Legends of the Wolf: The Omnibus, page 82
‘Target all weapons when in range,’ Gunnlaugur said. ‘Get a lock on the upper hull. We can ignore the escorts – they’re already busy.’
Olgeir looked at the lenses doubtfully. They were still a long way off, but everything he’d seen suggested that the Immaculate Destiny outgunned them easily. It would have been a difficult task to get in close at the best of times, and the full-scale orbital war raging around them made it even harder.
He was about to speak, suggesting another tack, when the images changed. The Immaculate Destiny briefly disappeared behind a huge flash of light, followed by a blistering column of energy spearing down to the world below. Anything caught in that burning column was smashed apart in a cascade of explosions, clearing a well of space all the way down to the surface. A split second after that, docking doors on the underside of the ship yawned open, and a brace of heavily armoured landers emerged, falling fast.
‘Can we lock on yet?’ Gunnlaugur asked.
‘Just a few seconds…’ grunted Jorundur, working frantically even as more impacts skittered the galleon’s viewfinders sideways. ‘Teeth of Russ – just a few seconds…’
The landers plummeted, dropping like stones through the tumbling void-wreckage, their undersides reddening fast until they looked more like meteors than manned vessels.
Gunnlaugur swore loudly, striding over to an augur-lens and wrenching it round to take a closer look. ‘Mark where they went! Get a clear fix!’
‘Aye, lord,’ Suaka acknowledged, hunching over her station, her fingers a blur of movement.
‘We can’t take that ship on, Skullhewer,’ said Olgeir, seeing his chance. ‘Not easily. But we can follow those.’
Gunnlaugur looked back up at him, his ragged mouth splitting into a wide grin. ‘Aye, Heavy-Hand, that we can. So start moving – I’ll want Sigrún with me too.’
CHAPTER TEN
Four of them ran from the command bridge to the hangars – Gunnlaugur, Ingvar, Olgeir and Baldr. By the time they reached the lower level, the kaerls had made everything ready. The fuel lines had been withdrawn from the Hlaupnir, the hangar doors were opening to the void, warning klaxons were blaring and the aprons were cleared of personnel.
Ingvar sprinted across the deck, his blade swinging at his belt. Hafloí hadn’t been happy about staying on the galleon with the Old Dog, but the whelp had learned to bite his tongue when given an order. In any case, things were unlikely to be uneventful on board – the hard-round impacts just kept coming in, clattering against the void shields, gathering in intensity. As soon as the system runner was away, Jorundur would be forced to fight his way clear, and that would keep the entire crew busy.
Ingvar reached the system runner and leapt up through the open crew hatch, seizing a handhold and throwing himself into the access berth. Gunnlaugur was a few paces ahead of him, charging up a ladder and making for the bridge. The Hlaupnir had felt absurdly cramped during the first few weeks of the hunt, but now was crewed sparsely – two dozen of Bjargborn’s troops, a few servitors, the four Space Wolves. That made it trim, lean, something that could react quickly and still pack a punch. You wouldn’t want to attempt a warp jump with that complement, but a planetary descent, hot and hard, that was a different matter.
Baldr was the last one in. The hatch slammed closed behind them, the locks spun tight and the atmosphere seals sucked rigid. The decks thrummed, then shivered as the manoeuvring thrusters ramped up. By the time Ingvar reached the bridge, the Hlaupnir was off the apron, swivelling around, making ready to boost clear of the hangar and out into the void.
The system runner’s bridge itself was small – room enough for twenty, maybe, if you stuffed them in. Gunnlaugur occupied the stone-hewn command throne; the remainder of the operational stations were taken by kaerls, strapped in and armoured up. A sloping armaglass canopy stretched away overhead, barred with iron and already glistening with hololithic tactical read-outs. The whole place was bare, stripped down, utilitarian, just like a Fenrisian ship should be.
Olgeir hauled himself up through the floor-level hatch just as the engines blasted into full pitch, and was nearly thrown back into the rear bulkheads.
‘Watch your step, brother,’ Baldr said helpfully, coming up behind him.
