Vought saw nothing but a grey shadow as the heretic pilot passed by his cockpit with only a few metres to spare. Autocannon rounds crashed through the bomber’s hull at point-blank range, silencing Weslund’s songs for the Emperor forever as they ripped him apart. Part of the captain’s canopy shredded as shots grazed the air near where he sat, but left him unharmed.
Nilner fired blindly at the oncoming Lightning and tore off one of its wing-mounted engines for good measure; but in return, a hot shell from the autocannon, big enough to punch through a ceramite plate, took all of his left leg below the knee. The big gunner screamed and spat blood.
Vought swore a blistering curse that would have earned him a dozen lashes if it had been spoken in earshot of a commissar, hands rigid around the yoke as cold air howled through holes in his cockpit. He shouted into the communicator, not knowing if his voice would be carried back to the airfield.
‘Point November, this is Griffon. Mission failed. Returning to base.’
Aves was waiting by the runway when the first of the Marauders emerged from the clouds. Sentinel powerlifters and Trojan crawlers fitted for firefighting details were clustered by the ramp, ready to move at a moment’s notice if a bomber made a crash landing. The crewman squinted into the murky sky and his breath caught as he counted the steel-grey shapes as they closed in, many of them trailing smoke in black streams. By his count, only a quarter of the squadron had returned.
Aves saw Griffon then, the watery sunlight glinting off the shattered nose turret. One of the lascannons had been completely sheared away, and the broken spars of the turret sphere looked like ragged teeth in a howling, angry mouth. As he watched, the landing skids emerged from their hatches and locked into place. With the number three engine a shredded wreck, it seemed that Captain Vought was preparing to forego the more difficult vertical touchdown and attempt a runway landing. The fire crews saw this as well, and the Trojans started up their motors, rotating in place to tear after the bomber if the need arose.
Griffon turned into the wind at the end of the runway and trembled slightly. Aves found he could not take his eyes off the wounded flyer as it descended towards the ferrocrete airstrip. At the last second, Vought chopped the Marauder’s throttles and the heavy bomber touched down with an echoing scrape. The landing skids spat sparks and wisps of vaporised paint where they kissed the runway. The aircraft flashed past Aves, choking him with a lungful of smoke from the damaged engine. Two Trojans roared into life and made off after the Marauder; Aves leapt and grabbed a handhold on the second, clinging on as it rumbled towards the slowing bomber.
At the end of the runway, Griffon skidded to the right and almost left the paved airstrip, finally shuddering to a halt on the grassy abutment nearby. Guardsmen scrambled over to the flyer, wrenching open the hatchway, and Aves followed. Up close, he could see the myriad holes and scars from bolter impacts and laser burns that dotted the underside of the fuselage. The Marauder stank of spilled fuel, and dark puddles of lubricant were already beginning to pool beneath it where conduits had been severed by shrapnel. Griffon seemed to sag beneath her own weight, bleeding fluid into the mud.
Aves heard a strangled scream and turned to see Kheed and one of the Guardsmen moving Nilner out of the hatch. The gunnery officer’s uniform was slick with blood, the stark white of bone dangling from where his leg used to be; the leg he’d used to kick Aves savagely, gone now, torn to fleshy tatters. Kheed caught his eye and shouted.
‘Aves, get over here! He’s bleeding out and I can’t stop it.’ He nodded towards a small three-wheeled rover parked at the end of the runway. ‘Get him to the infirmary, fast!’
The Guardsman laid Nilner down on the flatbed and strapped him in. Kheed waved a blood-smeared hand at Aves. ‘He’s lost a lot of blood. If you don’t hurry, he’ll be dead, understand? So get going!’
‘Yessir!’ Aves replied nervously, but Kheed was already gone, rushing back to the bomber. The Trojan crews were squirting fire retardants over the wing, leaving him alone with his charge. Aves climbed into the saddle and gunned the engine, yanking the handlebars around in a tight turn. He heard Nilner wail as the rover bounced over a bump in the road.
