Lightning Run - Peter McLean Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Lightning Run – Peter McLean

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Glory Imperialis Omnibus’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Lightning Run

  Peter McLean

  Flight Officer Salvatoria Grant

  Munitorum base Sigma

  Elijan III

  The thunder of the engines gave Sal life.

  Her gloved hands played over the Valkyrie’s controls, caressing the age-pitted steel and brass levers as the plane throbbed with potential on the landing pad. The powerful twin engines were idling, but she knew from long experience that it would only take her to pull that lever back, push those throttles forward, stamp on this pedal, and the assault carrier would rip free of the ground and into the air with a bellow of fury like the very wrath of the Emperor.

  This Valkyrie had been Sal’s plane for three years now, Terran standard. It wasn’t hers, as such, of course. It belonged to the Imperial Fleet, Segmentum Pacificus, Fourth Flotilla, First Battle Group, troopship Damocles. Through those holy lines of command, it belonged to the divine God Emperor Himself, and that was as it should be. The plane was her connection to the Emperor’s divinity, her conduit to enacting His will on whatever world she had been sent to. The machine made her whole, gave her a purpose in the galaxy – to deliver death unending, in His name.

  ‘Not long now,’ she whispered to the Valkyrie. She felt as though she could feel its machine-spirit’s need to be free of the ground, to fly the way it had been ordained to by the will of the Emperor. ‘He’ll be here soon, and when he comes he’ll be in a hurry. They always are. Then we can fly and Emperor willing, we can kill His enemies.’

  ‘You talking to yourself again, Grant?’

  Second flight officer Herrion leaned into the cockpit behind her, his helmet dangling from its straps in his hand. They had been flying together for six months now and she still hadn’t learned to like the man. He was unshaven, and an unlit lho-stick dangled from his mouth in open defiance of her rules. She let her right hand fall to her side and touched her father’s ancient autopistol. She wore it at her hip on every mission, for luck and for her father’s blessing.

  ‘Ditch that smoke,’ she ordered.

  ‘Oh, come on, Grant…’

  ‘Emperor, help me resist the temptation to shoot this fool,’ Sal said, turning in her seat to fix Herrion with a savage glare.

  There was no smoking on Sal’s plane, no way. Not only because of the regulations, although she took those seriously, but also because you could actually smell the fumes of unburned promethium welling up from the Valkyrie’s idling engines. One flame could be the end of both of them, and half the Munitorum base as well.

  Herrion sighed and put his smoke away, unlit.

  ‘Get in and buckle up,’ Sal snapped, taking her hand off the gun. ‘When he gets here we need to go now, not once you’ve got your kit together. And put your damn helmet on. Do you think you’re some sort of mudfoot?’

  Mudfoots, that was what the Navy flyers called the Astra Militarum infantry they usually ended up transporting in their Valkyries. Men and women who would nonchalantly take their helmets off and sit on them for protection against the occasional bursts of groundfire that were bound to come up through the floor of the plane sometimes. People who had never been in a crash-landing situation, in other words.

  Mudfoots didn’t belong in the air, but Salvatoria Grant did. Air was her element, the same as earth and mud was theirs. Her heavy Valkyrie felt like an extension of her own body. She wondered for a moment if the bridge crew of the Damocles, their desiccated bodies hardwired into the ancient spaceframe, felt the same way. She supposed they probably did, if they could still feel anything at all.

  Herrion pulled a face but he buckled his helmet on as she had told him, and took his place in the co-pilot’s seat behind her. Her two gunners were already aboard too, one at each of the side doors in the aft crew bay, where their heavy bolters protruded through the fuselage. The canopies were still up, and damp air blew into the cockpit. It smelled like it might rain later.

  Elijan III was a temperate world, mostly forested on the surface but rich in deep underground promethium reserves. Sal had heard that when the wind blew from the right direction at night, the Munitorum base had reeked of promethium from the great refinery twenty miles up the river. That was before, though. Before the corruption.

