“Laquell,” she voxed, aiming her Thunderbolt towards the mass carrier. “You want to fly with the Apostles?”
“Sure, Larice,” replied Laquell. “I could do with another heart attack today.”
Larice flipped her aircraft over and pushed its nose down. The two fighters spread out and increased power, diving for the deck at high speed. She saw the enormous carrier was wallowing in the ocean, industrial-grade meltas flaring around its edges to melt the ice and allow it to escape beneath the water. The bats in the air would have nowhere to land if it submerged, but that didn’t seem to matter to the Archenemy commanders.
Autocannon shots burst around them and Larice grinned as she jinked the Thunderbolt up and down, avoiding the flak as though it was coming at her in slow motion. She flew instinctively, not even consciously aware of any decision-making process, just flying as though she knew, just knew, where the streams of tracers would be.
“There’s too much fire!” shouted Laquell.
“You might be right,” agreed Larice, calmly lining up her cannon’s gun-sight on the command spire of the mass carrier. Her quads opened up, and drifting blooms of fire erupted across the surface of the black tower like orange-petalled flowers with every impact.
“We’ve got to pull up, Larice! We’re too close!” screamed Laquell, hauling his plane away in a desperate climb that cost him valuable speed.
Three rockets leapt from the deck of the carrier as Larice pulled the trigger on her control column again. The quad-mounted autocannon thundered and blazed, the noise like a roaring chainsaw. The shells impacted ten metres in front of one of the carrier’s launch batteries before tearing into it and ripping it messily in half.
She pushed out the throttle to full military power and executed a tight, rolling spin, flipping up and over the deck of the carrier. Masked warriors fired pistols and rifles at her, and the rockets streaked across the deck in pursuit of her furnace-hot turbofans. Booming waves of icy water surged up from the carrier’s sides as it began to submerge.
Her auspex screamed warnings at her. She pulled a recklessly tight turn around the carrier’s command spire, spitting a string of incandescent flares as she punched the engines.
The rockets couldn’t match a vector turn and two of them slammed into the control spire of the carrier, gutting its upper levels with fire and high explosives. Its top section keeled over drunkenly, falling slowly, like the tallest tree in the forest. It slammed into the deck as Larice pulled higher and aimed her Thunderbolt towards the heavens as the Marauders swooped down like sharks with the scent of blood.
She saw the first bombs shedding from their bellies, falling like black raindrops towards the carrier. A few streams of close-in defence fire licked upwards. Some of the bombs would be caught in the flak storm, but nowhere near enough of them to make a difference.
Larice turned away from the doomed carrier, bleeding off airspeed in time to see the last rocket explode five metres from the engine of Erzyn Laquell’s Thunderbolt.
The blast sheared off his aircraft’s port wing and tail section, sending the aircraft into an uncontrolled downward spin.
“Punch out!” screamed Larice, “Come on, damn you! Eject!”
But the Thunderbolt continued to fall. It smashed into a spire of ice, cartwheeling end over end in a brilliant fireball. It slammed into the ice in a blizzard of silvered shrapnel.
“Damn you, Laquell, I told you to punch out!” she yelled at the wreckage of the burning aircraft. She cut her speed as low as she dared, flying over the crash site even though she knew there was no way anyone could have survived so fierce an impact. Hot tears pricked her eyes and she pulled up and away from the carrier as thunderous detonations rocked the air with hammerblows of searing air and percussive shockwaves.
Behind her, the Archenemy mass carrier shuddered like a dying beast as the Marauders spilled their load of iron and fire upon it. Bombs punched through its decks and exploded in the hangars, the dark temples and the slave pens. They vaporised the engines, the ballast tanks, the supply halls and the torture cells.
Blazing columns of tar-black smoke coiled from its ruptured innards, hundred-metre flames roaring from its wounds like elemental blood. The air went phosphor white as a collection of incendiaries, dropped from a Marauder of the 22nd Yysarians named Give ’em Hell, sailed through the cratered deck of the sinking carrier and exploded in the midst of its ruptured engine core.
