Last Flight - Edoardo Albert

by Warhammer 40K

  The flare bounced off the armourglass. The pilot, hidden beneath the heretical symbols sprawled over the viewport, manoeuvred their craft in closer and lower.

  He really wanted to watch them die.

  Neriah stared into the multi-laser. He would not close his eyes. He would stare death in the face. Beside him, the crew of Spirit of St Pascale screamed defiance.

  Then the sea opened.

  It thrust up a mouth, a hand, a forest – Neriah could not make sense of the monstrous shapes he saw – and seized the aircraft hanging so low above it, dragging it down into the blue.

  ‘Yes, yes!’

  They were all screaming triumph as death disappeared beneath the waves.

  Then death, impersonal and implacable, came back for them.

  The sea opened again, a sucking void made by the sudden descent of whatever vast creature had plucked the Valkyrie from the sky, and the edge of the life raft began to slip downwards into the vortex.

  ‘Get out! Jump!’

  Neriah tumbled into the water. It closed over his head. He looked down, with water-blurred eyes, and saw Radin reaching up to him, reaching…

  Fingers touched.

  Radin was jerked downwards, into the blue dark, eyes wide and staring, a bubble trail streaming up to the surface.

  Neriah broke, gasping, into the air and light. He looked round, wildly, searching for his crew. Items from the life raft – a paddle, ration packs, a life vest – were bobbing on the surface, but no men. He pushed his face under the water again, searching, looking. But all he could see was the blue, fading to the black of the abyss.

  The last surviving member of the flight crew of Spirit of St Pascale floated on the ocean, bobbing up and down with the motion of the waves, an orange speck in an endless expanse of blue. The sun burned down on him from a cloudless sky. Floating in a world of water, Neriah felt his lips begin to crack with thirst. A plane flew past, high above, and he yelled and waved but, of course, it did not see him. Another went past, to the west.

  They were searching, quartering the sea, looking for survivors.

  But with no transponder and no life raft, he was invisible.

  Day slid down to dusk, then night. The stars came out, the livid scar of the Great Rift cutting across the sky. Around him, the sea began to glow in drifts of pulsing, living colour. Phosphorescent plankton, cool blue on the night black.

  Neriah stirred the light into shapes, and words. He wrote his name in lingering light.

  Then he heard the plane. The thrum of jet wash over water.

  It was coming in low and slow. Heading back to the fleet now, but still looking for survivors.

  Neriah looked at the shapes of light he had drawn on the water.

  He drew another.

  The shape of a double-headed eagle.

  The downwash of the jets stirred away the pictures of light.

  Baruch Neriah raised his arms in praise and thanks and guilt as the winchman descended and raised him from the sea.

  About the Author

  Edoardo Albert is a writer and historian specialising in the Dark Ages. He finds that the wars and cultures of the early Medieval period map very well on to the events of the 40th and 41st millenniums. His Black Library fiction includes ‘Green and Grey’ and the novella Lords of the Storm.

  An extract from Double Eagle.

  Over the Makanites, 06.32

  In the side rush of dawn, the peaks glowed pink, like some travesty of a fondant celebration cake. Hard shadows infilled the cavities like ink. Streamers of white cloud strung out in the freezing air three thousand metres below.

  Hunt Leader was just a cruciform speck in the bright air ahead. He started to turn, ten degrees to the north-west. Darrow tilted the stick, following, rolling. The horizon swung up and the world moved around. Slowly, slowly. He heard the knocking sound and ignored it.

  At least the inclinometer was still working. As he came around and levelled the column, Darrow reached forward and flicked the brass dial of the fuel gauge again. It still read full, which couldn’t be right. They’d been up for forty-eight minutes.

  He took off a gauntlet and flicked the gauge once more with his bare fingers. He felt sure the lined mitten had been dulling his blows.

  The dial remained at full.

  He saw how pinched and blue his hand had become, and pulled the gauntlet back on quickly. It felt balmy in his insulated flightsuit, but the cabin temp-stat read minus eight.

