On Wings of Blood Read online

  Liosa had downed another plane and was sweeping wide to evade the roaring gunfire of the jet pursuing her. Padruic had arced above and behind a fat bomber, and raked it with a burst from his pulse laser. One wing burst into flames, and the plane began rolling onto its side. Padruic’s fighter veered away as the ork craft plummeted towards the ground. The younger pilot had no desire to re-enact Liosa’s reckless pursuit. Seoci tried to cry out and warn him, but it was too late.

  The lurching bomber righted itself, the turret-mounted guns blazing away at Padruic’s underbelly. Seoci winced at the psychic squeal as the heavy calibre fire shredded Padruic’s cockpit, the moment of sorrow cut off by the war mask, replaced only by a cold rage in his heart.

  Seoci banked towards the ork bomber, unsure if the enraged scream was only in his mind, or if he actually vocalised it. The only thing he was sure of were the lances of laser fire ripping into the cockpit of the ork vehicle, punching through like a trio of vengeful furies. The pinpoint intensity was so great that the ork pilot burst into flames, his blazing corpse a fitting match for the plane’s incendiary paint scheme.

  Seoci’s interceptor pulled a tight turn. The two remaining ork pilots had seen enough. They’d disengaged from the aerial battle and turned towards their original target, their afterburners sending up great funnels of black smoke behind them.

  There was no communication, because there was no need. He and Liosa dived and accelerated, synchronised in their ruthless intent. The ork planes had drawn eldar blood, and mere death would no longer satisfy for them. This was the culmination of a shrine’s life together, of months or years of training: a concord of thought that transcended directions or orders.

  Their pulse lasers lit up the first fleeing plane, each of them clipping the outmost edge of the fighter’s wings. Buffeted by the supersonic impact of the air itself, the majority of the damaged airfoils wrenched free. The plane fell away in a slow, unstoppable plummet. The other jet spun and dipped in a desperate attempt by the pilot to foil his attackers with a corkscrewing dive. The Hunters’ bright lances fired again, shearing away his tail stabilisers. Ailios reached out to show them the second ork’s final thoughts: a brief sense of visceral triumph at having evaded the superior eldar fighters, and a sudden, dire panic when he realised he couldn’t pull up.

  Gallafweldeic Tyofanhyn, or the Long Death: the sadistic and deliberate end reserved for those who had earned the Crimson Hunters’ ire. They had halfway caught up with the remainder of the force before Seoci felt Ailios’ amusement. Just as she could enter his mind as easily as slipping on a glove, she could scarcely keep her own thoughts private from him, not when they were joined. She was rolling his obsession of a moment ago over in her mind, the anger so profound he’d been able to taste blood, and thinking of the first time she had seen him weeping, reciting his compassionate daedo ‘Tears for the Fallen,’ mourning the enemies their race was forced to slay in order to preserve their own existence.

  We walked a different path then, he thought.

  We walk a different path now,+ she replied.

  How had it come to this? When he’d left the Fane of Prophecy, they’d both agreed to join the Searing Zephyrs, to walk the Path of the Crimson Hunter together. Linked this close to her mind, the question was no sooner formed than it was answered. He saw as she remembered, the pitched battle that had taken place after he had left, dozens of spirit stones returning to Lugganath in the hands of the survivors. He could see how each soul had to be comforted, incorporated into the spirit matrix with care and respect. The seers assisting out of necessity. All but one of them turning away, the task of speaking with the dead too great a burden to bear. He could recall her memories as if they were his own, how she promised herself each time she picked up a stone that this time would be the last, until there was no longer a question of leaving, the songs of the departed echoing too deep in her psyche to ever leave again. When his acceptance and training had concluded, he’d looked for her, but the other seers had told him his love was gone, and their cruel double meaning had never before occurred to him.

  Lost on the path. Even in the throes of the war mask, there was enough of Seoci left to find the idea abhorrent. When the mask was no longer necessary he would feel sympathy for Ailios, mourn for her even, but in the heat of battle all he could feel was revulsion. Feeling her thoughts, experiencing her own memories of loss, only strengthened his decision: this was his last mission. When they returned after Gorkog Chrometeef’s demise, he would exit his interceptor for the last time. There was no longer any question of whether he would wait one battle more. The only uncertainty that remained was what path he would travel down next.

