Above and Beyond by Áron Németh

Author:Áron Németh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

Four

The Genestealers opened with a barrage of missiles. His retinue sprinted in the direction of the flyer and saw one its engines taking a direct hit from a krak missile, rendering it inoperable. Another missile punched through the fore armour, and filled the pilot's cabin with a quickly dispersing needle of molten metal. The heat would have even turned their bones into ash, had they been inside. The three holes in the flyer billowed acrid, dark smoke. By the number of hot exhaust trails crisscrossing the gloomy sky, the hybrids had made sure that the flyer would be staying on the ground even if it came at the expense of ammunition: with a swift glance the inquisitor counted at least twenty of them.

Mercer cursed silently for the time he had wasted with the Eldar, but there had been no other way: any direct attempt to calm her down would have been met with yet another bout of anger.

Whoever had orchestrated this ambush knew a lot about them and had timed the attack well.

The Genestealers came in from three directions, dropping in from unarmed suborbital barges. Only the Adeptus Mechanicus had the means of flying these automated beasts from afar, which immediately marked them as heretics – with the exception of those who had assisted them in the Administratum fortress and provided them with those wondrous plasma weapons, the pride of the Mechanicus. They also had access to vast amounts of data, and the means to disseminate information to the Genestealer cult if they managed to identify one of its human contacts. They would also be able to tamper with the Machine Spirits of the Summer Palace. The entire conspiracy unfolded before him, with terrifying certainty: high ranking members of the local Adeptus Mechanicus had been appeasing the very Genestealers who were threatening their entire world with extinction.

The more immediate problem was that they had also provided said Genestealers with transport, although without their Patriarch nearby, the brood would be a lot less effective.

Above the metal fields, the Mechanicus could sneak the barges in close enough to prevent the orbiting Navy vessels firing their lances. The roar of the engines was deafening, the gusts of hot wind shook off the scales from the dead trees, exposing their ashen, diseased bark, showering the retinue with clinking flakes.

The attackers landed far off – as a precaution, otherwise they could have been hit by explosives while disembarking and clustered – but were closing in. It also meant that the brood mind had either made a mistake or been somehow forced to drop the heavy weapons teams farther back, on another plateau. From above, with that armament, they could have pounded his retinue into tiny, slightly charred bits hanging from the trees.

The good part about a trap is that once it is sprung things get quite straightforward. The world that used to be full of unknowable possibilities suddenly solidifies into two options: either you live, or you do not.

Mercer calculated his chances as he pulled

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