Sabbat War Page 10

  ‘Your flight officer–’ the man started.

  ‘Is a fine pilot,’ Stavven finished. ‘She and the Keyzon would not have this honour if they were not the best. But her duty is to care for the aircraft, mine is to care for the martyrs.’ He smiled at the mortuarian. ‘Would you mind telling your servitor to pull back the lid? I need to run an auspex scan, and quickly – just to ensure there’s no danger to the aircraft. So many explosive rounds and exotic weapons in this theatre, you know.’

  The colonel was in bad shape. Though the mortuarian had done his best, Stavven could see patches where the glass coat of armour sagged over missing pieces. One leg ended at the knee, the shin and foot carefully placed by his side.

  Thankfully the colonel wore a full helmet, so Stavven didn’t have to look into his face as he swept the auspex over the remains, searching for ordnance.

  ‘Don’t worry, sir,’ he said, voice soft. ‘We’ll get you where you belong. You’ve done your part, leave the rest to Glory Flight.’

  ‘CB Forward Control,’ said Dzeck into the rubber cup of her rebreather. Beyond the muffle of her helmet, she could hear the keening of quad turbofans directly aft of the cockpit. ‘This is Glory Flight, flying Imperial martyrs to Tercius. Request departure clearance.’

  A crackle in her ear. ‘Glory Flight, this is CB Forward Control, you have priority, go ahead and God-Emperor’s speed. Get our heroes home.’

  ‘Confirmed, Control,’ she said, then opened her channel to the three other Valks of her flight. ‘Glory, Glory. We are clear for ignition. Angelic and Eternal, lead off. Standard formation.’

  ‘Confirm, Glory Lead,’ said Malkov.

  Two pads to her right, she saw the Angelic Mourning rise off the mat, heat haze wavering the air beneath it, dust billowing away in ribbons from the down-thrust. To her left, she saw Eternal do the same, coming to three-metres hover.

  ‘Go,’ she said.

  The two craft pitched nose down and opened their vector turbojets. They raced along the runway, rising as they went, giving Dzeck a glimpse of the blue halos of fire in their exhaust. They hit the ramp at the end of the dirt field at full speed, using its lift off to shoot themselves into the sky before breaking in opposite directions to make spiralling ascents.

  Angelic Mourning was a Vulture gunship. Nimble and fast. Beautiful and lethal. Eternal Honour was a standard Valkyrie, Voss-pattern like Dzeck’s old kite. She saw the side doors slide open and gunners level the heavy bolters as it ascended.

  Both would fly escort two hundred metres above them in case of trouble, keeping an eye on the cargo-carrier Ascension and its sister machine, Duty Fulfilled. Each escort loaded out for different combat roles, Angelic packing hunter-killer missiles to counter air-to-air threats, and Eternal specced out for vaporising ground threats.

  She used to fly kites like that. Combat aircraft. So wholly different from the grox-like Spectre-class. Twice as wide and with double engines and vector nozzles.

  ‘Duty Fulfilled, you are go,’ said Dzeck, and she watched the Sky Talon, Glory Flight’s heavy lifter, rise from its rubberised launch mat. While the craft was based around a basic Valkyrie fuselage, its crew compartment had been removed in favour of four mag-clamps that could deliver vehicles or supplies.

  In this case, it held a cargo container puckered with purity seals.

  ‘Will you look at that.’

  It took Dzeck a moment to realise it was Stavven speaking, not the Duty’s pilot, Kazaran. And at first, she didn’t see anything amiss.

  It wasn’t until the Duty sprinted for the launch ramp that Dzeck realised the ground crews, from every wing, were lining the runway, arms held in a salute.

  ‘They’re seeing them off,’ said Stavven. ‘Duty has two crew from Ninth Special Tactics Squadron aboard. Poor souls. Killed by ground fire in a bad drop. Seven machines overrun on the ground.’

  For a moment, Dzeck felt something before swallowing it. She focused on planning her take-off, on the exact steps she’d need to get her people back safe, and make sure that tomorrow, no one was lining up to see them off.

  Duty Fulfilled hit the ramp and angled skyward. The escorts technically didn’t need the ramp – none of Glory Flight did – but ramp take-off preserved fuel for the transports, who burned more promethium in vertical thrust.

