Umbra was already up. So were all the other wings from Lucerna, Viper Atoll and the other Midwinter bases. The techmages had blessed their craft and sent them on their way.
Umbra climbed high, to about fifteen thousand, and formed two packs. Jagdea, with Viltry, Darrow, Del Rum and Marquall, and Blansher leading Scalter, Kaminsky, Zemmic and Van Tull. Once again, the ominous track on the auspex showed the ride of Archenemy airpower rolling north. Jagdea had heard a flight controller estimate that at the peak of the morning’s activity, the Imperial planes had been outnumbered eleven to one. She wondered how the kill rates had compared.
Reserves had been added. Commonwealth units were mobilised now after the morning’s surprise, and had their machines—mostly pulse-jets and reciprocating-engine birds—standing ready in fields along the northern coast, a last ditch defence. Those old craft wouldn’t stand a chance against the Archenemy’s vector planes, Jagdea knew. The point was, if the enemy wave reached the north coast in any numbers, nothing mattered any more anyway.
That morning, despite terrible losses, the Navy wings had denied the bulk of the enemy wave. The north coast had been hit, but not with the full fury the onslaught had threatened.
Now it was round two.
Tactics had changed. Now spearhead groups of fighters were storming ahead of the bomber strings to disrupt the Navy interceptors and prevent them from flushing the bombers.
Jagdea saw condensation nails crawling out. The bats were clocking in at maximum thrust, lashing forward to meet the Imperial line.
Air flashes lit up to east and west. The first contacts had been made. Operations traffic suddenly became frenetic.
Umbra’s scopes showed a fighter group, nearly thirty strong, coming in at twelve thousand.
“They’re moving bloody fast,” muttered Zemmic.
“Let’s slow them down,” said Jagdea.
In the paired packs, Umbra stooped, and began to fire as soon as the racing bats were in range. They were a squadron of Locusts, some maroon, some yellow, some gold, and they broke upwards into Umbra’s attack.
Viltry killed a bat head on, but Jagdea picked up two that refused to let her go. Darrow and Del Ruth almost converged, and managed to smack las shots into the same hostile, chopping it into fragments. Marquall avoided getting his tail shot off in the first pass, then climbed hard again to help Jagdea.
The two maroon Locusts had locked down on her despite her violent slips and turns. Any tighter and she risked a high-speed stall.
“Can’t shake them!” Jagdea snarled, gripped tight against the lousy G.
“Umbra Leader! Speed brakes and drop out!” Marquall yelled as he came howling in.
Vision closing into a grey tunnel, Jagdea deployed the speed brakes into the slipstream and slammed violently back out under the still-turning Locusts. Immediately, she started to recover with vector thrust. Marquall came in over her guns firing and the Locusts swung out of his way with some haste. One darted up out of sight, but the other went into a dive and Marquall committed after it.
The pilots in Blansher’s half of the flight all made kills within twenty seconds, though Van Tull was himself hit and took wing damage.
“You okay, Three?” Blansher called.
“Four-A,” came the expected response.
Blansher could hear Kaminsky distinctly over the link. “Fire. Fire. Fire. Switch. Fire.”
As he came up, mushing off speed, Blansher looked up and saw Kaminsky’s plane flick-roll, quads firing, and make his second kill of the sortie.
The remaining bats retreated. Marquall came back up from his chase empty-handed. Umbra reformed, and immediately sighted the front edge of the bomber wave, low and south of them. They scoped more fighter escorts. They began their attack run anyway.
Over the Sea of Ezra, 14.02
The batteries of the mass formation opened up as the fighters stooped in amongst them. In the flat, yellow light, the bombers looked like a mezzotint image. Four Thunderbolt wings were now attacking this gigantic string, and two more were duelling with its Razor escorts.
Viltry’s anti-bomber expertise earned him two stings straight off and Jagdea followed his example, damaging a heavy raider that Del Ruth polished off in her wake. Darrow found a Tormentor and blew away part of its engine assembly. It hung in the air for a second, then pitched away as if it had fainted.
