Angel of Fire

We passed through a massive arch and emerged onto a concrete plain with a view out over the great lava deserts and the vast array of industrial structures that surrounded the great hive of Irongrad.

I could see pipes running away into the distance and gigantic refineries and huge hangars containing who knows what. It was not that which held my attention though – it was the airfield itself. A number of flying vehicles were arriving and departing. There was a good deal of military traffic, doubtless part of the local air force fighting against the Imperial Guard armies to the south. There were several tethered airships of enormous size, used for interhive transport during times of peace and which had now been requisitioned as troop carriers. Even as we watched, we could see monstrous lines of infantrymen queuing up to board them from massive docking towers.

This looked to be as close as we were going to get so we piled out of the groundcar and made ourselves ready. At the edge of the huge airstrip we could see a number of small flying vehicles. It was then that Anton mentioned something that I was sure was on all of our minds. ‘Can anybody here fly one of those things?’ Anton said. ‘Or is this the time that I begin my improvised pilot training?’

‘Both the inquisitor and I can do so,’ said Macharius.

‘I can too, sir,’ said Anna.

That ended all argument. It was now simply a case of moving downslope, passing the perimeter defences of the airfield and getting aboard one of those flyers. Easy, I told myself sarcastically.

‘We going through the wire,’ Macharius said. He brandished the chainsword that he had carried all the way from the cathedral just so that there was no doubt about how he intended to do that. ‘There are guard towers down there and there will be divination engines set to spot intruders.’

‘I can take the towers and override the systems, sir,’ said Anna. She seemed completely confident in her ability to be able to overcome whoever was guarding those engines, justifiably so, I suppose.

‘It would take too much time,’ said Macharius. ‘We need to go now,’

‘As you wish, sir.’

‘Can you shield us, high inquisitor?’ Macharius asked.

Inquisitor Drake nodded. Obviously, they trained inquisitors in more things than theology wherever he had studied. He said, ‘Stay very close to me, all of you. If you get beyond a few arms’ length, you will be out of the range of my protection.’

We stayed close to the inquisitor like we knew what he was talking about. None of us liked relying on psyker powers for our protection even if those powers were wielded by an inquisitor.

We began to move down the side of the hive, cautiously, looking for divination engines and minefields and all of the other things that you might expect to encounter around a military airfield in time of war.

If there were minefields, no one had marked them and I found myself becoming more and more tense with every step I took. Macharius led us to a spot between the guard towers. His keen gaze scanned backwards and forwards and I knew that he was looking for sentries patrolling the open space between those towers. I could not see any, but that did not mean they were not there. Perhaps they were standing, smoking, behind one of the pillars that supported the wire. Perhaps they had already spotted us and were lying in wait, weapons ready to open fire as soon as we got within range. It’s astonishing the things that your mind comes up with in situations like this.

We reached the edge of the wire and took up positions to cover Macharius in case anyone closed with us while he was cutting. He slashed through the wire with one sweep of the chainsword and then paused for a moment, listening.

If any alarm had been given it was not audible to us, but that did not mean anything. Somewhere, in some distant control bunker perhaps, a red light was flashing and alarms had started to sound.

Macharius gestured for Anton to go through. Anton did so and then the rest of us followed until only Macharius and I were left on the far side of the wire. I gestured for him to go ahead like some polite gentleman at the door of his club in the upper reaches of the hive. Macharius grinned and went through and I took a last look around to make sure that no one was creeping up on us from this side of the fence and then I followed him myself.

We began to move across the plascrete plain, moving closer to the flyers that Macharius had already picked out. They were small local transport models of a variant I was not familiar with. They were armoured though and they had turrets, which might well prove useful, providing no one was already in them and ready to shoot us down. It all seemed to be going too well. I thought for a moment that the luck of Macharius or the Blessing of the Emperor shielded us still. It was Ivan, as usual, who had to spoil things by pointing out that this was not in fact the case.

‘Watch out,’ he said, indicating off towards the control bunkers of the airstrip with the barrel of his lasgun. I immediately saw what he meant. From out of the central bunker, a number of wheeled vehicles had emerged and were moving in our direction as fast as they could be driven. Either the alarm had been given or someone had spotted us and mustered the guards. It looked like we were going to have a fight on our hands and it was not a fight that we could win.

‘Run,’ said Macharius, moving towards the nearest of the flyers.

I don’t think I have ever covered ground as quickly as I did then and I suspect that the same was the case for the others. Ground crew surrounded the flyer. They had been running checks on the systems and preparing the vehicle for flight. One of them looked at us and shouted something. Anton did not wait to see what would happen next. He pulled the trigger on his lasgun and burned the man down.

