On Wings of Blood Page 20

  ‘Confirmed destroyed,’ said Seoci, trailing just far enough behind Padruic and Liosa to track the number of enemy casualties. Across their communications network, they heard the mounting casualty reports confirming the destruction of any lingering anti-air support. Their arrival had been clean; in the time it would take to recite a single eight-line seada they had removed all non-eldar from the skies, and eliminated any anti-aircraft resistance.

  ‘Engage ground targets at your discretion.’ Princess Isbeil’s command over the network heralded the next phase of the attack. From the luminescent portal of the Helheart Gate the eldar began to pour: tanks and jetbikes, Vypers and Venoms, filling the air with hissing shuriken and sizzling energy lances.

  Seoci smiled to himself. Banking away from his squadron, his eyes flickered across the targeting runes, seeking one that might strike his fancy. His console read the narrowing of his eyes, locking on to the chosen enemy unit and making velocity predictions. Seoci’s grin turned feral. He had no need for such projections. He’d walked the Path of the Hunter long enough to know how far he’d need to lead his shots.

  Ahead of him, a squadron of three ork rotorcraft spluttered and belched thick black smoke, struggling to gain the altitude necessary to make strafing runs on the targets below. Seoci’s shots were as precise as surgical incisions, each strike clipping a rotor shaft away as neatly as shears snipping a flower stem, allowing Seoci to savour the image of the orks: the rolling descent, bellowing faces frozen, arms flailing wildly.

  Seoci realised he’d composed a three line eado without meaning to. For the millionth time he thanked the gods that he’d been pulled away from the poet’s path at the last minute. Gritting his teeth, he surrendered himself to the war mask, banishing thoughts of yesterdays, his feet firmly on the today-path. Below him ork vehicles roared about on clattering wheels and grasping treads, their guns firing at random, trying to get a fix on a target. One mechanical abomination after another, the white columns of laser fire tore them apart, melting rusted plating to slag and vaporising any ork caught in the blast. The interceptor’s guns reaped a bloody harvest, the kill-poetry of a moment ago abandoned.

  ‘Bridgehead established,’ said Princess Isbeil. ‘Final emergence imminent.’

  Through the wide streets of the conquered city, the orks fought a losing battle with the eldar. Caught completely by surprise, they were torn apart by the lightning attacks. Many groups of greenskins fled for the sanctuary of the ruined buildings, only to be cut down from behind by waves of razored shuriken, or to have their shelters collapsed by volleys of rocket fire. A few of the larger orks tried to rally their overwhelmed forces, but no sooner did they begin bellowing and posturing to impose order than they were riven apart by laser fire, the screaming figures making easy targets.

  Banking to the left, Seoci soared low over one of the ­thoroughfares, following Liosa’s rune to link back up with his squadron. The chaotic fighting below was so thick that a pilot of any other race would have been unable to pick out targets for fear of hitting their own forces. Seoci’s weapons fired as fast as his eyes could highlight targets. White beams of laser fire slashed in-between the darting eldar shapes, sometimes so perilously close as to spray a passing Windrider with the ashen remains spurting from Seoci’s latest kill.

  The orks in the main square, which had served as the arrival point, saw the white slash of the Helheart Gate begin opening a third time, and surged towards it. Having suffered two blistering waves of attack, the dim-witted brutes were at least intelligent enough to respond to this latest threat, and charged the webway portal in a headlong rush, intent on cutting down this newest attack and turning the tables on the eldar.

  The front line of the greenskin horde collapsed without warning, the orks following behind them tripping over the sudden casualties. Soundless, the first of the wraithguard strode through the portal, hefting their distortion scythes for a second volley. More of the orks collapsed, each of them going from a frothing knot of unthinking fury to a lifeless slab of refuse in the space of a blink.

