Imperial Glory

by Richard Williams

  There was certainly no laughter, nods or glances after that.

  Breaking the silence, Arbulaster strode over to the grand table in the centre of the room. He keyed in a few strokes and the surface flickered and came to life, displaying a topographical map of the area. Two icons appeared there: the first, the familiar red and black roundel of the 11th; the second, a leering green-etched orkish glyph. He allowed his officers a minute or so to peer over the map.

  ‘This,’ Arbulaster continued, pointing to the roundel with a stylus, ‘is here. DOV-A, or Dova as the men call it.’

  He moved the stylus to the green glyph. ‘This is the ork rok. I’m told its original Crusade Command designation was 692 Brutal Fury. Brooce?’

  Arbulaster took a half-step back to allow his second to talk them through the specifics and the speculation. He had long ago learned that it was good command to do so. Brooce had a chance to act outside his shadow, and he had a chance to watch his officers and not be observed himself.

  Brooce began: ‘We have only been able to acquire limited information on the rok so far. From the size of the crater, however, we estimate that the rok did not strike the planet at full speed, rather that it must have slowed before it hit. Either some kind of re-entry engines or something more… alien. That, and the interference the rok is still generating, leads us to presume that some or all of its point defences may still be operating. We expect to acquire more detail shortly. Squadron Commander Zdzisław is leading a flight of Valkyries to the crater in order to reconnoitre for any defences or other activity. He shall feed those images straight back to this room for our consideration. Major Roussell? What’s the current status of the other matter?’

  The languid commander of the light companies shifted closer to a respectful stance. ‘Received a message just before you arrived, major. We’ve caught one of the beasts and are hauling it in for the commissar’s interrogation, prior to our own… dissection.’

  ‘Good,’ Brooce replied crisply. ‘Pass on my commendation to Lieutenant Carson.’

  Roussell shifted again, this time in discomfort at Brooce’s implicit criticism that he had not led the raiding party himself. Arbulaster suppressed a smile and contented himself with a slight twitch of his eyebrow. The petty antagonism between his two infantry commanders was well-known and had kept him amused for half a decade now. One needed to find these little diversions in a life of boredom, violence and horror, and both officers were careful enough not to commit the colonel’s cardinal sin of ‘affecting the regiment’. Brooce had a point though, Arbulaster reflected; Roussell had become lazy, spending so much time resting on his former glories that the other officers joked that his backside looked like it had been awarded the Imperial Laurel. If Carson hadn’t killed the wrong man all those years ago, Arbulaster would have put him in Roussell’s place right now.

  ‘Dova base, Dova base, this is Valkyrie G for Galaxy.’ The robotic words crackled over the speaker on the shooting deck.

  Brooce activated the transmitter. ‘G for Galaxy, this is Dova base. Go ahead.’

  ‘Valkyrie flight holding at aquila five. Ready to descend. Request clearance for mission.’

  ‘Commander,’ Arbulaster spoke up. ‘This is the colonel. Any trace of the interference at that height?’

  ‘Negative, colonel. I expect interference once we go below aquila two.’

  ‘And how low do you think until you can get a clear picture through that cloud?’

  ‘Below five hundred, colonel.’

  ‘Understood. You are cleared for mission, commander. Good luck.’

  High above the ork rok, Zdzisław acknowledged the colonel. He looked out into the white cloud, pressing up against the cockpit and hiding the rest of the Valkyries from view. He switched the vox to call out to them.

  ‘Valkyrie flight, this is G for Galaxy, acknowledge and confirm vox-net is active.’

  ‘Leader, this is D Doctrine, acknowledged and confirmed.’

  ‘Leader, this is P Pius, acknowledged and confirmed.’

  ‘Leader, this is T Terra, it’s all bang on here!’

  The pilot’s enthusiasm made Zdzisław smile, with what little of his natural face remained. It was the first time he’d smiled in the last two days. He knew that his Valkyrie was the same bird as he’d always flown. He wasn’t so befuddled that he thought a simple lick of paint would stop her being who she was. It didn’t, it had just made her hate him.

  He checked that all was well with his co-pilot sitting behind him. They had left the other crew back at Dova to save weight.

