Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

‘You turned on us once. You shamed us and humiliated us. You will not do so again.’

‘Lorgar! Listen to me. This is a mistake!’

‘Why in all the stars would you presume this to be a mistake?’ asks Lorgar. He still does not look up.

‘Cease fire,’ Guilliman says. ‘We have not attacked you, nor allowed you to be attacked. I swear this, upon our father’s life.’

Lorgar’s reply is lost in a crackle of noise. Then the image of him vanishes too, and the hololithic platform dies.

‘Contact lost,’ Zedoff announces. ‘He’s refusing our attempts to restore the link.’

Guilliman looks at Gage.

‘He’s not going to back down,’ Guilliman says. ‘He’s not going to stop this unless we stop him.’

Gage can see the pain in Guilliman’s eyes, the enormity of what this means.

‘What was that thing he said, my primarch?’ Gage asks. ‘That last thing?’

Guilliman hesitates.

‘He said, “I am an orphan”.’

Gage straightens up and glances at the senior crew.

‘Your orders, sir?’ he says firmly.

‘Issue the instruction as best you can,’ Guilliman says, stepping down from the platform. ‘To all XIII Legion units and auxiliaries, upon my authority code. Priority one. Defend yourselves by all means at your disposal.’

Gage clears his throat.

‘My primarch, I need your confirmation. Have you just authorised actions up to and including return of fire?’

There is a long pause.

‘Return of fire is so ordered,’ says Guilliman.

Zedoff and the senior gunnery officers start barking orders. Gage turns to the rubricator waiting ready at his station beside the shipmaster’s throne.

‘Officer of record,’ he says. ‘Start the mark.’

The rubricator nods and activates his cogitator.

‘Initiating XIII Legion combat record, elapsed time count,’ the rubricator says. ‘Count begins. Calth mark: 00.00.00.’

‘My brother, hear me. Warriors of the XVII Legion, hear me. This violence is against the code of the Legiones Astartes and against the will of our father, the Emperor. In the name of the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, I implore you to cease fire and stand down. Open communication with me. Let us speak. Let us settle this. This action is an error of the most tragic kind. Cease fire. I, Roboute Guilliman, give you my solemn pledge that we will deal with each other frankly and fairly if these hostilities can be suspended. I urge you to respond.’

Guilliman puts the speaker horn down and looks at Gage and the Master of Vox.

‘As soon as we are able,’ he tells them, ‘transmit that message on repeat. Cycle transmissions. No interruptions.’

‘Yes, sir,’ says the Master of Vox.

Leviathans stir. Bigger than the human mind can comfortably conceive, starships move through the burning clouds of dust above Calth. Their dark hulks emerge from glittering banks of debris, through swirling flares of ejected energy, like marine monsters surfacing for air.

They are flying blind. They are fighting blind. They scream challenges and threats into the burning void through shorted vox systems and blown speakers. They detach themselves from the super-massive gantries, derricks and anchorages of the yards, some shearing cables, lines and airgates in their desperation to run free.

A moving target is harder to hit. That’s the logic. In truth, a moving target makes itself alone and vulnerable.

The warships of the XVII Legion make the kills appear effortless. Coasting, almost stately, they run forward, shields lit, creating bright halos around their hulls as dust and particulate matter burns off the fields. Their snarling gunports are open, their primary weapons extended in their silo bays. Charge batteries and plasma capacitors seethe with power, ready for lethal discharge. They are supposed to be deaf and blind too, but they are not. Detection and target systems beyond the darkest imaginings of the Mechanicum peer out into the noisy darkness and alight upon the scattering cobalt-blue vessels of the Ultramar fleet as though they were hot coals on cold ash. They find them, and they bind them, tracking them relentlessly, scrutinising them in lascivious detail, weighing and assessing their shielding and hull strength, while weapons batteries train and align, and munitions loads are ordered up. Bulk magazines chug and clatter as projectile shells and missiles are conveyed by automatic loaders, through-deck hoists or ordnance chutes.

Munitions fill the void like seed pods, like blizzards. Columns of scorching plasma and las, hundreds of kilometres long, stripe afterimages on the retinas of those who witness them. Main lance batteries vomit bright energy and spit light in beams, in gobs, in splinters, in twitching withies of lightning.

Ships burst in the darkness. The Gladius, a four-kilometre-long escort from the Saramanth Wing, serially detonates as it draws clear of its slipway, its armoured hull sectioned and chewed apart by internal explosions. The barge Hope of Narmenia is caught by a missile spread that strikes it like a storm of needles, puncturing its upper hull and stern in a hundred places, peppering it, engulfing its interior in white-hot fire. The support carriers Valediction and Vospherus are wrecked by sustained broadside fire from a battle-barge of the XVII. The Valediction breaks up first, its hullplates unwrapping around a core explosion like a time-lapse feed of a flower’s petals opening, blooming and dying. Hastily deployed lifeboats are swept away by the superheat wash. The Vospherus, shielded by the fate of its sister ship, turns away to run, but the enemy guns reach it and pulp its drive section. Drive vents and engine bells explode, and the inward pressure forces a drive plant event, a series of star-hot overblasts in the engineering spaces that burst the stern of the carrier like a pipe bomb. The force of the blasts throws the ruined carrier forward on a pressure wave and slams the ship into the troop transport Antropheles, cutting it in two. Eighty thousand lives lost in five seconds.

The Infernus-class battleship Flame of Purity, one of the true monsters of the XVII fleet, runs into the Asertis Orbital Yard, firing cannonades to maximise collateral damage. Its prow is armoured: a vast, burnished ramming blade, a giant’s chisel gilded with seraphs, narwhals and eagles. It ploughs through the smaller, berthed ships in its path, bisecting some, ripping others open, shattering hulls. Its main spinal lance mount, a primary magnitude exo-las weapon, wakes and screams, uttering a shaft of matter-annihilating light that sends the picket cruiser Stations of Ultramar reeling from a hammering concussion as it attempts to defend the yard space. The cruiser tries to rally, trailing debris from a blackened and molten port side. It turns about, dazed, clumsily glancing against support stations and yard gantries. Clouds of pink flame belch from its stricken engines. It raises its shields. The Flame of Purity fires its recharged exo-laser again. The shields surrounding the Stations of Ultramar do not even retard the beam. They pop like soap bubbles. The beam vaporises the cruiser’s central mass, until it’s merely a toroid of hull metal around a glowing white-hot hole. The Flame of Purity powers on, bumping the drifting ruin of the Stations of Ultramar aside on its magnetic bow-wave.