THE WARMASTER Read online

  ‘Your point is well made,’ said Oysten calmly. ‘I’m just telling you how it is. The vox feels like it’s being signal-blocked. Maybe it’s the superstructure of the ship. We’re pretty damn armoured down here.’

  Rawne shrugged.

  ‘Maybe it’s you not knowing one end of a fething voxcaster from the other, Oysten,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe it’s an after-effect of the real space shift?’ Hark suggested quietly. ‘Maybe we’re flooded with energies that…’

  His voice trailed off. He realised he was speculating in areas that even he, an educated and experienced senior officer of the Officio Prefectus, knew feth all about.

  ‘Wait please,’ said Oysten. ‘I’m getting something. Voice, I think. Voice signal…’

  She wound one of the dials hard, then flicked two toggle switches, moving the audio to speakers rather than the headset hanging around her neck like a torc.

  They heard a blend of squeals, hums, e-mag burbles and bangs, out of which emerged a crackling signal that sounded like overlapped voice recordings. The whole mix was bathed in a white noise hiss.

  ‘Can you tease that apart?’ Rawne asked, craning to listen.

  Oysten made a few adjustments in an attempt to isolate the individual signals.

  ‘Just trying to clean it up,’ she said.

  She stopped suddenly. The thread of voices had become very clear. It was vox back-chatter between multiple operators, a scratchy to and fro of orders, acknowledgements and advisories. They could tell that from the tone and flow.

  The content was impossible to discern. None of the words were being spoken in a tongue they recognised as human.

  ‘Feth that,’ said Varl.

  ‘Archenemy transmissions,’ Bonin said.

  Oysten nodded.

  ‘Shut it down,’ said Rawne.

  ‘Before we know what it means?’ asked Hark.

  Rawne shot him an ugly look.

  ‘Seriously?’ he asked.

  ‘I think we’re in deep shit, Rawne. I think we can use all the intel we can get right now.’

  Rawne looked at Bonin and Varl.

  ‘Bring him out,’ he said.

  The pair of them moved swiftly, gathering LaHurf and Brostin as they advanced to the door of the primary cell. Their weapons were ready.

  ‘Open it!’ Varl yelled to Nomis at the security station.

  ‘Opening three!’ Nomis called back as he threw the levers.

  The outer hatch slid up, and the inner interlock doors opened.

  Bonin entered first to sweep the cell. Then he re-emerged and waved in the other three.

  It was about two minutes before they appeared. Hark knew that time had been spent adjusting shackles, removing deck-pins, and doing a tight search of hands, hems and mouth.

  The four Suicide Kings appeared, advancing at a slow pace determined by the hobble-chain on the prisoner’s ankles. They flanked him in a square formation.

  It seemed to take forever for them to escort Mabbon Etogaur to the vox-station. Every man in the room watched the Archenemy prisoner as he shuffled along.

  Mabbon’s face lacked expression and personality. His shaved head was a mess of old ritual scars.

  ‘What has happened, m–’ he began to ask when he was brought to a halt.

  ‘Don’t ask questions,’ Rawne replied bluntly. He gestured to the vox-set. ‘Answer them. What is that, pheguth? What does it mean?’

  Mabbon Etogaur cocked his scarred head and listened for a few moments.

  Then he sighed deeply.

  ‘V’heduak,’ he said. ‘Four or perhaps five storm-teams are on board. To aft of the engine house, I think. They are making ground.’

  ‘What was that word?’ Hark asked.

  ‘V’heduak,’ replied Mabbon. ‘You’ve been boarded by the V’heduak.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Literally? “Blood-fare”,’ Mabbon replied. ‘It is part of a longer phrase… Ort’o shet ahgk v’heduak… which means, “Those that will claim a price or fare in blood in return for conveyance”.’

  He glanced at Hark with his eerily expressionless face.

  ‘What it actually means,’ he said, ‘is that we are, to use Sergeant Varl’s vernacular, spectacularly fethed.’

  SIX: PICK OUR BONES

  Gaunt reached the bridge of the Armaduke about thirty seconds after Shipmaster Spika died.

  Trailing the A Company command squad, with Criid on one side of him and Maddalena lurking on the other, he entered the bridge via the main arch and saw the crew gathering in a mob around a fallen figure.

  Some of the bridge personnel – and there were an awful lot of them – had not left their stations or posts. Indeed, many could not because they were jacked and wired into their positions.