Del Ruth did a split-S then swooped onto a super-heavy that was dark red, like carrion. Chains fluttered out behind the huge machine and Del Ruth realised they were strung with human skulls. She banked in, not even waiting for the sights to lock. It would have been difficult to miss. She put eight pulses of lasfire into the swollen flank and, as she pulled away, saw the aluminoid skin shred and burst as fuel-air explosions blew it apart from within.
Even as the giant craft died and burned, its turrets kept firing. Del Ruth felt her bird shudder as something hit the underside of her nose with huge force, tearing the stick out of her hands for a moment and knocking the plane’s attitude through twenty degrees.
She recovered control.
“Six, are you okay?”
“Yes, Leader,” Del Ruth responded. She checked her instruments and saw two warning lights lit, indicating damage to the starboard autoloaders. “Hit, but not critical.”
Kaminsky and Zemmic had both taken out bombers on the first pass, but Blansher, Scalter and Van Tull were intercepted by the Razor escort before they could do any harm. Van Tull had to fly an almost complete figure of eight before he shook a purple Razor, then almost immediately got the drop on another, chequered black and white, that had lined up on Scalter. As the chequered hostile vaporised, Scalter peeled away towards a heavy bomber, firing on it from its seven.
The purple Razor that Van Tull had shaken reappeared, swooping steeply and opening fire on Scalter’s machine. Bolt rounds sliced down into the starboard engine, the midsection, and the tail, shredding part of the rudder. The impacts destroyed Scalter’s auspex, ruptured his coolant system and crazed the side screens of his canopy white.
“Umbra Seven! Umbra Seven!” Van Tull yelled.
Dazed, Scalter heard the voice and looked around. The air of his cockpit was full of blue smoke. He stared at the shattered instruments. The few panels still functioning were a mass of warning lights. Overheat, leak, pressure loss, power failure…
“Scalter, can you hear me?”
Scalter looked down and let out a sob. At least one of the rounds had gone clean through his lower torso. He couldn’t believe the bloody mess was anything to do with him. He couldn’t feel his legs. He couldn’t feel anything much at all.
“Scalter!”
“Four-A…” he whispered. “Taken a little damage.”
“Seven, if you’re not flyable, eject for Throne’s sake!”
With effort, Scalter touched the stick. It was dead, slack, all control gone. His ruined machine was just flying straight. He looked down again. There was no way he could eject. No point, either.
He looked up. The heavy bomber he’d been targeting was still ahead, cruising on.
Scalter put his hand on the throttle. “For Enothis and the Emperor,” he murmured and pushed the throttle open.
Umbra Seven accelerated in a straight, unswerving line and hit the heavy bomber in the port ribs. A huge halo of flames engulfed them both.
“Seven’s gone! Scalter’s gone!” Marquall could hear Van Tull yelling. Negative G was preventing him from replying. He was cranking round in a murderous loop with a mauve Razor on his back. He felt hits skinning off his armour. He banked hard—a bone-shaking shudder—and managed to force the Razor to fly past under him. Now he was behind it. It would break at any second, Marquall knew. But which way?
Which way would you go? Jagdea had always told them. Marquall went right, and the Razor did just that in the same instant. Target lock.
Marquall was screaming as he fired. He knew it was a kill before Double Eagle had even started firing. The mauve Hell Razor started to s
pin, then spiralled away like a leaf.
Marquall hoped someone had seen that. He dearly hoped that someone—
“Umbra Six! Umbra Six! Status?” Jagdea started shouting over the vox.
There was no obvious hostile on her, but Del Ruth’s Thunderbolt looked like it was taking hits to the nose. Explosive crackles rocked her airframe and plating blew out.
“I don’t know—” she began. It was the hit she’d taken in the autoloaders just minutes before. Overheated damage or a late detonating round wedged into the mechanism had explosively cooked off the drums of ammunition. The rippling blasts were her own shells exploding in the caissons. In horror, Jagdea saw several detonate up through the main hull, blowing out both sets of engine pipes, and another flurry wrecked her radiator.
Mortally wounded, the Thunderbolt began to dive.
“Aggie! Pull out! Pull out!” Jagdea yelled.
“I can’t! Negative! Dead stick!” Del Ruth screamed back.
