The Flight of the Eisenstein (33 page)

The Astartes was an ashen rendition of himself, the colour of a week-old corpse. Had Garro seen such a body on the battlefield, he would have cast it on to the pyre and let it burn. For a moment, Nathaniel found his hand near the hilt of Libertas and Voyen's words echoed in his thoughts.
You should consider granting him release.

'That would make a lie of what I said to Qruze,' he said aloud. 'The fight is all that we have now. The struggle is what defines us, brother.'

'Brother...'

The voice was so faint that at first Garro thought he had imagined it, but then he looked down and saw a flicker of motion as Decius's eyes opened into slits. 'Solun? Can you hear me, boy?'

'I can... hear you.' His voice was thick with mucus. 'I hear it, captain... inside me... the thunder in my blood.'

Suddenly, Garro's sword seemed to be ten times its weight. 'Solun, what do you want?'

Decius blinked, even this smallest of motions appearing to pain him terribly. 'Answers, lord.' He gasped in a breath of air. 'Why have you saved us?'

Garro pulled back in surprise. 'I had to,' he blurted. 'You are my battle-brothers! I could not let you perish.'

'Is that... the better path?' the wounded warrior whispered. 'Unending war between brothers... We saw it, captain. If that... if that is the future, then perhaps...'

'You would have us embrace death?' Garro shook his head. 'I know your pain is great, brother, but you cannot submit to it! We cannot admit defeat!' He placed his hand on Decius's chest. 'Only in death does duty end, Solun, and only the Emperor can grant us that.'

'Emperor...' The word was a dim echo. 'Forsaken... We have been forsaken, my lord, lost and forgotten. The beast Grulgor did not lie... We are alone.'

'I refuse to accept that!' Garro's words became a shout. *We will find salvation, brother, we will! You must have faith!'

Decius coughed and the pipes in his mouth gurgled, red-green fluid siphoning away into a disposal tank. 'All I have is pain, pain and loss...' His bloodshot eyes found Garro and bored into him. 'We are lost, my captain. We know not where or when we are... The warp has made sport with us, cast us into the void.'

'We will be found.' Garro's words seemed hollow.

'By what, lord? What if... if the time we were lost in the empyrean was not hours... but millennia? The warning... worthless!' He coughed again, his body tensing. We may be ten thousand years too late... and our galaxy burns with chaos...' The effort of speaking drained the Astattes and he sank back into the cradle, the shambling servitor creaking to his side with a fan of outstretched fingers made of syringes and blades.

Garro watched Decius's eyelids flutter closed and the youth's consciousness slipped away once more. After a long moment, the battle-captain turned back to the airlocks and began the arduous process of cleansing his wargear of any lingering taint.

When he stepped out of the isolation chamber's outer hatch, he saw Sendek charging towards him across the infirmary, his face tight with tension.

'Captain! When I could not reach you, I feared something had happened!'

Garro jerked a thumb at the chamber's thick walls. 'The protective field baffles in there are electromag-netically charged. Vox signals won't penetrate inside.' He frowned at the alarm in Sendek's voice. What is it that requires my attention so urgently?'

'Sir, the
Eisenstein's
sensor grids were badly damaged in the shock from the warp flare and the engagement with Typhon, and we have only partial function-'

'Spit it out,' snapped Garro.

Sendek took a breath. There are ships, captain. We have detected multiple warp gate reactions less than four light-minutes distant. They appear to be moving to an interception heading.'

He should have felt elation. He should have been thinking of rescue, but instead, Garro's black mood brought him only imagined terrors and predictions of the worst. 'How many craft? Mass and tonnage?'

The sensors gave me only the vaguest of estimates, but it is a fleet, sir, a large one.'

'Horus?' Garro breathed. 'Could he have followed us?'

'Unknown. The ship's external vox transceiver is inoperable, so we cannot search for any identifier beacons' Sendek paused. They could be anything, anyone, perhaps an ally, perhaps ships on their way to join the Warmaster's insurrection, or even xenos.'

And here we sit, blind and toothless before them.' Garro fell silent, weighing his options. 'If we cannot know the face of these new arrivals, then we must encourage them to show it to us. They must have been drawn by the flare. Any commander worth the rank will send a boarding party to investigate. We will allow it, and from there take the measure of them.'