  The advance of the wraithbone warriors was the stuff of nightmares: a long line of expressionless killers who gazed upon their targets without sight, fought without sound and killed with no wounds. Their unyielding bodies and chilling coordination might give the impression of auto­mata, but there was always a subtle sign, from a curious pan of the head to gaze at a cowering foe to a cautious step around the body of a fallen ally, that spoke of a living mind and the unmistakable presence of a soul. The long orange limbs of the wraithguard carried them through the horde, heedless of the living orks that had tripped over their own dead, still thrashing to gain their feet. The second line of wraith constructs emerged from the open portal to solve the problem for them, ghostblades rising and falling in silent, brutal, relentless butchery.

  Seoci could remember the dread such constructs instilled in him when he shed his war mask, and felt disgust. He beheld the smooth, silent killers, bemused by the horror such a spectacle would have been to him during his poet days. But as he closed in on the portal, he could hear the low psychic droning at the edge of his mind, the war chants of the dead warriors sending a chill up his spine that even the discipline of his war mask could not fully quell.

  A column of energy nearly tore him apart. He saw the beam, as wide as his cockpit, smash to his left. Banking hard, Seoci ground his teeth and pushed his interceptor into a tight roll. The pillar of coruscating magnetic force swept after him like a spotlight, lurching drunkenly in a vain attempt to hit him. Seoci swept his plane in a tight turn around what was once a large manufacturing facility, and pitched sharply skywards.

  ‘We have sky guns,’ he snapped. With a whine his engines burst into overdrive, and he yanked the interceptor into a bone-crushing turn.

  One of the gun batteries, the same ones they had targeted on their way in, was operational again, streams of energy scouring the skies for the nimble eldar attackers. One of the fingers of energy caught a Windrider, the magnetic force yanking the warrior from his bike and crushing him to a pulp.

  At the apex of his trajectory, Seoci turned and fired at the building, but no sooner did his wild shots impact the masonry than one of the beams swept for his new position, sending him into a screaming dive. Forcing every bit of speed out of his engines, he angled towards the guns, hoping to rake them with close-range fire as he passed. In response to his intent gaze, his cockpit view zoomed closer, to the gleeful mob of screaming gretchin tilting their guns this way and that. He pulled his fighter up to fire, even as one of them pointed in his direction and started to swing the magnetic projector around.

  The psychic thrum passed close enough to his fighter to tug at the edge of his psyche. Outside there was no sound as the wretched greenskins fell, flopping to the ground like discarded rags. But Seoci was close enough to hear the wail of the warp unleashed, and the agonised screams as the gretchin’s souls were wrenched from their bodies in an instant. Seoci’s secondary viewer displayed the sky behind him and confirmed what he already knew: a small knot of wraithfighters soared over the city, the portal closing behind them.

  Fear not, water len,+ said a familiar voice, eschewing the communication network to speak directly into his mind, +I would not let them harm you.+

  Seoci’s mouth went dry, his whole body numb, even as he obeyed Liosa’s command to form up. Their planes punched forwards, leaving the cleansing of the city to the methodical ruthlessness of the wraith warriors.

  Ailios? Could it be? There was no mistaking the sound of the dusky feminine voice, or the thin aroma of night-blooming aoifemint. His secondary viewer scanned the shaded canopies of the wraithfighters, wondering which one was hers. The cold pressure in his gut wasn’t fear but a kind of unbelieving surprise, the closest his war mask would let him come to the anguish he would feel when Seoci the poet learned this.

  He shook his head and ground his teeth. Terror, anguish, these emoti
ons had been scoured away by the hot wind of Khaine. Rage, however – that he could relish to his heart’s content. His eyes scanned for a target. The roadways below were largely deserted, save for scattered outcroppings of ork activity. It occurred to Seoci that they had seen no sign of any of the former human occupants, save for the bleached skulls decorating the ork flagpoles. He banished the thought just as quickly. The fate of the mon-keigh was irrelevant. Whether they had been driven into the wasteland to die, been ground to dust as slave labour for their greenskin conquerors, or butchered for the larders of the ork commanders made no difference. They were gone now, with only their body lice to mourn them.

