‘Aleks, I need a heading to get us out of here and back to the Implacable Advance. Bernd, check how much fuel we’ve lost and whether we have enough to get us back into the upper atmosphere. Gunners, how are we doing on ammunition?’
‘I’m down to my last five hundred rounds,’ reported Krol.
‘Slightly less,’ said Fyodor.
There was no reply from Dudak.
‘Dudak? Are you there? Dudak?’
Static on the vox.
‘Bernd, get forward and see what’s happened to him,’ ordered Mikal.
‘Orks, captain,’ cut in Krol’s voice urgently. ‘Fighters, five o’clock.’
Almost immediately Krol and Fyodor’s bolters opened up. Mikal kicked the rudder pedals to starboard as tracer fire whipped past the canopy. Bernd was thrown against the fuselage as he attempted to get forward to Dudak’s turret.
‘Fyodor, seven o’clock!’ said Krol, all coolness lost from his voice. Bolters chattered in unison. Mikal hauled the joystick over to port to change direction again and heard Bernd groan as he was flung to the other side of the fuselage. A pair of flame-coloured rockets sped past, their greasy vapour trails spiralling over the Grace’s starboard wing.
‘Terra, that was close,’ said Aleks as he heard the rockets explode ahead of them.
Mikal banked the Grace again and Bernd staggered back into view, gripping the bombsight for support.
‘Dudak?’ asked Mikal.
‘Shock. That tower. Thought he was dead,’ said Bernd as he struggled back towards his seat. Mikal kicked the rudder hard again. Too late.
There was a huge bang behind the cockpit and Mikal instinctively ducked. The whole airframe shook and Krol’s bolters stopped firing.
Smoke and a cloud of shattered glass blew around the cockpit. Even through his respirator Mikal picked up the distinctive smell of cooked meat. Confused, he looked up and saw Bernd staring incongruously down at his flight suit. A fist-sized hole had punched straight through his chest and out through the front fuselage. Bernd turned his head slowly towards Mikal and, as the life left his eyes, he toppled forward onto the control column. Emperor’s Grace dropped her nose and fell from the sky. Bernd’s body pinned Mikal helplessly against the cockpit wall and he could feel the bomber begin to accelerate into a death spiral down towards the sea of Balle Prime.
‘Holy Emperor. Aleks. Get him off me. Get him off!’
Mikal wrestled with the dead weight of Bernd’s body as the control column lay jammed between them. The Grace’s remaining two turbines began to whine worryingly as their airspeed increased. Mikal felt desperate. This was not how he was going to die. Not this way. Not today.
He felt his ever-present rage build inside him and this time he did not attempt to contain it. He used years of frustration and anger and channelled them into this death struggle which he simply refused to lose.
‘You useless lump! Get off me!’ he screamed into Bernd’s lifeless face, inches from his own, and with an inhuman surge of adrenaline he hefted Bernd’s blood-soaked chest away from him. The body pitched across the cockpit and crashed into Aleks, who had struggled up from his station to help. The diminutive navigator was sent flying back down onto his chart table, with Bernd pinning him to it like a drunken lover. Aleks stared horrified at his friend’s flaccid features before rolling Bernd off him and onto the floor. He saw the gaping wound in his friend’s chest, pumping arterial blood in crimson fountains across his normally ordered workspace. Aleks screamed.
‘What was that?’ asked Fyodor over the vox. ‘Krol? Krol?’
Mikal had no time to respond. He had grabbed the control column, now sticky with blood, and wrenched hard, using the adrenaline still coursing through his body. He pushed hard on the rudder pedals and gradually Emperor’s Grace responded. Slowly the spin corrected. Mikal clenched his teeth and hauled the control column back into his midriff and the nose of the crippled bomber edged upwards.
‘Krol? Krol?’ continued Fyodor.
‘Shut it, Fyodor.’ Mikal barked.
‘Captain. Who’s screaming? Is it Krol?’
Mikal disengaged Aleks’ vox on the panel in front of him and the screaming was abruptly cut short.
‘Fyodor. The fighters? Where are the fighters?’
‘Fighter, captain,’ corrected Fyodor, ‘Krol got one. Before we got hit.’
