Battle for The Abyss (13 page)

Gravity gave way as the structure was violated.

Mhotep held on, armoured fingers making indentations in the metal, as the last gales of atmosphere hammered past. A corpse rolled and bumped against his armour, on its way to the void. It was Officer Ammon, his eyes red with burst veins.

They were dead: thousands all dead.

Mhotep felt some grim pride, knowing that, had they seen it would end this way, the crew would all still have given their lives to Magnus and the Thousand Sons. With no time for reve-rie, the Astartes pulled himself along the wall, finding handholds among shattered mosaics. With the air gone, the only sound was the groaning of the ship as it came apart, mumbling through its structure and up through the gauntlets of Mhotep’s armour. His armour was proof against the vacuum, but he could only survive for a limited time.

The same was not true of anyone else aboard ship.

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Mhotep passed through the crew quarters. In the wake of its demise, the
Waning Moon
had become an eerily silent tomb of metal. As power relays failed, lights flashed intermittently, the illumination on some decks made only by crackling sparks. Gobbets of blood broke against Mhotep’s armour as he moved, and icy corpses bobbed with the dead gravity as if carried by an in-visible ocean. The Astartes shoved tangled bodies aside, faces locked in frozen grimaces, as he fought his way to a pair of blast doors and opened them. The air was gone beyond them, too, and more crewmen floated in the corridor leading down to the saviour pod deck. One of them grasped at Mhotep’s arm as the Astartes went past him. It was a crewman who had emptied his lungs as the air boomed out and had, thus, managed to stay conscious. His eyes goggled madly. Mhotep swept him aside and carried on.

The starboard saviour pods were not far away, but the Thousand Son had to take a short detour first. Passing through a final corridor, he reached the reinforced blast door of his sanctum. Incredibly, the chamber still retained power, operating on a heavily protected, separate system from the rest of the ship. Mhotep inputted the runic access protocol and the door slid open. The oxygen that remained in the airtight sanctum started to pour out.

Mhotep stepped over the threshold quickly and the door sealed shut behind him with a hiss of escaping pressure.

Ignoring the damage done to the precious artefacts within the room, Mhotep went straight to the extant sarcophagus at the back of the sanctum. Opening it with controlled urgency, he retrieved the short wand-stave from inside it and secured the item in a compartment in his armour. When Mhotep turned, about to head for the saviour pods, he saw a figure crushed beneath a fallen cry-glass cabinet. Shards of glass speared the figure’s robed body, and vital fluids trickled from its bloodless lips.

‘Sire?’ gasped Kalamar, using what little oxygen remained in the chamber.

Mhotep went to the ageing serf and knelt beside him.

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‘For the glory of Magnus,’ Kalamar breathed when his lord was close.

Mhotep nodded.

‘You have served your master and this vessel well, old friend,’

the Astartes intoned and stood up again, ‘but your tenure is at an end.’

‘Spare my suffering, lord.’

‘I will,’ Mhotep replied, mustering what little compassion existed in his cold methodical nature and, drawing his bolt pistol, he shot Kalamar through the head.

THE SAVIOUR POD deck was situated next to the hull, a hemis-pherical chamber with six pods half-sunk into the floor. Two had been launched and another was damaged beyond repair, speared through by a shaft of steel fallen from the ceiling.

Mhotep pulled himself down into one of the remaining pods.

Contrary to naval tradition, he would not be going down with his ship. In his chambers, just prior to docking at Vangelis, he had seen a vision of himself standing upon the deck of the
Wrathful
. This was his destiny. The hand of fate would draw him here for some, as of yet, unknown purpose.

Mhotep engaged the icon that would seal the saviour pod. It closed around him. There was room for three more crew, but no one was alive to fill it. He hit the launch panel and explosive bolts threw the pod clear of the ship.

He watched the
Waning Moon
turning above him as the pod spiralled away. The aft section had burned out and was just a black flaking husk, disappearing against the void. The main section of the ship was tearing itself apart. The fires were mostly out, starved of fuel and oxygen, and the
Waning Moon
was a skeleton collapsing into its component bones.

