Chapter 8
The ship-to-ship duel with the Agony Eternal had persisted through another two passes, neither vessel scoring clean blows. Archmagos Dhukov was some time conferring with his attendants before he turned to Jak with his report.
"The last assault of the Eldar dark lances pierced the port topside combustion nave. Until the damage can be repaired we are down an engine."
"Thank you Dhukov," Jak said. "The old girl's always had a list to her, I trust the helmsman can accommodate." He was sanguine about the damage received; in return, the Yolenna had got her first solid fix on the Agony Eternal and torn the Eldar vessel's shadow field to ribboned tendrils. He'd take the engine damage as a fair trade.
"Sir! The Unshakeable Will requests immediate fire support. She is taking heavy fire from the torture cruiser Tears of Isha".
Fingers flicking across a throne mounted rune board, Jak brought up a hololith of the Unshakeable Will. The Great Cruiser had been horribly scarred by her battle with the two torture cruisers. Cathedral spires from her command deck had been sheared from the ship and were free-floating ponderously alongside. Broadside hatches were closed over where plasma shot had torn through the outer stirrups and great rents had been dragged across the flanks of her hull.
"Thank you Ms Jate," he called out. "Hold on your response".
The Agony Eternal was out there in the asteroid field somewhere, hiding till her shadow field replenished no doubt, a welcome respite that would give Jak's people time to bring her void shields back to full power and deal with the boarding parties. But moving to support the Unshakeable Will would leave the Yolenna Symphony vulnerable again, positioned to be caught between the Agony Eternal and Tears of Isha. A great risk, and one that required immense trust in L'Tarvius to prioritise both Imperial ships' survival against an Eldar foe that could turn the tables on them in an instant.
"Mr Sykarin," he voxed his Master-at-Arms, playing for time. "Report." There was nothing but static. "Report, Master-at-Arms!" When again he got no reply Jak turned to ship's Master of Etherics. She looked troubled.
"Sir, we're getting internal auspex interference across the ship. There seems to be battles in a hundred passageways but I can't confirm any of them. Sykarin reported in ten minutes ago that at least three groups had broken through and were running the passageways, but that was the last we've heard or seen from him." Jate appeared and Trigal's side to add, "Shield engine reported all clear a minute ago, Sir, but I couldn't raise Sergeant Teylor on the vox and the Chief's priests are reporting heavy fire from that part of the ship so I don't know which to believe. Mr Narn reported three minutes ago that they're facing heaving resistance on the portside top choke and I've lost all contact from the starboard choke, but I'd swear I hear screaming through the static."
This was what Garian had warned him of. Chaos in the passageways. The elite raiders of the Dark Kin carving their swift and bloody path through the Yolenna's innards, using their xenos technology to interfere with any attempt to coordinate a response. A dozen boarders could seem like a hundred and the thousands of Yolenna armsmen could be dragged all over the ship, forced to leave vital systems vulnerable while they responded to ghost signals.
"Sir, the Unshakeable Will," Al Dessi reminded him. Jak glanced at her, then at his Wing Commander.
"Mr Sokil, are any of your Marauders able to break off and support the Unshakeable Will?"
The Wing Commander turned slowly to look up at his captain, his voice seeming to come from some place distant. "Marauders?"
"Yes, man. Your bomber squadrons."
"Sir," Sokil said, with the blank, red-eyed stare of a broken man. "I have no bomber squadrons."
Jak gawped at him, then at the Battlesphere. He'd been so focused on his personal battle with the captain of the Agony Eternal that he'd completely missed the destruction of the entirety of his bombing wings. It was a neophyte's mistake, the kind a spotty, stumbling midshipman would make, and be beaten severely for. It his father had lived to see it…
"Sir!" Jate called out, interrupting Jak's troubled reverie. "L'Tarvius himself is on the vox. He's demanding a response from you personally. Shall I patch him through?"
Jak ignored her. He was recalculating their position within the Battlesphere now. He was down his bomber wings and his Fury squadrons had been reduced to one fifth of their original strength. Whatever became of this battle, the Yolenna Symphony would be returning home with empty hangar bays.
"We've lost contact with Guard Captain Narn at the tupport choke," called Jate. "And Sergeant Speartz at the starboard is babbling about witches and screaming for mercy on open vox."
