The Lost and the Damned

by Guy Haley

  ‘He’s not a man,’ muttered Hanis. ‘He’s much more than that.’

  ‘Well then, lad!’ said Fendo, his overfamiliarity prompting another scowl from Hanis. ‘Best get ready, because you’ll have the chance to prove your worth to him soon.’

  ‘No, no I won’t!’ The spoon sliced through the plastek. After only a couple of minutes, he suddenly had all eight arms done. He started on the arrow tips for the ends. ‘There’s not enough of us left. What kind of threat could the Thernians present? Eh? We’ve hardly got sufficient guns for every man. What are we going to do, throw our empty ration packs at the enemy?’ Hanis shook his head. ‘Mark my words, he’ll send in his Legions first – we’ll be left to mop up.’

  ‘I know you’re wrong.’

  ‘And I know you’re–’

  A klaxon sounded twice, cutting Hanis dead.

  The vox crackled on. ‘Attention all Thernians. This is not a drill. Prepare for immediate combat deployment. Prepare for battle. I repeat, this is not a drill. We have the honour of securing the beachhead.’ Their commanding officer’s voice wavered with pride.

  ‘That… that was the colonel!’ said Hanis. He frowned. ‘I thought he was dead.’

  Fendo nodded, his idiot’s grin spreading wider.

  ‘We’re going in?’

  Throughout the bay every man froze, looking up dumbfounded as if the gods themselves had spoken to them, and would do soon again.

  ‘By the Four,’ said Hanis.

  Suddenly, all at once, the hold exploded with activity. Everybody was shouting. Everybody was moving. Tatty uniforms were thrown on. Battered flak armour shrugged over worn jackets. Guns were snatched up. Crude amulets yanked off hooks and slung about necks.

  ‘But how… how are they going to get us down there?’ said Hanis. We’ve got no landers. This ship can’t put down! Are we going to be transferred?’

  The ship answered his question with a shudder. The background noises of the vessel changed, the grunting whoosh of its plasma thrusters sounding loud, even over the racket of excited men. A faint push upwards told Hanis which direction they were going.

  ‘No,’ he said, afraid now. ‘No, they’re taking the tender down. It’s not made for it! We’ll crash! We’re all going to die.’

  Fendo’s smile turned wicked. Before that moment, Hanis had never really noticed just how ugly the man was.

  Traitor fleet, Terran near orbit, 25th of Secundus

  All across Horus’ fleet the landing ships departed.

  From the carriers and the troop transports, the hulks and the freighters, from vessels of every kind pressed into service by Horus’ armada, a hundred thousand craft set out. Among them went vessels never intended to leave the weightlessness of the void. Sinking determinedly, they pierced the upper envelope of Terra’s dirty atmosphere, bellies glowing with compressive heat as smaller ships plummeted past in a race to the surface. They descended among a hail of mass fire and the discharge of ten thousand lances. The boiling fires around the Palace were visible from Luna, while overworked void shields sparked lightning that crackled from one side of the planet to the other. Outside of the Palace’s protective fields, tracts of Terra burned under heavy bombardment. Dust pillared the heavens. Ash flew streamers in raging stratospheric winds. Every city, every settlement, was under attack. Most possessed their own defences, but none compared to those guarding the Palace, and several hives already burned, as giant pyres that lit Terra with a hellish glow. Debris had yet to occlude the sky completely, though it was only a matter of time before the atmosphere was choked by the ejecta of so many impacts. Steam boiled from young seas. Regenerating vegetation burned. Wherever there were settlements, buildings were reduced to craters and people to ash. Nothing was spared, no matter how insignificant. In his desire to make his father suffer, Horus punished the human race.

  Into this maelstrom went the ships. Terra’s guns gave fire as soon as Dorn judged the drop formation set. The guns of the Palace targeted anything on a downwards course. Once the landers were past the protection of the larger ships’ shields, they were immediately at risk. Smaller ships were atomised. Larger craft were crippled to plummet blazing through slate-grey skies. The warp around the Throneworld boiled with souls snatched from their mortal housings, and yet still the Warmaster’s ships came, thundering through the air by the thousands. So many were obliterated, but the forces of Horus were so immense that each one lost was but a grain of sand removed from a desert.

