The Beast Arises

The bridge of the Azimuth was a place of pandemonium. Alarms sounded, most of them notifications of damage to other decks, some of them target or proximity alerts triggered by the attacking warships. The air was rank with smoke from artifice deck fires. Crewmen rushed in all directions, delivering data, or attempting frantic repairs on crashed bridge systems. For now, the strategium was working again. On it, Kiran could see the ships of his line, a curve of green icons hooked like a claw into the nearspace region of Ardamantua. He could see the enemy too, a blizzard of red icons spilling from the hazard marker of the rogue moon.

The taskforce fleet was outnumbered thirty or forty ships to one. A bridge officer did not need years of training at the Imperial College of Fleet Strategy to know how this was going to end.

‘The odds are too great,’ said Maskar. ‘We run. Obviously, we run.’

Kiran shook his head.

‘No time, sir. They’d bring us down stone dead before we ever made it to translation.’

‘Then what?’ asked Maskar, horrified.

‘Tell the Lord Commander to make a full statement of the events as we know them, and send it via astropathic link as fast as possible. I will buy him as much time as I can, but it won’t be long. We will take as many of them with us as we can, general.’

Maskar looked at him.

‘Quickly,’ Kiran said, tightening his grip on his sword.

Maskar saluted him. Kiran saluted back. The Astra Militarum commander turned and hurried towards Heth, who was at the vox-station across the bridge.

‘Gunnery!’ Kiran yelled.

‘Gunnery, aye!’

‘Status?’

‘Status effective!’

‘Target selection is now at my station. Primary batteries live.’

‘Primary live, aye!’

‘Secondary batteries may fire at will.’ Kiran drew his free hand across the touch-sensitive hololithic plate of his console, aligning targets in order of priority.

‘Autoloaders live!’ a sub-commander called out.

‘Gunports open!’ yelled another.

‘Let’s kill them,’ said Admiral Kiran. He stabbed his finger at the glass to activate the first pre-programmed firing sequence.

The Azimuth’s main forward batteries and spinal mount fired. The recoil stresses made the vast ship’s superstructure groan. Beams of energy lashed out from the ship, followed by slower-moving shoals of missiles and void torpedoes.

An ork warship died in a ball of light, like a sun going nova. A second ship ripped open, spilling its mechanical guts into the void in a cloud of oil and gas and flame, tumbling end over end, inertial stability lost.

Kiran tapped the second sequence. He was already loading a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, his eyes never leaving the complex mapping of the strategium display. Two more kills. Then another two. The Azimuth’s shields began to reach saturation.

He ordered them forwards on their coursing plasma engines. The real space drive swept them in to meet the rising enemy swarm. To port, one of his frigates was engulfed and annihilated. A second later, the fleet tender suffered a shield failure, and was lost in a puff of superhot gas and vapour. To starboard, the grand cruiser Dubrovnic fended off swarms of ork boarding ships as it targeted and slew three bulk warships with its main batteries. It took the third with a passing broadside that shredded the monstrous attacker.

Kiran saw the massive ork cruiser hoving in on an attack vector.

‘Focus shield strength!’ he yelled. ‘Starboard bearing!’

The cruiser began shelling and lacing the void with beam-fire. The Azimuth shook, shields flaring, straining.

Maskar crossed the shuddering deck to join Lord Commander Militant Heth.

‘Summon the astropaths,’ Heth told him without looking up from the communication console. ‘We have to make this good. There will be data to send. As much as we can code and packet.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Maskar. He signalled to aides to prepare the astropath chamber.

‘Look,’ said Heth, gesturing to the comms console. ‘Look at this.’ Various images were displayed on adjacent pict monitors. One was of the rogue moon, showing the macabre ork visage that had been mechanically created to glare out at them. Maskar could hear both coded transmission signals and noise bursts running through the vox-caster station.

‘Help from the surface,’ Heth explained. ‘The magos biologis. We’re unravelling some of the ork transmissions. It’s all bloodthirsty threat, I think. Nothing of substance. Just declarations of hatred and pronouncements of destruction. And this began about three minutes ago.’

He indicated one image in particular, and then enlarged it onto a console’s main overhead screen. The image made Maskar blench. It was a pict feed, streamed through some exotic form of image capture system, that was being broadcast directly to them. It was a transmission for their benefit, for the benefit of any victims the orks came upon.