  There was no sound, except for the background rush of the jet stream. Darrow looked up and around, remembering to maintain his visual scanning. Just sky. Sundogs flaring in his visor. Hunt Three just abeam of him, a silhouette, trailing vapour.

  The altimeter read six thousand metres.

  The vox gurgled. ‘Hunt Leader to Hunt Flight. One pass west and we turn for home. Keep formation tight.’

  They made another lazy roll. The landscape rose up in his port vision. Darrow saw brittle flashes of light far below. Artillery fire in the mountain passes.

  He heard the knocking again. It sounded as if someone was crouching behind the frame of his armoured seat, tapping the internal spars with a hammer. Pulsejets always made a burbling, flatulent noise, but this didn’t seem right to him.

  He keyed his vox. ‘Hunt Leader, this is Hunt Four. I’ve–’

  There was a sudden, loud bang. The vox channel squealed like a stabbed pig.

  The world turned upside down.

  ‘Oh God-Emperor! Oh crap! God-Emperor!’ a voice was shouting. Darrow realised it was his own. G-force pummelled him. His Commonwealth K4T Wolfcub was tumbling hard.

  Light and dark, sky and land, up and over, up and over. Darrow choked back nausea and throttled down desperately. The vox was incoherent with frantic chatter.

  ‘Hunt Four! Hunt Four!’

  Darrow regained control somehow and levelled. He had lost at least a thousand metres. He got the horizon true and looked around in the vain hope of seeing someone friendly. Then he cried out involuntarily as something fell past his nose cone.

  It was a Wolfcub, one wing shorn off in a cascade of torn struts and body plate. Flames were sucking back out of its pulsejet. It arced down and away like a comet, trailing smoke as it went spinning towards the ground. It became a speck. A smaller speck. A little blink of light.

  Darrow felt his guts tighten and acid frothed inside him. Fear, like a stink, permeated the little cockpit.

  Something else flashed past him.

  Just a glimpse, moving so fast. There and gone. A memory of recurve wings.

  ‘Hunt Four! Break! Break and turn! There’s one right on you!’

  Darrow leaned on the stick and kicked the rudder. The world rolled again.

  He put his nose up and throttled hard. The Wolfcub bucked angrily and the knocking came again.

  Throne of Earth. He’d thought his bird had malfunctioned, but it wasn’t that at all. They’d been stung.

  Darrow leant forward against the harness and peered out of his cockpit dome. The aluminoid skin of his right wing was holed and torn. Hell’s-teeth, he’d been shot.

  He pushed the stick forward to grab some thrust, then turned out left in a hard climb.

  The dawn sky was full of smoke: long strings of grey vapour and little black blooms that looked like dirty cotton. Hunt Flight’s formation had broken apart and they were scattering across the heavens. Darrow couldn’t even see the bats.

  No, that wasn’t true. He made one, bending in to chase Hunt Five, tracer fire licking from its gunpods.

  He rolled towards it, flipping the scope of his reflector sight into position before resting his thumb on the stick-top stud that activated the quad cannons in the nose.

  The bat danced wildly across the glass reticule of the gunsight. It refused to sit.

  Darrow cursed and bega
n to utter a prayer to the God-Emperor of Mankind to lift his wings and make his aim true. He waggled the stick, pitching, rolling, trying to correct, but the more he tried, the more the bat slipped wildly off the gunsight to one side or the other.

  There was a little smoky flash ahead, and suddenly Darrow’s Wolfcub was riding through a horizontal pelt of black rain.

  Not rain. Oil. Then debris. Pieces of glittering metal, buckled machine parts, shreds of aluminoid. Darrow cried out in surprise as the oil washed out his forward view. He heard the pattering impact of the debris striking off his nose plate and wing faces. The bat had chalked Hunt Five and Darrow was running in through the debris stream. Any large piece of wreckage would hole him and kill him as surely as cannon-fire. And if so much as a demi-mil cog went down the intake of his pulsejet…

  Darrow wrenched on the stick and came nose-up. Light returned as he came out of the smoke belt, and slipstream flowed the oil away off his canopy. It ran in quivering lines, slow and sticky, like blood.

