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Blackshield – Extract

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Blackshield

Chris Wraight

He had taken back his name.

That was a victory, of sorts – a measure of defiance. Now he bore it openly again, and they called him by it, and he listened to the scrape and rasp of Barbaran tongues reminding him where he had been birthed, and made, and turned.

Kho – rak. Two syllables, pronounced with the rattle of toxin-hardened throats.

Despite all else that had taken place, it felt good to have it spoken again.

Now Khorak looked out over the bridge of the Ghogolla, his ship, heavy and rust-spidered, fitted out for close-range actions. The menials worked below him, their faces hidden behind smeary, gas-filled facemasks. The recycled air tasted faintly brackish.

One of them approached – a mortal, Narag, the ship’s master, clad in XIV Legion grey, white and green, eyes lowered, fists balled in deference.

‘And?’ Khorak asked, pushing the pivoted command throne around on its creaking axis.

‘Commander,’ Narag said. ‘We cannot outrun it.’

Khorak considered that. The Ghogolla was old, and tired. Its plasma drives creaked like stretched leather. Sooner or later they were bound to meet something faster, something that had properly weathered the storm and which could end them.

‘Then we fight it,’ Khorak told him.

Narag looked uncertain.

‘What other option remains?’ Khorak asked.

‘Perhaps, on firm ground…’

Ah yes, that was still possible. They had headed to Agarvian for a reason, playing to their Legion’s strengths. It might be better yet to cleave to that, cheating destruction one more time, rather than face a tilted contest in the void.

‘Can we reach it, though?’ Khorak mused idly, glancing at the grease-specked monitors showing forward augur scans. ‘What manner of hunters are they?’

Narag did not know. It had become hard to detect the enemy from range, what with overlapped ident-markers, false flags and hidden colours. The galaxy was now a patchwork of broken allegiances, and you could only tell truly who your opponent fought for when you looked him in the eye and watched for the twitch.

The intentions of these opponents were clear enough, though.

They were coming to kill.

Khorak spun his throne around again, pushing lazily with a scuffed boot-tip. ‘No matter. Make for Agarvian, but prepare for void-action. It will be tight, to reach sanctuary.’

‘Aye, commander,’ Narag replied with a bow. Before withdrawing, he hesitated. ‘But I will get you there,’ he added, his voice a mix of pride and resignation.

Khorak nodded. That was probably correct, though it would likely be the shipmaster’s last feat of void-craft. They were handsomely out-gunned and out-powered, and it seemed somehow fitting that the tortuous fate spawned on Isstvan had caught up with them at last.

‘I believe you,’ Khorak said. ‘Now get to work.’

They ran hard. The Ghogolla seemed aware of its impending demise and, as if from wounded pride, dragged some vestige of its old thunderous power up from a clanking enginarium. As they were now too far from a Mandeville point to make the warp, Narag took the ship deep under the solar plane of the Leops system, shadowed all the while by their pursuer. They passed within ten thousand kilometres of the silky mass of the methane giant Hereb before breaking for the system’s heart on full burn and in towards Agarvian.

Khorak saw none of this. He trudged down to the principal hangar lodged against the leeward hull-edge, where his remaining sworn brothers waited for him in their full panoply of war – old XIV Legion plate, worn unbroken from the slaying fields of Isstvan through the years of variegated slaughter thereafter.

Out on the apron, his lieutenant, Hesch, saluted him silently, raising a stained chainsword across his shell-pocked chest. The three others took their places on the panels – Urgain, with his carbon-black volkite serpenta, Turgalla hauling a rad-launcher in both gauntlets, Lyphas loosely twisting paired chainaxes from the wrist. Khorak himself was heavier and grander than them all, weighed down by the age-pitted ceramite of Terminator armour, the edges as pale as bleached bone and scuffed with the mottle of a hundred worlds. He hefted a manreaper power scythe before him just as the first hit came in, making the chamber shake.

‘Do not gainsay this,’ Khorak warned, looking past Hesch, out to the bulk of his lone operational Stormbird Skarvor, already prepped on the steaming deck plates. The open void beyond was as black as a scab.

‘We could fight from here,’ said Hesch anyway, sceptical, though still respectful.

