On Wings of Blood

by Warhammer 40K

  The clouds were thinning even as the raging storm of gunfire increased. The bomber dropped into the attack slope towards the heretic’s mobile base, and Aves could see where a near miss from an Atlas had run it aground. A second hit would kill the big machine once and for all, cutting out the heart of the apostate forces. Aves felt his fear wane as a cold, clinical calm came over him. The certainty, the rightness of purpose he had felt on the runway was in him once again, and he heard Captain Vought’s words echo in his mind: ‘He must understand that the Emperor places His servants where they are needed.’

  Aves nodded to himself. This was where he had been destined to be. Griffon was shuddering all around him, electrical arcs jumping from component to component, the burnt tang of sizzling plastics mingling with the stink of hot metal; and then he heard the voice. A single word.

  ‘Aves…’ The captain poured a lifetime of agony into his name.

  In an instant, the crewman had vaulted out of his seat and dropped into the fuselage; he dashed past the hatch to the bomb bay, barely registering Sorda’s body sprawled across the floor there, blackened shreds where his chest had been. Aves pulled himself up the ladder rungs and into the cramped cockpit. The handholds were slippery with liquid, and the crewman felt his gorge rise as he realised it was Vought’s blood.

  ‘Captain…’

  Vought held one hand pressed to his throat, fingers wet around a knife of glass embedded in his larynx. His face was bathed in red light cast from a dozen warning glyphs on the console before him. ‘Boy. Listen.’ He spoke in ragged gasps. ‘Can’t launch… Atlas… Too much damage.’ Griffon bucked as a shell chewed a lump out of her wing. Vought nodded at him. ‘Take over.’

  Aves did not question the order, quickly unstrapping the pilot from his couch. Released, Vought slipped to the floor of the cockpit, barely breathing. Aves took the captain’s place, feeling pools of vital fluid soaking into his flight suit.

  Beyond the cockpit window, the land leviathan was growing to fill the horizon, the plume of smoke emerging from its cracked hull like an arrow in its side.

  Aves reached forward and flipped the arming switch for the Atlas from safe to active setting. ‘Ready, sir.’

  ‘Good lad.’ With painful effort, Vought forced himself up and held out his hands. ‘Take this. Quickly, now.’

  The captain placed a blood-stained emblem in Aves’ trembling hand, an age-yellowed skull framed with skeletal wings. The crewman ran his finger over them, caressing the careworn bone carving.

  ‘Earn them, lad. You know what must be done,’ Vought coughed. ‘Wear them with honour.’

  The crewman turned Griffon into the face of the gunfire, pinning the bone wings to his chest; then he reached for the throttle and pushed the Marauder’s engines to the redline.

  Griffon fell into the leviathan like a spear thrown by the Machine-God Himself, and in the glorious firestorm of her sacrifice, the heretics knew the wrath of the Imperium’s most steadfast souls.

  About the Authors

  Matt Westbrook has written The Realmgate Wars: Bladestorm for Age of Sigmar, and the novel Medusan Wings for Warhammer 40,000. He lives and works in Nottingham.

  Gav Thorpe is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Deliverance Lost, Angels of Caliban and Corax, as well as the novella The Lion, which formed part of the New York Times bestselling collection The Primarchs, and several audio dramas. He has written many novels for Warhammer 40,000, including Ashes of Prospero, Imperator: Wrath of the Omnissiah and the Rise of the Ynnari novels Ghost Warrior and Wild Rider. He also wrote the Path of the Eldar and Legacy of Caliban trilogies, and two volumes in The Beast Arises series. For Warhammer, Gav has penned the End Times novel The Curse of Khaine, the Warhammer Chronicles omnibus The Sundering, and much more besides. In 2017, Gav won the David Gemmell Legend Award for his Age of Sigmar novel Warbeast. He lives and works in Nottingham.

  E J Davies, currently of Ottawa, is a writer, reviewer and gamer. When not wrangling words, in the curling rink, or supporting the losing side – still not convinced it was the wrong one – E J can be found teaching chemistry or buried in one of his other diverse hobbies. ‘Sturmhex’ is his first story for Black Library.