  ‘It’s all buttoned up, skipper. Ready when you are.’

  ‘Link the vox-net with Dova and confirm Dova receiving.’

  ‘Linked,’ the co-pilot replied and then heard Dova confirm. Now, if one of the Valkyries could get a picture, even if it was embroiled in the interference, it would be retransmitted from the other flyers so it would appear back at Dova. With that, they were ready.

  ‘Valkyrie flight, I’m descending. Hello, D for Doctrine, are you there?’

  The voice of Zdzisław’s second, Lieutenant Plant, crackled through: ‘Here, leader.’

  ‘Stand by to take over if I lose contact.’

  ‘Okay, leader, good luck.’

  Zdzisław powered back the throttle. The whine of his bird’s engines quietened and she started to descend. He brought up the display from the nose-picter, pointed straight down. There was nothing to see yet but more cloud, getting darker and darker as they dropped. He called out his height as they went. He felt the first tug at his controls as they hit twenty-five hundred metres. There had been a vain hope, voiced during planning, that perhaps the interference would not extend directly above the rok, but Zdzisław had not given it credence. To his mind, this interference that jostled his flyer in the sky could only be one of two things: first, a defence mechanism, designed for use in space, to disrupt assault boats and boarding actions, which given that orks adored the chance to carve their enemies apart in person seemed unlikely; or second, a by-product of whatever had functioned to slow the rok’s fall as it plummeted towards the surface of Voor. In neither situation would it make sense for it only to project out and not above as well.

  Nineteen hundred metres and Zdzisław felt the invisible force from this ork machine kick his bird to one side. He burned the jets for a moment to stabilise and then throttled back again. She hated him for this. First he had allowed that commissar to bully him into painting over her decorations, stripping her of all she had done, and now he was forcing her down to be pummelled by these ork ghosts in the air.

  Seventeen hundred metres and the Valkyrie was slewed to one side. Zdzisław yanked the stick back around to compensate, but she bucked and protested beneath him.

  Sixteen hundred metres and the ghosts tried to spin her; Zdzisław turned the nozzle adjusters and overrode the equalisation to steady her with a burst.

  Fifteen hundred metres and Zdzisław was thrown near out of his metal body as the bird flipped under him. Alarms rang, the co-pilot swore and the cockpit display lit up with a battery of red lights, as the engine thrust that had been fighting gravity to keep them up was now accelerating them ever faster down. The numbers on the altimeter blurred and Zdzisław desperately twisted the nozzle control. Then the ghosts struck anew, and the bird lurched to one side and flipped again. Zdzisław shoved forwards on the throttle and the angry engines roared. Zdzisław tipped the bird’s nose down and away from the rok and powered clear as quickly as possible.

  His heart was thudding, someone was yelling in his ear, his co-pilot was heaving behind him.

  ‘This is G Galaxy responding.’

  ‘Leader!’ It was Plant on D Doctrine. ‘Confirm condition.’

  ‘Operational at this time. The old girl gave me a bit of a fight. We’ll check to see if anything’s shaken loose and return to aquila five.’

 
‘Glad to have you back, leader. Are you clear?’

  ‘Clear.’

  ‘This is D Doctrine, beginning descent.’

  ‘Acknowledged, D Doctrine. Watch for the daemons at fifteen hundred.’

  ‘Will do, leader. Going down.’

  ‘Okay, D Doctrine. Better luck.’

  But D Doctrine did not have better luck. The ghosts came for him in force at twenty-one hundred and by eighteen hundred he was boosting clear. P Pius came in on a different vector and made it to sixteen hundred, before nearly stalling his engines and dropping a hundred metres as a dead weight. Zdzisław heard the shaking in the pilot’s voice as he recovered.

  All the pilots could hear the growing impatience in the signals from Dova as T Terra began his descent. T Terra was determined and he rode his Valkyrie all the way down to thirteen hundred. Zdzisław watched on T Terra’s nose-picter through the vox-net, as the clouds below him went from a white to a dirty grey, hoping against hope that he had been wrong in his estimate of how low the cloud descended. At eleven hundred T Terra was swatted from the sky, and he went spiralling away from the crater-site. His vox went out but the picter stayed transmitting and Zdzisław, the other pilots and Dova watched in horror as T Terra fell below cloud cover five kilometres from the crater and they saw the jungle much too close beneath. They were helpless as the Valkyrie continued to spiral out of control as the green canopy raced up towards it. But then flames burst around the picter as T Terra’s engines fired at full blast and the fall slowed and stopped.

