by David Guymer
The vastness of the Fist of Iron owned the void behind him, filling in for the occluded stars with a constellation of guidelights, communications lasers and coherence fields. Around her dominant bulk, Moses caught glimpses of Executor and the other Expedition vessels seeding the stratosphere with aircraft of Legion hue. But space was big, even on orbital scales, and the bulk of the 413th Expedition was spread out, enforcing their blockade of the planet. He had no visual confirmation of the other fighter wings.
He engaged a wide-angle auspex sweep, returning passive signals from millions of aircraft-sized chunks of near-orbital debris and several hundred coded auto-replies from Imperial transponders. The cog-toothed snarl of Iron Hands attack craft, the crisp alpha-numeric returns of Imperial Army Thunderbolt Heavy Fighters and the signature binary of Mechanicum Taghmata Avengers. They had coasted into the atmosphere on forward inertia and were only now lighting engines. Wrath- and Xiphon-pattern fighters were shooting wider, flanking, utilising their void engines to approach the atmosphere from differing angles of attack. Though the machines were not well favoured by the X Legion, when it came to pure void combat there was little more capable and the Fist of Iron boasted several squadrons. In addition, two wings flew under the proud noospheric identifiers of the Emperor's Children, more Iron Hands pilots filling out their cockpits.
Moses felt his blood rise as he tallied the returns.
It was going to be one hell of a fight.
Telemetry from the Fist of Iron's command and control finally arrived to fill out his basic overlay with hostile returns and Moses saw that Lord Commander Cicerus' report had been accurate. The Gardinaal aeronautica were numerous but not void-capable. They swarmed the troposphere like hornets.
'Hornet?' he asked, looking at his dashboard. He shook his head. No. That was not right either.
'Assume attack formation,' Paliolinus ordered. 'Maintain supra-orbital velocity until we cut into the stratopause, three degrees off the engagement zone.'
Affirmatives clicked through the vox. 'Two, ready… Three, ready.'
'I have a connection error in my port lascannon cell,' said Thyro, Four. 'Shoddy Iron Hands maintenance.'
Moses scowled, but said nothing.
'Do you need to drop back?' Paliolinus asked.
'I only need one.'
Vertanus, Five, sounded ready, then Moses.
Looking up through his canopy screen, he saw the colossal black delta-wing shape of the Skylance gunship Oden Spear swoop towards the planet. Its draconic wingspan was flocked by Arvus lighters in Taghmata and Army colours, escorted in by smaller Thunderhawk-pattern gunships and an entire squadron of III Legion Wrath Starfighters.
'What's going on there?' asked Edoran, Three.
Moses' expression remained cold, blood rushing through his ears as the formation angled down, hitting the stratopause like a volley of torpedoes on a warship's voids.
It was the storm.
If you've never had your guts shaken out by a Skylance gunship performing a combat drop, then you'll never know how hard fought Unification really was. That was what DuCaine liked to say. The Legion was slowly replacing its fleet with the upgraded Stormbird, but DuCaine liked to be reminded. And as far as he was concerned, the Imperium never built a meaner, uglier or more indestructible bird than the Oden Spear.
Leaving Rab Tannen fussing over the bolts that secured the Land Raider's tracks to the deck and his seventeen veterans harnessed up in their restraints, DuCaine wove towards the forward wheel hatch, occasionally resorting to the overhead grips to keep himself upright. He spun the wheel lock, dragged it open, and staggered through to the cockpit, pulling it shut behind him.
'A little bumpy, lads,' he muttered.
There were four large seats, two rows of two. A pair of Iron Hands legionaries in flight armour in the pilot's and co-pilot's chairs, each backed up by a plugged-in servitor. They worked to the radium glow of their needle gauges, the prismatic luminance of gem displays, and the front-facing trapezoid of reinforced armourglass, lit by flurries of weapons flash and engine burn. The occasional direct hit or near fly-pass buffeted them, but the cockpit was armoured like a Primaris-grade saviour pod. Heavy bracing rods filled a large portion of the tight space with shock-absorbent plasteel. DuCaine barely felt it.
'The Gardinaal aren't exactly holding open the door for us,' said the co-pilot.
'Inhospitable bastards,' DuCaine growled.
