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  Something caught Jaeger’s attention from the corner of his eye, but before he had a chance to look properly, Arafa was screaming in his ear.

  ‘Incoming! Ork fighter-bombers, moving in on an intercept vector, closing fast. Where’s our damned fighter screen?’

  Jaeger was transmitting even before Arafa had finished.

  ‘Storm Leader, Arrow Leader!’ he rasped, throat dry with sudden fear. ‘This is Raptor Leader, we need cover and fast! We have…’ Jaeger checked the display in front of him, ‘…eight fighter-bombers incoming!’

  ‘Okay, Raptor Leader,’ the fighter commander came through immediately. ‘We’re on our way. Arrow Leader out.’

  ‘Everyone, keep sharp!’ Jaeger ordered over the squadron comm-link. ‘Gunners, mark your targets, watch for the crossfire. Tight formation. Don’t let them get in amongst us. Drake, you’re uppermost – cover the blindsides.’

  Jaeger forced himself to calm down, loosening his white-kuckled grip on the control column. He kept his gaze firmly on the slivers of light that marked the approaching orks. Now was the time to trust in the gunners.

  The orks were jinking and swerving as they closed in on Raptor Squadron, surrounded by a cloud of tracer shells and pulses of laser light as the Marauders’ guns opened fire. Each enemy craft was different, haphazardly constructed from crudely cut and bent metal plates, pushed screaming across the stars by hugely oversized engines that spluttered multi­coloured trails. Each was decorated differently too: some painted in bold stripes of red and black or red and yellow, others embellished with ork glyphs which were indecipherable to Jaeger, others still just a mess of jagged patterns and garish colours. Blazing cannons protruded from the nose of each interceptor and their wings were hung with bombs and missiles.

  The Marauders were flying close in to each other, relying upon weight of fire to drive off the attack, rather than trying to evade the much more manoeuvrable ork aircraft. Their gunners covered each other’s blind spots, trying to keep up the almost impenetrable wall of bolt shells and las-beams that was needed to keep the fighters at bay until the Divine Justice’s interceptors could arrive.

  ‘Got one!’ Arick shouted from behind Jaeger, as an ork fighter exploded into an billowing cloud of shrapnel and r­apidly burning fuel. Then the fighters screamed within range, raking along the length of Drake’s plane, sending splinters of metal flying. A few stray rounds ricocheted off the shield in front of Jaeger, causing him to flinch, but the armourglass held out against the impacts. As the enemy swept overhead, the dorsal guns on the Marauders swivelled to track them, spraying salvo after salvo of fire into the ork formation. Through the armoured view panel to his left, Jaeger saw one of the craft caught in a crossfire by Phrao’s and Drake’s gunners. The enemy’s cockpit shattered, causing it to tumble out of control towards Jerryl’s stricken Marauder. As the bomber laboriously swung out of harm’s way, its damaged wing twisted, until it sheared off completely. Lurching out of formation, the Marauder flipped madly out of control, and was suddenly in the centre of a devastating crossfire from the orks. Jaeger averted his gaze, but in his mind’s eye he could picture the lifeless bodies of the crew drifting out towards the stars.

  With Jerryl’s covering fire lost, the ork fighter-bombers closed in on the rear of Raptor Squadron, twisting nimbly between the volleys of fire from the tail gunners. The situation was looking grim: the orks could simply pick them off one by one now that the formation was disrupted. If they just carried on flying straight towards the target they’d bee sitting targets and wouldn’t last more than a couple of minutes more.

  ‘Break formation for dogfight!’ Jaeger ordered. ‘Drake, Arafa, circle round and get–’

  Jaeger’s order was interrupted by a message from the Divine Justice. ‘This is Admiral Veniston. Maintain formation, proceed towards primary target without delay.’

  Jaeger gripped the control column, trying to quell his rising fury. Was Veniston deliberately trying to get them killed? He stabbed at the comm-net button again. ‘This is Jaeger. Repeat, break formation – take out these damned orks, or we can forget about our target!’