  ‘Sorry, leader, bit of a close shave there,’ the officers back at Dova heard T Terra report back.

  ‘Quite a show,’ Arbulaster muttered. The images from the Valkyrie’s picter had been fed back and displayed across the entire table. As T Terra fell, every officer in the room was falling with him. None of them had looked away as it happened, but now the moment had passed, a few dared to step back, take a draught from their drinks or glance out at the calmer jungle outside their own windows. Reeve, of course, was unmoved; he looked almost bored. Van Am also, Arbulaster noticed, appeared unaffected, rather she was staring at him, waiting to see what he would do.

  ‘Brooce,’ Arbulaster said quietly. ‘Get me a private line to Zdzisław.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Brooce configured a handset and passed it over.

  ‘Zdzisław here.’

  ‘Commander Zdzisław, it’s the colonel.’ Arbulaster stepped away from the other officers.

  ‘Yes, colonel.’

  ‘Is that it then?’ he asked curtly. ‘You said five hundred metres. None of you even came close! Are you just going to keep throwing yourselves in until you run out of fuel or do you bluebells have any better ideas?’

  There was a long pause at the other end of the line, and Arbulaster for once considered that he might have overdone it. These were Navymen, not his Brimlocks, and if they decided to fly off, well, he could request they be court-martialled, but that would be of precious little use to him here and now.

  ‘There may be another possibility…’

  Arbulaster heard him out, considered the risk and approved it. He stepped back to the table, which had returned to its tactical view, displaying the positions of the flight of Valkyries as they moved into position for their next attempt.

  Zdzisław’s plan was to descend not one at a time, but all four Valkyries together. If whatever was generating the interference had limited capacity then it might be possible to overwhelm it. The danger, though, was clear. For best effect, the four Valkyries would have to descend close together, targeting the interference at a single point. But with such limited control, if one should strike another then both craft would be lost. Arbulaster, though, with his officers, Reeve and Van Am all watching, felt he had no choice. He would trust Zdzisław and his pilots to keep themselves safe.

  To test Zdzisław’s theory, he and D Doctrine descended as a pair. Zdzisław started getting buffeted at twenty-two hundred, but coaxed his bird down to thirteen hundred before aborting. D Doctrine, however, had a smoother ride. Only once Zdzisław pulled back, did the ghosts attack him with a fury. He made it down to eight hundred metres and Arbulaster willed the details of the crater to appear on the table showing D Doctrine’s picter, to get the picture now and have this damned mission finished already. But eight hundred was still too high. D Doctrine was rolled, flipped twice and spun before the pilot finally managed to break away. Arbulaster stopped himself from tugging at his moustache in annoyance, but the theory, at least, had been proved. Now nothing remained but to try it out for real.

  Zdzisław watched the icon for D Doctrine edge across his viewer until it settled in position. The four Valkyries were formed up in a spiral to reduce the chance of collision, and facing out so that if any of them hit their engine-burn they would head out rather than in. They were at the closest quarters, yet would be utterly reliant on their instruments. It all made tactical sense, but the formation gave Zdzisław the eerie feeling of four warriors standing back-to-back, making their last stand. The other pilots called in ready. He gave the order.

  ‘Valkyrie flight. Descend.’

  He kept his eye glued on the spacing between his flyers. In mid-air collisions, you could not rely on conscious thought, they happened too quickly; you only had instinct and you had to pray that your instinct was right otherwise you were simply dead. At twenty-five hundred, right on cue, P Pius reported the first twitch. Zdzisław acknowledged, there was little else he could do. By twenty hundred he could see P Pius’s engines firing as the pilot tried to compensate for the buffeting, T Terra had felt the first knock, but Zdzisław, in the third position above, was still flying smooth. At sixteen-fifty, P Pius’s icon suddenly swivelled in its place on Zdzisław’s display and the pilot’s terrified scream burst over the vox as his flyer was spun. He hit his thrusters and powered clear. Then T Terra started reporting the ghosts’ attack. The close call during his previous run had not dampened his enthusiasm.

