by Various
Corbin broke in: ‘The other Hunter must have fired it.’ As if Arkelius had needed telling.
He was already voxing the commander of the Vengeance of Daedalus, but before he could speak to him, the fly – at least twice the size of an average man – smacked into the Scourge’s prow and explosively disgorged its disgusting innards.
The impact shattered the armaplas pane of Arkelius’s vision slit: its outer pane, that was. The ancient designers of the Rhino and its mechanised offspring hadn’t let them be so easily penetrated; their vision slits were actually short fixed periscopes, with a vertical tube and several lenses and mirrors separating the user’s eye from what the slit showed him.
Arkelius didn’t have to worry about one dead, mutant fly. He had to worry about what was coming up behind it.
Brusquely, he informed the Daedalus’s commander of his vehicle’s predicament; too late, he feared. There was a good reason why Skyspear missiles were as effective as they were.
Unlike other missiles, their flights weren’t guided by machine-spirits and cogitators. They were guided by human intelligences. The mummified brains of distinguished Chapter-serfs were entombed within the Skyspears’ warheads, still partially aware.
What this meant, in practice, was that they did more than just follow enemy pilots; they could actually outthink them, anticipating their evasive manoeuvres. They almost always hit their targets – sooner or later – as Arkelius had seen for himself. Even when their targets were currently splattered across the front of a friendly tank.
Arkelius could do nothing now but pray.
He wasn’t used to that feeling, and he hated it. Even on the worst day of his life; even as the ork axe had cleaved his armour and the dirt of an alien battlefield had rushed up to meet his face; even then, as long as he had been able to cling to consciousness – and to his bolter and chainsword – he hadn’t felt as powerless as he did now.
The nose cone of the missile had grown to fill his view through the vision slit.
Then, with a sudden flash of light, it was gone.
The Daedalus’s gunner had transmitted the abort codes in time – or perhaps, just perhaps, the embalmed intelligence inside the Skyspear had seen the havoc it was about to wreak and acted on its own initiative. The result, either way, was that the missile had been destroyed, without its deadly warhead being triggered.
The Scourge of the Skies had been buffeted by the blast, but had weathered it. Corbin had acted on his own initiative too, lowering the hydraulic stabilisers.
Arkelius already had another problem. The suicidal fly on his prow was – incredibly – clinging to a shred of life. It was stabbing through his broken vision slit with a slender barbed stinger. Its wings, torn though they were, vibrated furiously, creating a loud buzz that seemed to drill into Arkelius’s ears.
The stinger, of course, couldn’t reach him in his sealed compartment. The fly must have realised this for itself because it squirmed around and showed him its misshapen head instead. Green pus dribbled from its clicking mandibles. Its three compound eyes seemed to fix the tank commander with a baleful glare through his periscope mirrors.
Then, the fly vomited up a thick stream of viscous green liquid. Arkelius’s readouts confirmed his instinctive suspicion: the ooze was virulently acidic. It was eating into the Scourge’s armour plating. He cursed under his breath.
He threw open his circular top hatch. He levered himself up until his head and chest were above the Scourge’s roof, and he could see the fly on the front of the tank below him. The fly saw him too – those blasted compound eyes, he realised – and it spat at him. Acidic green ooze spattered against Arkelius’s forearm and it began to strip away the topmost layers of his ablative armour. He shook off as much of it as he could.
Then, he emptied a full bolter magazine into the insect’s vile, black body.
The fly slid down the Scourge’s sloping prow and out of Arkelius’s sight. He dropped back into his seat and pulled down the hatch behind him. His right forearm was a mass of congealed blue ceramite and plasteel. He voxed Corbin, telling him to pull up the stabilisers and step on the accelerator pedal. He felt no more than a slight bump as they rode over the fly’s remains and crushed them underneath their caterpillar tracks.
‘Resume course, sergeant?’ asked Corbin.
Arkelius checked through the slits in his hatch again. The battle in the sky was showing no signs of abating. Flies and their riders were being battered by Stormtalon assault cannons. It looked as if the tide was slowly turning the Imperium’s way.
