as Corbec called out. The big Tanith was pointing up at the northern sky.
High up, streaks of orange fire were slashing across the pale sky. A few dozen at first, and then more. Hundreds more Like a shower of meteorites, they rained down from high orbit overhead, diving north, leaving long, perfectly straight, perfectly parallel trails of flame and vapour in the sky behind them.
They weren’t meteorites.
Gaunt saw distant flashes light up the northern horizon as the first hit. A second later, a distant sound like continuous thunder rolled in from the Great Western Obsidae.
Drop-pods. For a half-second, Gaunt felt relieved. The archenemy was going for ground assault after all. Then he reconsidered. Death was not going to be swift and total. It was going to be slow and painful and hard.
But at least, if that was the case, he and his men had a chance to make it mutual.
“Ensign! Ensign!”
There was a voice in Valdeemer’s dream, calling his name, and it wouldn’t go away.
He blinked and found himself lying on his back in the strategium of the Omnia Vincit.
“Ensign Valdeemer! Are you alive?”
Valdeemer sat up and looked around. The air was full of smoke and flashing alarm lights and the baleful screech of klaxons and damage alarms.
“Ensign!”
He got up. The deck shook hard, and he steadied himself against a console. The crew servitor at the console was still working furiously, augmetic hands rippling over the display. The mechanical was totally oblivious to the chaos around them.
Valdeemer shook his head, trying to lose the swollen muzziness. Blood spattered on the deck. He raised his hand and felt a deep gash across his forehead.
They’d been hit.
He’d been at Esquine’s side when the torpedo had struck them under the bridge tower. He remembered the numbing concussion, bodies flying. Yes, that’s right. He’d been thrown to the deck.
How long had he been out?
“Ensign!”
He lurched forward towards Fleet Captain Esquine’s throne.
“Sir?”
“I need you to man the main station. Can you do that?” Esquine looked like he was in pain, struggling, but there wasn’t a mark on him.
“Sir? That’s the commander’s post.”
“Do it!”
Valdeemer turned and hurried through the smoke towards the main station. The deck was littered with smouldering debris and fallen panelling. He had to step over several bodies. Crewmen, deck aides, servitors, ripped apart by blast force or killed by flying debris.
One of them was Velosade. A piece of deck plating the size of a dinner plate had almost, but not quite, decapitated him.
Swallowing hard, Valdeemer got to the station and reviewed the board. Three shield failures. Two hull breaches. Fires on decks seven through eighteen and also in carrier bay four. Lances were out. Structural integrity was down to forty-seven per cent.
“Help me, Valdeemer,” Esquine whispered, his fingers flexing.
Valdeemer tried to assemble a plan in his mind. His ringers flew across the console, activating and deactivating runes as they lit up, calling up displays — enginarium, structural, shielding, deck-to-deck — and then cancelling them. He routed power away from the huge firestorm on deck eight. He bypassed two cogitator nodes damaged on deck eleven and brought lance number three back on line. He sealed the deck hatches that had not closed automatically and shut off the oxygen supply fuelling the lower deck fires. He shut down reactor two, which was red-lining and clearly damaged, and kicked in auxiliary power from the redundant reactor in the Omnia Vincit’s belly.
Why hadn’t Esquine already done these things? They were obvious, standard. The great capital ship was bleeding and burning to death, and Esquine hadn’t even begun to apply emergency procedures.
“Report?”
“Damage is contained. I’ve got a lance back on line. We’re painfully weak, but I’d like to divert all power from the engines to the shields.”
“Do it Valdeemer!”
“I… I need the command override, sir. I’m not rank authorised!”
“The code is Vesta 1123!”
Valdeemer’s bloody hands shook as they entered the code. He diverted power, ignoring the protesting howls of the tech-priests.
“Fighter screen?” Esquine urged.
“All but gone. Their small ships are all over us.”
“Where is the enemy?” Esquine asked.
Valdeemer looked round at the fleet captain. “The Incarnadine is flanking us to port, sir, and returning full and sustained broadsides. Shields at thirty-five per cent. The Harm’s Way is off the starboard bow, training main lances. Sir… can’t you see this?”
“No,” said Esquine, his voice barely audible above the alarms and vox chatter.
