The monster bristled with heavy guns and large-bore cannon and was crawling with greenskin gunners. Worst of all, along the colossal span of the Deffkopta’s four rotor blades ran high speed, serrated, chain blades: as well as keeping the monster in the air the blades could be used to shear an inferior aircraft in two. And Vertigo was an inferior aircraft.
‘We got problems,’ Rosenkrantz repeated to herself, stunned by the brute spectacle of the ork super-gunship. ‘Chief, talk to me!’ she bellowed once more.
‘Tail’s on fire!’ the chief suddenly bawled back. ‘So we’re kind of busy down here. Ramp opening.’
‘Sass, why’d we lose thrust?’ Rosenkrantz was all out and didn’t have time to confer with the cognition banks. She figured she could lose little by consulting the adjutant’s notoriously encyclopaedic brain.
‘Depending on where it’s spreading – an internal fire could short all kind of systems,’ the adjutant replied.
Rosenkrantz’s eyes widened as the huge deffkopta skimmed the depository rooftops, running down on them. As its killer rotor blades cleared the surrounding dust and smoke the green tsunami of ork ground troops reappeared. They washed through the streets underneath the nightmare aircraft and flooded the freightway, scudding towards the airfield with blades and bastardised weaponry drawn.
Rosenkrantz made her decision: ‘Chief, get inside and close the ramp. I don’t have time to explain.’
‘What about the fire?’ Sass interjected.
‘Benedict, fire the thrusters.’
‘The fire?’ Sass reiterated, allowing moderate alarm to creep into his voice.
The co-pilot did as he was ordered. The fuselage bucked: the quad of engines choked.
‘Again.’
‘What if the thrusters short on us in flight?’ the major’s adjutant put to her with increasing hysteria.
‘We crash and die?’ Mortensen hazarded from the companionway.
Rask looked to the major for orders. ‘We really gonna do this?’
‘It’s her bird,’ Mortensen replied, holding on to both sides of the cockpit egress. ‘She knows what she’s doing.’
Geysers of dirt and rockcrete sprang up before the Spectre as the deffkopta unleashed its motley arsenal of forward firing cannons and chain guns. Vertigo’s thrusters choked once more before indulging in an unanticipated last moment rally. The quad of engines cycled for a split second before reassuming its customary high-pitched roar.
Fighting the instinct to pull straight up with her reinstated power, Rosenkrantz rolled the bird starboard out of the path of destruction that cut through her landing zone like an angry elemental force. It was just as well, as the Spectre would have almost certainly climbed into the umbrella-like reach of the deffkopta’s buzzsaw rotors. Automatic fire danced across the canopy and hull as greenskin blister nests along the length of the enemy aircraft’s armoured flanks let rip with their own assortment of pintle-mounted weaponry. Sparks flew in the cockpit and something died in the instrumentation.
‘Just lost comms and scanners,’ Benedict informed her helpfully.
The doom-laden shadow of the beast passed overhead, giving the flight lieutenant time to retract landing gears that were fast becoming tangled in the blasted shell of an Arvus lighter.
‘Can we return fire?’ the major enquired as he took in the full horror of the bloated, greenskin gunship.
‘Ordnance spent,’ Rosenkrantz managed, trying to shrug off the twisted wreck. ‘We have the four heavy bolters on the side doors and a cannon on the nose, neither of which is going to put the slightest dent in that thing.’
Putting everything she had into forward thrust, the Jopallian pilot took Vertigo off the deck and blasted back towards Corpora Mons, a ripple of ground small-arms fire following in her wake.
Rask put his cheek to the canopy armaplas in an attempt to spot the deffkopta. ‘It’s back on our tail,’ he told the pilot. The graceless piece of scrap had had to waste time on a lumbering, ungainly turn, but now it was back – the unbelievable span of those deadly rotors equipping the helicopter with blistering acceleration.