  As the Marauders pulled away from each other, Jaeger dragged his plane round in a tight circle, the control column juddering in his hands. Berhandt was crouched over the lascannon controls, staring intently through the firing visor for a target. Jaeger spotted a fighter expertly tailing Drake’s weaving Marauder. Jaeger brought his own craft down above the ork craft, glancing across to check that Berhandt was ready. The slicing beams of the bombardier’s lascannon were joined by Arick’s fire from above their heads. It tore through the tail of the ork fighter, sending it listing off uselessly, fountains of sparks spraying from its ruptured fuselage.

  The rattle of shells against the hull snapped Jaeger’s attention to his left, where another enemy fighter-bomber was roaring towards him, its cannons blazing away. Something punched through the hull just behind the flight commander and he heard a muffled cry over the internal communicator.

  ‘What’s happening back there? Saile? Marte?’ he demanded.

  He was answered by Marte’s deep voice. ‘Clean head shot, Commander Jaeger. Saile’s dead.’

  Everything was anarchy. Jaeger watched the Marauders twisting and weaving, trying to shake off the much quicker ork craft. The enemy was everywhere, the fighter-bombers looping around the squadron, unleashing volley after volley of fire from their cannons.

  Arick’s voice filled the internal link: ‘Come on, scum! Yeah, just a little closer… Take that! Damn, just winged him! Oh, you hungry for some as well, filth? Emperor, these scum are slippery…’

  Jaeger pushed the Marauder into a steep dive, the mass of the ork hulk sliding across his field of vision through the canopy. He saw Drake’s Marauder being tailed by a trio of fighter-bombers and realised the first attack wave had been reinforced by more of the ork craft. Glancing down at the onboard scanner, he realised that the bomber’s sensor arrays were damaged and hadn’t picked up the new arrivals. The flickering amber and red lights across the whole panel showed that nearly all the plane’s systems were in need of serious repair. Glancing over his shoulder, Jaeger could make out Ferix clambering about in the gloom, frantically rewiring cables and sealing split pipelines, muttering prayers all the while.

  Turning his attention back to the outside, he watched helplessly as a volley of fire from the orks shredded the tail of Drake’s Marauder. But then, without warning, the fighter-bombers tailing Drake exploded into widening blasts of twisted metal. A moment later, three Imperial Thunderbolts screamed through the cloud of burning gas, their engines at full throttle. The comm crackled into life.

  ‘This is Arrow Leader. We have them now. Break for your target.’

  With a howl of relief, Jaeger opened up the engines to full and flicked the transmit rune on the comm-panel. ‘Just in time, Dextra! Stay lucky and I’ll see you back on board.’

  The interceptors had punched a hole in the fighter-bomber squadrons, leaving the route clear for the bombers to proceed towards their destination. Jaeger banked his aircraft around to head for the opening, his eyes fixed on the huge ork vessel ahead.

  ‘Raptor Squadron, this is Raptor Leader,’ Jaeger announced over the squadron frequency, trying to keep his voice calm, despite his trepidation and pounding heart. ‘Follow me in.’

  ‘Check missile and bomb links,’ Jaeger ordered the squadron. Behind him, Berhandt touched a pair of runes and frowned as they failed to light up. Snarling, the bombardier brought his fist down sharply on the display and grinned cheerfully as his faced was bathed in green light. He looked towards Jaeger and gave a thumbs up.

  ‘This is Raptor Leader,’ Jaeger broadcast to the squadron. ‘Prepare for bombardment of primary objective.’

  As a series of affirmatives came back across the comm-link, Jaeger gave a quick smile to himself. They’d got through. Not all of them, admittedly, but hop
efully they’d get the opportunity to avenge Saile, Jerryl and the others.

  ‘Look at the size of that beast,’ Arafa’s awed voice came over the comm.

  ‘Less talk, men. Stay sharp,’ Jaeger interrupted ‘We’ve come too far to mess up now.’

  Despite his stern words, Jaeger could understand the other pilot’s feelings. The hulk was truly massive, dwarfing even the majestic size of the Divine Justice. As the squadron moved closer and closer to their target, and the hulk grew larger and larger in their sights, Jaeger could make out more details. He could see where three or perhaps four different starships had been compacted together, forming outcrops of twisted metal, jutting at a bizarre angle from where innumerable other craft and asteroids had been compressed together by the tides of warp space to form the central mass of the drifting hulk. It looked like a gigantic wedge of crumpled and torn metal and rock, the size of a city, weighing untold millions of tons. How the orks managed to populate one of these randomly wandering behemoths, the Emperor alone knew. That they could was bad enough, but when the green-skinned savages managed to activate dormant engines or build their own immense drives, that turned an uncontrolled, erratic menace into a dire threat. The bulk of the ork vessel shimmered with the frozen particles that encrusted its hull. Billowing gases vented from unseen ports, creating a wreath of lazily moving smog around the hulk’s huge girth. It had a kind of savage beauty: a wracked sculpture of tortured metal that somehow seemed to be cleaving elegantly across the stars.

