Tomb World, page 22
Ptah lifts his hands, a conductor of mighty and ephemeral force, and brings the ship to life.
Shields light with a soap-bubble swirl of energies. The majesty of inertialess engines are awoken. Hard-light umbilical platforms retract and entry points seal, leaving no seam in the blackstone hull. With a shudder of effort, the Hepherentes rises.
The crushing weight of water is pushed aside, and the great harvest ship emerges from the depths. It breaches the surface at speed, throwing back a mountain of water that glitters in the sunlight.
It is a deceptively slight craft. Crescent jaws crown a dragonfly body, strong at its centre and tapering to a long tail. Three wings project from its central mass, a dorsal sail and a protrusion from either flank. To the human eye, there is nothing strong in the ship’s design. It is too slender, too alien to their understanding of strength. If their guardians of the void who see the harvest ship rising towards them are misled by its slight form, it will be the last mistake of their lives.
The Hepherentes climbs swiftly, the blue of Qeretesh’s sky fading to the black of the void, studded with the ten thousand lights of defence platforms and void wharves and monitor ships. No guns greet the harvest ship’s rise, no fusillades of macro shells or the shafts of lances. All of the planet’s orbital defences are in the grip of catastrophic systems errors, their machine spirits shrieking nonsense that drives the adepts at their controls into fits of scrapcode-induced madness.
As the harvest ship clears the last clinging traces of atmosphere, Night Shrouds streak from bays along its flanks. The compact, lethal bombers peel away from the Hepherentes, forming into pairs of crescent shapes that race through the emptiness with a speed that confounds the humans’ primitive scrying systems. A single Immortal is at the controls of each craft, their minds bound by interstitial strands and filled with the war-honed tactics of an ancient empire.
Each pair of craft has been given primary, secondary and tertiary targets, a nested hierarchy of destruction to sow through the planet’s orbit. This is Hekasun’s work, the first and only exercise of tactical decision making the nomarch has undertaken since arriving on his world. This victory, this murder in the void, will be his doing.
As the crews of the closest vessels struggle to classify the strange craft that are charging towards them, it is already too late. The twinned cannons mounted at the centre of the Night Shrouds’ jaws fire. Each bolt is the work of a technology just as far beyond the humans’ understanding – a fragment of antimatter suspended outside the confines of the material universe. The few point-defence turrets that are hurriedly turned on their axes are entirely inadequate. Their macro-bolter shells simply pass through the bombs.
The spheres return to the rigours of their home dimension in the moment before they detonate. Matter meets antimatter, and excoriated waves of energy annihilate everything around them. The first Imperial warships cease to be, sundered from the sky by the ancient power of the necrontyr.
Hekasun laughs, joy redounding on joy. He splits his consciousness into several parts so he can observe more of his grand design unfold. The Night Shrouds soar on, unhindered by the clouds of microscopic wreckage, to line up their next victims.
The moment of surprise has passed, but the chaos it has caused has only begun.
The void around Orymous is suddenly ablaze with the lights of engines, as the hundreds of troop transports and conveyor craft and anything not outfitted for war turn to flee. They point their sterns towards the surface of the world they stole and burn hard for the dubious safety of deep space.
Hekasun drives the Hepherentes into their midst, striking out with arcs of power that ripple along their flanks and smash through their hearts. Defenceless vessels die by the minute, what shielding and armour they possess overwhelmed by the merest touch of the harvest ship. The lords of the Zathanor, alongside Hekasun for this moment of triumph, exult in the massacre. Each Unclean body that tumbles into vacuum is a measure of vengeance extracted from an arrogant foe.
Not every Imperial ship has fled.
The Braetor and the Hammer of Golmera, a pair of Lunar-class cruisers recently returned from a twenty-year patrol of the Ruidus Stars, lead the hastily assembled counter-attack. The two ships race around the curve of Qeretesh, followed by a small fleet of frigates and monitor ships.
