# High Anchor [BFG]



## Zwan (Nov 18, 2009)

First ever piece of fanfic, and an old favourite of mine. It made an appearance over three issues of Warp Rift, an excellent online BFG fanzine that I encourage all of you to check out. Comments/criticisms are welcome and encouraged as always.

*Synopsis​*
Fleet Admiral Grant, commander of the Segmentum Pacificus 701st battlegroup, has a problem. Holding high anchor over the Chaos-held world of Omicron Septimus, his fleet is being slowly infected with something sinister. The trouble is, no-one is quite sure exactly what it is. In fact, on board the flag ship itself, the _Titan Imperial_, no-one is even aware of its happening. Can anyone discover what lurks in the dark corners of the battlecruiser before it’s too late?


*HIGH ANCHOR​*










*ONE*


Omicron Septimus, High Anchor
07 231 M41​

His aide de camp, Grechte, had been on station for only eighteen minutes when the ship's night cycle abruptly ended. Illumination panels and wall lights in the surrounding corridors flickered reluctantly into life, and the Imperial anthem Glory of the Emperor warbled on the municipal address system, more to annoy personnel from their sleep then for any rousing purpose. The splayed brass horn above Fleet Admiral Grant, commander of the Segmentum Pacificus 701st Battlegroup, however, stuttered for a precious few seconds, fuzzed with static, and died. Grechte's shoulders slumped slightly as his relief manifested itself, rather more overtly than Grant expected he'd intended. 

"Glory of the Emperor not for you, then?" he asked, smiling. Grechte looked slightly embarrassed for a second, squirmed in his starched, midnight blue navy uniform, and finally stood to attention. Grant shook his head slightly, and decided against rolling his eyes. The wide hemispherical bridge of crewman and console banks faced him directly, and it wouldn't be good to be seen snubbing his own equerry. He supposed all new aides would be frustratingly tense for their first few weeks in office - but the man just wouldn't relax.

"You know you don't have to be frightened of me," he whispered out the corner of his mouth. "I won't bite."

Grechte nodded, but Grant could see his words had had little effect on the man's nervous temperament. Seeing the vastly armoured bulk of the Fleet Admiral, hardwired through interface tubing and thick bio-electronic cables directly into the ship's mainframe, had certainly taken its toll on the young equerry. It probably hadn't helped that Grant had told him to leave the first time he'd seen him, mistaking him for a rating that had no business on the bridge. Grant could break out a fearsome temper when he was provoked, and when that temper controlled a million ton, nine-kilometre Mars-class battlecruiser, precious few people sought to provoke it. 

He broke from his musings and turned his terawatt attentions back to the bridge. Holographic screens depicting the current fleet encounter flashed on in front of his sallow face, and he dismissed them.

"How's our engagement going? Has Fulden destroyed them yet?" he shouted into the amphitheatre. When they were holding high anchor over a Chaos-held world, keeping abreast of every minute event was paramount.

"All quiet again, sir," replied his First Officer, a short, swarthy man by the name of Mulbern. "Last contact 03:40 Imperial. The Glory says they've lost 'em, sir." 

"What do you mean lost them?" Grant cried. "They were only here five minutes ago! How can an Imperial battlecruiser lose a bloody Chaos frigate in five minutes?"

"Disappeared sir," his Senior Vox Officer said. "The Glory reported battle damage at 03:39, before astropaths lost the enemy frigate on the auspex. They've jumped outsystem, sir."

"Is that so?" Grant asked, bringing a mighty gauntlet up to massage his chin. "Engagement time?"

"Latest encounter was thirteen minutes, sir, although Captain Fulden said it was at least fifteen. Whatever it was, they're definitely getting longer."

"Yes," Grant said slowly, "they are." 
Chaos ships had been jumping insystem for the last hour, probing their naval strengths with hit and run attacks, testing their formations. The twelve Imperial ships holding anchor were preparing planetside troop deployment, and the duration of the enemy attacks was increasing, probably in anticipation of such a mass disembarkation of Guard. If they could knock out the 701st's ground element in one fell swoop, they could render the entire battlegroup impotent. Grant just hoped the Archenemy didn't know it.

"Alright," he said, "keep vigil, and prioritise the long range auspex. I want to see exactly what they're hiding out there."

"Aye aye, sir," Mulbern said.

"And get me Fulden on the line," he said, turning to his SVO. "I want to speak with that despicable bastard myself."

* * *

The Divine Glory was by no means a large ship - indeed, at five kilometres it was the smallest cruiser in the 701st Segmentum Pacificus Battlegroup - yet it was regarded by many to be as formidable as its sister ship, the Titan Imperial, which the Fleet Admiral himself commanded. This fact was widely acknowledged as due to the Captain of the Glory, Marcus Fulden, a large man with an even larger personality. Known for his bold and sometimes crass tactics - often involving ramming smaller ships to almost unacceptable detriment, he had earned the contempt of the Fleet Admiral on more than one occasion, and the war for Omicron Septimus had proved to be no different. In fact, if Fulden hadn't been so annoyingly successful in the Imperial Navy, Grant would have thrown his hide in the stockade four months beforehand at Farrax-Carthage Naval Port.

The very rumour that the Glory may well be as formidable as the Imperial was not unknown to Fulden, and he liked to remind the Fleet Admiral on their occasional encounters, whether in person – a very rare opportunity indeed, and one that required deliciously veiled insults – or more frequently on the long rage vox, which required much less tact.

This occasion, however, appropriated neither of these methods. As soon as his SVO patched the link through, Fulden knew that the Fleet Admiral was in no mood for his subversion - and he was in no mood to dish it out.

"My Lord, to what do I owe this pleasure?" he asked helplessly, as his Damage Control Officer tried desperately to seal off seventeen separate bulkheads down their starboard flank. He waved the amphitheatre of crewmen quiet as solar static washed across the already weak long-range vox.

"Fulden, where in the name of the Emperor is that damned frigate?" came Grant's voice over the link, thick with pending anger. One wrong word and Fulden would feel the brunt of the Fleet Admiral's wrath like a bolter round to the sternum.

"My Lord, they translated outsystem faster then I could get her to broadsides..." the Captain said, his eyes flickering to the short range auspex in front of him, "...and took a good portion of my starboard flank with them. Our shields are shot to sh-"

"By the Throne, man! What are you playing at? Fifteen minutes of contact and you can't bring a cruiser to broadsides?"

"My Lord, there were...complications with our engines, entire power stacks locked down. I think the Archenemy used some kind of electronic warfare pulse to knock out our power core -"

"They locked down your power core!" the Fleet Admiral asked, utterly incredulous. Fulden knew how flimsy the excuse was. He felt his usually sharp tongue dry up in apprehension, and a bead of sweat trickled down his spine. It slowly soaked into the top of his cream breeches.

"My Lord, it won't happen again, I promise. A temporary electronics malfunction, nothing more. I have the adepts working on it already."

The Fleet Admiral said something that was erased by another wash of static, but Fulden knew whatever it was, he was treading on thin ice. No Chaos electronic pulse, no matter how strong, could shut down an entire cruiser's power core, and they both knew it. 
His DCO gave him a thumbs up, and a holo-schematic of the Glory's starboard flank wavered next to Fulden's face. He cancelled it irritably, and readdressed the vox. 

"My Lord, I-"

"Shut up Fulden, for Throne's sake," the Fleet Admiral snapped. "My astropaths tell me you're straying from formation. Realign at once, and get your gear together, or you'll be headed back to Carthage stockade faster than you can say 'yes sir'. Understand, Captain?"

"Yes sir," Fulden replied lamely. "Very good sir."

The line went dead.

"Signal terminated," his SVO said. The bustle of the amphitheatre resumed, and the starboard schematic reappeared. Fulden reviewed it, and thanked the DCO.

"Engines, get us back to formation, double time," he shouted to the crewmen. "First Officer, a word."

His First Officer, Dolgen Aleksi, left his dais and crossed the short space of metal grilling towards the Captain. 
"Yes sir?" he asked, his face awash with anticipation. 

"Has the problem in the power core been taken care of?" Fulden whispered feverishly. He looked at the faces of his crewmen, glancing at the pair of them like conspirators. 

"Yes sir," Aleksi replied, glancing to his left, "but it's a mess down there sir. Casualties are on the medicae level now sir, but the apothecaries say they won't pull through. Tainted, sir."

"Alright," Fulden replied, after a long pause. He decided against swearing - there were too many people watching him. "As you were."

The Captain watched as the First Officer strode back to his dais, and exhaled, removing his cap and revealing a sweaty mop of black hair. He fiddled with the rim nervously, feeling his fingers tremble. 

Fulden was prepared to die in many ways for the Emperor, but the list did not include being annihilated in high anchor by an Imperial ship, for having been tainted by a Chaos Spawn in his power core.


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## Bad Badger (May 18, 2010)

Oh! If this is the High Anchor I read on the old BL forum (and I think it is) I _love_ this story.

Great to see it again. Looking forward to reading it. :biggrin:


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## Zwan (Nov 18, 2009)

Ah! Thanks badger, much appreciated! I hope it lives up to your nostalgia second time round.


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## Zwan (Nov 18, 2009)

*TWO​*

Grant smirked as the signal terminated. It was about time he put that damnable man in his place.

“The Glory has returned to formation, sir,” his SVO shouted.

“Good,” Grant said, tapping his fingers on the huge steel throne that supported him. The ringing of metal on metal hammered out through the bridge.

“Auspex, any news?” he asked, reviewing the latest status reports on the holoscreens whirling around his head. He plucked them from the air with a thought, and read and dismissed them with superhuman speed. 

“Nothing sir. Not so much as a whisper.”

“Alright,” the Fleet Admiral said, “I think it’s about time we got this show on the road. Any longer and there won’t be an Omicroni civilian left to save from these Chaos bastards.”

There was a murmur of concurrence with the Admiral’s angry tenacity, though he could tell not everybody entirely agreed with him. Deployment required they move to low anchor to reduce the distance between them and planetfall, minimising the time their Guard landers were in flight. A mass shift of formation to such a state would not only render their reaction times to an enemy attack dismally slow, but it also meant that the deployment would go ahead despite the battlegroup being on Quick Reaction Alert. And the Chaos fleet holding outsystem had proven to be quite the deft foe. If they had them mapped on long range auspex, all they had to do was translate insystem in the ten or so minutes it would take the 701st to reposition, and engage them at will. It would be like attacking a single man armed with a pistol with a battalion of Space Marines. 

Like he gave a damn what any of them thought.

“Vox! The following message please, fleetwide,” he said, clearing his throat. “This is Fleet Admiral Grant to all ships. Repositioning to low anchor effective immediately. Execute manoeuvre formation 007.143.IP CAD, standard Imperial. You are to report combat readiness to me personally in no less than eight minutes. All Guard units on immediate standby for planetfall. Message ends…03:52 Imperial.” 

“Message sent and acknowledged, sir,” his SVO shouted.”

Grant started a timer on the nearest holoscreen to his face, the blinking digits counting down from 07:00, and began the delicate procedure of moving all million tons of the Titan Imperial into low orbit, feeling the colossal bulk of the battlecruiser flowing through his thickly armoured body. Schematics of the planet flowed through Grant’s head, showing optimal orbit trajectories, geosynchronous anchor and polar anchor, and he remarked quietly to himself how miserable the dusty yellow and brown orb looked from space. Outside the ship, the massive positioning engines vented geysers of propellant into the cold vacuum, and the primary and secondary manoeuvre engines rumbled inaudibly into life. Excess warmth was dumped as the ship began to move, slowly at first, then with more speed as the practiced shift was executed. Heat shields slowly locked down over their eight-hundred gun broadside compliment, to prevent the five metre-wide barrels from becoming clogged with propellant, and sensor clusters recessed into their deployment pods.

The fact that the Titan Imperial would be flying blind and impotent for another six minutes was not lost on its three thousand strong crew.

And the sudden cacophony of alarms that signalled an incoming mass of Chaos warships did little to quell these fears.

* * *


The first of the ships to be caught in the barrage was the Flame of Gandolar, a frigate of some nine hundred metres with a paltry fifty gun broadside. Stuck halfway through the manoeuvre to low anchor, with its blast and heat shields locked down, it was destroyed piecemeal by the freshly spawned Chaos fleet. Ordered forward by Fleet Magister Pustria, the Lictor, crested by an iron halo of eight spikes and daubed with kilometre-high obscenities, fired its forward guns almost immediately after translating insystem. 

As Fleet Admiral Grant watched on the long-range auspex, he realised it had fired blind and got lucky. The Imperial frigate listed wildly to port, exposed decking on its starboard side jutting out like a gigantic metal ribcage and leaking molten globules of adamantium into space. But the Lictor gave no quarter as it pressed home the attack, swinging deftly to broadsides and unleashing a full five hundred gun salvo. Violent beams of energy tore into the hull of the Gandolar like it was paper, the multiple puncture wounds ripping inwards with hundreds of Gs of force to explode on the port side. Utterly destroyed, the frigate’s power core, exposed to the bare void, froze solid, and the ship imploded into a nebula of light.

“By the Throne,” Grant whispered, “Vox! Get me fleetwide! Abandon manoeuvre! Attack formation on the double!” he bellowed into the amphitheatre, realised it was perhaps already too late. The Archenemy had amassed with almost twice their number, though many of their ships were smaller.

Except the False Emperor. Fleet Magister Pustria’s own flagship, it was a huge, lumbering hulk of adamantium, eleven kilometres from fore to aft, with a snarling broadside compliment of one thousand guns. A million, vacuum-preserved Imperial corpses were nailed and skewered on its bloody surface, and eight-pointed stars and ungodly profanities were stencilled down the flanks in sickening abundance. Even Grant, the staunchest, most steadfast Fleet Admiral many Naval personnel had seen, almost wept at such a blasphemy.

The formation of Imperial ships was quickly abandoned, as each re-prepared itself for combat. Now neither in high nor low anchor, they had to remain especially vigilant of their spacing. Collisions were not unheard of in the heat of battle. Blast and heat shields recessed, heat exchangers and sensor clusters extended, and the eleven-strong 701st battlefleet presented arms in a fantastic display of Imperial military might.

“Let’s have these bastards in the next hour,” Grant growled, viewing the myriad of holoscreens appearing in front of him, documenting the initial longer range exchanges before the Chaos fleet moved in to broadside range. “Engines, full speed ahead, twenty degrees to starboard. I want the Terror,” 

The Star Terror was only a destroyer, but Grant knew it would be good for morale if they could get in a few easy kills early on.

