Indomitus, p.7
Indomitus, page 7
‘First gunship is in the bay, captain,’ came Oloris’ report.
‘Acknowledged, shipmaster.’
To pick up the incoming gunships, Aeschelus had dropped down on the orbital plane by three miles, which had fractionally increased their flight time but placed the lure-ship between the Ithraca’s Vengeance and the incoming traitor battleship. Not just range but an unobstructed firing solution were needed before the enemy could open fire.
‘Augur control, what is the status of the cruiser’s reactor?’ He looked at Praxamedes. ‘Any sign of their weapons powering up?’
‘None, brother-captain. I think that whatever system they used to crash-vent the reactor to simulate the breach needs time to reset. All power output on the target vessel is minimal.’
Forty-three seconds.
Forty-two seconds.
It was possible that, with some close manoeuvring and patience, the Ithraca’s Vengeance could stay in the sensor shadow of the cruiser for some time, repositioning to keep its bulk between the Ultramarines ship and the Despoiler-class vessel that was now hunting them. The enemy commander might even be frustrated into closing the range, giving the Space Marines a chance to break from cover and dare the guns with a hit-and-run attack.
Of course, if that covering ship suddenly restored power to its weapon bays it would be at point-blank range, and certainly powerful enough to overload the Ultramarines’ shields. Time did not appear to be on Aeschelus’ side.
‘Second gunship touching down, captain.’
Aeschelus stepped forward to his command panel and activated the vox-link.
‘Assault command, what was the status of your data extraction?’
‘Barely ten per cent complete, brother-captain.’ Nemetus’ breathing seemed slightly laboured, but it might have just been the link. ‘It would be a miracle if there was anything much of use in what we managed to upload.’
‘Understood, assault command.’
Twenty-eight seconds.
It was not just the relinquishing of the prize that rankled, though that would be enough to vex any commander. It was the manner of the trap and the ignominy of its conclusion. Aeschelus gritted his teeth, looking again at the schematic, trying to figure out the best way to launch a potential counter-attack. If they closed the distance at full speed, accelerating from the moment the bay doors were shut – damn it, before the doors shut – it would take…
Aeschelus snorted.
Too long.
A few thousand yards closer, maybe they would weather the incoming fire. Maybe they would get close enough to re-launch the assault on a new target, but there was no reason to assume the battleship was as under-crewed as the lure vessel and escorts had been.
He had mentally started preparing the report to the Battle Group Command.
The commander of the Ithraca’s Vengeance is pleased to report a most advantageous and decisive engagement. If it would please Group Command to forward the attached intelligence direct to Fleet Command and the lord primarch.
What a different missive he would have to compose.
‘All gunships aboard. Closing doors, captain.’
If Aeschelus could have reached inside himself and torn out his hearts to offer as payment to make the situation different, he would have done so. The sense of failure burned in his chest like acid, and he desperately wanted to issue an order to attack. Better to strike and fall than to run without retort.
‘Engines to full power,’ he ordered.
Battle Group Faustus Command regrets to inform the lord commander of a disastrous engagement.
There was no glory in dying without cause. Better to face failure than flee its consequence, and survive to set it right in the future.
‘Orders, captain?’ Praxamedes’ question prompted Aeschelus to look at the chronometer.
Eight seconds.
‘Helm, full speed, directly away from the enemy.’ The words were like hot nails in his mouth but he managed to say them without anger, not wishing to corrupt the crew with a moment of unnecessary emotion. It was only the taste of his pride.
‘Get us out of here.’
PART II
‘Across the void to traitors’ nest,
They matched their arms ’gainst Death’s harsh claw.
Overjoyed to pass the test,
And eager for the righteous war.
So light a flame and send a prayer,
For the souls of the Cursed Fleet.’
– ‘The Lament of Quintus’,
an Imperial Navy shanty.
