Forge Master - David Annandale Read online

  The Verdict of the Anvil had shadowed the kroozer since the launch of the boarding party. Mulcebar had held the strike cruiser at a distance, presenting a less inviting target, and giving the repair crews a chance to heal what they could of the Verdict’s injuries. The kroozer’s fire had diminished since the boarding torpedoes had hit, as if the tactical intelligence aboard the ship were being distracted by other, more pressing problems. Now Mulcebar ordered the distance closed. Vox contact with the boarding party was becoming more and more sporadic. He knew the prisoner had been found, and he knew that the fighting was so fierce there was the very real chance that the boarding torpedoes were impossibly distant.

  ‘I want firing resolutions for the forward batteries,’ he announced. ‘And for the nova cannon.’

  There was no true pause before his orders were carried out, but there was a beat of silence as the Verdict of the Anvil prepared to annihilate some of its own.

  ‘Contacts,’ the augury servitor intoned. ‘Ork ships.’ It began a list of designations, and the list just kept going. Mulcebar called the readings up on a tacticarium screen. Ships were translating into the system. They were coming in force. This was not a squadron. It was a fleet.

  Mulcebar saw his options become very few and very bad.

  He also saw his choice become very easy, if he could receive the answer he needed to a simple question. He opened the vox-channel to the boarding party. ‘Brother Berengus,’ he said, ‘link me to your sergeants.’

  Static. Explosions of white noise mixed with clanging and grunts. Then a clipped, ‘Brother-captain,’ as if squeezed in between death blows. Ba’birin’s voice.

  ‘Can you yet prevail?’ It was an honest question. Mulcebar required an honest answer.

  Ba’birin’s response was almost completely lost in the welter of growls and clashes of metal that erupted from the speaker. Only one word came through: ‘Anvil.’ Its two syllables were spoken with faith and determination.

  So it wasn’t just an easy choice. It was really no choice at all.

  ‘Helmsmaster,’ Mulcebar told Phanes, ‘we need a new bearing. We will face the greenskin fleet.’

  Again that beat of silence, only this time because of eagerness.

  The Verdict turned. The wounded predator raced to throw itself into the teeth of the swarm. Mulcebar watched the screens as the catalogue of attackers grew.

  +Designation: Onslaught.++

  +Designation: Ravager.++

  +Designation: Savage.++

  +Designation: Brute.++

  Over and over and over, a multiplying taxonomy of threats. And something else, multiplying and repeating like the beat of a savage drum:

  +Designation: Unknown.++

  +Designation: Unknown.++

  +Designation: Unknown.++

  To the massive punch of the attack ships was added a host of the eccentric and the grotesque. Many ships appeared to be formerly Imperial, killed, salvaged and reconfigured into xenos obscenity. Others, whatever they had once been, were now hulks, garbage given propulsion and made stupidly dangerous. There were transports, out of which came insect clouds of fighters and bombers. There were ships that should never have made it through the warp, but had reached the field of battle on the strength, it seemed to Mulcebar, of sheer ignorance. Some had not arrived intact, and were already burning, breaking up into high-velocity debris that crippled and killed nearby craft.

  But enough had come through. Too many. Mulcebar was looking at the green horde embodied in void-ships.

  There was really only one sensible response to the horde: burning it.

  ‘Nova cannon ready,’ Phanes said.

  The Verdict of the Anvil was still a fair distance from the ork fleet. Too far for either side to deploy guns and torpedoes to any effect. The nova cannon had plenty of range. It was the drake’s breath of the Salamanders, and it had been held back for too long. ‘Give me a target,’ said Mulcebar. ‘Anything of attack-ship size or greater. In the centre of their formation.’ The cannon wasn’t an accurate weapon. It didn’t need to be. It was a gun that embodied the idea that ‘close’ was good enough. Mulcebar simply wanted a point chosen for the moment of shell implosion.

  ‘There’s a very large mass,’ the gunnery officer said. ‘Bigger than a grand cruiser.’

  ‘Shoot that,’ Mulcebar said. ‘Fire.’

