‘What do you mean, you’ve lost them?’
‘I mean we’ve lost them. The communications link has been severed,’ answered Rayhelm, doing her best to ignore the imposing figure of Sergeant Theron at her side as she called out orders to her officers. Four minutes had passed since the link to Helios and his squad’s transponder signals was dropped, and in that time the shipmistress’ lips and mind had not ceased moving.
‘Boost the signal again,’ barked Rayhelm down into the augur stations, waving away a pack of junior officers clamouring around her as she returned to the central dais.
‘What of the Pilum?’ asked Theron.
‘We still have contact with her,’ said Rayhelm. ‘We are using her as an extension of our own vox and augur systems, and since we can still see the Pilum that points to something that must be happening inside the Excelsior.’
Theron folded his arms over his chest, his eyes locked to the tiny red dart of the Genesis Chapter frigate through the viewing blocks. ‘Take us in closer.’
‘We’ll have to alter our flight path for orbit over the planet.’
‘Then take us between the two.’
Rayhelm tapped at her chin as she studied her instruments. With a soft exhalation, she sat back in her control throne. ‘As you wish, sergeant. Navigation, stand by for course correction. Come about at heading–’
‘Ma’am,’ came a voice from across the bridge.
‘What is it?’ demanded Rayhelm. ‘Have we reestablished contact?’
The young officer rose from the console she had been leaning over. Her face had gone pale. ‘No, shipmistress. We are detecting a new inbound contact, something large. Something very, very large.’
<Do you know what you ask?>
There were precious few places aboard the battleship that could have had any chance of calming Bolaraphon’s rage, and the command deck of the Damnatio Memorae was absolutely not one of them. It was one of many places that only increased his ire every time he had set foot upon it. Now he found himself there again, in the court of his reluctant saviour. The self-proclaimed Pirate Queen of the Dark Mechanicus.
The Warsmith baulked at the anachronism of the title, of the inconsistency and blinding hypocrisy inherent in those born of the Red Planet. Minds lashed to machines who strove for knowledge and technological progress, yet spent their lives chanting placations to imagined deities and smothering engine cores in incense.
<Well, do you?> the voice asked again, as the mistress of the Damnatio Memorae unfolded from the rafters like a twisted mechanical spider.
Hyzra hung suspended from an armature of dark brass, moving wherever she pleased via a system of tracks built into the darkness of the vaulted ceiling. Her robes were threadbare silk of deepest black, edged in scarlet. Across the tattered fabric, arcane algorithms were stitched in hair-fine threads of Martian red gold. Eye-aching to behold, they were the mathematical depiction of scrap-code, the lingua diabolis that she and her heretek kind used to converse and commune with the fell gods of the warp.
Bolaraphon could only look upon her vile, spindly form for so long before his anger forced him to avert his eyes.
<The loss will be great if you pursue this course. Of materials, of men. An entire ship gone.>
‘You will do well to remember to whom you speak,’ growled Bolaraphon. ‘They are here, and they shall die. All of them.’
The shipmistress regarded the Warsmith, a cluster of violet ocular lenses dilating and tightening as they pored over every nuance.
<This recklessness is aberrant, Warsmith,> said Hyzra. <What have the sons of Guilliman done to you I wonder, to provoke you into abandoning the acquisition of the materials we desperately require, simply to send a pittance of their number to oblivion?>
‘Obstruct me further, machine-witch, and you will join them.’
<You realise,> she buzzed, <the Damnatio Memorae and I are one. I am the ship, and the ship is me.> She raised an outstretched palm of a hand with too many fingers, long slender digits of black iron flexing like insect legs. A schematic of the warship beamed from her palm, turning gently in her hand like a child’s toy.
<Eighteen hundred times per second, a sequence to send the primary reactor core into cardiac overload is broadcast. My continued existence is the sole countermand that interrupts this occurrence from realisation. In the event that my life-signs were to terminate, the sequence would proceed.> The pirate jerked closer with a squeal from the hidden tracks overhead. <And all here, including you, Warsmith, would join me as dust and a fleeting moment of flame.>
Bolaraphon raised himself to his full, towering height, eye level with the dark machine priestess. He leaned forward. ‘Then whisper a supplication to whatever it is you worship.’ He did not look away as he punched in the last of the heading adjustments on the primary navigation console. ‘And pray for constitution.’