The acceleration was wrenching, throwing them clear of the Amethyst Suzeraine’s side and deep into the orbital apocalypse. Gunnlaugur swung the nose down, and Ojada’s burning atmosphere swelled up in the forward viewers. Ingvar caught a final view of the galleon as it peeled away, its void shields swimming with energy discharge, before everything turned into a criss-cross splash pattern of las-fire and plasma impacts.
He grasped his way over to Gunnlaugur, staggering against the heavy pitch of the deck and gripping the handholds. ‘You still have the fix on them?’ he asked.
Gunnlaugur nodded, face hidden behind his full armour. ‘Interference heavy,’ he growled. ‘But they’re not getting away.’
The Hlaupnir blasted to its full velocity, screaming planetwards like a shivered spear, leaving behind a whole gaggle of gunships that had started to take an interest in it. It headed straight down, nose first, boosting hard through the smack and skid of las-fire impacts. Ingvar finally reached his throne and thunked into it, hauling on the restraints to keep himself from being hurled back across the steepling deck.
The view ahead was burning up – first in gouts of rippling flame, then streamers of it, then a solid curtain that roared and licked across the armaglass. The vessel bounced and shook as the atmosphere thickened, tearing at the void shields. Collisions continued to rain in, though it was impossible to tell whether they were debris or the last desperate shots from the orbital zone.
‘Hel! Signal lost,’ Gunnlaugur spat, grappling with the controls. ‘But I’ve got a rough lock – we’ll come down close.’
Even as he spoke, the Hlaupnir pulled out of its vertical descent, switching to turbines and sliding into a shallower atmospheric run. The hard pull of gravity tilted, vying with the colossal inertia of the engine switch, making every rivet and fitting on the bridge rattle in its housings.
‘Morkai’s teeth,’ breathed Olgeir, staring out of the realviewers as the vista cleared. ‘They’ve made a mess.’
Flames still gusted and ripped across the armaglass, which now offered the first, tattered glimpses of the world beyond. A vivid orange atmosphere bloomed above them, striated with thick palls of oil-fuelled clouds. The planetscape was a storm of turbulence – lead-dark oceans boiling into columns of steam, ranks of lightning crackling through the roil like dancing star fields. Rig-cities loomed up around them on every side, marching off to the smoke-thick horizon, towers of blackened iron marked by layer upon layer of lumens and marker lights, colossal artificial cliffs that belched and spat with industrial burn-off.
The water, slathered in heavy slicks of promethium, shimmered like magma. The rigs all bore huge gouges in their flanks, exposing the extravagant complexity of their innards. Many sections had come down entirely, sliding into the oily waters as they fell apart, sending out tidal surges that crashed into the next rig along in bursts of spark-laced spray.
Atmospheric craft, thick flights of them, zipped and swerved through it all, strafing, spinning, loosing barrages of missiles into any intact fortress walls. Some bore Imperial livery – the Ojada defence forces, sundry military orders – but they were outnumbered many times over by the bizarre craft of the invaders. These were like junkyard rejects, vomiting out smuts, clad in overlapping plates of rust, slapped with vivid icons of heretic warbands and crowned with broken horns, spikes and hooks. Further off, up in the ruined crowns of the mighty rigs, heavier landers were coming down from orbit, shielded by coronas of covering las-fire, their swollen bellies full of warriors ready to be disgorged into the seething torment.
‘This world is already dead,’ said Baldr.
‘Not quite,’ said Ingvar, studying the scanners keenly. ‘Just enough left for someone to come hunting.’
Olgeir’s senses were alive now, his skin tingling. Getting out of the warp and back onto a world of air and fire would always do that, kindling the instincts that he’d been born with. He could already sense them – the agents of the Ecclesiarchy, out there, lost to vision amid the fire and smog, but there nonetheless, amid the listing rigs, come to salvage something from the wreckage just as they had done on Ras Shakeh. He could almost taste their presence on the air, just as he had once tasted the presence of beasts on the ice, just a spear-throw away, just a sword-thrust, just the reach of a hand.
‘Target rig ahead,’ Gunnlaugur announced, bringing the Hlaupnir down three hundred feet from the boiling seas. ‘That’s where I lost them.’
