The clattering Armaduke came in lower, reducing its velocity. Its shipmaster reined in its headlong advance, easing back the power, sensing it was finding a last burst of acceleration like a weary hound or horse in sight of home and shelter.
It passed over the harbour, bleeding speed. Beneath, watercraft left white lines in a sea that glowed pink and russet with algal blooms. The south shore approach to the harbour was lined with derelict food mills and the rafts of rusting bulk harvester boats that had once processed the algae and weed for food. Scores of Astra Militarum troop ships, grey and shelled like beetles, were strung on mooring lines at low anchor over the harbour slick. Tender boats scooted around them on the water or flitted around their armoured hulls like humming birds.
Then they were over land, the foreshore of the city. The immense dry docks like roofless cathedrals, some containing smaller warships under refit. The endless barns and warestores of the Munitorum and the dynast craftsmen. The towers and manufactories of the Mechanicus, clustered like forest mushrooms around the base of the volcanic stack. The huge foundation docks and grav yards of the shipyard, like cross sections of sea giants, structural ribs exposed, each one an immense, fortified socket in the hillside, waiting to nest a shiftship. Watchtowers. The bunkered gun batteries at Low Keen and Eastern Hill and Signal Point. The tower emitters of the shield dome and their relay spires, thrusting from the craggy slopes like spines from an animal’s backbone. The skeletal wastelands of the refinery, extending out over the sullen waters of the Eastern Reach, one hundred and sixty kilometres wide.
The Armaduke slowed again. Its real space drives began to cycle down, their glow dying back, and the clattering noise of the ship abated a little. Gravimetrics and thrust-manoeuvre systems took over, easing the impossibly huge object in slowly above the towers of Eltath. The sound of the ship, even diminished, echoed and slapped around the walls of the city. Windows rattled in their frames.
The Faustus escort peeled away, winking lamps of salute as they banked into space on higher burn. The Helixid Thunderbolts stayed with the slowing bulk of the Armaduke a little longer, dropping to almost viff-stall speed. Then they too disengaged, curling in lines like streamers as they broke and ran back to their parent ship.
Guide tugs, lumpen as tortoises, lumbered into view, securing mag-lines and heavy cables to harness the warship and manhandle it the last of the way. The Armaduke was crawling now, passing between the highest spires of the city, so close a man might step out of a hatch and onto a balcony.
Horns and hooters started to sound.
The southern end of plating dock eight, a gigantic portcullis, groaned as it opened wide, exposing the interior of the dock – a vast, ribbed cavity open to the sky. Rows of guide lights winked along the bottom of the dock. The air prickled as the dock’s mighty gravity cradle cycled up and engaged. Air squealed and cracked as the grav field of the crawling ship rubbed against the gravimetric buffer of the dock. The Armaduke cut drives. The guide tugs, like burly stevedores, nudged and elbowed it the final few hundred metres.
Lines detached. The tugs rose out of the dock, and turned. The dock gates were closing, re-forming the end wall of the coffin-shaped basin that held the ship.
The Armaduke settled, slowly releasing its gravimetric field as the dock’s systems accepted and embraced its weight. The hull and core frame groaned, and weight distribution shifted. Plates creaked and buckled. In places, rivets sheared under the pressure, and hull seams popped, venting gas and releasing liquid waste that poured down into the basin of the dock.
With a final, exhausted shudder, the Armaduke stopped moving and set down, supported on monolithic stanchion cradles and the gravimetric cup of the dock. Massive hydraulic beams extended from the dock walls to buffer and support the ship’s flanks. Their reinforced ram-heads thumped against the hull with the bang of heavy magnetics, taking the strain.
Quiet came at last. The engine throb and drone of the ship were stilled. The only sounds were the dockside hooters, the clank of walk bridges being extended, the whir of cargo hoists rolling out on their platforms and derricks, and the spatter of liquids draining out of the hull into the waste-water drains of the unlit dock floor.
With a long gasp of exhaling breath, the Armaduke blew its hatches and airgates.
Then the storm broke. Thunder peeled across the bay, across Eltath and across the Urdeshic Palace. Above Plating Dock Eight, the sky curdled into an early darkness, and rain began to fall. It showed up as winnowing fans of white in the beams of the dock lamps illuminating the ship. It sizzled off the cooling hull, turning to steam as it struck the drive cowling. It buzzed like the bells of a thousand tiny tambourines as it hit the invisible cushion of the grav field, and turned into mist.
It streamed off the patched and rugged hull of the Armaduke, washing off soot and rust in such quantities that the water turned red before it fell away.
To some on the dockside and ramps of the bay, it seemed as though the rain were washing the old ship’s battle wounds, bathing its tired bones, and anointing it on its long, long overdue return.
The heavy rain drummed off the canvas roofs of the metal gangways that had extended out to meet the ship’s airgates. Gaunt stepped out onto one of the walkways, feeling its metal structure wobble and sway slightly. He saw the rain squalling through the beams of the dockside floodlights that illuminated the Highness Ser Armaduke. He tasted fresh air. It smelt dank and dirty, but it was fresh air, planetary air, not shipboard environmental – the first he had breathed in a year.
Ten years, he corrected himself… Eleven.
There was activity on the dock platforms at the foot of the gangway. He began to walk down the slender metal bridge, ignoring the dark gulf of the dock cavity that yawned below.
A greeting party was assembling. Gaunt saw Munitorum officials, flanked by guards with light poles. An honour guard of eighty Urdeshi storm troopers had drawn up on the dockside platform in perfectly dressed rows, holding immaculate attention.
Gaunt stepped off the gangway onto the dockside. The wet rockcrete crunched under his boots. Now he was beyond the gangway’s canvas awning, the rain fell on him. He was wearing his dress uniform and his long storm coat.
Someone called an order, and the Urdeshi guard snapped in perfect drill, presenting their rifles upright in front of them in an unwavering salute. An officer walked forwards. He wore the black-and-white puzzle camo of Urdesh, and his pins marked him as a colonel.
‘Sir, welcome to Urdesh,’ he said, making the sign of the aquila.
Gaunt nodded and returned the sign formally.
‘I’m Colonel Kazader,’ the man said, ‘Seventeenth Urdeshi. We honour your return. As per your signal, agents of the ordos and the Mechanicus await to discharge your cargo.’
‘I will brief them directly,’ said Gaunt. ‘There are specifics that I did not include in my signal. Matters that should not be contained in any transmission, even encrypted.’
‘I understand, sir,’ said Kazader. ‘The officers of the ordos also stand by to take your asset into secure custody. That is, if he still lives.’
‘He does,’ said Gaunt, ‘but no prisoner transfer will take place until I have met with the officers and assured myself of their suitability.’
‘Their…?’
‘That they are not going to kill him, colonel,’ said Gaunt. ‘Many have tried, and they have included men wearing rosettes.’