“Eject, Aggie! For Throne’s sake, eject!”
The machine plunged away. Jagdea saw a flash of glitter and a shape in the air. Far below her, a chute opened, a tiny dot against the tungsten sea.
Lucerna AB, 15.20
As they refuelled and reloaded, no one spoke much. Fatigue and nerves had almost wrung them out, but the losses made it much worse. Their hearts ached as much as their joints. For most of the pilots, circulation and balance were seriously impaired. Just walking around the hangar was difficult.
Just before 16.00, as they were preparing to launch, Operations reported that the second wave had broken short of Zophos. Fought to a near-standstill after four hours, the Archenemy formations had turned back.
If a third wave was intended, they’d see it within the next five hours.
“Third time lucky,” said Zemmic.
“Who for?” asked Kaminsky.
Over the Midwinters, 18.23
They came back early. As if hungry, somehow sensing that they had their enemy on the ropes. Or desperate. That’s what Jagdea told herself.
The third wave came out over the coast in the early and unnatural dusk, seemingly just as immense as before. How could they have shot down so many of the bastards and there be so little sign of a thinning in their ranks?
The remaining eight machines of Umbra Flight climbed with four other Thunderbolt squadrons to nine thousand, and circled in over the archipelago as the enemy formations approached. The other bases had put up their wings.
The line was drawn.
Combat began at 18.45. Another new tactic was immediately revealed. Frustrated by the Navy’s staunch resistance, the Archenemy had committed the front elements of its bomber waves low, to pattern bomb the islands in the hope of annihilating the hidden bases there. From its overall heading, this arm of the wave was intending to cross the Straits of Jabez and target Tamuda once the islands were done. The radiant ripples of furious detonations began to light up the southern part of the island chain.
The Imperial planes went in amongst the bombers, cutting them out of the air even as they dropped their warloads.
“I don’t see fighters,” Marquall called.
“There’ll be fighters,” Blansher said.
Darrow made his eighth kill of the day, then throttled up to join Viltry in an attack on a super-heavy. The tracer patterns were torrential and bright in the stale air.
Jagdea turned in tight. She couldn’t see Zemmic or Van Tull in the mayhem, but she could hear them over the link. Blansher and Kaminsky were attacking a trio of Tormentors. She was about to start a run onto a Hell Talon when she saw the escort bats coming in across them.
“Bats! Twenty-plus! Two o’clock!” Jagdea yelled.
They were Razors. Black and red, a few bright crimson. One pearl-white.
The Killer and his circus came on. Two of his wingmen attacked and destroyed a pair of Navy Thunderbolts from the 96th who didn’t react anything like fast enough.
“Umbra! Split! Split!” Jagdea ordered and opened her throttle, going for the pearl leader. His evasive roll left her wrong-footed, but she turned hard and tried to get on his tail. He refused to sit, vectoring to port and coming up underneath her. Desperately, she flick-rolled and dropped down around him to his right, but he turned off sharply to port.
For a moment she wondered if she had actually scared him into a break, but then saw in dismay that he’d simply been lining her up for his two crimson wingmen. Serial Zero-Two shuddered as laser bolts went through its wings. Jagdea slammed the suck over and tried to barrel under the Razors, but they were as agile as their master, and stuck tight to her tail.
“Throne of Earth!” Jagdea cursed, fighting to break out. Moving far too fast for such close quarters, she almost rammed a Hell Talon, and bled speed miserably as she was forced to duck under it. Another shot clipped her tailfin. Two more ripped through the sensor dusters and her auspex screen flickered and died. She vectored, came round stubbornly and started to climb between a pair of Tormentors that lashed at her with their weapon mounts.
Viltry saw her plight. He pulled away from the superheavy he had just crippled and lit his burners, spearing down through the bomber formation into the denser smoke.
“Jagdea! Come left!” he called. She turned, but the crimson bats would not let her go. Viltry fired on them and tucked in. He couldn’t get a lock. He wasn’t going to get them in time.
Blansher and Kaminsky left the bombers alone and stooped after Jagdea too. Kaminsky saw the pearl-white bat first. It seemed to come out of the vapour of fyceline smoke like a spectre, gun-pods flickering. Umbra Two wrenched violently as gaping wounds punched into its tail plane.
