Then he saw Meryn, passing him twenty metres to his left, looking stiff and awkward but at least in control. Squeezing his handgrip, he propelled himself after the sergeant.
Larisel 1 was two minutes short of its DZ, juddering through flak, when the engines finally failed. Jagdea yelled at them to go, fighting to keep the nose of the leaden craft up as long as she could. They bailed: Vadim, Unterrio, Banda, Varl. Bonin hesitated, and clambered back to the cockpit ladder. The Marauder was beginning to vibrate wildly.
“Come on!” he cried. “Move it! You’ve both got chutes! Come on!”
Jagdea pushed him back. There was a bright burst right outside the cockpit dome and flak sent ribbons of metal and glass spearing in at them. Bonin didn’t have to look to see that the co-pilot was dead.
“Jagdea!” he bellowed, grabbing at her.
Stalling out, the Marauder rolled over onto its back and entered a terminal swan dive. Bonin was upside down, pressed into the roof, the harness of his jump-pack half-choking him.
Fighting the mounting G-force, Jagdea pulled a lever that fired the explosive bolts in the cockpit canopy’s frame, and the damaged canopy ripped away entirely. She unbuckled her restraint harness and pulled at Bonin hard, yanking him up into the cockpit. The force of the wind did the rest, sucking them both up and out of the diving craft and scattering them away into the sky.
“Are we on the target?” asked Mkoll. “I don’t know!” said Babbist. “Are we on the target?”
“The damn aimer is off-line!” Babbist yelled, struggling to get the flickering, rolling image to freeze. “We’re going to overshoot if we’re not careful,” said Nour. “We go, we go now!” Mkoll decided. “But—” Babbist began. “We go now!”
Mkoll moved to the hatch. “Come on! Line up and out!”
There was an odd bump, like something had flicked at his inner ear. Mkoll swayed and looked round. There was a smouldering hole in the deck of the cabin where a large calibre tracer round had punched through, killing Babbist on its way up to the roof. Nour had been knocked down, and Rilke and Cocoer were trying to lift him.
“Come on!” Mkoll cried. A shower of sparks blinded him. More tracer was riddling the cabin, ripping through the hull-skin. He heard Rilke scream and Nour yelling, “It’s going! It’s going! It’s going!”
Varl landed a damn sight harder than he might have wished, and lay for a moment on a section of reinforced roof plating, winded and bruised. Unterrio appeared over him, grabbing him by the hands and pulling him up. “Feth,” said Varl.
They were on a wide manufactory roof structure adjoining the main vapour mill, high up above Ouranberg with only the mill chimneys and the crag of Ouranpeak rising above them. The sky was a bright fury, but the raid now seemed far away.
Banda had made it down on a roof section adjacent to theirs, and as they went down to join her, using the lift of the packs to bounce themselves along as if on springs, they heard Vadim calling urgently over the vox.
Unterrio spotted the young Verghastite up on the inspection walkway of a chimney flue. He was pointing up at the sky.
“There! There!” he said.
Varl looked. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, then he saw what Vadim’s sharp eyes had already detected. A Marauder, about a kilometre and half away, turning south in a loop. It had to be Mkoll’s bird, Larisel 4, making its pass on the mining habs.
Then he realised it was on fire.
“Feth, they had better—” he began. The Marauder exploded in mid-air. A big sphere of white light expanded in the sky and then was gone.
Mkoll, Rilke, Nour, Cocoer… just gone. Vital men, friends…
A whole team finished before they’d even begun.
LARISEL AND THUNDERHEAD
THE ASSAULT ON OURANBERG, PHANTINE,
224 to 226.771, M41
“Right through the specialist training, we’d all had this feeling of confidence, like the beloved Emperor was with us in all things. Then we were on the ground, and Mkoll and the others were dead, and we started to realise we didn’t stand a chance.”
—Brin Milo, 3rd Team trooper, Tanith First
ONE
They had to get off the roof-space fast. Thick streams of black smoke from petrochemical fires and incendiary bursts were washing back across them and across the roof structures of the Ouranberg’s secondary vapour mill.
