Pharos

by Guy Haley

  Oberdeii gripped the Thunderhawk’s control sticks. At a nod from Arkus, he pulled back upon them with the sergeant. The sticks fought him every step of the way. As he understood it, the ship’s controls operated through wires rather than mechanical attachment, but feedback motors built into them allowed a pilot to feel what forces his ship fought against, and it seemed like he was wrestling the whole of Sotha.

  Arkus made a wordless noise that transformed into a shout of triumph as the nose of the Thunderhawk struggled upward and the ship levelled out. The fires blinked out, replaced by streaming clouds that glowed blue and red in Sotha’s night.

  ‘Well done, neophyte. We live for a few seconds more.’

  Such a display of emotion from Arkus revealed what peril they had been in.

  ‘Ignite the jets. Activate the atmospheric wing surfaces. Get us flying rather than falling.’

  Oberdeii reached to obey.

  A series of huge bangs rocked the ship, opening up rents in the side of the cockpit. Air blasted them. Tebecai gave a shout of surprise. The craft pitched to the side. Oberdeii reacted automatically, levelling out their flight. Only when he was done did he see Arkus slumped forward over the pilot’s console, his face blackened.

  ‘They’ve found us,’ said Tebecai grimly.

  A shape whipped past the cockpit. All they saw of their deadly pursuer was a blur and the fires of its engines as it blasted on into the red-stained night.

  ‘Find the others,’ said Oberdeii. ‘Keep them off us.’

  ‘I can see only one. I can’t see the others,’ said Tebecai, with an edge to his voice that Oberdeii didn’t like.

  Wind whistled in through the gash in the cockpit. Loose hull plates rattled in the fierce air wash. Blue smoke poured out from under Sergeant Arkus’ slumped form. Oberdeii feared it was burning him. He reached out a hand but he could not move his mentor from the smoke, and the ship yawed dangerously for his lack of concentration. The noise from the breach was tremendous, a hurricane that threatened to tear Oberdeii’s skin from his face.

  ‘Stay calm. See if you can keep it off our backs,’ he said to Tebecai.

  Oberdeii adjusted his grip on the flight sticks. Half-learned knowledge shifted around in his head. He almost understood how the Thunderhawk operated. Frustration tore at his self-control.

  Tebecai got up from his seat and pulled Arkus off the smouldering pilot’s station. He was unconscious, his face black and red raw, a charred wound low down on his left side.

  Tebecai opened his mouth to speak.

  ‘Don’t say it,’ said Oberdeii.

  The sticks leapt around in Oberdeii’s hands like living things. He pushed the levers that should have operated the wings’ in-atmosphere control surfaces. Servos motors in the right complied obediently, but those for the left were unresponsive. With the right flaps extended and the left locked shut, the ship went into a pronounced downward spiral. Oberdeii hurriedly reset them, wrenching the stick hard to level out the craft. He managed to halt the spin, but without any way of controlling the form of the wings, the Thunderhawk flew through the atmosphere with all the finesse of a clay brick.

  ‘They’re coming around again!’ said Oberdeii.

  Tebecai half fell back into the gunner’s seat. He responded with a lack of control, firing off the Thunderhawk’s forward lascannons. The enemy aircraft jinked and the lasbeams went wide, their intense light slashing the clouds.

  Oberdeii tried not to think about it, letting his mind go clear, trusting to his embedded knowledge to carry them through. The craft shook. He glanced to his left.

  ‘Reroute the control input through the back-up systems.’

  Tebecai searched for a moment for the correct system panel. Grinding noises came from the left wing, but Oberdeii engaged the flight control surfaces again. This time, both responded, and he found himself flying the craft rather than fighting it.

  Sotha’s night spread under them. Artificial light was ordinarily restricted to the settlement, its castellum, and the tiny landing fields. The deeper forests on the edge of the Odessa region were mottled shades of darkest blue and black, the distant Blackrocks a stout wall, dark red highlights picked out on their crags by the Ruinstorm.

  That night orange fires blotched the forests and fields around Sothopolis, and the tiny city’s streets glittered with the exchange of fire.

  ‘How can we help the civilians? We won’t last long down there.’

