‘Something hit us,’ said Judd Cardass. ‘I think we’re in some kind of battle.’
Kolea looked up at the ceiling. The superstructure of the ship was creaking and groaning.
‘Seriously?’ he asked. Apart from the bump, he wasn’t sure how anyone could tell.
‘Report,’ Shipmaster Spika was yelling through the smoke. ‘All departments report!’
The main lights of the bridge chamber stuttered and came back on. Damage klaxons were whooping. Some of the ornamental glass shades on the platform lights had been dislodged, and had shattered on the deck.
Voices peeled off reports from every direction. Spika listened, trying to adjust his console. The main display had frozen. He thumped it, and it hiccupped back into luminous green life.
‘Shut up. Shut up!’ he yelled above the conflicting voices. ‘Artifice, do we have shields?’
‘Negative, master. Void shields are down.’
‘Get them operational. At once!’ Spika thought hard. ‘Position? Inertial station, I want our relative now.’
Data zapped onto his screen, the figures echoed aloud by the voice of the officer at the Inertial desk.
‘Still side-on…’ Spika murmured. The hit had wallowed the Armaduke like a heavy swell and halted the starship’s lumbering turn. Not a good place to be, especially without an active shield system.
‘Steersmen! Complete that turn.’
At the long, brass- and wood-cased helm station, the hardwired steersmen cranked the attitude controls.
‘Shield status?’
‘Repairs underway, master!’
‘I want a two-minute corrective burn to these adjusteds. All plasma engines,’ Spika declared, following his order with a string of four-dimensional coordinates.
‘Plasma engine four reports fire. Output suspended,’ said the duty officer at Spika’s side.
Spika recalculated faster than his cogitator. He announced a corrected set of coordinates.
‘Cap engine three, and boost five and six to compensate,’ Spika ordered. ‘Bring us about. Bring us about!’
‘Corrective burn in five, four, three…’ the duty officer announced.
‘Tell the artificers to crack the whip!’ Spika told another subordinate. ‘The stokers must put their backs into it. Feed those damn furnaces. Death is the only excuse for not shovelling!’
‘Sir.’
The deck shuddered and the lights dimmed as the burn began.
‘Gunnery!’ Spika yelled, selecting another pict screen. ‘As soon as you have capacity, you may fire at will.’
‘Aye, master!’
Spika looked at the strategium, assessing the proximity of the Archenemy line. It appeared that one of the unholy escorts – Ominator by its wild animal screams – was peeling towards the shield-less Armaduke to finish the duel while the others gunned directly for the main line. It had lofted attack ships from its carrier decks.
Spika’s poor relic of a ship had survived the first knock, though the list rolling up the damage report display was chilling. Spika had a feeling it had been less of a case of their shields doing their job, and more a case that the Necrostar Antiversal had developed insufficient power for another blast so soon after crippling the Domino. The Armaduke had survived because the discharge had been underpowered.
Even underpowered, it had blown out their shields.
Spika could smell fear in the air. All of his young and inexperienced officers were ashen and shaken. The hardwired servitors twitched in their sockets and plug-racks, neural links pulsing. Even the more veteran crewmen, like the Officer of Detection and the Chief Steersman, looked frantic.
They were terrified. His ship was terrified. Spika could taste the wash of cortisone and other stress hormones flooding the ship’s neural and biological systems. There was a stink of terror mixing with the smoke in the air-circulation system. Thirty thousand souls, locked in a metal box, in the dark, under fire. Most of them had never known anything like it before.
He remembered his life as a bridge junior. It was the absence of information that really gnawed at you. Only the shipmaster and the officers with access to the strategium feed had any real notion of what was going on outside, and then only if the Officer of Detection was doing a decent job. In a void fight, realspace ports shuttered and closed, and everything became feed only. Even if the ports had remained open, there was nothing to see. You were brawling with – and being fired upon by – an object that might be thousands of kilometres away in the interstellar blackness, and moving at a considerable percentage of the speed of light. There was the shake and terror of impacts, the raging engines, the cacophony of voices and data-chatter, but everything else was blind and far-removed, separated from the realm of the senses. No wonder juniors lost their nerve, no wonder the helm servitors and data-serfs wept and moaned as they worked at their logic stations, no wonder the stokers wailed and lamented as they laboured in the fiery caves of the engine vaults. Every soul depended on the uniting perception, the singular view, of the shipmaster. He alone could appreciate the grand dance of a fleet action, the war going on outside the metal tomb inside which the crew toiled. Every man worked without even understanding what benefit his small contribution was making. If death came, it overwhelmed suddenly, utterly lacking in warning or explanation.