  But even those who could not move were staring. Some were beginning to wail. Others had tears in their augmeticised eyes.

  As soon as he saw that it was Spika, Gaunt pushed through the huddle, shoving robed bridge seniors and masters aside.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Gaunt asked them. As far as he could see they were all agitated and upset, but no one was offering any treatment.

  ‘He fell!’ one of the officers declared.

  ‘He fell down! The shipmaster fell down!’ moaned another.

  ‘I think it is his heart,’ said the officer of detection. ‘I think our proud ship is mortally struck, and the sympathetic pain has–’

  Gaunt ignored him. He looked at Maddalena.

  ‘Get Curth!’ he cried.

  ‘But–’

  ‘I said get her!’ Gaunt yelled. Maddalena scowled, and then turned and ran from the bridge. Gaunt knew she was fast, faster than Criid, probably. Besides, he needed Criid and her authority.

  Gaunt dropped to his knees and listened to Spika’s heart. The shipmaster lay on his back, his skin as white as wax and his eyes empty.

  ‘Feth,’ Gaunt murmured. He knelt up and began compressions.

  ‘Criid!’ he yelled as he worked.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Secure the bridge! Get these people away from the shipmaster! Get them back to work, dammit!’

  Criid looked dubious. The senior officers and high-function servitors of the Armaduke seemed fearful and outlandish creatures to her. They were staring at Gaunt and the other newcomers with puzzlement and distaste, as if they were invaders or zoological specimens.

  ‘What if these good persons of the Imperial Navy do not recognise the authority of the Astra Militarum, sir?’ she asked.

  ‘Then see if they recognise the authority of a bayonet, Criid. Improvise.’

  Gaunt kept working. Spika’s body didn’t betray the slightest hint of vitality.

  Gaunt had saved lives before. His trade was taking lives, and he was miserably good at that, but he had saved a life or two in his time. Battlefield aid, trauma procedures. He had pumped lungs and hearts, bound up fast-bleeds with fieldwire tourniquets, and plugged gouting wounds with his fingers until the medicae arrived.

  He was better at death than life, but the latter counted now. They needed Spika. More than that, Spika didn’t deserve this end.

  ‘Come on!’ Gaunt snarled as he worked.

  ‘We have been boarded,’ a man said.

  Maintaining the compressions, Gaunt looked up. A stout, sandy-haired battlefleet officer was looking down at him. Silver brocade decorated his dark blue tunic. He was command branch, not a master of anything or an officer of any specific department.

  ‘We anticipated that,’ Gaunt replied, his hands working steadily.

  ‘You must clear the bridge,’ the officer said.

  ‘Can’t you see what the feth I’m doing?’ Gaunt asked.

  ‘Our beloved shipmaster, may the Throne bless his soul, has departed this life,’ said the officer. ‘Stress. He had been fairly warned. His health was an issue. We will mourn him. Now he is gone, the life of the ship is all that matters. You will clear the bridge.’

  ‘Like feth!’ Gaunt an
swered.

  ‘I am Subcommander Kelvedon,’ the officer said. His voice was light and dry, like long grass at the end of a summer season. ‘I stand second to the shipmaster in line of succession. At this hour of his death, I have command of the Armaduke. Its welfare is my business. You will clear the bridge.’

  ‘He isn’t even cold!’ Gaunt snapped. He regretted his words. Spika’s flesh, where Gaunt had torn open his frock coat and uniform shirt, seemed as cold as the void. Spika looked forlorn and forgotten, his chest a scrawny, shrivelled knot, like the belly of a fish. He had seemed a commanding man. Death had diminished him mercilessly.

  ‘Clear my damned bridge, sir,’ Kelvedon said. ‘Have your meat-head troops gather in their appointed billets and stay out of our way. This is a fighting ship. We will secure all decks and drive out the enemy.’

  ‘We fight better than you,’ replied Gaunt. ‘Imperial Guard. Astra Militarum. Best damned fighting bastards in the universe. Stop talking crap and collaborate with me, Acting Shipmaster Kelvedon. Spika knew our worth and how to profit from coordinated responses.’

  ‘Spika made decisions that I would not have made,’ replied Kelvedon. ‘This entire run was not battlefleet business. It was some kind of undistinguished smoke and mirrors blackwork by your Commissariat masters and–’

  Kelvedon suddenly made a curious sound, the sound that a cargo-8’s tyre makes when it blows out. His eyes watered, his cheeks ballooned, and he sank to the deck, doubled up.

