Sons of the Selenar by Graham McNeill

Author:Graham McNeill
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2020-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

7

No More to Give

Infiltration

Too Late

Wayland leaned back in his pilot's seat and gritted his teeth against the pain.

It raced around his body in rivers of fire from his severed leg, suffusing every fibre of his being with almost paralysing agony. His armour had long since exhausted its supply of balms in the years since Isstvan V, but not all the pain he was feeling was his own.

Thick cables ran from his gauntlet into an exposed conduit of wires he'd unscrewed from the interior of the Storm Eagle's fuselage. He felt the agony of the machine-spirit at the heart of the gunship, its fury and its torment at being grounded.

It overwhelmed his pain, for it was the pain of desire broken on the wheel of reality.

Wayland whispered the binaric catechisms of repair and restoration to soothe its broken spirit. The machine's pain was hideous, and he felt its wounded soul on the verge of dissipating into the ether. He reached for it, but it turned at bay, screeds of binary lashing out at him.

The connection between the gunship and Wayland was severed with a screeching roar of fury from the vox, and Wayland's eyes snapped open, his skin lathered in icy sweat.

He disconnected from the avionics panel, his movements clumsy with pain and residual echoes of his conjoined consciousness. He pulled himself from the pilot's seat and limped back to the compartment.

Frater Thamatica knelt by the dormant form of the demersal-splicer Ta'lab Vita-37 had brought down. Its appearance bore few hallmarks of Imperial craft, and its grotesque, cephalopodic body possessed a more organic form than Wayland was used to seeing. Ever the tinkerer, Thamatica had the mechanised arms of his servo-harness prodding circuitry within an access panel he'd prised open.

The Iron Father usually preferred to work manually, but such was the scale of repairs needed to render the Storm Eagle flyable that he had been forced to dig a servo-harness from its stowage bay. The welder tips on its fusion torch arms still glowed red with heat.

'What are you doing with that?' asked Wayland.

'Investigating.' said Thamatica without looking up. 'I've never seen technology like this before. It would be a shame not to at least take a look at it. The MIU links are extraordinary, verging on the edge of true machine autonomy. Given free rein, this could fly a fleet of gunships on its own. If I can just disengage these inhibitors, I could link it with-'

'The Storm Eagle,' interrupted Wayland. 'Walk me through it.'

Now Thamatica looked up, and the multiple arms of the servo-harness folded into their collapsed forms on his back

'The fuselage was split in so many places I lost count, and a great many of the control surfaces are so badly damaged that it will be almost impossible to manoeuvre effectively. The landing gear is shattered and the fuel tanks are all but empty.'

'What's your prognosis? Is it fit to fly?'

Thamatica said, 'I've sealed up all our wounds and realigned what I can, but without a Legion graving dock and a squadron of servitors, I fear this will be its final flight.

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