Engines of War (12 page)

Iunus had hauled Corbin up through the
Scourge
’s hatchway. Arkelius helped by supporting his head as, together, they lowered the injured driver down from the Hunter’s roof. The lenses in Corbin’s helmet had been shattered and his eyes were badly damaged.

‘Emperor, grant him the strength to overcome this,’ Iunus breathed. As Arkelius had noted earlier, he was young, and, for as long as he had served with the Ultramarines, Corbin had served alongside him.

He said nothing to his battle-brother, however. He was listening to the latest vox reports, with a sinking feeling. ‘The captain…’ he muttered. ‘The captain’s down.’

It hardly seemed possible. Caito Galenus had been a lieutenant when Arkelius had been recruited into the Fifth Company. He had been a captain for as long as Arkelius had been a sergeant. He had always been there, at the forefront of every combat, leading his men by example, never asking them to take a risk he wouldn’t gladly take himself.

Some people – only those who didn’t know him – had called him a glory-hunter, albeit never twice within Arkelius’s earshot. He had seemed to be invincible.

At the fort, in the captain’s absence, Terserus led the charge against the monster. He thundered towards it, his arm-mounted bolters flaring. His bolts pinged off its patches of armour and, equally, off the exposed bones in between them.

The Daemon Prince’s bloodshot but fiery eyes narrowed and its twisted maw gaped open. It belched out a thick stream of glistening mucus in its attacker’s direction.

Even Terserus was stopped – temporarily, Arkelius hoped – in his tracks.

The three battle-brothers who had been following in his footsteps kept going, but separated, having lost the protection of the Dreadnought’s armour in front of them. Their bolters were proving ineffectual too, so they fired up their chainswords.

The first of them reached his hovering foe and slashed at a dangling leg. His blow landed solidly and appeared to have done some damage, although Arkelius was too far away to tell if it had drawn blood. Did a Daemon Prince have blood to draw, he wondered?

The monster let out a contemptuous laugh and dropped heavily onto the rubble, squaring up to its opponent. It was carrying a massive, filth-encrusted flail, with which it lashed out viciously. The Space Marine threw up an arm to protect his chest and head; the flail’s twin chains wrapped around it and shredded his armour.

His brothers came at the Daemon Prince from each side, hoping to slam it between them. Its wings droned loudly as they hauled it back into the sky, maddeningly out of their reach.

In the absence of an Apothecary, Iunus was kneeling beside Corbin, patching him up as best he could with the
Scourge
’s medi-kit. Once that was done, he looked up at his sergeant for instructions. He was already fingering the haft of his sheathed chainsword, in anticipation of what those instructions would be.

An hour earlier, Arkelius wouldn’t have hesitated. He would have led Iunus to the front lines in a heartbeat, and been glad of the chance to exercise his muscles in combat – real combat – once again. An hour earlier, he had prayed for a chance like this.

A lot could change in just an hour.

Again, he turned his gaze towards Fort Kerberos’s shattered remains, just as the Daemon Prince’s pox-ridden flail claimed its first kill. One down, and it had only taken a matter of seconds. The luckless Ultramarine, at least, had not given his life for nothing.

The Daemon Prince’s attention had been drawn away from Terserus, which had given him the chance he needed to recover his strength. The Dreadnought bellowed a fierce litany of hatred as he ran at his monstrous foe like a speeding tank.

The Daemon Prince tried to climb further into the sky, but its wings couldn’t lift its considerable bulk quickly enough. The Dreadnought tackled it and dragged it back down to the ground. With one arm, he pinned its wings behind its back; with the other, he emptied two bolter clips into its leering face.

They crashed into the rubble together, the Dreadnought and the Daemon Prince, and, for a moment, the watching Arkelius thought – hoped, prayed – that the battle might not have been as hopeless as he had first thought. Just for a moment.

It soon became clear which was the stronger of the two combatants. The Daemon Prince was slower than Terserus, but its flail, where it hit, was slicing into the Dreadnought’s casing, cutting fibre bundles inside it. It looked as if his right arm, his storm bolter arm, was dead, although his power fist had landed a few good punches.

