He studied the display. Blocks of machine text and code swam hololithically around the three-dimensional representation of the Armaduke. It was the bones of the ship, a skeletal diagram. Gaunt could see three bright wounds around the aft section of the ship, damage points that glowed so brightly data was negated. The area around them was fogged with fragments of loose data.
‘Are those imaging defects?’ asked Gaunt.
‘No,’ said Darulin. ‘That’s the best the strategium overview can do to render the debris field.’
‘We’re hit badly then?’
Darulin frowned.
‘We’re not hit at all, sir,’ he said softly.
‘What?’
‘Those three impact sites… they are the remains of the three boarding vessels that had clamped to us. The enemy raiders have been burned off our hull.’
‘Are you being serious?’ asked Gaunt.
‘By that?’ asked Criid, pointing at the predatory shadow of the enemy killship that was looming over the Armaduke. It was so vast only a small portion of it appeared in the spherical display field.
‘Yes,’ said Darulin. ‘The enemy killship has annihilated our enemies. It… it has spared us.’
‘Saved us?’
‘With pinpoint accuracy. It would seem so.’
‘Why?’ said Gaunt. ‘Why?’
‘It is an attested fact that the logic and mindset of the Archenemy is alien to us,’ said Kelvedon.
‘I know that better than most,’ said Gaunt. He took a step back. He realised he was shaking. It was panic. He’d been running on adrenaline, the rush that had seen him through years of war and combat. But now he felt fear, genuine fear. Not a fear of risk or danger, or the desperation of warfare. It was horror. A terror of the unknown. A simple inability to comprehend and fathom the dark workings of the galaxy. He could fight a physical enemy, no matter the odds. A practical problem could be attacked and extinguished. But this was beyond him, and he despised the feeling. There was no sense. The harder he looked for it, the less sense there was.
‘Perhaps–’ Criid began. Everyone looked at her.
‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘it’s a territorial thing. Like gang versus gang. We’re the enemy to both, but they are no kind of friends. Perhaps the big brute wants us for itself.’
‘The notion is not without value,’ Darulin nodded.
‘We should anticipate, then, a further boarding action from the killship?’ said Criid. ‘I mean, re-form and stand ready to repel again?’
Gaunt nodded.
‘If that’s its intention,’ he said. ‘Yes, that would be wise. Whatever defence we can now muster–’
‘Sir!’ said Kelvedon.
Darulin turned to look.
‘The enemy killship has powered down its weapons,’ said Kelvedon, studying the tactical display. ‘It is retraining power to its drives.’
On the display, the giant shadow began to stir.
The Archenemy warship, black as night, began to move. Starlight glinted off the bare metal buttresses that lined its coal-black hull. Its prow rose like the beak of a breaching whale, then it banked silently and plunged back into the abyssal trenches of space.
The Armaduke’s bruised sensors retained a track on its heat-wake as it extended away from them by sixty, eighty, one hundred thousand kilometres.
Then the Master of Artifice had to be uncoupled from the strategium for his own safety. His flesh was starting to smoulder, and he could no longer form intelligible words. The strategium display shut down.
By then, the Tormaggeddon Monstrum Rex was a million miles away, vanishing into the starfield.
Eleven: Forge World Urdesh
Thunder rolled across the Great Bay of Eltath. It was high summer, and the air was dull with a haze that made the low, wide sky a bright grey. Cloud banks running out across the wide bay and the sea beyond stood like inverted mountains, dark and ominous as phantoms. Lightning sizzled like trace veins in the dead flesh of the sky.
It was not a summer storm breaking, though changes in the weather were anticipated before nightfall. It was the electromagnetic shock wave of a large magnitude ship entering the atmospheric sheath.
Descending at speed, the Highness Ser Armaduke sliced through the cloud cover, emerging into the hard sunlight in a squall of rain. It left a long furrow in the cloud system behind it, like a stick drawn through old snow, a trail that would take several hours to fade.
It came in low over the sea. It was running fast, the vents of its real space plasma engines shining blue, but it was limping too. It was a patched survivor, sutured and soldered, its broken jaw wired shut from the fight. It had taken six weeks to reach Urdesh, and that voyage had been made thanks to frantic running repairs, constant coaxing, desperate compromises and sheer willpower.
In atmosphere, it made a terrible noise: a droning, vibrating, clattering howl of breathless engines, weary mechanicals and straining gravimetrics. The sound of it boomed out across the bay like ragged thunder, like a bass drum full of lead shot being kicked down a long staircase.
Its bulk was ugly, blackened and scorched. Three massive wounds scarred its heat-raked flanks and one of the four real space drives was unlit, a black socket leaking tons of liquid soot and water. It left a long, filthy plume of vapour and oily black smoke behind it, smoke that puffed and popped from exhaust cowlings like the fume waste of a steam locomotive. Slabs of dirty ice peeled from its hull as the air shaved at it, taking paint and hull coating with it. The chunks scattered away, dropping like depth charges into the ocean below, so that to shoreside observers, the Armaduke looked like it was performing a low-level saturation bombing run.
Vapour clung to its upper hull, swirling in the slipstream, and traceries of wild static sparked and popped around its masts.
It came in across the bay. To the west of it, grav-anchored at a height of one-and-a-half kilometres above the sea, the battleship Naiad Antitor sat like a floating continent, half shrouded in sea mist, an Imperial capital ship nine times the size of the relentless Armaduke.
The three Faustus-class interceptors that had guided the Armaduke in through the fleet, packing high orbit, purred down out of the cloud in formation, and resumed their station as an arrowhead, chasing ahead of the Armaduke, their running lights winking. The Naiad Antitor pulsed its main lanterns. Vox-links squealed with the ship-to-ship hail. Crossing the Naiad Antitor’s bow at a distance of ten kilometres, the Armaduke blazed its lamps, returning the formal salute. On both ships, the bridge crews stood and made the sign of the aquila, facing the direction of the other vessel as the Armaduke crossed beside its illustrious cousin.
A squadron of Thunderbolts, silver and red in the livery of the Second Helixid, scrambled from the Naiad Antitor’s flight decks and boiled out of its belly like wasps stirred from a nest. They raked low across the grey water, leaving hissing wakes of spray, and rose in coordinated formation on either side of the racing Armaduke, forming an honour guard escort of a hundred craft.
Ahead, the Great Bay began to narrow into the industrial approaches of the wet and dry harbours and the vast shipyards of Eltath. The mound of the great city, dominating the head of the peninsula, rose in the distance. Sunlight caught the flags, standards and masts that topped the Urdeshic Palace at its summit.