  ‘Knee in testicles,’ Criid announced to Gaunt as Kelvedon flopped onto his side in a foetal position. ‘That the kind of thing you had in mind?’

  ‘Superb work, Captain Criid.’

  She half turned, then looked back.

  ‘You what?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you,’ said Gaunt pumping at Spika’s chest with the balls of his palms, ‘there just hasn’t been a moment. Promotion, Tona. Captain. Company command, A Company. I want you to run my company.’

  ‘For kneeing some void-stain in the knackers?’ she asked.

  ‘I may have taken a few other factors into account. Your peerless combat record, for example. Now, Captain Criid, if you don’t mind, would you kick Acting Shipmaster Kelvedon in the testes a second time?’

  Criid frowned.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  Gaunt stopped compressions and sat back on his heels.

  ‘Because it would make me feel better. This isn’t working.’ He rubbed his hands together. The cold radiating from Spika’s corpse had seemed to leech into him, numbing his hands, his wrists, his forearm.

  ‘He’s fething dead,’ Gaunt sighed.

  He rose slowly, stepped away from Spika’s pathetic corpse and over Kelvedon’s blubbering mass.

  ‘Who’s actually in charge here?’ he asked the bridge around him. ‘Not this blowhard runt,’ he added, gesturing back at Kelvedon. ‘Who is next in line? Come the feth on! This is an emergency!’

  ‘I am,’ said one of the robed figures waiting at the edge of the bridge platform. He stepped forwards. He was tall, as tall as Ezra Night, and just as rake-thin. His floor-length robes were blue, trimmed with an odd fabric that seemed opalescent. His eyes were gross augmetic implants, and one of his hands was a bionic spider. Input plugs and data cables threaded his neck, throat and chest.

  ‘Darulin, Master of Ordnance,’ he said to Gaunt, with a slight bow.

  ‘Ordnance has precedence over artifice and helm?’ Gaunt asked.

  Darulin nodded.

  ‘A ship is its weapons. Everything else is secondary.’

  ‘Is it true that we’ve been boarded?’ asked Gaunt.

  ‘Available data says so. There is fighting in the engine houses.’

  ‘Who’s fighting?’

  ‘I misspoke,’ Darulin replied. ‘There is killing in the engine houses.’

  ‘Who has boarded us?’

  ‘The Archenemy,’ said Darulin.

  ‘How did they find us?’ asked Gaunt.

  ‘Consult the chronometer,’ Darulin invited, with a whirring spider-gesture. ‘A moment passed for us, but we are missing ten years. We are adrift. The Archenemy had time to detect and triangulate.’

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Gaunt.

  ‘The Archenemy had time to detect–’

  ‘No, before that.’

  ‘We are missing ten years. We have lost ten years because of the temporal distortion of the translation accident.’

  Gaunt and Criid looked at each other.

  ‘We were only unconscious for a moment,’ murmured Criid. ‘A moment.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Gaunt asked the Master of Ordnance.

  ‘Yes. Such time-loss is rare and troubling, but not unheard of. You are not void-experienced. You do not know such things.’

  Gaunt regarded the deck for a moment, collected his thoughts, then looked back at Darulin.

  ‘We must coordinate a counter-assault,’ Gaunt said. ‘My regiment. Your armsmen.’

  Darulin was about to respond when Ana Curth entered the bridge. A couple of Tanith corpsmen followed her, and behind them came Maddalena Darebeloved. Larkin, Beltayn and the rest of A Company gathered in the doorway behind, looking on grimly.

  ‘Who’s hurt?’ Curth asked.

  ‘The shipmaster,’ Gaunt told her. ‘It’s too late for him.’

  Curth elbowed past Gaunt, heading for Spika.

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ she told him. She paused and glanced back at Gaunt.

  ‘Don’t send your bitch to fetch me, ever again,’ she said.

  He didn’t blink.

  ‘Behave like a professional,’ he replied.

  Curth knelt beside Spika, examined him, and checked his vitals.

  ‘Compressions!’ she ordered at one of the corpsmen, who rushed to oblige.

  ‘I tried that,’ said Gaunt.

