Azarok Sector – Berrenos System
744.M32
From its inception at the dawn of the Dark Age of Technology, Warp travel had been an imprecise art, depending more upon skill, intuition and blind luck than any real science. Calculations helped, but whether that was because the theorems behind them were actually valid or because they imposed some of the order of the Materium upon the madness of the Warp was still a matter of hot debate between those few who knew Geller's secrets (and none living truly understood them).
The barriers between reality and the Immaterium were thankfully resilient in most parts of the galaxy, and breaking through them was done through brute force on human vessels. Once the rift into the Sea of Souls had been opened, the ship would pass through, protected from the madness of the Empyrean by its Geller Field, and would sail the tides of the Warp guided by the sight of its Navigator, who would use the ancient secrets of his House combined with the reference beacon of the Astronomican and maps of existing Warp routes drawn by men who rarely died well to bring the ship to its intended destination. For one ship to travel any distance through the Warp was a trial upon the minds and souls of all aboard, and even the most skilled Navigator could never be certain of delivering her vessel to the desired destination, such were the dangers of the Empyrean.
Such perils were demultiplied when dealing with an entire fleet seeking to journey together to the same destination. The ships may enter the Warp in perfect formation, only for half of them to be lost in translation, reappearing years or centuries after the war they had been sent to fight was over. There were means to alleviate these dangers, but they could never be truly avoided altogether. This was known to any captain of the Imperial Navy. And yet, the fleet that entered reality at the Mandeville Point of the Berrenos system did so with near-perfect synchronicity. A quick count of the ships showed that only two of them had been lost to the Warp, and the formation in which they had entered the Empyrean had barely been altered by the weeks of travel.
It was enough to make most aboard the fleet offer a prayer of thanks to the God-Emperor, their faith renewed that they were doing His work today, and that He had bestowed upon them this miracle. And that may very well have been true – but, as ever, the reality was more complex.
There was a reason why this fleet's trip had been so successful, one that, should they ever come to learn it, would bring the death of any Imperial soldier aboard. And though the journey to Berrenos had been relatively easy, departing from the system would be much more difficult. The Aether was boiling with the deaths left in the Unbound Host's wake, and the Navigators of the fleet could all sense that something was being done on Berrenos to keep the tides from calming down.
Until whatever was causing that phenomenon was dealt with, the Imperial fleet could not hope to leave Berrenos in any coherent fashion. In fact, the Navigators were quite insistent that they wouldn't lead the fleet back into the Warp before the situation at Berrenos had been dealt with. After listening to the half-hysterical warnings of the Navis Nobilite mutants, the leaders of the Imperial armada agreed to destroy the Chaos forces present at Berrenos before continuing on their mission to save the Azarok Sector from the enemies of Mankind.
Not that the servants of the Emperor needed any additional reason to crush the heretics, of course.
A total of fifty-three ships translated into the system before the Warp rifts closed behind them. It was a mighty host, and yet it was only the first wave of the Imperium's retribution, composed of the forces that had been closest to Azarok when the call for help had been launched. Battlefleet Ekontyr had sent a full battle-group to Azarok's aid, and more ships were being gathered within the Sector's spaceports. Great troop transports carried entire Imperial Regiments within their holds, and the ships of the Imperial Navy sailed alongside those of the Adeptus Astartes and the Inquisition. Ostensibly, two Chapters of Space Marines had already answered Azarok's call for help : the Red Hunters and the Purple Stars, both Chapters of the Second Founding, whose history was shrouded in mystery. Neither of those Chapters had their home in the Ekontyr Sectors, but their cruisers had joined the fleet at the muster point, and none had dared question the presence of the Emperor's Angels of Death. Most officers already knew that there were Chaos Marines involved in the invasion of Azarok, though that truth, like many others, was concealed from the masses.
There were other ships, sailing right amidst the fleet, their names unknown by the auspex officers. Their identification codes were so highly classified, only a handful of souls across the entire fleet were allowed to know the vessels' allegiance, let alone their name. They were silver and grey, but none could see them, and the auspexes that scanned them returned only their position, size and mass, to allow navigation around them. The mere knowledge that they were there at all was restricted to the bridge crew. There were five such warships, who had joined the retribution fleet mere hours before the journey to Berrenos had begun, forcing the entire formation to be changed to accommodate them – but when the Inquisition had demanded it be so, none had dared to complain.
