His veteran pilot’s instincts immediately knew the cause of the power surge interference which was currently threatening to overwhelm his Fury’s control systems, but his conscious mind took several vital more seconds to realise what was happening.
“Evasive manoeuvres! The Macharius is raising its shields,” confirmed Manetho, from the cockpit space behind him. “We’re too close! We’re caught in the flux of the energy backwash!”
Kaether fought with the controls, powering the Fury out of the grip of the invisible force which was threatening to destroy it. He fed more power to the engines, seeking to put as much distance as possible between himself and the Macharius, and the energy force it was now throwing out. As the Fury turned and looped in a safe course away from the massive shadow of its mothership, he caught a brief glimpse of the Dictator-class cruiser as it swung across the portside view from his cockpit.
It was moving, engaging the main drive engines, the telltale plumes of plasma fire along the sides of its hull showing that it was firing up its manoeuvring thrusters. Slowly, ponderously, the three kilometre-long bulk of the warship was swinging round in space.
“They’re making evasive manoeuvres,” Kaether realised, almost shouting into the squadron comm-net. “They’re under attack!”
Even as he looked, he saw the eldar cruiser swing round towards the Macharius. In comparison with the Imperium vessel, the movements of the alien craft were lithe and graceful; it seemed almost to turn on its own axis without the visible aid of any manoeuvring thrusters. Despite the seductive grace of the manoeuvre, despite the way in which the strange craft’s giant, almost sail-like appendages spread out, their delicate crystalline veins and surfaces scintillating as they caught the sunlight from Stabia’s two stars, Kaether recognised the manoeuvre for exactly what it was.
An attack.
Now he knew he and his squadron were in even greater danger. Tiny as the Furies were in comparison to the leviathans of the Macharius and the eldar ship, it was highly unlikely that any of his squadron would actually be hit by the incoming weapons fire from the eldar ship, but that was not what worried Kaether.
The Macharius had its shields up now, probably at full strength, judging by the amount of feedback wash which was still cutting into the Fury’s own onboard systems. The shields would bear the brunt of the enemy’s initial attack, protecting the ship from serious harm, but the impact of the enemy weapons fire against the powerful void shield barrier would unleash an energy burst of ferocious strength, more than capable of annihilating any attack craft caught in its reach.
Kaether opened up with the Fury’s afterburners, punching the space fighter at speed away from the Macharius and out of the danger zone. The rest of the pilots in the patrol flight followed suit, just as the eldar ship opened fire.
Kaether saw a brilliant, stuttering stream of lance fire burst from the alien ship’s prow. His cockpit surveyor screen flared brilliant red, overloaded by the readings it was receiving back as the energy beams cut through space around his flight. Despite conventional wisdom, he had to jink his Fury out of harm’s way, as one burst of energy bolts passed lethally close to his fighter.
The long, stuttering line of energy fire struck the Macharius square on, hammering against the invisible barrier of its void shields. The eldar ship kept up the punishing torrent of fire for far longer than Kaether would have believed possible, certainly for far longer than the recharge capacity of any Imperium-built lance battery could have managed. Exhausted by the relentless battering they were being subjected to, the Macharius’s void shields collapsed in an implosion of energy. The remainder of the eldar lance fire slashed across the Imperial cruiser’s hull, laying open its armoured flanks and blowing apart launch bays and shuttle docks.
Wounded, violated, the Macharius still swung ponderously round in space, completing the rest of its manoeuvre.
The blast wave thrown out by the collapsing void shields sped out in pursuit of the escaping Fury flight, crackling bursts of electromagnetic energy and fiery plasma squalls snapping angrily at the fighters’ tails. At the head of the scattered formation, Kaether rode out the effects of the Shockwave, gripping the flight controls tightly and mumbling the words of half-remembered prayers as he felt his fighter shake violently around him.
Only after the dissipating Shockwave had passed, only after the flashing runes on the instrumentation panel in front of him returned to something resembling normalcy, only after the feedback scream had faded away to be replaced by an excited babble of voices from the flight controller officers aboard the Macharius, did Kaether allow himself to look at the panel showing the squadron status runes. Four runes were still lit; two were not.
