Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

‘Who is... Samus?’ asks the Master of Vox. Then he flinches, and pulls his headset away from his ears.

‘Report!’ snaps Gage.

‘Sudden and chronic interrupt, sir,’ says the Master of Vox, working his console deftly to reconnect. ‘Interference patterns. It sounded like huge storm-pattern distortion, as if bad weather had closed in on the Leptius Numinus area.’

‘Have you lost vox?’ asks Gage.

‘Vox-link with Leptius Numinus is suspended,’ the Master of Vox reports.

‘The datalink is still active, however,’ says the magos at the next station. ‘Information is still being processed and relayed by the palace’s data-engine.’

‘Restore that link,’ Gage says to the Master of Vox.

Gage crosses to the strategium where Shipmaster Hommed and his officers are examining the rapidly building tactical plot. It is a three-dimensional hololithic representation of Calth and its nearspace regions.

The story it tells is a bitter one.

Virtually all the orbital yards are gone, or so damaged that they will need to be destroyed and replaced rather than rebuilt. XVII fleet formations are bombarding the southern hemisphere of Calth. The rest of the fleet has established a clear orbital superiority position.

The Ultramar fleet is scattered. It has been reduced to about a fifth of its original strength. Those vessels remaining are either fleeing to the far side of the local star to avoid fleet attack or the inexorable fire of the weapons grid or, like the Macragge’s Honour, they are lying helpless and drifting in the high anchor zone.

There’s virtually nothing left to fight with. They are done. It is over. It is simply a matter of the Word Bearers picking off the last few fighting ships of the XIII fleet.

The weapons grid seems to be having no difficulty doing that. It has destroyed the local forge world, a small moon with offensive capabilities, a starfort near the system’s Mandeville Point, and several capital ships.

‘We have sensors,’ says the shipmaster, ‘and power is coming to yield. I anticipate capacity for weapons or drive in fifteen minutes. Not both.’

‘What about shields?’ asks Gage.

‘It seemed to me that weapons or drive were greater priorities.’

Gage nods. The theoretical is sound. There are three Word Bearers cruisers effectively docked to the flagship. The weapons grid will not fire at the Macragge’s Honour while they are so close. The cruisers will not fire, because they would have done so by now. They have come in close to begin boarding actions.

The enemy wants the flagship intact.

Gage sees the pattern. For a moment, he couldn’t understand why, of the surviving Ultramarines vessels, many were the largest and most powerful capital ships. Surely an adversary with control of the weapons grid would pick off the most serious threats first?

The ships that have been spared are all helpless and drifting, like the Macragge’s Honour. The moment they shake off the effects of the scrapcode or the electromagnetic pulse, and move, or raise shields, the grid destroys them.

The Word Bearers intend to take as many of his Legion’s capital ships intact as they can. They want to bolster their fleet with warships. They want to build their strike power.

They want to turn Ultramarines ships against the Imperium.

What was that nonsense Lorgar was ranting at the end? Horus turning? A civil war? He was demented and, besides, it wasn’t Lorgar. It was some xenos manipulation. It was some empyrean breach effect.

Gage knows he’s lying to himself. Today has changed the shape of the galaxy in a way that the wildest theoretical could not have anticipated. He hopes he will not live to endure the new order.

However long the rest of his life turns out to be, he will not allow ships of Ultramar to be used against the Imperium.

He turns to Empion.

‘Are your squads assembled?’

‘They are,’ says Empion.

‘Mobilise,’ orders Gage. ‘Repel boarders. Find them and drive them off this ship.’

Oll Persson tells them to wait.

Smoke covers the river, covers the wharfs, covers the docks. Two container ships are on fire out in the estuary, making dancing yellow fuzzes in the stagnant fog. It’s as if the whole world is reducing to a vaporous state.

He tells them to wait: Graft, Zybes, the two troopers and the silent girl. They take cover in a pilot’s house overlooking the landing. They’re all armed, except Graft and the girl. She has still to speak a word or look anyone in the eye.

Oll shoulders his rifle sling and finds a quiet spot in one of the packing sheds. Back in the day, he’d often come to Neride Point for the markets. There was always a fresh catch coming in, even though the wharf spaces were primarily industrial. Hundreds of boats would bob along the jetties and landings, in between the bulk containers.

It’s all messed up now. More than one huge sea-surge has swept boats into the streets and smashed them against habs and factory structures. The streets are wet, and covered with an ankle-deep litter of garbage and debris. The water is worse. It’s like brown oil, and there are bodies floating in it, thousands of bodies, all choking the landings and under the pier walks and bridges, gathered up by the prevailing currents like jettisoned trash.

The place smells of death. Waterlogged death.

Oll sits down and opens his old kitbag. He turns out the few items he rescued from his bedroom and sorts through them on the top of an old packing case.

There’s a little tin, a tobacco tin for rough cut lho leaf. He hasn’t smoked in a long time, but several older versions of him did. He pops the tin open, smells the captured scent of lho, and tips the cloth bundle into his palm. He opens it.

They are just as he remembered them. A little silver compass and a jet pendulum. Well, they look like silver and jet, and he’s never corrected anyone who said that’s what they were. The jet stone is suspended on a very fine silver chain. It’s been years since he last used these objects – Oll suspects it might be more than a hundred – but the polished black orb on the end of the chain is warm.

The compass is fashioned in the form of a human skull, a beautiful piece of metalwork no bigger than his thumb. The cranium is slightly elongated, slightly longer than standard human proportions, suggesting that it was not actually a human skull that formed the model for the design. The skull, a box, opens along the jawline on minutely engineered hinges, so that the roof of the mouth is revealed as the dial of the compass. The markings on the compass rim are so small and intricate you’d need a watchmaker’s loup to read them. Oll has one of those too.

The simple gold and black pointer spins fluidly as he moves the tiny instrument.

He sets it down, aligns it north. He watches the pointer twitch.

Oll takes a little clasp notebook out of his kit and opens it to a fresh page. Half the book is filled with old handwriting. He slides out the notebook’s stylus, opens it, and writes down the date and the place.

It takes a few minutes. He suspends the pendulum over the compass on its silver chain and lets it swing. He repeats the process several times, noting down, in a neat column, the angles and directions of the spin and the twitches of the compass needle. He calculates and writes down the azimuth. Then he flips the pages of the notebook to the back, opens out a folded, yellow sheet of paper that has been glued into the back cover, and studies the chart. It was written on Terra, twenty-two thousand years earlier, a copy of a chart that had been drawn twenty-two thousand years before that. His handwriting was rather different in those days. The chart shows a wind rose of cardinal points. It is a piece of sublime mystery recorded in ink. Oll thinks of the two forces clashing on Calth and reflects that they are both right about one thing. It’s the one thing they agree on. Words are power, some of them at least. Information is victory.