  ‘In the name of Vaul, what is that thing?’

  The horrified cry from Princess Isbeil, coordinating her forces from her void barque, wrenched him from the memories. The interceptors could go no faster, but Seoci’s neck craned forwards, scanning for the faintest signs of what might have drawn such a response from the Corsair commander.

  ‘We are inbound,’ said Liosa. ‘What is happening?’

  ‘Chrometeef,’ spat a voice Seoci didn’t recognise, which meant a Corsair. ‘He’s… he’s making the city itself take off!’

  ‘Clarify,’ said Seoci. He frowned, at a loss as to what the pilot meant.

  ‘Explain, you hyperbolic child!’ Liosa’s rage spilled through the communication line, her patience for the undisciplined Corsairs now officially at an end. Nothing greeted their demands but a cacophony of screams and weapons fire.

  The squadron blazed overhead, reaching the edge of the capital. The eldar ground forces below had crashed into the orks, and for the first time the greenskins had enough numbers to counter the superior eldar mobility. Seoci and Liosa raked the ork lines with their lasers, but with no time to pause and line up their shots, they had little tactical effect.

  The wail came without warning. A wave of agony swept down from above, smashing into the orks from Ailios’ wraithfighter. Every moment of physical pain, emotional torment, or psychic agony experienced by ghost or pilot, all bound into one. Whole clots of orks pitched themselves to the ground, dying from phantom wounds that ripped open on their bodies, falling victim to torturous seizures that left them to their enemies’ mercy, or tearing at their own flesh as they wept tears of blood. The eldar were protected from the psychic wrath, but in such close proximity, they could not help but feel the edges of it. The mariner whose soul animated the craft had perished in a plasma fire, and Seoci could taste the harsh tang of the fire that had licked down his throat in his final seconds. In a moment of pure sorrow that even penetrated his war mask, he felt the instant that Ailios had realised she had lost herself, and would never join him on the next path.

  Carry on, water len,+ said Ailios. Her fighter broke formation and rolled away down the ork line, joining the other wraithfighters flying in grim circles above the enemy throng. Now too far away for the spiritual wailing to lap at the edge of his mind, he saw another mob of greenskins fall beneath her shadow.

  ‘Farewell, sorrowrose.’ He felt none of the heartache her leaving would bring when his war mask was gone. Instead, there was just a dull sense of loss upon hearing the pet names spoken aloud again, and the knowledge that she was right. The harvest she could reap among the ground forces was of far more use to their cause than the benefit she could provide their squadron in the air. He dispelled his secondary view, and fixed his gaze ahead.

  The buildings of the capital told of a once-thriving metropolis, of steel and glass fingers scraping against the sky, before the industrialisation of the world covered everything in corrosive dust and soot, the population dwindling until the whole planet could be conquered by a single greenskin pirate and the horde he had gathered. It was hard to believe the orks had caused so much destruction, and so much vile creation, in but a single orbital cycle. Great collages of sheet metal had been welded together between buildings, the colossal lee
ring faces they depicted meant as primitive homage to the foul greenskin deities. The buildings were missing vast portions of themselves, the raw material stolen away to be used by the ork engineers in their mad creations.

  As a leader who had risen from the ranks of the deranged ork engineers, it only made sense that Gorkog Chrometeef would attract more likeminded followers, and their influence could be seen as well. Wires and cables had been strung haphazardly throughout, diverting power from one part of the city to another in no discernible pattern, each insane artisan working with no coordination with the others. Cannons, energy emitters and electrified coils littered the rooftops.

  The fighting had reached the city. Ork planes careened above the spires, firing indiscriminately into the battle below. Eldar grav-tanks weaved through the streets, throwing spears of energy like the mythical heroes of old. Orks surged across the ground, fighting and dying by the hundreds. They lined the windows everywhere, their raucous gunfire falling like a deadly rain. As Seoci and Liosa swooped to rise above a bank of power generation facilities, a burning ork bomber sailed past them, and Seoci caught a surreal glimpse of one of the gretchin turret gunners abandoning his post, racing along the wing of the doomed craft with a stolen parasol tucked under one arm before leaping away, abandoning himself to the mercy of the sky.