Aves pushed down the accelerator and cut across the tracks between the runways. The direct route to the infirmary would take a few minutes, following the service road around the barracks and hangars. It would be quicker to thread through the alleys formed by the maintenance sheds. Aves made a tight turn and drove out of sight, into the shadows by the base wall.
Nilner was babbling something incoherent from the litter behind him, alternatively weeping and coughing as the trike skipped over the ferrocrete paving. Aves brought the rover skidding to a halt at a junction and hesitated.
‘Aves!’ the delirious gunner shouted. ‘You took my leg, you little bastard!’ The crewman watched Nilner thrash against the restraints. His eyes were unfocused as he raved. Aves realised that Nilner was completely unaware of his surroundings, maddened with shock and pain. ‘Worthless piece of excrement! You’re pathetic!’
He took his foot off the accelerator and watched Nilner silently. There was nobody around this part of the base, nobody to hear the gunner’s shouts. Aves watched the crimson patch of blood-soaked cloth on Nilner’s litter as it grew and grew, fed by the big man’s vital fluid. A cold, callous thought began to form in his mind.
‘If you don’t hurry, he’ll be dead.’ Aves spoke Kheed’s words out loud. It would be so simple to just wait, he mused. So easy to stay here and watch Nilner bleed out his last in agonised delirium. He studied the gunner’s tunic, the bloodstained wings on his uniform breast.
‘I hate you,’ Aves told him in a quiet voice. ‘You make my life a misery for your own sport and now I have yours in my hands.’ He leaned closer to Nilner’s sweaty face and recognition glimmered in the gunner’s eyes.
‘Aves,’ he rasped. ‘Help me!’
The crewman’s face twisted in anger; suddenly he wanted to make Nilner beg for his life, he wanted him to suffer. ‘It’s my choice now!’ Aves growled. ‘My choice if you live or die!’
Nilner seemed very small then, a wretched and feeble shadow of the thug that had tormented Aves for months. ‘Please…’ he whispered.
Sorda tapped Aves on the shoulder and the crewman gave a start. ‘Sir! Forgive me, I was just loading parts for the repairs on Griffon–‘
‘I know. The captain tells me that we have a replacement engine and spares for the lascannon.’ He paused. ‘This is not about Griffon.’
‘Sir?’
‘This is about Nilner.’
Aves looked away. ‘I followed my orders, bombardier.’
‘Yes. Yes, you did.’ Sorda gestured towards the infirmary. ‘He’ll live. The tech-priests will be able to give him a mechanical leg, just like Dolenz. The medics told me you got him there just in time. A few minutes more, and they would not have been able to save him.’
‘I followed my orders,’ Aves repeated.
‘And I can’t imagine why you did.’ Sorda stepped closer, lowering his voice. ‘Do you think that he will thank you for it or be grateful? That’s not his way, Aves. Nilner has no compassion in him, not a spark of it. If your places had been reversed, he would not have hesitated to let you perish.’
Aves spoke after a long pause. ‘I know, sir. But I’m not him. As much as I wish I could be sometimes, I’m not like Nilner.’
The officer gave him a measuring gaze and then nodded towards the load of equipment the crewman had been assembling. ‘Captain Vought has been summoned to the command post for new orders. Griffon will be airworthy before nightfall, yes?’
‘With the Emperor’s blessing, yes.’
‘Get to it then, and we’ll fly against these heretics again.’
Aves climbed out of the bomb bay, rubbing a cloth over his hands to wipe off the grease and muck. The fuel feeds for the replacement engine
were now secured, and his job was done. Griffon would fly, if the Imperium so commanded it. The crewman noticed a train of ordnance carriers snaking across the service road. Dragged by a Trojan crawler were a dozen flatbeds, each dominated by the bulk of an Atlas bomb. Aves had never seen an Atlas up close before. They were like long, distended teardrops ending in a splay of winglets, heavy and threatening. Unlike the standard bombs the Marauders usually carried, Atlas warheads were so huge that only one could be taken aboard each aircraft. Aves knew little about ordnance but everyone in the Navy knew what an Atlas looked like. Concealed inside that oblate black cowling was an atomic charge big enough to crack a mountain.
