Lightning Run - Peter McLean Read online

  He had been a pilot himself, once, and he had given her his beloved sidearm on the day she came home and announced she had taken her oath and joined up with the Navy.

  ‘The Emperor expects every woman to do her duty, however hard it may be,’ her father had said to her that day. ‘Make Him proud of you, Salvatoria. I already am.’

  ‘The Emperor expects,’ she whispered.

  She forced herself to her feet, made herself ignore the pain of a hundred cuts and scrapes and bruises. At least nothing seemed to be broken. She looked at her beloved Valkyrie, and wanted to weep. The whole rear section of the plane had been blasted away, and the fuselage had burst open where it had hit the ground.

  One of her gunners was red paste under the wreckage.

  She knew she had to try to complete the mission. Whatever the general’s purpose had been, she knew it was vital to the war effort there on Elijan III. She had to have faith in the Emperor and try, however unlikely it may seem.

  Both hatches were buckled and twisted but there was a gaping hole at the back of the plane where the tail had been, and Sal hauled herself painfully up and into the stinking interior of the crew bay. It was crimson with blood, reeking of ruptured guts and promethium. The upper fuselage had sheared off and come down onto the passengers like a guillotine, bisecting four of them and taking the others’ legs off where they sat helpless in their flight webbing. They had all bled out from severed femoral arteries. The general looked up at her and smiled.

  ‘Hell of a landing, pilot,’ he said.

  Sal almost died of fright.

  In the Emperor’s name, how…?

  The general’s legs were gone just below his groin, but… Sal blinked, and realised this wasn’t the first time that had happened to him. The augmetics were ruined beyond repair and even now sparks were spitting dangerously from his dull metal stumps, daring the promethium in the air to explode and obliterate the entire wreck in a roaring fireball.

  ‘Sir, we have to get you out of here,’ she said, reaching for him.

  He shook his head and tried to laugh, and blood ran out of his mouth and over his chin.

  ‘My legs were augmetic, but my lungs aren’t’ he said. ‘There’s some of your damn plane so deep in the right one I can taste the metal. I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘The mission…’ Sal started.

  The general nodded.

  ‘That’s yours now,’ he said.

  He reached into his uniform jacket with his left hand, and Sal realised the entire right side of his body wasn’t working. He grimaced as he moved, and more blood ran out of his mouth and nose. He took something out of an inside pocket and held it out to her – an ornate ring, steel and brass with a gleaming gold bezel and a single clear crystal set into it.

  ‘Take this,’ he said. ‘Wear it, if you have to, but keep it safe and get it to Patroclus base.’

  ‘What?’ Sal asked, taking the offered jewellery with open bewilderment.

  ‘Encrypter,’ the general said, and coughed up more blood. ‘Code level vermillion. It’s got… their battle plans on it. I’m a Navy intelligencer. Get this… to Colonel Shrake at Patroclus, whatever it takes. The words are Ave Imperator, in circulum arcanus trismegistus est. Win… this war, pilot. The Emperor expects.’

  Her father’s words rang in her head.

  The Emperor expects every woman to do her duty.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Sal said, but he was already dead.

  Sal peeled off her left glove, put the ring on and pulled the glove securely back over it to keep it in place. That done, she braved Herrion’s corpse again to get back into the cockpit, and raided the emergency kit for bottled water and hard rations – and for the other thing she knew would be there, the thing every downed pilot hopes they never have to use.

  She rigged the timed demolition mine to the Valkyrie and fled into the forest.

  She was half a mile away when it blew. All the same she threw herself to the ground and covered her head with her hands, missing her helmet as burning debris rained down through the trees. After an explosion like that at the crash site, no one would come looking for any survivors, friend or foe. She was a ghost now, with no hope of rescue.

  No pilot wanted to put themselves in that position, but it was the only way to be sure the cultists wouldn’t come to investigate the downed plane and realise there was an Imperial pilot at large in the forest. The mission was everything, now.