Two Furies gone, destroyed by the energy wave from the collapsing void shields. Lerovo and Selle. Two good pilots. Two men who had been with Kaether and Storm squadron since almost the start of the Gothic War.
Finally, through the babble of comm-net voices and the communications-disrupting after-effects of the Shockwave, Kaether was able to make contact with the Macharius. The orders he received were exactly what he had expected.
“Macharius to Storm Leader. We are under attack. Engage nearest enemy targets at once.”
Kaether smiled. He didn’t have to check with Manetho to find out what those nearest targets might be.
Kornous’s mind was a storm of cold, fierce fury. They had received word from the Vual’en Sho. The mon-keigh had betrayed them yet again. One of the mon-keigh ships had attacked and destroyed the Lament of Elshor, and they had lost contact with Medhbh’s Shield and could only presume that it too had been destroyed. The killers of these two craft were on the loose elsewhere in the system, beyond Kornous’s reach, but the human flagship was right here in front of him, already under vengeful attack from the Vual’en Sho, and Kornous was determined that it would not escape unpunished.
With a single, powerful thought-command, communicated in a way which offered no opportunity for question, he directed the flight of Eagle bombers towards their target. Forewarned of the mon-keighs’ treachery, the Vual’en Sho had struck first, but, for all its barbaric crudeness, the mon-keigh vessel was larger and more powerful, and Lileathon’s vessel would stand little chance against it in a straight duel. Both vessels were carriers and both would now be scrambling to launch their fighter and bomber squadrons. Whichever vessel got its attack craft into space first would almost certainly win the battle. A successful bombing attack now on the mon-keigh ship’s launch bays, with its flight decks crammed with fuel-and-munitions-laden attack craft, would leave it crippled and at the mercy of the Vual’en Sho’s other bomber wings.
Kornous was determined to land that knock-out blow, and punish the mon-keigh for their endless deceit and upstart arrogance.
A flicker of doubt—a mind-thought warning from Kelmon, commanding the Eagle craft on his far starboard, passed through Kornous’s consciousness. Kelmon had detected a wing of human fighter craft speeding towards them on an intercept course. Kornous surveyed the sensor information fed to him through the bomber’s infinity circuit matrix, and then dismissed his wingman’s warning with a contemptuous mental shrug.
A mere four craft, he almost laughed to himself. What could such things—rudely built, powerfully but crudely armed, piloted by soulless mon-keigh animals—achieve against his own craft and crew?
The answer was not long in coming.
Suddenly, shockingly, the Eagle on Kornous’s near port-side exploded apart, struck by a hail of lascannon fire at a range and accuracy which the eldar commander did not think possible of mere mon-keigh gunnery skills.
The Eagle squadron split apart at his command, offering their enemies a spread of fluid, fast-moving targets, forcing them to break their own formation in response. The human fighters split into two sets of pairs, closing in on their designated targets.
At Kornous’s mind-thought command, one of those targets, Marnwroth’s craft on the far starboard, peeled away from the others, abandoning its bom
bing run but drawing off the two enemy fighters from the main battle, leaving just two of them still in the fight.
The eldar craft opened fire with their forward turrets, infinity circuit-linked scatter lasers filling the space around the human fighters with bright-splashing las-fire. To Kornous’s almost incredulous consternation, the two mon-keigh craft weaved a skilful—or perhaps merely just fortunate, he thought to himself—path through the twisting maze of weapons fire.
The two Furies opened fire in return, the accuracy of their fire proving that their survival so far had not been a matter of mere good fortune.
The Eagle on Kornous’s portside spun away as missiles blew off one of its wings and shredded its tail. From the craft behind him came a collective mental death-scream as a volley of lascannon fire from the other human fighter blew apart its cockpit section.