  When the void was thick with this flotilla, and the gunners of Terra spoiled for choice of target, then the hangars of the fleet opened, and uncountable fighters and bombers rushed out. Their engines burning at full capacity, they raced down between the landers as swift as arrows, each locked upon a goal, their bomb bays filled with ordnance and cannon magazines stacked with shells.

  Their mission was to break the teeth of the Imperial Palace.

  A soldier’s duty

  Bright Hawks

  Flight at last

  Eagle’s Watch rapid deployment hangar,

  Eternity Wall space port, 25th of Secundus

  We wait. That is a warrior’s primary task. Our duty calls for readiness to fight, the ultimate result of which is sacrifice, but before death comes the wait. The wait lasts and lasts, and sometimes is never done. Equally it can cease at any moment, and life finish in the fire. An airman therefore must be two things above all else. They must be fearless, and prepared at all times for the end, but more than that they must be patient, or the waiting will drive them to despair.

  Sat at her small desk, Aisha Daveinpor reread yesterday’s words in her diary. Her pencil was poised over the day’s new entry as it had been for three minutes, but she could think of nothing new to add. The bombardment had gone on for nearly two weeks, and her squadron hung on the very edges of their nerves waiting for action. Sleepless nights led to tense days. The repetitive duties demanded of any soldier helped fill the time: flight readiness checks, kit checks, cleaning, tidying and so on. They formed a fortification of duty around her emotions, but as the bombardment wore on with its ceaseless, gut-rumbling pounding, it eroded those walls. Trepidation crept in through the breaches, and fear snuck in behind. She wasn’t frightened to die – she had become resigned to death a long time ago. A useless death terrified her, however. While her squadron was grounded she was useless, and as much at risk as any civilian.

  A useless death, she wrote in her diary, is the worse death of all.

  The words looked stark on the white of the journal page, and she almost crossed them through. Instead, she threaded the pencil back into its loop and snapped the small book shut, and left it upon her table.

  Her status as an Aeronautica pilot gave her a good-sized room; being a squadron mistress gained her a little more space. Her quarters even had a window. High up on the side of the enormous Eternity Wall space port, it had unrivalled views, the sort a rich man would pay a planet’s ransom to possess. On fine days she could look out across the Palace, taking in a slice of the northern aspect, over the Daylight section of the Eternity Wall, and the mountains beyond.

  That’s what she saw in normal circumstance. Fire was what she saw then, reds and golds and orange, shot through with the multicoloured lightning flicker of void shield discharge. The Eternity Wall space port’s great bulk projected high over the fortification it was named for. The top of the port scraped the underside of space. As such, the Palace aegis rose around it in a sloped blister of energy.

  The fire was a few hundred metres from her window. If she angled her head, she could see down towards the ground, past the docks and wharfs projecting from the sides of the port. The top of the wall and the towers she could also see, before the downturn of the aegis cut off the view of the world beyond and screened it with fire. The chrono said it was night, but for weeks the world had endured perpetual firelight.

  She left her quarters. The
198th Squadron barracks were plain yet neat. What the pilots themselves didn’t keep in order, their unit servants did. Corridors of plain grey rockcrete decorated with a single yellow stripe at waist height made up the majority of her world. Breaks in the colour told her where she was. There were scores of barracks in yellow sector, and they all looked very much the same.

  The corridor terminated on a balcony overlooking hangar one. Half her squadron was housed inside: eight one-man Panthera-class fighters including her own ship, Blue Zephyr. Like the corridors, the hangar was plain but for yellow striping. Their banner hung limp on the wall over the entrance, machines underneath wrinkling up the number and the common name of ‘Bright Hawks’ stitched into it. Hazard striping stencilled directly onto the floor took up much of the space, especially around the fighters’ individual standings, and at the ends of the two mag catapults that propelled the craft out of the hangar. With two more catapults in hangar two, all of the squadron’s sixteen ships could be in the air within minutes, and at full burn in the void ten minutes after that. Right then the fighters were silent, their canopies covered with tarpaulins dogged tight, except Yancy Modin’s ship. She sat in the cockpit fiddling with her guns while their tech-priest checked the tracking of their swivel mounts.