“Broadsides online sir, loaded and ready,”

The Fleet Admiral nodded curtly. Grechte stood in front of him, having remained completely unmoving since the last engagement, shivering almost imperceptibly. He would have to find a job for him soon, lest the man be driven insane with fear. The streaming images of the Chaos ships seemed to have overwrought an already overwrought man, and Grant almost felt sorry for him. 

But now he had a battle to fight.

“Sir, the Terra requests aid to our coreward flank. They say –”

“Not now dammit!” Grant roared, cutting his SVO off. “If the Terra can’t hold on for five minutes I’ll not have it in my battlefleet!”

“The Terror’s approaching now sir,” said his Senior Auspex Officer. "Range in five...four...three…two..."

“Torpedoes fire on approach!” Grant shouted, his attentions snapping back to the amphitheatre. Their first shot in anger. There would be no clemency with the Archenemy, no quarter. Their fore-silos burned violently as the torpedoes shot straight arrow lines through the shortening space between the Imperial and the Terror, two of the six scoring hits. Blossoming explosions ruptured great seams in the destroyer’s aft-port flank, crippling the shields and slamming the ship sideways with the sheer force of it. It was no match for an Imperial cruiser. No match at all. 

“That’s it!” Grant shouted, his blood up. He took control of the ship himself to bring it to broadsides, feeling it as an extension of his own mighty body swinging round. His stomach would have lurched with adrenaline, had he not long since overcome such human impulses. The shape of the ugly Chaos destroyer grew in his vision, the drab grey and red hulk of sick metal filling his sight. The very look of it was enough to unleash a full salvo of broadsides, even before its own were online. 

“Shots away,” Mulbern shouted as their heavy guns blasted fresh ordnance into the gulf between ships. “Tracking…tracking…two hundred hits!” he exclaimed incredulously, turning to the steel throne. Grant looked at him disdainfully – as if he’d have scored less. 

“I am Fleet Admiral for a reason, you know,” he said to his First Officer. Mulbern looked slightly abashed for a second, before another alarm wailed into life and brought his attention to his console.

“Emperor! We’re being pincered!” shouted his Auspex Officer. As the wreckage of the Terror sank into the endless depths of space, two more Chaos obscenities were moving down both their flanks, their prows fashioned like mouths screaming in pain.

“Cruisers,” Grant muttered. He hated Chaos cruisers. The two approaching were looted Imperial ships, and the crews had gone to town on disgracing as much of the beautiful archways, statues and spires as they could. 

They were also daubed entirely in blood.

“Khorne,” Grechte whispered nervously. It was the first word he’d spoken in a long time. And from The Fleet Admiral’s expression, he suddenly got the feeling that it would be his last.

“What did you say?” Grant thundered, his voice harmonising with the ship’s municipal address system for an instant, broadcasting his rage into every cabin on the Titan Imperial.

“N-nothing sir,” Grechte replied.

“If you think –”

“Sir!” Mulbern cut him off as another klaxon yammered on, bathing the bridge in pulsing red light. “We’re losing power!”

“What?” Grant asked, doing a double take. The two Chaos cruisers were closing them down fast. They may have been a good few kilometres smaller, but if they had no power, they were already as good as dead. The next words Mulbern spoke weren’t exactly reassuring either. In fact, their implication was decidedly chilling.

“We've got a power drain of some sort...it's - there’s...something in the power core!”


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## Zwan (Nov 18, 2009)

*THREE​*

“Power loss of decks 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 13, 14, 15, 17, starboard broadsides offline, heat exchangers offline, long range auspex offline, long rang vox offline, shields offline...God Emperor we’re screwed!” Aleksi shouted as soon as the Chaos fleet had jumped insystem. 

But even before he had, Fulden had known something was wrong. A dull, throbbing headache had started at the back of his head, and was working its way towards his eye sockets. He brought a trembling hand up to his nose, and wiped away a small trickle of blood across the back of his glove. 

“Power at 36% and falling,” Aleksi continued. “Power at 32%.”

“Will you shut up, man!” Fulden roared, throwing his hands forward. “By the Throne, if the power’s shutting down, stop wasting time telling me and sort it out!” 

His First Officer looked at him as if he’d been backhanded across the face, and turned back to his console. 

“Enemy destroyers approaching!” an Auspex Officer shouted, “three, converging! One hundred and thirteen kilometres, approach speed! We've got nothing in range!”

“Forward guns to bear, all power to our remaining weapons!” Fulden shouted, more blood trickling from his nose. He wiped it away irritably once more, and it flecked on the dull grey grilling of the floor. A buzzing, like that of insect wings, sounded distantly in his ears, and he shook his head.

“Forward guns online, fifty fore-to-port broadsides online, power at 12% and falling,” Aleksi said helplessly. Adrenaline churned through Fulden’s stomach. “Power core’s almost dry,” the First Officer continued, “Warp interference.”

“Again?” Fulden hissed. 

“Yes sir,” Aleksi rounded on him, “or perhaps you’d like me to shut up?”

“What?” The Captain replied, unsure if he’d heard, scanning the amphitheatre. “Get a grip man, we’re in the middle of an engagement here! Don’t be so-”

“So what sir?” Aleksi said, with pure venom in his voice. “Don’t be so, what?”

The Captain looked at him incredulously. There was something seriously wrong if his First Officer was getting upset over Fulden telling him to shut up. Something seriously wrong indeed.

“Aleksi, what in the name of the Emperor is the matter with you?” he asked, more perturbed than concerned. The damnable buzzing in his ears would not relent, and his nose was still weeping blood – which nobody had deemed fit to acknowledge. 

“Fifty-two kilometres and approaching!” the Auspex Officer shouted again. 

“Uh, forward guns offline, port batteries offline. Power at 3%,” a Gunnery Officer shouted in a surprised voice, when Aleksi did not. 

But Fulden wasn’t listening. Only the bridge had power now, and the majority of that was rapidly fading lighting. But the Captain could still see Aleksi’s murderous expression. His hand crept towards his snub-nosed autopistol, and just then his First Officer began running.

“Throne!” was all Fulden managed before Aleksi’s hands found his throat. The autopistol banged loudly in his hand as he shot from his waist, but the rounds seemed to have no effect on the First Officer as they exploded out the back of his navy blue uniform, blood and pellets of flesh slapping onto the cold grilling of the floor. 

“Get this bloody madman off me!” he gurgled, his face turning red. More blood ran from his nose, and his ears as well – but its insignificant volume was nothing on Aleksi’s, who’s very face was a red mask. His teeth leered out from behind the dribbling visor of crimson, and his eyes were the deepest, malevolent black.

“Blood for the Blood God!” he roared in an inhuman two-tone, and Fulden felt his bladder threaten to empty itself. He desperately thumbed on the ‘full auto’ switch on the pistol, and emptied almost the entire magazine into Aleksi’s torso. Broken ribs and glistening gristle buckled outwards until the man was little more than a spine from the base of his ribcage to the base of his throat – yet his hands still tightened around Fulden’s windpipe.

It was his Senior Vox Officer, a man by the name of Dannicks, who saved him. 
Somehow unaffected by the spell that had transfixed the remainder of the bridge crew, he ripped a length of coolant piping from the wall, ignoring the acid burns it gave him, and slammed the end of the pole through Aleksi’s head. The brass rod erupted through the First Officer’s blackened eyeball, and the man collapsed, almost pulling Fulden down with him. 

The Captain choked and coughed harshly as he righted himself, the buzzing almost intolerable in his ears. He spat blood onto the floor, and brought a hand up to his ears, probing the haemorrhaging aural canals. 

“Are you alright sir?” Dannicks asked, leaning forward slightly then suddenly recoiling in horror as he looked into his Captain’s eyes.

They were in fact, the last thing the SVO saw, before the back of his skull was blown wide open by the last of the rounds in Fulden’s pistol. 
* * *


“We’ve lost contact with the Glory, sir,” his Auspex Officer shouted.

Grant closed his eyes briefly. Fulden may have been an arse, but he was a damn fine Captain.

“I want the Chaos son of a bitch who destroyed it,” he growled, quite forgetting they had a power core lockdown and were slowly being outmanoeuvred by two smaller cruisers. “And I want them n-”

“Oh no sir, sorry sir, he’s not dead. We’ve just lost contact with him. Long range vox is down sir. Our own power loss certainly isn’t helping.”

Grant gave the man a look that would strip paint off a frigate’s hull, and erased all sentiment about Fulden from his mind. If that damnable man didn’t have the decency to get himself foolishly killed in battle, then Grant sure by the Throne wouldn’t spend any more time thinking about him. 

“Alright, Mulbern! Full power to engines, hold it there and wait for my signal. If these Archenemy bastards want to play dirty, we’ll give ‘em dirty.”

“Yes sir, I would sir it’s just the pow-”

“Just stick as much of our bloody remaining power into the engines, and hold it there!”

“Aye aye, sir, very good sir,” Mulbern said – but slightly too sullenly. The Fleet Admiral’s rage hit him like a Baneblade on a Sunday.

“Listen to me, and listen in good,” he snarled, in such way that only a lengthy monologue could ensue. “I am the Fleet Admiral. I worked long and hard to get where I am today. I am a better tactician than all of you – even the bloody tacticians. I know my own ship. I know what it can and can’t do. Now if I tell someone- anyone – to take our remaining power, however little there might be left, and hold it in the engines, that man will obey my orders, or by the God Emperor Himself, I’ll rip out his larynx through his arsehole and strangle him with it! Is this clear?”

It certainly was clear. In fact, it was the clearest thing anyone had ever heard. 

“Yes sir,” Mulbern said, perhaps not as taken aback as he should have been.

“Yes SIR!” Grant ecchoed, finally leaning back into his steel throne and letting the blood drain from his face. “Damnable crewmen,” he muttered.

“Enemy cruisers one hundred and forty-nine kilometres and closing, approach speed,” shouted Auspex nervously.

It was at this point in time Equerry Grechte risked a glance back to the Fleet Admiral, saw he was no mood to be asked questions, and instead decided to leave the bridge without permission.

He got three steps.

“Where…are…you…going?” Grant asked him, slowly, yet with so much anger he threatened to implode the ship.

The horrified aide de camp faltered. “I was j-just, uh, going to organise a, erm –”

“Enemy cruisers at thirty kilometres, slowing to attack speed. Ranging..."

“Organise a what?” Grant thundered.

Grechte was horribly aware that everyone on the bridge was watching him. Sooner or later, someone was going to notice the patch of bloody urine seeping into his breeches. And there was nothing in the Imperium of Man that would make him ask to go to the toilet. Not in the heat of battle.

“A team of, uh, men to-”

“Twenty kilometres, attack speed,” Auspex shouted, as hopelessly and dejectedly as any sane human would have thought possible.

“God-Emperor, man, be gone,” Grant said with a flick of his gauntlet. “I have two Chaos cruisers to prosecute.

“Power at 13% and stable,” Mulbern shouted. Grechte quickly and quietly exited the bridge. “Uhm, power rising…at 28% - 36% - 40%!”

“What?” Grant asked.

“Ten kilometres, attack speed!” Auspex shouted with a little more enthusiasm. 

“Power rising sir, and fast!”

“What about the power core?” the Fleet Admiral said, surprised, “I thought you said there was something in it?”

“There still is!”

“SIR!” Engines shouted, as the Chaos cruisers overlapped them. 

“Throne!” Grant bellowed, as the first Archenemy broadsides hit the void. 
"Hard down! Hard down now!” 
* * *


Fulden gasped and struggled as his throat tried to open as fully as was considered normal by the apothecaries. He was still on the bridge – he guessed, judging by the various hummings of consoles and electronics stacks – but that was about all he could guess.

For now he was hopelessly blind.

The attempt on his life by his Chaos-possessed First Officer had been shocking, yes, and a million questions circulated his brain. But even more troubling was that he had killed, he now suspected, the man who had saved him, thinking he was another Khorne heretic.

“Status report!” he shouted through a bleeding mouth. No answer. His cracked lips split open, and he spat out a chip of tooth enamel. “Someone!”

A lone, dull alarm wailed into life – an alarm Fulden knew better than any other, and an alarm he dreaded more than anything.

He was being mapped – probably by the three destroyers his Auspex Officer had told him about.

“Emperor save us…” 

He guessed he was in the same position he had been in upon his attack, and taking his bearings from there, ran to the helm, his boot heels echoing loudly off the metal grilling. He felt the polished wooden wheel in his blood-slicked fingers, though where the helmsman was, he had no idea. He then thrust a hand out to his right and gripped the pitch lever, jamming it forward. His stomach coursed with adrenaline as the Glory swung downwards, nose first, towards the planet below.

The alarm abruptly stopped, and he could hear the dull crump of muffled explosions above the ship – where he had been less than ten second before.

With both hands, he gripped the pitch lever once more and heaved back as hard as he could, trying with all his might to haul the cruiser out of its nosedive, gasping with the effort. The cacophony of alarms that had warned him of his plunging also abruptly ceased. 

It was only then he suddenly realised that the power was back on. And the damn buzzing in his ears had stopped.

“What the…?” he breathed to the frighteningly empty amphitheatre. God Emperor, but he wished he could see. Not only were all systems inexplicably back online, he also had no idea where he was in relation to the rest of the fleet. Throne knew how far he’d gone down – a hundred kilometres for all he could guess.

And then a thought struck him; if he could find the vox, he could take his positioning off another ship.

Tearing across the floor once again, his hands outstretched, he found the First Officer’s dais by falling headlong into it, almost shattering his skull on the metal railing, and headed left to the communications centre. He snatched up the headset and scrabbled over the dials to find the ‘autotune’ function. He toggled it upwards, feeling a crackle of static in his bloody ears – that was another thing. His facial orifices had ceased their bleeding.

“Wings of Varagar, go ahead Glory,” a nasal voice, made metallic by the nature of the long range vox, sounded in his ear.

“Mayday, mayday!” he shouted in a hoarse voice, pulling the mouth piece away as he coughed. “I am flying blind, I repeat, I am flying blind, request ship status and positioning!”

“One second sir,” the Vox Officer replied.

Fulden let his head collapse into his arms in relief. The vox crackled back into life twenty seconds later.

“Divine Glory, you are 32 degrees coreward, plus twenty degrees vertical pitch on a bearing 224-716-2803, speed eleven hundred knots,”

Fulden did a quick calculation. He was heading upwards, away to the galactic west of the battle, very, very quickly.

He threw the headset down, running back over to the helm. He grabbed the pitch lever, and eased it down twenty degrees. Incoming torpedo warnings wailed into life as soon as he did so.

“Brace for impact!” he shouted on impulse, wheeling the helm round. Without Engines to cut the power, he would be travelling in a huge thousand kilometre arc. He began to weep as the hopelessness of his situation dawned on him. 