The fighters flew in tandem through the midst of the dispersed Eagle formation, their rear gun turrets spitting out fire at the eldar bomber craft. Seething with fury—how could two mere mon-keigh craft wreak such havoc?—Kornous linked into his craft’s infinity circuit systems, using his own consciousness to boost the efforts of his craft’s defensive turret fire.
Massed fire from linked series of shuriken cannon gored the belly of one of the fighters, flaying through plasteel armour. Fire from another of the Eagles struck the other human fighter, blowing out one of its wing-mounted engines, but the Eagles did not escape the exchange unscathed. Combined autocannon fire from the two Furies riddled the hull of another Eagle, crippling it and causing multiple casualties amongst its crew.
Even through the protective firewall installed in his craft’s mind-link communications systems, Kornous could easily sense the pain in the mind-voice of the co-pilot of the damaged Eagle. Her pilot commander was dead, blown apart by human auto-cannon shells, the bomber’s hull was punctured in dozens of places and she herself was badly injured, struck by shrapnel from an exploding control console. Despite her wounds and the damage to her craft, the young eldar pilot was requesting permission to carry on towards the target.
Kornous ordered her to return to the Vual’en Sho, with a single angry command. Eldar blood was too rare and precious to be wasted in noble but futilely suicidal gestures.
Inwardly, he cursed to himself. Five of his Eagles were gone, leaving just two of them to continue the bombing run. The mon-keigh had been lucky so far, but, as they closed in on the target, the favour of Asuryan would be with them now, Kornous knew.
One of their pursuers, the one with the crippled engine, fell back, reluctantly abandoning the chase. The other one, with the shredded fuselage, wheeled and gave pursuit, its pilot pushing his damaged craft hard to make up the lost ground between him and his targets. Had it been any other kind of being, Kornous would have been grudgingly impressed at the pilot’s furious bravery and single-minded dedication to the chase. As it was nothing more than a mon-keigh, Kornous knew all the pilot was really doing was brutishly obeying its basest animal instincts to keep on fighting, even at the cost of its own life. At the speed he was pushing his crippled fighter, the foolish mon-keigh pilot would soon realise the error of his ways when the thing simply tore itself apart around him.
They were close now. The shape of the target loomed up ahead of them. Defence fire flashed out from it, but the two Eagles skipped effortlessly past and through, Kornous almost laughing at the predictable patterns of the humans’ gunnery abilities.
Two of the cavernous launch bays buried into the hull of the vessel flared into angry life, and two separate swarms of fighters buzzed out of them. Hurriedly launched, and seeking targets already dangerously close to their mothership, it would take several seconds—several vital, precious seconds—for the fighters to organise and acquire their targets. Kornous denied them that vital leeway, diving into the midst of one of the groups and commanding his craft’s gunners to open fire.
Two of the Furies exploded apart, caught in the streams of shuriken and pulse-laser fire. Another few seconds, another relentless and close-range burst of pulse-laser fire, and another human fighter was gone. The rest scattered in panic, inadvertently opening up a path towards the target. By the time they regrouped and gave pursuit, Kornous would already have launched his missiles and be on his way back to the Vual’en Sho.
The other Eagle was gone, fallen prey to the other swarm of human fighters. That made Kornous, and the clusters of sonic warhead missiles carried by his Eagle, all the more precious. He would have to pick his target carefully.
As if in answer, light flared within another launch bay, signalling more attack craft firing up for imminent launch. This was the moment when attack craft were at their most vulnerable. A successful hit on that launch bay would probably destroy an entire squadron of craft, the chain reaction explosion blowing back into the flight deck hangars beyond, destroying even more of the human ship’s complement of attack craft and crippling its ability to launch any more.
Kornous smiled, seeing the gaping mouth of the target launch bay open in front of him. “Mael dannan,” he whispered to himself, thought-triggering the missile firing systems.
A split-second later, his Eagle shuddered violently. It was too soon and too violent to be the after-effects of the missile launch, Kornous knew, with a sudden sick realisation. In the remaining split-second which remained of his life, he looked into his sensor systems and saw the impossible.
