The Victory: Part 1 by Dan Abnett

Author:Dan Abnett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-10-11T14:06:24+00:00

FIVE

HIGHNESS SER ARMADUKE

At midnight, local time, a new star woke in the skies above Anzimar. The city’s population was hurrying to attend the day’s Sabbat Libera Nos service, which had been held in the temples of the Beati every midnight since the Crusade began, in the hope of vouchsafing a brighter tomorrow. Some of the hundreds of thousands of citizens bustling from their homes, or even their beds, or suspending their labour, at that time may have turned their eyes skywards, for since the very origin of the species, mankind has entertained the notion that some ineffable source of providence may look down upon us. The upward glances were vain, involuntary wishes to glimpse the face of salvation.

No one saw the star light up. The smog that night was as thick as rockcrete.

Ship bells rang. At high anchor at the edge of the mesopause, the Imperial Tempest-class frigate Highness Ser Armaduke lit its plasma engines. The drives ignited with a pulsing fibrillation before calming into a less intense, steady glow.

Below the ship lay the troposphere and the stratosphere. The shadow of the terminator lay heavily across Menazoid Sigma, and the smog atmospherics were so dense there were no visible light concentrations from the night-side hives. Part of the world was in sunlight. The foetid clouds, brown and cream, looked like infected brain tissue.

Small ships buzzed around the Armaduke like flies around a carcass. Fleet tenders nestled in close to its flanks. Launches, lighters, cargo boats and shuttles zipped in and out. The Armaduke’s hatches were all wide open, like the beaks of impatient hatchlings. Entire sections of the frigate’s densely armoured hull plate had been peeled back or retracted to permit access. The old ship, ancient and weathered, looked undignified, like a grandam mamzel caught with her skirts hoisted.

Above the ship lay the exosphere. The vacuum was like a clear but imperfect crystal, a window onto the hard blackness of out-system space and the distant glimmer of tiny, malicious stars.

The Highness Ser Armaduke was an old ship. It was an artefact of considerable size. All ships of the fleet were large. The Armaduke measured a kilometre and a half from prow to stern, and a third of that dimension abeam across the fins. Its realspace displacement was six point two megatonnes, and it carried thirty-two thousand, four hundred and eleven lives, including the entire Tanith First and its regimental retinue. It was like a slice cut from a hive, formed into a spearhead shape and mounted on engines.

It was built for close war. Its hull armour was pitted and scorched, and triple-thickness along the flanks and the prow. The prow cone was rutted with deep scars and healed damage. The Armaduke was of a dogged breed of Imperial ship that liked to get in tight with its foe, and was prepared to get hurt in order to kill an enemy.

To Ibram Gaunt, closing towards it aboard one of the last inbound launches, the ship had the character of a pit-fighter, or a fighting dog.

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