Engines of War (8 page)

The daemon’s wound didn’t seem to have slowed it down. It was jousting with another Stormtalon – and it was winning. It sideswiped the Imperial gunship with a claw, causing black smoke to pour out of its engine. This was it, thought Chelaki. He knew what he had to do now. He knew why the Emperor had kept him alive this long.

The other Stormtalon was already badly damaged; the blow to its engine must have been the final straw. The pilot ejected. It seemed like everything was happening in slow-motion. The Stormtalon spiralled towards the ground. Its former pilot was suspended in midair, in that fraction of a second before gravity took hold of him. The daemon engine was wheeling towards him again, throwing open its maw to release its searing hellfire.

And Chelaki’s thumb was poised over his missile launch rune.

The Typhoon missile launcher was underneath his cockpit. He felt the vibration through the soles of his boots as it spat out three rockets in quick succession. His hope was to ram them down the daemon’s open throat.

The first of the missiles flew wide. The daemon engine twisted out of the way of the second, but straight into the path of the third. It unleashed the stream of flames that had been meant for the falling pilot, and the warhead blew before the missile could reach its target. The daemon was battered and flung away by the shockwave, but – as far as the disappointed Chelaki could tell – it wasn’t damaged.

At least he had saved his brother pilot’s life. The jets in his seat were flaring to control his descent. He had also got the daemon engine’s attention.

He had already begun to take evasive action. He plunged into a nearby cloud bank and dived steeply. The daemon engine was faster and more manoeuvrable than Chelaki was. His only hope of shaking it off was to deny it line of sight on him.

Dropping out of the clouds, he saw the Death Guard’s tanks underneath him. There were over a dozen of them, plastered with filth, festooned with rotting bones and sprouting arcane weapons like swollen tumours. They were holding their ground in a line in front of Fort Kerberos. They were letting the Imperial invaders come to them, although a few of them were already straining forward, like wolves against a leash.

He was closer to the fort – closer to the warp rift – than he had thought. A little too close for comfort. Had any of those tanks had sky-strafing weaponry like the Imperial Hunters and Stalkers did, he would have made an irresistible target for them.

The daemon engine was above, still searching the clouds for him.

A fly and its rider came at him from the right, but Chelaki wasn’t interested in engaging either of them. He banked away from the arc of the rider’s swung blade – but the fly spat a plume of green goop in his direction, which he couldn’t evade.

His starboard engine pod took the worst of the spray. A second later, predictably, his instrument panels flared red with warning runes. In the meantime, he had outpaced the mutant fly easily enough. He fixed his true nemesis – the dragon, the daemon engine – in his gun sights, and he opened up his throttle.

The acid was eating its way through Chelaki’s starboard engine, while the damaged port engine couldn’t take the additional strain. He might have made an emergency landing – he
might
have – but for what purpose, he asked himself grimly?

For the second time today, his ship was done for – and so was he.

He could feel the infection coursing, burning its way through his veins.

Right now – if Chelaki could believe the whispered rumours – a new seed pod was ripening in Nurgle’s sickly garden. A budding daemon was leeching off his dwindling life force, weakening him further by the second. If he let the rot take him, then the daemon would have the rest of him. It would have his very soul.

There was only one certain way to stop it; one way to keep the disease from running its course and ensure that the daemon was stillborn.

Chelaki came up behind and beneath the daemon engine. At the instant that it heard his spluttering engines and began to turn, he hit it with everything he had.

The nightmare creature let out a terrible shriek. It tried in vain to twist and roll its way through an impossible gauntlet of exploding rounds. It was clipped by some, buffeted by the blasts of others. Its armour plating was scorched and cracked, but not shattered. The daemon made sure to protect its wounded wing, where it was most vulnerable.

Chelaki loosed off his Typhoon missiles, one after the other. There was no point in worrying about conserving his resources now. He scored a direct hit with his first shot, but missed with the second. The next two, he sent wide of the mark on purpose.

His opponent was finally looking hurt. It had lost more armour, exposing rotting purple flesh. One of the pinions on its right wing was broken, hanging limply. It wasn’t enough, and Chelaki had used up his element of surprise.