Hekasun steers the Hepherentes towards them, purposefully placing his ship in the centre of their line. The vengeful glee on the faces of the two ships’ captains falters as the xenos ship shrugs aside the combined fury of both craft. Its arcane shielding has been tested against greater and more exotic weaponry than the humans can bring to bear.
From the inferno that encloses the necron craft come coils of lightning and streams of plasma. The Hammer dies first. Whole decks are exposed to the airless abyss in moments. Its engine clusters burst apart, unleashing a nuclear inferno that serves as the vessel’s death-light. The Braetor sails on, too wounded to mourn the death of its sister ship.
The monitor ships lose their nerve, the formation breaking apart to escape the inviolate killer that has appeared above the world they once thought theirs.
With the defenders dead and broken, the voidyards and depots lie exposed. Tens of thousands live and work within their skeleton frames, with thousands more trapped by the flight of their transports.
The Hepherentes descends towards them. There will be no mercy for any of the usurpers.
Wreckage tumbles in clouds, vacuum-bloated human bodies mingling with ruined armour and shattered spars. Iron scrap will rain down upon Qeretesh for months to come, each streak of light a reminder to the Imperium’s defenders that their guardians died in ignominy.
As swiftly as it began, the war for the void is over. From the imperious vantage of space, Hekasun settles in to watch Khemet win him the war for the land.
CHAPTER 3
The holographic table bathes Khemet’s faceplate in shifting shades of light, revealing the war for a world.
It has been four months since Kamoteph’s rash action forced her hand. Four months in which Khemet has been required to abandon carefully laid plans and meet a weakened, but not yet defeated, enemy in battles across the length and breadth of Qeretesh.
Hekasun has left Khemet for the might of the Hepherentes. He commands the void war, as he has airily proclaimed on several occasions, though that war, it is plain to see, was won with the opening shot. Any Imperial vessels that might have challenged the harvest ship were either destroyed or have fled to the farthest reaches of the system to escape its wrath. The wreckage of wharves and weapons platforms drifts undisturbed in the upper atmosphere, painting the skies with streaks of fire as it falls to gravity’s grip.
Khemet has been abandoned by Hekasun, but the tomb world is anything but peaceful. With her restraining hand lifted, Qeretesh has surged into life. Power thrums along the conduits that girdle the planet, lighting defensive structures and awakening entire portions of the tomb complex. Ptah’s apprenteks, and those crypteks of Qeretesh whom Kamoteph has revived, work without pause in the stasis vaults. Legions are roused in the depths, their lockstep footfalls shaking the foundations of the world. They march to Khemet’s command, pausing only to assemble into their cohorts before striding into the eternity gates to emerge wherever they are required. And they are required in many places.
Khemet stands at the same projection table where she first told Hekasun of her strategy, the same place she has stood for the past four months, almost without interruption. With Hekasun and his court decamped to the void to revel in their splendour, Khemet has been left to win their war. Kamoteph’s precipitate action has made the scouring of Qeretesh a more equal contest than she would have preferred, and had planned for. With just one more year – perhaps two – the humans would have been brought to their knees, reduced to abject chaos incapable of resistance.
But Khemet, ever practical, works with circumstances as they are, not as she would wish them.
In the holographic image that slowly turns before her, the primary continental shelf is rendered in opaque cobalt. Lines of elevation and knots of human settlements are picked out as bright lines and shapes. Green runes denote Khemet’s armies, red those of the humans. The nexus units of the necron armies – the monoliths that deliver reinforcements to the front, the lychguard and those few of Hekasun’s toadies who have insisted on taking to the field – are denoted with particular emphasis.
Where green and red intersect are the battle lines, angry knots of runes that unfurl into data points when she turns her attention on them. They show whatever she requires. Reports of enemy strength and size, particularly of their lumbering armoured vehicles. The locations of the humans’ command nodes. The attrition rates for her troops, compared against Khemet’s estimates.