The Grace was now flying level and so Mikal risked a look over his shoulder to see what had happened to Krol. He saw the shattered remains of the upper turret. Krol’s headless body was hanging in his harness straps. Mikal turned back to his instruments. Bernd and Krol. The Marauder’s interior was looking like an abattoir, he thought callously.
‘Fyodor, listen,’ he said firmly and clearly. ‘Krol and Bernd didn’t make it.’ He heard nothing from the tail gunner.
‘Fyodor,’ he said. ‘Ammunition status?’
There was a further pause.
‘Fyodor,’ he repeated, louder.
‘None, captain. I’m dry,’ said Fyodor.
Mikal wasn’t surprised. Fyodor had been firing almost continuously since they started their bomb run. ‘Right, I need you to keep alert. Report any orks that come stalking us,’ said Mikal in a measured tone.
‘Like that one, you mean,’ said Fyodor.
‘What? Where?’ said Mikal. He swung round in his chair and gaped. There, just off the shattered stub of the port wing, was an ork fighter. In it was an ork pilot, leering at him with fiery red eyes.
The ork aircraft was painted black with chequered trim around its huge engine nacelle. Beneath its wings hung empty missile racks. Its forward facing guns were silent.
‘Out of ammunition,’ said Mikal.
As if reading his mind, the ork pilot shook his huge head and broke into a wicked smile. He jabbed a clawed thumb back towards the rear of the fighter’s cockpit. Mikal looked at the rear of the ork’s grimy canopy and saw a diminutive greenskin manning a pair of rear-facing, heavy stubbers. The second greenskin was desperately trying to pivot the guns round to get a shot on the stricken Marauder. Mikal realized that the angle was too acute. Then the greenskin began jabbering to its pilot, who nodded and, with a belch of oily smoke from its multiple engine exhausts, the ugly aircraft started to pull ahead of Emperor’s Grace. Mikal knew that the ork pilot intended to get far enough in front of the Marauder to allow his gunner to get the kill shot. A mistake, as it turned out.
The twin-linked lascannons of the Grace’s nose turret burst into life, sending a blaze of energy straight through the fighter and out the other side. There was a blinding flash and the ork aircraft, pilot and crew vaporised in a shuddering explosion.
Mikal was momentarily stunned.
‘For Bernd and Krol,’ said a voice over the vox.
‘Dudak,’ said Mikal.
A laugh came from the tail turret. Or was it a sob?
Then there was silence on the vox and it dawned on Mikal that for the first time since the attack began they were alone in the air. They were clear of Balle-Delta and heading out to sea. And they were still flying. Barely.
Mikal knew he had to grip his remaining crew if they were to have any chance of getting back to the carrier. He looked over to the navigator’s section. Aleks was rocking back and forth on his chair, Bernd’s body face down at his feet. Aleks wasn’t screaming any more. Mikal reconnected his navigator’s vox.
‘Aleks. I need you to plot us a course for the Implacable Advance.’ No response.
‘Aleks? Can you hear me? I need a course from you,’ Mikal said. The navigator continued to rock back and forth.
Dudak responded instead. ‘Captain, I can see a Marauder ahead of us.’
Mikal peered ahead and sure enough he saw pinpricks of light from afterburners in the distance. It was Divine Retribution.
‘Good spot, Dudak,’ he said, relieved. ‘T
hat’s our course.’ Mikal eased the control column back and pointed the Grace towards their wingman. He reached forward to wipe dried blood from the instrument panel in front of him and noticed for the first time that his hands had stopped shaking.
On the Implacable Advance, Ryll swung down from the forward hatch of his aircraft, Emperor’s Wrath, and headed across the launch bay towards the control bridge. Crews were disembarking from their battered aircraft, those who could still walk. Medicae units were scurrying from plane to plane, retrieving burnt and tattered bodies or in some cases clambering aboard to perform emergency procedures on crewmen whose injuries were too critical to allow them to be moved. Losses had been high, one aircraft in four. Of those bombers that had survived, most had taken a beating. Ryll was not happy as he strode up the gantry to the control room. There he found Borkowski, bent over auspex screens, checking off the returning bombers.
‘Borkowski, who’s still out there?’ he demanded.
Borkowski studied the auspex for the serial number of the last aircraft.
