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  The command decks might have been savaged beyond fast repair, but the under-officers aboard the Sword had only to ensure the grand cruiser could move from the battle, and its armour could easily sustain it until it could thrust clear of the orbital war. Efforts were redoubled in tech crews and officers racing to the enginarium decks, which was where the second factor came into play.

  Talos and First Claw had not been alone.

  The second impediment to regaining any semblance of control over the ship was that the secondary enginarium sector was in the hands of the enemy. While this section of the ship was nowhere near as vital to overall function as the main engine decks, it was a significant disruption to power flow and drive efficiency. The Night Lords hadn’t hit the primary sections and allowed themselves to be drawn into protracted firefights. They’d hit all they needed to hit; enough to take the Sword out of the fight with a minimum of delay and effort.

  Teams of armsmen stormed the massive engine chambers seeking to oust the invaders, but Second and Sixth Claws had left their pods with their bolters barking, and held their ground until the order to leave. When that order finally came, the defiant Imperials retook the subsidiary enginarium chambers, only to find a farewell gift left by the Night Lords, who had fastened explosives to the same hull section that their pods had breached in the first place. When the detonators counted down to zero, the explosives took out a vast section of the already compromised hull wall, leaving a sizeable portion of the secondary enginarium decks open to the void.

  This killed any hope of crew transit to and from the primary enginarium decks alongside the starboard edge of the grand cruiser, and left the secondary engines silent and dead. Directionless, with neither a brain nor a beating heart now that the bridge and enginarium were disabled, the Sword of the God-Emperor rolled in space, naked without its shields, taking a million scars from the weapons of the Warmaster’s fleet.

  In the space of half an hour, a handful of Astartes had killed several hundred Imperial souls, kept the two key areas of the vessel disrupted and only loosely in loyal control, and made their escape after ensuring no significant repairs could be made in time.

  Aboard the Covenant of Blood, the Exalted – already anticipating the praise he would receive from the Warmaster – ordered the helm to run close to the suffering Sword and be ready to receive boarding pods back into the starboard landing bays.

  His personal screens mounted in the arms of his command throne spilled digital data in a ceaseless stream of green runes on a black setting.

  Second Claw had disengaged and awaited retrieval.

  Sixth Claw, the same.

  Fifth Claw… no contact. No contact since launch. The Exalted suspected the pod had been destroyed almost as soon as it left the Covenant, hammered into nothingness by the pulverising fire from the grand cruiser’s broadsides. A shame, certainly. Five souls lost.

  But First Claw… Their pod was still attached. The last to be fired from the Covenant, their pod hadn’t impacted as close to their target objectives as the others.

  ‘Talos,’ the Exalted drawled.

  ‘This isn’t happening.’ Cyrion had to smash his chainsword against the wall to free it of the spasming, screaming armsman he’d impaled. ‘We’re not going to make it in time.’

  First Claw was embattled in the myriad corridors between the bridge and the gunnery deck where their boarding pod had struck the hull. Around them, the great ship shuddered violently, already breaking into pieces. The Night Lords had no idea how much of the Sword was still intact, but from the screams trailing across the hacked enemy vox, there wasn’t going to be anything left worth speaking of within the next few minutes.

  They’d met a flood of Imperial crew coming their way, which at first had been a surprise and had quickly become an annoyance. As they’d butchered the mortals running at them in the low-ceilinged corridor, Xarl had joked that it was amusing to see humans running towards them for a change.

  ‘Makes the hunt all the easier,’ he smiled.

  ‘You say that,’ Cyrion replied, ‘but you have to wonder what they’re running from if we’re a more pleasant option.’

  Xarl reached for a running female officer, grabbing her by the throat to drag her into a headbutt that caved in the front of her skull and snapped her spine. He hurled the body into the oncoming horde, knocking several people from their feet to be trampled by the advancing Astartes. Her blood was smeared across Xarl’s helm, starkly dark against the skull-white of his painted faceplate.

  ‘I see your point, brother,’ he said to Cyrion.