  Now the air only smelled of blood.

  The corruption of Elijan III had come fast, and it had come hard. The vile taint of the Archenemy had spread like wildfire through the simple communities of pipemen and refinery workers, threatening to overtake all Imperial order on the world. That much Sal had learned at the Fleet briefing, at least. The rest of it, what the high command hadn’t told them, she had learned in her time on the surface since the Damocles made orbit and disgorged four regiments of Guard and a hundred Valkyries to support them. Since her plane had first touched down on Elijan III, Sal had learned more about the hideous threat they faced than she had ever wanted to know.

  The simple fact was, they weren’t winning.

  Oh, the Officio Prefectus would have it otherwise, of course, but Sal had eyes to see and she could think for herself. Not traits valued in the Guard, perhaps, but the Navy was different. In the Navy, you were expected to make command decisions based on the available information, to protect your plane and your passengers to the best of your ability. That meant not lying to yourself about the odds. The Munitorum base was crawling with troops, the walls manned with heavy autocannons and missile launchers, and still she thought it wouldn’t be enough.

  Elijan III had all but fallen to Chaos, and there was no lying to herself about that. Some terrible, blasphemous cult had overrun the planet, harvesting its rich natural resources for themselves in their endless pursuit of death and slaughter.

  Now, though, there might be hope. She had been seconded to the Munitorum base, and although no hard intel had been revealed to her, it was clear enough to Sal that something of great importance to the war effort was coming to a head.

  She took a deep breath and touched the controls in front of her again, taking strength from their holy construction and the connection she felt they gave her to the Emperor’s divine will.

  This control was for the nose-mounted multi-laser, those triggers would unleash her two Hellstrike missiles from their cradles under the wings. She could kill a main battle tank with those, if the Emperor willed it. She touched the triggers again, and slowly let out her breath. The plane calmed her. It was her spiritual anchor, her link to the ultimate divinity of mankind. Every shot fired was a prayer to the Emperor, every kill an offering to His glory.

  She bowed her head and whispered the Emperor’s catechism of devotion.

  ‘Now what are you muttering about, you mad mare?’ Herrion snorted. ‘Emperor’s blood, you’re–’

  ‘Use His name in vain again and I really will shoot you,’ Sal snapped at him, twisting in her seat to glare at Herrion over her shoulder. She touched the pistol again. ‘Not on my plane. Shut up and– They’re here. Launch prep, right now!’

  She wasn’t looking at her co-pilot any more. Her attention was out of the side of the open cockpit, where a full general of the Astra Militarum was marching stiffly towards her boarding ramp at double time, with three aides and six heavily armed troopers hurrying after him. He was the hope of Elijan III, Sal knew, even if she wasn’t privy to exactly why.

  Herrion knew the art of aerial warfare well, which was the only reason
she put up with him. His hands flew across the controls in front of him, running preflight checks with the practised skill that came from thousands of hours of flying time. He flicked switches, checked gauges, threw rockers, and the amber status runes on the main display turned to green in rapid succession as the twin canopies closed smoothly over their heads.

  The Valkyrie shuddered with anticipation.

  The crew bay intercom crackled in Sal’s helmet vox.

  ‘The general is aboard, pilot. Immediate dust off ordered. Proceed to Patroclus base with all haste.’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ Sal said.

  She could only assume she was speaking to one of the general’s aides, but it didn’t really matter. She knew a command when she heard one. She flicked to the Navy channel.

  ‘Crew, secure doors, brace for dust off. Bolters to automatic,’ she said, and flicked back to the open channel. ‘Lock down and buckle up, sir.’

  Two runes on her readout went from red to green as her gunners closed the side doors and made fast. That was it, they were ready.

  ‘All systems green,’ Herrion reported, his voice all business now they were working.

  ‘Systems green,’ she repeated.

  The base channel clicked open in her ear.

  ‘Transport, cleared for dust off.’

