The deck panels above the Antarctic airfield retracted in sections, each one pulling back to expose a widening rectangle of Antarctic sky. Cold air poured through the gap and met the warmer air of the pressurized interior, and the condensation it produced briefly filled the opening with a thin drift of ice crystals before the wind took them.
The Cobra-class destroyer rose into the light.
The Carcharodons Terminator first company boarded through the main hatch in orderly column, Tyberos at their head, the bulk of his Terminator plate making the hatchway appear correctly sized for the first time. Behind them, the Lamenters Terminator company followed with Nolan walking among them, the Six-Armed Iron Cavalry Terminator's presence making the column's composition immediately legible to anyone watching.
Thor came aboard in the same armor, the six-armed frame fitted to him during the base preparation, the Terminator plate proportioned for a being of his physical scale and moving accordingly. Rogers came up the boarding ramp in speed-pattern power armor, his stride unhurried, his expression the one he wore when he had already accepted what was coming. Tony had swapped his standard suit for the Iron Centurion configuration, the heaviest frame in his current arsenal, and he came aboard last from the upper hatch access.
After that, the ship held only its crew.
Every functional station that the ship required for operation was staffed by servo robots under David's direct control. David had interfaced with the ship's systems during the preparation period and now held them as extensions of his own processing architecture, the way a Machine Spirit held a vessel in the Imperium: total, comprehensive, and not inclined toward inefficiency. The combat capability that this arrangement freed by removing the need for organic crew at non-essential posts was not trivial.
The Warp engine started.
The vibration of it spread from the drive section through the entire hull in a single low pulse, and then the ship was moving, rising from the airfield on its own thrust, clearing the Antarctic air, climbing through atmosphere into the dark above it. Nolan felt the transition in his boots through the deck plating: the moment when gravity became something the ship was generating rather than something the planet was providing.
They reached the predetermined orbit and David brought them to station-keeping.
The augur arrays and space radar systems came online across the bridge displays simultaneously, and the data they returned painted the solar system in detail that no instrument on Earth's surface had ever achieved. Every mass, every trajectory, every emission source in the system's volume appeared in the virtual projection above the bridge command table, layered and cross-referenced, updating in real time.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
Rogers and Tony were at the porthole together. Through the glass: the Earth, whole and blue and smaller than either of them had ever seen it. Thor stood apart from both of them, familiar with the sight but not immune to the specific weight of seeing it from this position. The Astartes did not gather at the portholes. The view from a ship's void meant something different to warriors who had been in space for longer than Earth's recorded history.
Nolan looked at it for exactly as long as he needed to.
Then he turned to the command table.
The augur returns resolved the enemy's position within minutes of full system scan.
One Chitauri mothership. Five escort and support vessels of varying configuration, their hull profiles not matching each other or the mothership, suggesting a assembled rather than purpose-built fleet composition. They were moving in formation at superluminal speed, inbound toward Earth on a trajectory that would bring them into the inner system within days.
Nolan looked at the projections, looked at the angles, and gave the order.
David started the drive.
The Cobra-class destroyer pulled out of Earth orbit and began to accelerate, the Antarctic vibranium modification in the drive's energy routing enabling the engine to climb past its original envelope toward the upper limit of what sublight physics permitted. The ship did not quite reach the speed of light. It reached 99.9 percent of it and held there, and at that speed the distance between Earth orbit and the Mars star field became a question of days rather than weeks.
The cold of the void outside was absolute. The ship moved through it in silence, because in the void there was nothing for sound to propagate through.
The fleets found each other near Mars.
The Chitauri formation registered the approaching human ship on their sensors and responded with the immediate, coordinated fire of a fleet that had fought before and knew what to do when something came toward them at high velocity. Blue laser energy and alien torpedo patterns crossed the void in overlapping tracks, converging on the Cobra-class destroyer from multiple approach angles.
The void shields absorbed them.
The technology had been developed across millennia of void warfare in the Warhammer universe, tested against weapons and tactics that made the Chitauri fleet's available armament look elementary. The shield arrays that Reed and Tony had confirmed were functional during the preparation period took the incoming fire without registering it as a threat. The colorful shimmer of the fields under sustained bombardment was the only visible evidence that anything was hitting them.
The Chitauri torpedoes that were slow enough to penetrate the shields rather than being deflected reached the hull itself. They detonated against armor plate built around an adamantium keel, and the results of that detonation were proportionate to striking something that was not engineered to be damaged by what they were carrying. The hull integrity reporting that David was monitoring showed no entries worth flagging.
The Cobra-class destroyer went straight through the middle of the formation.
It did not slow down and it did not divert. David held the course, the lance battery turrets at the bow indexed to targets as the range closed and then fired: long, coherent energy lances that covered the intervening void in the time it took to register that they had been fired. The energy shields of the small Chitauri escort vessel that had moved to intercept held for a short time and then did not hold. The ship came apart in a debris field that the Cobra-class destroyer was already past before the pieces had fully separated.
The second vessel, a mid-sized supply configuration, was on the charge route and presented the same problem in larger scale. David handled it with the same instrument. The result was the same.
The Cobra-class destroyer passed through the formation's center and came out on the far side, the enemy fleet now behind it, the shield indicators showing nominal across the board.
The ship came around slowly, the hull crossing the void in a wide arc that brought its flanks to bear.
The torpedo launchers along the sides opened.
Boarding torpedoes went out in staggered clusters, their courses set for the four remaining vessels. Mixed in among them, a spread of standard space torpedoes with no boarding capacity but significant destructive effect, enough to complicate any attempt to track and prioritize which incoming projectiles required defensive response.
The lower deck hatches released the Fist-class assault boats.
The Carcharodons and Lamenters Terminators aboard them had been in the cramped interiors of their craft for the hours of the transit and the minutes of the engagement, and they came out of the lower deck the way compressed things come out when the container that held them opens. The assault boats diverged immediately on preset courses, each one moving fast, each one aimed.
The Chitauri mothership received ten of them.
The boarding torpedo impacts came first: shaped charges burning through the heavy deck plating in bright cores of heat, each one opening a breach, each breach immediately darkened by the melta-cut entry and then by what came through the entry behind it. The assault boats hit their contact points seconds later, and the boarding drill that the Carcharodons and Lamenters had been running on Primogenitor Isle's training grounds transferred from drill to application without discontinuity.
The mothership's interior was now a boarding action.
For the Chitauri fleet, this meant one thing and only one thing, and every commander present understood it before the assessment was complete.
Catastrophe.