Wild Rider - Gav Thorpe

by Warhammer 40K

  Meliniel departed to make good his plans, but the Visarch ignored her warning stare and stood close, as though her ailment were a foe he could save her from with a stroke of his blade. Seeing him standing guard still brought some measure of balance to her thoughts. She remembered her epiphany from before the loss of the Whisper, and wondered which of the gods might be wearing the crimson armour. The thought brought comfort and she allowed herself to slip into unconsciousness, safe in the sanctuary of his presence.

  Carried aboard several drop-ships, the Wild Riders led the Saim-Hann contingent of the warhost, their commander in the foremost craft. In direct contradiction to placing himself at the tip of the attack, he had insisted that his family, escorted by squads of warriors from the Aspect shrines of Khaine, made the descent in the heart of the arriving flotilla. Even his father’s protestations had been overruled by the Wild Lord, who was quite willing to take the greatest risks for the greatest glory, but would be loath to extend the same opportunity of swift demise to his close family.

  Nuadhu’s first impression, looking down upon the forest-covered hills of Agarimethea through the tinted canopy of a Ghostlance drop-craft, was that nothing had changed since he had fled with his Wild Riders. First impressions are rarely to be trusted, and it was not long before the truth was revealed.

  When his expedition had come upon the tomb vault, it had been a relatively small collection of structures surrounding a central pyramid, nestled in a wooded valley. The valley itself was still visible, in a fashion. Where before had risen majestic slopes of woodland now towered silver-flanked bastions that glittered with a jade aura. Pulses of energy flared along complex circuit-sigils that ran the length of the edifices, discharging as bursts of forking lightning from their summits. Seven higher peaks stood out – the ones that had disgorged a flight of necrontyr attack craft, he recalled. Higher than the others, their peaks opened like the petals of a bloom, revealing cavernous interiors with a great burst of green light. From these hangar-tombs rose a stream of crescent-shaped interceptors, coruscations of power dripping from their wingtips as they emerged, as though dragging themselves free of the pulsating coronas.

  The valley floor was equally denuded of its arboreal cover, revealing an expanse of trenches, obelisks and smaller pyramids that ran along its considerable length. Like the mountaintops, the artificial fissures gleamed with necrontyr power, casting their emerald light across circuit-scribed needles and tall archways.

  Opportunity to further study the enemy’s lair was interrupted by the pilot.

  ‘You better mount up,’ she said, pointing to the glint of incoming scythe-ships. ‘We’ll need to take evasive manoeuvres. I’ll try to get down to drop altitude as quick as I can.’

  Around the Ghostlance, Nuadhu could see other drop-ships plunging groundwards, while Crimson Talon fighters and Hemlock fighters soared ahead to meet the gleaming stream of necrontyr attackers. In the moments before the nose of the craft plunged down, he saw the opening flickers of bright lance fire and the answering scorch of emerald beams. The memory of the necrontyr death rays disintegrating his kin made him shudder and he quickly picked his way out of the piloting suite to the transport compartment.

  Three Vypers nestled in the hold, held in a tracery of harness lines, his steed Alean between the two other attack skimmers. Each was a large jetbike, the two flanking machines fitted with a seated gun platform at the rear, while Alean had a railed fighting deck upon which Nuadhu rode to battle. Inertia-dampening systems masked the worst effects of the Ghostlance’s movement, but as he clambered aboard the back of the Vyper with a nod to B’sainnad at the controls, Nuadhu could feel the rocking motion of the pilot’s efforts. A glance through the viewing ports to either side revealed a swinging horizon of trees and skies, appearing and disappearing alternately as the Ghostlance rolled first one way and then the other, zigzagging towards the arboreal landscape.

  ‘Get ready to drop!’ shouted the pilot, her alarm not only heightening the pitch of her voice but throbbing along the drop-craft’s empathic spirit-link. ‘Ground defences appearing!’

