This is the first story I've written in a while - I hope you enjoy it, as I've had much kudos from my other work. It's still WIP, but expect a superhuman fighter pilot enthralled by a daemon weapon, a duel between a carnifex and said fighter pilot and Orks versus small teams of guardsmen.
It's mainly centred around the fighter pilot who discovers the powers of a daemon weapon and turns against his friends, cutting a swathe through his former allies for abandoning him and killing lots ofOrks and Tyranids too. There will also be flashes to the action around the hive city and other guard units being slaughtered in the planetwide forest.
Well, here's the beginning - more will be added soon.
“All fighters, scramble, scramble!� Came the voice from the room’s main vox-speaker. A klaxon wailed in the small hangar as a gaggle of pilots tore their way to their aging Lightning and Thunderbolt fighters. A screeching cut through the freezing air of the huge room as the rusty cogs ground the hangar doors open, and even before they had come to stop engines were whining into existence within. Like a huge mouth spitting metal flying machines, the Imperial fighters span and twirled from the cavernous maw, slicing through the cold morning air as they reached optimal engagement height.
“Engage weapon systems.� Flight commander Jex ordered his squad over his vox-bead, following suit by flicking a number of switches on the dashboard of his Lightning fighter. “Target enemy aircraft. Break by pairs and fire at will.� At that, eighteen of the twenty fighters under his command banked into couplets, and his wingman joined him at his side. Below him, dense jungle rushed past, every now and then breaking up to reveal a gun emplacement or command post , while off in the distance, and displayed on his sensor board as glowing green circles, he could see the swarm of ork fighta-bommaz chugging towards the air base. It was incredible how fast they could move – they seemed to be bolted together in such an unaerodynamic and haphazard manner that it was a miracle they got off of the ground. But in some ways they were superior to Imperial fighters – the layers of salvaged armour plate that made up their hulls offered surprisingly good protection from enemy gunfire, most of the time by sheer accident, and the way they were built, from different metal plates that could flake off one by one rather than an entire shell that could be blasted through meant that a hole in the wing or missing tailfin did little to decrease the fighta-bomma’s effectiveness – rather it decreased their target silhouette and made them even harder to hit. Their durability in a battlefield role was sickening as well – they were able to carry high-yield explosives and light anti-aircraft weaponry, aided by an engine that was supremely powerful, but very heavy. The worst thing was the sheer tenacity of Ork pilots – indeed, Jex had seen Orks loose off their entire payload in a random spray if they were cut off from their main objective, or fight on with one wing remaining, or even none. Whether they were too proud or too stupid to disengage when the battle was lost, he didn’t know; and he didn’t care really. His job as a fighter pilot was to kill the enemy in the air and the enemy on the ground, and in this situation, the best Ork was a dead Ork.
A faint ping echoed from the dashboard, and he activated his vox bead again, this time on a different frequency.
“Hydra one-thirteen, this is Raptor one, copy?�Hydra one-thirteen was the officer in charge of the anti aircraft batteries. The hydras were permanently set in an enormous ring around the air base, around twenty metres between them, each sitting in it’s own clearing that the guardsmen had painstakingly burned away. The relentless jungle still fought back though – Jex tended to wake up early, and he could often smell the promethium, and sometimes see the process of the guardsmen burning back the vines that had crept in close overnight.
Strangely, in the past few weeks the foliage was getting more relentless, and changing. The vines were a lot thicker, grew faster and whipped so hard when a guardsman stood on them that they could break a leg. Up until a few weeks ago, they had barely curled up.
One-thirteen was a stern man, short, shaved bald and with a face of a true veteran, he had trained his men up to a high standard. Jex still didn’t know his name.
“Receiving you Raptor one, go ahead,� One-thirteen’s voice crackled back. In the background, Jex could hear a clunking – probably the Hydra flak platforms loading their ammunition in their characteristic rusty way. They were old, and wearing out. Just like the defence force fighters. Just like the tanks. Just like everything on the verdant world of Tyreth. The only thing that remained was the rapidly mutating plantlife, but as for machinery and weapons of war, the backwater planets got served last, the small brother of the forge and hive worlds.
“We’re gonna go head-on with these greenskins. Once they pass through us they should be in range of anti-aircraft fire, but don’t start firing until we’re all clear – my pilots aren’t that good.� The reply was a grunt of acknowledgement, and then the line went dead.
Anticipation rose in Jex’s stomach like bile as the rangefinder on his dashboard counted down to his maximum effective weapons range. The fighta-bommaz rumbled closer, thick black smoke issuing from their exhausts and ungainly wings wobbling as they crawled to their target. Suddenly, a double set of flashes glinted from each of the aircraft and more trails of filthy smoke joined the exhaust fumes. A blast of realisation hit him like a flak round, and he opened the squad channel.