  ‘Great blood-father,’ swore Liosa. ‘There it is.’

  The city itself had not taken flight, but Seoci could see how the Corsair might have reached that conclusion. The craft, Chrometeef’s masterwork, was enormous. A dozen city blocks, large enough to rival small starships, were rising slowly from the ground, taking a huge portion of the city’s substrata with them as foundation for a single massive aircraft. Throughout the streets, weaving through walls and out of windows, the glowing blue lines showed Gorkog’s psychotic vision: hundreds, thousands, of skimmer units, linked together in a single mad choir of anti-gravitic force.

  As the sky-monstrosity gained altitude, cresting the spires of the city that had birthed it, the true purpose of its bulk became clear. From the streets and lots of the surface, and the train tunnels and sewers beneath, planes began to pour out, sailing beneath great arcing streams of lightning as the power generators continued to build strength. Gorkog Chrometeef’s masterpiece was nothing short of an enormous and insanely armed aircraft carrier, capable of transporting an unprecedented number of attack craft across an entire planet. Seoci rolled his plane into a slithering, winding roll as the storm of fire stabbed at him from all sides.

  ‘What is this?’ Liosa’s interceptor barrelled through a squadron of ork fighters, blasting a pair of them as she passed, rolling gracefully to avoid the wrecks. ‘Where is the rest of our force?’

  ‘Prince Eidear has been delayed,’ snapped another voice on the net. ‘The ork forces along his run were thicker than foreseen.’

  The communication network for the squadron devolved into a mass of ear-scorching profanity as the enraged Hunters gave voice to their ire. The arrogance of the Corsairs had turned to bite them all.

  ‘If Prince Eidear cannot follow a battle plan, then we hold,’ said Liosa, rallying their attention with a snarl. ‘Now, clear these skies.’

  The word of an exarch had power. Seoci’s fingers danced, his interceptor firing at targets as fast as he could lock them. The Crimson Hunters fought with a teamwork the orks rarely employed; Seoci would bait a fighter into pursuing him, leading the jet closer to an unengaged interceptor before pulling up, allowing the other Hunter to vaporise the ork when he rose to follow. He eschewed the enemy targets locked on to him in favour of those locked on to other pilots. Each Hunter did likewise, trusting the overlapping fire of his companions to be his defence. Still, the ork numbers were inexhaustible. For each plane they shot down, another launched from the skyship, its spires blasting out huge columns of sparks as massive amounts of power coursed through it.

  ‘There’re too many.’ Seoci rolled beneath a missile as it soared past, his bright lance hammering the ork plane from the sky in retaliation.

  ‘The ones that run out of ammunition are landing,’ said the Corsair pilot, the same one Seoci had heard earlier. ‘They have to be rearming and refuelling.’

  A line of bullets chattered against the nose of Seoci’s interceptor, scarring the surface but doing no damage. Chrometeef’s creation had to be destroyed, and they couldn’t wait for Prince Eidear’s reinforcements to do it. He scanned the runes on his canopy, looking for Liosa. He swooped in behind her. There was no need to communicate; she was already angled towards the massive skyship.

  They swerved through clouds of ork fighters. As they closed in on the vessel, still ascending, Seoci could see hundreds of canvas sheets crudely sewn together into a single massive flag, so that the skull and curved horns of Gorkog Chrometeef’s clan could proudly stare from beneath jagged ork scrawl that spelled out the creation’s name, or some greenskin battle motto. Seoci unleashed a hail of laser fire at the ridiculous banner. To his surprise, the beams never connected, dissipating instead against an oily iridescence that flickered into being in mid-air. Liosa’s volley tore through the flag with no difficulty as the shimmering field vanished, only to appear again a moment later.

  ‘By the red hands,’ said Seoci, ‘he’s got void shields. They’re intermittent, but if he gets them working, he’ll be able to leave the atmosphere.’ This was the answer to the seers’ question, the method by which Gorkog Chrometeef would go from a planetary nuisance to become a threat to three subsectors. Unless he was stopped.

