by Various
Arkelius heard the urgent voice of the Predator’s commander, reporting that he was abandoning his vehicle. Its hatches flew open and three power-armoured figures stumbled out of them. Iunus, in the meantime, was scrambling to get a lock on the Predator’s attacker. He lowered his missile launcher as far as it would go – until it was near-horizontal – but Arkelius could see his problem: while his target was still attached to the abandoned tank, his auspex couldn’t differentiate one from the other.
The dragon breathed fire at the Predator’s withdrawing crew before returning to the sky with a raucous screech. One of the crewmembers – the commander, to judge by his numerous honour badges – was hurt, badly burned, and the daemon engine was getting away.
‘As soon as you have that lock, Iunus…’ said Arkelius, tersely.
An age seemed to pass before, at last, Iunus’s fingers snapped shut around his launch trigger and the Scourge of the Skies trembled with the now-familiar sensation of recoil. Arkelius held his breath as he followed the Skyspear missile’s flight. The utmost silence of his crewmates suggested that they were holding theirs too.
The missile quickly dropped onto the daemon engine’s tail.
The dragon saw it, and tried in vain to shake it off. It looped around behind a Stormtalon, banked steeply and threaded its way sideways between two giant flies. But the Skyspear evaded both friend and foe alike in dogged pursuit of its programmed target. The daemon had the edge over it in terms of manoeuvrability and it occurred to Arkelius that it was also guided by an interred intelligence. The missile’s smaller size, however, compensated for that advantage – and it was faster too. It was homing in on the daemon engine’s debased emissions.
The missile struck its fleeing target, right up its exhaust pipes.
The daemon engine exploded – and several monstrous flies in its vicinity were knocked off-balance or injured by the force of the blast and by razor-sharp pieces of shrapnel. Inside the Scourge of the Skies, three voices were raised in triumphant roars.
Arkelius had despatched many enemies of the Emperor, of course. He had lost count of the number long ago. To have destroyed a creature so monstrous, however, so powerful – it felt different. He felt that he – together with his vehicle and his crew, of course – had just accomplished something special, something bigger than he had ever accomplished before.
It was a heady realisation, enough to make him forget the discomfort – the mild itch of claustrophobia – that had lurked on the periphery of his awareness all day.
There was only one thought on the tank commander’s mind at that moment, and he clenched his teeth in a grim smile as he voiced it, ‘…and one to go!’
Two of Galenus’s battle-brothers were down.
A Plague Marine planted his foot on the chest of one of them, and plunged his infected knife through a crack in his bright blue armour. He leered across the battlefield at Galenus, with his blackened stumps of teeth, as he twisted his blade in his enemy’s guts.
A Plague Marine had fallen too, and, at that moment, Terserus drove his power fist through the stomach of another, splintering his armour and his spine.
Two casualties apiece, then. With their greater starting numbers, that meant the Ultramarines were gaining the advantage.
Sergeant Thalorus and Brother Filion came to their captain’s assistance, giving him a welcome respite from his relentless, skull-headed opponent. He used it to converse with the orbiting Quintillus, specifically, with Captain Fabian’s epistolary, who had taken charge of the Librarians of all three companies.
‘I need answers now,’ he barked. ‘Why do we have two Chaos transports – one carrying, we have to assume, a Plague Champion – headed for the second Great Seal?’
‘We have been trying to divine the answer to that question, and–’
‘Don’t tell me what you’ve been doing. Just tell me what you know.’
The Librarian drew a breath before he answered. ‘No doubt remains that those ships are en route to Fort Garm to destroy the Great Seal there. This may be good news for us.’
Galenus raised a cynical eyebrow. ‘How so?’
‘It could be that our assumptions were… incorrect.’ The word was spoken reluctantly. ‘It could be that, in order to unleash the warp rift fully, both Great Seals must be broken.’
‘Because why else would the Death Guard divide their forces this way,’ Galenus mused, ‘when they’re so close to unearthing and destroying the Kerberos Seal?’