The Daemon Prince stretched open its mouth again, this time to cough up a cloud of buzzing black flies. The Dreadnought reeled as the insects engulfed him; still, he clung to the Daemon Prince’s feet as it attempted to take to the air once more, doggedly weighting it down.

Then, the fastest of the Space Marines from the main force reached their battle-brother’s side and, for all its size, the Daemon Prince found itself swarmed by a grim mass of blue-armoured avengers. The screams of their angry chainswords rent the air.

They would keep the monster busy for a short time, Arkelius judged. What they needed in the longer term, however, were bigger guns – much bigger.

At least two other tank crews had come to the same conclusion. They had started up their engines and were advancing upon the fort again. Their Predator Destructors, however, didn’t have what the
Scourge of the Skies
had. They didn’t have the Skyspear missile launcher.

Nor, for that matter, were the Predators sitting with their noses in the ground and their back ends in the air, their engines and most of their onboard systems burned-out.

Arkelius, nevertheless, met his gunner’s enquiring gaze. ‘Think you can hit that thing from here?’ he asked.

Iunus looked at him, then past him at the ruined fort and the monstrous Daemon Prince and at the upturned
Scourge
. He nodded, ‘It’s well within the Skyspear’s range, sergeant.’

Arkelius broadcast an urgent appeal through his vox-grille. He asked for assistance from the closest available units. A tank driver and gunner – having given up on coaxing their own vehicle back to life – responded to his summons.

They were joined by a Techmarine too, clad in the red armour of the Adeptus Mechanicus. His servo-harness, with its mechanical arms and cutters, was exactly what Arkelius needed.

Five brothers, all told, himself and Iunus included. It would be enough.

He gathered his team beside the crippled Hunter. ‘I want this wreck on its wheels again,’ he announced, ‘and back in the fight.’

Righting the
Scourge
proved to be no easy task.

Not that Arkelius had expected it to be. The Hunter must have weighed something close to thirty tonnes, which was a lot of mangled metal for even five Space Marines to lift.

The Techmarine helped. He employed his cutters to disentangle the
Scourge
’s tracks from the crushed Predator Destructor in which they had become embedded. He also braced the
Scourge
’s vital missile launcher with improvised wedges to protect it from any further jarring. He positioned each Space Marine along the
Scourge
’s hull and calculated the optimal angle at which his force should be exerted.

Arkelius was grateful for the Techmarine’s input, and accepted that the work he was doing was worthy. At the same time, he chafed at the time it was taking.

He could see his battle-brothers at the fort, fighting and dying in his stead, and he yearned to go to them. The Daemon Prince was hurling Space Marines away from it as if they were no heavier – and no more of a threat to it – than stalks of grain. Most of them got up again and leapt straight back into the fray, but it was wearing them down, slowly but surely.

The Techmarine announced that, at last, his work was done, and it was time for his brothers to do theirs. The knees and shoulders of five suits of power armour bent and strained, and the back end of the
Scourge of the Skies
was slowly raised, though not without a protest.

The most difficult part of the operation followed, as the Space Marines had to manoeuvre the cumbersome wreck around until its back end was clear of the Predator. Only then could they lower it to the ground, which they managed less gently than Arkelius had hoped.

The
Scourge
landed heavily on its tracks – and, with a shudder and a wrench and a deathly groan, it settled there, if not exactly standing proud, then at least unbowed.

The Techmarine climbed onto the Hunter’s roof. He tinkered at the base of the Skyspear’s missile tube with his servo-arms, making sure it was properly aligned. Iunus wrenched open the
Scourge
’s side hatch and retook his seat in the rear compartment.

Arkelius dismissed his other two helpers – they hurried off to join the battle – and waited as long as he could bear before prompting his gunner, ‘Well? Damage report?’

Iunus looked up from his monitors, shaking his head. ‘We’ve lost the targeting auspex, sergeant, which means I can’t–’

‘Don’t tell me what you can’t do, only tell me what you can.’

‘I could aim the Skyspear manually, sergeant – if I could see the target, that is.’

‘Or if someone told you where to shoot.’

‘There are too many battle-brothers between us. I’d fire over their heads, of course, but without a target lock, the savant wouldn’t know–’

‘The savant? The brain inside the missile?’ Arkelius scowled. ‘Are you telling me it couldn’t tell the difference between a Son of Guilliman and that warp-spawned–?’

