On Wings of Blood Read online

  ‘Into the city,’ he said. ‘As close as possible. Find their power generators, and silence them.’ Throttling forwards, he led the charge into the guns of the Beastmother.

  The gouts of white-hot blaster fire, and the waves of bullets from the myriad ork guns kept them from firing, instead intent only on their dancing, weaving flight patterns. Once through the initial defenders, they found themselves soaring through the streets of the former capital, screaming along the runways of the ork monstrosity. In the air, the ork fighters might have been nimble enough to evade some of the eldar firepower, but the fighters refuelling on the ground were not so lucky. Seoci couldn’t kill the stationary planes fast enough as he flew over, pulling one blazing right angle turn after another.

  The destruction couldn’t go unanswered, and the orks who were already airborne followed their enemy into the tight confines of the avenues between buildings, desperate to stop the eldar before they destroyed too many of the orks’ toys. The Hunters split apart, dashing through the streets with a grace the orks could never hope to match.

  Seoci let out a cruel laugh when the first enemy rune vanished with no accompanying weapons fire. He focused his gaze outside of his canopy in time to see another ork jet fail to execute the same turn its quarry had and plough into the side of a building, the fireball smashing clear through and out the other side. A proximity rune chimed and he dipped to the side, as the ork bomber diving towards him barrelled into the street, its payload detonating a second later and vaporising the surrounding rockcrete.

  The Hunters’ laser fire flitted across the city, setting off explosions of superheated metal, but the damage they inflicted was minimal. The pilots themselves were doing the work, their bombs blasting holes in the carrier’s foundation, their clumsy vehicles smashing through buildings and exploding with even greater force.

  The first building to collapse destroyed one of the interceptors as it fell, but the others began to use that new danger to their advantage. Laser fire was aimed at exposed and damaged girders instead of the too-numerous lines of the skimmer arrays. As the Beastmother’s ascent began to slow, finally grinding to a halt, the orks on the streets panicked. Seoci smiled. He remembered well the vision of his world’s destruction, and the sensation of the ground breaking apart beneath him. How fitting that Gorkog Chrometeef’s reward should be the very fate he would have brought down upon Lugganath.

  ‘All forces away!’ Seoci yelled over the communication net. ‘The mother of beasts perishes. Impact imminent.’

  The eldar forces below scrambled to comply. Jetbikes flared into life, screaming for the horizon. Corsairs leaped aboard Venoms and clung desperately to the rails as the vessels shot away. In all directions the eldar fled, concerned only with escaping the blast zone of the coming destruction.

  On the ground, the greenskins remaining in the city bellowed in triumph, firing their weapons in the air or doggedly trying to run the retreating eldar down on foot. Aboard the Beastmother, ork pilots dashed for their aircraft, frantically trying to gun the engines of the surviving planes to life before the doomed craft returned to the surface. Panic turned to desperation as the ground began to list, sending mobs of orks in a terrifying tumble along doomed streets and over the edge of a yawning abyss. Many of the greenskins in the remaining buildings tried to leap onto a passing plane, friendly or otherwise. More than a few of them even made it, only to have the supersonic impact rend them asunder in a spray of viscera.

  The fall of the Beastmother was increasing in speed, and Seoci pulled away, having no desire to be caught if the ungainly aberration tumbled in mid-air. The other eldar pilots soared free as well, leaving the cityscape to plummet away.

  The impact was catastrophic. The ground bucked and heaved beneath the force of the Beastmother’s fall, the waves of seismic reaction smashing the rest of the city to the ground as easily as a child kicking over a castle of blocks. The cloud of dust boiled out like an ocean wave rolling ashore, swallowing the ground for miles, enveloping even the fast-retreating forces of the eldar.

  In the sky, the orks still held the advantage of numbers. They had no leader and no place to return to, but that did nothing to disperse their bloodlust. Seoci found himself focusing entirely on staying alive, rolling wildly through spins and loops, looking for any opportunity for retreat. Three more interceptors went down, one after another, ­unable to find their way through the labyrinth of overlapping lanes of ork fire.