These she considers particularly carefully. Just as the crypteks work to rouse new warriors, the canoptek constructs in Qeretesh’s interior have not ceased their toil since the first shots of this war were fired. When the immense durability of her warriors proves insufficient to the damage they have endured, fallen necron bodies are stolen from the battlefield at the moment of their destruction by the tomb world’s vigilant spirit. They emerge in the restoration vaults, where the scarab swarms convey their bodies to the furnaces. This is not the end for them, but merely a new beginning. Soon enough the warriors’ minds are reunited with their necrodermis, reforged and rearmed, so they can return to their eternal duty.
So Khemet does not lack for line troops, but her hand is lacking in key forms of war. The Zathanor’s poverty has manifested as a limited strategic palette, creating constraints around which Khemet must work. Qeretesh lacks the seraptek constructs that can face down the largest of the humans’ war machines, requiring that she lure them into the firing arcs of massed pylon batteries. The paucity of Doom Scythes and Ghost Arks initially made the aerial war a troubling sphere, but fortunately her preparations have paid dividends. The humans have lofted fewer and fewer air-to-air and air-to-ground combat craft as the months have worn on, as the machines – like their pilots – are starved of the fuel required to keep them flying.
The same tools she has deployed for the past two years are still active, still working to cripple the humans’ ability to make war. Kamoteph’s enslaved minions are silent saboteurs, points of failure that see their scarce resources destroyed, misallocated, or simply lost. Hunger stalks the defensive trench lines that encircle the humans’ besieged cities, and plague the denizens trapped within. By simple arithmetic alone, Khemet’s stratagems have depleted the planet’s population by six per cent since the fighting began. Their corpses are mounding in the streets or – so Kamoteph’s reports tell her – are hauled away to be reconstituted in a somewhat similar manner to the necron restoration vaults, to partly ameliorate the humans’ dwindling rations.
Her estimates indicate that the number of human dead will rise dramatically in the next few months, unless the Imperials receive a miraculous influx of foodstuffs, and it would seem that their deified overlord has little interest in their fate. Indeed, Khemet has calculated that she does not need to make any further offensive measures, as the humans’ destruction is assured. All her efforts on the battlefield are simply to hasten their demise, and make an emphatic declaration to Hekasun and his ilk that her honour is restored.
All her efforts are achieving success, except for one.
Ahnuret has not responded to any form of communication since the fighting began. Khemet and Kamoteph have tracked her movements by the destruction left in her wake, and the residual energy signature of her enmitic weaponry. The deathmark has become an agent of blood-soaked chaos behind the Imperial lines, laying waste to all that she encounters. Civilian refuges, military strongpoints, the rare spaces within their brute cities given over to parkland and greenery. Ahnuret has exterminated every microbe, laid waste to every life.
In itself, this is no bad thing. The deathmark is one more weapon to destabilise the humans, albeit one Khemet cannot control.
As she often has over the past months, Khemet calls up a schema of Ahnuret’s last known position. She has found her way, stepping from massacre to oubliette and back to massacre, to the billet-city of Carwyne. It is a strategic hub for the humans, the centre of their western flank and the only line of resistance between the necron forces and the humans’ seat of governance. It has been under siege for most of the war, the humans steadily collapsing back through layers of defensive fortifications that have inflicted an anomalously high rate of destruction on her warriors.
But for all their fortune thus far, the siege is collapsing; it will be a matter of days before the city’s resistance dissolves and Khemet’s legions advance over the final barricades. That will be the moment of absolute crisis for the deathmark. She will be surrounded by so much human death, so much human fear; so much of the extremity of the life she has sworn to destroy.
Carwyne’s fate is assured. There is no need for Khemet to so closely scrutinise its death. And yet, her digits hover over the control plate.
She owes Ahnuret nothing. She has no reason to venture away from her place within the tomb. If the deathmark yields to the curse that has infected her, then that is either her choice or her weakness. In either case, Khemet’s role as a praetorian would dictate that she expunge the tainted element from within her ranks, if she feels the need to take any action at all.
She watches the glyphs around Carwyne duel and merge for some time.