“Raptors, rockets! Evasive man-� He was cut off suddenly as something did hit his craft like a flak round. He could hear a faint whistling behind him, just over the metallic juddering of a Hydra launching it’s payload into the air. Suddenly, his attention was more on the flak platforms behind than on the approaching rockets. He wheeled around just to catch a burst of cannon fire cut into his wingmate and turn the fighter into a ball of flame. Tracking the shells back to their origin, he tried to hide the panic in his voice as he switched the vox link over to another frequency.
“Hydra seven-thirteen, stand down!� he shouted. It was quite clear his order had been ignored as the guns began to turn around and target him. But he was too quick. A burst from his wing-mounted lascannon sent the platform up in flames, setting alight the trees and scattering green silhouettes over the Hydra’s clearing. Fething greenskins, Jex thought. They had got into the PDF lines before the fighters had even launched. That meant they were further forward than Jex had thought. Even as Jex turned on vertical wing, back to the fighta-bommaz, he could see defence force guardsmen rushing to the flaming wreck of the Hydra, obviously to ascertain what was going on.
The flight commander had barely turned his craft around when a rocket flashed past his viewport, before spinning into the ground and exploding. Jex cursed to himself. A recruit’s mistake, he thought. Two seconds earlier and that rocket would’ve hit me.
The fighta-bommaz seemed awfully close now. Well within weapon range. As if responding to his thoughts, the green crosshair stencilled onto his canopy turned red, and he squeezed both triggers on his hand grips.
His feet vibrated as the long-barrelled autocannon beneath his feet spat metal death at his enemies, but the wings of the craft stayed firm whenever the lascannon fired their stream of coherent light. A fighta-bomma closing with him caught the brunt of the autocannon barrage; it’s ****pit windows shattered, sending a rain of crystal shards sprinkling through the air behind it. Flame engulfed it’s nose, and the pilot appeared to be making a suicide run towards one of the hydras before two lascannon shots hit it in the rear and it’s fuel tanks exploded, knocking it out of the sky and vaporising most of the tail. He rolled away, searching for another target. It came to him soon – a fighta-bomma, it’s rear quadrant peppered with bullet holes and it’s left wing shredded by flak. The flyer was low to the ground, spitting a mixture of large-calibre gunfire and bombs into the hydra next to seven thirteen. The platform enclosed in a writhing fireball, but still the Ork launched it’s payload into the defence – the pilot was clearly in the throes of bloodlust, and that gave Jex an opportunity.
He throttled back, matching speed with the ramshackle vehicle and gently rested his crosshairs over it’s silhouette. Squeezing the triggers tightly, he watched as his gunfire connected with the craft, further devastating it’s fuselage. Something burst in the back, spraying flaming fuel over the treetops. The flier, it’s back broken, went into a wild head-over-heels spin before it became tangled in the upper branches. It juddered to a halt, it’s engines finally dying before the rest of the craft caught fire.
“On your tail, one!� Jex dragged up on his control yoke instinctively, as the voice of Bren Calik, raptor seven crackled through the vox. He saw the fighta-bommaz lumber past, followed by the sleek craft of raptor seven. His weapons ate into the enemy craft, and as it struggled to manoeuvre and engage him, it’s overstressed wings tore off and it dropped like a stone to the floor of a clearing, falling to bits when it hit the ground. The pilot ripped his way out of the wreckage, shaking his brawny fist at the fighter, before Jex dived downwards and vaporised the Ork with a precision lascannon shot.
Calik was probably a better pilot than Jex – how Jex had made squad leader before Calik, he didn’t know, but Calik didn’t really crave responsibility and fame as a squad leader – he was simply a fighter pilot, and he was dedicated to the job only, he didn’t care if he advanced or not.
Jex watched as Calik cut a swathe through the enemy fighta-bommaz, darting and weaving between flight groups and destroying enemy fliers in droves. He was like some angry flying insect, deftly flying and delivering a lethal sting to his prey.
He was so involved in the fight that he didn’t even notice the enemy fliers that were clustering behind him. Jex activated the vox-link, but it was too late – the fighta-bommaz were blasting away at Calik’s fighter even as Jex swooped in. His first few bolts of lascannon fire caused two of the Orks to corkscrew away in surprise, one colliding with a tall tree, and the other vectoring off to attack a hydra. A final one remained, hanging on with a tenacity that outweighed the armour of his craft – even as Jex poured autocannon fire into the centre of the enemy crafts fuselage, it’s guns flashed, blowing apart the rear of Calik’s Lightning. The fighta-bomma shattered along it’s side, but still the guns fired. There was a flash from the rear of Calik’s craft, and he went down hard, trailing smoke and chunks of metal.