Jak stood up suddenly. The throne attendants started and ran to him as he uncoupled himself from the Yolenna Symphony, letting the neuro-connectors drop. They were snatched up by the attendants before they could hit the ground.
"Sir?" Al Dessi looked up at him from the deck below the cupola. "Captain L'Tarvius."
"Ms Jate, Give L'Tarvius my regrets, but we are unable to come to his aid at this time. Mr Sokil, bring your Furies back in. Tell them they've done their job. Tell them they have the Captain's thanks."
Jak walked, deliberately moderating his pace as he feel the urgency of the Yolenna leech out of his mind. Before departing with Borjean, Jestross had brought Jak his strongbox, a beautifully carved oak chest that had been a gift from his father upon becoming a midshipman. It had lived under whatever bunk Jak had called home for the past six years. He knelt before it and pressed his thumb to the print-coded lock. It sprang open. Inside lay an ebon black carapace vest, his las carbine and his personal collection of grenades.
Despite being a member of Scintillian nobility, Jak had never possessed a great deal of personal wealth, his father being notoriously frugal. His mother had always indulged Jak though, and her gifts of anti-personnel grenades had been a regular source of joy for him as a young firebrand. Some of them were simple frak grenades, cheap, plentiful and always useful, but others were truly rare. Works of art, products of war-artisans on far-flung Forge Worlds that had in some cases cost as much as one of the Potential's torpedos; plasma bombs, leaper mines, hallucinogen and tanglefoot grenades. With practiced care, Jak selected a half-dozen and slipped them into a bandolier.
Rising now, Jak unbuttoned his coat, shrugging it off his shoulders. Half the bridge were watching him now, some less surreptitious than others and staring at their bare chested captain atop his cupola. He put the carapace vest on, and cinched the armour tight across his chest, before slinging the badolier over his shoulder.
Borjean had left Jak with two guards. He turned to them now. "Helmsworn, Dunor. You're with me." To Ravenna, he called out. "Ms Al Dessi, I'm taking two men to secure the starboard chokepoint to the bridge. You have the cup and the throne until I return."
His first officer gaped at him, with good reason. A captain leaving the bridge to repel boarders was beyond all propriety in the Navy. But Jak was a privateer now, and he would go where his ship needed him most. There were three primary entrances to the bridge. If any one of them fell, the Dark Kin could cause carnage, right when the battle was balanced on a knife edge.
Jak and Ravenna held each other's gaze for a silent moment. He knew that if there was any resistance to this order he would have to kill her for mutiny. There could be no hint of disobedience during this critical point of battle. Ravenna knew that too, and still it clearly took every ounce of her military discipline to hold back from questioning him. Instead, she simply nodded.
"Aye-aye Sir. Happy hunting."
Borjean was scrambling like a man possessed, grabbing at one of the lumen rods that ran along the bulkheads, and tearing it free from the brackets. The fluorescent light threw up a startling relief of barely controlled fear on the man's face as he turned, holding the flickering lumen like a torch against the darkness. Torn wiring sparked behind him as he bellowed orders to the survivors.
"Wrench the bloody lights out, lads! Make a barrier! Sharply, before he's back!" He dropped the lumen on the floor, detached from the ship's electronics but still giving off light from the energy storing machine spirits within its batteries.
A low, bass chuckle echoed through the passageway. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, rumbling through the metal of the ship. A black shadow passed between the group once more, and an armsman gave a gurgling scream as he collapsed, his throat cut just like the first victim's had been.
"What are we doing?" Babbled the man next to Maternin, at the edge of panic. "What is that thing?"
"Mandrake," Jestross hissed. His head bobbed low and his arms, all four of them, spread wide, flexing in what Maternin took to be a hunting stance. He leapt at the bulkhead and tore two lumen rods free at once. Without questioning the order, Maternin joined in, whispering prayers of apology to the ship as she yanked a rod free. They soon had a half dozen lumens, set up as a rough perimeter around the five huddled survivors. A small circle of light surrounded them, throwing up strange shadows on the bulkheads.
"Mandrake," Borjean repeated. "One of the weirdest bloody monsters in a galaxy full of them." He was holding one lumen rod in his hand and using it like a torch, swinging it back and forth to light the corners of the passageway. "They move through shadows and they don't like the light. Slows them down. You step out of the shadows and you're a dead man, my lads."