‘I… I can’t answer that, sergeant. Perhaps.’

Arkelius glanced towards the fort again. There were half as many Space Marines standing as there had been the last time he had looked. ‘What if we got you closer?’ he asked.

‘Without the targeting auspex, yes, the closer, the better,’ said Iunus. ‘It means less chance for the missile to veer off course or–’

Arkelius didn’t wait for him to finish. He stepped back from the hatchway and barked at the red-armoured figure on the
Scourge
’s roof. ‘I need an answer, do we have a gun or don’t we?’ The Techmarine replied that he had done all he could and that the rest was in the hands of the Machine-God now. It would have to do.

Arkelius clambered up onto the
Scourge
’s roof as the Techmarine jumped down from it. The driver’s hatch was still open, and he squeezed himself through the narrow circle and lowered himself into the driver’s seat. He voxed Iunus on the
Scourge
’s frequency.

‘All right,’ Arkelius growled. ‘For the Emperor!’

The driver’s compartment of the
Scourge
was, if anything, more cramped than the tank commander’s compartment had been.

Arkelius was hemmed in by equipment. He could barely move without bumping his elbows on something. He placed his hands on the U-shaped joystick and his feet on the brake and accelerator pedals. His main control console was a mess of blinking runes and burned-out panels. He could see light through several fractures in the prow in front of him, doubtless caused by the missile strike in which Corbin had been injured.

As always, vox-chatter filled his helmet, keeping him up to date on the battle outside. He heard that Terserus had picked himself up and launched himself at the Daemon Prince for – what was that now, the fourth time or the fifth? He had staggered it with a series of energised punches, but had been beaten back again by the chains of its unholy flail.

‘Hold on,’ Arkelius muttered under his breath. ‘Just hold on one more minute.’

He punched in the ignition sequence. The
Scourge
’s self-repair systems must have been hard at work – or the Machine-God was listening to Arkelius’s prayers again – because, for all the abuse that had been heaped upon it, the engine spluttered into life.

Arkelius eased the accelerator pedal down, and the Hunter grumbled forward. The steering was still faulty, that pull to the left a lot stronger than he had anticipated. The joystick was large and sturdy – an unenhanced human couldn’t have handled it at all – but Arkelius feared that, under the amount of force he was having to apply to it, it might break.

Still, he brought the
Scourge
around until he could see Fort Kerberos – and the Daemon Prince – squarely through the driver’s vision slit. His helmet’s range-finder supplied him with the monster’s bearing, height and distance, which he relayed to his gunner.

‘But don’t fire yet,’ said Arkelius. ‘Wait for my mark.’

He stepped harder on the pedal and felt the
Scourge
’s frame juddering ominously around him. He eased up again and let the tank crawl forward at a fraction of its usual speed. As long as it was giving him something, he thought; as long as he was closing in on his target.

The
Scourge
had reached the edge of the ruins now, crushing debris under its tracks.

Terserus, unfortunately, had just gone down for what sounded like it might be the final time, and, from what Arkelius could see, the Daemon Prince’s flail was making short work of its remaining opponents. ‘That’s it,’ he announced to Iunus. ‘We’re out of time.’

He stepped on the brake pedal and lowered the stabilisers. He updated his gunner on the Daemon Prince’s position: directly ahead of them and less than two hundred metres away. ‘Aim high,’ he added, ‘and fire at will.’

‘I’m still getting warning runes here, sergeant,’ Iunus cautioned, ‘and what with the damage done to the missile launcher when we–’

Arkelius cut to the end of the explanation. ‘Blown sky-high. I remember.’

‘Perhaps you should bail out. I can take it from here, while you–’

Arkelius interrupted him, gruffly, ‘A tank commander stays with his vehicle, Iunus. My place is here.’ He had never expected to speak such words today. He was even more surprised to realise that he had meant them. The Emperor certainly did work in mysterious ways.

The Daemon Prince had thrown off the last of its attackers, and its insect wings were beginning to vibrate again. There probably wouldn’t be a better chance than this. ‘Now!’ Arkelius screamed. ‘Now, Iunus! Fire that missile now!’