Larice didn’t see it break in two and didn’t watch as it came apart in cracking splits of unclean metal. She didn’t watch it upend and spill its thousands-strong crew into the freezing water beneath the sea. She didn’t watch the greatest victory any of the men and women on Amedeo had ever seen.
She flew with her wings dipped over the remains of Erzyn Laquell’s Thunderbolt and felt her heart turn as cold as the ocean ice below.
“Get up,” said Seekan. “Get out,” replied Larice.
“I said get up, Apostle Five,” said Seekan. “And if it makes things clearer, that’s an order.”
Larice rolled over, seeing Seekan silhouetted by the door of her room with a suit bag slung over his shoulder. Dressed in his heavily-medalled cream frock coat, dress blue trousers and polished boots, he looked every inch the Wing Leader of an elite squadron of Navy flyers. His hair was immaculately oiled and his thin features were almost expressionless.
Almost, but not quite.
Seekan came into the room and sat on the edge of the bed, laying the linen fabric of the suit bag across his lap. One of the advantages of taking the Aquilian as their billet meant there was plenty of space for each pilot to have their own room. What would once have housed wealthy off-world socialites now sheltered weary Naval aviators. In case of flash alerts, all their rooms were on the first floor, and Larice heard the booming strains of Laude Beati Triumphia coming from the ballroom. Clearly Krone was in charge of the music again: he favoured rousing marching tunes.
“Another carrier destroyed?” she asked, pulling the bed sheets around her naked body.
“No,” said Seekan. He didn’t elaborate. Then what?
“None of the Apostles died.”
Winter Spear had been an unqualified success, with a combined tally of three hundred and ninety-six enemy bats accounted for in the air, together with however many were aboard the mass carrier when it sank. A total of one hundred and six Imperial craft were shot down, mostly the Die-ten-tens and Laredo bombers, but none of the attacking squadrons had come through without losses.
No squadron but the Apostles.
“None of the Apostles died, that’s true,” agreed Seekan. “But one of them learned a valuable lesson.”
“That’s why you didn’t offer Laquell a place, isn’t it?”
Seekan nodded. “I’m not as unfeeling as I appear, Larice. We don’t have the camaraderie of other Naval wings, and now you know why. We can’t afford to be friends with the people we fly alongside. Out of all the wings that fought in the attack on the carrier, we are the only ones to escape loss. Fate’s wheel has turned, and once again we escape its notice. The galaxy isn’t ready for us to die, and you need to show it that you don’t care one way or another. You need to show it that you don’t fear it, to spit into the darkness and say that nothing it can do will make the slightest bit of difference.”
Larice bunched the sheets in her fists. “I don’t know if I can.”
“You have to,” said Seekan. “The minute you start to care, that’s when they get you.”
“They?”
He shrugged. “Fate, Death, whatever’s out there in the darkness.”
“And that’s what you do? Not care?”
“I do what I have to. I drink and I sing and I rage at the stars, whatever really. Each of us has his own way. You’ve seen that.”
“Does it help?”
“It makes it easier. I don’t know if that’s the same thing, but it means I can climb into the cockpit of a Thunderbolt and not care if I come back.”
&
nbsp; Larice felt tears brimming on her eyelids, but forced them back with a swallow and grim nod. She reached for the suit bag draped across Seekan’s lap.
“Give me it,” she said. “I’ll be down in ten minutes.”
Attired in her full dress uniform, Larice strode into the ballroom, her heels clicking on the hardwood floor in time with the clashing timpani of Krone’s music. The Apostles gathered around the fire, drinking, arguing and behaving like naval ratings on their first shore leave in a year. Saul Cirksen had his pistol drawn and was taking potshots at the busts of forgotten notables of Amedeo.
Leena Sharto smoked a huge cigar and burned holes in the armrest of her chair, while Owen Thule knocked back shot after shot of hard liquor. Seekan gave her the briefest nod of acknowledgement as she approached. Jeric Suhr and Quint continued their endless game of regicide. Ziner Krone pressed a heavy balloon of amber-coloured liquor into her hand.
