The Beast Arises

It was inconceivable that Obsidian Sky could destroy every last torpedo, but they could thin their numbers. And miracles happened, Magneric knew. The hull squealed in torment, shaken, this time from without, as though being attacked with a drill.

‘We shall know no fear!’

With a sudden lurch, the drilling stopped. Seconds elapsed without an explosion. The crew held their breath, and held onto their brace positions. They knew what a torpedo hit felt like.

‘Sound the general alert,’ boomed Magneric.

‘Aye.’

The bondsman covering at the main drive station — Cecillia — staggered from starboard to port, thumbed open a transparent plastek cover to expose a red key in a slot, and then turned it. The flickering light was immediately shot through with red. The effect was bitty, hazard-striping the debris-strewn deck as dull red lights glowed from broken screens.

Internal sensors were dead. Communications were dead.

Without them, necessity had demanded the command crew be creative. Power utilisation profiles indicated active terminals in all sections. Oxygen saturations pinpointed signs of life at muster points on all decks. Kaplin, at Operations, had breathlessly suggested retrofitting a pair of servitors to link up as a two-way communicator, but there had been no time to implement it. Now, Kaplin was directing that reckless enthusiasm into the pump action of a Mk IX shotgun. He took position on the steps near the late castellan, a slightly crazed look in his eyes.

Magneric stamped through an about-face. The assault cannon mounted on his right shoulder ran through a sequence of test cycles. His immense power fist rotated, clicked and reversed, like some kind of puzzle clock. He trained the spinning gun barrel onto the magnetically locked blast doors that sealed off the command deck from the rest of the ship.

He could almost feel the xenos aboard his ship, the way a man of flesh and bone would feel the tasteless, textureless, odourless itch of a radiation dose. This new breed of greenskin was a dangerous foe. They fought tactically, acted coherently: if they had forces to spare to claim his crippled ship then he could only assume they would do so exactly as he would in their place. The command deck would be the priority target. Then the enginarium, gunnery control, the flight bays.

It was useful however to remind oneself that they were not men. They were still orks.

‘Rolans,’ he voxed, attempting to raise the battle-brother barracked in the deck below with a squad of Black Templars and two platoons of armsmen serfs. ‘Sword Brother?’

A light crackle of static filled his acoustic register.

The carrier had somehow managed to kill off helm-to-helm vox. Until then, Magneric had thought that unblockable.

Cold gases swirled. The lights rattled, and blinked. On, off. On, off.

On…

Time stretched, bloated. The blast doors seemed suddenly a yawning distance away, although his own triple-grid spatial positioning system insisted that their relative positions were unchanged. It was as if, in this chamber alone, the laws of the universe had been relaxed, the space between particles expanding even as the particles themselves remained exactly as they were. Making room.

Off

.

There was a pop, like a broken vacuum seal, and an ork burst out of the vapour cloud as if it had been hidden there all along and slammed into the middle of the main deck. The flickering light made the sudden appearance of its gruesome mass even more unreal. It was the monster that stalked the unevolved lobes of the human brain, fear centres unchanged since Homo sapiens sapiens first emerged from the forests and onto the plains of prehistoric Terra. And now, two hundred millennia and half a segmentum removed, they still recognised a beast.

The ork bared yellow fangs and roared.

Kaplin roared back, mad with horror, and swung about, leading with his shotgun. There was a boom. Scatter shot from both barrels tore up the ork’s black-and-white body armour and riddled its heavy jaw with pellets. It bullied through, tusked mouth wide like a dog thirsty for the rain.

Feet spread and mag-locked to the deck, Magneric’s torso swung one hundred and eighty degrees and obliterated the ork’s skull with a point-four-second burst of fire. Exit wounds and ricochets wasted the surrounding consoles, but the wellbeing of his ship was no longer a priority. Better to deny it to the alien.

‘Deny the alien! Kill the alien!’

More orks charged through the mist and onto the command deck, and by the strobing light men began to die.