She looked around, scanning the packed sky for some sign of Ranfre.
Far below, unseen by Jagdea, a Thunderbolt descended.
Ranfre’s bird had sailed through the shot-storm of the bomber pack. Every bolt round blasted out by the turrets had missed it, except the one that had shattered its canopy and burst Ranfre’s skull.
His Thunderbolt, uncontrolled, slowly dropped away and hit the sea.
Lucerna AB, 08.13
The flight came in through the south entry of the hangar. Del Ruth’s machine was making smoke and Jagdea’s rudder was flapping like a weather vane.
“Refit, rearm and refuel!” Jagdea yelled to the fitter crews.
Power loaders and tank trucks were already spurring forward the vapour-swathed machines.
“Where’s Marquall?” Jagdea yelled to Racklae over the noise.
“He was here, ma’am! We fixed him up! He’s gone up again!”
Promethium jetted out of a hose poorly fitted to Cordiale’s machine. Racklae ran towards the problem, cursing his crew.
Jagdea looked up out of the hangar mouth at the sky.
Marquall was alone out there.
Over the Midwinters, 08.45
The sky was lit up by the fight. Marquall took a deep breath. It was amazing. He’d never seen so many air machines in combat before.
He put Nine-Nine into a dive and came in on a pack of Locusts, thirty strong. He didn’t care. Effortlessly, he rolled into them and fired the moment he had a tone lock.
One of the small Archenemy fighters bucked, then flew apart in a dazzle of heat.
“Three!” Marquall whooped to himself. “Three! Frigging three!”
The Locust pack broke and looped. Suddenly, they were all over him.
He took three holes in the port wing, two in the starboard and four through the tail.
Gasping, Marquall turned out high, trying to evade. The Locusts swarmed after him.
He saw a flash. A passing glint.
Eight Thunderbolts, painted cream, sneaked down past him into the Locust swarm. The Apostles.
Throne of Earth, the Apostles! “Larice?” he whispered.
Holy Terra, those Apostles were punishing the Locusts hard. Perfect riming, perfect formation. They blitzed into the pack and killed most of them in one pass.
So fast. Marquall felt almost stationary, even though the speed gauge said he was topping eight hundred.
“Larice? Larice Asche?” he called.
“Who’s that?” snapped a hard voice.
“Umbra Eight,” he said.
“Marquall? Emperor’s teeth! This is no time for reunions. Get your arse out of here!”
“Copy that, Larice. I’m going.”
“Get the hell gone. And don’t call me that. I am Apostle Five.”
Over the Midwinters, 09.18
Blansher led up the first four Bolts that were ready: Van Tull, Cordiale, Scalter and Zemmic. The others would follow under Jagdea the moment her rudder was fixed.
Blansher turned them south-west, in the direction of Theda. Another wing of eight Thunderbolts that had just turned round at Lucerna launched and fell into step with them.
Ahead, it seemed like a great storm had slid down across the horizon. There was a wide, brown cliff of smoke along the sea, extending as far as Blansher could see, filled with sparks and flashes like lightning.
As they closed, the cliff began to resolve. What he’d been seeing was the glare distortion of thousands of exhaust plumes and engine fires, ribboned into a lattice across the sky, so dense that from a distance it seemed solid.
They passed several Imperial machines limping for home. Blansher kept calling for Marquall. The vox was still burbling with hundreds of intersecting transmissions. According to Operations, the massive clash they were prosecuting here was matched by a vast battle over the Sea of Ezra, and another near the east coast approaching Ingeburg. Other reports said that bomber streams had got past the Midwinter line, and were beginning to hit Zophos and even the northern shore. Every available Imperial machine was now aloft on at least its second sortie of the day.
Contacts were closing. A large pack of Hell Talons cruising north.
“Umbra Flight,” he ordered. “Engage!”
Over the Midwinters, 09.50
It had taken an age for the fitters to fix Jagdea’s rudder. Even now, Hemmen had warned, it wasn’t a solid repair. She ascended at maximum speed, tailed by Del Ruth, Kaminsky, Viltry and Darrow. It was no longer a matter of getting track instruction from Operations. The sky above the archipelago was loaded with machines everywhere she looked.
