Sons of the Selenar Read online

  A twisting shape emerged from the screeching static and waves of interference rippled through the holographic representation of the void brawl.

  Huge, and coming right at them.

  Range markers and ident-tags flickered to life.

  'Tumbling Lunar-class dead ahead!' shouted Sharrowkyn.

  'I see it,' replied Sabik Wayland, spliced into the Sisypheum's multiple helm controls via neuro-proxy devices crafted by Frater Thamatica. 'Manoeuvring now.'

  Wayland sounded matter-of-fact, but Sharrowkyn had fought beside the warrior of the Iron Hands long enough to hear the strain beneath his outward calm.

  The bridge deck tilted violently as the Iron Father threw the Sisypheum into a hard, rolling turn. The heavily modified strike cruiser shuddered. Its hull plates buckled and up-armoured bulkheads groaned in protest as the kilometres-long keel flexed.

  Gravity shifted with the violence of the manoeuvre and proximity alarms brayed. The clashing, discordant shriek of intersecting void shields filled the bridge. Hardwired servitors maintaining shield integrity spasmed as electrical feedback burned them alive from within. Sharrowkyn gagged at the smell of scorched machine oil and flesh.

  The unimaginable scale of the gutted Lunar-class vessel filled the viewscreen. Sharrowkyn felt himself ducking as its burning superstructure passed over them. So vast it felt like it would never end.

  So close he felt he could reach the other ship's bridge in one powered leap.

  'Didn't even come close,' said Wayland, pulling out of the turn and leaving the doomed ship in their wake as he angled them back to the battle.

  'That warning was too damn late, Sharrowkyn!' bellowed Ulrach Branthan, the newly resurrected captain of the Sisypheum. His voice was a hideous amalgam of ruined human vocal cords and ad hoc augmetics. 'You're supposed to be tracking the flow of this battle.'

  'Do I look like the master of surveyors?' snapped Sharrowkyn.

  'Then step aside and find someone who can read a damn auspex!' said Branthan, his towering form stepping down from the command podium with a booming thud of asymmetrical, splay-clawed feet.

  The captain's body was a nightmarish fusion of flesh and machine, but it bore only a passing resemblance to the honourable chassis of the Dreadnought from which its parts had been cannibalised. Rather, he was now a thing of biomechanical horror wrought by Atesh Tarsa in a moment of madness and desperation. The ancient relic known as the Heart of Iron was enmeshed in Branthan's exposed ribs and musculature like a chromium spider, beating with a loathsomeness Sharrowkyn could barely stomach.

  The spoiled-meat stink of Branthan's body and the noxious chemicals keeping his rotten flesh alive reminded Sharrowkyn of his youth - of when he would find milky, bloated bodies afloat in the deep salt pools of Lycaeus.

  A psyber-eagle wrought from pale steel and brass perched at his shoulder. The Iron Hands had named it Garuda, after an ancient Medusan myth, and, like the crew of the Sisypheum, it had suffered great hurts, but yet endured. On Iydris, it had taken a bolt-round from the swordsman Lucius, but Thamatica and Wayland had restored its mechanical life.

  The surveyor station was awash with flickering ghost images of the absurdly close-range battle. Wayland rolled them around the shuddering wreck of the Glory Hound, a Mars-class warship burning from bow to stem.

  Booming clangs echoed through the ship's superstructure. Repurposed maintenance servitors at damage control blurted screeds of binaric gibberish.

  'What was that?' demanded Branthan.

  'I don't know,' said Sharrowkyn. 'Suicidal bombers or fighter craft with no carrier to return to? Maybe drifting wreckage too small for the auspex to pick up.'

  'Not good enough. Raven Guard!"

  Sharrowkyn bit back an angry retort as the display flared with signal bloom. Threat warnings blazed to life across the glowing surface of the slate.

  'Capital vessel coming about on our rearward quarter.' he called. 'Oberon-class, I think.'

  'The Covenant of Truth. Seventeenth Legion predator-ship,' replied Wayland sharply. 'But it's not coming for us.'

  Dozens of threat runes blinked to life on the viewscreen.

  'How can you be sure?’ barked Branthan.

  'The Kryptos,' said Wayland, pulling the Sisypheum away from the larger vessel's void-wake. 'It's feeding me the Covenant's encrypted vox. Its captain is communicating with two other ships. They're moving to bracket the Europa's Wrath.'

