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  Pride uncurled within his stomach, hot and welcome. Perhaps some nobility could be salvaged from this night after all.

  ‘Orders confirmed,’ the vox-officer called.

  ‘Do as the flagship orders,’ the creature nodded to the helm. ‘They won’t even be able to come about in time.’

  As the Covenant shuddered in obedience, the Exalted opened a vox-link to every speaker on the ship.

  ‘This is the Exalted. We are remaining within the fleet until the recovery of our brothers on the surface. We must buy our Thunderhawks time, during which we will endure assault from our former brethren, the Blood Angels. Seal all bulkheads. Atramentar, to the bridge. Claws, to your posts. All hands, to battle stations. Stand by to repel boarders.’

  XX

  THE ANGEL’S SONS

  The fleets met only briefly.

  ‘These battles are won and lost in the opening manoeuvres,’ the Exalted said as it stared at the Astartes fleet bearing down upon them. ‘If one side is in a strong enough position, the other – commanded by intelligent souls – would do better to retreat rather than be annihilated in a hopeless engagement.’

  Garadon regarded the three-dimensional hololithic performance as a dull mystery. ‘They will not back down, my prince.’

  ‘No. They will not. Another opportunity lost. Helm, be ready to break orbit on my mark.’

  ‘Break orbit?’ Malek grunted. ‘But lord–’

  ‘We are not going away from Crythe, Malek. Quite the opposite.’

  The Exalted closed its eyes, breathing deep and slow. It remained in this state for several moments. Finally, it spoke, without opening its jet eyes. ‘The first lances will be firing… now.’

  The Atramentar, all seven of them in their Terminator plate, watched as the hololithic display began to add weapons fire to its projection.

  ‘The lead battle-barges, bearing the Blood Angels’ insignia, will be hit by lance fire from the first of our perimeter ships… now.’

  The Exalted opened its eyes, seeing its predictions confirmed. Officers and servitors at consoles started working frantically. ‘We have a Blood Angels strike cruiser inbound, do we not?’ the Exalted asked.

  ‘Yes, lord!’ called a rating.

  ‘How predictable. Sometimes, we do not even need Talos to see the future for us. Our foes’ grasp of tactical potential is so coarse.’

  Garadon grunted acknowledgement, but said nothing.

  ‘Fire lances,’ the Exalted ordered, even as the weapons officer was drawing breath to announce the Blood Angels cruiser had just entered lance range.

  ‘Firing lances, lord.’

  The Exalted went back to its hololithic staring even as the ship started shuddering with the first impacts.

  Shields holding. Six per cent drain.

  ‘Shields holding!’ an officer called. ‘Seven per cent drain.’

  Close enough.

  ‘Weapon batteries, ready for my signal.’

  ‘Weapon batteries, aye.’

  Come on. Closer. Closer.

  The bridge shivered again. The rune depicting the Blood Angels strike cruiser Malevolence bore down like a spear. That was the one. It would release boarders onto both the Spirit and the Covenant. They were well within scanning distance now. They would know how vulnerable the Warmaster’s capital ships were. How empty the internal corridors stood without the Astartes to defend them.

  The bridge lights dimmed, then failed for a handful of seconds. The fleets, as they crossed each other, exchanged a ferocious volley of fire. The smaller capital ships like the Covenant had void shields far below the punishment capacity of battleships like the Vengeful Spirit.

  ‘Shields are down,’ a rating called out on cue. The tremors shaking the ship intensified tenfold.

  ‘My prince,’ one of the weapons officers said. ‘They’re in weapon battery range.’

  Wait. Wait…

  ‘Lord, enemy cruiser Malevolence has fired boarding pods.’

  The Exalted burbled a sound that might have once been a chuckle.

  ‘All batteries fire.’

  Two of the eight pod-runes flickered out of existence from the hololithic display. The others streamed home into their target ships. Four impacted into the Covenant.

  The Exalted calmly demanded a vox-channel to the entire ship. A rating at the console nodded back.

  ‘All claws, this is the Exalted. Between twenty and forty Blood Angels have breached us with assault pods. Hull impact locations are routed to squad leaders. Find the loyalists, my brothers. Kill them.’

  The Exalted rose from its throne, dragging its armoured bulk to the dais railing. It stared into the occulus, at the greyish orb of Crythe below.