  J C Stearns is a writer who lives in a swamp in Illinois with his wife and son, as well as more animals than is reasonable. He started writing for Black Library in 2016 and is the author of the short story ‘Wraithbound’, as well as ‘Turn of the Adder’, included in the anthology Inferno! Volume 2 and ‘The Marauder Lives’, in the Horror anthology Maledictions. He plays Salamanders, Dark Eldar, Sylvaneth, and as soon as he figures out how to paint lightning bolts, Night Lords.

  Matt Smith is one of Black Library’s newest authors, and the Warhammer 40,000 short story ‘In Service Eternal’ is his first. He is based in Norwich and spends his spare time working on his Raven Guard army and training in martial arts.

  Alec Worley is a well-known comics and science fiction and fantasy author, with numerous publications to his name. He is an avid fan of Warhammer 40,000 and has written many short stories for Black Library including ‘Stormseeker’, ‘Whispers’ and ‘Repentia’. He has recently forayed into Black Library Horror with the audio drama Perdition’s Flame and his novella The Nothings, featured in the anthology Maledictions. He lives and works in London.

  Nicholas Alexander has written the Astra Militarum short story ‘The Trophy’ and the Imperial Navy story ‘The Emperor’s Grace’. He lives and works in Cambridge, UK, and is a huge Space Wolves fan.

  Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Titandeath, Wolfsbane and Pharos, the Primarchs novels Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter, Corax: Lord of Shadows, Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia, and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Dark Imperium, Dark Imperium: Plague War, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Baneblade, Shadowsword, Valedor and Death of Integrity. He has also written Throneworld and The Beheading for The Beast Arises series. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

  Cavan Scott is the author of the Space Marine Battles novella Plague Harvest, along with the Warhammer 40,000 short stories ‘Doom Flight’, ‘Trophies’, ‘Sanctus Reach: Death Mask’, ‘Flayed’ and ‘Logan Grimnar: Defender of Honour’. He lives and works in Bristol.

  Author of the Path of the Dark Eldar series and the related novella The Masque of Vyle, along with the Necromunda novel Survival Instinct and a host of short stories, Andy Chambers has more than twenty years’ experience creating worlds dominated by war machines, spaceships and dangerous aliens. He lives and works in Nottingham.

  James Swallow is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Fear to Tread and Nemesis, which both reached the New York Times bestseller lists. Also for the Horus Heresy, he has written The Flight of the Eisenstein, The Buried Dagger and a series of audio dramas featuring the character Nathaniel Garro, the prose versions of which have now been collected into the anthology Garro. For Warhammer 40,000, he is best known for his four Blood Angels novels, the audio drama Heart of Rage, and his two Sisters of Battle novels. His short fiction has appeared in Legends of the Space Marines and Tales of Heresy.

  An extract from Double Eagle.

  Over the Makanites, 06.32

  In the side rush of dawn, the peaks glowed pink, like some travesty of a fondant celebration cake. Hard shadows infilled the cavities like ink. Streamers of white cloud strung out in the freezing air three thousand metres below.

  Hunt Leader was just a cruciform speck in the bright air ahead. He started to turn, ten degrees to the north-west. Darrow tilted the stick, following, rolling. The horizon swung up and the world moved around. Slowly, slowly. He heard the knocking sound and ignored it.

  At least the i
nclinometer was still working. As he came around and levelled the column, Darrow reached forward and flicked the brass dial of the fuel gauge again. It still read full, which couldn’t be right. They’d been up for forty-eight minutes.

  He took off a gauntlet and flicked the gauge once more with his bare fingers. He felt sure the lined mitten had been dulling his blows.

  The dial remained at full.

  He saw how pinched and blue his hand had become, and pulled the gauntlet back on quickly. It felt balmy in his insulated flightsuit, but the cabin temp-stat read minus eight.

  There was no sound, except for the background rush of the jet stream. Darrow looked up and around, remembering to maintain his visual scanning. Just sky. Sundogs flaring in his visor. Hunt Three just abeam of him, a silhouette, trailing vapour.

  The altimeter read six thousand metres.

  The vox gurgled. ‘Hunt Leader to Hunt Flight. One pass west and we turn for home. Keep formation tight.’

  They made another lazy roll. The landscape rose up in his port vision. Darrow saw brittle flashes of light far below. Artillery fire in the mountain passes.