  Sharrowkyn tried to sort the conflicting auspex returns and match what he was seeing to what Wayland was telling him.

  'Are you certain?' he asked, 'looks to me like the Covenant is manoeuvring for a raking barrage across our drive.'

  'I don't like ships on my rear!' said Branthan. Garuda spread its wings and squawked angrily.

  'It's not coming for us,' insisted Wayland.

  'It has a perfect firing position,' said Sharrowkyn.

  'Holding course.' said Wayland.

  'Throne damn you, Sabik Wayland!' cried Branthan, pounding across the deck towards the Iron Father. For an instant, Sharrowkyn thought he was going to rip Wayland from helm control.

  The range counters slowed and extended.

  Sharrowkyn let out a breath. 'It's pulling away.’

  'I told you, the Covenant is hungry to kill the Europa's Wrath'.

  The viewscreen erupted with light as the Covenant of Truth launched staggered broadsides into its victim. Boxed in by the barrages of two other traitor warships, the Imperial vessel was forced to endure the punishing fire flaying its shields.

  Torpedo boats and bomber wings flew in close to the Europa's Wrath, and wave upon wave of ordnance punched into the titanic warship's hull. Secondary boosters thrust warheads farther into the larger ship before delayed-action fuses detonated them deep in its vitals.

  A rippling wave travelled the length of the vessel as explosions raced through its internal compartments, tearing it apart from the inside. Swirling conflagrations erupted from the Wrath's many wounds, burning white-hot with pure oxygen and the chemical fire of its blood. Sharrowkyn felt his heart clamped by an icy fist as he watched the majestic ship die. Like the last of a species finally brought to extinction, it fought to the end, but its doom was assured. The rad-wash of its murder fouled every sensor return, but Sharrowkyn saw rampant cascades of high-band atomics flaring deep in its enginarium

  That could only mean one thing.

  'She's going critical,' shouted Sharrowkyn, 'Get us clear, Wayland.

  'Belay that!' ordered Branthan. 'Get us closer!'

  'What?' shouted Sharrowkyn. 'No! You'll kill us all!'

  He took a half-step towards Branthan

  'Remain at your post!' barked the monstrous captain of the Iron Hands.

  'Wayland, no!’ shouted Sharrowkyn. 'It’s suicide to be anywhere near that ship.'

  'Bring us around,’ said Branthan. The Covenant of Truth's shields are down. Vector a course directly towards its bridge. Sharrowkyn, get me a firing solution right now!'

  'Wayland, get us out of here,' pleaded Sharrowkyn. 'He'll kill us all for the sake of vengeance.'

  Branthan spun around, murderously swift for something so hulking. A powerful fist, ripped from the chassis of the fallen Brother Bombastus, slammed into Sharrowkyn's chest.

  He flew backwards, twisting in the air to land in a crouched skid across the deck. Muscle memory made his hand fly to his hip, where his black-bladed gladius was sheathed.

  He looked up to see Garuda perched on the edge of the auspex table, its head cocked to the side as it regarded him with its unblinking eyes.

  Was it just his imagination or did the bird shake its head? Sharrowkyn let out a breath as Garuda took flight and returned to Branthan's shoulder. The deck shuddered as the Sisypheum fired its prow bombardment cannon at point-blank range. The Covenant of Truth's close-in defence systems had no lime to react, and the city-leveling ordnance impacted on its command deck with devastating effect.

  An Oberon-class battleship was a monstrously
powerful ship of the line, heavily armoured and bristling with weapons systems, but without shields it was vulnerable. The Sisypheum's shells punched deep into the nexus of its command centre, gouging mortal wounds into its brain. Plumes of fire and blossoming clouds of molten steel vented into space.

  The Sisypheum flew through the expanding clouds of superheated vapour and cascades of wreckage, chased by a storm of hastily aimed las-fire and burst shells from anti-torpedo frag-launchers.

  Branthan turned from Sharrowkyn, Garuda once again at his shoulder.

  'Hard turn, bring us back around,' said Branthan. 'I want to finish this bastard off.'

  'It's already out of the fight,' said Sharrowkyn.

  'I don't want it out of the fight,' snapped Branthan. 'I want it dead'.'