‘EMGR2243,’ Borkowski reported in a mechanical tone.
‘Who’s that?’ said Ryll as he came over to look down at the manifest.
‘Emperor’s Grace.’ Borkowski said.
‘The rookies?’ said Ryll, surprised. ‘I thought they had ploughed into the ork tower?’
‘It appears not,’ said Borkowski.
They both looked down at the landing bay to survey the clusters of surviving crews who stood waiting for the final aircraft to arrive. Some started pointing and both officers watched the launch bay entrance as Emperor’s Grace eased herself into view.
‘Holy Throne of the Emperor,’ said Ryll.
Borkowski’s steel jaw twitched but he said nothing.
Emperor’s Grace hovered uncertainly just above the landing bay deck on her two remaining engines before dropping a little unsteadily to land with a bump. All eyes around the landing bay were on her, transfixed by the appalling damage she had sustained.
The Marauder’s mangled port wing leaked hydraulic fluid like an amputated limb. Her two useless engines were blackened and blistered, flanked by their overworked, smoking twins. Her interior airframe was visible through the countless holes and tears in the bodywork and light shone through the multiple perforations of the tail section. The upper turret was shattered and there was the unmistakable stain of frosted blood trailing back along the fuselage. Little could be seen of the Marauder’s original paint scheme under the soot and scorch marks that covered most of its surfaces, the result of the fireball from the near miss with the ork tower.
In the landing bay, no one moved, no one ran forward to assist, as if none could imagine anyone was still alive inside the aircraft. They were looking at a flying coffin. Ryll left the bottle of amasec in the control tower as he headed for the landing bay.
Inside Emperor’s Grace, Mikal unstrapped his respirator and sat motionless for a few moments. From the tail turret, Fyodor broke the silence.
‘Permission to disembark, captain.’
‘Right,’ said Mikal. He didn’t know what else to say. He knew he should be relieved, glad even at surviving his first mission. Instead he felt ashamed. He felt ashamed of how he had felt towards Bernd when his shattered body had almost brought them to ruin. He could not bring himself to look at Krol’s corpse hanging like a broken doll behind him. The other member of his crew he had failed to bring back alive.
Dudak’s voice broke into his darkening thoughts.
‘The squadron leader, captain.’
Mikal looked out through the shattered window panel and saw Ryll emerging from the assembled crowd.
Not now, he thought.
He struggled up from his chair and sought out Aleks. The navigator was still rocking back and forth on his seat, his eyes tight shut.
‘Aleks,’ said Mikal leaning down into the navigator’s area. ‘Aleks.’
The navigator continued rocking back and forth.
Mikal reached over to rest his hand an Aleks’ shoulder. At that moment someone began opening the crew hatch from the outside. The tortured metal of the Grace’s fuselage screeched as the buckled housing was wrenched apart.
Aleks stopped rocking at the sound and opened his mouth wide. He began to scream.
Mikal gripped his navigator’s shoulders. ‘Aleks, stop.’
Aleks kept screaming. Mikal wrapped his arms around the hysterical navigator and lifted him down onto the Grace’s gory deck.
That is where Ryll found them, the pilot, navigator still in his arms, wedged next to the corpse of the bombardier. All were covered in dried blood. The pilot looked up at the squadron leader, his eyes cold as he repeated the same mantra from cracked lips.
‘We must not show weakness, we must not. To show weakness is death…’
WRAITHFLIGHT
Guy Haley
The wayseers sang their songs, songs that remembered days of glory and days of beauty. Sad songs that were never intended to be so, glad songs made sorrowful by their singing in these terrible times. The webway responded to these paeans of glory still, though the singers were of a diminished people. The membrane of reality split. The gold of the webway changed to the black of space. The Great Wheel’s cold embrace awaited the Iyandeni.
Iyanna Arienal reached out to the dead around her. To those within the infinity core of her ship, Ynnead’s Herald. To those in the Hemlock fighters, and in the cores of the battleships. To the ghost warriors crewing the ships of the Wraithborne squadron, to the spirits guiding the wraithbombers. There were many. In the fleet of Iyanden, the dead outnumbered the living.
We go again to war,+ she told them.
