spurious reputation for leading from the front without actually having to put myself in any physical danger for a change, especially if we could pot a few with the Aquila’s autocannon[115] into the bargain.
‘Might be best to let them congregate,’ Zyvan said, ‘then take the lot out from orbit.’
‘If the Navy’s got time,’ I said. ‘They seemed a bit busy the last I saw.’
‘They still are.’ Zyvan sighed regretfully. ‘But relay the coordinates anyway, you never know. It’ll help get some ground units there, if nothing else.’
‘Will do,’ I assured him, then settled down to enjoy the rest of the flight as best I could. (Which I’m bound to admit wasn’t all that much.) At least the buffeting was beginning to die down a little, as the pilot broke through the maelstrom of turbulence into the pocket of dead air behind the plummeting bioship. It was crisping up nicely, so far as I could see through the heat-hazed air, smoke and steam billowing around it while greasy flames licked greedily at its leading edge. Fragments the size of a Chimera kept breaking off it, each more than capable of swatting us from the skies if it hit, and our pilot was forced to evade several times as these lethal pieces of scurf came rather too close for comfort.
Between the heat haze, which tinted the horizon the colour of ackenberry preserve, and the cloacal palette of the landscape below, it was hard to tell where the sky ended and the ground began, so I was taken by surprise when the incinerating corpse beneath us suddenly disappeared in a cloud of ejecta. ‘Impact!’ I voxed, to show I was paying attention, while fist-sized nuggets of the Fecundian surface began to rattle against our hull. Not that they were the worst of it by any means. We were flying though a plume of particulates, among which they were the largest chunks, the vast majority of it being made up of gravel and dust, admixed with a generous dollop of pulverised flesh. ‘It’s down!’ More or less, anyway; most of it was still bouncing, and breaking up into ever smaller portions as it did so.
At which point I began to detect a worrying change in the note of our engine, which began to waver alarmingly in pitch. ‘That doesn’t sound good,’ Jurgen said, displaying his gift for understatement to its fullest, and I felt a sickening lurch in the pit of my stomach as the Aquila dropped like a stone. A second or so later it rallied, clawing its way back towards the sky for a moment, only to falter a second time.
‘Brace for impact!’ our pilot called, quite unnecessarily, as I’d already been in similar positions far too often for comfort, and knew an impending catastrophe when I saw one. I was already strapped in about as securely as I could be, so I simply held on and hoped for the best, nudging the barrel of Jurgen’s melta a little further away from my chest with the toe of my boot. I’d just seen a shipload of ’nids being barbequed, and had no desire to share their fate at this stage.
The Aquila struck the ground hard, driving the breath from my lungs in a single explosive oath, lurched, slithered, and came to rest in an oddly anticlimactic lack of fire, flood, or rending metal. I inhaled deeply, and instantly regretted it; quite aside from Jurgen’s proximity, the cabin was evidently no longer airtight, admitting eye-watering amounts of what passed for an atmosphere around here. I tapped the vox-bead in my ear, but could raise nothing but static. Evidently the Aquila’s vox system was down, or at least unable to relay transmissions. Which, coupled with the lack of sound or movement from the cockpit, was disquieting to say the least.
‘Door’s jammed, sir,’ Jurgen said, to my complete lack of surprise, giving the thick metal panel separating us from the flight deck an ill-tempered kick. It would be hopeless attempting to hack through it with the chainsword, and using the melta in such a confined space would probably incinerate us with the backwash, not to mention the pilot, so I gave it up as a bad job and turned my attention to the rear access ramp[116]. Reaching it entailed scrambling up the steep slope the floor had become, canted a little to starboard, but the ridging in the deckplates gave us a firm enough foothold for the purpose.