The daemon engine swooped low and came around, beating its left wing vigorously to compensate for its crippled right. Chelaki knew what it was trying to do, and against a lesser flyer it might have worked.

He had fired those Typhoon missiles wide for a reason: to give the daemon engine only one safe way to go. With the help of his auto-senses – but mostly, his years of training and combat experience – he had predicted its flight plan precisely.

His opponent sheared right as it pulled out of its dip, and if only Chelaki had fallen for its lure he would have been in serious trouble. No doubt, the daemon engine had expected to catch him, side-on, in its sights. He could only imagine what the machine-creature felt as, instead, it found his Stormtalon screaming head-on towards it.

It couldn’t avoid a collision with him; there wasn’t time. The dragon threw open its mouth, and Chelaki found himself staring past its teeth and its coiling metal tongue. He saw the fireball building there, an instant before the searing flames streamed out towards him.

His starboard engine was bleeding promethium, which ignited – too late to save the fire-breather. Chelaki rammed his gunship at full speed down its throat, even as it exploded and he felt shrapnel tearing through his body.

His last thought was that he had done it. He had accomplished the task for which the Emperor had spared him: slain the daemon that had slain him in turn. A ghost’s revenge. He could think of no more fitting fate for a Doom Eagle.

He died fulfilled.

When Arkelius heard, he felt a brief twinge of disappointment. He suppressed it, of course, knowing it was an unworthy reaction.

He ought to have been gladdened – he
was
gladdened – by the annihilation of another foul daemon, another great victory won in the Emperor’s name. He passed on the news to his crew, who welcomed it unreservedly.

With the daemon engines gone, the Death Guard forces in the air suddenly found themselves outmatched. The few remaining Imperial Stormtalons made short work of several more flies, while even more were picked off by the Stalker tanks beneath them.

The
Scourge
fired off just one more Skyspear missile. It breezed past its target and looped around for a second run at it. In the meantime, however, the fly met its fate in a hail of cannon fire. By the time the Skyspear struck it, it was already dead and the missile, with its guiding intelligence, was sacrificed in vain.

Arkelius told Iunus to hold his fire and conserve their ammunition. He lowered his sights to survey the ground ahead of them. The battle was going the Imperium’s way there too; more slowly, but just as surely.

The one-eyed daemons had, for the most part, been dispensed with and Imperial casualties, while not exactly minimal, so far had been comparatively light. The Ultramarines certainly had the advantage of numbers now. Most of their remaining foes, however, were Plague Marines, and Arkelius knew better than to underestimate their strength.

The
Scourge
’s missiles were of no use in this situation. There was no way the Hunter could fire into the melee and not take out more friends than it did foes.

For the first time in a while – since before the destruction of the first daemon engine – Arkelius felt a familiar itch. He longed to be out there, fighting alongside his brothers. He longed to feel the trembling of a chainsword in his palm as it bit into a stinking traitor’s armour. An irrational part of him felt unworthy, even, watching from inside his plasteel and ceramite bunker while others put their lives on the line for him.

He threw open his top hatch again. He stood up on his seat and levelled his bolter across the
Scourge
’s roof. He squeezed the trigger whenever he had a clear shot at an enemy, which wasn’t nearly as often as he would have liked. At least he was doing something useful.

In between shots, Arkelius prayed that the Emperor would lend strength to his battle-brothers’ arms and precision to their weapons. He prayed that for each brother cut down by a Plague Marine’s sword, his gene-seed at least might be rescued.

The Death Guard were outnumbered, yes, but each one of them fought to the last breath in his festering body, refusing to surrender even a centimetre of ground.

Once again, Arkelius wondered just what it was they were fighting for. What was it that made Fort Kerberos a prize worth the having, even as it lay in ruins?

The battle seemed to rage forever, Arkelius’s enforced inactivity making every second seem to stretch into a lifetime. Then, the field in front of him began to clear at last, and Captain Numitor’s voice came over the vox-net again.

