THE WARMASTER Read online

  ‘Was that it?’ asked Hark.

  ‘No,’ said Mabbon, pressing his ear to the ’phones Varl was holding out. ‘It’s repeating it, like another chant. “That which was made must remain whole… the offspring of the Great Master…”.’

  ‘Offspring?’ said Hark, stepping closer.

  ‘Again, that’s open to interpretation,’ Mabbon told him with an apologetic shrug. ‘The word “offspring” can mean a thing made, or a child, or something spawned. It is the female noun…’

  ‘What, like a daughter?’ asked Oysten.

  ‘No, I think not,’ said Mabbon. ‘Things are female. Ships, for example, are referred to as “she”. The connotation is any significant creation.’

  He paused.

  ‘What?’ snapped Rawne. ‘What else?’

  ‘It just said,’ said Mabbon, ‘it said, “All this shall be the will of he whose voice drowns out all others”.’

  He looked at Varl and shook his head. Varl lowered the headset.

  ‘It has stopped speaking,’ he said.

  ‘I’m scared!’ sobbed Yoncy. ‘I want Papa to come!’

  Elodie held her tight. She didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Come on!’ Gaunt yelled at the Navy adepts repairing the strategium. They glanced up at him, puzzled, their optics blank.

  ‘Barking orders may serve well in the Astra Militarum, sir,’ said the Master of Artifice, ‘but in the Fleet we favour a more effective system of encouragement and support.’

  Gaunt stared at him, and then stepped back and shrugged.

  ‘The colonel-commissar has displayed the virtue of dynamism in this crisis so far,’ Darulin said to the Master of Artifice. ‘He has been by far the most controlled of any of us. And if this is my ship now…’

  His voice trailed off, and he glanced over at Spika’s body on the deck nearby, where Curth was still tending him.

  ‘It is my ship now,’ he repeated. ‘In which case… get this damn strategium functioning!’

  Startled at his rage, the adepts resumed work with increased vigour.

  ‘The primary optic relay is blown, master,’ one of the adepts reported.

  ‘Replacement parts are located in hold fifty,’ said another, reading off the manifest the noosphere was displaying in front of his eyes.

  ‘There’s no time for that,’ said Darulin. ‘Bridge it. Splice in! Now!’

  The adepts hesitated.

  The Master of Artifice pushed them aside. He extended his arms and held his augmetic hands over the open casing of the strategium table. Prehensile cables, as slender as twine and as fluid as snakes, curled out of recesses in his wrist-mounts and wormed their way into the complex mechanism, attaching and connecting.

  ‘Splice established,’ he said. ‘Temporary operational relay in place. You have approximately four minutes.’

  Gaunt glanced at Darulin.

  ‘The Master of Artifice has bridged the relay,’ Darulin said. ‘His own bio-mech system has become a replacement component.’

  ‘Activate,’ the Master of Artifice ordered. Power was thrown. He trembled and shuddered, but remained standing. Gaunt could see a faint halo of heat-bleed surrounding him.

  ‘That looks dangerous,’ Gaunt said.

  ‘It has its limits,’ replied Darulin. He moved to the strategium, entered the access code, and the display relit.

  They peered at it.

  ‘Resolution is impaired,’ said Darulin. ‘Data retrieval is a fraction of what we had before.’

  He studied the display. Blocks of machine text and code swam hololithically around the three-dimensional representation of the Armaduke. It was the bones of the ship, a skeletal diagram. Gaunt could see three bright wounds around the aft section of the ship, damage points that glowed so brightly data was negated. The area around them was fogged with fragments of loose data.

  ‘Are those imaging defects?’ asked Gaunt.

  ‘No,’ said Darulin. ‘That’s the best the strategium overview can do to render the debris field.’

  ‘We’re hit badly then?’

  Darulin frowned.

  ‘We’re not hit at all, sir,’ he said softly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Those three impact sites… they are the remains of the three boarding vessels that had clamped to us. The enemy raiders have been burned off our hull.’

  ‘Are you being serious?’ asked Gaunt.

  ‘By that?’ asked Criid, pointing at the predatory shadow of the enemy killship that was looming over the Armaduke. It was so vast only a small portion of it appeared in the spherical display field.

