Predators and Prey
They moved along the thoroughfare of the ship’s spine, and the enemy followed.
Reports were constantly being routed to Erastus, an incessant buzz in his earpiece as squads fought and held against the enemy. The lower areas of the ship were teeming with the foe, where they were not maliciously propagated ghost signals. The docking bays and cargo holds were lost to hordes of the enemy, wrenched from their grasp by misshapen claw and gun. Calls flooded in of sightings of the enemy, moving in force. Key systems were holding, though. The enginarium, command bridge and gunnery decks were all mounting stern defences.
The ship still moved, and it moved to their design and command.
Erastus turned and unleashed another bolt of searing plasma. It tore through the squad of cultist militia, reducing them to a smear against the iron pillars that braced the corridor. The pillar sagged and buckled under the heat of the onslaught, before it dissipated. Astrid had armed herself with a bolt pistol, and was taking measured, well-judged shots at any interlopers who presented themselves. Every detonation made her bare her teeth in that animal grimace common to her lineage. Like a canid scenting blood.
‘I want them off my ship,’ Erastus growled. ‘Once the threat has been dealt with I am going to take the entire fleet and cut the head from the beast. I will burn Gunther from whatever crevice he hides in, and I will see him dead.’ The Soul shook. He cursed. There was too little time. The ship crawled with the enemy and whatever saboteurs had been seeded within, yet pausing to fight them would cost them dearly in the void war. He trusted in his crew, but knew the tide was swiftly turning against them.
Vengeance is a beautiful dream, if we can live to seize it.
‘Fine sentiments, but the truth is that we are outmatched,’ Astrid said. ‘The fleet we could contend with, perhaps. My mother’s voidcraft will bring her back into range before long. She leads them a merry dance, where their numbers will not matter. We, though, we are caught in the maelstrom of their making. Upon the open seas you do not fight the storm, nor do you yield to it. You can only weather it.’
‘I will not do nothing!’ he snapped.
‘Then do not! But they have come for you! All their cunning, all their guile, it culminates now! And it is not an assassination, not the spite of man against man. This is the clash of gods and monsters. Of beasts that walk in the skins of men, and turn their craft against them.’
‘I had heard rumours of such,’ he said as he shook his head. And he had. There had always been stories of the corruptive potency of the tyranids, and the things which scuttled ahead of their advance. Xeno-cults such as these were a cancer, pumping poison into the Imperium’s veins. He wondered how long it had taken to suborn an organisation such as a rogue trader dynasty. Had it come to them as a prize? A menagerie pet that had broken its cage? Or had it oozed its way into their heart through occult ritual and misdirection? Had they thought they were chasing some grandeur or glory, by prostituting themselves before the abhorrent?
‘More than rumours, but then there have always been those of us who would look the monsters in the face and spit in their eyes.’ She laughed, and looked away from him. ‘Your culture was not steeped in trolls and kraken, Erastus.’
‘I’m not sure I have a culture.’
They pushed onwards as he spoke. The ship lurched as it turned in another burst of motion. It was impossible to forget that you were aboard a ship at war. It shook and growled, the decking trembled with the constant pulse of the engines. The guns were firing decks below, but he could still feel every thunderclap as they unleashed. The return volleys died against the shields, or penetrated through them, tearing at the hull. The violation was enough to make the ship buck with machine-agony, and he felt it. He felt it all, rippling through him.
They were linked. Captain and vessel. As bound together as a culture was to the world that had birthed it.
‘That is not so,’ Astrid said. She reached up and pushed her hair from her eyes. A simple gesture, given the circumstances, but it struck him as somehow poignant. They had both found themselves thrust into an impossible circumstance. ‘My mother spoke of your father, and your lineage. This ship, she has a Jovian soul, yes?’ She laid a hand on the nearest pillar. ‘A good, strong soul. As strong as its sister ship. We are both born of clans, Erastus. Mine simply walked the ice of Fenris, and yours plied the void in the ages before the Allfather.’ She gestured down the spinal corridors, littered with ruin and the detritus of bodies. ‘You can still build something from this.’
Something exploded further down the corridor, drawing their eye. Astrid placed her hand on his shoulder, bracing him for what was to come.
‘You have done all that you can with what has been available to you. It is not your fault that your wyrd is to suffer, and to be betrayed.’ She drew back and raised her weapon.
Another raid crew slipped through the wreckage of the door they had just demolished, turning this way and that, sniffing the air as though scenting their presence. When they saw them they let out a scream, a primal shriek of rage and hate that made Erastus wince with its sheer intensity.
Astrid gritted her teeth. ‘Now, we fight. Now we show them what it means to fear.’
Immediately the enemy took aim, peppering the walls with stubber rounds as they started to advance up the corridor, ducking behind pillars and firing as they moved. They ran with a scuttling, sinuous pace, an inhuman fluidity that made Erastus’ stomach churn. He holstered his pistol, and held Bloodsong with both hands, bracing it as he charged forward. Rounds dinged and skittered off his armour, or sailed just past his head. He could feel the heat in the air as he rushed through the throng and into their midst, vaulting over a fallen beam. He landed hard, swinging as he did. The cultists reared back, baring their fangs as the sword sliced the air before them. The air crackled with the power-field wreathed blade’s motion, driving them back.
One swung at him with the butt of its gun, but he caught it with the sword’s edge, splitting the weapon in twain with a spatter of molten metal. He brought it down again, through the ruin of the gun and into the wielder’s gurning face. It tumbled to the floor, mewling piteously through a veil of blood. He stamped on its sternum for good measure, and turned just in time to parry aside the swipe of a knifeblade.
