The Eternal Crusader - Guy Haley Page 6

  With the cordon around the world broken in half a dozen places by the space hulks, small, swift landing ships hurried through while the hulks began a bombardment. Fusion bombs rained down from the battle-barges in return, slamming into the hulks. Where they scored hits, the rock and steel of the ork vessels became pockmarked by glowing craters. But the hulks were so vast, so heavily armoured and protected by energy fields and anti-ordnance fire that it did little good.

  Under the hulks’ protection, the orks’ rustships pierced the diffuse layers of the outer atmosphere, hulls glowing as they descended. Imperial ships pirouetted, delicately avoiding each other, trying to keep their guns trained on the landing craft, but there were too many to destroy. The High Marshal roared out his anger at them.

  ‘All Adeptus Astartes vessels! Concentrate all fire on the hulk designate Woeful Desolation. Naval strike wings, keep the battle-barges free of ork attack. We’ll take one of these abominations down before we retreat.’ A chorus of thirty different Imperial dialects acknowledged him.

  Servitors gabbled their sluggish alarms.

  ‘We’ve energy spikes from all over the hulks, my liege, unknown source or purpose,’ said an augur officer.

  ‘My liege, we have reports of orks landing all over the surface,’ said another.

  ‘How is that possible? None of their ships have made landfall. Teleportation? It is said they used such technology during the invasion of Piscina Four,’ said Helbrecht.

  ‘Aye, my lord. No ships, orks appearing out of nowhere,’ confirmed Baloster.

  ‘Concentrate fire! Destroy the Woeful Desolation!’

  Helbrecht had chosen the hulk on a whim. All were bespoke creations, no recognisable class. Their capabilities and intended purpose were unknown. Some were bewildering mishmashes of rock and derelicts – true, warp-forged space hulks adapted by the orks. Others appeared to have been constructed, while two were giant asteroids festooned with ramshackle towers and thrusters. Woeful Desolation paid richly for the actions of its fellows. The rain of fusion bombs slamming into it overwhelmed the hulk’s crackling green energy fields. As they impacted on its void-worn surface, the outer layers were turned to ruddy slag. Still it persisted, until one of the lava bombs broke through into some vital internal space. With a tremendous heave, its back broke, scattering rubble and metal all across Armageddon’s upper orbits, troubling already damaged ships and knocking void shields down across a swathe of Helbrecht’s fleet.

  A cheer went up on the command deck. ‘Praise be!’ the serfs and brothers of the Black Templars shouted. ‘Praise be!’

  Helbrecht did not join their cheers; his attention remained on the bewildering dance of hundreds of ships across the command deck displays.

  The Imperial fleet was in a poor position. The orks had effectively dismantled its formation. Many of the attackers died, but so close to the planet, that the ships the massed Space Marines fleet shot down were as much a hazard as those they didn’t. The downed craft became missiles, spearing towards the planet bearing the promise of destruction as surely as if they had still been packed with living orks.

  ‘My liege, you should take a look at this,’ Baloster called, drawing Helbrecht’s attention to a section of the screen, which he duly magnified.

  Helbrecht watched on the oculus as an asteroid was catapulted from an aperture at the front of a hulk they had dubbed the Malevolent Dread. The asteroid, vaster than an island, tumbled with deceptive slowness towards the world below. It skipped across the surface of the world’s blanket of air, glowing hotter as friction did its work. On its second orbit, it was dragged down into the haze beneath. The impact came twelve minutes later. The plume of superheated vapour it threw out reached all the way into the upper atmosphere, the blast front racing out across the wastelands of Armageddon at supersonic speed, destroying everything in its way.

  ‘Hades Hive has been destroyed, my liege,’ said Baloster.

  ‘As Yarrick predicted,’ said Helbrecht dispassionately.

  And then the Malevolent Dread turned its guns upon the Eternal Crusader. Crude cannons wheeled out of irregular apertures all along the thing’s ugly spine. Welded artlessly together from two massive ships, one alien of unknown origin, the other ancient Imperial, the Malevolent Dread was a graceless chimera of a ship, but deadly.

  Blasts of green lightning hurled themselves across space, writhing all over the Eternal Crusader’s shields. They flared brighter and brighter, struggling to shrug off the actinic energy wracking them.