  ‘Yes,’ said Darulin. ‘The enemy killship has annihilated our enemies. It… it has spared us.’

  ‘Saved us?’

  ‘With pinpoint accuracy. It would seem so.’

  ‘Why?’ said Gaunt. ‘Why?’

  ‘It is an attested fact that the logic and mindset of the Archenemy is alien to us,’ said Kelvedon.

  ‘I know that better than most,’ said Gaunt. He took a step back. He realised he was shaking. It was panic. He’d been running on adrenaline, the rush that had seen him through years of war and combat. But now he felt fear, genuine fear. Not a fear of risk or danger, or the desperation of warfare. It was horror. A terror of the unknown. A simple inability to comprehend and fathom the dark workings of the galaxy. He could fight a physical enemy, no matter the odds. A practical problem could be attacked and extinguished. But this was beyond him, and he despised the feeling. There was no sense. The harder he looked for it, the less sense there was.

  ‘Perhaps–’ Criid began. Everyone looked at her.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘it’s a territorial thing. Like gang versus gang. We’re the enemy to both, but they are no kind of friends. Perhaps the big brute wants us for itself.’

  ‘The notion is not without value,’ Darulin nodded.

  ‘We should anticipate, then, a further boarding action from the killship?’ said Criid. ‘I mean, re-form and stand ready to repel again?’

  Gaunt nodded.

  ‘If that’s its intention,’ he said. ‘Yes, that would be wise. Whatever defence we can now muster–’

  ‘Sir!’ said Kelvedon.

  Darulin turned to look.

  ‘The enemy killship has powered down its weapons,’ said Kelvedon, studying the tactical display. ‘It is retraining power to its drives.’

  On the display, the giant shadow began to stir.

  The Archenemy warship, black as night, began to move. Starlight glinted off the bare metal buttresses that lined its coal-black hull. Its prow rose like the beak of a breaching whale, then it banked silently and plunged back into the abyssal trenches of space.

  The Armaduke’s bruised sensors retained a track on its heat-wake as it extended away from them by sixty, eighty, one hundred thousand kilometres.

  Then the Master of Artifice had to be uncoupled from the strategium for his own safety. His flesh was starting to smoulder, and he could no longer form intelligible words. The strategium display shut down.

  By then, the Tormaggeddon Monstrum Rex was a million miles away, vanishing into the starfield.

  ELEVEN: FORGE WORLD URDESH

  Thunder rolled across the Great Bay of Eltath. It was high summer, and the air was dull with a haze that made the low, wide sky a bright grey. Cloud banks running out across the wide bay and the sea beyond stood like inverted mountains, dark and ominous as phantoms. Lightning sizzled like trace veins in the dead flesh of the sky.

  It was not a summer storm breaking, though changes in the weather were anticipated before nightfall. It was the electromagnetic shock wave of a large magnitude ship entering the atmospheric sheath.

  Descending at speed, the Highness Ser Armaduke sliced through the cloud cover, emerging into the hard sunlight in a squall of rain. It left a long furrow in the cloud system behind it, like a stick drawn through old snow, a trail that would take several hours to fade.

  It came in low over the sea. It was running
fast, the vents of its real space plasma engines shining blue, but it was limping too. It was a patched survivor, sutured and soldered, its broken jaw wired shut from the fight. It had taken six weeks to reach Urdesh, and that voyage had been made thanks to frantic running repairs, constant coaxing, desperate compromises and sheer willpower.

  In atmosphere, it made a terrible noise: a droning, vibrating, clattering howl of breathless engines, weary mechanicals and straining gravimetrics. The sound of it boomed out across the bay like ragged thunder, like a bass drum full of lead shot being kicked down a long staircase.

  Its bulk was ugly, blackened and scorched. Three massive wounds scarred its heat-raked flanks and one of the four real space drives was unlit, a black socket leaking tons of liquid soot and water. It left a long, filthy plume of vapour and oily black smoke behind it, smoke that puffed and popped from exhaust cowlings like the fume waste of a steam locomotive. Slabs of dirty ice peeled from its hull as the air shaved at it, taking paint and hull coating with it. The chunks scattered away, dropping like depth charges into the ocean below, so that to shoreside observers, the Armaduke looked like it was performing a low-level saturation bombing run.