CHAPTER ONE
‘Everything is proceeding exactly as my cousin requests.’ Overlord Simut turned back to the shimmering apparition of Emissary Tholotep. The Silent King’s messenger was rendered in blue light atop the black disc of the hierolith, a metallic skeleton figure draped in robes of office and golden chains, much like Simut himself. ‘I find this constant inquest unnecessary, Tholotep.’
Simut strode across the command-mastaba of his tomb ship to stand before the dais on which his throne had been installed. The chamber was a large semi-circular structure, its flat wall set before the throne, covered with images translated from the ship’s many sophisticated sensors. At this moment in time, they displayed a shifting view of the planet below, the stars, the accompanying tomb fleet and the immense resonator-ships descending to the planet, their jet-black charge a shard of darkness against the pale grey of the world’s surface.
The hieroliths, seven in all, were arranged before this wall, a line of three in front of four. Tholotep’s ghost appeared on the central disc of the first row, full-size and bright despite the cosmic distance that separated him from Simut. Behind the throne, the curved wall was set within a tracery of mind-circuits, angling around twenty-one sarcophagi alcoves. Lit from below by the energy of the tomb ship, each alcove but for the central niche held one of the overlord’s lychguard. Immobile for the time being, they stood as silent sentries, half with warscythes held across their chests, the other half stood to attention with phase-swords bared and shields upon their arms. At the centre waited the broad form of Archimedion Phetos, the royal warden. The overlord’s lieutenant bore a large double-barrelled gauss weapon, its energy chambers reflecting the jade light of the surrounding hall.
The throne itself was set upon a dais almost as tall as Simut, reached only by a narrow set of steps at the front. It was a golden chair inlaid with crystal lines that linked the occupant to the energy trove of the tomb ship, the conduits flowing from its base in complex patterns across the dais and the floor of the mastaba-chamber. The back of the chair flared outwards like the wings of a great bird, the lines of the feathers glowing with the same thought-light as that which glowed from the walls. Simut’s warblade was set into a clawed holder beside the throne, as tall as the overlord, its long cutting edge dormant for the moment. On the other side of the great chair a frame held a suit of torso exo-armour, the sculpted plates nestling over shoulders and spine, gauss cables hanging free ready to power the overlord’s weapons.
‘King Szarekh demands that his plan be enacted as he wills it, and it is my responsibility to ensure his commands are followed precisely,’ the emissary replied. The image of Tholotep thrust an accusing finger towards Simut, its tip gleaming in the azure light of the astral projector. ‘You are thirty-two dekas behind schedule, Simut. Your tardiness will not be tolerated much longer.’
‘Tardiness?’ Simut’s artificially modulated voice rose in pitch. ‘I have conquered barbarians and filth in the name of the Silent King, while others have planted resonator pylons on empty worlds, devoid of all glory to the Szarekh dynasty. If I have proceeded more slowly it is because I have walked the harder road.’
‘You have certainly made hard work of the task assigned to you.’
‘Choose sweeter words when you address me, Tholotep. You would do well to remember that I am royalty, of the line of Szarekh himself.’ Wisps of energy flared from the overlord, whipping around him as a visible sign of his displeasure, his eyes gleaming with the same jade power. ‘I am Overlord Simut, Stormhawk Commander of the Winter Stars, Ruler of Anthothekis and Akapris.’
‘Your posturing will not save you from the displeasure of the Silent King.’ Tholotep’s sneer could be heard in his tone, though the mouth of his abstract-fashioned death mask did not move. ‘Your claims to apparent bio-kinship are irrelevant and your worlds are ill-regarded.’
‘Nevertheless, I am overlord and you are but a herald. Your rudeness to me is a slight against the blood of the Silent King.’
‘Listen well, Overlord Simut, so that the will of King Szarekh is plain. Any more delays and you will be replaced. The Contra-Empyric Matrix must expand on schedule. No more excuses.’
The image blinked out of existence before Simut could respond, leaving the overlord coiled within his own energy-forms, brooding and angry. He stalked up the steps to his throne and sat down, fingers forming into fists and then unclenching. Around him the mastaba-chamber flickered with agitated energy, fronds of power lapping from the circuit lines, the display wall shimmering with ripples of rogue power.