The system runner screamed along at full speed, carving a deep furrow in the waters beneath and throwing up a wall of spray. Fighters latched on and tried to keep up, but were left far behind as they angled to fire. Ahead of them, vast as a hive city, the rig swelled into clarity, smoke-shrouded and bleeding, towering into the burning atmosphere like some sacrificial volcano. Its gigantic supporting piers were lashed with the storm-swell, half lost in a sliding torrent of foam and fire-flecks. Its lower decks billowed with ash. Higher up, enormous sections had been cut out, as if by a jagged knife, stripping out a bewildering landscape of tortured rebar and twisted scaffolding. The giant oil processors were still churning, sucking up fuel from the undersea crust and piping it to the refineries, even as the entire world around them sunk into ruin.
Gunnlaugur didn’t slow until the very last moment. The Hlaupnir careered towards the open flanks of the rig, finally pulling up just as it seemed he would crash them straight into the outer shell. The engines howled, the world swung on its axis, and for a second they were staring straight up the towering edge itself, gazing high into orange skies.
Then he killed the forward power and activated the manoeuvring thrusters, spinning the Hlaupnir over and sending the system runner dropping back sharply towards the rig’s edge. A huge supporting spar passed overhead, then another, and then they were inside, under darkness, slowing rapidly as the city’s structure swallowed them up. The retros activated, and Gunnlaugur zeroed in on a landing platform. The Hlaupnir, its hull steaming and scorched, hovered for a second, grinding to a halt, before he brought it down in a whine of turbines and thrown-up dust.
Gunnlaugur leapt out of the throne and onto his feet, hammer already in hand. Ingvar and the rest did the same, throwing off the restraints, weaponing up, ramming home magazines, kindling disruptor fields.
‘Follow me in,’ Gunnlaugur told them, his snarling voice alive with relish. ‘And let the murder-make begin.’
The death’s head kept on coming.
‘Skítja’, spat Jorundur, working to haul the galleon out of cannon range. ‘It’s got its jaws into us now.’
It wasn’t the only ship after them – a hundred lesser craft were zeroing in, loosing missiles, spitting las-batteries, trying to carve a piece of them off into the void – but the skull-faced cruiser was by far the most dangerous. Bjargborn’s gunners had started to return fire in earnest by then, loosing strikes whenever anything got too close. They were good, and Bjargborn had worked hard at training them. But still, the targets just kept mounting up, and after a while that pressure would become too much to handle.
Jorundur liked flying. He liked flying a Thunderhawk, and he liked flying a battleship. The principles were different, the techniques were very different, but you could still take the same pleasure in it. This, though – this hunk of heavy metal, gravid, wallowing – was nothing like pleasure. It was torture just getting it to move where you wanted it to move, like wading through quicksand. It had been built for preying on the weak, for feasting on the dregs of inter-system trade. It was big, to be sure, and its hull was as thick as grox-hide, but just then he’d have traded all that bulk for some more powerful drives, for some agility, for just a sliver of tautness.
‘Full spread, away port-nadir!’ Bjargborn ordered, speaking directly to the gunnery master down in the lower decks. ‘Clear us some space there, then keep the close cycles going.’
The rest of the bridge crew shouted over one another as the decks shook and banged, spraying orders down the comm-lines, their eyes fixed to the batteries of lenses that fizzed with the ship’s vital signs and sensor-spreads, their hands dancing across input-boards.
And through it all, the death’s head kept on coming.
‘Keep me something in the tubes for that monster,’ Jorundur told Bjargborn, struggling to get the Amethyst Suzeraine to roll around to where he wanted it. It felt like a stray hit had damaged the drives somehow, though most of the void shields were still holding. ‘We need some distance, we need some time.’
‘Ecclesiarchy squadron holding position,’ said Hafloí, standing beside Jorundur’s throne. ‘Its firepower’s rolling out now.’
‘So it is,’ mused Jorundur. He’d guessed the Ecclesiarchy battleship would withdraw once its landers had made planetfall, but instead it was staying put, hovering over the landing sites like a vast golden vulture, its escorts clustered around. The Immaculate Destiny was the largest ship in the immediate void-volume by some distance, and when it opened fire, it detonated an impressive amount of plasma. It hadn’t launched one of its orbital barrages again, but its regular broadsides were still huge enough to overload the realviewers when they went off, sending the lenses white and racing with static. ‘Keep at range from that thing,’ he ordered Suaka, feeding a slice more power to the plasma drives to kick out along the orbital zone. ‘Treat as just another hostile – track the macrocannons, and report if you detect a lock.’
