Engines of War by Steve Lyons

the collapsed fort shifting behind him.
    Brother Filion yelled out a warning too; but the zombie was still up in Galenus’s face and he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off it. He just needed a second – a half-second, less than that – to deal with the immediate threat. He didn’t get it.
    One of the Plague Marines had clung to a vestige of life.
    It was one that Galenus had encountered briefly earlier: the one that had summoned the cloud of filth. He had fallen to Terserus’s storm bolter, but dragged himself back up from the rubble: through faith, through passion, through sheer bloody willpower, perhaps even just through the sorcery of his foul deity.
    He plunged a knife into Galenus’s back, with enough strength to penetrate his armour.
    The blade tore through arteries and muscles before puncturing a kidney; then, the Death Guard gave the haft an additional sadistic twist. Galenus gasped. He would have screamed if only he had had the breath, but one of his lungs had collapsed.
    His system was immediately flooded with painkillers, which rushed to his head and left him dizzy – too dizzy to defend himself from his other opponent, the zombie in front of him. With a swipe of a supernaturally strong claw, it slashed through his armour’s gorget; with a second swipe, it opened up his throat.
    He thought he heard Terserus’s voice.
    Indeed he had. The Dreadnought had released an ear-shattering bellow of defiance. He palmed off two zombies and came thundering towards his stricken captain, pulverising rockcrete beneath his footsteps.
    His storm bolter blazed, even though Galenus was between him and his target, acting as a living shield. A few bolts pinged off the captain’s pauldrons, but, somehow, a lot more of them found the Plague Marine’s head.
    As it happened, he would probably have fallen anyway. His dishonourable attack must have used up the last of his strength, because he held onto Galenus like a stanchion to keep himself upright. It was gratifying, all the same, to feel his body jerking, his frantic grip releasing and to feel the Death Guard sliding – once more – to the dusty ground, to know that the Emperor’s bullets had finally sent him to an overdue grave.
    Too late, of course, to spare his final victim.
    Warning runes flashed across Galenus’s blurry vision. He didn’t need his power armour’s life signs monitor, however, to tell him what he could feel for himself.
    His wounds were mortal.
    In a sickly-looking grain field to the north-west of the ruined fort, the tanks of two powerful armies continued their slow-motion dance around each other.
    An Imperial Stalker was baited into a trap. As it wheeled around to strike at a Chaos Vindicator from the side – where its armour plating was weaker – another Death Guard tank came up behind it, guns blazing. The Stalker was immobilised, one of its tracks destroyed. The Vindicator’s turret spun around and pumped a Demolisher shell into its stricken enemy.
    The Ultramarines had lost a Hunter too: the Vengeance of Daedalus . Arkelius was unclear on the details of its demise. He only knew that the crew had, praise the Emperor, escaped with their lives.
    The terrain for quite some away around was flat, offering no natural cover. Now, however, the battlefield was becoming littered with burned-out tank corpses, which the remaining drivers scrambled to use to their best advantage. Through his vision slit, Arkelius could make out the remaining Stalker, sheltering behind its dead twin. It edged out to fire off a rapid salvo from its stormcannons, then reversed back into hiding while its gunner reloaded.
    In the midst of all this activity, the Scourge of the Skies was paralysed. Its gun was silent. To the other combatants, it must have appeared to be a corpse itself. With so many gunners trying to shoot around it, however, it was far from safe.
    Arkelius heard Corbin cursing loudly as the engine failed to start again.
    ‘Try increasing the throttle