It didn’t help that the buzzing in his ears had started again.

* * *


The battle above Omicron Septimus was moving, and it was moving fast. Already two ships down, to the enemy’s four, the 701st Imperial battlegroup desperately sought to unite in attack formation – cruisers to form the gun line, escorts in support; but they were scattered to the wind. Fleet Magister Pustria may have been an abomination of Chaos filth, but he certainly knew what he was doing. As soon as the initial insystem salvo of torpedoes, he had arranged his fleet into a speartip, splitting the manoeuvring Imperials into two groups – one of four, one of six, and chasing them up with almost admirable attack formations of his own.

Almost.

Their one weakness was the Chaos escorts’ reluctance to leave the False Emperor’s side – understandably. The ship was more than a match for any Imperial vessel, and the very sight of it could strip a cruiser of morale faster than an axe of flesh. 

But it meant that instead of following standard exchange lines between cruisers, the Archenemy were leaving the bigger ships to go it alone – meaning the Imperial formations, where they could make them, could pick them off one by one. 

Of course, the more sensible cruisers doubled up and pincered; but with typical Khorne bloodlust, the remainder did not.

And the 701st were making sure they paid for it.


----------



## Zwan (Nov 18, 2009)

Feedback/criticisms always welcome! :read:


*FOUR​*

Hard down was not a pleasant manoeuvre to undergo. It involved sending the ship in question plunging nose first into the endless depths of the void, at high speeds, in order to avoid being crippled. It was an emergency move, invented by whoever decided that mass red-outs and vomiting were good things, as well as putting an immense strain on the backburners for the subsequent inertia shift. 

But for Fleet Admiral Grant, it was currently the best feeling in the world. Twelve kilometres above them and counting, the two pincering Chaos cruisers, unable to do anything but accept their fate, exploded as masses of heavy ordnance slammed into the side of each one. The lack of oxygen meant that the flames were only able to expand as far as the ships’ internal atmospheres would allow, but it was still an impressive sight, as the foul hulks of the Archenemy disintegrated into streamers of slag. 

“Alright!” he shouted, licking his lips. “How’re we doing, First Officer?” 

“Power at 89%, sir,” Mulbern replied cautiously, still not having forgotten his master’s virulent temper.

“You were telling me what was happening in the power core?”

“Yes sir, erm, I was just thinking…maybe we should talk in private?”

Grant laughed out loud as the Titan Imperial swung back up far enough away from the fight to give them some breathing space.

“And where would you like me to go?” the Fleet Admiral said, indicating the steel throne. “Helm! Get us back to formation!”

“Which one, sir?” the crewman asked back. “We have two operational formations.” 

“Whichever’s closest,” Grant snapped. “What’s on your mind, Mulbern?”

“Well sir,” the First Officer said, stepping forward out of the dais and walking up to the Fleet Admiral’s command chair. His head only just reached the top of the man’s kneecaps. “I’m…certainly no expert, but...well, it's just it looks like...”

Grant saw the man hesitate, and felt his frustration build again. “Tell me man!” he exclaimed. 

“It looks like Warp interference, sir.”

“In the power core!” the Fleet Admiral scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous Mulbern, this ship isn’t tainted!”

“Well sir, it’s not only that sir – it’s just when your equerry left, sir, I saw him bleeding,”

“And?”

“Well there are stories, sir – the stigmata of the Archenemy, the bleeding and things, sir. They’re all marks of...well, of Khorne, sir.”

“Careful First Officer,” Grant warned, his face darkening. “You sound too learned of these things, for a naval crewman.”

“No sir!” Mulbern said, genuinely taken aback. “I’m not, I’ve just heard things sir, stories and such.”

“Rumours, nothing more,” Grant said dismissively. The First Officer looked unconvinced, and he sighed.
“Mulbern, I want you to…put these things from your head,’ he said eventually. “Concentrate now, on the task at hand. You’re a damn fine officer, and I can’t have you paying any heed to these...silly ghost stories.”

“Of course, sir,” the First Officer replied, reluctantly. He turned to leave, but he couldn’t contain himself.

“Sir, at exactly the same moment as when Grechte left the bridge the power level rose again,” he blurted.

”Hm,” Grant said with an unconcerned gesture of his hand, now hopelessly preoccupied with the holoscreens in front of him depicting optimal trajectories to join the formation in front. 

“But what about the power core, sir?”
Grant sighed – and somewhere on the ship, several steam grates vented.

“Vermin of some kind, probably chewed through a power conduit. I’ll send an adept ASAP. Now please, Mulbern, put it from your mind and get back to your station.”

* * *


Fulden wept desperately now, the tears salty to the taste, as he heaved the helm until it locked to starboard. The buzzing in his ears was unbearable, causing him to chew completely through his lower lip. Blood ran from the fresh wound in bitter rivulets down his chin and soaked into the top of his sweat-soaked navy uniform, and his neck had broken out in deep purple and grey bruising. 

Despite his injuries, however, in his time alone he’d had a chance to think – that was, after three Chaos torpedoes had thumped into his port shields and sent him off his feet – and pieced together the situation as best he could.

The spawn in his power core must have returned with the translation of the Chaos fleet, thanks to the freshly channelled Warp energies. The very nature of Chaos itself would have made Aleksi, in his embittered state, and easy target, and the abomination in the centre of his ship would have only strengthened his First Officer’s resolve to mutiny. But now that he was dead, the power had come online again. And that, Fulden couldn’t explain. The bridge contained no major power supply for the ship – only the power core contained enough energy to, when disrupted, shut down entire control systems. The death of his First Officer shouldn’t have made a difference to the electronic systems of the Glory.

But then again, maybe it hadn’t. God Emperor knew how long he’d been out cold for after the attack. Maybe the power had only come online a second before he’d regained consciousness.

He snorted. 

“Stupid,” he found himself saying aloud. It didn’t matter now – all his crewmen, as far as he could tell, were dead or missing. 

If the power had come online a long time after Aleksi had died, then the only other explanation was that whatever had been in his power core had since vacated it. 

Which could only have been a good thing…

Even before the Chaos spawn had smashed through the thick bulkhead of the outer command centre, Fulden was running towards the vox console as fast as his legs would carry him, emptying his bladder as he went. 

* * *


“We’ve reached the first formation, sir,” Auspex shouted as the spired and crenelated forms of two cruisers, three frigates and a destroyer holding Imperial attack pattern one at mid-anchor filled the main holoscreen in front of Grant’s face. 

“I’ll take us in,” the Fleet Admiral said, feeling the slightly diminished power from their primary plasma core filling the direct neural interface. Images of the inky blackness of space filled his vision, studded by a million-star veil and the distant red smears of Chaos ships. The ferocity of their attack seemed to be concentrated on the second formation, the rest lurking around the False Emperor like maggots over warm meat. The 701st had punished them cruelly for not taking adequate formations, and Fleet Magister Pustria had evidently decided to reform.

the Titan Imperial slowly glided upwards, propelled by its secondary thrusters, and Grant took it along the curved predicted trajectory lines of the flight computer perfectly. It cut back speed, countering the ascension with a few bursts from the reverse thrusters, and held steady fifty-four kilometres coreward of the Wrath of Termina, a Dauntless class light cruiser. 

“Attack formation protocol seventeen initiated,” Grant said to the ships of Imperial attack pattern one, and received a smear of overlapping acknowledgements. 
“Now, let the Chaos bastards come,” he growled.

* * *


Fulden scrabbled desperately at the vox controls, finding the ribbed tuning dials with his trembling fingers. He half screamed as another crash echoed through the ship. The thing was getting closer, and he retched in fear, the chunky mess slapping onto the grilling next to his boots – not that he cared. 

He pulled the headset on, trying to find the Fleet Admiral through the channels. With all the inter-ship vox chatter, it was proving to be extremely difficult. Solar static wasn't helping either.

Crash – another bulkhead torn aside. The horrifying roar of the spawn washed through the command centre.

Fulden was weeping violently now, out of sheer terror. The fact that he couldn’t see the spawn was perhaps even more terrifying. His bowels loosed and adrenaline ripped through his system uncontrollably, making his movements shaky and difficult.

“Wings of Varagar, go ahead Glory,” said the same nasal voice again – but much, much fainter. “Do you want me to position you again sir – that’s a wide angle you’ve got. I recommend course change – you’re going to overshoot attack pattern 2 and head out for open space.”

“Patch me through to the Fleet Admiral!” he screamed as the thought of open space hit him, “Patch me through NOW!” 

* * *


Fleet Magister Pustria, frustrated with the lack of progress its cruisers were making, decided to move the False Emperor in to battle. Surrounded by a cloud of swirling escorts, it headed for Imperial attack pattern two – a group of one Lunar-class and one Dauntless-class cruisers and another frigate holding mid anchor over the planet. The Divine Glory still continued on its wide, eleven hundred knot parabola, and seemed to have been overlooked by the Chaos fleet.

The first engagement lasted only twenty-two minutes – with the Lunar-class cruiser, the Steadfast, firing off its lances too early and shooting wide of the incoming rabble holding skirmish formation, and the Wings of Varagar having to desperately compensate with a salvo of torpedoes whilst both ships could manoeuvre to broadsides. 

But despite these base mistakes, the forward attack party of Chaos destroyers taking the brunt of the cruisers’ wrath were punished cruelly, and withdrew after three were destroyed outright, their severed hulks leaking fluids and atmosphere into the void in great geysers of vapour. Whilst spent batteries reloaded and shields recharged, the frigate, the Imperial Hunter, chased down and destroyed another Archenemy escort, soaking up its weak shields with light ordnance before landing a torpedo in its starboard engine. The vessel blew into smithereens.

It seemed to have the desired effect on the Chaos speartip, which broke off and bunched to defence formation – that was, until the False Emperor utterly smashed aside one of its own escorts out of sheer frustration, and the fleet reformed into attack pattern. Forward batteries of Pustria’s flagship made light work of the Hunter as it struggled to get back to formation, and the fifteen-strong Chaos fleet advanced inexorably onwards Imperial attack pattern two, amidst vast chunks of the Hunter’s architecture.

Which left the two remaining cruisers no option but to sell their lives as dearly as they could.


----------



## Zenith_of_Mind (Mar 12, 2010)

Awesome as always Zwan! I have really enjoyed the story so far, with all the space battles we rarely have the chance to read about. The only thing that bothered me a bit is the constant change of story between Grant and Fulden. I understand that's your writing style, but sometimes it can get a bit wearing to read, when after couple paragraphs the story switches to another character. If only there was more text between the switches, it would be alright. 

Since I can't give any advice on improving the writing style which is already on par with professional writing, I'll at least list several minor mistakes I have seen, and make myself useful.



> “Message sent and acknowledged, sir,” his SVO shouted.”


Quotation marks behind "shouted" shouldn't be there. 



> Except the False Emperor.


I'm not sure what exact rules are, but I think that ship names should be in italics to discern them from the rest of the text.


> “Let’s have these bastards in the next hour,” Grant growled, viewing the myriad of holoscreens appearing in front of him, documenting the initial longer range exchanges before the Chaos fleet moved in to broadside range. “Engines, full speed ahead, twenty degrees to starboard. I want the Terror,”


The comma after "Terror" should be a full stop.



> “Are you alright sir?”


A comma after "alright" would be appropriate. 



> the Titan Imperial slowly glided upwards


Missing capital letter.

These are all minor things, but I reckon its always good to polish up any material you write.

Cheers


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## Mossy Toes (Jun 8, 2009)

I have to say, this story is rather more grim and gripping than the Vandemarr series. There, we know that the main character is going to survive and continue. Here, everyone's fate is in doubt...and everyone is tried more severely.

Delightful stuff, as always. I'm going to confess that I haven't the time to reread it all (again), but know that I still firmly support it.


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## Zwan (Nov 18, 2009)

Zenith_of_Mind said:


> Awesome as always Zwan! I have really enjoyed the story so far, with all the space battles we rarely have the chance to read about. The only thing that bothered me a bit is the constant change of story between Grant and Fulden. I understand that's your writing style, but sometimes it can get a bit wearing to read, when after couple paragraphs the story switches to another character. If only there was more text between the switches, it would be alright.


Thank you very much! Since this is a very old piece (nearly three years now!) and has already been 'published' in Warp Rift in this form, the actual story/writing style isn't going to change; although if I were to rewrite it now, I'm sure it would indeed contain much more text for each section. 

The space battles are a guilty pleasure of mine, they start featuring much more heavily in Vandemarr tales later on. I'm glad you like them. 

Thank you for pointing out the grammar and spelling mistakes, it seems no matter how many times you comb through something, without a fresh pair of eyes you're always bound to miss something. You are of course, absolutely right, it's these kind of mistakes that need pointing out and correcting. 



Mossy Toes said:


> I have to say, this story is rather more grim and gripping than the Vandemarr series. There, we know that the main character is going to survive and continue. Here, everyone's fate is in doubt...and everyone is tried more severely.
> 
> Delightful stuff, as always. I'm going to confess that I haven't the time to reread it all (again), but know that I still firmly support it.



Thanks mate. You're right about Vandemarr - once _The Source _was written it's pretty clear he's going to be a character of mine for a while (although that's easy to say with hindsight isn't it ).

Old friend, I wouldn't expect you to re-read it a third time! But I thank you for your support. Once my exams are over (June 9th) I will have plenty of time to finish Plaything - for the love of the Emperor, hold me to that!


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## Zwan (Nov 18, 2009)

*FIVE​*

“Sir! I have Captain Fulden on the line, a secondary patch from the Varagar. He says he has an urgent message for you,” Grant’s SVO shouted, clearly perturbed by the state of the man on the other end of the line.

“Municipal, please,” the Fleet Admiral said, reviewing the holoscreens in front of his face. “I don’t have time for private conversations.”

“Aye sir,” the man said, and a brief crackling and wash of static played across the municipal address system.

“My L-lord? Sir is that you?” came a gibbering, sorry excuse for a voice from the link.

Grant suddenly abandoned the holoscreens and turned his undivided attention towards his SVO. Never had he heard such a seasoned Captain as Fulden sound so damned…frightened. He almost felt revulsion at the entirely alien emotion.

“Clean that signal up,” he snapped.

“I can’t sir, it’s over two thousand kilometres away!” the SVO protested.

“What in the name of the Emperor is he playing at?” the Fleet Admiral growled, before depressing the ‘transmit’ button on the top of the arm on his steel throne. “Go ahead Fulden. This had better be bloody good.” 

“Oh G-God Emperor!” Fulden suddenly screamed at the sound of his master’s voice. “Sir there’s a s-s-spawn on my shi…ou have to help me! My First Officer…d me, he’s dea…! My whole crew’s miss…!”

