The Eternal Crusader - Guy Haley Read online

  Over the scrying chamber was the Acies Horrens, a dome of toughened armourglass reinforced with adamantium rods and threaded with veins of psy-active crystal. Thousands of charms, seals and other holy, esoteric wards were placed upon its muntins.

  Nevertheless, although they were in real space, the great bipartite shutters were closed, only to be opened when necessity demanded and the Navigator must guide the ship through the warp. Helbrecht was an Adeptus Astartes, biogenetically crafted to feel no fear, and yet he was glad the Acies shutters were closed. What that window revealed was unholy, not for men to see, not even men like him.

  Jushol rolled the parchment tight and clutched it. ‘Refreshments, High Marshal?’

  Female menials came to them, bodies as cosmetically modified as the house mistress’s. Helbrecht supposed they represented some bizarre beauty aesthetic; Jushol certainly looked upon them favourably, his face lighting up with some emotion alien to the High Marshal. The women said nothing to him, other than to pay the proper respect. Their whispering robes were their only voices as they silently gave out sweetmeats and wine. Helbrecht sipped it; it was like no vintage he had ever tasted, born of unfamiliar fruit.

  Jushol took his own goblet, his long fingers wrapping delicately around it, too long for a human hand.

  ‘Soon I must leave the Eternal Crusader and return to Terra. My time of bonding approaches. I have license from the Paternova, and the match chosen by my family is propitious. When this is done, I will fly no more. Other duties call.’ What other duties were he did not elaborate, and Helbrecht did not ask. The byzantine power struggles of the Navis Nobilite were not his concern.

  ‘We will miss you, Lord Navigator,’ said Helbrecht. ‘You have proven yourself invaluable to the Eternal Crusader.’

  ‘It is a venerable vessel. It has been my great honour to serve aboard it.’ He looked around the ornamented dome, mixed feelings on his elongated face.

  ‘You see the light of the Emperor every day – you are truly blessed. Surely you will miss the light of the Astronomican?’

  ‘If you saw what I saw, my lord, you would not think me blessed at all. But yes, in answer to your question, I will miss it. I will never be blind to the light.’ He tapped the cloth band about his forehead over his third eye. ‘This is the eye that never sleeps. But to guide a starship such as this through the immaterium? I will miss that.’

  ‘Then this will be my last petition to you, Lord Navigator.’ Helbrecht gestured towards the scroll. ‘Can you do it?’

  ‘Jumping into a system within the safe zone of the Mandeville point is not to be advised. Jumping into the midst of a battle… Well, my lord, that is practically suicide, although our gravitic death-wave might well win you the battle. Posthumously, that is.’

  Helbrecht glowered. ‘Suicide for some, perhaps, Lord Navigator, but our Chapter is guided by the hand of the Emperor himself. Did we not cross the stars to Armageddon with great speed? Was the journey to Fergax not shortened by His intervention? By the same means, we will emerge unscathed and bring his fury down upon our enemy.’

  Jushol shrugged equivocally. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘So, can you do it?’

  Jushol’s eyes slid closed, the movements of his warp eye visible through its silk blindfold like the embryo of a shark twitching in its pouch. ‘Yes, yes, my lord, I can. What you suggest is a great risk.’ Jushol essayed a smile, tight on his parchment skin. ‘But I relish the chance at one last challenge. I will speak with the others of my House within your fleet, but they will not refuse. Where I go, they are pledged to follow. I will gladly do as you ask. When?’

  ‘When the Emperor commands it,’ said Helbrecht.

  Admiral Parol paced the bridge of His Will. He was exhausted by months of warfare, but could not rest. And so, between the endless engagements with the ork fleets, the hit-and-run battles, the ambushes and kill-missions, he walked his command deck until he could walk no more.

  ‘Sir, I have an astropathic response from High Marshal Helbrecht. He has emerged from the warp at Fergax, and has been joined by an additional five hundred members of his Chapter.’

  Parol walked around the rows of his bridge officers to the astropathic liaison’s desk. He leaned in close to the cogitator screen where the astropath’s report scrolled jerkily downwards in an eye-watering green.

  ‘He’s been gone a month. That is good news. Does he give notice of when he might return to Armageddon?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the officer hesitantly.

