Terek-8-10’s blind cannon blasts had gouged the interior of the bay, turning another two moored shuttles to molten slag. Two or three of the micro-warheads had also gone into the hangar, unimpeded by any obstacles. They detonated deep inside as they finally met solid objects. The Caestus tore through the gantry frame of a cargo loader, folding the girders and scaffolded structure around itself like a garland. The dragged framework ripped two small landers from their ceiling rack moorings.
The Caestus had almost run out of space. The far end of the docking bay was another gate hatch. Automatically triggered, blast-proof door skins were closing across the scored and grubby hatch.
Terek-8-10 fired the cannon, roasting a spear of energy out in front of the Caestus. The afterburners had finished their jolt, but the pilot-servitor fired them again, using reserve fuel, grabbing a last little bit of force and momentum.
The inner doors did not explode. They buckled under the melta-fire, forming pustules and scabs of molten chrome that spalled flakes of metal like dead skin. Still trailing shreds of twisted girderwork behind it like streamers, the Caestus hit the inner doors.
Now they exploded.
The impact stove the doors in. It folded one horizontally and punched it clean out of the hatch frame. The other, weakened more extensively than the first by the melta damage, ruptured like wet paper or damaged tissue, spattering the Caestus with superheated liquid metal.
The Caestus came through the doors into the secondary dock, bringing most of them with it. It had lost a considerable amount of momentum. Part of its port wing had been stripped away by the collision. Stability was impaired. Further explosive decompression caused gale-force cross-winds to wrestle with the heavy craft. The prow shields that had protected it thus far had finally burned out and failed.
It was more projectile than vehicle. It bore on, demolishing, one after another, three lighter shuttles that were suspended side by side above the dock floor on mooring clamps. Terek-8-10 saw sensor displays that told him the Reach’s vast atmospheric processors were running at hyperactive levels as they attempted to compensate for the catastrophic pressure loss. Field generators were fighting to establish a cordon against hard space and seal the deep, gaping wound in the Reach’s environmental integrity.
That was good. The Archenemy was too concerned about retaining its environment to consider the consequences. Atmospheric stability meant the Imperial Guard components following the Caestus in would be able to deploy directly.
The Caestus was almost out of room in the secondary bay. Terek-8-10 fired the magna-melta again and softened the end of the compartment enough to stab the ram-ship through it. The boom arms punched through hull plate, rock infill and inner skin compartment lining. This time, it left most of its other wing behind. Clipped and injured, ceramite armour blackened with firewash and molten metal, it tore through into the next chamber, an engineering depot. Almost all of its effective momentum had been robbed away.
Terek-8-10 stabilised the shuddering craft, slamming it sideways into the casing of a bulk processor as he fought it to a halt. He pulled the lever that dropped the boarding ramps.
‘For the Emperor,’ he howled in an amplified augmetic monotone. ‘Kill them!’
Tell-tale lights on his main console showed him that, down in the transport compartment, three inertial suppression clamps had been released.
SEVENTEEN
Boarding Action
‘They’re in,’ said Beltayn, over the vox. ‘Contact reported.’
‘Begin cutting!’ Gaunt ordered. The artificers nearby had been poised for the order. The blessed engine of the ugly Hades breaching drill thundered into life, and the oily beast, like some giant promethean beetle from the lightless depths beneath some world’s rocky crust, was coaxed forwards. Its heavy tracks clattered on the deck plates of lateral sixteen.
The Hades was a siege engine, a boring drill designed for sapping and trench warfare. Gaunt had seen the engineers of Krieg deploying such devices to great effect when he was still a cadet. Cutting through what amounted to the hull of a starship was not a conventional use, but it was the quickest and most expedient way in that the tactical planners had been able to devise. The Hades’s huge cutting head, a four-part breaching instrument of interlocked, diamantine-tipped rotary power cutters, was mounted on the front of the tank chassis and adjusted by a powerful frame of piston drivers. The power cutters bit from the outside in, so that shredded material passed into the maw between the cutters, down a conveyer belt that ran through the middle of the machine like a digestive tract, and was ejected as spoil through the rear. Seen front-on, the Hades resembled the grotesque concentric mouthparts of some deep sea sucker fish, with rows of teeth surrounding a funnel throat. Deep in that throat, above the belt, was a melta-cutter positioned to weaken and blast the target solids into consumable slag.
The chassis snorted black exhaust fumes. The cutter bits were spinning at maximum cycle. The operator triggered the melta-array and fired several searing blasts into the skin of the Reach.
The skin began to buckle and deform, filling the hold space with a stink of pitch and scorched metal. Then the whizzing teeth bit in.
The noise was painfully loud. It was the shrill scream of a high-speed drill, but mixed with the deep throb and roar of bulk industrial machinery. The heat blasts had softened the hull skin enough for the grinding, rending drill heads to find purchase. Hull metal wailed as it was abraded away. Fine scrap began to tumble out of the belt ejector, shavings polished almost silver by the rotary teeth. Fine dust and smoke rose off the power cutters, which were already super-heating from friction. The crew members standing by unlocked their pressure hoses and began to spray the advancing head with jets of dank water. The Hades operator still applied ferocious heat using the melta, because it was essential for the hull fabric to be soft enough for the teeth to bite. But it was also essential to keep the power cutters cool enough not to fuse and, more importantly, damp down and emulsify the clouds of micro-fine, ultra-sharp spalling that was coming off the cut in clouds like dust. If that got into eyes or throats, if that was inhaled into lungs, it would kill a man through catastrophic micro-laceration. The cooked mineral stink was bad enough. Occasionally, a flaw or imperfection in the hull fabric caused a large shard of debris to splinter off and be flung out by the spinning teeth. These pieces pinged and cracked off the protective screens and baffles. Gaunt knew what the Ghosts behind him were thinking. It sounded exactly like small-arms fire spanking off trench boarding.
One of the operators was struck by a piece of flying debris. It knocked him off his feet, but he got back up again, bruised and shaken. A few seconds later, another operator was hit by a sharpened sliver that went clean through his body armour and into his torso above the right hip. Colleagues pulled him clear, but he was already bleeding out by the time they got him to the hold doorway where the medicae teams were waiting.
‘How thick?’ Gaunt yelled over the howl of the drill.
‘Density scans show just over three metres,’ replied the chief artificer.