“For Throne’s sake somebody get me a better line!” Grant roared. “Fulden, calm down son, what’s happened? My Vox tells me you’re over two thousand kilometres away,”

The sounds of Fulden’s violent sobbing preceded the next broadcast, and an utterly terrifying, multi-tone roar stabbed across the link, making many of his crewmen flinch. The Vox Officer’s console briefly lost power with the Warp interference, and one of the astropaths cried out in pain. 

“My wh-whole c-crew’s dead, lord! My First Officer …ned on me, I h-had to kill…! S-spawn fed off the plasma in the power…ore! It was in my power core!”

Grant’s superhuman blood ran cold. His eyes locked with his First Officer’s.

“Fulden, listen to me and listen carefully,” he said. “You need to bring the ship around. I can only help you if you head back for formation.”

“It’s too late sir, I’m blin…I-I’m flying by myself…” another loud crackling threatened to sever the link entriely.

“We’re losing signal,” Vox shouted.

“I’ve got him!” Auspex shouted triumphantly. “He’s eighteen hundred kilometres galactic northeast, heading 197 degrees spinward, vertical pitch plus zero-point-one degrees on a bearing 101-997-003, one thousand n’ three knots,”

“Throne,” Grant whispered. “Fulden, can you hear me?”

“..PEROR, PLEASE HELP ME!” came the Captain’s strangled cry, before the link crackled with static, and a low monotone hum filled the municipal address. 

“Sir! Both the Steadfast and Varagar request immediate aid! Attack pattern two outnumbered! Estimated remaining shield integrity at twenty-six minutes and falling!”

A surge of adrenaline churned the Fleet Admiral’s stomach. He ran a thousand event scenarios based on their current situation through his head in the blink of an eye, and decided on a course of action.

“Alright, everybody’s attention, now!” he bellowed into the amphitheatre. “Vox! Prioritise the Glory’s signal, no excuses! Transcribe everything you hear and report back to me.” Grant swivelled his head to the left of the amphitheatre. “Engines; make ready to move, full ahead by full. Helm! Set course, bearing 016-798-302, 3 degrees spinward, vertical pitch plus 0.1.”

A chorus of unquestioning ‘ayes’ answered him.

“Vox, the following message please, Imperial attack pattern one; all ships to move in support of attack pattern two, skirmish formation, protocol four. Command delegated to Rear-Admiral Winchester for the time being, on my authority. I shall be with you all ASAP. Always remember! Every ship lost is ten thousand souls to the Emperor’s halls! And whilst the honour may be great, I think we could all put them to better use in this life!” he paused. "The Emperor protects."

His SVO gave him the thumbs up. “Message sent and acknowledged sir.”

“Excellent," Grant breathed. "Engines, full ahead by full, you have your set bearing,”

“Aye aye sir,” 

Grant paused, seemingly deliberating his next words. The power core still hovered at an annoying 89%, and Fulden’s words had chilled him more than he’d been ready to admit. There was definitely something bad going on. His mighty, directly-hardwired bulk could feel it.

“First Officer!” he said after a short pause, his mind made up. 

“Yes sir?” Mulbern turned to the Fleet Admiral from his dais, gripping the rail in front of him with sweaty fists. 

“Take two squads of armsmen,” he paused again. “No, three, take three.” He exhaled loudly. “As quickly as you can, investigate the power core. I’ll be on the net if you need me.”

Mulbern gulped, but his face was one of resolve. “Aye sir. Very good sir.”

“And Mulbern?”

“Yes sir?”

“Find me Grechte.”
* * *


It was silent inside the latrine cubicle block. Dank, grey metal panels, dripping with foul fluids, formed a rank of ten, each with rusting basins piped with some very dubious plumbing skill on the wall opposite. Vermin ran freely over the flooring, and everywhere was the stink of faeces and urine.

Equerry Grechte, aide de camp to the Fleet Admiral and naval crewman of ten years, sat on the tarnished steel latrine seat, breeches round his ankles, and groaned. His stomach lurched violently this way and that, and his head hammered with an intense headache, a terrible buzzing filling his ears. 

“Urgh,” he moaned, saliva drooling from his flaccid lips. He retched, twice, three times, but nothing but bloody bile was left, the stinking crimson mess dribbling down his chin. Blood also trickled from his nose in intermittent gouts, and he wiped it away when he wasn't concerned with clutching his heaving guts. 

“So much…blood,” he mumbled to himself through cracking lips, “so...much blood,” 

A horrible convulsion saw something soft and red slap into the toilet bowl, followed by a series of sickening and inhuman sounds. His stomach did another somersault, and he retched again. Beads of perspiration were dripping from his forehead as his brow screwed up in pain. More blood trickled from the corners of his eyes. His uniform was in such a mess already that he no longer cared what fluids were sprayed onto it. There was only pain. Blood and pain.

Acceleration warnings briefly sounded over the municipal vox – or at least, that is what he took them to be. He couldn’t hear properly with all the buzzing in his ears. 

Khorne.

Grechte snapped his head upwards, wishing he hadn’t when his stomach felt like it was attached to his chin by a rope.

“Who’s there?” he asked, beginning to cry. “Who said that?”

Silence.

He whimpered, feeling thoroughly sorry for himself. He cried out in pain as another convulsion racked his body, fiery tendrils spreading out through his blood vessels. His heart was going twenty to the dozen, and it felt as though it would burst out of his sternum at any second.

Khorne.

The damned noise again! “Who’s there?” he shouted through the pain barrier, clenching his teeth as the inevitable aftershock washed through his system.
And then came his answer. 

In front of him, a great incision appeared in the fabric of space and time, light pouring through the extra-material dimension despite the rift remaining impossibly black, and Grechte shielded his eyes. The pain became so intense he retched again, more blood splashing over his tunic. The tear was growing wider and wider, encapsulating the cubicle, surrounding him. He could hear a million voices all in his head at once, and a buzzing so loud it threatened to burst his eardrums.

Khorne, the rift said, followed by a terrible crescendo of; “BloodfortheBloodGodBloodfortheBloodGodBloodfortheBloodGodBloodfortheBloodGod! BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! 

The chanting reached a terrible climax, but just when Grechte reached the cusp of sanity, it stopped as suddenly as it had started, and an uneasy silence ensued. 

He opened his eyes. The Warp rift had gone, and something had definitely come through – he could feel it’s presence in front of him.

“Who’s there?” he whispered, for what would be the last time, despite the pain gnawing at his innards. He wept bitterly as the invisible presence moved towards him, it’s breathing clearly audible, echoing in the cramped cubicle. 

Grechte began to scream as two blood-red, deeply malevolent eyes appeared in the air in front of him, shortly followed by a great, leering mouth swarming with flies.

“Blood for the Blood God,” It whispered with a grin.

Grechte screamed as it tore into his flesh.


----------



## Zwan (Nov 18, 2009)

*SIX​*

Mulbern decided to run down the arrow-straight corridors of the command centre, away from the bridge and out towards the elevators that would take him to the barracks decks and garrisons. Though slightly scared, he couldn’t help but feel a thrill of excitement that he would be leading the men into fight whatever filth they found in the power core – and pride that the Fleet Admiral had chosen him to do it, above everyone else. 

A brief acceleration alarm warbled into life for a few seconds, before dying down again. Mulbern ignored it, making sure his footing was good as the G increased slightly.

His boot heels clunked loudly against the metal grilling of the cramped, gothic corridors, attracting the attention of various command personnel – Guard Generals and crewmen in the planning chambers surrounding the bridge – as he continued on his way. The prospect of firing a weapon again sent surges of adrenaline through his veins. 

He was just reaching the end of the command centre and entering into the officer’s quarters, when Grechte appeared outside a latrine chamber.

“Grechte!” Mulbern called. The Equerry turned to face the First Officer, and to say Mulbern was startled would have been an understatement. The aide de camp was immaculately turned out, his midnight blue tunic and jacket straight and clean, his cream breeches pressed, and his boots polished to a mirror shine. His dark hair was slicked back, his Navy-style goatee trimmed and perfect. 

He casually tipped a white glove to his forehead on the First Officer’s approach, who now felt decidedly self-conscious about his appearance.

Mulbern stopped just short of the man, out of breath, with a fresh sheen of perspiration marking his brow. 

“Admiral wants you on the bridge, ASAP,” he breathed.

“That’s just where I was heading, First Officer Mulbern,” Grechte replied, and with a warm smile, turned on his heel and strode towards the command centre. 

* * *


An unnerving silence had descended over the Divine Glory. Unnerving because, only minutes before, the command centre had been filled with the snarling and snorting of a rampant spawn. 

Now it had stopped, Fulden didn’t know what to do. 

He didn’t exactly know what a Chaos spawn was – and thus what it was capable of. He didn’t know if it could trick him into thinking that it wasn't there, or if it had some kind of teleportation abilities, or had turned invisible – not that it mattered when he was blind. But the simple fact was, the Captain had gone from being insanely frightened and knowing that the spawn was charging towards the bridge with all the speed and fury it could muster, to being insanely frightened and not knowing where the spawn was. And he felt a whole lot worse as a result. 

The vox headset crackled into life, and with all the courage he could muster, he scrabbled for the controls to try and clean the signal up. He was therefore surprised when the broadcast came in loud and clear.

“Fulden, this is Grant. My SVO tells me you haven’t said anything in a while. If you can hear this, then you are on approach in excess of one thousand, that’s one-zero-zero-zero, knots. We’re coming to board, but you need to stop. We only have one shot at this. If you do not slow down, I cannot come back for another turn, I must look to the enemy attack. Please acknowledge.”

Fulden felt his heart race at the sound of the Fleet Admiral’s voice, and unglued his lips to respond, but found he couldn’t. Still absolutely terrified by the spawn and traumatized almost beyond repair, the Captain found that he had been struck dumb out of sheer fright. As desperately as he tried to shout back across the vox, his larynx stubbornly remained unmoving.

“Fulden, please acknowledge,” came Grant’s voice again.

Fulden began to experience a sensation not unlike drowning. He tried to shout again, but his throat was sealed. Only in dreams did such things happen.

It was then he realised he was suffocating.

“Fulden, acknowledge son, or we’re heading back,” Grant’s voice came a little more frantically. Soon he would think he was dead. If he didn’t already.

Fulden began to clutch at his throat, feeling his epiglottis locked over his windpipe. The seizure racked his body with pain, and he felt warm blood streaming from his tear ducts and ears. 

Khorne.

Fulden wheeled around, gasping for air. He could feel his skin bulging under his tunic. Buzzing once again filled the air, rising in volume. He tried to scream. He tried to weep. But there was nothing.

Only Chaos.


----------



## Zwan (Nov 18, 2009)

*SEVEN​*

The bridge of the Titan Imperial had long since fallen silent at the prospect of boarding a tainted ship, and Grant almost relished in the relative quiet. The fact that Fulden wasn't responding to the Fleet Admiral's hails seemed to be having a positive effect on them, however, which he noted with some disgust. He and Fulden hadn’t always seen eye to eye, but he was not about to abandon any Imperial Captain to such a horribly gristly fate on principle, no matter who they were. 

A holoscreen informed him that the power level had risen from 89% to 100%, and he cancelled it, satisfied. Mulbern hadn’t been gone long enough for it to have been his doing – Grant doubted that the First Officer had even reached the barracks deck yet. But it was a relief, at least. He knew it had been vermin all along, not a spawn. He would have felt it if there was a spawn on his ship. He still wanted to talk to Grechte – his uncanny link with the power was still to coincidental to be left un-investigated. But he suspected nothing would come of it.

He turned his attention back to the link to the Glory. 

“Please acknowledge,” he said once more, unenthusiastically, for what would be the last time.

He sighed loudly as the link faded for a second, filling with some kind of buzzing static he wasn't familiar with. When it resumed, he could hear heavy breathing fill the link.

“Fulden? Is that you?” he asked suddenly, feeling his heart leap.

“Yes Fleet Admiral,” the Captain replied in a perfectly calm voice, “stopping as ordered. Have you my bearing?”

“What? Oh, y-yes, yes I have,” Grant replied, uncomfortably flummoxed. The voice was so calm for a second he thought someone else had come on the link. “Fulden…is everything alright? Are you alright?” he asked cautiously.

“Of course I am sir. Slowing down now sir. Estimated stopping distance at four hundred kilometres.”

“Get on it,” Grant shouted into the amphitheatre. Another chorus of ‘aye’s answered him, and he felt the Titan Imperial slow down to docking speed. 

“Hold in there Fulden. We’re coming for you,” Grant said, wishing the Captain would sound frightened again. 

“I know you are, sir,” Fulden replied, not entirely reassuringly. “I know.”

* * *


By the time Mulbern reached the barracks deck, he was thoroughly out of breath. He came to a clumsy stop outside the bulkhead, which had been daubed in various army obscenities, and held up his signet ring to the passcode slate. The greasy doors slid aside into their magnetic alcoves, and he walked into the wide, arched corridor that ran down a full two kilometres of the ship, each wall lined with hundreds of billets. 

The deck was in chaos. Battle stations had meant every soldier and naval armsman had made ready for counter-boarding actions, and it mean a lot of screaming by NCOs, a lot of shouting by troopers, and a lot of swearing on both sides. 

Luckily, however, because the Guardsmen had already been on QRA for planetfall, they were all already armed to the teeth. All Mulbern had to do was pick three squads, and he would be set.

But it was proving more difficult than he had originally anticipated. As he waded through the grizzled crowds of Imperial Guard, he found himself attracting a lot of unwanted attention – most directed at his apparent cowardice and ‘fancy uniform’, and all of the comments interspersed with generous amounts of expletives. 

“Sergeant!” he shouted to a nearby Guardsman, “Can I have a word with you please?”

He didn’t quite catch the man’s reply, but he was sure it wasn’t ‘yes, of course First Officer’.

He pressed on, heading for the armoury whilst now trying to find any naval armsmen. They would be infinitely more helpful than Imperial Guard, having also to live on a ship and therefore not partial to the same prejudices as the troopers.

He caught the glimmer of a man in grey form-moulded body armour, and instantly made for him. He smiled as he recognised the man – Sergeant Grippen, of the battlegroup’s 6th naval armsman company. 

“Grippen!” he shouted. The man turned towards him; grubby, tired and unshorn, he looked positively haggard. But when he saw Mulbern, his face brightened noticably.

“Mulbern!” he shouted back, and as the First Officer reached him they briefly embraced. “What in the name of the Throne are you doing here?” he asked incredulously.

“I need you,” Mulbern replied, “three squads, possible trouble in the power core. You up for a bit of action? I have clearance from the Fleet Admiral himself.”

