Voices peeled off reports from every direction. Spika listened, trying to adjust his console. The main display had frozen. He thumped it, and it hiccupped back into luminous green life.
‘Shut up. Shut up!’ he yelled above the conflicting voices. ‘Artifice, do we have shields?’
‘Negative, master. Void shields are down.’
‘Get them operational. At once!’ Spika thought hard. ‘Position? Inertial station, I want our relative now.’
Data zapped onto his screen, the figures echoed aloud by the voice of the officer at the Inertial desk.
‘Still side-on…’ Spika murmured. The hit had wallowed the Armaduke like a heavy swell and halted the starship’s lumbering turn. Not a good place to be, especially without an active shield system.
‘Steersmen! Complete that turn.’
At the long, brass- and wood-cased helm station, the hardwired steersmen cranked the attitude controls.
‘Shield status?’
‘Repairs underway, master!’
‘I want a two-minute corrective burn to these adjusteds. All plasma engines,’ Spika declared, following his order with a string of four-dimensional coordinates.
‘Plasma engine four reports fire. Output suspended,’ said the duty officer at Spika’s side.
Spika recalculated faster than his cogitator. He announced a corrected set of coordinates.
‘Cap engine three, and boost five and six to compensate,’ Spika ordered. ‘Bring us about. Bring us about!’
‘Corrective burn in five, four, three…’ the duty officer announced.
‘Tell the artificers to crack the whip!’ Spika told another subordinate. ‘The stokers must put their backs into it. Feed those damn furnaces. Death is the only excuse for not shovelling!’
‘Sir.’
The deck shuddered and the lights dimmed as the burn began.
‘Gunnery!’ Spika yelled, selecting another pict screen. ‘As soon as you have capacity, you may fire at will.’
‘Aye, master!’
Spika looked at the strategium, assessing the proximity of the Archenemy line. It appeared that one of the unholy escorts – Ominator by its wild animal screams – was peeling towards the shield-less Armaduke to finish the duel while the others gunned directly for the main line. It had lofted attack ships from its carrier decks.
Spika’s poor relic of a ship had survived the first knock, though the list rolling up the damage report display was chilling. Spika had a feeling it had been less of a case of their shields doing their job, and more a case that the Necrostar Antiversal had developed insufficient power for another blast so soon after crippling the Domino. The Armaduke had survived because the discharge had been underpowered.
Even underpowered, it had blown out their shields.
Spika could smell fear in the air. All of his young and inexperienced officers were ashen and shaken. The hardwired servitors twitched in their sockets and plug-racks, neural links pulsing. Even the more veteran crewmen, like the Officer of Detection and the Chief Steersman, looked frantic.
They were terrified. His ship was terrified. Spika could taste the wash of cortisone and other stress hormones flooding the ship’s neural and biological systems. There was a stink of terror mixing with the smoke in the air-circulation system. Thirty thousand souls, locked in a metal box, in the dark, under fire. Most of them had never known anything like it before.
He remembered his life as a bridge junior. It was the absence of information that really gnawed at you. Only the shipmaster and the officers with access to the strategium feed had any real notion of what was going on outside, and then only if the Officer of Detection was doing a decent job. In a void fight, realspace ports shuttered and closed, and everything became feed only. Even if the ports had remained open, there was nothing to see. You were brawling with – and being fired upon by – an object that might be thousands of kilometres away in the interstellar blackness, and moving at a considerable percentage of the speed of light. There was the shake and terror of impacts, the raging engines, the cacophony of voices and data-chatter, but everything else was blind and far-removed, separated from the realm of the senses. No wonder juniors lost their nerve, no wonder the helm servitors and data-serfs wept and moaned as they worked at their logic stations, no wonder the stokers wailed and lamented as they laboured in the fiery caves of the engine vaults. Every soul depended on the uniting perception, the singular view, of the shipmaster. He alone could appreciate the grand dance of a fleet action, the war going on outside the metal tomb inside which the crew toiled. Every man worked without even understanding what benefit his small contribution was making. If death came, it overwhelmed suddenly, utterly lacking in warning or explanation.
The world would come apart in light, and then fire and hard vacuum would annihilate you.
The Officer of Detection cried out. Spika checked the scope.
The monster Ominator had launched munitions at them. Deep-range warheads were rippling through the void at them on plasma wakes.
Spika swore. He expected some comment from Gaunt.
To his surprise, the colonel-commissar was no longer at his side.
Elodie tried to focus. She’d been doing something. Something really ordinary. That was it, she’d been signing something. The ship had just that minute shuddered, and a metallic voice had announced they were arriving at wherever it was they were supposed to be going.
Some men from the regiment had come into the transport decks with yet more Munitorum paperwork for the retinue to sign. They’d circulated. Costin, the drunkard, had brought stuff to her when it was her turn. He just needed her to make her mark. It was another disclaimer, all part of the accompany bond.
Elodie had barely paid attention. The sustained quake of re-translation had disquieted her, and some of the children and younger women had become upset. When the metallic voice made its announcement, there had been cheering, and loud prayers offered in thanks to the Saint and the Emperor. Lay preachers and men of faith got up to lead the retinue in hymns of deliverance from the warp.
Then other things had happened very quickly. Things she didn’t understand. Sirens had begun to sound. Klaxons and bells. Sudden tension and fear had flashed through the hold habitats of the retinue company, an alarm born of ignorance. No one knew what was happening.
Realspace port shutters in the outer chambers that had only just begun to re-open after the immaterium transit were suddenly closing again. Old shutter motivators groaned at the sudden reverse. Members of the retinue had been waiting days to see out of the ship, if only to glimpse the brown darkness of space and the reassurance of distant stars, and now that solace was being denied them, all over again.
And the voice. The metallic voice. It was shouting words that sounded like battle stations.
How could they be in a battle? That seemed so unlikely.
Abruptly, as she was puzzling it out, something happened to the ship. Something hit the ship so hard everyone was thrown about, and the lights went out, and the air began to reek of smoke. When the lights began to flutter back on again, people were screaming. The children were wailing. Men and women had been hurt by the fall, bruised or bloodied by striking the deck or furniture fittings. Elodie struggled up, helping an older woman beside her. She was amazed at her fear. She’d never felt so numb and helpless. Costin had fallen too, spilling his papers all over the deck mesh. He was panicking. As she helped the older woman, Elodie glimpsed him taking a deep pull from a flask. The noise of panic in the chamber was almost overwhelming.