Void Stalker (28 page)

The prophet crossed the quiet landing bay, to where Deltrian was descending down his ship’s gangramp.

‘All is in readiness,’ Deltrian vocalised.

Talos regarded the adept with unblinking red eye lenses. ‘Swear to me you’ll do as I say. Those three sarcophagi are priceless. Malcharion will stand with us, but the other three tomb-pods have to reach the Legion. They are relics beyond price. They cannot die here with us.’

‘All is in readiness,’ Deltrian said a second time.

‘The gene-seed matters most of all,’ Talos pressed him. ‘The gene-seed supplies in storage must reach the Eye, at all costs. Swear to me.’

‘All is in readiness,’ Deltrian repeated. He had scant regard for the swearing of oaths. In his view, promises were something sworn by biologicals seeking to use hope in place of calculated likelihood. In short: an agreement made on flawed parameters.

‘Swear to me, Deltrian.’

The tech-priest made an error sound, vocalising it in a low burr. ‘Very well. In an effort to end this vocalisation exchange, I give my oath that the plan will be followed to precise parameters, to the best of my ability and capacity to oversee the efforts of others.’

‘That’ll do.’

Deltrian wasn’t quite finished. ‘Estimates suggest we will remain in the asteroid field for several hours after your departure before we know for certain if every xenos vessel is giving chase. Auspex unreliability is a factor. Drift jamming is a factor. Alien interference is a factor. The logistics of–’

‘There are many factors,’ Talos interrupted. ‘I understand. Hide as long as you need to, and run when you can.’

‘As you will it, so shall it be.’

The tech-priest turned, then hesitated. Talos wasn’t moving away.

‘Do you linger here in the desire that I will wish you luck?’ Deltrian tilted his leering skull of a face. ‘You must be aware that the very idea of fortune is anathema to me. Existence is arbitrary, Talos.’

The Night Lord held out his hand. Deltrian’s eye lenses focused on the offered gauntlet for a moment, soft whirrings in his facial structure giving away the fact his eyes were refocusing.

‘Intriguing,’ he said. ‘Processing.’

A moment later, he gripped the
l
egionary’s wrist. Talos gripped the adept’s, returning the Eighth Legion’s traditional warrior handshake.

‘It’s been a privilege, honoured adept.’

Deltrian searched for the appropriate response. He was an outsider, but the ancient formal words, traditionally spoken between warriors of the Eighth Legion on the eve of hopeless battles, came to him with an alacrity he found surprising.

‘Die as you lived, Son of the Eighth Legion. In midnight clad.’

The two broke apart. Deltrian, as dead to patience as he was to subtlety, immediately turned and walked up the gangramp, heading into the ship.

Talos hesitated, seeing Septimus at the top of the ramp. The slave raised his gloved hand in farewell.

Talos snorted at the gesture.
Humans. The things emotion forces them to do.

He acknowledged his former slave with a nod, and left the hangar without a word.

XXII

GAUNTLET

The Echo powered
through the asteroid field with no concern for ammunition reserves or void shield charges. The smaller rocks crashed aside, repelled by the ship’s crackling shields as the cruiser rammed the asteroids out of the way. The larger rocks died in invisible detonations, as the warship’s guns pounded them into rubble.

It didn’t turn to avoid any impacts. It didn’t slow down, or manoeuvre, or deploy drones to break up any debris in its path. The
Echo of Damnation
was done hiding. It tore its way from its volatile sanctuary, every cannon along its sides and spine swinging forward, ready to cry out in anger for the final time.

On the bridge, Talos watched from his throne. The command crew, mortals all, were almost silent in their focused devotion. Servitors relayed printed reports, several of them emitting slow rolls of inked parchment from augmetic jaws. The prophet’s eyes never left the occulus. Beyond the twisting rocks, past even those that weren’t yet bursting apart under the
Echo
’s
weapons fire, the alien fleet lay in wait. He saw them moving through the void in a tidal drift, disgustingly harmonious, their glittering solar sails tilted to catch the distant sun’s weak light.

‘Report,’ Talos said.

The responses came from every section of the command deck. Calls of ‘aye’ and ‘ready’ hailed back in an orderly verse. To coin Deltrian’s phrase, all was in readiness. There was nothing he could do now beyond wait.

‘Alien fleet moving to intercept. They’re positioned in the clearest paths through the rest of the asteroid field.’

He could see that well enough. The smaller vessels, shaped of contoured bone, remained around their motherships – lesser fish feeding from sharks – but the bigger cruisers moved with a speed no less impressive. They came about in fluid arcs, sails banking, running to head off the
Echo of Damnation
as soon as it left the densest sector of the asteroid field.