His skin gleamed dark, dangerous and powerful, and the scarring on the side of his face pulled tight in a grin as she downed the entire glass in one long swallow. It burned her, but it felt good. The heat and pain in her chest reminded her that she was alive. She looked at her fellow flyers and felt nothing for them. No emotions at all, not even contempt.
She threw the glass into the fire and it shattered with a brittle explosion.
Larice gripped Krone’s jacket. She pulled his face to hers and kissed him hard on the mouth. He responded hungrily and pulled her to his wide chest.
“About time,” he said.
“Shut your mouth,” she snapped, turning and pulling him towards the stairs.
Crisp sunlight beat down on the hardstands of Coriana, heating the honeycombed landing mats, but leaving the day cold. Pilots, fitters and armourers milled back and forth between the planes, dodging speeding tow-rigs and flashing gurneys laden with missiles and ammo boxes. Peristaltic fuel lines snaked from juddering bowsers to feed the thirsty aircraft, and ground crew directed taxing fighters and bombers to their designated runways. Larice clambered over the upper fuselage of her cream Thunderbolt, checking the repair job the fitters had done and watching the controlled dance of military might as the Imperium took the fight to the Archenemy. With the defeat of the northern flanking thrust, all assets were being directed to aid the ground war in the west. Confidence was high that the newly established air superiority would soon result in victory.
She knelt beside an opened panel behind the canopy. The damaged armour plates had been replaced and a tangle of cables ran from the exposed mechanisms of the aircraft to a diagnostic calculus-logi servitor. One of the Martian priesthood studied the tickertape clattering from the brass-rimmed slate fitted to its chest, a soft burble of binary spilling from the shadows beneath his hood.
Larice slid over the wing to the crew ladder and swung her leg around to hook the top rung. She climbed down and dropped to the hardstand, slapping her palm on the warmed flank of her plane.
Seven Thunderbolts in the same pristine colour scheme as hers were parked in a neat row, just one of a dozen squadrons being prepped and made ready to fly. Three Lightnings surged from launch rails, powering skywards on blazing plumes of firelit smoke. She watched them go, shielding her eyes from the low sun as they rolled over their port wings to head west.
Her gaze lowered as she saw a young, good-looking pilot in a camo-green uniform approaching her. He cocked his head to one side as he drew near, like he wasn’t sure he had the right person, but was going to ask anyway.
“Flight Lieutenant Asche?” he said. “Larice Asche?”
“Yeah, who wants to know?” she said, walking down the line of her plane’s fuselage.
The young man jogged after her and held out his hand.
“Flight Officer Layne Schaw,” he said with a beaming smile. “It’s an honour to meet you.”
Larice looked at the proffered hand and Schaw’s earnest smile.
“Get the frig away from me,” she hissed. “And don’t tell me your name.”
I’ve been a fan of Matt’s work since I first read it, and I think his Enforcer trilogy featuring the Adeptus Arbites Shira Lucina Calpurnia is entirely made out of epic win with a splash of awesome sauce.
For this story, Matt was interested in combining the activities of the Adeptus Mechanicus with the terrible instruments of warfare—the Woe Machines—used by Heritor Asphodel in several Gaunt stories, particularly Necropolis. Forgotten and misapprehended nightmares lurk on one of the worlds the giant Crusade has already rolled past…
Dan Abnett
THE HEADSTONE AND
THE HAMMERSTONE KINGS
Matthew Farrer
“It’s coming for Him. It’s carrying a Magos who’ll examine Him.”
An instant after Jopell had said the words, Kovind Shek’s long, wiry fingers gripped his suit-front and yanked him into a humiliating, stumbling fall into the dust between two slumped and broken engines. He lay there on one elbow, eyes closed, feeling the fine, tawny grit he’d stirred up as it drifted back down and coated his sweating skin with muck. The morning was chilly but having to double-time it into the graveyard in his heavy labourer’s jumpsuit had begun it, and a growing brew of fears in his belly—being caught, being caught and his forged papers spotted, not finding Kovind, how Kovind would take the news when he did find him—had done the rest. Jopell was damp and he stank.
