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Sturmhex - E J Davies

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Double Eagle’

A Black Library Publication

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Sturmhex

E J Davies

The Sturmhex incident still troubles me. Even now, a century after the events in that system, I am uncertain we chose the right path.

‘The veil was thinning,’ I was told. ‘Anahk’hir was the harbinger, a blanket of blight to shroud the system from our sight. The dying star naught but a doorway for the Despoiler and his legions to thrust their talons deep into our heart. He had to be stopped.’

I had stood alongside my brothers for years as we were honed into weapons against the daemon. Centuries more as Astrotechnicus. And for nearly a decade as squadron leader. I always understood why we were summoned. I always understood our methods of war. But I still struggle to understand why it ended in that manner.

– Extract from the personal journal of Aegir,
Techmarine of the First Brotherhood.

Long may he stand at the Emperor’s side.

‘Board the Stormravens!’ Brother-Captain Pelenas’ order was still fresh in his mind as Aegir pitched Kodachi down on his approach vector. The rapid deployment of a handful of squads behind enemy lines was an accepted stratagem. Airlifting the entire First Brotherhood on gunships was unprecedented.

Aegir took a lingering look at the blue dwarf star slowly collapsing under its own gravity. Its corona bled away to the void. Nucleons, ions and atoms of short-lived isotopes were spirited away on stellar currents, fouling the scrying arrays and teleportaria of the argent Castigator as it orbited Sturmhex Prime. Without scanning capabilities, long-range bombardment was impossible. Aegir winged the gunship into a tight turn, his brothers following suit, as the planet filled his viewport.

+It’s an ugly thing,+ Iocaste pulsed. Aegir smirked slightly beneath his helm before responding.

+We were ordered to undertake a silent incursion,+ he sent.

Iocaste was not wrong. Sturmhex Prime was an ugly rock. Dead, cold and grey. Its pockmarked surface was the legacy of collisions with meteors and asteroids. Stellar winds whipped dust across the planet’s surface. Aegir looked out towards the outer planets, no longer warmed by the system’s feeble sun, rendering them uninhabitable, while the penal colonies of the second and third planets mined ore beneath its dwindling light and the harsh atmospherics of retasked terraformers.

Aegir pulled his gunship into a tight loop, following his vector to the ingress point – a vast opening dug by some long-extinct species of gigantic insect. With one last look out at the blue Sturmhex star, he dived.

Kodachi’s assault cannon whined as it blasted rounds into the blight drone. The Bilecyst exploded in a mist of green-grey fire. It was snuffed instantly by the lack of oxygen, its existence ended. This was the eighteenth such drone to be ended in the tunnels that burrowed beneath Sturmhex Prime’s surface.

A warm sensation washed over Aegir from the First Brotherhood who were assembled on a wing of Stormravens. Exposure to the combined psychic might of Grand Master Vardan Kai’s Grey Knights was like being bathed in the glow of Sol’s radiance – warm and peaceful, and roiling with restrained power. Despite this, the Techmarine could not lose the leaden weight in his occipital lobe.

+On your guard.+ Thebe’s warning was a pinprick of ice in the back of Aegir’s skull. An image lanced into his consciousness – another drone, to the left and slightly below. Like the first, it was as large as a Dreadnought – a huge rust-mottled insectoid carapace attached to two corroded iron rotors. Aegir tasked the servitor. Turning the dorsal weapons array, he loosed a tight burst from the assault cannons. Bullets ripped through the drone’s armour, destroying it in a cloud of baleful fire. Its biomechanical corpse tumbled to the tunnel floor.

+This is an Emperor-forsaken place,+ Iocaste pulsed, his thoughts mirroring those of his brothers.

+The planet is too close to its star, Iocaste,+ Aegir replied.

+And so, like everything, it dies,+ Metis added.

Aegir allowed himself a half-smile beneath his crusader helm. He felt proud of the squadron he now commanded. They functioned well together, even when separated by miles of rock. He could feel each of them communing with their Stormraven’s machine-spirits, relaying binharic commands to the lone gunnery servitors.

+They are becoming more abundant.+

+Then perhaps, Iocaste, we might get a rest from your rambling.+

A psychic presence imposed itself on the collective. It felt like a lodestone: hard and magnetic, pulling the brotherhood to it with its very existence. And then, it was gone, and with it went the Grand Master.

For a fraction of a second, Aegir felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. The rapid appearance and disappearance of such a magnificent psyche disorientated him. He breathed, long and slow, reciting his catechisms and returning balance to his talon. He could feel each of them return: Iocaste’s childlike inquisitiveness, Thebe’s stoicism, Metis’ cold rationality, and Kalyke’s zeal. Through him, they focused their talents, and through them, he was a more potent weapon against the daemon.

+Company,+ Kalyke interrupted.

Aegir skimmed the surface of his ceramite-like mind, gleaning the information. Seven squads of Raptors lit their ancient jump packs, and streaked straight for the Stormraven.

+On your guard,+ he communed. +Renegade contact made. Engaging now.+

By the Raptors’ movements it was evident the planet still retained its gravity. They leapt from outcrop to outcrop, scurrying like flies over a carcass, searching for sustenance. Aegir could feel the hatred rising in him; his breath was hot, and his hearts beat faster.

Aegir recited litanies of warding as he pitched Kodachi downwards. Thumbing the activation stud on his control column, he sprayed the incoming renegades with rounds from the nose-mounted heavy bolters. He could feel the passengers below, and their hate magnifying with each second of inaction.

The Raptors spun, swooping to avoid the oncoming wave of mass-reactive shells. One shell exploded inside a Raptor’s torso, spattering his comrades with black-brown ichor and bone shards. Another Raptor erupted in mid-air as a shell punctured his back-mounted reactor, taking out two of his comrades in a miniature nucleonic mushroom cloud.

The rest of the Raptors threw their heads back and keened at the loss of their brothers. Screeching howls filled the air, and the sound waves fed on each other, building to a fevered scream in the honeycombed tunnels of Sturmhex Prime. The Raptors scattered, presenting too many targets for the gunship’s weapons. Aegir fired into the greatest cluster of them, taking down five more with the assault cannons.

+We need more guns,+ he pulsed.

+We have more guns.+ Brother-Captain Pelenas’ voice was low and deep, even in Aegir’s mind. +Open the door.+

Warning klaxons echoed through the cargo space. A red lumen globe flashed its warning as the front access door lowered. Aegir’s litanies changed as he tried to placate the belligerent machine-spirit, which baulked at this improper use of its body.

Aegir could feel his brothers communicating, selecting targets and shooting solutions through the void to maximise casualties. Utilising the egregore was among the very first talents the Grey Knights were ever taught.

+Fire,+ came Pelenas’ silver-edged command. Storm bolters chattered along with the Stormraven’s assault cannons, picking off Raptors as they weaved between the bolt shells, trying desperately to survive. In the close confines of the tunnel, they were no match for the Grey Knights’ guns. The Raptors were annihilated within seconds of sustained fire. The few survivors fled down the tunnels. Aegir felt the speed of the Stormraven pick up, the machine-spirit eager to press the advantage.

+Easy,+ Aegir soothed. +We will find them soon enough.+

Roga watched as seven figures in tattered robes knelt in a circle. Each chanted words long forgotten to the tongues of humans, and long forbidden in the halls of the eldar. For seven days, they had neither eaten nor rested, instead dedicating themselves to the completion of the summoning. Weeping sores covered their skin in triads – the sacred mark of the Grandfather, the blessing of the Great Master of rebirth, the bringer of despair. Words tumbled from bleeding gums that bared teeth the colour of tallow.

As the ritual finally came to its close, a wind rose in the cavern. Dust from the floor drifted, coalescing into clumps in the middle of the circle. The gusts grew stronger and the matter was drawn into a tight spiral, spinning ever faster with the hastening currents. A vortex formed, its column reaching high to the ceiling. The gale whipped at the figures’ robes, flapping them like battle standards.

The sorcerers’ voices swelled until they were screaming their incantations over the sounds of the vortex: a discordant howl, a mix of hatred and joy, a baleful melody to those who listened too closely.

Together, they threw back their heads. Sickly green light poured from their eyes and mouths, only to be pulled into the cyclone. Lightning crackled in the dust. Only now, it wasn’t dust. It was a swarm of fat-bellied flies. The sorcerers spasmed, their bodies jerking and twisting as if they were electrified. The tempest dropped, but the buzzing of a billion bloated, swirling insects remained.

An immense fork of lightning struck in the centre of the column of flies. The maelstrom of insects ceased its spinning. The carrion feeders scattered, landing on the spent sorcerers and consuming their rotten flesh, before disappearing into the porous rocks.

The herald emerged. It was as large as a Space Marine but had the body of a grotesque slug, glistening with moisture and maggots that rippled like a river of undulating flesh. Its head was the only part of its anatomy that was covered. A single horn protruded from beneath the cowl, and an ancient mechanical arm, ending in a simple grab-claw, had been grafted to its shoulder. Blood and pus oozed from the graft site. Skittering beetles played in its skin’s folds, while larvae emerged from the numerous triad pores.

Roga inclined his head towards the figure, his decaying armour protesting at such a movement. Flakes of white lacquer shed from the corroding ceramite. The ache in his temple magnified, though it had improved since he removed the helm. A trio of sores at the corner of his mouth constantly wept. He licked at them, drawing the corruption into his mouth, and delighting in the taste of so many virulent diseases percolating in his body.

‘Captain Roga?’ The herald’s voice was like a breeze through a valley of dead trees. ‘First Captain of the Lords of Decay, and honoured sire of the Great Plaguebearer?’

‘Yes, herald.’

‘His most Imperious Majesty, and chosen of the Grandfather, Anahk’hir.’ The herald swept his mechanical arm wide and shuffled to one side.

Captain Roga’s eyes widened. Despite his corroded armour, he dropped to one knee. The Space Marines and thralls behind him did the same.

‘My lord,’ he said. ‘My followers are yours to command.’

Anahk’hir bid the captain to stand. The daemon prince grinned, revealing yellowed teeth, a swollen tongue and a mouth full of larvae.

‘Then we should begin.’

Two things happened within a heartbeat: Grand Master Vardan Kai’s presence returned to the egregore, and the stench of death sprang forth in Aegir’s senses, then vanished just as fast.

+Brothers,+ Captain Pelenas interrupted, summoning those of Aegir’s level and above. +Tactical communion.+

Aegir closed off the part of his psyche open to the squad. In his imagination, the tactical communion took place around a large, circular wooden table aboard the Castigator – though no such table existed in reality. His mind’s eye painted the picture into which he projected his consciousness. As the others appeared in the shared psychic space, they took their seats at the table, devoid of armour and rank.

Brother-Captain Pelenas joined them, his presence larger than the others, manifesting as a broadening of the shoulders, and standing taller than the rest. Outside of the communion, Aegir had never seen the brother-captain without his armour, so could not gauge the projection’s accuracy. Grand Master Kai then entered, standing a clear head taller than even Pelenas, radiating with a faint golden light.

+Brothers,+ the Grand Master began, his voice reverberating around the communion chamber like thunder through Titan’s great valleys. +Sturmhex is dying. With that death comes a weakening in the barrier between reality and the warp. This is just the opportunity the Despoiler needed to launch a crusade against the Imperium. The Prognosticars have foreseen a great awakening that bathes this system in corruption.+

Aegir could feel the lodestone pulling at the edge of his consciousness. Something was there that he couldn’t quite identify.

+The Lords of Decay, brothers, occupy Sturmhex Prime. Where the renegades amass in number, surely the daemon is to follow.+

Aegir looked around the circle. It did not take a latent psychic talent to see the word ‘renegade’ ignite anger in a Grey Knight. He felt his own hands ball into fists and his jaw tighten.

+The Holy Inquisition has tasked us with destroying our enemy, and whatever Neverborn abominations they have allied themselves with. Agreed?+

+Agreed,+ the communion chimed as one.

+Land the brotherhood. Annihilate the enemy. Extract to the Castigator. You have your orders. Brother-Captain Pelenas, they are yours.+

+Thank you, Grand Master.+

Pelenas was the first to disappear from the circle, followed by the Justicars. Aegir was about to leave when he thought he saw a ripple of anger cross the Grand Master’s face. There was a slight pull at the edge of the image, a slight elongation of the table. Grand Master Kai disappeared, leaving Aegir alone. The mental turbulence of the last few moments left him with a slight sick feeling in his stomach, and a throbbing pain behind his left eye. He dismissed the communion, opening up his psyche to relay the intelligence to his squadron.

+Is everything in order?+ Metis asked, careful to shroud his words from the others. +I can feel something is unsettled.+

+It is nothing, Metis,+ Aegir replied, cursing himself for not closing off that part of his mind to the clairvoyant. +A slight headache that manifested when we translated in system.+ The throb remained, and the sound of buzzing crept in at the edge of his hearing.

+Dying stars will do that to some,+ came the reply.