Caius Caphen stood behind the co-pilot's chair, watching the legionary operate his side of the controls with rapt attention. The boy was just like Akurduana. He had to see and touch everything.
'Boy!' DuCaine barked, giving Caphen a guilty start.
'I was just seeing if I could help. Lord.'
'Not enjoying the ride?'
Caphen winced. 'I don't see why we have to try and land in the middle of the battle.'
DuCaine chuckled. The boy was learning some independence. He took a hold of the pilot's chair-back and peered through the forward window. The Oden Spear was not unarmed, far from it, but its descent vector made acquiring and retaining targets difficult. Their escorts and the other Imperial fighters whizzed past, like chunks of rock on erratic orbits around a falling asteroid. He saw a squadron of Fire Raptors break formation and drop to conduct ground attacks, drawing off some unwelcome attention.
'Simple. The Gardinaal aren't going to commit their aeronautica to destroying ours, not when ours is superior, but a large landing force they can't ignore. So we draw them out, we raise the damn storm, and we dismantle that layer of their defence in one move.'
An explosion lit the lower-right quadrant of the screen. Close. The pilot broke his facade of perfect calm to flinch from the sudden flash. The blast rocked the cockpit, followed by a pattering of debris.
'What was that?' asked Caphen.
'Perfect Storm,' mumbled the co-pilot.
A Thunderhawk. A good ship, Terran-made. DuCaine swore.
'How many aboard?' Caphen asked.
'Thirty warriors of the Avernii Clan.'
The explosion shrank from the screen as the dying gunship consumed its flammable reserves. Lighter gases rose to disturb the Skylance, jolting them from their thoughts.
'What is that alarm?' said Caphen, pointing.
The co-pilot slapped his hand away and flicked it off. 'Proximity alert.'
'I see it,' said DuCaine.
A lance formation of heavy Gardinaal fighters had broken through the Imperial fighter screen and made it as far as the gunship transports. Make that a half-lance. It had lost an edge cutting through Perfect Storm. A chill passed through DuCaine's gut. Not fear, but a full realisation of what he was witnessing. A suicide run. Lascannon-fire chased the Gardinaal in. Sparks ripped one of the heavily armoured dog-fighters apart, but they didn't break, didn't even try to evade.
Oden Spear's point defences came into play, flooding the main viewer with threat locks and distance counters, both diminishing rapidly as its trio of twin-linked heavy bolters filled the air with flak.
As he watched, a heavy fighter peeled off, bolter-fire riddling its undersection, and struck a breaking Wrath. The aircraft's wings disintegrated as they came together, the dismembered fuselage of the Gardinaal fighter ploughing through the Wrath's cockpit, ripping it in half. Another gunship vanished in the ensuing fireball.
'Shields?'
'At strength,' said the co-pilot, voice tense. 'But those fighters are big. I wouldn't—'
'Get us down.' DuCaine squeezed the pilot's chair-back, firmly, as the jagged tip of the half-lance struck towards the viewer. 'Quickly now.'
'I see it,' voxed Vertanus. 'Watch my tail, brother.'
The lead Gardinaal fighter came apart under Vertanus' lascannon hose, showering the Skylance and its remaining escorts with flaming debris. The III Legion pilot then executed a millimetre-perfect slice through the aircraft's remains while Moses, killing throttle, hung momentarily, pivoting with wind shear to eviscerate the following heavy fighters with hi
s own nose guns.
'Appreciated,' came the relieved transmission.
It sounded like DuCaine's voice, Awe at the lord Commander's recognition filled his thoughts, but he could not think how to respond, He gave himself to his machine.
His subconscious scoured the EM bands for heat locks, pressure waves, data bleed from hostile cogitators. Telemetries and optimised pursuit curves poured through his interface, manifesting in a mental display he perceived as an ethereal screen intersecting the Xiphon's more conventional control panel. Proximity awareness data occupied at least sixty per cent of his cogitation capacity.
There may have been no clouds on Gardinaal Prime, but it had them now: swollen nimbi of vaporised metal and carved vapour trails, troubled by the staccato bursts of autocannons and las and the exotic particle bursts of the Gardinaal.
His mind parsed the anarchy into sub-melees, dogfights into duels, yet still chaos ruled the skies of Gardinaal.
