Читаем Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies полностью

‘Not a chance,’ I said. The weight and drag of the bolters, which I was pretty sure hadn’t been installed by the original manufacturer, was probably impeding my pursuers as much as the mass of the armour was degrading the performance of my own flyer, but they were used to piloting these things, and I wasn’t – and, as I’d already discovered, blind luck can only last so long against superior skill. As if to emphasise the point, the air car lurched again as another bolt hit and detonated; this time a red warning icon, the precise meaning of which escaped me but the gist of which was pretty clear, lit up on the dashboard. I poked at the controls, and tried to turn, finding the little flyer noticeably less responsive than it had been. ‘One of the rear fans has been damaged.’ Making me a sitting target. I jinked frantically, but the two enemy air cars were nailed to my six106 now, taking their time to line up a killing shot.

Which, ironically, was their undoing. Had they simply opened up immediately, relying on the hail of bolts to inflict a hit, they’d almost certainly have done enough damage to send me plummeting from the skies to my death. But for whatever reason, they were spending a few precious seconds to make sure of it.107 So I was probably as surprised as they were when the leading air car disintegrated in mid-air, ripped apart by a hail of eldar shuriken.

‘I’ve found the missing eldar,’ I voxed Kasteen, although it would probably have been more accurate to have said that they’d found me. A trio of heavy jetbikes, the pilots tucked away in enclosed cockpits while their gunners spat heavy ordnance from an exposed pillion seat – which seemed like a distinctly uncomfortable arrangement to me – were soaring up out of the concealing smog below, blazing away with everything they had. ‘Three Vypers, in close formation. Not looking friendly.’ Like the eldar we’d faced on Drechia they were liveried in green with purple trim, a combination which put me in mind of the carnivorous plants of Mychtarsh108 – not a particularly comforting association. The surviving air car jinked frantically, banking and diving for the refuge of the cloacal clouds below, but it was a futile endeavour, the eldar craft turning to follow it with balletic precision. A krak warhead detonated against the marauder’s canopy, blowing the roof off and sending its luckless pilot spinning out into the void. A moment later, what was left of the bodywork was shredded by a hail of fire from a shuriken cannon.

Then all three eldar raiders banked smoothly round and began to climb in a rising spiral, chasing one another’s tails; with a distinct sinking feeling I realised that my relatively ponderous air car was at the centre of the circle they were describing. I began to climb, putting off the inevitable for as long as possible, already aware that I could only buy myself a handful of seconds, but even that was better than nothing. To my surprise they were holding their fire, but I was under no illusion that such a happy state of affairs would be continuing; to be honest I was a little baffled as to why they hadn’t finished me off already.

‘They’re closing in,’ I told Kasteen. ‘May the Emperor protect you all.’ Which might strike you as a surprisingly pious sentiment for what I honestly imagined were to be my last words, apart from a probable ‘oh frak,’ on the way down, but it was the sort of thing someone with a reputation like mine was supposed to say, and it would play well with posterity. Besides, a small part of me was still assessing the options, refusing to give up hope before I actually hit the ground, which, given the number of times I’d already escaped death by millimetres, was hardly surprising; I’d cheated the reaper on those occasions by sheer bloody-minded refusal to accept the inevitable, and saw no reason not to do the same now. If by some miracle I did manage to survive this, it certainly wouldn’t hurt my standing among the troopers if my putative last thoughts had been of them, and a prayer for their welfare rather than my own. (Not to mention the fact that if I was about to meet the Emperor in person, it probably wouldn’t hurt to have made a good impression prior to my arrival.109)

I glanced to the left, finding one of the Vypers pacing me, the gunner swinging their heavy weapon in my direction, while another slotted neatly into place above me, and the third behind and below. No chance of repeating the trick which had discommoded the air cars, then. If I cut the power to the fans, this time I’d simply drop straight through the lower eldar’s line of fire. If I put the nose up and tried to climb, the one above would get me, and if I turned right the one next to me would still have a clear shot. I was completely boxed in.

Перейти на страницу:

Похожие книги

Все жанры