‘We’re in a fight! A fight!’ someone shouted.
‘We will perish in the void!’ someone else shrieked.
‘Be calm. Be calm!’ Elodie heard herself saying to the people around her. She had no calm of her own to share. She wanted to know why she could smell smoke. She wanted to know if the world was about to turn upside down again, and if the lights would come back on if they went out again. The screech of the alarms seemed designed to promote acute anxiety.
She saw Juniper. The woman was frantic.
‘Where’s my little dear?’ Juniper was crying. ‘Where’s my dear little girl? I lost her when the lights went out.’
Elodie put her arm around Juniper to steady her, and looked around, searching the seething crowd. People were rioting in every direction.
‘Yoncy?’ Elodie yelled. ‘Yoncy, come here to us!’
‘Where are you, Yoncy?’ Juniper called.
Elodie saw Captain Meryn, who’d been supervising the troop of men on paperwork detail.
‘Have you seen Yoncy?’ she asked.
Meryn had an ugly expression on his face, a sick look of fear. He glared at her.
‘Who?’ he asked.
‘Captain’s Criid’s little girl!’ Juniper blurted, crying. ‘The dear thing will be trampled!’
Meryn pushed past them. He said something that Elodie didn’t hear properly.
She was pretty sure it was something like, Do I look like I care? Or words to that effect.
There was a sudden rekindling of panic as the ship’s plasma engines began to thrash and rumble at an accelerated rate, making everything reverberate. Elodie clutched Juniper, who was sobbing and shaking.
‘We’ll find her,’ she insisted. ‘We’ll find her.’
Elodie assumed that the trauma couldn’t get any worse. But there was a sudden bark of cracking gunfire. Everyone flinched and ducked, and almost everyone screamed.
The crowd began scattering. Those who couldn’t flee threw themselves flat onto the deck or took cover behind cots, crates or bunk blocks.
There was a Tanith trooper barging down the central hold space aisle towards Elodie and Juniper. Elodie didn’t recognise him. There seemed to be something wrong with his face, as if it had become blurred. His right hand was soaked in blood and brandishing a lasrifle. As he advanced, the soldier was cracking off bursts of autofire above the heads of the crowd to scare them out of his way. The gunfire bursts pattered and sparked off the high hold ceiling.
His left hand was around the throat of the terrified child he had snatched up as a shield.
It was Yoncy.
TEN
Shields
Spika stared at his comparatives for a second. His plasma engines were burning hard, and he could feel the grav torque pulling at the ship’s seams as it surged into the hard turn.
They were never going to make it. They were never going to turn in time. They were certainly not going to pull clear of the munitions spread rushing towards them. He had ordered counterfire to try to track and detonate some of the incoming torpedoes, but even with the detection systems on their side, it was like trying to hit an individual grain of sand with a bow and arrow during a hurricane. Another few moments and the enemy munitions would be sufficiently in-range to establish target lock and start to actively hunt them.
A warhead spread that large would demolish an unshielded hull like an eggshell.
Spika had one choice. In truth, he had two, but one of them was ‘die’, so there was little to discuss. Ominator, shrieking its name in grotesque pulses of noise through the void, like a wounded animal in a trap, was coming for them. Aggressor Libertus was racing away from the solid Imperial gunline to offer support, but it was six or seven minutes away from being any use.
Spika adjusted the heading values and added nineteen seconds to the burn duration.
The chief steersman glanced at him.
‘Execute!’ Spika yelled.
Through the glass, darkness.
‘I can’t see anything,’ said Felyx.
‘Get behind me,’ hissed Maddalena Darebeloved.
Felyx glanced at her.
‘You’re ridiculous. Simply ridiculous,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a street hit, this is a void fight. How is getting behind you going to protect me?’
He turned back to the realspace port. They’d found a stretch of hull-side hallway in the outer accommodation deck where the realspace shutters had failed to close properly. There was a limited view out into the blackness. Felyx was leaning close to the thickened armaglass to peer out, but he was seeing little more than his own reflection.
‘I can’t see anything,’ he whispered. There was nothing visible outside, just darkness. Not even stars. For all the commotion going on inside the Armaduke, there was apparently nothing to warrant it.
Dalin watched Felyx and his lifeguard. There was a tremendous noise coming from the transport decks behind them, a palpable edge of panic. Dalin was anxious, and very distressed by the great surges of engine noise, and the rapid shifts and sways in mass and gravity. He felt like he was on a boat in a heavy sea.
‘We should go to the bunker spaces,’ he said.
‘Someone speaks sense,’ said Maddalena.
‘Being in a bunker deck isn’t going to help much if we’re hit,’ snapped Felyx. ‘If the ship goes up, there’s nowhere to hide.’
‘Being in a bunker deck offers better chances of survival than standing beside an unarmoured window that could blow out to hard void at any moment,’ said Maddalena. ‘Don’t make me pick you up and carry you.’
The shipwide alarms were still sounding, and personnel were running past them. The smell of smoke remained intense, but it had been partly obscured by a rising stink of heat. The engines were running hot. Furnaces were seething.
‘My first void fight, and this is what I witness,’ complained Felyx, peering out again, bobbing his head to try different angles. ‘I suppose everything is too far away for us to see.’
‘Really?’ asked Dalin. He was honestly surprised. He’d never really thought about the scale in those terms. He understand that the void was big, but he’d never imagined a situation where ships the size of the one they were travelling aboard could engage without being able to see each other.
The ship was the size of a city! How ridiculous was it to fight something so far away you couldn’t see it? A lasman had to appreciate his enemy, or at least his enemy’s position, in order to fight. And what kind of gun could–
Somebody ran up to them, out of breath. Dalin turned, and suddenly stiffened. Maddalena also snapped around in surprise.
‘What in the God-emperor’s name are you doing here?’ asked Gaunt.
Felyx turned from the realspace port at the sound of Gaunt’s voice.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Gaunt snarled. Dalin blinked. There was something in Gaunt’s manner, an agitation, that he had never seen before. ‘Get to the bunker spaces. The shelter decks. Come on!’
‘I–’ Felyx began.
‘Shut up and move,’ Gaunt barked. He looked at Maddalena. ‘Some lifeguard you are! Do your damn job! Get him into a shelter cavity! There are standing orders for this kind of situation. I could have you all on charges!’
He looked at Dalin.
‘I’m disappointed in you, trooper. I thought you could be trusted to keep these people in line.’
Dalin stood to attention.
‘No excuses, sir.’
Gaunt looked back at Felyx and his minder.
‘No excuses, but they probably aren’t cooperating, are they? Did you tell them to go to the bunker decks?’