‘The problem, captain, is that the eldars’ ancient technomancy is still beyond our–’
Galenus tuned out the Librarian’s voice. The skull-headed Plague Marine was holding off his two attackers; they couldn’t seem to penetrate his defences. Galenus, however, had spotted that a patch of the armour between his ribs had rusted away, and that there was a fresh-looking, suppurating wound behind it.
He holstered his boltgun and drew his gladius. Like Terserus’s power fist, the short sword’s blade fizzed with energy. Of course, it was smaller and less powerful than the fist. However, at close quarters and in skilled hands – like the captain’s – it was a highly effective weapon.
With a forward lunge, he thrust his gladius into the Plague Marine’s side.
He was pleased to elicit a grunt from the traitor’s throat – the first sign of pain or weakness that he had displayed. Galenus stepped back and left the rest to his battle-brothers. He was thinking about what the Librarian had told him.
It was certainly an appealing notion, he thought, if they were to achieve their evil goal, the Death Guard had to win on two fronts, while the Ultramarines had only to beat them on one. It would mean he could forget about the southbound enemy forces. An appealing notion indeed…
‘But what if it’s the Death Guard who have made the wrong assumptions?’
‘Captain?’
‘What if we were right before and wrong now?’ Galenus asked. ‘We could win the battle here but lose the war. Can you guarantee that won’t happen? That, if we allow the Garm Seal to be destroyed, it won’t mean the end of everything?’
‘I have a team of Codicers consulting the Emperor’s Tarot as we speak to determine–’
‘I’ll take that as a “no”, then,’ said Galenus.
A death’s-head grenade exploded against Terserus’s armour, enveloping him in a pall of smoke but hardly shaking him. The skull-headed Plague Marine gave way to the inevitable at last, and was decapitated cleanly by Brother Filion’s chainsword.
Galenus voxed the sergeant in charge of his aerial forces. He asked him how many ships he could spare from the ongoing battle. With its greater speed, a Stormtalon could easily catch up to the southbound Chaos-controlled Thunderhawks, although its cannons would be little use against their near-impervious hulls.
‘I want them to run interference,’ Galenus explained. ‘Do whatever they can to slow those plague ships down. Whatever it takes.’
Next he voxed Fabian, ‘Contact the surviving members of the garrison at Fort Garm. Tell them to lay explosives throughout the building and to blow them the second they see the enemy coming. Let them dig for the Garm Seal too.’
He knew he was only buying time, at best. He just prayed that it might be time enough.
Chelaki felt better than he had in several hours. He was calmer, more focused. He had the wind in his face and he could finally breathe again.
The ground dropped away beneath his cockpit. Within seconds, the Ultramarines and the daemons fighting down there were little more than blue and grey specks to him, like icons on a hololithic projection.
He didn’t like the sound of his port engine, which was grumbling hoarsely. It must have been damaged in the crash-landing. He ought to have known that, but he had had neither the time nor the energy for his usual preflight checks.
No matter, he told himself. He didn’t need much more from the en
gines than they had already given him. They had already lifted him up here, back into the sky.
A vox-grille in one of his control panels crackled. A voice – the voice of another Ultramarine sergeant – addressed him by the call sign of his vessel and ordered him to identify himself. Chelaki complied, and at the same time he eased his joystick forwards and plunged into the midst of the ongoing aerial battle.
He pointed his nose at a cluster of giant flies and let rip with his twin-linked assault cannons. He pumped scores of rounds into the hideous creatures in a matter of seconds. A couple of flies survived, but he had shot away the wings of one of them. It could no longer keep its revolting bloated body aloft and was dropping like a stone.
The remaining fly flew at him with a furious buzz. Its mouth gaped open, wider than seemed physically possible. He remembered seeing one of these creatures on the ground. It had been slain, its stomach split open, and the partially digested corpse of a Space Marine had spilled out of it. Chelaki was only too painfully aware of his cockpit’s shattered glacis – he had nothing, no shielding, between him and his vengeful attacker.