“No!� Shouted Jex, wheeling around towards the direction that the Orks were coming from, anger pulsing through his body. The sky was now swarming with fighta-bommaz, trails of black smoke from rokkits and blast clouds indicating destroyed fighters. But still, he was going to take them all with him. He was going to keep them away from Calik’s crash site, and he was going to kill them all. A ring of redness was beginning to appear around his vision, and he depressed the throttle slightly as the rage ebbed – he’d been so eager to combat the Orks that he’d forgotten the effects of acceleration, but still his goal was foremost in his minds. Destroy the Orks.
“Raptors, fall back. Fall back to the secondary base, this hangar is lost,�
The order to withdraw crackled through Jex’s vox-link, and he could see the surviving Raptors whirl around to the secondary base. But Jex would not turn. He couldn’t leave Calik to the Orks, he thought as he blasted another Ork out of the sky. One of the enemy fighters struggled to turn around and engage Jex, but Jex piled lascannon shots into it’s c0ckpit until the nose was reduced to slag. He put another fighter under his crosshairs, and squeezed the autocannon trigger. It rattled off hundreds of rounds into the fighta-bomma, but suddenly there was an explosion in the rear of the craft and the dashboard went dark. His weapons refused to fire, and he heard his engines go silent behind him. More and more explosions sounded as the fighta-bomma he hadn’t noticed blew the rear of his craft into fragments. He kicked the dashboard hard, and it flickered back into life. Frantically flicking switches, the keening pitch of a heavy damage alarm was all the reward he received before the lights died again.
In total despair, Jex prayed to the Emperor. The ground rushed up to meet him, but still no salvation came. He wrestled hard with the controls as gravity drove him towards the ground.
Twenty years of service, he thought. Twenty years of death, scars, and watching planets burn beneath his craft and then being blamed for it. And still the Emperor forsakes him.
A fighta-bomma flew past as Jex glided roughly through the air, and Jex noticed a piece of hull plate on one side. Etched into its glossy surface was an eight-pointed star, the symbol of Chaos. And for the first time in his life, Jex prayed to the ruinous powers, as the ground filled his windows.
(There you go phobos - sorry, i copied it into the forum from word and they were blocked, but for some reason it left a gap between them)
It's mainly centred around the fighter pilot who discovers the powers of a daemon weapon and turns against his friends, cutting a swathe through his former allies for abandoning him and killing lots ofOrks and Tyranids too. There will also be flashes to the action around the hive city and other guard units being slaughtered in the planetwide forest.
Well, here's the beginning - more will be added soon.
“All fighters, scramble, scramble!� Came the voice from the room’s main vox-speaker. A klaxon wailed in the small hangar as a gaggle of pilots tore their way to their aging Lightning and Thunderbolt fighters. A screeching cut through the freezing air of the huge room as the rusty cogs ground the hangar doors open, and even before they had come to stop engines were whining into existence within. Like a huge mouth spitting metal flying machines, the Imperial fighters span and twirled from the cavernous maw, slicing through the cold morning air as they reached optimal engagement height.
“Engage weapon systems.� Flight commander Jex ordered his squad over his vox-bead, following suit by flicking a number of switches on the dashboard of his Lightning fighter. “Target enemy aircraft. Break by pairs and fire at will.� At that, eighteen of the twenty fighters under his command banked into couplets, and his wingman joined him at his side. Below him, dense jungle rushed past, every now and then breaking up to reveal a gun emplacement or command post , while off in the distance, and displayed on his sensor board as glowing green circles, he could see the swarm of ork fighta-bommaz chugging towards the air base. It was incredible how fast they could move – they seemed to be bolted together in such an unaerodynamic and haphazard manner that it was a miracle they got off of the ground. But in some ways they were superior to Imperial fighters – the layers of salvaged armour plate that made up their hulls offered surprisingly good protection from enemy gunfire, most of the time by sheer accident, and the way they were built, from different metal plates that could flake off one by one rather than an entire shell that could be blasted through meant that a hole in the wing or missing tailfin did little to decrease the fighta-bomma’s effectiveness – rather it decreased their target silhouette and made them even harder to hit. Their durability in a battlefield role was sickening as well – they were able to carry high-yield explosives and light anti-aircraft weaponry, aided by an engine that was supremely powerful, but very heavy. The worst thing was the sheer tenacity of Ork pilots – indeed, Jex had seen Orks loose off their entire payload in a random spray if they were cut off from their main objective, or fight on with one wing remaining, or even none. Whether they were too proud or too stupid to disengage when the battle was lost, he didn’t know; and he didn’t care really. His job as a fighter pilot was to kill the enemy in the air and the enemy on the ground, and in this situation, the best Ork was a dead Ork.
