‘You’re not coming along,’ said Gaunt.
‘I know, but if the fight spills this way, I want to be ready.’
She looked at Gaunt’s power sword. It was clamped in its rack on top of the locker, ready to fit into the scabbard: the power sword of Heironymo Sondar, an emblem of Vervunhive and the great Verghast victory against the Ruinous Powers.
‘You should show him that,’ she said.
‘Felyx?’
‘Yes. You should show him that sword. Explain what you did to get it.’
‘He already knows,’ said Gaunt.
‘Of course he does,’ she said, ‘but that doesn’t mean it’s not important for him to hear you tell it.’
Gaunt took down the sword, activated its field briefly, felt the throb of its power, then deactivated it and sheathed it.
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ he said.
There was a knock at the cabin door. Gaunt had begun to enjoy the way Maddalena’s hand went for a weapon at the slightest cue, hardwired to fight and protect.
‘Get in the bedroom,’ he told her.
She raised her eyebrows.
‘I really don’t think we have time,’ she said.
He laughed, though it felt like too serious a time. She got up and disappeared.
Gol Kolea was waiting at the door, in full kit, weapon slung. His salute let Gaunt know it was an official visit.
‘Regiment battle ready and correct, sir,’ he said. ‘Strike Alpha is assembled on the main excursion deck. Strike Beta awaits you in lateral hold sixteen. Strike Gamma is assembled in lateral hold thirty-nine.’
‘Thank you, major. Time on target?’
‘Estimate is now five hours sixteen, sir.’
‘Have the shipmaster informed we stand ready.’
‘I will.’
‘Anything else to report, Gol?’
Kolea shook his head.
‘The mood’s good,’ he said. ‘I mean, everything considered. All the build-up, the extremity of it. I think the Ghosts have been out of the fight too long. For some, it’s been so long they thought they’d never march again. We need this.’
‘We need to win this,’ said Gaunt.
‘Of course, sir. That’s always true. In the grand scheme of things, we need to win this. But for us, for the regiment, we just need to do it, win or lose. We have to get bloody again or we’ll be good for nothing.’
Gaunt nodded.
‘Point taken. I think we’re ready to get bloody.’
Kolea nodded at Gaunt’s power sword.
‘You might let the boy take a look at that sometime.’
Gaunt frowned sharply. Kolea held up his hands peaceably.
‘I know, I know,’ Kolea said. ‘I’m hardly the one to be handing out advice on being an effective father.’
‘It’s not that,’ said Gaunt. ‘Have you been talking to someone?’
‘No.’
‘You’re not the first person to say that to me.’
Kolea shrugged.
‘The Ghosts haven’t taken to the boy yet, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s a little strange for them, to be honest. But I think they will. I think they’ll respect him because he’s yours. But I think you need to show them you respect him too.’
Gaunt didn’t reply. He put on his cap and picked up his gloves.
‘I’ll walk down with you and inspect the assemblies,’ he said.
Kolea looked back into the apparently empty cabin and pointed with his chin.
‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye first?’ he asked.
Gaunt was forced into a half-smile.
‘Not much gets past you, does it, Gol?’
Kolea laughed.
‘I’m not disapproving, sir. Not my place. And she’s a handsome woman.’
‘She’ll also be here when I get back,’ said Gaunt. He closed the cabin door behind him and set off along the hallway with Kolea.
‘That’s what I like to hear,’ said Kolea. ‘Confidence.’
‘That she’ll still be there?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘That you know you’re coming back.’
The sheer scale of the debris mass became clearer as they approached. The Armaduke was just a speck, a speck amongst billions of specks surrounding the vast bolus of material. Salvation’s Reach was a planetoid, a veritable planet, except that its mass was not spherical. It was a colossal lumpen ingot, flattening out to a disk form at its extremities, where gravity had moulded it.
Through the outer scopes and telepicts, Spika resolved surface detail akin to some ork ships he’d encountered. Except it was put together with less precision. He saw a compressed jumble of mechanical material, like machines mangled and intermingled by an industrial compactor. There were canyons and ravines, sharp peaks and plateaux, deep fissures and almost smooth plains of hull fabric. Swimming through the dense swarms of loose junk, the Armaduke found itself slipping through floating slicks of promethium and other liquids and particulates, substances that had seeped out of the main mass and bled into space.
Lateral holds sixteen and thirty-nine were situated about two-thirds of a kilometre apart on the port side of the Armaduke. They both had large armoured outer hatches equipped with atmospheric field generators. Prior to departure from Menazoid Sigma, the hatch surrounds of both hold apertures had been reinforced and built out with vulcanised buffer collars.
Spika initiated the final approach. Apart from orbital drydocks, the Armaduke had never been positioned this close to a larger object. It felt counterintuitive to him, though every system was green. A shiftship was built for the freedom of the open void, not to snuggle in against the outer layers of a megastructure, like a tick on the skin of a grox. Spika had been obliged to cancel and mute all the proximity alarms, and fundamentally adjust the ship’s inertial stability to counteract the gravimetric load. The ship itself seemed to sense that the manoeuvre was wrong. Like Spika, the Armaduke was reluctant, as if it felt it was being deliberately crashed into the surface of a planet. The hull frame creaked and groaned uneasily. Burn corrections became hair’s breadth subtle.
With a dull and protracted rumble, and an eerie screech of scraping hull that shuddered through the ship and seemed to issue from some immense, echoing cavity, the Armaduke settled against the skin of the Reach.
Spika killed the drives and correction thrusters. He activated the magnetic clamps and inertial anchors.
He turned to Beltayn.
‘Inform your commander that the mission may now proceed,’ he said.
In lateral holds sixteen and thirty-nine, artificer crews scrambled towards the outer doors, erecting protective screens and baffles around what would be their workspace. Several of them waited for the indicator lights on the control panels of the atmospheric field generators to show green. In order to assure the results, they anointed the panels and uttered the correct propitiations. Processors hummed and throbbed. Machinery was rolled forwards in front of the hatch gates, and power cables were played out. Servitor crews advanced and stood ready with pressure hoses that fed from the water reservoirs inside the Armaduke’s hullskin, water that was dark and sludgy with ice.
Behind the protective barriers in the main body of each holdspace, assembled with their equipment and weapons, the strike teams sat and waited. Some spoke quietly, some rechecked their kit or specialist equipment, some muttered blessings to themselves or smoked lho-sticks, some caught catnaps.
Some watched the artificers at work. The Ghosts were dubious. This wasn’t their field of specialism. Every now and then, some pained metallic squeal would echo through the ship, a grinding shriek from where the cruiser’s hull rested against the bulk of the scrap-metal world they had docked against. Ghosts jumped, made the sign of the aquila, and looked around for the source of the noise.