  ‘Dust off,’ Sal replied. ‘Five by five.’

  She reached out and threw a lever forwards.

  Her gloved hand closed over the twin throttles and pushed them forward, and the thunder of the engines built to a piercing scream as the plane threatened to shake itself to pieces on the pad. She raised a clenched fist over her shoulder. Herrion leaned forwards for a moment, tapped his own against it. Good to go.

  Sal stamped on the release pedal.

  The Valkyrie hurled itself vertically into the air, the acceleration crushing her down into her padded leather flight seat until she thought her spine must surely be compacting on itself. That was the feeling of the Emperor’s will being done, by her own mortal hand. Her connection to the divine, through His holy war machine.

  A tight smile crossed Sal’s face as she vectored the engines, channelling their furious power from lift into forward acceleration. The plane roared and blasted through the air with a howl of righteous fury, leaving Munitorum Sigma behind as she struck out over the thick forest below. Her head-up display layered information over her field of vision, the preset course to Patroclus base showing her an endless hololithic tunnel of well-spaced green triangles that seemed to hang in the air in front of her.

  Sal adjusted her flight yoke slightly, guiding the hurtling Valkyrie smoothly through the first triangle, which blinked out of existence as she passed it. She checked airspeed, altitude, wind shear, fuel and cargo weight, and keyed the passenger band again.

  ‘ETA nine hours, sir,’ she said.

  A new voice came on the line. A man, older than the aide by the sound of him, with a voice that spoke with the gravitas of long-accustomed command. The general himself, she thought, and straightened with pride in her seat. She was honoured to be directly addressed by one of his illustrious rank.

  ‘Make it eight. Can you do that for me, pilot?’

  Sal looked at her readouts again, factored fuel tolerances, reheat burn durations, structural fatigue risk. Always a risk, when you pushed a plane this old to its limits. She cleared her throat.

  ‘Maybe, sir,’ she said. ‘But…’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘We might blow up in the air. I have the authority to tell you this, pilot, but consider yourself sworn to crimson-level secrecy – if I can get what I carry there in time, we’ve won this war. If I don’t, then it doesn’t matter if I get there at all. Every minute counts. Do it.’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ Sal said.

  It would mean a course alteration, Sal realised. However hard she pushed the old plane, it couldn’t be done otherwise. Not on their current heading. If she dropped them ten points east though…

  That meant she would be flying them over a known enemy location. She didn’t know exactly what was down there, but there was something. It was a gamble. Sal thought of the general’s words, of the grim determination in his tone, and she made her decision.

  She cancelled the preset course, vectored ten points east, and keyed in the afterburners. The plane kicked her in the base of her spine as it blasted through the air.

  The Emperor’s will be done. All their fates were in His hands, now and forever more.

  The Valkyrie howled east over the forest on a flaming stream of afterburners, and a nine-hour estimate that became eight on their new heading, then became seven and a half. Sal hunched over the controls, milking every scrap of power from the overworked engines. She had felt the urgency in the general’s words, the desperation he had been trying to hide. Whatever his mission was, whatever he carried, it was clear it had to reach Patroclus base as soon as humanly possible.

  They were flying over the enemy lines now. Great swathes of the forest were burning, where overland promethium pipelines had been ruptured in the fighting. Senseless waste and destruction, Sal thought. The vile cultists destroyed for the simple joy of watching things burn. All the same, they built as well. Already they had streaked over settlements and military bases, crude but effective looking. More than once, she had spotted tanks on the ground. Former Imperial tanks, to be sure, noble Leman Russ machines captured and corrupted by the abominations of the Archenemy. Another time, she would have been raining righteous Hellstrike fury down on them from her plane, but not now. The mission was all that mattered.

  Runes were starting to flicker amber on the display as the strained Valkyrie began to complain, but Sal caressed her controls and whispered encouragement to the plane’s machine-spirit.