  ‘And? And? Go on.’

  ‘It says they are waiting for a sign.’

  ‘A sign?’ said Parol.

  ‘From the Emperor.’

  ‘Obviously from the Emperor, lieutenant. Who else?’ said Parol shortly. The news had agitated him. He wanted Helbrecht back, and soon. ‘I doubt they are hanging on the word of your mother.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘Well then.’ Parol stood straight again.

  ‘Sir,’ said the lieutenant. He was a career officer from a good family, but as one that couldn’t stop his mouth opening half the time, he wasn’t likely to rise far. If he lived.

  ‘Yes, lieutenant?’

  The officer winced, too late now. ‘I always thought the Adeptus Astartes were a little less, well, devout than most of us. I heard that they do not worship the Emperor at all.’

  Parol gave the officer a look that left the man wondering whether he’d still have his post come the morning. ‘These ones, lieutenant,’ he leaned in close, conspiratorially, and hissed, ‘are a little bit different.’

  The admiral continued his slow swaggering stride along the ranks of his officers’ stations. ‘Keep me apprised, lieutenant. I wish to know that they have set out the moment they send word.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘In the meantime,’ Parol continued, addressing the command deck at large, ‘I am going to my quarters for four hours. I suggest you find a realistic target for His Will to destroy by the time I awake. This war will not win itself.’

  ‘Yes, lord admiral,’ they chorused.

  ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Carry on.’

  Parol went to his quarters, wishing as he reached them that he could afford just a little more time to sleep. He lay in his bed for two hours, his head whirling with strategic possibilities, before his exhaustion took him.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Return to Armageddon

  ‘Concentrate all fire on the Harbinger of Disaster!’ shouted Admiral Parol. ‘Do not let my kill slip away!’

  ‘We can’t get any closer. We’re taking too much–’ A scream blared out into the command deck as a ship took catastrophic damage, reduced in moments from a purposeful instrument of the Emperor’s will to a flaming cloud of scrap.

  ‘We’ve lost the Storm of Ages, admiral.’

  The babble of voices on the command deck crowded Parol’s hearing. He shut it out. Before him, the oculus screen showed a dazzle of short-lived white-light explosions and engine burn. Clouds of debris drifted through the maelstrom, further adding to the confusion. Alarms blared as wreckage from the Storm of Ages’s demise pattered into the shields of His Will. Swarms of mass projectiles, simple but brutal, followed, collapsing more shields. A spread of them penetrated as far as the hull, hammering into the thick skin of the Apocalypse-class battleship.

  Parol braced himself as the giant vessel shuddered. Sparks flew from ruptured conduits.

  ‘Get those damn shields back up now!’ Quarist, his chief flag officer, roared.

  ‘Damage report!’ said Parol.

  ‘Minor breaching on decks 100 and 302, admiral.’

  ‘Helm steady.’

  The Harbinger of Disaster drifted under them, the haphazard arrangement of crude engines bolted all over its mangled shell making it surprising manoeuvrable. Parol cursed as it passed under His Will’s keel. A trio of ork cruisers came in its gravity wake, all guns blazing.

  ‘Sir, shields are still below fifty per cent.’

&nb
sp; As fast as the soap-bubble sheen of the void shields popped into life they were being knocked down by concentrated fire from the front.

  ‘Roll ninety degrees. Port battery, mass fire on the Harbinger. Lance batteries, open fire on those cruisers. Battlegroup Glorious Age come around to sector 495. Destroyer groups Augustus, Cleon’s Brilliance and Woeful Heart come in closer to our stern. Draw fire from the ork asteroid fortresses. Keep my space free of those cruisers! Fire control, be sharper! How the hell am I supposed to conduct a battle when I’m micromanaging your bloody mistakes!’

  ‘Sir,’ came the response from below.