  ‘Damage report.’

  ‘Minor structural damage, primarily the starboard side.’

  ‘Order the enginarium to vent plasma from the reactors. Bleed power directly into the void.’

  ‘Sir?’ his human bridge attendant stammered.

  ‘Do as I command, mortal.’

  ‘As you wish, lord.’

  ‘Vox-officer.’

  ‘Yes, my prince.’

  ‘Transmit emergency crash landing signals to the Vengeful Spirit. Inform them we’ve taken glancing damage that has managed to wound our reactor. Tell them we are losing our orbit due to the pull of the planet’s gravity, and our engines are locked at full power.’

  As the confused vox-officer obeyed, the Exalted turned to face the row of helmsmen.

  ‘Are we bleeding plasma? Self-scan the Covenant. Do we appear to be haemorrhaging from a reactor leakage?’

  The helm officers bent over their consoles. ‘Yes, lord,’ one replied.

  ‘Then dive,’ the Exalted grinned.

  ‘What?’ Malek stepped forward. ‘Lord, are you insane?’

  ‘Dive!’

  Like a sword falling from the sky, the Covenant of Blood tilted downward and fired its engines. Flame wreathed the shieldless strike cruiser as it tore through the pollution-clogged atmosphere.

  Septimus burned Blackened’s engines, coming in tight and low over the plain. Behind him came another two Thunderhawks and two transporters, forming a loose ‘V’ formation.

  ‘Be ready to break at the first sign of attack,’ he warned over the vox.

  ‘Compliance,’ replied three servitors.

  ‘Understood,’ came a deeper voice. An Astartes. Septimus had no idea which one.

  A trickle of sweat made its uncomfortable way down his back, seeming to pause at the bump of at each vertebra. It was one thing to know you’d eventually die in service to the VIII Legion. It was another thing to realise you were going to meet that fate imminently. Even if the Black Legion had stopped shooting down Night Lords gunships, what hope was there to get back into orbit and survive a docking operation in the middle of a void war?

  Septimus swore under his breath and activated a general vox-channel.

  ‘All VIII Legion units, this is the 10th Company Thunderhawk Blackened. Report your locations.’

  The voices that came back to him were strained, angry, embattled. He throttled up, letting the engines shout harder, approaching the storm of disorder that engulfed the landing site of the Warmaster’s forces.

  ‘Look to the skies, Night Lords,’ he said in fluent Nostraman. ‘We are inbound.’

  ‘Be swift,’ one voice said. ‘Most of us are down to killing them with our bare hands.’

  The chorus of replies detailed exactly what needed to be recovered from the surface. A Land Raider, four Rhinos, a Vindicator and forty-one warriors.

  Mere minutes later, Septimus kicked Blackened into hover, his altitude thrusters burning to keep the gunship aloft over the landing site. The landing platform erected by the 11th Company of the Hunter’s Premonition was a bare bones setup – and Septimus was being generous calling it even that. The surviving tanks and men clustered around an engine-scorched patch of land, their weapons turned outwards into the ranks of the Black Legion’s mortal slaves. Th
e humans had seen the incoming gunships and sought to escape, charging the encircled Night Lords vehicles.

  As the Astartes had said, several of the VIII Legion warriors were reduced to beating the mortals to death with their fists. Ammunition had not been landed and supplied to the front line in several hours. Even the guns of the tanks spat their deadly payloads only intermittently into the seething horde laying siege to their position.

  ‘They’ve not got room to get the tanks into a loading position. Should we open fire on the crowd?’ Septimus asked. ‘My ammunition counters are practically voided.’

  The gunship hovering fifty metres to his port bow immediately opened up with a vicious hail of heavy bolter fire, punching holes in the panicked mortal horde.

  Foolish question to ask a Night Lord, really.

  Septimus added his fire to the chaos below.

  Brother-Sergeant Melchiah moved with purpose.

  In units of five, his men moved through the enemy ship.

  The darkness was nothing to him. This, he pierced with the vision modes of his helm. The winding corridors offered no mystery to his senses. These, he navigated by memory, for one Astartes strike cruiser was the same as almost any other. Such was the wisdom contained with the Standard Template Construct patterns of all noble machines birthed by the Adeptus Mechanicus.

