Contents

Cover

Last Flight – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Last Flight

Edoardo Albert

‘And having completed the attack run, return on the opposite bearing. The fleet will be steaming to meet you.’

Baruch Neriah, pilot commander of Marauder Spirit of St Pascale, glanced round the rest of the flight crews in the briefing room. Wasn’t anyone going to ask the obvious question? But they were all studiedly staring ahead at the tacticae simulation that the briefing officer was standing beside. The air in the room was heavy with what had not been voiced.

‘If that is all, gentlemen…’ The briefing officer bent over the desk and began to gather together the tactical readouts.

Neriah held his hand up.

The briefing officer paused.

Neriah raised his hand further.

The briefing officer straightened. ‘Yes?’ He peered across the brightly lit briefing room, squinting to see the name tag. ‘Pilot Commander Neriah?’

‘Sir, range to target is seven thousand miles.’

‘Current intelligence tells us that is correct.’

Neriah did not need to look round to feel the tension in the room.

‘Maximum range in my Marauder is ten thousand.’

‘The fleet will be making full speed towards you. Simulations suggest that the lead vessels should be coming into range just in time for your return.’

‘The carriers?’

‘They will be following.’

‘So we’ll be ditching.’

The briefing officer paused. ‘That is a possibility.’

‘I hope you all know how to swim, boys.’

The laughter that filled the briefing room was loud, and brittle. Pilot Commander Baruch Neriah watched the briefing officer gather his papers. Behind him, the tacticae screens were showing the pictures that had led the fleet commander to authorise the mission: the heretic carrier fleet. To escape the hurricane that was turning the great northern ocean into a deathtrap, they had had to steam south. Within range of a flight of Marauders.

Well, within range so long as you weren’t too bothered about the Marauders getting back again. But, so far as the fleet commander was concerned, the risk of losing a squadron of Marauders was worth it for the chance to attack the enemy carrier fleet. Sink them, and the long struggle for Sagaraya would be all but won.

Winning the war was worth a sacrifice.

Baruch Neriah looked around the briefing room at the silent crews slowly absorbing the knowledge that they were the sacrifice.

The briefing officer stepped back to the lectern. ‘If you do have to ditch, use your life rafts. They have all been fitted with transponders. We will find you.’

Neriah held up his hand again. ‘Have you seen the things that live in the sea?’

‘We will find you.’

‘Hopefully before they do.’

The world was water.

There had been cases, during the war for Sagaraya, of pilots losing themselves in the endless heave and shift, and flying on, in a wave-induced trance, until their fuel tanks were exhausted and their planes slid down from the sky to be embraced by the ocean. It was mainly a problem for the fighter boys, the single-seat jockeys, but Neriah had heard of Valkyries getting lost in the big blue, and there was a rumour that even a couple of Marauders had gone missing, flying on until they disappeared.

Pilot Commander Baruch Neriah pulled his focus back from the horizon. Under the respirator, he licked his lips. He had lost himself in the blue. His eyes flicked to the mission-time clock. He had been lost for at least ten minutes. And if he had been lost, then so were the rest of the crew – any comms talk would have snapped him out of his reverie.

Neriah glanced to his left, to his co-pilot and navigator, Mehem Radin, and saw the long stare and still face that told of a soul slowly flowing into the blue.

‘Mehem.’

As the name sounded, Radin’s face shifted, the co-pilot waking from his distant daze. He looked round, eyes still stupid with the sea, and saw Neriah looking at him.

‘Sorry. Got a bit lost there.’

‘The forever stare.’

‘Not so much,’ said Radin. ‘I… I knew the crew of Wind Bird well.’

Neriah stared ahead. Losing one of the craft on take-off was not a good start to the mission. Wind Bird, burdened with the fuel drop tanks needed to extend its range, had failed to gain height from the carrier flight launch, instead scything into the sea in a welter of fracturing debris. Even with Spirit, who had always been a light-flying bird, Neriah had had to push the control stick forward on clearing the deck of the carrier to pick up enough speed for lift before he could haul the labouring plane upwards, and for a moment he had thought that he had overcooked it, and the wave ridges were going to trip the Marauder up and send it tumbling into the sea.

