Night Lords Omnibus Read online

  A huge central table projected a distorted green hololithic display of Crythe and the dozens of ships surrounding it. In angry red blurs, a second fleet a short distance from the planet was depicted. They wavered in jagged, flickering detail.

  The pict link to Hunter’s Premonition showed Captain Halasker in his Terminator plate, unhelmed as he stood at the head of his own holoprojection table.

  ‘They are holding off, then.’

  The Exalted dragged its spiked bulk closer to the projected display, and gestured with a swollen, pale claw. ‘Two battle-barges, three strike cruisers. This represents overwhelming force. Perhaps two-thirds of the entire Chapter.’

  ‘We are aware of numbers. What we are not aware of is why they arrived so soon.’ Malcharion stood opposite the Exalted, dwarfing the daemon-twisted former captain. The division in the room was obvious for all to see.

  ‘The Warmaster lied to us,’ Halasker insisted. ‘He must have known.’

  ‘Why would he lie and endanger his own forces on the surface?’ the Exalted countered.

  ‘Maybe so. But can that many seers truly be wrong?’

  ‘Did not your own astropaths agree with the Warmaster’s declaration?’ the Exalted asked. ‘The wake of that many ships casts great waves through the sea of souls. Your astropaths confirmed the judgements of the Warmaster’s own. The tide should not have broken upon us for another month.’

  ‘The seers are mortal.’ Halasker wouldn’t concede the point. ‘I placed no overt trust in them at all.’

  Talos spoke from his place close to Malcharion. ‘A larger fleet is still incoming. We are dealing with nuances in the immaterium – a dimension none of us understand. Can you, Captain Halasker, look into the warp and see which waves are natural tides in an unnatural realm? Can you, Captain Vandred, see whether the war-wake of one fleet is masked by the tidal wave caused by another? Everything we do is guesswork compounded by inexperienced estimation.’

  The Exalted met Halasker’s black eyes over the screen link. ‘If the Blood Angels will remain at bay, they can be ignored while Crythe falls. We can recommit our forces and avoid the Warmaster’s further displeasure.’

  ‘You are free to commit the 10th wherever you wish,’ the other captain replied. ‘I am done with this fool’s errand. A fine concept in the simulation displays. A fine concept that has bled us dry when it came to the moments of bolter and blade.’

  ‘The Warmaster has carelessly spent our blood,’ Xarl snarled low. ‘We owe him nothing.’

  ‘I agree,’ Talos said. ‘We should disengage from the fleet as soon as all of our forces have been recovered from the surface.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Halasker.

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘I am enjoying this display of supreme naivety.’ The Exalted’s tongue bled as it licked its fangs. Eyes as black as dead stars turned upon Talos and Malcharion. ‘But the Despoiler will not allow this. He has the strength to prevent us breaking away, and he will never forgive such a betrayal.’

  ‘Enough, Vandred.’ Halasker shook his head. ‘Your loyalty to the Old War is commendable, but Abaddon is a fool. Yet again, he has committed too much, too hard, too far from support. He holds tenuous lordship over Legions that are greatly-enamoured of endless infighting. This is just one of many betrayals he will forgive because he will need allies again in the future.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ the Dreadnought rumbled.

  ‘The last of my forces will be on board the Premonition within the hour.’

  ‘And how are we supposed to placate the Warmaster? I promise you, Halasker, he will fire upon us if we run.’

  ‘Cripple his ships.’

  All eyes turned to Talos.

  ‘What did you say?’ the Exalted asked, softer than he’d spoken in years.

  ‘When we break from the fleet, we cripple the Vengeful Spirit, or any other vessel that challenges us.’ Talos met the Exalted’s stare.

  ‘And leave them at the mercy of the Angels?’

  ‘Do I look as though I will shed any tears over that?’

  ‘Nor will I,’ Halasker added. ‘Abaddon is hardly short on ships. Even without us, he outnumbers the Blood Angels eleven to five.’

  Chatter began to pick up around the room as the gathered Astartes discussed the imminent treachery.

  ‘No,’ the Exalted growled. ‘This cannot, and will not be.’

  ‘And why not?’ Halasker narrowed his eyes.

