James Swallow: The Flight of the Eisenstein

'And this knowledge is yours how?' demanded Decius.

Sendek waved the data-slate in the air. 'I am well-read, Solun. While you batter your chainsword's teeth blunt in the cages, I study the foe. These dissection texts of the Magos Biologis are fascinating.'

Decius snorted. 'All I need to know is how to kill them. Does your text tell you that, Tollen?'

Sendek gave a heavy nod. 'It does.'

'Well, come, come.' Voyen beckoned the dour Astartes to his feet. 'Don't keep such information to yourself

Sendek sighed and stood, his perpetually morose features lit by the glow of the data-slate's display. He tapped his chest. The jorgall favour mechanical enhancements to improve their physical form. They have some humanoid traits – a head, neck, eyes and mouth – but it appears their brains and central ner­vous systems are situated not here/ and he tapped his brow, 'but here.' Tollen's hand lay flat on his chest.

'To kill would need a heart shot, then?' Rahl noted, accepting a nod in return.

'Ah/ said Decius, 'like this?' In a flash, the Astartes had spun in place and drawn his bolter. A single round exploded from the muzzle and ripped into the torso of a dormant practice dummy less than a few metres from Garro's arming pit. The captain's house-carl flinched at the sound of the shot, drawing a tut from Hakur.

Decius turned away, amused with himself. Meric Voyen threw Hakur a look. 'Arrogant whelp. I don't understand what the captain sees in him.'

'I once said the same thing about you, Meric'

'Speed and skill are nothing without control/ the Apothecary retorted tersely. 'Displays like that are bet­ter suited to fops like the Emperor's Children.'

The other man's words drew a thin smile from Hakur. 'We're all Astartes under the skin, brothers and kindred all.'

Voyen's humour dropped away suddenly. That, my brother, is as much a lie as it is the truth.'

In the hololith cube, the shape of the jorgalli con­struct became visible. It was a fat cylinder several kilometres long, bulbous at one end with drive clusters, thinning at the other to a stubby prow. Huge petal-shaped vanes coated with shimmering panels emerged from the stern of the thing, catch­ing sunlight and bouncing it through massive windows as big as inland seas.

Mortarion gestured with a finger. 'A cylinder world. This one has twice the mass of the similar con­structs found and eliminated in orbits around the planets Tasak Beta and Fallon, but unlike those, our target is the first jorgall craft to be found under power in deep space.' One of the adepts tickled switches with his worm-like mechadendrites and the image receded, revealing a halo of teardrop-shaped ships in close formation nearby.

'A substantial picket fleet travels ahead of the craft. Captain Temeter will lead the engagement to disrupt these ships and break their lines of communication.'

The primarch accepted a salute from Temeter. 'Ele­ments of the First, Second and Seventh Great Companies will stand with me as I take the spear tip into the bottle itself. This battleground is suited to our unique talents. The jorgall breathe a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen with heavy concentrations of chlorine, a weak poison that our lungs will resist with litde effort.'

As if to underline the point, Mortarion sniffed at a puff of gas from his half-mask. 'First Captain Typhon

will be my support. Commander Grulgor will pene­trate the drive cluster and take control of the cylinder's motive power centre. Battle-Captain Garro will neutralise the constract's hatcheries.'

Garro saluted firmly mirroring Grulgor and Typhon's gestures. He held off his disappointment at his assigned target, far down the cylinder from the primarch's attack point, and instead began to con­sider the first elements of his battle plan.

Mortarion hesitated a moment, and Garro could swear he heard the hint of a smile in the primarch's voice. 'As some of you have deduced, this fight will not be the Death Guard's alone. I have, on the request of Malcador the Sigillite, brought a cadre of investigators from the Divisio Astra Telepathica here, led by the Oblivion Knight Sister Amendera.' The primarch inclined his head and Garro saw the Sister of Silence bow low in return. She gestured in sign language, quick little motions of finger and wrist.

'The honoured Sisters will join us to seek out a psyker trace that has led to this bottle-world.'

Garro stiffened. Psykers? This was the first he had heard of such a threat on the jorgalli ship, and he noted that only Typhon did not seem surprised at such news.

'I trust that the full importance of this endeavour is impressed upon each of you,' continued the Death Lord, his low tones strong. These jorgall repeatedly enter our space in their generation ships, intent on spawning over worlds that belong to the Emperor. They must not be allowed to gain a foothold.' He turned away, his face disappearing into his cloak. 'In time, the Astartes will erase these creatures from humanity's skies, and today will be a step along that path.'

Garro and his battle-brothers saluted once more as Mortarion turned his back on them and moved away towards the welcoming shadows. They did not chorus in a battle cry or mark the moment with raised pro­nouncements. The primarch had spoken, and his was voice enough.

TWO

Assault Brothers and Sisters Message in a Bottle

The thrust of the heavy assault boat's engines was a hammer to their bones, pressing the Astartes into the acceleration racks. Garro held his muscles tense against the powerful g-forces and let his gaze wander over the interior of the clamshell doors that formed the bow of the boarding ship. Intricate scrollwork spread across the inner face of the doors, charting the countless actions the craft had been involved in.

It was one of hundreds hurtling through the void at this moment, packed with men primed for war, each of them targeted on the jorgall world-ship with the unerring single-mindedness of a guided missile.

Through the pict-circuits laced into the lenses of his armour, Garro rapidly blink-clicked through the data available to him via his command level vox-net. There were feeds from the eye cameras of the squad leaders, quick scripts of telemetry from Voyen's med-icae auspex and there, for a moment, a grainy, low

resolution image from outside across the boat's ser­rated prow.

Garro dallied on that for a few seconds, watching the motion of the vast cylinder as they approached it. The hull wall of pearlescent metal grew larger. It was so huge that the curvature of it was hardly noticeable, and the only sign that they were actually closing on it was the slow crawl of detail as surface features became clearer: here, a cluster of spikes that might be antennae, there a bulbous turret spitting yellow tracer fire.

The captain felt no fear at the jorgall guns. The assault was moving at punishing speed beneath a cloak of electronic countermeasures, heat-baffle flare bursts and glittering clouds of metal chaff that would render sensors unintelligible. He was confident in Temeter's skills, certain that the captain of the Fourth had sent the picket fleet into disarray and robbed the xenos of any usable warning.

The wall was very close, the distance vanishing in moments. Garro was aware of other boats converging at the edges of the greyed-out image. Long-range sen­sors had determined that this portion of the cylinder's hull was thin, and so it would be here, some half a kilometre from the cylinder's mid-line, that the Death Guard would make their ingress. Garro let the link fade and gathered himself, switch­ing over to the general vox channel. His voice echoed in the helms of every Astartes on the boat.

'Steel in your bones, brothers. Impact is imminent. I want a clean and fast deployment. I want it so sharp the Emperor himself would applaud its perfection!' He took a breath as the standby alert began to wail. 'Today the primarch leads us, and we will make him proud to do so! For Mortarion and Terra!'