  The invasion had become a headlong drive, as swift as an onrushing storm, towards the planet’s former capital. The gravity-defying tanks and jetbikes of the eldar screamed forth like lightning, the jets above them providing escort, along with Isbeil’s wing of Corsair fighters. Prince Eidear, leading the combined might of the Corsair fleets allied to his cause, as well as whatever mercenary elements he had been able to persuade or hire from the seamy depths of the webway, rushed to meet them from the other side. Synchronised in their assault, the eldar forces would fall upon the horde of orks united underneath the warlord-engineer Gorkog Chrometeef in an unstoppable flood.

  Gorkog Chrometeef. Even the very sound of the name disgusted him. Seoci had been there when Tearlan had foreseen the rise of the ork warlord. So had Ailios, of course; the two of them had walked the Path of the Seer together, and the Path of Service before that, their centuries entwined since she had saved him from himself so long ago. When Tearlan emerged from his trance and began casting runes, demanding the lesser seers confirm his findings, Ailios had been the one to take Seoci’s hand in hers, calming his fear with her presence. There had been much reason to fear, of course: the farseer had been correct. His prophecy verified, he had shared his vision with the rest of the seers, the most senior among them weighing the best course of action.

  The destruction had been… unbelievable. Although more than a decade in the future, Seoci could taste the ash on the wind of the planets that Chrometeef would burn, and feel the tremors in his bones as the ground beneath his feet broke apart, as Lugganath tore itself asunder. For years a thorn in the side of shipping in the Rassemi Divide, the ork was part engineer and part pirate, but was considered a great threat by no one. Tearlan’s vision, however, told a different story. Although the closer the vision pressed to the origin of Gorkog’s rise the more obscure it became, devolving into a mass of tortured wails, the outcome was clear: he would become a menace to every world within his reach, and billions of humans would die at his hand. In the end, his wanton destruction would provoke a violent reaction from the corpse-worshipping mon-keigh: an anti-xenos crusade which would sweep through three sectors of space, culminating in Lugganath’s defiant last stand against the horde of filthy pink apes.

  A target rune flickered to life on Seoci’s canopy. The host of aircraft that screamed around him, and the clouds of Wind­riders beneath them, zipped over the heads of ­scattered groups of orks, largely ignoring the lesser mobs of the brutes, at best peppering them with passing fire as they continued their fevered rush to where Gorkog had dug himself in. The only targets of any priority were the ramshackle ork vehicles that might have enabled the greenskin hordes to reinforce the city before the eldar had finished dealing with their leader. Seoci fired, his bright lance shot vaporising the driver’s-side wheel on the truck below. The vehicle jerked to the right and flipped into a violent roll, its crushed crew no longer a concern.

  ‘Fighters.’ Liosa’s voice drew his attention to the horizon, where a distant smattering of pinpricks marked an encroaching enemy squadron. Seoci banked right with his squadron, their three interceptors breaking away from the other Hunters without any further word. Seoci counted twelve enemy contacts. The eldar pilots could have flown on and easily outpaced the ork planes, but if not dealt with, the greenskins would just vent their rage on the lower, ground-skimming targets.

  One of the wraithfighters drifted away from the main charge to follow them, falling into formation with the Crimson Hunters squadron as if it were just another of their brethren. A slight chill at the back of Seoci’s skull reminded him that in all likelihood this was precisely the case: the dead eldar hero whose tormented spirit animated the craft had probably been an exemplary pilot in life, possibly even a traveller on the Path of the Crimson Hunter. Seoci’s secondary display shifted to the wraithfighter, and he wondered if the ghost within realised it was no longer flesh and blood, or if the exhilaration of the chase, enemies in sight, fellow Hunters soaring by its side, was enough to impart the illusion of life, if only for a time.

  The former.+ The rich feminine voice in his mind answered his thought the moment it was formed, just as she had so many times before. Seoci regarded the wraithfighter, unsure of how to respond. +My ward was a pilot, but he walked the Path of the Mariner, not the Hunter.+

  Liosa’s fighter began a sharp ascent, and Seoci followed dutifully. He had so many questions he wanted to ask Ailios, but conversation would have to wait. The interceptors vanished amid the thick, high-altitude clouds of smoke and polluted gas, well before the orks caught sight of them. Away through the smog, Seoci could see the cloud of ork targets closing, so far beneath them.

