Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

Around him, the chamber shakes with a sudden storm of gunfire. Twenty or thirty boltguns discharge almost simultaneously. Armoured bodies, blown backwards, fall. Blood mist fills the air.

The goblet lands on the third bounce, rolls in a circle, and comes to rest on its side next to Honorius Luciel’s seared and shattered skull.

An alarm sounds. A red hazard light starts to blink on a burnished copper console.

The officer of the watch, at his station on the bridge of the Samothrace, reacts swiftly but with some confusion. Are the ship’s systems notifying him of a malfunction? It is a high-scale alert.

He presses an ivory-cushioned key to access clarification. On the small glass screen, a phrase appears in luminous green characters.

[Weapons discharge, company deck]

That can’t be correct. Even if it somehow is, a weapons discharge must be accidental. The officer of the watch is, however, highly trained and well disciplined. He knows that answers, clarifications, corrections and explanations are secondary issues. They can wait. Even informing the captain can wait. He understands protocol. He reacts as he has been trained to react.

He activates the vox systems and rouses deck protection. His hands move with rehearsed agility over the keys. He sounds general quarters. He starts to systematically close the bulkheads fore and aft of the company deck space, and to lock out the through-deck access points and elevators.

Within four seconds of the alarm sounding, the officer of the watch has begun the procedure to cordon and secure the entire company deck, and to place deck troops at all access points. His response is exemplary. Within thirty-five seconds of the alarm sounding, a full, regulation lock-down would have been enforced.

But thirty-five seconds are not available.

The captain has heard general quarters sound, and has started out of his seat to join the officer of the watch and examine the issue. There is a frown on his face.

‘What’s going on, Watch?’ he asks.

His words are drowned out by another alarm. Then another alarm. Then another. Klaxons, bells and hooters overlap, screeching and booming.

The proximity alarm.

The collision warning alert.

The course defect advisor.

The detector array.

The passive auspex.

The primary orbital traffic alert from Calth System Control.

Something is coming at them. Something is moving into the dense and rigorously controlled shipping formations spread across the close orbit band. Something is sweeping through the orbital high anchorage without approval or authorisation.

The officer of the watch forgets, for a second, what he was in the middle of doing.

He looks at the main screen. So does the captain. So do the bridge crewmen.

What happens next, though they are looking straight at it, happens too fast for them to see.

The Campanile accelerates. It lights its main realspace drives, delivering main extending thrust in a position where it should be almost coasting at correction burst only. It raises its void shielding to make itself as unstoppable as possible. It fires itself like a bullet at the planet Calth.

The screams of its crew can still be heard, but no one is listening.

Main extending thrust is a drive condition used for principal acceleration, the maximum output that takes a starship to the brink of realspace velocity as it makes the translation to the empyrean. It is a condition that is used as a starship moves away from a planet towards the nearest viable Mandeville Point, a distance that is roughly half the radius of an average star system.

There is no such long run-up here. The Campanile is already inside the orbit of Calth’s satellite. There is not enough range for it to reach anything like maximum output or velocity. Even so, it is travelling at something close to the order of forty per cent of the realspace limit as it reaches the edge of the atmosphere. It is travelling too fast for anything physical, such as an eye or a pict-corder or a visual monitor, to see it. It is only visible to scanning systems and sensors, to detectors and auspex. They shriek at its sudden, savage, shockwave approach.

Their shrieks are as futile as the unheard screams of its lost crew.

It does not hit Calth.

There is something in the way.

The Campanile streaks like a missile into Calth’s orbital shipping belt. It punches through the formations of ships in parking orbit, the rows of freighters, barges and troop vessels at high anchor, the precisely spaced lines of vast cruisers and frigates, the glittering clouds of small craft, loaders, lifters and boats attending the parent ships.

It is like a bolter round fired into a crowd.

It misses the Mlatus, the Cavascor, the Lutine and the Samothrace by less than a ship’s length. It passes under the beam of the battleship Ultimus Mundi and skims the back of the gargantuan carrier ship Testament of Andromeda. Its shields graze the hull of the strike craft Mlekrus, vaporising the masts and arrays of its starboard detectors. It slices between the battle-barges Gauntlet of Victory and Gauntlet of Glory. By the time it crosses the bow of the grand cruiser Suspiria Majestrix, shredding the mooring and fuelling lines that secure the famous vessel to its bulk tenders, the Campanile has begun to swat aside small craft, annihilating them against the front of its shields. The small ships disintegrate, fierce blue sparks fizzle against the shield shimmer: cargo boats, lighters, ferries, maintenance riggers. The Campanile’s shield displacement hurls others out of the way like a tidal bore, swirling into each other, compressing them with gravimetric thrust, crashing them against the hulls of larger ships or the support cradles of the outer orbital yards.

Then the Campanile reaches the main shipyard.

The Calth Yards are orbiting islands, the fledgling beginnings of the planet’s first proper superorbital plate. There are a dozen of them orbiting Calth. This is Calth Veridian Anchor, the largest and oldest of them. It is a massive edifice of jetties and slips, ship cradles and docks, suspension manufactories, habitats, depots and docking platforms. It is a little over three hundred kilometres across, a raft of metal and activity and life.

The Campanile hits it, creating light. Void shields moving at high sub-light velocities strike physical matter, and mutually annihilate. The tender simply vaporises the Ultramar Azimuth Graving Dock, shredding the superstructure of the giant berth cradle, and the cruiser Antipathy docked inside it. Cut in half, the nine kilometre-long Antipathy vanishes in a ripple of rapidly expanding heat and light as its drives detonate, and six thousand lives disappear with it. The blast incinerates the two manufactory modules adjoining the graving dock, instantly killing another thirty thousand artificers and engineers, and shears the superstructure away from arrestor silos A112 and A114, both of which collapse sideways, spilling the escort Burnabus into the fast escort Jeriko Rex. Both vessels suffer catastrophic hull damage. The Burnabus crushes and deforms like a spent shell case.