The Inquisition War Omnibus by Ian Watson

Author:Ian Watson [Ian Watson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: none
Published: 2012-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Ian Watson «The Inquisition War»

TEN

BATTLESHIPS

CAPTAIN LEXANDRO D'ARQUEBUS of the Imperial Fists stood with Terminator Librarian Kurt Kempka on one of the observation terraces of the Gothic-class battleship Imperial Power.

Fifty metres away, a senior ship's officer paused briefly. His heavy high-collared greatcoat was trimmed with silver fur. His sleeves and breast were adorned with honour braids, nobility brooches, ship's icons and medals. Apower-cutlass hung from his belt.

The officer glanced respectfully at the two puissant Marines, but would not intrude.

Lexandro and Kempka were both wearing pus-yellow dress uniform. Fanged skulls within crosses decorated their knees. Their fur-trimmed cloaks of dark blue were embroidered with sunbursts and icons.

A line of five-lobed windows revealed, a kilometre below, the starlit deck of the battleship. Like some broad gargantuan spear-blade, this deck jutted fully four kilometres into space. Moored halfway along it, the Fists' own troopship seemed almost lost amidst the battleship's Cobra attack cruisers. Nevertheless, that troopship's sleek bulk housed assault torpedoes into each of which half a company of Fists could pack.

The cinquefoil windows also framed a sister battleship sailing in harmony with Imperial Power, gushing a wake of brilliant plasma. How splendid that celestial city of crenellated spires studded with great lasers and bomb launchers! How like an axe-head was the warp keel diving below.

Further off was an ancient ironclad, massively armoured.

'Praise be to Him,' remarked Lex, and Kempka nodded.

Aye, glory to Him-on-Earth. Glory likewise to the indomitable dead primarch who had founded the Fists. Lex's own left fist itched. It often did so when a campaign was gearing up. This itch was within. Upon the very bones of his left hand he had once inscribed with an engraver tool the names of two battle-brothers who had been closest to him in all the universe, though he could only acknowledge this fact after they were dead.

To engrave his bones, he had first dissolved the flesh of his hand in caustic acid. Pain is the healing, purifying scalpel!

The chirurgeons of his fortress-monastery had rebuilt Lex's hand with synthmusclefibre and nervewires and pseudoflesh. True, he furnace-fire. Yet his gesture of devotion had perhaps been admired. Here he was, decades later: an officer, a captain, with six steel had been reprimanded and he had experienced punishment in the nerve-glove - which cloaked his whole body in simulated service-studs in his forehead.

Twelve studs decorated Kempka's forehead. However, the Librarian - a powerful psyker whom Lex held in comradely awe - was a military seer rather than a tactical commander. Lex could faintly smell the Librarian's superhuman hormonal secretions, like a sacred spice.

Lex's finger-bones tingled and prickled. They wished to be encased in a power glove, clutching a heavy bolter and firing it. To

Yet not to fire heedlessly. A Fist was a planner and a thinker. slay is to pray, is it not? Thus Lex had only lost three of his company of a hundred men (and ten wounded) on the planet Hannibal, where the itch had most recently been assuaged in action against alien eldar warriors.

THE FISTS'

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