Hellforged, p.2
Hellforged, page 2
‘Archmagos,’ she said.
‘Report.’
‘We have a contact.’
The Adeptus Mechanicus fleet that flew in a shoal around the Antithesis had been assembled on Mars. The Antithesis was a cruiser-class vessel, not quite the equal of one of the Imperium’s ancient mighty battleships, but a swift and well-crewed ship with enough Martian-forged armaments to punch above her weight. Her sister ship, the Constant, was slower and less manoeuvrable, but much more heavily gunned, and sported an enormous nova cannon on her prow that could blow an enemy cruiser clean in two. The Constant was under the command of Magos Hepsebah who trusted no one but herself to operate the nova cannon. Both craft were in the dark red of the Adeptus Mechanicus, with the half-steel skull of Mars worn as proud heraldry.
Several armed explorator ships of the Asclepian Squadron flew a picket around the two cruisers. They were smaller craft, but they were hardy, built for exploring harsh regions and for resisting the worst excesses of stellar radiation and micrometeorite impacts. They made for capable escort craft, tough enough to weather enemy fire and nimble enough to outfox slower enemies. They had been difficult for Voar to acquire since they had been destined to explore the Imperium’s Eastern Fringes. Magos Khrul, his speciality being the same kind of deep-space hostile exploration at which the squadron excelled, was in command.
The light cruiser Defence of Caelano Minoris had been fitted out as a laboratory ship, its gun decks stripped out and replaced with medical labs and crucible chambers to research anything the fleet might find. A whole deck was sealed and gene-locked so it could be used for the study of alien artefacts. The Defence was the domain of Magos Crystavayne and Magos Devwyn. It usually flew in the wake of the Ferrous, an armed factory ship that wallowed obesely through space, dragging an enormous processing and storage section behind it, plumes of plasma fire bursting through the vents down its spine as it turned its cargo of harvested ore and chemicals into fuel for the rest of the fleet. Magos Vionel, the commander of the Ferrous, was as much a part of the ship as its chemical tanks and fusion chambers were.
The final element of the fleet, and by far the largest, was the swarm of smaller explorator ships, armed merchantmen, tech-guard transports, cargo containers and single-squadron fighter platforms collectively known as the Fleet Minor. They flew around the larger ships in a silver cloud, serving as flying laboratories, scouts, storage space and fighter response. Should crews be lost on the cruisers, ships of the Fleet Minor could be decommissioned and their crews used to replace the dead. In a naval battle, the Fleet Minor could spoil the aim of enemy ships, outflank hostile formations and distract enemy guns from the real targets. On a mission like the exploration of the Veiled Region, the ships of the Fleet Minor were a mathematical necessity.
The contact picked up by the sensorium dome on the Antithesis was some way ahead of the fleet, obscured into a vague shadow by the stellar dust that choked the Veiled Region beyond the Plateau. It was huge, though, far bigger than any ships of the Mechanicus fleet. No ship of the Imperium, even a titanic battleship of the Battlefleet Solar, had ever been built that big.
There were only two possible identities for such a contact. First, it was a craft of alien design built with technology that allowed for immense size. Secondly, it was a space hulk.
‘We’re being followed,’ said Techmarine Lygris, rapidly skimming the reams of statistics spooling out of a bridge cogitator. The rest of the bridge was dominated by several cogitators salvaged from other parts of the space hulk known as the Brokenback. They were ill-matched chunks of technology, with exposed circuit boards and banks of valve-switches, constantly clattering and humming. The rest of the bridge looked like it had once been a theatre, with ornate decorative panels fixed to the walls, drilled through to accommodate bundles of cables. It had once been dominated by a viewscreen, which was now blank and blind.
Every sensor and system that still worked on the Brokenback was hooked into a web created by Lygris so he always knew what was going on in and around the ship, as well as being able to command it, from the bridge. Lygris had summoned Chapter Master Sarpedon to the bridge shortly before the space hulk exited von Carnath’s Plateau and entered unknown space. A couple of other Soul Drinkers were attending to Lygris on the bridge, monitoring the various readouts and sensors, but even the tall armoured shape of a Space Marine looked relatively insignificant compared to the mutant shape of Sarpedon in the ornate armour of the Chapter Librarium.