  Vapour clung to its upper hull, swirling in the slipstream, and traceries of wild static sparked and popped around its masts.

  It came in across the bay. To the west of it, grav-anchored at a height of one-and-a-half kilometres above the sea, the battleship Naiad Antitor sat like a floating continent, half shrouded in sea mist, an Imperial capital ship nine times the size of the relentless Armaduke.

  The three Faustus-class interceptors that had guided the Armaduke in through the fleet, packing high orbit, purred down out of the cloud in formation, and resumed their station as an arrowhead, chasing ahead of the Armaduke, their running lights winking. The Naiad Antitor pulsed its main lanterns. Vox-links squealed with the ship-to-ship hail. Crossing the Naiad Antitor’s bow at a distance of ten kilometres, the Armaduke blazed its lamps, returning the formal salute. On both ships, the bridge crews stood and made the sign of the aquila, facing the direction of the other vessel as the Armaduke crossed beside its illustrious cousin.

  A squadron of Thunderbolts, silver and red in the livery of the Second Helixid, scrambled from the Naiad Antitor’s flight decks and boiled out of its belly like wasps stirred from a nest. They raked low across the grey water, leaving hissing wakes of spray, and rose in coordinated formation on either side of the racing Armaduke, forming an honour guard escort of a hundred craft.

  Ahead, the Great Bay began to narrow into the industrial approaches of the wet and dry harbours and the vast shipyards of Eltath. The mound of the great city, dominating the head of the peninsula, rose in the distance. Sunlight caught the flags, standards and masts that topped the Urdeshic Palace at its summit.

  The clattering Armaduke came in lower, reducing its velocity. Its shipmaster reined in its headlong advance, easing back the power, sensing it was finding a last burst of acceleration like a weary hound or horse in sight of home and shelter.

  It passed over the harbour, bleeding speed. Beneath, watercraft left white lines in a sea that glowed pink and russet with algal blooms. The south shore approach to the harbour was lined with derelict food mills and the rafts of rusting bulk harvester boats that had once processed the algae and weed for food. Scores of Astra Militarum troop ships, grey and shelled like beetles, were strung on mooring lines at low anchor over the harbour slick. Tender boats scooted around them on the water or flitted around their armoured hulls like humming birds.

  Then they were over land, the foreshore of the city. The immense dry docks like roofless cathedrals, some containing smaller warships under refit. The endless barns and warestores of the Munitorum and the dynast craftsmen. The towers and manufactories of the Mechanicus, clustered like forest mushrooms around the base of the volcanic stack. The huge foundation docks and grav yards of the shipyard, like cross sections of sea giants, structural ribs exposed, each one an immense, fortified socket in the hillside, waiting to nest a shiftship. Watchtowers. The bunkered gun batteries at Low Keen and Eastern Hill and Signal Point. The tower emitters of the shield dome and their relay spires, thrusting from the craggy slopes like spines from an animal’s backbone. The skeletal wastelands of the refinery, extending out over the sullen waters of the Eastern Reach, one hundred and sixty kilometres wide.

  The Armaduke slowed again. Its real space drives began to cycle down, their glow dying back, and the clattering noise of the ship abated a little. Gravimetrics and thrust-manoeuvre systems took over, easing the impossibly huge object in slowly above the towers of Eltath. The sound of the ship, even diminished, echoed and slapped around the walls of the city. Windows rattled in their frames.

  The Faustus escort peeled away, winking lamps of salute as they banked into space on higher burn. The Helixid Thunderbolts stayed with the slowing bulk of the Armaduke a little longer, dropping to almost viff-stall speed. Then they too disengaged, curling in lines like streamers as they broke and ran back to their parent ship.

  Guide tugs, lumpen as tortoises, lumbered into view, securing mag-lines and heavy cables to harness the warship and manhandle it the last of the way. The Armaduke was crawling now, passing between the highest spires of the city, so close a man might step out of a hatch and onto a balcony.

  Horns and hooters started to sound.

