Sabbat War Read online

  And as she did it, she screamed into the mic: ‘Blood Pact! Blood Pact! Blood Pact!’

  It was the mask that tipped her, the snarling grotesque covering the bottom half of the door gunner’s face. But it was too late.

  The orange-striped Valk on approach let loose with a Hellstrike missile, the unmistakable purple flame spearing from its nozzle, rushing it in a straight line towards the landing field’s tower.

  Dzeck heard the flight controllers scream before the missile detonated, knocking out the prefab command building in a blast of fire and smoke that threw a debris cone sixty metres deep.

  She only saw the damage peripherally. She was knife-fighting the traitor Valk now.

  It slammed air brakes and slipped out from under her, trying to get her in its forward sights. But she blasted her left wing’s vector nozzle to send her into a partial roll, flying on one wing tip for a moment – a spear of multi-laser fire passing by – before she folded over and crashed down into a dive.

  She lost the bat. It turned and overshot her, not realising how quickly the quad engines would rocket her towards the ground.

  Dzeck hadn’t either. She was a scout pilot, used to air-to-ground engagements in a small craft. Her on-the-wing manoeuvre had taken her too steep, too fast. The kite was overloaded, carrying two tonnes more than her accustomed haul.

  ‘We’re in a spiral dive,’ said Stavven.

  ‘I know,’ she shot back. Not much room to manoeuvre. She was rolling left, already hearing the stress on the airframe. Watching her altimeter go down and her airspeed spike.

  She cut the engines, used her pedals to counteract the roll. Wind whistled by the canopy. Dzeck pulled back on the stick, trying to bring her nose up and grab some lift. Heard the groan of tortured metal and eased off, not wanting to rip her wings off. Sweat pooled in her rebreather cup.

  Two hundred ems.

  ‘Ascension, Ascension,’ squawked Malkov. ‘You’ve got a bat on you.’

  Red multi-laser fire flashed past. The kite rocked, slamming her forward, rattling her stick out of position, increasing the dive.

  One hundred and twenty ems.

  She pulled back and locked her elbows, compensating for the next laser hit. The ground was coming at her, spinning like a betting wheel. Another kick in her tail. She heard Stavven throwing up.

  She was pulling Gs now. It felt like her arm was made of stone as she reached for the master engine ignition…

  Eighty ems.

  Reaching.

  Seventy.

  Reaching. Nose nearly level.

  Lock tone.

  She punched the engine ignition, jammed the throttle forward.

  Took off like an arrow, quad engines shooting her away from the base and pressing her back into her seat. Lock tones blaring. The missile on them.

  ‘Countermeas–’ she choked. ‘Count–’

  BANG.

  Sparks fountained around them and for a second she thought they’d been hit, but then an explosion echoed the shotgun blast and she heard shrapnel score the thick armour. Knew Stavven had deployed flares.

  ‘Thanks,’ she gasped, viffing to gain altitude and banking around.

  She didn’t see the bat. Only empty horizon, and a trail of smoke leading down to a fire on the blue-dusted lava field.

  ‘Splashed him,’ said Malkov. ‘Shoka finally got to use a hunter-killer.’

  Relief at her evasion and the head rush of a full breath sparked a weird elation. She opened her mouth to respond but Stavven cut her off.

  ‘The airfield!’

  She swept low over the black lava. Saw the chaos they’d left behind as they’d fled from the bat. Saw where all the other traitor machines were.

  They were swarming on Tertius, making firing passes on the transports.

  On the crater rim, las-bolts sketched across the Hydra batteries, evidence of what she could only assume was the Valk-deployed squads murdering the gunners.

  Three hundred ems above, Duty was in a circling brawl with a traitor Valk, both machines dancing, spitting streams of tracer fire as they banked and dodged. Kazaran had been a Vendetta ace before assignment to Glory, and had more dogfighting experience than any of them.

  But below was the real danger.

  A Valk floated at hover in front of one of the landing ships, its rocket pod firing a spiral stream of ordnance directly into the transport’s throat. Critical systems detonated. Fire belched from the cargo bay, throwing shapes Dzeck knew were bodies.

  The traitor was already rising diagonal to reorient on a new target – the unloaded cargo.

  A flash-memory from Dzeck’s approach. Her visual scan of conditions near the landing pads. Red bands on the crates.

  Heavy ordnance.

  ‘Stop that bat!’ she yelled. ‘The one near the pad! Get me a lock!’