"So we're safe inside the circle?
"Not likely," Borjean grunted. "It just means we've got a chance to see the bastard before he guts us. Jestross, you think you can take him in a knife fight you old sack of bones?"
"Yesss," Jestross hissed, seemingly becoming more bestial with every moment of battle. "Oh yesss,"
"If he can move through shadow," Maternin asked, "won't he simply bypass us and go straight to the bridge?"
"Mayhap. But they're a perverse bunch, your Mandrakes. He's just as likely to forget that he's here to do a job and decide he wants to have the pleasure of finishing us one by one."
Indeed.
The voice sounded like something wet and slimy that slithered through dank swamps. It was a voice thick with contempt and amusement. The mandrake struck again with horrific speed, but this time at least it was forced to come at them, emerging from the shadows and running barefoot across the decking. It took a running leap at the group, katana thrust forward. Jestross moved up from his crouch, meeting the thrust with crossed blades.
What followed was perhaps only truly visible to Jestross, the mandrake and Maternin. Jestross with his xenos eyes and Maternin with her augmentations were able to resolve movement twice as effectively as a normal human could. The flurry of blows that the two aliens traded must have looked like a blur to the surviving armsmen, and after only 2.68 seconds Maternin watched the mandrake backflip away and disappear into the shadows again.
Borjean rushed forward to catch Jestross as his alien friend dropped to one knee gasping. The alien's blood dripped from a half dozen wounds, and one arm hung uselessly at his side, the knife slipping from his fingers to clank against the deck.
From the darkness they heard the laughter again, slow, sonorous and twisted.
Well fought. I believe I will save you for last.
He struck again, from the other end of the passageway. Again he had to come at them from a short distance, and Maternin blasted away with the surviving armsmen, trying to hit the creature with their shot canons. Again the result was the same. Another corpse, eyes staring sightlessly into the darkness, hands grasping uselessly at the gaping wound in his neck.
Now there were only four of them left.
At times like this, Maternin was acutely aware of her two minds. The first mind ran hot and fast and thick as blood, purely organic, her instincts screaming at her to run, howling in terror that she did not want to die today. Most adepts of the Omnissiah purged this part of their mind as soon as they were permitted to, relying instead on their second, cybernetic minds, brains augmented with the pure processing power of neural cogitators. The fast mind and the slow, instinct versus logic. Maternin could feel in her mind the sharp edges where the two met, where the pulsing human brain touched the cold mechanicality of her augments.
The Genitari believed, she believed, that her Omnissiah-gifted human instincts were still valuable, still worth keeping, but at times like this she took solace in the retreat to her mechanical mind, and its reassuringly emotionless analysis. Processing power was directed towards a careful, systematic profiling of the threat; the way the creature had moved, its speed and grace, its interactions between the shadow world and the physical world. It was a beast surely worthy of further study, so quickly able to shift from corporeal to incorporeal form.
She was going to die here, but she could still use her last moments to learn.
A faint echo from her human mind wondered, did non-Mechanicus feel like this? Were they too ever in two minds, feeling the raging conflict between instinct and rationality in moments of mortal danger?
With her mind processing at a feverish rate, Maternin also found herself acutely aware of her environment. The smooth, reinforced bulkheads curving off into the darkness. The water pooling across the floor where a stray shot had damaged the piping. The dim light from the lumen rods that had been hastily dragged across the decking, and the flickering spray of sparks from exposed wiring, their light dancing with the groaning shudders of the ship.
The soft patter of the creature's feet against the decking. The look in its eye as it drew back its sword, exulting for a split second before delivering the death strike.
And then the answer came to her, floating out of the morass of raw data. A hope, only the slimmest of hopes, but she clung to it as the sailor clings to wreckage in a storm.
As the other survivors looked about them in fear and confusion, Maternin smiled and stepped back into the darkness.
The passageway was littered with corpses. The armsmen at the starboard chokepoint had been butchered almost to a man. Some of them were still clinging alive and their final moments of agony melded with the ship's shuddering groans, a nightmarish whorl of screams and pleading. Two figures stood in the passageway, drinking in the suffering, seemingly unsurprised at being accosted by Jak and his two bodyguards.