The smoke was pouring from the main city, carried by the powerful high-altitude winds and, if the Emperor was with them, it would have concealed them in the last stages of their jump.
But from the moment he was down, Doyl had been surveying the area. There were six defence towers in the immediate vicinity, all of them with decent views of the roof where they had landed, smoke or no smoke.
The five members of Larisel 3 hurried into the cover of a ventilator stack and got down. No firing had come their way; indeed, two of the towers were still spitting tracer streams at Imperial aircraft peeling off the target.
“Did they see us?” Milo voxed.
“We’re alive, aren’t we?” replied Sergeant Adare. “I think their attention is on the sky above.”
“Check in,” voxed Specialist Cardinale. “Any injuries? Any equipment losses?” There were none apparently. Adare made a special point of signing to Nessa to make sure she was okay.
“Did you hear what they said?” muttered Doyl. “Sergeant Varl, on the vox, as we were coming in?”
Milo had. A brief, incomplete, dreadful message-burst. Mkoll’s craft had gone up short of its drop point.
“I can’t believe it—” he murmured.
“Me neither,” said Adare. “God-Emperor rest their souls. But there’s nothing we can do about it. Except go on with this and get some fething pay-back.”
Adare raised his gloved hand and exchanged palm-slaps with Doyl, Milo and Nessa. Cardinale hesitated and then smacked his own hand against Adare’s proffered gauntlet. Milo knew Adare was trying to make sure the Phantine felt like part of the team.
In truth, Milo had returned Adare’s palm-slap with little conviction himself. The loss of Mkoll was a profound shock. The scout sergeant had always seemed invulnerable, one of those Ghosts who would never fall. Milo even felt a little envious of Nessa. She couldn’t read their lips because of the visors and no one had signed her the news. He’d been worried about how she might cope with the mission given her disability, but now it seemed she was lucky to be spared the bad news. At least for a while.
Doyl led them down the length of the ventilator stack and then across a narrow open space to the cover of some galvanised pipework. They moved sluggishly and heavily, even though the grav-units of their jump-packs were still on to ease the burden.
Cardinale helped Doyl out of his jump pack and the scout hurried on alone, looking for an entry point while the others got rid of their packs. Adare and Cardinale stowed the heavy units in a stack under the pipework, lashed them in place with rope and concealed them with a scrim net. Milo doubted there would be many foot patrols up here in the toxic atmosphere outside the dome, but the last thing they wanted was for the enemy to find traces of a troop landing.
They were still weighed down with kit, helmets and the armoured smocks, but now they felt a thousand times lighter. Nessa had taken her long-las out of its cover and assembled it, though with her visor in place, there was no point aligning the scope. Milo peeled the adhesive tape off his U90’s twenty-five round clip and replaced it with a drum magazine marked with a red cross — the special armour-piercing load. Adare collected in and pocketed the plastic muzzle stoppers. Then he gently tried his vox-link. They’d picked up Varl’s strangled message whilst still in the air. Now they were down, the hard structures of Ouranberg were blocking anything but short-range transmission. As Daur had predicted in his last briefing, there was going to be no contact between teams once the mission was underway. A full-gain vox-caster would have weighed one of them down unnecessarily. Besides, it wasn’t impossible that the enemy was scanning for vox
-calls on the known Imperial wavelengths.
Milo hunched down so that he had a good firing position, covering the space all the way from the pipework to what looked like a row of short exhaust flues on the edge of the roof section. Despite the bitter cold, he was hot, and he could feel cold sweat running down his spine. It was getting harder to breath. They were probably reaching the limit of their air-bottles.
Doyl reappeared. He had unshipped his camo-cloak and shrouded himself with it.
“Got a possible entry point. Thirty metres that way. Looks like a maintenance hatch and it’s locked, but we should be able to force it.”
They ran forward, low, in single file, after his lead. The hatch was thick with rust and lay in the side of a raised hump in the roof, under the lea of an exposed roof spar. Milo and Cardinale stood look-out to either side with weapons ready as Adare and Doyl examined the hatch.