  He heard the knocking again. It sounded as if someone was crouching behind the frame of his armoured seat, tapping the internal spars with a hammer. Pulsejets always made a burbling, flatulent noise, but this didn’t seem right to him.

  He keyed his vox. ‘Hunt Leader, this is Hunt Four. I’ve–’

  There was a sudden, loud bang. The vox channel squealed like a stabbed pig.

  The world turned upside down.

  ‘Oh God-Emperor! Oh crap! God-Emperor!’ a voice was shouting. Darrow realised it was his own. G-force pummelled him. His Commonwealth K4T Wolfcub was tumbling hard.

  Light and dark, sky and land, up and over, up and over. Darrow choked back nausea and throttled down desperately. The vox was incoherent with frantic chatter.

  ‘Hunt Four! Hunt Four!’

  Darrow regained control somehow and levelled. He had lost at least a thousand metres. He got the horizon true and looked around in the vain hope of seeing someone friendly. Then he cried out involuntarily as something fell past his nose cone.

  It was a Wolfcub, one wing shorn off in a cascade of torn struts and body plate. Flames were sucking back out of its pulsejet. It arced down and away like a comet, trailing smoke as it went spinning towards the ground. It became a speck. A smaller speck. A little blink of light.

  Darrow felt his guts tighten and acid frothed inside him. Fear, like a stink, permeated the little cockpit.

  Something else flashed past him.

  Just a glimpse, moving so fast. There and gone. A memory of recurve wings.

  ‘Hunt Four! Break! Break and turn! There’s one right on you!’

  Darrow leaned on the stick and kicked the rudder. The world rolled again.

  He put his nose up and throttled hard. The Wolfcub bucked angrily and the knocking came again.

  Throne of Earth. He’d thought his bird had malfunctioned, but it wasn’t that at all. They’d been stung.

  Darrow leant forward against the harness and peered out of his cockpit dome. The aluminoid skin of his right wing was holed and torn. Hell’s-teeth, he’d been shot.

  He pushed the stick forward to grab some thrust, then turned out left in a hard climb.

  The dawn sky was full of smoke: long strings of grey vapour and little black blooms that looked like dirty cotton. Hunt Flight’s formation had broken apart and they were scattering across the heavens. Darrow couldn’t even see the bats.

  No, that wasn’t true. He made one, bending in to chase Hunt Five, tracer fire licking from its gunpods.

  He rolled towards it, flipping the scope of his reflector sight into position before resting his thumb on the stick-top stud that activated the quad cannons in the nose.

  The bat danced wildly across the glass reticule of the gunsight. It refused to sit.

  Darrow cursed and began to utter a prayer to the God-Emperor of Mankind to lift his wings and make his aim true. He waggled the stick, pitching, rolling, trying to correct, but the more he tried, the more the bat slipped wildly off the gunsight to one side or the other.

  There was a little smoky flash ahead, and suddenly Darrow’s Wolfcub was riding through a horizontal pelt of black rain.

  Not rain. Oil. Then debris. Pieces of glittering metal, buckled machine parts, shreds of aluminoid. Darrow cried out in surprise as the oil washed out his forward view. He heard the pattering impact of the debris striking off his nose plate and wing faces. The bat had chalked Hunt Five and Darrow was running in through the debris stream. Any large piece of wreckage would hole him and kill him as surely as cannon-fire. And if so much as a demi-mil cog went down the intake of his pulsejet…

  Darrow wrenched on the stick and came nose-up. Light returned as he came out of the smoke belt, and slipstream flowed the oil away off his canopy. It ran in quivering lines, slow and sticky, like blood.

  Almost immediately, he had to roll hard to port to avoid hitting another Cub head on. He heard a strangled cry over the vox. The little dark-green interceptor filled his field of view for a second and then was gone back over his shoulder.

  His violent roll had been too brutal. He inverted for a moment and struggled to right himself as the mountains spread out overhead. That knocking again. That damn knocking. He was bleeding speed now, and the old pulse-engines of the K4T’s had a nasty habit of flaming out if the airflow dropped too sharply. He began to nurse it up and round, gunning the engine as hard as he dared. Two planes rushed by, so fast he didn’t have time to determine their type, then another three went perpendicular across his bow. They were all Wolfcubs. One was venting blue smoke in a long, chuffing plume.

