Chapter 304: Khârn: Run!
Aboard the Conqueror, a Gloriana-class Battleship
"They are on us again."
Khârn's fingers tapped lightly on the twisted carvings of his bone throne. The knuckles of his gauntlet striking the skeletal ornamentation produced a hollow, echoing sound. He could feel the tenuous connection between himself and the ancient warship, like trying to pull the trigger of a chainaxe, only to have the damned mechanism slip away at the last moment, receding into some unreachable corner of the machine.
Click… click…
As a flicker of anger rose within him, the firing pins inside Khârn's skull began to cycle with a grim regularity. Each mechanical pulse was a fresh agony, a burst of pain at his nerve endings. This torment was not of the flesh, but something deeper. It crawled up through the fissures in his soul, a living thing gnawing at his will.
This was his penance, his curse. The price the Betrayer had to pay. If he ever ceased his slaughter, even for an instant, the torment would return.
He took a deep breath, the stale air of the bridge a mixture of blood, promethium, and something far older, far darker. He forced himself to maintain his imperious posture, betraying no sign of the pain. The fingers of his heavy gauntlet dug into the throne's armrest, and the master-crafted metal groaned under the pressure, as if it would shatter into dust at any second.
Self-restraint. It was a virtue, one that the frothing madmen with Butcher's Nails embedded in their skulls had long forgotten. If a man does not fight against temptation, he becomes its slave. Khârn knew this well, for he had once been such a slave—to the Emperor, to Angron, to the World Eaters Legion.
But he was different now. He was stronger than all of them.
As the throne began to tremble in his grip, Khârn forced the agony of the Nails from his mind and focused on the blood-soaked augur display, which showed the void battle raging outside. The Mechanicum fleet was in tatters, with only a single Ark Mechanicus and its escorts still fighting, barely holding on against the Conqueror's relentless assault. The one remaining starfort acted like a mother hen protecting her chicks, constantly pecking at his ship with its weapon batteries.
BOOM!
A salvo of macro-cannon shells, far heavier than what a standard battleship could mount, struck the Conqueror. The crimson-hued void shields flickered.
Click.
Behind him, the mass of daemonic flesh fused to the command throne twitched. The Conqueror moved like a toy in its grasp, executing a sudden, impossible turn in the void that dodged the starfort's second salvo. A renegade battle barge, too slow to react, was caught in the line of fire. Its void shields flared and died after absorbing two of the macro-shells, and it was forced to endure the rest of the barrage with its unshielded hull.
CRACK!
The instant the shields collapsed, a chain of explosions blossomed along the battle barge's port side. Khârn watched with cold indifference as the warship was crippled.
"Increase distance. Disengage. All ships, maintain orbital bombardment. Inform ground forces to prepare for extraction."
Cypra-Mundi. It was a powerful Forge World. Before its arrogant refusal of the Primarchs' military aid had drawn his and the renegade Mechanicum's focused wrath, it had been a super-fortress, garrisoned by eight Ramilies-class Starforts, eighteen capital ships, and over 1.4 billion Skitarii. If Khârn hadn't decisively used warp sorcery to teleport in those Space Hulks—hulks so dangerous that even a demigod of the warp would find them troublesome—to ram the starforts directly… If he hadn't used the authority granted him by the Lord of Iron to override the greed of the Dark Mechanicum, forcing them to abandon any thought of preserving the technology and simply throw the starforts at the planet's surface to obliterate its orbital defenses… then the forces of Chaos would have been bogged down in a war of attrition and annihilated. They wouldn't have even been able to outrun the Primarchs' main fleet, which was already in hot pursuit.
"The Primarchs," Khârn muttered, his gaze never leaving the blood-augur. Dozens of crimson icons, representing his ships, moved across the tactical display under his will.