Aegir angled Kodachi through increasingly tight turns. The tunnel opened out into an enormous domed cavern, the size of Deimos, with a thin, noxious haze hanging in the air. The rest of the squadron emerged from similar tunnels that perforated the cavern walls. Land Raider-sized flesh sacs the colour of flensed bone lay strewn across the ground. Tactical data scrawled across the weapon’s augur. It identified thousands of targets – Traitor Space Marines, thralls, acolytes and edifices in numbers to rival most fortress-monasteries of the Adeptus Astartes.

+By the Emperor,+ Aegir pulsed. +This is not just a simple warband. This is almost two Chapters’ worth of souls! Regroup. Now.+

The wing emerged from the tunnels into the hollow cavern of the planet’s core, and opened fire.

Roga turned his gaze from the approaching fleet to Anahk’hir. The bloated daemon’s skin was stretched thin – thin enough to see the myriad of tiny beasts that fed on his insides. Buboes wept viscous yellow fluids on which maggots and flies gorged. He was the epitome of the Grandfather’s blessing.

‘My lord?’

‘You heard me, captain.’ The tone in his voice was dangerous. ‘Engage the Sigillite’s puppets. Bring them in close. We shall draw him out and devour him. We will make his body a new garden for my children to play in.’

‘But what of the Black Lord’s orders? What of his campaign? Without this foothold, his crusade will falter before it begins.’

‘You swore your lives to me. Each one of you. They are mine to command, and mine to take away. You will commit your force as ordered. If we are driven back, the Despoiler’s plan is worth nothing.’ Anahk’hir chuckled. ‘I promised the Lord of the Black Legion this system, and he shall have it. I never said I wouldn’t use this day to pursue my own ends.’

Aegir banked hard left. The inbound missile strafed under the starboard wing, and exploded against the cavern wall. Aegir returned fire, stitching a line of bolt shells across the cavern. The havoc squad ducked, going to ground against the retribution.

+Thebe! Iocaste! Disembark your payloads.+

Kalyke unleashed his hurricane bolters, killing an advancing line of cultists, and halting their charge. Metis swept in low to Kalyke’s port, covering the western approach. He fired his weapons and drove the enemy to ground. Aegir circled overhead, keeping watch as Thebe and Iocaste landed. Two full squads of Terminator brethren emerged from the Stormravens’ holds.

Aegir’s hearts swelled with pride as he watched his brothers advance, their silver armour shining, and their weapons crackling with nascent psychic energy. All across the cavern, the action was being mirrored by the other gunships, each disgorging the First Brotherhood with a roar of storm bolters.

The taste of cold iron. The scent of burning flesh. Then they were gone. Two fragments lasting no more than half a heartbeat each. Aegir was shaken by the two great intrusions behind the wards in his mind. He was used to the gentle brushstrokes of his squad, and the heavier probing of the brother-captain. These were like hard punches, one after the other. He felt a bead of sweat drip down his face inside the armour.

+Aegir–+

+Not now, Iocaste,+ he clipped. +Switch with Kalyke.+

Captain Roga had joined his elite troops on the front lines. They fought on the eastern slopes as the Grey Knights advanced, bolters stuttering. Anahk’hir sat in a shallow cut into the cavern floor formed by his summoning. He surveyed the battle of his prized possessions, drinking in the death songs that filled the domed space. The daemon prince watched as the silver craft of the First Brotherhood tore through armoured Raptors and blight drones. As each fell, Anahk’hir gifted them with life anew, imbuing the hollow armour and machinery with daemonic children.

‘He is near, herald. I can feel him,’ Anahk’hir said, larvae spilling from his mouth. ‘I will take from his flesh the millennia I spent banished in his prison, unable to tend my gardens, unable to cultivate my children.’

Anahk’hir stretched his arms wide, his low voice chanting an ancient language. Bruise-coloured clouds formed in the upper reaches of the planet’s hollow core, and unnatural lights began to flicker behind his eyes. Anahk’hir smiled as the first of his beings materialised from nothingness.

‘Yes,’ the daemon prince said. ‘I shall lure him here, and then breed corruption in his body until the end of time.’

Aegir often marvelled at the manoeuvrability of the Stormraven. It did not look the most graceful of creations, but could be called upon to produce some sublime aerobatics with a talented pilot at the helm. Pulsing an order to his gunnery servitor, Aegir launched a Stormstrike missile. He watched the vapour trail until it penetrated the hull of the lead Rhino. The vehicle exploded from within, killing the occupants and leaving a smoking ruin in its stead. The second transport ploughed into the wreckage of the first, buckling its front blade, and bringing it to a complete halt. Its doors struggled to open, the squad inside trapped by the corrupted machine-spirit’s frustration, and the carcass of its brother. A squad of Grey Knights closed in with speed that belied their bulk. Heaving the doors open, they thrust their weapons into the troop hold and fired.

A third Rhino swerved into Kalyke’s firing arc.

+Now, Kalyke!+ Aegir pulsed.

The Grey Knight relayed the fire order, and unleashed the multi-melta. Intense microwave energy bubbled the ceramite shell of the Rhino, turning it to liquid in seconds. Kalyke pulled the craft to port, yanking the multi-melta blast across the flank, to aim at the engine block. The Rhino buckled, detonating in a plume of shrapnel and viscera.

As the Stormravens covered them, the Grey Knights on the ground charged. Storm bolters spat shells into the advancing line of the Lords of Decay. Their grey-and-white armour was coated in patinas of green mould and corrosion. Aquilae had been carved from the armour by knife or axe, leaving the ceramite wounds exposed. Some bore the triad mark of the Master of Decay, others bore a single horn, or a single eye. A number went without helm, their skin covered in boils and sores, with hair falling out from some virulent disease.

They moved like a disorganised rabble. But nothing could be further from the truth of it. Each warrior had a role. Where a gap opened up in the line, there was another waiting for an opponent to over-extend and step through it. Where lines weakened and crumbled, it was to pull in an impatient foe and crush him completely.

The sons of Titan were no fools. They struck hard and fast, countering each charge with a flurry of bolt shells, and spinning blades of psychic energy fuelled by hatred. They were as lethal as the diseases the Lords of Decay carried, and no less cunning than their foe’s master.

A corrupted Razorback, its pale green hull covered in rusted chains and gangrenous heads, advanced on the left flank, sweeping its lascannon turret along the lines. Aegir saw it approach, and communed with the battle-brothers on the ground to warn them. Metis swooped in low, his assault cannon chewing through the debased armour. The Razorback’s turret turned on the Stormraven, and fired.

+I am hit!+ Metis relayed. Aegir reached out with his mind, seeing the smoking hole left by the lascannon strike that had punctured the wing and tail section of his Stormraven. The pilot was doing his utmost to bring it in softly, struggling against aerodynamics and gravity. Metis continued firing, cutting through the Razorback’s armour until it exploded in a surge of flames. The Stormraven dipped, flying through the fireball.

+Emperor be with you, brother,+ Aegir said.

+And also with you,+ came the reply as the Stormraven ditched.

The Grey Knights were outnumbered, but that didn’t matter. Their martial skill and superior armament meant they rarely faced an enemy they could not defeat. The Lords of Decay had been caught unawares by the Stormravens’ approach, and the onslaught of the First Brotherhood drove them backwards towards their redoubts and fortifications. Although a few of their number had fallen, the warriors of the Six Hundred and Sixty-Sixth Chapter were undaunted.

The haze that pervaded the cavern was dispersed by hexagrammic wards inscribed inside each suit of armour, pushed away like dust in the wind. The Terminators spread as they advanced, forming a thin silver line – a delineation between Imperial space and the realm of the traitors.

+Something is amiss,+ Pelenas communed, detecting a flicker across his psyche.

At that moment, the traitor’s line fell back at the double, fading from combat. The Terminators seized on the opportunity, advancing unopposed further into the enemy’s territory.

+Hold!+ Pelenas bade.

In the clear zone between the two battle lines, corrupted lightning began to gather.

+Hold!+ Pelenas ordered again.

Seventy-seven individual coruscating spheres of energy appeared. They grew smaller and smaller until a concussive boom rang out from each. Dust whipped at the Grey Knights, battering their armour, making it rattle and ping. Seventy-seven lesser daemons – plaguebearers – now stood against the Grey Knights, each brandishing a rusty knife as long as its arm, and bearing all manner of skin sores and distended intestines.

+Charge!+ Brother-Captain Pelenas bellowed at last. The Grey Knights obeyed. Behind those daemons just summoned came scores more and scores more again; a stinking, rotting flesh tide to stand against the might of the Imperium’s finest warriors.

Force staves and halberds spun in expert hands, dancing beams of psychic energy, ice-blue against the necrotic skin of the plaguebearers. Blades bit deep into flesh, severing limb and neck, pulping rotten muscle and exposing internal organs. Pelenas chanted the words of the First Canticle of Banishment.

Nurglings, irritating creatures slightly larger than a human skull, swarmed the battlefield. Great slug-bodied beasts eagerly barged their way through the lines to investigate the warriors.

The daemons of Nurgle slowed the brotherhood’s charge. They stymied the Grey Knights, forcing them into an attritional campaign, making them fight for each step and each solitary inch they gained. But still they gained. One by one, each of the brotherhood took up the canticle, raising it as a battle cry through the vox-arrays in their helmets.

Overhead, the Stormravens battered the hunkered-down defences of the Lords of Decay. Havocs were driven behind casements and hastily constructed earthworks, then pummelled by bolter and cannon. Rhino transports were destroyed before they were given a chance to mount a counter-attack. Bikers revved angry engines, jinking and scything around incoming ordnance, only to be unseated by another of the attack wing closing from the opposite flank.

Raptor packs hunted the Stormravens, leaping from promontories and galleries to hound them. A number of the flyers bore crazed canopies, testament to the fervour with which the Raptors attempted entry to the cockpit, intent on murdering the pilots within. None had fallen.

The Grey Knights’ superiority over the forces of the Archenemy was absolute.

+This number of lesser specimens would be impossible for a traitor to summon without support.+ Pelenas’ voice was strained. +There must be a greater aberration out there somewhere. Find it!+

Aegir banked left to cover Iocaste’s strafing run across the renegades’ withdrawal when the brother-captain’s order was broadcast. Kodachi and Longsword were approaching from the opposite vector. Together, Thebe and Kalyke decimated the throng of summoned plaguebearers with concentrated fire. But where they fell, more were summoned.

The pilots began to recite the canticle, and the atmosphere buzzed. Wards on the inside of the Stormraven glowed a dull blue against the brushed steel of the Chapter’s livery. Aegir could feel the power coursing through his system. His hearts responded by beating faster and harder.

+Brothers,+ he communed. +Let us find their master, and ease the burden for the brother-captain.+

He felt the assent of the others as they gathered on his left wing. They flew over the battle lines, firing into the daemons with sanctified ammunition. With every daemon or traitor that died, another rose to take its place. The Grey Knights’ advance was faltering.

+Does this feel right to you?+ Aegir spoke just to Thebe.

+None of this feels right,+ Thebe replied. +But I do not ask why. That is not my purpose.+

+You have permission to speak freely.+

+I have never seen these foetid creatures employ this tactic. They were never ones for this kind of sapping warfare.+

Aegir’s mouth twisted slightly. +So what are they doing?+

Thebe paused for a moment. +If I was to guess, I would say they are trying to draw something out into the open. They are hunting.+

+Using themselves as the bait?+

+Precisely.+

‘He has still not shown himself,’ Anahk’hir mused.

‘Lord?’ The transfixed herald looked away from the battle lines.

‘He has grown cunning these last years.’

The herald returned to watching the bloodshed with a wry grin, realising Anahk’hir was talking to himself.

‘Perhaps the stakes must be higher for him to wield his own weapons. Very well. I shall be first onto the field of battle. Though I shall not be going alone. He may watch his pretty silver birds burn!’

The daemon hoisted himself to his tree-trunk-like feet. He flexed and incanted words that sounded like a thousand bones snapping in sequence. His arms began to flicker as they transformed into brutal weapons – a rusted blade in his right, and a tri-barrelled cannon grafted on the left. On his back, a tank of bilious fluid containing unspeakable corruption slopped as he clambered from the crease in the cave floor.

‘Herald,’ he hissed. ‘Unleash the Heldrakes!’

Aegir pressed the button, shredding the line of plaguebearers in his targeting reticle. He felt something familiar. A tickle on his palette, and the taste of salt against his tongue.

+Aegir.+ Metis was alive, and communicating.

+Metis–+

+There is no time,+ Metis interrupted. +I have found the locus of the interdiction. The brother-captain was correct. It looks as if it is taking to the field. On your–+

A yawping screech broke Aegir’s concentration. It was the sound of a diving hawk, or hunting eagle – though it was made by a machine a hundred times the size of either of those birds. Great clouds of flame to rival the refineries of the Scouring of Genye pillared through the haze towards the ground. Aegir thought he saw, just for a second, a glint of metal. Orbs glowed red then orange – twinned like a binary star.

