Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [56]
His second wave arrived, unleashing their payloads. Thunderbolts, much larger and heavier armed than the Lightnings, sent great plumes of smoke and dust rising from the wasteland’s surface as their incendiaries impacted.
‘Bomb this place to ashes,’ Barasath voxed, and watched his pilots do exactly that.
Fire ripped across the wastelands in hungry trails, consuming the ragged airstrips that would never be allowed to take shape after this. Grounded junk-fighters exploded in succession.
Of course, the site wasn’t completely defenceless, even with most of it in flames. A few tanks fired gamely up at the strafing Imperial flyers, with all the grace and accuracy of old men trying to swat flies.
He’d taken fire on his last banking swoop over the airbase. A lucky – or unlucky, as Barasath saw it – shot sheared off the best part of his left wing. There would be no climbing from this death-dive. No aiming for a wreck-Titan as Helika and a handful of others had done.
He pulled the cockpit release as the fighter started to spin, ditching above the burning site. There was a moment of disorientation, the push of the wind, the world coming into focus after the twisting plunge of the falling fighter… and then he was falling into black smoke and dust clouds.
Darkness embraced him. His respirator saved him having to breathe the choking smog, but his flight goggles were unenhanced and couldn’t pierce the smoke. Barasath pulled his cord, feeling himself jerked upward as his grav-chute opened.
With no idea where the ground was, he was lucky to hit the earth without breaking both of his legs. His ankle flared up in protest, but he considered that to be getting off lightly.
Cautiously, aware of the fact that the smoke hid him as much as it hid the enemy, he pulled his laspistol and moved through the blinding darkness. It was hot, a savage heat all around him that spoke of burning planes and landers nearby, yet not enough light to offer direction.
When he finally broke through the black cloud, pistol in his sure grip, he blinked once at what stood before him, and started to fire.
‘Oh Throne,’ he said with surprising politeness, right before the orks lumbering ahead shot him through the chest.
Stormherald hungered.
It ached with each pounding step, its roiling plasma core burning in its chest as it reluctantly turned its back on the enemy and marched through the streets.
Its way was clear, its path already set. Buildings had been demolished earlier in the week – their foundations blown up and the hab-blocks themselves fallen to rubble – to make way for its passage.
The need to turn around and pour its hatred into the enemy was fierce, a hunter’s urge, almost strong enough to overwhelm the Crone’s whispers in its mind.
The Crone. Her presence was a savage irritant. Again, Stormherald leaned as it walked, seeking to turn with its ponderous, striding slowness. And again, the Crone’s claws in its mind forced its body to comply with her intent.
We move, she whispered, to fight a greater battle soon.
Stormherald’s rage faded at her voice. There was something new in her words, something its predator’s mind clutched and recognised immediately. A fear. A doubt. A plea.
The Crone was weaker now than she ever had been before.
Stormherald knew nothing of pleasure or amusement. Its soul was forged in ancient rites of fire, molten metal, and plasmic energy that churned with the ferocity of a caged sun. The closest it came to an emotion approximating pleasure was the rush of awareness and the dimming of its painful anger as enemies died under its guns.
It felt a ghost of that sensation now. It complied with her urgings now, still bound to her control.
But the