  Aisha leaned on the gallery railing, and stared at Blue Zephyr. There weren’t many ships like the Pantheras in the Imperium. They were among the best, advanced technology laid into every part; rumours had it that the Emperor Himself had a hand in their design, and why not? They were the front line of the Palace’s airspace defence.

  ‘The best pilots in the segmentum, and we’ve been sitting on our behinds for weeks,’ she muttered to herself.

  ‘Getting itchy to fly, ma’am?’

  ‘Flight Master Dandar Bey,’ she said, accepting the mug of recaff he held out to her. He was her second-in-command, and led flight two of the Bright Hawks. ‘I’m always itchy to fly.’ She made a sorry little noise. ‘I should never have accepted this posting. No action for years, always bloody waiting.’

  ‘I don’t think you want to fly in that, ma’am,’ Bey said, nodding out at the firestorm through the hangar entrance. He’d told her where he was from, somewhere on Terra warm enough to give him rich brown skin and matching eyes. He never looked unhappy, even when he was. Thoughtful was the most miserable emotion he displayed.

  ‘I’d fly in that quite happily,’ she said. ‘Better than sitting in here.’

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to stamp down on that kind of talk? Keep our morale up?’

  She snorted. ‘What are they going to do? Relieve me of command? Not right now, my friend.’ She sipped her drink and pulled a face. ‘This is bloody awful.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Bey.

  Aisha looked out past the end of the mag catapult ramps; metal piers that looked to be supported by nothing, they ended in thin air, past which was the ceaseless roil of explosions. It was a view she was growing tired of.

  She was about to open her mouth and ask the question she did every morning, ‘Do you think it will be today?’ when klaxons stopped her.

  ‘All squadrons report to launch bays. All squadrons report to launch bays.’

  The lumens snapped off. Rotating ready lights spun up to action on the walls. Emergency lighting came on.

  ‘Is this is a drill?’ Bey said.

  ‘It better bloody not be,’ she said. The klaxons barked on and on. Men and women were streaming into the hangar from all sides, followed by stolid servitors moving to prepare the Pantheras for takeoff.

  ‘All squadrons prepare to launch,’ said the voice.

  Outside a flight of golden aircraft sped by.

  ‘The Legio Custodes are up!’ said Bey.

  She grinned savagely, and put her recaff down by the railing’s footing. ‘Then it’s not a drill,’ she said.

  A clangour of sirens rose wailing over the Palace, outcompeting the sound of the bombs.

  The crews tumbled into the ready rooms, wrenching open their lockers and flinging on their flight gear. In a ruckus that hid how orderly they were, they were suited and sprinting to their war machines in moments.

  Aisha shouted the ground crew out of the way and sprang up the ladder hooked into Blue Zephyr’s fuselage, then shouted at them some more to clear her path for takeoff.

  ‘Get the ladder off! Get me into the air!’

  They’d been drilling this for months, they should be faster.

  All around hangar one, engines coughed into life and began pre-ignition burns. The rotating tables they sat on turned them towards the hangar slot. Small trucks were guided forwards to the first two ships, and munitions locked into place. Aisha checked her chrono.

  ‘Point two slower than best!’ she yelled into her helm vox. ‘Hurry it up!’

  More ships were streaking past the hangar, disgorged from similar facilities all over the Eternity Wall space port. She keyed in her vox to strategic-level communications.

  ‘Squadron Mistress Aisha Daveinpor ready for launch,’ she said.

  ‘Scramble immediately,’ came a terse reply. ‘Engagement coordinates incoming.’

  ‘Understood. For the Emperor.’ She switched channels to the squadron net. ‘Into the air! Now! Now! Now!’

