Last Flight - Edoardo Albert Read online

  It had to be stopped.

  Neriah scanned the auspex. The carrier appeared on it as a monstrosity, a blight in the orange-and-black world of the screens, with minor traces scurrying around it. Glory Two and Glory Three were still with him, riding along the wave troughs, their progress covered by Plotnik’s and Salk’s gun turrets.

  The bolter music thrummed again, the whole body of Spirit resonating in harmony with the twin heavy bolters in the tail and on top of the plane. Through the comm, Neriah could hear the steady stream of curses that Plotnik spat at the Chaos aircraft: the pilot commander had sometimes wondered if the curses were as effective as the bolter shells in bringing down the enemy, for otherwise it was hard to explain the extraordinary tally of downed aircraft that Plotnik had claimed. Salk remained wreathed in the song of his own weapons, speaking only to claim a hit.

  ‘Three.’

  Neriah had missed the first two.

  He glimpsed, in peripheral vision to starboard, the cartwheeling impact of a Hell Blade plunging into the sea.

  The pilot commander keyed the comm live. There was no point maintaining vox silence any longer.

  ‘Glory One to Glory Two and Glory Three – prepare for attack run.’ Neriah glanced at Radin, whose eyes were flicking to his screens. ‘Call the vector, Mehem.’

  ‘Vector three hundred degrees on my mark. Three, two, one… mark.’

  Neriah pulled the control stick left. At the same moment he engaged the ramjets’ afterburners. The twin engines kicked Spirit up and over the wave crest, taking the plane to flight level one.

  There it was. An island rising from the sea, with cliffs and promontories and headlands, forested not with trees but gun emplacements. Its flanks were bristling with weaponry. Above the carrier, the air was abuzz with planes, moving like a hive swarm. From their movement, however, Neriah could tell that the attacks launched by Wrath and Bane Flights had exhausted the fuel reserves of the carrier’s fighter cover: most of the hastily scrambled birds were returning to the roost. How far before Shivkin could let the torpedo run?

  The size of the thing made it impossible to judge distance by eye.

  ‘Range?’

  ‘Thirty miles. It can’t avoid. We could release now.’

  Neriah looked ahead, over the wave caps, and saw, looking like upended triangles, the upturned hulls of at least five ships around the Chaos island carrier. While the carrier was unable to manoeuvre to avoid being struck, its flotilla of fast protective destroyers and cruisers was able and willing to interpose itself between the bombers’ torpedoes and their target. Already, five ships were sinking, taking their crew down into the black below the blue, so that the carrier might sail on.

  The only way to ensure that his torpedo was not blocked was to get in close, past the screen of destroyers and cruisers. Right in under the cliff walls of the island carrier.

  ‘Negative. Shivkin, release at half a mile. Glory Two, Glory Three, Glory One going in.’ Neriah keyed the channel to Gasko, the nose gunner. ‘Clear a path for me, Eitan.’

  ‘We will.’

  Neriah felt Spirit judder as the lascannons in the nose turret ate into their powercells, the electric thrum building and falling with each shot as he lifted the plane over a wave crest. Ahead, a light vessel disintegrated, the sea bursting in through the gaping holes the lascannons had left in its hull.

  Over the vox, crackling in through the scrapcode jamming from the island carrier, Glory Two announced he was starting his attack run.

  ‘Range?’ Neriah asked Radin.

  ‘Twenty-five miles. One minute to target.’

  ‘Release at ten seconds.’

  ‘Order acknowledged, pilot commander,’ said Shivkin, like all good bombardiers a stickler for protocol.

  ‘Fifty seconds,’ counted off Radin.

  The island carrier was looming ahead, bigger than a mountain. From its cliff sides spat red lines of tracer fire, lacing over the blue, kicking waves into spindrift. But Neriah held Spirit level and true at flight level one. Coming straight in, low and fast, they were a tiny target. Even the best gunner would be hard put to catch them, but the barrage was frothing the ocean all around – any stray shot might be fatal.

