Aves made sure he did not make eye contact with him. Although he and Kheed were the same age, the arrogant young officer was everything Aves was not. A high-born caste member from a hive world, the navigator looked down his nose at everyone but the captain, and strutted about Point November as if he expected a command of his own to appear by the Emperor’s grace. Kheed made no secret of the fact he thought of the crewman as less than a servant. Aves hated him almost as much as he hated Nilner.
Aves walked on past the fighter he had destroyed. The momentary elation he had felt at striking a blow against Terra’s enemies was gone now, faded like a distant memory. In its place remained only the dull pain from where Nilner had repeatedly struck him. It seemed that despite his actions, Aves still had no leniency to come after breaking the rules, and Nilner had been very clear on many occasions that Aves was not worthy to man a post aboard Griffon. The gunner seemed to have made it his life’s work to victimise him, and the other junior crewmen were content to let it happen, rather than risk being the target of the officer’s ire themselves. Aves kept to the shadows, hoping to avoid another confrontation with the gunner, slipping through pools of dark cast by the officers’ quarters.
‘–Aves.’
He froze as he heard his name spoken aloud. The voice came from Captain Vought’s private quarters. Aves moved closer and recognised the deep tones of Sorda, Griffon’s bombardier and Vought’s second-in-command. The crewman crouched down, afraid of discovery, but equally afraid of missing something vital in the conversation.
Inside the captain’s hut, Sorda was helping himself to a brackish local brandy from Vought’s private store. ‘You must admit he displayed quick thinking.’
Vought said nothing, and arched an aristocratic eyebrow in response. Sorda downed the drink in one jolt. In the half-light of the room, the bombardier’s bald head seemed to shine, the glow of the lamp glittering off the steel on his temple and his bulbous, bionic eye.
‘Crewmen are not trained to think,’ Vought said, his rich core-world accent adding gravity to every word. ‘Aves has ideas above his station. He must understand that the Emperor places His servants where they are needed, not where they want to be.’
‘You would rather he had let the heretic pass unchallenged?’ Sorda eyed the brandy bottle but thought better of it. ‘You may be correct, but why do you let Nilner treat the poor fool as a whipping boy? Aves does his job well, yet that thug berates and abuses him at every opportunity. And you allow it to go on.’
Vexation flickered on Vought’s face; he was not one to encourage the questioning of his orders. ‘Sorda, there are many other captains who would see your behaviour as insubordinate. Do you know why I tolerate your familiarity?’
The bombardier was not cowed. ‘Because you owe me your life twice over? Because we flew through hell together at the Tellus Marches and Ogre IV?’
Vought allowed himself the smallest of smiles. ‘No, Sorda. It is because that bionic eye of yours makes you the best bombardier in the squadron. But sometimes I wonder if you see a little too much with it.’
Sorda shrugged. ‘What I see is a poor wretch that the crew consider a joke of a man, a failure who lacks the spine to be a true soldier of the Emperor… And yet, when he serves the Imperium he is punished for it.’
The captain’s expression went cold again. ‘Griffon has the finest combat rating in the 404th, because I allow my men to do what they will as long as that battle record stays unblemished.’ He poured a little of the brandy for himself. ‘Nilner is a thug and a bully, but he keeps the gun crew in line. To maintain that, I’d let him beat Aves all day if need be. Only the mission matters, Sorda. If you ever lose sight of that, I’ll put you off my crew.’
Outside, Aves held his breath. Sorda had never spoken anything but clipped orders to him since he had been assigned to Griffon, and it surprised him to think the officer might actually show some compassion. He was still turning this over in his mind when a strident voice cried out his name, startling him.
‘What are you loitering around here for?’ Aves spun on his heel to confront Weslund, Griffon’s lascannon gunner. His sallow face was set with annoyance, and he gestured sharply at the crewman with his free hand, the other gripping a volume of Ministorium doctrine. Weslund advanced menacingly, the light of zealotry flaring in his eyes. ‘Spying, perhaps? Listening and skulking?’
Aves realised that the gunner must have just returned from his regular prayers at the base’s tiny chapel. Weslund was extremely pious and fervent in his devotion to the Golden Throne, given to seeing the taint of heresy in every corner.
‘I was just walking...‘ Aves fumbled at an answer, eyes downcast.