They picked up a quartet of Marauders, all damaged, that were being harried by a formation of nine blue Locusts. The bats seemed to move as one, skilled and disciplined, as if they were somehow controlled by one fierce mind.
Jagdea rolled the wing into them.
One of the Marauders was finally overwhelmed, and went down towards the atolls. It was hard to keep a focus on the brawl at hand. Parts of other dogfight clashes kept impinging, as the edges of one skirmish overlapped another. Umbra was rolling with the blue Locusts when seven Lightnings blundered into their fight-zone, tumbling around three pairs of Razors. Jagdea found herself having to deal with one of the Razor pairs which switched from the Lightnings they’d been chasing onto her. Any semblance of strategic formation in Umbra vanished.
Darrow turned tightly over one of the ailing Marauders and locked onto a yellow Hell Razor that seemed to be either confused or suffering from vector damage. He led his shot, expecting it to break left, but it didn’t, or it couldn’t. As a result, Darrow’s first burst missed. He banked to the right, floating the machine into his reticule and fired again, killing it instantly.
Kaminsky and Viltry had been forced to the eastern part of the skirmish, separated from the others by the Razors going through their midst. They found themselves mugged by all nine of the blue Locusts. Both of them began turning and firing, and the blue bats danced away like a shoal of fish, triggered by a single impulse. They switched, and came around again, almost in line. Kaminsky broke hard, and Viltry executed a savage vector-assisted turn, representing so the Locusts were almost head on to him.
He got a good but momentary lock on the lead plane and fired his quads, leaving his thumb on the stud so that the salvo would rake. The first Locust blew out and because they were running tight, in line, Viltry’s target lock carried his bombardment onto the second one, which also disintegrated.
Then Viltry had to bank abruptly to avoid the others. Something blinked past over his canopy and he saw Kaminsky coming in on a barrel roll into the thick of them, forcing the Locusts to lose cohesion for the first time.
Kaminsky hit one, then damaged a second, and hunted a third round, at its six. The blue bat was so eager to avoid the Thunderbolt on its tail that it ran blindly across Viltry’s field of fire and he stung it with his lascannons.
Kaminsky and Viltry scissored past each other. Their pack cut in half, the Locusts pulled out.
Over the Midwinters, 10.10
Blansher’s element flew out of their tangle and enjoyed a brief respite of quiet air before a vast swirl of fighting planes engulfed them from above. They were forced low, then lower still. Burning engine parts, wing fragments and pieces of elevator rained past them from craft destroyed in the upper levels of the brawl. One large fragment bounced off Scalter’s nose, destroying his las battery and stripping the cover plating off his starboard turbofan. He cried out in alarm and fought with the controls to steady the plane. Peering forward, he could see energy from the split las-cables crackling and sparking on the dented nose. He deactivated the power magazine and switched to quad.
“Umbra Seven! Pay attention!” Blansher yelled.
Scalter had been so intent on his damage that he’d been flying straight for too long. A mauve Hell Talon came sweeping down out of the frothing smoke wash above and started to fire.
Scalter sat down in his armour plating, flinch
ing as the shots went by. He seemed to have frozen. Blansher was too committed to a pair of Razors to help him.
Cordiale came out of the north, firing heavily. The Talon took a hit or two in its rear armour and forgot all about Scalter. It dropped low, towards the sea, running to escape. Cordiale stormed after it.
They went across the water at less than ten metres, kicking up wash and spray with their thrusters. The Talon slipped back and forth, around atolls and cliffs, determined not to climb and thus make itself a target. Cordiale stuck to it, banking as it banked, slicing around islets and surface rocks. They came around a tall, sheer cliff in a hard turn, the noise of their engines reflecting oddly off the cliff face, and immediately had to leap-frog two mass-barges lying at anchor in the cove. Cordiale missed the vox masts of the big tubs by centimetres. The Talon rushed low across the basin, chased by Hydra batteries along the beach, and bent right around the shoreline of the atoll.