At their rate of closure, there is little time to prepare,' Sendek noted.

Agreed,' Garro said with a nod. 'These are my orders. Issue weapons to all the crew who know how to use them and get everyone else into the core tiers. Find somewhere they can be protected. I want

Astartes at every entry point, ready to repel boarders, but no one is to engage in hostilities unless it is by my word of command.'

The armoury chambers would be best,' mused Sendek, 'they are heavily shielded. Many of the crew are there already, with the... the woman.'

Garro's lip curled. 'Sanctuary in the new church. It seems fitting.' He gathered up his bolter. 'Quickly, then. We must be ready to meet our saviours or our assassins with equal vigour.'

They crowded about the frigate in the manner of wolves circling a wounded prey animal, observing and considering the condition of the
Eisenstein.
Sensor dishes and listening gear turned to face the drifting warship, and learned minds attempted to discern the chain of events that had led to its circumstances.

Vessels that dwarfed the Imperial frigate placed hordes of armed lance cannons upon the ship's target silhouette, computing firing solutions and warming their guns in preparation for her destruction. Only one volley, and even then not one at full capacity, would be enough to obliterate the
Eisenstein
forever. It would only be a matter of a single word of command, a button pushed, a trigger pulled.

The fleet moved slowly. Some of its number had counselled for the immediate destruction of the derelict, concerned that the flare it had generated to bring them here might only have been a lure. Even a ship the size of a mere frigate, when correctly armed and altered, could become a flying bomb big enough to destroy a battle cruiser. Others were more curious. How had a human vessel come to find itself out here, so far from the rim of known space? What lengths had driven those aboard it to give up their engines in the vain hope of rescue? And what enemies had wrought the damage that scarred the armoured hull?

Finally, the predator ships of the war fleet parted to allow the largest of their number to face the
Eisenstein.
If the frigate was a fox to the wolves of the battleships, then against this craft it became no more than an insect before a colossus. There were moons that massed less than the giant. It was the clenched hand of a god carved from dark asteroid stone, a nickel-iron behemoth pocked with craters and spiked with broad towers that jutted from its surface.

At a great distance, the vessel would have resembled the head of a mace, filigreed with gold and black iron. At close range, a city's worth of spires and gantries reached out, many of them glowing with the light of thousands of windows, others concealing nests of weapons capable of killing a continent. Ships like the
Eisenstein
were carried in fanged docks around the circumference of the colossus, and as it drifted closer the sheer mass of its gravity gently tugged at the frigate, altering her course. Autonomous weapons drones deployed in hornet swarms, staging around the drifting craft. As one, they turned powerful searchlights on the ruined hull and pinned the frigate to the black of the void, drenching her in blinding white beams.

Eisenstein's
name, still clearly visible atop the emerald sweep of her bow planes, shone brightly with the reflected glow. Inside, a handful of souls waited for their fate to be decided.

Hakur stepped in from the corridor, a loaded and cocked combi-bolter looped over his shoulder on a thick strap. 'Outermost decks are all but empty now, captain,' he told Garro, Vought has re-routed the atmosphere to storage tanks or down here. Less than a third of the ship has life-support, but we won't lack for breathing.'

'Good.' He accepted the sergeant's report. 'The men on the promenade decks, they have been withdrawn?'

The veteran nodded. 'Aye, lord. I left them there as long as I thought I could, but I've pulled them all back now. I had them spying out through the ports. What with the scrying being out of action and all, I thought that eyeballs were better than no watch at all.'

'Quick thinking. What did they see?'

Hakur shifted uncomfortably, as he always did when he had no concrete answer for his commander. Garro knew this behaviour of old. Andus Hakur prided himself on providing accurate intelligence to his battle-brothers and he disliked having only half the facts about anything. 'Sir, there were a lot of ships and they seemed to be of Imperial lines.'

Nathaniel's lip curled. After Isstvan, that information only makes me more wary, not less. What else?'

'The fleet orbits a large construct, easily the size of a star fort, or larger. The brother who laid eyes upon it told me he had never seen such a thing before. He compared it to an ork monstrosity, but not so crude.'