All loyal servants of the God-Emperor were welcome, for this Chaos incursion had already defeated the might arrayed against it at Silberstadt. There were whispers circulating across the fleet comparing it to the Second Black Crusade, less than a century and a half ago, when Abaddon the Despoiler had once more led the denizens of the Eye of Terror against the Imperium. The Archfiend had been defeated, of course, but he had still ravaged the Cadian region before being forced back into the pit from which he had crawled. Despite the best efforts of the Commissars to suppress them, there were rumors that this incursion was another Black Crusade – that somehow, the Despoiler had managed to send his forces from the Eye to the Wailing Storm in order to bypass the Cadian Gate entirely. What none knew, was that this was both true and false at once.
The flagship of the Imperial fleet was a Victory-Class battleship, the Perseus. She sailed at the head of the Imperial Navy contingent, and on her bridge sat Lady Admiral Rebecca Del Baranthir, cousin to the Lord Admiral Francesco Del Baranthir, who had survived the battle of Silberstadt and still led the remains of the Imperial Navy in the Azarok Sector. Her face set in stone, the Lady Admiral looked at the first battle that awaited her in Azarok. The reports of her fleet's auspex flowed through her cortical implants in an uninterrupted data-stream, giving her as complete a picture of the situation as was possible. A lesser mind would have been driven insane by the flow of information, but Rebecca had been trained by the best teachers of the Del Baranthir family.
The fleet of the Unbound Host was gathered in Berrenos' orbit, around the daemonship Blade of Terror. Once, the vessel had been called Blade of Terra, and it had fought for the Imperium. But it had died, and been resurrected by the dark arts of the Warpsmiths into its present form : a nightmarish amalgamation of flesh and metal, driven by monstrous hungers and just barely kept under the control of the Dark Mechanicum hereteks dwelling within it.
If one went purely by numbers, the Chaos fleet had the advantage. However, the vast majority of the crafts of the Unbound Host were not military vessels but civilian ships re-purposed as troop transports or bearing Dark Mechanicum experimental weaponry to make them marginally useful in combat. There were more than two hundreds of these vessels, and most of them were empty now, having disgorged millions of troops onto the planet below. More than a few were derelicts, their entire crew having abandoned ship to take part in the war on the surface, leaving critical maintenance undone. If the Lord of the Unbound had ever intended to have his entire Host leave Berrenos, this would have already put an end to that plan.
The Unbound Host had very few ships (twelve, including the Blade of Terror) actually designed for battle, and those were a disparate collection captured during the conquest of the Wailing Storm. Three of them were Dark Mechanicum cruisers from the daemonic forge-world of Argenta Primus. They had no names, only numbers that were of some mystical significance to the Dark Mechanicum, but the Unbound had taken to calling them the "Daggers", as they were slightly smaller than the Blade of Terror, and almost as much infernal in nature as the flagship. They had been detached from Pareneffer's armada to escort the forge-barge Eidolon of Regret.
The monstrous behemoth had been assigned to the Unbound Host in order to keep it supplied with everything that an army of that size needed to make war. The supplies they had gained from the trade with the daemon of Mulor Tertius wouldn't last forever, after all. That forge-barge had also been used in transforming Berrenos into a stronghold suitable to hold the wrath of the Imperium at bay, and it was far too precious to risk in battle. In fact, according to Al-Zarak (whose true body being located aboard the Eidolon may or may not be influencing his judgement), it was worth more to the Forsaken Sons than the rest of the Unbound Host combined.
Another ship had once belonged to a Rogue Trader Dynasty stretching back to the founding of the Imperium, and whose noble legacy had ended when the ship had been caught in the Wailing Storm. The Unbound Host had found the Balance of Virtue drifting in a system where every formerly inhabited world was as dead as the vessel. They had captured it, made some repairs, installed a prize crew on it, and kept the name, thinking it humorous. The Balance of Virtue was cruiser-class, but carried armaments far above the norm for a ship of that size.
Four of the remaining ships were frigates, and had been the Balance of Virtue's escorts when it had been stranded in the Wailing Storm, meeting the same fate as their capital ship. Each had been assigned a pack of Unbound to act as overseers for the crew, which, like for the Balance, had been skeletal at first, but had grown to full strength as the warband found more recruits in the Wailing Storm. At the demand of their captains, the frigates' weaponry had been overhauled, with each vessel being added a powerful lance capable of punching through the shields of any ship of their class. They were called the Voice of Impurity, Fearmonger, Sakhramand's Tear and Feral Heart.