The Heldrakes hiding in the gloom dropped from the cavern roof and screamed their battle cries.

Kalyke was the first to die, his Stormraven snatched by the lead Heldrake as it dropped. The mechanical daemon-beast clamped its jaws around the flyer. A tooth the size of a forearm pierced the gunnery blister. With the wards broken, and the psychic protection dissipated, the Stormraven began to corrode. Within seconds, the entire hull was rusted beyond reckoning, and when the beast released its quarry, Longsword flaked to the ground.

Eight more creatures joined the lead, unfurling their wings like bats emerging from their roost. Where the lead belched fire and flame, the others breathed smoke, insects or pestilence. They were big, their manoeuvrability hampered by their size, but they were fast – easily able to outpace the Stormravens.

Thebe was next to die. Caught by the tail and spun into the cavern wall, he was obliterated in a pyroclastic sphere as the ordnance ignited. Chunks of red-hot ceramite rained from the sky.

Losing one voice from his squad was painful, but to lose two was traumatic. Aegir felt like he’d been hammer-struck.

All across the cavern sky, Stormravens dipped and ducked between the breath weapons and autocannons of the Heldrakes. Some were fortunate, evading the incoming fire, or able to weather the storm of corruption loosed upon them. Others were not so lucky. They fell to the ground as balls of fire, or broken husks of the illustrious war machines they had been. Each Grey Knight taken was a glorious light lost to the void.

Justicars and battle-brothers across the brotherhood felt the losses, but none more keenly than Aegir. He tried to move his arms, but they would not comply. He felt like two-thirds of his brain had simply vanished without trace, or by some occult surgeries. His consciousness rose from his physical form, leaving his brain to swim freely in his skull, feeling like it was no longer attached to his brainstem. He was lost without his brothers and their stabilising influence.

Skeins of psychic energy emanated from Aegir, leaving Kodachi drifting in the sky, as the battle raged on around them.

On the ground, the loss was also taking its toll. For the first time since making planetfall, the Grey Knights began to pull back. Just a step at first, which became a second, then a third.

The air grew thicker as the haze returned. It seeped between the Grey Knights, thickening as it rose. Weapons boomed a fraction of a second slower. Storm bolters fired with an almost imperceptible delay. Pelenas felt that he was fighting through a viscous liquid, forcing his muscles to move faster than they ever were capable.

He had begun the Third Canticle of Banishment as the Heldrakes dived, the loss of his airborne brothers striking him like acid-tipped arrows. Yet one could not rise to the rank of brother-captain without accepting the inevitability of loss or sorrow. His chant rose clear from his vox-grille, echoed by those Grey Knights closest to him. But even their canticles could not shift the dense miasma that closed in around them.

As the miasma thickened, so the forces of the Lords of Decay became resurgent. The plaguebearers struck with their rusted knives, the blows turning away from the heavily warded armour of the Grey Knights. Breaths of acrid fumes and vinegar-soaked ashes cut through filtration systems, causing those affected to choke, or their eyes to stream.

The Traitor Space Marines attacked in force. Bolters thundered out in the murk, their ammunition exploding against the aegis armour of the brotherhood, sending deadly white-hot shrapnel flying out in all directions. A number of the brothers died. Shell fragments cut through armour joints, dispelling the sacred wards beneath, allowing the daemons’ weapons to bite down hard.

Each death only spurred the brother-captain to greater and greater action. His voice grew louder until the canticle occupied every known vox frequency. His blade whirled as fast as the fog would allow, severing limbs and banishing daemons to the warp. Burning blue with witch-fire, his hatred, and the hatred within all who stood with him, was channelled into it. The brotherhood dug in, repelling the daemonic advance.

The stench of decomposing bodies overtook the brother-captain. The screams of anguished souls echoed in his mind. He staggered. The ground shook as the waves of assaulting daemons and traitors parted to allow the daemon prince’s advance.

The Neverborn levelled his mighty weapon at the brother-captain. His face looked like it had been moulded from clay using a template from a child’s nightmare.

‘You will summon your master to face me, and I will grant you mercy,’ he yelled, spitting acrid liquids to the ground where they ate into the rock and gave off wisps of steam. He stood as tall and wide as a Dreadnought, his torso a bulbous mass of blubber. Great pectoral flabs hung low over his corpulent belly. His skin was a rancid green colour, and pale to the point of translucency. Scars, scabs and boils covered almost every inch of the daemon prince’s hideous flesh. Sores wept fluids that seemed like sustenance for the myriad parasites that crawled over it.

The enmity of the Grey Knights burned brighter. Sparks of power licked along their blades. Pelenas felt like he would be sick, his fury magnifying.

Anahk’hir’s mouth split his face in half as he spoke, revealing rotten teeth and a putrid black tongue. ‘Or you shall all fall beneath my weapons, and your corpses become playgrounds for my children.’

Pelenas drew breath behind his helm. A radiant energy uncurled itself from the gestalt. The brotherhood released the concealment, and the warrior standing at Pelenas’ side became Grand Master Vardan Kai. Pelenas looked into the bare face of the ancient warrior – his sapphire eye-lenses meeting the pale grey gaze of the Grand Master as they began the Fourth Canticle.

The daemon stilled. ‘No! You are not him. You are not who I wait for.’

Pelenas poured his hate into the gestalt. His brothers did likewise. Grand Master Kai drew on this well of emotion, crafting it. He spread his arms wide, forming a transparent bubble in the miasma. It surrounded the Grey Knights. Weapons swung more freely, bolters were brought to bear as before. The sanctuary in the miasma forced back the lines of the daemon.

‘My plans, my bargains, will not be for nothing. He is here, I know it.’ The daemon’s face leered in fury.

+Now, brothers,+ Grand Master Kai pulsed. +We make them pay for their very existence.+

‘Your lives are forfeit,’ Anahk’hir growled. The daemon lowered his cannon into the advancing line of Grey Knights, and destroyed them.

Iocaste ducked under the incoming Heldrake’s neck. His servitor fired the assault cannon into its metallic underbelly, as the craft looped over the creature’s thrashing tail.

Iocaste reached out with his mind, searching for Aegir, but he could not be found. Aegir had become isolated only once before. He had retreated from the group mind for a long time. Iocaste knew his brother did not have that luxury on this mission. If he didn’t awaken soon, he would perish.

Thuds of flesh against ceramite brought him back to the present, as scraping claws squealed against sacred metals.

‘Ugh!’ Iocaste spat. ‘Furies!’

Targeting the largest concentration, he pulled the nose cannons to bear, commanding the servitor to open fire. Pounding reports issued through the hull as the heavy bolter filled the sky with shells, blasting apart the daemonic carrion feeders. Those he missed with the guns he burned with superheated air as he angled the jet exhausts in his wake. Thumps and bumps through the bulkheads told him they still had company.

Iocaste suddenly felt Aegir’s presence in his mind. Slowing the throttle, he angled the Stormraven to starboard-down.

Two Heldrakes fought over the quarry they had snared in their mouths. Each was curled like an ancient eagle from an arcane heraldic device. They pulled against each other, wrestling over a silver gunship. Iocaste drifted his gunship alongside, scrutinising the markings, and felt a stab of relief to see it wasn’t Aegir.

Something sharp was tapping against Talwar’s skin, looking for a weak spot. Seeing the split-second window of opportunity open, Iocaste gunned the engine. He pitched the nose up and flew straight towards the captured flyer. The machine-spirit pulled back, baulking at the request. Iocaste fought the controls, winging the craft over in a loop as the two creatures yanked. The snared craft was growing ever closer in the window. The taps were getting louder, closer to the side hatch.

The creatures tore once more, ripping the captured Stormraven in half. Its promethium fuel ignited on contact with the red-hot engine cowls, and erupted into a fireball. The Heldrakes tumbled backwards. Iocaste, unsighted, entered the fireball at maximum velocity. The intense heat searing the furies from the hull, and setting off warning sigils on the console.

They emerged charred, but mobile, with a few minor scratches in the hull from the attention of the flighted daemons and wreckage. Iocaste pulled around in a tight pass as his servitor launched a brace of Stormstrike missiles – each targeted at the duelling Heldrakes, annihilating them in a conflagration of incendiary warheads and shrapnel from the thrice-blessed munitions.

‘Find me Kodachi!’ he said.

Anahk’hir unleashed all he possessed at the Grey Knights. Plaguebearers fell faster than they could be summoned. His nurgling pets could not penetrate the protective shell that had been cast, and his own attempts to counter the shield had failed. Even his beloved slug-beasts could not make a dent in the wall of silver. Two of his Heldrakes had fallen, their hearts ripped out by the irritating silver ships. Not even Roga’s troops could break through the line.

The Grey Knights’ canticles had worked their way under his skin, gnawing at his bones. They burrowed their way into his skull, distracting him, and ruining the summoning. His skin itched and burned like it had been doused in acid, but his rage was driving him to greater and greater risk.

The balance needed tipping. The more silver-clad warriors that were lost, the closer it brought his tormentor to the field. And then, Anahk’hir’s vengeance could be exacted.Anahk’hir closed his eyes. Summoning his will, fear and hatred, he merged them into a single invocation. He exhaled, manifesting a swarm of flies that covered the sky. The Land Raider-sized flesh sacs around the cavern writhed. Ripping open, they disgorged packs of rotflies, each one bearing one of the Grandfather’s chosen on its back.

The daemon raised his cannon and fired an ugly ochre viscera at the sanctuary. Around him, the summoned creatures lifted into the air on wings that hummed louder than a Chapter’s collected power armour.

The swarm spread through the cavern like oil across water, enveloping a lone Stormraven, choking its fan blades and air intakes. Smoke bellowed from the exhausts. The gunship’s nose pitched down. Kodachi began to fall from the sky.

Aegir floated on a kaleidoscope of stimuli. A riot of sound collided with every colour and shade known to the realm of men. Every nerve was supercharged with electricity. It coursed through his skin like a violent storm.

He drifted in the immaterium, past bloated things with distorted faces and distended limbs, past avian-faced scholars and writhing tentacled manifestations, and beyond countless unspeakable horrors of excess and blood. Finally, he saw emaciated bipeds wearing a mockery of his brother’s armour. As he looked closer, he saw their faces – the blistered, hollow-cheeked imitations of Kalyke and Thebe.

The corners of his vision began to fold in on themselves, and with that sensation came pain. With each fold came an increase in temperature; pain gave way to anger, anger gave way to hatred.

Aegir looked at his gauntlets and saw white light emanating from his armour’s joints. Rage burned through his veins, magnifying with each heartbeat. His face twisted, becoming a rictus mask of loathing. He balled his fists as his vision collapsed in on him.

For a fraction of a second, he hung inside the vision in a foetal position, his blood white-hot, his rage distilling into pure wrath. Aegir’s form exploded outwards with a primal scream.

He opened his eyes.

Iocaste felt the acrid tang on his palette before he saw the plummeting Kodachi’s fly shroud glow, red at first, then orange. The faster it fell, the brighter it got. The tang flushed over his tongue and dripped acid down his throat. A scream built in microseconds in his mind – from a distant shout to a deafening cry.

The flies detonated in a white ball of fire, carbonising the creatures, and turning them into pellets that rained harmlessly off Talwar’s armour. He could sense Aegir battling the controls as blue flames licked at the hull, searing anything that dared to get too close. The engines screeched as the last of the choking insects burned off, igniting from a growl of mechanical vexation.

Faster the Stormraven dived, and faster the ground came to meet it. Iocaste was willing the flyer to right itself. He could feel Aegir’s struggles against inertia, desperate to save the craft he loved.

Suddenly, the flames guttered and died at once. The suicidal dive of the gunship slowed, and it was pulled into a hover.

+Iocaste.+ The squadron leader sounded different. His timbre was still that of Aegir but deeper, more resolute.

+Your orders, squadron leader?+

+Stormraven wing,+ he broadcast, opening his consciousness to the pilots and gunners of the First Brotherhood. +We are outnumbered. We are outgunned. But we shall never be outmanoeuvred. Rendezvous point alpha-five, then take flight, brothers. Back to the tunnels at full speed. You have your instructions. Enact them,+ Aegir pulsed, closing down his communion.

A wide grin spread itself across Iocaste’s face.

Kodachi flew languid patterns while the remaining Stormravens disengaged to gather at the muster point. As the last Stormraven raced in ahead of its draconic pursuer, the wing split, scattering towards the tunnels through which they entered.

The Heldrakes turned their heads in confusion, unsure of which to pursue. The subsumed pilots tried to exert some control, but the daemons in the machines simply spat angry sheets of flame as the gunships scattered. Aegir took aim at the fire-breather, striking its maw with a few rounds from the assault cannon. It howled its displeasure and gave chase, accelerating at a rate far beyond that expected from a beast its size.

It was on Kodachi fast. Aegir dipped and snatched the craft out of the beast’s line of fire. Autocannon shells swept by, exploding in mid-air and scattering shot off the fuselage.