  The wraithfighters that had been engaging ground targets rejoined them, and their psychic concealment afforded the Hunters the edge they needed to stay alive. Gunfire was answered with lasers, and the air became a churning mass of weapons fire. Overuse had begun to tax the focusing chamber of the Hunters’ lasers, whose timbre had gone from a great feline growl to an anguished shriek, the sound of an animal fighting for its life. At last, Seoci saw the friendly runes appearing from the far direction, heralding the arrival of Prince Eidear and his fleet. The prince’s Vampire Raiders led the charge, barrelling towards them like the heroes of myth, a host of aerial cavalry riding to the craftworlders’ salvation.

  Seoci angled for the edge of the aerial battle. The orks had spotted the approaching reinforcements, and many turned away from the hazy blurs they were struggling to hit in order to engage the new arrivals. His weaving path nearly clear of the enemy, Seoci dipped his interceptor to pass beneath a fat bomber without losing any speed. He had a brief sense of direst foreboding, but it was too late to manoeuvre. A bright lance fired up from beneath, striking the bomber directly in the wing. The plane detonated along with its remaining ordnance, engulfing Seoci in a wall of fire.

  His life became a series of still images. First, white-hot flame, heat everywhere, the sky gone. Then a rushing wind, the crystal of his canopy shattered, his arms struggling to pull his interceptor from its lurching dive. Next, forcing the plane as level as possible, the last of the interceptor’s energy failing, its power core ruptured, desperately aiming towards a relatively flat expanse of the wasteland between cities. Finally, jarring force as the inertial stabilisers failed, the interceptor slamming into the ground on its belly, skidding sidelong, throwing Seoci from one side of the cockpit to the other like a clapper in a bell. Then, blackness.

  Seoci opened his eye, the only eye that would respond. He had no way to know how much time had passed; his instruments were dead. Reaching to remove his helmet, Seoci found that it was already gone, shattered or ripped away in the crash. Where his fingers touched, they found his skull pliant and yielding, as if the bone beneath had been ground to meal. Blood coursed down the side of his face. Seoci coughed. With his restraint webbing only partially secured, the impact had injured him grievously. He placed his hand on his chest, feeling the call of the Tear of the Mother he wore there.

  He dropped his hand, fighting the pull. If he were to die, it would be as a feeling, thinking being and not the cold, ruthless killer the war mask forced him to be. He struggled to discard it, but it was like trying to remove a ring from a finger that had grown too thick for it. Each time the war mask had been harder to remove, and for a moment he began to think he didn’t have the strength to do so again. Finally however, it occurred to him that this would be the last time he ever had to make this struggle, and with that thought the war mask slipped away as easily as shrugging off smoke.

  The hateful wind of Khaine dispelled from his mind, Seoci took a ragged breath. He couldn’t remember the killing, the rage, the hate that must have consumed him to be able to go to war as he had. Unlike every other time he had discarded the war mask, he could see fragments, certain pieces. The joy of dancing upon the wind. The thrill of moving in concert with his fellow Hunters. The smell of night-blooming aoifemint.

  Ailios. A sudden terror gripped Seoci. He had led the fight, rallied the fighters against… something. They would call him a hero, he knew that much. He fingered the Tear upon his chest. They would want to call him back. The wra
ithfighters could not be flown with a pilot alone; the ships of the damned needed a captain, a dead soul interred within their frames forever to give them their unlife. He thought of tearing the stone from his chest and smashing it against the cockpit.

  He sighed. Closing his eyes, he let his senses slip away from the present. He needed to know what would happen. Seoci had been, at the best of times, a poor seer, but his desperation lent him clarity. Dimly, as though through a thick fog, he could see his plane lying upon the wasteland. From within the cockpit he stared up from the eyes of his own corpse as a shape leaned in through the broken shards of crystal. The horned helm of a wraithseer stared down on him. Nimble fingers closed over the Tear, and as they pulled his soul gem from his body, he caught the cool smell of night-blooming aoifemint.

