Engines of War (7 page)

‘I think…’ he said, flicking a few runes, running a few tests. ‘I don’t think there’s too much damage.’ It must have been the pilot, rather than the ship, that had been critically wounded, and he must have clung to consciousness long enough to complete a safe, albeit bumpy, landing. A better landing than Chelaki had managed, anyway.

‘I can get this ship back in the air,’ he declared.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Beyus, doubtfully.

‘This is what I was trained for, sergeant,’ Chelaki told him.

He held his back straight, with an effort, looking Beyus in the eye. He couldn’t let him see how weak he truly was. Had his sergeant suspected that he had become infected, that the rot had spread to Chelaki’s very soul, he would surely have had him executed on the spot.

He wasn’t ready to die just yet.

All the years he had served he had spent at a gunship’s helm. He didn’t think he had the strength to swing a chainsword any longer, but Chelaki could have flown a Stormtalon in his sleep; and the Emperor had seen fit, at this moment of all moments, to drop a Stormtalon virtually at his feet.

Beyus nodded his assent. ‘And may the Emperor go with you,’ he said, as he turned to rejoin his battle-brothers in combat against more plague daemons.

Chelaki felt ashamed of himself, unworthy, for having deceived a superior officer, but he had no doubt that the Emperor was with him indeed. He expected yet more from Chelaki than he had already given – just one final act of service, perhaps – and the Doom Eagle could better oblige him in the air, in his element, than he could on the ground.

A fresh explosion rocked the
Scourge of the Skies
.

Arkelius saw a maggot-ridden Death Guard on the battlefield ahead of them. He had lobbed a grenade at the Hunter and was preparing a second one, taking aim.

An alarm screamed out from Arkelius’s instrument banks, and Corbin reported in, ‘We’re overheating again, sergeant. Systems failing across the board.’

Arkelius had Iunus fire a volley from the hull-mounted storm bolter. Several of his bolts struck true. The Plague Marine didn’t fall, but his grenade detonated in his hand and he took the full force of its blast. Frustratingly, however, he remained standing.

The Death Guard’s explosives were fashioned from the shrunken skulls of their slain enemies. They were low on concussive force, but loaded with toxic spores. They were deadly to Nurgle’s enemies, but far less so to the Plague God’s already diseased followers.

Two Ultramarines closed with the shaken traitor, their chainswords singing. Arkelius instructed Corbin to keep the
Scourge
moving forwards, but then Iunus spoke up as his instruments sounded a chirruping alarm. ‘We’re coming into weapons range of the enemy’s artillery, sergeant. I suggest we–’

A rune panel beside him exploded, venting pressurised steam into his compartment.

Arkelius scowled behind his helmet. ‘Very well,’ he conceded. ‘Put on the brakes and lower the stabilisers, and, Iunus, target the flies and their riders again, but sparingly. Don’t fire until you’re sure of a kill.’ They only had so many Skyspear missiles – too few to waste any.

He leaned forward to look through his main vision slit again.

His eyes widened at the last sight he had expected to see: a daemon engine, one of the metal dragons. All this time, he had been hunting it and suddenly it had appeared from nowhere. More accurately, it had emerged from the blast field of an exploding missile. It flattened its razor-edged wings and lowered its triangular head as it began to dive.

‘Iunus!’ Arkelius yelled.

‘I see it, sergeant. It’s coming right at us. No, strike that. We aren’t its target.’

The dragon soared over the
Scourge
, and alighted upon a Predator Destructor. It tore into the turret of the Imperial tank with its claws, shredding its guns in seconds.

Arkelius heard the urgent voice of the Predator’s commander, reporting that he was abandoning his vehicle. Its hatches flew open and three power-armoured figures stumbled out of them. Iunus, in the meantime, was scrambling to get a lock on the Predator’s attacker. He lowered his missile launcher as far as it would go – until it was near-horizontal – but Arkelius could see his problem: while his target was still attached to the abandoned tank, his auspex couldn’t differentiate one from the other.

The dragon breathed fire at the Predator’s withdrawing crew before returning to the sky with a raucous screech. One of the crewmembers – the commander, to judge by his numerous honour badges – was hurt, badly burned, and the daemon engine was getting away.

‘As soon as you have that lock, Iunus…’ said Arkelius, tersely.