  ‘Almost all of the Warmaster’s forces are engaged upon Crythe. If the Blood Angels strike – if they board the Black Legion’s cruisers – the Warmaster will struggle to escape with any of his fleet intact. There might be as many as six hundred Blood Angels waiting on their ships on the other side of this world! They will sweep through any resistance on board the Black Legion’s vessels.’

  ‘Then he should have begun the recall of his men hours ago, as the prophet’s vision suggested. Warnings were sent. You sent them yourself. Abaddon chose to leave them unheeded.’

  ‘Malcharion,’ Halasker addressed the Dreadnought now. ‘Are the 10th’s full forces back on board the Covenant?’

  ‘Yes, brother.’

  ‘Then make preparations to leave. I still have fifteen squads on the surface, with armour support. They were deep in the caverns, and their fighting withdrawal is taking lamentably long. Vandred?’

  ‘Yes, “brother”?’

  ‘Even after all this time, you are still a worm,’ Halasker finished. Then the screen went dead.

  The Exalted looked at its shattered company, with no more than thirty Astartes remaining. They watched him from where they stood around the table. Their armour was pitted and cracked. Their bearing remained strong and tall despite this pointless war. How had it come to this? Betrayal after betrayal. The erosion of trust. The death of brotherhood.

  ‘Incoming transmission,’ a servitor intoned from a wall console.

  The screen came alive again. This time, the face wasn’t Halasker’s, it was a dark helm with slanted eye lenses. The Astartes there inclined his head in greeting. Armour of black and gold shone in the flickering light of his own bridge.

  ‘Covenant of Blood. The Warmaster demands to know why you have still not recommitted your troops.’

  ‘Tell the Warmaster he will be losing this war without us, if he still aims to fight it. The Blood Angels have arrived, and more Imperial forces will be here soon.’

  ‘Silence, Dead One. Exalted, hear me. You know who I was, and who I am now. As the Eyes of the Warmaster, I speak with the Despoiler’s voice. Lord Abaddon cares nothing for the presence of the Sons of Sanguinius and their quaint fleet. He demands that the Covenant pull alongside the Vengeful Spirit in defensive formation.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? No? You will risk allowing them to board us?’

  The Exalted shook its horned head. ‘Ruven, you were once of the 10th yourself. So you know we will not comply. We are not enslaved to the Warmaster’s will. You know this as well as any other. Malcharion speaks the truth. Pull your own forces off Crythe before it’s too late.’

  ‘It is not that simple. We have committed much to the battle for Seventeen-Seventeen.’

  ‘Leave the mortals. Let them die. Who cares if they do not live to be slaughtered on another world in a later war? Recover your Astartes and be ready to engage the Blood Angels. Perhaps if we move quickly, we can decimate them before other Chapters fall out of the warp in support.’

  ‘We have Titans on that world. Thousands of Astartes. Hundreds of tanks. We are the Black Legion, not some shattered, impoverished horde weeping over its misfortunes and the memory of a martyred primarch.’

  The Exalted tongued its broken teeth again, feeling his veins ache with the need to see this bastard’s blood. Who was this wretch, this traitor, to speak of the Night Lords Legion in such a way…

  ‘If you will not comply,’ Ruven said, ‘you will be fired upon for trying to flee.’

  ‘The Throne’s vengeance is here,’ the E
xalted spoke low. ‘My prophet insists more will arrive within hours. We will not be selling our lives to preserve yours. We will not be repeating our warnings again.’

  ‘Your prophet is unreliable. You have indicated as much yourself.’

  The Exalted grunted a breathy sigh. ‘That may be so. But he is my brother, and you are nothing more than a betrayer who fled to wear the black of Abaddon’s many failures. I trust his words, as I trusted my father’s.’

  With a too-long claw, the Exalted dragged a finger across its throat in the demand for silence. The servitor at the vox console killed the link.

  ‘Battle stations,’ the Exalted said. ‘Be ready to disengage from the fleet.’

  The minutes passed with agonising slowness. More signifier runes appeared on the hololithic display as the minutes became hours. Vessels belonging to the Marines Errant, and the cousin Chapters of the Blood Angels – the Flesh Tearers and the Angels Vermillion – pulled alongside their fellows.