The world would come apart in light, and then fire and hard vacuum would annihilate you.
The Officer of Detection cried out. Spika checked the scope.
The monster Ominator had launched munitions at them. Deep-range warheads were rippling through the void at them on plasma wakes.
Spika swore. He expected some comment from Gaunt.
To his surprise, the colonel-commissar was no longer at his side.
Elodie tried to focus. She’d been doing something. Something really ordinary. That was it, she’d been signing something. The ship had just that minute shuddered, and a metallic voice had announced they were arriving at wherever it was they were supposed to be going.
Some men from the regiment had come into the transport decks with yet more Munitorum paperwork for the retinue to sign. They’d circulated. Costin, the drunkard, had brought stuff to her when it was her turn. He just needed her to make her mark. It was another disclaimer, all part of the accompany bond.
Elodie had barely paid attention. The sustained quake of re-translation had disquieted her, and some of the children and younger women had become upset. When the metallic voice made its announcement, there had been cheering, and loud prayers offered in thanks to the Saint and the Emperor. Lay preachers and men of faith got up to lead the retinue in hymns of deliverance from the warp.
Then other things had happened very quickly. Things she didn’t understand. Sirens had begun to sound. Klaxons and bells. Sudden tension and fear had flashed through the hold habitats of the retinue company, an alarm born of ignorance. No one knew what was happening.
Realspace port shutters in the outer chambers that had only just begun to re-open after the immaterium transit were suddenly closing again. Old shutter motivators groaned at the sudden reverse. Members of the retinue had been waiting days to see out of the ship, if only to glimpse the brown darkness of space and the reassurance of distant stars, and now that solace was being denied them, all over again.
And the voice. The metallic voice. It was shouting words that sounded like battle stations.
How could they be in a battle? That seemed so unlikely.
Abruptly, as she was puzzling it out, something happened to the ship. Something hit the ship so hard everyone was thrown about, and the lights went out, and the air began to reek of smoke. When the lights began to flutter back on again, people were screaming. The children were wailing. Men and women had been hurt by the fall, bruised or bloodied by striking the deck or furniture fittings. Elodie struggled up, helping an older woman beside her. She was amazed at her fear. She’d never felt so numb and helpless. Costin had fallen too, spilling his papers all over the deck mesh. He was pan
icking. As she helped the older woman, Elodie glimpsed him taking a deep pull from a flask. The noise of panic in the chamber was almost overwhelming.
‘We’re in a fight! A fight!’ someone shouted.
‘We will perish in the void!’ someone else shrieked.
‘Be calm. Be calm!’ Elodie heard herself saying to the people around her. She had no calm of her own to share. She wanted to know why she could smell smoke. She wanted to know if the world was about to turn upside down again, and if the lights would come back on if they went out again. The screech of the alarms seemed designed to promote acute anxiety.
She saw Juniper. The woman was frantic.
‘Where’s my little dear?’ Juniper was crying. ‘Where’s my dear little girl? I lost her when the lights went out.’
Elodie put her arm around Juniper to steady her, and looked around, searching the seething crowd. People were rioting in every direction.
‘Yoncy?’ Elodie yelled. ‘Yoncy, come here to us!’
‘Where are you, Yoncy?’ Juniper called.
Elodie saw Captain Meryn, who’d been supervising the troop of men on paperwork detail.
‘Have you seen Yoncy?’ she asked.
Meryn had an ugly expression on his face, a sick look of fear. He glared at her.
‘Who?’ he asked.
‘Captain’s Criid’s little girl!’ Juniper blurted, crying. ‘The dear thing will be trampled!’
Meryn pushed past them. He said something that Elodie didn’t hear properly.
She was pretty sure it was something like, Do I look like I care? Or words to that effect.
