NOVEL NEXT B2 Chapter 31
Simo and Veerta were the only two crew without an official function during space battle.
Veerta had been assigned to keep the civilians in the cargo hold calm, quiet, and out of the way.
While still in Ierne's orbit, Simo had been hauled to the Gulson and shuffled through its bustling corridors, with no clue what was expected of him.
No one bothered to explain the plan, because no one seemed to know the plan.
Escorted to a hatch beneath a fighter clamped to a sling-rail, he'd been told a half-baked briefing once he entered its cockpit. He'd be instructed on how to fly the thing just enough to reach an Old Guard ship's docking bay.
He wasn't thrilled with that plan.
Simo hadn't piloted so much as a shuttle in his life. His only brush with vehicles was a Senior Non-Commissioned Officer course that included a small class on battlecycles two decades back. And that was just roaring through mud, not navigating through the void.
Strapped into the fighter's cockpit, he waited as the Gulson's Lux Aeterna Drive hummed to life, its golden glow signaling their plunge into the Lumenstream.
As his armor was void-sealed, he crawled back through the hatch, blending into the chaos of the Gulson's crew.
He had no idea how to fly, but what he did know, and had plenty of experience with, was military muck-shows, where no one knew what was going on, everyone faking they did.
He'd been a Praefectus Logis, the ninth of ten enlisted ranks, for a better part of a decade. He excelled at pretending he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
Mimicking the air and purposeful stride of someone in charge, he set to gathering info. Few knew anything.
He eventually gathered that most of the best warriors of the Sanguineous Sisterhood and Ierne's finest were crammed into fighters, waiting to be slung into battle's carnage.
The four medium-class shippers, packed with sect warriors and Ierne's noble forces, were set to ram Old Guard battleships, their hulls breaching enemy shields for boarding.
The Gulson and two lumbering bulk freighters were to shield their suicidal charge, soaking up fire to give the shippers a chance.
Simo exhaled. His life insurance wasn't chump change. His family would be secure, his duty carved in blood and credits.
But death came in many flavors, and Simo preferred one fighting as he knew how.
He wasn't a marine, had never boarded a ship in his life, and this was only his second space battle. Still, he'd rather die firing his lancer inside an Old Guard ship than flailing in a fighter.
He rounded up the only semi-competent warriors among the Gulson's crew, a grizzled handful of third Tier veterans, a few without armor or decent arms.
They were none too eager to follow a stranger, but being part of Hidetada's crew gave him weight he threw around. They ended up listening, falling in line, staking out a shuttle in the docking bay.
They stood ready, weapons primed, as the Gulson trembled under distant impacts.
Simo's gut churned, but he exhaled in relief when the shipper they were tasked to follow didn't crumple or erupt into a plasmatic fireball upon slamming into an Old Guard battleship.
"Move!" Simo barked, leading his team into the shuttle. Its engines roared, hurtling them at breakneck speed toward the shipper.
He never faced the Old Guard, but an infantryman's job was knowing the many enemies of the Holy Empire, and for forty years he had that information drilled into his bones.
There were three distinct types of main war-machines employed by the Old Guard, each an unholy fusion of flesh and steel, engineered for annihilation.
The first, called a Cannoneer, scuttled on six insectoid legs, with bulbous, tumorous chassis studded with writhing conduits, glowing runes, and flashing diodes.
Twin bio-plasma cannons, grafted like festering limbs, pulsated with viscous energy, each capable of firing corrosive volleys that melted armor and flesh alike.
Their targeting arrays, embedded like compound eyes, locked onto heat signatures, saturating areas with unrelenting barrages to pin down and dissolve foes from a distance.
The second, the Spitter, was a serpentine frame hovering silently on anti-grav lifts, cloaked in thick, scaled plating.
From what looked like a maw, a biomechanical railgun cycled with a high-pitched whine, launching hyper-velocity flechettes in a storm of razor-sharp shards designed to shred entire squads. They constantly adjusted their aim, slicing through cover or ricocheting off walls, ensuring no target escaped the lethal hail.
The third, a Lunger, was made for melee charges. They had hulking, bipedal frames, a nightmarish hybrid of biomechanical metal and sturdy plate.
Standing nearly four meters, their bodies throbbed with bioelectric veins, feeding a pair of massive, claw-like gauntlets that sprouted serrated, monomolecular blades.
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Those claws, capable of shearing through armor like parchment, vibrated with bio-plasma, leaving trails of searing energy with each swing.
Their lower bodies, fused to a segmented, tail-like stabilizer, allowed it to pivot and lunge with unnatural agility, smashing through lines.
This wouldn't be easy.
The pilot didn't spare a glance as they docked, grinding across the deck. Simo and his conscripted team spilled out, racing toward the boarding forces, pounding the shipper's deck with their boots.
He was relieved to see the breaching gangway held, a sealed lifeline punched through the enemy's hull, held by a few hundred soldiers.
Simo gripped his new Doombringer lancer, hefting the stock and handguard as he charged through the gangway's ribbed and alloyed corridor, the emergency lights strobing red against his visor.
The air, filtered through his helm, carried the sharp, acrid bite of Reptiloid and scorched bio-metal from the Old Guard battleship beyond. Halfway through, as it swayed under their strides, the gangway shifted to the heavier Reptiloid-normal gravity.
He burst into the enemy ship, expecting the chaos of combat, but found a gaggle of Ierne troops clogging the nearest corridor to the right, kneeling, their nervousness thickening the air like a miasma.
He was glad their right arms still bore the imperial sigil of a Trey set on a shield, crossed with mace and sword, but compared to Imperial Military troops, they were poorly equipped, the Whisperguard Helms their only decent equipment.
