[Inferno 40] - Wings of Bone by James Swallow

Author:James Swallow [Swallow, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

*

THE CAPTAIN turned to call down into the fuselage below the cockpit. ‘Kheed, get down there and confirm Stoi’s sighting. I want to know if there were secondary explosions, anything.’

Without looking to see if his orders were being followed, Vought flicked to the main comm channel and relayed a warning about the leviathan’s lascannon, but the remainder of the 404th were still caught in the flak, fighting to stay on course and bomb the living hell out of the heretics below them.

Kheed reached the hatch to Stoi’s turret and cranked it open. The albino gunner said nothing, and handed him a pair of ageing field glasses, stabbing one bony finger at the smoke wreathed horizon below. The navigator searched for the steel deck of the land leviathan and found it. Smoke poured from massive chimneys along its spine, and tracer fire arced skyward from myriad guns along its armoured hide, but no flames or structural damage were evident, beyond a few pits and dents across the face of the grinning skull.

The navigator keyed the intercom and spoke in a flat, toneless voice. ‘Target remains, captain. Confirming, status is undamaged.’

Vought’s lip curled in annoyance and he pitched the Marauder round in a harsh wingover, determined to see the leviathan for himself. A force field, Kheed?’ he snapped.

‘Negative. Sir, they must have armour as thick as a battlecruiser to shrug off a strike like that.’

‘Indeed,’ Vought fumed quietly. The intelligence reports from Imperial Guard on the ground had mentioned nothing of this, and now the squadron had lost aircraft in an attack that would have failed even if the enemy crew were blind or asleep. The captain decided that there would be harsh words spoken with his Guard counterparts on return to Point November.

‘Incoming!’ Nilner’s rough shout cut through Vought’s train of thought. ‘Lightnings, coming out of the suns!’

The pilot turned the bomber hard to port and flicked a glance upward. He saw a trio of bat-winged fighters vectoring in on their position. ‘Gunners, target and annihilate! Sweep the heretic scum out of the sky!’

Nilner pedalled his turret around to follow the lead fighter as it swooped down on Griffon. His big, sweaty hands enveloped the firing grips and squeezed. In answer, the heavy bolter cannons screamed death into the flashing shape of the seized Lightning. The massive bolts tore through the engine cowlings of the flyer and shattered the glass cockpit, turning the interior into a red ruin. Nilner grunted his approval and turned the turret around, looking for another kill.

The gunner had been quick to spot the trio of interceptors, and true to the training doctrine that had been drilled into him, Nilner concentrated his attention on the most immediate targets. Consequently, he never saw the fourth Lightning, hanging back from the trio, as it emerged from the brightness of Rocene’s twin suns. As Griffon turned to avoid the laser trails from its surviving squadmates, the other fighter tore over the nose of the Marauder, triggering a long burst from the autocannon mounted on its chin.

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