  On he stalked, chainsword purring with rev-breaths, his plasma pistol raised before him. The blackness of the Traitors’ vessel yielded before him, his vision stained emerald green by his helm’s lenses, picking out details of walls, side corridors, and the heat smear of recent footsteps.

  ‘Auspex,’ he voxed to Hyralus.

  ‘No movement,’ Hyralus replied. ‘Vague heat traces all around. A nexus of them in the chamber ahead.’

  ‘Forward, in the name of the Emperor,’ Melchiah said, moving on. He removed his helm, trusting to his own senses even in the pitch dark. He was Astartes. It was the way of things. Immediately, he felt more in tune with his surroundings, his senses no longer caged by the helm. Even with its enhancements, it was not always the perfect replacement for true perception.

  Corruption was rife here. Even the air of the ship tasted foul. Too long in the warp, too long with the same recycled air. Warm and stale, it tingled against the steel studs implanted above Melchiah’s eyebrow. Three of them, in recognition of his long service.

  Upon the shoulders of each warrior, a ruby-red drop of blood the size of a mortal’s fist was winged by marble angel pinions. It was a symbol that had endured for thousands of years, and one the Night Lords were sure to recognise. The Traitors’ own symbol was the corrupt opposite – a fanged skull instead of a primarch’s holy blood, and arching bat wings instead of the pure aileron of the murdered Angel, Sanguinius.

  With the ancient hatreds hot in his heart, Melchiah entered the chamber, plasma pistol raised. The shuddering of the ship was growing savage. Curious, that it wasn’t the jagged shaking of battle, but something much more regular. An atmospheric entry burn? Perhaps. But with little indication of why the Traitor Legion ship would be reacting this way, Melchiah put it out of his mind. He had a duty. He was oathed to this moment.

  The chamber was large. Almost impressive. On board the Malevolent, this room was a chapel to the Emperor of Mankind. On the Covenant, it looked to be some kind of communal haven for slaves. Detritus decorated the floor. Tables stood abandoned and bare. Bedrolls lined one wall.

  ‘Auspex?’ he said. ‘I see nothing.’

  ‘And that’s why you’re dead,’ Talos hissed as he dropped from the ceiling.

  Like spiders, they had lain in wait, clinging to the ceiling. With the Blood Angels in their midst, First Claw dropped the ten metres to the ground, their weapons spitting death at the loyalists below.

  Talos hit first, Aurum deflecting a bolt from the Angels and lashing out to ram home in the chest of the helmless squad leader.

  ‘Aurum!’ the sergeant snarled. ‘The blade!’

  Talos’s reply was a headbutt that crashed against his foe’s reinforced skull, hammering the long-service studs through the bone and into the soft tissue of the brain beneath.

  The two squads tore into each other, equal in all ways but for the fact First Claw had the advantage of surprise.

  Talos powered the sword to the side, ripping through Melchiah’s spinal column, lungs, one heart and his ceramite armour as if none of it existed. The blade’s arc was as smooth as if Talos chopped air. As the Blood Angel staggered back, the Night Lord pounded a bolt into his neck, just a single shot. Melchiah had a single moment to claw at the wound before it exploded, removing his head in a shower of organic mess.

  ‘For the Emperor!’ one of the Angels cried. The darkness broke in the face of bolter flashes and clashing power weapons.

  Talos leapt at the shouter, his golden sword cleaving through the warrior’s bolter on the downswing. The Astartes met the blade’s backslash with his own combat gladius.

  ‘For the Emperor,’ the Blood Angel said again, this time in a snarl.

  ‘Your Emperor is dead,’ Talos growled back. The moment came; the moment when the Angel’s gaze flickered to the blade in the Night Lord’s dark hands. Talos couldn’t see his enemy’s eyes, but he felt the minute movement of the Angel’s muscles as his attention wavered. In that critical moment, Talos hurled the Blood Angel back against the wall. Three bolts to the head downed him for good, and Talos nodded his thanks to Cyrion.

  Uzas, Mercutian, Xarl, Adhemar, Cyrion and Talos stood in the darkness, listening to the hiss of cooling bolter muzzles, watching the last Blood Angel in the doorway. He turned and ran, boots pounding down the corridor.