  The Sisypheum shuddered as Wayland put the ship into a tight corkscrewing turn to starboard. He angled the prow down to obscure their course in the blazing plasma wake of the wounded battleship.

  'Thamatica!' barked Wayland over the vox. 'I'm going to need those reactors burning hotter.'

  The vox crackled with a blurt of angry binaric code before Thamatica answered from the enginarium.

  'I assure you, Iron Father, it is taking everything I have simply to keep the reactors from overloading and killing us all. I can do only so much with barely a handful of menial servitors assisting me.'

  'Do what you can, Ironwrought,' said Wayland, snapping off the vox. 'Nykona?'

  Sharrowkyn didn't answer, his gaze fixed on Ulrach Branthan's back. He released the breath he'd been holding, feeling a sharp pain in his ribs. He relaxed his white-knuckled grip on his gladius, understanding that he had been on the verge of unleashing lethal violence on a fellow legionary.

  An insane fellow legionary, yes, but one whose loyalty was still given to the Emperor.

  'Nykona,' said Wayland, his voice calm but authoritative. 'I need eyes in this fight. Return to your station, brother.'

  Sharrowkyn nodded slowly and sheathed his blade.

  The void was burning with innumerable atomic flare-storms, pulsing tsunami of e-mag surges and the detonation echoes of the Covenant's magazine stores.

  Situational awareness was next to impossible to determine.

  Even an asupex-savant or an officer with decades of experience would likely divine nothing from this sensory anarchy.

  'Coming about,' said Wayland matter-of-factly, as if announcing mundane orbital manoeuvres. 'Gun Deck, how long till the bombardment cannon is back online?'

  The pained voice of Atesh Tarsa, the Salamanders Apothecary, echoed through the bridge.

  'Numen's working on it, but it will be at least seven minutes before the weapon is ready to fire. Every part of the reload process has to be done manually.'

  Wayland cut the link and said, 'Broadsides it is then.'

  A discordant wailing cut over the vox-bands, and Sharrowkyn winced at the torment he heard in the nightmarish howls.

  Part binaric code, part daemonic cant.

  In its purest form, the Mechanicum called it scrapcode.

  It was the Kryptos, screaming from its below-decks cell.

  Not a warning, a shriek of terror...

  'Brace, brace, brace!' yelled Wayland.

  Sharrowkyn saw it a second later.

  A tapered prow knifing through the void, vectoring in at the perfect kill angle, murder-torpedoes already loose, stabbing lasers stripping away the last of the Sisypheum's shields.

  The ship screamed over the vox, tearing through the Sisypheum's security protocols with the visceral trauma of its name.

  Carnager! Carnager! Carnager!

  White-hot beams of light seared through the strike cruiser s many decks, the relative movement of the two vessels causing them to whipsaw through its reinforced superstructure. Hundreds of metres of hull plate peeled away, like meal pared from the bone by a butcher's knife.

  The force of entire sections venting explosively into hard vacuum heeled the ship over like a pugilist rocked back on their heels.

  The auspex screamed with incoming ordnance.

  The blood-red light of a mortal wound filled the bridge. It painted Branthan in a daemonic glow.

  'You've killed us all,' hissed Sharrowkyn.

  Then the world turned inside out.

  And red light turned to white.

  2

  The Way is Open

  Echoes of the Past

  Back from the Dead

  A frozen moment of time.

  It stretched, soundless and serene.

  Sharrowkyn's first thought was that if this was death, then everything the old-timers on Lycaeus had told him as a rebel youth was wrong.

  They'd spoken of death as a fire that consumed you.

  It would be painful, they said.

  Death was always painful in the old-timers' tales, and it was never easy. A good death would be sudden and, if you were lucky, one you wouldn't see coming.

  But this moment? This eternal moment was peaceful.

  Which told Sharrowkyn it wasn't death.

  This was something else.

  Cold and weightless, Sharrowkyn's gut swelled with nausea, like the worst translation sickness imaginable. His eyes burned, as if micro-scopic needles were slowly pushing into his pupils.

  He saw nothing but blinding searing light.

  His senses swam in and out of coherence.

  Screaming voices, cries of horror, unbridled joy.

  These were not voices he knew, for there were men, women, and children who screamed names he'd never heard.

  A thousand voices, tens of thousands.

