Galen’s taunting and boasting died after two hours of continuous combat, of arduous realignment of his Knight’s shields and exhausting aiming of the Eximus Convictor’s weaponry in every direction. How many had he felled? The troop count was too vast to number explicitly, even when considering those that Galen was able to see—many more were obscured behind the veil of ever-whipping winds and snowfall of surfaceside Quintus. The armor, though, he was surer of, though only on a matter of magnitude, not specificity; Galen believed he crushed or liquified dozens of armored vehicles and even a handful of Astartes drop pods before they landed upon the ground.
He had defended three surface-to-orbit defense batteries, known as Firestations, across the two hours of his efforts, allowing the batteries to chip away at void shields or, once done with that, cleave warships twain. Having protected Firestation Ibos, he was hailed by Firestation Cariza, many miles away. Another request for aid. As Quintus spun, Galen would need to run across its continents, as few others could, and slay the invading forces that fell upon the world. This was his calling. It is what he was raised for, what he had bled for, what he had said he could do no matter the enemy.
And still, when Cariza called for him, Galen paused in reticence. He looked to the snowy skies above, and beheld the gargantuan pillars of light, the Emperor’s Wrath made manifest, that screamed into the heavens from the dozens of Firestations of the world. Far, far ahead, deep into the skies above, a fireball began to scream toward Quintus—a dead voidship, now plummeting to the surface. Galen could not identify whether it was an allied or enemy vessel. For his purposes, it did not matter, save for needing to be beyond the initial blast radius when the vessel made its crash landing upon the world. The resultant radiological contamination of the reactor core’s exposure would not be a threat to his Knight and, therefore, he himself.
#I RECEIVE YOU CARIZA. THRONE-ONE EN ROUTE. HOLD OUT UNTIL I ARRIVE TO PURGE YOUR ASSAILANTS. THE EMPEROR PROTECTS,# Galen answered at last, and then shot forth into the wintery night once more, weapons at the ready.
***
Visually, the scene in the void was utterly indecipherable. Firestorms, columns of lancefire, and wanton mechanical carnage filled the full scope of the theatre of battle. Mirena, then, relied on her Fury’s sensorium apparatus to gauge her surroundings and help her fly. Much of this was relayed to her through her pressurized pilot’s suit and her augmetic, nearly—but not totally—invalidating her need for ocular assessment of the situation in her cockpit. And what was that situation?
“We have lock-on. Enemy Swiftdeath expected to fire missiles in—missile launched,” reported a servitor in what was, to Mirena, unfitting nonchalance. War empowered emotion, and for servitors to be perpetually emotionless made Mirena question their acuity for warfare.
“All crew, brace for g-force,” Mirena warned her pair of living operatives—two gunners—before swerving her Fury around a wreck of metal in void. Finding that the missiles on their tail began to angle in kind to follow her, she then punched the Fury downward, plunging behind the wreck to use its corpse in intercepting the missiles’ flight. The dead thing would not have minded, she thought.
“That wasn’t so bad,” Eli Jess, one of her gunners, replied over their local voxband. “But there’s still two Swift’s on our six!”
“I know!” Mirena shot back. “But I wasn’t referring to that g-force, but this!” Mirena answered, and then yanked back on the axial shaft of their Fury with such intensity as to threaten to tear the craft apart at the seams as it spun, wildly, through the void. Had she pulled such a maneuver in an atmosphere, her Fury would have surely ruptured into a million pieces. But as it was, the centrifugal force of rotating her vessel through the void proved insufficient at shredding their ship.
It was sufficient, however, at clouding the vision of all lifeforms aboard the Fury. That did not matter; for the moment, Mirena did not need to see in order to flick on the stabilizing air thrusters to finish inverting her craft. She simply prayed to the Throne that her gunners had maintained consciousness, even if without sight. The roar of lascannons suggested to her that yes, indeed, her gunners were still with her, opening fire upon their pursuers now that their craft had spun to face them. Mirena’s maneuver had not sacrificed any momentum, being carried through the void at the same speed at which they had attained prior due to their frictionless environment. It would have looked as though they were flying in reverse at supersonic speeds, and probably quite comically at that.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
One of the pair of Swiftdeath’s succumbed to the unexpected maneuver from Mirena, while the other was able to break off and evade her gunners’ return fire. A rookie, Mirena thought to herself, might chase after that one. But she knew better. It was one thing to change one’s orientation in a vacuum; it was another to invert one’s momentum. Mirena began to ease her Fury into facing the direction of its movement, but in the process prompted Catiel Salmutan, her other gunner, into evidencing strategic naiveté. “One of the swift’s is getting away!” Catiel reported over vox.