At some point in the distant past, the Negator and Tiarelion had been Astartes strike cruisers. As far as the Unbound had been able to determinate, the vessels had been dragged into the Warp sometimes during the Heresy, though which Legion they had belonged to (if they had belonged to the same at all) had been lost beneath the changes wrought upon the vessels in the Empyrean. They weren't quite daemonships, but their machine-spirits had undeniably been corrupted into malign entities that had needed to be appeased with the sacrifices of hundreds before they had submitted to the control of the hereteks. Each housed more than a hundred Unbound, and they were the best ships of the Host when Mahlone needed his brothers to board an enemy ship.
The final ship, Shiva's Wrath, looked nothing like a battleship. In truth, it barely resembled a ship at all, and if any tech-priest had suggested its design, he would have been sent away to be converted into a servitor. The Shiva's Wrath was shaped like a ring, with two straight sections making its diameter and crossing into the center at a straight angle, where an array of whirling metal rings surrounded what looked like the bright, captured heart of a star. It was one kilometer wide, and it did not have any Warp engines of its own : to bring it to Berrenos, Mahlone had had it tethered to twenty lesser crafts that had dragged it into the Empyrean, staying close enough to one another that their Geller Fields had overlapped and covered the Shiva's Wrath as well (because, of course, it didn't have its own Geller Field generator either). The same ships had dragged it into orbit, for the only motion it could do under its own power was to slowly, slowly spin in place.
And yet, for all its crippling flaws, it was the most important piece of Mahlone's plan to prevent the Imperial armada from simply crushing the Unbound Host with their void superiority.
Though only one planet of the Berrenos system was inhabited, there were other planetoids orbiting the system's star. Four more worlds turned around the sun, all of them with several mining stations orbiting them, relentlessly extracting resources for Berrenos' industry. These stations had been the first to feel the wrath of the Unbound Host, their crews slaughtered to the last by boarding parties of Unbound while the bulk of the fleet made for the inhabited world, closest to the sun.
One of these stations orbited the planet furthest from the star, known simply as Berrenos V (the one inhabited world was called Berrenos, even though it was the second closest from the sun). It had served as a mining outpost, supporting a community of a few hundreds people whose blood and entrails now covered the broken metal walls. Gravity, heat and air were all gone, the machines that had provided them torn to pieces. Without the gravitic compensators that helped keep the station in geosynchronous orbit above the most abundant mining area, the station's orbit had already begun to deteriorate. The ruins turned around the planet now, slowly, and every rotation brought them closer to the surface. In a few decades, they would get too close, and fall to the planet below, leaving a crater as the sole mark that the station had ever existed.
It was there, in this cold and silent tomb, that the Unkindness had made its nest. Of all the weapons the Unbound Host had found in the Wailing Storm, the Unkindness was one of the most disturbing, and perhaps the one that the Imperials would find the most blasphemous, if they ever learned the truth of its nature and origins.
At first, they had thought that the system was dead. It wouldn't have been the first time : while the Ruinous Powers took great amusement in twisting the populated worlds trapped into the Wailing Storm, their monstrous appetites couldn't always be held in check. So, when the first scans showed no signs of life, the Unbound Host believed that this system, which according to the archives had once been a prosperous industry world under the direction of a branch of the Adeptus Mechanicus, had been scoured clean of life by the daemonic legions. But there might still have been something of value to find, and so Mahlone had commanded a deeper exploration.
The planet had been ripped apart by the storm, reduced to a loose conglomerate of rocks orbiting a star whose Chaos-touched radiation made the surfaces it kissed bubble and whisper the secrets of the dead. Its atmosphere was gone, its biosphere extinguished. Unbound warriors in full, void-sealed armor and magnetic boots had descended to explore the ruins of civilization that still clung to the planet's fragments.
They had lost thirty-nine of them when the Unkindness had awakened, disturbed by their intrusion. It had taken seven days before the hereteks had been able to make contact with the creatures – seven days of pitched battle across the broken world, as the Unbound fought to retreat to their landing zones in order to escape. Mahlone had been able to strike a deal with the creatures, half-threatening and half-offering in order to make them submit to his authority. After that, they had been able to piece together the origin of these creatures which the Unbound commander had named, after taking a good look at them, the Unkindness.
