‘Repairs still underway!’ sang out an artificer’s junior.
‘Track them. Deterrent fire,’ Spika ordered.
The Armaduke’s smaller, more nimble batteries and gun stations woke up, streaming beams and ripping, stuttering lines of las bolts up into the black. Barrels pumped in their arrestor sleeves as the gun mounts traversed hard, chasing the fast-moving attack ships. Through multiple viewers via multiple pict feeds, Spika watched the enemy pack rip over, darting along the flanks and underside of the Armaduke, banking between crenellated surface towers and engraved armour buttresses, hugging the lines of the ribbed prow, like aircraft flying low-level through the streets of a hive. Battery fire pursued them. Spika saw one attack ship engulfed in flame, tumbling like a firework wheel under its own momentum. He also saw a battery go up, strafed into oblivion. Lights began to go dark across his master console, tiny individual lights among the thousands of system indicators. Prow battery 1123. Prow battery 96 (starboard). Keel battery 326 (centreline). Port tower 11. Environment hub 26 alpha (portside). Detection relay nine beta.
A wave of target strikes rippled down the Armaduke as the enemy squadron raced aft, jinking, evading, gunning for weak spots.
There was a sudden electromagnetic crackle, a distort across most pict feeds, the fuzz-wash of serious las fire. As the pictures jumped and cycled back into life, Spika saw Furies. The Imperial void fighters, all of them from the poor Domino’s fighter screen, were soaring down the length of the Armaduke’s hull in the opposite direction, meeting the enemy squadron head-on. Spika tracked almost three dozen individual dogfights, acrobatic duels that were suddenly, bitterly in progress. Furies banked after enemy craft around shield pylons or detection towers, or harried them down around the flanks and around the keel line. Like ascending birds, Furies and foe-ships locked together, spiralling up and away from the Armaduke as they tried to out-turn each other and gain the kill shot. Some were tumbling. Others turned out in wide arcs, forced away from the frigate in an effort to lose a pursuer, sometimes as far as the glowing mass of the Domino. It was like an angry swarm of insects mobbing the old ship.
‘Shields in twenty seconds!’ an artificer announced.
‘Acknowledged,’ Spika replied. ‘Vox, do what you can to signal the Furies. Warn them we are relighting and they need to be clear when we do.’
‘Aye, master!’
Spika’s attention was on the Ominator. It had clearly not grown tired of saying its own name. Instruments estimated about nine minutes to firing point at their current intercept rate. Spika shook that off. More like seven or six and a half. The Ominator was hasty and hungry. It wanted to get a lick in before the Armaduke was shielded again, and before the storming bulk of the Aggressor Libertus came charging in from the rear line. The Aggressor Libertus was already trading long-range punches with the Necrostar Antiversal as it accelerated. Necrostar Antiversal, realspace drives burning orange-hot, clearly wanted to test its mettle against the Sepiterna.
‘Dammit, do we have any vox?’ Spika asked.
‘Routing available circuits to you, master.’
Spika pulled his silver speaker-horn close.
‘Hailing, hailing, Master of the Libertus. Hailing, hailing, Master of the Libertus. This is Spika, mastering the Highness Ser Armaduke.’
A crackle.
‘This is Libertus, confirm.’
‘Confirm, Libertus. Let the capital ship worry about that cruiser. We can crush this target with pinning fire and then turn together.’
A long pause, full of static.
‘Libertus, confirm?’
‘Agreed, Armaduke. You have guns effective and shields, confirm?’
‘Confirm guns effective. Maintain positions relative. Armaduke now accelerating to close. Be ready to turn wide, repeat wide, if he proves reluctant to run between us.’
‘Relative noted and matched. Acceleration matched. Let’s slay the bastard, Armaduke.’
‘Confirm.’
‘Shields at your discretion!’ the artificer announced.
‘Light them,’ said Spika.
There was a stuttering pulse as the void shield generators cycled into life. Deck lights dipped all the way into brown-out and back as onboard power was briefly refocused. Shielding crackled into being around the advancing Armaduke, forming blistering fields of immaterium distortion. Several Furies, late leaving the side of the Armaduke, tumbled, lights out and power gone, their systems temporarily blanked by contact with the defence fields. Four of the Archenemy’s small hunter-ships detonated, crushed against the expanding shields, their drive plants destroyed by some allergic, alchemical interaction.
Shields raised, the Armaduke began to power past the Domino towards the onrushing Ominator. Aggressor Libertus followed on, about sixty kilometres astern and twenty to starboard.
‘Clear the missile tubes!’ Spika commanded. ‘Main batteries, main mounts – firing solutions on the designated target now.’
He focused the primary rangefinder on the Ominator.
The air in the system still smelled of smoke. At least this disguised the Armaduke’s pervading odour of kitchen grease.
Gaunt walked back towards the bridge, through corridors empty of life. All of the passenger complement was stowed in the bunker decks, and the crew personnel were at their battle stations. Occasionally, a junior rating or a servitor rushed past on some errand.
Gaunt had started out with little sense of the void fight, and now he had none at all. He wondered if they were close to winning, or close to dying. The ship was peaceful. It wasn’t like being in a battle on the field, with the thump of guns, of artillery pummelling the skyline, with airborne overhead. Space was silent. There was no communication of nearby destruction.
But he could tell that a fight was going on. The deck creaked and the superstructure groaned, under tension. Every minute or so, the lights would dip and come back, or the engines would begin another frantic round of thrashing output. Static coated every surface; he presumed that was a side effect of the void shields. He’d seen it in buildings and ground vehicles close to active Titans.
Most of all he could feel the fight inside him, in his gut, his inner ear, his kinaesthetic sense. He could sense the soundless, invisible pull and twist and wrench of inertial compensation. The gravitic systems were fighting to maintain the environmental status quo as the ship lurched and came about. He felt as if he was standing in a quiet, swaying building: it flooded him with memories. Being in a high tower on Balhaut during the first firestorms. Being on the curtain walls of Vervunhive as the Heritor’s woe-machines lumbered in.
At least, he reflected, he hoped it was the gravitic stresses. He hoped it was not the turbulence of his restless soul, troubled by a distress it had never expected.
The hatchway to a grand chamber lay open. Inside, under gently swinging lamp rigs, the Iron Snake Holofurnace was performing a fast sword drill against hololithic targets.
The sword work was devastatingly swift. Holofurnace was using a cross-stroke and rotational style Gaunt had not seen before, switching from one hand to a two-handed grip depending on the attitude of the sword.