  The Exalted’s expert eyes roamed over the formation, seeing the possibilities playing out within his mind. Loose. Their formation was loose, as if the captains had no experience with one another, or any desire to work together. This may indeed have been true, for all the Exalted knew. Either way, it was an opening.

  They will come at us soon.

  He knew that because, had he commanded the gathering fleet, it would have been what he’d do. Strike hard, ramming the point of the lance through the heart of the Warmaster’s fleet. Such a gambit held grave risks and definite casualties. The Despoiler’s ships bristled with immense firepower, and still outnumbered the loyalist vessels.

  Strange, in truth. Not only had this approach been so masterfully masked, but the sense of opposition emerging between the two fleets was almost poetically startling. The advantage we hold is in the external force we can bring to bear against them. The advantage they hold is in the internal threat they bring. In a straight clash of vessels, the Throne’s Astartes would be annihilated. But no void war was ever so clearly defined. When boarding actions came into consideration, the Warmaster’s fleet would be lost.

  Distances within void conflict are matters of thousands and thousands of kilometres. As the runes depicting the enemy fleet began to blink and move, the Exalted rose to its full height and addressed Malcharion – the only other Astartes still in the room.

  ‘Alert the Premonition. We have forty minutes before they reach us.’

  Orbital pict imagery was useful again with the ground forces in retreat. Talos watched on the bridge’s occulus as the blurry forms of Astartes and rolling tank armour sheared back from their attack on the city beneath the mountains. Individuals were impossible to make out and the images were rendered even hazier by the shroud of pollution across the world’s skies, but the stuttering, distorted picts still told their tale.

  Talos saw the Black Legion falling back to their troopships spread across the conquered plain. Behind them in a routed wave came a teeming mass of humanity. Titans and tanks seemed like pockets of calm in the swarm.

  ‘Will they be able to get more than a few hundred Astartes back into orbit before the Angels reach us?’ he asked.

  The Exalted watched the same picts. ‘No. They will rely on the renegades that still have sizable forces on board their ships. The Purge, the Scourges of Quintus, the Violators… Here, look.’ The Exalted gestured to other vessels in the fleet, their hololithic images flickering and sending streams of smaller craft between them.

  ‘Thunderhawks,’ Talos said.

  ‘Exactly, my prophet. The Black Legion is begging its lesser allies for aid. Warriors from renegade Chapters are to be pressed into service, defending Abaddon’s own ships.’

  The Exalted shook its head as it sighed. ‘Once more, our Warmaster has grievously overcommitted his forces onto a battlefield. At least he was wise enough to leave many of his allies in orbit in the event of disaster.’

  Talos nodded to the creature on the throne. As much as it galled him to admit it, the Exalted was sinking into his element now. The myriad plays and ploys of void war lit up his eyes from within.

  ‘If this is the spearhead of the Throne’s force,’ Talos said, ‘I would hate to see the relief fleet arrive in full.’

  ‘The odds still favour us.’ The Exalted’s gaze only left the pict screen to glance at a miniature hololithic tactical display generated from the armrest of his throne. ‘Two battle-barges and six strike cruisers, with frigate support… We would survive, at crippling cost, should they be unable to board us.’

  The Exalted summoned a naval rating to the side of his command throne. ‘You. What’s the status of the Premonition’s withdrawal?’

  ‘The last report still has fifty Astartes and their transports on the surface, lord.’

  ‘Get me a link to Captain Halasker.’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘Halasker,’ the Exalted said. ‘What is taking your men so long?’

  Pictureless, the vox-link crackled back. ‘I have five squads fighting through to the landing site now. This is madness, Vandred. The Black Legion is shooting down our Thunderhawks.’

  ‘I demand confirmation.’

  ‘This is not the time to argue over picts! I have the sworn oaths of fifty men on the surface that they are embattled with the Black Legion, and that they have seen Abaddon’s own forces tearing our gunships from the sky. They are led by some kind of warp-sorcerer… My men cannot kill him.’

  ‘Ease your choler, brother. Be aware that no more than twenty minutes remain before we’ll need to engage the Angels or break into the warp.’

  ‘No. I will not leave half a company to die in the dust of a world Abaddon failed to take.’