  Sal waited until the rain of twisted metal stopped, then sat up and touched her father’s pistol. She was on foot and alone behind enemy lines, with two days’ rations, one handgun, four magazines of ammunition, and over two thousand miles to cover in somewhere around six hours. There was nothing else for it.

  She needed to steal a plane.

  A fast one.

  The enemy airbase was easy enough to find, even in the unfamiliar forest. She only had to follow the noise. The vile cultists delighted in wanton destruction, and the engines of war that enabled it.

  Planes roared down the runway and into the air. They arced around to head back the way Sal had come, towards Munitorum Sigma. She recognised them from their silhouettes as they flashed west overhead. Lightnings. She knew then that the base was doomed.

  Following my trail, backtracking us, she thought. They’ve had it.

  The Munitorum base had missile defences, of course, but against a flight of Lightnings? No. No, they were too fast, too powerful. It would be a massacre.

  Sal crept through the thinning screen of trees towards the cultist airbase, shuddering as she passed rows of broken skulls mounted on sharp stakes. There was a single fighter left on the runway, refuelling hoses trailing from its fuselage like limp tentacles. The beautiful machine had been defiled, Sal could see now, vile runes of Chaos etched into once-sleek flanks that looked as if they had been freshly anointed with blood.

  She tasted bile, to witness such desecration of the Emperor’s holy war machine.

  She drew her father’s pistol.

  Cultists walked the perimeter, draped in blood-red robes daubed with evil black sigils. They had lasguns in their hands, no doubt stolen the same as the Lightnings were. As the base itself had been, probably. Looking at it, Sal reasoned this had to have originally been an Imperial facility before the corruption came and claimed it. No one but Imperial engineers had ever laid a runway so perfectly.

  She narrowed her eyes as she thought about it. It was an Imperial facility, and an Imperial plane sitting there in front of her. She was no fighter pilot, no, but the Imperium ran on the principle of standard patterns. And she was a Navy flyer.

  How different could it be?

  The Lightning’s cockpit canopy was open, and the boarding steps were still rolled up to its side. The fuel hoses were limp and flaccid, which either meant the plane was fuelled up and ready and just hadn’t been uncoupled yet, or it had been hooked up only recently and refuelling hadn’t started.

  Fifty fifty on that, Sal, she told herself.

  A fifty fifty chance, life or death on the flip of an Imperial Crown.

  Whatever it takes, the general had said.

  The Emperor expects.

  She had faced worse odds.

  Salvatoria Grant flicked off the safety of her father’s pistol, said a prayer to the Emperor and sprinted for the grounded Lightning.

  She got six yards before the first las-shot blew a chunk out of the rockcrete in front of her.

  ‘Halt!’ someone shouted, their voice guttural and somehow wrong.

  Sal turned and fired on pure instinct. Her father’s pistol kicked in her hand and twenty yards away a red-robed figure spun and dropped.

  All hell broke loose.

  Warning klaxons wailed across the airbase as someone triggered an intruder alarm, and then there was las-fire sizzling through the air all around her.

&nbs
p; Sal fired again, missed, put her head down and ran like every enemy of mankind was on her heels.

  The boarding steps were twenty yards away, then fifteen. Sal jinked and dodged, firing blindly over her shoulder as she ran as hard as she had ever run before in her life. The plane was waiting for her. The beautiful, crippled, wounded Imperial war machine, its hide so cruelly defiled with the foul sigils of the Archenemy.

  The machine won’t hear you, Herrion had said, and perhaps he was right about that, but Sal felt that she could hear the machine. In her mind, she could hear it weeping with shame and fury and the burning need for revenge.

  She changed magazines at a full sprint and turned at the foot of the boarding steps, the pistol braced in both hands. She blazed into the charging cultists, dropping four, five, six, until they were just too close to miss her. At the last minute, she swarmed up into the plane like a simian, wincing as she felt the impact of las-rounds against the armoured fuselage.

