‘Behind the engines?’ Rallis asked, already making the course correction.
‘No. Keep up the speed.’ Beneath his feet, Narkissos could just detect the faint vibration in the deck as the Militant Fire powered up. She was ready to race for her life, for the lives of all aboard, and for the life of any hope of victory. ‘Skim by her. Then the Spreading Word.’ He pointed to the colony ship just beyond the Europa Forge. ‘Understand?’
‘I do.’
‘We have a fast ship, helmsman. Let’s prove it to the orks.’
‘They won’t even see us.’
‘That’s the whole idea,’ said Kondos.
The Militant Fire streaked towards the Europa Forge. ‘Like a stone over water,’ Narkissos urged, and Rallis took him at his word. He took the ship in at a low angle of approach, as if he might really land on the other vessel’s refinery. He passed over the superstructure. The orks were clustered on the flanks of the hull. For a moment, the run looked clear, but then another squadron appeared off the prow, heading straight for the bridge. The Fire was flying level with them.
‘Down!’ Narkissos yelled.
A few decades earlier, Rallis would have questioned such a reckless order. Once, in the early days of the helmsman’s service, Narkissos had forced him at gunpoint to perform a manoeuvre that Rallis had maintained would tear the ship apart. It hadn’t, and they had escaped faster, more agile raiders. Rallis no longer questioned him. He plunged into the insane as if he were piloting a fighter, not a cargo ship.
Rallis dropped the nose. The Militant Fire arrowed at the refinery. A collision could take out a large part of the fleet if the smaller ship punched through the plasma containment tanks.
The surface of the reservoirs came closer. The Fire was below the height of the chimney vents. They rose like a steel forest on either side. Narkissos felt the vertigo of rushing disaster, but he said nothing. He sensed Rallis’ need to pull up, but the helmsman maintained course.
Another second. Then another. The orks passing overhead. Wait. Wait. The impact in two breaths. Now.
‘Level us!’
One breath. The perspective of the oculus changed with tectonic lethargy. The second and last breath… The Militant Fire flew straight. The struts of the belly auspex array snapped off as they brushed against the Europa Forge’s reservoir. Ahead, the ship bulked upwards. The orks were now behind. ‘Up,’ Narkissos ordered at the same moment Rallis altered the course again. They pulled away from the Europa Forge. Rallis held them in a close parallel flight with it until they passed over the bow. Then he angled towards the Spreading Word.
Any form of order in the Merchants’ Armada had collapsed. The fleet was a storm of ships, boiling with evasions and captures. Collisions killed more vessels than the orks as panicked flights intersected. The Militant Fire flew through a dissipating fog of plasma. Fragments of wreckage tumbled by. As she closed with the Spreading Word, she encountered what Narkissos thought was another debris cloud. The remains were corpses, thousands of Crusaders, frozen in their last agony, sucked out of the open flanks of the colony ship.
For every ship that destroyed another, and for every one that was boarded, there were two that kept running. The fleet was a confusion of movement, but it still closed with the ork moon. Some of its elements raced far ahead of the others. The distance between ships grew. The sense of a collective action disintegrated, but there were so many vessels that there was still a crowd, still a mass migration of humans towards the fortress.
Closer yet. Narkissos had to guard against the temptation to gaze at the moon’s gorgon image and lose the thread of the moment-by-moment decisions needed to see the Militant Fire to its destination. He was sweating. He was frightened. His ship’s path was crossed again and again by squadrons of brutal predators. On all sides, the heroes of the Proletarian Crusade were dying, killed on boarded ships, ejected into the void, or vaporised by collisions. But he was also exhilarated because the Fire was not alone in its race. There was more than terror, flight and destruction visible in the oculus. There was also determination. There was strength. There were no more ork fighters emerging from the star fortress. For the first time, Narkissos dared imagine that their resources were not infinite.
The strategy that Speaker Tull had conceived was working. The Imperium had turned the orks’ own tactics against them. ‘We’re going to do it,’ Narkissos said, turning hope into words. ‘We’re going to flood them with our numbers.’ What he said was an incantation, an attempt at a great alchemy: hope into words, words into reality.
‘Port, upper quadrant,’ Kondos said.
Narkissos looked. ‘Are you serious?’ Kondos had indicated one of the ork cruisers. The Militant Fire was ahead of almost all the large ships now. Most of the Imperial vessels in its company were smaller than it was.
‘Why not?’ Kondos asked. ‘Aren’t we trying to get close to the greenskins?’
Narkissos grinned. ‘Yes, we are.’ There were very few ork fighters near the cruiser. The big ship was doing little beyond being a massive escort, protecting the squadrons against non-existent Imperial fire. ‘Helmsman, let’s embrace the madness.’
He imagined he could actually hear the blood drain from the faces of the bridge crew. He laughed. It was that or let terror close his throat altogether. Rallis muttered prayers under his breath, but turned the Fire’s nose towards the ork monster. They closed the distance quickly. They shot past a handful of ork fighters, which ignored them. Narkissos wondered what the greenskins thought when they saw his ship’s trajectory. Could orks be stunned by the lunacy of an adversary? It pleased him to think so.
The thought that the orks just ignored the ship pleased him less, because behind it lurked the question of why they would not care.
The Militant Fire flew beneath the cruiser’s hull. Narkissos had a sense of metal dense as muscle, large as a city. The cruiser was a hellish god that could annihilate his ship with as little notice as he would swat an insect.
His shoulders hunched, as if the image alone of the ork vessel could crush him. But then they left it behind too.
And now there was only the moon. The dark divinity of the cruiser faded to nothing. The star fortress filled the oculus. Narkissos confronted an entire world built for war. The monstrosity became all that was real, and it was a reality that was shaped to enact a greater monster’s will. It was a reality that travelled.
There was too much impossible in his vision. Too much horror. In defence of his sanity, he narrowed his focus to the geography, to the purpose of landing his ship where there was no space port. He concentrated on what he knew would be the last act of his career.
Tunnel vision. He saw mountains, and he tuned out their constructed nature. He looked for a plain. He clutched the dream of victory. It held reality at bay.
Fuelled by the dream, followed by hundreds more dreaming vessels, the Militant Fire brought Juskina Tull’s vision to the orks.
Sixteen
The moon had an atmosphere. The air was foul, ashy, reeking of burning gases and the effluvium of xenos industry. It was thin. When the Militant Fire’s cargo door opened, Haas felt the immediate urge to gasp. Yet the air was breathable, and no worse than the more toxic hives of Terra, except for the stench of the inhuman. The smell was acrid, a mixture of filthy industry and the foul organic. Though it was dry, it had the cloying grip of high humidity. Above all, it was an odour that she had never encountered before, and she bristled, a hunted animal reacting to the approach of the predator. The air had a taste, too. Haas wanted to spit. Her mouth was full of iron, promethium and rotten blood.