  Almost immediately, he had to roll hard to port to avoid hitting another Cub head on. He heard a strangled cry over the vox. The little dark-green interceptor filled his field of view for a second and then was gone back over his shoulder.

  His violent roll had been too brutal. He inverted for a moment and struggled to right himself as the mountains spread out overhead. That knocking again. That damn knocking. He was bleeding speed now, and the old pulse-engines of the K4T’s had a nasty habit of flaming out if the airflow dropped too sharply. He began to nurse it up and round, gunning the engine as hard as he dared. Two planes rushed by, so fast he didn’t have time to determine their type, then another three went perpendicular across his bow. They were all Wolfcubs. One was venting blue smoke in a long, chuffing plume.

  ‘Hunt Leader! Hunt Leader!’ Darrow called. Two of the Cubs were already climbing away out of visual. The sun blinded him. The third, the wounded bird, was diving slowly, scribing the sky with its smoke.

  He saw the bat clearly then. At his two, five hundred metres, dropping in on the Cub it had most likely already mauled. For the first time in his four weeks of operational flying, Darrow got a good look at the elusive foe. It res­embled a long, sharp, elongated axe-head, the cockpit set far back above the drive at the point where the bow of the blade-wings met. A Hell Razor-class Interceptor, the cream of the Archenemy’s air force. In the dispersal room briefs, they’d talked about these killers being blood red or matt black, but this was pearl-white, like ice, like alabaster. The canopy was tinted black, like a dark eye-socket in a polished skull.

  Darrow had expected to feel fear, but he got a thrill of adrenaline instead. He leaned forward, hunched down in the Wolfcub’s armoured cockpit, and opened the throttle, sweeping in on the bat’s five. It didn’t appear to have seen him. It was lining up, leisurely, on the wounded Cub.

  He flipped the toggle switch. Guns live.

  Closing at three hundred metres. Darrow rapidly calculated his angle of deflection, estimated he’d have to lead his shot by about five degrees. God-Emperor, he had it…

  He thumbed the firing stud. The Wolfcub shuddered slightly as the cannons lit up. He saw flash-flames licking up from under the curve of the nose cone. He heard and felt the thump of the breechblocks.

  The bat had gone.

  He came clear, pulling a wide turn at about two hundred and seventy kilometres an hour. The engagement had been over in an instant. Had he killed it? He sat up into the clear blister of the canopy like an animal looking out of its burrow, craning around. If he’d hit it, surely there would be smoke?

  The only smoke he could see was about a thousand metres above in the pale blue sky where the main portion of the dogfight was still rolling.

  He turned. First rule of air combat: take a shot and pull off. Never stick with a target, never go back. That made you a target.

  But still he had to know. He had to.

  He dipped his starboard wing, searching the peaks below for a trace of fire.

  Nothing.

  Darrow levelled off.

  And there it was. Right alongside him.

  He cried out in astonishment. The bat was less than a wing’s breadth away, riding along in parallel with him. There was not a mark on its burnished white fuselage.

  It was playing with him.

  Panic rose inside pilot cadet Enric Darrow. He knew his valiant little Cub could neither outrun nor out-climb the Hell Razor. He throttled back hard, and threw on his speed brakes, hoping the sudden manoeuvre would cause the big machine to overshoot him.

  For a moment, it vanished. Then it was back, on his other side, copying his brake-dive. Darrow swore. The Hell Razor-class were vector-thrust planes. He was so close to it that he could see the reactive jet nozzles on the belly under the blade-wings. It could out-dance any conventional jet, viffing, braking, even pulling to a near-hover.

  Darrow refused to accept he was out-classed, refused to admit he was about to die. He twisted the stick, kicked the rudder right over and went into the deepest dive he dared execute. Any deeper, and the Wolfcub’s wings would shear off its airframe.

  The world rushed up, filling his vision. He heard the pulsejet screaming. He saw the glory of the mountains ascending to meet him. His mountains. His world. The world he had joined up to save.

  Behind him, the pearl-white enemy machine tucked in effortlessly and followed him down.