  ‘Let’s see what happens when somebody knows what they’re doing,’ she shot back. She opened her case, lifted the folding layers, and selected a hydroneumat syringe. She loaded it from a phial, checked it, flicked it, then swabbed a place over the carotid on Spika’s neck.

  The needle slid in and she depressed the cartridge release.

  Spika did not stir.

  ‘Shit,’ said Curth, and began mouth to mouth as the corpsman applied diligent heart massage.

  Gaunt turned back to Darulin.

  ‘My regiment. Your armsmen. You were saying?’

  His route to the drive chambers had been blocked by a corridor that had suffered catastrophic gravity collapse. Scout Sergeant Mkoll had switched to service ducts and crawlspaces. He was edging his way down an almost vertical, unlit vent tube when the vox finally woke up.

  A voice crackled, dry in the cold darkness.

  ‘Advisory, advisory,’ the voice said. ‘The Archenemy is aboard this vessel. Arm and prepare. The Archenemy is in the drive chambers and advancing for’ard.’

  Mkoll braced himself on a welding seam, legs splayed. The vent duct was sheer. He let his rifle, now strip-checked and reloaded, hang off his shoulder and adjusted his microbead link. Cold air breezed up at him from far below, bearing mysterious sounds of clanks and bumps.

  ‘That you, Rawne?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Identify?’

  ‘It’s Mkoll.’

  ‘Where are you?’ Rawne asked over the link.

  ‘Like I’m going to tell you that over an open channel. Report.’

  ‘We’ve been boarded.’

  ‘I know. I’ve met some. Not sure what they are.’

  ‘Intel says six storm-teams, which means about seven hundred hostiles. V’heduak.’

  ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ Mkoll asked.

  ‘No time to explain in detail. The Archenemy fleet, basically. Ever wondered how the Sanguinary Tribes get around? How the Blood Pact move from world to world? V’heduak, that’s how. And when they’re not acting as drivers for the bastard ground forces, they stalk the stars, looking for ships to pic
k off and plunder. We’ve been hit by cannibals.’

  ‘Tech cannibals?’

  ‘Yeah, and the rest.’

  Mkoll fell silent for a moment. He felt the sweat bead on his forehead despite the chill breeze gusting from below him.

  ‘Where are you getting this intel from, Rawne?’ he asked.

  ‘You don’t want to know, Oan.’

  ‘But it’s reliable?’

  ‘As feth.’

  ‘Where are you?’ Mkoll asked.

  ‘In the brig, securing the asset.’

  ‘Rawne, is anyone moving aft to the drive chambers?’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Mkoll, it’s all a bit uncoordinated. The vox is choppy. I think Bask’s company is moving in. No word from Kolea. Nothing from Gaunt.’

  Mkoll sighed.

  ‘Feth,’ he whispered to himself.

  ‘Say again?’

  ‘Hold the fething line,’ Mkoll said. ‘I’m going to take a look.’

  Toe-cap and fingernail, he resumed his descent.

  Ezra Night threw himself headlong into cover. Enemy fire whipped at him, exploding the bulkheads and wall braces behind him. Sparks showered. Pieces of plastek and alumina whistled through the air.

  Ezra rolled. He brought up his lasrifle and clipped off two solid bursts of fire. Varl would be proud of him. Varl and Criid. Those who had taught him.

  The enemy dropped. The Archenemy.

  Ezra had been fought back into the rear spaces of the drive chambers, vast as they were. He was just one man facing squads of hundreds.

  He would fight and die. Fight and die. That was what Ibram always said. Better to fight and die. Do you want to live forever?

  A little longer would be nice, Ezra thought.

  He aimed again, and fired a burst. Two attackers flipped over on their backs, their torsos blown apart.

  He was aware of a little amber rune winking on the rim of the clip-socket above his thumb. Powercell low. He needed a reload. Why hadn’t he thought to take one off the corpse?

  A series of heavy explosions detonated along the centre of the deck space, marching towards him. Debris showered into the air, whole deck plates and underdeck pipework.

  The Archenemy had sent heavier units into the Armaduke.

  Ezra spied the first of the stalk-tanks as it clattered along the drive hall towards him. Two more followed. He had seen such machines before. They were lightweight, with an almost spherical pod of a body just large enough to contain a single driver or hardwired servitor operator plus control packages and data sumps. Powerful quad-lasguns or plasma cannons were mounted on a gyro cradle beneath the body. The tanks walked on eight pairs of long, slender spider-legs.