  ‘We can’t. I’m going to set us down past the mountain,’ said Oberdeii. ‘We’ll examine possible practicals there.’

  His hands shook as he flew the Thunderhawk. At any moment his half-learned knowledge could slip from his mind. It did not fail him, and his hands continued to move independently of his conscious thought.

  Mount Pharos grew in front of them. From space it appeared an insignificant bump on the earth, but now it grew and grew, taking on its true proportions; huge and forbidding.

  ‘Where’s that fighter?’ asked Oberdeii.

  ‘I can’t get a view on it. The Pharos is blinding the auspex.’

  ‘At least they can’t see us,’ said Oberdeii. ‘Get down below and tell the others to prepare themselves.’

  Tebecai undid his harness, bouncing with the occasional sudden movement of the Thunderhawk as it passed through thermals coming off the burning forest.

  Oberdeii hunted about for a safe place to land. The cohort had spent a lot of time in the forest between Mount Pharos and the Blackrocks. He could not recall seeing a clearing so far out. In any case, the trees of Sotha grew at a speed that bordered on the ridiculous. If there had been a clearing a month ago, it would not be there now. The forestry teams from Sothopolis had enough to do keeping the various apertures of the Pharos open, and no serious attempt had been made to clear the woods beyond what the colony needed to grow its food. The hilly terrain behind the Pharos was unbroken canopy. Only up the mountains did altitude force the vigorous trees to give up their dominion.

  Oberdeii glanced repeatedly at the auspex screens for a promising landing site. The visual feed was a striping of bruise-coloured blurs. The subtler inputs of thermal and sonic imaging were scrambled.

  The landing gear of the Thunderhawk squealed as it extended, damaged by their hasty take off. Oberdeii opted to put the ship down directly into the trees.

  It quickly became apparent he had not chosen the best practical.

  So fierce was the competition for light on Sotha that the quicktrees did not stop growing until they collapsed under their own weight. The speed of their growth made them useless for timber, for their wood was wet and stringy and lacked a lignaceous structure. Instead they relied on hardened tubes encased in a soft pith for support, rather like the bambu of Old Earth turned inside out, or so Oberdeii had been told.

  The trees caught on the undercarriage with a series of wet, slapping cracks. At first the momentum of the ship was enough to snap the trees or brush them aside, but the trees clogged the front landing claw as wet grass clogs the machineries of harvest, swiftly arresting the ship’s forward motion. The nose pitched down. Oberdeii fired the forward jets to keep the ship from flipping over, unintentionally robbing it of its remaining momentum. At that moment, the Thunderhawk ceased to fly and fell so suddenly Oberdeii was too shocked to fire its vertical landing jets.

  A spine-breaking jolt announced their arrival on Sotha.

  Oberdeii winced. The ship was tilted at an uncomfortable angle forward and to the right. The urinous stink of scorched quicktree stung his nose.

  Tebecai appeared at the cockpit door, Tolomachus with him.

  ‘What the Throne was that?’ said Tolomachus.

  ‘A landing?’ said Oberdeii.

  ‘Shut off the engines!’ said Tolomachus, hurrying forward. ‘You’ll set the forest on fire and signal the enemy.’

  Oberdeii faltered finding the con
trols. Tolomachus pushed him aside.

  ‘Arkus should have had me up here with him,’ he said as he deactivated the engines.

  ‘You wouldn’t have done any better,’ said Tebecai.

  ‘Yes I would, I–’ Tolomachus’ protests dissolved into horror. ‘Arkus! What happened? How is he?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Oberdeii. He released himself from the co-pilot’s station.

  Tolomachus pressed his fingers against the sergeant’s neck. He turned him slightly, his nose wrinkling at what he saw. ‘He’s alive, but he won’t last long with a wound like that. He’s got a hole in him like a fist.’ He peered inside. ‘Cauterised front to back. He’s not bleeding.’

  The three Scouts looked at each other.

  ‘Is this it?’ said Oberdeii. ‘Just we three?’

  ‘Solon’s downstairs, getting the gear free. Florian isn’t going to survive. We got hit a couple of times in the passenger compartment. It’s a mess down there.’

  Neither Tebecai nor Oberdeii had noticed these hits in the panic of the descent.