All the time, the death’s head kept on coming. It was barging through the ship-clusters now, breaking a corvette across its prow as it advanced, heedless of the damage it took as the smaller craft’s spine cracked and disintegrated. The cruiser looked strangely withered amid all the carnage, like a skin-stretched cadaver, its profile limned with corpse-light, its bony flanks strewn with wreckage. Its gun decks were open and firing, gaping with silver-mawed cannons, spewing more of that ink-blot filth into the void as it came.
‘Analysis, shipmaster,’ Jorundur said, maintaining course but preparing to make a change.
‘Pattern unknown, lord,’ Bjargborn replied. ‘My guess – only a guess – Heretic Astartes, battle cruiser-class.’
Jorundur nodded. ‘Pain waiting for us on the inside too, then.’ He shot a series of commands down to the enginarium, and pulled up a hololith of the volume immediately below. ‘It’ll launch boarders, if we let it. Prepare hard drop to five-six, on my mark, then loose main volley aft.’
Suaka looked up sharply. ‘Lord, that will–’
‘Course laid in, lord,’ Bjargborn reported, giving her a hard glare. ‘Ready for hard drop.’
The death’s head picked up speed, shrugging off a raking scatter of solid rounds from a half-destroyed Ojada defence frigate before boosting clearly into transmit range. It was firing rapidly now, blasting a path through the tumbling debris with its forward batteries, making ready to strike.
‘Launches detected!’ Suaka cried. ‘Boarding torpedoes incoming, eight signals, hull-breaking speeds.’
‘Eight of them,’ murmured Hafloí dryly, hefting his axe. ‘They must rate us highly.’
‘Attempting to get a lock…’ reported Bjargborn. ‘Hel. They’re moving too fast.’
‘Don’t bother – they’ll outpace a tracking augur,’ Jorundur said. ‘Just keep the drop primed.’
For a few seconds more, the Amethyst Suzeraine raced along at near full speed, plasma drives burning hard, taking the ship skating across the cap of Ojada’s troposphere. The pursuing boarding torpedoes closed in quickly, corkscrewing through the firebursts. With its deadly cargo dispatched, the death’s-head cruiser pivoted, rolling around and upwards to bring its cannon batteries to bear. Any moment now, it would open fire, smashing the Amethyst Suzeraine’s void coverage open and clearing a path for the incoming boarding parties. All the while, the torpedoes scythed in closer, closer, closer…
‘Mark!’ shouted Jorundur.
Bjargborn hit the controls, and the ship’s power suddenly snapped out. Retros ignited, and the galleon smacked to a halt as if it had been stunned. It jolted, nose-down, then collapsed like a thrown anvil straight into the planet’s gravity well.
Jorundur was yanked forward in his throne, Hafloí nearly hurled into the servitor pits. A cable severed, lashing across the upper galleries in a welter of sparks, and a whole rank of cogitators smashed loose of their moorings, crunching across the deck in a steel-denting cascade.
The galleon dived, all forward momentum killed, its main thrusters cold. The torpedoes, locked in by their machine-spirits, swooped after it, homing in on the tumbling mass ahead of them. A second later, and the Amethyst Suzeraine hit the upper atmosphere, scraping along it like a plough thrust deep into frost-tight earth. A plume of fire blazed out from the lower hull, flaring up around its flanks and surging into the semi-void. The boarding torpedoes activated crisis protocols and tried to pull out, battling hard against the sudden gravity-wrench.
‘Torpedoes away aft!’ Jorundur roared, fighting to keep his seat as the entire bridge shook around him. ‘Full volley, maximum spread, away, away!’
Bjargborn had been hurled from his command seat by then, but scrambled back across a pitching deck and threw himself on the control lever, driving it open. The order sequence shot down to the launch bays, and the pre-targeted volley swooshed out of the rear tubes.
The torpedoes ignited as soon as they hit the wall of re-entry fire rearing up behind the plummeting galleon. As their warheads detonated, the torrent of flame bloomed into a gigantic plasma-field, a raging inferno that atomised everything within its rapidly expanding borders. The pursuing boarding tubes punched through the field, exploding into fragments as the extreme heat blew their casings apart.