  Spirit of St Pascale lurched and heeled left, the movement all but simultaneous with the sound of autocannon rounds ripping into plasteel. The wing tip cut into and caught in the blue. Neriah fought with the control stick, trying to haul the wing back out of the water’s friction grip before it pulled the nose down and into the wave top. Acting without thought but with the experience of ten thousand hours of flight, Neriah throttled back the twin ramjets on the right wing and gunned those on the left, adding engine torque to the yaw and roll he was imparting with control stick and rudder.

  It was the engine torque that did it, the thousands of pounds of thrust from the twin ramjets pushing the wing tip out of the water’s grip. But, with the drag on Spirit suddenly ended, the plane yawed violently and pitched vertically upwards, its belly suddenly open in an exposed crucifix to the tracking gun turrets on the carrier island.

  Autocannon rounds, las-beams and bolter fire ripped through the air, while Neriah fought to push Spirit’s nose down again as he gunned the starboard jets to maximum.

  ‘Hang on!’

  Neriah pushed the control stick hard over, going with the plane’s motion rather than fighting it, rolling the forty-ton bomber through the sort of barrel roll manoeuvre that she was never designed to carry out. Neriah felt the wings straining under the pressure, like limbs being pulled from their sockets, the strain transmitting through the metal substance of the plane and to his fingers, locked on the controls.

  ‘Come on, come on, you can do it.’

  The worlds of blue, sea and sky, inverted, held, then returned to their proper positions. But the evasive action had turned them round: the traitor carrier was now off the port side and vectoring away. They had missed their attack run.

  ‘Glory Two, releasing torpedo.’

  The vox message was almost inaudible amid the screech of jamming scrapcode, but Plotnik confirmed.

  ‘Fish running.’

  ‘Glory Two, get out of here.’

  A burst of scrapcode ate any acknowledgement.

  ‘Hit!’ Radin shouted, turning to the pilot commander. ‘The torpedo hit.’

  Neriah began to haul Spirit round and saw the last settling of the water from where the torpedo had struck.

  ‘We’re hit, we’re hit.’ Glory Three, on fire, streaking low over the sea, her progress marked by streams of las-fire.

  A Hell Blade, little more than a blur of movement, flashed overhead, stitching the waves with a stream of autocannon fire as it went after Glory Three, only to jerk sideways as it was hit by wild las-fire from the carrier, before a targeted burst from Spirit’s lascannons punched it into a shower of flying wreckage.

  ‘Got it.’ The voice was Eitan’s, from the nose turret.

  Neriah pushed Spirit’s nose back down, sending her to the wave tops, and engaged the afterburners on all four ramjets.

  ‘Shivkin, we’re following Glory Three in – aim for where they hit.’

  If he were flying a burning coffin, knowing that he was about to die, Neriah knew that he would try to take some of the heretic filth out with him. Pilot Commander Mar Rossoff of Glory Three was an old friend: Neriah could picture him nursing the controls, squinting through the smoke at the looming bulk of the enemy carrier and singing through the litany of flight that he might keep Glory Three, Soul of the Valiant, in the air long enough to finish his attack run in person.

  And Neriah would follow in behind it, using the distraction of the enemy gunners to make his own renewed attack run.

  But it meant that Neriah, and Radin, and Gasko in the nose turret, saw the slow death of Soul of the Valiant, its turrets disintegrating into shards of armourglass,
its wings peppered with multiplying holes, trailing fire and glory.

  ‘How is it still flying?’

  Neriah heard Radin’s question but he could not answer it. The Marauder was little more than fire and fragments, yet there was still purpose at the heart of the flames, a purpose and striving that overcame even the clutch of gravity and the increasingly frantic fire from the cliff turrets of the carrier island.

  Soul of the Valiant struck the enemy carrier just above the waterline. For a fractured moment, it seemed as if the plane had exhausted itself in getting so far. Then the explosion came. The torpedo, still clutched to the belly of the Marauder, followed by the fuel tanks and all the remaining munitions. The side of the enemy carrier was torn asunder, cracks sending gun emplacements tumbling into the seething water.

  Neriah, following after Glory Three, holding Spirit down to the wave tops, called for the mark from Radin then keyed Shivkin on comms. ‘Send our torpedo into that hole. Radin, mark at five seconds.’

  ‘Five seconds.’ Radin licked his lips. That would give them almost no time to pull out before smacking into the side of the carrier themselves.