  The nova cannon was a marvel of war. It was a technological miracle worthy of the most hushed Mechanicus prayers. But in its fundamental conception, at the core of its being, it was simplicity itself. It was just a gun. A gun of godlike proportions, but a gun. Its barrel ran much of the length of the strike cruiser. Its projectile was fifty metres in diameter, and was fired at speeds commensurate with the weapon’s scale. When Mulcebar gave the order, enough stored energy to power the entire ship was unleashed. The weapon’s trigger automatically kicked the Verdict of the Anvil’s engines into a massive thrust forwards against the cannon’s recoil. Magnetic fields that bordered on the sorcerous impelled the projectile to near light-speed. Space bent as the shell blasted from the prow of the Verdict. It slashed across the Lepidus Capital to the storm of ork ships on the wings of wrath.

  Before it reached the implosion point, the shell passed through two ork craft. The encounters had almost no effect on the projectile. Massive as it was, its size was negligible by comparison to the hulk and the Ravager that crossed its path. But its kinetic energy was near infinite. The ships slowed the shell by a microscopic degree, to their doom. The energy transferred to their hulls blew them apart, every rivet and beam flying off as if in terror from the point of impact. For a fraction of a second, the ships retained their shapes, swelling, still moving forwards. Then they disintegrated, the blasts of their stricken fusion engines racing to swallow the metal debris.

  Then the light of their spreading destruction was eclipsed by the bright dawn of the shell’s death.

  The implosion stopped the shell’s flight. Kinetic energy was released as light and heat. The light and heat of hell. For a few terrible seconds, the system had a second star. It howled its birth and death in the dense centre of the ork fleet. The nearest ship was a massive transport. It had once been the Universal-class mass conveyor Benedictionis Aeternae. Twelve kilometres long, it had, before its first doom, been host to a voidfaring community that had developed a thousand years of unique culture. Its people had created blown-glass icons that were never seen outside the ship’s hull, and that would have moved the most unforgiving Ministorum cleric to tears. Now it carried an invasion force of half a million orks. The nova cannon strike blew a hole a third of the ship’s size in its stern. The demolished plasma engines added their screams to the new star’s. The Benedictionis bucked, its prow dropping as if in penance for its betrayal before it boiled out of existence. It took the last of its glass icons with it. The five-hundred metre winged statue of Cardinal Marat survived long enough to fly straight into the loading bay of a bomber transport, venting the entire ship’s oxygen supply.

  The damage radiated out of the implosion zone in chained explosions. When night fell again, half a dozen ships had been crippled or destroyed. The Verdict of the Anvil had struck a legendary blow.

  And an inadequate one. The orks broke formation, scattering from the devastation. The fleet lost cohesion. But still the horde was present. Still, it came on.

  In their crude language, the orks called the thing a Deff Dread. It was an insult, by its very existence. Ha’garen felt his gorge rise in hatred. His modified cortex suppressed the emotion, perceiving it as a threat to rational action. It transmuted the energy into strength and speed of motion.

  The ork creation was a blasphemous parody of a Dreadnought. Its body was huge metal box, somewhat taller than it was wide. Spikes jutted from its base like tusks from a jaw. Mounted on each side was a massive gun barrel. The thing rocked side to side as it advanced, with a speed that belied it
s apparent clumsiness, on pile-driver legs. Steam and oil shrieked from the joints. It waved massive pincers twice the size of Ha’garen’s servo-arms. The right limb had the lower claw of its pincer replaced with a circular saw. The modification made little practical sense, but displayed a raw genius for violence. The pincer would automatically start shredding anything it grabbed.

  The Deff Dread thundered into the Salamanders’ flank. R’alum met it with bolter-fire. The rounds punched and dented the walker’s armour, but the monster didn’t notice. The painted, snarling face of the Dread appeared to laugh as its arms grabbed R’alum. The saw screeched as its teeth ground against ceramite. Splinters of metal and armour sprayed. The saw was digging into R’alum’s shoulder, working to sever his arm, when the Dread threw him into the air. Speakers amplified and distorted monstrous laughter as the mechanised ork opened fire. It tracked the arc of R’alum’s flight, slamming a rapid-fire stream of massive rounds into the Salamander’s body. He was a mass of butchered meat when he hit the deck.