“Blansher!” Kaminsky yelled.
Blansher tried to viff, tried to shake it just the way he had taught Kaminsky. But his vector ports were damaged. The white bat fired again, a stream of illuminated shells, and a spray of flames sheathed Blansher’s entire tail. The shots had penetrated the tanks of the Thunderbolt’s rocket motor, and the hypergolic propellants had ignited. The huge thread of flame was greenish-white with intense heat. Blansher started to dive.
Ignoring the white killer, Kaminsky scream-dived after Umbra Two. Blansher’s plane was now on fire from nose to tail.
“Get out! Get out, Milan, eject!”
“…can’t! I… can’t… canopy’s jammed!”
“Blansher!”
The Thunderbolt no longer resembled a plane. It fell like a comet. A meteor. An attenuated ball of fire, almost too bright to look at. But diving with it, Kaminsky could not look away. He knew fire. He knew the terror of a burning plane all too well.
Blansher started screaming. The fire was inside the cockpit now. The voice on the vox no longer seemed human.
Kaminsky was strangely relieved when the inferno hit the sea.
Obarkon watched with curiosity as the Imperial’s wing-man made the strange choice to follow his burning leader down. How odd. As if there was anything he could do.
It rendered the wingman an extraordinarily easy target. Obarkon turned into a dive, feeling the grav armour clench around his body and the cardio-centrifuges throb. He blinked to settle the gunsight focus and put the orange pipper on the wingman’s tail.
Attention…
Target found.
Just a little more.
A warning sounded. Obarkon glanced up and instinctively raised his nose, losing the target immediately. Shots stripped past him.
“Someone’s eager to die,” he muttered.
Darrow came in hard and tight, firing as soon as he dared, but leaving it late enough to be in positive range. The white bat pulled out of his line and banked away.
Darrow turned and chased it. This wasn’t going to be like the last time. He wasn’t going to run, frantic, in an outclassed machine. He was a Thunderbolt pilot now. The bastard white bat that had slaughtered all of Hunt Flight—and Heckel too, in a way—was going to be the one doing the running.
A vector-aided roll and a burst of speed put Darr
ow closer and closer still, despite the enemy’s excellent out-rolls. Darrow got two brief locks, but lost them both. He waited for the third.
Interesting, Obarkon thought, his pulse not even drifting in its rhythm. This one has some merit. He flies by the claws. If this had been a quieter hour, he would have enjoyed sport with this child. But this was the day of days, and there was still great work to be done. This duel was over.
The white bat dropped down to an altitude of no more than fifty metres and proceeded to whip in and out of the inlets and bays at speeds that Darrow thought he’d never be able to follow. Every turn threatened to smash them into a sheer cliff or clip a rocky outcrop.
He stayed on the bat as long as he could and then was forced to climb by a jutting atoll that he knew he would not otherwise avoid. The white bat let him go over, then sliced up after him, firing. Darrow twisted out, but the bat locked him cold.
Then shots sprayed in from a second Thunderbolt. It was Marquall.
Viltry put all his power into a last turn and fired again. Now at last he disturbed the crimson bats enough to break them from Jagdea’s tail. One looped back to engage him. “Switch out!” Jagdea ordered.
Viltry obeyed. Ignoring the looping attacker, he kept on after the other one, lining up. Jagdea broke wide and turned up to face the threat to Viltry.
Viltry opened fire and the crimson bat empted and came apart.
A moment later, Jagdea caught the other one in a head-on attack and ripped it out of the sky.
Marquall’s flunked attack gave Darrow time to break. The white bat turned out to meet Umbra Eight.
“I’ve got him!” Marquall cried. “I’ve got a score to settle!”
So have I, thought Darrow. And I wouldn’t be so sure that you’ve got him either.
Marquall fired again, but the Razor rolled on its axis and slid under his fire cone. Marquall banked, exactly the right way, but the white bat had already viffed as it looped, and it fell on him. Its gunpods roared.
Darrow watched in horror as shots tore into the midsection of Marquall’s plane.