Hyzra tilted her head, a curiously human thing for one so divorced from her birth species, before withdrawing back to the centre of the bridge.
<Proceed.>
‘Go!’ barked Helios, blasting at a pair of Iron Warriors to shield the advance of Kyros and Nicanor. The Primaris Space Marines moved forward with a speed that belied their bulk as they slid into cover behind a pillar of reinforced plasteel. Bolt-rounds exploded against it, showering them with bits of metal that plinked and bounced from their sculpted armour.
The thoroughfares of the Excelsior’s spinal battlements were wide avenues where warriors could gather in fellowship or walk in silent contemplation. Statues of grand heroes from the histories of both the Genesis Chapter and the Ultramarines stared down with grim regality, artistic works that would have rivalled the finest of any shrine world. Dense ribbed girders formed a ceiling that supported immense panes of armourglass, giving those who walked it an incomparable view of the void beyond the ship’s hull.
It had once been a place of reflection, where the dizzying scale of the cosmos could be pondered and appreciated by the warship’s crew as they passed from one section to the next. Now, it had become a battleground, the site of a grinding slog of attrition between two opposing forces of Space Marines.
After the revelation of the presence of the Iron Warriors and their first engagement against them, Helios had abandoned the course of restoring power to the Genesis Chapter warship. The forces of Chaos had butchered the crew and warriors of the Excelsior, and the clearest route to the answers the Ultramarines sought would lie upon the frigate’s bridge. They had managed to make their way through the enginarium and maintenance decks without any further combat, but their fortunes had shifted once they arrived on the upper spinal thoroughfare.
With the ship’s reactor offline, gravity had no sway over the warship. Iron Warriors moved along the walls, firing down upon the Ultramarines who had engaged their magnetic seals to ground themselves. A concentrated salvo of bolter fire riddled one of the Chaos Space Marines, leaving him to float in a twisted tangle of limbs and a spreading orbiting mist of blood, oil and venting oxygen.
Small unit tactics ruled the field, with each side splitting their numbers and fighting a seesaw battle of fire, advance, fire, withdraw. The Ultramarines held a tenuous edge in numbers, yet the Iron Warriors possessed the advantage of holding elevated and more defensible positions. Every time the Imperials gained fire superiority, the renegades would abandon their ground in favour of another strongpoint, destroying whatever fortification they had in place to deny the Ultramarines any protection from their fire.
Helios had learned much watching his Intercessors fight. They were strong, efficient and capable. They bore an innate understanding of the angles of fire available at every step, and how to utilise the superior range of their bolt rifles to keep the Iron Warriors ducking behind their cover. Each of them had suffered enemy fire, and while they all now bore cracks and fist-sized holes in their cobalt, their armour had succeeded in turning the worst of the damage away.
But by the Emperor, thought Helios, they were inexperienced. The Chaplain could not help but think of neophytes as the Primaris Marines fought beside him. They lacked the unspoken connection of a squad whose bonds of brotherhood had been forged in the fires of battle, and as a result they still moved as individuals rather than a single, cohesive unit. They reacted to the ever-shifting moment to moment nature of each firefight with tactical decisions that, while technically correct, were not applied properly in a combat situation.
Even their movements, while sound and precise, were stiff, marred by the slightest of hesitations. Just as notes and symbols inked onto parchment were not truly music, Helios’ charges fought with a posture that had yet to be smoothed into instinct.
The training regimen of the Primaris Marines was exhaustive, and these warriors had learned their lessons well, but drill could only take one so far. The entirety of their lives had been lived within one half of their precious mental binary, the theoretical. Now they faced the practical, in all its swiftness, blood and horror. They needed this fighting desperately. They needed to be blooded.
Helios fired his plasma pistol. The bolt of blazing blue energy struck an Iron Warrior on the shoulder pauldron, sending him crashing onto his back in a cloud of boiling ceramite. A report crackling over the secure vox from Kyros preceded a fist-sized sphere clattering amongst the traitors. The barricade they sheltered behind exploded into metal splinters as the frag grenade detonated, littering the surrounding area with gore and bits of bloodied metal armour.
