Dan Abnett - Know no fear. The Battle of Calth

Thiel fires his boltgun, and the shells burn away ahead of him on trembling blowtorch tails. There is no sound. They explode the chest plate of a Word Bearer who was standing guard on a heat exchange port but looking the wrong way. His torso erupts in a ball of flame, expanding shrapnel and globules of blood. The impact convulses him, and sends him tumbling backwards, end over end. Thiel streaks past the spinning corpse, firing again. His third shot misses, gouging a silent crater in the hull. His fourth takes the face off a Word Bearer, turning him hard in a spray of flame and sparks. Blood balloons out from his ruined skull, wobbling and squirming in the near-void.

The rest of the kill squad fires. They streak across the target area like a strafing pack of Thunderbolts, and Word Bearers die as the bolter fire drums across them and punches through them. Bodies tumble and bounce. Some disintegrate, releasing clouds of blood beads that ripple like mercury. One Word Bearer is hit with such force his body flies away at great speed, dwindling as it leaves the flagship behind. Another is hit by a blast that causes his own void-harness to malfunction, and he lofts on a fork of fire, colliding brutally with the armoured hull of the cruiser above them.

Four Word Bearers die without breaking the magnetic anchor lock of their boots, and they simply remain standing on the hull, arms limp, like statues, or like bodies sunk to a seabed with their feet weighted.

The environment is full of drifting, swirling blood masses. They splash against Thiel, burst into smaller blood beads, slicking across his armour. For one second, his visor is awash and visibility is lost.

He brakes hard, jets back, makes a landing.

He clears his vision in time to see a Word Bearer bounding at him across the hull. They are both on the side of the docking tower, their ‘ground’ at ninety degrees to the level of the ship. The Word Bearer’s motion, assisted by the light gravity, seems exaggerated, almost comical. He fires his weapon. A bolt burns past Thiel. Thiel fires back. Silent, streaming shots blow the enemy’s right leg off and shred both of his shoulder guards. The impacts immediately and violently alter his course, turning his forward leap into a severe backwards tumble and spin. He cannons off a thruster mount and rebounds at a different angle.

Thiel turns. He barely avoids a power axe that slices out of the darkness. He kills the wielder with a single shot that smacks the figure backwards out of shadow into light. But there are two more. Both come at him with cutting tools: a particle torch, fizzing hot, and a power cutter. The Word Bearers bound at him, in big, slow leaps.

Thiel carries his electromagnetic longsword. He draws it from the scabbard, and puts two bolter rounds into the chest of the Word Bearer with the cutter, creating a shoal of dancing blood beads. Then he meets the torch as it flares at him.

It can slice through void hulls. It can certainly slice through him.

Thiel uses the reach and sharpness of the longsword to maximum effect. He cuts through the torch fairing, and the arm holding it. Blood spills out of the severed arm, and energy roasts out of the ruptured torch. Caught in the ball of white fire, the Word Bearer struggles backwards, thrashing, melting, incinerating. Thiel risks one hard kick to the enemy’s chest to launch him clear. Immolating, too bright to look at, the Word Bearer rotates as he falls away. The unleashed energy reaches the torch’s power cell, and ignites it. Blast-shock and light, both silent, surge up the docking tower, channelled by the hull. The fireball hits the skin of the cruiser, and ripples outwards, exhausting its fury.

Thiel is rocked back. His armour sensors white-out for a second, and he gets a burst of static and crackle.

He tries to lock down on the hull, to re-anchor.

The blast light fades. He makes a swift assessment of the combat. He’s lost two men, so far as he can see, but the Word Bearers force has been crippled. There are drifting, broken bodies all around him, surrounded by a sea of quivering, non-symmetrical blood droplets. There is still, however, no sign of the other kill squads.

Thiel jets down to the bulk cutting heads. They are huge instruments, each one bigger than a Rhino, extended on titanic articulated servo arms from the interior of the enemy cruiser. Thiel signals to Bormarus, who is one of the men assigned to carry the mag-mines. They start to clamp them onto the first of the cutting heads. Thiel leaves Bormarus working, and jets up the servo arm to a control platform mounted halfway up. If he can retract the mechanism into the enemy ship...

Like a comet shower, mass-reactive shells blizzard down around him. Some hit the platform and the guard rail, exploding with bright flashes. The deluge of fire is immense. In what is, to him, below, half a dozen of his men die, cut down. Blue-armoured bodies start to drift alongside the red-armoured ones. All the gleaming, trembling blood beads are the same colour.

He looks ‘up’.

His kill squad’s strike has not gone unnoticed. A main force of Word Bearers are making evac from the open cargo hatches of the cruiser. They emerge firing, their own void-harnesses flaring.

Thiel and his men are outnumbered eight to one.

Oll Persson steps off the skiff onto the landing. He’s got his lasrifle.

One flick of his calloused right thumb flips off the safety and arms the gun. Oll’s not even looking at the weapon. He’s looking straight ahead, looking up the length of the landing, looking at the figures gathered there. His face is set grim. It makes the care lines harder. His frown gives him a squint as though the sun is out and it’s too bright.

He doesn’t hesitate. One pace, two, and then he’s jogging, then running, running straight up the landing, bringing the armed rifle up to his shoulder, pushing it into his cheek, taking aim as he runs.

Shot one. A knife brother, in the spine between the shoulder blades, just before he stabs the screaming Krank in the neck. Shots two and three. A knife brother, in the face, the man pinning Krank down. Shot four. A knife brother, in the lower jaw as he turns, knocking him backwards into the water. Shots five, six and seven. Two knife brothers turning with their rifles, the trio grouping punching through both of them.

Two more start firing back down the landing stage.

Shot eight. One of the shooters, wings him. Shot nine. Kills him. Shot ten. The other shooter, top of the head.

Shot eleven. Misfire. Clip’s out. He’s been shooting a lot today. Ejects, still running up the landing, drops the empty cell thump onto the decking. Slams home the fresh one.

He reaches them, he’s in amongst them. Close combat. Oll swings a block, smacks the gun stock into a face. Trench war style, like they were taught all those years ago in the mud outside... Verdun? Oh, for a bayonet! The bare gunsnout will have to do. It cracks a forehead.

A sideways stamp breaks an ankle, another stock-smash fractures a cheek. He blocks a knife-thrust with the rifle like a quarterstaff, turning it aside. He shoots again. Point blank. Through the sternum. Blood sprays out the back.

Las shots rip past him in the dark. He doesn’t flinch. Four knife brothers are scrambling over the jetty-end railings to join the fight, to get at him.

Oll turns, lasrifle at the hip, thumbs to full-auto. One burst, muzzle-flash ripping like a strobe light.

There’s a bone-crack behind him. Oll whips around. A cultist he hadn’t spotted is laid out in a spreading pool of blood. Graft has punched him with one of his hoist limbs.

‘Thank you,’ says Oll.

‘He was going to hurt you, Trooper Persson.’

At times like this, Oll wishes he could have taught the old work servitor to shoot.