  With a tortured groan, the shields collapsed. The Eternal Crusader was wide open to attacks from all quarters, and they came. As if the Black Templars flagship had been identified as key to the Imperial defence, a hundred ork attack craft assailed it simultaneously.

  The ship rumbled under the assault.

  ‘Get the shields up!’ ordered Helbrecht. He came to a decision. ‘Hail Admiral Parol. Prepare for retreat.’

  Parol’s voice sounded out over the command deck, vying with the noise of the Eternal Crusader at war.

  ‘High Marshal,’ said Parol. He was harassed, but the steel in him shone through. His manner suggested that Helbrecht make this quick.

  ‘They are too many – we are too many, admiral. We’re getting in each other’s way. Your ships are too few for this fight, and our ships are certainly not intended for this kind of warfare. We must pull back, and engage them from a distance – let us see if we can convince a few of the orks to follow us and break up their attack.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Parol. ‘We have had some success harrying the advance, but we cannot sustain this level of attrition. The war must be fought on the surface, for now.’

  Parol signed off.

  ‘Signal Grimaldus,’ said Helbrecht. Down there, it was the calm before the storm. In minutes, that calm would be swept away.

  ‘I can’t raise him, my liege.’

  ‘Then take this message, and send it into the vox-network.’ Helbrecht began, pitching his voice so that it cut through the racket of bombardment. ‘Helsreach, this is Crusader. We are breaking from the planet. The orbital war is lost.’ A weapons platform burst apart in a briefly lived orange fireball, the shockwave causing the ship to rumble and punctuating Helbrecht’s speech with its destruction. ‘Repeat, the orbital war is lost. Grimaldus… Once you hear these words, stand ready. You are Mordred’s heir, and my trust rides with you. Hell is coming, brother. The Great Beast’s fleet is without number, but faith and fury will see your duty done.

  ‘Grimaldus, die well.’

  Helbrecht took a deep breath. ‘Message ends. All ships retreat, all ships retreat! Break from orbit. We will return when the odds favour us better.’

  The Eternal Crusader’s engines howled in protest as the ship’s pilots brought it about and pointed its ornate prow away from Armageddon. Firing all the way, the warship departed, the battered fleets of a dozen Space Marine Chapters flying after.

  Three days later, the fleets of the Imperium gathered in orbit of Armageddon’s primary gas giant to regroup. Fleet tenders from St Jowen’s Dock dodged ork blockades to bring ammunition, supplies and crew. All over the fleet, repair tugs and service vehicles flew to and fro, the brittle electric sparks of Adeptus Mechanicus and Imperial Navy repair crews twinkling upon damaged hulls.

  His Will was moored alongside the Eternal Crusader. Within the High Marshal’s quarters, Admiral Parol took counsel with Helbrecht.

  Parol was a slender man, thin-faced with an aquiline nose underlined by a pencil moustache. He had a cynical kind of expression, not helped by his features being twisted out of shape by his shipmaster’s ocular augmetics and interface. He was shrewish on occasion, but shrewd, and respected because of that.

  He disliked dealing with the Adeptus Astartes on their own ground; everything was too damned big. Trying and failing to get comfortable in their ludicrous furniture while they towered over him made him feel like a child, dragged before the Magna Domina for some schoolboy transgression at the scho
la navitas. There was something nightmarish about it all. Aboard his ship, surrounded by his officers and with a spread of the Navy’s greatest vessels at his beck and call, Parol felt not invincible, because that kind of thinking got a voidsman dead very quickly, but potent. In the chambers of this giant, he felt robbed of all his power. That the High Marshal was completely devoid of expression did not help. Space Marines could be difficult to read at the best of times; beyond fervour and aggression, their emotional range was so limited. Helbrecht was worse than most. His face showed nothing of his feelings. Even though his gruff voice rumbled words heavy with respect for Parol, it somehow made no difference. The admiral couldn’t help the feeling that he was being reprimanded.

  I’m the second son of an Imperial commander, he reminded himself. My father ran a Blessed-Throne planet. I’ve a million men under my command.

  He still couldn’t shake the feeling.