The unliving shifted, their attentions turned from the things of the dead. The urge for revenge kindled in their slow thoughts. The escort of Ynnead’s Herald formed up about the cruiser, awaiting further direction, the Aconites of the Wraithborne, House Haladesh’s undying navy. Dozens of fighters waited behind.
The webway opened like a mouth and disgorged the fleet of Iyanden from its golden throat. On swift wings, craft after craft sped into real space, their yellow-and-blue livery bright against the black.
Before them was the world the humans called Krokengard, an ugly name for an ugly planet. An ash-grey atmosphere marbled with pollutant cloud obscured the surface. A dying world, infested with the human plague. And yet even this poisoned morsel appealed to the Great Dragon. The tyranids of Starving Dragon, that which the humans called Leviathan, attacked. Human ships fought them, desperate to keep their soiled den safe.
At the back of the bridge of Ynnead’s Herald, Iyanna Arienal lay upon a couch. She was surrounded by other spiritseers. The Angel of Iyanden was curled at the centre, the other seven arrayed about her like petals around the heart of the most perfect of flowers. From the point of view of those piloting the ship, the spiritseers were arranged on the vertical plane, but gravity’s constraints meant little to the eldar. Three living crew manned Ynnead’s Herald: two steersmen and their captain. Behind the spiritseers’ station stood wraithguard. A crescent of a dozen of them, still as tombstones, watched over the Angel of Iyanden. Many more of the dead passed as bright lights through the exposed infinity core of the ship, lending their power to the vessel, working its systems. Among them were mighty dead, those that had carried their strength and purpose with them through the gates of Morai-heg.
The helmets of the spiritseers were off. Their eyes were shut. Their breathing was steady. To an observer, Iyanna might appear to be a sleeper, albeit one with troubled dreams. A frown creased her perfect brow. Her eyes were agitated behind lids tinted a delicate blue.
She was not alone in her disquiet. The hive mind hurt the eldar. As the ships left the webway, it was a sudden weight that descended and threatened to crush their souls. Snared in the hive mind’s psychic shadow, their minds became as sluggish as those of the dead.
So far out from the tyranid ships, and yet dread insinuated itself into their hearts. The hive mind had adapted. The roar of its composite soul had increased twentyfold since the Battle of Duriel. Where before it had brought pain and despair, to draw close now spelled death for sensitive eldar psyches.
Lesser eldar might quail and flee at this intimate violation; the Iyandeni did not. Bitter experience made them strong. Their anger outweighed their fear. The Great Dragon was not the only being capable of adaptation. The Great Dragon was not the only being that made use of the dead.
Forwards,+ Iyanna sent.
The sails of the battle group filled, the engines of the attack craft flared blue. They picked up speed, and moved away from the main battlefleet of Iyanden.
The hive fleet of Starving Dragon stretched out in an elongated teardrop billions of lengths long. The vanguard was close to the planet. Beaked monstrosities and tentacled assault beasts were only several hundred thousand lengths from Krokengard. This front wave was being pounded by a line of human ships and orbital defences. A mist of organic detritus clouded the stars. But the humans could not win. Every living ship destroyed saw the Great Dragon gain on the humans’ position. Every one killed had a dozen replacements. More were coasting into the system with each passing cycle.
Iyanna had seen examples of artifice from many human cultures. At the height of their art, humanity had made ugly things, and in this age of the Corpse-Emperor they were far from their height. Their ships were an offence to the eye.
There were those philosophers who took grim delight in pointing out how the humans’ fate was unfolding as a cruder version of the Fall. Iyanna did not agree. Their fate was an inverse of the eldar’s. The humans’ god had been alive, and was dying a slow death. He could not save them. Her goddess Ynnead was yet to be, and undergoing a long birth. Her advent would restore the eldar. Yet the humans thought themselves masters of the galaxy.
The time of humanity was ending. In future ages historians would look back upon this interruption of eldar dominance and note the passing of mankind with disinterested diligence. For sixty million arcs the eldar had ruled the stars. They would do so again, and soon. What was ten thousand arcs of despair in the face of sixty million? This was an era of renewal. Humans were vermin infesting a closed-up home, unaware that the true owners would soon return.
On Wings of Blood Page 30
