Shadow Captain - David Annandale Read online

  PROLOGUE

  The orks raced over their dead. They trampled the fallen, crushed bodies to pulp beneath treads and wheels, and left a wake of their own blood with every metre of their advance. Their battle joy raged. It shook the air itself.

  The aggression wave travelled ahead of the horde. It was a continuous battering. There was no adapting to it. The furious revel kept growing. The wave built on itself, a monstrous, mountainous psychic shock that never crested and never troughed, yet crashed and crashed and crashed against the eldar. The orks rode the crest of the wave, howling with the glee of absolute destruction. They came to smash and sever, shoot and burn. They came for a violence so pure, victory was incidental.

  That would not make it any less real. Or catastrophic.

  Though they died by the hundreds, the orks didn’t care. They were ecstatic. The deaths didn’t matter. And they were closing in on the city. Though they could not know what its capture truly meant, that didn’t matter either.

  The orks raced over their dead, and they raced towards victory.

  Perched in the high branches of a conifer at the edge of a narrow forest, Alathannas pulled the trigger of his long rifle with a steady rhythm. Every second, he dropped another ork, taking his prey out with a concentrated energy bolt between the eyes. He chose the big targets. The larger the ork, the more authority it wielded. His hope: kill enough leaders to create confusion in the ranks and slow down the advance.

  The reality: there were so many big orks. Too many.

  On the plain before him, the warriors of Saim-Hann fought to stem the green tide. Jetbikes streaked the length of the front lines, their shuriken catapults shredding the orks into strips. They were supported by a squadron of Vypers, whose rear-mounted bright lances struck at the ork battlewagons. The harvest of death was immense. The eldar irrigated the plain with ork blood. And the brutes came on. The war-fire in their veins burned ever higher. Nothing would turn them back. Only total annihilation would stop them.

  It would also be the one thing that would end the Saim-Hann struggle. Alathannas would snipe his prey until he was ground beneath the wheels of the ork tanks. And that, he knew, was his likely end. The orks had the numbers for a war of extermination. The eldar did not.

  Alathannas fought the temptation to look behind. He knew what there was to see. Nothing would have changed. If it had, if the thing he both hoped and feared was transpiring, he would hear the change. If he turned his head, he would miss an opportunity for at least one more precious kill. In exchange, all he would see would be the reminder of how little space and how little time the Saim-Hann had left.

  The forest was barely a hundred metres wide. It ran north and south a few thousand metres in either direction from the ranger’s position, marking the end of the plain. The land sloped downwards through the trees. Beyond the forest was an even narrower strip of barren, rocky ground, ending at a deep gorge. The river at the bottom was a thin ribbon. The bridge that spanned the gorge was the only access to the western side of the city.

  The city whose beauty had died millennia before. The city that was now a brutal cluster of human spires. The city that had become an aesthetic scab on the surface of the planet.

  The city that the orks must not take.

  Alathannas aimed and fired, aimed and fired. Every kill was a handful of water taken from the ocean. Every shot was a denial of the futility of what he was doing. Every pull of the trigger was an act of defiance. He was fighting as hard against his own despair as he was against the orks.

  Despair. The state had the toxic allure of simple logic. In the adjacent system, the orks and tyranids clashed, destroying each other by the millions, and thus strengthening each other. The orks were spilling out of their empire, and now they had come to this system. Perhaps their initial incursion had been the result of luck. The improbable played a dismayingly crucial role in the successes of the orks.

  The first orks into the system were a terrible sign. The first on the planet were catastrophic. Alathannas was sure that the orks did not understand how important the world was to them. Their understanding, though, was irrelevant. They wanted the world, and so they would take it, and given enough time, in the end, they would find the secret.

  In the end. Yes, that would be the end. For uncountable systems. Alathannas could bring himself to face the material destruction that would follow. He refused to imagine the spiritual damage that would strike the eldar.

  The one comfort that might come from failure on this day would be not living to see its consequences. But such comfort was cowardice. It was not on the path down which Alathannas was travelling.