‘Lies trip off your tongue so easily!’ Weslund snapped.
The door to Captain Vought’s quarters opened, revealing Griffon’s commander and Sorda. ‘What is the meaning of this?’ Vought’s voice cut like an icy scalpel.
Weslund spoke before Aves could even think. ‘I discovered him hiding outside your door, sir, eavesdropping.’
Vought gave Aves a hard stare. ‘Is this true, crewman?’
Aves shook his head, his cheeks reddening, unable to speak.
‘Nilner was too lenient with him, captain. The fool is corrupted, I’m sure of it. He should be shot as a traitor!’
‘Weslund, Aves shot down a suicide flyer. He’s no heretic,’ Sorda said. The lasgunner’s manner exasperated the bombardier.
‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. He may have been trying to silence–’
‘Enough of this prattle!’ Vought growled. ‘While I admire your zeal in searching for immorality, you will not find it among my crewmen, Mister Weslund. Understand?’
The gunner closed his mouth with an audible snap and nodded.
‘As for you, crewman,’ Vought flicked a glance at Sorda, ‘if you were listening at my door, you’ll take another hiding from Nilner in punishment.’
Aves felt the blood drain from his face, seeing Nilner in his mind’s eye, the big man grinning as he laid into him.
‘Captain, if I may,’ Sorda broke in, tapping his bionic eye. ‘If Aves had been loitering outside, I would have seen his heat trace with my optics.’ He made a show of looking around. ‘I saw no such trace,’ Sorda lied.
Vought gave the bombardier a measuring look, then nodded. ‘Very well. You men are dismissed. We have a mission at dawn and I expect you to be ready.’ The captain slammed shut the door of his cabin and Weslund took the cue to walk away, giving Aves a lingering sneer as he shouldered past him.
After a moment, Sorda addressed Aves in a quiet voice. ‘You did well today, lad, but take some advice. Keep to yourself. You’ll live longer.’
Aves nodded jerkily. Sorda’s were the first words of encouragement he could ever remember hearing from a superior officer.
The interior of Point November’s operations bunker was dingy and grim, an array of seated men gazing into auspex screens or buried in scanner hoods. In the centre of the room was a chart table sporting a map covering the whole of the peninsula around the base. Even from a few feet away, Aves could see that the red tide of markers denoting heretic forces was slowly consuming the Imperial-held zone. A tactical officer moved a set of symbols closer to the enemy line, the tags represented the 404th’s bombers.
‘Aves, lad,’ Dolenz beckoned him over. ‘Don’t stand in the way there.’
The crewman did as he was asked. Dolenz gave him a weak smile as he approached. Aves forced himself not to look below the old man’s waist; where his legs should have been there were two spindly bionic replacements. Their steel exteriors made them seem like arcane metal bones grafted from an iron skeleton. The sight of Dolenz’s disability always made Aves feel uncomfortable, but the old soldier seemed not to notice. He handed Dolenz a small jar of machine lubricant, secreted from the aircraft stores.
‘Here you are. Enough for another few weeks.�
�
Dolenz took the jar with a crack-toothed smile and daubed a little of the fluid on his leg joints. ‘Good boy. I’d have rusted stiff long ago if not for you.’
Aves looked around, listening to the mumbled litany of battle prayer and communications chatter. ‘How goes the mission?’
Dolenz nodded at his auspex screen, the green display shimmering like a tank of stagnant water. ‘Close now. Griffon is on target, with Basilisk in support.’
Aves took this in with a nod. Basilisk was Captain Marko’s Marauder, a good crew with a record almost equalling Griffon’s. He rubbed a hand over his brow; it was blood-warm in the bunker and the crewman was sweating.
‘I heard what you did last night,’ Dolenz said. ‘Terra be proud, you were sharp and no mistake.’
‘I was just lucky.’
‘Luck?’ The old soldier’s face screwed up in dismay. ‘No such thing. Some say I was lucky when I got shot down and lived to tell the tale.’ He tapped a finger on his metal legs. ‘I don’t call having these pieces of iron welded to me lucky.’ Dolenz gave a heavy sigh. ‘Matters little, anyway. We’ll quit this piece of dirt soon enough.’
