SABBAT WAR

by Edited by Dan Abnett

  ‘Well,’ comes Himura’s voice, ‘It’s a good thing we’ve got the death wish.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ Ido replies, flatly.

  ‘We’ll only get one shot,’ Mosi says. ‘So make it count.’

  Daire acknowledges in time with the others. Waits for the words.

  ‘Death from above, Reaper.’

  Daire pitches the Spirit over, dust lashing against the cockpit armaglass as the mass carrier grows to fill his field of view. The rest of Reaper are just shadows on either side of him. Lost to the grey. But then Daire catches sight of something else out there in the clouds. Something massive, shifting in the murk. For an instant, he thinks it’s one of the bombed-out towers collapsing, but then he realises it isn’t falling away. It’s getting closer.

  ‘Incoming!’ Daire yells over the vox as the something erupts through the dust towards him. It’s a machine. A monster. A brass serpent, one hundred storeys high with armour-plated coils and massive, mechanical jaws. As those jaws yawn wide, a name rushes up inside Daire that he thought he’d left behind long ago. Buried, on Balhaut, along with everything else.

  Woe machine.

  Daire rolls the Spirit messily aside as a column of laser fire erupts from the woe machine’s jaws with a deafening, animal shriek. The laser catches the very edge of the Spirit’s wing, tearing away chunks of armour plating and slamming Daire sideways in his flight seat. He feels his bones flex and his harness cut into his chest. His head crashes against something, hard. For an instant Daire is blind all over again, his vision burned white by the laser and streaked dark with blood. He drags the Spirit’s nose up, banking back over the woe machine as it rushes beneath him, brass armour blurring. Daire sights on the rest of Reaper through stinging, streaming eyes as the laser spears out for a second time. Mosi yells something over the vox. A single word.

  Break.

  The command comes too late. Ido and Himura vanish under the white-hot glare of the woe machine’s laser cannon, leaving nothing behind but smoke. Mosi is cursing now. Railing against the machine. But Daire finds that he can’t speak. Can’t move, or blink. He is frozen. Overcome by the smell of smoke and ash. By a memory he thought he’d lost. Another world. A bitter winter. Empty streets, stalked by terrible machines. Running with others, then running alone. Looking back to see them lying there.

  Blood, on stone.

  Daire blinks. He glances down at the woe machine as it slides beneath him, coiling for another strike. Then he opens the vox-channel to Mosi.

  ‘I’m going after it,’ he says.

  ‘Bas,’ Mosi replies, urgently. ‘Don’t be a fool!’

  Daire shakes his head. He smiles, though Mosi can’t see him. ‘I said no promises.’

  Daire tips the Spirit over her starboard wing as the woe machine’s jaws hinge wide beneath him, a stark white light growing inside. He burns hard towards it, surrounded by the furious bellow of the Lightning. It should terrify him, like the drop should have. Like carrying the death wish should have. But Daire doesn’t feel afraid, staring into the monster’s maw. He feels exactly as he has always felt while flying.

  Alive.

  The woe machine fires and Daire snaps the Spirit over into a corkscrewing roll, spiralling around the white-hot column of light. The Lightning howls, temperature alarums blaring. Instruments fail, and the cockpit armaglass cracks in its setting. Daire doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t blink. He holds his course as the laser gutters out, falling between the woe machine’s brass teeth and into its clockwork throat. It’s dark inside the machine. Black as the void. Daire can’t see a thing, save for the system lumens flickering on the Spirit’s console. All red, save for one. He rests his thumb against the trigger switch for the incendiary mounted on the Lightning’s undercarriage.

  ‘Death wish, away,’ Daire says, and he presses the switch, feeling the Lightning judder as the heavy ordnance releases. For a moment, nothing happens. Daire wonders if it was a dud. Then there is a colossal, bone-jarring boom. Explosion pressure slams into the Spirit from below, and Daire’s vision fills with fire. His ears ring with the sound of shearing metal. Not just from the woe machine, but from the Spirit, too. Alarums scream in Daire’s ears as he hammers the afterburners, rocketing clear of the woe machine as it tears apart along its length. The Spirit tumbles clear of the collapsing machine, her wings in tatters, her armour split and sloughing away. The cockpit is full of choking, black smoke. Daire’s eyes are full of blood. He can hardly see the ground as it rushes up to meet him. The Spirit meets the surface of Lyubov with a terrible, grinding crash. Armaglass breaks. Metal buckles. And everything goes black.