The male was a warrior of one of the roaming Eldar Kabals, the reavers and slave-takers whose darkly armoured carapaces gave the impression of deadly beetles, graceful and hideous in equal measure. Head to toe in black, violet and red armour, his faceless visage swung towards Jak, the two crimson jewels of the eye sockets monitoring the new foes with a slow head tilt of curiosity.
The female could not have been dressed more differently, and Jak recognised her too, from the stories of old sailors who swapped legends of the terrible gladiator pits of the Dark Kin. She was armoured only on one side of her body, plated greave and vambrance beneath a spiked pauldron covered her from shoulder to ankle but only on the left side. Her right side was not only unarmoured, it was barely dressed, clad in a figure hugging black body stocking with so many windows cut out that there was more pale flesh than material visible.
She was perfectly proportioned, perfectly toned, and she displayed her flesh with the reckless nonchalance of a woman who knew no man was fast enough to touch a blade to her. The sight was enough to make a man sink to his knees in strangled desire, until you saw the face; eyes slightly too wide, too narrow, the pointed chin drawing the little mouth down into a permanent sneer, a lifetime of cruelty and an utterly alien lust for pain etched into a face that otherwise could have belonged to a porcelain doll.
A gladiatrix of the Wytch Cults, perhaps one of the deadliest aliens in the galaxy.
She walked like a dancer, one leg swinging elegantly in front of the other, metal toed shoes clicking against the deck as she lightly stepped around a man crying out his last pleas to the Emperor. Neither Jak nor his guards moved, watching transfixed as one dainty alien foot pressed down against the throat of the dying man and twisted. The wytch gave a flirtatious moue of pleasure at the man's strangled last gasps.
Now level with her companion, she shared with him a short, wordless glance. Neither spoke. Jak raised his las carbine.
It wasn't that the aliens moved quickly, Jak would explain later to an eager audience, it was that they seemed to move as smoothly as water, simply flowing over or around any shots fired at them. In a moment the gun had been knocked out of his left hand, and Jak was swinging his cutlass desperately to defend himself. The Kabalite warrior held two, wickedly curved knives and crossed them to lazily fend off Jak's blow.
The Velasquez Sword that Jak had retrieved from his father's coffin was an ancient power cutlass, its blade glowing with an almost imperceptible corona of humming energy, emanating from the power source in the ornate shield guard. As it met the Kabalite warrior's crossed blades the alien weapons simply shattered. The expressionless mask of the Kabalite warrior had no chance to show any reflection of its owner's momentary surprise before Jak's blade cleaved through the helm, biting deep into the alien skull beneath.
Jak kept moving as the Eldar dropped bonelessly to the deck, yanking his sword free and spinning towards the other Eldar. The wytch was watching him with a faint, scornful curiosity. Helmsworn and Dunor, two of the best fighters on board the ship, were already prostrated at her feet, victims of the wytch's sword play. But they were alive, Jak didn't miss that detail. The wytch wanted them to see them experience slow death.
A good sign then. The both wanted the same thing. A few centuries from now would suit Jak just fine, preferably surrounded by women and liquor on a distant pleasure world.
She raised her sword in a salute. It was an impressive weapon, forged into the spiked style that the Dark Kin seemed to favour so much, with the blade being made of twenty interlocking smaller fragments, each one shaped like the head of a battle-axe, or perhaps like batwings.
"You are the captain of this vessel," she said. It didn't seemed to be a question.
"Captain Jakobian Velasquez, ma'am." He said. Politeness was always called for with a pretty woman, murderous alien bitch or no. "I take it you're here to surrender."
She laughed, high and pealing. "How droll! No, I am here to do you the greatest of honours. I am Vetrianas of the Cult of the Pale Blades, once and future champion of the Pit of Belshammaroth and mine shall be the last name you ever hear. Your death shall be one of a thousand cuts, each longer and deeper until you bleed to death on the deck of your own ship. Your death shall mirror your vessel's, in a perfect duet of agony that shall be spoken of in Commorragh for years to come."
Jak gripped his cutlass tighter. "Well the pleasantries didn't last very long," he muttered to himself. To the wytch he replied, "Your death will be short, and probably a bit messy. If you like, afterwards I'll sing a sea shanty for you."
The wytch lunged, stabbing her arm forward, despite being metres away from him. Her body didn't move, only the arm. And the sword. It snapped apart, the individual segments splitting, flying towards Jak like a flail, twenty blades connected along single line of mono-filament.