Finally, Khemet calls up the identifier of the closest monolith to the front line of battle, and heads towards the nearest gate.
CHAPTER 4
‘Good morning, everyone.’ General Eron Ingvalen marches into the bastion’s strategium with habitual crispness. He checks a pocket-chrono against the bank of timepieces on the wall above him. Satisfied, he snaps its face shut and tucks it into a pocket of his tunic. ‘It is zero-six hundred hours, on day one hundred and twenty-one. Colonel Ylda, will you yield command?’
Ylda has stood the night’s watch. ‘I will yield, sir.’
‘Very well, I have command.’
Both men salute crisply, then step back to allow Deacon Antrodeinto to walk up to the encircling rail. Activity around the bastion pauses to allow every man and woman not hardwired to their station to stand and receive his benediction.
Antrodeinto swings a small censer from a golden chain, wafting a fine coil of smoke before him. ‘The Emperor protects. May His holy light bless and guide our labours this day. May we be the instrument of His wrath.’
‘The Emperor protects,’ Sinos intones with the rest of the bastion.
With the deacon’s blessing delivered, the men and women of the Gerhemenst Bastion turn back to their duties. The low chatter of vox-operators to their far-flung contacts rises immediately.
General Ingvalen nods his thanks to the deacon, then grips the metal balustrade. ‘Senior staff in fifteen minutes.’
Every day is the same.
Sinos wakes, dresses in her armour, and reports to the bastion. She stands for a duty of twelve hours, punctuated by command meetings, alerts, and the infrequent drone of emergency klaxons that warn of an approaching air attack. Her watch complete, she returns to her quarters and reviews incident reports from the bastion’s security until she can stave off sleep no more.
If she is lucky, she eats at some point. This question has become a defining factor in her life – will the aching knot of hunger in her belly be assuaged this day, or will it grow ever greater?
She is fortunate; rank still has its privileges. General Ingvalen’s morning briefings are typically accompanied by some kind of starch brick, occasionally flavoured with powder taken from expired ration packs.
With that in mind, Sinos follows Ingvalen into the meeting room that abuts the strategium. With her are a dozen of the bastion’s section leaders. Most are of the Officio Logisticarum, men and women who have spent a lifetime on Orymous preparing others to be sent to war, only to find war has come to them. The rest are Astra Militarum officers.
Ingvalen does not waste time.
‘The offensive has stalled. General Naylor’s armour was initially effective in breaking their line around Verongyl, but they encountered heavy resistance and more of the enemy’s damned weapons platforms. Enemy infantry re-formed behind them. The brigade is cut off, and considered lost.’
Sinos watches for those who let their disappointment show. The slumping shoulders, the downcast heads, the muttered oaths. These she will make a point of visiting in the course of the day to stiffen their resolve.
In the earliest days of the war, Sinos had been utterly useless. Despite the wave of assassinations and suicides and sabotage that ripped through the heart of the Officio Logisticarum’s operations, the foresight of its adepts gifted it extraordinary resilience. Emergency scenarios, never seriously considered outside of the Logis Strategos’ war games but also never allowed to fall out of date or mind, were unearthed and distributed. Deputy officials were elevated, division and corps commanders appointed, lines of communication reestablished. The first thirty-six hours after the devastation of the Plakid Islands saw a chain of command restrung through the disparate armies of the Imperium on Orymous.
And Sinos played no part in it. She was sidelined, quite literally pushed aside by the Munitorum adepts and Astra Militarum commanders. She did not feature in the fallback scenarios, and so was ignored. It was as though the Emperor’s guiding hand had brought her to Orymous simply to watch it fall.
Paschel and several other cities on the coast were lost in the first weeks, succumbing to an almost endless wave of hostile forces marching out of the water. The lord-militant locum’s decision to abandon the chain of southern billet-cities was one of the most ruthless and most necessary acts Sinos has witnessed in a century of service. It condemned nineteen million servants of the Emperor to die, without any hope of aid. But each life bought time for the rest of Orymous to ready its defence.