  Her own clusters of missiles were loaded up. By then, the first two Pantheras were angling their jets, pushing up from the ground on cushions of shimmering air. They hovered forwards and let the mag catapults take them. Running lights on the short runway spars turned from red to green, and the ships were hurtled out of the port. The second two were close behind, the third pair rising. Aisha adjusted her helmet, kissed two fingers and pressed them against the pict of her husband pinned to her ship dashboard. She’d not seen him for five years. That didn’t stop her loving him.

  Her hands danced over a dozen switches. Displays came on in a crescent in front of her. Easing up the stick, she fell into line between the third pair of aircraft, and waited her turn for the catapult.

  Third pair were out, shrinking to the size of birds before punching through the voids and into the maelstrom.

  Then it was her turn. The ship wavered on its own backwash, the scream of engines magnified by the hangar. Red light, red light, red light. Her foot hung over the burner pedal.

  Green light.

  The mag catapult took her ship in its fist and hurled her like a javelin out over the Palace. She slammed back into her seat with force, and pressed hard with her suddenly heavy foot.

  The burners roared at full power. Blue Zephyr and its companion Leo shot out at near-maximum speed from the sides of the space port. The sprawl of the Palace was a blur. The world was a crush of acceleration weight and a glare of fire.

  ‘Bright Hawks flight two, in the air,’ voxed Bey.

  ‘Bright Hawks flight one, in the air,’ she responded.

  Blue Zephyr shot through the voids into a world of flame.

  Mass projectiles dumb and explosive, laser lance beams thick as hive spires, nova cannon shot, plasma streams and plasma balls, weapons of such potency as could level a world slammed into the aegis of the Palace, and Aisha flew straight into it.

  ‘Bright Hawks, fall in.’ She gritted her teeth. There was no time to say anything more complicated than that. The vox was a shrieking mess of conflicting voices and interference cast out by the bombardment.

  ‘Bright Hawks, converge attack point–’ Her controller’s voice broke up into squealing as a particle beam sliced down from orbit, cocooned by an invisible magnetic coherence field that incidentally blotted out all nearby vox-comms. Her displays danced. She got a snatch of her squadron on the disposition screen coming into formation, only for them to break in every direction as a lance strike punched through the middle. The graphics flickered out. When they came on, one of her ships was gone.

  ‘Curse it, Bey! Bey! Get them moving!’

>   No reply came over the whooping of energy weapons ionising the air.

  Suddenly, they were through the worst of it, racing across a patch of sky over the central districts clear of weapon strikes. The dust-laden heavens writhed with lightning. Visibility was down to a few kilometres. Through the haze of dust and smoke and the witchfire glow of the aegis, the Palace was a set of unguessable shapes spitting fire into space.

  Thousands of aircraft were in flight from every division of the Imperial war machine. True starfighters raced beside purely atmospheric craft. Legion attack ships of white, red and yellow fell in with Aeronautica wings, while the rare, bulbous pursuit ships of the Legio Custodes glinted between. Communications cleared enough for Aisha to organise her squadron, and for orders to come down from high command within the Bhab Bastion.

  ‘All air defence units prepare for engagement.’

  Augur screens lit up with a solid mass of contacts. As fast attack ships, the Pantheras arrowed upwards ahead of the flocks of fighters, ready to take the fight up into the void if need be.

  When her prow was pointed heavenwards, Aisha saw it would never come to that.

  The traitor’s air fleet filled the sky.

  Thernia’s last glory

  Rage of beasts

  We hold

  Loman’s Promise, Katabatic Plains airspace, 25th of Secundus

  Loman’s Promise shook all the way down. Men who had been full of excitement minutes before screamed in terror. The engines roared like dying, angry things. Metal screamed and tore. Subsystems gave out in showers of sparks that lit fires among the regiment’s possessions. The temperature within shot up, the terrible howl of tortured atmosphere wrenched at the hull. Smoke billowed from open doors, rolling over the ceiling like a monster out to suffocate them. Alarms blared from every quarter, mocking the screams of the men. The racket was tremendous, but the noise of the enemy guns crashing outside was louder, and growing worse the further they fell.