  As Talos listened to the scraps of enemy vox that reached his ears, Aurum rose and fell with mechanical precision, almost without any attention at all. A picture built up in his mind – a picture of the ship ahead and the horrendous damage it was taking as the Warmaster’s fleet picked it apart like a flock of vultures worrying a fresh corpse.

  ‘It seems,’ he spoke calmly, ‘the gunnery decks between here and our pod are taking the brunt of fire from our fleet.’ His bolter roared once, but the range was too short. The high-calibre shell pounded right through a running Imperial’s chest and out his back, to explode against the wall beyond.

  Cyrion chuckled as he saw.

  ‘What do we do?’ Uzas, more coherent now, asked as he laid about left and right with his combat blades. ‘Can we cross the suffering sections?’

  ‘Gravity is out, and they are ablaze,’ Talos replied. ‘No, we need to get back to the bridge. Close to it, at least. Even getting to the pod will take too long. The ship is in pieces already, and the crew are swarming like ants in a kicked hive.’

  ‘Then we kill our way there!’

  ‘Be silent, brother,’ Talos told Uzas. ‘The sheer number of lives we need to end is the main reason this will take too long. The gunnery deck must be in pieces by now. These mortals are coming from there.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Uniforms, Xarl,’ Talos replied.

  Xarl, always one to need the proof of his own eyes, grabbed another human attempting to flee past. The man’s uniform looked like every other – white and generic. What was Talos talking about? He lifted the struggling man off the ground by his greasy hair, holding the officer’s yelling face close to his bloodstained faceplate. Through the vox speakers in his helm’s snarling mouth grille, Xarl’s voice came out at insane volume.

  ‘Tell me where you are stationed. Is it the gunnery de–’

  The officer – quite deaf now – hurriedly drew a pistol in shaking hands and fired it point-blank into Xarl’s face. The small slug pinged against the ceramite, knocking Xarl’s head back a little before ricocheting with a wet crack back into the man’s own forehead. Xarl took one look at the deep red groove in the man’s skull and dropped the corpse, swearing in Nostraman. He could hear that bastard Cyrion laughing over the vox.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, ignoring Cyrion’s laughter. ‘Why the bridge?’

  ‘Because it has several decks beneath it that won’t explode if a lance strike hits them,’ Talos said. ‘And because I’m going to do something we may regret.’

  With those words spoken, he blink-clicked the spiralling rune on his retinal display that represented the Covenant.

  The Exalted listened to its prophet’s voice more than the actual words he spoke. Talos sounded calm, but there was a hard edge of irritation in the Astartes’s tone. They were cut off from their pod, and it would evidently take too long to fight through the panicked crew.

  It nodded its horned head as it relayed the orders to a servitor manning one of the lance gunnery stations.

  ‘You. Servitor.’

  ‘Yes, lord.’

  ‘Lock a single lance on the three decks beneath the main bridge of the enemy flagship. Cut at the angles I am transmitting now.’ It tapped a blackened claw on a number pad mounted on the arm rest of its throne. ‘Break off fire after exactly one-point-five seconds.’

  Yes, that should be enough. Penetrate the hull. Cut deep,
excise the metal meat, without doing too much damage. Tear a chunk of hull away, and expose the command decks to the void. It might just work, too.

  It would be a shame to lose the prophet if this failed.

  ‘Lord,’ spoke one of the mortal officers. The Exalted noted with only faint interest that the man still wore his old Imperial Navy uniform, from over a decade ago.

  ‘Speak.’

  ‘Servitors in Bay Five report a Thunderhawk is readying to launch. It requests clearance.’

  The Exalted nodded again. It had been expecting that. ‘Let it go.’

  ‘Servitors also report, Exalted one, that the crew is not Astartes.’

  ‘I said to give them clearance,’ the Exalted burbled, low and wet, saliva stringing between its fangs.

  ‘A-as you say, lord.’

  The Exalted turned to the gunnery servitor it had addressed before.

  ‘Ready, lord,’ the servitor murmured.

  ‘Fire.’

  The ship shuddered again, more violently than ever before.

