Daylight had admired the eldar immensely. They were truly worthy opponents, and he had always thought them sad, tragic, like figures in an ancient play. He had thought about them often as he paced the ritual patrol routes in the cold hallways of Daylight Wall. They were great warriors, the greatest their species could produce, and in their time, in older ages, they had been peerless among the infinite stars.
Their time had passed, however, and their glory with it. Their suns were setting, and they were but ghosts of their old selves, unimpeachable warriors with great stories, proud histories, old glories and fine hearts, who were simply fighting their end-day wars as they waited for extinction to overwhelm them. When Daylight had slain the crest-helmed master of Sethoywan Craftworld, there had been tears in the alien’s eyes, and tears in Daylight’s too. When great eras end, all should mark them, even the champions of the next epoch. And no great heroes should ever pass unto shadow unmourned.
For a long time, Daylight had felt that the Space Marines were facing a similar long decline. They were more like the worthy eldar than they cared to admit: giants from another age who were simply living out their twilight amongst mortals, incapable of fending off the gathering darkness, and unable to recapture their halcyon greatness.
Daylight had not expected to see that end approach so fast inside his own lifespan. If the Imperial Fists were as lost as Zarathustra feared, perhaps the age of the Adeptus Astartes was coming to a close faster than anyone imagined.
Zarathustra’s words had troubled him in another way. He had spoken of the terrain turning against friend and foe alike, of Ardamantua and its geological mayhem being the true enemy.
That was a bleak prospect. The pride of the Imperial Fists was their ability to defend anywhere from anything. How could they hope to excel if anywhere and everywhere, the very ground itself turned on them?
The Stormbird bucked again, more violently than ever. More warning lights lit and a klaxon sounded. The pilot and his co-pilot were too busy controlling the breakneck descent to be able to cancel it this time. The lurching turned into a protracted bout of shuddering vibrations.
‘Atmospherics worse than cogitator prediction,’ said the tech-adept, a flutter in his tone. ‘Crosswinds… also, ash in the upper airbands.’
‘Ash?’
‘Volcanic ash, also particulate matter. Aerosolised mud. Organic residue.’
‘Hold on!’ the pilot yelled suddenly.
The Stormbird started to bank along its centre line. The exterior light beaming into the gloom of the cabin through the slit ports began to rapidly creep up the cabin walls, over the ceiling and back down the other side, illuminating the struggling, desperate faces of the Asmodai troopers behind their visor plates, cheeks and chins tugged by the inverting gravity.
The banking turned into a full rotation, then another, and then another, faster. Daylight knew that the humans aboard weren’t built to withstand that kind of flight trauma. The Stormbird crew members were modified enough to withstand it, with their reinforced bones and muscle sheaths, their inner ears and proprioception senses replaced by augmetics, and their stomachs and regurgitative mechanisms removed and regrafted with fluid ingesters. But the Imperial Guardsmen would be disorientated, panicked, distressed, vomiting inside their helmets, choking.
‘Stabilise!’ Daylight ordered.
‘Negative! Negative!’ the pilot yelled back. ‘We’ve hit some kind of gravitational—’
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
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?’