Inferno! Presents: The Emperor’s Finest (Inferno: Warhammer 40,000) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2022-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

WINGS OF FAITH

Victoria Hayward

Flight Lieutenant Bren Tonor was flying over the old country. The thermal winds ruffled her hair as she glided, the wing tip of her light craft nearly touching the leathered wing-claw of the ygel flying alongside her. It was a creature of the sky, born to be airborne, like her. She glanced down at the grey clumps of moisture farms clinging to the cliff faces that made up her home world of Zephyris.

The thought of the ground pressed into Bren’s mind suddenly, flat, oppressive and, for some reason, looming. She became aware of a sound, a flat, insistent beeping. She looked at the instrumentation panel of the glider, which wasn’t there. It had become a brilliant flickering light which became larger and larger until…

Bren regained consciousness with a gasp. Lights flashed all around her, and suddenly, sound rushed into her ears. The roar of aircraft and the hiss and crump of missiles. She struggled to make sense of the scene in front of her. A mountain of rock rose beside her in a stark grey sky spattered with explosions. Where were the ygel? Cold realisation needled through her waking confusion. She was on operational duty on a war-torn planet, a long way from Zephyris, or any ygel. She had been flying her Lightning Strike back to base when something had happened. What was it? She grasped for the memory – which suddenly dropped into her consciousness like a lead weight. Her craft had been hit, and she had ejected into the plasma-streaked sky as her Lightning disintegrated around her, with only the scream of a prayer to guide her. She kicked out, unable to feel the deck beneath her feet, only open air.

Blinking hard, she tried to get rid of the marks in her vision. The straps of her ejection seat compressed her chest. Her head throbbed and felt painfully heavy, so she released her helmet, which fell upwards.

After a moment of cold confusion during which she watched the helmet tumble into the sky, Bren realised why it felt as if all the blood in her body was pooling in her skull. She was upside down, hanging in her ejection seat. She swallowed. She was so far up that she was above the clouds. The helmet had actually fallen downwards, towards a ground so far below she couldn’t even see it.

Her brain reassembled the scene in front of her. It’s the citadel, she realised. I’m looking at the rock base of the citadel the wrong way up.

She reached a hand to her back and felt a tangle of taut para­chute cord. She gritted her teeth and jerked herself upright. She swung around in her seat and everything flipped into place. The myriad towers and fortifications of the citadel spread out in front of her, sitting atop the inverted pyramid of lodestone that had floated above the surface of Sannan II since before humans had inhabited the planet.

Bren was hanging from one of the citadel’s spires that jutted vertically from the base of a tower.

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