  ‘Mallius?’

  ‘He’s with Florian.’

  ‘Lucky for us we got hit when we were in the atmosphere, or we’d all be dead,’ said Tolomachus. He glowered at Oberdeii. ‘Sergeant Arkus made you his second. What are your orders?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be like that. We can confer,’ said Oberdeii.

  Tolomachus bared his teeth. ‘No, no, Oberdeii. With no chain of command we’ll be arguing like the senators of Old Macragge when the Illyrians burned the civitas down. Arkus appointed you, for better or worse. What are our orders?’

  Oberdeii looked at his fellows. By human standards, they were malformed. Their faces were swollen with hyper-hormonal activity, features budding grotesquely directly from boyhood to godhood, avoiding something necessary and human in the process. They were not boys, not men, nor were they Space Marines. Not yet. He sighed uncertainly, but as he spoke his voice became surer, theoreticals and the practicals they spawned chaining rapidly in his enhanced mind.

  ‘Get Sergeant Arkus out of here. Find a bier. Make one if the ship’s are done. As long as he lives, we take him with us. Have every­one out and ready within the next two minutes. It won’t be long before they find the wreck. We need somewhere to hide, and work through theoreticals.’

  ‘What about Florian? He’s taken a spar through his chest. It’s grazed both hearts, so far as I can tell,’ said Tolomachus. ‘He is holding on, but only just. We cannot move him. We cannot leave him, not for the Eighth to find. What should we do?’

  They all knew what had to be done. Tebecai’s face was even paler than usual with the thought of it. He looked to Oberdeii, pleading with him to relieve him of the need to volunteer. Oberdeii felt sick as he spoke. Intellectually he understood that command was an awful burden. To be confronted with it like this was a fist to the guts.

  ‘Give him mercy,’ he said.

  Tebecai didn’t move. ‘I…’

  Oberdeii felt a rush of anger at their position. Hotter and stronger than any emotion he had felt before. He fought to control the urge to punch Tebecai, the ship, anything. The fine muscles in his face fluttered, then it passed.

  ‘I will do it,’ he said. He looked into the darkness of the ship’s lower deck. His hand went for his knife.

  ‘No, you won’t,’ said Tolomachus. He took Oberdeii’s wrist, preventing him from drawing his blade. ‘You concentrate on keeping us alive. Let me worry about the dead.’

  Oberdeii nodded his thanks. Tolomachus took a deep breath, and headed down.

  Silence for a moment, then a shout. Florian knew what was coming.

  ‘Do it,’ he said, his pain-wracked voice loud enough to carry into the cockpit.

  Mallius cried out in alarm when Tolomachus drew his knife.

  Oberdeii looked at the floor until the shouting stopped.

  The Scouts went out into the forest, leaving the crashed Thunderhawk and their dead comrade behind. From the outside the damage to the hull did not look too bad. Oberdeii supposed it might fly again if it were taken into the company forges for repair.

  The vegetation around the Thunderhawk had been squashed into a springy mat that was treacherous to walk on, but it had cushioned their landing, and the ship was more hidden than Oberdeii had expected. The support of their neighbours removed, the trees bordering the crash site had leaned inward and so the furrow carved by the Thunderhawk was very narrow. It would be hard to get a visual fix on the downed ship’s location, although a sweep with a light intensifier or thermal augur would reveal it in seconds. He supposed the enemy were busy elsewhere. The sky and forest were quiet.

  ‘We’ve got to move,’ he said quietly.

  His cohort were around him, their faces freshly streaked with camouflage paint, weapons ready. Solon and Tolomachus bore Sergeant Arkus on a bier retrieved from the ship. White eyes gleamed in the forest dark. Not far away, a lumbering phantine boomed out a mating song, ignorant of the disaster befalling its world.

  ‘We should head back to the castellum,’ said Solon.

  ‘We can’t do any good there,’ said Oberdeii. ‘The enemy are there with overwhelming forces. Our mission is to protect the civilians as best we can and harass the Eighth Legion where possible.’

  ‘Then we should head into the caves,’ said Tebecai. ‘That’s where the survivors are supposed to go. We should go back to Sothopolis and act as escorts. Those were the sergeant’s orders.’