He threw the Stormtalon into a sideways spin. The fly didn’t react to his sudden manoeuvre in time. Instead of landing on the flimsy framework of the cockpit canopy, it glanced off the hull and was stunned. A moment later, it burned and finally expired in the backwash of the starboard-side engine pod.
‘Welcome to the team, brother,’ said the sergeant’s voice from the vox-grille.
There were fewer Imperial ships in the air than Chelaki had expected, fewer than he had seen from the ground. It had seemed to him before that the battle was almost won. From up here, however, the odds looked a lot less favourable.
He glanced at his targeting auspex. He saw that two larger shapes with Imperial signatures – more Stormtalons – had broken off combat to fly southward. He didn’t know why and he didn’t ask. It wasn’t his business. At least they hadn’t been shot down, as he had briefly feared. ‘Glad to be of service, sergeant,’ Chelaki voxed.
He had picked up another large shape on the auspex – and this one was no ally. He slammed his joystick hard to the left and banked around. He swooped past another fly. Its rider hurled a grenade in his direction, but missed.
And now he saw it: the metal dragon, the daemon engine that had ripped him out of the sky once already. He was sure it was the one: its right wing had lost one of its metal panels. He had noticed that before, as his gunship was blistering in its infernal fire and his cockpit had crumpled around him.
The daemon’s wound didn’t seem to have slowed it down. It was jousting with another Stormtalon – and it was winning. It sideswiped the Imperial gunship with a claw, causing black smoke to pour out of its engine. This was it, thought Chelaki. He knew what he had to do now. He knew why the Emperor had kept him alive this long.
The other Stormtalon was already badly damaged; the blow to its engine must have been the final straw. The pilot ejected. It seemed like everything was happening in slow-motion. The Stormtalon spiralled towards the ground. Its former pilot was suspended in midair, in that fraction of a second before gravity took hold of him. The daemon engine was wheeling towards him again, throwing open its maw to release its searing hellfire.
And Chelaki’s thumb was poised over his missile launch rune.
The Typhoon missile launcher was underneath his cockpit. He felt the vibration through the soles of his boots as it spat out three rockets in quick succession. His hope was to ram them down the daemon’s open throat.
The first of the missiles flew wide. The daemon engine twisted out of the way of the second, but straight into the path of the third. It unleashed the stream of flames that had been meant for the falling pilot, and the warhead blew before the missile could reach its target. The daemon was battered and flung away by the shockwave, but – as far as the disappointed Chelaki could tell – it wasn’t damaged.
At least he had saved his brother pilot’s life. The jets in his seat were flaring to control his descent. He had also got the daemon engine’s attention.
He had already begun to take evasive action. He plunged into a nearby cloud bank and dived steeply. The daemon engine was faster and more manoeuvrable than Chelaki was. His only hope of shaking it off was to deny it line of sight on him.
Dropping out of the clouds, he saw the Death Guard’s tanks underneath him. There were over a dozen of them, plastered with filth, festooned with rotting bones and sprouting arcane weapons like swollen tumours. They were holding their ground in a line in front of Fort Kerberos. They were letting the Imperial invaders come to them, although a few of them were already straining forward, like wolves against a leash.
He was closer to the fort – closer to the warp rift – than he had thought. A little too close for comfort. Had any of those tanks had sky-strafing weaponry like the Imperial Hunters and Stalkers did, he would have made an irresistible target for them.
The daemon engine was above, still searching the clouds for him.
A fly and its rider came at him from the right, but Chelaki wasn’t interested in engaging either of them. He banked away from the arc of the rider’s swung blade – but the fly spat a plume of green goop in his direction, which he couldn’t evade.
His starboard engine pod took the worst of the spray. A second later, predictably, his instrument panels flared red with warning runes. In the meantime, he had outpaced the mutant fly easily enough. He fixed his true nemesis – the dragon, the daemon engine – in his gun sights, and he opened up his throttle.