The Primaris Marine lingered over his cover a second too long, as though to judge his own handiwork, and was stitched up with a volley of bolter fire that sent him crashing to the deck. Helios peered over at Kyros as he hauled himself up into a crouch, fresh cracks and gouges marring the ornamentation of his breastplate.
‘Move up!’ Helios bellowed, waving Seneca and Caprico forward as the tide of enemy fire slackened. ‘For the Emperor!’
‘For the Emperor!’ came the thunderous reply from Helios’ squad, and it swelled his chest with joy to hear a trace of zeal edge into their battle cry. The fighting was losing its mystery in their hearts, usurped beat by beat with holy wrath. Slowly but surely they were seizing the initiative. Whether the Primaris brethren were green or not, it was the Iron Warriors who were dying, not the Ultramarines.
Helios thudded behind cover as the deck beneath them began to quake. Chips of broken debris rattled and jumped, clacking against their boots. Helios peered up into the stars as he felt the bones of the Excelsior give out a shuddering groan, like a great ocean leviathan crying out in pain.
‘What is that?’ asked Ariston as he skidded to a crouch beside Helios.
‘Could they have restored the ship’s core back to function?’ posited Kyros.
‘No,’ murmured Helios, his eyes still locked to the void above. ‘No, this is something else.’
Ariston craned his neck, his gaze following that of the Chaplain. The rest of the squad did the same from their own places of cover across the thoroughfare. None of the Ultramarines had consciously realised that all shooting had ceased. Whatever they were seeing had taken the attention of the Iron Warriors as well.
From a distance, it appeared like a golden spear’s tip amongst the grainy snowstorm of Quradim’s shattered moon. As it grew closer and larger in view, the gold soured into a deep, rust red, and the spear tip became a jagged, serrated blade with flared edges. Even from a distance it was clear that it dwarfed the Excelsior in size by many ship lengths.
‘A battleship,’ said Helios. ‘An enemy battleship.’
A flash of creamy purple light blinked from the crest of the approaching ship. An eye blink later the Excelsior reeled as it took the full brunt of a lance strike amidships. With no power, and no void shields to deflect it, the energy of the blast knifed through the warship in an ear-splitting shriek of rending metal.
Statues came crumbling apart in great shards of stone and metal that crashed against the ground and walls. The deck tilted violently, throwing Space Marines on both sides off balance. Their mag-locked boots kept them from being cast off their feet as the Genesis Chapter frigate listed with the force of the impact.
‘Brother-Chaplain,’ said Seneca, panning above his cover with his bolt rifle. ‘The enemy, they are quitting the field. Do we pursue them?’
Helios was still watching the Chaos vessel. It continued to grow larger and larger in view.
‘It isn’t stopping,’ said Helios.
‘What?’ said Seneca.
‘It’s still coming.’ Helios blink-clicked a rune to open a vox-link to the Light of Iax. Static screamed in his ear. He cut the link. ‘And it is jamming us.’ Helios turned to where Seneca and Caprico were hunkered down ten metres away to his right. ‘If they keep going at that speed it will cut right through us.’
‘Then I humbly suggest we take our leave, Brother-Chaplain,’ said Caprico.
‘Second,’ said Ariston.
‘Agreed,’ replied Helios. ‘Pilum,’ he said into his collar. ‘If you receive this, get clear. This ship is about to come apart and we won’t make it to you in time. We shall find our own way out.’
A databurst of binaric cant slipped through the interference. The message rippled across Helios’ visor from the gunship’s servitor pilot, his auto-senses quickly translating it into Gothic.
Compliance.
‘Your will, Brother-Chaplain?’ asked Seneca.
Helios smiled. ‘No, brothers. The will that guides us is that of the Emperor. We must simply have the strength to follow it.’
The Primaris Marines exchanged glances, then looked back to Helios. The deck of the Excelsior gave another violent, storm-tossed lurch. The bust of a long-dead champion of the Five Hundred Worlds snapped loose from its moorings and burst apart in a shower of glittering marble fragments.
The Chaplain waved them forward with his crozius. ‘Come.’