Aves gave him a quizzical look. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You wouldn’t have heard, would you?’ The sensor operator looked around to see if any officers were listening to their conversation. ‘There’s talk, lad. A retreat is in the offing. We’ll give up this forsaken piece of turf and let the Adeptus Astartes take the lead instead.’
‘Space Marines? Here? But what about the base?’
Dolenz shrugged. ‘Probably be abandoned. If the rumours are true, mind.’
Aves tried to assimilate this new piece of information. The sudden idea of the unknown left him with a jumble of excitement and fear.
‘Here, lad, it’s starting,’ hissed Dolenz, as the comm-channels came to life. ‘They’re in sight of the mark.’
‘Point November base, Griffon,’ Vought’s voice issued out of the air. ‘Commencing attack.’
Clouds of flak thrown up from guns on the ground burst about Griffon in dark spheres of smoke, opening like deadly black poppies. Vought dismissed them, concentrating on steering the fully laden Marauder through streams of bright red tracer, spat into the sky from Hydra anti-aircraft batteries that had been captured by heretic units. Every few moments, a brilliant white flash on the ground signalled the launch of a massive Manticore missile, prompting the captain to trigger a flare shell or chaff cylinder from a control on his yoke. Vought could see the ground as a seething carpet of armoured vehicles and enemy soldiers, all of them pouring weapons fire into the bomber’s path. The air was his medium, and he was master of it, powering the massive tonnage of the Marauder through the flak and into the kill-zone.
‘Griffon, Basilisk. You’re three o’clock low,’ Captain Marko’s voice said in his ear. ‘I have the lead.’
‘Copy, Basilisk. We’ll follow you in,’ Vought replied, then switched to Griffon’s intercom channel. ‘Sorda, arm the weapons. Open the bay.’ A red indicator glyph on Vought’s console glowed, indicating the bombardier’s readiness, and across the ventral hull of the bomber, heavy metal doors yawned open revealing a tightly packed payload of ten spin-stabilised, gravity-assisted bombs. Each of the warheads contained two hundred kilos of dense high explosive compound and an iridium penetrator fuse, designed to pierce through enemy armour before detonating. From the nose turret, Weslund began to sing a hymn about blood and fire, his reedy voice carrying through the fuselage.
In the weapons bay Sorda gave the bombs a smile, like a proud parent about to send a child out into the world. He had chalked a devotional message on every one of the grey cases; the closest one bore the words ‘The Emperor’s Might Knows no Boundaries’ in his precise Gothic hand. He glanced down through the open hatch, watching shot and shell flash by beneath Griffon’s wings.
Vought saw a flare of power from Basilisk’s engines and the other Marauder dipped down towards the centre of the heretic army. Griffon shivered violently as a flak shell blew close by, spent shrapnel clattering off the wing. The aircraft commander sighted down over the nose, past the lascannon turret. For a moment, Vought thought his eyes had deceived him; there appeared to be a grounded starship down there in the mud, a flat expanse of hull like a beached steel whale. What he saw was the mobile command post of the heretics, a colossal land leviathan easily the size of an Imperial frigate. Great tracks and spiked wheels churned at mud and earth, labouring the vehicle forward, flattening hills and uprooting woodlands before it. And there at the very centre of it, beckoning Vought like a target on a range, was a hideous grinning skull set upon a star.
At the sight of it, Weslund spat a foul curse over the intercom and began to babble in dark, stentorian tones, breaking his litany every few moments with a discharge from his cannons.
Basilisk swooped down over the prow of the leviathan, jinking from side to side to dodge tracer spat from Hydra batteries. ‘Ready. Ready,’ said Marko. ‘Drop–’
The bomber’s commander never finished his sentence; a vibrant laser flare tore into Basilisk from the eye of the skull and cut down the middle. The aircraft’s fuel reservoir tore open and exploded, instantly flashing the bomber to ash.
‘Emperor’s blood!’ Weslund gasped.
Vought set his jaw and pushed the yoke forward, mirroring Basilisk’s attack run. All about him, he heard the bomber’s bolter turrets chatter as Nilner and Stoi raked the enemy with punishing salvos. He would only have seconds before the leviathan would be able to recharge the massive lascannon for another shot.
‘Ready. Ready,’ Vought called.
Sorda made a sign of supplication to the Golden Throne and gripped the release switch, pressing his eye to the sightglass.