  Parol rattled off a long procession of orders. Adjutants cast them onto chart-desk holos with their augments, while data savants ran battle outcomes through their lobotomised brains. Parol kept one eye on the predictions, the other on the battle as it was playing out and gave further orders relayed by data squirt and vox to the ships under his command. The fleet responded with somnolent movements, swinging like logs under water. Too slow, too slow. A lifetime of service in the Navy and still he thought the ships too slow! Sweat ran down Parol’s face, soaking the brocade of his high collar, making the flesh around his augmetic eye itch maddeningly. He narrowed his flesh eye, but… but… but… For all that, his plan was working; they were boxing the hulk in, slowly but surely. Waves of bombers chipped away at its stone and metal, ineffectual ork flak guns blasting away at them. Thunderbolt wings scoured the void of ork fighters. The hulk was wide open.

  ‘Cruiser group Annihilus, steady as she goes. Give me four more volleys at this wreck and we’ll have ourselves another trophy.’

  ‘Sir, we’ve another two hulks coming in, sector ninety-six!’ shouted an augur officer.

  I spoke too soon, thought Parol. ‘Give me the designations!’ he said.

  ‘It’s the Paean to Discontent, and… and…’

  ‘Designation! Designation!’ shouted Parol.

  ‘The Malevolent Dread, sir.’

  ‘It’s a trap!’ cried Quarist. He slammed his fist into the railing around the command platform.

  ‘Steady there, Quarist,’ said Parol from the corner of his mouth. ‘Bring me a view of the approaching flotilla, cast onto chart desk 4-a.’

  ‘Aye, sir!’ shouted his ratings.

  ‘Compliance,’ blurted half a dozen servitors.

  The two hulks were a fair way off, but lumbering closer.

  ‘Designate inbound hostiles call-sign “Ork Flotilla Secundus”,’ Parol said – not very imaginative, he thought, but I am rather busy. ‘I want the Harbinger of Disaster in pieces before they are in range, is that clear?’

  ‘Sir, we do not have the time!’

  Parol bit back a rebuke. The optimo of his fire control team was correct. A perfect chase, the careful ripping away of power fields, and now to be cheated of his prize as it ran helpless before his guns. Most annoying.

  ‘I never thought I’d say this sir, but they’re getting cleverer,’ said Quarist. ‘They are responding to our strategy.’

  ‘Damn it all, of course they are!’ said Parol emphatically. ‘Well, in the best of all possible worlds, the same strategy never works over and again. Although,’ he added to himself, ‘I was rather hoping the orks might fall for it just one more time.’ He jabbed an impatient finger at his vox-officers. ‘Open broad channel, no encryption – if the orks think we’re running, they’ll make more mistakes.’

  ‘Aye, sir, all channels open.’

  Parol smoothed the front of his uniform, and wiped the sweat from his face with his handkerchief. He would not have his command see him dishevelled, and he’d be damned if he would let the orks believe him scared.

  ‘Hailing all fleet, hailing all fleet! Belabour that hulk for all you are worth, do as much damage as is possible. Then…’ He paused. ‘Prepare to withdraw. Good order.’

  He depressed a stud on a board mounted on the rail.

  ‘Return to encryption,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we might do a little more on the way out…’

  Parol’s orders were complex, but efficiently delivered.

  Jushol rode the waves of the empyrean, at one with the Eternal Crusader. More than at any other time in the warp, he felt the ship’s presence intimately – every thrum of its metal skin, every stretch and ache of its superstructure, every phantom urge of its vicious spirit. This was not the mind-bond a princeps might feel with his Titan, or an adept of Mars might feel with his machines. Jushol did not dominate; instead, he shared something of an empathy with the vessel: the way a good horseman has with his mount, it had been explained to him, although no horse had been seen in his clan house in aeons. Like a horseman, Jushol knew his steed’s every mood – if it were sick, if it were sorrowful, if it felt joy.

  The Eternal Crusader was eager; it always had been enamoured of war.

  The warp shone through the Acies Horrens, bathing his inhuman face with a light whose colour had no name. His primary eyes were closed, the ritual blindfold now bound tightly about them while he looked out instead through his warp eye, fixing it upon the blazing sun of the Astronomican. The Emperor’s beacon cut through the riot of hellish colour, a lighthouse in nightmare fog.