  ‘I’m going to make it this time, leader!’

  ‘Hold formation as best as you can.’

  ‘I’m going to make it!’ Then he swore violently at his bird over the vox as he wrestled it down. At ten hundred the ghosts pummelled him hard and he was thrown across the sky, but he was ready for it and flicked the engines around and regained control.

  ‘Crossing eight hundred!’ he said triumphantly over the vox. Zdzisław could hear the Valkyrie’s distress in the background. ‘Activating picter!’

  Back at Dova, the officers looked down at the table as the cloudy image appeared there. Still not close enough.

  Suddenly, T Terra shouted and Zdzisław’s proximity alarms shrilled. The ghosts had struck the flyer hard in the nose and it flipped back. The safety distance between the two flyers vanished in a split-second and Zdzisław’s instinctively powered forwards. It was the right choice. T Terra grazed the back of his tail, spinning end-to-end. Only as it passed did Zdzisław hear the pilot’s warning. D Doctrine heard it as well and hit his engines the same as his leader. For D Doctrine, however, the instinct was wrong. The screen at Dova flashed white as T Terra’s nose-picter pointed up to the sky. For an instant, they saw the shadow of another Valkyrie racing towards them. Then the screen went black.

  Inverted, T Terra had collided with the other flyer, the two armoured undersides smashing against each other. D Doctrine’s hull structure held, but the flyer was knocked clear of the spiral and the ghosts came for it.

  ‘D Doctrine. Aborting! Aborting!’ Arbulaster heard the pilot shout.

  ‘Commander Zdzisław, report!’ Arbulaster demanded of the blank screen, but there was no reply.

  ‘Report, damn you,’ Arbulaster urged again, and this time he was answered.

  ‘This is–’ and then the transmission was interrupted by the howling of the air through a breached cabin.

  ‘Repeat that.’

  The voice, faint
over the rushing air, responded. ‘This is T Terra! Aborting! Aborting!’

  ‘G Galaxy,’ Brooce interrupted firmly, ‘report your status.’

  As if in response, the screen flickered back to life and Zdzisław’s artificial voice resounded over them.

  ‘Crossing five hundred.’

  For the first time, through the cloud, they could see the details of the ground below. The image was shaken and blurred but it was there and Zdzisław was still going.

  ‘Four-fifty.’

  ‘Excellent work, commander,’ Arbulaster said with relief.

  ‘Four hundred,’ was Zdzisław’s only response.

  The view of the crater was clear now and the officers clustered around closely. The orks were there. The crater was pock-marked with dark splotches, huts and other primitive buildings, which made up the burgeoning settlement around the rok.

  ‘Three-fifty.’

  ‘That’s enough, commander. Abort,’ Arbulaster ordered. Zdzisław did not respond. ‘Can he hear us, Brooce?’

  ‘Acknowledge, G Galaxy,’ Brooce said clearly into the vox.

  ‘Three hundred.’

  ‘Respond, G–’ Brooce began again.

  ‘Aborting,’ Zdzisław replied, but the ground below kept coming closer. ‘She’s fighting me.’

  The rok skewed from the screen as Zdzisław tried to steer the flyer away.

  ‘She won’t, she’s not–’ he began. They had crossed two hundred now.

  ‘Pull out, commander!’ Arbulaster instructed, and at the same time, they could hear the co-pilot start shouting at him to do the same.

  One hundred, and now the officers around the table stood back from the sight, as if it were them falling towards the ground.

  ‘Engines stalled,’ Zdzisław said, even now his toneless voice not wavering. ‘Come on, girl. Come on.

  ‘Forgi–’ Arbulaster heard, and then the vox went silent and the screen went blank.

  There was silence on the shooting deck. The officers stayed fixed on the black screen, unwilling for a moment to raise their heads and catch another’s eyes. Then the table lit up again. The cogitator had pieced together the imagery from the Valkyries’ picters into a single plan. As they watched, it began running its identification routines, highlighting the likely nature of the shapes the images had captured.