I heard the roar of machine engines close behind us and turning I saw the enemy vehicles were almost upon us. I aimed my shotgun at one of the buggies. The huge balloon tyre exploded and the vehicle skidded into another buggy with a crash of metal on metal.

Men screamed as they were crushed between the two. The others opened fire on us. We kept moving towards the flyer, shooting at the ground crew, even though they were not armed. None of us wanted one of them to get inside and disable the vehicle or even attempt a take-off before we got there. Sirens were sounding in the distance now and I could see the lights of more buggies coming closer.

We were within the shadow of the flyer when the rest of buggies rolled to a stop and disgorged their cargo of armed men. I counted at least twenty of them, all of them in the uniforms of the local defence forces. One of them was a priest of the Angel of Fire. I suspected that they were in every important, strategic location, overseeing the local warriors in exactly the same way as our commissars oversaw us. At the sight of that red-robed heretic, my heart sank.

The alarm had very definitely been given and if we did not manage to get away in this flyer, it was obvious that we were never going to manage to get away at all.

Macharius had already leapt on board along with the inquisitor, and the others were following them up the loading ramp. Only the Understudy and myself were on the ground now. I pumped the shotgun and aimed at the priest and pulled the trigger. He saw what I was going to do and raised his arms in a gesture that I am sure had some cryptic, mystical significance. He never got to complete it before something took his head off. I looked around and saw Anna standing there with that huge gun in her hand.

Whatever protected those heretic psykers from las-bolts clearly had no effect whatsoever against those high-calibre, sanctified slugs.

The guards kept coming closer. I kept shooting and backing away up the ramp on the back of the flyer. Metal flexed under my feet even as las-fire melted the metal of the walkway. The smell reminded me of the factorum workshops of my youth with their casting forges and sacrosanct welding engines.

The flyer began to move, taking off even with the loading bay open. I tumbled forwards and I felt the shotgun slip out of my grasp. I clutched it tight and then a claw-like hand grabbed my shoulder and pulled me backwards with such a jerk that I almost fell over. The Understudy had caught me and was dragging me inside.

As ever, he ignored the shots of our enemies as if he simply could not see them. This time one of them hit him and I smelled burning cloth and burning flesh. He grunted but he did not scream and he kept pulling and I kept scrambling and then the loading bay ramp began to fold itself into flight position and the movement of its hydraulic systems tumbled us into the body of the aircraft.

I heard strange sounds as the flyer’s systems creaked under the strain of the take-off: the sizzling sounds of melting paint and metal where las-fire impacted on the hull. Worse than that was the thunder of metal on metal as some sort of heavy weapon was brought to bear. The hull gave way as if an ogryn were hitting it with a sledgehammer. Dents appeared and the flyer began to wobble in the air as if the force of the shooting was driving us off course.

I lay on the floor gasping and trying to calm my nerves. I have never minded being in a tank when it was under fire but there was something about being in an aircraft in similar circumstances that made me want to void myself with fear.

I forced myself to stand upright despite the lurching of the aircraft. A loud scream echoed within the hull and I looked around quickly to see what had caused the panic. It was only Anton shrieking with pure pleasure, as if this was some sort of joyride and he was some sort of child. I fought down the urge to punch him and instead turned to face the Understudy.

I wanted to take a look at his wound but he had already stripped away his officer’s jerkin and was inspecting the scorched skin beneath. It looked nasty. There was a huge blister that had burst and peeled away revealing the moist, sticky flesh beneath. I began to rummage through the emergency medical kit near the rear loading-bay door. Within a few moments I found what was needed and was spraying the damaged skin with synthi-flesh. It closed over the wound, filled with air bubbles and resembled nothing more than a large wart but it would protect the damaged flesh until it could heal. The Understudy nodded as if to thank me and then sat down and strapped himself in.

I looked forwards and I could see that Macharius and Inquisitor Drake were within the cockpit, wrestling with controls. They seemed to be moving them at random and the flyer jumped all around the sky.

Had they gone mad, I wondered?

I looked at the porthole and realised that there was some semblance of sanity in what they were doing. Heavy bolter fire tracked our flight and sometimes impacted on the armoured hull. I could also see that there were other flyers coming in pursuit. I looked at Anton and Ivan and I said, ‘Can you two lazy bastards do something? Doesn’t this flying heap of junk have some turrets that you could be inside?’

They looked at me as if I was speaking another language. If it had been a tank and if it had been on the ground they would have taken up position at once but outside the environment that they were familiar with, the idea had never occurred to them.

‘Why don’t you go bloody fly the thing?’ Anton asked.

‘I would but we already have two people doing that,’ I replied.