  ‘I am here,’ he whispered. He was here for his kin. He had voyaged far from the craftworld. It had been so long since he had seen it that his memories of home were growing distant to him, curiosities without pain, and he knew that his emotional distance did not inspire trust. He could wish that his actions would prove his loyalty, though he had his doubts. He knew how important this mission was, and what its failure would mean. He felt the dread of those consequences so acutely that he nurtured a forbidden hope. Though he risked treason even to think of this event, he would welcome it.

  He could see how the battle was going. The orks were pushing the eldar back. In another few minutes, the Saim-Hann would be forced to fight in the woods. The wave of orks might break into foam in the trees, but the skimmers would be hampered, too. The horde’s advance would continue. The orks would push the eldar to the bridge. This was inevitable. It was as true as if it had already happened.

  Now he felt a greater fatalism with each pull of the trigger. It might even be the despair after all. A battlewagon took out a Vyper with its big gun, brutish excess of explosive triumphing over the perfected art of war. The skimmer’s elegant flight turned into a rolling fireball, its pilot and gunner vanishing into the wraithbone pyre. The other Vypers slashed through the troops and concentrated their lances at the tank, bringing the energy to bear on a single point of the lower rear armour. They ruptured the fuel tank, ignited it, and rewarded fire with fire.

  But the green tide was endless. The front lines of the orks were ragged, but they were also amorphous, spreading like liquid across the plain, defying the eldar attempts to hold them back. The skimmers were no longer in front of the ork army. They were in its midst. There were more tanks coming, and ahead of them were the raving mechanical monsters that the orks created by wiring their kin into armoured cylinders. Piston legs smashed into the ground with all the pained rage of the pilots. Articulated metal arms with pincers or snarling blades for hands waved with hunger. The guns on either side of the cylinders unleashed a perpetual stream of projectiles whose size and velocity rendered their primitive nature irrelevant.

  The walkers were mad. And they were lethal. Even as the Vypers killed the battlewagon, three of the walkers lurched forwards with a sudden unity and surrounded a jetbike. The density of the orks was slowing the skimmers down, hampering their movement. The jetbike pilot, cut off from his squadron, tried to evade the orks. He couldn’t. Three pairs of arms fell on his ride. He was already dead before three of his comrades managed a return pass to come to his aid. They shot the arms off one of the walkers, but the central mass of the beast survived their attack. The cluster of cylinders turned as one. They met the jetbikes head-on. Their fire was unavoidable, devastating. Two of the skimmers, their pilots dead, slammed into the walkers. The conflagration spread wide, taking out the third jetbike and every ork within a dozen metres.

  Six eldar had died in the last few seconds compared to scores of orks.

  The advantage was to the orks.
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br />   From a great distance, Alathannas realised he was whispering curses. He mouthed the oaths without emotion. He killed the orks without hope. Another few seconds, and he would have to retreat. The tide was lapping at the edge of the forest.

  Then, over the primal howl of the orks and the sear of energy bolts, he heard it. The event was beginning. His forbidden wish was coming to pass. Still he exercised discipline, and did not look towards the city until the orks were only moments away. He dropped down from his tree and ran deeper into the woods. Beneath his cameleoline cloak, he was almost invisible. Once their numbers were great enough, though, the orks wouldn’t have to see him to crush him beneath their onslaught.

  Alathannas reached the edge of the woods. He had a clear view across the gorge to the city, and of the territory to the south and west, on the other side of the river, where the elevation dropped and the river once more meandered through a plain. He saw the streaks in the sky. He gave himself a few seconds to observe the descent of tears of metal. The humans were coming. They were the one hope left against the orks.

  The ranger’s despair retreated. His dread, however, did not.

  It grew worse.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The command tent stood in the centre of the Raven Guard base. Its walls flapped sluggishly in the wind that blew over the wide plain. Inside, surrounded by his sergeants, Reszasz Krevaan leaned over the tacticarium table, eyeing the hololithic map of the region.