The Imperial tanks started forward on Numitor’s order. The
Scourge
was still out a short way ahead of the pack, so, as Arkelius dropped back into his seat, he told his driver to give the other vehicles a second or two to draw level.

It was just as well. Corbin had switched off the engine while they were stationary, giving it a chance to cool down. It took him three tries to restart it, and, when he did so, warning lights flashed across the instrument banks again and Arkelius smelt something burning.

Corbin voxed him, anticipating his commander’s question, ‘I can hold it together, if we take it slow and steady.’

For the first time he sounded stressed, and, as the Hunter ground into reluctant motion, Arkelius felt it pulling insistently to the left.

They rolled past a Plague Marine, still on his feet and holding his own against four Ultramarines. Then, suddenly, another traitor emerged from the smoke in front of them. His face was hidden by a rash of vile mutations and grafted-on augmetics.

He saw the
Scourge
bearing down on him, and braced himself as if to halt it with the strength of his own arms. Arkelius had Iunus train the hull-mounted storm bolter on the Plague Marine, and they blasted him with explosive rounds.

Then the Plague Marine leapt, a jump pack on his back firing, and he landed with a thump, spread-eagled across the
Scourge
’s prow. He was holding a death’s-head grenade, and Arkelius realised that he was trying to jam it down the Skyspear missile launcher’s barrel.

He was dragged from his perch by a pair of Ultramarines and shot at point-blank range in the head until he stopped twitching. Arkelius recognised one of the slayers – recognised the markings on his sealed armour, anyway – as Valerion, a former squad-mate.

The
Scourge
rolled over something its weight couldn’t crush – a hillock, or, more likely, an armoured corpse – and, briefly, his vision slit pointed up at the overcast sky. He saw the jagged warp rift and quickly wrenched his eyes away from its purple glare. At least its close proximity told him that they were finally nearing their objective.

Standing in their way, of course, was a line of enemy tanks.

There were several Chaos Predators among them. Most of the tanks, however, were Vindicators: siege engines, fitted with Demolisher cannons and dozer-blades. Their Death Guard owners had modified them in other ways too: more bizarre and horrifying ways.

Directly ahead of the
Scourge
, one tank had slimy tentacles sprouting from its hull and it was coughing up gouts of flame; another daemon-engine, it seemed. Most of the tanks were daubed with blazing Chaos runes, which made them painful to look at.

They had played little part in the fighting thus far, and had waited in silence for their enemies to come to them. As the battlefield began to clear, however – as the risk of causing collateral damage diminished – they were bringing their guns to bear.

Two Ultramarines were struck by Demolisher shells and vaporised.

Arkelius held the
Scourge of the Skies
back, alongside its sister Hunter – the
Vengeance of Daedalus
– and the two Stalkers. He let the Imperial Predator Destructors edge ahead of them. Their autocannons blazed, as did the lascannons in their sponsons, to which the enemy artillery were quick to respond in kind.

The enemy tanks were well within the Skyspear’s range now – and close enough for Iunus to get a target lock on any of them, despite the intervening smoke haze. So, Arkelius had his driver step on the brakes and lower the stabilisers.

Iunus asked permission to fire a missile. As Arkelius gave it, he heard sobering news through his earpiece: a Predator, one of theirs, had already been destroyed, struck by one of those Demolishers. Its crew hadn’t had time to get out; they had perished in flames.

‘All right,’ he snarled, addressing his own crew, ‘this is it! Captain Galenus is dealing with the Death Guard at the fort. That just leaves these unholy machines for us. Blow our way through them, and it’s over. We’ll have done the Emperor proud.’

As the leader of an infantry squad, he had often given similar speeches before. In the past, though, he had usually believed them.

The
Scourge
’s first Skyspear missile hit the Vindicator in front of them. Arkelius was sure that it had cracked its armour plating, but the tank’s hull flowed like ooze, reforming into a new and even more hideous shape. Its turret spun around to face its attacker.

A pair of searchlights on the Vindicator’s prow snapped on, glaring through the smoke of the explosion like malevolent eyes. To Arkelius, it seemed as if those eyes were looking right through the front of the
Scourge
and directly into his soul.