A distribution complex below the Vertigo vaporised as a ragged stream of rockets and missiles seared past the Spectre and indiscriminately carpet-bombed the stretch of vat labs and slave mills rolling swiftly beneath their hull. Rosenkrantz fitfully nudged her stick this way and that, evading the shower of greenskin ordnance. The fact was that there was only a limited amount that she could do. Vertigo wasn’t built for manoeuvrability like her waspish gunship cousins. Heavily-laden with a personnel carrier secured in her belly, she wasn’t exactly going to be doing three hundred and sixty degree rolls either.
For a heart-stopping moment every soul in the cockpit thought that the thrusters had died. This was largely because they had, but this time it was the flight lieutenant’s doing. The airbrakes cut deeply into Vertigo’s vaulting run and the Spectre slowed, allowing a wire-guided death dealer to pass over their heads. It touched down on the ornate roof of a Genetor parliament building, vaulting a curtain of broiling flame skyward. Rosenkrantz had little choice but to punch through and re-engaged the thruster quad, hammering into the explosive backwash.
As the Spectre came through the other side, Rosenkrantz mused, ‘Well, if we weren’t on fire before – we are now.’
‘Shouldn’t we be heading for Deliverance?’ Sass asked fearfully, his bleached knuckles wrapped around his flight harness. Rosenkrantz was growing weary of the corporal’s questions, which she increasingly found difficult to ignore.
‘We’d never make it,’ Mortensen answered for her. ‘The taller buildings around the cathedra and the narrower avenues will work to our advantage.’
Of course he was right. Rosenkrantz rolled the aircraft over as much as she dared to allow clearance before diving down between the Gothic splendour of high-rise bethels and tabernacular archways. The deff-kopta was forced to decrease speed and rise: its murderous rotor blades no match for the constricted airspace and busy architecture of the Mechanicus religious district.
‘Do you see it?’ Rask called, his eyeballs once again at the reinforced plas. She didn’t, but kept up the scorching speed along the monument-strewn boulevards, banking left and right high above the twinkling carpet of gunfire and green bodies until she found herself alongside the chasmal, gargoyle-encrusted walls of the Artellus Cathedra itself. She allowed the velocity to fall off until the Spectre found itself hovering alongside the grandiose detail of a vast, circular stained-glass window. The window depicted a hololithic representation of the Sixteen Universal Laws of Adeptus Mechanicus endeavour at work.
‘Perfect,’ Sass grumbled. ‘Right back where we started.’
As the aircraft gently twirled in the greater space of the plaza avenue, all eyes were on the two open ends of the canyon boulevard where they terminated at the far reaches of the cathedra super-structure. These were conceivably large enough to accommodate the monster aircraft and Rosenkrantz’s finger rested against the trigger-thrust.
‘Maybe we lost them?’ the major said, his usually grating tone unnecessarily hushed.
As the nose cone rolled round once more to the spectacular window, a niggling doubt appeared like a half-glimpsed phantom in the background of Rosenkrantz’s already preoccupied thoughts. She felt her eyes climb skyward. She peered directly up through the Spectre canopy.
There it was.
The deep, black outline of the junker behemoth was holding still about a hundred metres above the surrounding Corpora rooftops. It was partially obscured by the fast growing shadow of a fat, cigar-shaped object falling rapidly towards the Spectre.
The words, ‘No, no, no, no,’ passed the pilot’s clenched teeth, drawing further faces skyward.
‘Shoot it out!’ Mortensen yelled.
Rosenkrantz jerked back on the stick, unleashing the autocannon on the immaculate stained
glass. The window imploded, the priceless relic blasted apart, leaving a gale-tormented hole. Dipping the nose and lifting the tail, Rosenkrantz glided the carrier in carefully through the improvised aperture. It was close: she felt the slipstream of the bombshell tug on the back of the Spectre as it fell past the shattered window.
There was a stomach-churning rumble, then a blast wave of furious energy; the wall of mighty Artellus visibly quivered. The gloom of the cathedra evaporated as a deluge of raging flame poured inside and washed up the walls of the building from the armageddon outside. A gust of pure explosive force pushed Vertigo up further towards the vaulted roof as a rainbow of shards cascaded down around them from other giant stained-glass windows put in by the blast.