Cordiale steered after it, standing his plane on its starboard wing. He laughed as he saw that their passing rush had caused seabirds to take off in panic out of the rocks.
The Talon twisted to port, skimming over a pattern of low, semi-submerged islets. Following, Cordiale heard the lock tone and fired.
The Talon lurched and plunged nose-down into the rocks, detonating with huge force. Cordiale shot past it, glancing back at the fireball gleefully.
Travelling at seven hundred kilometres an hour, his plane tore into another flock of startled seabirds erupting from the low rocks. Each one weighed a kilo or more, and they shredded his nose cone and front plating like jack-hammers. Two annihilated his right engine, and one punched through his canopy, shattered the gunsight and hit him square in the face, driving his goggles into his skull and snapping his neck instantly.
Umbra Eleven hit the outer line of the rocks and disintegrated in a blizzard of hull plates, cables and machine parts.
Over the Midwinters, 10.45
Swinging wide for home, Jagdea’s flight had come up on a Tormentor wing that had broken from the thicker fighting and was heading towards the Sea of Ezra. They harried it until their tanks were too low.
Gaining altitude for Lucerna, they sighted Marquall.
“Umbra Eight,” Jagdea voxed. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Not really sure, Lead,” Marquall responded. “But wherever it was, there was an awful lot of planes there.”
Lucerna AB, 11.30
“Turn them around as quickly as you can!” Jagdea said as she jumped down. Her four had brought Marquall back with them. According to Operations chatter, Blansher’s element was five minutes away.
“Yes, ma’am!” Racklae replied. Smoke was coming out from under Kaminsky’s machine, and Racklae yelled at a deck crewman to get it doused. Turning back to Jagdea, he indicated the trolleys of ammunition at the hangar side waiting to be loaded.
“We’ve not got the whole of our last order, commander,” he said. “I’ve called down to the base arsenal, and they told me we’re draining the magazines. This morning so far they’ve fetched up as much as they would usually in eight days.”
“They’ll have to work harder,” Jagdea said.
“It’s not that, mamzel. The magazines are actually emptying. They’re having to pull munitions supplies that came in on the barges and haven’t been unloaded yet. It’s slowing things down.”
“I’ll go and put in a good word,” Jagdea said, heading for the briefing room. As she walked, she turned round and shouted, “Pilots! Make sure you all, I repeat all, get some fluid inside yourselves! Maybe a little food too, if you can stomach it, but not too much. Fluid is a necessity.”
Marquall dismounted and took a water bottle that one of his fitters offered him. He spat out the first mouthful, trying get rid of the thick taste of rubber his mask had left in his mouth.
“Running better?” Racklae asked.
Marquall nodded. “Look I want to apologise f—”
Racklae shook his head. “Least said, soonest mended, sir.”
“I got my third,” Marquall said.
The chief fitter grinned, and clapped him on the shoulder. “There, you see? What jinx?”
In the briefing room, Jagdea got on the vox to the armourers and had to listen while someone told her the same story she’d heard from Racklae.
“Just take a look up at the sky and see if that helps you any,” she said and hung up.
While she’d been making the call, Jagdea had been gazing across at the main auspex. It looked more like the climate plot of a tropical storm than aircraft tracking.
Viltry came in, put down his helmet and came to look at the screen too.
“Operations say they’re breaking off,” Viltry said.
“Operations can kiss my arse, they’re not up there.”
“No,” Viltry pointed to the southern sections of the display. “I can sort of see what they mean. Overall. That was a huge wave pattern they threw at us at dawn. The sky may be full of machines and plenty of fighting, but a lot of that’s involving hostiles that are turning back for home, fuel out, or coming back from target if they made it. This whole area here, see?”
He tapped a section east of Zophos. “That’s all medium bombers, all going south. The actual wave has broken.”
“The first wave,” Jagdea said. “A mass onslaught like this is all or nothing. They’ll be coming again as soon as they’ve rearmed and refuelled.”
Viltry nodded. “Of course. I have a feeling they’re going to keep this up until they’ve crushed us. The Archenemy is many things. Subtle is not on the list.”