'Play the ceiling.' Paliolinus' transmission came through fouled by static. 'Increase altitude and alter course, sixteen degrees off north. Draw the Gardinaal to the edge of their envelope.'
'With me, brother.' Vertanus peeled off in a burn of thrust to engage a quintet of drab metallic atmosphere fighters that were harrying a Storm Talon squadron. Picking off one from the pack, the III Legion pilot set off in pursuit, yo-yoing and rolling.
Moses stuck close to his wing-brother's tail.
The Gardinaal fighters appeared most analogous to the Thunderbolt. Laden with weapons hard points that spat armour-breaking particle beams with the power of a lascannon and the fire rate of a heavy stubber. Heavily armoured, front and back, but with an entirely unconventional engine design that provided a marginal performance boost over the Thunderbolt. It still couldn't touch the agility of a Xiphon, and even if it could, no mortal pilot could pull off the aerobatics that a Space Marine was capable of.
Moses shook off hostile locks as Vertanus skilfully shepherded the Gardinaal into his brackets.
'He's good,' Vertanus voxed. 'They're all good.'
'They are bred for it.'
'I was hoping for something more supportive. Something like 'you are better'.'
'You have Edoran's vox frequency.'
Vertanus chuckled. 'I'm going to undershoot him. Be ready.'
Dumping height for velocity, Vertanus' Xiphon nosed down and shot across the enemy fighter's belly. It fell back to offer pursuit, while Moses gunned his engines to come in behind and complete the sandwich manoeuvre. Targeting runes lit up his mindscreen as his various weapons systems chased locks.
'Take him and we'll break out,' voxed Vertanus. 'We've done enough damage for one day.'
'Affirmative.'
Moses' fingers tensed around the trigger pull on the back of the central stick that operated his lascannons. It was too crowded for missiles.
Alert to its danger, the Gardinaal dropped into a spiral dive. Moses rolled after it, fleeting of Oden Spear and the other landers from beneath a lattice trace of weapons fire and interceptor duels. His altimeter raced as he ran the heavy fighter down. One thousand metres. Nine hundred. Eight. A great sweep of overlapping atomic blasts craters came into view. They formed a chain, a panoramic arc that had flattened thousands of hectares of the Gardinaal capitolis and reduced an unimaginable amount more to rockcrete skeletons and shattered glass. Seven. Fire blossomed where Marauders and X Legion Fire Raptors performed ground attacks. Six. A musical chime announced sequential locks.
A trio of brackets closed over die enemy fighter and turned red. He squeezed the trigger, shredding the heavy fighter from tail to nose with a stream of rapid-cycling lasers.
He followed the chemical-tinted explosion as he began to pull up. 'Purple sun,' he murmured, and felt the Xiphon respond with a jolt. Like Sthenelus. The Medusa star. 'Perfect.' The sense of satisfaction evaporated almost at once. A string of collision-prevention alarms pulled his attention up. Directly up. Another of the quintet of Gardinaal fighters descended towards him and the transports below. No.
Not descending.
More alerts screamed across his neural shunt as the newly baptised Purple Sun detected the signature waveforms of a cascade engine overload. He gripped the flight stick and yanked it hard.
It was dropping out of the sky towards the men below.
Like a fifteen-tonne bomb.
With the full ferocity of the Gardinaal's air defence directed at the Oden Spear and the Mechanicum super transports conveying Legio Atarus, the smaller workhorse Arvus shuttles of the Imperial Army were the first to make planetfall.
The box-like transports landed in a debris field just inside the densely irradiated crater chain that now encircled the capitolis. Rear hatches dropped in spasms of incendiary charge to disgorge squads of veletarii stormtroopers. They were encased in hardened void armour, helmed and visored, in the ochre and grey of the Fifth Galilean Mixed Infantry, cradling heavy volkite chargers and crunching out from their landers with a graceless, hunchbacked gait.
Lieutenant Colonel Tull Riordan emerged from his boat, hustled out and into cover by his command section, under the rattle of auto-fire from the rad-scorched and windowless hab-towers that rose crookedly around them. He may have grinned. It was front-line duty he had signed on for after all, and part of him did still miss the thrill.
'Light resistance, sir,' said Calva, a junior strategos, steeply promoted following the near wipe-out of Colonel Grippe's command tercios. 'But it's not going to stay light.'