The deck shook again, then again. The enemy were finding their range, and soon the power-deprived void shields would start to fail.

Khorak gazed grimly around the cracked hangar vaults. ‘This old hull no longer gives us any advantage. Better to fight with our feet on the earth, as the Death Lord taught us.’

That brought a snort of amusement from Lyphas. Beyond them, Skarvor’s ramp hissed down, exposing the crew bay within. The whine of turbofans started up, making the atmosphere-bubble of the hangar flex.

‘Come, then,’ ordered Khorak, striding out towards the Stormbird. ‘As we planned it.’

But they had not planned it, not like this. The Ghogolla was to have been their watcher in low orbit once they reached Agarvian. For all its decrepitude, it still had manufactoria and powerplants, and once it was destroyed they would be stranded on the world below – alive, but unimaginably far from help.

Still, alive was the key. While their hearts still beat there was always a chance of something more.

More strikes impacted, syncopating closer, smashing through the tortured voidship’s reeling exterior. The hangar began to tilt over, its grav-generators knocked out of kilter, and arm-wide cracks snaked across the ceiling.

Skarvor lifted off, juddering badly as its old Warhawk-pattern engines worked to compensate for the rapidly changing environment. It blasted ahead, making the switch from atmospheric thrusters to void-drives even before the hangar entrance had been breached.

Around them, the Ghogolla slewed across the transverse, skidding through space as though kicked. Clouds of angry static burst out ahead of them, showering from the hangar’s crumbling doors as the fields clashed.

Khorak fed the last of the available power to the Stormbird, and it boosted on pure plasma, skating over the bucking rockcrete and leaving plumes of sparks where the metal grated. Something deep in the Ghogolla ignited, and flames surged up from the breaking deck-level, liquid and roiling.

But then they were out, bursting clear of the disintegrating shell of their home vessel and out into the vacuum beyond, spreading a smear of fire across the deep well of space. Khorak sent the gunship swinging hard over to port, down and down towards the looming gravity tug of the planet Agarvian. As they accelerated out of the exploding remnants of the Ghogolla, debris clanged and scraped across their ship’s spine.

For a few moments, the chained explosions masked their presence. On any pursuing augur the Skarvor would be just one more piece of racing debris, a buttress or a deck-brace flying clear of the Ghogolla’s demise. That was the precious window they needed to get clear, to race ahead, to put themselves beyond the range of the enemy’s guns for long enough to reach the approaching troposphere.

Khorak nudged the control column, bringing the Stormbird’s trim higher, now finding the optimum line of atmospheric entry. They had seconds, no more, before the Legion gunners who had already destroyed their ship zeroed down on the new target.

Khorak found himself wondering which Legion they were from. The Raven Guard, perhaps – the pursuit had been stealthy enough. Or maybe some mingled bastard amalgam of the broken Legions, such as infested the dregs of the universe like a stubborn infection. They refused to die quietly, those ones, even though their hopes were long gone. That might have been admirable, or it might have merely been irritating. Given his own situation, Khorak no longer knew which.

The console before him chimed a warning, and the Stormbird’s tracking system pulled the gunship into a swirling dive.

‘They’ve locked on,’ observed Hesch, coldly.

‘Not quickly enough,’ said Khorak, gauging the distances and seeing that Narag had been right – he had delivered them to sanctuary.

Las-beams lanced down, sizzling through the thickening void, none finding its mark. The planet’s outer layers started to curdle ahead of them, thickening like churned slurry and making the forward viewers race with static. Agarvian was a small world, little more than a planetoid, swathed in gaseous curtains that swayed and trembled, but still it fought their approach.

The Stormbird shook as Khorak piloted it down, its nose soon aflame, its turbofans kicking in again and sucking the gas-rich air in hungrily. More las-beams twisted and spat, following them down, nearly taking the tail off with a direct hit.

But the voidship couldn’t follow them down, and soon the Skarvor had levelled into a surging parallel run across Agarvian’s land-mass below – a seamy swampland of olive-green and grey, boiling with gas. They raced across it, weaving through heavy columns of condensation.

‘Just like home,’ observed Turgalla, wryly.

‘If we’re lucky,’ said Khorak, looking for somewhere to land.

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A Black Library Publication

Published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
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