As their world fell apart around them, the tech-priests had grown desperate. Inspired by visions granted to them by the Warp, they had remade themselves and their followers so that they would be able to survive even their planet's death. They had stripped away almost all of their flesh, grafting cybernetics that would allow them to survive even in the void. And, to their credit, it had worked.
But when the world had died, the Warp had come surging in, and the currents of the Empyrean had remade the cyborgs, twisting them into the Unkindness. Their fleshy component had all but died away, and the souls that had clung to existence within them had been snuffed out, replaced by base daemonic spirits that were barely self-aware. According to Iames, these daemons had been spawned by the very fear of the void, created by the minds of spacers having nightmares about what awaited them just on the other side of the hull. Perhaps he was right – it didn't matter either way.
This was the Unkindness, and per the bargain Mahlone had struck, the Lord of the Unbound was bound to feed them, and assist them in replenishing their numbers. Of course, he had found a way to make that last responsibility work in his favor by making sure it reinforced his control over them.
The being who called itself the Alpha had once been an Unbound, and before that, a child living in fear of the beasts that stalked the Dark, which itself had been the world Mulor Secundus before the coming of the Wailing Storm. But time, and the whims of Chaos, transformed all things, and now, it was the Prime of the Unkindness, leader of that flock of monstrous daemonic cyborgs.
Slowly, it woke from its cold slumber. A voice was whispering into its ears, demanding that it rise, that it perform the function for which it had been remade. It knew that voice of old, though it had forgotten how exactly. It remembered that the voice should be obeyed, for it promised blood and meat in exchange for following its orders.
'We … hear … you,' it replied, its words carried across the airless void.
It was difficult to speak – to think using human words instead of the simpler, clearer language of the pack. Every time it had to, it took it longer to remember how to do it. Part of it knew that eventually, it would lose the ability completely, but only a smaller part of it cared. Such was the glory of flying in the void that the loss of what remained of its humanity seemed a small price to pay. In fact, the greater part of it awaited the complete loss of these last remains with impatience.
Speaking made it remember, and it hated that. It made it remember that, once, it had been a he. And it remembered that he had been hurt, badly. It remembered flying on wings of fire, and the raw exuberance of fulfilling the purpose for which he had been designed, as an Unbound gene-bred for three-dimensional combat. Then, it remembered the smell of rotting flesh, the sensation of his hearts hammering in his chest, the screams of a monster heard through mundane senses – and it remembered fangs too, so sharp and so huge, cold as ice as they bit into him …
He had died then, but the voice had brought it back. It was a wraith, a ghostly echo possessing the remnants of his body, machine-bound to one of the Unkindness. It … was the Alpha. Violence and death clad in cold metal and driven by inhuman will, unbound by any restraint, any mercy.
The Alpha screamed silently across a frequency that only its brethren could hear, sending disturbances across the aether that would reach distant worlds in thousands of years and cause their inhabitants to wake from sleep, seized by a nameless dread. It was a call to awaken, using brutal imagery and drawing upon instincts inscribed into the darkling minds of the Unkindness. It had no words, but if a mortal soul had been able to comprehend it, it might have translated it thusly :
The Unkindness goes to hunt.
Alarms began to ring across the bridges of every Imperial vessel as an unidentified threat emerged from the ruined mining station. Where before there had been nothing but cold metal, now there was a flurry of activity, as hundreds and then thousands of signals suddenly became visible on the auspex. Each signal was the size of a space fighter, though one of the larger models, but they didn't move like any such engine known to the Imperium.
This new force struck the Imperial armada from the side, slipping under void shields and ripping the outer layer of the hulls apart with their claws. The point defenses of the vessels opened fire in response, but the creatures moved in the void with preternatural agility and dodged almost every shot from stationary defenses. In response, Lady Admiral Del Baranthir ordered her fleet to unleash their own fighter squadrons, and the void above Berrenos V was lit by the battle between the Unkindness and a veritable army of the Imperial Navy's best and brightest.
Among them was First-Class Pilot Howard Joneson, assigned to the 727th Imperial Navy Fighter Wing, deployed aboard the Perseus as part of the liberation effort in the Azarok Sector. He and the rest of his wing had been waiting aboard their crafts, ready for launch, since the flagship had emerged from the Warp. They hadn't known what the situation in Berrenos was, and though the sheer size of space made being ambushed right after translating out of the Warp almost impossible, it had been known to happen, especially where the foul sorcery of the heretics was involved.