  ‘They’re flanking, Shadow Captain,’ Sergeant Behrasi said.

  Krevaan traced a route on the map leading down from the flash point at the bridge. ‘Sweeping around to the south?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, as expected.’

  ‘Any signs that they care about our presence?’ It was most likely that the orks had seen the drop pods come down, though he knew, given their single-minded focus on the eldar, that it was possible they were unaware of the Raven Guard’s presence. But he could not risk such an assumption. Krevaan did not believe in the ignorant act. Information was the most potent weapon he knew. The warrior in the dark required a battle-barge. The one with full knowledge of the enemy needed only a blade.

  ‘The greenskins appear to be focused on the eldar,’ Behrasi told him. ‘Not one of them has shown any interest in this location.’

  ‘Good. Thank you, brother-sergeant.’ He thought for a moment while the rest of his sergeants waited. If the orks wanted a fight, they would find the Raven Guard Eighth Company ready. The drop pods had landed about a kilometre south of the city of Reclamation, and Krevaan had ordered the base established here. The location was nondescript. It was not a defensible position, a fact that held exactly no importance for Krevaan. The Raven Guard were on the attack on Lepidus Prime. If they wound up on the defence, then they had already failed their mission. The location was a useful one for its openness. Enemies would be visible from a great distance.

  ‘Have you reached my fellow captains?’ Krevaan asked Akrallas, who was operating the vox.

  ‘I have Captain Mulcebar. No luck with Temur Khan.’

  ‘Anything at all from the moon?’

  ‘Fragmentary. Some brief moments from the Mordian Iron Guard.’

  ‘Which leads me to guess you are hearing nothing good.’

  ‘It seems the orks have a great deal of heavy armour on the moon as well.’

  ‘The White Scars must be delighted,’ Krevaan muttered. He indulged in a moment of irony at the expense of the sons of Chogoris, but only a moment. Though the Raven Guard had no love for the White Scars, the difficulties that Temur was facing had implications for them all. The Imperial forces had expected the orks to be formidable, but based on how long they were known to have been in the Lepidus system, it didn’t seem possible for them to have ramped up tank production to such a degree. Yet they had. That was the reality of the situation. Krevaan accepted that. There was information that was missing. That bothered him more.

  He took the handset from Akrallas. He was connected to Mulcebar, captain of the Salamanders Fifth Company, on the strike cruiser Verdict of the Anvil. ‘Has there been any change?’ he asked Mulcebar.

  ‘None. All quiet.’

  ‘That won’t last. We are just getting started.’ He was aware that his optimism sounded forced. The plan was ambitious. The Overfiend ork had defiled an Imperial system. The White Scars, the Raven Guard and the Salamanders would do more than crush the invading force: they would use the Overfiend’s own temerity against the warlord. For whatever reason, the Overfiend had committed massive resources to conquering Lepidus. If the beast wanted the system badly enough, the thinking went, important losses might draw it out of Octavius to take personal charge of the invasion. Greenskin psychology was not sophisticated. A good fight, frustrated desire and a point of pride would be enough to call the monster forth from the safety of its stronghold.

  So the White Scars would destroy the heavy armour manufactorum on the moon of Lepidus Prime. The Raven Guard would put an end to the threat on the planet, and so preserve the Imperial colony. At the edge of the system, the Salamanders would wait in the Verdict of the Anvil for the Overfiend to show itself.

  Yes, an ambitious plan. Sound as far as it went. Krevaan accepted the merits of its conception. He was troubled by its lacunae. For whatever reason. Orks were creatures of aggression and impulse. Krevaan had rarely known them to do anything for a reason. But ‘rarely’ wasn’t ‘never’. When there was discernible reason behind ork actions, that was when they were at their most profoundly dangerous, as Armageddon had learned to its cost. The orks had not hit Lepidus as a raiding force. This was a campaign. The manufactorum was proof of that. And now silence from Temur and the White Scars. Signs that something was calling very forcefully to the orks.

