The assassin threw himself flat, rolled close to Mktally’s corpse outside the hatch, and tore the lasrifle away from the dead Tanith. Sitting up, the assassin returned fire down the approach. Kolea dived behind a bulkhead to avoid the hail of bright las rounds.
‘Varl!’ Kolea yelled. ‘Varl, close the hatch.’
The assassin was no longer wearing Cant’s face, nor Rawne’s. Pain, and the necessity of redirecting his strength into the fight, had obliged him to revert to his own face. It wasn’t the one he’d been born with, but it was what amounted to his true identity. It was the face of Sirkle. All of the rogue Inquisitor Rime’s minions had the same visage.
Kolea fired again, two or three loose bursts. The shots spattered around the hatch end of the approach. Sirkle fired back, full auto, his rifle lighting up with bright petals of muzzle flash. The barrage caused Kolea to duck back into cover. Sirkle turned around to unload into the cell and finish his mission.
He was just in time to see the pained, red-faced Varl slamming the cell door in his face.
The hatch locked. Sirkle roared in frustration. He turned back and began blasting down the hallway again, walking forwards, preventing Kolea from getting out of cover or returning fire.
Head down behind the bulkhead rim as shots hammered against it, Kolea yelled into his microbead.
‘Holding level. This is Major Kolea in the holding level. I need security here now! Security and medicae. Urgent!’
Kolea couldn’t hear if there was any reply. The fury of the gunfire coming at him, combined with the shrill of the alarms, filled the boxy hallway.
Sirkle advanced, firing as he came.
The interdiction flotilla didn’t wait to be fired upon. There was no mistaking the intent or allegiance of the howling daemon ships that streaked in towards them from the disintegrated stretch of realspace fabric.
The Aggressor Libertus lit off first, rolling out of its line position ahead of the massive Sepiterna. Advancing at a crawl, it delivered a series of punch-fire barrages with its main batteries, which surrounded its steepled, armoured flanks with a corona of fire.
Benedicamus Domino also commenced firing. It began to come about out of its rendezvous heading with the Armaduke and retrained on the attacking group. Its turrets began to spark and crackle as it directed its fire forwards across the gulf. It was attempting to screen and support the decelerating Armaduke, which was all but aft-end on to the attack.
The other escorts, holding their places in the gunline relative to the capital ship, began their own rates of fire.
The range was considerable, but the Archenemy ships were closing rapidly, and they seemed to drink in the Imperial barrage. Firefly darts of light crackled around the ruddy glow of their shields. Even the formidable main weapon fire of the Aggressor Libertus flashed off their shields like rain.
They continued to howl out their names, throaty and malevolent, scorching out the Imperial vox systems, drowning their audio traffic, distorting their auspex returns.
Ominator! Ominator!
Gorehead! Gorehead!
Necrostar Antiversal!
Behind them all, the doom-voice of the daemon monster.
Tormaggedon Monstrum Rex!
‘Have you located Cybon’s launch?’ Gaunt demanded.
‘I’m trying to,’ replied Spika. With the vox system compromised by the daemon ships’ relentless aural assault, the bridge crew of the Armaduke had switched to voice relay, shouting commands, instruction and data from position to position. Gaunt realised that the shipmaster was doing a thousand tasks simultaneously. Spika was watching every single bridge position, and the main board of his station, plus the strategium’s tactical plot. He was listening to every shouted relay, every nuance of dialogue, and chipping in with orders that sent crewmen rushing to obey. He had both hands on his master systems, operating dials and power-modulation levers without looking. He was feeling the soul and motive energy of the Armaduke as it spoke to him through the deck, the seat, the metal controls.
‘Coming about,’ he said.
‘You’re turning to face them?’ asked Gaunt.
Not even looking at Gaunt, Spika manipulated another control and reeled off a string of corrective heading numbers. Below, the steersmen hurried to obey his command.
‘How do you usually fight, colonel-commissar?’ Spika asked. ‘With your back to the enemy?’
Gaunt didn’t reply.
‘I can mark more of my batteries as status effective if I present head-on or broadside,’ said Spika.
‘Side-on makes us a bigger target,’ said Gaunt.
‘Only while we’re turning.’
‘Shouldn’t we run in alongside the Sepiterna?’ Gaunt asked. In truth, he had very little idea of the fight’s comparative geography. The three-dimensional strategium displays were moving too swiftly, and the type of detail they were processing was far removed from the tactical flows he was used to reading. They made the essentially flat plane of a battlefield seem elegant and pure.
But he knew enough to know that the Armaduke was turning into the line of fire, and that, along with the Benedicamus Domino, they were placing themselves ahead of the flotilla’s main strength and directly in the path of the howling daemon ships.
‘I’m not going to leave the Domino alone to face this,’ said Spika, working his controls. ‘Two frigates, side by side. They can harm a lot of hull between them.’
‘But–’
Spika looked at him for the first time. It was just a brief glance, but Gaunt was struck by the singleness of purpose he saw in Spika’s eyes, the fortitude and, in a tiny measure, the anticipation.
Shipmaster Spika had been too long away from fights worthy of his talents. He wasn’t going to run or back down.
Gaunt raised one hand in a gesture of submission.
‘You don’t come down to the surface and tell me how to deploy my men,’ he admitted.
‘I certainly do not,’ replied Spika. ‘I imagine I would be tremendously bad at it.’
‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ asked Gaunt.
‘Wouldn’t you?’ asked Spika. ‘Now keep quiet or I’ll have you ejected from my bridge.’
He stood up.
‘Enhance the strength of the port voids as we turn. Artificers, power to the primary batteries. Bombardiers, load up. Detection, find us a target we can burn. And find the thrice-damned lord militant so we can screen him!’
Gaunt had seen Spika’s spirit before. It was an old warrior’s lust to achieve one last hoorah, to prove he was still worthy of the uniform. It was a desire that often manifested in suicidal decisions.
Given what was bearing down on them, a man prepared to take potentially suicidal risks might be their only hope.
The Armaduke began to turn. Once fully executed, the manoeuvre would put it in a modest gunline formation with the eager Benedicamus Domino, which had slowed to a dogmatic attitude of confrontation and was blitzing with all weapons. Huge volleys of main battery fire were ripping past and above both ships from the main gunline thousands of kilometres astern.
The Sepiterna had begun to spit huge, ship-killing bolts from its primary batteries.
The onrushing daemon ships wore the fusillade. Their shields wobbled like wet glass as they soaked up the punishment. They were half a million kilometres out, closing at a sharp angle to the system plane, as if they intended to perform a slashing strike down and across the Imperial gunline.