Jak barely had time to dodge, the blades flying so close to his face he could feel one shave him. He glanced down in horror at the dark hairs and single drop of blood that fell to the deck. His fingers to his cheek. They came away wet with blood, a gash so shallow he'd barely felt it.
"That was the first," Vetrianas said with satisfaction, jerking her sword hand up so that the flail clicked back cleanly into a single blade once more.
"Well let's try to make it the last," Jak grunted and dodged again as Vetrianas danced closer. He swung his sabre wildly, trying to force her onto the back foot. She'd be far too fast for him if she got within striking range, he had to keep her back. She fended his blow almost disdainfully. Unlike the Kabalite warrior's blade, her sword was clearly made from an alloy capable of standing up to a power sword. Blue and purple sparks flew when the blades crossed, and she moved gracefully to the side, dragging her sword down Jak's bare arm, cutting a second gash.
Jak roared with pain and frustration, driving forward. Like all sons of nobility, Jak had trained to duel with swords. He knew his Thibault from his Agrippa, but he had been an indifferent student at best. The Velazquez cutlass was much larger and heavier than a duelling rapier, and whatever fighting style this wytch had studied, she was far from indifferent in its application. In the name of survival Jak employed a defence sometimes referred to as the Templar cross, but more commonly as the "Swing and Pray", flailing his arm, first up and down then left to right, vigorously and ceaselessly. It made for an impressive barrier that even the lighting fast wytch struggled to penetrate. But it was a technique that could only last minutes before the practitioner inevitably tired and faltered. Then, Jak knew, he'd be gutted.
In contrast to Jak's fighting style, the wytch moved like she could fight all day, probing Jak's defences with almost playful intent, their swords sparking each time. As fatigue slowed Jak down he began to bleed from a half dozen cuts to his arms and legs, each one biting a little deeper. He screamed in pain as she spun behind him and slashed down his calf, then again when her upswinging blade caught his wrist. His cutlass fell clattering to the deck below, immediately sparking out as it left his hand.
Vetrianas smiled and took a step back, admiring her handiwork. "Do you feel it captain? Do you feel your ship dying?"
Panting heavily, Jak dropped his hands to his knees. Looking up from the curtain of dark hair that hunk lank with sweat against his face, Jak used the bulk of his body to cover the slow slide of one hand to his bandolier. "You're right, I definitely feel something. Give me a moment to work out what it is." His fingers moved across his grenades, identifying them by touch. As the wytch stepped forward to deliver her coup-de-grace, Jak trigged the grenade known as the Tanglefoot.
The Tanglefoot Grenade: a device so ancient and esoteric that only a handful of Forge Worlds still produced them. It worked by temporarily distorting the direction of local gravity over a small area, a delightful form of children's entertainment or a deadly form of discombobulation, depending on where you deployed it. Jak's had cost a small fortune and it was the only one he owned. He deployed it now to save his life.
The grenade activated. Jak and Vetrianas flew (or, depending on your point of view, fell) to the overhead deck. Gravity flipped itself around 180 degrees. Jak was ready for it and landed well, but even caught unawares Vetrianas twisted like a cat to land on all fours, hissing in surprise but never off balance. But Jak was already lashing out with a boot as he landed. His kick caught the wytch a heavy blow to the stomach.
Vetrianas tumbled backwards, spinning as gravity lurched around them, bodies of the dead and dying flying about like missiles. Jak ran down the side of the bulkhead, and launched himself at his cutlass as it flew past. Vetrianas was caught a knock to the side of the head by a passing body, smashing back into the bulkhead before she tumbled down.
Both Jak and the wytch dropped into crouches, trying to follow the movement of the ship around them as the tortured gravity field reasserted itself. Even fighting against gravity, Vetrianas retained her control, and lashed out with her razor flail. Jak jerked his cutlass up just in time, catching the flail. A string of blades wrapped around his sword, sparking ferociously as the two power fields ground together. Jak wrenched back, dragging the flail free from the wytch's grip.
Both dropped to the deck at the same time as gravity was finally restored to the ship's natural settings. Vetrianas' hair was a mess and her face was a mask of fury, the latter perhaps a result of the former. Ignoring the fact that she was disarmed, she launched herself at Jak. His second grenade caught her in mid-air, a shock grenade this time, designed to emit a blinding flash of light. Jak threw himself to the side, covering his eyes as the grenade went off.