Olgeir looked at the lenses doubtfully. They were still a long way off, but everything he’d seen suggested that the Immaculate Destiny outgunned them easily. It would have been a difficult task to get in close at the best of times, and the full-scale orbital war raging around them made it even harder.
He was about to speak, suggesting another tack, when the images changed. The Immaculate Destiny briefly disappeared behind a huge flash of light, followed by a blistering column of energy spearing down to the world below. Anything caught in that burning column was smashed apart in a cascade of explosions, clearing a well of space all the way down to the surface. A split second after that, docking doors on the underside of the ship yawned open, and a brace of heavily armoured landers emerged, falling fast.
‘Can we lock on yet?’ Gunnlaugur asked.
‘Just a few seconds…’ grunted Jorundur, working frantically even as more impacts skittered the galleon’s viewfinders sideways. ‘Teeth of Russ – just a few seconds…’
The landers plummeted, dropping like stones through the tumbling void-wreckage, their undersides reddening fast until they looked more like meteors than manned vessels.
Gunnlaugur swore loudly, striding over to an augur-lens and wrenching it round to take a closer look. ‘Mark where they went! Get a clear fix!’
‘Aye, lord,’ Suaka acknowledged, hunching over her station, her fingers a blur of movement.
‘We can’t take that ship on, Skullhewer,’ said Olgeir, seeing his chance. ‘Not easily. But we can follow those.’
Gunnlaugur looked back up at him, his ragged mouth splitting into a wide grin. ‘Aye, Heavy-Hand, that we can. So start moving – I’ll want Sigrún with me too.’
CHAPTER TEN
Four of them ran from the command bridge to the hangars – Gunnlaugur, Ingvar, Olgeir and Baldr. By the time they reached the lower level, the kaerls had made everything ready. The fuel lines had been withdrawn from the Hlaupnir, the hangar doors were opening to the void, warning klaxons were blaring and the aprons were cleared of personnel.
Ingvar sprinted across the deck, his blade swinging at his belt. Hafloí hadn’t been happy about staying on the galleon with the Old Dog, but the whelp had learned to bite his tongue when given an order. In any case, things were unlikely to be uneventful on board – the hard-round impacts just kept coming in, clattering against the void shields, gathering in intensity. As soon as the system runner was away, Jorundur would be forced to fight his way clear, and that would keep the entire crew busy.
Ingvar reached the system runner and leapt up through the open crew hatch, seizing a handhold and throwing himself into the access berth. Gunnlaugur was a few paces ahead of him, charging up a ladder and making for the bridge. The Hlaupnir had felt absurdly cramped during the first few weeks of the hunt, but now was crewed sparsely – two dozen of Bjargborn’s troops, a few servitors, the four Space Wolves. That made it trim, lean, something that could react quickly and still pack a punch. You wouldn’t want to attempt a warp jump with that complement, but a planetary descent, hot and hard, that was a different matter.
Baldr was the last one in. The hatch slammed closed behind them, the locks spun tight and the atmosphere seals sucked rigid. The decks thrummed, then shivered as the manoeuvring thrusters ramped up. By the time Ingvar reached the bridge, the Hlaupnir was off the apron, swivelling around, making ready to boost clear of the hangar and out into the void.
The system runner’s bridge itself was small – room enough for twenty, maybe, if you stuffed them in. Gunnlaugur occupied the stone-hewn command throne; the remainder of the operational stations were taken by kaerls, strapped in and armoured up. A sloping armaglass canopy stretched away overhead, barred with iron and already glistening with hololithic tactical read-outs. The whole place was bare, stripped down, utilitarian, just like a Fenrisian ship should be.
Olgeir hauled himself up through the floor-level hatch just as the engines blasted into full pitch, and was nearly thrown back into the rear bulkheads.
‘Watch your step, brother,’ Baldr said helpfully, coming up behind him.
The acceleration was wrenching, throwing them clear of the Amethyst Suzeraine’s side and deep into the orbital apocalypse. Gunnlaugur swung the nose down, and Ojada’s burning atmosphere swelled up in the forward viewers. Ingvar caught a final view of the galleon as it peeled away, its void shields swimming with energy discharge, before everything turned into a criss-cross splash pattern of las-fire and plasma impacts.