‘They sent out recovery craft.’

‘Didn’t look like much to recover.’

Neriah, never one to let silence fester, keyed the comm open. If he had gone into the blue, others might have too.

‘Crew, report status.’

As the comm began to squawk into life, Radin turned to his navigation panel.

‘Shivkin reporting, pilot commander. All well.’ The bombardier. During the approach run, he would be down in the blister below the fuselage – the glasshouse, they all called it – lining up the torpedo slung under Spirit of St Pascale’s belly. The torpedo was designed to run ten feet below the water’s surface. The enemy carrier, the size of an island, had barely noticed the munitions dropped from the sky on the very few occasions it had come within range of Imperial forces: the carrier’s decks and forecastles were heavily reinforced and had shrugged off the bombs that had managed to pierce the vessel’s fighter screen.

But the sea of Sagaraya was restless and hungry: give it a breach and it would push it open and wide, flooding in and pulling the vessel down into its dark deeps. The torpedo each Marauder carried was designed to do exactly that.

‘Gasko, pilot commander. Nothing to report.’ Eitan Gasko, nose turret gunner.

‘Pilot commander, Salk reporting.’ Tsvi Salk was the top turret gunner, the sky sight.

Neriah waited. He waited a beat longer. Then he sighed.

‘Plotnik. Are you still with us?’

Pinye Plotnik was the tail gunner. Like all tail gunners, he existed within a separate world, all but cut off from the rest of the crew, to whom he sometimes reported, normally only to tell of the downing of some approaching enemy craft.

‘…five…’

Neriah sighed again. ‘Plotnik, report.’

‘…six… seven, eight… nine, ten.’

Plotnik was not one to disappear into the blue.

‘Are you reporting a contact, Pinye?’

‘I’m counting,’ said Plotnik.

Neriah glanced at Radin, who raised his eyes and shook his head – a familiar response to one of Plotnik’s whimsies. But the man was the best tail gunner in the Circus, the Third Air Fleet, with an uncanny ability to down enemy aircraft – he had even taken out at least six locked-on air-to-air missiles, which was four more than any other gunner in the Circus.

‘Counting what, Pinye?’

‘Drop tanks. They make a nice splash. Some even float for a minute – until the sharks get them.’

‘They’re not sharks,’ interrupted Radin, who when in his cups had been known to take an aviator aside and explain to him, with all the truthful sincerity of a man who would remember nothing of what he said in the morning, that the only reason he had joined the Navy was to see something other than the hive of his birth. ‘They appear to be aquatic reptiles that returned to the water when the ocean covered all the land of Sagaraya.’

‘They’ve got teeth and they’re in the sea – they’re sharks.’

‘We’ll leave aside questions of xenobiology for the moment,’ Neriah said. ‘Give me a visual check on the flight, Plotnik and Salk.’ With the mission flying in vox silence, the tail and top turret gunners had the best visual for the other two Marauders in Neriah’s flight.

‘Glory Two, check,’ said Salk.

‘Glory Three, check,’ said Plotnik.

‘Waymark four,’ Radin added.

‘Noted,’ said Neriah. ‘Is it time to descend?’

The navigator checked then rechecked the distance readings before looking to the auspex.

‘On the mark, descend to flight level one – three, two, one, mark.’

Neriah gently eased the control stick forward, bringing the nose of Spirit of St Pascale down. Rolling blue filled the world beyond the cockpit canopy.

The ramjets, set for maximum fuel economy during the approach, were quiet – it would have been possible to speak to Radin without comms.

‘Salk, Plotnik, check that Glory Two and Glory Three are following us down to flight level one.’

Neriah heard the confirmation as he concentrated on bringing Spirit down to the correct altitude. The ramjets, appreciative of the richer air, struck up a deeper, more full-throated note.

‘Listen to the music,’ Radin called out.

‘Just got to make sure I don’t choke it,’ said Neriah.

Click here to buy Last Flight.

A Black Library Publication

This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

Last Flight © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. Last Flight, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78999-753-8

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.