‘Very good, lord captain.’ Marcarian stumped off to distribute orders.
‘Find me that distress beacon, shipmaster.’
‘Come and look at this, lord captain.’
Marcarian was standing by the chart desk that dominated the strategium turret. The base unit was an illuminated table, above which a wavering hololithic grid chart was displayed. A golden aquila dead-centre represented Dantalion. She was surrounded by a cloud of unidentified blips, trailing back towards the bloated, crimson wire-frame that represented the Vandis star. The intervening grids filled fast with ship markers, like a spreading infection reviewed on rapid playback. The banks of time-lapse and repeater screens that surrounded the desk were walled with static.
‘Disregard the orks for now,’ Marcarian commanded the strategium liaison. ‘Authorise removal of the necessary coding wafers and route the spared cogitation capacity to parse Last Wall identifiers.’
‘Do you not want targets?’ asked Zerberyn.
‘Scanning for Last Wall signals will identify both the source of the distress beacon, and our own fleet if they are here. That should be our first priority.’
Zerberyn offered his silence by way of agreement. Before a void fight with a Death Guard flotilla had wasted his right side and earned him his command, Marcarian had been Augur Master aboard the Grey Ranger. He knew his system.
‘I’d also recommend mobilising the First. The orks have shown themselves to favour long-range teleport actions.’
It was then that Zerberyn realised that at some point during the translation cycle he had drawn his pistol.
‘We are ready for them.’
All Adeptus Astartes fleets employed the same classes of ship, but the modular design allowed for variations on the basic STC. Fists Exemplar warships differed from those of their cousins in many ways, but principal among these was the manifold layers of dedicated psychic shielding they employed. They were built for void-war, purposed to patrol the storm-wracked region of wilderness space afflicted by the Rubicante Flux. In addition to the cherub-serfs that filled every inhabited section with song, choristers from the Chapter Librarius psychically conducted the chorus from chambers specifically designed for their warp-soothing acoustics. Every one of Dantalion’s millions of consoles was worked with monomolecular silver wires. Her ballast chambers were filled with the scent of candlewood and samphyr, silvic oil and rose cedar. Even the very halls of the ship were arranged into the schematised form of potent protective runes and a good portion of her orbit-to-ground firepower had been retrofitted with psychic null generators.
She had been designed to fight the enemies of Man and triumph in regions of space where other ships could not enter, and only deep-survey barges of the Inquisition sailed with greater protection against warp-borne assault.
‘But again, granted. Have them deploy at your discretion.’
‘Bright skies…’ someone exclaimed.
Zerberyn followed the staring faces to the main viewscreen. Someone amongst the veteran crew zoomed the screen’s visual feed and placed a bracket around a patched-up old colossus. Almost three times the mass of Dantalion, it looked like an Imperial Navy battleship. It was heavily damaged and, so it appeared, either partially or carelessly rebuilt. Its aft section was almost completely crumpled, and had been fitted with a monstrous engine housing almost as large as the rest of the ship that filled the void behind it with cones of chemical fire. Construction scaffolds spread from the hull like a beetle’s wings. Fires burned on several decks.
‘Oberon-class,’ Marcarian confirmed. ‘Or she was.’
The big vessel yawed into the lower quadrant of the main viewer, drifting across the plane of the solar system with a trail of gnat-like ork fighters in pursuit. ‘Approaching on an intercept vector.’
Whatever their current naval supremacy, the orks would always make use of what they found. Zerberyn could almost respect them for that.
‘No serial codes, no auto-transmissions, no response to hails.’ Marcarian limped through the strategium desks, looking over shoulders at the read-outs. ‘I’d say it’s an ork ship.’
‘Of course it is an ork ship. That much is clear.’
‘Still no sign of Last Wall transponders on our scans, lord captain,’ said Marcarian, stiffly. ‘All hands ready for emergency translation at your order.’
Zerberyn brought the barrel of his pistol to his gorget ring and tapped it as he thought, watching the zipping ork fighters wind about the nearing battleship like surgical thread through a wound.
‘Lord captain, I think that—’
‘I commend you your unfettered thought, it improves us all,’ Zerberyn spat, quoting from the Oriax Variorum. The ship slid into full view, Dantalion gunning for it amidships. Zerberyn aimed his bolt pistol at the viewer.
‘Kill that ship.’
Two
The shuttle deployed its landing struts for its final descent stage onto Daylight Pad Theta, the light void craft wobbling in the crosswinds generated by the perpetual grind of the Palace hive’s colossal cycler fans and the sheer volume of air traffic. Transorbital lighters were picking up and setting down in a near-constant flow, crowding the Palace’s skyline: red and purple and black and gold, a swirling plasteel snow of new conscripts pressed into the Navy’s proudest regiments. To navigate a shuttle through either obstacle, let alone both, was a task closer to reading the Emperor’s Tarot than landing a void craft. To even make the attempt took the superhuman reflexes and unshakable confidence of the Adeptus Astartes.
Koorland, Chapter Master of the Imperial Fists, looked up to watch the shuttle’s approach.
Waves of promethium heat beat down on him, and the roar of the angling turbofans rippled his lips and cheeks, but his eyes stayed open despite the onslaught. The Templar crosses emblazoned on white panels on the shuttle’s nose and underwing appeared to resize as aerofoils made minute adjustments. Jets of air from lateral stabilisation thrusters held it level. Roused from torpor by the approaching lander and flushed of soporific neurosedatives, servitors bonded to caterpillar-tracked motive assemblies moved haltingly forwards against the jetwash. Lengths of bright orange vulcanised hosing played out behind them, the oil-washed outlet valves supplanting superfluous hands and emerging from artificially gaping mouths flanked by mind-wiped stares.
The shuttle touched down within the innermost ring of blinking guidelights, and eased onto its landing struts. The roar of its turbofans became a whine and gases hissed from heat flues and radiator grilles, equalising pressure and temperature across the shuttle’s glowing heat-shields. One of the servitor units sprayed the shuttle with super-cooled carbon dioxide vapour. Another trundled underneath, frozen gases crystallising its slack features, and nozzled its wrist adaptor over the shuttle’s filler pipe. It emitted a guzzling noise, smoking under the white hiss of venting gases.
Either side of Koorland, an honour detail of human (and another of not-quite-human) troopers endeavoured to stand crisply at attention, despite the successive waves of engine heat and coolant that came at them from the middle of the pad.
The men were all tall and hard-faced, in black uniforms with red piping and frogging, armsmen of the Navy’s symbolic flagship, the Royal Barque. Each wore the Royal Barque’s forbidding ensign on their shoulder in place of the usual regimental insignia, a sheathed cutlass and a pair of ceremonial red gloves. They were the Navy’s elite protection detail, and only the highest-ranking admirals and most influential of visiting dignitaries warranted such bodyguards. In this instance, the subject of their care was Rear-Admiral Pervez Leshento of the Tiamat-class battleship Dies Dominus. The name was High Gothic for ‘Lord of Daylight’. An extraordinary coincidence, or Lansung was honeying Koorland’s gruel a little thickly.