A faint ping echoed from the dashboard, and he activated his vox bead again, this time on a different frequency.
“Hydra one-thirteen, this is Raptor one, copy?�Hydra one-thirteen was the officer in charge of the anti aircraft batteries. The hydras were permanently set in an enormous ring around the air base, around twenty metres between them, each sitting in it’s own clearing that the guardsmen had painstakingly burned away. The relentless jungle still fought back though – Jex tended to wake up early, and he could often smell the promethium, and sometimes see the process of the guardsmen burning back the vines that had crept in close overnight.
Strangely, in the past few weeks the foliage was getting more relentless, and changing. The vines were a lot thicker, grew faster and whipped so hard when a guardsman stood on them that they could break a leg. Up until a few weeks ago, they had barely curled up.
One-thirteen was a stern man, short, shaved bald and with a face of a true veteran, he had trained his men up to a high standard. Jex still didn’t know his name.
“Receiving you Raptor one, go ahead,� One-thirteen’s voice crackled back. In the background, Jex could hear a clunking – probably the Hydra flak platforms loading their ammunition in their characteristic rusty way. They were old, and wearing out. Just like the defence force fighters. Just like the tanks. Just like everything on the verdant world of Tyreth. The only thing that remained was the rapidly mutating plantlife, but as for machinery and weapons of war, the backwater planets got served last, the small brother of the forge and hive worlds.
“We’re gonna go head-on with these greenskins. Once they pass through us they should be in range of anti-aircraft fire, but don’t start firing until we’re all clear – my pilots aren’t that good.� The reply was a grunt of acknowledgement, and then the line went dead.
Anticipation rose in Jex’s stomach like bile as the rangefinder on his dashboard counted down to his maximum effective weapons range. The fighta-bommaz rumbled closer, thick black smoke issuing from their exhausts and ungainly wings wobbling as they crawled to their target. Suddenly, a double set of flashes glinted from each of the aircraft and more trails of filthy smoke joined the exhaust fumes. A blast of realisation hit him like a flak round, and he opened the squad channel.
“Raptors, rockets! Evasive man-� He was cut off suddenly as something did hit his craft like a flak round. He could hear a faint whistling behind him, just over the metallic juddering of a Hydra launching it’s payload into the air. Suddenly, his attention was more on the flak platforms behind than on the approaching rockets. He wheeled around just to catch a burst of cannon fire cut into his wingmate and turn the fighter into a ball of flame. Tracking the shells back to their origin, he tried to hide the panic in his voice as he switched the vox link over to another frequency.
“Hydra seven-thirteen, stand down!� he shouted. It was quite clear his order had been ignored as the guns began to turn around and target him. But he was too quick. A burst from his wing-mounted lascannon sent the platform up in flames, setting alight the trees and scattering green silhouettes over the Hydra’s clearing. Fething greenskins, Jex thought. They had got into the PDF lines before the fighters had even launched. That meant they were further forward than Jex had thought. Even as Jex turned on vertical wing, back to the fighta-bommaz, he could see defence force guardsmen rushing to the flaming wreck of the Hydra, obviously to ascertain what was going on.
The flight commander had barely turned his craft around when a rocket flashed past his viewport, before spinning into the ground and exploding. Jex cursed to himself. A recruit’s mistake, he thought. Two seconds earlier and that rocket would’ve hit me.
The fighta-bommaz seemed awfully close now. Well within weapon range. As if responding to his thoughts, the green crosshair stencilled onto his canopy turned red, and he squeezed both triggers on his hand grips.
His feet vibrated as the long-barrelled autocannon beneath his feet spat metal death at his enemies, but the wings of the craft stayed firm whenever the lascannon fired their stream of coherent light. A fighta-bomma closing with him caught the brunt of the autocannon barrage; it’s ****pit windows shattered, sending a rain of crystal shards sprinkling through the air behind it. Flame engulfed it’s nose, and the pilot appeared to be making a suicide run towards one of the hydras before two lascannon shots hit it in the rear and it’s fuel tanks exploded, knocking it out of the sky and vaporising most of the tail. He rolled away, searching for another target. It came to him soon – a fighta-bomma, it’s rear quadrant peppered with bullet holes and it’s left wing shredded by flak. The flyer was low to the ground, spitting a mixture of large-calibre gunfire and bombs into the hydra next to seven thirteen. The platform enclosed in a writhing fireball, but still the Ork launched it’s payload into the defence – the pilot was clearly in the throes of bloodlust, and that gave Jex an opportunity.