  ‘That was close,’ said Xarl. His suit’s stabilisers kicked in, but he’d almost had to grip the arching wall of the passageway for support. First Claw had withdrawn to the command decks, no longer seeking to carve their way through fleeing human crew elsewhere. Here, in the darkness of the halls webbing beneath the bridge chambers, the Night Lords sheathed their blades and locked their bolters to thigh guards with magnetic seals. The ship’s lighting here was dead, a legacy of the lord admiral’s murder and the wounding of the Sword’s machine-spirit, and four pairs of crimson eye lenses glared out into the blackness, seeing everything in crystal clarity.

  Distantly, as the ship’s tremor subsided to a background shudder again, Talos’s helm auditory sensors picked up a faint sound wave: a series of metallic clangs, faded with distance.

  ‘You hear that?’ Xarl asked.

  ‘Bulkheads closing,’ Cyrion acknowledged.

  ‘Move faster,’ Talos ordered, and the squad broke into a run, their heavy boots thundering on the steel decking. ‘Move much faster.’

  Dimly, in his right ear, he heard a familiar voice.

  ‘Master?’

  The Night Lords sprinted through the blackness, rounding several corners and smashing aside the few crew that lingered, hiding and panicking, in the darkened hallways.

  ‘The squad,’ Talos breathed into his vox mic, ‘is using frequency Cobalt six-three.’

  ‘Cobalt six-three, acknowledged, master.’

  ‘Confirm our location runes.’

  ‘Locator runes sighted on my augury screens. Lord Uzas’s rune is flickering and weak. And… Lord, the ship is breaking apart, with eighty per cent damage to the–’

  ‘Not now. Has the Covenant fired?’

  ‘Yes, master.’

  ‘I thought so. We seek the closest deck to the voided sections of the command levels.’

  The silence stretched for five seconds. Six. Seven. Ten. Talos could imagine his servant scanning the hololithic display of the degrading grand cruiser, watching the locator runes of First Claw as they navigated the tunnels.

  Twenty seconds.

  Thirty.

  Finally… ‘Master.’

  The shuddering was so violent that both Cyrion and Uzas were thrown from their feet. Talos staggered and left a dent in the hull where his helm crashed into the metal. The ship was coming apart now. No question.

  ‘Master, stop. The left wall. Breach it.’

  Talos didn’t hesitate. The wall – which looked no different from any other in their headlong flight through the dark passageways of the command decks – exploded under the anger of four bolters.

  Beyond the wall, just for a moment, was fire.

  Beyond the fire was nothing but the infinite night of space, sucking the four warriors into the void with a greedy breath.

  Pain flooded him.

  Talos looked down… up… at the planet below… above. A dreary rust-red rock decorated by thin wisps of cloud cover. He wondered what the air would taste like.

  Stars spun past his field of vision, and he stared without truly seeing.

  Then, a slowly-turning cathedral, a palace of stained glass and a hundred spires, on the back of the burning Sword. He saw none of this, either.

  Blackness took him for a moment, which blessedly dulled the pain. When it passed, he tasted blood in his mouth, and was blinded by the bright warning runes flashing across his vision. He tried to vox Cyrion, Xarl, Septimus… but couldn’t recall how to do it.

  Pain, like light from a rising sun, bloomed in his skull again. Voices spoke in his ears.

  ‘Armour: void sealed,’ one of the runes said. Talos tried to move, but wasn’t sure he could. There was no resistance to his movements, no traction to anything he did, to the point he wasn’t sure he was moving at all.

  His vision turned once more, revealing pinprick stars and shards of metal spinning slowly nearby. It was difficult to see clearly, and that worried him more than anything else. One of his eye lenses was darker than it should be, blurry and black-red with dim, watery runes. Blood, he realised. There was blood in his helm, coating one of his eye lenses.

  One of the voices resolved into something approaching clarity. It was Xarl, and Xarl was swearing. Xarl was evidently swearing about blood.

  Talos’s vision turned, and then he saw Xarl suspended by nothing, drifting in the blackness, his brother’s skulls on chains floating around his armour like a dozen moons orbiting him. He felt thunder, a powerful tremor, as Xarl’s reaching hand slammed into his chest.

  ‘Got him,’ Xarl grunted. ‘Hurry up, slave. My leg’s smashed to hell and I’m bleeding into my armour.’