  Jushol judged them close to their destination and so he took his attention from the white light of Terra. He stared deep into the swirling patterns in front of the ship, although no such directional term could be held true in the warp. The ship shuddered as it breasted swells of emotion, the warp whipped up into a curdled mass of despair and rage by the war going on at Armageddon. Into these roils his jet-black third eye peered intently, seeking out smaller, subtler disturbances – places where gravity infinitesimally pulled on the no-place of the warp, distorting it. These tiny whorls of psychic foam marked out the skerries of reality. Combine this with the agitation of human beings packed close together under stress, and you had a ship; many such markers, many ships. He smiled. Few were as skilled as Jushol, and fewer still could fulfil the High Marshal’s request. He was justly proud of his ability. The Eternal Crusader was no ordinary ship, and it demanded no ordinary Navigator.

  Around the weak imprints of humanity’s souls living out their short existences in real space, strong and brutish essences cut the stuff of the empyrean, single-minded as ocean predators, the collective manifestation of the orks’ self-belief adding to the turbulence. In the shifting vistas cast up by the empyrean, Jushol caught glimpses of warrior giants clashing their fangs. A great battle was going on in the mortal realm, orks pitted against men, reflected by the phantoms in the warp.

  ‘I have it, Lord High Marshal,’ he said, his quiet words picked up by a servo-skull hovering close to his head. ‘Prepare for immediate real space translation.’

  He relished the power. While in the empyrean, the Eternal Crusader was at his mercy. One push of his mind, and he could destroy every soul aboard the vessel. He could damn them. Jushol Ju-Sha-Eng was senior enough in his House to know some of the truth of the warp. He was no naive shipsteer, who believed the faces howling at him were mere fancy. He knew them for what they were – souls, and the things that hunted them.

  They called to him, gesticulating lewdly, their faces cycling from plea to threat to promise like patterns on molten metal. ‘Release them to us, release them!’ they seemed to say. ‘Open up your box of morsels, and you shall be rewarded!’

  Jushol Ju-Sha-Eng raised his aquila pendant to his lips, and kissed it.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ he whispered.

  The Eternal Crusader remained true upon its course, guided by the indomitability of his will. Beneath the faces were the eddies and currents of the raw warp stuff; it was there his attention needed to be. He shut the whispers out.

  Focus, he thought. Focus. He willed himself to see through the nonsensical landscapes, evaluating the patterns of the corporeal universe that shared the same space, choosing the perfect spot. The High Marshal was a mighty warrior, but what was he without Jushol? Nothing. Nothing at all. Without Jushol, the plan would fail.
>
  All the while, the Navigator held the ship in check. Its spirit was keen, desirous of throwing off its warp field and plunging into the cold night of true space where endless war awaited.

  Focus, focus, he thought. Wait. Wait. There.

  ‘Now.’

  By his thought alone, the warp engines howled. A rent opened to reveal mortal stars flickering behind hideous draperies of warp energy. The Eternal Crusader tore through the flimsy veil that divides reality from the truth, and plunged back into the void.

  They went from one form of chaos to another. Battle raged in the heavens. The great bodies of ships, kilometres long, twinkled with weapons fire both received and released. This was not the stately dance of void war as it should be waged, fleets so far apart they could not see one another, payloads taking hours if not days to arrive, but battle as up close and dirty as a Naval engagement on a backwards world, where wooden vessels exchange close-ranged cannon shot. Mighty Imperial capital ships, great castles of the skies, traded blows with the unlovely creations of the orks at distances measured in the mere hundreds of kilometres. Jushol was no great strategist, but he could see the Imperial trap for the hulk at the centre of the ork fleet, and the approaching flotilla that threatened to undo it all.

  Moments later, Majesty, Night’s Vigil, the Virtue of Kings and the Light of Purity burst through polychromatic coronas into the night, the smaller ships that made up their escort powering ahead to protect the flagship. Warp fumes curled away from them as Geller fields flared and winked out. A millisecond later, banks of void shields flicked into life all around them, cutting off the barrage that had already begun to come their way. Psychic impulses, not quite telepathy but not far removed from it, came from Jushol’s cousins. Navigators of the other vessels, who informed him of their safe arrival in system.

  From somewhere far away, Jushol heard an alarm ring. Not his concern. He sighed with satisfaction. All said, not a bad placement. He had put the Space Marine fleet directly between two ork battlegroups, much to the surprise of Navy and ork alike, he imagined gleefully.