Engines of War Read Free

danger yet. ‘The plague ship,’ barked the shipmaster. ‘Where is it?’
    Crewmembers were scrambling around the bridge in a frenzy, running diagnostic checks, taking readings. ‘It broke off its pursuit of us, sir,’ one of them reported. ‘It went after the transporters.’ He punched up the information on the tactical display.
    ‘Bring us around,’ the shipmaster ordered. ‘I want eyes – and guns – on that junk pile.’ Once again, the deck plates tilted as the Quintillus banked ponderously to the right.
    A moment later, Orath heaved back into sight in the forward viewport – along with the rotting plague ship, which was now between them and the yellow-green planet.
    The plague ship had a straggler in its sights. Its cannons blazed, and the luckless Thunderhawk – along with its pilot and the Predator Destructors it had been carrying – were consumed in a blossom of flame.
    Galenus held himself still, clenching his jaw. He had to remind himself that this wasn’t his battle to fight. The shipmaster knew what he was doing.
    On his snarled command, his gunners assailed the plague ship with everything they had: assault cannons, torpedoes, they even brought their lances online and pounded the enemy’s shields with focused energy beams. The plague ship reeled under the sustained assault and the last of its would-be prey, the Imperial swarm, slipped out of its grasp.
    The Quintillus kept up the punishing bombardment regardless.
    Galenus watched with grim satisfaction as a muck-encrusted engine pod exploded. The stricken plague ship came around, and, for a moment, the captain thought it was actually going to try to ram them. It veered away, however, and plunged into the warp rift instead.
    It was probably returning to the Eye of Terror, he thought. Doubtless, it had a base there, perhaps on the Plague Planet itself.
    He only prayed that the ship was as damaged as it had appeared to be. Otherwise, there was a chance of it returning – loaded up with reinforcements.
    Chelaki remembered.
    Blazing drop pods plummeting from the sky; the air filled with hideous, bloated flying insects, large enough to be ridden as mounts; Fort Kerberos in ruins.
    He remembered the creature – or some manner of infernal machine? – that had come screeching out of nowhere, with burning breath and rending claws. It had shrugged off his cannon fire and torn the cockpit of his Stormtalon apart.
    Tangled up in twisted metal, he hadn’t had a chance to bail out.
    There had only been two Doom Eagles squads stationed on Orath. It had seemed like more than enough to guard a pair of minor listening posts.
    A jagged shard of the Stormtalon’s hull had pierced Chelaki’s side.
    The force of the crash must have driven it straight through his armour. It had lodged itself deep between his ribs. It seemed to have the whole weight of the hull pressing down on it. He didn’t have the strength to pull it out.
    The only thing he could do was pull himself off the shard. To gain the leverage he needed, he had to shift his position and let the shard tear further through his flesh. His armour increased the flow of stimulants to his brain to dull the pain.
    At last, with a spray of arterial blood, Chelaki stumbled uncertainly from the gunship’s wreckage. He wasn’t able to get his legs underneath him in time and he landed flat on his face and stomach. He levered himself up to his knees.
    He had come down in a grain field. But the sorghum-variant crops around him were diseased and blackened – and smouldering, as a cluster of small fires struggled to take hold in their midst. The crops, he realised, were the source of that rotten stench in the air.
    The readouts in his helmet were warning him of a hundred different airborne diseases and viruses, both known and unknown. His armour had been fractured and fatally compromised. No longer was it airtight. The wound in Chelaki’s side had scabbed over – his Larraman’s organ had done its job, as always