  He recognised languages of Terra, as well as dialects that had taken root in the centuries since humanity first set sail from its world. Woven within them were words never meant to be given voice, daemonic chatterings of razor teeth and loathsome appetite*

  Sharrowkyn's mouth tasted metal, and his skull bloated with a raging storm of emotions, only a few of which were his.

  Fear, guilt, hoped-for redemption, and overwhelming horror that was only kept from turning into a raging storm of self destruction by iron discipline.

  Too much. Too fast.

  He felt the synapses within his mind coming untethered, the torrent of emotions eroding them like a surge tide that rips away the supports of a bridge.

  The empty white of his vision cleared, and once again he saw the cold steel of buttressed gantries and the riveted steel plates of the ship s bridge.

  The Sisypheum spun like a leaf on the wind, and an awful sense of vertigo permeated every fibre of Sharrowkyn's being. From his marrow to his psyche, he felt as though he were folding inside out - as if every dimension of his existence were now revealed to be a flimsy construct

  No sirens blared, and only the warning hiss of static filled the bridge, like the droning of carrion flies swarming the meat of the battle-fallen. Light flickered at the corner of his vision, and he rolled onto his side closing his eyes as a fresh stab of nausea ripped up through his stomach. The sensation was so unnatural to his transhuman physiology that he almost didn't recognise it.

  The feeling passed, and Sharrowkyn gripped the edge of the nearest console to pull himself upright, feeling as weak as a newborn. He blinked away the last of the burning pain in his vision, seeing the rest of the bridge crew recovering from whatever had just happened

  'Wayland, what in Medusa's name was that?' demanded Branthan, his mechanised body drooling coolant fluids and crackling with what looked like warp corposant. Garuda lay on the ground, its legs twitching and its eyes flickering with machine light.

  Sabik didn't answer, his eyes wide and his lips moving soundlessly, like a servitor in the midst of a mindwipe. Strapped to his command throne. Sabik hadn't fallen like the rest of them, but integrated with the rest of the Sisypheum's systems, he'd felt everything the ship had suffered.

  'What was that?' repeated Branthan.

  Sharrowkyn wanted to check his friend, but knew he had to deal with the most pressing demand b
efore moving to the next

  Prioritise and execute.

  The surveyor array was a flaring mess of static and distortions, a jumble of signals, datum points and navigational beacons dial bore no resemblance to those in Jupiter's vicinity.

  'I don't know,' said Sharrowkyn. 'None of the readings on the auspex make any sense.'

  'Make them make sense,' ordered Branthan, as if the reality of their surroundings could be made clearer simply by force of will. 'The Carnager could be ready to finish us off!'

  Sharrowkyn shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'I'm not picking up any ship signatures or engine flares in the void. We're alone out here'

  'And where exactly is here? We can't fight effectively if we don't know where we are.'

  'If the few datum points I'm picking up are correct, then it looks like...'

  'Like what?' said Branthan when Sharrowkyn didn't continue 'Like we made a warp jump,' he said, trying to make sense of what little information he could confirm. 'Everything I'm seeing suggest we're no longer in the Jovian battlespace. We're somewhere above the solar disc, in the outer reaches of the trans-Martian void. Roughly a third of an AU from Terra...'

  'That's impossible,' snapped Branthan. 'A warp jump this close to the sun would have torn us apart.’

  'I don't know how else to explain it,' said Sharrowkyn, his words growing more confident as fresh information confirmed his hypothesis.

  'He's right, captain,' said Wayland, his words slurred with system-shock. 'I felt a huge spike in warp spectra right after the Carnager hit us. I don't know exactly what it was, but it was somewhere in the vicinity of the Comet Shrine. Similar to what I'd expect to see when a war fleet translates, but many orders of magnitude larger.'

  'A warp rift? This deep in the Solar System? How?' said Branthan, and every one of them knew there could be only one architect of such a traumatic wound in reality.

  'Horus Lupercal,' said Sharrowkyn.

  'That's how he's going to do it, how he was always going to do it,' said Wayland, unable to conceal a fleeting admiration for the sheer audacity of so bold a plan's execution. 'The fighting around the Kthonic and Elysian Gates was just to spread out our defences along the solar perimeter. We assumed the gates were the only way Horus could bring his fleets through, but if the scale of these readings is even vaguely accurate, then the traitors could sail a hundred fleets through that rift. Practically into Terra's orbit...'