  Looking over his shoulder, back through the pilot’s canopy, Nuadhu saw swathes of woodland falling away, a pulse of green light felling trees like a harvester’s blade, turning timber and leaf to a floating haze of particles. In the place of the forest, necrontyr engines were revealed, shimmering with jade energy. Cruciform semicircular firing arrays turned skywards and arcs of artificial lightning leapt up towards the plunging aeldari aircraft. Powerful gauss rays flared along the fuselage of the nearest Ghostlance, turning matter to scintillating clouds of atoms. Its wing tore away, sending it spiralling down towards the green canopy.

  Some distance ahead, closer to the tomb complex, even larger weapons slid out of their subterranean stasis vaults, the shimmer of their deadly cannons dancing across the surrounding treeline.

  ‘Drop us now and climb!’ barked Nuadhu, leaping over the rail of his fighting platform. He attached the grav-harness to his armour – he usually eschewed the safety precaution for freedom of movement, but even in his excited state knew better than to let himself freefall from such a height.

  ‘My lord?’ the pilot replied.

  ‘We are too high for the anti-gravitic impellors, Nuadhu,’ said B’sainnad.

  ‘The lord is right, we can glide first to bleed off descent speed, and then activate the engines when we are low enough,’ said Ceridhan, one of the other Vyper pilots.

  Her gunner, Laedagda, nodded from his scatter laser’s cradle. ‘Better than getting shot down from the skies before we launch.’

  ‘All right,’ conceded B’sainnad. ‘You better hold on really tight.’

  The pilot darted them a look, assuring herself that they were secure upon their war steeds. Receiving their shared assent across the matrix, she lifted her fingers to her spirit stone and then brow in a departing salute.

  ‘Opening drop doors now,’ she announced. With a hiss, the fuselage slid forwards, splitting the rear and bottom of the Ghostlance’s sleek form. Wind screamed past, carrying the growing shriek of necrontyr attack craft. ‘Fly sure. Fight well.’

  Nuadhu was about to reply with something inspiring, but the words were ripped from his mouth as the securing harness peeled away like a parted web. In the next instant Alean was falling through open sky, the Ghostlance swiftly becoming a red blur above them.

  ‘This is a transport, it has no weapons.’

  Tzibilakhu’s words confirmed what Aradryan had feared and his attention slipped back to the scythe-like attack craft vectoring hard towards the incoming Ynnari drop.

  ‘Concentrate on flying, leave the fighting to others,’ his companion continued. He felt the edge of her consciousness butt against his and allowed their peripheral thoughts to overlap within the dawnsail’s systems.

  It happened on instinct, but only when he felt the sharp edges of her spirit gripping his did he remember that her history in Commorragh was very different to his upbringing on Alaitoc Craftworld. When he had been a self-exiled outcast, Aradryan had spent much time in the company of the drukhari Maensith, but never had he shared her soul in this way. Tzibilakhu’s mind was hot to his ­psychic senses, their connection like heated nails binding them together.

  Pushing through the discomfort, he focused on the dawnsail’s ailerons and other control surfaces, while his partner used her thoughts to manipulate the thruster engines and anti-grav impellors. The dawnsail shuddered and the hull twisted slightly as Aradryan sought to bank away from the attacking necrontyr while Tzibilakhu’s pulses of energy were directed towards taking them to the enemy. He pulled back from the manoeuvre as she also altered her commands, so that the dawnsail yawed leftwards, slipping sideways through the air.

  ‘This is not working.’ Aradryan tried to do nothing, letting the drop-craft settle again. ‘You are reacting too slowly.’

  ‘And you are going the wrong way!
Follow my lead, do not try to force your course upon me.’

  ‘But you would have us steer directly towards the enemy. Folly!’

  ‘We must travel where we can be protected, Aradryan,’ Tzibilakhu insisted. ‘Look further afield.’

  Following a nudge from her thoughts, Aradryan let his consciousness seep out into the dawnsail’s main sensory array. He picked up several dozen other plunging aeldari craft, among them the star-like pulse of interceptors. They spiralled around the descending flotilla but soon they would have to break off to engage the incoming necrontyr.

  ‘That still makes no sense!’ Aradryan tried to pull the dawnsail away from the imminent exchange of weapons fire. ‘The fighters should be between us and the enemy!’

  ‘If we break away from our escort and even one scythe-craft gets through, who will be close by to protect us? We fly together or die alone.’