“Emperor yes,” Grippen breathed, “I’m getting so sick of this place. What kind of trouble?”

Mulbern hesitated, “look, I’ll tell you on the way. Just get three squads together, and I’ll meet you at the bulkhead.”

“Aye aye, sir!” the Sergeant replied, grinning, as Mulbern moved off through the crowds again. His memory served him well, and he soon reached the armoury – little more than a square hole in the wall preceded by a shelf. He got a lot of angry looks as he pushed to the front of the queue, explaining that he was very high priority; but luckily no-one was stupid enough to start a fight. 

He reached the stand, and confronted the quartermaster.

“I need the most lethal shipside weapon you have,” he said in one dramatic exhalation. 

The quartermaster squinted at him. He was a fat man, wearing a simple grey smock covered with gun grease, and a cigar poking out his thick lips. 

“On ‘oo’s aufori’ee?” he asked.

Mulbern was slightly taken aback for a second by the man’s appalling diction. 

“The Fleet Admiral himself,” he said confidently, almost feeling the jealousy behind him. The quartermaster squinted at his proffered identity card, and bustled away to some dingy corner of the armoury. He returned a few seconds later with a bulky carbine of some sort, looking like a stripped-down heavy bolter but with a wooden finish. The man slapped a few boxes onto the shelf as well. 

“Medium-range stubbah, subsonic ammo,” he said. “I ‘ope what yer shootin’ at is big,”

“I don’t,” Mulbern replied, shouldering the deceptively heavy weapon.

He left the armoury shelf, thrusting the ammo boxes into a canvas satchel, and once again pushed his way through the jostling crowd of milling Guard. He reached the bulkhead to see that Grippen had indeed assembled three squads of naval armsmen – something which he was visibly glad about. He couldn’t deal with any more snide Guard comments at the moment.

The men Grippen had picked seemed a good bunch – most were noticeably strong, with the traditional buzz haircuts of the naval counter-boarding wing. They carried an array of subsonic ammunition-wielding weapons, to prevent someone putting a hole in the hull and collapsing an entire compartment through explosive decompression, and the standard grey body armour naval armsmen.

“So, you gonna fill us in?” Grippen grinned.

“I said I’d tell you on the way,” Mulbern replied, and punched the door release catch. 

"That good huh?"

Mulbern laughed out loud, though why, he didn't know.

"Just be prepared for the worst," he said, waiting for the doors to open once again.

Behind him, the band of armsmen exchanged nervous glances, before donning their helmets and following him into the dark corridors of the deck. 

* * *


Grant felt the ship slow down as if he himself was slackening the pace after a long run. The massive hulks of the two mighty cruisers slowly approached each other – a manoeuvre one might make to come to broadside – and the irony of their situation was not lost on him.

He wondered if the irony was lost on Fulden. 

The man had gone from being completely insane with fear, to completely calm, in a matter of minutes. He could forgive the Captain’s fear – alone with a Chaos spawn was enough to frighten anybody. But the sudden change in his demeanour meant something more, of that he was sure. Fulden had made no mention of the spawn when his temperament had reversed. In his calm – almost lucid – state, it was as if nothing had happened. 

There were only two possible explanations the Fleet Admiral could think of: either the spawn was gone, and Fulden was a very adaptable character; or the spawn was in Fulden.

The first scenario, he supposed, was viable, but it did mean that if the spawn had just up and vanished, Fulden had not only overcome the whole ordeal, but overcome it in a spectacular fashion. It didn’t make enough sense, and he dismissed it quickly.

The second scenario seemed equally unlikely. Grant had never heard of a spawn possessing someone – as far as his knowledge reached, a spawn was simply a pure manifestation of Warp energy, channelled into Chaos Champions who, for some God-Emperor unknown reason, seemed to think it was a good thing. A physical being could not have possessed his Captain. Besides, the only thing it would explain was Fulden’s change of mood. He was pretty damn sure a spawn didn’t know how to pilot an Imperial cruiser. 

Thus, the second scenario was abandoned. 

He would have asked Mulbern were he there, but Grant was tiring of his First Officer’s suspicions of sorcery – the main reason why he had had him personally dispatched to oversee the mission to the vermin in the power core. His assumptions of Chaos magicks working themselves into his equerry had unsettled his crew, and the man deserved to be berated for that. But his absence would do for now. He quietly terminated the personal vox link to his First Officer, to give him some peace. Their findings of the state of the power core would have to wait until the party got back.

Which, hopefully, would have been filled with a productive interview of his aide de camp.

“Two kilometres until docking,” his Senior Auspex Officer shouted. “One kilometre. Target vessel is stationary and locked down.”

“Good,” Grant said, “Vox? Inform the garrison, port side.”

“Sir?” 

“Inform the arms garrison that we will be docking port side,” he snapped again irritably. 

“It’s only –”

“I’m not taking any chances dammit!” Grant bellowed, nowhere near as angry as he thought he should be. He decided the next man to defy him would be shot. 

“Aye aye, sir. Very good sir,” replied his SVO.

In front of him, the proud grey hull of the Glory grew on the holoscreen. 

Soon, he thought. I will destroy you.


----------



## Zwan (Nov 18, 2009)

*EIGHT​*

The freight elevator to the power core level was an old, corroded machine that had no business on a working Mars-class cruiser, squealing down the shaft in an unbearable cacophony of metallic, rusty shrieks. It clanked and rocked as it descended the decks, so loudly it almost drowned out what Grippen was shouting.

Almost. 

Mulbern wanted to crawl up into a ball and block his ears. But he knew if he had told the Sergeant what he and his men would potentially be up against before, they wouldn’t even have come this far. And he knew that the elevator opened directly into the power core. At least once they reached the bottom, they wouldn’t have a choice but to investigate. 

“A Chaos spawn?” the man shouted incredulously. “A CHAOS, SPAWN!”

“Maybe,” Mulbern replied, holding his hands out palms first – the way one does when backing away from a large ugly man wielding a knife. “It hasn’t been confirmed.”

Behind the Sergeant, the eighteen armsmen made the sign of the Aquilla and clutched Imperial rosary beads, reciting various prayers and litanies. They looked absolutely petrified.

“On this ship?” Grippen continued.

“Look, we don’t know, it’s just an investigation. Fleet Admiral thinks it’s just vermin.”

“Vermin don’t leak…Warp energies,” the Sergeant said in an almost comically low voice, now particularly frightened. “Only Warp energies have the power to shut down a power core. We’ve all heard the stories.”

“It could have been a blown power coupling…” Mulbern said helplessly. He wasn't even convincing himself anymore. “You know how the rats chew through them all the time?”

“Enough to shut down 60% of a Mars-class cruiser’s power?” Grippen laughed bitterly. 

“Look, what do you think the Guard do when they find them planetside? They fight them. They kill them! They aren’t invincible. All we’ve got to do is shoot it!”

Grippen snorted, his chest heaving upwards with the motion.

“You be my guest!”
He gripped the guard rail next to him, turning to address the First Officer in a manner that only foreshadowed imminent matter-of-fact statements. 

“We aren’t Guard, Mulbern,” he said dangerously, “We’re armsmen. We garrison ships, playing bloody cards!’
There was a pause, and Mulbern was about to speak when Grippen cut him off again. 
“Any anyway, this is a damned flagship! We counter enemy boarders once a year – if we’re lucky! Do you think anyone has made a serious enough dent in the side of the Imperial to ever warrant a –”

“Sergeant, SHUT UP!” Mulbern suddenly interjected, sick of the armsman’s whining and almost tempted to backhand him across the face. “If there is a Chaos spawn on this ship, then by the God Emperor we shall find it and kill it, or so help me I’ll report you to the Commissars faster than you can say insubordination! Are we clear, Grippen? Enough of your complaining!”

The elevator screeched and ground to a halt, the long line of runes ribbing the doorway blank excluding one glowing red icon. 

They had reached the power core level. 

“Alright everybody, concentrate,” Mulbern said, not in the strong voice he hoped it would be. “We’ll be fine.”

The Emperor only knew how he had been excited by the prospect of this mission. 

The elevator doors slid open.
* * *


It wasn't long now. He could feel the power inside him; hear their voices in his head. They tempted him with promises of riches and glory beyond his wildest dreams. They showed him images of the Lords of Terra paying him homage, of beautiful exotic women, unclothed and beckoning him, images of hoards of riches, precious stones, of sumptuous feasts, of great halls and palaces. All this they could promise him, and more.

His head throbbed with pain, but it was a good pain. The buzzing in his ears had turned into sweet melodies. The mess in his breeches had gone, and his uniform was immaculate.

He was confident, swarthy, astute and powerful. He was a better man than the Fleet Admiral. They told him so. 

And he believed them.

It wasn’t long now. He could feel the energy of another Anointed nearby – not on this ship, but on another, close to them. The other could sense him also. They could feel each other, taste each other’s blood, smell their sickly-sweet odours of pride and arrogance. They shared visions of sweet corruption, of decadence and debauchery. They would become one, soon. When they were closer.

Grechte rounded the corner of the bulkhead, and strode silently on towards the bridge. 
* * *


“The garrison has been informed, sir,” his SVO said quietly. “Port side, as ordered.”

“Docking position reached.” 

“Engines locked down.”

“Shields at defence level five.”

“Port side batteries online and loaded.”

Grant sat in silence, only half listening to the information being shouted at him from all directions. Of course he already knew all of these things. He knew the Titan Imperial like an extension of his own body – which, in essence, it was. 

He stared at the external sensor pict images broadcasting directly onto the holoscreens in front of him. The long, crenelated hull of the Divine Glory filled more that three of them, and still extended beyond the reaches of the picters. Docking umbilici waited inside the Imperial, their potential energy like adrenaline in his stomach.

Dare he board? He had never been so unsure of something in his long, long life. Every second it took him to think, he knew it was costing the lives of the thousands of crewman under his command currently engaging the Chaos fleet without him. But there was a feeling he just couldn’t shake. A dark foreboding, and ominous feeling that deeply unsettled him. If there was a Chaos spawn in the ship, it would be easy enough to destroy. But if Fulden had been tainted – or even worse, possessed – what then would he do? Kill him? And how would he know he even was? His perceptive faculties had abandoned him. Now they were this close to a tainted ship, he suddenly wasn’t so sure it was just vermin in the power core. And hadn’t Fulden mentioned something about his First Officer assaulting him? Had his First Officer also been possessed and tried to kill him? Because of the Warp energies in his power core? By boarding the ship, he would virtually be inviting the danger in. 

He tried to reopen the direct vox link to Mulbern, but found a temporary electronics disruption prevented him. 

“Sir?” someone asked. He didn’t know who. He didn’t look up. “What are your orders, sir?”

Grant wasn't about to admit he had no idea what to do. He needed to get control of the situation and fast.

He thought for another ten seconds, weighing up the pros and cons of possible scenarios so quickly it would have taken a normal man many days to do the same. Once he reached his decision, he knew he was going to have to see it through to the potentially bitter end.

“Vox? Anything on the net?” he asked in a tired voice. 

“Nothing sir. It’s deader than a corpse in there, sir.” 

Another prolonged silence. 

“Let’s move in,” he said, finally. 

In the cold gulf of space, the Imperial’s docking umbilici noiselessly slammed into the side of the Glory.


----------



## Zwan (Nov 18, 2009)

*NINE​*

The power core level was hot. Very, very hot.

The huge domed chamber was racked with hundreds, maybe even thousands of plasma powerstats, all glowing a fantastic cerulean in their dank metal alcoves. Steam and heat distortion misted the air, vented from a million kilometres of piping, coolant ducts and couplings, and cables smothered and draped the ceiling like a myriad of rainforest vines. Every second there was a crackle and shower of sparks, as the hyper-ionised plasma gasses worked up such powerful electrostatic charges they briefly overshot their containment chambers – but the mighty core was long since used to dealing with such minor occurrences.

The core.

It was simply breathtaking to behold. In the dead centre of the dome, the cables and piping from the uncountable plasma stats converged like the roots of a colossal electrostatic tree, and surged towards the ceiling. The ‘trunk’ exuded frightening amounts of energy – with bolts of electricity like miniature lightning storms flashing across the aperture in the dome’s apex. It almost defied the imagination – yet it made sense how such a mighty ship, a Mars class battlecruiser, would need an equally astonishing power supply. 

Mulbern was the first through the elevator door, stubber prone. There was a suspended walkway that led directly to the trunk – yet certain lapses in safety had meant that no signs were visible to warn of the high energy death awaiting anyone who got within a hundred metres of it. 

He, along with the eighteen-strong party of armsmen behind him, began sweating instantly. Hair stood absurdly on end as the static charge almost succeeded in polarising their bodies, and hearts palpitated. In the short time it took them to accustom to the environment, electrostatic energies had completely invaded their bodies.

They walked on cautiously, weapon butts to shoulders, eyes on sights. Low energy lasgun barrels swung round in short quick arcs. They flinched with every shower of sparks, with every crackle of power. By the time they reached the halfway point on the seven-hundred metre walkway, they were all torpid and thoroughly out of breath.

“What now?” Grippen asked the First Officer, beads of perspiration dripping off his forehead. He was sweating so heavily it was dribbling through the gaps in his body armour.

Mulbern turned around, his eyes frantic.

“I don’t know,” he said, “everything looks fine here. I mean, I’m no expert on what any of this stuff does…”

The others looked about, thoroughly perplexed. They would need a legion of techpriests to tell them how it all worked. Mulbern hadn’t the faintest clue what it was supposed to look like.

“Let’s keep looking,” Grippen said. “Then at least we can say that we didn’t see anything and mean it.”

Mulbern thought for a second. 

“There was something in the power core,” he said slowly, “definitely. It came up on the sensors. A power drain of some kind.” He brought an arm across his brow. “Which means there’s definitely something still in here, because Grant hasn’t told me the power’s come back online yet.”

“What do you mean?” Grippen asked, licking his lips.

“Think about it. Grant’s got a direct vox link running,” he said, tapping the comlink on his epaulette. “Don’t you think he would have said something if the power had come back online? To save us wasting this effort?”

A series of thuds rang out through the ship, and it vibrated for a second. They all instinctively ducked.

“What was that?” one of the troopers shouted.

Mulbern strained to hear, but the throbbing hum of the power core formed some kind of pressure wall blocking his ears. 

“Dunno. Sounded like boarding tubes,” he said. “Grant said we’d be heading for the Glory. Maybe they’ve found it.”

“And we’re stuck down here,” Grippen said bitterly.

There was a pause. 

“Spread out,” Mulbern said to the armsmen after a while, “see what you can find. And for Throne’s sake don’t get too close to the core.”