  There’s a cold wind blowing. It is snowing, too. Daire can feel it on his face. He opens his eyes slowly and finds himself staring up at a stormy sky. There are motes of fire drifting down slowly with the snow, little pieces of gold against the grey. Rubble shifts slowly at his back. He smells of smoke and ash. Blood, and stone.

  ‘I’m home,’ Daire murmurs, into the freezing air.

  ‘Not quite,’ says a familiar voice. A smiling voice. Daire blinks, his eyelids sticking. He realises that the rubble isn’t shifting. He is. Mosi sets him down gently, and slides into a sitting position on the rubble beside him. The flight lieutenant is cut and bruised, his jacket scorched black.

  ‘Thought you were dead,’ Mosi says.

  ‘So did I,’ Daire says. He tries to laugh, but only manages a cough. Tries to sit up, but only gets halfway before Mosi stops him. His hands are scorched, too, just like his jacket. It’s as though he plunged them into a fire.

  ‘Don’t bloody move,’ Mosi says. ‘There’s a medicae coming.’

  Daire shakes his head. It makes him dizzy. ‘What happened to the carrier?’

  ‘It’s right in front of you,’ Mosi says.

  It takes Daire a moment to see the carrier amongst the ruin. The colossal tracks, unspooled and smoking. The twisted spars of adamantium, jutting up from the rubble.

  ‘You killed it.’

  ‘The woe machine’s death did half the work. All I had to do was finish it.’ Mosi smiles, ruefully. ‘Cleaning up after you, again.’

  Daire is only half-listening, because he has spotted the Spirit, too. Or more precisely, what is left of her. The Lightning is a wreck, her armour plating peeled away and her airframe buckled along the spine. She is blackened, nose to tail. Burning, slowly.

  ‘Throne,’ he says, absently. ‘What a mess.’

  Mosi looks too. ‘It’s a hell of a crash, Bas,’ he says. ‘You must be blessed, to survive something like that.’

  Daire puts his hand inside his flight jacket and takes out the silver crown. He looks at it sitting there on the flat of his hand. One shiny thing amongst all of the muck.

  Daire shakes his head.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Just lucky, I guess.’

  03

  THE POLAR EXPANSE, TYGRIS.

  784.M41.

  The lock on the reserve hangar is frozen shut, so Avery has to smash it off. The pilot officer uses the butt of her sidearm to do it, as stupid as that is. But then, all of this is stupid. A small part of her knows that. That she’ll be written up for what she’s about to do. Lashed, or locked up. Shot, maybe. But that doesn’t seem to matter. Nothing does, any more. The lock gives with a hard snap, and Avery drags open the sliding door of the hangar. It sticks a little, frozen too. Everything is, except Avery. She’s running on anger and agony and the better part of a bottle of Colt’s fire-whisky. He’d be furious if he knew she finished it without him. But he’ll never know now, because he’s in pieces at the bottom of the Verglas Gorge, just like the others.

  Dead.

  There’s only one bird on deck. The Lightning glowers in the dark. She is old and battered, the armour a patchwork of refit panels and primer. She has no name. Just a serial number. Ten-twelve. But the Lightning is still in one piece, and that’s all Avery needs. She limps over to the interceptor and sets about loosing the flight locks. Each one takes se
veral tries, thanks to the fire-whisky and the cold. Thanks to the heavy, bloodstained bandages on her hands. Avery has only just freed the last of the locks when she hears a shout at her back.

  ‘What in the God-Emperor’s name are you doing?’

  Avery glances over her shoulder. It’s Cadmuz. The chief of the deck is stamping across the deck towards her, a breather mask hanging loose around his neck, and his coveralls rimed with ice.

  ‘I’m taking her up,’ Avery shouts back.

  Cadmuz looks incredulous. Furious. He picks up his pace, still shouting.

  ‘The hell you are! You’re grounded. You should be in the recovery ward.’

  Avery stands, and turns. ‘I should be in the damned sky!’

  Cadmuz shakes his head. He takes another step towards her and reaches out as if he’s about to grab her by the arm. Avery steps back. She does something instinctive. Something even more stupid than breaking into the hangar.

  She pulls her sidearm and points it at him.

  Cadmuz freezes in place, his hands coming up in surrender.

  ‘Woah,’ Cadmuz says. ‘Easy now.’

  Avery stares him down. Her hands are trembling with the effort of keeping the pistol level. With the nerve damage from the burns she sustained in the crash.