  Ha’garen cut his way through the ork before him and closed with the Deff Dread. It still had its back to him, but swivelled as he drew near. Its reach was much greater than his, but he dropped as the enormous arms swept in to grab him. He angled his flamer nozzle up and bathed the front of the Dread with fire. He didn’t hurt the ork imprisoned in the war machine, but he did confuse the beast. It staggered blindly, flailing its arms, firing off random shots. Staying low, keeping the flames going, Ha’garen raised his cutter arm to a narrow horizontal slit, level with where he imagined the pilot’s head would be. He fired the plasma beam through the slit. The scream was very short. The Deff Dread stumbled forwards on nervous system reflex, the momentum of its mechanism sending it on a pointless march, its arms swinging like syncopated pendulums. It waded into the crush of orks, leaving a wake of crushed bodies.

  Orks wailed and fled the erratic path of the walking coffin. Then a moment came of precious hope and potential. Ha’garen saw the way forwards across the last few dozen metres of the hold’s metal dementia to the exit and the corridors beyond. It was not clear, but the ork density had thinned. A short, concerted punch was all the Salamanders needed now. Not in a straight line, but lunging from enemy weakness to enemy weakness. Instinct, forged by decades, recalled by the molten light in the forge of war, had him call to Ba’birin.

  ‘I see it,’ Ba’birin answered before Ha’garen could speak. The same instinct there.

  But no, Ha’garen realised as the second of possibility stretched long in his consciousness. The instincts weren’t the same. Not his, at any rate. What had been unthought before was now the product of analysis. The battlefield resolved itself before his eyes as an exercise in the application of force. To act was not to follow gut impulse. The nature of the distance between himself and his battle-brothers achieved a still-greater clarity. Their actions would mesh, but emerge from different origins. He would forever be among brothers, but never again be part of them.

  Ha’garen worked through the thought process and reached its conclusion in the time it took Ba’birin to speak his three syllables. That was also how long the moment lasted. It ended with a storm: a hail of melta bombs and a wind of fire.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The eldar strike force had been hammered badly. It was down to half its strength. Its extermination was inevitable. Its mission was the most important fact of its members’ existence. So the Fire Dragons struck with the furious desperation of a terminally wounded animal. Weapons fuel was no longer a concern. There was only the imperative to stop the Salamanders here, in this nightmare space, before they disappeared into the warren of corridors. Beyond that, there was nothing for which to hope.

  Later, Ha’garen would have the spare seconds needed to look back at this moment and understand the frantic need of eldar. But now, all he knew was heat and a terrible alchemy that turned metal to liquid and gas, and battle-brother to twisted hulk or nothing, nothing at all. The Fire Dragons kept up a constant stream of fire from their fusion guns as they advanced. A swath of orks vanished, and after them more Salamanders, reduced to vibrating molecules.

  (Remember their names, add them to the roster of the lost and faithful: Verus and Hateris, Tychaeus, Sy’pax and Ob’iang. The cordon between the Fire Dragons and Elisath. The Space Marines who sacrificed themselves for an eldar. Warriors of purest faith and unshakeable duty.)

  There was no formation defence against weapons designed to melt tanks and bunkers. For several seconds, the Salamanders were under simultaneous attack by enemies of such radically opposite methods of warmaking that to counter one was to be vulnerable to the other. Then the eldar strike culled the orks engaged with the Space Marines, and there were possible actions.

  The Salamanders spread out, reducing the effectiveness of the fusion guns. There were no more melta bombs coming. Ha’garen deduced that there would be no further such weapons on this field. If the eldar still had some, they would have used them and finished the squads completely. They had not. Instead, they closed rapidly, still firing, their leader scouring the terrain before him and all who stood on it with his powerful xenos flamer.

  Ha’garen grabbed Elisath with two servo-arms and hurled him out of the range of the Aspect Warrior rushing to greet him. His flesh-arms swung the chainaxe. The eldar jerked left, trying to dance around him and reach the seer. Ha’garen’s ruined servo-arm, now nothing but an articulated club, swept in, knocking the Fire Dragon off balance. Ha’garen brought the chainaxe back. His blow exploded the eldar’s helmet and face.

