Pharos Page 27

  The third, that previously injured, did not last long after that.

  The Dreadnoughts were an obvious threat to the wall, and had to be dealt with, but their advance had screened a hundred legionaries who were now closing to close assault range. The ancients’ sacrifice had been calculated.

  Some of the warriors carried lightweight ladders or grapnels. They flung these up against the wall as their brethren slammed melta bombs and shaped charges against the outer plating or brought lascutters into play.

  The amount of firepower being traded was horrendous. So many bolt-rounds flew between the lines that they hit each other, the space between the opposing forces filling with small explosions. Three of Polux’s men fell. Ruby beams of lascannons turned Night Lords into smoking piles of armour in return.

  ‘Captain.’ Polux was signalled by Chokis, the sole White Scar in his Lightkeepers. ‘The lower gallery is breached.’

  ‘Fall back,’ ordered Polux. Chokis would not like the order, but would obey. ‘Everyone, fall back to the second line.’

  The enemy crested the wall.

  Polux swung his massive power fist into the face of a Night Lord as he emerged over the parapet. The Nostraman’s head vanished in a mist of metal and carbon atoms, the body fell backwards. Polux used the edge of his storm shield to push the ladder down. ‘Fall back!’

  Men either side of him left their positions, firing as they went. A dozen came out from the wall interior, lined up in the tunnel, and raked wall-top and wall-door with fire as their fellows retreated behind them. They departed with their faces to the enemy, their guns never silent.

  Polux surveyed the scene. He calculated one hundred and ninety dead Night Lords, three downed Dreadnoughts. His defence force had lost ten. An acceptable trade were he facing an equal force, but he had far less coin of that nature to spend than the enemy.

  He left with the last Space Marines. Night Lords were coming over the parapet unopposed. He slammed one in the chest, killed another near the stairs. A third leapt at him from the parapet, sword drawn, but he fell away before Polux could strike, slain by covering fire.

  The stairs off the wall beckoned. Deeper in the tunnel was a second wall with fresh defenders fronted by a minefield. The tunnels were endless, and Polux had laid them all the way in with traps. If the Night Lords ever found their way to any of the primary locations, they would pay for every step in blood.

  There was a flash, a curious sense of weightlessness, and Polux realised he was sailing through the air just as he connected hard with the smooth tunnel wall.

  The rampart reared high, sundered in the middle, and crashed back to the rock in smoking ruin. Fire billowed out from the fortification, concentrated into a fierce tongue by the tunnel. Polux’s head rang and blood pooled under his tongue. Four more of his men were down. A dozen Night Lords had been caught in the blast. Polux could not understand the kind of commander that would throw the lives of his troops away in such a manner.

  More were coming, running through the wreckage, a dozen sailing down through the air on roaring jump packs.

  Polux swayed to his feet. A few of his warriors were in the same difficulty, isolated from their fellows and unable to make the wall of covering loyalists. The Space Marines deeper in saw his predicament and stood firm, firing so much their bolters glowed with the heat of discharge. They downed Night Lords as they poured through the breached wall by the dozen, but were felled in turn, having no fortifications to shelter behind.

  Raptors landed all around Polux. A deadly punch crushed the torso of a Night Lord, slew a second, a third he vapourised with his fist’s underslung meltagun, but there were too many to fight and they surrounded the captain in a ring of leering gargoyle masks and obscene trophies.

  His men called out for him, and many turned back to his aid.

  Polux assessed the situation as he fought. If his men came to him, they would fail. Depleted of defenders, the second line would be lost.

  ‘Fall back! Leave me!’

  The Space Marines hesitated.

  ‘Leave me!’ Polux slew another foe. His power plant was hot on his back, running past its safety limit supplying energy to his fist. The raptors were all around him. The few of his own warriors trapped alongside him were slain.

  Reluctantly the others fell back, firing at Polux’s assailants where they could, and then they were gone, back into the safety of the mountain.

  Raising his fist and shield, Polux charged.

