Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

This is no accident. This is an attack.

Someone, somewhere, gabbling in the flash flood of unfiltered vox traffic, uses the word ‘ork’ or ‘greenskin’. The enemy has got wind of the Veridian mobilisation. It has received warning of the force poised to launch at it, and it has struck first.

Within ten or twenty seconds of the first impact, ships across the high anchorage have desperately begun to power drives and weapon systems. Some are generating power in the hope of raising shields, or even preparing to slip authorised moorings so that they can reposition.

Then a battle-barge opens fire. The massive barge is known to the Ultramarines as the Raptorus Rex, but it has been renamed, with as little notice as the Word Bearers gave when they changed their battledress colours, the Infidus Imperator.

The Infidus Imperator is the barge of Kor Phaeron.

It discharges all of its primary lance weapons at the battle-barge Sons of Ultramar and reduces it to a whizzing cloud of metal chaff carried outwards in all directions by an expanding ball of fire.

The Infidus Imperator chooses its next target. In formation behind the mighty craft, the Crown of Colchis starts to fire too. So does the battleship Kamiel. So do the Flame of Purity and the Spear of Sedros.

And so does the flagship of Dark Apostle Erebus, the battle-barge Destiny’s Hand.

Shipmaster Ouon Hommed, captain of the heavy destroyer Sanctity of Saramanth, sees the Infidus begin its merciless prowl along the anchorage line. He understands precisely what the vast Word Bearers barge is doing. It’s executing the ships in the line beside it the way a man might execute a row of helpless prisoners.

He’s done it before himself. At Farnol High Harbour, after the Ephigenia Compliance, he crawled the Sanctity along the slipways, scuttling the captured enemy ships so they could not be reactivated and re-used. It was a graceless, unrewarding task, utterly pragmatic. The ships were too dangerous to leave intact.

As a shipman, as a person whose life has been dedicated to the service of the great starships, he’s never taken pleasure in scuttling duties.

Why does it seem like the Infidus is relishing it?

Hommed is screaming at his command staff, demanding yield of power, weapons, shields, data… anything they can give him. The Sanctity was sitting at slip cold, drives tamped down. With the best will in all the worlds, it will take fifty minutes to rouse the ship to operational readiness.

This is true of the entire fleet. The starships of Ultramar were sitting cold at high anchor for the conjunction. All of their power plants were at lowest yield for the purposes of maintenance, loading and embarkation checks. None of them needed ready drives or weapons or shields. They were all under the protective aegis of the planet’s weapon grid.

‘Power!’ he yells. ‘I want power!’

‘Yield is rising, sir,’ his first officer replies.

‘Nothing like fast enough. I need active condition!’

‘The Drive Room says we can’t hope to raise the yield any faster than–’

‘Tell the bastards in the Drive Room I want power, not excuses!’

There’s no time. The Infidus is coming. Whatever has happened, whatever outrage has occurred, the ships of the XVII clearly believe it to be an attack, and clearly regard the ships of Ultramar as a threat. They’re killing everything they can pre-emptively, killing everything before…

Hommed stops. He forces his mind to clear for a second. He realises how stricken he is with panic and extreme stress. Everyone is. The bridge around him is pandemonium. A clear head is the only hope he has to salvage anything, anything at all, from the situation.

The Infidus is coming. That’s the point. That’s the point. The thrice-damned Infidus is coming. Every ship was powered down at the time of the attack, which is why they’re all helpless and shield-less now.

Except the Infidus is coming. It’s moving. So are other ships from the Word Bearers fleet. It’s not that they’re responding hastily. It’s not that they’re taking wild shots at imagined targets before finding out what’s really going on.

It’s the fact that they’re moving at all.

They weren’t powered down. They were sitting at anchor hot.

They knew what was coming.

They were ready.

‘Those bastards,’ he breathes.

The Infidus closes. It’s firing callous broadsides; the whole length of it lighting up with multicoloured fury. Each salvo causes the counter-active gravimetrics to tense and brace the ship against the monumental discharge.

Each salvo murders another helpless vessel.

The Constellation of Tarmus disappears in a clap of heat and metal.

The Infidus closes.

‘Power?’ Hommed asks.

His first officer shakes his head.

The Infidus shivers and looses another broadside. Enough firepower to scorch and split a moon.

The Sanctity of Saramanth, struck amidships, bursts asunder.

Magos Meer Edv Tawren registers her own hyper-elevated adrenal levels. She has survived the great data-death that has ripped through the orbital Watchtower. Hesst saved her. Basic operational procedure saved her.

She does not want to think about that irony. That happenstance. That kindness.

There’s too much to do. They are in the middle of an unthinkable crisis. A disaster. She has to rescue the situation.

She has to save Hesst.

The tower’s elevators and lifting platforms are out. She hauls up the skirts of her long robe and rushes up the main spiral staircase. Smoke hangs in the air. The buzz of alarms. Voices echo from above and below. Outside, the sky is unnaturally luminous.

She passes servitors that are stumbling and mindless, trailing torn plugs, drooling. Some have slumped. Some are whining or replaying bursts of their favourite data like nursery rhymes. Some are smacking their heads against the staircase wall.

Toxic-data. Data-death. Overload.

Let Hesst be alive.

He was plugged in. He would have taken the brunt of the shock–

Don’t think about it. Just get upstairs.

She trips over the sprawled body of a high-grade servitor. A hand steadies her arm.

‘Do not fall, magos,’ a meatvoice requests.

Tawren looks up into the menacing face of Arook Serotid, the master of the tower’s skitarii brigades. Arook is a creature modified for war, not data. His ornate armour is part ceremonial, part ritual, a deliberately baroque throwback to the eras of threat-pattern and fear-posture.

‘Indeed, I will not,’ she agrees. He helps her up the stairs, moving blind and mindless servitors out of her way. He is a metre taller than her. His eyes are hololithic crimson slits in his copper visor. She notices that one of them is flickering.

‘We took a hit,’ he says.

‘A major datashock,’ she says. ‘Hypertraumatic inload syndrome.’

‘Worse than that,’ he replies. ‘Explosions in orbit. We’ve lost ships, orbitals.’

‘An attack?’

‘I fear so.’

They’re both using fleshvoice mode. She’s painfully aware of it. It’s so slow, so painstaking. No canting, no data-blurts. No simultaneous and instant transmissions of ideas and data. She doesn’t believe she’s ever spoken to Arook in fleshvoice before, and he’s clearly not used to talking at all.

But the mannered effort is necessary. They were both insulated from the datashock. They must stay insulated.

‘I need to reach the server,’ she explains.

He nods. That one red eye is still blinking. A malfunction? Arook has taken some damage. Like all skitarii, he would have been linked to the noosphere, so the datashock would have hit him like everyone else. However, the skitarii also have their own dedicated emergency manifold, a crisis back-up. Arook has been hurt by the inload shock, but he’s switched to the reinforced, military code system of his brigade.