  Jaeger’s thoughts hardened. Inside that bizarre, sprawling shell were thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of orks waiting to devastate some planet; to spill across continents in a wave of wanton destruction and killing. He remembered what had happened to the Imperial Retribution and pictured Saile’s corpse in the sealed gunnery chamber behind him. All thoughts of beauty slipped from his mind immediately. The hulk was a threat to the Emperor’s domains, a stain upon the galaxy. It was his duty to destroy it.

  Checking the targeting data scrolling across a small, dull yellow viewscreen just above his head, Jaeger banked the Marauder in towards the hulk to assume the best attack trajectory.

  ‘Raptor Squadron, this is Raptor Leader,’ Jaeger growled, turning over the attack pattern in his head. ‘Praise the Emperor, it’s time.’

  The Marauders sped across the chaotic hull of the ork hulk, diving low to swoop beneath ruined gantries, swerving around twisted columns. With the Marauders this close, the defence turrets had little time to react to their presence, sending up a harmless spray of energy bolts and shells seconds too late.

  Jaeger started to chant the mantra that would ease his mind into union with the aircraft he controlled. He would rely solely upon instinct rather than thought, he and the bomber acting and reacting as a single entity. As he felt his mind slipping into the semi-subconscious state he required for total concentration, Jaeger glanced over to see Berhandt hunched over the targeting screen, his fingers instinctively adjusting the row of dials below it to get the focus and magnitude correct.

  Guiding the Marauder across the hulk’s surface with one hand, Jaeger activated a series of runes and the canopy in front of him darkened slightly as it interfaced with the Marauder’s artificial eyes and ears. A false image of outlines and silhouettes imposed itself over the view through the shield, highlighting particular obstacles, bringing the twisted contours and angles of the hulk’s surface into stark contrast for ease of navigation. Patches of static or blankness showed here and there where the Marauder’s sensors were damaged or some interfering energy source was fluctuating within the hulk itself.

  With Berhandt concentrating on the bombs and missiles, it was Jaeger’s task to take control of the lascannon. The flight commander reached overhead and pulled a lever. With a sudden venting of quickly dissipating steam, the lascannon controls slid forward from the control panel beside Berhandt, four clamps locking the whole control bank into its new position alongside Jaeger. Punching a pair of buttons on the weapon control panel with his right hand, still guiding the Marauder around the obstructions ahead with his left, the flight commander activated the lascannon and the canopy display in front of him was filled with a swirl of static. Quickly adjusting the weapon’s sensor array, Jaeger retuned the lascannon’s false eyes and the cloud of random specks coalesced into moving icons, highlighting possible target points. The blood-red rune of their primary target stood out like a guiding beacon, a procession of angles, estimated armour, trajectories and other information scrolling rapidly alongside it.

  ‘Raptor Squadron, sound off current status,’ the flight commander ordered.

  ‘Raptor Two, lascannon’s out, missiles and bombs online and ready to blow!’

  ‘Raptor Three, all systems acceptable, by the Emperor.’

  ‘Raptor Five. Everything’s in the green ’cept tail retros. She’s handling hard, but we’ll be fine.’

  ‘Okay. Assume attack vector Prime, standard diamond,’ Jaeger commanded. ‘Let’s not waste our chance.’

  Jaeger slowed his breathing, realising that despite his prayers he was becoming agitated. In a few more moments they would pass over the jagged outcrop of an impacted cargo ship and would have a line to their as yet unknown target. A hum started in Jaeger’s ear through the internal comm, as Berhandt wakened the spirits of the Marauder’s self-guiding missiles and they set about seeking their target. As the bomber neared its objective and the missiles’ surveyors acquired the targeting point, the hum became ever more high pitched. Tilting the nose of the Marauder forward, Jaeger led the squadron over the wrecked cargo transport. The unidentified target came into full view.