  ‘Watch the third engine!’ commanded Dantioch. ‘Do not allow it to go above seventy per cent total output.’

  ‘The Pharos light is dim,’ complained Magos Carantine. As he spoke, his second voice of binaric chittered instructions to his servitors. ‘We have lost much capacity because of the landslides. Blocking the apertures has compromised the efficacy of the beam.’

  ‘It is enough. Corvo is locked in the transit beam. He will be here in a few hours.’ The mountain shuddered under an impact. ‘The Eighth become careless. We must hold on only for a while longer. Captain Corvo’s reinforcements will allow us to prevail.’

  Carantine worked a whole bank of machines, mechadendrites waving over his back to plunge unerringly into dataports. Nine servitors worked alongside him with unusual speed, impelled by his augmetically enhanced brain. ‘I am not a strategist, but he comes with two and a half thousand against twenty thousand.’

  ‘It will be enough to stymie them until Lord Guilliman comes,’ said Dantioch. He limped up and down the wall of Mechanicum machines, casting a critical eye over the work of his own subordinates, offering rebukes or direction where needed. ‘All we need do is reinforce the mountain.’

  ‘But they must get into the mountain.’

  ‘There is a way,’ said Dantioch.

  Battle noise sounded through the chamber, sometimes amplified, sometimes dulled by the Pharos’ odd acoustic properties. Dantioch had grown used to it and did not let it distract him from his task. ‘It is vital that the transit beam is maintained. A sudden loss will be catastrophic to the fleet!’ he scolded one technician.

  He leaned in to readjust the Mechanicum focusing array installed in an unimportant-seeming chamber a hundred metres below. ‘This substream must not decohere!’

  ‘I am sorry, Lord Dantioch,’ said the man.

  The warsmith continued his pained circuit. He had not departed Primary Location Alpha since the invasion began, too anxious of mishap to leave the machines in the hands of his servants, especially with Polux leading the mountain’s defence. He was irritable; part of him wished to be fighting again, to be free of the Pharos’ obtuse alien technologies. He walked past Carantine and his host of lobotomised slaves. It took all of Dantioch’s considerable will not to check the magos’ work too.

  His concentration fully occupied, he did not see the greasy curl of teleport vapour gather itself at the rear of the tuning stage. His first warning was the bark of a bolter as one of his sentries opened fire. Half a dozen guns replied. The warrior crashed down.

  Dantioch turned, pain gripping his side. A group of warriors garbed in Cataphractii Terminator plate stood at the back of the room, the teleport glimmer fading from the planes of their armour. They had not come through unharmed. One was buried halfway in the floor, his flesh and armour fused to the stone. Another stood motionlessly, his armour crumpled. A third had arrived around his armour, his viscera steaming on the outside of his stretched skin. Appallingly, this last lived for long seconds. The organs twitched with dying circulation. An agonised mewling came from somewhere within the scarlet folds of gore.

  There were still eight of them, all in the bulky war-plate. Seven veterans, their armour decorated with images of horror and death, and an officer, sporting a crest of red bat wings upon his cowling.

  There were four Ultramarines in the chamber with the warsmith. All were killed quickly, blasted apart by concentrated b
olter fire while their own rounds exploded on the Cataphractii’s energy fields or bounced from their thick armour.

  Carantine was not given the option to surrender. His weak spots were expertly targeted; his cranium, power plant and organ flasks. All were blown apart and he fell to pieces without the chance to speak. His servitors froze as their datalink was severed.

  ‘Do not cry out or call for aid,’ said their leader, in a voice made grating and ugly by his vox-grille.

  ‘If I were to, you would perish,’ said Dantioch.

  ‘I think not. My entire force assaults your mountain. I have five hundred of my finest about to breach the nearest entrance. There cannot be more than forty warriors between there and this location.’

  ‘The ways through this mountain are not easily traversed,’ said Dantioch.