‘Who?’ asked Sarpedon.
Lygris glanced down at the data-slate he held, which was wired up to one of the cogitators. ‘It’s a fleet. A big one. We’re too close to the nebula to see much more, but they’ll be watching us. They must be taking the Plateau into the Region, too.’
Sarpedon, Chapter Master and senior Librarian of the Soul Drinkers Chapter, sat back on the haunches of his eight mutant legs and thought about the predicament.
‘I had hoped that, here of all places, we would be alone,’ he said. ‘As soon as Chaplain Iktinos suggested this place, I knew he was right. The Imperium hasn’t tried to explore the Veiled Region for thousands of years. Now there’s a fleet on our tail. Can we outrun them?’
‘Hard to say,’ said Lygris. ‘Dropping into the warp here isn’t something I’d relish under fire. Just because this hulk’s warp-capable doesn’t mean I can get all its engines pulling in the same direction without more time to prepare.’
‘Can we tell if they’re armed?’
‘There’s at least a couple of cruisers in there. Nothing that big flies into a place like this without being able to handle itself.’
‘Set us to battle stations. Get ready to flee as soon as you can. We’ll stand and fight until then.’
‘As you wish, commander.’ Lygris made a few adjustments to the data-slate, and the space hulk’s vox-casters blared a warning. The bridge was bathed in deep red light.
Soul Drinkers ran through the corridors past the bridge to their assigned battle stations. There were barely two hundred and fifty Space Marines left in the Chapter, and the last of the Chapter serfs had succumbed to battle or the rigours of space a long time ago. It was a tiny crew for a ship so vast, and Lygris’s command of tech-lore was most apparent in the way the space hulk could be commanded at all.
When the Soul Drinkers had first entered the Brokenback it was an abomination, an alien-infested amalgamation of dozens of Imperial and xenos ships, lost in the warp to be welded together and spat out again centuries later. The Soul Drinkers had boarded and cleansed it to use as their base of operations. A space hulk was a symbol of the warp’s corruption, a harbinger of dread things from beyond real space. It seemed fitting that the outcast Soul Drinkers should have made such a dreaded place their home.
‘How’s our ordnance?’ asked Sarpedon.
‘We uncovered a stock of torpedoes on one of the cruiser sections,’ said Lygris. ‘Very old. High explosive, armour piercing heads. Better than anything the Imperial Navy has. They’ll be in the tubes within an hour.’
‘Good. I take it you’ll remain on the bridge to command. Where do you want me?’
‘I had Scout Sergeant Eumenes commanding one of the gun decks,’ said Lygris, ‘which leaves us one short there.’
‘Then I should replace him,’ said Sarpedon. ‘After all, I’m the one who killed him.’
The relative calm of the Plateau was replaced with the gluey, dust-heavy void of the Veiled Region proper. The enormous vessel being followed by the Mechanicus fleet had dived into the mire, and the fleet had followed, every tech-priest and magos amongst its crews uttering prayers to the machine-spirits of the ships. Normal space died out, and the nebulae of the Veiled Region seemed to crowd around the fleet, reaching out with overlapping fields of lethal radiation, and throwing off flares of half-born stars. The fleet, however, had the advantage of collected millennia of naval lore, and it made good speed through the outer reaches of the Veiled Region. It closed in on the target ship, hundreds of sensorium arrays scouring it to collect a picture of its shape and the energy signatures flickering through it.
All of the information was filtered through to the sensorium grotto, a cave-like appendix to the bridge-library of the Antithesis. It was crammed with information that did not take the form of books or data-slates: carved tablets, symbolic statues, and paintings stacked up against one wall. Amongst all this were the sensorium readouts, mostly autoquills spilling out reams of parchment covered in jagged signal lines and pict screens showing streams of numbers. Archmagos Voar peered over the shoulder of one of the tech-priests, watching as the data was compiled into the first image of their quarry.