  ‘I’m going to fly the gorge,’ she says, in a low voice. ‘To finish the op.’

  Cadmuz stares back at her. He is sweating now, despite the cold.

  ‘Don’t be stupid. You’ll die out there.’

  ‘Like they did, you mean?’ Avery snaps. ‘Shido and Liza. Colt.’

  ‘It won’t bring them back.’

  ‘Maybe not. But it’ll make it right.’

  Cadmuz’s face changes, turning a little sad.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘It won’t.’

  A heavy silence falls between them, punctuated only by the wind, and the quiet rattle of the gun in Avery’s hands.

  ‘I’m taking her up,’ Avery says, again. Softly this time.

  Cadmuz shakes his head. ‘I can’t let you,’ he says. ‘You know I can’t.’

  Avery blinks, feeling a tear turn to ice on her cheek. She lowers the gun from Cadmuz’s face.

  ‘I know,’ she says, and pulls the trigger. The gunshot is thunderclap loud in the vaulted space. It shatters Cadmuz’s left knee, sending a thick welter of blood onto the frozen deck. He collapses with a ragged cough of air, and Avery unhooks her vox-bead and throws it at him.

  ‘Call a medicae,’ she says, then turns away and hauls herself up onto the Lightning’s wing. She hammers the cockpit release, then hesitates for a moment, one hand on the airframe. She looks back at Cadmuz sitting crumpled on the deck, the leg of his coveralls soaked red with blood.

  ‘You’ll die out there,’ he says, between breaths.

  Avery shakes her head and turns away again.

  ‘I already did.’

  The sky over the polar expanse is a monochrome rush. A tunnel, narrowing to a circle of solid black. Visibility is for shit, so Avery flies on instruments and instincts, fighting the polar winds as they rock the old Lightning. The cockpit armaglass keeps riming, and so do the intakes, the Lightning’s engines gasping bad-temperedly at the freezing air. Avery has to compensate with the burners, though it’s a spend on fuel she can hardly afford. The tanks are half-empty, and draining fast. The missile racks are empty too. There’s no chaff in the launchers, and her lascannons are hardly at half-charge. It’ll have to be enough. There’s no going back now. Not after she broke into the hangar and stole the bird.

  Not after she left Cadmuz bleeding on the hangar deck.

  Avery shakes herself, and checks the heading indicator. She is coming up fast on her target, the icefire eruptions of the cryovolcanoes already visible even through the snowstorm and the darkness. Intermittent jets surge up in blue-white columns, marking the winding path of the Verglas Gorge, and the location of the Archenemy communications hub buried like a bloodbeetle in a vast natural ice cavern at the end of it. Avery fixes on those lights as she dips the Lightning’s nose, bleeding altitude and piling speed towards the gorge. It is a stark, jagged scar on the face of the world. Black as the void, between the burning, blue-white lights. Avery blinks, the cryovolcanic eruptions printing on the insides of her eyelids.

  ‘Time to finish it,’ she says, and pushes the Lightning down towards the darkness. There’s no hesitation in the old interceptor. The Lightning responds quickly. Much more so than she’d expect of a hangar queen. Much more so than Avery’s old Lightning. The interceptor roars like nothing Avery has ever heard. It’s as though the Lightning knows what’s waiting at the end. As though it knows what she needs to do.

  Avery pulls wings level with a hefty thump of burners, a hundred and fifty metres above the base of the gorge. The walls close in on either side, black and jagged and blurred by speed, the bright veins of venting gas leaving streaks of light on Avery’s vision. She rolls and yaws between the eruptions, her hands sweating and slick with blood inside her flight gloves. Collision alarums blare in her ears as Avery stands the Lightning on its wing, barely missing an outcropping of jagged rock. She’s sluggish. Sloppy. Which is bad news, because Avery knows that they’ll already be on her, just like last time. The enemy fighters.

  The Pact.

  The enemy announce themselves with a hail of hard rounds that jolt Avery in her seat. Bang, bang, bang. Warning lights flicker live across the control panel, and the Lightning snarls. Avery snarls, too, cursing through her teeth. She can’t fly evasive with the walls closing in. Can’t go up and over to get behind them. So Avery does the only thing she can think of.

  She cuts the thrust, and pulls the Lightning upright into a full-body air brake.