  Ailios’ wraithfighter shimmered, blending in with the dirty grey background. Seoci caught the odour of night-blooming aoifemint, and knew she was in his mind again. He could feel a faint sense of amusement from her, and realised she’d found it easier to affect him than the dead soul in her plane. Seoci’s plane faded and dimmed as well, hidden from sight. A few moments later Padruic’s and Liosa’s interceptors followed suit. The squadron began accelerating, a gliding flock of Raptors just waiting for their prey to move into position.

  Liosa dived first, the others following closely behind. Below them the ork planes chugged along, eager to reach the line of charging eldar. The first volley of fire tore three of the aircraft to shreds before the orks knew what was upon them. The ork pilots were far quicker to react than their land-walking kin at the Helheart Gate had been, and scrambled to evade the attack even as the squadron opened fire again.

  The interceptors barrelled through the cloud of orks, as debris from two more casualties rained down onto the wasteland below. Padruic’s second target rolled at the last moment, evading the laser shots and sending a hail of rattling gunfire after the enemy planes, still visible only as blurry grey streaks. Seoci angled up sharply, sharper than any ork craft was capable of, and gutted another one of the ramshackle planes from below.

  A melodic chime sounded, warning Seoci of enemy fire in close proximity. Automatically, his secondary view swung around to show him one of the ork jetfighters above and to his rear. The scrambling plane had managed to secure a prime position to strike at the eldar fighter, and the banks of guns along its wings were chattering away, throwing a blistering stream of fire at the interceptor. Only the cloaking effect of Ailios’ psychic invocation kept the shots from finding their mark. Seoci sighed and dived. Several of the shots pinged off the side of his plane as he sped away.

  Above him, in the secondary viewer, Seoci could see the other members of his squad wheeling through the group of orks, evading the undisciplined shots with ease, waiting to line up their own killing blows. Even the primitive ork planes were too fast for the wraithfighter’s distortion scythes to lock on to, leaving Ailios to weave and dodge, concentrating on keeping all of her companions in range of psychic communion.

  Liosa swept in behind an ork bomber, her lasers blasting away, such frequent use changing their rich purr to a harsh growl. The ork jerked and weaved, diving in wild arcing loops, but the exarch followed behind him as if attached with a tether. The greenskin pulled into a steep dive, plunging towards the ground at an alarming angle.

  ‘Anr-hyded!’ Padruic’s yell went ignored. ‘Pull up!’

  Seoci had known Liosa
long enough to know it was futile. The ork plane juddered and rolled, finally levelling out as the greenskin pilot frantically tried to pull up before his clumsy plane smashed belly-first into the ground. The moment he broadened his profile, Liosa fired. Her interceptor barrelled through the fireball, pulling up just in time to streak away along the ground, low enough to send great clouds of dust up behind her. Although their skill and reactions were extreme even for eldar, Seoci knew the truth: it was not skill which had preserved Liosa. As close as she had cut it, a variable as minute as a wind current or piece of errant debris could have spelled the difference between life and death. Only good fortune had kept her from pursuing her obsession unto her own death.

  Seoci shook his head. That’s what it meant to be exarch. As the last rune vanished from the overhead portion of his canopy, indicating clear skies above, he realised he’d reached the same conclusion in the depths of his war mask that he’d come to without it. The same thing wouldn’t happen to him.

  The interceptor’s hyperjets engaged with a hostile shriek. Even the gravity-stabilised cockpit struggled to mitigate the force slamming into him as the plane burst forwards. Seoci grimaced and yanked the plane into a hard ascent, rolling even as he cut the hyperjets to allow the plane to flip, only to engage them a moment later and race back towards the ork jet still firing at him.

  Seoci had a moment to behold the ork’s face, frozen in shock. In the space it took him to drop his jaw in surprise, Seoci had gone from fleeing prey to vengeful predator. The eldar waited a touch longer than he absolutely had to, letting the reality of the situation sink in before his laser fire bored through the gaping maw of the jet, burning it out from tip to tail. Seoci dipped one wing, allowing the smoking wreck to pass beneath him as he soared back into the chaos of aerial combat.