  Oberdeii shook his head. ‘We have come down too far away. If the Sothans are going to make it to the caves, they already have. By the time we make it back it will be too late to save any in the town, and there is little need to guard those already in the caves,’ said Oberdeii. ‘We should reverse the order, harass as a primary, rescue where possible. The men of the Emperor’s Watch will protect the Sothans. We’re going to the mountain to present ourselves, then we shall search for stragglers and fulfil any other tasks given us. Are we all clear?’

  ‘They’ll be all over the mountain too,’ said Solon. His voice was low and urgent, pitched just above the loud chirr of Sotha’s insect chorus. ‘They have to be here for the Pharos.’

  ‘That’s why we have to go there.’ Oberdeii took a step forward. ‘We know the mountain better than they do. If they want us, they’ll have to fight their way across terrain they know nothing about to catch us. Our knowledge is an asset to ourselves and the greater Legion.’

  ‘What if they want to destroy it?’ asked Mallius quietly. ‘We’ll be better in the caves if they attack.’

  Oberdeii looked up at the night sky. The streaks of fire coming from the orbital had ceased. ‘They haven’t yet.’

  ‘You sound sure of yourself,’ said Solon. ‘This is nonsense. We should go underground. We’ll last hours out here. The forest is no protection!’

  ‘We are going up the mountain. We’ve done the majority of our training around the peak,’ said Oberdeii calmly. ‘Who is going to come off best in a tunnel fight – us, or a full brother in power armour?’

  ‘I won’t throw my life away because you’re afraid of the dark!’ snapped Solon.

  The two of them locked eyes and stepped in close.

  Tebecai put a hand on Solon’s chest and pushed him back. ‘The sergeant told us the same thing,’ he said. ‘About ten minutes after he put Oberdeii in charge. Harry and withdraw, protect the civilians where possible. This is the best practical for those orders. You heard Oberdeii, brothers: we’re going to the mountain.’

  FIFTEEN

  Ancient

  Last stand

  Shattered shield

  Ancient Carakon pulled back his fist and slammed it into the command deck blast doors. The impact point flashed as the disruption field around his fist annihilated the metal of the door, shaking the corridor. Several craters already pocked the door’s smo
oth surface. They would be through soon.

  Kellenkir checked the mission mark. They were running behind schedule. Ultramarines held out in several other pockets. They were proving just as troublesome as he had expected, and more. The corpses of his Legion brothers were scattered the length of the long corridor, blasted apart by the weapons emplaced in the ceiling. These were smoking wrecks now, but they had done their damage. Skraivok’s company, already undermanned, was down to less than half strength. They had come at their master’s command, arriving by Dreadclaw and assault ram after the fall of the docking concourse. Six hundred had commenced the assault on the station, but fewer than four hundred remained.

  At least Skraivok could be satisfied that his continued survival would vex Krukesh greatly.

  Kellenkir did not care for the losses or the claw master’s politicking. His mind was red with a gnawing angst no act could assuage. He was frustrated, he knew, but in his more dispassionate moments he could not decide why.

  ‘Kellenkir,’ said Skraivok. Kellenkir hated the sound of Skraivok’s sneering voice through the vox. It was as bad as having the count in his helmet.

  ‘My lord,’ said Kellenkir sarcastically.

  ‘Keep an eye on the rear,’ said Skraivok.

  ‘The rear?’ said Kellenkir. ‘There’s nothing there! We’ve killed everything in this sector.’ He looked back to where a number of legionaries and Legion servants were being riveted to the wall. Some of the humans were wailing. The Ultramarines glared grimly at their captors. ‘Or we will have done soon.’

  ‘Nevertheless, Kellenkir, I desire you to watch the rear,’ said Skraivok without turning to look at the vexillary.

  ‘Are you ordering me, captain?’ said Kellenkir.

  Carakon smashed another punch into the door. Sprays of lightning burst around his fist. He withdrew it with a grating crunch. The motors at his joints whined loudly as he pulled it back for another strike.

  ‘Stop, Carakon,’ said Skraivok. The Dreadnought complied. ‘Are you challenging me in front of my own First Claw, Kellenkir?’