‘Monsters!’ he snarled. ‘Traitors!’
The thing which had swung at him spat its hatred, twisted mutant features gnarled with the strength of its outrage. Chitinous growths distended its face, forming erratic ridges and protrusions. Ritual scarring had further distorted the hybrid’s face, marring it with whirling patterns like the scatter of constellations. Erastus reared back, feeling the next cut score across the plates of his armour. His sword was alive in his hands. Striking, parrying, he moved by sheer momentum of instinct. Muscle memory burned in his every gesture, recalling training with Zofia, with Astrid, and further back; to when he had learned from his father, and from Evelyne.
Lessons of survival gleaned from the living and the dead.
He knocked the thing back with the flat of the blade, cracking it along the length of its chest. It glared at him, drool-spattered jaws agape, and made to lunge forwards before its head exploded with a burst of fyceline stink.
Astrid fired as she advanced, each shot precise. Armour blew away, skulls shattered, and bodies burst with wet, slapping detonations. Erastus threw the headless corpse out of his way, weaving into the fracas. He cleaved arms away in jets of stinking blood, swinging the sabre until his arms ached. He cracked a misshapen alien jaw with the pommel of the blade, and sent it gurgling to the deck.
This was purity. This was what his father had always tried to teach him. The raw, brutal soul of combat. Something that could not truly be taught or imparted, only lived through and experienced.
You never thought that I was ready for such a crucible. The thought made him snarl, throw himself to the next foe, and the next. His bladework became almost rote, the sweeping strikes of a scythe through the harvest. But I am capable. As capable as ever you were.
‘Where are we going?’ Astrid asked at his ear, and he spun to face her. They stood in the midst of the charnel leavings of battle. Blood dripped from the ironwork columns, and ran along the pitted deck. Marble embellishments had been rouged, painted with it. He could feel the poison life of the enemy against his skin, and brushed it away with too much eagerness.
‘I have a plan,’ Erastus said simply. ‘This is the primary transit conduit. From along the ship’s spine we can gain access to the primary teleportarium.’
‘The teleportarium?’ she repeated, blinking. ‘Where are we going to go? Where is there to go?’
Erastus smiled, stepping over another bisected corpse as he did so. He gestured with the gleaming blade, down the corridor towards their target. ‘I mean to find the beast’s heart, and gouge it out. As this all began, so must it end.’
‘What do you mean? How must it end?’
Erastus’ face locked in a grimace, as though giving voice to the thought pained him.
‘With the death of a king.’
The Wyrmslayer Queen arced around, and its lance batteries raked the side of a fat, ailing converted merchantman. The ship’s shields shone for one glorious moment of defiance and then collapsed, dying a fraction of a second before the ship itself succumbed. Katla laughed as her ship hunted and killed. Even in its depths, fighting alongside her crewmen, she could sense the flow of battle by the shaking of the hull and the scream of the engines. She was the ship’s captain and she knew the warlike soul of the great vessel as well as she knew her own daughter. Even so, the bridge’s communications were a whisper in her ear.
‘For the Compact!’ she screamed. ‘For the Allfather!’
The ship lurched again. The hunter’s strike tore through the engines and crippled the enemy ship. Secondary detonations rippled through its midsection even as the cut continued. The deluge of energy gouged it, gutting it like a fish, before fading as the attacking vessel moved off.
They had sought to pin down the Helvintr, but it was a fool’s quarry. The traitors might as well have tried to pin down the storm or the sea.
The Queen surged from the debris, as though it carried the fury of the World Sea at its back. Even as the crew fought their staggered battles within, the ship itself coursed through the void with all the fury expected of its kind. The Spear of Ice and the Shield of Wolves swept by in its wake, adding their own contemptuous broadsides to the dying ship. There was nothing there but spite. Hatred, sharpened to a fine point, driven into the heart of the foe. Their strikes finally killed the wheezing vessel, obliterating it outright as the reactors died in a star-bright detonation.
Their ragged arc carried them round and over the duelling fleets, like the sweep of a god’s sword blade. The Indomitable Soul lay ahead, beset on all sides by the ravenous maws of the enemy. Boarding pods stained the void like shed blood, flowing from the corrupted enemy towards the flagship. The Helvintr ships sighted them, turning about to bring their weapons to bear – to liberate their kinsmen.
If they broke the deadlock, the crew of the Queen knew, then they could force the battle on their terms. The enemy could be beaten back, and if the fleet could be fought and destroyed then the problem of Endymica could be addressed. No weapons had yet fired from the surface or from near-orbit, nor had there been any concerted sortie beyond snatches of auspex that seemed entirely befitting of system’s traffic.
Only one problem could be conquered at a time; as the saying went, The wolves in the mountain can wait, when there are wolves at the gate.
As they drew nearer communications were restored. The ships could commune as before, and the captains exchanged their terse words. Seeking unity of purpose amidst the tumult and confusion. Even now, pressed as they were – with their backs against the wall – they could still elicit favours, and make demands. Compromises sketched out in the heat of battle, riven by the passions of war.
In such times arrangements could still be reached, though. The web of signals, of priority transmissions and private communications, tightened. Agreements blossomed from the madness, resolving as the Queen continued its plunge. Its guns burned, relentless in their firing. Shields and hulls cracked and burned under their power, boarding craft were swatted from the air – reduced to atoms, as though they had never been.
The vengeance, the wrath, of fire and ice drove down upon the enemy ships. The shields caught alight, sheathed and sheened in volcanic fury. It ebbed to an oily smear of iridescent colour, then blazed again, white-hot.
She came for the head of the enemy, and the way to that great trophy lay through the liberation of their fellows.