+Aegir,+ Iocaste pulsed

Aegir dismissed it with a shrug, shooting a few more shells at the creature’s face, shattering one of the carmine eyes. The Heldrake flinched against the attack. Shaking its head, it screamed again and increased its speed.

+Get out of there,+ Iocaste warned.

+Keep going.+ Aegir’s rage still burned beneath his skin. It was evident from his tone.

Another few shots, and the beast cried, its mouth wide. Kodachi shot into the tunnel at maximum speed. The Heldrake didn’t have time to realise its error, and it slammed hard into the cavern wall, erupting in a storm of fire. The flames that entered the tunnel lapped harmlessly against the wards of the Stormraven’s hull.

Images flooded Aegir’s mind from the remaining pilots – all witnessing the demise of Heldrakes in a similar fashion. He smiled.

The gunnery servitors and their pilots made short work of the fast but cumbersome Heldrakes, hitting them and retreating back through the tunnels, only to emerge in another part of the cavern to strike again. The daemons could not keep up with the Grey Knights. Once the gigantic Heldrakes had fallen, the rotflies came next. The Stormravens unseated the rotfly riders and destroyed them with multi-melta, bolter and cannon.

Daemon after daemon fell to the guns of the Grey Knights Stormravens, their corpses falling from the sky.

+Now, brothers,+ Aegir communed. +Let us aid those on the ground.+

Pelenas was into the Sixth Canticle. As the battle overhead shifted, he could feel his own rage adding to that of his brothers. Pure, unadulterated rage. He felt its power in him, its purity coursing through him, sending new energy through tired muscles and his aching sword arm. The wards inside his armour felt warm against his skin.

He channelled the emotion towards the Grand Master, as Vardan Kai intoned a counter-chant. Pelenas recognised it at once. The potential in each syllable resounded in every chest and every throat. The battle-brothers opened their souls to the collective, feeling each emotion as richly as their first, willing it towards their locus.

The Grand Master drank deeply from it. He reformed it around the words he sang, shaping it into something angular and sharp: a blade made of emotion and power, a seething mass of energy.

As he reached the final couplet, the Grand Master released the energy as a brilliant dagger aimed at the daemon’s heart. It lodged in the daemon’s chest. Anahk’hir staggered back a few paces, bent over at the waist.

‘I name you, Anahk’hir Terrigassimal Yarnick,’ Vardan Kai thundered. ‘Back to your birth realm. I banish you by the rites of the Emperor of Mankind.’

The daemon laughed, a sound that started in his belly and worked its way through his chest.

‘You should know that only a daemon’s true name holds any kind of power over them,’ he said.

Pelenas glanced at his Grand Master, catching a glimmer of uncertainty.

‘I sense perplexity in you, Grand Master. Perhaps Nicodaemus sold you a falsehood.’

Pelenas’ sword flashed, bisecting the daemon’s arm. As fast as the blow landed, ichor and muscle reknitted the wound. Kai’s own blade lashed out, only to be blocked by the rusting edge of the daemon’s weapon. Behind him, the ranks of the Grey Knights engaged in their own battles with the ranks of the Lords of Decay and the daemonkin.

+Nicodaemus?+ Pelenas pulsed to his superior.

+Focus on the canticles, brother-captain,+ came the clipped, steely reply.

Pelenas channelled his hate into every blow. Grand Master Kai ducked and weaved, firing bolts of coruscating energy from his fingers as the psychic might of the Grey Knights First Brotherhood coursed through them both.

As fast as Pelenas could land blows, Anahk’hir countered with his blade, blocking their swords and slicing at the two warriors. With each blow they landed, the daemon prince healed to strike back with greater speed. His plague cannon streamed disease and filth over the Grey Knights, engulfing warriors and consuming their sacred silver armour.

Pelenas could feel their psyches being snuffed out like candles in a windstorm. And with each light that dwindled, there came a distracting barb of loss and pain.

Grand Master Kai ducked under an arcing blow of the daemon’s sword. Pelenas took the opening to ram his sword deep into the daemon prince’s putrescent flesh, and ignited the psychic blade with a fragment of his energy. As Anahk’hir stumbled, Grand Master Kai drove his blade into the beast’s abdomen.

The daemon prince lurched backwards. A trio of Stormravens zipped past, strafing gunfire across the cavern floor and into Anahk’hir’s body.

The sounds of a thousand books being torn asunder accompanied Anahk’hir unfurling his wings. He beat the air with a sickening sound of pallid flesh tearing. The daemon lifted into the air, and a horde of his minions charged into the Grey Knights.

Aegir saw the daemon take off. Kodachi looped around, gathering Iocaste and the remaining pilots. They approached on a high-pass vector, all weapons firing. The daemon bellowed battle cries as cannons ripped fresh holes in his wings. Rounds were absorbed into his flesh without harm.

It incensed Aegir that such a being dared to exist. This particular specimen, and its legion, had robbed him of three of his squadron. It could not be suffered to live.

+Aegir,+ Iocaste pulsed, seeing the daemon alter his course to follow Aegir’s craft. But Aegir was too far gone. His emotion boiled over. Blue lightning played across the surface of Kodachi, and it caught fire.

Aegir willed the machine-spirit for just a fraction more power. It complied, pushing itself beyond normal operational tolerances. Kodachi, aflame with indigo fire, barrelled towards Anahk’hir. It collided with the daemon in mid-air.

+Brother-captain, do you feel that?+

+How can I not, Grand Master?+ Pelenas replied.

+Begin the Cleansing,+ he urged.

+Where?+

+On that Stormraven. Now, brother-captain!+

A pillar of pure white light crashed through the cavern, enveloping the fallen daemon. The cyclonic wind blasted Anahk’hir, and his form shrivelled. The cannon fell free from his atrophying body and fluids leaked from every pore. Lice, maggots and worms scuttled into the light, only to be vaporised.

Vardan Kai took out a small cube from a belt pouch and hurled it at the fallen daemon.

‘I’ll gift you anything,’ Anahk’hir said. ‘A life without dying. Without the burden of duty to an unseen spectre. Without service to masters with agendas and schemes. Without politicking or fear–’

The Grand Master did not hesitate. In a flash of unlight and unknowing, Anahk’hir disappeared. Grand Master Vardan Kai strode over to the cube; he stared at it where it lay on the ground. He picked it up in a gauntleted hand and brought it to eye level.

‘We are the Emperor’s might, and we know no fear.’

Iocaste landed on the cavern floor as the last of the Lords of Decay were dispatched. To treaty with daemons was heresy, and heresy begat death. As their patron vanished, so did their will to fight. Captain Roga’s corpse was incinerated, along with those of his traitor brethren.

Iocaste watched with a heavy heart as the reclaimators picked across the battlefield, salvaging armour and weapons from the dead, and eased the mighty Stormraven carcasses from the twisted wreckage of their crash sites. Every trace of the incursion was scoured from Sturmhex Prime.

Talwar and the remaining Stormravens flew repeated sorties back to the Castigator until what remained of the First Brotherhood was back aboard.

His task finally complete, Iocaste made his way through arterial walkways and connecting corridors, heading direct to the medicae. The salt tang, once tasted, had never left his mouth. He entered the observation gantry. The bitter stench of counterseptics and astringents dug through the filtration systems of his armour.

Aegir lay on a steel slab, his armour being carefully removed by a team of red-cloaked adepts and laid on a cot lined with sapphire silk. They removed a vambrace, revealing seared skin, patchworked in the brilliant red colour of regrowth. His armour sockets were ringed with black, charred callouses.

+Aegir,+ he pulsed, doubting he would even get a reply.

+I live, Iocaste.+

+How?+ Iocaste’s system flooded with relief.

+The Emperor protects, brother.+

Aegir opened up his mind, allowing Iocaste to see what he’d seen in the last moments leading up to the crash.

The pillar of light. The cube of xenos design in the Grand Master’s hand. The betrayal deep within Aegir’s soul. Aegir raised his head and stared at Iocaste.

Iocaste removed his helm, making direct eye contact with his squadron leader. For a fraction of a second, without speech or thought, they agreed and sealed a pact with a brief nod.

Eighteen decks below, in a sealed section of the Castigator’s foredecks known to only two, Vardan Kai strode on sandalled feet, having long since removed his armour. The grey robe he now wore swept along the ground.

‘Grand Master.’ Inquisitor Nicodaemus Quixos’ voice was cold as iron, but mesmeric. ‘You have the device.’ It sounded as if it should have been a question, but it felt more like a statement.

Kai held out the cube to the inquisitor, keen to distance himself from the xenos device and the daemon it contained.

‘The tesseract labyrinth is such an elegant device, do you not think?’ Nicodaemus Quixos spun the cube between his fingers as he spoke.

‘I do not, inquisitor. That daemon,’ he said, pointing at the inquisitor’s hand, ‘should have been purged, not captured.’

‘But those were not your orders, Grand Master.’

Grand Master Kai turned to leave the chamber. He thought of the warriors he’d lost in the battle, and the decades it would take them to return to their former strength. He knew that Quixos would be skimming his thoughts, and paused by the bulkhead hatch.

‘I hope the ends truly justify the means, inquisitor.’

When I felt the lodestone pull once more, it was many years later. Quixos had been declared traitor by then, sentenced to be captured, tortured for confession, and killed. His part in the demise of my brothers can never be forgotten, and will never be forgiven – even when he stands before the Golden Throne, and weeps.

– Extract from the personal journal of Aegir,
Techmarine of the First Brotherhood.

Long may he stand at the Emperor’s side.

About the Author

E J Davies, currently of Ottawa, is a writer, reviewer and gamer. When not wrangling words, in the curling rink, or supporting the losing side – still not convinced it was the wrong one – E J can be found teaching chemistry or buried in one of his other diverse hobbies. ‘Sturmhex’ is his first story for Black Library.

An extract from Double Eagle.

Over the Makanites, 06.32

In the side rush of dawn, the peaks glowed pink, like some travesty of a fondant celebration cake. Hard shadows infilled the cavities like ink. Streamers of white cloud strung out in the freezing air three thousand metres below.

Hunt Leader was just a cruciform speck in the bright air ahead. He started to turn, ten degrees to the north-west. Darrow tilted the stick, following, rolling. The horizon swung up and the world moved around. Slowly, slowly. He heard the knocking sound and ignored it.

At least the inclinometer was still working. As he came around and levelled the column, Darrow reached forward and flicked the brass dial of the fuel gauge again. It still read full, which couldn’t be right. They’d been up for forty-eight minutes.

He took off a gauntlet and flicked the gauge once more with his bare fingers. He felt sure the lined mitten had been dulling his blows.

The dial remained at full.

He saw how pinched and blue his hand had become, and pulled the gauntlet back on quickly. It felt balmy in his insulated flightsuit, but the cabin temp-stat read minus eight.

There was no sound, except for the background rush of the jet stream. Darrow looked up and around, remembering to maintain his visual scanning. Just sky. Sundogs flaring in his visor. Hunt Three just abeam of him, a silhouette, trailing vapour.

The altimeter read six thousand metres.

The vox gurgled. ‘Hunt Leader to Hunt Flight. One pass west and we turn for home. Keep formation tight.’

They made another lazy roll. The landscape rose up in his port vision. Darrow saw brittle flashes of light far below. Artillery fire in the mountain passes.

He heard the knocking again. It sounded as if someone was crouching behind the frame of his armoured seat, tapping the internal spars with a hammer. Pulsejets always made a burbling, flatulent noise, but this didn’t seem right to him.

He keyed his vox. ‘Hunt Leader, this is Hunt Four. I’ve–’

There was a sudden, loud bang. The vox channel squealed like a stabbed pig.

The world turned upside down.

‘Oh God-Emperor! Oh crap! God-Emperor!’ a voice was shouting. Darrow realised it was his own. G-force pummelled him. His Commonwealth K4T Wolfcub was tumbling hard.

Light and dark, sky and land, up and over, up and over. Darrow choked back nausea and throttled down desperately. The vox was incoherent with frantic chatter.

‘Hunt Four! Hunt Four!’

Darrow regained control somehow and levelled. He had lost at least a thousand metres. He got the horizon true and looked around in the vain hope of seeing someone friendly. Then he cried out involuntarily as something fell past his nose cone.

It was a Wolfcub, one wing shorn off in a cascade of torn struts and body plate. Flames were sucking back out of its pulsejet. It arced down and away like a comet, trailing smoke as it went spinning towards the ground. It became a speck. A smaller speck. A little blink of light.

Darrow felt his guts tighten and acid frothed inside him. Fear, like a stink, permeated the little cockpit.

Something else flashed past him.

Just a glimpse, moving so fast. There and gone. A memory of recurve wings.

‘Hunt Four! Break! Break and turn! There’s one right on you!’

Darrow leaned on the stick and kicked the rudder. The world rolled again.

He put his nose up and throttled hard. The Wolfcub bucked angrily and the knocking came again.

Throne of Earth. He’d thought his bird had malfunctioned, but it wasn’t that at all. They’d been stung.