He didn’t like how they moved; not only because of the grotesque agility far beyond human capability, but because outrunning and outgunning this fleet was already impossible, and they were making it look like outmanoeuvring them was an equal fiction.

‘Forty-five seconds, lord.’

Talos leaned back in the throne. He knew full well there was a chance he’d never get off this deck alive. The run to the planet was looking to be the hardest part; slaughtering these skeletal alien wretches in the Tsagualsan catacombs would be a delightful treat by comparison, and one that almost made his mouth water.

‘Thirty seconds.’

‘All targets marked and locked,’ called out the weapons overseer. ‘We’ll need a full minute of uninterrupted bearing to unleash the entire first volley.’

‘You’ll have it, Armsmaster,’ Talos replied. ‘How many targets will that hit?’

‘If the aliens behave as eldar fleets usually do, rather than running alongside us for a broadside exchange… Fifteen targets, my lord.’

Talos felt his lips twitch behind his faceplate, not quite a smile.
Fifteen targets in one volley.
Blood of Horus, he’d miss this ship. She’d been a beautiful twin sister to the
Covenant,
and it would be churlish to begrudge the armament improvements performed by the Corsairs in the centuries they’d claimed her
.

‘Twenty seconds.’

‘Give me shipwide vox address.’

‘Done, lord.’

Talos drew a breath, knowing his words were being heard by thousands upon thousands of slaves, mutants, heretics and serfs across the ship’s myriad decks.

‘This is the captain,’ he said. ‘I am Talos, of the bloodline of the Eighth Primarch, and a son of the sunless world. A storm like no other bears down upon us, ready to break against the ship’s skin. Survival rides on your blood and sweat, no matter the deck you toil upon. Every life counts in the minutes to come. All hands, all souls, brace for battle.’

‘Five seconds, lord.’

‘Start the Shriek.’

‘Aye, lord.’

‘First volley as planned, then fire at will.’

‘Aye, lord.’

‘Lord, we’re clear of the Talosian Density. Enemy fleet is moving to eng–’

‘
Open fire.’

The
Echo of
Damnation
ran with all its heart, streaming plasma flame in contrails almost beautiful in their devastating heat.

The wider asteroid field’s presence was one of the many unwelcoming aspects that made Tsagualsa such a secure haven for so many years after the Heresy. It was significantly less of a hazard to navigation than the denser debris around the shattered moon, but the eldar ships still ghosted and looped around any loose rock rather than risk impact.

The
Echo of Damnation
took no such care. It ploughed ahead, relying on its void shields and forward weapons array to ram aside any impending threats.

Their initial dives were somewhat less graceful than their previous void dancing, for their prey was playing a different game. The
Echo
obeyed no conventional logic, never once turning for better angles with its weapon batteries, making no adjustments to its flight vectors. The warship wasn’t where the alien vessels expected it to be, nor was it going where they’d prepared for it to go. By simply carving its way through the asteroid field, the
Echo
was sacrificing an insane amount of ammunition and shield power, knifing directly towards the world ahead.

The eldar ships ready to engage, laying in wait throughout the clearer routes in the debris field, now found themselves far away from the path of their fleeing prey.

‘Is it working?’ Talos asked. He could see it working – it was obvious in the way several alien vessels were coming about at speed to adjust their attack runs – but he wanted to hear it, nevertheless.

The officers stared down at their consoles, none more keenly than those stationed at the auspex hololithic projectors.

‘The eldar fleet is struggling to come about to our trajectory. Several cruisers are already failing their intercept courses.’

‘It’s working.’ Talos remained in the throne, resisting the desire to pace the deck. The ship shook with the firing of the guns, and the hammering shivers of rocks pounding against the void shields. ‘We’re outrunning almost half of them.’

The alien ships were elongated, contoured things – all smooth bone and shining wing-sails. He suspected the distant sun made the eldar warships sluggish, starved of the heat they needed on their solar sails, but he hardly had a wealth of experience in the function of alien vessels. With the eldar, everything always felt like guesswork.

‘Xenos vanguard ships entering maximum weapons range.’

Talos thought of his brothers in their drop-pods, and the gunships warmed and waiting in the landing bays. On the occulus, the coin-sized grey sphere of Tsagualsa grew by the second. Proximity alarms wailed at each and every asteroid that went spinning aside from the inexorable advance, and servitors slaved to their stations chattered at the threat of incoming warheads.

For no reason he could adequately explain, Talos felt a smile creeping across his face. A crooked, sincere smirk of inappropriate amusement.

‘Lord,’ called out one of the auspex officers
.
‘
A
lien torpedoes are resistant to our interference.’

‘Even to the Shriek?’ He knew it was calibrated to Imperial technology, but even so, he’d been hoping it would make a difference.