He throttled back, matching speed with the ramshackle vehicle and gently rested his crosshairs over it’s silhouette. Squeezing the triggers tightly, he watched as his gunfire connected with the craft, further devastating it’s fuselage. Something burst in the back, spraying flaming fuel over the treetops. The flier, it’s back broken, went into a wild head-over-heels spin before it became tangled in the upper branches. It juddered to a halt, it’s engines finally dying before the rest of the craft caught fire.
“On your tail, one!� Jex dragged up on his control yoke instinctively, as the voice of Bren Calik, raptor seven crackled through the vox. He saw the fighta-bommaz lumber past, followed by the sleek craft of raptor seven. His weapons ate into the enemy craft, and as it struggled to manoeuvre and engage him, it’s overstressed wings tore off and it dropped like a stone to the floor of a clearing, falling to bits when it hit the ground. The pilot ripped his way out of the wreckage, shaking his brawny fist at the fighter, before Jex dived downwards and vaporised the Ork with a precision lascannon shot.
Calik was probably a better pilot than Jex – how Jex had made squad leader before Calik, he didn’t know, but Calik didn’t really crave responsibility and fame as a squad leader – he was simply a fighter pilot, and he was dedicated to the job only, he didn’t care if he advanced or not.
Jex watched as Calik cut a swathe through the enemy fighta-bommaz, darting and weaving between flight groups and destroying enemy fliers in droves. He was like some angry flying insect, deftly flying and delivering a lethal sting to his prey.
He was so involved in the fight that he didn’t even notice the enemy fliers that were clustering behind him. Jex activated the vox-link, but it was too late – the fighta-bommaz were blasting away at Calik’s fighter even as Jex swooped in. His first few bolts of lascannon fire caused two of the Orks to corkscrew away in surprise, one colliding with a tall tree, and the other vectoring off to attack a hydra. A final one remained, hanging on with a tenacity that outweighed the armour of his craft – even as Jex poured autocannon fire into the centre of the enemy crafts fuselage, it’s guns flashed, blowing apart the rear of Calik’s Lightning. The fighta-bomma shattered along it’s side, but still the guns fired. There was a flash from the rear of Calik’s craft, and he went down hard, trailing smoke and chunks of metal.
“No!� Shouted Jex, wheeling around towards the direction that the Orks were coming from, anger pulsing through his body. The sky was now swarming with fighta-bommaz, trails of black smoke from rokkits and blast clouds indicating destroyed fighters. But still, he was going to take them all with him. He was going to keep them away from Calik’s crash site, and he was going to kill them all. A ring of redness was beginning to appear around his vision, and he depressed the throttle slightly as the rage ebbed – he’d been so eager to combat the Orks that he’d forgotten the effects of acceleration, but still his goal was foremost in his minds. Destroy the Orks.
“Raptors, fall back. Fall back to the secondary base, this hangar is lost,�
The order to withdraw crackled through Jex’s vox-link, and he could see the surviving Raptors whirl around to the secondary base. But Jex would not turn. He couldn’t leave Calik to the Orks, he thought as he blasted another Ork out of the sky. One of the enemy fighters struggled to turn around and engage Jex, but Jex piled lascannon shots into it’s c0ckpit until the nose was reduced to slag. He put another fighter under his crosshairs, and squeezed the autocannon trigger. It rattled off hundreds of rounds into the fighta-bomma, but suddenly there was an explosion in the rear of the craft and the dashboard went dark. His weapons refused to fire, and he heard his engines go silent behind him. More and more explosions sounded as the fighta-bomma he hadn’t noticed blew the rear of his craft into fragments. He kicked the dashboard hard, and it flickered back into life. Frantically flicking switches, the keening pitch of a heavy damage alarm was all the reward he received before the lights died again.
In total despair, Jex prayed to the Emperor. The ground rushed up to meet him, but still no salvation came. He wrestled hard with the controls as gravity drove him towards the ground.
Twenty years of service, he thought. Twenty years of death, scars, and watching planets burn beneath his craft and then being blamed for it. And still the Emperor forsakes him.
A fighta-bomma flew past as Jex glided roughly through the air, and Jex noticed a piece of hull plate on one side. Etched into its glossy surface was an eight-pointed star, the symbol of Chaos. And for the first time in his life, Jex prayed to the ruinous powers, as the ground filled his windows.
(There you go phobos - sorry, i copied it into the forum from word and they were blocked, but for some reason it left a gap between them)