“Very true,” said Jagdea. “We go up as soon as we can. Hunt stragglers, and steal some altitude before the second mass comes in.”
“I’ll see if Racklae can scare up some rockets,” Viltry said.
“You’ll be lucky,” Jagdea laughed.
“But with rockets, we could seek out a mass-carrier and have a go. I don’t care how many bats they’ve got, they can’t refit and refuel without a carrier.”
“Yes,” said Jagdea. She looked up at the log board that the fitters were keeping. Times of launch, times home, damage, work done. Ranfre’s log line was ominously blank.
“Ranfre?” Viltry asked, guessing what she was thinking.
She nodded. “Hasn’t been seen since about six-thirty. Even flying to conserve fuel, there’s no way he’s still in the air.”
“Maybe he put down at another base?” said Viltry. “Or… ejected… or…”
She appreciated Viltry was trying. She picked up a stylus and wrote “Missing” next to Ranfre’s name.
“It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the last few days,” Viltry said quietly. “You know… death, I mean.”
“You and everyone else,” said Jagdea.
He shook his head. “No, in particular. As far as the Imperium is concerned, Oskar Viltry is dead. I’m just a… a scrap of paper, a pending number to be assigned.”
“So?”
“Will you promise me something, Bree?”
“Yes,” she said immediately.
“You haven’t heard what it is yet. I’m here, at your side, proud to be a member of Umbra. And that’s how it’ll be until the end.”
“I know,” she said. Few men were as loyal and committed as Oskar Viltry.
“But when this is done. When we win this fight. I don’t mean today, I mean however long it takes… will you forget you ever saw me?”
“What are you talking about?” she laughed. Then she saw in his eyes he was entirely serious. Viltry took the paper registration docket the Munitorum had given him out of his pocket and smoothed it flat.
“Forget you ever knew that Oskar Viltry came back from the desert and flew with you. List this pending number as missing in action. Let me disappear here, on Enothis, when the fighting’s done.”
She blinked. “Is that what you want, Viltry?”
“Yes. Not just me. There’s someone…” he paused. “There will be li
ves to rebuild here, after the war.”
She thought about it for a moment, then picked up the paper.
“I promise,” she said.
Out in the hangar, as the fitters worked feverishly, Darrow sat in silence, his back against the wall. His hands were no longer shaking. They were completely steady. What was shaking now was inside him, some deep core part that had been rocked and rattled and squeezed and slammed and wrenched. In one morning. No clear image remained to him of the day’s fighting. Just a blur. A smell of fuel and fyceline. A sound of thunder.
Nearby, he heard some of the ground crew cheering as they added a third stripe to Marquall’s plane. Marquall looked triumphant. Even in the short time he’d known him, Darrow had been able to tell that Marquall was desperate for glory.
Darrow thought for a moment, and realised, to his shame, that he couldn’t precisely remember how many kills he’d got himself. He tried to picture them all. The fluke the day before, then the bombers…
He realised that his tally was now five. He was an ace.
Darrow decided not to tell Marquall.
Buzzers sounded. Blansher’s element came in at last, shrieking down through the north entry. Darrow leapt up. He saw immediately how damaged the snout of Scalter’s plane was.
Scalter himself seemed all right, but dazed. Jagdea ran out to inspect the damage.
“Las systems completely shot,” said the lead fitter. “It will take hours to mount in a new system. We can replace the plating quick enough, but if you want him up again, he’ll have to make do with quads.”
“Then he’ll have to make do,” Jagdea said. She glanced round as Blansher, Van Tull and Zemmic plodded across from their machines.
She froze. In her concern for Scalter and his bird she’d missed the obvious.
“Where’s Cordiale?” she asked.
Milan Blansher shook his head.
Over the Sea of Ezra, 13.16
The second wave rolled in an hour after noon. Though the day was bright, the pollution of the morning’s combat had now stained the sky with a strange, yellowish opacity. Volcanic columns of smoke rose from Theda, Ezraville and Limbus, visible for hundreds of kilometres.