  ‘You’re no tech-priest, the machine won’t hear you,’ Herrion reminded her. ‘You’ll kill us all if you keep pushing it this hard!’

  ‘Shut up,’ Sal growled, and ran a reassuring hand across the yoke. ‘She can do this. She has to.’

  Whether Sal’s plane could do it or not became irrelevant precisely seven seconds later, when the surface-to-air missile blew her tail off. Warning klaxons wailed as though in physical pain, and the display lit up with flashing red runes across the board.

  ‘Critical, critical!’ Sal shouted into the open channel. ‘Brace, brace, brace!’

  Her Valkyrie was suddenly in a spinning nosedive, trailing flames as it died screaming in the sky over Elijan III. Sal fought the controls with all her might, cutting the afterburners and vectoring what was left of her engines in a desperate attempt to turn their headlong plummet into something approaching a controlled descent. There was a clearing maybe two miles away, ferrocrete runway and armoured bunkers flashing in her vision as the Valkyrie spun wildly in its death throes.

  Airbase, Sal thought. Missile defences.

  It had always been a gamble; Sal had known that and she had accepted it. The enemy might be insane, but they weren’t stupid. Of course they had air defences – and she had flown straight into them. Such was the Emperor’s will for her that day, it seemed.

  Wind screamed in her ears over the vox-channel from the crew bay, now torn open to the rush of air. A burst of flames ripped through the cockpit behind her from a ruptured fuel line. Herrion shrieked, and Sal snatched a glance over her shoulder just in time to see him incinerated in his webbing. She slapped the big red fire suppressant switch on the console in front of her, but it was too late for him. The retardant foam sprayed uselessly across his reeking blackened corpse.

  ‘Anyone alive back there, brace and pray!’ Sal yelled into the vox. ‘We are landing hard!’

  The first of the treetops hit them, and the Valkyrie rolled sickeningly as the great trees shattered in her wake. Sal screamed, and everything went black.

  The pain hit Sal like a commissar’s bullet to the temple. She forced her eyes open, barely ab
le to move. There was a section of twisted airframe embedded in her helmet, maybe one polymer layer away from having gone through her skull. She reached up with shaking hands, found the buckle at her throat and released herself. She was stuck fast in the wreckage, and had to squirm down in her seat to get her head out of her ruined helmet.

  It had saved her life – just.

  She checked her father’s autopistol was still at her belt, the three spare magazines in their leather pouches balancing its weight on her other hip, and hit the quick release that freed her from her webbing. She pitched sideways against the canopy, and only then realised that what was left of the Valkyrie was lying on its side on the forest floor. She yanked the canopy release handle, but the mechanism had been so badly crushed by the impact that it refused to move. Sal swallowed, realising she was effectively trapped in the cockpit.

  She twisted in her seat and looked over her shoulder at the shattered remains of Herrion’s console, his blackened corpse still strapped tightly into the webbing behind it. His canopy release looked undamaged.

  She swallowed again.

  Taking a deep breath, she braced with her legs and forced herself up and over Herrion’s console, straining for the second canopy release handle. She pushed herself upwards with a grunt of effort and half fell onto the charred and foam-encrusted ruin of Herrion’s corpse. Her gloved hand tore into his stomach cavity as she put her weight on him, rupturing his half-cooked insides.

  When she stopped vomiting, Sal grasped his emergency canopy release and pulled it, blowing the entire top of the cockpit clear with a sharp crack of explosive bolts. She crawled gratefully over the roasted filth of her co-pilot and out of the plane, and threw up again on the churned loam of the forest floor.

  She stayed there for some time, hugging the ground and retching with a mixture of shock and horror and sheer relief. She was Emperor only knew how far behind enemy lines, but she was somehow, miraculously, alive. There was nothing she wanted to do more than run, retrace her flight path on foot and try to find her way back to the Munitorum base. Find another plane, and just fly away. She belonged in the air, not here, not in some wild forest. She touched her father’s pistol, and his words came back to her.