Darrow leant forward against the harness and peered out of his cockpit dome. The aluminoid skin of his right wing was holed and torn. Hell’s-teeth, he’d been shot.

He pushed the stick forward to grab some thrust, then turned out left in a hard climb.

The dawn sky was full of smoke: long strings of grey vapour and little black blooms that looked like dirty cotton. Hunt Flight’s formation had broken apart and they were scattering across the heavens. Darrow couldn’t even see the bats.

No, that wasn’t true. He made one, bending in to chase Hunt Five, tracer fire licking from its gunpods.

He rolled towards it, flipping the scope of his reflector sight into position before resting his thumb on the stick-top stud that activated the quad cannons in the nose.

The bat danced wildly across the glass reticule of the gunsight. It refused to sit.

Darrow cursed and began to utter a prayer to the God-Emperor of Mankind to lift his wings and make his aim true. He waggled the stick, pitching, rolling, trying to correct, but the more he tried, the more the bat slipped wildly off the gunsight to one side or the other.

There was a little smoky flash ahead, and suddenly Darrow’s Wolfcub was riding through a horizontal pelt of black rain.

Not rain. Oil. Then debris. Pieces of glittering metal, buckled machine parts, shreds of aluminoid. Darrow cried out in surprise as the oil washed out his forward view. He heard the pattering impact of the debris striking off his nose plate and wing faces. The bat had chalked Hunt Five and Darrow was running in through the debris stream. Any large piece of wreckage would hole him and kill him as surely as cannon-fire. And if so much as a demi-mil cog went down the intake of his pulsejet…

Darrow wrenched on the stick and came nose-up. Light returned as he came out of the smoke belt, and slipstream flowed the oil away off his canopy. It ran in quivering lines, slow and sticky, like blood.

Almost immediately, he had to roll hard to port to avoid hitting another Cub head on. He heard a strangled cry over the vox. The little dark-green interceptor filled his field of view for a second and then was gone back over his shoulder.

His violent roll had been too brutal. He inverted for a moment and struggled to right himself as the mountains spread out overhead. That knocking again. That damn knocking. He was bleeding speed now, and the old pulse-engines of the K4T’s had a nasty habit of flaming out if the airflow dropped too sharply. He began to nurse it up and round, gunning the engine as hard as he dared. Two planes rushed by, so fast he didn’t have time to determine their type, then another three went perpendicular across his bow. They were all Wolfcubs. One was venting blue smoke in a long, chuffing plume.

‘Hunt Leader! Hunt Leader!’ Darrow called. Two of the Cubs were already climbing away out of visual. The sun blinded him. The third, the wounded bird, was diving slowly, scribing the sky with its smoke.

He saw the bat clearly then. At his two, five hundred metres, dropping in on the Cub it had most likely already mauled. For the first time in his four weeks of operational flying, Darrow got a good look at the elusive foe. It resembled a long, sharp, elongated axe-head, the cockpit set far back above the drive at the point where the bow of the blade-wings met. A Hell Razor-class Interceptor, the cream of the Archenemy’s air force. In the dispersal room briefs, they’d talked about these killers being blood red or matt black, but this was pearl-white, like ice, like alabaster. The canopy was tinted black, like a dark eye-socket in a polished skull.

Darrow had expected to feel fear, but he got a thrill of adrenaline instead. He leaned forward, hunched down in the Wolfcub’s armoured cockpit, and opened the throttle, sweeping in on the bat’s five. It didn’t appear to have seen him. It was lining up, leisurely, on the wounded Cub.

He flipped the toggle switch. Guns live.

Closing at three hundred metres. Darrow rapidly calculated his angle of deflection, estimated he’d have to lead his shot by about five degrees. God-Emperor, he had it…

He thumbed the firing stud. The Wolfcub shuddered slightly as the cannons lit up. He saw flash-flames licking up from under the curve of the nose cone. He heard and felt the thump of the breechblocks.

The bat had gone.

He came clear, pulling a wide turn at about two hundred and seventy kilometres an hour. The engagement had been over in an instant. Had he killed it? He sat up into the clear blister of the canopy like an animal looking out of its burrow, craning around. If he’d hit it, surely there would be smoke?

The only smoke he could see was about a thousand metres above in the pale blue sky where the main portion of the dogfight was still rolling.

He turned. First rule of air combat: take a shot and pull off. Never stick with a target, never go back. That made you a target.

But still he had to know. He had to.

He dipped his starboard wing, searching the peaks below for a trace of fire.

Nothing.

Darrow levelled off.

And there it was. Right alongside him.

He cried out in astonishment. The bat was less than a wing’s breadth away, riding along in parallel with him. There was not a mark on its burnished white fuselage.

It was playing with him.

Panic rose inside pilot cadet Enric Darrow. He knew his valiant little Cub could neither outrun nor out-climb the Hell Razor. He throttled back hard, and threw on his speed brakes, hoping the sudden manoeuvre would cause the big machine to overshoot him.

For a moment, it vanished. Then it was back, on his other side, copying his brake-dive. Darrow swore. The Hell Razor-class were vector-thrust planes. He was so close to it that he could see the reactive jet nozzles on the belly under the blade-wings. It could out-dance any conventional jet, viffing, braking, even pulling to a near-hover.

Darrow refused to accept he was out-classed, refused to admit he was about to die. He twisted the stick, kicked the rudder right over and went into the deepest dive he dared execute. Any deeper, and the Wolfcub’s wings would shear off its airframe.

The world rushed up, filling his vision. He heard the pulsejet screaming. He saw the glory of the mountains ascending to meet him. His mountains. His world. The world he had joined up to save.

Behind him, the pearl-white enemy machine tucked in effortlessly and followed him down.

Theda MAB North, 07.02

Sometimes – times like this perfect dawn, for instance – it amused August Kaminsky to play a private game. The game was called ‘pretend there isn’t a war’.

It was relatively easy in some respects. It was quiet, and the night chill was giving way to a still cool as the sunrise came up over the city. From where he sat, he could see the wide bay, hazy in the morning mist, and the sea beyond it, blue-grey, glittering. The city of Theda itself – a mix of pale rockcrete towers, low-rise hab-stacks and pylon steeples – was peaceful and quiet, huddled on the wide headland in a quaint, antiquated manner, as it had done for twenty-nine centuries. Sea birds wheeled overhead, which spoiled it slightly, because he envied them their wings and their freedom, but still, at these times, it was easy to play the game.

Theda was not Kaminsky’s birth-town (he’d been delivered, a silent, uncomplaining infant. forty-two years earlier and three thousand kilometres north in the Great Hive of Enothopolis on the far side of the Zophonian Sea), but he had, unilaterally, adopted it. It was smaller than the Great Hive, prettier, a littoral town that understood the mechanisms of the sea and, with its universitariat and its many scholams, was famous as a seat of learning. It was older than the Great Hive too. The Old Town quarter had been standing for three hundred years when the first technocrats began sinking their adamantine pilings into the Ursbond Peninsula to raise Enothopolis. Theda, dear old Theda, was one of the first cities of Enothis.

Kaminsky had adopted Theda partly because of its distinguished past, mostly because he’d been stationed there for six years. He’d come to know it well: its eating houses, its coastal pavilions and piers, its libraries and museums. It was the place he’d always longed to return to every time he snapped the canopy shut and waved the fitters away. And it was the place he always had come back to.

Even the last time.

‘You there! Driver!’

The voice broke through his thoughts. He sat up in the worn leather seat of the cargo transport and looked out. Senior Pincheon, the Munitorum despatcher, was coming over the hard pan towards him, three aides wobbling along in his wake like novice wingmen. Pincheon’s long robes fluttered out behind him and his boots were raising dust from the dry earth. His voice was pitched high, like the seabirds’ calls.

Kaminsky didn’t like Pincheon much. His game was ruined now. The senior’s call had made him drop his eyeline to take in the ground and the airfield. And no one could pretend there wasn’t a war when they saw that.

Kaminsky opened his cab door and climbed down to meet the senior. He’d been up since five waiting for despatch, sipping caffeine from a flask and munching on a coil of whisp-bread.

‘Senior,’ he said, saluting. He didn’t have to. The unctuous man had no military rank, but old habits, like Kaminsky himself, died hard. Pincheon had a data-slate in his hands. He looked up and down Kaminsky, and the grubby transport behind him.

‘Driver Kaminsky, A? Vehicle 167?’

‘As you well know, senior,’ said Kaminsky.

Pincheon made a check in one of the boxes on his slate. ‘Fuelled and roadworthy?’

Kaminsky nodded. ‘As of 05.00. I was issued coupons for sixty litres of two-grade, and I filled up at the depot before I came on duty.’

Pincheon checked another box. ‘Do you have the chit?’

Kaminsky produced the paper slip from his coat pocket, smoothed it flat, and handed it to the senior.

Pincheon studied it. ‘Sixty point zero-zero-three litres, driver?’

Kaminsky shrugged. ‘The nozzle guns aren’t really accurate, senior. I stopped it when it wound over sixty, but the last few drops–’

‘You should take care to be more accurate,’ Pincheon said flatly. One of his aides nodded.

‘Have you ever fuelled a vehicle from the depot tanks, senior?’ Kaminsky said lightly.

‘Of course not!’

‘Well, if you had, you might know how tricky it is to get the wind exact.’

‘Don’t you blame me for your inaccuracies, driver!’ Pincheon sputtered. ‘Essential resources such as fuel must be managed and rationed to the millilitre! That is the task of the Holy Munitorum! There’s a war on, don’t you realise?’

‘I had heard…’

Senior Pincheon ignored him and looked at the nodding aide. ‘What’s zero-zero-three of a litre two-grade at base cost?’

The aide made a quick calculation on his pocket slate. ‘Rounding down, ten and a half credits, senior.’

‘Round up. And deduct it from the next wage slip of driver Kaminsky, A.’

‘So recorded, senior.’

Pincheon turned back to Kaminsky. ‘Transportation run. Personnel. Pick up within thirty minutes from the Hotel Imperial in–’

‘I know where it is.’

‘Good. Convey them to the dispersal point at MAB South. Do you understand? Fine. Then sign here.’

As he signed his name, his stiffened fingers struggling with the stylus, Kaminsky asked: ‘Are they fliers? Navy fliers at last?’

Pincheon huffed. ‘Not for me to say. There’s a war on.’

‘You think I don’t know that, senior?’ Kaminsky asked.

As he took back the slate and the stylus, Pincheon looked up at Kaminsky’s face and made eye contact for the first time. What he saw made him shudder.

‘Carry on, driver,’ he said, and hurried away.

Kaminsky climbed up into his battered transport and turned the engine over. Blue smoke coughed and spurted from the vertical exhausts. Lifting the brake, he rolled the ten-wheeler down the gentle slope of the hardpan and drove off along the field circuit trackway, following the chain link fence.

The game was certainly ruined now. No pretending any more. Here were fuel bowsers, smeared with treacly black promethium waste, armoured hangars, repair sheds reverberating with the noise of power tools, lines of primer coils on their trolleys, electric munitions trains parked and empty on verges of swishing sap-grass.

And airstrips. Cracked rockcrete looking like psoriatic skin in the early light, with eight-engine bombers sulking on their hardstands, props like sabre-blades raised in threat, hook-winged Shrike dive-bombers under tarps, fitters and armourers working around them.

Beyond the strips, facing the sea, lay the long launch ramps of the Wolfcubs, stretched out like exposed spinal chords, glinting and skeletal in the rising sun.

Five Wolfcubs sat on taxi-racks at the head of the ramps. Bottle green with grey undersides, they were tiny, one-man planes with stubby wings and tails, their rocket engines raised above their backs, their nose guns muzzled. They looked squat, leaden.

But Kaminsky knew how they felt to fly. He knew how they rose off those catapult ramps, throttles right back, pulse-engines farting and popping as the airflow fired them to launch velocity. The belly-dropping jink as they cleared the ramp end and lifted up into the blue, raw and throbbing. The cold smell of the cockpit. The reek of rubber and steel, promethium, nitrous, fyceline. The feel of being aloft, alive…

God-Emperor, how he missed it.

At the gate, beside the staked revets and the heavy blast-fences, he pulled over to let a munitions convoy roll in. He glanced up into the driving mirror and, for a moment, saw himself.

More than anything, more than even the airfield full of prepping warplanes, the sight of himself reminded August Kaminsky that his cherished game was only pretend.

There was, inescapably, a war on.

Theda Old Town, 07.09

He couldn’t sleep. It was anticipation mostly, the prospect of a new war to survive, but his body clock was still running on shipboard time, and to him it was late afternoon.

Just before six by the chronograph on his night stand, he gave up on his bed and got up. It was cold and not yet light. In the adjacent rooms, the other men of G for Greta were sleeping. He could hear snoring, particularly the volcanic rumble of Bombardier Judd. The Munitorum had issued them billets in a once-handsome pension on Kazergat Canal, and they’d piled in late the previous afternoon, leaving their packs in a heap in the hallway, eagerly laying claim to rooms. The younger men had broken open liquor and got down to the business of getting drunk so they could better sleep off voyage-lag. He’d had a glass or two, but the cheap escape held little attraction.