'You don't say.' His heart was racing from the descent, and it was only now it began to slow that he distinguished the rapid-fire click of the rad-counter strapped to his thigh plating. 'Auspex. Vox. Give me checks.'
'Vox is choppy, but I still have contact with Fist of Iron.'
'Auspex is reading up to five hundred metres. After that, it gets glitchy.'
'Who uses auspex anyway?' Tilting his head as far back as the rubberised seals between helmet and cuirass could give him, he watched the pin-wheeling aircraft. Gunships droned low overhead. Missiles whooshed across the sky through fields of auto-tracer. Mobile AA batteries traversed the immense walls of the capitolis on rails, hammering the sky with particle beams, inconsiderate of the Gardinaal fighters engaged in their arcs of fire. It was worse than that. He could see that the Gardinaal were actively using their fighters to lure the Imperials towards the capitolis walls, where they could deploy AA units and mutually assure destruction.
'Most of the Fifth is down, sir,' announced his vox officer. 'Awaiting orders.'
'The primarch's orders were to take the rail access.' Calva consulted a paper map, and then pointed. 'There. And secure it for the Tenth Legion to enter the capitolis.'
'I seem to recall being in the same meeting,' Riordan muttered, straightening out his leg and massaging his game knee through the rigid all-environment cladding.
'I thought you signed off on this plan?'
'Not in so many words. I simply didn't tell the nice primarch to his face what he could do with his plan. I'm sure you understand.'
A few of the older hands chuckled.
Tull lifted magnoculars to his visor to examine the objective that Ferrus Manus, for all his inhuman greatness, seemed to believe that a few hundred demoralised and largely untried mortal troopers could claim. Radiation glitched the view, fouled everything beyond ten-times magnification in static, but he wasn't yet so old that he needed ten-times magnification to make out what the Fist of Iron's high strategos had designated Rail Ingress Octavius.
It was a tunnel of adamantium-plated ferrocrete, thirty metres high and fifteen abreast, two sets of wide-gauge rails running through it, flanked outside and in by a quartet of defence towers, striped with fire slits and bristling with turrets. He'd estimate a standing garrison of five hundred per tower, but the Gardinaal had already demonstrated their ability for packing men in. Eight hundred then. Say three and a half thousand men in all.
'Sir,' said Calva. 'The honour of the regiment has be
en impugned.'
'I'm—' Tull lowered the magnoculars and turned to the strategos. 'Where do you learn these words?'
'Sir!'
The veletarus that had called out turned back from the capitolis and pointed with the barrel of his charger towards the slagged satellite hives behind them. A dusky grey shuttle wearing the sombre decimal insignia of the Gardinaal militias sat in the centre of a ring of ripple-fractured glass. Its engines were still warm.
'Check it out.'
'Sir.' The veletarus saluted and began rounding up men.
A drone like that from a heavy gunship grew loud enough to drown out their shouts. Tull looked up, saw the hard-angled shape of a Gardinaal heavy fighter dropping steeply out of the sky towards them, and swore.
Moses Trurakk knew that what he was trying to do was impossible; the scream of binaric warnings that radiated outwards from his neocortex with break plots and escape curves was entirely superfluous. He fought Purple Sun's urge to break, the motors in his bionic hand whirring as he pushed the flight stick hard against the aircraft's instincts. His wing flaps juddered violently. His tail groaned. The Gardinaal fighter was falling fast on his inside, trailing thick black smoke and fire like a carbonaceous meteor. He gritted his teeth, the flesh of his face flattened to his skull by the force of gees, and leaned his body that way as if it might help. It would not hurt. Even a Xiphon couldn't turn sharply enough to get the Gardinaal in its sights before it hit the landing zone But he forced it to try. Not because he much cared about the thousands of Imperial soldiers in its blast radius, but because the primarch had deployed them for a purpose. And because honour was at stake.
Scanning his controls, weighing the risk of deploying heat-seeker missiles without a lock with allied aircraft so close, he felt the onset of an idea. It was so unorthodox that it could only have come to him from Purple Sun. He silently thanked it, experiencing a rarefied moment of communion with its spirit, and then activated vox.
'Five, this is Six.'
'Break off, you can't get it.'
Moses smiled. 'Tell Ferrus Manus that an Iron Hand got this one.'