Nearby, Sorda was speaking with the remainder of the bomber’s crew. ‘With Weslund dead, we’ll need someone to man the lascannon. Kheed, you can take that post. We won’t need a navigator to find that cursed leviathan again.’
Kheed’s face soured. ‘A gunnery post? I don’t think the captain would agree–’
‘Captain Vought authorised me to issue whatever orders I saw fit,’ Sorda interrupted. ‘You may feel that cannon duty is beneath you, Mister Kheed, but necessity overrides your personal feelings. Man the weapon, that’s an order.’
‘You won’t get your hands too dirty,’ said Stoi sarcastically. It was possibly the longest sentence that Sorda had ever heard the tail gunner speak.
‘What about you, then?’ Kheed sneered. ‘You’ll be leaving your precious bombs to stand at Nilner’s turret?’
Sorda shook his head, watching the Trojan approach. ‘We’ll only be carrying a single munition. I have to be the one to get it on target.’ But the Trojan rolled right past Griffon without stopping, taking the bombs to the other flyers on the ready line.
Aves’ face creased in confusion. Was the Marauder to be given a conventional load while all the others in the squadron would carry an Atlas? His answer came as Captain Vought strode out of the lengthening shadows of evening towards the assembled crew.
‘Captain,’ Sorda began, ‘those Atlas–’
‘We are to stand down,’ Vought said bluntly. A ripple of disbelief passed through Griffon’s crew. ‘Because of the shortage of personnel, we’re to remain on base and assist with the evacuation.’
‘Transport duty?’ Kheed said, his voice rising. ‘We’re fit to be nothing more than a common shuttle now?’
Vought ignored the interruption. ‘Command has ordered that Point November be abandoned and all Imperial Guard forces are to fall back. A full company of the Doom Eagles are on their way from Merron, and the remaining combat capable aircraft in the 404th will launch a final bombardment prior to their arrival.’
‘Griffon is ready!’ Aves blurted out. Normally, he wouldn’t have dreamed of speaking out of turn, but his heart was racing and his better judgement was forgotten.
‘The grease monkey’s right,’ snapped Kheed. ‘We can fly right now, captain. Command can’t brush us aside like this!’
Vought’s voice was icy. ‘Command can do whatever they wish, navigator. We go where the Emperor wills, and you would do well not to let your desire for glory tell you otherwise.’
‘But why, captain?’ Sorda pressed. ‘Did we work around the clock to reach flight status just so we could ferry boxes of paperwork up to orbit?’
‘I was informed by the wing commander that Griffon will not be granted battle-ready status without a replacement for Nilner.’ Vought was tense. He shared his crewmen’s anger at being denied a chance to avenge themselves on the heretics. ‘No one can be spared to take his place. The commander felt that in such an undermanned state, Griffon would be wasted on the sortie.’
‘I can take Nilner’s turret, sir,’ said Aves. ‘I can stand his post.’
Kheed made a face as if he had smelt something bad. ‘You can’t be serious. You’re a washout, a grounded weakling!’
Vought gave the crewman a hard stare. ‘Look me in the eyes, Aves. Convince me.’
Aves did as he was ordered, a powerful wellspring of surety surging up inside him. ‘It will be my honour to serve the Emperor.’
The captain felt a flicker of surprise as he saw something in Aves that he’d never seen before – a steely, unbending resolve. He gave him a brusque nod and turned to Sorda. ‘Get him outfitted and have the ordnance crew load an Atlas aboard. We’ll lift in fifteen.’
Aves never saw the looks of incredulity on the faces of the other men. He was elated, and it was all he could do not to whoop for joy and cry out thanks to the heavens; but then Vought was at his side and the captain was speaking in low, grave tones.
‘Mark me well, lad. If you blunder up there, you’ll be the death of us all, and by the Golden Throne I swear you’ll die screaming before I do!’
The crewman gave a shaky nod.
‘You should have been careful about what you wished for. Now you’re going to learn the truth about your dreams – those fantasies you have about wearing the wings, that’s all they were. The reality is enough to ruin some men for life.’ He paused, turning to study the darkening sky. ‘You’re in it now, lad. No turning back.’
‘I... I’ll do my best, captain.’