  ‘Count it,’ said Neriah.

  The walls of the enemy carrier were higher than he could see now, an endless expanse of metal and plasteel carved into obscene, stomach-churning shapes.

  ‘On my mark,’ said Radin. ‘Release in five… four… three… two… one – mark!’

  ‘Torpedo running!’

  Even as Shivkin released the torpedo, Neriah was hauling the control stick starboard, his foot hard down on the rudder, gunning the port engines.

  ‘Come on, come on.’

  Spirit’s nose was coming round, autocannon and bolter fire flashing past, but they were so close and travelling so fast that none of the gunners could traverse their guns quickly enough to keep up with the Marauder.

  ‘Hit! Hit!’

  The yells came in two voices, Plotnik’s and Salk’s, but Neriah was too busy fighting with Spirit’s controls to do more than barely register what they said, as he slowly brought Spirit back level before engaging all four afterburners. The safest place was as near the enemy carrier as he dared.

  He glanced to his left. The wing tip was all but scraping the blur of gun emplacements. He would run the length of the island carrier before turning – any of the screening flotilla trying to get a lock on them would risk shooting their own vessel.

  Then, he felt it. A judder and ripple. The cliff wall of the carrier island jerked forward, and Neriah had to roll Spirit hard to starboard. From above, falling in cascading streams, came gun turrets and munitions and gantries and, among them, flailing, tumbling figures.

  Then the carrier island juddered again.

  They heard it this time. Over the roar of the ramjets, a low, gathering rumble, interspersed with metal screams, that built to a physical crescendo of sound which shoved the forty tons of the Marauder sideways through the air.

  ‘By the Emperor’s grace,’ said Plotnik – and Neriah knew that something extraordinary must have happened, for never before had he heard the tail gunner use anything but an expletive as an exclamation.

  Still riding Spirit on the leading edge of the explosion, and with the carrier now directly to the rear, Neriah could only see the front edge of the blast wave rocking and overturning the vessels in the flotilla.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he yelled into the comm.

  ‘It’s… it’s like the end of the world,’ said Plotnik. ‘The carrier – fire, erupting, splitting it open.’

  Neriah turned Spirit through sixty degrees so he could see. He saw the heretic carrier erupt into fingers of fire, ammo and fuel stores catching, bursting, paring open its innards to the sky. He saw the sea seethe, and react, as things beneath the waves swarmed to feast on drowning heretics.

  Neriah turned away. ‘Radin, what’s our heading?’

  The navigator started. He had also been caught up with watching the end of the leviathan. ‘Set course to one-seventy degrees.’

  ‘Check.’ Neriah brought Spirit round to the return bearing. ‘Fuel?’

  Radin leaned forward. He tapped the gauge. He tapped it again. Then he looked to his pilot commander. ‘Fifteen per cent. One of the tanks must have been hit.’

  Neriah nodded. ‘She’s a good girl. She’ll get us there.’ He keyed open the comm. ‘Crew, shut down every system that doesn’t directly keep us in the air.’ He looked to Radin. ‘Get rid of everything. We killed that thing. Now we’re going to make it back alive.’

  While Radin closed down the systems, Neriah gentled Spirit higher. Sea level provided the richest air mixture for the ramjets, but had the highest resistance. Normal cruising altitude would require the oxygen circulation systems to be restored. In the end, Neriah decided on five thousand feet as the best altitude: low enough to allow both jets and crew to breathe, high enough to reduce drag a small but significant amount – and, with a glide ratio of 20:1, the height would provide a further twenty miles of travel when the fuel tanks ran dry.

  As Neriah coaxed Spirit further on her heading south, feeling for any thermal and updraught he could find, Radin unstrapped himself and began stripping the cockpit of everything that could be moved. From further down the plane, Neriah could hear thumps and banging and dragging as everything detachable was moved to the hatches.

  In the middle of shutting down systems, Radin stopped. ‘What about the auspex?’ he asked. ‘If I shut that off, we won’t be able to see if we’re anywhere near the fleet.’

  ‘Shut it off,’ said Neriah. ‘We’ll try firing it up when the juice runs out – there should still be something left in the batteries to run it.’