  ‘Hunt Leader! Hunt Leader!’ Darrow called. Two of the Cubs were already climbing away out of visual. The sun blinded him. The third, the wounded bird, was diving slowly, scribing the sky with its smoke.

  He saw the bat clearly then. At his two, five hundred metres, dropping in on the Cub it had most likely already mauled. For the first time in his four weeks of operational flying, Darrow got a good look at the elusive foe. It res­embled a long, sharp, elongated axe-head, the cockpit set far back above the drive at the point where the bow of the blade-wings met. A Hell Razor-class Interceptor, the cream of the Archenemy’s air force. In the dispersal room briefs, they’d talked about these killers being blood red or matt black, but this was pearl-white, like ice, like alabaster. The canopy was tinted black, like a dark eye-socket in a polished skull.

  Darrow had expected to feel fear, but he got a thrill of adrenaline instead. He leaned forward, hunched down in the Wolfcub’s armoured cockpit, and opened the throttle, sweeping in on the bat’s five. It didn’t appear to have seen him. It was lining up, leisurely, on the wounded Cub.

  He flipped the toggle switch. Guns live.

  Closing at three hundred metres. Darrow rapidly calculated his angle of deflection, estimated he’d have to lead his shot by about five degrees. God-Emperor, he had it…

  He thumbed the firing stud. The Wolfcub shuddered slightly as the cannons lit up. He saw flash-flames licking up from under the curve of the nose cone. He heard and felt the thump of the breechblocks.

  The bat had gone.

  He came clear, pulling a wide turn at about two hundred and seventy kilometres an hour. The engagement had been over in an instant. Had he killed it? He sat up into the clear blister of the canopy like an animal looking out of its burrow, craning around. If he’d hit it, surely there would be smoke?

  The only smoke he could see was about a thousand metres above in the pale blue sky where the main portion of the dogfight was still rolling.

  He turned. First rule of air combat: take a shot and pull off. Never stick with a target, never go back. That made you a target.

  But still he had to know. He had to.

  He dipped
his starboard wing, searching the peaks below for a trace of fire.

  Nothing.

  Darrow levelled off.

  And there it was. Right alongside him.

  He cried out in astonishment. The bat was less than a wing’s breadth away, riding along in parallel with him. There was not a mark on its burnished white fuselage.

  It was playing with him.

  Panic rose inside pilot cadet Enric Darrow. He knew his valiant little Cub could neither outrun nor out-climb the Hell Razor. He throttled back hard, and threw on his speed brakes, hoping the sudden manoeuvre would cause the big machine to overshoot him.

  For a moment, it vanished. Then it was back, on his other side, copying his brake-dive. Darrow swore. The Hell Razor-class were vector-thrust planes. He was so close to it that he could see the reactive jet nozzles on the belly under the blade-wings. It could out-dance any conventional jet, viffing, braking, even pulling to a near-hover.

  Darrow refused to accept he was out-classed, refused to admit he was about to die. He twisted the stick, kicked the rudder right over and went into the deepest dive he dared execute. Any deeper, and the Wolfcub’s wings would shear off its airframe.

  The world rushed up, filling his vision. He heard the pulsejet screaming. He saw the glory of the mountains ascending to meet him. His mountains. His world. The world he had joined up to save.

  Behind him, the pearl-white enemy machine tucked in effortlessly and followed him down.

  Theda MAB North, 07.02

  Sometimes – times like this perfect dawn, for instance – it amused August Kaminsky to play a private game. The game was called ‘pretend there isn’t a war’.

  It was relatively easy in some respects. It was quiet, and the night chill was giving way to a still cool as the sunrise came up over the city. From where he sat, he could see the wide bay, hazy in the morning mist, and the sea beyond it, blue-grey, glittering. The city of Theda itself – a mix of pale rockcrete towers, low-rise hab-stacks and pylon steeples – was peaceful and quiet, huddled on the wide headland in a quaint, antiquated manner, as it had done for twenty-nine centuries. Sea birds wheeled overhead, which spoiled it slightly, because he envied them their wings and their freedom, but still, at these times, it was easy to play the game.