‘We’ve got a serious problem.’
‘How do you know about the Geller field?’ asked the shipmaster.
‘I–’ Gaunt began. ‘What about the Geller field? I’m talking about a security breach. A killing.’
Spika blinked slowly.
‘It’s so they know we’re here,’ he said quietly.
‘It’s what? ‘ asked Gaunt. ‘What is?’
‘It’s so they know we’re here. It’s a trail they can track…’ Spika’s pitch was rising. ‘Oh, Holy Throne of Terra.’
He wrenched his silver-plated voice-horn up close to his mouth.
‘Alert! Alert stations. Shields up. Shields up. Shields up!
The bridge personnel turned from their positions and stared at him. They were young. Painfully inexperienced. A few of them clearly thought it was a surprise drill.
‘Don’t gawp at me, you mindless idiots! Do it now!’ Spika yelled.
Multiple alarms and bells began to sound. The bridge crew went into a kind of overdrive, dashing in all directions. Light levels dipped as the shields woke up. Squealing and clattering, ceramite shutters began to close like eyelids across the realspace ports.
‘Are we under attack?’ asked Gaunt.
‘I think the prospects are very likely,’ replied Spika.
‘Lord Militant Cybon is out there in a small unescorted ship,’ said Gaunt.
Spika ran his tongue around the inside of his lips as he thought about this.
‘Damn him,’ he said. He looked at the Officer of Detection, whose seat was surrounded by dead-eyed auxiliary servitors spinally hardwired into the deck.
‘Full sensory sweep,’ Spika said. ‘Locate the lord militant’s ship, track it, and prepare to put us between it and any attack if necessary.’
A different series of alarms sounded.
‘Contact! Contact!’ the officer of detection announced. ‘Translation signature three AU to port.’
‘A ship? Identify!’ yelled Spika.
‘Tracking one signature. Tracking a second signature. Tracking a third.’
‘Three?’ asked Spika.
‘Tracking a fourth!’
Lightning struck.
The lightning was a spear one thousand kilometres long. This time it was red, like the most malignant hatred, and shot through with snakes of yellow and coral-pink.
The lightning flashed, puncturing realspace and eating a hole through it, like acid eating through a plate of steel. Surrounded by a crown of thorns of aftershock lightning, four starships translated through the corroded wound, ploughing out into the materium like missiles fired from a launcher.
The first two were Destroyer-class escorts. The third, close behind them, was a much larger cruiser.
The fourth, trailing slower and more ponderously still, was a monster, a vast battleship.
All four vessels were blackened as if they had spent too long scorching in the heart of a sun’s furnace. A volcanic red light lit them from within, glaring from their window ports and coiling across their surfaces like veins filled with magma. They had once been Imperial ships, all of them of the most ancient patterns and design. But that identity, and those lives led in Imperial service, were distant memories. Gross corruption had stolen them from the Imperial fold aeons before and transformed their adamantine carcasses to the whim of the Ruinous Powers.
The ships began to scream. Hellish noises and foetid transmissions blasted out through their vox networks as though each one possessed a voice, part animal howl, part augmetic rasp. On the Imperial ships, vox heralds collapsed at their consoles, their brains bursting as the amplified shrieks burned through their systems and shorted them out.
Each Archenemy ship howled out its name as it gunned in; gut-howls that came from their inner cores, from the smoking hearts of their reactors. It was like the bellowing of mindless, stampeding cattle, or the idiot shouting of lobotomised bulk servitors that knew nothing but their own names.
Ominator! Ominator! raged the first destroyer.
Gorehead! spat the shredded vox-casters of its twin. Gorehead! Gorehead!
Necrostar Antiversal! declared the blood-shot cruiser.
Last of all, deepest, and most awful, the voice of the monstrous capital ship, like the deathscream of a black hole.
Tormaggedon Monstrum Rex!
NINE
The Fight at Tavis Sun
Kabry fell backwards into the pheguth’s cell, the back of his skull blown out. A sticky sheen of blood and tissue coated the wall and floor surfaces behind him. Cant forced his way into the cell, laspistol drawn.
It had all happened in a second. Chained at his seat, Mabbon Etogaur looked up, saw Kabry twist over dead, and dropped the trancemissionary text he was reading.
The other guard on duty inside the cell that shift was Varl. He screamed at Mabbon to get on the floor, and threw himself at the open hatch door. His lasrifle was still strapped around his body.
Varl’s weight hit the hatch and swung it hard into Cant. The impact staggered Cant halfway back out of the hatchway, but his chest and shoulder prevented the hatch from fully closing so that Varl could bolt it.
Varl put the full yield of his augmetic shoulder into keeping the hatch pinned on the attacker, but with his body wedged against the door, he couldn’t unship his rifle. He yelled a few savage curses as he rammed the hatch repeatedly.
Cant had his right arm and shoulder inside the cell. He was pushing back, his left hand and cheek pressed against the outside of the hatch.
His laspistol was in his right hand.
He raised it and fired into the cell, shooting blind. Shots smacked off the rear wall and the floor. One grazed the ceiling. Two of the bolts ricocheted like cometary fragments off the dull metal surfaces. One punched clean through the back of the pheguth’s seat. Mabbon was face down on the floor, as far out of the firing line as the chain would allow.
Cant fired again, intent on filling the interior of the cell with sizzling, rebounding las bolts.
Calling Cant a name that would not have impressed his poor, dead mother, Varl stabbed him through the forearm with his warknife. The blade cleaved through muscle and bone and bit into the steel liner of the cell, staking Cant’s right arm against the wall inside the hatch, so he was pinned like a specimen. Pain forced Cant to drop his pistol.
Varl redoubled his efforts to shove the door, hoping to crush or crack bone. Cant growled in discomfort.
‘You like that, you bastard?’ Varl shouted. He stepped back and threw the hatch wide so he could gun the assassin down.
Cant faced him.
Varl hesitated, seeing the face of a friend and comrade. He didn’t hesitate long, but it was just enough for Cant to form a beak with the fingers of his left hand and smash Varl in the chest. Varl was thrown clear across the cell.
Alarms started to shriek. The bracket lamps in the approach corridor began to flash and cycle. Battle stations. There was a strong ozone whiff as the void shield generators lit up.
Cant yanked Varl’s warknife out of the wall and freed his pinned arm. Blood ran down his wrist and dripped off his fingers. He took a step forwards.
Varl was trying to get up, gulping in air as he tried to fill lungs that had been pressed empty. His face was bright red, his eyes wet with tears.
Lasfire ripped up the approach hallway and spanked off the hatch and the hatch surround, causing Cant to duck in alarm. Cowering, he turned. At the far end of the hallway, Kolea was approaching, firing his rifle from the hip.