He grasped his way over to Gunnlaugur, staggering against the heavy pitch of the deck and gripping the handholds. ‘You still have the fix on them?’ he asked.
Gunnlaugur nodded, face hidden behind his full armour. ‘Interference heavy,’ he growled. ‘But they’re not getting away.’
The Hlaupnir blasted to its full velocity, screaming planetwards like a shivered spear, leaving behind a whole gaggle of gunships that had started to take an interest in it. It headed straight down, nose first, boosting hard through the smack and skid of las-fire impacts. Ingvar finally reached his throne and thunked into it, hauling on the restraints to keep himself from being hurled back across the steepling deck.
The view ahead was burning up – first in gouts of rippling flame, then streamers of it, then a solid curtain that roared and licked across the armaglass. The vessel bounced and shook as the atmosphere thickened, tearing at the void shields. Collisions continued to rain in, though it was impossible to tell whether they were debris or the last desperate shots from the orbital zone.
‘Hel! Signal lost,’ Gunnlaugur spat, grappling with the controls. ‘But I’ve got a rough lock – we’ll come down close.’
Even as he spoke, the Hlaupnir pulled out of its vertical descent, switching to turbines and sliding into a shallower atmospheric run. The hard pull of gravity tilted, vying with the colossal inertia of the engine switch, making every rivet and fitting on the bridge rattle in its housings.
‘Morkai’s teeth,’ breathed Olgeir, staring out of the realviewers as the vista cleared. ‘They’ve made a mess.’
Flames still gusted and ripped across the armaglass, which now offered the first, tattered glimpses of the world beyond. A vivid orange atmosphere bloomed above them, striated with thick palls of oil-fuelled clouds. The planetscape was a storm of turbulence – lead-dark oceans boiling into columns of steam, ranks of lightning crackling through the roil like dancing star fields. Rig-cities loomed up around them on every side, marching off to the smoke-thick horizon, towers of blackened iron marked by layer upon layer of lumens and marker lights, colossal artificial cliffs that belched and spat with industrial burn-off.
The water, slathered in heavy slicks of promethium, shimmered like magma. The rigs all bore huge gouges in their flanks, exposing the extravagant complexity of their innards. Many sections had come down entirely, sliding into the oily waters as they fell apart, sending out tidal surges that crashed into the next rig along in bursts of spark-laced spray.
Atmospheric craft, thick flights of them, zipped and swerved through it all, strafing, spinning, loosing barrages of missiles into any intact fortress walls. Some bore Imperial livery – the Ojada defence forces, sundry military orders – but they were outnumbered many times over by the bizarre craft of the invaders. These were like junkyard rejects, vomiting out smuts, clad in overlapping plates of rust, slapped with vivid icons of heretic warbands and crowned with broken horns, spikes and hooks. Further off, up in the ruined crowns of the mighty rigs, heavier landers were coming down from orbit, shielded by coronas of covering las-fire, their swollen bellies full of warriors ready to be disgorged into the seething torment.
‘This world is already dead,’ said Baldr.
‘Not quite,’ said Ingvar, studying the scanners keenly. ‘Just enough left for someone to come hunting.’
Olgeir’s senses were alive now, his skin tingling. Getting out of the warp and back onto a world of air and fire would always do that, kindling the instincts that he’d been born with. He could already sense them – the agents of the Ecclesiarchy, out there, lost to vision amid the fire and smog, but there nonetheless, amid the listing rigs, come to salvage something from the wreckage just as they had done on Ras Shakeh. He could almost taste their presence on the air, just as he had once tasted the presence of beasts on the ice, just a spear-throw away, just a sword-thrust, just the reach of a hand.
‘Target rig ahead,’ Gunnlaugur announced, bringing the Hlaupnir down three hundred feet from the boiling seas. ‘That’s where I lost them.’