Blinded and furious, the wytch was still deadly, and she leapt immediately to her feet. Head spinning from left to right, trying to track her prey with hearing alone, she might have been able to defeat Jak even from there if Dunor, fighting to stay conscious, hadn't reached out to grab her ankle, clinging with the last of his strength. The wytch stumbled and fell forward tumbling to the decking in front of Jak.
In the end it was a combination of skill, cunning, desperation and sheer dumb luck that led to victory. As it always does.
The Velasquez cutlass cut cleanly, slaying the former champion of the Belshammaroth Pit in a single blow.
When Jak arrived at the second chokepoint, he was carrying two blades, the Velasquez sword and the wytch's razor flail. Borjean quirked an eyebrow, but Jak was distracted by the corpse at his bodyguard's feet. It didn't look like an Eldar; its skin was black as the void and covered in fluorescent tattoos that writhed against its skin even in death. And it was clearly dead; no one could survive having one of Jestross' knives buried that deep in its chest.
"What is this?" He asked.
"Mandrake," Borjean said. "Only the second time I've ever seen one. Fast as sin and they move through shadows. The little red robe saved our hides. You're bleeding Sir." He added.
He waved it off. "Flesh wounds." He looked at the xenos sword in his hands. "Huh. You know what I should have said? I should have said, 'Sorry I don't know any sea shanties.' I never think of these lines in the moment."
"Sorry, Sir?"
Jak, blinked at Borjean, seeming a little dazed then shook the question off. He turned to Maternin, who was standing silently to the side, along with the one surviving armsman from Borjean's group. Naerin, if Jak was remembering her name right.
"How'd you save them, adept?"
"It was a simple solution in the end," Shyendi said, radiating modesty. "I merely observed that the creature was forced to interact corporeally with its surrounds in order to strike a killing blow, and that it was also went barefoot, visibly and audibly making contact with the ship's decking when it ran. I merely stepped back into this puddle, which was electrified by a loose wire, an obvious hazard. When he materialised to kill me, he did so in the centre of the pool and was instantly electrocuted, giving Mr Jestross the opportunity to slay him."
When this was met by awed silence from her captain, she continued awkwardly.
"I had to take an educated guess of course, that his body would respond to electricity as most organic species would, but my own boots are entirely insulated, so there was no great risk to me in comparison to the almost certain death that would have resulted from taking no action."
Jak put a hand gently on her shoulder, and appeared to be about to say something, but they were interrupted in that moment, by a sudden change in the air. Jak, Maternin, even Jestross sensed it and swivelled his head, searching for the source.
It was a moment marked by absence rather than presence, the cessation of something that had always been there on the edge of sensation. You never quite heard it or felt it, but the moment it was gone you suddenly became very away that it was missing.
Jak, who had lived almost his whole life aboard ships, was the first to be able to put a name to it.
"The void shields are down. They got to our shield drives. We're flying naked."
Jak sprinted back to the bridge as fast as he had ever run in his life. On arrival, it was clear that something had changed in the last half hour of battle. The Lysandrians were in disarray, all semblance of fleet formation lost and each ship on its own, desperately trying to escape the fray or hold off the swarming Dark Kin vessel. The Portentia was in retreat, and the Eldar were focusing their fire on the Unshakeable Will, which was holding the Tears of Isha off at great cost.
Jak took all of this in with a glance at the holo-lith. The hollowness in the eyes of his bridge officers told him the rest. The Lysandrian Armada was not going to make it to the second fortress. They would be lucky if any of them escaped alive.
Al Dessi turned to him from the throne, her eyes flashing with the surging will of the Yolenna's machine spirits in her brain. "Sir, we've lost void shields. We've been trading fire with the Agony Eternal but we won't hold up to another pass without the voids." Jak glanced at Dhukov, who gave a curt nod in agreement with the First Officer's assessment.
The Agony Eternal was no longer in range, but the hololith gave her position dead ahead of the Yolenna Symphony, her shadow field torn apart, seemingly for good this time, leaving her vulnerable to targeting by the Yolenna's lances. She'd be in range in under five minutes. One good shot from the lances might cripple her but the Eldar weapon had the greater range. Jak knew he couldn't win a straight shoot out with the Eldar warship.