  If the gunfire from the city had seemed intense, it was nothing compared to the firepower coming from the fortress of the warlord’s chosen followers. The fury of the ork weapons was rivalled only by their variety. Blistering streams of bullets spewed from barking ork gatling weapons. Huge spiralling blaster weapons recreated the power of the sun, hurling streams of incandescent energy skywards. Seoci saw a Corsair fighter enveloped in a spherical field of force, only to have the field collapse, crumpling the plane as easily as a dry leaf.

  Seoci skirted the edges of the city, blasting at the glowing lines of the skimmer relays. There was no way to focus in on them before whole gangs of ork pilots swept by in their roaring fighters, forcing him away again. Trying to destroy all of the skimmer arrays before the void shields became fully operational was fruitless, but he could think of no alternative. He pulled away, looking for a better way in.

  The bolt of blue-white energy smashed into his fuselage with enough force to overcome his inertial stabilisers. His head slammed into the canopy, bone crunching beneath the impact. Seoci pulled into a tight dive, struggling to clear his vision. Blood flowed down over his right eye, but he swiped it away. His runes showed heavy damage; the energy relays for his right bright lance had been destroyed. The impact had also buckled his fuselage and torn away one of the links to his restraint webbing. Cursing, he pulled up to rejoin the fight.

  Liosa danced around the squadron that had shot him. The dual-boom jets harried her with energy weapon fire, the orks showing more cooperation than most greenskin pilots did. Executing a tumbling roll, she jerked around and fired at one of them. Seoci grimaced when her shot impacted a wall of static. His own laser fire punched straight through the crude force field, burning through the ork’s cockpit with far greater accuracy than the ork had shown.

  The remaining two dived sharply for the city. Liosa’s interceptor turned nose down, following them with the same wrathful intensity that had overcome both of them when Padruic had been hit.

  ‘You are needed here, anr-hyded,’ yelled Seoci, knowing it was pointless. He had no choice but to follow.

  Liosa closed the distance to the pair of fighters, the turrets swivelling to fire ineffectively at her. Unable to drive her off, the two jets split up as they reached ground level, going in opposite directions around a massive, squat building. From his vantage point so high above, Seoci could see what would happen, but his screa
m over the communication net went unheeded. Liosa’s obsession would not let her hear as she pursued one of the jets, chasing ever closer as if she intended to reach out and tear it from the sky with her hands. The jet banked around one corner, but before it could clear the next, her pulse laser shredded its tail. Even as it flipped and rolled, out of control, her bright lances tore it to pieces.

  The other jet, coming in the opposite direction, roared through the fiery wreckage of its squadmate, energy blaster blazing. The explosive force rent one wing from her interceptor entirely, leaving the main body to plough into the ground. Seoci’s plane clicked automatically, runes transmitting to the rest of the eldar force the location of the exarch’s remains. The ork pilot’s victory was short-lived, however. Struggling to pull itself out of the reckless banking manoeuvre, it hit the side of a building in an explosion of glass and plasteel shrapnel.

  Seoci felt a wail of sorrow building within him, but the war mask clamped down on the thought, filling him up with the now familiar rage instead. A glimmer of inspiration came to him, and he struggled against the mask to pull the idea from the murky distortion of anger.

  ‘All fighters form up,’ he said. ‘Reform squadrons.’ He started to climb back towards the carrier, which the chattering communication net was already calling the Beastmother, but a rattling string of gunfire banged against his canopy. He jerked his interceptor to the side, a squadron of four jets swooping in pursuit. He cursed again. The interceptors were too far away. There was little chance of returning to them.

  The smell of blood and failure faded, replaced with the cool, powerful aroma of night-blooming aoifemint. He could feel his interceptor fading from view.

  Right behind you, water len.+

  Seoci soared upwards again, leaving the mystified pilots behind him to chase shadows. The remaining Crimson Hunters above had reformed into squadrons, none complete. Their casualties had been heavy, and none of the friendly runes bore the extra ornamentation of an exarch.