Wings of Bone - James Swallow Read online

  Kheed’s face soured. ‘A gunnery post? I don’t think the captain would agree-‘

  ‘Captain Vought authorised me to issue whatever orders I saw fit,’ Sorda interrupted. ‘You may feel that cannon duty is beneath you, Mister Kheed, but necessity overrides your personal feelings. Man the weapon, that’s an order.’

  ‘You won’t get your hands too dirty,’ said Stoi sarcastically. It was possibly the longest sentence that Sorda had ever heard the tailgunner speak.

  ‘What about you, then?’ Kheed sneered. ‘You’ll be leaving your precious bombs to stand at Nilner’s turret?’

  Sorda shook his head, watching the Trojan approach. ‘We’ll only be carrying a single munition. I have to be the one to get it on target.’ But the Trojan rolled right past Griffon without stopping, taking the bombs to the other flyers on the ready line.

  Aves’s face creased in confusion. Was the Marauder to be given a conventional load while all the others in the squadron would carry an Atlas? His answer came as Captain Vought strode out of the lengthening shadows of evening toward the assembled crew.

  ‘Captain,’ Sorda began, ‘those Atlas-‘

  ‘We are to stand down,’ Vought said bluntly. A ripple of disbelief passed through Griffon’s crew. ‘Because of the shortage of personnel, we’re to remain on base and assist with the evacuation.’

  ‘Transport duty?’ Kheed said, his voice rising. ‘We’re fit to be nothing more than a common shuttle now?’

  Vought ignored the interruption. ‘Command has ordered that Point November be abandoned and all Imperial Guard forces are to fall back. A full company of the Doom Eagles are on their way from Merron, and the remaining combat capable aircraft in the 404th will launch a final bombardment prior to their arrival.’

  ‘Griffon is ready!’ Aves blurted out. Normally, he wouldn’t have dreamed of speaking out of turn, but his heart was racing and his better judgement was forgotten.

  ‘The grease monkey’s right,’ snapped Kheed. ‘We can fly right now, captain. Command can’t brush us aside like this!’

  Vought’s voice was icy. ‘Command can do whatever they wish, navigator. We go where the Emperor wills, and you would do well not to let your desire for glory tell you otherwise.’

  ‘But why, captain?’ Sorda pressed. ‘Did we work around the clock to reach flight status just so we could ferry boxes of paperwork up to orbit?’

  ‘I was informed by the wing commander that Griffon will not be granted battle ready status without a replacement for Nilner.’ Vought was tense. He shared his crewmen’s anger at being denied a chance to avenge themselves on the heretics. ‘No one can be spared to take his place. The commander felt that in such an undermanned state, Griffon would be wasted on the sortie.’

  ‘I can take Nilner’s turret, sir,’ said Aves. ‘I can stand his post.’

  Kheed made a face as if he had smelt something bad. ‘You can’t be serious. You’re a washout, a grounded weakling!’

  Vought gave the crewman a hard stare. ‘Look me in the eyes, Aves. Convince me.’

  Aves did as he was ordered, a powerful wellspring of surety surging up inside him. ‘It will be my honour to serve the Emperor.’

  The captain felt a flicker of surprise as he saw something in Aves that he’d never seen before - a steely, unbending resolve. He gave him a brusque nod and turned to Sorda. ‘Get him outfitted and have the ordnance crew load an Atlas aboard. We’ll lift in fifteen.’

  Aves never saw the looks of incredulity on the faces of the other men. He was elated, and it was all he could do not to whoop for joy and cry out thanks to the heavens; but then Vought was at his side and the captain was speaking in low, grave tones.

  ‘Mark me well, lad. If you blunder up there, you’ll be the death of us all, and by the Golden Throne I swear you’ll die screaming before I do!’

  The crewman gave a shaky nod.

  ‘You should have been careful about what you wished for. Now you’re going to learn the truth about your dreams - those fantasies you have about wearing the wings, that’s all they were. The reality is enough to ruin some men for life.’ He paused, turning to study the darkening sky. ‘You’re in it now, lad. No turning back.’

  ‘I… I’ll do my best, captain.’

  ‘Yes. Or we’ll all die.’

  * * *

  GRIFFON DOVE INTO the battle on spears of orange flame, knifing through the sky amid the ragged remains of the 404th. Aves felt his gut knotting in fear. The sky, the perfect night sky of Rocene that he’d admired so many times from the safety of the ground was gone now, replaced by an ominous void choked with explosions and spitting streaks of inferno. He gripped the dorsal bolter cannons tightly as the Marauder sank into a voyage through the footless hall of an airborne hell.

  Off to port, he saw the eye-searing flash of a laser as it connected the ground briefly with another flyer that seemed to vanish in a cloud of ashes, disappearing like some twisted conjuring trick. Aves blinked furiously, his eyes watering as the bright beam remained imprinted as a purple stripe on his retinas. The thick air was a mix of turbulence and random thermals, hot gas and smoke rising upward from the ground where great swathes of city lay burning or Imperial forces died by the thousands in heretic fuelled death pyres.

  The crewman twitched as he glanced around inside the enclosed steel turret, frantically trying to scan every inch of the horizon at once, terrified that some enemy would approach from just the direction he hadn’t been looking. The triggers of the bolters were wet with sweat from his palms, and he found himself remembering the uncountable times he had wiped them down after a mission. Aves imagined Nilner, sitting where he was now, feeling the same fears, courting the same terrors.