  Theda MAB North, 07.02

  Sometimes – times like this perfect dawn, for instance – it amused August Kaminsky to play a private game. The game was called ‘pretend there isn’t a war’.

  It was relatively easy in some respects. It was quiet, and the night chill was giving way to a still cool as the sunrise came up over the city. From where he sat, he could see the wide bay, hazy in the morning mist, and the sea beyond it, blue-grey, glittering. The city of Theda itself – a mix of pale rockcrete towers, low-rise hab-stacks and pylon steeples – was peaceful and quiet, huddled on the wide headland in a quaint, antiquated manner, as it had done for twenty-nine centuries. Sea birds wheeled overhead, which spoiled it slightly, because he envied them their wings and their freedom, but still, at these times, it was easy to play the game.

  Theda was not Kaminsky’s birth-town (he’d been delivered, a silent, uncomplaining infant. forty-two years earlier and three thousand kilometres north in the Great Hive of Enothopolis on the far side of the Zophonian Sea), but he had, unilaterally, adopted it. It was smaller than the Great Hive, prettier, a littoral town that understood the mechanisms of the sea and, with its universitariat and its many scholams, was famous as a seat of learning. It was older than the Great Hive too. The Old Town quarter had been standing for three hundred years when the first technocrats began sinking their adamantine pilings into the Ursbond Peninsula to raise Enothopolis. Theda, dear old Theda, was one of the first cities of Enothis.

  Kaminsky had adopted Theda partly because of its distinguished past, mostly because he’d been stationed there for six years. He’d come to know it well: its eating houses, its coastal pavilions and piers, its libraries and museums. It was the place he’d always longed to return to every time he snapped the canopy shut and waved the fitters away. And it was the place he always had come back to.

  Even the last time.

  ‘You there! Driver!’

  The voice broke through his thoughts. He sat up in the worn leather seat of the cargo transport and looked out. Senior Pincheon, the Munitorum despatcher, was coming over the hard pan towards him, three aides wobbling along in his wake like novice wingmen. Pincheon’s long robes fluttered out behind him and his boots were raising dust from the dry earth. His voice was pitched high, like the seabirds’ calls.

  Kaminsky didn’t like Pincheon much. His game was ruined now. The senior’s call had made him drop his eyeline to take in the ground and the airfield. And no one could pretend there wasn’t a war whe
n they saw that.

  Kaminsky opened his cab door and climbed down to meet the senior. He’d been up since five waiting for despatch, sipping caffeine from a flask and munching on a coil of whisp-bread.

  ‘Senior,’ he said, saluting. He didn’t have to. The unctuous man had no military rank, but old habits, like Kaminsky himself, died hard. Pincheon had a data-slate in his hands. He looked up and down Kaminsky, and the grubby transport behind him.

  ‘Driver Kaminsky, A? Vehicle 167?’

  ‘As you well know, senior,’ said Kaminsky.

  Pincheon made a check in one of the boxes on his slate. ‘Fuelled and roadworthy?’

  Kaminsky nodded. ‘As of 05.00. I was issued coupons for sixty litres of two-grade, and I filled up at the depot before I came on duty.’

  Pincheon checked another box. ‘Do you have the chit?’

  Kaminsky produced the paper slip from his coat pocket, smoothed it flat, and handed it to the senior.

  Pincheon studied it. ‘Sixty point zero-zero-three litres, driver?’

  Kaminsky shrugged. ‘The nozzle guns aren’t really accurate, senior. I stopped it when it wound over sixty, but the last few drops–’

  ‘You should take care to be more accurate,’ Pincheon said flatly. One of his aides nodded.

  ‘Have you ever fuelled a vehicle from the depot tanks, senior?’ Kaminsky said lightly.

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Well, if you had, you might know how tricky it is to get the wind exact.’

  ‘Don’t you blame me for your inaccuracies, driver!’ Pincheon sputtered. ‘Essential resources such as fuel must be managed and rationed to the millilitre! That is the task of the Holy Munitorum! There’s a war on, don’t you realise?’