Behind Simut, one of the alcoves flared into life, bringing its occupant to full wakefulness. Stepping down with a metallic tread, the warden advanced around the dais and stopped before the overlord, lowering to one knee at the foot of the steps. He offered his weapon, laying the gauss cannon upon the lowest step.
‘I await your command, Blade of Szarekh, Sunlord of the Dynasty, Rising Light of the Stars of Heloki,’ the royal warden intoned, eyes briefly dimming as a sign of subservience while his cortical field connected to the will of Simut.
‘Arise, Phetos.’ Simut gestured with a metal claw. The royal warden retrieved his weapon and stood. ‘Summon the plasmancer. I would know why we have not yet completed the installation of the trans-empyric resonator.’
Simut could have easily accessed the communications conduits directly, but it would be unseemly to perform such a menial task. He felt the brief surge of power flowing into Phetos as the warden directed the energies of the Barge of the Stormhawk, sending an invisible beam of tachyons across the vacuum to the plasmancer, Ah-hotep.
While he waited for his subject to attend, the overlord focused the sensor wall on the world below. He turned the attention of his tomb ship on a city on the largest continent, where the cryptektonik survey had determined the pylon needed to stand for maximum effect. Was it coincidence that the most populous habitation on the human world was also the same location, or a sign that unknowingly the ignorant mortals had gathered at the nodal spot, drawn to its empyric footprint as some creatures blindly follow magnetic fields or pheromone trails? With the eyes of his starship Overlord Simut scrutinised and studied, fascinated and disgusted in equal measure by the transient creatures that had swarmed and multiplied across the stars.
As she drifted through the alien city, Ah-hotep felt herself moving through the liminal zone of the matrix. The soul-deadening throb of the resonator and Simut’s necrolith-infused warriors lay like a shroud on the buildings, a dead calm that felt like cooling ice on the plasmancer’s inorganic senses. It was a sensation of complete and utter stillness, devoid of the slightest turbulent thought or emotion. The stasis faded as she and her bodyguard of Szarekh dynasty warriors advanced on the last zone of resistance. Around them, the conurbation’s inhabitants wandered listlessly, sometimes frowning in dismay at the metallic skeletons and wraith-like plasmancer, but such was the extent of their reaction. Most barely registered the necrons at all. They slumped at the roadside or stood staring up at the black needle of the resonator high above, gaze drawn to the pylon that dominated their thoughts and suppressed their souls.
Sometimes the necron warriors had to thrust aside wandering humans, who would stagger away and either sit down or somehow totter a few steps before retaining their balance, coming to an unconscious equilibrium once more. Others would briefly flinch at the skull-faced phalanx, shuffling out of their path in a half-daze. Their mouths fell agape as they watched the column of animated soldiers marching past, strides in perfect unison, the clash of their tread rebounding from glass-faced spires and walls decorated with large ceramic tiles, the light of gauss energy dancing emerald gleams from every reflective surface.
It seemed like an age since Ah-hotep had given her physical environs anything more than a cursory acceptance. She took a moment to study the painted tiles, wondering who the people displayed on the glossy murals were, their hands held up to a bird figure at the summit of the wall. It seemed so inconsequential. In time, nothing would remain of the city except its constituent particles, engulfed by the great void and scattered on the stellar winds. Matter was impermanent; only energy endured.
The thought was prompted by a nagging emptiness in the heart of her floating construct-body. Sustained by incorporeal power, Ah-hotep first and foremost saw the universe as interconnected energies. She could sense the electrical power still coursing along cables beneath the street, and the waves of electromagnetism pulsing around the planet. Each human was a flicker of bioelectrical activity; the heat of slow breath-puffs of lambent radiation.