His master had already turned his back and was shouting orders again. Jopell didn’t bother to open his eyes to look. It would be another labour-crew accident, one of the careful fatalities that Kovind didn’t trust him enough to let him help organise. Over the clank of metal he could already hear the frightened groans of the men the accident was going to happen to. For some reason they all had to be men. Jopell had wondered aloud about that once and Kovind had kicked him in the gut hard enough to tumble him over backwards.
“A Magos who’ll examine Him,” he muttered to himself again as he pushed himself up onto his arse. His legs jutted into a careless V in the dirt and his belly itched as it overhung them. He had delivered the message in the old Asheki dialect, and the pronoun form it used had a very precise set of connotations: the compound suffix showing respect due to a senior whose authority originated outside one’s own lineage and manory, the vowel intonations carrying nuances of standing in the Customs, the Practices and the Traditions, and the accents denoting forge-work and engine-craft. Context did the rest. There was only one thing he could be talking about.
He leaned back, staring up between the crushed and tarnished steel hulls, and fixed on it: the little dark dot hanging high up above them, looking like a tiny splinter embedded in pallid skin. It had been there for two days; for two more before that it hadn’t been visible at all, except at high magnification through the spyblock they’d stolen from the garrison post. It was taking its time, this “Headstone”.
Jopell wondered if he should feel greater unease about it. “Examine”, after all. Or at least that would be the closest Low Gothic word for the Asheki k’seoshe, a term which referred to something more complex. It meant careful, competent disassembly by a knowing hand and study by a knowing mind, but with a thief’s agenda—learning a device’s lore outside the formal blessing of the Traditions, examining its naked secrets against its builder’s will, an invasive hand and gaze devoid of respect or shame. It was what they were here to protect Him from. But they were weak now, in hiding since the hives had burned. Would they be able to do it?
He dropped his gaze at a shout from before him, in time to see a scrag-bearded victim duck under the reaching arms of one of Kovind’s thugs and break clear. He was a clumsy runner, the loose-hanging suit flapping around his staggering legs and swinging arms. His mouth gaped with terror and exertion. One thug tried to break off after him, but they had the rest of the victims to restrain and a brawl broke out under the tilting hulk. Kovind cursed and shouted.
“Brother!” the man said as he homed in on Jopell. “Brother, they’re mad, get out of here! Get the soldier
s, get the preachers, I don’t know what they—” and then Jopell, who was good with distances and movement, came up off the ground and into him and broke his jaw with an elbow. The man’s feet shot out in front of him as his head was knocked backward and his full-length landing sent up another puff of grit. A moment later meaty hands were dragging him back to the broken machine.
Jopell strolled after the kicking figure, some of his composure seeping back. The hulk was a Skybreaker train, the segments torn off one another and left in an ungainly pile by some ignorant Throne-licking hauler crew who’d have been acid-flayed for their disrespect in a righter world than this one. This segment, one of the rear ones as far as Jopell could tell, was badly balanced on the pile. Pict records and testimonies from the other crews would show that it had already looked liable to topple over. The gantry cranes had waddled into position on one side of it, where they could plausibly claim to have been trying to stabilise the pile for a cutting crew to start work.
These men weren’t a cutting crew. Skilled cutters were valuable, and the most skilled ones knew about the Customs and even the Traditions and had the same loyalties as Kovind and himself. But they carried a cutter rig, an old one that could be spared, and Psinter was doing her thing in the Administratum compound. By the time the bodies were found the records would show these men had been a cutting crew indeed.
The muscle men had been bought with various combinations of favours, promises, stolen Adeptus scrip and crude liquor. They thought they were working for a slightly elevated version of themselves, someone with rackets to protect and reputation to enforce. They didn’t know Kovind Shek’s place in the Traditions. It worked best that way. Now they shoved the victims into position, immobilised one pesky struggler with two heavy heel-stomps to his knees, and backed away. They were barely out of range when Kovind gave the signal and the crane operator let the grip claw disengage. Two of the men screamed, and then the pitted and blast-burned side of the Skybreaker hulk came down on them like a boot on a beetle.