He and the other flight officers had swung the best rooms. He’d had to order a disappointed Orsone out to make way for him. ‘Find somewhere else,’ he’d told the young tail-gunner. But the room wasn’t much of a trophy. The carpet had long gone and the plaster was crumbling. Pitch-washed sheets were nailed over the windows in place of curtains. Damp patches blotched the ceiling like sores. There was a smell of fatigue and faded grandeur. That’s what years of warfare did to a place. They certainly did the same to a man, after all.

The old woman who ran the pension had told him that there would be no hot water until after eight, and he hadn’t come that many parsecs to start a tour by standing under a piss-cold shower. He’d got dressed in the half-light – boots, breeches, fleece-vest – and started to pull on his flight coat. But his fingers had then encountered the insignia sewn into the thick quilts of the garment, the captain’s bars, the squadron badge, the name-strip that read ‘Viltry, Oskar’. He had put it aside and opted instead for a more anonymous tan leather coat.

The landing was dark. On the floor above, the crewmen of Hello Hellstorm were slumbering, with the crews of Throne of Terror and Widowmaker on the floor above that. The retinues of K for Killshot and Get Them All Back were billeted on the ground floor. The other six crews of XXI Wing ‘Halo Flight’, Imperial (Phantine) Air Force were tucked up in another pension down the street.

Viltry activated a glow-globe. The light was dim, but enough to light his way down the creaking staircase. In the hall, there were ancient books stacked on the mantel of the ornate but flaking fireplace, but those that he touched in the hope of finding an hour or two’s distraction fell into dust.

He let himself out onto the street. It was chilly and quiet, except for the gurgle of the canal. A van rumbled by on the far side of the canal, its headlights cowled as per blackout procedures. He walked a few paces, noticing the stumps, regularly spaced, where iron lamp stands had been removed from the boulevard for the war effort. He tried to imagine the place in peacetime. Elegant, glass-hooded lamps, purring electric cruisers on the grand canal, prosperous Imperial citizens going about their business, stopping to greet and talk, dining at terrace taverns now long boarded-up. There would have been students too. The briefing documents said that Theda was a scholam town.

In truth, he realised, he knew precious little about Enothis. Precious little apart from three things: it was an old, proud Imperial world; it was strategically vital to this zone of the Sabbat Worlds; and he, and thousands of other aviators like him, had been drafted here from off-world at short notice to save it from extinction.

He noticed passers-by suddenly – other pedestrians out in the early light, dressed in dark clothes, all hurrying in the same direction. He heard the chime of a chapel bell ringing out seven of the clock, calling them to worship. Viltry followed them, crossing a bridge over the canal, hanging back.

By the time he reached the Ministorum chapel on the far bank side, the dawn service had already begun. He stood for a moment outside, listening to the plainsong chants. Above him, in the cold, grey light, the bas-relief facade showed the figure of the God-Emperor gazing down on all mankind.

Viltry felt ashamed. He bowed his head. When, eight years earlier, he had sworn to give his life as a warrior in the service of the God-Emperor, he hadn’t realised how damn hard it would be. He’d always wanted to be an aviator, of course. Phantine’s unusual topography bred that instinct into all its sons and daughters. But the cost had been great. Two years before, during the final onslaught to liberate his home world from the toxic clutches of the Archenemy, fighting alongside the Imperial Crusade forces of Warmaster Macaroth, he had almost died twice. Once as wind waste over the Scald, then as a prisoner of the vile warlord Sagittar Slaith at Ouranberg.

In the two years since then, Viltry had been unable to shrug off the idea that he should be dead already. He was living on borrowed time. His tutor at the scholam had drummed into him the concept of Fate’s wheel. He’d said that it spun at the Emperor’s right hand. It spun for balance, for symmetry. What was given would be taken, what was loaned would be paid back. A life saved was only a life spared.

His had been saved twice over. There was a reckoning to be had. And here he was, on another world, charged with the duty of fighting to save it. The reckoning would be here, he was sure of it. Fate’s wheel would turn. He had been spared twice so he could live long enough to see his home world saved. Now he was fighting to save another man’s home world. This, surely, would be where the accounts got squared.

The crew of G for Greta had seen this fatality in his every action, he was sure of that. They knew they were flying on a doomed bird. Doomed by him, cursed by him. He’d lost one crew over the Scald, and he should have gone with them. Now Fate’s wheel would bring another crew down with him in its efforts to even the tally.

He’d asked for a transfer, been refused, asked for a non-operational posting, had that turned over as well. ‘You’re a bloody fine flight officer, Viltry,’ Ornoff had told him. ‘Get rid of this fatalistic nonsense. We need every man-bastard with airtime and combat experience we can get. Enothis will be tough as nails. Our ground forces are in hard retreat from Sek’s legions. It’ll come down to a bloody air war, mark my words. Request denied. Your Navy transport leaves orbit tomorrow at 06.00.’

Viltry looked up at the graven image of the God-Emperor, hard-shadowed in the sluggishly rising sun. It looked disapproving, scowling at his timid soul, fully aware of the cowardice in his heart.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, out loud.

A woman in a long black coat, coming late to the service, looked round at him. He shrugged, bashful, and held the chapel door open for her.

Light, and a chorus of triumph dedicated to the Golden Throne of Earth, washed out on them both. She hurried in.

He followed her, and closed the heavy door behind him.

Over the Makanites, 07.11

This one was good. Daring. Young, most likely, desperate to live. Weren’t they all?

The dive was magnificent, foolhardy. Flight Warrior Khrel Kas Obarkon, chieftain of the fifth echelon, which was of the Anarch, and so sworn to he that is Sek, decided he would like more of this boy’s kind in his echelon come the showdown. The boy flew, as they say, by the claws. Such a scream dive. Obarkon didn’t know the runty little enemy pulsejets could achieve that.

It seemed almost a waste to slay him.

Wound tight in his grav-armour, auto-pumps and cardio-centrifuges compensating his circulation, Obarkon committed his Hell Razor steeper still, adjusting the trim, slicing down through the air like a knife at point eight of mach. His cockpit was dark save for the winking lights of his instruments, which reflected off the black, patent-leather gauntlets encasing his hands. The stooping Wolfcub was a bright orange pip on his auspex display.

How was it surviving? Pilot skill or luck? The young had little of the former and, sometimes, barrels of the latter. The dive was testing the enemy plane right to the limits of its airframe. A single degree deeper and the descent would strip the wings away at the cabane or blow out the inductive motor.

Behind the matt-black glass visor of his full-head helmet, Obarkon smiled. His face, so seldom seen, was a grizzled tissue of fibre and poly-weave reinforcements. His eyes were augmetics, linked directly to the warplane’s gunsights by spinal plugs.

At three hundred metres, the Wolfcub pulled out, dragging a long, aching turn up and away to avoid the ragged peaks, its jet engine spitting and foundering.

Another surprise. Another admirable display of skill. Or luck.

Obarkon tilted his stick and nudged the reactive thrusters, pulling out of the dive non-ballistically, mocking the laboured struggles of the smaller plane. It had been locked in his gunsight for two minutes now. The target finder was chiming over and over again.

Attention…

Target found.

Target found.

Target found.

Why hadn’t he killed it?

I want to see what you’ve got, Obarkon thought.

The Wolfcub veered around a peak-top, letting the cross of its shadow flicker across the sunlit snow, then tipped its wings hard to steer around another crag. Obarkon kept his Hell Razor almost level to execute a following path, ripping through the air like a heat-hungry missile. The Wolfcub was still in his crosshairs.

Suddenly, around the next peak, it disappeared. Obarkon frowned and swung about, assuming the boy had finally misadventured and flown into a cliff wall. For the first time in nearly three minutes, the target finder bleeped lock lost… lock lost… lock lost…

No, not dead. There he was. The little wretch. He’d somehow flick-rolled the Wolfcub around the promontory and swung back the way he’d come, gunning low on full thrust.

Obarkon lifted his shiny black-clad hands off the stick and clapped. Very fine indeed.

A warning note sounded and Obarkon snapped it off with a curse. He was down to reserve now, almost at the critical fuel threshold. That meant he had no more than two minutes left before he had to turn for home. More than that, and he wouldn’t make it to Natrab echelon aerie.

‘Game’s done now,’ he hissed through chapped lips. He surged the Hell Razor forward and it went fluidly, responding perfectly, sure as a shark. ‘Reacquire,’ he told the auto sight. He’d made five kills already, another ace day, but this boy would make a nice round six. He’d dallied too long, playing games.

The target pipper chased and bleeped. The Wolfcub was pulling wide rolls and staying low, keeping the twisting furrows of the peak line between itself and the hunter.

Target denied…

Target denied…

Target denied…

Obarkon cursed in the name of his most foul god. The little bastard was slipping away. By the skin of his teeth. By the claws. He had allowed too much grace. Now the enemy was mocking him.

He got a partial target, then lost it again as the fugitive Wolfcub banked perilously around a crag. They both passed so close that snow blizzarded up off the crag in their combined wash.

Another partial. Obarkon fired. Dazzling tracers laddered away from his machine and cut the cold, mountaintop air. Miss.

Another turn, another partial, another futile burst. Obarkon throttled up and soared around, using reactive thrust to viff his machine out wide on the Wolfcub’s eight.

It was running for all it was worth, burning at full thrust. Obarkon got a true tone at last.

Target lock.

Target lock.

Target lock.

‘Goodnight,’ he muttered, bored of the game now. Hardwired thumbs dug at the trigger paddle.

Cannon fire lanced down through the air ahead of him. Obarkon felt a tiny vibration and a sudden display told him he’d been holed in one wing-sweep. Out of the sun, a second Wolfcub was diving on his tail, its nose lit up with muzzle flash. Just a glance told the expert chieftain that this second Cub was piloted by an idiot, a man far less capable than the spirited boy he had been chasing. It was coming over too shallow, wobbling badly, desperately. It had no real target lock.

But still, it was behind him and gunning madly.

The warning sounded again, impatient. He’d reached critical fuel threshold.

He was done here. Enough. Obarkon traversed the reactor ducts and powered off almost vertical, pulling out of the chase. The second Wolfcub went by under him as he climbed, bemused by the sudden exit.

Obarkon climbed into the sunlight, gaining altitude and speed. He turned his beloved Hell Razor south.

This broiling air war was just getting started. There would be another day.

And another kill.

Hotel Imperial, Theda, 07.23

Kaminsky made a good run across the northern sectors and arrived outside the Hotel Imperial well inside the time Senior Pincheon had allocated for the job. The only slight delay had been a queue of market stallers lining up to get onto Congress Plaza for the midweek moot. These days, it seemed to Kaminsky, the Old Town kept to its bed until after eight, as if afraid of what horrors might roam in the dark hours of night.

He rolled in under the wrought iron frame of the hotel’s awning, quietly wondering how long it would be before even that was taken for war metal, and glanced around. There was no one about except for an ancient old porter dozing on a folding chair amongst a half-dozen deactivated cargo servitors, and a gaggle of housekeepers smoking lho-sticks together by the service door down the side of the building.

Kaminsky was about to get down out of the cab when the glass and varnished wood of the hotel’s front doors flashed in the early sunlight, and a mob of dark figures strode out purposefully towards him.

They were fliers, he knew that at once by the swagger of them, but not locals. Nor were they wearing the black and grey coats and flight armour of Navy aviators. There was at least a dozen, dressed in quilted taupe flightsuits and brown leather coats, carrying equipment packs loosely over their shoulders. They were unusually tall and well-proportioned individuals, slender and uniformly black-haired where the average Enothian was robust and fair.

And they weren’t all male. At least three of them – including, it seemed, the figure leading them towards the transport – were women.

Kaminsky got out and walked round to the back of the transport to drop the tailgate. He nodded a greeting to the first of the newcomers, trying to get a decent look at the insignia on the coat sleeve, but the young man spared him not a second glance and simply hoisted in his kit bag and climbed up after it.

Only the woman paused. She had cold, searching eyes and a slim jaw that seemed to be set permanently in a gritted clench. Her black hair was cut unflatteringly short.

‘Transport to Theda MAB South?’ she asked Kaminsky. She spoke with an offworld accent that sounded rather odd and nasal to him.

‘Yes, mamzel. To the dispersal station.’

‘That’s “commander”,’ she corrected, hauling her lithe figure up into the transport. ‘Carry on.’

Kaminsky waited for the last of them to climb aboard, then shut the gate. He limped back round to the cab and started the engine.

Phantine. That’s what it had said on the woman’s silver shoulder badge. Phantine XX, embossed on a scroll backed by a double-headed eagle that clutched lightning bolts in its talons.

Kaminsky had been a student of aviation history since childhood and, though he’d heard of a world called Phantine, he had no idea why a flight wing should bear the name.

