Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

He leads the way up.

‘You are undamaged, magos?’ he asks over his shoulder.

‘What?’

‘Are you hurt, magos?’

‘No. The data shock missed me. I was unplugged.’

‘That was fortunate for you,’ Arook says.

‘It was. There was a scrapcode problem. Server Hesst switched from discretionary to deal with it.’

Arook glances at her. His visor looks like a raptor’s beak. His shoulders and upper body are huge, like a bull simian. He understands. It is simple protocol. When dealing with a significant scrapcode problem, a server will have his second-in-command unplug so that there is no danger of the second-in-command being compromised by the scrapcode. It is an operational safety measure.

It has saved Tawren from far more than just a scrapcode infection.

‘Might the scrapcode be an issue?’ Arook asks.

Tawren has already thought of that. A serious noospheric failure brought on by a critical code corruption… that might have caused orbital collisions or accidents. It might have even caused the grid to misfire, or a ship to discharge weapons in error.

They reach the command deck. There’s a pall of smoke in the air. Technicians are struggling to free injured moderati from broken amniotic pods. Servitors hang limply from their plug sheafs. The screens are fizzling with blizzard noise.

Hesst is crumpled on the platform.

‘Out of my way!’ Tawren cries, shoving through the hesitant servitors and sensori clustered around him.

There’s a pool of dark fluid beside his head. She can smell the toxic hormones and excess chemicals that have seared through his bloodstream and ruptured his vessels.

‘We must disconnect him,’ she says.

Arook nods.

A technograde servitor blurts something.

‘In voice, damn you!’ Tawren snaps. ‘The noosphere’s gone.’

‘Disengaging the server could result in extreme cerebral trauma,’ the technograde clacks. ‘We need a cybersurgical team to properly detach him from the MIU.’

‘He’s dying,’ says Arook, looking down at the server. Arook has seen death many times, so he knows what he is looking at.

‘He is severely injured,’ the technograde clicks. ‘Expert disengagement may save him, but–’

‘We understand,’ says Tawren. She looks at Arook.

‘We need the specialists,’ she says. ‘If there’s any chance of saving him, we have to take it.’

‘Of course.’

She kneels beside Hesst, getting blood on her robes.

‘I’m here, server,’ she says, leaning in. ‘I’m here. It’s Meer Tawren. You must hold on. I’m ready to relieve you, but we need a surgical crew. Just hold on.’

Hesst stirs, a flicker of life.

He murmurs something.

‘Just hold on. I’m here,’ she says.

‘Unplug me,’ Hesst gurgles, flecking his chin with blood.

‘We need a surgical crew first, server. There has been a major incident.’

‘Never mind me. The grid is off. It’s off, Tawren. Unplug me and take over. You have to see if you can get it restarted.’

‘Wait,’ she soothes. ‘The surgeons are coming. Wait.’

‘Now!’

‘You’ll die, server.’

His eyelids flutter.

‘I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. I don’t matter. The orbital bioengines have gone, Meer.’

Her eyes go wide. She glances at Arook.

‘They’ve gone,’ Hesst repeats, his voice a sigh. ‘You have to plug in, Meer. You have to take my place, plug in, and see what can be salvaged. See what control can be re-established.’

‘Server–’

‘You have to reconstruct the noosphere. Without the grid, Calth is defenceless.’

Tawren looks at the heavy cable-trunking of Hesst’s permanent MIU link, coiled on the floor under him like a dead constrictor snake. She can’t detach that without killing him, surely? Especially not with him in such a fragile state–

One of the sensori cries out.

They look up.

Debris is falling from the clouds from the orbital explosions. The first scraps of metal are raining down across the river valley, trailing fire like meteorites. She sees them strike the river in columns of steam, or scratch across the rooftops of Kalkas Fortalice. Some heavier chunks strike like rockets, exploding buildings. Something smacks against the command deck’s windows, crazing the armourglas.

The hail of debris is just the beginning. Larger objects are falling. Parts of ships. Parts of orbitals. Parts of docking yards.

Tawren sees it before the sensori do. The grand cruiser Antrodamicus, twelve kilometres from bow to stern, falling backwards into the atmosphere from its ruptured drydock in a cloud of micro-debris, falling slowly and majestically, like a mountainside collapsing.

Falling, stern first, towards them and Kalkas Fortalice.

‘I don’t care what there isn’t, show me what there is!’ Marius Gage roars.

Zedoff, master of the Macragge’s Honour, starts to argue again.

‘Show him,’ a voice booms.

Guilliman is on the bridge.

‘Better still, show me,’ he growls.

‘Assessments! Everything you’ve got!’ Zedoff yells at his crew.

Impact was less than two minutes ago. The flagship’s screens are blind. There’s no data, no noospheric link, no contact with the grid. What comms traffic exists is a stew of screaming voices.

‘We’re blind,’ the Master of the First Chapter tells his primarch.

‘Some impact in orbit?’ Guilliman says. He casts a look at Magos Pelot, who is seizing on the deck. Most of the other Mechanicum personnel are faring no better.

Crewmen start handing the primarch data-slates. He scans fragments of the record. Gage knows that Guilliman is putting them together in his mind. A line of data from here, the last snatch recorded from there, a pict, the most recent auspex scan…

‘Something hit the yards, we think,’ says Gage. ‘Scanners are down, screens are dead.’

‘Use your damned brain, Marius,’ Guilliman says. He turns to the bridge crew.

‘Open the shutters! All of them. All the window ports!’

Servo systems begin to raise the blast shutters that have sealed the bridge’s vast crystalflex panels. Some of the wall protective shutters have to be hand-wound back to reset. Deck stewards rush to find the crank handles.

The main shutter crawls up. An alarming quality of light, unsteady and flickering, spills in through the opening gap.

‘In the name of Terra,’ Gage murmurs.

‘Shipmaster,’ Guilliman says, turning to Zedoff. ‘Your priorities are as follows. Power up. Shields up. Restore our sensory ability. Restore the vox. Inform me as any of these are achieved, and if any of them are going to take more than five minutes, I want an accurate time estimate.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Once we have vox, I want links to the following: each ship of the line commander, the server at the Watchtower, the ground commanders, the orbital station masters, not to mention my dear brother. Then–’

He stops as he hears Gage curse.

The shutters are raised high enough for them to see out. The bridge is bathed in firelight. They are looking out across the planet, across the vast and explosive destruction of Calth’s primary yards. Ships are on fire everywhere they look. Some are shaking and exploding, like live rounds left too close to ignition.

It’s an image Roboute Guilliman will never forget. It is more terrible than anything he could have imagined when the shockwave rattled him in his compartment and sent him running for the bridge.

It’s about to get worse.

‘That’s ship fire,’ he says, pointing at a blink of light.

‘That’s definitely ship fire,’ Zedoff agrees, a break in his voice.