“Yes, they are,” Mirena answered, voice calm. “Let another squadron catch them out. We’ll slow to sitting-grox speeds if we tried to pursue. And besides, our armaments are running low. One missile left, both lascannon batteries under fifteen percent. We could take that engagement and die to the following one, or head back to Command for resupply and recharge. I know what my call is,” she explained to her crew.
“Understood, ma’am. Fly as you will,” Eli responded.
Mirena flicked a few dials to tune her vox to the command broadcast frequency, then spoke, “This is Gold-1 to Cold, Alpha Squadron, Command Wing, requesting authorization for landing and resupply, come in Cold, over.”
***
“Let her in,” I told to Captain Vakian, though I wagered he was already planning to grant her that authorization.
“Gold-1 you are clear for landing in Bay 3, come round quick as you can, over,” Vakian answered Mirena. He then turned his attention to the dozens of other similar requests and began sorting through them. I, meanwhile, remained stoic, ever peering out through the looking glass unto the metaphorical field of battle. I had stood here for ten hours now, despite insistence from Lucene to at least sit and rest. But I wanted—no, needed—to see everything happen. I needed to see how these Iron Warriors conducted themselves at a larger scale. I needed to discern how to react. I needed to feel the fury of this war.
“How is it looking?” Zha Trantos asked me, catching me off guard. I had been so absorbed in the battle beyond that I had not heard or otherwise sensed her approach, but she was standing next to me now, to my right.
“You tell me, Inquisitor Trantos,” I smiled.
She paused in her reply, taking a moment to survey the scene in full. But it only took her a moment. She amazed in that regard, and in many others. “It is a near-stalemate,” she asserted.
“Leaning where?”
“Against us. Barely. We are losing, aren’t we?” she understood.
“Only just, but yes. Galen and Mirena, out in the field, are providing their great heroism on our behalf. Others whose names I do not know do the same. But we are losing, yes. In this battle of attrition, we have stalemated, but the bulk of the foe’s elite has not been fielded yet, and stalemate favors an aggressor when defensive reinforcements are not coming. They bleed us, now, before they intend to break us later. But that clock is ticking,” I explained. Zha nodded in agreement before turning to me.
“So, what then? Do we die here?” she asked. Her question was asked without a hint of emotional investment, pursuing only the fact of the matter. But none of this was to say that she was not invested in living.
“That is one option,” I admitted.
“And the others?” she asked.
I heaved a deep breath in and out, and then beheld something I was dreading seeing: the void shields around the Cyprus Aeterna, the vessel Caliman was on, succumbing to lance batteries. Two cruise missiles crashed into his vessel while they were down, rupturing swaths of his craft into great and terrible balls of fire, gasps of light quickly quieted by the oppressive depths of the void.
“Heroism,” I muttered before looking toward Zha at last. “The foe descends upon us, but we still have our wits and our wills. We can drive a blade straight through this monster’s maw, but we’ll be bitten for it.”
“Better that than to sit and wait for the end to come, no?” Zha suggested. I saw in her eyes that she knew the answer. I saw in her eyes that she knew I knew the answer too.
“Captain!” I called while still looking into Zha’s eyes. For so long now, I saw in her my equal, yet I believe she still looked up to me. Lost, in a moment, in looking at the mirror image of myself, I spied Captain Vakian making an impatient—albeit not impolite—gesture in the corner of my vision, silently asking me what I had called him for. I glanced toward him, past Zha. “Drive us ahead, Captain Vakian.”
“Inquisitor, I must remind you that your fleet is a long range patrol fleet, not a main battle fleet,” he warned me.
“I am aware. Alas, my command ends at this fleet; I cannot order Battlefleet Ixaniad around so directly. It will need to be us, then. Send us on ahead, Captain,” I repeated.
“How close?”
I raised my augmetic into the air, hand at first open but tensed into a fist as I spoke. “Close enough to crush their skulls. Send us on, and the rest of our fleet will follow.”
“Right away, Inquisitor,” he assented, and began to put such commands in with his staff before I again interrupted him.
“Caleb,” I called, making him raise a curious—if still impatient—glance my way. “Thank you for your service.”
“Of course, Inquisitor. Throne willing, may our blade cleave these bastards’ heads from their necks,” he answered, hinting at having overheard my conversation with Zha. “The Emperor protects.”
“The Emperor protects,” I repeated. I then turned back to Zha. “Now the likelihood of our deaths increases. But the likelihood of victory…”
“It raises as well. Odds…almost favorable,” she calculated. “But not for us.”
“No. Not for us.”