The Spectre idled at minimum thrust in the confined roofspace of the cathedra, amongst the cord pulls hanging from the vertiginous heights of the cathedra bell tower like vines in a jungle treetop. The cockpit was deathly silent. Rosenkrantz clutched her stick, flicking her nail back and forth over the nose cannon’s safety stud in a futile act of mock aggression.
The pilot and the storm-troopers watched as a descending shadow spiralled around the cathedra exterior, blacking out the holes left by the stained-glass. Fortunately the openings were not large enough to admit the deffkopta, but they would suffice for the almost solid stream of greenskin lead pouring in from the aircraft’s heavy weaponry.
It was only a matter of time before they acquired the Vertigo.
‘What I wouldn’t give for a Hunter-Killer right now…’ Rosenkrantz spat.
XII
And that gave the major an idea.
Leaning over the stolid Benedict, Mortensen reclaimed his gift to the co-pilot earlier that day: the souvenir rocket launcher he’d taken from the mechhead that had dropped Blazer Two in the plaza.
It was the kind of cheap military hardware mass-produced on a hundred different forge worlds for use by PDF and conscript Guard troops. The single shot tube was dented and smeared with dry blood and while hardly a veteran’s choice, it might be the kind of equaliser Mortensen was looking for.
‘Lower the ramp,’ he snarled, throwing the weapon’s sling strap over his head and across one shoulder. His request was met by with a flurry of objections but by that time the major was already at the bottom of the companionway. It was their only real chance, anyhow.
The troop bay was hushed. The battle-scarred Centaur rocked in its restraints; the Navy gun crew harnessed themselves, fearing the worst, hoping for a miracle. It was out of their hands and in the bloody, sweaty palms of the major.
Commissar Krieg was lowering the ramp, his ragged greatcoat molested further by the breeze. He pulled down his cap and gave the Gomorrian major snake eyes.
‘Who are you today, Mortensen: storm-trooper or saviour?’ the cadet-commissar put to him as the ramp juddered down.
‘I don’t follow you,’ the major called back across the turbulence.
‘Do you believe you can save this ship? Save us?’ Krieg asked, handing the storm-trooper his black leather gloves.
‘Does it matter?’ he returned, pulling them on.
‘To me it does.’
‘Well, Commissar Krieg,’ the grizzled major said as he mounted the ramp. ‘I guess you’ll never know, will you?’
Mortensen looked out across the vast depth of open space below the Spectre; the eternity of distance he would plummet before hitting the mosaic, marble floor at the very bottom of the cathedra where a garrison of Trepkos’s tech-guard had already lost their lives in the defence of the cathedra. He turned back to the intense young officer: ‘But I suppose you’d better hope I can and that I will.’
With that he tore off the ramp and sailed across the emptiness. Snatching at the bell cords, the slick gloves slid at first, burning through the leather and taking the skin from his palms, until the major’s pulverising grip brought him to a dangling swing. The boom of the Mechanicus bells reverberated around the roofspace with deafening power. The air trembled around him as each movement on the cord brought new jarring combinations of chimes.
Then began the agony of the rapid hand over hand climb which even Mortensen felt: the rancid burn of raw muscle deep within his arms. At one moment he was sure he was going to fall. The greenskin war machine routinely blasted a storm of shot and shell through the open windows, which inevitably plucked at the bell pulls, shredding cord and severing random strands above him. A bolt round yanked on his line cutting the material in half, but somehow the cord continued to hold his weight.
With little or nothing left in his arms the major pulled himself up past the titanic bell and in through the bell tower balustrade. The breathtaking view of an industrial metropolis in rebellion and smoke-streaming ruin would be enough to convince most men that they had reached the summit of the cathedra. The manned but silent plasma silos that had claimed White Thunder still towered above the major, however. That didn’t matter to Mortensen.
Carefully climbing down the extravagant Gothic architecture of the cathedra, Mortensen slipped the rocket launcher off his back and primed the weapon. Below he could hear the shearing blades of the deffkopta’s rotor as the hulking aircraft came round for another pass on the remaining machina opus-emblazoned window. As it came into view, the Gomorrian storm-trooper could see orks and their runts swarming over the thing, reloading spent, swollen cannons and cocking gatling-style heavy weaponry. Vertigo could only have mere seconds left.