  Dzeck opened the throttle on the down-thrust, feeling the Ascension come up on the cushion of air, bobbing slightly. Riding heavy as gravity pulled at it.

  ‘Emperor and saints, bless this flight,’ intoned Stavven. ‘As you blessed the beloved Saint Kzacja, whose hands carried the bones of martyrs. And thus…’

  ‘Engaging engines,’ said Dzeck, pushing her throttle forward, slow and steady. A managed acceleration with only the smallest down-tilt.

  The lines of saluting ground crew crawled by, then slipped, then blurred as the quad engines built themselves to full howl. Dzeck set her teeth, eyes fixed on the ramp. Getting a craft as big as a Spectre off the ground was inherently dangerous, with little margin for error. Too shallow or too steep and they likely wouldn’t walk away from the resulting crash.

  ‘Watch over us, Saint Sabbat,’ intoned Stavven. ‘She who has returned in her glory to us. And bring to our charges what all martyrs crave.’

  Dzeck had heard that rumour, but she didn’t believe it. The commissars were always saying a miracle was about to happen, but in six years of flying for the Emperor, Dzeck hadn’t seen one yet.

  The leading edge of the ramp passed beneath the Ascension’s nose and Dzeck hauled back on the stick, two-handed, pitching the canopy view into the white sky so the jet thrusters shot them into the air of Herodor. An anaemic sun, filtered through cloud layer, blurred the left side of her tinted visor.

  She felt the tug of lift as splitting air rushed past the airframe, and let out the breath she’d been holding.

  ‘Ascension,’ Stavven said, and kissed the sandbag at his neck.

  Below, Dzeck could see the improvised runways of Civitas Beati Forward Airbase shrinking. She rushed past a flight of Valks hovering fifty metres on their right as they waited for the big Spectre to clear the runway. The flight dipped in unison, as if bowing. A mark of respect to the dead.

  ‘Comforting, isn’t it?’ Stavven said. ‘How they treat those who’ve gone to meet the Emperor?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, because it was expected.

  ‘When we’re killed,’ he continued, ‘they’ll do the same for us. We’ll be in repose in the rear, going to our rest in honour.’

  ‘We wouldn’t be in the rear,’ she corrected. ‘Lowly warrant officers like us go in the container.’

  Only full officers rated embalming or burial whole. The Ascension of Saint Kzacja was for lieutenants and up. Everyone else was either cremated or rendered down to bone depending on religious preference, and stacked in the compartments of the cargo container under Duty Fulfilled. Dzeck had made the mistake of looking into that container once, at the twig-like snarls of loose bone, each tagged with parchment ribbons noting which regimental chapel they would go to when they made it to Balhaut. Many had no labels at all. By contrast, the plastek bags of ash were comparatively neat and sane, making Dzeck glad she’d noted cremation as her personal preference on the intake forms.

  Stavven, being from Balhaut, had no doubt opted for the acid-renderer.

  Creepy world, creepy people.

  Dzeck levelled out and came alongside Duty, matching its speed. Though she could make them out on auspex, she craned her neck and looked directly up to spot the two Vultures circling above. She could barely make them out against the sky, due to their resprayed grey-white undersides. Camouflaged, like all of them, against the uncanny blue earth and bone sky of Herodor.

  ‘Glory Flight, check-out and call in,’ she said. ‘Factorum floor’s open. Raise your time cards and punch in for day shift.’

  ‘Duty reporting, all systems green,’ said Kazaran. All business, no banter.

  ‘This is Angelic, sitting on you
at three hundred ems,’ said Malkov, using the non-approved abbreviation for metres. ‘You can see the front from here. I can feel Shoka right behind me caressing that firing stud.’

  ‘You know it,’ cut in Malkov’s weapons operator.

  Laughs on the channel.

  ‘Negative, Angelic,’ Dzeck said. ‘You loose a missile, it’s coming out of your pay stub.’

  ‘Shame,’ he shot back. ‘All this ordnance, no one to drop it on.’

  ‘This is Eternal, if I can get a word in edgeways,’ cut in Stola. Her voice was hard but not humourless. ‘Right engine has a bit of a stutter, think I sipped a bit of dust on take-off but nothing to worry about. Better call the turn or we’ll be halfway round the planet before Malkov stops jawing.’