  The screeching chatter of Stoi’s tail guns brought him crashing out of his reverie and Aves spun the dorsal turret around to sight down the fuselage. The albino gunner was pouring rounds into the sky behind Griffon, but Aves could not see a target; then they appeared, bursting out of the funeral black mist like two angels of death, twin Thunderbolt fighters each smeared with foul graffiti and Chaotic symbols. Stoi caught the leader with a well aimed salvo that shattered the heretic flyer. The wingman reacted quicker and executed a sharp wingover, dancing close to Aves’s sights. The crewman shouted out a wordless cry and slammed the triggers home.

  Bolt shells tore the flyer into ribbons and it collapsed in on itself, folding up into a burning knot of metal. Aves found himself grinning and panting as he realised he had just made his second kill.

  White light flared out in the distance, casting stark, sharp edged shadows in the turret. The crackle of static over his headset confirmed that one of the bombers had dropped its Atlas, immolating untold numbers of heretic troops in an instant atomic holocaust.

  Something glittered in the clouds to starboard and he turned the guns to train on it. Through his auspex, Aves saw another of Griffon’s sister bombers, a Marauder Destroyer variant, spitting orange fire from ducts along the fuselage, and without warning one of the vessel’s wings broke away. Fragments of metal sliced though the air around the bomber and peppered Griffon’s wings, slicing through fuel lines and fluid channels. Aves’s heart leapt into his mouth as jets of combustion streamed from the engine cowlings. A large spear of broken metal clattered over his head and ricocheted off the tailplane, spiking through Stoi’s turret as it passed. The tailgunner’s bolters drooped and fell silent.

  Griffon flew on, cutting through the sky, seemingly unaware that her lifeblood fuel was bleeding out behind her, that one of her crewmen had likely just been killed. All around him, Aves saw an inverted rain of bright fireflies lancing up into the darkness, streaking past in thin glowing trails. The bomber jinked wildly to port, slamming his head against the console, knocking sense into him.

  ‘Tracers!’ Aves trembled as cannon rounds from a massed battery of Hydras converged on the bomber. In places where the hull had been patched with thin, substandard plating, the flak cut through Griffon’s fuselage and ate int
o her vital systems.

  ‘Griffon, inbound to target. Terra, protect us.’ Vought’s voice, tight and forced, spoke from Aves’s comm-set, and he heard the grinding metallic noise of the bomb bay doors opening.

  Still the tracers chewed and nipped at the Marauder as she turned into the wind. Aves glanced over his shoulder toward the nose and saw smoke streaming from the lascannon turret, the cupola ravaged by a direct hit from below. First Weslund, now Kheed; the devotional icons and prayer pamphlets Weslund had decorated the inside of the turret with had not stopped the cramped metal sphere from becoming the coffin for two men.

  The clouds were thinning even as the raging storm of gunfire increased. The bomber dropped into the attack slope toward the heretic’s mobile base, and Aves could see where a near miss from an Atlas had run it aground. A second hit would kill the big machine once and for all, cutting out the heart of the apostate forces. Aves felt his fear wane as a cold, clinical calm came over him. The certainty, the Tightness of purpose he had felt on the runway was in him once again, and he heard Captain Vought’s words echo in his mind: ‘He must understand that the Emperor places his servants where they are needed.’

  Aves nodded to himself. This was where he had been destined to be. Griffon was shuddering all around him, electrical arcs jumping from component to component, the burnt tang of sizzling plastics mingling with the stink of hot metal; and then he heard the voice. A single word.

  ‘Aves…’ The captain poured a lifetime of agony into his name.

  In an instant, the crewman had vaulted out of his seat and dropped into the fuselage; he dashed past the hatch to the bomb bay, barely registering Sorda’s body sprawled across the floor there, blackened shreds where his chest had been. Aves pulled himself up the ladder rungs and into the cramped cockpit. The handholds were slippery with liquid, and the crewman felt his gorge rise as he realised it was Vought’s blood.

  ‘Captain…’

  Vought held one hand pressed to his throat, fingers wet around a knife of glass embedded in his larynx. His face was bathed in red light cast from a dozen warning glyphs on the console before him. ‘Boy. Listen.’ He spoke in ragged gasps. ‘Can’t launch… Atlas… Too much damage.’ Griffon bucked as a shell chewed a lump out of her wing. Vought nodded at him. ‘Take over.’

  Aves did not question the order, quickly unstrapping the pilot from his couch. Released, Vought slipped to the floor of the cockpit, barely breathing. Aves took the captain’s place, feeling pools of vital fluid soaking into his flightsuit.

  Beyond the cockpit window, the land leviathan was growing to fill the horizon, the plume of smoke emerging from its cracked hull like an arrow in its side.

  Aves reached forward and flipped the arming switch for the Atlas from safe to active setting. ‘Ready, sir.’

  ‘Good lad.’ With painful effort, Vought forced himself up and held out his hands. ‘Take this. Quickly, now.’

  The captain placed a blood-stained emblem in Aves’s trembling hand, an age-yellowed skull framed with skeletal wings. The crewman ran his finger over them, caressing the careworn bone carving.

  ‘Earn them, lad. You know what must be done,’ Vought coughed. ‘Wear them with honour.’

  The crewman turned Griffon into the face of the gunfire, pinning the bone wings to his chest; then he reached for the throttle and pushed the Marauder’s engines to the redline.

  Griffon fell into the leviathan like a spear thrown by the Machine God himself, and in the glorious firestorm of her sacrifice, the heretics knew the wrath of the Imperium’s most steadfast souls.