Then, they had been sent data from the bridge, showing them the disposition of enemy forces, the local conditions and phenomena, and everything else they might need to know once they were unleashed. The data collected by the auspex streamed across his screen, and he frowned. These specs, compiled from what the enemy crafts had been observed doing, made no sense. He knew of nothing that could move with such manoeuvrability at such speeds and at that size.
He would trust his Fury-class Interceptor over any devilish invention of the Archenemy any day, of course. The Redclaw was a beautiful, beautiful thing, sixty meters of shining metal and reinforced plexiglass panels, with banks of forward-facing lascannons and missile launchers. At her helm, he had taken part in over forty engagements, battling pirates and xenos raiders all over the Segmentum in the twelve years since he had graduated from the Navy's academy and been assigned to the 727th and the Perseus. In all that time, he hadn't met any heretic craft that could match her.
But still, this was going to be an interesting fight for sure.
The orders came through the vox, in the terse, clear voice of the flight's monitor from the flagship's bridge. One by one, the rest of his flight called off, signalling their readiness.
'Redclaw,' he heard his navigator call out behind him when their turn came, 'ready to go.'
'Squadron readiness acknowledged. Begin take-off. For the Emperor and the Navy!'
'For the Emperor !' they all dutifully chorused back.
One by one, the squadron left from the hangar, flying outside at speeds far above what was recommended for take-off, but which were necessary with enemies so close to the ship. Indeed, no sooner had the craft passed outside of the vessel's shield envelope that they were right in the middle of as tense and chaotic a fight as any he had ever taken part in.
The rush of g-forces slammed Howard against his padded seat. If not for the spinal injector jacked into his body, feeding him a cocktails of stimulants along with hyper-oxygenated blood to sharpen his reflexes, the shock would have made him pass out. As it was, he still felt the same acute and familiar discomfort and pain, which he ignored with practiced ease. He had more pressing concerns – much more pressing ones, in fact.
There were auspex returns from everywhere around them. Hundreds of fighters had been unleashed by the Imperial fleet, and the enemy, whatever it was, matched their numbers. Point defenses were firing, unleashing short-range (at least for a void-battle : the shots easily reached several kilometers away) weaponry.
His navigator, Oleg, called out to him in warning.
'Bogey on our tail, quadrant nine-five-three !'
'I see it !' replied Howard, glancing at the auspex before leaning into the commands and plunging Red Claw into a nosedive, relatively to the Perseus' plane.
They danced through the void, Howard focusing his entire being on keeping his distance with their pursuer, while Oleg tried to get the assistance of another craft and Nikos, their gunner, took every shot that presented itself. It was at times like this that Howard wished that the Fury-class came with some rotating weaponry, in order to deal with enemies that were in pursuit. But that wasn't Imperial Navy doctrine : either the enemy was in front of them, or they were in the thick of it and could rely on their comrades. He was fairly sure this was to discourage cowardice – though how a gunship with limited fuel was supposed to flee in the cold void of space, he had no idea. But it was best not to discuss such things aloud, in case the Commissars heard.
Their pursuer was closing in on them, using its superior manoeuvrability to keep up with every manoeuvre Howard was using to throw it off. He was confident Red Claw had more powerful engines, but in the chaos of the battle, going in a straight line to accelerate in full was simply suicidal – it was guaranteed someone would lock onto their path and blow them apart.
Thrice another Imperial craft tried to kill their pursuer, and thrice it dodged their blows. Finally, after making a run close to the defense batteries of the Space Marine frigate Daramon's Blade, Howard finally managed to break free, thanks to the cover provided by the ship's defenses forcing their enemy to break off their pursuit.
It was right then, as Oleg scanned the battlefield for a target or someone else in need of assistance, that the creature slammed into them. It loomed over Howard, obscuring the entire plexiglass panel. It was the first time Howard actually saw what the enemy looked like in the battle. During the entire hunt, not only had their pursuers been behind them, but the distances involved in even such a comparatively close-quarters engagement as this were still measured in hundreds of kilometers.