In the distance, thousands of sparks burst around the
Furious
Abyss
, as if it were at the heart of a vast pyrotechnic display.

Mhotep was as disciplined as any Thousand Son, and Magnus made the conditioning of his Legion’s minds the most important part of their training. He could subsume himself into the collec-90

Ben Counter – Battle for the Abyss

tive mindset of his battle-brothers, and as such was rarely troubled by emotions that did not serve any immediate purpose.

He was disturbed. He very much wanted to exact the hatred he felt on the
Furious Abyss
. He wanted to tear it apart with his bare hands.

Perhaps, Mhotep told himself, if he was patient, he would find a way to do that.

THE FIGHTERS HAD come from nowhere.

With the violent death of the
Waning Moon
, the remaining escort ships, the
Ferox
and the
Fireblade
, were locked in a deadly duel with the massive enemy vessel. Even with the
Boundless
in support and the
Wrathful
inbound they would not last long against the Word Bearer battleship. The frigates would have to use their superior speed to endure while aid arrived. That advantage was summarily robbed with the appearance of crimson-winged fighter squadrons issuing from the belly of the
Furious
Abyss
in an angry swarm.

It was impossible for such a ship, even one of its impressive size, to harbour fighter decks and the weapons system that had destroyed the
Waning Moon
. This fact had informed every scenario the escort squadron’s captains had developed for any reaction to their attack runs. The
Furious Abyss
, however, was no ordinary ship.

The destruction of the
Waning Moon
, appalling as it was, had at least given the escort ships the certainty that the Word Bearers would not have the resources for attack craft. That was before the launch bays had opened like steel gills down the flanks of the battleship, and twinkling blood-slick darts had shot out on columns of exhaust.

Captain Ulargo stood in a corona of light on the bridge of the
Fireblade
. The rest of the bridge was drenched in darkness with only the grainy diodes of control consoles punctuating the gloom. Arms behind him, surrounded by the hololithic tactical display and with vox crackling, the terrible choreography of war played out with sickening inevitability.

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‘
Ferox
engaged!’ came the alert from Captain Lo Thulaga. ‘Multiple hostiles! Fast attack craft, registering impacts. Shutting down reactor two.’

‘Shield your engines, for Terra’s sake!’ snapped Captain Ulargo, watching the grim display from the viewport.

‘What do you think I’m doing?’ retorted Lo Thulaga. ‘I have fighters port, aft and abeam. They’re bloody everywhere.’

The
Ferox
spiralled away from its attack run on the underside, pursued by a cloud of vindictive fighters. Tiny explosions stitched over the hindquarters of the escort ship, ripping sprays of black debris from the engine housings. Turrets stammered back fire from the belly and sides of the
Ferox
, but for every fighter reduced to a bloom of plasma residue there were two more pouring fire into it.

It was like a predator under attack from a swarm of stinging insects. The
Ferox
was far larger than any of the fighters, which were shaped like inverted Vs with their stabiliser wings swept forwards. Individually its turrets could have tracked and vaporised any of the enemy before they got in range, but there were over fifty of them.

‘I cannot shake them,’ snarled Captain Vorgas on the
Ferocious
, his voice ragged through the vox.

‘They’re bloody killing us!’ yelled Lo Thulaga, whose voice was distorted by the secondary explosions coming from the escort’s engines.

Ulargo wore a disgusted expression. In his entire career, he had never backed down from a fight. He hailed from the militaristic world of Argonan in Segmentum Tempestus, and it was not in his nature to capitulate. Clenching his fists, he bawled the order.

‘Squadron disengage!’

Fireblade
pulled away from the
Furious Abyss
, followed by the
Ferocious
. The
Ferox
tried to pull clear, but the enemy fighters hounded it, darting into the wake of the escort’s engines, risking destruction to fly in blind and hammer laser fire into its engineering decks.

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One of the reactors on the embattled frigate melted down, its whole rear half flooding with plasma. The forward compartments were sealed off quickly enough to save the crew, but the ship was dead in the void, only its momentum keeping it falling ponderously away from the upper hull of the
Furious Abyss
. The fighters circled it, flying in wide arcs around the dead ship and punishing it with incessant fire. Crew decks were breached and vented. Saviour pods began to launch as Lo Thulaga gave the order to abandon ship.