The acid was eating its way through Chelaki’s starboard engine, while the damaged port engine couldn’t take the additional strain. He might have made an emergency landing – he might have – but for what purpose, he asked himself grimly?
For the second time today, his ship was done for – and so was he.
He could feel the infection coursing, burning its way through his veins.
Right now – if Chelaki could believe the whispered rumours – a new seed pod was ripening in Nurgle’s sickly garden. A budding daemon was leeching off his dwindling life force, weakening him further by the second. If he let the rot take him, then the daemon would have the rest of him. It would have his very soul.
There was only one certain way to stop it; one way to keep the disease from running its course and ensure that the daemon was stillborn.
Chelaki came up behind and beneath the daemon engine. At the instant that it heard his spluttering engines and began to turn, he hit it with everything he had.
The nightmare creature let out a terrible shriek. It tried in vain to twist and roll its way through an impossible gauntlet of exploding rounds. It was clipped by some, buffeted by the blasts of others. Its armour plating was scorched and cracked, but not shattered. The daemon made sure to protect its wounded wing, where it was most vulnerable.
Chelaki loosed off his Typhoon missiles, one after the other. There was no point in worrying about conserving his resources now. He scored a direct hit with his first shot, but missed with the second. The next two, he sent wide of the mark on purpose.
His opponent was finally looking hurt. It had lost more armour, exposing rotting purple flesh. One of the pinions on its right wing was broken, hanging limply. It wasn’t enough, and Chelaki had used up his element of surprise.
The daemon engine swooped low and came around, beating its left wing vigorously to compensate for its crippled right. Chelaki knew what it was trying to do, and against a lesser flyer it might have worked.
He had fired those Typhoon missiles wide for a reason: to give the daemon engine only one safe way to go. With the help of his auto-senses – but mostly, his years of training and combat experience – he had predicted its flight plan precisely.
His opponent sheared right as it pulled out of its dip, and if only Chelaki had fallen for its lure he would have been in serious trouble. No doubt, the
daemon engine had expected to catch him, side-on, in its sights. He could only imagine what the machine-creature felt as, instead, it found his Stormtalon screaming head-on towards it.
It couldn’t avoid a collision with him; there wasn’t time. The dragon threw open its mouth, and Chelaki found himself staring past its teeth and its coiling metal tongue. He saw the fireball building there, an instant before the searing flames streamed out towards him.
His starboard engine was bleeding promethium, which ignited – too late to save the fire-breather. Chelaki rammed his gunship at full speed down its throat, even as it exploded and he felt shrapnel tearing through his body.
His last thought was that he had done it. He had accomplished the task for which the Emperor had spared him: slain the daemon that had slain him in turn. A ghost’s revenge. He could think of no more fitting fate for a Doom Eagle.
He died fulfilled.
When Arkelius heard, he felt a brief twinge of disappointment. He suppressed it, of course, knowing it was an unworthy reaction.
He ought to have been gladdened – he was gladdened – by the annihilation of another foul daemon, another great victory won in the Emperor’s name. He passed on the news to his crew, who welcomed it unreservedly.
With the daemon engines gone, the Death Guard forces in the air suddenly found themselves outmatched. The few remaining Imperial Stormtalons made short work of several more flies, while even more were picked off by the Stalker tanks beneath them.
The Scourge fired off just one more Skyspear missile. It breezed past its target and looped around for a second run at it. In the meantime, however, the fly met its fate in a hail of cannon fire. By the time the Skyspear struck it, it was already dead and the missile, with its guiding intelligence, was sacrificed in vain.
Arkelius told Iunus to hold his fire and conserve their ammunition. He lowered his sights to survey the ground ahead of them. The battle was going the Imperium’s way there too; more slowly, but just as surely.
The one-eyed daemons had, for the most part, been dispensed with and Imperial casualties, while not exactly minimal, so far had been comparatively light. The Ultramarines certainly had the advantage of numbers now. Most of their remaining foes, however, were Plague Marines, and Arkelius knew better than to underestimate their strength.