Jak gestured to the rising Al Dessi to stay on the throne. There was no time for him to reconnect. He strode to the edge of the cupola, looking down at his weary crew. There was no time, either, to praise their dauntless work, or give them comfort. Survival was at stake.
"Ms Jate, please signal the Unshakeable Will and inform her that we are disengaging from the battle. Also signal Captain Sinkmoss and advise him that we will rendezvous at the Mandeville and assess our damages there."
There was a palpable sagging of the bridge crew. Even amongst those who knew there was no other option the ignominy of retreat hit hard.
"Agony Eternal coming in dead ahead, Sir." His Master of Etherics reminded him. Unsaid in her voice was this: if the Yolenna Symphony tried to disengage now, the Eldar vessel would tear her apart. The narrow walls of the cobweb gave a captain only two options for retreat, and the Yolenna was not agile enough to be able to make a full 180 degree turn before the Eldar ship would be upon her.
"Thank you Ms Trigal. Helm, keep our current course, dead ahead, and wait for my mark. Mr Stieg, you can draw power from the shields, we won't be needing it there. All forward lances ready to fire, but I want Red Rhoda at minus 80 and 20."
Stieg gave him a questioning glance but the crisp "Aye, Sir" was all Jak wanted to hear from him. Red Rhoda was the ship's prow-mounted lance, a rare weapon in the Imperial Navy, almost unique to the Enforcer class of ships to which the Yolenna Symphony belonged. Designated as system control vessels, built to keep recalcitrant planetary governors in line, each Enforcer ship carried a prow-mounted weapon that could swivel on both horizontal and vertical axes. This allowed a captain to fire a weapon down at planetary targets whilst still keeping his main lances pointed at foes in orbit.
On, in this case, it would allow Jak to pull off the manoeuvre that would save his ship.
The Agony Eternal was coming in fast, like a jousting knight, head down and lance raised. No longer clouded by her shadow field, the Yolenna's sensors could show Jak every inch of deadly power packed into the sleek silhouette. He would get one chance at this he knew. It was a manoeuvre that would usually be calculated down to the last degree, but there was no time. He would have to trust in the expertise of his crew.
"Helm," he said, hearing the cool detachment in his voice. "Object A-4-20. You have it?"
"Aye, Sir. On your mark." The helmsman's voice matched Jak's in its composure. No more words were required to outline Jak's intent.
There was almost complete silence on the bridge. Jak stared ahead through the vista pane as if he could see the dark shadow of the enemy ship against the void. It was out there somewhere. A counter to his right was eating up the kilometres between the two vessels. Jak knew the range of the enemy ship, their duelling had revealed that information. Her dark lances would be powering up…
Now. "Helm, hard to starboard and pitch up!" Jak barked.
"Aye Sir, starboard burn and up!" The scene through the vista panes suddenly lurched to the left, but the inertial dampeners were still working well and Jak felt only the slightest of tugs as the ship turned. "Fo'ard lances, fire!" He shouted, bracing.
The ship's lances fired together, the two primary lances firing straight ahead, whilst Red Rhoda struck out an angle, firing towards the Agony Eternal. The Eldar ship had got her shot off first. The lance beam struck alongside the Yolenna's portside, tearing straight through one of the flight decks. Whatever of Wing Commander Sokil's ships had survived the battle would have been vaporised instantly, along with the hundreds of support crew who would have been present on deck.
"Object A-4-20 has been destroyed, Sir." Al Dessi reported. The Yolenna Symphony was making straight for the gap in the wall of the Cobweb, careering through a cloud of debris that dug great pockmarks into her armour. Jak knew it would be months before all the damage to her hull would be repaired, and the old girl might never be the same again.
"The Agony Eternal?" Jak asked. There was a pause before Minas Trigal answered.
"We hit her, Sir, straight through the beak. She overshot us and she's breaking off."
Jak finally allowed himself to breathe again. "Very good. Well done, all."
A screen to his left was blinking, shifting through images of deck after deck, providing dozens of damage reports from across the ship. The Eldar boarders might have killed hundreds in their assault, but thousands would have died on the decks that the Eldar lances had hit. It would be a long time counting the butcher's bill, and the Lysandrian Crusade was over. But the Yolenna Symphony had survived.