‘Yes. Or we’ll all die.’
Griffon dived into the battle on spears of orange flame, knifing through the sky amid the ragged remains of the 404th. Aves felt his gut knotting in fear. The sky, the perfect night sky of Rocene that he’d admired so many times from the safety of the ground, was gone now, replaced by an ominous void choked with explosions and spitting streaks of inferno. He gripped the dorsal heavy bolters tightly as the Marauder sank into a voyage through the footless hall of an airborne hell.
Off to port, he saw the eye-searing flash of a laser as it connected the ground briefly with another flyer that seemed to vanish in a cloud of ashes, disappearing like some twisted conjuring trick. Aves blinked furiously, his eyes watering as the bright beam remained imprinted as a purple stripe on his retinas. The thick air was a mix of turbulence and random thermals, hot gas and smoke rising upward from the ground where great swathes of city lay burning or Imperial forces died by the thousands in heretic-fuelled death pyres.
The crewman twitched as he glanced around inside the enclosed steel turret, frantically trying to scan every inch of the horizon at once, terrified that some enemy would approach from just the direction he hadn’t been looking. The triggers of the bolters were wet with sweat from his palms, and he found himself remembering the uncountable times he had wiped them down after a mission. Aves imagined Nilner, sitting where he was now, feeling the same fears, courting the same terrors.
The screeching chatter of Stoi’s tail guns brought him crashing out of his reverie and Aves spun the dorsal turret around to sight down the fuselage. The albino gunner was pouring rounds into the sky behind Griffon, but Aves could not see a target; then they appeared, bursting out of the funeral-black mist like two angels of death, twin Thunderbolt fighters each smeared with foul graffiti and Chaotic symbols. Stoi caught the leader with a well-aimed salvo that shattered the heretic flyer. The wingman reacted quicker and executed a sharp wingover, dancing close to Aves’ sights. The crewman shouted out a wordless cry and slammed the triggers home.
Bolt shells tore the flyer into ribbons and it collapsed in on itself, folding up into a burning knot of metal. Aves found himself grinning and panting as he realised he had just made his second kill.
White light flared out in the distance, casting stark, sharp-edged shadows in the turret. The crackle of static over his headset confirmed that one of the bombers had dropped its Atlas, immolating untold numbers of heretic troops in an instant atomic holocaust.
Something glittered in the clouds to starboard and he turned the guns to train on it. Through his auspex, Aves saw another of Griffon’s sister bombers, a Marauder Destroyer variant, spitting orange fire from ducts along the fuselage, and without warning one of the vessel’s wings broke away. Fragments
of metal sliced though the air around the bomber and peppered Griffon’s wings, slicing through fuel lines and fluid channels. Aves’ heart leapt into his mouth as jets of combustion streamed from the engine cowlings. A large spear of broken metal clattered over his head and ricocheted off the tailplane, spiking through Stoi’s turret as it passed. The tail gunner’s bolters drooped and fell silent.
Griffon flew on, cutting through the sky, seemingly unaware that her lifeblood fuel was bleeding out behind her, that one of her crewmen had likely just been killed. All around him, Aves saw an inverted rain of bright fireflies lancing up into the darkness, streaking past in thin glowing trails. The bomber jinked wildly to port, slamming his head against the console, knocking sense into him.
‘Tracers!’ Aves trembled as cannon rounds from a massed battery of Hydras converged on the bomber. In places where the hull had been patched with thin, sub-standard plating, the flak cut through Griffon’s fuselage and ate into her vital systems.
‘Griffon, inbound to target. Terra, protect us.’ Vought’s voice, tight and forced, spoke from Aves’ comm-set, and he heard the grinding metallic noise of the bomb bay doors opening.
Still the tracers chewed and nipped at the Marauder as she turned into the wind. Aves glanced over his shoulder towards the nose and saw smoke streaming from the lascannon turret, the cupola ravaged by a direct hit from below. First Weslund, now Kheed; the devotional icons and prayer pamphlets Weslund had decorated the inside of the turret with had not stopped the cramped metal sphere from becoming the coffin for two men.
On Wings of Blood Page 43