  The orange displays flared and died. As Radin headed down the aircraft, Neriah looked around. The cockpit looked different without the constant ruddy glow. Colder. More dead.

  ‘You’ll make it, old girl,’ whispered Neriah, patting the control panel. ‘You’ll make it.’ But the control panel was dead too. He was, he realised, slowly killing the machine that had brought him back alive from over two hundred and fifty sorties.

  He drew his hand back from the control panel. There was nothing else to say.

  Pilot Commander Baruch Neriah looked to the horizon, searching for the distant flecks that might tell of the approaching fleet. But there was only blue.

  There was only blue.

  In her final service to them, Spirit of St Pascale, fuel exhausted and systems dead, had settled upon the ocean with the gentleness of a seabird. Safely evacuated into the life raft, Baruch Neriah, Mehem Radin, Mark Shivkin, Eitan Gasko, Tsvi Salk and Pinye Plotnik watched in silence as the plane – their home, their protection and their refuge – slowly sank.

  The auspex, fired up during the long glide downwards, had shown not a single trace. If any of the other planes from the mission had survived, they were out of range – as was the fleet. From the altitude at which the always temperamental auspex had finally restarted – three thousand feet – its effective range was only ten miles.

  Sitting in the life raft, ten miles seemed a long way away.

  Pinye Plotnik took off his flight helmet. He tossed it from hand to hand. ‘Catch, anyone?’

  Neriah shook his gaze away from the blank patch of water that had surged over his last glimpse of Spirit of St Pascale. It had been her tail fin, raised as if in final farewell.

  ‘We paddle.’

  Plotnik opened his mouth as if to make one of his usual smart comments then, catching sight of Neriah’s expression, he closed it again.

  ‘Yes, pilot commander.’

  They paddled. The life raft had two paddles, and Neriah assigned the men shifts, while the rest took shelter from the fierce sun under the shade that they rigged over half the raft.

  There were emergency rations for ten days, water for two. Water took much more storage space than rat
ions.

  Along with the emergency rations, the raft was supplied with five flares and an emergency transponder, with an effective battery life of twenty-four hours. Calculating, in his head, the likely range to the vanguard of the approaching fleet, Neriah decided that they should paddle south for a full day before activating the transponder.

  But he did not get the chance.

  The rip of a flare launching pulled Neriah from his doze.

  ‘Plane, plane!’

  He stared around, still stupid from sleep, and saw the flare trailing orange into the sky. He heard the rumble-thrum of jets approaching, the sound catching and springing off the waves. Salk and Shivkin were on their feet, waving; the others were shouting, while Neriah looked round, trying to locate the sound. He saw Radin loading another flare.

  He knocked the flare gun from Radin’s hand. ‘Get down!’ he yelled, pulling Salk and Shivkin off their feet.

  ‘What are you doing?’ yelled Radin, scrabbling in the bottom of the life raft for the flare gun. ‘They’ll miss us.’

  ‘It’s coming from the north. It’s coming from the wrong direction.’

  At that, the men in the life raft fell silent.

  The flare trail hung in the sky, pointing down at them like a finger.

  And, following the mark from the north, came a red bird, crouched and hooked and barbed. The Valkyrie was covered in foul heretic sigils, its autocannons held in silent readiness as its ramjets cycled to hover and the great red death bird settled above the sea a hundred yards away from them, the water beneath its jets turning to fume.

  With the island carrier drowned, the crew of the remaining Chaos aircraft had nothing left but the search for vengeance before it was their turn to drown.

  The pilot vectored his Valkyrie closer. The downdraught rocked the raft.

  ‘What’re they doing?’ asked Radin. ‘Why don’t they just finish us?’

  ‘They want to watch the kill,’ said Neriah. ‘They want to unman us.’

  ‘Well, frag that,’ said Pinye Plotnik, standing, determined to die on his feet telling the heretics exactly what he thought of them. And Radin got up next to him, and Gasko, and Salk and Shivkin, copying Plotnik, yelling and cursing and screaming at the enemy. Neriah, picking up the flare gun, levelled it at the cockpit of the traitor Valkyrie. It was a pop-gun against the heavily armoured craft.