Something pushed at the back of Garro's mind, a half-remembered comment that chimed with the description. Anything on the vox?'

Hakur shook his head. We are maintaining communications silence, as you ordered. If whatever is out there is close enough to broadcast on our battle frequencies, they are choosing not to.'

Garro dismissed him with a nod. 'Carry on. We'll wait, then.' The battle-captain crossed back into the wide space of the armoury chamber. Partition walls had been hastily opened along the length to allow the ship's complement of survivors to find purchase here, and from where he stood Garro saw a sea of figures huddled in the dim glow of emergency biolume lanterns. Many on the edges of the group were armed, and they had the air of desperation upon them. With deliberate care, Garro went in and walked among them, making eye contact with each of the crewmen just as he would do with his fellow Astartes. Some of the men trembled as he passed them by, others stood a little taller after the nods he gave them.

In all his years of service, Garro had always thought of the ordinary men of the army as warriors in the same cause as the Astartes, but it wasn't until this moment that he felt anything like kinship with them. Today we are all united in our mission, he mused. There were no barriers of rank or Legion here.

He came across Carya, the dark-skinned officer cradling a heavy plasma pistol. 'Lord captain,' he said thickly. The shipmaster's face was swollen with his injuries from the escape.

'Esteemed master,' Garro returned. 'I feel I owe you an apology.'

'Oh?'

Garro gestured at the hull walls around them. 'You presented me with a fine ship, and I have made such a mess of it.'

'You need not comment, my lord,' Carya laughed. 'I have served under your kind in the Great Crusade for decades and still I think I will never understand you. In some ways you are so superior to men like me, and in others...' His voice trailed off.

'Go on,' Garro said. 'Speak your mind, Baryk. I think our experiences together allow us to be candid.'

The shipmaster tapped him on the arm. 'In some ways you are like wanton siblings who yearn for a place, for fraternity, but also spark against one another with your rivalries. Like all men, you strive to escape from the shadow of your father, but also to seek his pride. Sometimes I wonder what would happen to you brave, noble lads if you had no wars to fight.' When Garro didn't reply, Carya's face fell. 'I am sorry, captain. I didn't mean to offend you.'

'You did not,' Garro replied. 'Your insight is... challenging, that is all.' He thought for a moment. 'As to your question, I do not know the answer. If there were no wars, what use would weapons be?' He pointed to Carya's pistol, and then himself. 'Perhaps we would make a new war, or turn upon each other.'

'As Horus did?'

A chill washed through Garro's soul. 'Perhaps.' The thought lay heavy upon him, and he turned, forcing it away.

Garro found Sendek and Hakur scrutinising an aus-pex unit. With the aid of Vought, Sendek had been able to connect the device to some of the
Eisenstein's
external sensory mechanisms. 'Captain! A reading...'

Garro dismissed Carya's words from his mind and snapped back to battle focus. 'Report.'

'Energy build-up,' said Hakur. 'For a second I thought it might have been a deep scan of the hull, but then it changed.'

A complex wave-form writhed across the auspex screen.

'A scan?' He glanced at Sendek. 'Could we be detected in here, through this much iron and steel?'

'It is possible,' replied the Astartes. A vessel with enough power behind her sensors could burn through any amount of shielding.'

A ship, or something like a star fort,' added Hakur.

Cold realisation seized Garro's chest and he snatched the auspex from Sendek's grip. The pattern; he knew what it was. 'To arms!' he bellowed, his voice echoing around the chamber. 'To arms! They're coming in!'

The auspex forgotten, Hakur and Sendek brought up their weapons and panned them around the compartment. At Garro's words, the crew surged with panic. He saw Carya snap out commands and the men brought their guns to the ready.

'Sir, what is it?' Sendek asked.

'There!' Garro pointed into the centre of the chamber, to an open area just inside the doors where Hakur had arranged a staggered barricade. A low humming, like electric motors deep beneath the earth, was issuing from the air, and static prickled at the battle-captain's skin.

Embers of emerald radiance danced and flickered across the deck, for one moment recalling the strange warp-things that had come to the ship in the depths of the empyrean; but this was something different. This time, Garro knew exactly what to expect. 'No man opens fire until I give the word!' he shouted.