He drove them through Vilberg borough and turned south towards the base. On Scholastae Street, a pair of Commonwealth Cyclones went over at about five hundred metres, turning north and west. Kaminsky looked up to watch them pass.

In the driving mirror, he saw the fliers in the back do the same.

Theda Old Town, 07.35

The service had finished, and the faithful were filing out, most stopping to light candles at the votary shrine. Candles for the lost, or those who might soon be.

As usual, as she did every morning, Beqa Meyer lit three: one for Gart, one for her brother, Eido, and one for whoever might need it.

She was tired. Night shift at the manufactory had really taken it out of her. It had been a struggle not to sleep through the hierarch’s reading. If she’d been any warmer, she surely would have dozed off. But her coat was too thin: a second-hand summer coat, not even lined. Perhaps next month, with her next wages and what she had put aside, she’d be able to pick up a thermal jacket or better from the Munitorum almshouse.

As she turned from the candle-stand, she knocked against someone waiting their turn to light an offering. It was the man she’d seen by the church door on her way in for the service. Tall, dark-haired, an offworlder. He had a sad face. He was dressed like a soldier, and had that scent of machine oil and fyceline about him.

‘My pardon, mamzel,’ he said at once. She nodded ‘no harm’, but kept a distance as she went by. He’d been talking to himself when she’d first seen him. A stranger, maybe with battle-psychosis. That was the sort of trouble she didn’t need.

In fact, the only thing she needed was her rest. She could be home by a quarter to the hour, and that would give her three hours’ sleep before she’d have to rise and dress for her day job at the pier. When that was over, at evening bell, she’d have an hour to nap before the night shift at the manufactory began.

She hurried out through the templum doors into a cold street where full daylight now shone, and made her weary way back towards her hab.

Over the Thedan Peninsula, 07.37

‘Hunt Two, you’re making oily smoke.’

The flight leader’s anxious voice cut over the vox. There was no immediate response from Hunt Two. Darrow sat up in his seat and scanned around in the morning light. The scrub plains and grass breaks of the Peninsula swept by, two thousand metres under him, a wide expanse of greys, dull whites and speckled greens.

Down at his four were Hunt Eight and Hunt Eleven, with Hunt Leader running to starboard on the same deck as Darrow himself. Hunt Two and Hunt Sixteen were off and low at Darrow’s port.

Six planes. Six planes were all that was left from the engagement. They’d left all the others as flaming pyres littering the snowcaps of the Makanite Mountains.

And it might only have been five. Darrow knew he surely would have been chalked by that white killer had not Hunt Leader, sweeping back in a desperate effort to rally his few remaining machines, run in at the last moment, cannons blazing, and driven it off.

Major Heckel – Hunt Leader – kept asking Darrow if he was okay as they pulled what remained of the formation back together. Heckel sounded extraordinarily worried, as if he felt Darrow might have simply scared himself to death in the frantic chase. But it was probably shock and the ache of responsibility. So many cadets dead. One of the squadron’s black days.

And there had been so many in the last few months. Darrow wondered how officers like the major coped. But then Heckel was only three years Darrow’s senior, and had gained his rank through the accelerated promotion caused by severe losses.

‘Hunt Two. Respond.’ Even over the distorting vox, that tone in Heckel’s voice was clear as day.

‘Hunt Leader, I’m all right.’

He wasn’t. Darrow had a good angle down at Hunt Two. Not only was he cooking out a steady stream of grubby smoke, he was losing altitude and speed.

What was it? Coolant? Smouldering electrics? Some other lethal eventuality Darrow hadn’t even thought of?

How long had they got? By his own map and bearing they were forty-six minutes out from Theda MAB North, longer if Hunt Two maintained its rate of deceleration. Darrow’s fuel gauge still showed full, but by Heckel’s calculation, none of them were likely to have more than about fifty minutes in them. Especially not Darrow, given his excessive aerobatics.

‘Hunt Flight…’ Heckel’s voice came over the comm. He paused, as if frantically trying to make up his mind. ‘Hunt Flight, we’re going to divert to Theda South. That should shave fifteen, maybe twenty minutes off the flying time. Confirm and line up on me.’

Darrow confirmed and heard the others do so too. It was a good decision. Flight command would rather get six Wolfcubs back at the wrong MAB than none back at all.

Darrow switched channels and heard Heckel banter back and forth with Operations as the reroute was authorised.

Then he heard the knocking again.

He was about to call it in when Hunt Eight began screeching over the vox.

‘Hunt Two! Look at Hunt Two!’

Darrow craned his neck around. The wounded Cub was gently arcing down away from the formation. Its smoke trail was thicker and darker now. It looked heavy and sluggish, as if much more gravity was weighing down on it than on the other planes.

‘Hunt Two! Respond!’ Darrow heard Hunt Leader call. ‘Hunt Two! Respond!’

A faint crackle. ‘–think I can hold the–’

‘Hunt Two! Bail, for Throne’s sake, Edry! Cadet Edry… Clear your plane now before you lose too much height!’

Nothing. The Wolfcub was just a dot at the end of a line of smoke far behind and below them now.

‘Edry! Cadet Edry!’

Come on, Edry. Get out of there. Darrow strained to see. With their fuel loads so low, none of them could risk turning back. Come on, Edry. Come on! Let us see a ’chute! Let us see a ’chute, Edry, before–

A small flash, far away in the grey-green quilt of the landscape. A small flash of fire and no ’chute at all.

Theda MAB South, 07.40

By the time the transport turned off the highway onto the field approach way, it had been joined in convoy by three others. They waited in turn to be checked off by weary-looking PDF sentries at the west gate and then rumbled on down a steep cutting onto the field basin.

Commander Bree Jagdea raised herself up on the hard bench of the jolting transport and looked around. Theda Military Air-Base South covered over twenty square kilometres of low land south-west of the city itself. She could smell the coast a few kilometres north, and the sea air had layered a light morning haze across the field that the sun was just beginning to cook off.

Vast defences ringed the field. Ditches and dykes, blast fences and stake lines, armoured nests for Hydra batteries, pillbox emplacements for raised missile cylinders. There was a patched perimeter track, busy at this hour with military trucks and weapons carriers moving both ways, and a leaner inner ring of anti-air batteries. To the south end of the field stood the great housing hangars and rockcrete armouries, to the north Operations control and the stark derricks and pylons of the vox, auspex and modar systems.

A hash-shape of crossed airstrips covered the main inner area, the primary runways large enough to manage the big reciprocating-engined bombers the locals flew. Jagdea saw a few of them parked on a hardstand in the distance. Magogs, big and old and ugly. They’d used them back home on Phantine during the final offensive, desperate to get aloft anything that could fly and fight. Here they were a standard bombing mainstay. No wonder Enothis had been punished so hard.

But most of the local machines had been shipped out to clear the field for the newcomers.

Jagdea and her flight had arrived in darkness the night before. This was their first proper look at the base. It would serve; it would have to.

Work gangs from the Munitorum were already busy making field conversions. Labourers were proofing up more hard-wall silos for the arriving machines, and in one place were beginning to dozer up one of the old runways to make additional parking bunkers. The newcomers’ aircraft, over seventy of them already, were dark shapes under netting in the clusters of anti-blast revetments to the east. There was a muddle of activity – chugging generators, clunking excavators, bare-chested rock-drill operators, growing heaps of spoil – all across the inner landscape of the field.

Jagdea glanced at the chronograph strapped around the thick cuff of her flightsuit. They were right on time. Their transport had left the perimeter track and was bumping towards the nearest of the huge drome hangars.

‘Up and ready, Umbra Flight,’ she ordered. The eleven aviators under her command gathered up their kits as the transport rolled to a stop.

Jagdea jumped down and took a deep breath. ‘Here we go,’ she muttered to Milan Blansher, her number two. Blansher was a grizzled veteran in his forties, his career tally of twenty-two kills the finest in Umbra Flight. He said little, but she trusted him with her life. He had unusually pale, distant eyes for a Phantine and sported a thick grey moustache, partly to lend himself an air of avuncular seniority, mostly to help conceal the ridge of white scar tissue where a piece of shell casing had split his face from his right nostril, down across both lips, to the point of his chin.

‘Here we go indeed,’ he murmured, and hoisted his kit onto his shoulder. The others clambered down. Van Tull, Espere, Larice Asche with her hair up in a non-regulation bun, Del Ruth, Clovin, the boy Marquall, Waldon, forever whistling a melody-less tune, Zemmic, jangling with his cluster of lucky charms, Cordiale, Ranfre. Almost all of them made the superstitious bob down to touch the ground.

Vander Marquall didn’t. He was gazing across the field, watching three machines of the Enothian Commonwealth Air Force crank up for launch. They were powerful, twin-engine delta-form planes, an Interceptor pattern known as Cyclones. Started from trolley-mounted primer coils, their massive piston engines sucked and thundered into life, kicking out plumes of blue smoke from the exhaust vents as the heavy props began to turn to a flickering blur. They rocked impatiently at their blocks as the ground crews rolled the carts aside. Marquall could see the two-man crews in the glass nose cockpits making final checks. Though most Commonwealth wings had been withdrawn to make way for the offworlders, a flight of these Cyclones had been left on station to fly top-cover tours while the Imperials bedded in.

‘Coming, Marquall?’ Jagdea asked. He turned and nodded.

‘Yes, commander.’ Marquall was the youngest aviator in Umbra by four years, and the only one with no operational combat experience. Everyone else had seen at least some action during the Phantine liberation. Marquall had still been in the accelerated program at Hessenville when hostilities ended. He was eager and, Jagdea believed, reasonably gifted, but only time would really tell his worth. He had the classic saturnine good looks of a Phantine male, and a white, toothy grin that people either found winningly charming or unpleasantly cocky.

Umbra Flight strode off across the apron towards the hangar, followed by another flight of aviators spilling down from a second transport. Jagdea took a glance back at their own ride. In the cab, the Munitorum driver nodded briefly to her. She could clearly see how one half of his face was lost in burn scarring, as if soft, pink rose petals had been plastered across his skin.

They walked into the vast drome hangar. The air inside smelled cold and damp, with a tang of promethium. The interior space had been cleared, except for a lone Shrike under tarps in a corner, and a stage of flakboards supported by empty munition crates had been raised along the west wall. A chart stand and a hololithic displayer had been set up on the staging.

A group of more than twenty aviators was already waiting inside. They stood near the stage, their kit bags at their feet. Like the men who had come off the second truck, they were Navy pilots, wearing grey flight armour and black coats. Some of them sported augmetic eyes. They greeted their colleagues from the second truck, but both groups looked dubiously at the Phantine as they came in, and stayed apart from them in segregated groups. Jagdea regarded them casually as Umbra Flight dropped their bags and made a huddle. The Navy fliers kept glancing their way. Jagdea knew the Phantine Corps was unusual, and that set them apart from the regular Imperial aviators. It undoubtedly would mean rivalry and a pecking order, she accepted.

They were tough-looking brutes, sturdy and thickset, with pale skins and cropped hair. Most of their flightsuits were reinforced with plating sections or coats of chainmail, and their heavy leather coats were often fur-trimmed. Many had ugly facial scars. Several displayed medal ribbons and other honour sashes.

‘Sixty-Third Imperial Fighter Wing,’ Blansher whispered discreetly in her ear. ‘The Sundogs, as they like to be styled. I believe that one there, the big fellow with the flight commander pins, is Leksander Godel. Forty kills last count.’

‘Yeah, I’ve heard of him,’ she answered lightly.

‘The other bunch are the 409 Raptors, I believe,’ Blansher went on, ‘which would make that unassuming fellow there Wing Leader Ortho Blaguer.’

‘The same?’

‘The very same. One hundred and ten kills. See, he’s looking at us.’

‘Then let’s look somewhere else,’ Jagdea said and turned away.

‘Orbis at your six!’ Pilot Officer Zemmic suddenly cried out loudly, his voice echoing round the drome. Dismounting from another transport just now drawn up outside, a dozen more Phantine fliers were marching into the hangar. Jagdea felt instant relief at the sight of familiar faces. Orbis Flight, comrades and friends. At the head of them strolled their commander, Wilhem Hayyes.

The two wings clustered together and greeted each other.

‘Nice of you to join us,’ Jagdea grinned as she shook Hayyes by the hand.

‘Nice of you to wait for us,’ Hayyes replied. ‘I trust there are still some bats flying for us to hunt.’

A hush suddenly fell. A final group of aviators, all Navy men, had just entered the hangar, making a late entrance that seemed to Jagdea calculatedly theatrical. There were only eight of them. Their armoured flightsuits were matt black and their suede jackets cloud-white. They wore no insignia or rank markings whatsoever, except silver Imperial aquilae at their collars.

‘Holy crap!’ Jagdea heard Del Ruth whisper. ‘The Apostles!’

The Apostles, indeed. The celebrated wing of aces, the very elite. Jagdea wondered which one was Quint, ace of aces, which one Gettering. The tall one, was that Seekan or Harlsson? Which one was Suhr?

