about us, noting the visible signs of readiness to face the oncoming storm. A squadron of Furies coasted past with flaring engines, one of the groups screening the flagship from enemy drones, and, glancing back, I could see a score or more others clamped to the hull, awaiting the call to action[112].
Everywhere I looked in the sky, it seemed, a loose star was drifting, its motion obvious against the fixed backdrop of the galaxy: the unmistakable spoor of a spacecraft, too far away to make out, but betrayed to the naked eye by the light reflecting from its hull.
‘There’s a lot of them,’ Jurgen remarked, although whether this was intended as reassurance or simply an observation I had no idea.
‘Good,’ I said, turning my attention to the world towards which we were descending. It looked no more inviting than it had on any of the previous occasions I’d done so, the portions of the surface visible between the thick clouds of airborne waste resembling nothing so much as rotting offal. Even the lights of the hives had little chance of punching through the murk, which was being stirred up across half the southern hemisphere by one of the periodic storms capable of laying waste to entire continents (assuming the vast midden had anything so clearly identifiable as a continent to lay waste to, of course). Nevertheless, I couldn’t help trying to pick out our destination, or, at least, its general location.
Occupied as I was in this futile endeavour, it took me a moment to realise that our pilot was throwing us around in a rather more violent manner than usual. Fortunately the Aquila’s internal gravity field was remaining steady, or Jurgen and I would have been flung against the bulkheads hard enough to have broken bones. As it was, the rapid oscillation of the planet across the viewport was my first clue that things were beginning to go as wrong as they usually did.
‘What’s happening?’ I voxed the pilot, trying to keep an edge of testiness from my voice. It seemed as though he had his hands full, and none of the reasons that I could think of for that made distracting him now a particularly good idea.
‘We’ve got incoming,’ he told me, in a voice which didn’t have to add so shut up and let me get on with my job to append that particular message. Leaving him to it seemed like the best idea, so I switched channels and spoke to Zyvan instead.
‘Kildhar’s modified auspexes are picking something up,’ the Lord General told me, in tones of some surprise. ‘They started returning echoes about thirty seconds ago, and the Navy scrambled everything they’ve got to intercept.’ Which explained the violent manoeuvring, at least; our pilot must have been jumping around to get out of the way of the fighter squadrons.
‘I can’t see anything,’ I said, inanely I suppose in retrospect, as my chances of picking anything up with the naked eye would have been miniscule. ‘Have you mobilised the ground forces?’
‘They’re as ready as they’ll ever be,’ Zyvan said. The trouble was, we’d both fought tyranids before, and were under no illusions about what that actually meant. I realised then that he must have been simmering with frustration, an unwilling spectator to a spaceborne clash of arms he couldn’t influence or participate in: perhaps the most galling position possible for a warrior of his prowess and tactical acumen.
‘Any sign of–’ I began, then broke off as something from a nightmare howled past the viewport[113]. ‘Holy Throne!’
It was hard to focus on, seeming to consist mainly of spines and talons, each larger than our shuttle. The one thing I could say for sure was that it dwarfed the pack of fighters snarling and yapping at its heels, still peppering its back and flanks with lascannon and missile strikes as it passed out of sight.
Then, without any warning at all, the void lit up, the main batteries of the warships all firing at once. And they had plenty of targets to choose from. The flickers of a thousand impacts, as energy beams and torpedo volleys struck home against steel-hard chitin, dazzled my eyes, and our pilot’s voice was in our ears again. ‘Hang on back there,’ he counselled. ‘It’s going to get rough.’
I bit down hard on the sarcastic rejoinder which had almost escaped my lips, and did as I was bid, cinching the seat restraints a little tighter. Jurgen did the same, his face paling slightly beneath its usual