They had been had, Howard realized, some part of him still analysing the tactical situation while the rest of him recoiled in terror at the sight. The bogey they had tried to escape had been a lure, a distraction set on their tail so that this one could catch them by surprise at the peak of the hunt. But to think that something like this was capable of an ambush …
Howard had seen servitors wired into the machinery of fighter crafts before, of course : the Imperial Navy made extensive use of them. He had even flown alongside engines belonging to the Adeptus Mechanicus, where the pilots were half-men bound to their crafts, never to leave them until they died. It had always made him uncomfortable, knowing that this could very well end up being his fate if he were to be gravely injured without being lucky enough to actually die. In the void, such a doom was rare, but … you never knew.
And yet, this … this was something else. He could see the body at the heart of the abomination : a shriven, desiccated thing, its skin blackened by void exposure and cosmic radiation. It should be dead, but its eyes glared at him with utterly inhuman hate, telling him that, against all sense and reason, some spark of life remained within that husk. Little more than a head and torso remained, the latter pierced by so many vicious-looking implants that barely any of it was visible.
Neuro-cables and tubes emerged from the stumps of its limbs, linked to machinery that made no sense to him. It was technology, but it looked … alive, somehow. Four articulated wings emerged behind the creature, each affixed with a propulsive unit, and four pairs of insect-like limbs stretched from its core, each ending with a razor-sharp claw. The ranged weapons were cannons at the "shoulders" of the cyborg's flesh component. All of it radiated malevolence, like a terrible cross between a madman's vision of an angel and a mechanized butterfly from Hell.
And yet, it was the eyes that scared Howard the most. They were made of flesh, the white almost completely filled by black veins, and they stared at him as if he were nothing, nothing at all – only prey to be devoured, meat to fuel the unholy hunger of this abomination. He wondered, amidst the terror and adrenalin, just how the creature's eyes (easily the organ most susceptible to be destroyed by the slightest exposure to space) were still functioning.
It was the last thought that passed through the mind of Howard Joneson before the claws of the monster pierced through the cockpit and reached him, plucking him from his seat, tearing his restraining belts and pulling out his spinal implant with a spike of cold agony. After that, there was only blind, mindless panic and pain, which ended mercifully quickly. Without its pilot, Redclaw was left drifting, at the inexisting mercy of the other monsters dancing in the void. The navigator was the last of the crew to die, seventy-three seconds after Howard, all of which were filled with fear.
From the bridge of the Blade of Terror, Morkoth watched as the engines of several Imperial ships were disabled in the Unkindness' initial onslaught, forcing the entire fleet to come to a halt until this threat was dealt with, lest the squadrons be cut off from their home bases. The Unbound smiled, revealing pointed teeth the same obsidian as his eyeballs, and turned to a vox-officer.
'Signal the Unkindness to withdraw from the engagement, then tell the Shiva's Wrath to open fire.'
The Shiva's Wrath did not have a bridge (or, if it had one, the Forsaken Sons hadn't been able to recognize it when they had claimed the wreck). In a way, considering it would take it years to simply move through a star system, it could be argued that the Shiva's Wrath was not actually a ship at all. It was a nightmare of slap-dash engineering and improvised repairs, held together by the endless work of thousands of servitors and hundreds of skilled hereteks. What passed for its command center was located in its outer rings, where the Forsaken Sons had boarded it first. It was from there that Julius, the Unbound who had been given the dubious honor of command over the Shiva's Wrath, directed the constant struggle of those under him to keep it in working condition.
Like most Unbound, Julius' physiology deviated from the standard Astartes template. The Fleshmasters loved to experiment, and Julius was another of Jikaerus' successes, though it had taken some time before Mahlone had found how best to use him.
Julius was one of the younger Unbound, found, tested and transformed during the conquest of the Wailing Storm. He had been taken from one of the most dangerous worlds ever encountered by the warband, a planet wracked by constant disasters both natural and unnatural. There, shelter was only ever temporary, and constant vigilance the only way to survive. The children who had been harvested from that place – an act that had almost certainly doomed the struggling human population to extinction – all had exceptional situational awareness, their senses sharpened by having lived their entire lives under the constant threat of immediate death. Jikaerus had taken Julius as one of the most promising Aspirants, and through tweaking his conditioning and gene-forging, the Fleshmaster had made him into what he was now.