“I don’t think it’s pressurised,” said Adare.
“Me neither. We get through this and maybe down inside to a sealed door.”
“Cut it,” Adare said.
Doyl took out a compact cutting torch, said the prayer of ignition, lit its small energy blade and sliced into the lock. There were a few sparks and a slight glow, but Adare held his camo-cloak out to screen the work.
Once the teeth of the lock were cut Doyl used his knife to force the corroded hatch out of its frame Adare led the way in, a lamp pack locked to his lasrifle’s bayonet lug. The chamber appeared to be a circulation space around the head of an elevator assembly. Heavy machinery, caked in grease, jutted up out of the floor. Even with his helmet on, Milo could hear the wind moaning through rust holes in the metal roof-cover.
Doyl located a floor hatch in the far corner and they snuggled down a short ladder into dark attic spaces that filled the cavity between the mill’s outer roof and inner pressurised hull. It was now getting very hard to breathe.
The floor beneath them was a skin of clean metal ribbed with tension members. Unwilling to find out if the inner hull skin was load-bearing, they edged along the ribbing. After about fifty metres, they came across a break in the inner roof where rockcrete support piles of staggering proportions rose through to buttress the main roof.
One had metal rungs fused into the side, and they descended again, carefully, hand over hand, weapons slung on their backs.
Twenty metres down, the way was blocked. A huge moulded collar of industrial plastene sheathed the descending piles and sealed them against the downward sloping rim of roof-skin. Adare believed they would have to go back, but Milo spotted an almost invisible inspection plate in the metal skin. With Adare supporting his weight, Doyl leaned out from the rungs and pressed against the plate until it fell into the cavity behind. Doyl swung over and clambered through. A moment later, he voxed them to follow.
They were in a crawl space under the inner skin, and there was barely room to stand. Doyl replaced the plate which had rubberised edging and formed a seal by being held in place by the internal pressure. Milo could feel the rush of air going out past him until Doyl got the plate back in position.
Gratefully, they unplugged their air-tubes and slid their visors up. The air was thin and cold and had a rough taste in it that stung their throats. But they were now inside the pressurised section of the mill.
“Did we trip an alarm?” Cardinale asked.
“I don’t think so,” replied Doyl, checking the frame of the plate for signs of leads or breakers. “The atmosphere processors might have lost a tiny amount of pressure while the plate was open, but I doubt it was enough for them to have noticed.”
“In case they did, and they’re able to pinpoint the source, let’s get moving anyway,” said Adare.
They hunched their way down the crawl space. It opened out dramatically, stretching out further than the eye could see, but didn’t get any deeper. Doyl scouted around, and found a hatch in the floor some forty metres off. It was heavy-duty, Imperial design, and electronically locked.
The scout worked fast. He taped one of the six miniature circuit-breakers he carried in his tool-roll to the hatch frame, and secured its leads to either side of the lock. He waited until the little green rune on its casing lit up, indicating that the hatch’s alarm circuit was now looping via the breaker, and then cut through the lock-tongue with his cutting torch. Though there was no immediate scream of klaxons, it was impossible to tell if the alarm had been bypassed, so they dropped through the hatch quickly and pulled it shut behind them.
The hatch had let them down into a maintenance corridor, old and dingy, and poorly lit. Centuries of condensation had rusted the walls, rotted the mat-boards and encouraged thick, lurid mould growths along the ceiling. The corridor ran north/south.
“South,” said Adare confidently, and they moved off. South, the direction of the main city structure of Ouranberg. And the creature they had come to kill.
It had taken Bonin a full ninety seconds to gain control of his jump-pack, and that had felt like an eternity: tumbling, wheeling, spinning, with no sense of up or down. Somehow, Jagdea had shown the good sense to cling on to him, despite the violence of their drop.
By the time he had squeezed enough lift out of the grav-units to pull them both up, and begun to compensate for their drift with the turbines, they were well out to the east of Ouranberg.