‘Drop.’ The instant the captain’s command left his lips, Sorda slammed the knife switch down and with a well-oiled whirr of machinery, the clamps holding the bombs in place opened in perfect order. Each of the weapons shrieked as it dropped out of the bomb bay and into the fast-flowing air, the wind whistling through the fusing propeller and steering vanes. The bombs struck hard across the leviathan’s hull in bright flares of flame.
Vought poured power into Griffon’s engines and pulled back on the yoke, arcing the aircraft up and away from the target site. He allowed himself a sneer at the heretic’s expense as the laser cannon cracked through the air where the Marauder had just been. ‘Too slow,’ he whispered, from behind his breather mask.
As the flyer turned outbound, Vought’s concentration returned to threading the bomber through the storm of anti-aircraft fire. Almost as an afterthought, he toggled the intercom. ‘Stoi, report,’ he demanded from the tail gunner. ‘Target status?’
When the weapons officer didn’t reply straight away, Vought felt a flicker of irritation. ‘Stoi, wake up! What is the status of the target?’
Every crewman on Griffon was surprised when the gunner gave a terse, single word response. ‘Undamaged.’
Kilometres from the combat, Aves and Dolenz exchanged glances. ‘What does that mean?’ said the crewman. ‘The bombs misfired?’
Dolenz shook his head. ‘Nothing like that. That great bloody tank, I’ll warrant it’ll take more than standard ordnance and cordite to crack it.’
Aves fell silent as Vought’s commands echoed out from the faraway bomber.
The captain turned to call down into the fuselage below the cockpit. ‘Kheed, get down there and confirm Stoi’s sighting. I want to know if there were secondary explosions, anything.’
Without looking to see if his orders were being followed, Vought flicked to the main comm-channel and relayed a warning about the leviathan’s lascannon, but the remainder of the 404th were still caught in the flak, fighting to stay on course and bomb the living hell out of the heretics below them.
Kheed reached the hatch to Stoi’s turret and cranked it open.
The albino gunner said nothing, and handed him a pair of ageing field glasses, stabbing one bony finger at the smoke-wreathed horizon below. The navigator searched for the steel deck of the land leviathan and found it. Smoke poured from massive chimneys along its spine, and tracer fire arced skyward from myriad guns along its armoured hide, but no flames or structural damage were evident, beyond a few pits and dents across the face of the grinning skull.
The navigator keyed the intercom and spoke in a flat, toneless voice. ‘Target remains, captain. Confirming, status is undamaged.’
Vought’s lip curled in annoyance and he pitched the Marauder round in a harsh wingover, determined to see the leviathan for himself. ‘A force field, Kheed?’ he snapped.
‘Negative. Sir, they must have armour as thick as a battle cruiser to shrug off a strike like that.’
‘Indeed,’ Vought fumed quietly. The intelligence reports from Imperial Guard on the ground had mentioned nothing of this, and now the squadron had lost aircraft in an attack that would have failed even if the enemy crew were blind or asleep. The captain decided that there would be harsh words spoken with his Guard counterparts on return to Point November.
‘Incoming!’ Nilner’s rough shout cut through Vought’s train of thought. ‘Lightnings, coming out of the suns!’
The pilot turned the bomber hard to port and flicked a glance upward. He saw a trio of bat-winged fighters vectoring in on their position. ‘Gunners, target and annihilate! Sweep the heretic scum out of the sky!’
Nilner pedalled his turret around to follow the lead fighter as it swooped down on Griffon. His big, sweaty hands enveloped the firing grips and squeezed. In answer, the heavy bolter screamed death into the flashing shape of the seized Lightning. The massive bolts tore through the engine cowlings of the flyer and shattered the glass cockpit, turning the interior into a red ruin. Nilner grunted his approval and turned the turret around, looking for another kill.
The gunner had been quick to spot the trio of interceptors, and true to the training doctrine that had been drilled into him, Nilner concentrated his attention on the most immediate targets. Consequently, he never saw the fourth Lightning, hanging back from the trio, as it emerged from the brightness of Rocene’s twin suns. As Griffon turned to avoid the laser trails from its surviving squadmates, the other fighter tore over the nose of the Marauder, triggering a long burst from the autocannon mounted on its chin. The first burst struck the number three engine, which blasted out a cascade of flame and broken turbine blades before choking into silence.
On Wings of Blood Page 42