  She brought her nose around, cursing the heavy slowness of the kite. Hating the man who lay entombed in the sarcophagus. Watching her gunsights slide slowly, too slowly, towards the inverted V of the traitor Valk’s tail.

  Knowing she wouldn’t get there.

  Eternal Honour dived down on it like a raptor on a kill. Spitting a multi-laser stream hot across the Valk’s spine that glanced off the armour plating but left a burning line of fire on the blue paintwork. Door guns chattering to keep the Valks above at bay, and deny them an attack run. Then Stola pulled up, firing a rocket pod at the last moment so the air-to-ground ordnance dropped in a fanning parabola directly on the bat, driving it nearly to the ground.

  But it had already loosed.

  Landing Zone Tertius rocked as the ammo dump blew first outward, then upward in a mushroom cloud. The stricken traitor Valk slammed sideways and tumbled across the runway, shedding parts before disappearing in the rolling fireball. Blue dust leapt upward from the expanding circular shockwave.

  ‘Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!’ voxed Stola.

  Her Valkyrie had been knocked through the air, spinning in a nose-and-tale axis rotation as she burned vector nozzles to stay upright and level. Two objects swung from the fuselage, and with a sick feeling she realised it was the door gunners, Xaj and Fannal, ripped out of the bay by the centrifugal force but still connected by their tethers.

  Two traitors, turning as one like raptors sighting prey, dived in on the stricken kite.

  Malkov scorched past Dzeck, pointing his Vulture on an intercept path. His silhouette shrinking even as she watched. ‘Everyone get clear,’ he voxed. ‘This field’s a no-go. I’ll do what I can to stall them before following.’ He let loose a hunter-killer that zipped ahead of him like a darting fish, causing both bats to break from their attack run on Eternal Honour. Stola’s craft was levelling out slowly, like a wobbling top about to fall.

  ‘Where the hells do we go?’ asked Kazaran.

  ‘The storm,’ said Stavven.

  Dzeck looked, saw the wall of blue silica blanketing the western horizon. Opened her channel. ‘Make for the storm.’

  ‘Are you kakking joking?’ said Stola. She’d levelled out and was running hard. Dzeck could see the door gunner Xaj hauling himself back into the crew bay, face white as the sky.

  ‘They’ll hunt us otherwise,’ said Kazaran. ‘Lose them and we can set down until the windstorm passes.’

  ‘Splash one!’ called Malkov. Through the calm, she could hear the edge of effort in his voice. ‘Bastards are all over me, out of countermeasures.’

  She couldn’t look back to see him. He was in their blind spot. Nothing in her front canopy but a billowing curtain of silica.

  ‘God-Emperor’s speed, Malkov,’ she said.

  ‘Splash two!’ he grunted. ‘Pulling a lot of Gs here. Lascannon battery zero. Think I scored a hit on one of the Hydras. They’re opening up now. Splash thr–!’

  A BANG in the vox-speaker.

  Then they plunged into the blue.

  Two hundred metres of altitude, twenty-five of visibility. Headwind thirty knots, gusting to forty. Changing direction at odd times as th
ey picked their way through the mountains.

  Blue everywhere, enveloping them like a plastek body bag. Silica scoring the paintwork from the Ascension’s wings.

  Duty Fulfilled and Eternal Honour followed behind, wobbly, like loklings after their mother. All three were relying on vector down-thrust to keep them airborne and minimise how much dust the turbofans slurped up.

  ‘You said it was around here,’ Dzeck said. Her eyes hurt from staring at blue. Her neck ached from leaning forward in her loosened straps to peer through the canopy. Extended stress-flying had curled her hands into claws.

  ‘The saint…’

  ‘Don’t tell me about the saint,’ Dzeck snapped. ‘Tell me about the map.’

  A gust of wind battered their left side, pushing them sideways and rattling tooth-sized stones against the canopy. Dzeck nursed the stick and pedals, steering to correct. It felt like trying to close a door in a gale.

  ‘It’s here,’ said Stavven. Dzeck could hear the maps on his chart flipping and crinkling. ‘The chart says we should reach it in one minute at current rate of speed.’

  ‘So where the hells is–’

  ‘Back air!’ Stavven yelled.

  Dzeck hauled on the stick like she was reining in a horse, jacking the throttle lever back so the downward thrust only drifted them backward rather than flipping them over.

  ‘Halt, Glory! Halt! Halt!’ she shouted into the vox.