“Hold on!” he voxed.
“My chute’s intact! I’ll drop!” she replied.
“Where to?” he asked. Below their dangling feet there was nothing but the frothing, fire-lit expanse of the Scald.
“It doesn’t matter—”
“No! Just hold on!” His voice over the link sounded tinny and dull. The night winds beat and tugged at them.
Cautiously, Bonin nudged them towards the gloomy city, using little squirts of turbine power to buoy them along like a leaf on a racing stream. The crosswinds seemed to be with them, but every now and then, the gale suddenly gusted against them, and the pair were turned or blown back.
“Your grip still good?”
“Yes.” She had her hands and forearms locked up under his chest harness. He realised he had his right arm protectively clutched around her left shoulder, gripping the top of her inflator-chute’s shoulder webbing.
“We’re going to need more lift,” he said, depressing the red stud on the handgrip. The grey, eastern slopes of what had to be Gamma dome were looming in front of them like a mountain range.
They almost didn’t clear Gamma dome. Bonin had to fight to stop the crosswinds smashing them into the outer hull, and the jump pack seemed to be struggling to find enough lift. Vortices of wind created by the dome’s angular surface eddied them like chaff. And though, by the altimeter, they were climbing fast the dome seemed to go on forever.
Gamma dome seemed to have been virtually untouched by the raid, though great flickers of orange and white lit the sky and the clouds behind it where Beta dome was ablaze.
As they hugged the curve of the dome up towards the summit a different level of wind patterns took over and suddenly started to carry them up with increasing speed. The dome-hull flicked by underneath them, and Bonin had to pull hard to the left to avoid collision with a protruding mast.
Then they were over, passing the massive icy crag of Ouranpeak, and dropping towards the main vapour mill.
“Varl! Banda! Vadim! Respond!” Bonin voxed. Foolishly, he had imagined his biggest problem was going to be getting anywhere near the mill. Now, seeing the size of it, he realised that finding his team mates was going to be a much taller order.
He repeated his calls as often as he dared. They soared down past a scaffolding tower structure that suddenly lit up and roared with heavy anti-air fire.
They weren’t the target. The tower was plugging away at a Shrike dive-bomber that had misjudged its run. But Bonin had been concentrating so hard on steering and guiding, he hadn’t even thought about the defence points and towers Ouranberg bristled with.
It was a sudden, sobering thought. Perhaps i
t was that they presented such a tiny target perhaps luck was with them, but it now seemed like a miracle that they hadn’t been spotted, tracked and fired on by any of the gun emplacements on Gamma dome.
Luck, Bonin decided. He couldn’t see it because of the high, covering cirrocumulus, but he was sure his lucky star was still up there somewhere.
However, it wouldn’t be for long.
“Brace yourself, Jagdea,” he said.
“What? Oh sh—”
They dipped onto a lattice-truss roof in the shadow of mill head, but the angle was bad, the deceleration a little premature, and the roof a good deal steeper than Bonin had judged.
They bounced once, denting the alloy siding hard, and rolled, flying apart. Jagdea bounced again, twice, cried out in pain as the impacts jarred her recently-knitted break, and slithered to the edge of the guttering.
Bonin tried to gun the turbine, but the first impact had buckled the control arm and he couldn’t find it. He crashed over the gutter, slammed into the side of a storage tank, and blacked out.
“Nice landing,” he heard Jagdea say as he came round. She was hunched over him, tugging loose the buckles of his harness. “Anything broken?”
“I don’t think so.”
He sat up. He had landed on a strip of roof between the tank and the raised section where they had first tried to set down. The strip was a tarnished sluice of metal matted with wet filth where the upper roof structures drained water away. Looking round he saw that if he had continued to roll or slide, he would have gone clean off a fifty metre drop into a derrick assembly.
Together, they scrambled up the strip and onto a slab roof behind the tanks. Bonin prepped his lasrifle and Jagdea took out a service issue Navy pistol. He tried the vox again, but there was still no signal from his team.