  ‘You’re a fine admiral, Parol,’ Helbrecht was saying. ‘I know what you achieved at Pelucidar. This isolation and destruction of the first ork hulks is very fine voidsmanship. And approaching assault group Gamma 14 with your engines cut to avoid detection was an admirably intelligent move.’

  ‘My thanks to you, Lord High Marshal,’ said Parol, shifting uncomfortably in his oversized chair. The goblet was a bucket in his hand, enough wine sloshing in its bowl to render every one of his command deck crew insensible, he reckoned. ‘The orks have their beachheads on Armageddon Prime. They are gathered about Armageddon in too great a force. There is nothing we can do about that, but we can disrupt their supply and reinforcement, and destroy the unwary. Once the Season of Fire begins, they will be unable to land at all. It is my contention that they will become bored and a portion of the fleet will move away from Armageddon towards other targets. Once the fleet breaks up, they will be vulnerable.’

  ‘Are you certain of this?’ asked Helbrecht. Not so much a question as a test of Parol’s knowledge, the admiral felt.

  ‘Of course. Not even the Great Beast can constrain the greenskins’ lust for violence. We can use this to our advantage.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Helbrecht. ‘Your battlefleet should continue with its current strategy of seek and destroy. We Adeptus Astartes will switch tactics as of now, however.’

  Parol leaned forwards to put his giant drink on the table. He slipped on the edge of Helbrecht’s chair, and was forced to brace himself clumsily with his foot. Not only was the chair too big for him, it was extremely hard. He gave up and stood. Even then, the sitting Helbrecht’s eyeline fell only a short way below Parol’s own. Parol drew himself up in an unconscious attempt to appear larger, caught himself doing it, and felt ridiculous.

  ‘You are speaking of boarding actions, I presume. That is more to your liking. The Black Templars, the other Chapters… Direct assault.’

  Helbrecht nodded. ‘More of our brother Chapters are inbound from the rest of the sector. Ork presence is lighter outside of the Armageddon System proper than feared. I have a number of astropathic messages promising aid. I will transmit them to the Adeptus Astartes fleet.’

  ‘These men would be better on the surface, surely…’ said Parol, waving his hand as a conclusion to his trailing sentence.

  ‘Exactly my thinking, admiral. The Adeptus Astartes will best serve the Emperor on the surface. I have spoken with many others of my brothers from other Chapters, including Chapter Master Tu’Shan of the Salamanders. Several of them wish to make orbital insertion to bolster the defences. We have more than enough warriors to defend our fleet and make sorties against the enemy hulks.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Parol. ‘How many ships will need to approach?’

  ‘In total, perhaps twenty. I estimate we will have gathered approximately thirteen companies of Adeptus Astartes, according to Guilliman’s codex.’ Helbrecht managed to make this sound like an insult; his kind had never had much time for the strictures of the Ultramarines primarch. ‘A deployment of fifty-eight Thunderhawks, eighty-nine drop pods – mass deployment is to be recommended.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘The Salamanders have a large contingent currently aboard the Serpentine. There are many others. We should rely on speed. I have advised my brothers to remove their men to their strike cruisers and leave their barges behind. This will be a blockade run, nothing more. We cannot risk being mired in orbit again.’

  Parol twisted his hands into one another behind his back and looked out to the assembled fleet. Not a single ship was free of damage. ‘Another approach to Armageddon itself. This is a somewhat inadvisable course of action.’

  ‘It cannot be done any other way, lord admiral.’

  ‘I am aware of that, Lord High Marshal,’ said Parol, struggling to keep the waspish tone from his voice. ‘But it is nevertheless a difficult proposition.’

  ‘But not impossible.’

  ‘Indeed, no.’ Parol looked around the room in curiosity, a moment of distraction. Not thinking about the war only for that instant, he felt how immensely tired he was. Exhaustion was like a heavy cape sodden with rain dragging at his shoulders.

  Helbrecht was not done. ‘There is more, admiral. Once the orbital insertion is complete, I will depart for a short time on business of my own.’

  That got Parol’s attention. He turned quickly on his heels to look at Helbrecht. ‘What? What did you say?’