  ‘I… wasn’t expecting that,’ Talos almost laughed. ‘Uzas, do the honours.’

  Uzas sprinted into the darkness, chainsword howling.

  The Blood Angel wasn’t fleeing. Uzas knew that.

  He hated to indulge the thought, even to himself, that the Angels were an admirable force – back in the Great Crusade, at least. These thinbloods left much to be desired. So far removed from the gene-seed of their primarch as to be almost mortal. But even so, the Angel wasn’t fleeing. The only time an Astartes backed down from a battle was when he had an idea for how to fight it better elsewhere. The trick, Uzas had learned, was to kill the enemy before they got that chance.

  He was on the Angel in under a minute, but the loyalist wasn’t giving up easily. Without the element of surprise – and really, that was an inspired idea he grudgingly gave Talos credit for – the two of them were close-matched.

  The Blood Angel pulled his gladius free from its ornate scabbard and lunged. Uzas parried the first thrust and dodged the second, third and fourth. Kharnath’s boiling blood, the Angel was fast.

  ‘I’m better than you,’ the Angel mocked, backhanding the Night Lord with a fist that crashed hard against Uzas’s helm. ‘Will you call for your brothers, Traitor?’

  Uzas gave ground, deflecting the gladius with his chainsword each time it sought his heart or throat. Teeth sprayed from his chainblade as the Angel hacked them away.

  ‘I will eat your gene-seed,’ Uzas grunted, ‘after I claw it out of your throat with my bare hands.’

  ‘You will die.’ The Angel lashed out with a boot, thudding the Night Lord into the wall behind. ‘And be forgotten.’

  The Blood Angel’s helm distorted with a tremendous clang, then exploded in a shower of red-painted shards.

  Uzas breathed out slowly. The dead Blood Angel crashed to the ground in a metallic chorus of plate. Talos lowered his bolter and shook his head at his brother.

  ‘You were taking too long,’ he said, and moved back down the corridor.

  The Covenant of Blood was constructed in the shipyards of Mars in the age before Mankind’s sundering. Since its birth in those fleet-raising forge-foundries, it had landed a total of zero times, and performed an equal number of atmospheric flights. As it burned through the atmosphere of Crythe and violently tore through the cloud cover, the Exalted’s eyes
remained closed, not seeing anything on the strategium command deck.

  Its ship, the ship it knew better than the creature knew his own twisted body, was shaking itself apart. The painful shudders wracking the Covenant transmitted through to the Exalted’s own spine in sympathetic torment.

  But it vowed it would die before it failed in the promise to that preening glory-hound Halasker.

  The bridge crew gripped their consoles or remained strapped into their own control thrones. The Atramentar Terminators were forced to their knees, even their enhanced muscle fibres unable to resist the gravity forces taking hold. They resembled worshippers before the Exalted’s throne, which brought a sick little smile to the creature’s face, even if only for a moment.

  ‘Position,’ it demanded of the helm. At the reply, the Exalted turned to the vox-officer. ‘Hail our Thunderhawks. Inform them they have two minutes to be skyborne or they will have no mothership to return to.’

  ‘We will be above Seventeen-Seventeen in ninety seconds, lord!’

  ‘Slow my ship down, mortals. I care not how it’s done, but make it happen. Give the Thunderhawks time to dock.’

  The shaking threatened the hunt.

  Talos cursed as gravity reasserted its grip on them at another inconvenient moment, and his bolt went wide. Across the chamber, a second squad of Blood Angels stood their ground beside an unopened boarding pod. They crouched behind what little cover existed in the Blackmarket hall, returning fire at First Claw. Talos and his brothers used the corners of linking corridors as cover.

  Neither side was getting anywhere.

  ‘Brother, I have grim news,’ Adhemar voxed. He crouched next to the prophet, twinning his fire with Talos’s. ‘That pod they’re guarding?’

  Talos unleashed another three bolts to no effect. ‘I see it.’ The hull was mangled and blackened where the red-metal pod had pierced the ship’s skin. ‘Hard to miss, Adhemar.’

  ‘It’s a Dreadnought pod.’

  ‘What? How can you tell?’

  ‘The size of the damn wound in our hull!’

  Talos’s retinal display outlined the measurements as he glanced around the corner. He resisted the powerful urge to sigh.