The system runner screamed along at full speed, carving a deep furrow in the waters beneath and throwing up a wall of spray. Fighters latched on and tried to keep up, but were left far behind as they angled to fire. Ahead of them, vast as a hive city, the rig swelled into clarity, smoke-shrouded and bleeding, towering into the burning atmosphere like some sacrificial volcano. Its gigantic supporting piers were lashed with the storm-swell, half lost in a sliding torrent of foam and fire-flecks. Its lower decks billowed with ash. Higher up, enormous sections had been cut out, as if by a jagged knife, stripping out a bewildering landscape of tortured rebar and twisted scaffolding. The giant oil processors were still churning, sucking up fuel from the undersea crust and piping it to the refineries, even as the entire world around them sunk into ruin.
Gunnlaugur didn’t slow until the very last moment. The Hlaupnir careered towards the open flanks of the rig, finally pulling up just as it seemed he would crash them straight into the outer shell. The engines howled, the world swung on its axis, and for a second they were staring straight up the towering edge itself, gazing high into orange skies.
Then he killed the forward power and activated the manoeuvring thrusters, spinning the Hlaupnir over and sending the system runner dropping back sharply towards the rig’s edge. A huge supporting spar passed overhead, then another, and then they were inside, under darkness, slowing rapidly as the city’s structure swallowed them up. The retros activated, and Gunnlaugur zeroed in on a landing platform. The Hlaupnir, its hull steaming and scorched, hovered for a second, grinding to a halt, before he brought it down in a whine of turbines and thrown-up dust.
Gunnlaugur leapt out of the throne and onto his feet, hammer already in hand. Ingvar and the rest did the same, throwing off the restraints, weaponing up, ramming home magazines, kindling disruptor fields.
‘Follow me in,’ Gunnlaugur told them, his snarling voice alive with relish. ‘And let the murder-make begin.’
The death’s head kept on coming.
‘Skítja’, spat Jorundur, working to haul the galleon out of cannon range. ‘It’s got its jaws into us now.’
It wasn’t the only ship after them – a hundred lesser craft were zeroing in, loosing missiles, spitting las-batteries, trying to carve a piece of them off into the void – but the skull-faced cruiser was by far the most dangerous. Bjargborn’s gunners had started to return fire in earnest by then, loosing strikes whenever anything got too close. They were good, and Bjargborn had worked hard at training them. But still, the targets just kept mounting up, and after a while that pressure would become too much to handle.
Jorundur liked flying. He liked flying a Thunderhawk, and he liked flying a battleship. The principles were different, the techniques were very different, but you could still take the same pleasure in it. This, though – this hunk of heavy metal, gravid, wallowing – was nothing like pleasure. It was torture just getting it to move where you wanted it to move, like wading through quicksand. It had been built for preying on the weak, for feasting on the dregs of inter-system trade. It was big, to be sure, and its hull was as thick as grox-hide, but just then he’d have traded all that bulk for some more powerful drives, for some agility, for just a sliver of tautness.
‘Full spread, away port-nadir!’ Bjargborn ordered, speaking directly to the gunnery master down in the lower decks. ‘Clear us some space there, then keep the close cycles going.’
The rest of the bridge crew shouted over one another as the decks shook and banged, spraying orders down the comm-lines, their eyes fixed to the batteries of lenses that fizzed with the ship’s vital signs and sensor-spreads, their hands dancing across input-boards.
And through it all, the death’s head kept on coming.
‘Keep me something in the tubes for that monster,’ Jorundur told Bjargborn, struggling to get the Amethyst Suzeraine to roll around to where he wanted it. It felt like a stray hit had damaged the drives somehow, though most of the void shields were still holding. ‘We need some distance, we need some time.’
‘Ecclesiarchy squadron holding position,’ said Hafloí, standing beside Jorundur’s throne. ‘Its firepower’s rolling out now.’
‘So it is,’ mused Jorundur. He’d guessed the Ecclesiarchy battleship would withdraw once its landers had made planetfall, but instead it was staying put, hovering over the landing sites like a vast golden vulture, its escorts clustered around. The Immaculate Destiny was the largest ship in the immediate void-volume by some distance, and when it opened fire, it detonated an impressive amount of plasma. It hadn’t launched one of its orbital barrages again, but its regular broadsides were still huge enough to overload the realviewers when they went off, sending the lenses white and racing with static. ‘Keep at range from that thing,’ he ordered Suaka, feeding a slice more power to the plasma drives to kick out along the orbital zone. ‘Treat as just another hostile – track the macrocannons, and report if you detect a lock.’