The
Furious Abyss
wasted no time sending fighters to assassi-nate the saviour pods as they fled the stricken
Ferox
.

The
Ferocious
pulled a dramatic hard turn, ducking back towards the enemy battleship to fox the fighters lining up for their attack runs. It strayed into the arcs of the
Furious Abyss
’s ventral turrets, and a couple of lucky shots blew plumes of vented atmosphere out of its upper hull. The fighters closed and targeted the breach, volleys of las-fire boring molten fingers into the frigate. Somewhere amidst the bedlam the bridge was breached and the command crew died, incinerated by sprays of molten metal or frozen and suffocated as the void forced its way in.

The remaining turrets on the
Furious Abyss
targeted the fleeing
Fireblade
, the last vessel of the escort. Most of the battleship’s attention was away from the frigate, representing as it did a mere annoyance. Its vengeful ire was focused squarely on the
Boundless
.

‘THE
FEROX
AND the
Ferocious
are gone,’ Kaminska stated flatly, watching the blips on the tactical display blink out. ‘How on Titan can that thing support those fighter wings?’

‘The same way it has a functioning plasma lance,’ said Cestus, grimly. ‘The Mechanicum know more about what they’re doing than they are letting on, and are ignoring Imperial sanctions.’

‘In the name of Terra, what is happening?’ Kaminska asked, seeing the enemy battleship turn its cross hairs on the
Boundless
.

For the first time, the Ultramarine thought he could detect a hint of fear in the admiral’s voice.

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‘We cannot win this fight, not like this,’ he said. ‘Bring the
Boundless
in, we need to regroup.’

Kaminska cast her eye over the tactical display. Her voice was choked. ‘It’s too late for that.’

‘Damnation!’ Cestus smashed his fist hard against a rail on the bridge and it buckled. After a moment, he said, ‘Contact your astropath, and find out what is keeping that message. I must warn my lord Guilliman at once.’

Kaminska raised the astropathic sanctum on the ship-to-ship vox, even as Helmsmistress Venkmyer relayed disengagement protocols to engineering.

Chief Astropath Korbad Heth’s deep voice was heard on the bridge.

‘All our efforts to contact Terra or the Ultramarines have failed,’

he revealed matter-of-factly.

‘By order of the Emperor’s Astartes, keep trying and you will prevail,’ said Cestus.

‘My lord,’ Heth began, unmoved by the Ultramarine’s threatening tone. ‘The matter is more fundamental than you appreciate.

When I say our efforts have failed, I mean utterly. The Astronomican is gone.’

‘Gone? That’s impossible. How can it be gone?’

‘I know not, my lord. We are detecting warp storms that could be interfering. I will redouble our endeavours, but I fear they will be in vain.’ The vox went dead and Heth was gone again.

Antiges’s return to the bridge broke the silence.

‘We must return to Terra, Cestus. The Emperor must be warned.’

‘What of Calth and Macragge? Our Legion is there, and our primarch; they are in imminent danger and the ones who must be warned. I do not doubt the strength of our battle-brothers and the fleet above Macragge is formidable, as are its ground defences, but there is something about this ship... What if it is merely the harbinger of something much worse, something that can be a very real threat to Guilliman?’

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‘Our primarch has ever taught us to exercise pragmatism in the face of adversity,’ Antiges reasoned, stepping forward. ‘Upon our return, we could send a message to the Legion.’

‘A message that would never reach them, Antiges,’ Cestus replied with anger. ‘No, we are the Legion’s last hope.’

‘You are letting your emotion and your arrogance cloud your judgement, brother-captain,’ said Antiges, drawing in close.

‘Your loyalty deserts you, brother.’

Antiges bristled at the slight, but kept his composure.

‘What good is it if we sacrifice ourselves on the altar of loyalty?’

he urged. ‘This way, we at least stand a chance of saving our brothers.’

‘No,’ said Cestus with finality. ‘We would only condemn them to death. Courage and honour, Antiges.’