  The drop-ship juddered as Tzibilakhu attempted to push it back to its original course with a sudden fire of attitude thrusters. She bulged the anti-gravitic field to slew the craft to the right, clumsily dragging them between two diving Nightwing fighters.

  ‘What is the meaning of this unruliness?’ Aradryan did not recognise the voice on the messenger-waves.

  ‘We are still adjusting for the loss of the Whisper, autarch Meliniel,’ replied Tzibilakhu, darting a venomous glare at Aradryan. ‘It will not happen again.’

  She freed a hand from her cradle and drew a long serrated blade, holding it up so that the edge caught the glint of control projections. The Commorraghan needed no words to convey her intent, the connection between them carried her murderous threat in a spine-chilling shudder through Aradryan.

  ‘You claim you have flown starships into battle, but I have flown with the Ynnari since their first escape from the clutches of Asdrubael Vect. If you do not follow me, I will fly by myself.’

  Aradryan wanted to retaliate, but the scant Whisper between them eliminated any possibility of her threat being a bluff. Any retort seemed pointless. She would dare. A pulse of attachment to Yvraine overcame all other considerations. She would die – and kill – for the Opener of the Seventh Way.

  Cowed, Aradryan let his consciousness recede slightly from the control systems.

  The streaks of holo-fielded craft darted past, flashes of laser leaping from within the rainbow blurs. Green arcs spat back from rolling scythe-craft, the shriek of engines thrumming through Aradryan’s soul as well as his hearing.

  ‘You have but one goal now, Aradryan.’ Tzibilakhu’s thoughts were a welcome thunderous distraction from the macabre scream of the necrontyr attack craft. ‘Yvraine is the start and end of your existence. She is our hope, all hope. Your death is nothing if she lives. Your life is nothing if she dies.’

  The vehemence with which this message was delivered was like magma forcing its way through Aradryan’s veins, fuelling him even as it turned his thoughts to cinders.

  Your life is nothing if she dies.

  With this thought flaring through every part of him, Aradryan lent his mind to his companion, guiding the dawnsail towards the necrontyr behind a cloud of fighters.

  Chapter 17

  FIRST ASSAULT

  Cold air stung Nuadhu’s eyes and robbed his lungs of breath, pulling at his hair. For what seemed an age they plunged vertically, a most unpleasant sensation that felt like his innards were being forced into his throat.

  Faced with a potentially deadly plummet, his racing thoughts alighted briefly on his family, hopefully still within the cluster of craft descending more sedately above him. He hoped earnestly that they negotiated the enemy interceptors and anti-drop arsenal with less drastic measures required. More immediate concerns ripped his attention back to his predicament.

  As the atmosphere continued to thicken, the Vyper shuddered, wisps of vapour coiling from the sharp tips of the stabilising fins, curling away from the tip of Drake’s Fang in its mounting sheath. With some effort, Nuadhu turned his head to the left, to see Ceridhan’s Vyper a distance below them. Above and to the right, Nuarrath’s skimmer followed.

  A sudden bolt of emerald flashed past the nose of the falling Vyper. The bold green streak struck the tail of Nuarrath’s Vyper, a glancing blow that was still enough to shear away half the fuselage. The gun cradle of Liaska’s brightlance peeled away, left hanging by a twist as it bucked in the draught of the Vyper’s decent. Nuadhu could see the panic in her face as she pulled at the gun harness, eyes flicking between the mechanism and the main body of the Vyper.

  At the same time, Nuarrath wrestled with the controls, trying hard to avoid the Vyper going into a flat spin.

  ‘Get us alongside!’ Nuadhu shouted over the windrush, jabbing a finger up towards the other Vyper.

  ‘We don’t have gravitic power yet,’ the pilot replied with a grimace. ‘We can’t climb.’

  A scream wrenched Nuadhu’s attention back to the beleaguered pair. The last piece of fuselage sheared away as Liaska dragged herself out of the gun harness. For several heartbeats she clawed at the ragged edge of the Vyper while Nuarrath leaned back, trying to extend a hand. The clan heir howled his frustration, almost within reach himself but powerless to help as Liaska’s grasp failed and she whirled away, her cries loud in the messenger bead inside Nuadhu’s ear.