  Septimus’s voice came from the garbled darkness. ‘I’m drifting in now.’

  ‘Do you have the others?’

  ‘Yes, lord.’

  ‘Confirm you have Uzas.’

  ‘Yes, lord.’

  ‘Huh,’ Xarl’s voice lowered. ‘Shame.’

  Talos, now blinded by the blood smearing both his lenses, gripped Xarl’s wrist as his brother held him. He felt his senses refocusing, and although he was sightless, the unearthly silence and weightlessness told him all he needed to know. He was in space, without any propulsion, turning in the darkness without any control at all.

  ‘This,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘was the stupidest idea I’ve ever had.’

  ‘Glad you’re still alive,’ Xarl laughed, his voice hard and edged. ‘You should have seen the way you hit your head on the way out.’

  ‘I can feel it now.’

  ‘Wonderful. You deserve it. Now shut up and pray that accursed little runt you trust doesn’t crash our damn Thunderhawk.’

  VI

  AFTERMATH

  ‘If there is nobility remaining within Konrad’s Legion, then it is hidden deeply beneath too many layers of twisted lusts, deviance, and disobedience. Their ways are foolish, ill-considered and a hindrance to the orderly flow of controlled war. The time is coming when the Night Lords must answer for their behaviour and be brought back into the doctrine of Imperial warfare, lest we lose them to their own deviant hungers.’

  – The Primarch Rogal Dorn,

  Recorded commentary at the

  Battle of Galvion, M31.

  Ten minutes after First Claw had destroyed the wall separating them from the vacuum of space, the four of them stood in the strategium of the Covenant of Blood, arranged in a half-crescent at the base of the Exalted’s raised throne. Two of the Atramentar – Malek and Garadon again, Talos noticed – flanked the former captain, their weapons deactivated but held at the ready.

  The Exalted paid little attention to the mundane aspects of the orbital war now. The beauty of its void dancing was done, and it merely awaited the accolades due for its boldness. For now, the Exalted was content to let its under-officers move the ship into the formations of the larger battle and add the strike cruiser’s formidable guns to the onslaught.

  Battlefleet Crythe
was finished. The Resolute and the Sword of the God-Emperor were well on their way to becoming burned-out wrecks in orbit around Solace, and the lesser ships were being savaged by the overwhelming firepower of the Warmaster’s fleet.

  The deck shook as the Exalted nodded its acknowledgement down at the four warriors of First Claw.

  ‘Nicely done,’ the creature said.

  Talos was bareheaded. His helm had been mauled in the final escape from the burning Sword, when the pull of the void had crashed his head against the breached wall as he was sucked out into space. Xarl was limping and favoured his right leg – he’d almost lost it in the same instant that Talos had narrowly escaped decapitation – and even his enhanced Astartes physiology was struggling to re-knit bones that had almost been reduced to gravel. Cyrion and Uzas were physically unharmed, but Cyrion’s internal organs were still tense and working in frantic heat from the brief time in the void. His war-plate had been compromised by an unlucky shotcannon spread that had damaged his chestplate, and he’d needed to hold his breath for several minutes once his armour had vented all air pressure in space. Uzas, with a lucky streak the other three had long begun to curse, was grinning, utterly unscathed.

  ‘You are insane, Vandred.’ Talos spoke up to the command throne on its raised dais. His shaven head was a mess of scabbing and dried blood-trails as his gene-enhanced Larraman cells clotted his blood at the wound on his crown.

  Immediately, the atmosphere soured. Both of the Atramentar brought their weapons to bear: Malek hunched the shoulders of his brutish Terminator war-plate, and thick claws slid, crackling with force, from the armour’s oversized gloved fists. Garadon’s hammer hummed with building energy as it sparked into life.

  Talos might have been handsome had he been left as a man. With his enlarged Astartes features, he’d ascended from the ranks of classical humanity, but there was still something recognisably imposing and inspiring in the way he looked. His black eyes, stony with rage, glared up at the Exalted, and Talos had no idea just how much he resembled a sculpted marble statue from the heathen ages of Old Earth.