  Imperial standardisation was one thing, but the cockpit of a single-seater Lightning fighter was nothing like that of a Valkyrie. Panic gripped her as she saw the interior of the plane had been daubed with the same hideous glyphs that marred its outer fuselage – eye watering signs of abomination. A peeled human skull had been nailed to the top of the console, and the entire interior of the cockpit was drenched in blood. The seat under her was sodden with it, and she felt it soaking disgustingly into her flight suit.

  Sal screamed and smashed the skull aside with a backhanded blow of her gloved left hand, feeling the general’s ring dig into her finger with the impact. That ring was all that mattered, she reminded herself, fighting down hot vomit with every breath.

  The mission, think of the mission.

  She forced herself to ignore the blasphemous filth around her and think. A Lightning was an interceptor, designed to be scrambled at a moment’s notice. There had to be an emergency action function, a way to override the need for preflights and just go when the Emperor called.

  A big red button, in other words.

  Everything in the cockpit was red, slathered with congealing blood, making it hard to distinguish one control from another. Not that one, that was the fire suppressant toggle. That was always in the middle of the console, on every plane Sal had ever been in. If not that, then… there!

  The trigger grip was so obvious she almost missed it; it was just in the wrong place compared to what she was used to. It was over her head, hanging from the bottom of the canopy so it could be grabbed as a pilot vaulted into the plane.

  Las-fire whined over her head under the open canopy, forcing her head down.

  Stupid, stupid! How did I miss that?

  She blasted three return shots out of the cockpit with her father’s pistol, until it clicked dry. She dropped it into the footwell, and risked losing her arm as she reached up and grabbed the big red grip.

  Sal pulled.

  Lots of things happened at once.

  The canopy slammed down so hard it would have taken her hand off at the wrist if she had been a fraction of a second slower, and she heard the violent hiss of pressure seals engaging. Something coughed behind her, then roared like a native Elijanian vhorbeast as her engines lit up. Sal swiped a gloved hand over the console, clearing away enough blood for her to see the whole display illuminated in a blaze of coloured runes. The external monitor showed her a screaming trail of jet backwash incinerating the cultists who had been pursuing her. Her hands fell to the controls: throttle and stick, not the yoke she was used to her in big Valkyrie, but not so very different to the single-seater trainers she had used in the Navy flight scholam.

  The Emperor bless standardisation, she thought.

  The fuelling rune was flashing amber to tell her the hoses were still attached, but the brass gauge above it read reassuringly full. Again, there was a promising looking button under the flashing rune, so Sal reached out and stabbed it with one gloved finger. The fuelling hoses blew clear with a bang, and the flashing rune turned to steady green.

  The Lightning was already pointed down the runway, so all Sal had to do was disengage the landing brake and push forward on the throttles. She whispered a prayer to the Emperor and shoved them forward hard.

  That was a very bad idea.

  The plane shrieked and almost flipped over backwards as far too much power was unleashed all at once. Only Sal’s honed reactions enabled her to control the wildly bucking machine, and now more las-rounds were slapping against the fuselage. She engaged ground manoeuvre mode and whipped the skittish plane around on its landing gear, using the jet exhaust to sweep the surrounding area like the mother of all heavy flamers until the gunfire stopped again.

  ‘Gently now,’ Sal whispered, half to herself and half to the plane’s furious, tortured machine-spirit. ‘We can do this. Together, we can.’

  She got the plane angled onto the runway again and this time made herself pour the power on gradually, letting the engine note build from a rumble to a growing howl as the rockcrete sped past outside the canopy. The end of the runway was coming up far too quickly for comfort.

  Sal hunted the blood-slick console frantically, looking for some sign of what was wrong. It’s a short-runway launch interceptor, there must be a way to… There!

  Her hand found the pull-toggle for the solid-fuel rocket assisted take-off and jerked it towards her. The resulting acceleration almost made her black out as the Lightning took off on a pillar of chemical flame, blasting into the air like a missile. The terrifying rush only lasted three or four seconds, by which time she was thousands of feet into the air with the spent rocket-fuel tank spinning silently away below her.