Since the siege of the Cadian Gate had begun, traitors and renegades had flocked from the Eye of Terror in their rust-bucket warships. Their numbers had nearly doubled, for none had chosen to swear fealty to any other warlord. They had chosen to follow Khârn. Because only his "hit-and-run" style of hunting didn't get bogged down in the quagmire of a single world. Because only he could deliver on his promises with blood. And because, of all the traitors who had turned from the Emperor, only Khârn's fleet still survived the Primarchs' wrath.
Because only he could think rationally. Only he followed the battle plan laid out for them by the Lord of Iron.
Khârn tore his gaze away from the dying battle barge. The Primarchs were moving too fast. Most of the other warlords and Dark Mechanicum factions had barely bared their fangs before being swept aside by the ensuing Imperial Navy fleets and Astartes strike forces, like autumn leaves in a gale. Their ground troops were washed away like flotsam by orbital bombardments and the tidal wave of Guardsmen and Space Marines.
Then it was on to the next world. And the next. It was too fast. It was as if the complex, fractious forces of the Imperium needed no time at all to integrate, as if they moved as one with the will of their Primarchs. This was a level of efficiency the Imperium had not displayed in ten thousand years.
It made Khârn think of the past. The Emperor, leading the grandest crusade in human history. Eighteen Legions guarding Terra. The Space Marines, with honor as their blades and loyalty as their shields, planting the banners of the Great Crusade across the galaxy.
A flicker of memory, of nostalgia, touched his eyes, until the throbbing pain in his skull dragged him back to the present. He was fantasizing again.
"What are the port-side crews doing? A boarding action at this stage is ill-advised. The loss of that battle barge was meaningless."
A sudden voice cut through Khârn's melancholic reverie. He opened his eyes.
A naval officer in a pristine white uniform had drifted over to another command station. She was perfectly composed, her slender hands clasped behind her back, a phantom mist of blood swirling around her.
She's here again.
Khârn's visor lenses glowed with a venomous light as he locked his gaze on the spectral figure. She leaned against the command console with practiced ease, coming to stand beside him, coolly assessing the tactical situation.
"They're getting carried away," the officer said, her voice laced with an icy derision. "Order the captains to maintain formation until the reinforcements are in position." She spoke of the Astartes not as revered demigods, but as insignificant thralls aboard this great vessel. "Dispatch the Iron Warriors escorts to the marked coordinates. Our flank requires cover."
Crrrack...
The armrest of the throne groaned under Khârn's grip. He watched, helpless, as this phantom issued commands from his own console, manipulating the fleet that should have been his. He didn't know her name, nor her origins. Only that she had been a part of this ship long before he had claimed the Conqueror after the defeat on Armageddon.
Khârn called her "Mistress." A World Eaters berserker, in a rare moment of lucidity after a battle, had once hinted to him that she might have been the Conqueror's original shipmistress.
Lotara Sarrin.
"What are you doing?!" Khârn admired her fighting spirit, but now was clearly not the time to remain engaged. The Primarchs' fleet was almost upon them. The priority was to rally these scattered fools and retreat. He remembered the orders Perturabo had given him: preserve as many of these forces as possible, these warriors who had recklessly plunged into realspace under the Blood God's influence, until the matter of who would be the true master of this war was settled between himself and Angron. They should pay the price for their recklessness, yes, but only after their value, as determined by the Lord of Iron, had been expended.
And so, he had to avoid this battle. He could feel the agony from the Butcher's Nails intensifying. This damned instrument of torture… it had ruined his Primarch, ruined his Legion. Khârn had finally freed himself from its torment. In the millennia since the Legion's end, he had worked to rebuild what the Betrayers had destroyed. He would not let a thousand years of effort be undone here.
Yes. He was running from a fight.
The officer stared at him coldly, as if she were the true master of this warship. Khârn tasted blood in the back of his throat. He swallowed it down and wiped his mouth.
"They are coming again. We must leave," he said. Not far away, the fleshy tumor that controlled the ship's movements pulsed.
"They are coming." His voice held no trace of bravado. Only undisguised dread.
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