An age seemed to pass before, at last, Iunus’s fingers snapped shut around his launch trigger and the
Scourge of the Skies
trembled with the now-familiar sensation of recoil. Arkelius held his breath as he followed the Skyspear missile’s flight. The utmost silence of his crewmates suggested that they were holding theirs too.

The missile quickly dropped onto the daemon engine’s tail.

The dragon saw it, and tried in vain to shake it off. It looped around behind a Stormtalon, banked steeply and threaded its way sideways between two giant flies. But the Skyspear evaded both friend and foe alike in dogged pursuit of its programmed target. The daemon had the edge over it in terms of manoeuvrability and it occurred to Arkelius that it was also guided by an interred intelligence. The missile’s smaller size, however, compensated for that advantage – and it was faster too. It was homing in on the daemon engine’s debased emissions.

The missile struck its fleeing target, right up its exhaust pipes.

The daemon engine exploded – and several monstrous flies in its vicinity were knocked off-balance or injured by the force of the blast and by razor-sharp pieces of shrapnel. Inside the
Scourge of the Skies
, three voices were raised in triumphant roars.

Arkelius had despatched many enemies of the Emperor, of course. He had lost count of the number long ago. To have destroyed a creature so monstrous, however, so powerful – it felt different. He felt that he – together with his vehicle and his crew, of course – had just accomplished something special, something bigger than he had ever accomplished before.

It was a heady realisation, enough to make him forget the discomfort – the mild itch of claustrophobia – that had lurked on the periphery of his awareness all day.

There was only one thought on the tank commander’s mind at that moment, and he clenched his teeth in a grim smile as he voiced it, ‘…and one to go!’

Two of Galenus’s battle-brothers were down.

A Plague Marine planted his foot on the chest of one of them, and plunged his infected knife through a crack in his bright blue armour. He leered across the battlefield at Galenus, with his blackened stumps of teeth, as he twisted his blade in his enemy’s guts.

A Plague Marine had fallen too, and, at that moment, Terserus drove his power fist through the stomach of another, splintering his armour and his spine.

Two casualties apiece, then. With their greater starting numbers, that meant the Ultramarines were gaining the advantage.

Sergeant Thalorus and Brother Filion came to their captain’s assistance, giving him a welcome respite from his relentless, skull-headed opponent. He used it to converse with the orbiting
Quintillus
, specifically, with Captain Fabian’s epistolary, who had taken charge of the Librarians of all three companies.

‘I need answers now,’ he barked. ‘Why do we have two Chaos transports – one carrying, we have to assume, a Plague Champion – headed for the second Great Seal?’

‘We have been trying to divine the answer to that question, and–’

‘Don’t tell me what you’ve been doing. Just tell me what you know.’

The Librarian drew a breath before he answered. ‘No doubt remains that those ships are en route to Fort Garm to destroy the Great Seal there. This may be good news for us.’

Galenus raised a cynical eyebrow. ‘How so?’

‘It could be that our assumptions were… incorrect.’ The word was spoken reluctantly. ‘It could be that, in order to unleash the warp rift fully, both Great Seals must be broken.’

‘Because why else would the Death Guard divide their forces this way,’ Galenus mused, ‘when they’re so close to unearthing and destroying the Kerberos Seal?’

‘The problem, captain, is that the eldars’ ancient technomancy is still beyond our–’

Galenus tuned out the Librarian’s voice. The skull-headed Plague Marine was holding off his two attackers; they couldn’t seem to penetrate his defences. Galenus, however, had spotted that a patch of the armour between his ribs had rusted away, and that there was a fresh-looking, suppurating wound behind it.

He holstered his boltgun and drew his gladius. Like Terserus’s power fist, the short sword’s blade fizzed with energy. Of course, it was smaller and less powerful than the fist. However, at close quarters and in skilled hands – like the captain’s – it was a highly effective weapon.

With a forward lunge, he thrust his gladius into the Plague Marine’s side.

He was pleased to elicit a grunt from the traitor’s throat – the first sign of pain or weakness that he had displayed. Galenus stepped back and left the rest to his battle-brothers. He was thinking about what the Librarian had told him.

