03 - Savage Scars (38 page)

Confirm launch order.

So it was voice activated, she realised. Another thud came from the hatch as
she struggled to recall the pronunciation of the tau word for “confirm”. Then
she realised that she had said “launch” in Gothic, and the pod’s systems had
understood her. Clearly, the tau had extensive knowledge of the Imperium, and
had disseminated that knowledge throughout their empire.

“Confirm,” she said.

The blue illumination inside the pod dipped, then came back, assuming a
pulsating rhythm. A siren started up as the pod’s systems cycled into life, the
air pressure change causing her ears to pop.

There was a grinding sound as an unseen launch cradle disengaged, accompanied
by suddenly frantic knocking at the hatch. A low, subsonic machine hum started
up, rising through the audible range to a high-pitched whine that made the hairs
on the back of Brielle’s neck stand on end.

With a jolt, the saviour pod propelled itself from the launch tube. The
grav-couch enveloped Brielle’s body even tighter, pressing in around her so that
only the extremities of her legs, torso and arms were visible. Then a dampening
field powered up around her, entirely cancelling out any sense of acceleration.
The view through the porthole changed as the globe of Dal’yth Prime swung away,
to be replaced by the white, cliff-like flank of the
Dal’yth Il’Fannor O’kray
.
The now-empty tube that the pod had launched from was revealed as one in a line
of dozens, and yet more were visible on every deck of the vessel.

A plume of silent flame, flaring as if in slow motion from a black wound on
the warship’s side, drew Brielle’s attention. She smiled wickedly, proud of her
work in wrecking the communications bay. She guessed that the flame was the
result of the entire bay being voided, so as to starve the fire of oxygen since
she had disarmed the suppression systems.

The pod’s manoeuvring jets flared, the hissing sound especially loud in such
a small vessel. The tau warship spun around as the pod changed attitude, and
Brielle caught sight of a point defence weapons blister nearby. The blister
sported a twin-barrelled weapon, which swivelled around to fix on the pod.
Brielle’s heart almost stopped beating as she fixed on the gun turret, willing
it not to fire. Now would be a damn stupid time to die, she thought… Please,
don’t fire.

It didn’t, the weapon lingering on the pod for a moment before tracking back
in the opposite direction.

The manoeuvring jets flared again and the pod swung around so that its base,
which consisted of one, huge retro jet, was pointing directly towards the planet
below.

The terminal above Brielle’s head bleeped and the display changed from the
tau text, to a graph plotting the craft’s insertion, descent and landing. The
three stages were shown in simple graphics, each labelled with the time it would
take to complete. The chart showed a direct descent, lasting twenty-two minutes
from now to landing. The craft would be in position to begin the descent in less
than six minutes.

“No you don’t…” Brielle said under her breath, another manoeuvring jet
firing.

Repeat instruction
, the text blinked, superimposed over the trajectory
chart.

“What?” Brielle muttered.

Repeat instruction,
the text flashed again.

“Erm…” Brielle said, feeling at once foolish and guilty. She had grown
accustomed to the tau’s use of thinking machines, but actually talking to one
dredged up the teachings of the Imperial Creed in no uncertain terms. “Alter, er…
landing point?”

Input new landing point
, the screen flashed. A moment later the text
was replaced by a flat representation of the surface of Gel’bryn, overlaid with
a fine grid. Brielle understood the system straight away, and recognised it as
intended for use under the considerable pressures of an emergency evacuation
from a stricken spacecraft. She searched her memory for a rough idea of the
location of Gel’bryn, and scanned the area where she estimated it would be
found. That stretch of the main continent’s eastern seaboard contained a dozen
cities. She recalled the conversations with Aura, and the scenes she had
witnessed in the command centre. It must be the eastern-most of the twelve
cities, the one nearest the ocean.

There it was. “Nine, nine, seven, zero two, er…” she read off Gel’bryn’s
coordinates from the grid, “by, er, two, nine, two, five, zero.”

The graphic changed, the flat grid replaced by an image of the globe. A line
traced the course from the pod’s current position to its interface point, then
almost straight downwards towards the surface.

Confirm course change,
the text blinked.