  The southern end of plating dock eight, a gigantic portcullis, groaned as it opened wide, exposing the interior of the dock – a vast, ribbed cavity open to the sky. Rows of guide lights winked along the bottom of the dock. The air prickled as the dock’s mighty gravity cradle cycled up and engaged. Air squealed and cracked as the grav field of the crawling ship rubbed against the gravimetric buffer of the dock. The Armaduke cut drives. The guide tugs, like burly stevedores, nudged and elbowed it the final few hundred metres.

  Lines detached. The tugs rose out of the dock, and turned. The dock gates were closing, re-forming the end wall of the coffin-shaped basin that held the ship.

  The Armaduke settled, slowly releasing its gravimetric field as the dock’s systems accepted and embraced its weight. The hull and core frame groaned, and weight distribution shifted. Plates creaked and buckled. In places, rivets sheared under the pressure, and hull seams popped, venting gas and releasing liquid waste that poured down into the basin of the dock.

  With a final, exhausted shudder, the Armaduke stopped moving and set down, supported on monolithic stanchion cradles and the gravimetric cup of the dock. Massive hydraulic beams extended from the dock walls to buffer and support the ship’s flanks. Their reinforced ram-heads thumped against the hull with the bang of heavy magnetics, taking the strain.

  Quiet came at last. The engine throb and drone of the ship were stilled. The only sounds were the dockside hooters, the clank of walk bridges being extended, the whir of cargo hoists rolling out on their platforms and derricks, and the spatter of liquids draining out of the hull into the waste-water drains of the unlit dock floor.

  With a long gasp of exhaling breath, the Armaduke blew its hatches and airgates.

  Then the storm broke. Thunder peeled across the bay, across Eltath and across the Urdeshic Palace. Above Plating Dock Eight, the sky curdled into an early darkness, and rain began to fall. It showed up as winnowing fans of white in the beams of the dock lamps illuminating the ship. It sizzled off the cooling hull, turning to steam as it struck the drive cowling. It buzzed like the bells of a thousand tiny tambourines as it hit the invisible cushion of the grav field, and turned into mist.

  It streamed off the patched and rugged hull of the Armaduke, washing off soot and rust in such quantities that the water turned red before it fell away.

  To some on the dockside and ramps of the bay, it seemed as though the rain were washing the old ship’s battle wounds, bathing its tired bones, and anointing it on its long, long overdue return.

  The heavy rain drummed off the canvas roofs of the metal gangways that had extended out to meet the shi
p’s airgates. Gaunt stepped out onto one of the walkways, feeling its metal structure wobble and sway slightly. He saw the rain squalling through the beams of the dockside floodlights that illuminated the Highness Ser Armaduke. He tasted fresh air. It smelt dank and dirty, but it was fresh air, planetary air, not shipboard environmental – the first he had breathed in a year.

  Ten years, he corrected himself… Eleven.

  There was activity on the dock platforms at the foot of the gangway. He began to walk down the slender metal bridge, ignoring the dark gulf of the dock cavity that yawned below.

  A greeting party was assembling. Gaunt saw Munitorum officials, flanked by guards with light poles. An honour guard of eighty Urdeshi storm troopers had drawn up on the dockside platform in perfectly dressed rows, holding immaculate attention.

  Gaunt stepped off the gangway onto the dockside. The wet rockcrete crunched under his boots. Now he was beyond the gangway’s canvas awning, the rain fell on him. He was wearing his dress uniform and his long storm coat.

  Someone called an order, and the Urdeshi guard snapped in perfect drill, presenting their rifles upright in front of them in an unwavering salute. An officer walked forwards. He wore the black-and-white puzzle camo of Urdesh, and his pins marked him as a colonel.

  ‘Sir, welcome to Urdesh,’ he said, making the sign of the aquila.

  Gaunt nodded and returned the sign formally.

  ‘I’m Colonel Kazader,’ the man said, ‘Seventeenth Urdeshi. We honour your return. As per your signal, agents of the ordos and the Mechanicus await to discharge your cargo.’

  ‘I will brief them directly,’ said Gaunt. ‘There are specifics that I did not include in my signal. Matters that should not be contained in any transmission, even encrypted.’

  ‘I understand, sir,’ said Kazader. ‘The officers of the ordos also stand by to take your asset into secure custody. That is, if he still lives.’

  ‘He does,’ said Gaunt, ‘but no prisoner transfer will take place until I have met with the officers and assured myself of their suitability.’