  It took a moment for their forward momentum to bleed off, and for a sickening instant, they slid towards the blinking red light of the aerial tower.

  Stopping two metres from the ghostly struts.

  ‘Glory,’ she said into the vox. ‘We found it. Back off ten ems and set down slow. Full lights.’

  The chart called it the Monastery of the Rocks, a rough-hewn cathedral erected in a volcanic overhang cave, its tower and spire thrusting up a hundred metres. If not for the mast with the red warning lumen, they might have run straight into it.

  The sanctuary lay inside the cave, sheltered from the frequent silica storms. A natural hangar.

  All three Valks slipped inside, where they could take cover and clear their engines.

  Eternal Honour was in a bad way, one turbofan shroud partially torn by the ammo dump explosion. She’d drunk more sacred dust than the rest, and had just made it under the lip of the cave when her engines cut and she set down hard – dropping the last three metres to bend a landing skid and crumple one vector-thrust nozzle.

  It had been the same nozzle that killed the door gunner, Fannal, during the uncontrolled spin. His tether had stretched too far and passed his legs under the wash, cooking them off. Dzeck hoped the head injury had killed him before that.

  She smoked a lho-stick while watching Eternal’s crew chief, Banqal, assess the damage.

  ‘Can she fly?’ Dzeck asked. She shifted the strap of her sub-compact lasgun, unused to the encumbrance.

  Banqal shook her shaved head. ‘It’s bad, mamzel. She’s salvageable but she won’t make it out under her own power.’

  ‘So… no escorts. We’re down to cargo-haulers.’

  ‘Yes, mamzel. Sorry.’

  ‘Kakk,’ Dzeck said.

  ‘Officer,’ chided Stavven, raising a hand to indicate the sanctuary. ‘The saints are watching, and we need all the help we can get.’

  ‘Kakking spectacular,’ she repeated, and ditched the end of her lho-stick on the cave floor. ‘Don’t you need to go check the body drawers, Stavven?’

  Stavven blinked, nodded and left, whispering and fingering his sandbag.

  Dzeck stared at the silica storm that raged outside the cave mouth, piling banks of blue powder shin-deep.

  ‘It’s weakening,’ said Kazaran. He was a small man, but so serious he seemed larger. ‘Give it until morning. My worry is where exactly we’re supposed to go.’

  Dzeck looked at him, noted the shrapnel scar – a perfect C-shape – that sketched through his hair at one temple.

  ‘Here comes Calkoi.’ Kazaran nodded at the Duty’s chief, who was wandering from the cathedral, looking windblown and shaky.

  ‘Get anything on the vox?’ Dzeck shouted.

  Calkoi raised a hand in apology, and Dzeck saw the dust trickling off in the folds of his flight suit. It caked his face, adhering to the sweat and moisture of his lips like make-up powder. A satchel-vox the size of an ammunition canister dangled at his hip.

  Kazaran held a canteen to him, and the Sky Talon’s chief – an aeronautical signals specialist – washed the dust off his face, took a swig, and spat before answering.

  ‘Storm’s kakked communications,’ Calkoi said finally. ‘Rigged a whip-wire up on the bell tower, but we’re in a cinder cone. Even without the dust it would be tricky to get a signal out.’ He took another swig of water. ‘I did pick up a broadcast. Fragmentary. They know Tertius was splashed, but don’t know how. Everyone’s supposed to reroute to LF Ganshar.’

  ‘So they don’t know about the hijacked Valks?’ asked Xaj, Eternal’s remaining door gunner.

  ‘Hopefully they went down in the storm,’ said Dzeck. ‘How far is LF Ganshar?’

  ‘Eight hundred kilometres,’ said Kazaran, looking at a flight chart. ‘We could get there, but that’s nearly half our operational range, and we’re max load on cargo. Fuel situation might get dicey. And now that we know there are bats, it would be good to have some promethium in reserve if we have to evade or fight. Those traitor Valks, we were the only witnesses to their methods, and they’re going to try to down us before we get the word out.’

  ‘Fight with what?’ sneered Stola, slapping a palm on her wrecked kite. ‘Eternal’s inoperable and we’re down a gunner.’

  Dzeck nodded. ‘So we strip it.’

  ‘What?’ said Stola, stepping protectively in front of the kite.