The forward sensors of the Fleet Minor depicted something so grotesque that they were checked over and over again to make sure they were correct. The enemy ship was a conglomeration of fused spacecraft the size of a city. Every element was deformed and merged with the craft next to it, and its every curve and rupture bore the hallmarks of the warp. It had been born there, in the abyss of the immaterium, from hundreds of ships that had become lost in the warp and gravitated towards this foul lump of tortured metal.
The closest thing to a visual the fleet had was a composite holo-image, fragmented where the sensors had been foxed by the stellar dust.
‘It’s a space hulk,’ said the sensorium tech-priest, ‘a big one. The archives put it in the tenth percentile.’
‘Signs of life?’
‘There’s too much interference for any more data.’
Archmagos Voar inspected the grainy image as it revolved above the holo-unit.
‘That,’ he said, indicating a long stretch of the space hulk’s hull, ‘is an Imperial craft. And here, this fin towards the stern. An eldar craft, used by their pirates. Xenos.’ Voar spat out the last word as if it tasted bad. ‘Input all your data to the ordnance decks. Work with them on firing solutions.’
‘Yes, archmagos.’
Voar strode through the sensorium grotto, mechanical feet clacking on the stone floor. He emerged into the less stifling gloom of the library. Tech-priests were hurrying between stations, jostling past menials and servitors, carrying stacks of books containing armament equations and tech-liturgies for ministering to the ship’s machine-spirit.
‘Magos Hepsebah?’ said Voar into his internal vox-unit.
‘Hepsebah here,’ replied the magos aboard the Constant.
‘You should be receiving firing data from the Antithesis and the Fleet Minor. What is your state of readiness?’
‘All gun decks are loaded and ready, archmagos,’ said Hepsebah. She was still human enough to have a trace of pride in her voice. Hepsebah’s calling was weaponry, and few weapons could be more sacred than the mighty guns of a spacecraft. She had seen to it that the Constant’s gun crews were so well-drilled they could put the proudest Imperial Navy crews to shame.
‘And the nova cannon?’
‘I am in the process of priming it.’
‘Good. You have my permission to break formation and attain high ventral vantage over the target.’
‘It will be done, archmagos. What is our plan of engagement?’
‘The fleet will pin the enemy down,’ said Voar. ‘And you will kill it.’
A space hulk was more than a material threat. It was an object of religious hatred for the Mechanicus. There were few tech-heresies as grave as xenos ships being melded with Imperial craft. Those Imperial ships had been sacred once, their machine-spirits ancient things before whom tech-priests knelt and begged for counsel. They were vessels of the Omnissiah’s wisdom as well as the Emperor’s might, god-machines that represented the human race’s greatest achievements in conquering the galaxy. Now they were dead and defiled, inhabited by Throne knew what aliens and blasphemers.
Death was the only punishment.
The Fleet Minor broke out of formation and thrust forwards, thousands of engines flaring like fireflies. Countermeasures were launched, bursting in silver fireworks, throwing sensor-baffling filaments everywhere. The Antithesis barged forwards, parting the smaller ships in front of it like an icebreaker, swinging to one side to bring its broadside guns to bear. The rest of the fleet moved around it, the Asclepian Squadron closing in to form a picket around the cruiser.
The fighter squadron carriers, Sunblade and Daggerfall, platforms shaped like thin cylinders with fighter craft and bombers clustered around them like fruit on the vine, spun through the clouds of chaff to send their squadrons lancing forwards on columns of flame. Electronic warfare ships followed them in towards the enemy, electromagnetic fields crackling between them to form blind spots where the fighters would be safe until they began their attack runs.
The Constant rose above it all, protected by its shield of Fleet Minor ships, and blue flames flickered around the barrel of the nova cannon that jutted from its prow.
Sarpedon reached the gun deck. Most of the automated loaders had been reactivated by Lygris’s efforts, but plenty of the enormous broadside guns still had to be loaded manually. The Soul Drinkers saluted Sarpedon as he arrived. Sergeant Salk was at the nearest gun, directing his squad to haul the chains, dragging a tank-sized shell into the gun’s enormous breech. It was one of a dozen along the steel canyon of an Imperial ship, the Intolerant, one of the largest warships in the Brokenback’s construction. Sarpedon remembered exploring the place for the first time when the space hulk had first been cleared by the Soul Drinkers. It was amazing that the dead ship’s destructive force had been reawakened by Lygris.