They obeyed, exchanging further nervous glances before moving off down the walkway. Up ahead was an intersection, and the group split into three squads, covering all the angles. Mulbern and Grippen watched them for a while, before turning back to each other.

“There’s a spawn on the Glory as well,” the First Officer said when he was sure the others were out of earshot, spitting a wad of saliva into the tangle of pipes surrounding the walkway like some kind of thicket. It sizzled and evaporated quickly. 

“What?” Grippen asked. 

“Yeah, all the crew’s missing. It’s just Captain Fulden left. Last I heard of him he was stuck in the command centre with the damned thing, blind as a serval. Grant’s taken us in to investigate. Nasty business.”

The Sergeant took little time to digest the news.

“Shouldn’t he just be destroying the ship?” he blurted. “If it’s tainted, he –”

“Er, Sergeant? Remember what we’re looking for?” Mulbern said, horrified that the man hadn’t picked up on the obviousness of the predicament.

“Right. Of course,” Grippen replied, slightly embarrassed. 

“It’s not one rule for one, another for another I’m afraid. At least this way he might be able to save the Captain and then destroy the ship.”

“But what about this ship?” Grippen asked. “Has anyone been tainted here then?”

“We don’t even know if there’s a spawn yet.” Mulbern replied, squinting into the distance briefly. “Admiral thinks it’s just vermin. But if it was a spawn, there’d be Warp energies all over the place. Especially with interference in the power core. I mean, everything’s dependent on the core.” 

“I suppose,” Grippen replied sullenly. “I mean the Fleet Admiral especially.”

Mulbern froze, his skin breaking out uncomfortably in gooseflesh despite the heat.

“What...did…you say?” he asked slowly, rounding on the Sergeant. Grippen was slightly taken aback.

“Well, I mean…well, um, you were talking about Warp energies in the power core, and that because everything’s linked to it, they’d be susceptible to Chaos taint. All I was saying was that if the Admiral’s directly hardwired to the power, if someone was tainted near him – or if he was tainted, it’d shut down the power. Amongst other things. Right?”

Mulbern stared at him, knowledge and understanding exploding through his neural strata like a sledgehammer. Of course, it all made such perfect, perfect sense. He should have seen it before. Dammit! How could he have been so blind!

“There’s nothing in here,” he said quietly, glancing back to the door. “There’s no spawn in here.” He was sweating feverishly now, and it wasn’t the heat. He looked at Grippen. “Don’t you hear me? It’s not in here!”

“W-what, it’s gone?” Grippen asked, a little too hopefully.

“No you idiot!” he broke out into a jog, a run, and finally a sprint, his boots thudding loudly on the not too stable walkway. “Get the men to the bridge, and fast!” He yelled behind him. 

“Why?” Grippen called after him, but Mulbern didn’t answer. He hadn’t even heard properly. Blood was crashing about in his head, and adrenaline knotted his stomach painfully hard.

The spawn wasn’t in the power core. 

The spawn was in Grechte. 
* * *


Imperial attack pattern one was, as both the Captains of the Steadfast and Varagar acknowledged, thoroughly doomed. Holding a shaky mid-to-low anchor over the planet, and with a combined shield integrity of less than 50%, even with the imminent arrival of attack pattern two, there was simply no way they were escaping the conflict with their lives. 

The mass of Chaos ships – fifteen all told – had finally aligned into working attack formations. Cruisers doubled or tripled into gun lines, escorts in support, whilst the False Emperor moved amongst them effortlessly, its obscene bulk gliding through the miniature gulfs between vessels. With attack pattern two still a comfortable eight thousand kilometres away, and the Titan Imperial over twenty thousand kilometres distant, Fleet Magister Pustria wasn’t so much prosecuting the Imperials as toying with them. Huge salvos of torpedoes flashed and flickered across the void, their potent plasma warheads exploding with muffled crumps. Energy beams and lances arrowed through space, forming expanding circles of white-hot energy as they punctured defences and melted great sections of hull into slag. Broadsides thumped, recoiled; hammered. Fantastical arrays of munitions chattered through the void, blossoming into sprays of miniature blasts and flashes as they thumped into overloading void shields.

Despite the overwhelming odds, Imperial attack pattern two, in traditional 701st form, was determined to make a good account of itself. Using admirable skirmish formation tactics and improvising long-successful attack protocols, they were able to employ their only strength admirably: their size. They were small as a formation, and thus manoeuvrable. Lightning pincers worked best on the medium size Chaos cruisers – the ones slow enough to take two full broadsides without shifting fast enough, but small enough to not carry masses of batteries. Similarly, hit and run on the larger cruisers worked equally excellently. The Archenemy escorts could be simply engaged in a straight exchange, and held at bay extremely comfortably – even rammed. 

For the twenty-six minutes of remaining shield integrity the Imperials had, they had destroyed four Chaos escorts and two cruisers. Glowing hulks floated seamlessly through the frozen wastes of space, leaking atmospheres, debris and corpses into the void. The crenelated forms of the two-strong Imperial skirmish formation soared and dived through the cross-grid of lethal fire, avoiding targeting beams, missile locks and the myriad of other volleys. Executing exhilarating turns through the frictionless environment, using inertia to guide them round in mind-bending three dimensional manoeuvres, they powered through Chaos formations, unleashing salvos of high energy death and destruction in their wake, ripping up great sections of enemy armour, decompressing bulkheads and overloading void shields. 

But their success was not to last.

As the two ships span around each other in attack protocol 91 – rising from the planet and towards the underside of the battle plain, the Wings of Varagar was suddenly engulfed by a volley of purple-contrailed Chaos torpedoes. Usually slow enough to penetrate void shields, the warheads sped greedily towards their target – wargear bioptics relaying their path directly back to Pustria’s sickly yellow eyeballs. 

But the torpedoes did not pass through. Instead they slammed into the Varagar’s shields, and spat out thousands of swirling balls of disease-ridden frag directly into the cruiser’s voidspace. Unhindered by the vacuum of space, and the shields themselves – designed not only to prevent enemy munitions but radiation, solar winds and particle migration – they tore straight into the observation deck, puncturing three metre-thick bulkheads like they were paper. Crewmen were ripped apart like rag dolls; flayed and utterly liquidated, along with power conduits, electrical piping, coolant piping, and thousands more vital arteries necessary for maintaining the ship. They lanced through the command centre, trailing with them explosively decompressed chunks of debris and meat. The Captain’s skull was burst like a watermelon by a lump of polybonded carbon – before the remainder of the bridge utterly dashed him to pieces as it was wrenched out into space by the gaping hole in the port hull. 

In the night time sky of Omicron Septimus, the last seconds of the Varagar would have been mistaken for little more than another star.

Yet to the Steadfast, its utter destruction couldn’t have been more damaging. Flares of expanding gas licked upwards from the blossoming supernova of exploding Imperial cruiser and sent the auspex haywire. Hundreds of lumps of hull swarmed the ship’s targeting consoles, blurring the obvious distinction between Chaos munitions and hunks of wreckage. Its void shields were bombarded, energy massing to exact counter-force where it was not needed, and sensor clusters simply shut down – most fried by the ionising plasma radiation from the Varagar’s power core. 

Its last message was sent on the long range vox at 04:34 Imperial, and logged in the receiver on board the Titan Imperial a full two minutes later.

Spinning blind and out of control, the Steadfast was struck square on by the False Emperor’s prow-mounted quad-power energy lance, and boiled away into nothing.


----------



## Zwan (Nov 18, 2009)

*TEN​*

It had been quickly decided that the Imperial Guard should board the Divine Glory, and not the naval armsmen. Though conflict between the two fighting wings was inevitable, the decision had been made for several very obvious reasons.

Firstly, the Imperial Guard had been on Quick Reaction Alert for planetfall, and were thus geared up and mentally prepared for combat. Though it had been argued by some that the naval armsmen were in a similar state, the Fleet Admiral had ignored them.

Secondly, they were better assaulters than the armsmen, and undoubtedly had more fighting experience.

And finally, Grant deemed them highly expendable. If they didn’t die on the Glory, they would most likely die on Omicron Septimus. At least this way, he’d still have his armsmen should The Imperial be boarded later.

Thus, three hundred men, from two separate companies of Guard, lined up in ill-fitting pressure suits in the docking tubes, nervously awaiting orders.

At the head of one of these lines was Captain Greeves, a somewhat grizzled veteran from the Corusdor V campaign – a three-year action that had seen him promoted twice, poisoned, shot on several occasions, and gassed. Decorated with the mandatory scarring of a lifetime soldier, the forty-one year old Guardsman was a respected and competent leader, and had been the obvious choice to lead the speartip into the ship. 

Yet right now, he was shaking like a leaf in the wind.

The reason was simple enough. Through his twenty-four years of service, he’d never once – quite strangely – encountered the Archenemy. It was unusual, though not unheard of. A protracted series of campaigns – the longest of which lasting eleven years – towards the coreward flank of the galaxy, had kept him comfortably out of the reach of the Eye of Terror and other Chaos hotspots. Tyranids, Eldar, Orks – all of these he had faced and defeated – or at least retreated from.

But never once Chaos.

Of course, he’d heard of them. He’d heard the stories – the bleeding, the headaches, the obscene symbols that defaced and degraded the Imperial creed and made grown men weep. He knew of the four gods that dwelt in the Warp. He’d heard of the manifestations of the Warp, the daemons, unspeakable horrors, the mutants, heretics, cultists, spawns. He’d heard of their raids of innocent and defenceless cities, their massacres of civilians, their foul acts of ritual and blasphemy.

Though he had boasted encountering Chaos Marines as a lowly Corporal, fighting off hoards of twisted cultists and mutants in desperate last stands; though he had said he’d seen the twisted and dark energies of the Warp and emerged a wiser man, he had not. 

And now he thoroughly regretted all those stories. Because now the men looked to him for guidance. Many of them were young – and though experienced, had yet to face the horrors of the Warp. 

He felt a lump in his throat, as fear took hold. He wanted to cry. He gripped his medium-power lasgun harder and harder, feeling his body tense up. In front of him – less than three metres away – the pressure-suited adepts worked to clear through the melted lump of the Glory’s hull blocking the end of the docking tube, where the heat exchangers had welded the umbilicus to the ship’s armour plating. 

They were working too quickly. They would have the blockage cleared in the next minute. And then it would be up to him to lead one hundred and fifty Guardsmen into the cramped confines of the Imperial cruiser, locate the bridge, secure Captain Fulden and any surviving crew members, and withdraw them to the medicae level for extensive testing. 

They had been warned of taint. The Litany of Warding should prevent the infections of the Warp permeating their pressure suits. The priests had seen to that. Should any man succumb, however, he, along with the Commissars accompanying them, had been ordered to terminate with extreme prejudice. 

They had also been briefed on the course of action to take when encountering Chaos spawns – not spawn, spawns. That had seen Greeves’ stomach turn somersaults.

“Shoot them,” the CO had said, “shoot them long and hard. With medium-powered lasguns, it’ll take longer than it would planetside. But with sustained fire, they’ll die like anything else.”

Brilliant, Greeves had thought. 

Some of the men had been eager. Eager to engage the Archenemy. He didn’t want to disabuse them. If anything, he wanted to be eager. But he was just filled with dread, and a dark foreboding. 

He was nothing more than an impostor and a coward. A true Guardsman feared nothing. He should have only to think of the Emperor’s Halls, the Great Feast where merriment was eternal and tales were exchanged with His audience and blessing, and his fear should melt away. 

But it didn’t. 

“Keep your movements tight,” he whispered over the comlink, “and keep your eyes peeled. You never know what these Chaos bastards have in store.”

Of course he didn’t know. He’d never fought them. But, pleased with his encouragement – it did after all, give the impression he wasn’t afraid – he raised his lasgun prone, and trained it on the door. 

The blockage was finally cleared with another slice of the energy-cutters, and a thick, circular slab of metal thunked onto the floor of the docking tube.

“Let’s go! Go go go!” Greeves said, running headlong through the hatch.

* * *


Grant watched on the holoscreen in front of him as the boarding party of Guardsmen charged headlong into the Divine Glory, a nervous anticipation gnawing at his stomach. 

“So it begins,” he whispered.

“Sir!” his SVO shouted, “Message from the Steadfast, high priority.”

“Municipal, please,” Grant said. The link filled with solar static for a few seconds, before the message began, hundreds of alarms sounding in the background and almost drowning out what the speaker was saying. 

“This is Captain Ourne of the Steadfast, 04:43 standard Imperial time, seventh day, two hundred and thirty-first year, forty-first millennium. Our sister ship, the Wings of Varagar, is gone, Lord, and I fear we’re not much longer for this life. We’ve made as good an account of ourselves as I feel possible, true to the oaths we took on the founding of the 701st battlefleet. It’s been an honour serving under you, sir…the Emperor pro-”

The sound of frantic shouts and crackling blasts filled the link, before it terminated.

“Message ends,” his SVO said quietly. 

There was a pause whilst all eyes turned to the Fleet Admiral. He could feel them watching him. Feel them doubt his command. They should have gone to join attack pattern one, they all thought. Then the Steadfast and Varagar would not have been destroyed. Instead they were out here, investigating a tainted ship which would have to be destroyed anyway. Their unspoken blame and hate stung him deeply. He felt himself flush red with embarrassment and anger.

“It is regrettable…” he began, but faltered. Did they dare mutiny against him? A Fleet Admiral of the Imperial Navy? A man who had dedicated entire centuries of his life to its service? “Those that perish in the service of the Emperor are…” his words failed him again. What was wrong with him? His abilities of speech seemed to be abandoning him. His vision briefly blurred, and was then restored. The holoscreens in front of his face wavered and crackled. He could hear a distant buzzing over the municipal address system. 

“Can…anybody else…hear that?” he slurred, a line of drool running off his bottom lip and onto his breastplate.

“Hear what, sir?” a crewman asked – though it was distant, and though being said from a thousand kilometres away. He could hear his breath ragged in his ears, and blood pulsed painfully in his arteries.

“What’s…happening…to…me?” he asked slightly more urgently, the buzzing increasing in volume. He could hear the shouts and cries of his crewmen – some inquiring as to his wellbeing, some uttering profanities as the ship lurched slightly to the side. His direct interface with the cruiser’s hardware was jumping on and offline, his spasming hand sending the vessel to starboard and port. Though the docking tubes holding them to the Glory were flexible, there was only so much punishment they could take. 

“Power…failure!” he mumbled through his lethargy.

His vision failed completely, and blood drooled from his nose. Hundreds of warning graphics about his ship support powerstats and interface piping flickered across his vision. Pain like no other crippled his left hand side.