  ‘Missile lock, missile lock,’ the plane’s servitor brain announced in a curiously emotionless voice. ‘Incoming, two contacts.’

  Two red contact runes were spiralling in on the head-up display now, closing with frightening speed. Sal cursed the cultist’s missile air defences and slapped the chaff and flare icons simultaneously, pushing the throttle all the way forward and finding the afterburners with a grin of triumph.

  The two incoming missiles blew themselves harmlessly apart in the cloud of chaff behind her as the Lightning went supersonic with a concussive boom fit to split the sky.

  The Emperor’s will be done.

  Nothing could catch her now.

  The base’s other Lightnings had been heading in the opposite direction, towards the Munitorum base she had come from, and even if the cultists had recalled them, they were still no faster than she was, and probably a thousand miles behind her by now. She was home free.

  The Lightning flashed over the endless forest far below, eating miles at a rate her Valkyrie could never have hoped to match. Sal used the time to work up a flight plan on the console’s navigation cogitator, plotting a fresh course to Patroclus base. She was maybe two hours out, at her current speed and heading. That put her ETA well within the general’s original target.

  She keyed the vox to send word ahead of her coming.

  Static howled in her ears, intercut with the blasphemous ranting of one of the cultist’s heretical preachers. She tried to change the band, got nothing but more of the same. It was unintelligible gibberish, to her ears, but still the harsh, guttural words made her feel ill. Just then she was suddenly, horribly aware of the vile sigils etched into the console and daubed over the surfaces inside the cockpit, of the skull she had knocked into the footwell, where it had sunk into the pooled blood that welled around her boots. She tried not to think about how wet her back and behind and legs were, her flight suit now saturated with blood from the sodden seat.

  This plane had saved her life, but it was hideously corrupted. Sal could feel the machine’s once noble spirit still fighting somewhere inside the fuselage, but it was dying under the weight of the Chaos horrors that had been inflicted on it. The vox refused to change to any other channel.

  Sal
shut it off, and thought about what that meant.

  She was coming up fast on Patroclus base.

  A Chaos-marked Lightning was coming up fast on Patroclus base, with its surrounding cordon of heavy air defences.

  They’re going to shoot me out of the sky.

  She shed altitude as fast as she could, bringing the Lightning as low as she dared, until she could be sure she was flying under their long-range auspex. The forested ground was a hurtling, insane blur of green at well over a thousand miles an hour and barely eight hundred feet up.

  Sal’s nerve gave out in the end, and she throttled back to under the sound barrier before the shock wave of her own passage could tear the plane to pieces around her. Patroclus base was barely a hundred miles away now, and she was coming up fast on the outer ring of defences.

  The plane blared a klaxon to tell her the first missile was coming at her. Sal launched more chaff and gave the throttle a blast to clear the area, dropping even lower until it seemed that the tops of the trees below were almost close enough to scrape the paint from the plane’s desecrated fuselage.

  Another alert, another burst of chaff, then the countermeasures icon was flashing to tell her that she was all out. She banked hard, throwing the plane into an arc that almost stood it on a wingtip, and keyed the main armament readout into her head-up display. The plane had two wing-mounted lascannons, but the primary weapon was a ventral-mounted long-barrelled autocannon that Sal knew had a truly awe-inspiring cyclic rate of fire.

  The head-up display zeroed on the incoming missile as Sal righted the plane, closing at a speed that made sweat stand out on her forehead. Her finger slipped down the stick to the trigger, sticky with blood, and she forced herself to stay calm until the four red triangles overlaid on her display locked on to the rushing blur of the missile and flashed with target lock.

  She squeezed down hard.

  A one-second burst threw one hundred and twenty-seven high-velocity armour-piercing rounds at the missile with a sound like a ripsaw going through rockcrete. She flew the plane straight through the resulting explosion at close to eight hundred miles an hour, and banked hard once more.