‘Commander!’ called Salk. ‘What are we up against?’
‘We’ll know soon enough. What can I do?’
‘Gun eight needs another strong arm.’
Sarpedon glanced down the deck towards gun eight; several Soul Drinkers from Iktinos’s command were working it. They were amongst the Soul Drinkers who had lost their officers and chosen to follow the Chapter’s Chaplain into battle, forming a flock devoted to Iktinos, who fought with a zeal that bordered on recklessness.
‘Then I’ll lend them a few limbs of my own,’ said Sarpedon. Salk saluted and returned to his gun team. Salk was developing into a very fine officer. He had been new to squad command when the Soul Drinkers had first turned away from the Imperium. Now, he had something new to fight for, and he had become one of Sarpedon’s most trusted sergeants. Like the rest of the Chapter, he was learning to strike out on his own.
One of Iktinos’s Soul Drinkers was hauling a shell towards gun eight. Sarpedon joined the man, crouched down on his arachnoid haunches and lifted the shell, forcing it the last few metres and into the gun’s breech. The other Space Marines slammed the shell home and closed the breech door.
‘Ready!’ shouted the Soul Drinker crouching at the top of the gun’s housing, peering through the targeting reticle that let him see the scene outside the ship. ‘Targets! Multiple, small, approaching fast!’
‘Lygris,’ voxed Sarpedon. ‘Who are they?’
‘Larger craft supported by smaller,’ said Lygris from the bridge. ‘They’re bringing a lot of interference. Looks Imperial.’
Sarpedon gave this a moment’s through. The Imperial Navy would fire on a space hulk if they found one, certainly. Even if they realised there were Space Marines on board, one glimpse of the Chapter’s mutations, not least Sarpedon’s eight-legged form, would convince them that they were dealing with traitors, and they would redouble their efforts to pound the Brokenback to dust.
‘Got a good look at one,’ continued Lygris. ‘It matches one of the marks in the archives, a Sapience-class cruiser. It’s the Adeptus Mechanicus, commander.’
‘The past is death. But the future is worse still – it is an existence on which order and sanity have yet to be imposed. To fight it, the past is the only weapon we have.’
Daenyathos, The Armaments of the Soul
CHAPTER TWO
The Soul Drinkers and the Adeptus Mechanicus had history.
The Adeptus Mechanicus had sought to recover the pre-Imperial artefact known as the Soulspear, so it could be properly studied. The Soul Drinkers, on the other hand, had wanted it returned to them as it was a relic of their Chapter, and, in particular, of Rogal Dorn, the Chapter’s primarch, who had given it to the fledgling Soul Drinkers upon their foundation after the Horus Heresy. The rift thus created had been the first in a series of betrayals that had led the Soul Drinkers to break with Imperial authority, become excommunicated from the human race, and ply a new future as a renegade Space Marine Chapter.
The Inquisition, taking responsibility for hunting down the Soul Drinkers, had ordered the Chapter’s name deleted from all Imperial records, so that the danger inherent in the very idea of a renegade Chapter would not imperil the minds of the galaxy’s citizens.
The Adeptus Mechanicus did not always follow the dictates of the Inquisition to the letter.
‘You are certain of this?’ asked Archmagos Voar, looking down at the data-slate in his hand. He was seated on the command throne at the top of the pyramid in the centre of the bridge, surrounded by tactical printouts brought to him by the ordnance and sensorium crew. The tech-priest that had handed him the data-slate was from the communications crew, who occupied a section of the library dominated by a monstrous switchboard with thousands of sockets and cables.
‘Every piece of data we have is consistent with this conclusion,’ said the tech-priest.
‘I see.’ Voar put down the data-slate and picked up a book fetched by a menial from the rare and sacred books section. It was one of the few copies in existence, since it had been ordered burned by Inquisitorial deletion squads in the great libraries of the Imperium. No doubt not one copy remained in the archives of the Inquisition. A golden chalice was embossed on its cover. It was a military history of the Soul Drinkers Space Marine Chapter. ‘You were right to bring this to my attention. Go about the Omnissiah’s work, brother of Mars.’