  Seoci closed his eyes, finally surrendering to the insistent pull. Once, when his path had threatened to consume him, she had pulled him away from obsession’s abyss. If he could not save her in return, then he could at least stay by her side, on the path that neither one of them could deny.

  IN SERVICE ETERNAL

  Matt Smith

  It hung there unfeasibly in the foetid air, a black mark on the already ugly aerial landscape. A utilitarian city of giant towers, enormous power generators and vast manufactoria, all held aloft upon dozens of anti-gravity platforms, each the size of a battle tank. Its name was Gamma One and it was one of many of its kind that floated in the upper atmosphere of Antropia, a ball of noxious brown gas around a dense mineral core that sat isolated within the Artran System of the Segmentum Obscurus. The space around the city was in a state of constant flux. Its tallest towers forever inhaled the toxic gases around it, filtered and repurposed them on an atomic level and fed them into the ever-hungering generators. Slaved mining servitors swarmed around helix-shaped ports atop sprawling refineries in their thousands, docking only long enough to unload their meagre cargo of ore before returning once more to the planet’s uninhabitable core miles below. All to feed the Imperial war machine.

  Far from the largest of Antropia’s floating cities, Gamma One was still of singular importance as it formed the centre of the planet’s deep-space communications and long-range augur.

  Shapes emerged from the dull shadow cast by the city as it blocked what little light had found its way to Antropia from its distant star and fought through the cloying atmosphere. Mere pinpricks against the forge city’s vastness, they broke away from the city’s imposing presence and formed shapes of their own. Short, squat trunks carrying pairs of engines upon their backs. Angular sloping wings and long twin tails.

  Valkyries.

  Embarking on a final shakedown mission, they were flown by pilots of the 41st Antropia Aerial Testing Division, veterans no longer fit for the front lines but whose flying skills could not be left idle, their service to the Emperor still incomplete.

  ‘All systems green. Confirm,’ said Wing Commander Arden Graves from the pilot’s seat of the lead Valkyrie assault carrier. His voice was calm and confident. The sound of a man who knew exactly what he was doing through decades of experience.

  ‘Confirmed, commander,’ came the clipped response from his co-pilot, Corporal Ryker Ness, sat above and behind him in the Valkyrie’s second seat. Despite their physical differences they looked the same now, their features masked beneath helmets, dark visors and respirators, their bodies encased in grey flight suits that seemed to blend with the dull metal of the cockpit.

  ‘Get me status reports from the rest of the group.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Reports coming in now… Gryphonne Five reports sub-optimal power to primary armament. Still within acceptable mission parameters. All other craft report status green. We are ready to proceed, commander.’

  ‘Thank you, corporal,’ Wing Commander Graves said before opening the group-wide vox-channel. ‘This is Gryphonne One to all craft,’ he said, with a casualness born of years of camaraderie with those in the ships around him. ‘Let’s keep it tight out there today and stay alert. Mirehawk sightings are up fifteen per cent over last cycle. We don’t want to get caught out like Third Wing.’

  Mirehawk was a generous nickname given to Antropia’s apex predators by the Navy pilots. There was nothing hawk-like about them. Leathery, scaled reptilian beasts the size of gunships with claws that could punch through a Valkyrie’s armour like paper. The pilots had become strangely fond of them. Their appearance lent some excitement to often otherwise dull test flights. No one knew where the name originally came from, but somehow it had stuck.

  On the wing commander’s order, the Valkyries fell into formation. The nine craft were painted a plain dull brown, the same as any built in Antropia’s great forge cities. It served the dual purpose of camouflaging them from the world’s predators and showing the least of the sickly, sticky build-up that always formed upon the hulls after even the briefest exposure to the toxic atmosphere. On the front port side of the hull the insignia of the Antropia 41st Aerial Testing Division, First Wing, had been lazily applied in white, no concern given for markings that would be covered up as soon as the Valkyries were sent off to the front lines. These very craft were destined for Lord Militant Vanderbee’s holy undertaking to hold back the ork horde of Waaagh! Gutslasha in the neighbouring Torpral System.

