Down a level, into the main deck, the bodies lay more thickly. Some had been crushed under falling panels or buried under shattered glass, and now lay staring up like dead men frozen under thin ice. They had been electrocuted, burned, cut by glass shrapnel and bludgeoned by high-mass debris, most while still strapped into work station chairs. One had been reduced to a carbonaceous smear on the seat leather by a catastrophic overload of his auspex. The console was still sputtering, sparking and fizzing into the nitrogen mist.
‘Boarding torpedoes incoming,’ mumbled the Master Ordinatum, Franzek, as though drawing each word one at a time from his head. Blood matted his hair and ran down the side of his neck. His eyes were glazed. The harsh lighting intermittently exposed his blanched face. On, off. On, off. ‘I’ve never seen so many at once.’
‘Faith is the first victim of thought. Keep firing,’ Magneric answered with a metallic rumble, stepping back from the hissing hololith projector.
Dead too.
‘Firing… aye.’
Targeting grids were dead. Auto-loaders were dead.
The gunnery chief was arming whatever had been already loaded and launching it manually, as fast as his shell-shocked nervous system could still manage. Each shot sent a shudder through the ship, a nail recoil-driven into the hull. Inertial stabilisers were dead too, but the crew, what remained of it, no longer even recognised the shaking. By sheer mass, Magneric stood immovably in the middle of the command dais.
‘We deny the alien this ship, until the Emperor gives us our leave to rest.’
‘Ave Imperator,’ they replied.
It was inconceivable that Obsidian Sky could destroy every last torpedo, but they could thin their numbers. And miracles happened, Magneric knew. The hull squealed in torment, shaken, this time from without, as though being attacked with a drill.
‘We shall know no fear!’
With a sudden lurch, the drilling stopped. Seconds elapsed without an explosion. The crew held their breath, and held onto their brace positions. They knew what a torpedo hit felt like.
‘Sound the general alert,’ boomed Magneric.
‘Aye.’
The bondsman covering at the main drive station — Cecillia — staggered from starboard to port, thumbed open a transparent plastek cover to expose a red key in a slot, and then turned it. The flickering light was immediately shot through with red. The effect was bitty, hazard-striping the debris-strewn deck as dull red lights glowed from broken screens.
Internal sensors were dead. Communications were dead.
Without them, necessity had demanded the command crew be creative. Power utilisation profiles indicated active terminals in all sections. Oxygen saturations pinpointed signs of life at muster points on all decks. Kaplin, at Operations, had breathlessly suggested retrofitting a pair of servitors to link up as a two-way communicator, but there had been no time to implement it. Now, Kaplin was directing that reckless enthusiasm into the pump action of a Mk IX shotgun. He took position on the steps near the late castellan, a slightly crazed look in his eyes.
Magneric stamped through an about-face. The assault cannon mounted on his right shoulder ran through a sequence of test cycles. His immense power fist rotated, clicked and reversed, like some kind of puzzle clock. He trained the spinning gun barrel onto the magnetically locked blast doors that sealed off the command deck from the rest of the ship.
He could almost feel the xenos aboard his ship, the way a man of flesh and bone would feel the tasteless, textureless, odourless itch of a radiation dose. This new breed of greenskin was a dangerous foe. They fought tactically, acted coherently: if they had forces to spare to claim his crippled ship then he could only assume they would do so exactly as he would in their place. The command deck would be the priority target. Then the enginarium, gunnery control, the flight bays.
It was useful however to remind oneself that they were not men. They were still orks.
‘Rolans,’ he voxed, attempting to raise the battle-brother barracked in the deck below with a squad of Black Templars and two platoons of armsmen serfs. ‘Sword Brother?’
A light crackle of static filled his acoustic register.
The carrier had somehow managed to kill off helm-to-helm vox. Until then, Magneric had thought that unblockable.
Cold gases swirled. The lights rattled, and blinked. On, off. On, off.
On…
Time stretched, bloated. The blast doors seemed suddenly a yawning distance away, although his own triple-grid spatial positioning system insisted that their relative positions were unchanged. It was as if, in this chamber alone, the laws of the universe had been relaxed, the space between particles expanding even as the particles themselves remained exactly as they were. Making room.
Off.
There was a pop, like a broken vacuum seal, and an ork burst out of the vapour cloud as if it had been hidden there all along and slammed into the middle of the main deck. The flickering light made the sudden appearance of its gruesome mass even more unreal. It was the monster that stalked the unevolved lobes of the human brain, fear centres unchanged since Homo sapiens sapiens first emerged from the forests and onto the plains of prehistoric Terra. And now, two hundred millennia and half a segmentum removed, they still recognised a beast.
The ork bared yellow fangs and roared.
Kaplin roared back, mad with horror, and swung about, leading with his shotgun. There was a boom. Scatter shot from both barrels tore up the ork’s black-and-white body armour and riddled its heavy jaw with pellets. It bullied through, tusked mouth wide like a dog thirsty for the rain.
Feet spread and mag-locked to the deck, Magneric’s torso swung one hundred and eighty degrees and obliterated the ork’s skull with a point-four-second burst of fire. Exit wounds and ricochets wasted the surrounding consoles, but the wellbeing of his ship was no longer a priority. Better to deny it to the alien.
‘Deny the alien! Kill the alien!’
More orks charged through the mist and onto the command deck, and by the strobing light men began to die.
An axe split Franzek’s head like a gourd before the dazed man even realised he was in danger. Seated beside him, Merrel punched his belt release buckle and rose, drawing his sidearm. A thunderblast from a brick-like stubber dropped him back down, printing the ruined contents of his chest over the console. The ork belted its pistol, hauled Merrel’s remains from the station and, leaving its axe where it was buried in Franzek’s head, stabbed a wedge-like device with a blinking base into the unit. The surviving screens immediately went haywire. Cecillia was ripped, chair fittings and all, from the main drive station and hurled screaming across the chamber. Her body broke so hard against the stainless steel aquila mounted over the prow in place of a viewscreen that she put a dent in its wing. Flinching from the meat-slap sound, Kaplin screamed a homily ad-libbed with wild obscenities and nonsense as he backed up the steps. He pumped his shotgun, spitting out a pair of spent casings, and then fired, whizzing the air with shrapnel and exploding a lumen fitting in the ceiling.
They were outmuscled, outgunned. The bondsmen of the Black Templars had never been so outclassed.
Venerable Magneric advanced at a measured pace, stitching the air with short, ultra-precise bursts of assault cannon fire. He shredded an ork in identical, almost uniform checker-pattern body armour with a point-three-second salvo, then pivoted, tracked, locked — and fired. A point-seven-second burst chewed through armour and skin and riddled the main drive terminal with bone.