Julius had displayed a surprising knack for technology, despite his people having been sent back to the Stone Age long ago. A few weeks of hypno-teaching had made him as knowledgeable as any Techmarine, though he had lacked the corresponding experience and had had to gain that the hard way, his survival instincts the only thing keeping him alive as he underwent a training regimen that would have made even the sternest Martian taskmaster pause with worry.
Right now, surrounded by a mess of cables and consoles showing the states of various devices throughout the vessel, he was calling upon all of that training. Morkoth's order had arrived twelve seconds ago, transmitted by a very nervous-sounding mortal officer, and they were entering the final stage of the firing sequence. The process had actually begun hours ago, when the Imperial fleet had begun translating in-system.
Beneath the cables and the cogitators, the original alien structure was still visible. It looked like ordinary stone, but was actually a compound stronger than ceramite, capable of withstanding the pressures put on it by the firing of the Shiva's Wrath. Which, of course, begged the question of just what had broken it in several sections of the vessel, requiring the Forsaken Sons' repairs. There were many theories circulating among the Dark Mechanicum contingent, but as far as Julius knew, no one had found any evidence supporting any of them.
'Results of the last check coming in … we are in alignment,' announced Clekar, one of the other Unbound aboard. 'Deviation 0.027%, within the acceptable margin of error.'
'Accumulators charged at 95 percents,' droned one of the many servitors. 'Initiating countdown … 97 percents … 98 percents … 99 percents … Accumulators charged.'
'Core receivers report full readiness,' called out one of the hereteks.
'Brace for firing,' said Julius, turning to where they had installed the big, red button that would actually unleash the awesome might of the Shiva's Wrath. He still wasn't sure why they had made it look like that. It had been after several months of long, complex, mind-bendingly frustrating work trying to make sense of the alien architecture and technology of the vessel, and they had all been going a little bit crazy by that point. He had to admit, though, that he certainly enjoyed that part.
Julius keyed in the code to remove the plexiglass cover, while everyone around him still able to think for themselves clung to the railings and prepared themselves. He heard more than a few quick prayers to the Dark Gods and the Eightfold Omnissiah for protection. Julius didn't say one himself : he had seen the faces of the Gods in the Wailing Storm, in a city of ensorcelled mirrors crafted by a civilization of blind mutants. Rather than find religion, he had emerged from the vision more determined than ever to bind the Warp to his will through the Machine. Submission of any kind to the divine was difficult when you knew the truth appearance of the gods – and when you had something like the Shiva's Wrath under his command.
'Firing !' he shouted, bringing his gauntleted fist onto the activation rune.
The power accumulators suddenly discharged, unleashing their stored energy toward the center of the ringed ship through the tank-sized focusing crystals jutting out of the vessel's inner side. The flows of power were channelled by the xenotech devices installed through the length of the engine's inner cross-section, and struck the waiting receivers at the central hub.
Hundreds of servitors, each performing a function vital to the Shiva's Wrath firing, were either obliterated or bathed in enough radiation to melt their augmetics and turn their flesh to charred husks. The entire vessel shook, breaches forming as sections of the hull tore under the strain. On the bridge, the sound of alarms was almost (but not quite) loud enough to drown that of disaster. Two servitors connected to working stations burst into flames and a tech-priest started screaming in the tongue of the ship's dead makers before an Unbound put a bolt into his skull and silenced him.
All in all, thought Julius, this was going much better than the last and only other time they had fired the ship's ridiculous gun. For a start, there weren't any daemons manifesting on the bridge to kill them all, though that may be due to the fact they were outside the Wailing Storm rather than to the warding signs that had been burned in the walls with plasma torches. And, according to the readout on his helm display, the radiation shielding on the command center was holding, which meant they wouldn't need to replace the less-augmented personnel when their biological parts got fried. Yes, much better than last time.
It was a shame that this was, in all likelihood, the last time that Shiva's Wrath fired. It would take weeks to repair all the damage and replace the destroyed servitors, and with a war going on, the warband wouldn't have the resources to spare.
But that was a problem for later. Right now, with the most urgent tasks done or delegated, Julius could watch the fruits of his work on the screen, and enjoy the show.
3.51387 seconds after Julius had pressed the rune, the single weapon of the Shiva's Wrath fired. A single beam of incandescent white energy burst out of the vessel's center at a perpendicular angle. It was so bright that, on the surface of Berrenos itself, humans who had the misfortune of looking up at that moment recoiled in pain, clawing at their faces as their eyes were blinded by the illumination, as if they had stared right into the sun by accident.