The torpedo strike had vaporised the fleet captain’s mind-impulse link, severing his connection to the massive ship. He was blind and deaf and lacking in all telepresent or hardwired connection to the Omnia Vincit, except for the waves of pain that washed through the ship into him as it took damage.
“Oh Holy Terra…” breathed Valdeemer, realising this. That meant he was in command. He, a junior ensign, was actually in control of the Imperial battleship Omnia Vincit.
How many times had he dreamed of command? How many hours had he spent longing for such a role?
Not like this. Gods of Terra, not at all like this…
“Orders, fleet captain?” he shouted over the din.
Esquine’s answer was just a whisper. “Kill them all… and if you can’t do that, make the price of our lives a dear one.”
The Incarnadine used its attitude thrusters to push in closer to the stricken Omnia Vincit. Its port batteries maintained their savage bombardment. The Incarnadine’s constant scan-sweeps of the Omnia Vincit showed that it was dead in the water, its combined reactor power channelled from engines to shields. Massively protected, it was still a sitting target.
The Harm’s Way, sitting off to bow-starboard of the Imperial warship, began to concentrate its lance blasts at the weak points of shielding, at the hasty overlap that barely covered the torpedo wound which had blown the fifth dorsal shield away and crippled the fleet captain.
The Omnia Vincit shook as the Harm’s Way got a good, solid hit in. A huge section of upper hull splintered and peeled away.
The Omnia Vincit fired its reactivated lance and struck the Harm’s Way’s shields so hard it was forced to back off. The Imperial gunnery crews, sweating and half dead, cheered.
The combined fighter fleets of the Incarnadine and the Harm’s Way, which had already obliterated the Omnia Vincit’s fighter screen, concentrated their efforts around carrier bay three on the starboard side. The last of the Lightnings were atomised by the waves of Locusts—“bats”, as the Imperial Navy slang called them — gunning in, cannons flashing.
Three Locusts managed to enter the deck mouth. One was destroyed by AF turret emplacements inside the deckway. The second was als
o hit by AF fire, but managed to fire all six of its missiles into the belly of the carrier hold before it went up.
The third, accelerating to hypersonic, made it in down the main launch deck, strafing as it went, and banked right into the munitions loading bay. There, just before it catastrophically ran out of flying space, it dumped its payload into the sub-deck autoloader shafts that lifted munitions up to the earner deck from the armoured heart of the Omnia Vincit.
The chain reaction blew the side off the noble Imperial ship in a vast flurry of underdeck explosions and fragmenting hull plates. Gored, its guts exposed, the Omnia Vincit yawed. In the strateghim, Valdeemer desperately converted three per cent of shield power back to the engines and pushed the battleship out from between the vicing archenemy ships.
The Omnia Vincit slid forward out of the Incarnadine’s fire-field. A three per cent drop on shield power wasn’t much, but the Harm’s Way, waiting at the bow like a jackal on a kill, didn’t hesitate. It cycled up full load power from its main reactors and fired its lances at the overlay weakness.
Valdeemer turned from his post to look at Esquine. The fleet captain was shaking with rage and sorrow, impotent and agonised.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Valdeemer, “but I’m afraid—”
He was incinerated before he could speak another word. Esquine was incinerated too, his golden throne melting around his combusting body. Blaze-fire swept through the strategium and out across the bridge, burning crewmen where they stood and vaporising control stations. The deep, glasteel ports fronting the bridge shattered and blew outwards under the superheated overpressure. The remaining shields failed.
The Incarnadine flurried off one final broadside to put the Omnia Vincit out of its death throes. Blown open, twisted, ruptured, its hull crackling with diffusing electric discharges, the Omnia Vincit rolled over.
The archenemy ships, satisfied, depowered their weapon systems, cancelled shields, and coasted away into high anchor station.
The burned-out ruin of the Omnia Vincit remained in orbit around Herodor for nine hundred and three years, until slowly decaying, unadjusted orbit rates finally sank it down through the gravity well into the atmosphere, where it burned up. The parts of it that survived atmosphere-kiss and heat-shear filled the skies of the southern continent like shooting stars, and hailed down onto the Lesser Southern Dry Sea, creating impact scars and craters that later became radioactive lakes in that distant wilderness.