“Sir? I believe you wanted to see me?” asked a familiar voice.

“Whosaidthat?” Grant blurted.

“It’s me, sir,” the voice said again, infinitely more malevolent.
“Grechte.”

* * *


Mulbern was still sweating nervously, willing the elevator to speed up. It trundled through the decks, ascending in typical ramshackle fashion, the runes lining the side of the door documenting its progress from the bowels of the ship to the upper decks. There lay the command level, containing the higher-ranking officer’s quarters - huge staterooms with luxurious dining halls, decorated with expensive furniture and fitted with exquisite bathrooms – and the command centre and bridge, nearer to the observation deck and upper embarkation level. Only those with the right clearance could make it into the command level, as allowed by various biometric scanners implanted on all the elevators. 

“Come on, come on!” he shouted. Only rusty shrieks answered him.

Followed by the complete cessation of movement - a power failure.

“Throne,” Mulbern whispered. His microlink remained silent, alive only with static. “Dammit! Dammit dammit dammit!” he cried, each time kicking the doors as hard as his foot would tolerate.

It wasn't too late, he told himself. There was still time. He thought for a precious few seconds. There had to be another way out of the lift. He looked around desperately – there! The maintenance hatch! 

He crouched and leapt upwards with all his might, grasping hold of the two handles flanking the hatch that allowed access to the roof of the elevator. Years of press-ups and crunches in his quarters had served him well, and he found that with a few acrobatics, he could swing himself upwards with enough force to hook his feet over the rim of the opening. 

He gasped with the effort, hauling himself up in his uncomfortable, sweat-drenched uniform, until his hand found the winch cables on the top of the elevator, and he hoisted himself out of the cramped confines of the carriage and into the musty, stale air of the shaft. Looking up, the long atrium stretched away from him, dark and dank, with small lights marking the progression of decks. 

“Emperor,” he breathed. It would take him an age to climb the ladder that ran the length of the shaft. And even longer to climb the winch cables.

Grasping the descent counterweight cable, and aiming the stubber, he fired off a stream of clumsy rounds, loud reports echoing off the metal walls of the shaft. The hawsers snapped and flickered all about him, and Mulbern, narrowly missing evisceration, cried out in pain as the cable yanked hard on his shoulder.

“Sorry Grippen,” he said as the lift fell away, and he was pulled inexorably towards the command level.

* * * 


The corridors of the Divine Glory, they all agreed, had a strange smell to them. It was a pungent odour, and not and obvious one, though none of them could get used to it. It persisted, clinging to the nostrils, a constant, smarting scent that reminded Captain Greeves of rotten alcohol – not that there was such a thing.

The ship was also eerily empty. He wasn’t entirely sure what kind of ship it was – a Dauntless maybe. But he did know that some of these ships could have in excess of three thousand men just to crew it, and countless thousands more in garrison and in transport. Thus, despite their size, it was fairly common – particularly if it had been on action stations – to see ensigns and ratings rushing about the corridors, or armsmen loitering, waiting for orders. 

On the Glory, however, the only sound to be heard, as they sped through the corridors, was their own boot soles thumping on the metal grilling of the floor. That, and the terrible grinding of the docking tubes as they threatened to snap under some immense and unknown strain.

“Something’s not right, sir,” one of the Guardsmen behind him hissed.

Like he didn’t know it.

“Well this is a tainted ship,” he hissed back over his armoured shoulder. His brown-smudged, yellow ochre armoured shoulder. Perfect for the desert terrain of Omicron Septimus. Decidedly useless for the drab grey interiors of a ship. 

He had long since decided, as they covered the first few kilometres of decking, that he would conceal his utter cowardice with an absurd combination of bravado and generally being an arse. This involved getting angry at the most innocent of questions to make it look like he’d heard them all countless times before – and answered them; and running a lot, throwing caution to the wind.

He was fully aware that he was jeopardising the lives of his company; but if it meant they thought he was brave – and, above all, he had defeated the Ruinous Powers before, then he just didn’t care. 

He suddenly held a fist up over his right shoulder, and extended a flattened palm towards the decking. The men behind him stopped and crouched low.

Greeves sidled up to the wall, and inspected the ship’s schematic bolted to the metal.

“If we’re here…” he breathed to himself, “then we need to go…hm. We could take this…right, I see, so that leads up…there.” He turned to his men – though to call all of them men wouldn’t be entirely accurate. There was a healthy sprinkling of men – mostly officers. The rest were boys. Seventeen, eighteen. Too young to see what he had lied about seeing. Probably. 

“Alright,” he said, “we need to keep moving down this corridor. At the end, there’s a stairwell that leads up to the command centre. That’s where Captain Fulden should be. Everybody understand?”

The men nodded or grunted their assent. He didn’t think any of them suspected he was a coward. That was good.

“OK, let’s move out!” he shouted, spinning on his heel and charging off down the corridor again.


----------



## Zwan (Nov 18, 2009)

*ELEVEN​*

“Grechte…you…son…of…a…bitch,” Grant murmured through useless lips. Only the blurred shape of his equerry was visible to him through his now thoroughly limited vision. The buzzing was intolerable in his ears, a terrible crescendo of noise that made him weep. His limbs lay limp and lifeless. The swirling cocoon of holoscreens had vanished. His interface was weakening by the second. 

“Shut up,” Grechte snapped, licking his vermillion fingers clean. “Pathetic man. Soon your blood will just be another meagre gallon for the Blood God, your skull just another for his mighty throne. You disgust me with your…” his lips curled around glistening fangs. “…self-righteous indignation.”

The former aide de camp turned and quickly decapitated Grant’s Senior Vox Officer with a rusty, sword-like extension from his forearm, relishing in the bloodletting. A fountain of arterial crimson soaked the equerry’s uniform, and he cried out in his – to him – erotic display of brutality. 

“Blood! YES!” he shouted to the high, domed roof of the bridge, laughing manically. 

The remaining crewmen – lined up and bound – gasped and struggled. Those that had been armed – the auspex and engine officers – had been the most swiftly dealt with. Soaking up their hard pistol rounds like a sponge to water, he had sunk his teeth into the first officer’s neck and dragged out a long cluster of stringy gore, before stuffing his hand in the fresh cavity and ripping out what remained. The second officer was then punched through the stomach as he retched at the sight, wet viscera showering out the gaping exit wound like a burst water balloon, before both corpses were quickly flayed and impaled on broken wall piping. The rest had charged him, but their feeble attempts were akin to those of children, and it had been no difficulty in restraining them. 

Of course, to say that the Fleet Admiral hadn’t been too happy would have been a severe understatement: but his direct neural interface with the ship had left him irrevocably impotent. The power core had been shut down because of his link to it, which had in turn weakened him. That, along with the all-pervading Chaos presence, had meant his apoplexy was all the stronger – and he was all the more powerless. 

Now the remaining crewmen had been lined up and bound – thirty four in total – and had, like the SVO, been executed in all manner of ways – unless they succumbed to Chaos. 

So far, the Fleet Admiral had noted with some pride, none of them had. But with twenty-six left, and the punishments for renouncing the Warp Gods becoming increasingly violent, he didn’t much rate their remaining mental strength. 

And his fears were confirmed when his Junior Auspex Officer, kneeling in urine-soaked breeches, chokingly accepted Grechte’s offer.

* * *


His pumping legs were screaming in oxygen debt. His muscles burned with all the ferocity of a ship’s engines. His breath rasped loudly in his heaving lungs. Sweat streaked and dripped across his face.

Shedding his stiff midnight blue jacket, so that only a white string vest remained to cover his muscle-knotted torso, First Officer Mulbern sprinted through the officer’s quarters as fast as he possibly could, as fast as his perspiration-soaked legs would take him. He gritted his teeth as stitches gnawed his innards, as the lactic acid built up in greater and greater quantities, as his heart palpitated painfully below his sternum, as his bicep bulged and pulsed with gripping the stubber.

None of it mattered now. His own physical discomfort was paltry in comparison to the Fleet Admiral’s safety. He no longer cared for anything – only finding, and killing Grechte as quickly as humanly possible. 

The preservation of the Titan Imperial was all. His single purpose, as if everything in his life was geared up to this deciding moment. This was his time, now. It had already happened to the Glory. It damn well wouldn’t happen to his ship. Not while there was breath in his lungs.

Biting his lower lip as the pain became almost unbearable, he upped his pace another notch, and charged towards the command centre.
* * *


The stairwell to the command centre wasn't the dingy access shaft Greeves had imagined it would be. It was a twenty-metre wide, claret-carpeted, marble flight of the most decorated and ornate steps Greeves had had the pleasure of gawping at. Of course the officer’s quarters and command centre required something of a grand setting, but this was…

Was…

He was drooling.

“Captain?” A lieutenant enquired, appearing next to him. Hallen, Greeves remembered. Lieutenant Hallen. 

“Yes Lieutenant?” he asked, giving his lasgun a cursory check.

“Are you alright, sir?”

“What? I’m fine, man, get back into line.” Greeves snapped, scanning the top of the staircase. It was the last place he wanted to be in the entire Imperium, yet he felt…drawn to it somehow. Like it was beckoning him.

“Alright men, let’s move it! The bridge is just up ahead!” he shouted, waving an exultant arm forward.

The hundred and fifty men under his command chased him up the staircase, their greasy boot heels marking the exquisite carpeting, lasguns prone. Following in Greeves’ fearless example, the men felt their own spirits lift. Perhaps the Archenemy wasn’t as bad as all the stories they’d heard. Perhaps it was all folly.

Their hopes were quickly dashed as, after a short run through the command centre, they were met by fifty impaled corpses – the sad remnants of the Glory’s bridge crew – and Captain Fulden, draped in a cloak of flayed skin, standing in the middle of them. 

* * *


Grechte smiled triumphantly as the trembling officer looked into his eyes. Little more than a boy – perhaps nineteen – his eyes were red raw and brimming with tears. His lower lip stuck out in a disgusting fashion, and snot dribbled from his nose.

The aide de camp was less than satisfied he would make a fine Chaos warrior – but that didn’t matter. As long as he was willing to accept the Warp Gods, they could bestow upon him whatever gifts they saw fit.

“You, boy, would embrace the light of Chaos, and leave behind your…false Emperor, your pitiful devotions?”

The boy choked back his tears. Anything was better than the prolonged and terribly painful death that awaited him should he refuse. Anything at all. He would abandon all his peers to survive. He would relinquish all his faith. If it meant living. 

“I-I-I w-will, m-my l-lord,” he half-whispered. 

Grechte smiled, licking his lips.

“Very well,” he said, eyeing the junior officer.

“Don’t listen to him son!” Grant cried from his delirium, stuck fast in the steel throne. “Follow in the example of your brothers! Join them now, and dine in the Emperor’s Halls! It’s not too late!”

“Shut up you overgrown tin can!” Grechte snarled, “Your time will come…soon.”

He laughed, turned back to the boy, ignoring Grant’s fever-bound, pathetic raging behind him, and closed his eyes, placing his hands on the boy’s head.

As long as he was willing, it didn’t matter.

“Do you renounce your Imperial teachings, boy, and accept the gifts of the Warp Gods? That they can make you strong? That they make you a slave to your utmost desires, a champion of darkness, as eternal as the stars, as powerful as a thousand mortal men? Do you pledge to join the legions of Khorne, and swear to deliver the blood of the innocents to the Blood God? To deliver their skulls to His throne? Do you swear to do all these things and more, in HIS service?”

The boy looked up, transfixed by the gouts of purple steam venting from Grechte’s body, the blood dripping from the hem of his trousers, the deep black eyes. In them he saw power, his for the taking. He saw riches beyond his wildest dreams, hosts of beautiful women, entire legions of men under his command, slaves to him. He was worshipped as the god he should be – as he was destined to be.

And the evil in his heart, tiny and locked away, grew. It turned to greed, to malice and power-hunger. It grew into hatred for the Imperium, disdain and mocking for its teachings, murderous intent for its followers, and utter, utter devotion to the energies of the Warp and its dark gods. 

“Blood for the Blood God!” Grechte roared in ecstatic frenzy as he felt the boy’s soul open up, as he felt the Warp permeating his very essence. With the on-looking line of terrified crew – both at the spectacle itself, and the expression on the boy’s face – and the Fleet Admiral as an audience, the thing that had once been Grechte raised the Junior Auspex Officer into the air, a cloud of malicious purple smoke surrounding him, and channelled the energies of the Warp into his flesh.

The boy screamed. He screamed in pain as his body writhed. The bridge filled with an awful stink, of rotting flesh and sulphur. Blood began to slip and slash from the boy’s body, dousing the terrified crewmen, splattering the pallid face of the Fleet Admiral. The screams of a thousand damned souls surrounded the amphitheatre like some satanic chorus, increasing in fervour and volume. Glass shattered, instruments ruptured. The ship’s astropath, his shaven skull ribbed with tubing and pulsing violet veins, exploded, showering those next to him with oily detritus. Noise and light tore great seams in the air, and the men and women clawed at their ears and eyes.

Then all was silent.

The change from the cataclysm of sense-bombardment to complete soundlessness felt like a physical blow, like a wall of pressure had descended. When they dared open their eyes, they wished they hadn’t. The boy had been transformed – and it wasn't into anything recognisable.

It was a snarling mass of rubbery red skin – a bloated sack of Chaos energy and Warp detritus. It writhed and screeched – the only discernible feature an elongated head on the end of a twisted, sagging neck, with rows of serrated, jagged teeth. Arms, tentacles and other appendages extruded from the seething mass of flesh and organs intermittently, with no real purpose other than to maim and kill. Hooked scythe-like talons whickered through the air, fused to knarled bones. The imprints of screaming faces stretched and indented the skin, forming agonizing rolls of wart-covered membrane that drooped and leaked pus of the floor. A haze of purple steam surrounded the beast, and it stank – the same rotting, sulphurous smell, but concentrated and distilled a million times.

In the few seconds he’d been exposed to the Warp, he’d been crammed full of as much Chaos energy as possible, and it had mutated and contorted his form into a being greedily and murderously sought by many dark Champions.

“The Gods have been…kind to you, my son,” Grechte breathed, marvelling at the spawn. It screeched and flailed in response, eviscerating a young, bound ensign. Warm, wet intestines spilled out over the deck, and the young man could do nothing but squirm in horror, waiting for sweet death to take him. 

Grechte laughed at his agony, and turned his back from the row of empty-bladdered crewmen to looked at the Fleet Admiral. 

“Oh Admiral?” he called mockingly to Grant’s sagging head, “Look what I’ve brought you!”

* * *


“That son of a bitch!” Grippen growled, as soon as the deafening smash of the elevator, crumpling into the base of the atrium far below, had subsided. “He’s sliced the winch!”