  ‘We’re coming up on Waypoint Alpha,’ Corporal Ness dutifully reported.

  ‘I see it,’ Wing Commander Graves replied as his trained eyes picked out the beacon of flashing red and white lights through the dull haze. ‘Gryphonne One to all craft. Waypoint Alpha. Weapons live. Fire on my order.’

  The Valkyries passed the beacon and Wing Commander Graves picked up targeting data ahead. More beacons, larger than the waypoint and enveloped in powerful refractor fields. They hung in threes, mirroring the formations of the Navy.

  ‘Second Squadron. Target’s dead ahead. Open fire.’ Graves watched out of the starboard side of his cockpit as the three Valkyries on his right flank opened fire, the multi-lasers mounted on the far side of their cockpits spitting streams of bright yellow light through the dull haze and striking the stationary beacons. The shields on the targets flashed wildly as they dispersed the energy of each hit, then faded.

  ‘Hits confirmed,’ Ness reported as the formation flew by the first targets and banked hard to the left to line up on a second set.

  ‘Third Squadron, fire.’ To his left side Graves watched Third Squadron open fire with their lascannons. The longer, brighter beams cut through the air, two of them striking ferociously against their targets.

  ‘You’re better than that, Gryphonne Eight. I don’t want to see you miss again, understood?’ Graves berated the crew behind the inaccurate shot, receiving fervent promises to do better in response. The Valkyries banked right and ascended to target the final beacons.

  ‘Message coming in from Gamma One, commander. It’s the Dominus,’ Corporal Ness said dourly, knowing that for the forge city’s Mechanicus leader to contact them personally and interrupt their flight could only mean bad news.

  Arden Graves sighed.

  ‘Put him through.’

  The vox crackled. ‘This is Magos Dominus Omicron-231 to Wing Commander Graves. Do you acknowledge?’ The voice had a flat metallic monotone that Graves knew would still sound as if it was spoken through an old vox-caster even if he had been standing face-to-face with the speaker. Projected through the Valkyrie’s own vox-system it bore a metallic edge that made the commander wince.

  ‘I read you, magos.’

  ‘Commander. We have just lost contact with seventy-eight of our mining servitors.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this, magos? I thought you had been losing servitors for some time,’ the wing commander asked impatiently.

  ‘Affirmative. Ever since we were able to penetrate to the third level of the planet’s core. However, the servitors in question in those circumstances were always working at that lowest level. These disap
pearances are occurring on all levels and are seemingly rising out of the core itself. You are required to perform reconnaissance and report back.’

  ‘I am in the middle of a test flight, magos. I don’t have time to–’

  ‘That is an order, wing commander.’

  Beneath his respirator, Arden Graves clenched his jaw and ground his teeth. ‘Understood, magos. I’ll do a fly-by and report back. Commander Graves out.’ Graves abruptly cut the channel. He opened a new one to the group. ‘Change of plan. The Mechanicus need us to make a little detour. Stay on me. Do we have coordinates, corporal?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Transmitting to all vessels now.’

  One by one, the nine Valkyries banked hard to port and dived, falling back into formation with experienced precision. As they descended closer to the planet’s core the air grew thicker and darker. A rancid smell like rotting vegetables seeped through into the pilots’ respirators, the air filtration systems unable to fully handle the increased weight of noxious fumes being forced through them. Behind him, Graves could hear Corporal Ness beginning to gag.

  Lights across the wing commander’s control panel flared red as an imminent collision was registered by the Valkyrie’s targeting sensors, and Graves was forced to thrust his control stick forward hard to dive under the unknown object. He winced, as despite his efforts the object struck the top of his craft with a loud metallic clang that reverberated through the cockpit. Seconds later reports flooded in from the rest of the group as they struggled to avoid more of the floating debris.

  ‘Throne!’ Graves said, ‘What was that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ness replied, ‘but Gryphonne Four is reporting a direct hit to its starboard engine. Minor damage.’

  ‘Put me through to them,’ said Graves.