Mortensen trained the tube’s simple sights on the grotesque mechanism at the heart of the deffkopta’s killer rotor blades. He aimed and he fired.
With a whoosh and a kick the krak missile was away, streaking for the enemy aircraft. Moments later the rotor blades were in disarray, chopping into the air with jolting irregularity as the warhead split the mechanism asunder. There was a brief flash and a shower of warped frag.
The monster began to lose altitude almost immediately, gravity dragging its heavy metal bulk towards the planet’s surface. A rotor blade – still buzzing away with serrated lethality – struck the cathedra wall and smashed, throwing wicked shards of razor-sharp metal in all directions. It was all over for the deffkopta from that point on as the behemoth bounced between the walls of Artellus and the surrounding buildings, descending like some fallen meteorite, tail over canopy in chaotic confusion, explosive disintegration and carnage.
Mortensen hawked and spat a gob of stringy, blood-threaded saliva after the doomed machine. Tossing the rocket tube too, his hand wandered down to his vest, where new blood had broken through Minghella’s field stitches with the exertion of the climb. He climbed down on the precipice of the cathedra roof and plucked the blood-soaked stub of a cigar from his fatigues’ pocket.
Lighting it, the major sat and watched the topless towers of Illium burn.
Being an incarcetorium, Krieg thought he might have to put his pistol in a few faces in order to get past security. To his surprise and confusion he found the gates wide open and the sentry posts unmanned. Occasionally prison personnel in drab uniforms and riot gear-adorned guards would dash past him from the opposite direction, but they barely gave him a second glance. The cadet-commissar couldn’t tell whether it was his cap and coat or the meaty bolt pistol he clutched in his good hand or perhaps simply that they had more important things on their mind. People were leaving in a hurry and they weren’t waiting to politely close the doors behind them.
Krieg slumped his way along the corridor, the powerful opiates swimming around in his brain making his steps uncertain and clumsy. Using the back of his good hand for stability along the cool metal walls the cadet-commissar followed the glyph signatures for the Panopticon security tower, the symbol of a single unblinking eye taking him to twenty seconds precious respite in a juddering elevator.
As the doors parted Krieg led with the barrel of the bolt pistol, sweeping the breadth of the circular observation deck. The staff were long gone,
however, and only a few servitors remained, hardwired into their console seats, waiting patiently for directions with their dead eyes and sickly grins. Three hundred and sixty degrees of wallspace were decorated with continuous banks of porthole security pict-casters with a canopy of ear horns dangling from the ceiling on wires and swaying in the gust from the elevator doors. Here the incarcetorium warden and his security force had kept a close ear and eye on the prison population.
At the hub of the chamber was a stairwell that offered to take him down to the warden’s personal quarters but Krieg found himself hobbling up the steps, drawn by the dull natural light flooding in from above. At the summit of the Panopticon security tower was a small terrace commanding a view of the incarcetorium complex and beyond. Pulling himself up to the terrace, Krieg made his way to the rail.
The incarcetorium was a sunburnt sprawl of corrugated metal blocks, partially built into the dusty, red rock of a mountainous outcrop that thrust defiantly out of the coarse sand of Spetzghast’s equatorial desert. The mountains had a craggy, angular quality making them look more like badly sculpted columns or primitive monuments but they formed a natural barrier on three sides of the complex, leaving the security arrangements of the fourth to a tall, electrified wall of rust encrusted metal that routinely fried leathery-winged scavengers unlucky enough to land on the thing. A similarly electrified portcullis had been left open and unattended and anything with tracks or wheels and an engine had been commandeered and gunned across the terracotta desert. It wouldn’t do them any good, Krieg reasoned, the bronze light of day perceptively fading around him moment by moment. An unnatural darkening: Sigma Scorpii wasn’t due to fall below the horizon for another month. The thin cobalt sky was a sea of shadows that were growing by the second.
Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Page 44