“Confirm,” Brielle said, swallowing hard at the finality of the statement.
The manoeuvring jets flared again as the saviour pod came around to its new
heading. Brielle forced her breathing to a calm rate, and tried to relax her
body, but she could not rid herself of the mental image of the vessel being
transformed into a streaking meteor as it plunged towards the surface of Dal’yth
Prime.

The voyage to the interface point took less than an hour, and Brielle watched
through the porthole as the saviour pod crossed directly over the terminator
line where day turned into night. Throughout that time she was gripped by a
feeling of helplessness; that her life was in the hands of a machine that
appeared to be able to think and hold, albeit rudimentary, conversation. She was
entranced by the patterns of light glinting from the serene seas far below, and
the faint, wispy cloud formations gracefully whirling over them.

Several times throughout the journey to the interface point, the pod’s vox
system had blurted into life, only to cut out after delivering several seconds
of distorted garbage. She had no doubt that the
Dal’yth Il’Fannor O’kray’s
main communications banks would be out of action for quite some time, and
guessed that these transmissions were coming from vessels further away, or from
less powerful, secondary transceivers on the warship. She could just imagine the
confusion and concern the tau must have experienced as the saviour pod cleared
the ship. Perhaps they imagined it to contain an over-reacting crewman convinced
the ship was crippled. After her failure to make any attempt to reply to the
hails, they had probably concluded that the pod had malfunctioned and been fired
in error, and would just let it slip away. After all, they had far more pressing
concerns.

The pod had been over Dal’yth Prime’s dark side for twenty minutes when its
manoeuvring jets fired for the last time. The view through the porthole shifted,
the world gliding out of view to be replaced with the star-speckled blackness of
the void. The pod’s interior lighting dimmed, then started to pulsate as it had
when it had first launched from the
Dal’yth Il’Fannor O’kray
. Brielle
looked straight up at the pict screen, and guessed that the descent to the
surface was due to begin.

Again, that feeling of utter helplessness came over her. She had made
planetfall countless times, but always, she had been in command. Although she
had only rudimentary piloting skills and was no drop-ace, she had always been in
charge. The pilot of whichever vessel she had rode had invariably been her
servant, and that, she realised, was the root of her unease. She hated not
having someone she trusted to rely upon, or if it came to it, boss around.

As the saviour pod began its descent, Brielle realised that she did have
someone to rely on. She closed her eyes, not wishing to watch the blinking icon
on the screen above her as it rode the trajectory line in a hell-dive to the
surface of Dal’yth Prime. Someone very far away. Forty? Fifty thousand light
years? Certainly, half a galaxy at least…

“Imperator,” she began, sacred words she had not spoken in years coming
unbidden to her lips as a shudder ran through the pod. “From the cold of the
void, we beseech your protection. From the fire of re-entry, we implore you to
shield us, from the…”

The saviour pod began its dive, surrendering to the inexorable pull of
gravity. For the first few minutes, not a lot seemed to happen, but Brielle
could feel the slow build-up of gaseous friction on the outside of the pod. Then
she realised she was sweating, and not from the tension of her situation. The
temperature inside the pod was rising, even with the life support systems
cycling at full power. A foolish notion appeared in her head: what if the tau’s
biology was more resistant to the trauma of re-entry than a human’s, and the
pod’s tolerances designed with that in mind? Nonsense, she told herself. Those
of the air caste might be more comfortable in zero-g, while tau of the earth
caste were better suited to hard work, but the pod would have to accommodate
them all.

A fluttering tremble passing through the hull cast the thought from Brielle’s
mind. She looked towards the porthole, and saw ghostly flame dancing across the
black void beyond. In any other circumstance the effect would be quite
entrancing, she thought, but being strapped into a lump of alien tech plummeting
at Emperor-knew-what speed through the sky above a warzone took the edge off it.

Another tremble, and the whole pod started to vibrate. The craft was entering
Dal’yth Prime’s upper atmosphere. While still incredibly thin, the air was still
dense enough to cause friction on the pod’s outer hull, though the energy shield
projected below was absorbing the majority of it. The Imperium’s military
drop-pods and emergency saviour pods were only rarely fitted with such a
feature, the utilitarian planners regarding it as a luxury in most cases. By all
accounts, planetfall in one of those junk buckets was almost as dangerous as
taking your chances on a burning assault ship.