  ‘Noted,’ said Dzeck. ‘Execute ninety-five-degree turn on my mark, head for LF Tertius. Let’s keep it at two hundred ems for transports, four hundred for escorts. That should keep us out of any ground fire. No reports of Archenemy fighters but keep an eye on the auspex for bats just in case. Ready?’ She paused, consulting her flight plan. ‘Mark.’

  Dzeck stomped the right pedal and brought the nose rotating around, seeing Duty do the same on her right, putting the sun behind them and their noses towards the horizon.

  Above her, the escorts mirrored their turn, as if the pairs were each other’s shadows.

  For a moment, she felt like a combat pilot again.

  Monthax, that’s when she’d been a real pilot.

  The fortress world had been hell. Some of the worst combat of the entire crusade. A siege that seemingly would not end.

  But Dzeck hadn’t seen that part of the fighting. Fourth Wing of 22nd Keyzon Air Assault had been up in the grasslands, running hunt-and-slay missions to keep the Archenemy from gathering in enough strength to take the staging areas so crucial to keeping the pressure on the fortress itself.

  When mortars harassed the staging area, they’d fly. When roving servo-skulls detected heat signatures on the hills, they’d fly. And that was when they weren’t just on patrol, looking for trouble.

  That was Dzeck’s job. To look. Her Valk, Foxhunt, had been stripped down for scout duty. No door guns. Extra fuel for extended time in hover. Only a pilot, a gunner/sensor operator, and a crew chief in the bay.

  They were the hunt in hunt-and-slay.

  Foxhunt would fly low and fast, spotting targets and marking them with smoke canisters fired out of the door by the crew chief’s grenade launcher. Then they’d haul-arse away as the Vultures and Vendettas circling above dived down to turn the place to char.

  Malkov had flown one of those Vendettas, sweeping down to wash the ground with flame as she pulled out. Watching her back in case the ground fire got too intense.

  At times, she flew so close to the ground that the downwash of her thrusters parted the tall grass like hair, revealing cultists crawling like lice through the foliage. She’d open up on them point-blank with the multi-laser.

  At times, the engagements were so close she came back with blood splashed across her canopy.

  Then it all went to kakk.

  They’d been out looking for trouble when they’d found more than they bargained for. A long-range patrol was pinned down amidst the enemy. Taking casualties. Begging over open vox for extraction.

  If there was one thing the Foxhunt had, it was transport capacity. Empty space. But it didn’t have much armour.

  Dzeck set down for only twelve seconds, then burned upward. But that was long enough. On the ascent the Archenemy scoured them. A frag missile detonated on her two o’clock. A las-bolt slashed in through the open door, killing her crew chief. Another punctured a marker grenade secured on the wall, filling the transport bay with red smoke.

  Air uptakes sucked the smoke right into the cockpit. Blinded her so all she could do was blast fire through the vector nozzles and climb for altitude.

  Dzeck didn’t realise Malkov was coming up behind her, in case she went down and he had to affect rescue. She ascended right into his Vendetta, clipping her tail fins off on the other craft’s nose, sending her into a spin that – though she didn’t know it at the time – almost made their cockpits collide. But she kept burning upward out of the ground fire. Actually made it.

  It was only at eight hundred ems that she regained control and managed to flush the cockpit.

  And found her gunner was dead. Klev had been killed by the missile detonation, bled out on the way up.

  But she made it back to base, somehow, the gunner’s blood pooling around her pedals.

  Collisions don’t look good on a flight record, but Malkov was a gentleman about it. Took the black mark, as he should have, after coming up so close in her blind spot. He could’ve got political. Kicked a fuss and equalised the blame, but he didn’t. Even in the politics of the officer’s wardroom, he was a good wingman, keeping fire off his scout.

  It was her last mission on the Voss-pattern Valk.

  When the ground crew slid open the door at base, pooled blood dribbled out from the deck inside. Seven dead soldiers in her kite.

  It was a mess. But either the action must’ve looked good on paper, or the three surviving members of the patrol had carried extremely vital intelligence, because instead of a reprimand, she and Malkov got transferred to Glory Flight, part of the rotating honour duty that fell to each squadron for a year. A demi-wing of the 22nd Keyzon’s most decorated and experienced pilots, pulled from duty, to serve the dead.

  And now, her kite spent every day full of corpses.

  ‘I don’t like that sky,’ said Dzeck. They’d been flying three hours, most of it in vox silence to prevent drawing bats. ‘That smear on the horizon.’