The damaged Fury, the one which should have torn itself apart long ago, was sitting on his tail and blowing his craft apart with tight, concentrated bursts of lascannon fire. Kornous’s scream of rage at his unjust fate was lost in the conflagration as a lascannon shot hit one of his missile warheads, detonating it and utterly vaporising Kornous and his craft.
Of the missiles which he had managed to launch, most spiralled off into space. A few, unguided and unaimed, smashed harmlessly into the densely-armoured sides of the Macharius.
Zane throttled back on his Fury’s power systems, avoiding the expanding debris cloud which was all that remained of his target. As damaged as it was, his Fury would need little more encouragement to explode apart around him from an impact with even the smallest fragment of spinning debris. Other than the hissing of escaping air from his Fury’s oxygen supply, there was no other sound in the cockpit. Certainly nothing from the space behind him, where the junked, bleeding remains of his servitor navigator still sat in place, killed by the strange razor shards of enemy fire which had penetrated the craft in their pass right through the middle of the enemy formation.
Zane permitted himself a small moment of human pleasure, offering up a prayer of thanks to the Emperor who had guided his hand in those last few moments. Machine mind had told him that what he was trying to do was impossible, that it was almost certainly a pointless, futile gesture which would lead to the destruction of him and his craft, but Zane had not listened. Human spirit and human hands, guided by the greater hand of the Divine Emperor, had carried him through.
“Storm Leader to Storm Six. Fine shooting, Zane. Return to the Macharius before that crate falls apart around you. I’ll follow you in.”
It was the voice of Kaether, trailing far behind in his own crippled Fury and carefully nursing an engine thruster which was threatening to explode apart on him any moment. Together, the two of them had almost single-handedly seen off an attack which would have left the Macharius almost defenceless against the enemy’s own attack craft. Assuming they survived the battle which was still only just beginning, another piece of Macharius legend had just been created.
“Understood, commander. Returning to base,” was Zane’s only reaction to his place in this legend.
Standing at her position on the command deck of the Vual’en Sho, Craftmaster Lileathon suddenly cried out and reeled back, gripping onto her control lectern for support. Ailill and several nearby crew members rushed to her aid. She raised her head and glared at them in fury, stopping them in their tracks with a single thought-command.
“Back.”
Ailill knew what that look meant, and what had made his craftmaster cry out in the way she had. Standing near her, he had caught something of the psychic echo of it himself. Kornous, her soul-mate and one of the few remaining survivors of craftworld Bel-Shammon, was dead. Even his spirit gem, that part of him which would protect his soul from the abomination of the Great Enemy was gone, vaporised along with the rest of Kornous’s craft, or drifting lost and unrecoverable somewhere out there in the void. Kornous, and all he had been, was lost forever to the eldar race, and to his still-living soul-mate.
Up until now, Ailill had still hoped some kind of ceasefire could be arranged with the human force. Details of what had happened to the other eldar ships in the Stabia system were still vague and confused. Medhbh’s Shield had disappeared without trace, and was presumed lost. It was assumed that it had been attacked and destroyed by one of the human vessels, although Ailill was unsure how the swifter-moving eldar frigate, with its superior communications and detection capabilities, could have been taken by surprise by any lumbering human warship without managing to get a warning out first.
Its sister ship Lament of Elshor had definitely been attacked by one of the human ships, and had been able to communicate this fact to the Vual’en Sho before its destruction by the human cruiser’s fearsome arsenal of lance batteries, but even this dire situation was not as clear as it seemed. According to communications signals intercepted from the human craft, the human ship claimed to have come under attack first, from another as yet unidentified eldar vessel. Unable to track down its elusive attacker, it had instead turned its guns on the Lament of Elshor. Other human communications intercepts also suggested that the humans had lost two of their own patrol vessels. A partial signal from the Lament of Elshor, sent just before its destruction and as it desperately tried to disengage from battle with the larger and far more powerful human ship, suggested that it too had detected the presence of an unidentified ship in the area.
[Battlefleet Gothic 02] - Shadow Point Page 20