The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,63
and into the open plain.
Something broke up high, over where the lumen-clusters hung, and the deck was showered with splinters of glass. I felt the deck keel over, swinging us down and round, and the warp shutters rattled in their armatures.
Erefan gave me a sharp look. ‘Orders?’ he asked, pointedly.
I wanted to wait. I wanted to let them in, and take them on again. I liked ending the shedim. I liked the look of outrage on their bestial faces as they realised that I would not be their victim but would be sending them back to their hell-realm to gnaw on failure. Such fights were the reason I had been made, after all.
Warning runes glowed into life, klaxons kicked off. Crew members scrambled to keep us flying straight, buffeted now by winds that were not winds.
‘One minute to Geller failure,’ came the tinny voice again.
The wall of the bridge began to bulge inwards, only metres from where I stood. I watched the metal stretch into the shape of a fist, curled and ready to slam its way in. From below us, the shouting had already started.
‘They’re latched on the hull!’ Slovo blurted. ‘They’re getting inside!’
Erefan lost patience. ‘Begin crash out of warp,’ he ordered, looking at me the whole time.
The crew didn’t react. Some looked at him, others looked at me. A cogitator station exploded, sending static skittering across the deck, and still they waited for the order.
They were a good crew, all told. They had worked faithfully for a woman they instinctively despised, and even now they held off until I gave them the command.
They deserved to live a little longer.
Crash out, I signed, beginning a flurry of concise orders. Void shields up on exit. Route plasma drive power to gunnery banks. Begin fire-sequence. Await targeting matrix on materialisation.
Erefan barked out the rest of the orders, beginning the wind-down that would see us hurtling back into reality. Fresh warning-blares sounded and the rune lenses streamed with screeds of trajectory data. The ship yawed again, wildly this time, and the swelling fist extended further, ripping the wall-matter wider until I thought it would surely split apart.
‘Out now! Out now!’ I heard Slovo squawking.
Erefan worked quickly, powering down the warp drives and sending us into a real space spiral. It was a violent exit, smashing and battering the Cadamara’s already bruised superstructure. Once across the threshold we flew into reality as if spat from the scabrous mouth of the gods themselves.
‘Shutters up!’ Erefan shouted. ‘Run out macrocannons! All crew to combat stations!’
Everything burst into motion – the crew were running, skidding across a teetering deck. Our internal grav-pull stuttered, our undercooked plasma drives blasted emptily. The damage wrought by the emerging shedim exploded as the nascent manifestations were ripped back into the warp – the bulkhead blew apart, the bulging wall collapsed in a rain of tumbling brace-spars. Augur lenses filled with flickering representations of local space, and for a moment I saw nothing, and dared to hope we’d crashed out far enough away for a fix to fail.
I stumbled over to the nearest full-spectrum scanner and widened the lens aperture. The real-view shutters clanged open, and across the forward oculus we saw a swath of space yawn away from us, empty and star-strewn.
‘Full burn ahead!’ Erefan bellowed. ‘Clamp that bulkhead down!’
We were out. We were alone. The daemon-scraped hull was still voidtight. We were going to make it again.
Then the oculus blazed with a riot of false colour, shining like multihued suns going nova.
‘Down nadir!’ roared Erefan, his voice cracking now. ‘Full hard-
burn and roll out starboard gunnery!’
I saw the pursuing vessel shoot from the gaping wound in real space. I had no idea exit-precision like that was possible – it swung into visible range, huge and smouldering, its ancient, char-black hull still burning with warpfire. One look at that ship and I knew we weren’t getting out of this.
Open fire, I signed. Enact first-stage evasion pattern.
It was already too late. I saw our macrocannon array loose, sending a spread of ordnance skittering wide of the target, and watched the stars smear away as we tumbled into a steepling dive. They were better shots – a barrage of high-energy lances smacked into us, exploding our still-charging void shields and blowing their coverage into a hail of electrostatic.
We were dead in the void now, our protection gone and our weapons of little use against the slab-hulled horror that loomed over us. We were whirling so fast it was hard to get