Despite the energy shield protecting the pod from the worst of the
turbulence, the whole interior was shaking. The effect increased to a violently
quaking crescendo as the pod neared terminal velocity and the heat in the
interior rose still further. Brielle squeezed her eyes tightly shut, wishing
only that she could free her arms to clamp her hands over her ears to deaden the
screaming rush of burning air consuming the pod.

Then, the pod’s retro thruster kicked in. The grav-couch cushioned the worst
of the violent arrest in downward momentum, but every cell in Brielle’s body
felt as if it were being squeezed, flattened and compressed, all at once.
Brielle felt at that moment that the pod really was a small compartment bolted
onto a huge jet thruster, which belched and roared just below her supine form.
She could feel the incredible energies being unleashed in that terminal burn,
and abandoned herself to them.

Quite suddenly, the roaring inferno that had raged outside was replaced by a
shrill whistling. Brielle opened her eyes and looked towards the porthole. The
view outside was of the dark-jade, night-time skies of Dal’yth Prime.

In the last few minutes of the descent, the manoeuvring jets kicked in one
final time, and the pod altered attitude. The stars swung upwards and the
distant horizon hove into view. An anti-grav generator powered up, guiding the
pod towards its final crashdown.

According to Imperial Navy doctrine, as well as sound military principle, a
fleet undertaking offensive operations should maintain an extensive
counter-penetration defence screen. A network of picket vessels, of every
displacement from interceptor to frigate, should provide three hundred and sixty
degree, three-dimensional surveillance before, during and after any engagement.
The fleet of the Damocles Gulf Crusade was not particularly large by naval
standards, especially given its losses at Pra’yen, and its carrier capacity was
woefully short, but nonetheless, no enemy vessel should have been able to get
within five thousand kilometres of its flagship, the
Blade of Woe.

Thus, it was something of a surprise when Admiral Jellaqua’s vessel was
hailed by an unknown vessel from less than a thousand kilometres away, and well
within its picket screen.

“
Blade of Woe
,” the unknown sender said, his voice relayed through the
vox-horns on Jellaqua’s bridge. “This is theta-zero. Requesting immediate dock,
over.”

“Who the
hell
is it?” Jellaqua scowled at none of his bridge officers
in particular. “Who the hell
dares
…?”

“Augur scan collating now, admiral,” a crewman called out. Jellaqua crossed
to the station, his eyes scanning the reams of scan data scrolling across the
flickering pict screen.

“Run it again,” Jellaqua said. “That makes no sense. Run it again.”

“Erm, admiral,” the officer stammered. “I have, sir. This is the third run.
Whatever that vessel is, it matches nothing in the registry.”

Jellaqua turned from the augur station and crossed to the comms station, half
a dozen aides trailing in his wake. “Well?”

Jellaqua’s Master of Signals was as much machine as he was man, a dozen
snaking cables running from grafted terminals in his cranium to the cogitation
array in front of him. The Master of Signals nodded, as if listening to
something very far away, before replying. “A sub-carrier wave, admiral.”

“What seal?” Jellaqua said, guessing the answer before it came.

“Magenta, my lord.”

“Confirm docking and alert all commands,” Jellaqua said, two-dozen staff
officers rushing off to enact his orders as others started yelling into
vox-horns. “Prepare to receive Inquisition boarders.”

The light infantry companies of Battlegroup Arcadius were advancing on foot
through the streets of Gel’bryn, and Lucian could see the lights of the star
port visible mere kilometres ahead. The tau were disengaging across the entire
city, the last of their units falling back on the star port to be evacuated by
huge, wallowing transports. The tau were still mounting a defence, but it was
poorly coordinated and piecemeal, and the crusade armies were pushing them back
on every front. By all accounts, the enemy’s command and control network had
completely collapsed, and the tau leaders on the ground had proven ill-prepared
to adapt. Lucian had no idea what had caused the collapse, and Gauge had claimed
that it was none of the crusade’s doing. Whatever had caused it, Lucian and the
other commanders gave silent thanks for this one nugget of good fortune.