  ‘You are the commander of one of our Legion’s last remaining battle-barges,’ the Exalted’s voice lowered to a dangerous snarl. ‘If you are going to sell your lifeblood, do it in tearing down the Imperium, not a vainglorious last stand. I will recover your Astartes. I have Thunderhawks and transporters standing ready. We will rendezvous in the Great Eye as soon as we are able, where the dogs of the Throne will not follow.’

  ‘Brave, Vandred. Very courageous. You think your little Covenant will survive where the Premonition would not?’

  ‘Yes. It will.’

  ‘Because it’s a less tempting target, eh?’

  ‘No. Not because of that.’

  ‘I sense you have an idea, brother.’

  ‘Halasker,’ the Exalted’s monstrous face lowered slightly, and its black eyes closed. ‘Enough of this. Just run while you still can. Abaddon’s mistake must not be allowed to kill us all. The Premonition, at the very least, must survive. Be ready to move the moment I give the word.’

  ‘Ave Dominus Nox, Vandred. Glory to the 10th. Die well, all of you.’

  The Exalted took a rattling, sticky breath. ‘We shall see.’

  After the link was silent, it spoke again. ‘Transmit the following message to the Warmaster’s flagship: “The Covenant of Blood is reengaging.” Then bring us alongside the Vengeful Spirit, as the Warmaster ordered.’

  The vox-officer nodded, and did as he was told. The helmsman did the same. The vessel shuddered as its drive engines awoke.

  ‘Vandred–’ Talos began.

  ‘All is not as it seems, my prophet.’ He fixed Talos with a haunted, fierce look. The web-like veins splitting his cheeks curled as he smiled. ‘Trust me.’

  In the infinitely slow ballet of void movement, the Covenant of Blood drifted through the scattered fleet, coming alongside the Warmaster’s flagship. A blue-black and bronze blade of a ship, it reached barely half the size of the Vengeful Spirit.

  ‘Launch Thunderhawks,’ the Exalted said, reclining once more in its command throne.

  ‘Thunderhawks launching,’ an officer called back.

  ‘Report the moment they’re clear of the fleet.’

  It took less than a minute. ‘Thunderhawks clear. All five are in the upper atmosphere.’

  ‘Drift to the foll
owing heading.’ The Exalted’s claws hit keys embedded in his throne’s console. ‘Engines cold. That is imperative. Drift. Use attitude thrusters, and no greater duration than two seconds from each. Keep all thrust emissions untraceable by casual auspex sweeps.’

  The Covenant obeyed. The Exalted watched the images displayed by the external picters, seeing the skin of the flagship edging closer to the hull of his own vessel. He was reminded briefly, as he always was in these dark and silent moments, of two sharks passing one another in the open ocean.

  ‘Open a one-way channel to the Premonition. Do not allow a reply.’

  ‘Done, lord.’

  ‘Halasker, this is the Exalted. Run.’

  Engines burned into angry life, propelling the Hunter’s Premonition from its position in the invasion fleet. The Exalted watched the hololithic display and the sensor readings of his focused auspex scans, but spared no attention for the disengaging Night Lords battle-barge. His focus was on the rest of the fleet.

  Several cruisers showed their weapons going live.

  ‘Incoming message, lord.’

  ‘From the Vengeful Spirit, I imagine,’ the Exalted said.

  ‘Yes, lord. They request we move, immediately, to a station at their starboard.’

  ‘Oh, woe,’ the Exalted grinned. ‘Are we accidentally within their firing solution? My, however will they open fire on the Premonition before it breaks into the warp?’

  Several of the bridge crew shared self-satisfied smiles.

  ‘They’ve repeated the demand for immediate compliance,’ the officer said.

  ‘Inform the flagship we require confirmation of that order. Only a short while ago, we were ordered to this position. Now we are required to move? With the Blood Angels inbound?’ The Exalted’s smirk was as ugly and inhuman as the creature itself.

  While the vox-officer sent the message, the Exalted watched the hololith again. Three other cruisers were powering up their lances to rip the Premonition apart for its betrayal. These, he disregarded. They would either be too slow to inflict more than minimal damage, or too late to do anything except watch the battle-barge escape.