  The leader walked towards Dantioch, examining the room. He looked longest at the Mechanicum machine banks. He said nothing for a moment, conferring privately with his warriors. Three of them stumped off towards the only entrance into the mountain from Primary Location Alpha, three more went out onto the promontory outside the cave. There, steps led up to Polux’s fortress. If they tried that road, Dantioch didn’t rate their chances. He willed them to try it. The remaining pair came to flank their leader.

  His commands done, the leader returned his attention to Dantioch. ‘I am Krukesh the Pale, Kyroptera of the Eighth Legion and champion in the war against the False Emperor. I claim this facility in the name of Horus, rightful ruler of mankind.’

  ‘I do not recognise Horus as my master.’

  ‘That will change.’

  ‘Will it? You cannot win.’

  ‘Dear Dantioch! Does our presence here not suggest we already have?’ said Krukesh. ‘You only delay the inevitable.’

  ‘You will never get out of this chamber.’

  ‘I do not think that really matters, do you, warsmith? I suppose you are going to be tediously intransigent when I ask you to explain the workings of the beacon, so we shall move on to your interrogation.’ He gestured at Dantioch. ‘Take him. We will make him talk.’

  As the Terminators came to Dantioch’s side and painfully forced him to his knees, he cast a sidelong glance at the struggling Mechanicum machinery. Whole fields of indicator lights glowed red.

  Without tending, the transit beam quietly failed.

  The beam fascinated Corvo. It dragged them through the warp at tremendous speed, and smoothly, the fleets’ own immaterial drives shut down. There was little sense of the storm wracking real space and empyrean within the Glorious Nova. Tranquility reigned.

  Wanting to better understand, Corvo had gone to his Mechanicum aides. When he asked them how it was done, they became agitated. Their augmetic eye clusters gleamed as inscrutably as always, but the faces of those less altered showed consternation at their ignorance, and their mechadendrites lashed.

  Exertion at distance, they said. Forced attraction multiplied by gravity lensing. The shunting of excess mass accumulated by quantum entanglement effects allowing swifter travel through warpspace. The warp offered shortcuts to locations in real space. The transit beam smoothed the way. Its mass-cancelling effect enabled a craft to exceed the relative speed of light within the warp, a doubling of advantage of speed and distance. A cascade of binaric blurts and machine sounds followed. The usual Mechanicum obfuscation when they did not know what they were talking about. They did not like having their ignorance exposed.

  Was it safe? he had asked.

  They replied with a collective cybernetic shrug.

  Nothing untoward had happened, so he could only assume that it was safe. The weighing and trading of risk was the cornerstone of successful theoretical.

  Still he was not entirely comfortable. To rely upon the technology of the alien disturbed Corvo. Too many times had he fought against creatures inimical to humanity, and he had begun to form the opinion that all things associated with non-humans were unclean. This prejudice had taken root a long time ago, but it had begun to flourish after Astagar where he had fought Lorgar’s Word Bearers and the warp-tainted machines they employed. In felling the corrupt Warlord Titan Felghast he had been confronted by human ingenuity suborned and perverted. Technology employed by alien species was often exotic, difficult to understand. How was it possible to tell whether that power came from the purity of material laws or through the sorceries of the warp?

  The road they travelled engaged with the empyrean and so therefore could itself be the product of so-called Chaos. What little steps to damnation were they taking by using it?

  He put such thoughts from his mind. The Lord Primarch himself had mandated the use of the Pharos, and it had kept the Five Hundred Worlds together. Nevertheless, he could not shake his concerns entirely. He wondered if he ever would. He was glad that such considerations were not his to ponder, and the practicals that inevitably came from them belonged to others to choose. Long may it remain so, he thought to himself. Give him the easily quantified risk exchanges of bolter, blade and battleship. Those were theoreticals he could comprehend.

  A shudder ran down the spine of the Glorious Nova. Corvo snapped instantly out of his reverie.

  ‘Helm station, report.’

  ‘Lord captain, I have detected something disturbing.’

  The ship groaned and rolled sharply enough to counteract the effects of the grav plating. Corvo grabbed at the railing around his command dais for support.

