Helmet off, Eadwine was sitting to one side, watching the rehearsal.
He didn’t look up as Gaunt approached, but he knew the human was there.
‘I thought you’d be cowering somewhere,’ said Eadwine, his voice a machine rasp.
‘No, you didn’t,’ replied Gaunt.
‘No,’ Eadwine admitted. He kept watching the Iron Snake’s sword drill. The Iron Snake hadn’t even acknowledged Gaunt’s presence.
‘He is getting sloppy,’ said the Silver Guard warrior. ‘I don’t know what kind of blade-work they teach on Ithaka these days.’
‘Aren’t you concerned about the battle?’ asked Gaunt. ‘I thought you might have gone to the bridge.’
Eadwine turned to look at him.
‘What would that achieve? There’s no part for us to play. Not unless they board us. Are they likely to board us?’
‘I don’t think so.’
The Silver Guard shrugged.
‘Then all we can do is bide our time until we are faced with our kind of fight.’
‘You don’t need to know what’s going on?’ asked Gaunt.
Holofurnace stopped slicing his sword and glanced over.
‘Only if we live,’ he said. ‘If we die, why care about the detail?’
He went back about his training. The sword flashed fast, spinning and interweaving.
Gaunt realised that Eadwine was still staring at him.
‘I do not read your face well,’ said Eadwine. ‘I do not read human micro expressions. They are too weak, insignificant.’
Gaunt didn’t know how to reply.
‘But you seem concerned,’ the Silver Guard went on. ‘Clearly, there is the stress factor of this fight, but you are a man who has known battles. Where is your resolution? There is, it seems to me, another element troubling you.’
‘You read our faces well enough,’ said Gaunt.
Eadwine frowned and nodded, as if quietly please with his achievement.
‘So?’
‘I find myself distracted,’ said Gaunt. ‘Without expecting to, I find myself concerned for the welfare of another person aboard. That concern has surprised me to an extent I find dismaying.’
‘You question your focus.’
‘I worry about maintaining it.’
‘Is it a woman?’ asked Eadwine. ‘A woman? A sexual partner? I understand that can be very distracting for the emotionally compromised.’
‘No,’ said Gaunt. ‘I have recently learned that I have a son.’
‘Ah,’ said Eadwine. ‘Offspring. I know nothing about them either.’
He tilted his head, listening.
‘You hear?’ he asked.
Holofurnace had stopped drilling to listen too. Gaunt concentrated. He could make out a distant, repetitive thumping, masked by the engine throb, the steady chug of a machine rotating or cycling.
‘That’s the ship’s primary magazine delivering munitions at the fastest possible continuous pace,’ said Eadwine. ‘We are unloading everything we have at a sustained rate. We are trying to kill something very big.’
TWELVE
Kill Recorded
Whatever sentience controlled the daemon ship Ominator, its gleeful hunger for murder was so intense that it only belatedly became aware of the way the Armaduke and the Libertus had squeezed it into an untenable position.
They had met its headlong rush at the Imperial position with calm resolve, intercepting its trajectory so that the Ominator was obliged to pass between them. Such was the Ominator’s fever to engage, it was over pacing itself. It became apparent that it was not going to be able to break off or execute an evasion in time, certainly not without rendering itself more vulnerable. Any attempt to hard turn out of the tactical lock would have consumed vast amounts of its power reserve and de-positioned it hopelessly in the battlesphere alignment.
It continued to shriek its name. The shielding around its prow and flanks began to throb with a sub-photonic gleam the colour of burst entrails. Mechanical organs along its spine and between the blades of its ribs began to throb as it gathered power for a main weapon strike.
Advancing steadily, the Armaduke and the Libertus exchanged a brief non-verbal signal and began to hose fire at the enemy ship. Two streams of bombardment ripped out from the Imperial pair, converging like the lines of some infernal diagram on the Ominator. The streams were traceries of pulsed and beamed energy weapons, the unified output of hundreds of batteries slaved to the master tracking cogitators. Heavy ordnance systems spat torrents of hard shell munitions, missiles, ship-to-ship ballistic charges and bombard rockets.
The Ominator soaked it up without breaking stride, taking the titanic barrage from the Libertus against its forward port shields and the destructive abuse of the slightly extended Armaduke across its starboard side and belly.
The two ships maintained their relentless assault. The Ominator advanced in the face of their sustained fury, apparently oblivious, as if the onslaught was entirely futile. The fire rate was stupendous. Two gunners aboard the Libertus were killed by recoil trying to service the hard batteries fast enough, and an artificer aboard the Armaduke was burned to death by an overheating laser assembly. From his command seat aboard the Armaduke, Spika believed he had never seen a ship take such relentless punishment.
The Ominator squealed its name and attempted to fire, but the hellish lightning failed to develop enough to whip out from the hull. It tried again, and then again: two or three more stuttering attempts at ignition.
Then its shields failed, and its hull tore open like a punctured membrane. Shielding energies billowed out into the void around it like ink in water, like ragged sailcloth carried along by a storm-borne ship, like a ruptured egg sac.
Something catastrophic happened deep inside the daemon ship’s hull. There was a considerable though muffled explosion deep inside the ship about two-thirds of the way down its length. It was not a huge, satisfying sunburst of annihilation, but it blew out areas of deck plate and internal structure. Clouds of burning, toxic energy and atmosphere belched out. The mainframe shuddered.
Then the Ominator went dead. All of its onboard light sources died, even the infernal red glow from its core. Its energy output signature ceased, apart from the shreds of radiation and flame coming from the damaged sections. Its drive failed. Its plant failed. Its reactors failed. It became, in a second or two, an inert, dead lump of black machine junk, scorched and holed. Carried by its own forwards momentum, it began to tumble, prow tipping up, drive section rotating under, debris littering out of it like a spiral vapour trail.
The Imperial ships ceased fire. They waited, poised, in case it was a ruse, in case the daemon ship had decided to turn itself into a weapon and ram one of them.
It was lifeless. Blundering on, spinning like a discarded piece of scrap, it passed between them leaving a trickle of ejecta dispersing in its wake.
‘Kill recorded,’ cried out the Master of Detection.
‘For the Emperor,’ growled Spika.
As the Armaduke and the Libertus shared their kill, the vast Sepiterna had turned its guns against the Necrostar Antiversal. The enemy ship had crossed the main Imperial gunline, soaking up fire from the escorts as it paced a long, fast burn of an attack run across the battleship’s bows, a diagonal slash across the alignment of the battlesphere.