  ‘You said yourself it’s inoperable. And it’s got what we need most – fuel and ordnance. If we can transfer the promethium to the Ascension and Duty, put one Hellstrike on the Sky Talon, and the other Hellstrike and door guns onto the Ascension, we can at least make a fight of it. The Ascension’s left and right number two doors are welded shut due to the mortis drawers, but the front two are operable – and they have gun mounts.’

  ‘Doesn’t solve our fuel problem,’ said Kazaran. ‘The Ascension is overloaded. It’s a Spectre, so it can handle the extra ordnance and three more crew, but that’ll burn more promethium. And we’re low.’

  ‘Scary low,’ added Calkoi. ‘We have to drop… something.’

  Nobody missed the emphasis. Neither would they take their eyes off the floor.

  ‘Make the arrangements,’ said Dzeck. ‘I’ll talk to our Ecclesiarchy colleague.’

  Victor Stavven rezipped the body bag and pushed the drawer closed.

  One drawer, of fifty.

  He’d been checking core temperatures. Auspex-scanning for decay. Visual checks for lividity and pooling. Adjusting the chill coils. Positioning chemical ice packs in the drawers to compensate for the weak electricals of a grounded aircraft.

  ‘We’ll get you home,’ he reassured them. ‘All of you. It’s the least we can do.’

  He saw a figure standing in his peripheral vision and touched his pouch of dust.

  ‘I’ve been serving our charges,’ said Stavven. ‘Their rest has not been disturbed so far, even with the manoeuvres you pulled.’

  ‘If I hadn’t pulled those evasions, our charges would be burning inside a wreck at LF Tercius,’ she said, taking a step inside the bay. Dzeck rarely came back here, and she looked a little haunted, her voice dropping and eyes lingering on the drawers as if one might spontaneously open.

  ‘It wasn’t a criticism,’ he said. ‘I’m saying that this is a well-built machine. Maybe a better one than you realise. It doesn’t respond like a scout Valk, and it never will. The Ascension was built for a different purpose, and it fulfils that purpose as well as any other loyal servant.’

  ‘We need to talk.’

  He stripped off his
plastek gloves. ‘I thought we were talking.’

  ‘There’s a plan in progress. Eternal is inoperable. Next field eight hundred kilometres away. We’re going to salvage what we can from Eternal to refuel and up-arm. Move out when the storm breaks. There’s only one problem.’

  Stavven let a breath out of his nose, long. ‘Weight.’

  Silence hung between them.

  ‘Do you have any ideas?’ Dzeck asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think I do.’

  Dzeck’s jaw tightened. ‘Don’t make this harder than it has to be.’

  ‘If you want me to jettison something from this aircraft, you will need to state, explicitly, what it should be.’ He paused. ‘I need to hear you say it.’

  ‘Cargo,’ she said.

  ‘You mean heroes,’ he responded. ‘You want me to leave Imperial martyrs who gave their all. Who at long last have laid down their burdens, made their great sacrifice.’

  ‘I can’t help them,’ said Dzeck. ‘But I can get my people out of here.’

  ‘These are your people. Our people.’ He lifted a yellowed drawer tag between his fingers, ‘And when they enlisted into the Emperor’s service and pledged to give their lives, we promised something in return: our respect. So no, I will not abandon these men and women. As Ecclesiarchal representative, I forbid it.’

  ‘If we take all of this’ – Dzeck splayed her hands at the sarcophagus and drawers – ‘more of my air crews will die. I’ve already lost three today. One I served five years with.’

  ‘And Flight Officer Malkov has my respect and gratitude, as do all Imperial martyrs. They gave their lives, and I give them my res–’

  Dzeck was on him so fast, he could barely defend himself. Her fists balled in his flight suit, and he felt his back slam the bulkhead.

  ‘Don’t you say it. Don’t you dare kakking say that you give them respect.’ She shoved him again into the wall and backed off, as if afraid she might do more. ‘How long have you been with this crusade, eh? Don’t you know how this all works? The Militarum? The Aeronautica? It doesn’t give anything. It takes. The whole Emperor-damned crusade is a machine designed for taking. First it takes your home and family, then your freedom. Then it uses up every bit of you it can. Rips parts out of your body. It takes your friends and your sanity. Feeds you on slop. Terrifies you with commissars. And the only time it gives you any kakking respect is when you’re dead in a kakking drawer.’ She smacked a palm against one of the porcelain mortis drawers, then nearly doubled over with rage and pain, fists pressed to her stomach. ‘God-Emperor, why are we even here? You left our wing short-handed, put them in danger so our best could haul corpses.’