  As he finished the swing, a blur passed within his reach and lunged upwards at his neck with a sword. Ha’garen took a stumbled step back, and the Witchblade sliced within centimetres of the seam between his gorget and helmet. Ha’garen grounded himself on his heel and countered with his axe, reversing his swing and bringing the weapon up. Its teeth snarled, ripping the air as they sought to tear flesh.

  Kaderial sidestepped. The eldar’s timing was beyond exquisite: it was impossible. As Ha’garen’s chainaxe went high, catching nothing, he realised that the warlock had dodged the instant before Ha’garen had begun his counter. And now the Witchblade plunged at his chest. He pivoted to deflect. He was as slow as Kaderial had been fast. He turned away the full force of the blow, but the blade sliced through his armour and he felt something cold and merciless, an omen of mortality, slide between his ribs. He brought his flamer to bear, and Kaderial was already behind him. He spun again, swinging the chainaxe before him, trying to use his greater reach to push the warlock back and regain the initiative.

  Kaderial was ahead of him again. The eldar crouched low, beneath the arc of the axe blade. The sword rose in a gutting strike. Ha’garen’s armour took the hit, but the sorcerous blade carved a deep gouge up his placket. He jumped back, using the damaged servo-arm to block a second strike. The sword sliced the arm off below the first joint, leaving Ha’garen a flapping stump on the servo-harness. The limb had already been ruined, and it was not part of his body, but his nervous system felt the loss as keenly as any flesh amputation.

  Kaderial jumped forwards, pressing his advantage. Ha’garen changed tactics, defending with offence, trying to crowd the warlock, limit his movements. Their duel was a brutal dance of move and countermove, but one where Ha’garen was perpetually out of step and off the beat. It was like a game of regicide where one player was obliged to reveal all his moves in advance to the other. Every one of Ha’garen’s blocks simply exposed a different flank to Kaderial. Every counter was nothing but an invitation for a specific strike. Ha’garen landed no blows. Kaderial was insubstantial as a shadow, as fluid as quicksilver. He struck the Techmarine at his leisure. There was a condescending artistry to his movements, as if it were somehow beneath him to be saddled with so clumsy and brutish a foe. When he decapitated the orks who tried to rush in and capitalise on the distraction of the duellists, the kills were elegant grace notes in a composition of perfect
balance and harmony. Ha’garen’s only victory was in not dying. He suffered a thousand cuts, and he turned them into a bloody accumulation of minor wounds, just managing, with hit after hit, to deflect and absorb and redirect the blade. His transhuman nature kept him alive. His wounds clotted almost as quickly as they were inflicted.

  Giving Kaderial a long fight was no victory. So as he fought and blocked and bled, Ha’garen analysed. The eldar was faster and more agile. His anticipation of Ha’garen’s moves was far beyond skill and the ability to read an opponent. The warlock responded before Ha’garen even knew what he was going to do. Kaderial had some form of precognitive power.

  Query: how do you vanquish a foe who can see the future?

  Answer: put him in circumstances where that makes no difference.

  Ha’garen saw what he had to do. So did Kaderial. The warlock stepped away from Ha’garen and thrust out his left hand, palm out. He hurled something at Ha’garen, something with no form but fierce substance. It hit Ha’garen, an invisible tidal wave. It was a blast of hatred and loathing. It pummelled Ha’garen. It crushed and drowned. It engulfed him with the knowledge that his species was the most obscene aberration the galaxy had ever produced. It implied by assault that extinction was too kind a fate for a species so perverse, so hideous, so vile. So beyond any hope for redemption.

  The weight of the loathing was immense. The power of the attack came in the depersonalisation of the hatred. When it struck, it was no longer the expression of one being. It was the wrathful judgement of the cosmos itself. It sank through the interstices of his soul, a deluge onto sand, seeking the means to pry him apart. Ha’garen did not know fear. Since his induction into the cult of the Omnissiah, he knew very little emotion of any kind. But he still bore traces of the human in his being, and so he did know doubt. Not in the Emperor. Not in the Machine-God. Not in his Chapter.