The phosphorus burn of auto-fire tracers stitched across the streaking blue, the loose-chain rattle of machine cannons barely audible above the roar of turbofans. The Penitent Wrath descended hard and hammered left. A propeller-driven biplane with a lightning bolt jagging down the side droned by on the right, and spat high-velocity slugs into the water. Kjarvik held on, scowling. More of the atmosphere fighters were buzzing low over the ocean on an intercept course. They were not going to make it, of course.
The ork aircraft were remarkably capable given their ramshackle design, but they had not a scrap on the Thunderhawk’s speed. And Atherias, the Hawk Lord, was good. Almost preternaturally good. His co-pilot was not too bad either.
The gunship levelled out, auto-fire crisscrossing the sky around them. Kjarvik beheld the mountainous structure that Atherias’ evasive manoeuvres had brought into view.
Bohr would have called it an island hive, or the remains of one, but Bohr had no soul.
It was a titan of the ocean underworld, the burned, bombed-out skeleton of a thing that could not die. Its skin partially regenerated with drift metal, plastek sheeting, and planks of wood, it reared up for the feast of metallics that glinted in the orbital band. Fat blimps and transorbitals buzzed around its thorny head like carrion birds.
Massive guy ropes held the teetering mountain upright, anchored within the sprawling pontoon shanties that crested and fell with the waves. The relentless wave action was converted into power by salt-corroded copper converters, fed into hab-size capacitors for storage or through fat cables towards immense desalination complexes. The dark blue water was slurped out of the ocean by the kilolitre, potable water and salts spitting out into drums for export. Fleets of ramshackle paddleboats trawled the ocean for usable scrap.
Mere months after Plaeos had fallen, the orks had made their new conquest not just viable, but valuable.
‘Twenty seconds,’ came Atherias’ voice, tinny in his ear bead.
An ork fighter came apart in a blizzard of outsized engine parts as Penitent Wrath’s lascannons neatly cut it out of the sky and set off its fuel tank. Debris spanked off the gunship’s heavy hull armour, and Kjarvik ducked back to avoid a piece of propeller that came scything across like a circular saw and took a bite out of the foot of the ramp before bouncing clear.
He looked back out, and saw the fighter’s wingman pull a turn that would have torn a Lightning interceptor in half, then spear out left. Machine-guided underwing hardpoints tracked it, mass-reactives spitting between its wobbling interwing struts as it flashed underneath the gunship then pulled into a gravity-defying vertical corkscrew that swung the fighter-bomber in behind. Kjarvik caught a glimpse of the pilot — immense musculature, bulked out in furs and squeezed into a cockpit. A huge grin split the ork’s ugly mouth beneath a set of red-lensed goggles as it mashed its firing toggles to send a stream of auto-fire gnawing through the Thunderhawk’s blocky rear armour.
A ruptured oxygen main sprayed compressed gases across the assault ramp as Kjarvik drew his bolt pistol and loosed a flurry of rounds. The gas spray cut out as Penitent Wrath’s spirit redirected her outlets. The wind cleared the ramp, and Kjarvik was able to watch as the fighter veered off with a mass-reactive wound in her upper wing before breaking up in the water.
‘Hah!’ he roared. ‘Did you see that?’
‘A lucky shot,’ Bohr chided, crackling in his ear.
‘Better to be lucky than not, I say.’
‘Ten seconds.’
The Thunderhawk responded to the heightened strain of four armoured Space Marines moving towards its rear hatch with a barely audible whine of its already howling turbofans. Kjarvik looked over his shoulder.
Baldarich pressed Phareous’ shield into his gauntlets. It was white against the fresh black of his armour and bore the emblem of a writhing snake. Phareous in turn tossed the Black Templar his broadsword. Behind them, Zarrael rammed the most vicious-looking weapon Kjarvik had ever seen across his back. He called it an eviscerator. The Flesh Tearer was massive, despite the fact he had just knelt to strap a bandolier of grenades over his thigh plate. Kjarvik had seen orks smaller.
Kill-Team Umbra.
‘Your helmet.’ Iron Father Jurkim Bohr appeared from the cockpit hatch. Whipping mechadendrites performed final checks on his battleplate and moved, apparently guided by their own spirits, to pluck spare magazines and grenades from the equipment lockers. Other tendrils snaked through the cargo webbing, moving in a weird mirror-fashion to the stride of his armoured limbs. Two women in bulky pressure suits, back-mounted grav-harnesses and underwater rebreathers flanked him.
Despite their protective coverings, their relative stature, the women possessed a presence that engulfed them all, that the Thunderhawk itself could not contain. They glided where the Iron Hand clumped, floated within a null singularity of their pariah physiology.
Kjarvik gave a pantherish snarl, and slid the black helmet over his mane as advised. It found the gorget softseals with a hiss of magnetic constrictors. It killed the wind, but it would take more than an environment seal to take the chill factor of the Sisters away. After a moment, his helm display came alive, pre-set with counters clocking local probable and relativistic time. They were all blinking rapidly down towards zero.
‘Five seconds.’
There was a time and a place for waiting. Kjarvik did not think that this was it. What was five seconds anyway?
He stepped backwards off the ramp.
The wind hit him hard and he began to fall. The thunder of turbofans and heavy bolters disappeared in the roar. He spread his arms and legs wide and let go a howl of joy. The black paint of the gunship disappeared. The wide grey of the ocean rushed up to meet him, waves rearing up as though desperate to hit him before he hit them.
Then they did, like being rammed in the chest by a Razorback, and everything became black.
Eidolica — orbital
Check 7, -00:09:01
No one had ever called the Fists Exemplar home world beautiful.
Its sun was a ball of thermonuclear rage. The daylight terminator was a line of fire ten kilometres high and twenty thousand long, a creeping barrage of photons and ultraviolet rays. Barren mountains rose high into the atmosphere, what wind the world’s torturous spin could generate insufficient to blunt them. Vast black expanses of promethium sands covered about a third of the surface in lieu of liquid oceans.
From the Storm Eagle’s open rear hatch Tyris could pick out the sprawling extraction and refinery complexes, a web of rust and piping and sporadic flare-offs that ate into the littoral boundary. A countdown timer hovered over his left eye, stretched slightly by the curve of his visor. He turned from the hatch and stepped aside. The deliberate heel-up, disengage, toe-down maglock gait came as second nature.
His own genetic proclivities, maybe, but the Raven Guard would always be more comfortable in the black.
‘Nubis. Antares.’
The Salamander and Fist Exemplar of Kill-Team Stalker clumped up to the hatch. The sun burned a white stripe along the smooth relief of their helmets, pauldrons, and the lift jets of their jump packs. They stood either side of a third figure, similarly geared with a light-variant jump pack and grav-lines. She was tall for a human, but not so tall in the company she kept. Her ornate, high-collared armour appeared gold, but the thermal membrane that had been painted over the top dulled its shine. It stretched over her bald head and braided topknot like a taut skin. The infinite depths of her eyes were shielded by a set of flare goggles.