‘Several have lost their bearings, others are ploughing into the debris field. But more than three-quarters are still on target.’

‘Time to impact?’

‘The first will be upon us in less than twenty seconds.’

‘That’s good enough. All hands, brace for impact.’

Soon enough, the hull’s rattling became shaking, and the shaking in turn became violent convulsions. Talos felt the creeping of some new and unwelcome unease worming its way up his backbone; how many times had he been aboard a warship in a void battle? A difficult question. One might as well ask how many breaths he’d drawn over the centuries. But this was different. This time, he was the one guiding the ship’s path. He couldn’t just leave it in Vandred’s hands and focus on his own lesser conflicts.

Malcharion should be here.
Talos quashed the treacherous thought, true as it might be.

‘Shields holding,’ a servitor chattered nearby. ‘Two-thirds strength.’

Talos watched the grey world growing as the
Echo of Damnation
cried out around him.

‘Come on,’ he whispered. ‘Come on.’

The Eighth Legion
warship hammered her way onward, ramming through the asteroids lying in her path.

The eldar captains were hardly novices in void warfare, nor could any of their craftworld home on the edge of the Great Eye ever be truly surprised by the tactics of an Archenemy warship. Solar sails aligned across the fleet as the alien cruisers swam through their haunting, beautiful attack runs, filling the rocky void with flashing streams of pulsar fire.

Individually, each pulsar beam was as thin as string against the background of infinite black, but they streaked across the void in a cobweb of shining force, raining and lashing against the
Echo
’s
suffering void shields.

The
Echo of Damnation
rolled as it ran, offering its broadsides and spinal batteries to the enemy. Return fire burst from the Eighth Legion cruiser – corruption bursting from suppurated wounds – as the warship lashed back with its own guns. Such was their grace, several of the eldar vessels seemed to shimmer out of existence, vanishing from the path of incoming fire. Others took the onslaught, letting it starburst across their shields, secure in the knowledge that the
Echo
’s
flight forced it to devote the majority of its armament to clearing a way through the rocks.

The first alien ship to fall was a minor escort ship bearing a name no human could accurately pronounce. Certainly, none of those present on the
Echo of Damnation
cared to try, yet they cheered and laughed when it broke apart before their eyes, ruined by a barrage of plasma and hard-shell fire from the spinal batteries.

A lucky shot, and Talos knew it. Nevertheless, his skin prickled at the sight.

The second xenos vessel died as much from the random tides of fate as from Night Lord malice. With no time to turn, the
Echo of Damnation
poured all of its forward fire into a huge asteroid ahead. Its lances carved into the frozen stone, splitting the rock along fault lines in time for the ship’s shielded prow to ram straight into the surface. As the asteroid broke apart, scattering from the crackling and protesting shields, spinning rocks tumbled in all directions. The eldar fleet, for all their arcing agility, were hampered by the oppressing rocks all around. Even as they scattered to fly aside, several of them took incidental damage from the spreading rubble.

Talos gave a crooked smile as one of the heaviest chunks crashed into the slender form of a swooping enemy warship. The debris shattered a solar sail into nothing more than beautiful diamond glass, before grinding into the vessel’s body of supernatural bone. The ship twisted, suffering and straining, before diving directly into another asteroid ahead.

‘Even if we die here,’ the Night Lord chuckled, ‘that was worth seeing.’

‘Three minutes until we pass Tsagualsa, lord.’

‘Good.’ The smile died on his lips as he remembered the betrayal to come. Given the ship’s trajectory and the overwhelming force against them, many of these poor souls had surely already guessed the only way this could possibly end.

‘Should we ready the ship for warp flight?’ asked one of the closest officers. Talos heard it in the man’s voice; the officer had surrendered his hope, and sought to hide his unrest. The prophet admired him for that. Cowardice had no place on this bridge.

‘No,’ Talos replied. ‘Do you genuinely believe we will make it to safety?’ The ship shuddered around them, forcing several mortal crew members to cling to railings and consoles. ‘Even with this successful run, do you believe we’ll evade them for much longer?’

‘No, lord. Of course not.’

‘A wise answer,’ Talos told him. ‘Focus on your duties, Lieutenant Rawlen. Don’t worry what will come after.’

Septimus and Deltrian
stood in the modest, cramped chamber that the tech-adept announced, with no trace of pride or shame either way, as
Epsilon K-41 Sigma Sigma A:2
’s
bridge.

He’d also demanded Septimus leave the deck, to which the human had replied in Nostraman, with something dubiously biological about Deltrian’s mother.

‘I’m a pilot,’ he added. ‘I’m going to help fly this thing.’