  ‘We’re losing speed!’ reported his helmsman, Matheris.

  ‘Is there a problem with our engines?’ asked Corvo.

  ‘Engines are still engaged at full,’ reported the engineering cluster. Tech-adepts there exchanged rapid blurts of information.

  A rattling groan boomed across the ship.

  ‘We’re gaining mass, captain,’ said the command deck head magos.

  ‘The Pharos,’ said Shipmaster Valentian. ‘The beam is failing.’

  ‘Will we be cast from the warp?’

  ‘Uncertain,’ said the magos.

  ‘We’ll be torn to pieces!’ said Valentian.

  Corvo had been right not to trust it.

  ‘Cut engines,’ yelled the shipmaster. ‘Full reverse thrust, bring our speed down to safe warp-engine operating parameters. Engine room, prepare immaterium drive for immediate activation. Now!’ The order was relayed across Corvo’s modest fleet; five Ultramarines cruisers beside the Glorious Nova, and the Watcher of the I Legion. All of them had suffered the same effects.

  ‘Too late!’ cried the helmsman.

  The road of light blinked out of existence.

  ‘All hands brace!’ said Valentian.

  Reality screamed, and the fleet was cast out of the warp, still travelling at tremendous speed.

  As an object accelerated, so its mass increased. The Pharos enabled faster travel through the empyrean by using its sympathetic effects to bleed the extra mass away. Now it was off, and the spilled mass of the ships returned with murderous force.

  Ships flipped and tumbled, their progress suddenly and catastrophically arrested. Dependent on the no-space of the empyrean, no human craft had ever been designed to go at such a pace in the world of natural laws. It was too much for the Spear of Hermia. The ship was crushed by its own mass, gone from something as light as air to the density of a neutron star in an eyeblink. Its reactor detonated, the star of its death weirdly stretched by the immense velocities of the fleet.

  The Glorious Nova groaned. The pressure of deceleration was unbearable. For all the ship’s energy fields and technological tricks, titanic forces pressed hard on Lucretius Corvo; the weight of the galaxy leaned on his chest. Men were flung forwards from their stations. Grav plating peeled away from the deck in long curling sheets torn free by their own energies. Servitors were ripped out of their housings. Everyone was shouting.

  And then it was over. The
ship adjusted to its sudden change in mass, somehow not shattering in the process.

  ‘Report,’ said Corvo. He pulled himself up off the floor. Something slid from his shoulder guard. It took him a moment to realise it was one of the bridge crew. The man had been thrown from his station, his rib cage smashed to splinters upon the Ultramarine’s

  armour.

  Dead men and women were everywhere, flung about like dolls, impaled upon machinery on every tier of the command deck. Fires burned in several parts of the bridge. The armourglass of the gallery windows displayed massive cracks. Were it not for the warp shutters being closed, they might have failed.

  ‘Back to your stations! Report!’ demanded Corvo.

  The living pulled themselves up. Feet crunched on broken glass. From a decimated servitor choir a single, damaged survivor repeated, ‘No… no… no… no…’ over and over again. Half of the crew were dead.

  Corvo stepped down from the dais. His chest was bruised. Each breath was hard. The pain subsided quickly, healed with preternatural swiftness by his transhuman physiology.

  He looked to the shipmaster’s throne. Valentian had been reduced to a pulpy mess.

  ‘Fire crews, to the bridge. Company report. Someone get vox and datasquirt contact with the rest of the fleet. I need fleet status now!’ he said. He strode about the room, pulling the unhurt to their feet, comforting the injured brusquely. The other Space Marines on the command deck did the same.

  ‘The Pharos effect has been terminated,’ said a young ensign. He sounded panicky, but was keeping his fear under control. Already Corvo was judging his remaining command crew, seeing how they reacted. He had to reorganise them; they must be prepared for battle. ‘But we are still proceeding at just under the speed of light.’

  ‘Fleet reporting in. Damage on all vessels. The Spear of Hermia is gone,’ said Matheris. Blood ran from a cut in his scalp.