  Like a bolt of unholy wrath, a ball of plasma a hundred yards wide swept through the Marauder squadron, engulfing Arafa’s aircraft, leaving nothing more then a cloud of gas and globules of molten plasteel.

  Drake was on the comm-link instantly ‘Emperor’s blood! It’s a damned gun battery! Why didn’t they tell us it was a damned cannon? What the hell were they thinking of? Aren’t we attacking the engines?’

  Jaeger saw that it was true: a pair of immense guns, each a barrel wide enough to swallow a Marauder, were pointing directly at the attacking bombers. Jaeger shivered with dread as he saw the scanner’s read-out showing the energy building up for another blast.

  ‘Pull up!’ Jaeger cried out over the squadron frequency. ‘Break formation! Hit it from the other side!’ As he wrenched his own plane into a steep climb, he prayed that the others had reacted in time, as if he could make their aircraft move faster, make them react quicker, through sheer force of will.

  As the Marauders dispersed, another volcanic blast of energy hurtled from the cannons, blazing a path through the space where seconds before the Marauders had been. Jaeger thanked the Emperor for His swift guidance, but inwardly he was cursing Veniston and Kaurl with all his might. Why hadn’t they told Jaeger that the target was a weapon battery? How the hell did they think he was going to plan an attack properly if he wasn’t made aware of all the dangers? Choking back his fury, Jaeger ordered the squadron back into an attack approach, fervently praying under his breath that the huge turret didn’t have enough time to traverse and get another shot at them. At this range it could hardly miss.

  With agonising slowness, the turret tracked around towards the incoming Marauders. The message ‘Deviant Perceived’ flashed scarlet across the left window of the canopy and the whine of the missiles became an unbearable shriek.

  ‘Fly, sweet vengeance!’ came Berhandt’s voice, quoting the words he’d personally inscribed onto each of the missiles as they were loaded.

  A salvo of fire from the other bombers joined Berhandt’s volley, a rippling wave of death that streaked towards its target on tails of flame, rapidly becoming distant sparks as the missiles sped towards the gun turret. They hit home with a deadly blossom of explosions and the viewscreen showed twisted chunks of metal being thrown in all directions.
Escaping gases briefly caught fire in actinic fountains of flaring light.

  The red target rune was still active on the canopy screen, shining bright just in front of Jaeger’s eyes. He realised with sickening dread that the turret wasn’t destroyed. It was still about to open fire once more.

  ‘Lascannons and bombs!’ Jaeger ordered, pressing the firing stud of his own plane’s weapons with his thumb, spewing forth a salvo of energy bolts. Debris and burning vapours exploded across the hulk’s surface as the lasers tracked towards their target, until the gun turret was at the centre of a storm of beams converging from the four Marauders. A warning sigil floated before Jaeger, showing the turret was in position to fire again. In his mind’s eye, Jaeger could imagine the huge barrels of the cannons glowing with the suppressed energy inside, waiting to spit forth destruction and damnation.

  With a blast that flung Jaeger back in his seat, the turret exploded in a vast, searing storm of white plasma and billowing clouds of magnesium-bright vapour. Easing the controls back, Jaeger began to pull the Marauder out of its dive towards the hulk’s surface.

  Suddenly, Drake’s voice was hammering in his ear: ‘Control’s lost, Raptor Leader. I can’t pull up.’

  Jaeger watched as Drake’s Marauder sped below him, dipping towards the hulk’s hull, trailing sparks and burning fuel from its damaged tail.

  Get out, Jaeger pleaded. Get to the saviour pod. He gave a heartfelt sigh of relief as he saw the midsection of the Marauder being punched upwards by emergency rockets, sending it spinning away from the hulk.

  ‘Lost Barnus and Cord.’ Drake’s voice was hoarse with sadness. ‘Their link to the pod was blocked.’

  ‘Raptor Squadron, this is Veniston.’ The admiral’s smooth voice cut through the comm-chatter. ’Excellent work, boys. You can come home now.’

  Jaeger frowned to himself in confusion. How the hell did destroying one gun turret help the Divine Justice against this brute? As he raged, the answer appeared on the display screen far across the rear of the hulk. More Marauders were moving in on the behemoth’s engines: the Marauders of Devil Squadron.