It was certainly an appealing notion, he thought, if they were to achieve their evil goal, the Death Guard had to win on two fronts, while the Ultramarines had only to beat them on one. It would mean he could forget about the southbound enemy forces. An appealing notion indeed…

‘But what if it’s the Death Guard who have made the wrong assumptions?’

‘Captain?’

‘What if we were right before and wrong now?’ Galenus asked. ‘We could win the battle here but lose the war. Can you guarantee that won’t happen? That, if we allow the Garm Seal to be destroyed, it won’t mean the end of everything?’

‘I have a team of Codicers consulting the Emperor’s Tarot as we speak to determine–’

‘I’ll take that as a “no”, then,’ said Galenus.

A death’s-head grenade exploded against Terserus’s armour, enveloping him in a pall of smoke but hardly shaking him. The skull-headed Plague Marine gave way to the inevitable at last, and was decapitated cleanly by Brother Filion’s chainsword.

Galenus voxed the sergeant in charge of his aerial forces. He asked him how many ships he could spare from the ongoing battle. With its greater speed, a Stormtalon could easily catch up to the southbound Chaos-controlled Thunderhawks, although its cannons would be little use against their near-impervious hulls.

‘I want them to run interference,’ Galenus explained. ‘Do whatever they can to slow those plague ships down. Whatever it takes.’

Next he voxed Fabian, ‘Contact the surviving members of the garrison at Fort Garm. Tell them to lay explosives throughout the building and to blow them the second they see the enemy coming. Let them dig for the Garm Seal too.’

He knew he was only buying time, at best. He just prayed that it might be time enough.

Chelaki felt better than he had in several hours. He was calmer, more focused. He had the wind in his face and he could finally breathe again.

The ground dropped away beneath his cockpit. Within seconds, the Ultramarines and the daemons fighting down there were little more than blue and grey specks to him, like icons on a hololithic projection.

He didn’t like the sound of his port engine, which was grumbling hoarsely. It must have been damaged in the crash-landing. He ought to have known that, but he had had neither the time nor the energy for his usual preflight checks.

No matter, he told himself. He didn’t need much more from the engines than they had already given him. They had already lifted him up here, back into the sky.

A vox-grille in one of his control panels crackled. A voice – the voice of another Ultramarine sergeant – addressed him by the call sign of his vessel and ordered him to identify himself. Chelaki complied, and at the same time he eased his joystick forwards and plunged into the midst of the ongoing aerial battle.

He pointed his nose at a cluster of giant flies and let rip with his twin-linked assault cannons. He pumped scores of rounds into the hideous creatures in a matter of seconds. A couple of flies survived, but he had shot away the wings of one of them. It could no longer keep its revolting bloated body aloft and was dropping like a stone.

The remaining fly flew at him with a furious buzz. Its mouth gaped open, wider than seemed physically possible. He remembered seeing one of these creatures on the ground. It had been slain, its stomach split open, and the partially digested corpse of a Space Marine had spilled out of it. Chelaki was only too painfully aware of his cockpit’s shattered glacis – he had nothing, no shielding, between him and his vengeful attacker.

He threw the Stormtalon into a sideways spin. The fly didn’t react to his sudden manoeuvre in time. Instead of landing on the flimsy framework of the cockpit canopy, it glanced off the hull and was stunned. A moment later, it burned and finally expired in the backwash of the starboard-side engine pod.

‘Welcome to the team, brother,’ said the sergeant’s voice from the vox-grille.

There were fewer Imperial ships in the air than Chelaki had expected, fewer than he had seen from the ground. It had seemed to him before that the battle was almost won. From up here, however, the odds looked a lot less favourable.

He glanced at his targeting auspex. He saw that two larger shapes with Imperial signatures – more Stormtalons – had broken off combat to fly southward. He didn’t know why and he didn’t ask. It wasn’t his business. At least they hadn’t been shot down, as he had briefly feared. ‘Glad to be of service, sergeant,’ Chelaki voxed.

He had picked up another large shape on the auspex – and this one was no ally. He slammed his joystick hard to the left and banked around. He swooped past another fly. Its rider hurled a grenade in his direction, but missed.

And now he saw it: the metal dragon, the daemon engine that had ripped him out of the sky once already. He was sure it was the one: its right wing had lost one of its metal panels. He had noticed that before, as his gunship was blistering in its infernal fire and his cockpit had crumpled around him.