The other armsmen gave voice to their concerns. Having brought no water, they were rapidly dehydrating in the plasma-charged air. Sweat no longer appeared in patches – it had soaked their grey fatigues an entirely darker shade.

“What’re we going to do now?” a young Corporal asked – Dunn. 

Again, the others voiced their concern. 

Grippen stroked his unshorn chin, the stubble scratching his fingers nicely. He stuck his head into the shaft. It was a long way up to the command centre.

“Guess we’ll just have to start climbing,” he sighed, eyeing the rather long metal ladder that extended up the length of the shaft.


----------



## Zwan (Nov 18, 2009)

*TWELVE​*

Greeves stopped and stared. 

Fulden seemed surprised to see them, having built a small world of his own and become thoroughly absorbed in it. The helm had been fashioned into a sick altar of some kind, with flayed skin draped over a frame of coolant piping making the table itself, and votive candles for the Emperor’s Deliverance placed around it. The Imperial corpses – originally having come from the ceiling, judging from the particular pattern of blood splatters across it – had been impaled and arranged into an eight-pointed star, with a great pool of blood in the First Officer’s dais. Chunks of organs and meat decorated the walls, fluids smeared into symbols depicting obscenities and blasphemies. The air was rife with a healthy purple mist that stank – a lot worse than the ‘rotten alcohol’ smell they had discovered earlier.

And everywhere seemed to have...aged. The bolted metal walls had rusted and warped, relatively new consoles were nothing more than heaps of old junk with cracked glass displays - and everything was grimy and dusty, like the interior of the notorious 'space hulks' they'd all heard stories about.

“Emperor save us,” Greeves whispered, taking it all in.

Fulden wheeled round at the mention of his former god, droplets of blood spinning away from the cloak of skin. His appearance was horrifying, to say the very least; great black spines extruded from his back, dripping a greasy black fluid and pinning the cloak to his hide. His mouth was fanged, and his eyes had merged into one single ocular ball – a purple sclera with an enlarged black iris. Horns sprouted from his head – great, misshapen, bovine horns dangling ragged strips of torn flesh. His face and remaining skin was red and smothered in obscenities, and imprints of faces had stretched great folds of it outwards in snarling, screaming mouths. Black claws had replaced nails. His lithe frame was padded out with great knots of bulging muscle, marked with black veins. 

What little remained of Captain Fulden had long disappeared behind a veil of Chaos filth. If fact, Greeves wasn’t exactly sure how he’d known it was Fulden in the first place. The…thing in front of the shocked assembly of Imperial Guard bore little resemblance to him. 

“Captain?” Greeves asked in a shaky voice, his muscles trembling. He brought his lasgun up and trained it on the ‘man’ in front. The Guardsmen around him did likewise, their movements rubbery and uncomfortable in the pressure suits. 

The thing laughed at the mention of its former rank, a mighty cackle that seemed to bend the walls of the very Materium itself. 

“Fire at will,” Greeves said quietly over the microlink, squeezing the trigger of his lasgun. "For Throne's sake fire,"

It wasn’t Fulden anymore. 

* * *


Mulbern almost suffered a coronary when he finally burst into the bridge – not just from the unbearable punishment he’d just forced upon his sweat-slicked body, but from the terrible sight that confronted him from within. 

The remaining crewmen – about twenty, he quickly guessed, were bound and lined up on their knees. Roughly ten were dead – a stretch of mutilated corpses, dismembered and headless, adorned the decking beyond them – and another, a young man, was bleeding and gagging into unconsciousness, his intestines sloshed out onto the grilling. 

But that was not all. 

Equerry Grechte had become a giant figure, a beast of a man; his body bulged with muscle, his features were bulky and distorted, and he was surrounded by a malicious purple haze. A wide pool of blood marked the floor around him and dripped from his long black fingernails. Perhaps more remarkable was what lay beyond him – a real beast – a three-metre sack of Chaos filth, screeching and rolling, dribbling pus and blood everywhere.

Mulbern recoiled in horror, both at the stench that assaulted his nostrils – the smack of urine, rot and death – and the sight of the two Warp monstrosities themselves. 

“What have you done?” he cried, lifting the stubber and training it on the spawn.

Grechte, who surprisingly hadn’t noticed the First Officer’s somewhat dramatic arrival, span round angrily. 

“What in the name of Khorne do you want?” he bellowed, extending a finger.

Mulbern felt his heart skip a beat. Never had he been so conflicted between fear and rage. His hands gripped the stubber tighter, and he shivered uncomfortably. 

“Put that down, boy, or you’ll kill us all!” Grechte shouted. Mulbern decided against telling him it was subsonic ammunition. It would give him the upper hand if it forced the former aide de camp to think twice before attacking.

“Get back, traitorous dog!” Mulbern shouted back. The spawn writhed with more vigour, clearly vexed, though the First Officer found it difficult to believe there was any form of intelligence behind the swirling bulk of decay. 

Grechte laughed, lowering his hand. 

“You have no power here, Mulbern,” he spat, a mad grin adorning his hideous features. “One wrong move and I’ll have your Admiral’s head faster than you can squeeze the trigger of that…toy you’re carrying.”

“We’ll just see how much of a toy it is when it’s ventilating your despicable hide, Chaos filth,” Mulbern spat back – though in truth, the sight of the obscenities disgracing the man’s flesh were enough to make him weep. 

Grechte laughed again, a deep basso rumble that acquired a frightening smatter of overlapping voices. Mulbern swore he could see shapes moving around the Equerry, just out of focus. Even his shadow seemed to have a mind of its own. 

“Put it down,” Grechte snapped, suddenly serious. The eviscerated boy on the floor coughed violently, tears streaming down his face. It was a sad wonder he hadn’t died yet. 

“Not on your life,” Mulbern replied through a grimace. He risked a quick glance over to the Fleet Admiral, who had long since fallen unconscious. Only basic lighting remained, giving the bridge a dark, gothic feeling. 

Grechte reached down and hoisted the boy up, his innards sliding out of his body – though still connected by wet red ropes of tissue. He winced, the pain having long since sent him into shock. 

“I can save him,” he whispered enticingly. “Look at your fellow crewmen, Mulbern. Look at my powers. I can save them. I’ll start with the boy. Look at his face. Look at the agony he’s in. I can make it one hell of a lot worse, Mulbern. Or I can make it all go away.” He licked his lips again, feverishly. “You cannot begin to understand my power.”

“I understand it enough to know it’s evil, Grechte,” Mulbern hissed, lifting the stubber up to train it on the boy’s head. Would he trade off a mercy-killing for his enemy’s knowledge that the weapon wasn’t powerful enough to breach the hull? 

One look at the boy’s pitiful expression gave him his answer. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and fired. 

Grechte howled – first in anticipation of a white-hot flash of pain, then in triumph as he realised the slug was still firmly embedded in the boy’s remaining brain. 

“Ha!” he cried, throwing aside the corpse, “They wouldn’t even give you a full-power weapon,”

Mulbern snarled his anger. 

“It’s powerful enough to waste your pathetic body,” he growled, leaving the stubber trained on Grechte.

The Equerry chortled nauseatingly.

“But not my beautiful here,” he said, stroking the side of the spawn’s rubbery flank. “And right now, I’m the only thing keeping it from slicing your Admiral’s sick stomach wide open.”

In the few seconds it took the First Officer to digest this news, he was full of a rage so profound his jugular threatened to burst. 

“You honourless son of a bitch!” Mulbern roared, screaming his frustration to the ceiling. “I’ll have you, you bastard! I swear it!”

Again, his anger was only met with laughter. Grechte hoisted the next crewman up – an ensign Mulbern didn’t recognise. 

“Just try it,” the Equerry said, casually opening the man’s carotid arteries with a claw. Hot, pressurised blood fired from the wound in regular gouts, and the man gasped and spluttered, an expression of horror plastered across his face.

“STOP IT!” Mulbern screamed, weeping and powerless. If he shot the spawn first, in the time it took him to unleash an adequate salvo of rounds, Grechte would be on him – whether with magicks or fists – and he didn’t much fancy his chances against a Chaos-possessed brute. If he shot Grechte first, the spawn would kill the Fleet Admiral – or him. 

It was an impossible situation, and it was an impossible situation that would soon see the Titan Imperial’s most important crewmen dead. All whilst the many more thousands of men and women aboard the cruiser sat in their billets or garrisons, with no access to the command deck, completely oblivious to what was happening. 

If he left to get help, they would all be dead when he returned – with the possibility of there being a greater number of spawns. If he stayed, they would all be killed, until he decided to take his chances with either of the…things in front of him.

Or he could wait for Grippen and the armsmen to arrive. But he’d foolishly sliced the hawsers on the elevator, and they’d be confined to climbing up forty decks-worth of ladder to get to the command level. 

How could he have been so stupid?
This was ridiculous. 

He would go for the spawn first. Damn his own life, the Fleet Admiral’s was more important. The crew’s lives were more important! A string of well-aimed shots to the spawn’s ‘head’. That would surely end this…this madness.

In a surge of anger and resolve, Mulbern lifted the stubber, and took aim.

* * *


Fulden span and jerked as the blizzard of medium-power las shots battered into his toughened skin, flaying great sections of flesh off and knocking him to the floor by the sheer volume alone. Steaming blood sprayed off in a haze of black, as the creature was filled with hundreds upon hundreds of cauterised, high-velocity wounds. 

Captain Greeves felt his spirits rise. He’d expected the man – the thing – to have taken more of a punishment, what with all the Chaos magicks available to him. 

But the simple fact was the sheer number of shots alone was killing the Captain. With typical Guard sledgehammer tactics, they holed the Chaos thing’s body until it was no more than a pool of sludgy, spongy mess, slightly smoking in the heat-distorted ship’s atmosphere.

As he looked around, he could see in his comrade’s faces that they were as surprised as he was. Surprised that the tales of the Archenemy had turned out, at least in this case, to be false on the most base of levels. That the wealth of sorcery available to this monstrosity hadn’t been employed. That they were able to kill this abomination in the sacrificial pit it had created.

Greeves suddenly froze, his finger releasing the trigger.

The sacrificial pit it had created.

The 

sacrificial 

pit.

“Cease fire!” he yelled across the microlink, his pulse suddenly rising uncomfortably and his skin breaking out in gooseflesh. “Cease fire! 

The unforgiving hail of laser fire died down almost as quickly as the tirade had started. But even before it had, the transformation was already taking place.

On the bridge of the Divine Glory, the remains of former Imperial Navy Captain Marcus Fulden were rising into the air, forming a spinning, swirling ball of entrails and gore. Droplets of blood flickered out in all directions as the mass rose further and further up into the air, hovering like a physical manifestation of the malign. 

“Lieutenant?” Greeves called, transfixed by the ball and utterly terrified, “Vox Beta Company. Tell them to get off the ship. Now.”

“Sir?”

“Do it, Hallen, for the love of the Emperor,” Greeves said more urgently, still not taking his eyes off the ball. 

Voices were rising in the wake of the ascending sphere, chattering like some deranged voxcaster. The ball was suddenly sliced open as spears of purple and red energy stabbed out from it, forming a miniature sun of wholly evil light. Obscene chanting and strange symbols poured forth from the rift in the Materium, making the company of Guardsmen weep.

“Alpha C-Company,” he stammered, his voice barely a whisper, “retreat…,”

But they all stood immobile, watching as the sun span round, faster and faster, the vile Warp energies flickering out like whips. Tendrils of lightning licked the walls around them, stencilling Chaos symbols into the iron hull, grafting screaming faces into the metal. The chattering and chanting reached a terrible crescendo, and the ball lurched upwards, as if propelled by the purple lightning, before suddenly slamming into the deck.

A tsunami of blood vomited forth from the Warp core, hot and steaming, the chattering still staining the air. The screams of a thousand damned souls rose up, and with them came the Daemon, unchained from the Warp, unleashed and ready to wreak a terrible retribution upon the soldiers of the Emperor with an evil and reckless hate. 

It was a huge, crimson, leathery form with colossal veined wings and a bovine head. It roared, bursting eardrums, loosening bowels, and emptying bladders. A profound stench like no other issued forth from its snarling mouth, hitting the company like a physical blow. 

“Throne,” Greeves whispered, feeling a warm dampness spreading about his crotch.

“Run,” he murmured, desperately looking at the petrified Guardsmen around him.

“RUN!”

* * *


After sixteen minutes of formation and reformation, clever uses of approach and attack speed, and general advanced combat preparation, Imperial attack pattern one, under the audacious command of Rear-Admiral Winchester, finally engaged the remaining nine Chaos ships. The two Dauntless class cruisers, the Wrath of Termina and the Terra, adopted attack protocol eight – vertically aligned on the battle plane, with the four remaining escorts forming diamond-defence pattern four. 

The speartip hit the waiting Archenemy ships hard and fast. Though less manoeuvrable than attack pattern two had been, they had the advantage of a greater gun compliment. Indeed, their combined opening gambit of torpedoes alone destroyed the Chaos forward sentry, the Champion of Decay, a fifteen hundred-metre frigate that warped and bloated outwards under the pummelling in a nebula of irradiating energy. 

The Imperials engaged the enemy fleet proper some three minutes later, amidst a hail of pulsing munitions that flashed and exploded against fully charged void shields. A criss-cross of laser fire converged on the frigate the Son of Khorne, soaking up its defences and enabling the Termina to strike it square on with its triple-power starboard lance. An ensuing series of pre-planned lightning manoeuvres quickly saw another Chaos escort, the Bane of the Emperor, transformed to a defunct hulk of red iron, its glowing belly sliced open and leaking ship vitals into the frozen depths of space. 

A further five minutes into the engagement, however, saw the first Imperial loss: the Emperor’s Will, a frigate hit square on the prow by the False Emperor – still considered comfortably distant from its brethren by Winchester, despite the fact that it made the long shot all the more skilled. Its prow-mounted quad-power lance scored a great seam in the armoured nose of the escort, and the immense power of the vacuum crumpled the bulkhead. Power failure from a previous hit meant that subsequent bulkheads failed to lock down, and the decompression was propagated through the top deck, destroying the escort piecemeal. 

Winchester acknowledged the news of the loss from his Auspex Officer with a grim nod of his head. He stood aboard the Termina, and gripped the railing of his command pulpit ever so slightly harder.

He said nothing, but the expression on his wrinkled face already betrayed his guarded thoughts. And the amphitheatre of crewmen knew what those thoughts were, because they were thinking the same thing. 

How much longer was the Fleet Admiral going to take wasting his time with the Glory, whilst they fought and died in his name?


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