And now, at last, he saw it: little more than a fleeting shadow, from this distance, a suggestion of outspread wings and an elongated neck. It was twisting and wheeling its way through a mass of blue machinery and chitinous carapaces. One of the blasphemous daemon engines; what else could it have been?
Arkelius gave a new heading to his driver, and an estimated range to his gunner.
‘Let’s bring that affront to all that is holy down!’ he snarled.
The Thunderhawk had gone down behind a hill to the north.
A thick plume of smoke spiralled skyward from the crash site, and Galenus monitored the vox-chatter in his ear until he knew that the crew had escaped with their lives.
To him, every man who fell under his command – every brother who died before Galenus did, while following his orders – was a cause for regret. He knew he couldn’t fight all his company’s battles for them; he could certainly fight the biggest ones, however.
He had gone toe-to-toe with the broadest-shouldered, strongest-looking of the seven Death Guard at the ruined fort. The traitor’s exposed head was little more than a mouldering skull, with scraps of grey skin fluttering from it like tattered banners. His charnel stench made Galenus want to retch. Of the Imperium’s many enemies, there were none that disgusted him more than these: former Space Marines themselves, turned to the Ruinous Powers.
The Plague Marine parried Galenus’s chainsword with the stock of a plasma pistol, and, somehow, it wasn’t sliced in two by the slashing blade. He thrust his pox-ridden knife at the captain’s guts. Twisting out of its way, Galenus fired his bolter at the Plague Marine’s skull. An unexpected swipe jarred his firing hand and sent his shot awry.
Galenus had taken the measure of his opponent now. The Plague Marine was stronger, if a little slower, than he was. He was confident, however, that he could defend himself against the enemy, keep him occupied, for as long as he had to.
His battle-brothers – on the captain’s orders – had partnered up, each fighting a single opponent, all apart from Terserus, that was, who had taken on two Death Guard by himself. They were trying to keep out of his reach – understandably – and concentrating their bolter fire on Terserus’s chest in the vain hope of punching through his armour.
Galenus’s sealed helmet buzzed with urgent vox reports.
He picked out a voice from among them: a Sergeant Beyus from the Eighth Company. He had found a surviving member of Orath’s garrison, who had set eyes – briefly – upon the enemy leader. He described a Death Guard a head or more taller than the others, with a missing nose, a maggot-infested eye socket and a belt of skulls.
A Plague Champion, thought Galenus. That was what they called themselves.
Artorius – the commander of the Fists of the Fallen – had spoken of such a being in his final reports from Orath. It was believed, however, that Naracoth had died: locked in combat with Artorius himself beneath Fort Kerberos, when the building had come down on their heads. The description of this new figure didn’t fit him, anyway.
So, this has to be a new Champion…
Galenus voxed Beyus directly, ‘Where is he?’ Beyus patched him through to the Doom Eagle, Brother Chelaki, who answered his question.
‘I should be able to see him,’ concluded Galenus. ‘Why can’t I see him?’
Chelaki cou
ldn’t answer him. Galenus warned his two squads to be wary; there could be more enemies – more powerful enemies – yet to show themselves. He contacted Captain Fabian on the Quintillus to ask if he had detected any troop movements in the area.
Simultaneously he feinted to the left, drawing an unforeseen opponent into the arc of his chainsword blade and landing a solid blow to his left wrist – the wrist of his knife hand. Another foe might have lost his grip on his weapon, but Plague Marines were abnormally resistant to pain.
Galenus was winged by an answering burst of plasma, which heated his left pauldron until it glowed red and seared the flesh underneath it.
The Plague Marine took a step back and brought his pistol to bear again, this time at Galenus’s head. The barrel of the gun was corroded, oozing green pus out of a number of hairline cracks; it could only have been through the application of the vilest sorcery that it functioned at all.
Fabian’s voice crackled in his ear again, ‘You were right. We have engine emissions, a kilometre and a half to the south-east of your current position.’