  ‘I’ve lost part of the gravitic impellor,’ Nuarrath said over the link. ‘I cannot fly and have no gunner. Win this battle, Wild Lord.’

  The other Vyper angled away, prow pointing almost directly down. Nuadhu moved to the back of the platform to follow its progress, watching until it became a scarlet blur heading towards one of the defence pylons below. He almost lost sight of the craft, but a sudden flash of detonation marked where it crashed into its target.

  Nuadhu fought back tears and looked around. Deadly beams of green and white flared up from the tomb complex’s perimeter, cutting through the flotilla of Ghostlances and larger craft. Aeldari fighters swooped and spiralled around necrontyr scythe-craft, lighting the skies with exchanges of brilliant energy.

  ‘We’ve acquired gravitic tension,’ announced B’sainnad. A heartbeat later the pilot pulled hard on the controls, tearing Alean out of its precipitous dive. Nuadhu’s legs buckled under the force and spots of light danced through his vision, distorting the view of entwined aerial combat. As his vision returned, he blinked hard, seeing dark blurs against the pale clouds above, almost bat-like in shape.

  The messenger bead buzzed with a long-range connection.

  ‘Stay on approach to your target, Lord of the Wild Riders,’ said a voice he didn’t recognise. ‘We shall clear the path for you.’

  The shadows rapidly resolved into the shapes of swooping Vampire and Phoenix bombers, a dozen of them in the scarlet of the Ynnari.

  The ripple of unruly plasmic detonations throbbed across the canop­tek array that served as the Watcher of the Dark’s royal chamber. Stood within the webwork of energy interfaces, crisscrossed by a mesh of energy lines, she monitored everything that transpired on the surface.

  The wave of heavy aerial craft inflicted a significant interlude to the resurrection cycle, their incendiary munitions and seismic charges not only incapacitating scores of awakening warriors but severely disrupting the whole immortality grid of Pantalikoa. Fast-attack gravitic vehicles exploited the denuded phalanx and rushed towards the tomb city.

  The aeldari simply could not be allowed access to the Panatheitik Vault. The Watcher of the Dark was slowly regaining more faculties, including access to older memory banks in the heart of the catacombs. Though she had not yet tapped into the founding data, she encountered more and more warnings about the inward dimensional barrier and the importance of maintaining its integrity. Past-her had been so insistent on this fact that she had incorporated several actionable routines to prevent any such interference from herself. The Watcher of the Dark had no direct control over the vault gate itsel
f, unable to penetrate the temporal field that had activated following the aeldari’s first intrusion.

  ‘Attend to me, wraiths of the neversphere.’

  It was the first vocalisation she had made since her entombment and it felt good to interact on a purely physical level. The imposition of strict sonic principles helped her detach her consciousness from the greater part that was the city, and in that separation she recalled a name.

  Hazepkhut. Phaerakh of the Septaplurachy.

  She revelled in the identifier, and the flood of memories that came with the positive association. Allies and enemies, lovers and foes, a succession of experiences and encounters that would all end when her ravaged physiology finally succumbed to the genetic weaknesses within.

  And then the blessing and curse of the day that Illuminor Szeras had come to Pantalikoa. The miracles of biotransference promised everything she had desired – everlasting dominion over her subjects and an eternity to indulge her desires.

  The reality was far harsher. She looked down at the shimmering metal of her artificial body and mourned the loss of sensation that had so filled her mortal life. When had that desire to seek experience forever been replaced by the solemn duty she now performed?

  Thoughts turning full circle, she returned her awareness to her present situation. Three figures drifted in front of the nexus-throne, each serpentine guard slowly undulating as though carried on the waves of emerald energy that pulsed slowly about the chamber.

  ‘We answer the summons,’ they intoned together, bowing their long bodies before their queen.

  ‘Heed my message and take it forth to the commanders of the aeldari army,’ she commanded, reaching out a hand. A flare of luminescence carried her thoughtwave to their receptors, imprinting her order upon their obedience circuits. The wraiths shuddered as new imperatives flowed into their systems.