‘There must be a balance,’ Forcas said. ‘I acknowledge the necessity that forces our hands today. Yet we must limit the moral harm.’
‘Restrict the use of such weapons to the Deathwatch,’ said Straton.
We. The Deathwatch. They were speaking as a unified force, Thane realised. And they were discussing situations that extended far beyond the current mission. He had agreed with Koorland that the Deathwatch was a temporary measure. In many ways, it had to be. He knew his involvement was limited. His responsibilities as Chapter Master made it so. Nor could he imagine any of the Space Marines before him adopting the black livery permanently. They, too, would return to their Chapters.
And yet.
We. The Deathwatch.
There was something permanent here.
‘Fifty seconds,’ Abathar said, recalling Thane to the moment.
The boarding torpedo had no viewing blocks. The pict-screens above the steering controls were Thane’s only window onto the battlefield. He watched the columns of icons and coordinates change as Abathar aimed the torpedo at its target. The bombardment was intensifying. There were more and more landing ships descending to the surface. Damage runes were also appearing with greater frequency. The defenders of the starless world were exacting a price from the invaders.
All of the ork fire was directed at the planet. The Herald of Night had not been detected.
‘The Emperor does protect,’ Thane said. ‘He does indeed.’
‘Brace for impact,’ Abathar warned.
Thane stood firm against the coming blow.
The boarding torpedo hit the port side of the engine block’s junction. Violent rattling shook the torpedo hull as the drill head ground its way through the immense barrier. There were no void shields, only a monstrous excess of metal between the Deathwatch and their prey. The grinding went on for several minutes. Squad Gladius stood in a line before the hatch door, ready for the moment to storm out of the torpedo. Abathar’s head was cocked as if he were listening for nuances in the cries of iron agony.
‘We are nearly through,’ the Techmarine said.
Thane lifted his bolter.
The torpedo jerked forward, grinding air, then stopped. The hatch blew open. Squad Gladius charged out from below the drill head. The torpedo had broken through into a corridor running fore and aft. The battleship rang with the incessant beat of its bombardment. There was a group of orks to the right, frozen in surprise. Gladius cut them down with a sustained burst of bolter fire and the orks died before they could react.
The corridor was wide and high, yet it felt crowded by the tangle of enormous conduits that made up its ceiling. The walls on either side were an assembly of mismatched and misshapen iron slabs, held together by an exuberance of rivets the size of Thane’s fist. Past the bodies of the orks, the passage continued a hundred metres into the engine block before it ended at a blast door.
There were no other orks in sight. ‘These seconds are ours,’ Thane said. ‘Let us make good use of them.’
The Deathwatch moved swiftly down the hall, Abathar in the lead. The Techmarine paused just short of the blast door.
‘A Dreadnought could pass through that,’ Straton said.
‘I choose not to,’ Abathar said. He was looking at the conduits above his head. ‘A struggle for the enginarium will not serve.’
‘Assuming it lies beyond that barrier,’ said Thane.
‘The presence of a blast door in this location of the hull suggests it does.’ Abathar took a step to his right. He pointed at the conduits. ‘So do these.’ He was under the largest. It was nearly three metres wide. Water dripped from cracks and clumsy welds. ‘This one,’ he said. His servo-arm reached upward. He used his plasma cutter to slice through the metal in a circle while the rest of the squad trained guns down the corridor. A few seconds later, a large iron disc clattered to the deck. A stream of brown water poured down. A hot wind, foul with a mix of xenos musk and burned fuel, blew from the gap.
‘Ventilation,’ he said, sounding both satisfied and offended. ‘Ventilation and cooling. The greenskins’ conception of the machine is obscene.’
‘Though powerful,’ Forcas said.
‘This is so.’ To Thane he said, ‘This will be my route.’
‘Very well. We will keep their attention focused elsewhere.’
Abathar took hold of the edge of the hole with the servo-arm’s claw. He pulled himself up until he could grasp the edge with his gauntlets and disappeared into the conduit, heading in the direction of the engine block.
‘Now the guns,’ Thane said.
There was the long, booming thunder of another volley. The corridor shook. Warfist laughed. ‘They will not be difficult to find.’
Abathar moved through the long darkness of the conduit, facing into a burning gale. He tasted the air through his rebreather grille, laden with particles of soot and unrefined promethium. He was conscious of how offensive this machine grotesquerie was to the Omnissiah. He would make the destruction of this ship a worthy offering.
The pipe stretched on and on. The wind grew stronger. He would find his goal at the source of the wind, he was sure of this. It was consistent with the paradox that was ork machines. They were a confounding mix of inconceivably advanced technology and constructs so crude that they should not have functioned at all. This conduit felt like it had been built by creatures who had heard of cooling and ventilation systems, but had no idea of how they actually worked. Yet on his back was a device that was an even more imperfect attempt to mimic technology far beyond the capabilities of the Imperium. The miraculous and the barbaric mixed with no reason, no order.
It would be his privilege to erase it from existence.
As the wind became stronger, so too did a sound that resembled the breathing of a gigantic beast. Close, Abathar thought. He was nearing the core of the ship’s enginarium.
After another thirty metres, dim red light worked its way into the conduit. A bit further on, and the conduit became a nexus for dozens of pipes. There were now also many holes in the main conduit. Perhaps they were prepared for other shafts yet to be constructed. Perhaps they were intended to admit air from the chamber beyond. Whatever their purpose, they let in the pulsing, flickering red. Beyond the junction, fans spun. Abathar could see only a portion of one. Its blades must have been thirty metres long.
Abathar crouched beside a circular grille in the floor of the conduit. Below him, in the red glow, incomprehensible machines clustered. They sparked, they smoked, they chittered at each other as if they were alive. Abathar waited. If there were orks about, they had little reason to approach this particular configuration of machinery. He cut the grille free, and dropped through.
He landed in a nest of cables and shadows, a mire of technical perversity. It stretched for dozens of metres in every direction. The only illumination was the crimson, and Abathar turned around until he could see its origin. He was in a chamber large enough to contain the dome of Vultus several times over. In the far distance a massive shape loomed, as huge as myth. In its centre, a grille opened and closed, revealing and concealing the crimson heart of power, a miniature red sun, enslaved and turned into the motive power for the ship.
Many levels of catwalks ran along the walls of the chamber. Precarious spans stretched through the air to connect to the heart of the enginarium and to other, lesser monoliths. Orks swarmed along the catwalks, welding gaps, replacing cables, tending to control consoles bristling with levers that would have needed two mortals to pull. Power flashed at faulty junctions, incinerating orks. Other greenskins were electrocuted by flailing cables. Their shrieks mixed with the braying laughter of their kin, who then moved to complete the lethal maintenance work or die in their turn. Hordes of the dwarfish greenskins hauled the bodies away or dragged bundles of equipment at the command of their hulking masters.