There was a sudden rekindling of panic as the ship’s plasma engines began to thrash and rumble at an accelerated rate, making everything reverberate. Elodie clutched Juniper, who was sobbing and shaking.
‘We’ll find her,’ she insisted. ‘We’ll find her.’
Elodie assumed that the trauma couldn’t get any worse. But there was a sudden bark of cracking gunfire. Everyone flinched and ducked, and almost everyone screamed.
The crowd began scattering. Those who couldn’t flee threw themselves flat onto the deck or took cover behind cots, crates or bunk blocks.
There was a Tanith trooper barging down the central hold space aisle towards Elodie and Juniper. Elodie didn’t recognise him. There seemed to be something wrong with his face, as if it had become blurred. His right hand was soaked in blood and brandishing a lasrifle. As he advanced, the soldier was cracking off bursts of autofire above the heads of the crowd to scare them out of his way. The gunfire bursts pattered and sparked off the high hold ceiling.
His left hand was around the throat of the terrified child he had snatched up as a shield.
It was Yoncy.
TEN
Shields
Spika stared at his comparatives for a second. His plasma engines were burning hard, and he could feel the grav torque pulling at the ship’s seams as it surged into the hard turn.
They were never going to make it. They were never going to turn in time. They were certainly not going to pull clear of the munitions spread rushing towards them. He had ordered counterfire to try to track and detonate some of the incoming torpedoes, but even with the detection systems on their side, it was like trying to hit an individual grain of sand with a bow and arrow during a hurricane. Another few moments and the enemy munitions would be sufficiently in-range to establish target lock and start to actively hunt them.
A warhead spread that large would demolish an unshielded hull like an eggshell.
Spika had one choice. In truth, he had two, but one of them was ‘die’, so there was little to discuss. Ominator, shrieking its name in grotesque pulses of noise through the void, like a wounded animal in a trap, was coming for them. Aggressor Libertus was racing away from the solid Imperial gunline to offer support, but it was six or seven minutes away from being any use.
Spika adjusted the heading values and added nineteen seconds to the burn duration.
The chief steersman glanced at him.
‘Execute!’ Spika yelled.
Through the glass, darkness.
‘I can’t see anything,’ said Felyx.
‘Get behind me,’ hissed Maddalena Darebeloved.
Felyx glanced at her.
‘You’re ridiculous. Simply ridiculous,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a street hit, this is a void fight. How is getting behind you going to protect me?’
He turned back to the realspace port. They’d found a stretch of hull-side hallway in the outer accommodation deck where the realspace shutters had failed to close properly. There was a limited view out into the blackness. Felyx was leaning close to the thickened armaglass to peer out, but he was seeing little more than his own reflection.
‘I can’t see anything,’ he whispered. There was nothing visible outside, just darkness. Not even stars. For all the commotion going on inside the Armaduke, there was apparently nothing to warrant it.
Dalin watched Felyx and his lifeguard. There was a tremendous noise coming from the transport decks behind them, a palpable edge of panic. Dalin was anxious, and very distressed by the great surges of engine noise, and the rapid shifts and sways in mass and gravity. He felt like he was on a boat in a heavy sea.
‘We should go to the bunker spaces,’ he said.
‘Someone speaks sense,’ said Maddalena.
‘Being in a bunker deck isn’t going to help much if we’re hit,’ snapped Felyx. ‘If the ship goes up, there’s nowhere to hide.’
‘Being in a bunker deck offers better chances of survival than standing beside an unarmoured window that could blow out to hard void at any moment,’ said Maddalena. ‘Don’t make me pick you up and carry you.’
The shipwide alarms were still sounding, and personnel were running past them. The smell of smoke remained intense, but it had been partly obscured by a rising stink of heat. The engines were running hot. Furnaces were seething.
‘My first void fight, and this is what I witness,’ complained Felyx, peering out again, bobbing his head to try different angles. ‘I suppose everything is too far away for us to see.’
‘Really?’ asked Dalin. He was honestly surprised. He’d never really thought about the scale in those terms. He understand that the void was big, but he’d never imagined a situation where ships the size of the one they were travelling aboard could engage without being able to see each other.