It took several minutes for the beam, moving at the speed of light, to reach its target. The Imperial fleet had no warming : by the time their instruments detected the attack and linked it to the power surge they had detected earlier in the bizarre engine of the traitors, it had already hit. After a delay exactly as long as the time it took for the beam to hit, Julius saw what happened then :
The frozen mining world which loomed to the right of the fleet core-ward simply shattered.
Julius had aimed his one shot well. He had hit Berrenos V at just the right angle and location to send the bulk of the fractured mass directly into the Imperial fleet, still recovering its fighters after the sudden retreat of the unholy tech-constructs that had attacked them. Shields buckled against the impacts, with several frigates being overwhelmed and broken apart by the speeding rocks. Reactors outputs had to be adjusted as the gravitic field was suddenly changed : even the ships that were untouched by the speeding meteors drifted out of position as their tech-priests and pilots tried to correct their course to take the new conditions into account.
Aboard the Perseus, Lady Admiral Del Baranthir reacted instantly to this new threat, refusing to let her shock at the traitors' incredible weapon make her fail in her duty. She called for the smaller ships of the fleet to seek shelter near the battleship, whose guns could reduce the biggest asteroids to dust before they hit.
Across the Imperial fleet, Commissars restored orders on bridge wracked by panic as the crew realized what the enemy had done, and the scope of the might arrayed against them sunk in. The execution of a few officers for cowardice brought back order, and the ships began to obey the Lady Admiral's command, seeking safety by combining their firepower and void-shields.
At the same time, aboard the Blade of Terror, Morkoth saw the results of his orders to Julius, and laughed, before ordering the eleven ships of his small fleet to advance and get into formation. The Shiva's Wrath could not move – it would be days before the radiation levels of its corridors had lowered enough that the work of cleaning up the dead servitors and repairing the damage could begin. Across the Chaos vessels, the Unbound roared their joy at the fleetmaster's command, knowing that the time had come for them to do battle once more.
The Unkindness soared back into the fray, manoeuvring the asteroid field with ease, their brutish daemon-spirits reminded of their ruined home. The crews of the flight wings were hurtled back out into the void, into a battlefield that was now even more dangerous than before.
But even as the fleet reeled from the blow, even as Lady Admiral Del Baranthir tried to restore formation and face the advancing Chaos fleet, a single ship broke free from the newly-created asteroid field. It was one of the five ships that were invisible to their allies, and it surged ahead, aimed straight at Berrenos Prime, like a silver arrow striking through the black void. Aboard it were warriors who were celebrated in neither song nor statues, for whom the destruction of Berrenos V was a minor concern compared to what they knew was unfolding on the system's inhabited world.
On the surface of Berrenos, within the innermost chambers of the Black Temple, the creature known as Jereb looked up, briefly, staring at something beyond the blood-caked walls of the horror-filled structure it had made.
It smiled.
'Come,' it whispered, in a voice that caused the latest sacrificial victim strung on the altar before it to moan in terror through the dirty rag pressed on his mouth. 'Come to me, little knights.'
'Such games I have prepared for you …'
AN : I intended for the battle of Berrenos to be a quick thing. One chapter, maybe two, to introduce the Imperial retribution forces and give the Unbound a chance to shine. Then we can go back to the Inquisition, the Eldar and the Nightmare Fleet greater plot, and actually advance this story for a change.
Now I look upon my writing plan, and I find two more chapters for the Breaking of Berrenos looking back at me and laughing. Ah, well, such things happen. There shouldn't be any more deviations, though : I have the outline of the next two chapters fairly completed.
I am going to keep this AN short, since I already posted a new story tonight. Prince of the Eye is now available on ffnet. It's a What-If fic, based on the premise "what if Horus had survived the Heresy". Check it out : I will post one new chapter a day for the foreseeable future.
I hope you enjoyed this chapter. It's sometimes difficult to write Warband of the Forsaken Sons, perhaps because it's my first fic, and it has a lot of backstory and, unlike the Roboutian Heresy, I can't shift to a new focus every chapter : this is the only one of my fics that's, for lack of a better term, "novel-like".
Still, it is interesting to write, and I fully intend to seeing this story to the end (which, yes, I already know what it is, and I have known for years now). I hope to keep you hooked and entertained throughout that long, long road.
Zahariel out.