‘Captain?’ the Master of the Forge called. ‘Captain, are you still there?’
‘Yes, Master Aloysian,’ Thane replied, ‘but not for much longer. We have to force the enemy back to range. The alien are too many and we are too few to take them one at a time. As Apothecary Reoch says, the arithmetic doesn’t add up.’
‘What can I do, captain?’
‘You can activate the Alcazar Astra’s remaining plasma drive.’
‘Captain?’
‘Are you hearing me, Aloysian?’ Thane called across the vox-channel. ‘I want you to fire the Transept East engine column.’
‘But captain,’ the Master of the Forge protested, ‘the star fort is buried in a crater of its own making. It cannot ascend on one engine alone.’
‘Can it be done?’ Thane demanded.
‘The fortress-monastery’s superstructure will suffer damage.’
‘Would you rather the invader demolish it instead?’
‘The fort will incline, not ascend, captain,’ the Techmarine insisted.
‘I certainly hope so,’ Maximus Thane said.
Sliding about in the gore, his chainsword singing its way through tough, alien flesh, Reoch allowed himself a grunt of realisation and agreement.
‘I should vox the First Captain,’ Master Aloysian said.
‘Captain Garthas is busy,’ Thane told him. ‘I am ranking brother on the ramparts and this strategy concerns their very orientation.’
‘Yes, captain.’
‘As soon as possible, Master Aloysian,’ Thane added. ‘Brother Fists will pay for any delay.’
‘Yes, captain.’
Crashing bolts through the greenskins throwing themselves at him, Thane smashed and skidded his way back to Apothecary Reoch.
‘Brother Zerberyn,’ the second captain voxed to the injured honorarius.
‘Captain?’
‘I want you to vox all companies and captains with the following order,’ Thane said. Before the battle-brother could protest, Thane added, ‘And if you don’t, Brother Zerberyn, in less than a minute you’ll very much wish you had.’
‘What’s the order?’ Zerberyn crackled back after a moment’s hesitation.
‘All Fists Exemplar battle-brothers to mag-lock their boots to the void hull.’
‘Why?’ the honour guard Space Marine voxed back.
Once again, the Apothecary and the captain’s packs brushed. Back to back, the Fists Exemplar Space Marines carved and blasted an open space in the green edifice of muscle and savagery surrounding them. An island of life — raw and desperate — in a sea of alien barbarity and death. Four gore-spattering clunks, one after another, echoed about the carnage as Thane and Reoch mag-locked their armoured boots to the blood-slick deck.
‘Why?’ Thane voxed back to Zerberyn. ‘Because we are going for a ride.’
SIXTEEN
The north-eastern anchorage was treacherous but, as Allegra had indicated, deep enough to admit the submerged draught of the Tiamat. With little else but the conning tower breaking the surface, Captain Lux Allegra accompanied Commander Tyrhone’s Marineer Elites out onto the small observation deck. The Elites carried garrison-duty dirks and stubby lascarbines, slung in waterproof casings.
The grating was awash with the chemical brume that passed for seawater on Undine. The commander and several other Elites had hauled personal sweeps up onto the deck. The sweeps were one-man watercraft: lightweight planers that consisted of a pontoon chassis, steering bars and a high-power churnfan. Setting off towards the colony outcrop that was Desolation Point on the sweeps, the watercraft’s riders dragged behind them wire ladders to which Allegra and the other Elites clung.
The sky was streaming with rocks and crash-capsules, falling towards the ocean surface. Fountains of spray erupted from impact sites. The greenskin descent wave had reached Desolation Point before them.
As Allegra had predicted, the anchorage was largely deserted. Vox-casts would have warned the many denizens of the marauder colony of the horror to come. Those with grapnel-rigs, solarjammers and Q-craft took to the seas, taking as many with them as could afford to leave the island. Even now, vessels were streaming out of port: smoke-belching outriggers, armed freighters and plasteel-clad sloops.
Although they remained low in the water and were not advertising their presence, Allegra and the Elites didn’t need to avoid such pirate vessels on their shoreline approach. Each was being horrifically boarded. As green alien hulks hauled themselves up the vessels they tore pieces off them and swamped the decks with brutality and carnage. The creatures soaked up canister-shot from pintle-mounted deck weapons and made short work of pistol-blazing raiders — who eventually had little choice but to climb for their towers and rigging.
The colony itself — a fragile accretion of scrap, adapted giga-containers and chain walkways — had been well on its way to becoming a proto-hive. The restrictions of the island bedrock meant that designs became more vertiginous and the rising architecture increasingly perilous. Fires were feeling their way through the pirate haven, with smoke snaking from underbuildings and corrugated citadels. As Commander Tyrhone guided his sweep through the choppy waters of the evacuating anchorage, Allegra held on tight, her eyes kept busy with the demise of Desolation Point.
The captain had not got off to the best start with the Elites. There had been several reasons for this. Firstly, like Tyrhone, they largely hailed from the Southern hives and so were naturally suspicious of a salt-pale Northerner like Allegra. Her tattoos and piercings marked her out as being a turncoat: a pirate turned privateer. The kind of scum that real Marineers like Tyrhone and his men traditionally hunted. Her Marineer rank, similarly, had little meaning for them either. Her ‘Screeching Eagles’ had been grunt coastals and boardsmen, not the highly-trained tacticals that General Phifer retained for his security detail.
The final insult was Allegra’s insistence that they eat before they set off on their mission. Tyrhone told her that he didn’t expect the operation to last long enough to warrant rations, while his men gave her jaundiced glares. Besides, if needed, Elites could live off the ocean for as long as the mission dictated. Allegra had been forced to make her insistence an order and gave each Marineer a rations can of toonweed. Several refused to eat the pungent mush, until Tyrhone too made it an order to do so. Toonweed, while cheap and nutritious, was considered a pauper’s dish by the mezzohivers, since it got its name from the crop-forests that grew on the bottom of roving pontoon shanties. Coming largely from sub-spire military families, the Elites regarded the stinking slaw with disgust.
As the sweeps churned away, dragging the Marineer Elites, Tiamat dropped back below the waves. Commander Tyrhone wasted no time in making a direct approach, but Allegra directed him towards the bare rock of a jagged spit on the anchorage side. As the sweeps drew closer, it became apparent to the Elites that the rocky shoreline of the island was awash with greenskin beasts, clawing their way out of the sea and shaking water from their brute weaponry. Pockets of resistence were evident across the haven, with the ocean-world pirates employing the island’s defences against the greenskin invaders, rather than the enemy for which they were intended — planetary defence and security forces like the approaching Marineer Elites. The spit seemed relatively sparse of alien invaders, and it soon became clear to the Elites why.
The water about the spit seemed agitated, and it had nothing to do with the currents or rock formations about the coastline. Like thick, rubbery propeller screws, a school-pack of helicondra surged for the shale beach. Long, muscular serpentforms, the native creatures cut through the water in a helical, spiral motion. They were prey for many of the ocean world’s marine megafauna, but also predators in their own right. They whirled their way through the shallows until, forming rigid, rubbery shafts, they surged up the shale beach to snatch flippered marine mammals from a dog-colony that existed on the spit. The blubber-dog meat was greasily repugnant and not favoured by the inhabitants of Desolation Point. The helicondra pack, however, would reach up the beach like a single, tentacular beast, slithering around surprised blubber-dogs and their pups before dragging them back to the shallows for unfussy ingestion.