‘External view?’ Gaunt asked.
Darulin nodded and waved an actuation wand. The well filled with a massive data-projection map of the Armaduke. It presented nose-down like a drowning whale. Gaunt rubbed his mouth. He realised he’d honestly never known what the outside of the ship looked like. He was looking at something that had been the limits of his world for weeks.
He had known it was vast. He hadn’t realised how vast. The Armaduke was a massive structure, and now it was a helpless massive structure.
‘What are those?’ Gaunt asked, pointing to three blob structures visualised at the aft of the ship’s mass.
‘Enemy craft,’ replied Darulin. ‘Light warp vessels of a much smaller tonnage than us. They have secured themselves to us to facilitate boarding.’
‘Do they have a mother ship?’ asked Gaunt.
Darulin dialled the strategium view back with his wand. The Armaduke shrank rapidly. The revised view showed another vessel sitting off them at a distance of seventeen thousand kilometres. It was large, a cruiser perhaps.
‘Yes, there,’ said Darulin. ‘An Archenemy starship. No standard pattern discernible. A destroyer, I would imagine. Fast, agile, well armed.’
‘And it’s not firing on us because?’ Gaunt asked.
‘They want us as scrap. As prisoners, as raw materials,’ said Criid. ‘They want to pick our bones.’
Gaunt looked at her.
‘I supposed so,’ he said to her. ‘I was hoping the acting shipmaster here might admit it.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ said Criid.
‘Sorry,’ said Darulin. ‘That is… that is exactly what they’re doing.’
Seven: The Line
Ezra was still laughing at his own doom when fury burst into the compartment. The slap of the shock wave threw him onto his side. The air filled with billowing smoke.
Huge figures emerged out of it.
Sar Af, the White Scar. Holofurnace, the Iron Snake. Eadwine, the Silver Guard. Full armour. Full weapons.
Three warriors alone against the mass of raiders flooding the vast compartment.
‘Kill them all,’ Eadwine said, a growl of sub-vox.
The Archenemy troopers, dazed and dismayed by the breaching blast, began firing. Las-bolts and hard-rounds pinged and slapped off the armoured Adeptus Astartes. In unison, they raised their bolt weapons and returned fire.
Bolter shots mowed down two rows of Archenemy foot troops. Explosive horror threw shredded meat and debris into the air. The enemy mass reeled back, recoiling as its leading edge was blown apart.
Ezra watched in disbelief as the three Space Marines charged the bulk of the foe. As they met the line, the impact threw bodies into the air. Eadwine’s chainsword flashed, roaring. Archenemy troopers collapsed like harvested corn, their armoured bodies torn apart. Particles of flesh, blood, tissue and metal showered out of the carnage. A wet red fog began to cloud the burning air.
To Eadwine’s left, Holofurnace hacked his way through the shrieking raiders. They were turning on each other, frantically fighting to get out of the giant’s path. The Iron Snake reached a stalk-tank and split open its belly with his lance. Fluid, blood and toxic water spewed out of the sliced control bubble. Holofurnace stabbed the tip of his lance inside the wreck to impale the huddled body of the hard-wired pilot.
Another tank began firing, auto-tracking its target. Holofurnace was jarred back by the scorching impacts, but remained on his feet and hurled his lance like a javelin. Impaled through its core, the stalk-tank shivered, spasmed and collapsed, venting bio-fluid.
Holofurnace wrenched his lance out. Fluid spattered.
‘For the Emperor!’ he yelled.
At Eadwine’s right hand, Sar Af pounced and landed on the back of another stalk-tank. It thrashed under his weight. He punched through the top of the main body to haul the driver out, and hurled the writhing body aside as he threw himself off the collapsing machine. Milling foot troops broke his fall. He killed them with his fists as they tried to scramble out from underneath him. More fled. Sar Af howled and followed them, cutting them down with his bolter.
Eadwine was murdering the foot troops too. Chainsword in one fist, storm bolter in the other, he was simply striding into the fumbling lines of the raiders like a man walking determinedly into a brisk gale, head down and unstoppable. Sparks flashed as hard munitions pinged and glanced off his armoured mass. He fired, selectively and methodically, toppling groups at a time, slashing into any bodies that came too close as though cutting back undergrowth.
Ezra left cover and cautiously followed in their wake. The Adeptus Astartes giants had cut a swathe down the engine house, littering the broad deck with burning wreckage and tangled corpses. The deck was awash with blood.
Ezra crouched, and pulled a lasgun from the dead grip of a fallen enemy. This time, he took spare clips too.
It was time to stop dying. It was time to win back the ship.
Ornella Zhukova led a portion of Pasha’s company along the ventral tunnel that approached the engine compartments from the bow of the ship. She could hear the rattle and boom of fighting from the chambers ahead, and she could smell burn-smoke. Every few seconds, the deck shook.
Everything had a glassy feel, a slightly out-of-focus softness. She didn’t know if that was the smoke getting in her eyes or her own mind. Something had happened. An accident. Something distressing that involved the physics and processes of shiftship travel, and it made her feel sick.
The company had been prepping for secondary orders. Then everything had gone to hell. Had they been hit, or was it something worse than that? She’d woken with a grinding headache, and many of her troopers had been sick, or complained of nausea or nosebleeds.
‘Vox?’ she hissed.
‘Nothing!’ the caster-man replied. Wall-mounted units wheezed nothing but static, and the squad’s voxcasters coughed and crackled.
‘Keep it tight!’ she ordered. The men were in disarray. Confusion did that, confusion and fear. They didn’t know the situation, and they didn’t know what they were facing. Worse, they had so little ammo. There had been no time to send carts down to the munition stocks, and even if there had been, Zhukova knew the racks were almost bare.
The regiment was in no position to fight another war.
One of her scouts appeared from a transverse duct and hurried to her.
‘Spetnin?’ she asked.
‘In lateral two, advancing, ma’am,’ the scout replied. He looked out of breath. His face was filmy with soot and grease. Spetnin had taken half the company to shadow Zhukova’s mob along the parallel hallway in the hope that, between them, they could block any forward movement along the aft thoroughfares. That’s if they’d remembered the deck plans right. Zhukova’s head hurt so much, she could barely remember her own birthday.
‘What does he report?’ she asked.
The scout shrugged.
‘A shrug is not an answer,’ she snapped.
‘Same as here,’ the scout replied, wary of her famous anger. ‘Fighting ahead.’
The hallway had been damaged by frame stress. Wiring in the walls was shorting out and crackling with white sparks that floated like snowflakes onto the deck. Oil dripped from the ceiling and dribbled from ruptured pipes. Some of the deck’s grav plates had worked loose or become misaligned, and they shifted uneasily underfoot, like boards floating on a lake. In one section, an entire twenty-metre portion of deck plate had broken away and slammed flat against the ceiling, held there by its own, unsecured antigravity systems. The exposed underdeck was a mass of wires and stanchions, and cables trailed from overhead like vines. Blood dripped down. Someone had been standing on the plate when it had snapped free, and had been sandwiched against the roof by six tons of rapidly elevating metal.