She turned her attention to one of the aliens, a short male that lingered by the corner of an alley, one shoulder against the wall, a hand half-lifted as though to point at the apparitions marching past. She could see its make-up down to the cellular level, the tiny bonds that kept it held together, so easily parted by the gauss effect of necron weapons. They formed blood vessels that became pulsing rivers of heat and vitality, feeding the organs and the powerful muscles.
Ah-hotep tried to remember flesh, the feel of it clothing a soul. No more. Now she was intellect in a manufactured body. She no longer walked as she would have done in physical life but was kept afloat by the same energies she craved. A chain of artificial vertebrae hung from her torso in mockery of what once was, her shoulders and back splayed with canoptek vaporators that shone with green power as they absorbed the nascent power fields around her.
She lowered her staff of office towards the slouching human, using its gauss coils to extend her own biotek field. Green light lanced from the tip and struck the human, lapping at the particle bonds like a beast at a waterhole, stripping down each layer of its form one molecule at a time.
There was no satisfaction to be had from such a tiny morsel. Ah-hotep could drain the whole city of its energy and still she would want more. She watched the human disintegrate, becoming dust on the breeze and then nothing.
Ahead, the unsuppressed minds of the humans defending the citadel were a far greater noise, a buzz of emerging static on the edge of her awareness. She could feel the throb of the great reactors that kept the defensive screens functioning and powered the weapons that had started to rain down rudimentary chemical-powered projectiles onto the army of Simut. Their energy weapons spat crudely condensed light beams, woefully inefficient yet powerful enough to shatter the living metal bodies of the necrons.
Here and nowhere else, the effects of the Contra-Empyric Matrix were being held back. It was not entirely unexpected that the crux point of the world’s astromantic field would prove the most resistant to the soul-deadening overnull, but it was inconvenient. Already several hundred of Simut’s warriors had been force-ported back to the tomb ships for reconstruction. The screens themselves oscillated at an astromantic frequency, simulating a breach into the neversea. They swallowed the particle beams and gauss rays of the attackers and prevented translocation to within their effect, so Ah-hotep had brought herself down to the planet to personally denude the enemy citadel of its power.
She liked the sonascape, a calming mix of ambient waves emanating from unattended machinery in the distance. She did not hear as she had done so when mortal, but her highly attuned biotek field could pick up the vibrations of the slightest sound, so that the beating hearts of the nearby humans created a background thrum that danced across every surface. A more aggressive turbulence emanated from the citadel at the settlement’s centre, where stabs of generator power and the thud of weaponry created ripples of disturbance through the sonascape.
The enemy fortification was a grandiose structure at the centre of the city, rising above the buildings that surrounded it. Through the shimmer of the screens, Ah-hotep saw banked storeys of battlements and buttresses, broken by cannon turrets and embrasures. The double-headed eagle device of the Imperial humans was carved in relief on many walls and above the great gateways at ground level. That they even dared call their scattered colonies an empire was an affront to the necrons. It had no more claim on a galaxy than the microscopic organisms of a sea could claim to rule the waves. In time the dominion of the necrons would be restored and the child races either exploited properly or exterminated.
The route to the main barbican was littered with corpses as proof of the defenders’ reluctance to succumb, though only for a short distance outside the influence of the citadel’s astromantic footprint. The humans had learnt early on that if they strayed too far from their defensive line, they succumbed wholly to the overnull’s debilitating shadow. This was the weakness of the defence, which Simut had so far failed to exploit. He had despatched his great war engines and elite phalanxes to overwhelm the citadel with a single grandiose attack. This had played directly into the strength of the enemy, giving them valuable targets to destroy at distance.
Ah-hotep had another plan: overcome with attrition. Three thousand of Simut’s warriors marched with her along three intersecting routes, and would come upon the foe in such numbers that they would physically breach the defensive screens. Once within, Ah-hotep would draw out the energy of the defenders and hunt down the astromancers whose powers kept the overnull at bay. Once the thought-strong were slain, the resonator would fog the minds of the survivors, leaving them unable to defend themselves as the plasmancer shut down their weapons and defences. Her army would occupy the citadel and the placement of the resonator could be completed.