  ‘Looks like a silica storm,’ said Stavven. ‘We’ll be on the ground long before it reaches us.’

  ‘I guess.’ Dzeck keyed the comm. ‘Glory, Glory. LF Tercius approach, standard holding pattern until we get clearance. Descending circles stacked at one hundred ems. Let’s get on the deck fast, looks like it’s blowing up out there.’

  She waited for confirmations before switching her vox-channel wide. Below, she could see Landing Field Tercius, a flat volcanic glass field on the floor of a collapsed caldera. Two troop ships were disembarking reinforcements ready to make the drive towards the uplands of the Stove Hills, where Blood Pact remnants were said to be digging in. Towards the crater rim, now no more than broken hills, a Munitorum work gang of servitors and their handlers were unloading red-banded wooden crates from a cargo lander and staging the boxes for inventory and disbursal.

  Heavy traffic. Especially since the control tower was a hasty pre-fab with only a mid-range vox and an auspex that got spotty due to the dust and terrain.

  Dzeck could even see another flight of Valks, deploying a squad into the Hydra batteries on the crater rim. Probably the best way to cycle crews given the rough terrain. Four more craft banked a circular approach, slow along the edge of the crater rim.

  With Glory Flight already stacked and circling, they’d get the first crack at the landing field.

  ‘Tercius Tower, Tercius Tower. This is Glory Flight, martyr transport inbound from Civitas Forward. Request clearance to land.’

  ‘We see you, Glory Flight. Transmit landing codes.’

  ‘Send them,’ Dzeck ordered. She heard the thick clack-clack of Stavven’s keypad.

  ‘Code received, Glory. Bring them to their rest. Put down on pads nine through twelve.’

  Dzeck waited as she came around in the holding circle, then released the right pedal to bring the Ascension out of its lazy spiral. She banked, lining the big kite up on the white lines of the field, chalked out to indicate the approach path for incoming traffic to keep them clear of the orbital lifters.

  ‘See,’ said Stavven. ‘No trouble. Saints took care of us.’

  ‘Say that when our skids set down.’

  ‘Have a little faith, Kaj–’

  ‘Glory Flight, Glory Flight!’ the tower broke in, so loud it made Dzeck’s depressuris
ing ears hurt. ‘We did not clear multiple landings. Instruct your Valks to break off. Break. Break. Break.’

  ‘What the hells?’ Dzeck swore, twisting in her seat and looking behind. ‘Is anyone back–’

  The cockpit shook, canopy panes rattling in their armoured frames as the aircraft shot over them – close enough that the jet wash of the intruder caused them to dip as the Spectre’s air intakes sucked the other craft’s exhaust.

  ‘Holy Emperor!’ Dzeck felt the stick go loose a second, nose dipping down and left wing dropping as left number two engine stuttered and stalled. She felt the controls catch and nursed the throttle forward to restart the stalled engine.

  ‘Kajj!’ It was Malkov. ‘You alright?’

  She saw the Valk up ahead, burning down fast on their former approach path. Blue up top, grey-white underneath. Double orange stripes of Ninth Squadron on the wings and tail boom.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, decelerating and breaking left to turn a wide circle and re-approach. ‘I’m okay. Bastard dropped in on my line.’

  ‘Couldn’t they wait their damned turn?’ Malkov snapped. On her auspex, she could see him breaking out of the stack and hovering protectively, three hundred ems above. ‘They could’ve–’

  Then the tower broke in on an all-bands broadcast.

  ‘Unidentified Valkyrie flight, you are not cleared for landing. Break off and give your confirmation code before approach.’

  Movement on her left. Dzeck looked out to see another Ninth Squadron Valk slipping down alongside the Ascension, matching it for speed. Pilot scoping her from the cockpit.

  ‘Squadron rivalry?’ asked Stavven.

  ‘Special tactics flight showing off,’ she replied. ‘Measuring their–’

  The Valk’s side door slid open, revealing a trooper in fatigues and an atmosphere helmet. Dzeck could see his rust-coloured uniform rippling in the wind, his tether waving as he unshipped the heavy bolter and swung it out to…

  Dzeck slammed her thumb on the vector thrust button and pulled the stick left, the sudden manoeuvre viffing her upward with a jerk and sliding the big Spectre directly over the Valk.