Just over twenty long, edgy minutes after the Armaduke snuggled itself in against the Reach, tell-tales flashed green in lateral sixteen and thirty-nine almost simultaneously. Gaunt had just arrived in sixteen, where Strike Beta had assembled. At a nod from the chief artificer, Gaunt took a handset from the waiting vox-officer and called through to Major Pasha in lateral thirty-nine.
‘We have green here,’ she reported.
‘Fields stabilised,’ Gaunt agreed. ‘Give the order to open your hatch.’
‘The Emperor protects,’ Petrushkevskaya replied.
Gaunt looked at the chief artificer.
‘Open,’ he said.
The chief artificer nodded, turned and signalled to the bay gallery, where cargo officers activated the hatch gate controls.
There was a gentle clatter. Gaunt turned, and saw that Strike Beta had risen to its feet, en masse, weapons ready.
He knew full well that an almost identical scene was playing out in lateral thirty-nine.
There was thump, a hiss of compression seal pistons, a whirr of retractor motors, and the hold’s massive outer hatch began to open. Effectively, the hull-side wall of the bay slid to one side.
Light from the hold revealed what was behind it: another wall, blackened and scabbed, worn by age and scoured by the void, lumpy and corroded, fused and blistered. This was the outer skin of the Reach.
Alarm lights flashed on and off, warning that the atmospheric field surrounding the docking buffers was fighting to maintain a seal. There was no danger of explosive decompression into the hard vacuum outside, but Gaunt could feel the sharp breeze of the slow leaks: air rushing out around the inexact seal.
‘Can you stabilise it?’ he asked.
The artificers were already making adjustments to the shape and size of the atmospheric field via the control station. Further prayers of efficacy were offered to the machine spirits. Slowly, the lights stopped winking and the sucking air leaks died away.
Silence. Silence apart from the very distant creak and squeal of metal on metal.
Gaunt walked past the protective screens right up to the face of the Reach’s exposed outer skin. It was ugly, like blackened metal scar tissue, ridged and contorted beside the dank but clean hold structures of the Armaduke.
Gaunt took off his glove, put out his bare hand, and touched the alien metal. It was only just beginning to warm from the ambient heat of the hold’s atmosphere. Gaunt felt an eternity of void cold, the legacy of airless dark. He felt the chill contours of threats and promises.
He looked at the chief artificer.
‘Prepare to cut it,’ he ordered.
The vox-officer was standing by. Gaunt relayed the same order to Major Pasha, and then switched channels to speak to Shipmaster Spika.
‘Bridge.’
‘Shipmaster, please signal Strike Alpha to launch. The order is given.’
‘Understood.’
Launch Artificer Goodchild placed the vox-horn back on its hook, stood up and walked down the metal gangplank into his supervision gallery. The brass control board had been purified and blessed, and the votive seals, threads of inscribed paper attached by wax and red ribbons, had been removed from the lever controls and dials.
Goodchild had only to say one word. His servitors and technicians set to work. Greased pistons began to elevate sections of the deck. Exhaust vents clattered open. The main and secondary lighting systems of the principal excursion deck dimmed to cold blue and yellow hazard lamps began to flash. There was a pressure drop as the main airgates and outer space doors opened, hingeing out and away like the petals of a flower. The atmospheric envelope adjusted accordingly. Field strength peaked. Voices murmured all around him: the augmetic drone of servitors mindlessly pronouncing streams of technical calibration figures, and flight crew adepts monotonously repeating the catechisms of service and duty.
On the main deck below, gangs of ratings, many of them bulk-grown abhuman serfs, hauled away the cable lines and mooring wires, cranking them into the under deck drums. The first six boats on the primary landing were laden and waiting, lift systems running. Through-deck hoists were already lifting the next wave of craft up from the parking hangar. It was unusual for small craft like Arvus lighters and Falco atmospherics to be hoisted or repositioned with personnel on board, but the shipmaster had expressed to Goodchild the importance of rapid launch. Laden with lasmen and assault equipment, the landing craft were being loaded into the launch platform like ammunition into a gun.
The first craft lifted and began to accelerate towards the space doors. It was the heavyweight giant that Goodchild had seen aboard at Tavis Sun, a martial brute in the colours of the Silver Guard. Its pattern designation was Caestus, an assault ram vehicle of ancient Adeptus Astartes design, a machine built for boarding actions. Its rear burners lit hot yellow as it cleared the airgate and then turned wild green as it slipped through the hazy edge of the atmospheric field into hard space.
Behind it came the first of the assault carriers: Arvus-pattern craft, both long and standard body variants, followed by four Falco boats. They launched in pairs, their engines making shriller, thinner sounds compared to the guttural throb of the Caestus. The engine sounds died away as soon as the small ships left the atmospheric field.
The second launch wave was already sliding onto the ramp.
Goodchild walked back to his vox station and lifted the horn.
‘We have launch conditions,’ he reported. ‘Launching in progress.’
Vox mic held ready in his hand, Beltayn watched the shipmaster and the other senior bridge officers gathered around the glowing strategium console. On the hololith, little patches of lights were spitting out of the imaged Armaduke, and whipping away in formation around the seam of the Reach structure. Spika had brought the resolution up, so not all of the Reach was being projected. Beltayn saw the little clusters of fast lights, like neon seeds, zipping across the ragged topography of the Reach’s hull away from the Armaduke, flying very low, hugging the terrain to avoid detection. Beltayn noticed the way Spika was drumming his fingertips on the handrail of the strategium as he watched. There was a slightly sour odour on the bridge, the smell of adrenaline. It wasn’t just the stressed crew: bio-wired into the neurosystems of the ship, the abhumans and serfs were reacting in tension too.
The ship itself was nervous.
‘Strike Alpha eight minutes to target,’ intoned one of the seniors.
Spika nodded. His fingertips drummed.
At the helm of the Caestus, Pilot-servitor Terek-8-10 maintained a steady course. His biomechanical hands rested on the helm controls, though he was operating the heavy machine through the neural impulse linkage of his augmetic plugs. Manual control was for emergencies. The chambers of his hearts thrilled to the output of the engines either side of him. Forward view through the small window port was restricted. He was following a tight course through the broken geography of the target area’s surface plotted by auspex and displayed via hololithic router. The Caestus was leading the assault flight, twisting around slopes of junk, banking over torn pylons, hugging the floors of metal ravines and chasms, even flying under accidentally created bridges and outcrops of shredded machinery.
Rear-projecting auspex showed the troop landers tight on his tail, following his lead. Terek-8-10 was also detecting steady vital readings from the three individuals strapped into the inertial suppression clamps in the armoured compartments of the twin hull booms below and ahead of him.