All the time, the death’s head kept on coming. It was barging through the ship-clusters now, breaking a corvette across its prow as it advanced, heedless of the damage it took as the smaller craft’s spine cracked and disintegrated. The cruiser looked strangely withered amid all the carnage, like a skin-stretched cadaver, its profile limned with corpse-light, its bony flanks strewn with wreckage. Its gun decks were open and firing, gaping with silver-mawed cannons, spewing more of that ink-blot filth into the void as it came.
‘Analysis, shipmaster,’ Jorundur said, maintaining course but preparing to make a change.
‘Pattern unknown, lord,’ Bjargborn replied. ‘My guess – only a guess – Heretic Astartes, battle cruiser-class.’
Jorundur nodded. ‘Pain waiting for us on the inside too, then.’ He shot a series of commands down to the enginarium, and pulled up a hololith of the volume immediately below. ‘It’ll launch boarders, if we let it. Prepare hard drop to five-six, on my mark, then loose main volley aft.’
Suaka looked up sharply. ‘Lord, that will–’
‘Course laid in, lord,’ Bjargborn reported, giving her a hard glare. ‘Ready for hard drop.’
The death’s head picked up speed, shrugging off a raking scatter of solid rounds from a half-destroyed Ojada defence frigate before boosting clearly into transmit range. It was firing rapidly now, blasting a path through the tumbling debris with its forward batteries, making ready to strike.
‘Launches detected!’ Suaka cried. ‘Boarding torpedoes incoming, eight signals, hull-breaking speeds.’
‘Eight of them,’ murmured Hafloí dryly, hefting his axe. ‘They must rate us highly.’
‘Attempting to get a lock…’ reported Bjargborn. ‘Hel. They’re moving too fast.’
‘Don’t bother – they’ll outpace a tracking augur,’ Jorundur said. ‘Just keep the drop primed.’
For a few seconds more, the Amethyst Suzeraine raced along at near full speed, plasma drives burning hard, taking the ship skating across the cap of Ojada’s troposphere. The pursuing boarding torpedoes closed in quickly, corkscrewing through the firebursts. With its deadly cargo dispatched, the death’s-head cruiser pivoted, rolling around and upwards to bring its cannon batteries to bear. Any moment now, it would open fire, smashing the Amethyst Suzeraine’s void coverage open and clearing a path for the incoming boarding parties. All the while, the torpedoes scythed in closer, closer, closer…
‘Mark!’ shouted Jorundur.
Bjargborn hit the controls, and the ship’s power suddenly snapped out. Retros ignited, and the galleon smacked to a halt as if it had been stunned. It jolted, nose-down, then collapsed like a thrown anvil straight into the planet’s gravity well.
Jorundur was yanked forward in his throne, Hafloí nearly hurled into the servitor pits. A cable severed, lashing across the upper galleries in a welter of sparks, and a whole rank of cogitators smashed loose of their moorings, crunching across the deck in a steel-denting cascade.
The galleon dived, all forward momentum killed, its main thrusters cold. The torpedoes, locked in by their machine-spirits, swooped after it, homing in on the tumbling mass ahead of them. A second later, and the Amethyst Suzeraine hit the upper atmosphere, scraping along it like a plough thrust deep into frost-tight earth. A plume of fire blazed out from the lower hull, flaring up around its flanks and surging into the semi-void. The boarding torpedoes activated crisis protocols and tried to pull out, battling hard against the sudden gravity-wrench.
‘Torpedoes away aft!’ Jorundur roared, fighting to keep his seat as the entire bridge shook around him. ‘Full volley, maximum spread, away, away!’
Bjargborn had been hurled from his command seat by then, but scrambled back across a pitching deck and threw himself on the control lever, driving it open. The order sequence shot down to the launch bays, and the pre-targeted volley swooshed out of the rear tubes.
The torpedoes ignited as soon as they hit the wall of re-entry fire rearing up behind the plummeting galleon. As their warheads detonated, the torrent of flame bloomed into a gigantic plasma-field, a raging inferno that atomised everything within its rapidly expanding borders. The pursuing boarding tubes punched through the field, exploding into fragments as the extreme heat blew their casings apart.