He had the first officer he saw send him and his small team an invite to their comms channels, then Simo shoved through the mess, elbowing past cheap, low-grade armor, until he reached the front, finding a muck-show, just as he'd feared. Disorganized, leaderless chaos.
An Ierne officer, probably some tribune with a noble's title appointed for blood or coin, screamed into the faceplate of a Sanguineous Sister hauling a mobile turret on her back, its barrel and frame in her gauntleted hands.
Both wore mismatched, bargain-bin light power-armor, the kind he wouldn't trust not to crumple under a real hit.
The corridor held maybe a thousand troops, a fraction of the shipper's ten-thousand-strong boarding force.
The rest must've split near the breach, heading deeper into the ship. Simo scanned the crowd, reckoning Ierne soldiers in shoddy gear outnumbered the Sisters' mech-suits ten to one, with training probably as flimsy as their armor.
There were no signs of combat, but that wouldn't last. The Old Guard's war-machines and Soldier-caste warriors would be coming to repel the boarders. He'd guess sooner rather than later.
Simo couldn't gauge their power levels. Only those with rare sensitivity could. But he didn't need to.
The officer's shrill, petulant tirade, demanding his troops fall back to defend the breach, marked him as the problem. The whole point of boarding was to assault, damn it – to take out the Synapse-Engine or the Neuronaut if it was on this ship.
Noble forces were infamous for incompetent leaders, especially on trash, fringe worlds like Ierne, where political appointments and nepotism festered like rot. That was a major issue the Imperial Military was free of. Mostly.
Simo raised his Doombringer, sighting the man's head. He aimed high, as his preset zeroes were for much further ranges and squeezed the trigger.
The helm held together, but the particle beam punched through the cheap alloy, and blood sprayed across the huge corridor's bio-metal floor as the body crumpled.
He hated politically appointed tribunes and had always wanted to kill one. Being part of Saint Hidetada's crew gave him the leeway to get away with it. It felt good. But now wasn't the time to revel in small victories. He barked out, "Orders, Sister?"
The Sanguineous Sister snapped a nod. "Follow me!" she bellowed, charging down the left corridor with heavy steps clanking down the passage.
The troops surged after her, Simo and his veterans at her flank, his lancer ready.
Ierne's soldiers scrambled to keep up, their discipline shaky but spurred by the Sister's zeal and the tribune's corpse.
Simo wasn't a marine, but he knew Synapse-Engines were buried deep in a ship's guts, sprawling across multiple decks.
Finding one meant spotting a long corridor with no inner doors, a telltale sign of the engine's fortified housing.
He scanned the corridors they passed while moving. The air grew hotter and moister, thicker with the stench of Reptiloid filth.
A tremor rocked the passage as the ship shuddering under a hit.
Once it settled, a metallic clacking echoed ahead, growing louder, and Simo's HUD flared with enemy signatures.
"Prepare for glory!" the Sister roared as the cheap hydraulics of her light power armor hissed. "Enemies ahead!"
His heart thudded, but he held steady and activated Heat Sink. He got the first enemy to appear with his lancer as he tucked against a door's frame, his team doing the same. His Snipe Ability got another.
The Soldier-caste Reptiloids, the pack's relentless warriors, were scattered among the war-machines, their metallic brethren slithering and stalking through the shadowy corridors.
Their armored forms stood a little over three meters, with sinewy bodies melded with shifting, biomechanical alloys, only their slitted eyes showing through green visors, auto-blasters, shoulder-mounted bioelectric turrets, and forearm plasma-guns primed for slaughter.
Guided by Neural Dominion, war-machine and Soldier alike, predicted enemy movements with surgically precise strikes, and began dominating the battleship's claustrophobic confines, tearing through Ierne's soldiers.
And more and more Old Guard forces kept pouring into the passage.
As was infantry doctrine, and Simo prayed it held true in a battleship, he targeted the Lungers first, desperate to keep their monomolecular claws from reaching the imperial line.
His heart pounded as he whispered a plea to the Three for protection, for a miracle. He clamped the Doombringer tighter, finger squeezing the trigger as he ducked behind the doorway, sending a particle beam blasting from the muzzle.
His Vanquisher armor, far sturdier than the flimsy suits of the troops being torn apart in the corridor, held under the strain of impacts, shrugging them off.
The soldier's blocks from Defensive Fortification were destroyed nearly as they sparkled into existence, or bypassed completely with Lesser Ebon Drains piercing the lightly armored troops.
The sects of Ordines Sanctus Puritas were battle-hardened, drilled to react without orders. As Simo assumed might happen, the Sanguineous Sister in charge, tucked in a doorway across the passage, her mobile turret spraying hot death, stood silent, failing to direct the fray.
Simo bellowed, "Focus on the Lungers!" Unsure if the troops were familiar with Old Guard war-machines, he added, "The clawed ones!"
Noticing all the corpses piling up near him each had a grenade or two on their belts, he yelled, "Use your grenades! Defensive Fortification where you stand, now! Don't wait until reaching the front!"
A handful of soldiers rushing to their death fumbled the explosives strapped to their belts, lobbing them before being cut down.
Explosions bloomed, sending shrapnel tearing into biomechanical flesh, but the enemy pressed on.
It was a real muck-show for the next frantic moments. The troops were being torn apart left and right, but all the corpses and Ebon Drains impaling them were creating more barriers and cover.
As soon as it ticked off cooldown, he activated Heat Sink, turning invisible for 1.5 seconds, and laid down the hate without drawing fire.
The enemy swarmed close enough Simo drew his new sidearm, a laser pistol with a lot of oomph.
Even with Hide waiting to be used, Simo knew this was his end. He vowed to make the Old Guard pay in blood for every step, for every imperial corpse they claimed.