The ship was the size of a city! How ridiculous was it to fight something so far away you couldn’t see it? A lasman had to appreciate his enemy, or at least his enemy’s position, in order to fight. And what kind of gun could–
Somebody ran up to them, out of breath. Dalin turned, and suddenly stiffened. Maddalena also snapped around in surprise.
‘What in the God-emperor’s name are you doing here?’ asked Gaunt.
Felyx turned from the realspace port at the sound of Gaunt’s voice.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Gaunt snarled. Dalin blinked. There was something in Gaunt’s manner, an agitation, that he had never seen before. ‘Get to the bunker spaces. The shelter decks. Come on!’
‘I–’ Felyx began.
‘Shut up and move,’ Gaunt barked. He looked at Maddalena. ‘Some lifeguard you are! Do your damn job! Get him into a shelter cavity! There are standing orders for this kind of situation. I could have you all on charges!’
He looked at Dalin.
‘I’m disappointed in you, trooper. I thought you could be trusted to keep these people in line.’
Dalin stood to attention.
‘No excuses, sir.’
Gaunt looked back at Felyx and his minder.
‘No excuses, but they probably aren’t cooperating, are they? Did you tell them to go to the bunker decks?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Gaunt stared at Maddalena.
‘Do your job.’
‘What’s happening?’ asked Felyx.
Gaunt glanced at him.
‘We’re in a fight
.’
‘I can’t see anything.’
‘Of course you can’t!’ Gaunt snapped.
‘How many ships? Are we winning?’ Felyx asked.
‘Go to the bunker, now!’
‘What are you doing here?’ asked Felyx. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere important?’
Gaunt hesitated.
‘Go to the bunker,’ he growled.
‘Holy Throne!’ Dalin blurted.
There was something to see outside. In the time they had been speaking, something had loomed silently, filling the realspace ports. They had indeed got the scale wrong, but in the opposite direction. The blackness they had been staring at had been the lightless shadow of another ship’s flank. Now it resolved as they surged past it. They saw where the hard-edged light caught the upper hull and gun towers, saw the glowing lines of fusion burning where vast sections of deck had been scoured away. Clouds of debris, like glitter, filled the void. Brutal ribbons of escaping energy licked and flared from ruptured power plants in the ship’s exposed entrails. Chunks of armoured hull wallowed past on slow, lazily spinning trajectories. They were right alongside another ship, but had been in its shadow and too close to see it before.
The other ship was stricken and all but dead. It looked like a burning hive, seen from the air.
‘I will escort them to the bunker right away, sir,’ said Dalin.
They all turned as they heard the same noise. A sharp, snapping report had come from the direction of the transport decks, a crackling chatter that for all the worlds of the Imperium sounded like gunfire.
‘Now get behind me,’ said Maddalena.
The plasma engines were exceeding the operational limit of their tolerances. Immeasurably old, and refitted more times than Spika cared to imagine, they were simply no longer able to develop maximum thrust from cold or low power at short notice.
The hull frame wasn’t up to it either. The Highness Ser Armaduke had never been an elegant or graceful ship, not even in the heyday of its youth, millennia before. It was dogged and robust, not agile.
The hull, wrenched by the extreme forces of the manoeuvre Spika was attempting, was crying out in pain. Crew members, especially hardwired servitors and serfs, were screaming as waves of techno-empathic pain gripped them. Several dropped dead. The steel and plastek cranium of a high-function servitor at the environmental station burst apart in a spray of firefly sparks, the pressure slap shearing the metal plates from the skull beneath, revealing the bone and organic traces of the Imperial human who had forfeited his life to the augmetic processes of Navy service many standard lifetimes before. Scorched rivets and yellow teeth scattered across the deck. An artificer’s assistant with a porcelain face lay down beside the manifold console as if to sleep. It scrunched into a foetal position and died without reopening its optics. A bulk servitor, a loader in the upper forward starboard magazine, suffered some kind of cerebrovascular crisis, and beat its reinforced head apart against a munitions silo wall. Hyper-strain triggered a convulsive fit in a precision drone serving the strategium, and its subtle haptic limbs began to thrash so rapidly they became a humming bird blur.