Engines of War by Steve Lyons Read Free Book Online Page A

strongest in their Chapters, and each crew tended to bond with its vehicle too, becoming almost like cogs in its machinery. When a crewmember, particularly a tank commander, was lost – in this case, reassigned to a less experienced crew – it could take a while for the others to learn to work with his replacement.
    Arkelius had one advantage over his experienced driver and gunner. Between his extra vision slits and the vox reports in his ear, he had a broader overview of the theatre of war than either of them. Corbin had just one slit, which allowed him to see straight ahead, while Iunus couldn’t see outside at all, and he only had the readings on his various monitors.
    Arkelius knew that his brothers were gaining ground against their daemon opponents.
    He had also learned that Galenus’s Thunderhawk had crashed and burned. He was glad to hear a slightly breathless report from its pilot, confirming that the crew had bailed out.
    The pilot described fire-breathing daemon engines, like dragons: two of them. There had been a few garbled reports of such creatures before – they had picked off a Stormtalon on the periphery of the battlefield – but no one had got a good look at them until now.
    They had circled the wreckage of the Thunderhawk once, but seemed uninterested in finishing off its former occupants. They had wheeled around and headed back north-west, the way they had come. A moment later, another Stormtalon pilot saw them, bearing down hard on his starboard side.
    Arkelius told Corbin to alter their heading and increase their speed. ‘Forget the flies and their riders. We’re hunting bigger game now. Iunus, two targets, roughly four hundred metres ahead of us, larger than the others and faster. Let me know when you have them.’
    Another pair of close explosions shook the Hunter.
    ‘Sergeant, we’re pulling ahead of the other tanks,’ Corbin advised over the vox-channel. ‘We’re making ourselves a target for–’
    ‘I’m told we’re fairly well-armoured,’ Arkelius snarled. ‘Let’s trust to that and take a chance, shall we? We have a pair of monstrosities tearing through our gunships out there. We’re loaded up with the best, the most accurate, surface-to-air weapons in the Emperor’s arsenal. I say we introduce the one to the other and–’
    ‘Sergeant!’ Iunus yelled.
    Arkelius saw it for himself, on his own monitors: an auspex contact, growing larger, more insistent by the second; the tiny, flickering runes that accompanied it on the screen were blinking red, a warning that the object was approaching them on a collision course.
    His gaze darted to his forward vision slit, and he saw it framed there too: one of the mutant flies, without a rider, spiralling out of the sky towards him. He thought it must be out of control as its wings appeared to be damaged. Then he realised that the insect was on a deliberate suicide run, and he saw the reason why: on its tail was a Skyspear missile.
    ‘Coming in too low, too fast,’ Iunus reported. ‘I can’t get a target lock on it.’
    ‘Abort that missile, now!’
    ‘I can’t do that either, sergeant. It isn’t one of our missiles.’
    Corbin broke in: ‘The other Hunter must have fired it.’ As if Arkelius had needed telling.
    He was already voxing the commander of the Vengeance of Daedalus , but before he could speak to him, the fly – at least twice the size of an average man – smacked into the Scourge ’s prow and explosively disgorged its disgusting innards.
    The impact shattered the armaplas pane of Arkelius’s vision slit: its outer pane, that was. The ancient designers of the Rhino and its mechanised offspring hadn’t let them be so easily penetrated; their vision slits were actually short fixed periscopes, with a vertical tube and several lenses and mirrors separating the user’s eye from what the slit showed him.
    Arkelius didn’t have to worry about one dead, mutant fly. He had to worry about what was coming up behind