  The High Marshal remained expressionless. ‘Marshals Amalrich and Ricard are travelling to our Chapter keep at Fergax. I am to go to them to form a grand congregation of my Chapter.’

  ‘And why can they not come here to you?’

  ‘Because I have an idea, admiral. One that will better serve our efforts than ordering them into the system piecemeal.’

  ‘The other Space Marines will not unify behind another commander.’

  Helbrecht shook his head. ‘They will. You.’

  ‘If that were the case I would be delighted, High Marshal,’ said Parol. ‘But I doubt it. There is bound to be disunity. If I were a betting man, and I am from time to time, that’s a wager I would gladly take.’

  ‘Yes,’ conceded Helbrecht. ‘You are correct, but it will play a part in my plan. I have ordered the Adeptus Astartes fleet to disperse anyway, to undertake hit and run and boarding actions separate from the combined fleet. Let them fight as Chapter units for a while. This should encourage the orks to fragment, and draw a portion of them away before the Season of Fire begins. I will not be gone long. I aim to return before the commencement of the Season of Shadows.’

  ‘Very well,’ sighed Parol. ‘Emperor knows, High Marshal Helbrecht, you are a skilled fleetmaster and a renowned warrior. I am sure you have your reasons. You will share them, I hope?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Helbrecht, in a way that quite definitely did not mean ‘of course’.

  ‘Good. What should be our next move? These boarding actions you mention, Lord High Marshal. Let us coordinate the first of those.’

  Helbrecht gave Parol an unreadable look. ‘One thing at a time, admiral.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Gathering of Brothers

  Fergax turned peacefully beneath the ventral weapon mounts of the Eternal Crusader, green and ignorant of the endless wars wracking the heavens. A feral world, innocent in spirit, some might think. The people there lived hard but simple lives, their greatest contribution to the Imperium being a supply of recruits for the Black Templars crusades. The world hosted a Chapter keep; aside from that, the Emperor and all his doings were myths to its inhabitants.

  The Chapter anchor at Fergax played host to more brothers of the order than had been gathered simultaneously for two thousand years. The aged castellan, a Space Marine too damaged to fight further, had been extremely relieved when Helbrecht informed him that the Black Templars would not be descending to the surface en masse, but would remain in orbit.

  Above the backwater world, more ships had joined the Black Templars fleet: the cruiser Virtue of Kings, commanded by Marshal Amalrich of the Damari
s Crusade, and the battle-barge Light of Purity, lead vessel of the Tiberor Crusade under Ricard. Five more escorts came with them to bolster Helbrecht’s destroyer and light cruiser squadrons. Three combined crusades of the Black Templars were, by any measure, a powerful force.

  Helbrecht greeted his marshals in person as they arrived on one of the Eternal Crusader’s cavernous embarkation decks. Amalrich landed as Helbrecht, Theoderic and their entourage of honour guard, sergeant-serfs and mortal priests arrived at the deck. Amalrich’s Thunderhawk was as black as interstellar space, its hard angles brightened by the marshal’s personal heraldry.

  Amalrich, the younger of the two, strode down the gangplank. Four Sword Brethren of humourless demeanour and a dozen shield-serfs came after him. All looked as if doomsday was upon them, except the marshal himself, who wore a broad smile. He took Helbrecht’s armoured forearm in the warrior’s grasp. ‘Brother Helbrecht! Master of Sanctity Theoderic. How goes the war at Armageddon?’

  ‘Badly,’ said Helbrecht.

  Amalrich pulled a concerned expression tinged with disbelief.

  ‘I had heard you had destroyed three hulks through boarding actions alone, my liege.’

  ‘I have,’ said Helbrecht. ‘It is not enough.’

  Honking klaxons announced the arrival of Ricard. A serf officer’s warnings echoed over the landed craft arrayed neatly down the length of the deck, the tail end of his orders lost to the scream of engines as Ricard’s Thunderhawk blasted from the launch tubes. Armsmen, deck-serfs and forge thralls marched to their positions, ready to welcome the machine-spirit of the ship. With a wash of acrid exhaust, the ship came to a gentle hover and landed with the clanking of spreading landing claws.

  ‘I have news, brother!’ shouted Amalrich over the roar of Ricard’s ship. ‘A Champion has arisen.’