‘How many?’
‘Two, three, it’s hard to tell. They’re airborne, beginning to fan out… Two. We have two confirmed contacts. Thunderhawks, from the shape of them – but they certainly aren’t ours.’
‘Where are they headed?’
‘Stand by… They’re levelling off at a cruising altitude. Looks like this is a planetary flight then. We have their trajectories and are projecting most likely destinations.’
Galenus mouthed two words to himself, grimly, ‘Fort Garm.’
In the meantime, he evaded another plasma blast and closed with his opponent again. A fierce flurry of cuts and thrusts forced the Plague Marine onto his back foot, a sitting duck for a sustained salvo of bolter fire. Bolts pinged off the Plague Marine’s armour and chipped his skull, but the traitor didn’t bleed, he only oozed more of that bright green pus.
‘We have it,’ said Fabian in Galenus’s ear. ‘We know where those ships are going.’
He spoke two words then, which made his fellow captain curse aloud.
The Ultramarines were beginning to make some real headway.
In Chelaki’s estimation, they had gained almost half the distance to the ruins of Fort Kerberos from their starting point, across the blackened grain fields. Now, however, the second wave of the Death Guard army – at least thirty Traitor Marines in discoloured and encrusted power armour – had entered the fray. They carried with them a tattered banner fashioned from flayed human skin, and their arrival was turning the tide again.
Sergeant Beyus and his two surviving original squad members were battling a mutated fly that had pounced on them from above. Before Chelaki could join them, however – in a moment of fever-induced distraction – a daemon leapt on him from behind.
It had him in a chokehold, forcing him down onto one knee. He managed to grab its deceptively bony wrist, but it took all the strength he had to keep its hand – and the sword it held – away from his throat. He heard Sergeant Beyus’s shouted warning – ‘Incoming!’ – but there wasn’t a great deal he could do about it.
Something was coming up through the field behind him. Something big. Something metal. He could hear its engines screaming even over the clamour of the battle. He could hear its hull protesting as it bounced and scraped along the ground. The daemon must have heard it too, but apparently it was happy to be crushed if it could hold him here for just a second longer and ensure that he was crushed too.
It was still chanting throatily to itself. The words were gibberish, but at the same time there was an ineffable sense of wrongness about them. The sound of them, clawing their way into his ears, made Chelaki’s eyes itch and his head hurt.
He put everything he had into one final, desperate effort, pushing himself backwards and over onto his back. He landed on top of the squirming daemon creature and, taken by surprise, it loosened its grip on him.
He tore himself free of it. He scrambled through the infected stalks of grain on his hands and knees. The daemon lunged after him and caught his ankle. Chelaki kicked out at it, and his boot sank into the soft tissue of its single eye.
It let go of him again – as a bright blue mass of metal came ploughing through the field and right over the prostrate creature. Had Chelaki been any closer to it – had he not been able to withdraw his foot in time – he would surely have shared its grisly fate.
He lay flat on his stomach, buried in the black grain. He was short of breath and his hearts were pounding in his ears. The burning pain from the wound in his side had spread, until he felt as if his every nerve was on fire. He longed to close his heavy eyes, but he knew that if he did he wouldn’t be able to open them again.
He pushed himself up, laboriously, letting his armour do most of the work.
The mass of blue metal had come to rest, about a hundred metres behind him. It was a Stormtalon, as he had already deduced. It had come down hard and left a burning furrow in its wake. From the rear, however, it didn’t seem too badly damaged.
Sergeant Beyus and his men had despatched their insect opponent and were clambering over the gunship’s nose. Its pilot must have been alive and in need of assistance. Indeed, a moment later, they lifted him out through the shattered glacis. The pilot was unconscious, and Chelaki heard the sergeant voxing for the services of an Apothecary.
Chelaki was still struggling to draw breath. He removed his helmet; what good was it doing him now, anyway? The cold air hit his skin like a bucket of water, and he realised that his face was drenched in sweat.
