The Beast Arises

The carrier had left the Black Templars vessel for dead until then, content to dispatch boarding torpedoes and assault pods, but now the few dozen kilometres between them erupted into a lava stream of shells and explosive rounds. The two ships were already too close together for primary weapons, but even under that restriction the volume of fire that the ork’s command ship was capable of putting out was staggering. Obsidian Sky’s armoured prow simply dissolved, as if the ork ship were projecting an energy field that was causing it to dematerialise on contact. But Obsidian Sky was just too much ship, even for the mass carrier, to completely obliterate with defence batteries alone.

The space narrowed to under a kilometre.

Her bow had been burned to a flat stump. There was a cauterising flare as ship met shields.

‘Venerable…’ Thane breathed.

With sublime slowness, Obsidian Sky plunged into the carrier’s port side.

It was not slow. Thane knew that. But the scales and distances involved made a nonsense of any human notion of speed. The shorn, void-exposed inner bulkheads of Obsidian Sky’s forward section were folded in and crushed, driven deeper into the carrier’s crust by failing thrusters. Her hull began to deform, ripples spreading back as her starboard thruster blew out. Drive plasma flaring out into space, Obsidian Sky tilted, ground in, and then finally crashed sideways into the larger ship.

Thane winced from the first spark of the explosion, a pure white nucleus of destructive energy swelling up from Obsidian Sky

’s drive core. It lasted a fraction of a second, then rushed out in a flash that washed the entire viewscreen white. As if to compensate for the glare, deck lighting dipped. Terminals surged, arced and blew out in serial cascades of sparks. The blast front hit seconds behind the electromagnetic surge, and slammed Thane back into the command throne.

Shaking his head clear of shield saturation alerts and the low whine of decompression warnings, Thane reached up for the command throne’s grip studs and pulled himself back up. His multi-lung took over his breathing as his chest filled with smoke and his blood acidity spiked. He felt the sudden burn of frustrated anger. They could still have seen the Obsidian Sky and her crew clear; instead Magneric had almost destroyed them all.

‘Report,’ he called out, but everyone was still pulling themselves together or nursing flickering consoles like primitives around a fire.

A pair of serfs at auspectoria hurriedly shared notes and drew some quick adjustments to the pattern of curves and vectors on the scanner table. At the same time, the main viewer began to clear and a rough cheer went up from the command crew. The mass carrier was listing, a massive hole blasted out of its side. It was possible to make out distinct decks within the almost perfect hemispherical cutaway, lights twinkling behind the debris cloud and coherence fields like stars within a nebula.

‘Obsidian Sky is down,’ reported an auspex serf. ‘Two Black Templars ships still intact. Cruisers. One of them is the

Interdictor. Dantalion, Bulwark, and Faceless Warrior are with them.’

‘The ork ships, my lord,’ said Kale, the swirling colours of the strategium chart desk like racing storm clouds across his face. ‘They’re assuming new headings, moving off from the carrier.’

Thane sank back into the command throne and summoned a pared-back copy of the strategium read-outs to his data-display. The orks were disengaging, breaking for the system perimeter. But why? Why run? Even with their leviathan flagship crippled they had the Imperial forces grossly outgunned.

‘I am seeing some unusual immaterial extrusions centred around the ork carrier,’ Thane said.

‘Teleporter activity,’ Kale explained. ‘High volume over short distances.’

‘It is unlike orks to evacuate. Or to run.’

‘This leadership caste we’ve been hearing about?’

Thane cupped his chin in his hand as the deck around him shook. But why run?

The movement in the viewer was so subtle that it took even Thane’s sharpened senses a moment to pick it up. The carrier’s fin-like primary weapon was cleaving through the wreckage field. Thane saw coils charging, energy gathering in glowing capacitors along the massive cannon’s length. For a moment, he was looking straight down its barrel. Alcazar Remembered was too big to move out of the way. Anything else was a stubborn act of futility.

An ember struck up within the splayed bore of the cannon, vibrating, caged within a magnetic field. Coming from within that debris cloud it looked more like a birthing sun than a weapon. Thane saw a glint, the tip of the sunbeam that lanced towards him, then it blinked like a shooting star as the beam shot across the bows.