‘Well maybe you should take your own advice then!’ Rather than arguing with the idiot I decided to do just that. I found a ladder that led up to the topside turret and in a few seconds I was strapping myself in and chanting litanies that I hoped would activate the weapon.

I ran through the invocation drills with my hands, pushing down the sacred spheres that I hoped would perform the same function as they did on a ground vehicle. I grabbed the handles of the weapon in exactly the same way as I would have grabbed the handles of a similar one in a tank. And then I leaned forwards and looked through the sight and got my first view of our surroundings and the things that pursued us.

The exterior of the hive skimmed by below. Enormous towers rose like tall, narrow fungi from the side of a mossy hill. Industrial effluent ran down the terraces like lava down the side of a volcano. I could see the multi-coloured lights of the jewelled windows of the hab-blocks and vehicles going about their journeys below us. In the distance, a couple of similar flyers to the one that we were in pursued us. They were already shooting with heavy bolters.

I put in a comm-net ear bead and listened but all I could hear was Macharius talking into the local system. ‘We need to take those down now,’ he said calmly. ‘If we don’t we’ll have other airborne swarming all over us in a few minutes.’

I suspected that that was going to be the case anyway but now did not seem like the time to argue about it. Instead I concentrated on shooting and sent a stream of heavy bolter fire towards one of the oncoming flyers.

It swerved to one side, an angry insect trying to avoid being swatted by a drunken man. I kept shooting and tracking it but it moved too fast for me and I had no skill with this weapon.

It was luck more than anything else that destroyed my target flyer. As the pilot swerved to avoid my shot, one of his flyer’s stubby wings struck the side of a nearby building. Immediately, the flyer swerved out of control, tumbling end over end and wing over wing. The damage would not have destroyed it if the pilot had been able to regain control but he simply did not have time and his tumbling vehicle smashed into the side of another hab-block and exploded. Splinters of broken metal smashed the nearby windows. A gas jet within the building ignited, causing blowback. A trail of flame shot out of the side of the hab and I was very glad that I was not alongside when it happened.

The other enemy flyer had gained altitude and was somewhere above us. I could tell by the bolter fire contrails coming down in the sky. Looking up I saw the vehicle’s running lights. I sat as far back in the seat as I could and the guns tilted upwards but they couldn’t elevate enough to get our pursuer into my sights. There was nothing I could do from the present angle. I spoke into the comm-net and said, ‘Take us up and I can get a second shot at the bastard.’ As an afterthought I added, ‘Sir.’

I heard Macharius chuckle and we began to swing upwards. At the same time other turrets on our own craft opened fire and I guessed that Ivan and Anton had finally decided to join the party. All three of us managed to target the flyer but it was just as armoured as our own vehicle and it withstood the impact.

The enemy weapons had found the range now and they kept shooting at us as we kept shooting at them. It was simply a case of which flyer’s armour gave out first or which of us found a weak spot in the other’s hull. I began to play my turret’s fire over the enemy flyer. The impact points sparked. Nothing gave way.

We gained altitude and then suddenly, sickeningly, we flipped over and looped down behind the enemy. I dangled upside down in the turret, trying to stay focused. The other pilot panicked. He veered to one side. We kept shooting, hammering the vehicle with our fire. Macharius dived suddenly and brought us alongside. We kept firing, our bolter shots impacting all along the side. Macharius nudged the other flyer with the stubby wing of our vehicle, forcing it into a nearby wall. It smashed hard, hull breaking apart. Our fire finally took effect, hitting some vital internal part. The explosion turned the enemy flyer into a fireball.

We cheered and flew on, racing over the hive exterior like a runaway rocket, staying low and dodging at speed between the buildings. I rotated my turret so I could look behind us to scan the sky for pursuit. I saw the running lights of hundreds of vehicles but nothing that looked as if it was coming for us.

I offered up a prayer of thanks to the Emperor as I watched Irongrad recede into the distance. It loomed behind us like an impossibly vast mountain, covered in glittering contrails of light and lava. At its peak, the monstrous figure of the Angel of Fire loomed, fiery wings spread wide and illuminating the swirling multi-coloured clouds above it. I had a sense of an ominous terrifying presence growing where it stood.

‘What the hell is going on down there?’ I heard Anton ask.

It took me long moments to see what he meant. On the vast industrial perimeter of the hive, it looked as if rivers of fire were boiling up from underground springs. The earth was cracking, buildings had tumbled. Pipes were broken. In a dozen places they vented flames. Ahead of us the wastelands were split by great fiery chasms. Lava bubbled forth, forming rivers and lakes. The flyer carried us closer. The sight was awesome. I was reminded of our original landing site. It looked as if a new lava sea was being born in front of us.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I do not like it one little bit.’