  The interceptor stands on its jets, airframe screaming. It bleeds speed in seconds, hanging momentarily in the air as a single crimson-and-chrome Hell Razor roars past, engines blazing. Avery doesn’t let the Lightning climb. She slams the nose back down, centring the Razor in her firing arc. It only settles there for a fragment of a second, but it’s enough. Avery stings the enemy bird across the port wing, sending it spiralling into the wall of the gorge. The Razor comes apart in a fireball, hurling chunks of stone and ice and armour plating into the air. One of those things hits Avery’s cockpit armaglass, fracturing it from seam to seam. Through the damage, she gets a split-second view of a jutting shelf of black stone as the gorge bends in front of her.

  ‘Shit,’ she hisses, and slams the control stick hard left.

  The world turns sideways, and Avery waits for the impact. For a fireball of her own. But it doesn’t happen. Instead, she hugs the curving wall of the gorge, ice and gas venting all around her in thick plumes. Then something does impact her. More autocannon fire, from a second Razor. A new warning light is blinking on the console. The ident-stamp above it says ‘fuel line’. Avery swears again. There’s no pulling another air brake. Not while she’s pissing fuel. There’s only one thing for it. Keep going for the comms hub as fast as she can, and try her damnedest to get her shadow killed into the bargain. Avery rolls the Lightning into a forward dive, the altimeter plummeting towards the redline.

  One hundred and forty metres.

  One hundred and twenty metres.

  Another hail of hard rounds find their mark, setting the integrity alarums blaring again. Avery shuts them off. The fuel gauge is moving visibly. Steadily. The marker shifting towards empty.

  One hundred metres.

  Eighty.

  Avery can see the gorge basin now, a flat expanse of pack ice, streaked with long smears of black ash. Littered with jagged scraps of silver.

  Seventy metres.

  It’s the wreckage of a flight of Lightnings, smashed to pieces on the ice.

  Sixty.

  Of her flight of Lightnings. Shido and Liza.

  Fifty.

  Colt.

  Avery slams the control stick back with a strangled, wordless scream. The Lightning screams with her as she drags the nose up against th
e pull of the world. Fire-whisky bile rushes up Avery’s throat, and her vision greys out. For almost a second, she can’t see anything. Just a black void. Inside it, she hears something. The clink of cut glass, and the low murmur of an old hymn-caster. Warm, familiar laughter. Then another sound erases it, loud and urgent.

  The furious bellow of turbofans.

  Avery comes to with a jolt. She’s level, all but skimming the gorge basin between blue-white jets of gas and ice. Avery twists and glances back, but she can’t see the Razor. It must have hit the deck behind her. Smashed to pieces on the ice. Ahead, she sees the cave mouth. A dark, jagged smile in the rock. Her heart lifts, fractionally. She’s going to do it. Complete the op. Honour the dead.

  Make it right.

  This time, the autocannon fire isn’t so much a jolt as a swift kick to the back of the head. The Lightning bucks and bellows like a wounded thing. It’s the Razor. Not smashed to pieces at all, but hanging high off her port side, gun mouths flashing.

  ‘Damn it,’ Avery hisses. She’s running out of ideas. Running out of fuel. There’s only one thing she can think to do.

  Something stupid.

  Avery rolls the Lightning hard left, evading the next hail of hard rounds. The manoeuvre puts her dangerously close to the gorge wall, right along a seam of venting gas. Jets of icefire explode upwards in violent, momentary bursts, catching Avery’s wing tips as she cuts between them, rolling and skidding. The Razor follows her. Matches her, turn for turn. Roll for roll. She can’t shake it. Not like this. An eruption goes off in front of Avery, bleaching her vision white. She stares into it. Then Avery grits her teeth and goes straight for it. Straight through it, punching through as the cloud of sub-zero ice and gas disperses. The Razor follows her. Matches her. Then it comes apart screaming as the icefire jet explodes upwards for a second time. Avery barely looks back. She’s too close for that now. The jagged mouth of the cave yawns before her, filling her cracked-glass vision. She flies straight inside without cutting speed, breaking through into a vast interior. The cavern is cathedrum-big, bathed in intense blue light from the ice and gas moving inside the walls. It is dazzling. As bright as a star. All save for a massive spur of dark iron, fixed to the far wall of the cavern by a series of clawed mooring anchors driven into the ice. The enemy communications hub. Data hardlines spill from it, disappearing through bore holes in the walls and ceiling. Every surface of the thing is shielded by adamantium plates. There’s no chance of collapsing it with lascannons alone, but then that’s not what Avery is planning to do.