The Beast Arises

He didn’t finish the word. The turbulence became too great and too noisy for voice contact. The unpredictable gravitational anomalies that plagued Ardamantua were regarded as the greatest threat of all because they couldn’t be mapped and thus avoided.

And they couldn’t be explained.

Daylight heard the pilot yell something again.

On the ground, a broad plain of mud and boiling pools lay beneath the angry sky. Ragged grasses blew in the hot crosswinds. In the distance, the broken horizon coughed and smoked, and spat sparks into the sky.

The sky was low, a rotting mass of swirling cloud striped by lightning. The clouds were running swiftly across it, like a pict-feed playing fast. Far away, six bright raptors punched out of the clouds, diving, catching the sun. They stayed in formation for a second, but they were fluttering, beset by both savage crosswinds and a gravitational pocket that refused to obey the reality around it.

One burst into flames, like a flower blooming, scattering its shredded fuselage. A second failed to recover from its dive, and plunged like a stone into the distant hills. A third tried to bank, but then spun away like a leaf on the wind, out of sight.

The other three stayed true, pulled up, cut low, but their trajectories were not stable either.

Gravity stammered again, bubbling the sky and slamming them hard.

They fell into darkness and black cloud, and were lost.

Sixteen

Ardamantua

Anterior Six was dead. They carried him from the crash site and laid him next to the nine Asmodai fatalities. Daylight waited for Nyman to tell him the extent of the other injuries.

Zarathustra clambered back into the wreck to recover his spear. Daylight knew he was also going to mercifully finish off the valiant pilot and co-pilot who had brought them down as intact as they were, and now lay mashed and bleeding out in the Stormbird’s compressed nosecone. They were plugged into the drop-craft’s systems anyway, nerves and neural links. They had burned their minds out sharing the Stormbird’s impact agonies. Even without their limbs and torsos irrecoverably sandwiched in ruptured metal, they could never have been disconnected to walk away.

It was a duty Daylight would have preferred to do, but he had command, and there were too many duties to deal with. He appreciated Zarathustra taking that sad burden from him.

He looked down at Anterior Six’s body. On impact, a fracturing spar had sheared the wall-brother’s head off.

‘I never thought I’d see him dead,’ said Tranquility, at Daylight’s side.

The plain they had come down on was a broad one surrounded by low, smoke-dark hills. It was grassy, and peppered with curiously pretty blue flowers. Some of the petals, torn up by the crash and scattered by the wind, had fallen across Anterior Six’s yellow armour, as if laid there by mourners.

‘No time for sentiment,’ said Daylight. ‘Give me a situation report, brother.’

Tranquility cleared his throat.

‘Flight crew dead, Daylight,’ he said. ‘Transport destroyed, vox-link down. No bearing from our instrumentation and portable auspex is flatlined. Last known location was forty kilometres short of the blisternest site.’

Daylight nodded.

‘No contact with the other birds,’ said Tranquility.

‘I saw one blow out.’

‘I think at least one other crashed before we hit,’ Tranquility agreed. ‘Gravity was just shot. We probably all fell out of the sky.’

‘So we’re all that we can count on,’ said Daylight.

‘There might be others nearby who survived the landing and—’ Tranquility began.

‘This is not a place where we can deal in “mights”,’ replied Daylight. ‘Even the laws of the universe are playing tricks. We can only count on what we know.’

‘I understand,’ replied Tranquility. ‘Then we have you, and we have me. We have Zarathustra and we have Bastion Ledge. We have decent resources of ammunition and our close-combat weapons. We have no ground transport. We have Major Nyman, a brain-damaged tech-adept, and twenty-six Imperial Guardsmen with kit.’

‘I thought there were nine fatalities amongst the Asmodai?’

‘There were, outright. But there are another five more of them are too torn up to walk away. Out here, they’ll all be dead in an hour, less perhaps. Even with express evacuation to a medicae frigate, they probably wouldn’t make it.’

‘We move out,’ said Daylight. ‘Find high vantage. Assess the landscape and consider our next action.’

Tranquility nodded.

Daylight strode back through the flowering grasses towards the Stormbird wreck. Zarathustra was just emerging, spear in hand. He reminded Daylight of one of the ancient, pre-Unity demigods, born alive from the belly of a fallen eagle. He liked the old myths. Paintings and tapestries of them filled the galleries and halls of the Imperial Palace, their meanings, names and symbolism lost forever, except perhaps in the memories and dreams of the Emperor.

‘Bad?’ asked Zarathustra.