Numerous tiny parasites were crawling over his armour. They must have jumped to him from their former host, the daemon creature. He brushed them off, disgusted, crushing as many of them as he could underfoot as they scuttled away from him.
Somehow, he made it to the front of the Stormtalon. He hoisted himself up into the empty cockpit and dropped heavily into the pilot’s seat. The gunship’s engines had been killed, but the dashboard runes were still lit up.
Sergeant Beyus voxed him, ‘Chelaki, what are you doing?’
‘I think…’ he said, flicking a few runes, running a few tests. ‘I don’t think there’s too much damage.’ It must have been the pilot, rather than the ship, that had been critically wounded, and he must have clung to consciousness long enough to complete a safe, albeit bumpy, landing. A better landing than Chelaki had managed, anyway.
‘I can get this ship back in the air,’ he declared.
‘Are you sure?’ asked Beyus, doubtfully.
‘This is what I was trained for, sergeant,’ Chelaki told him.
He held his back straight, with an effort, looking Beyus in the eye. He couldn’t let him see how weak he truly was. Had his sergeant suspected that he had become infected, that the rot had spread to Chelaki’s very soul, he would surely have had him executed on the spot.
He wasn’t ready to die just yet.
All the years he had served he had spent at a gunship’s helm. He didn’t think he had the strength to swing a chainsword any longer, but Chelaki could have flown a Stormtalon in his sleep; and the Emperor had seen fit, at this moment of all moments, to drop a Stormtalon virtually at his feet.
Beyus nodded his assent. ‘And may the Emperor go with you,’ he said, as he turned to rejoin his battle-brothers in combat against more plague daemons.
Chelaki felt ashamed of himself, unworthy, for having deceived a superior officer, but he had no doubt that the Emperor was with him indeed. He expected yet more from Chelaki than he had already given – just one final act of service, perhaps – and the Doom Eagle could better oblige him in the air, in his element, than he could on the ground.
A fresh explosion rocked the Scourge of the Skies.
Arkelius saw a maggot-ridden Death Guard on the battlefield ahead of them. He had lobbed a grenade at the Hunter and was preparing a second
one, taking aim.
An alarm screamed out from Arkelius’s instrument banks, and Corbin reported in, ‘We’re overheating again, sergeant. Systems failing across the board.’
Arkelius had Iunus fire a volley from the hull-mounted storm bolter. Several of his bolts struck true. The Plague Marine didn’t fall, but his grenade detonated in his hand and he took the full force of its blast. Frustratingly, however, he remained standing.
The Death Guard’s explosives were fashioned from the shrunken skulls of their slain enemies. They were low on concussive force, but loaded with toxic spores. They were deadly to Nurgle’s enemies, but far less so to the Plague God’s already diseased followers.
Two Ultramarines closed with the shaken traitor, their chainswords singing. Arkelius instructed Corbin to keep the Scourge moving forwards, but then Iunus spoke up as his instruments sounded a chirruping alarm. ‘We’re coming into weapons range of the enemy’s artillery, sergeant. I suggest we–’
A rune panel beside him exploded, venting pressurised steam into his compartment.
Arkelius scowled behind his helmet. ‘Very well,’ he conceded. ‘Put on the brakes and lower the stabilisers, and, Iunus, target the flies and their riders again, but sparingly. Don’t fire until you’re sure of a kill.’ They only had so many Skyspear missiles – too few to waste any.
He leaned forward to look through his main vision slit again.
His eyes widened at the last sight he had expected to see: a daemon engine, one of the metal dragons. All this time, he had been hunting it and suddenly it had appeared from nowhere. More accurately, it had emerged from the blast field of an exploding missile. It flattened its razor-edged wings and lowered its triangular head as it began to dive.
‘Iunus!’ Arkelius yelled.
‘I see it, sergeant. It’s coming right at us. No, strike that. We aren’t its target.’
The dragon soared over the Scourge, and alighted upon a Predator Destructor. It tore into the turret of the Imperial tank with its claws, shredding its guns in seconds.