  ‘If we’re just getting started,’ Mulcebar said, ‘I wish our start were more assured. We cannot raise Temur on the vox.’

  ‘Nor can we.’

  ‘And your situation?’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘When a Raven Guard tells me something is interesting,’ said Mulcebar, ‘I brace myself for the worst.’

  ‘There is an eldar force combating the orks.’

  ‘Oh. That is interesting.’

  ‘Puzzling, too.’ Unknowns on the moon. Unknowns on Lepidus Prime. Too many. Mulcebar was right to be wary. ‘To all appearances, their primary objective is to prevent the orks from taking Reclamation.’

  ‘Why would the eldar concern themselves with the fate of one of our cities?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  The Salamander was silent for a moment, taking in the full contours of the mystery. Then he said, ‘What are your plans?’

  ‘The orks are more numerous and better equipped than the Navy’s reports to us had suggested. The eldar might be useful. The orks won’t see us coming.’

  Mulcebar chuckled. ‘Does any foe see the Raven Guard coming?’

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ Krevaan admitted. ‘Good hunting, brother.’

  ‘And to you.’

  Krevaan turned back to his officers. ‘Brother-Sergeant Caeligus, take your squad to the bridge.’ The span over the gorge was the clear focus of the struggle between the two xenos races. He would show eldar and greenskins alike that control of the gateway to Reclamation belonged to neither. ‘Prepare it for demolition. Do not destroy it until you receive my command. Sergeant Behrasi, how large is the ork flanking movement?’

  ‘It is a considerable one. No heavy vehicles, but a number of smaller ones. They’re putting a premium on speed.’

  ‘Your estimation?’

  ‘If they manage to come up behind the eldar, that war is finished.’

  ‘Then we shall prolong it.’

  Caeligus and his men approached the bridge through the city. They had the streets to themselves. The orks were still a few kilometres distant, but the roar of their invasion had already arriv
ed. An endless howl filled the air and bounced off the façades. The echoes of gunfire and cannon shells were a constant thunder. The sound was a terrible promise of destruction to come.

  The citizens of Reclamation were off the streets. They hid behind their walls. Caeligus understood the mortals’ impulse to seek refuge. He wondered, though, whether they understood how pointless the attempt was. If the orks entered the city, there would be no defence, no shelter. No mercy.

  The human occupation of Lepidus Prime was a relatively recent one. Reclamation had been established only in the last century. The planet was verdant, fertile, temperate, and free of xenos taint, but the system’s proximity to Octavius had made it an uncertain proposition. When it had appeared, to the more optimistic members of the Adeptus Administratum, that the Overfiend’s war with the tyranids would keep both xenos horrors occupied with each other indefinitely, permission had been granted for colonisation. The founders of Reclamation were the descendants of the noble families of Orrok, the survivors who had fled the ork takeover of Octavius hundreds of years before.

  The spread of the colony had been slow. Reclamation remained the only major population centre. There were a few small clusters of homes on farmland some distance to the east, but most of those had been abandoned as the ork invasion had dawned. The humans had withdrawn into their city. Caeligus had heard a few of the exchanges that his captain had had with the planetary governor, Aloysius Kesmir. The man’s hololith revealed him as a thin creature, whose bones seemed slightly too long for his skin. He spoke with a mixture of fear and stubbornness. He was terrified of the orks, but determined to stand his ground.

  Or at least remain on it, while someone else actually fought the war. Caeligus had the impression that the governor was a good exemplar of the populace. He was unimpressed, but the possible unworthiness of the people of Lepidus was of no concern to the Raven Guard. They had not come to defend a colony. They had come to exterminate an enemy.

  As he passed through the city, though, he looked at it with interest. Its architecture was not what he had expected in something so new. He saw plenty of prefab rockcrete, but the city was just old enough that the colony’s initial homogeneity had eroded. Modifications and additions were breaking down the uniformity, differentiating one hab zone from another, creating a sense of local character.