There was no time to ask Blansher. Escorted by a dozen aides and tactical officers, an imposing figure in the uniform of a fleet admiral came in and took the stage. It was Ornoff himself.

All eyes turned to him.

‘Aviators,’ he began, his voice soft but carrying. ‘At 18.00 yesterday evening, I met with Lord Militant Humel in the War Ministry at Enothopolis. The lord militant, as you must be aware, has been prosecuting the war here on Enothis for the last nine months, in the name of Warmaster Macaroth and the God-Emperor of us all.’

‘The Emperor protects!’ one of the Apostles said smartly, and everyone eagerly echoed the words.

Ornoff nodded appreciatively. ‘I hope he does, Captain Gettering. In the meantime, we will have to do. I presented the formal orders sent to me by the Warmaster to lord militant Humel, and at 18.30 hours precisely, the lord militant formally handed command of the Enothis theatre to me.’

Spontaneous applause broke out across the hangar floor.

‘For now, the land war on Enothis is done. Now the air war begins.’

Theda MAB South, 07.46

Major Frans Scalter glanced at the co-pilot alongside him in the cramped bubble canopy of the thundering Cyclone, got a thumbs-up, then turned to wave the ground crew off.

He adjusted his mask. ‘Operations, Operations. This is Seeker One. Seeker Flight is ready for departure. Awaiting permission.’

Scalter had his hand on the wheel-brake lever.

‘Seeker One, Operations. Roll them out. Main is open. Fly true and may the Emperor protect you.’

‘Thank you, Operations. Seeker Flight, on my lead.’

Scalter released the brake, and opened the throttle gently. Bucking, the twin-engined plane began to creep out off the hardstand towards the main runway. Its wingmen followed. The combined roar of the six engines resounded across the field.

Scalter rolled to the start position, and made a final adjustment to the trim. At his side, Artone opened the radiators and made the fuel mix a little richer for a lusty take-off.

‘Seeker Flight–’ Scalter began.

Artone suddenly held up a hand.

‘What?’

‘Red flag!’ said Artone urgently, pointing down the field.

‘Throne! What now?’ snarled Scalter. ‘Operations, this is Seeker One. We’ve got a red flag. Please confirm our clearance.’

There was a pause. Then the vox fizzled. ‘Negative clearance, negative clearance, Seeker Flight. Abort now and clear main. Roll off to revetments fifteen through seventeen and stand down. Repeat – Negative clearance, abort and clear main.’

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Scalter demanded.

‘Wounded birds,’ the vox replied. ‘Wounded birds inbound.’

Twenty kilometres short of Theda MAB South, 07.46

They could see the spread of the field, slightly hazy in the morning light. Guide paths were popping off. The knocking from behind Darrow was now constant.

Major Heckel called in the fuel load from each Cub in turn. All were miserably low. Darrow could only answer full as he had no other reading. Hunt Sixteen had begun to dribble smoke in the last ten minutes, and its pilot reported rapidly dropping hydraulic pressure. Hunt Sixteen had taken at least two hits to the belly during the brawl over the mountains.

‘Hunt Flight, this is Hunt Leader. Sixteen and Four have landing priority. Let them go in first and we’ll follow as soon as they’re down. Confirm.’

Darrow stretched his shoulders against the harness. Heckel wanted Sixteen down before it died, and he wanted Darrow down as quickly because he was most likely flying on empty.

‘After you, Hunt Sixteen,’ Darrow voxed, allowing the Wolfcub to come around ahead of him. The Cub’s streamer of smoke pulsed clear then white, clear then white, like a ticker tape.

The knocking grew yet more insistent. Darrow began his approach.

Theda MAB South, 07.47

‘Your fighter wings,’ Ornoff told them, ‘are five of the first to arrive on station here along the southern coast. In the next seventy-two hours, a total of fifty-eight wings of the Imperial Navy… and its affiliates…’ he added, with a nod to the Phantine, ‘will be deployed at airfields along the entire littoral. Forty-two fighter wings, sixteen bomber flights. To say that you will be supporting the local Commonwealth squadrons here is a mis-statement. You will form the front line in the air. The stalwart Commonwealth forces who have, let me remind you, been fighting this theatre for months now, will take a supportive role. God-Emperor willing, this may allow them precious time to repair, refit, recrew and rest.’

He turned to the chart behind him. ‘I don’t need to tell you to familiarise yourself with the topography, channel use, and the location of friendly fields. Encryption codes will be changed on a daily basis. The Archenemy is listening.’

Ornoff paused and slid his open hand down the chart pensively. ‘The situation here is grave. Lord Militant Humel’s land forces, ably supported by the Commonwealth armies, almost succeeded in driving the Archenemy off this world. However, in the last two months, fortunes have reversed disastrously. The Archenemy, whose remaining surface stronghold is around the Southern Trinity Hives – here – has resupplied in great force as part of the counter-offensive launched last year through the Khan Group as a whole. The lord militant’s land forces are now in harried retreat northwards through the Interior Desert… this region, here. Some have already reached the Makanite Range, and are struggling through the passes there. Our task – your task – is to help as many of them reach the safety of the Zophonian Coast as possible. We are to supply comprehensive air cover to the retreating columns of armour and infantry. That means denying the enemy airspace, and prosecuting their land forces with aerial strikes. Enothis will only be saved if sufficient portions of allied land forces can be brought back to the coast intact. There, with resupply, they can make a stand, a counter-attack to meet the Archenemy invasion.’

Ornoff looked back at them all. ‘Expect to be flying sorties round the clock. A thorough strategic plan will be executed as soon as all the wings are on station, at which point your wings may be reassigned to other fields. In the meantime, you will be flying ad hoc missions at the discretion of Operations to supply cover until we are at full strength.’

Ornoff raised a hand and beckoned one of the staffers who had entered the hangar with him onto the stage, an older man in the flight kit of a Commonweath pilot officer. ‘I’ve invited Commander Parrwood here to brief you on climate and terrain peculiarities. Before he does, any questions?’

Godel, the Sundogs’ flight commander, raised a gloved hand. ‘What are we to expect here, admiral?’

‘Superior air power,’ Ornoff replied crisply. ‘Hell Razor and Locust-class fighters, Tormentor and Hell Talon-class fighter-bombers. The Archenemy is flying a large number of locally-made machines. There are also reports of heavy bombers, of a type yet undetermined. Many of their planes exhibit extended range, which may indicate mass carriers in the desert.’

‘When do we get in their reach?’ one of the Apostles asked.

‘Unless you deny them, Major Suhr, at their present rate of progress, the Archenemy wings will have range enough to begin attacking these coastal bases within the month. That is an eventuality I don’t want to see.’

‘And you won’t, admiral,’ said Suhr, ‘because we will deny them.’ There was a general murmur of approval.

‘Now, if Commander Parrwood would be so kind we–’

Ornoff’s words were cut off as a hooter began to drone outside. In a moment, it was chorused by others. A deep, ominous moaning wailed out across the field.

The aviators exchanged glances. Ornoff looked at his aides and hurried off the stage, heading for the hangar doors. Everyone followed.

Outside, in the bright sunlight, they clustered on the rockcrete apron, scanning the glassy sky. Path lights had been lit along the main runway track, and recovery vehicles were growling out of sheds along the north perimeter.

‘Someone’s in trouble,’ Blansher muttered.

‘There!’ one of the Navy pilots called, pointing.

Low in the southern sky, tiny dots. Jagdea heard the distant, burping putter of pulsejets.

‘That’s low,’ said Asche. Several of the dots were hanging back, but two were hoving in. They could see sunlight flare off canopies. The lead plane, a little dark-green monojet, was dragging a string of vapour behind it.

‘Not good,’ said Jagdea, staring.

Beside her, Marquall said, ‘What?’

‘If he’s going to land, let’s hope he gets his cart down.’

Over Theda MAB South, 07.51

The smoke coming out of Hunt Sixteen was getting thicker, and had started to plume out fat and heavy as their airspeed dropped. Darrow had to adjust height to stop himself flying in blind through the vapour. Hunt Sixteen was pitching low, and it forced Darrow to sit up high, higher than he would have preferred for an approach.

There was a slight crosswind. He felt his tail skidding, and he trimmed to compensate. According to the airspeed indicator, he was getting dangerously near critical stall.

‘Come on, Hunt Sixteen!’ he cursed. ‘Come on, Phryse! Get that bird down!’

‘Hold your water…’ the vox chattered. ‘I think… think my bloody cart’s hung.’

‘Clear it, Phryse!’ Darrow heard Hunt Leader urge over the channel.

‘Trying… damn thing’s stuck… lever’s jammed. Bent. I think…’

A bleeper sounded in Darrow’s cockpit. Fuel out… even though the damn gauge still read full.

‘I’ve got to sit now!’ he called.

‘Okay, okay! S’all right, Enric. I’ve got it now. Lever’s pulled. Cart down.’

Over Theda MAB South, 07.51

Even as the Cyclone’s engines whistled down to a dying chop, Scalter wrenched open the window slider of the canopy and stuck his head out, searching the sky.

‘Operations!’ he yelled, but then realised that pushing his head out of the window had pulled his mic-cord to full extent and yanked the plug out of the vox panel.

‘Damn it!’ he yelled, struggling back inside and banging his head. ‘Damn it!’ He fumbled for the end of the cord.

‘Got it!’ cried Artone, ramming the plug back into its socket.

‘Operations! Get a flag up! Signal! That Cub’s coming in with its undercart up!’

‘Clear the channel, Seeker.’

Scalter clunked off his harness, threw open the side hatch and fell out onto the ground. Artone was fast on his heels. The crews of the Cyclones in the revetment bunkers next to them had dismounted too.

Scalter ran up the embankment towards the main strip, waving his arms. Red flares had gone up over the field. Bleeding smoke, one wing hanging heavy, the Wolfcub was really low. The noise of its pulsejet was a drawn-out, plosive blurt.

Its undercart was locked up in its belly.

‘Up! Up!’ Scalter yelled. He fell on his face as Artone tackled him and brought him down short of the rockcrete track.

The Wolfcub came in, over and past them both. Just shy of stall speed, it began to drop its tail, about to settle onto gear that wasn’t there.

The underside of the tail hit first. There was an abrasive shriek. Metal shards and grit flew up in a hot grind of friction. Immediately, the tail came back up, bouncing, pitching the Wolfcub down straight on its nose. The Interceptor came apart, shredding aluminoid off its frame. The port wing crumpled and flew off. The pulsejet, coughing flames, sheared off its mounts, crushed the already buckled cockpit, and detonated as it lifted clear. Liquid flame boiled out across the runway.

High on its six, Darrow stared in disbelief. He’d just lowered his own undercart, and the added drag had dwindled his speed even more. There was no runway any more, just a lake of fire and a mass of tangled wreckage.

‘Abort, Hunt Four!’

Darrow slammed on full emergency thrust and trimmed for maximum lift. His Cub shook and fought, tired of flying now. He hauled on the stick.

Jet screaming, Hunt Four cleared the debris by scant metres and zoomed through the leaping fireball of the crash. Darrow’s canopy blackened with soot. There was smoke everywhere. As he came clear, he saw loose flame dancing along his wings.

‘Request secondary runway!’ he yelled.

‘Runway is clear–’ the vox sang. He came around, rising and turning as tightly as he dared. He wouldn’t stall. Not now. Not now. The stick was like lead. He came about onto the track, dropping fast but true. He had it now.

Red lights fluttered across his instruments. He felt a lurch. The engine had flamed out. Zero fuel or nothing like enough airspeed, he couldn’t tell which. Didn’t have time. Didn’t care.

The Wolfcub fell out of the air onto the ragged runway. The undercart survived the first hard bounce, but not the second. It disintegrated in a scatter of chrome struts and torn rubber. The machine made a third bounce on its belly, cascading sparks into the air. Body plating ripped away. The slide went wide, turning the dented nosecone right, folding a wing like paper. Darrow screamed, his arms over his face, shaken like a bead in a tin.

They came running from all directions, from the silos, from the fitter barns, from the main hangar. Recovery trucks, their hooters blaring, kicked up dust and stones as they raced over the verge sides.

Jagdea and Blansher were amongst the first of the aviators to reach the wreck.

‘Back! Get back!’ a tender driver screamed at them.

‘Get him out then!’ Jagdea yelled back, slamming past the barrier of the man’s outstretched arms.

The canopy hood of the downed Cub wrenched backwards, and the pilot dragged himself out. His plane was almost on its side, pinning a broken wing under it, surrounded by debris. He staggered towards them, shaking his head dizzily as the crash-crews ran in towards the wreck with retardant sprays.

The young man’s face was black with soot and oil. When he pulled off the breather mask, his lower face was pink and clean. He blinked at Jagdea and Blansher.

‘Shit,’ he said.

‘Good landing,’ Blansher said, offering an arm to support him. The pilot sagged heavily, shaking.

‘Good… landing…?’ he coughed.

Blansher smiled. ‘You walked away from it, didn’t you?’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in On Wings of Blood in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Nuala Kinrade.

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