Deus Encarmine by Jame Swallow

Author:Jame Swallow
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FLS
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2024-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

The Shenlong minefield was a death zone. As Bellus edged her way into the outer reaches of the belt of warheads, Brother-Captain Ideon registered the shapes of broken hull metal and shattered rock. The mines were complex and intricate devices, so his Techmarines had explained to him; they possessed a logic brain capable of determining the difference between an inert form like an asteroid and an active craft like a manned warship. Scattered about the battle barge were the remains of men who had not possessed such information, who had blindly charged into the zone, casting their fates to chance in hopes of running the forge world’s blockade. He detected pieces of an ork rok and other remains that might have been from reavers or perhaps an Imperial ship caught when the Word Bearers took the planet for themselves. Shenlong had become enemy territory, a vast trap for the unwary.

The Bellus was solely his responsibility now, and he extended himself into the ship’s systems. His mind embraced the warship’s machine ghost like a trusted comrade-at-arms. The rudimentary spirit of Bellus knew Ideon well and it welcomed him in, letting the Blood Angel move his consciousness from the fleshy form connected to the bridge throne deep into the barge’s command pathways. Ideon’s psyche sent out impulses that might normally have made fingers or toes flex gently; instead, they made etheric rudders twitch and retro-rockets spit in readiness.

From a great distance, he heard his own synthetic voice issue out from a throat voxcoder. ‘Set condition one throughout the ship, special alert status. All exterior running lights are to be doused. All hatches sealed. All zero critical systems are to be quiescent.’

‘Confirmed,’ Ideon was aware of his aide, the veteran sergeant Solus, as the Space Marine read the ship’s status from a pict-plate. ‘Silent running.’

Irritation underlined Solus’s words, and Ideon felt a swell of sympathy. Like every Blood Angel on board, Ideon’s heart raced at the prospect of action, and the stealthy, slow approach they were now forced to make chafed at him. Ingrained in every one of them was the appetite for combat – not the distant, ranged affair of some warfare, but the immediate thunder of close quarter fighting. Blood Angels lived for the scent of the foe’s open veins, the scream of the dying enemy and the hot rush of power that came from watching them perish, and feeling the blow of their last breath. Ideon knew that some of this brethren pitied him. They saw the crippled old warhorse bolted into his command chair, never to stand again or to rip the unholy apart with his bare hands. But here, in a sacred symbiosis with the Bellus, Ideon still knew the delirious, giddy rage of bloodlust – only now, his hands were energy lances and his fangs the fusion torpedoes eager in their launch tubes. When Bellus killed an enemy vessel, Ideon knew it as if it were he that cracked open the hull and sucked the adversary’s life into the void.

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