LeGuin nodded. The rift, and the mountains beyond it, represented the second and third of the great barriers the columns would have to overcome in order to reach safe territory. The desert was just the beginning. But it gave him some sense of hope. These were palpable markers that he could tick off.
LeGuin popped the hatch and sat up, taking the electroscope Matredes passed to him. The Line of Death was travelling in the forward quarter of the retreating column. According to unconfirmed rumours, some of the Imperial elements had already reached the Makanite passes, on the doorstep of safety. According to other rumours, enemy rapid assault units had reached there too, gunning to deny them.
He scanned ahead through the scope, trying to brace against the lurch of the machine. Every view was filtered by heat haze and whirling dust. But there did now seem to be something far ahead. A slender blue-white line. Mountains, or a daylight dream?
The vox chattered something he didn’t quite catch. A moment later, he didn’t need it repeated. Flickering shadows shot north overhead, and he heard the rush of afterburners above the roar of the tank’s engine.
Two dark red shapes in the bright sky, moving as fast as arrows, curled in low above the column ahead. He saw flashes, sprays of sand, then heard the rolling crump of detonating munitions. A kilometre away, something caught fire and began to smudge the sky with a thick spout of oily, black smoke.
“Alarm! Alarm!” he shouted into the vox. The Line’s turret weapons were already cranked to maximum elevation, but there was no point wasting ammo at this range. In the distance, he saw the choppy flashes of tracers from Hydra carriers in the front file.
Two more bats went over, using the convoy’s long dust wake as a marker to line up on their targets. Matredes was rotating the turret, but LeGuin shook his head. A troop truck three vehicles forward of them leapt into the air in a brilliant eruption of flame, and showered burning debris in all directions.
They hadn’t even seen that one coming.
The vehicles ahead of them swerved. The hit truck was a stricken mass of blazing, twisted metal. Burnt bodies, some stripped naked by the blast, littered the sand.
Another troop truck, turning to avoid the ruin, hit soft sand and dug in. It rocked violently, wheels spinning and digging deeper, engine over-revving. The infantrymen in the back leapt down with spades and chains.
“Full stop! Get the cable!” LeGuin yelled to Matredes, who clambered out at once with Mergson, one of the sponson gunners.
“Tie it up! Tie it up!” LeGuin shouted at the men on the ground as Matredes and the gunner fetched the hawser coil from the starboard panniers. They had to be quick. The enemy warplanes habitually dumped their payloads on the head of the column to slow it down. Then they delighted in coming about down the stationary line, strafing as they went home.
“Come on!”
Surface-to-air from the column ahead. Tracer, some wild cannon fire, small-arms. Some idiot tried a shoulder rocket. It went up, useless as a white flare in daylight. Where were they? Where the bloody hell w—
Booom! One went right over at zero altitude, rocking the tank on its torsion bars with the Shockwave. By the time it had gone by them, it was already pulling off. The track five hundred metres ahead was swathed in fyceline smoke from the deluge of cannon fire it had stitched down the line. New fires had started. Something big—a tank’s magazine, most likely—blew up with a dry roar.
“Come on, Matredes!” LeGuin bawled. Most of the troopers had thrown themselves flat when the bat went over, but LeGuin’s men had got the cable lashed around the truck’s bull-bars.
“Ease off! Get him to ease off!” LeGuin shouted to Matredes, indicating the truck driver, a Munitorum drone who was still thrashing the daylights out of the vehicle’s drive shaft in an effort to self-right.
“Emdeen?” LeGuin voxed to his driver. “Nice and easy back step, no jerks, or you’ll amputate its rear end.”
“Understood, captain,” Emdeen voxed back. “Fifteen segs, mind.”
Fifteen segs. LeGuin laughed despite the situation. A Pardus tanker was permitted to sew a little stylised track segment to the edge of his uniform collar for every year served active. Emdeen was reminding his captain that he was a fifteen year vet and didn’t need to be told how to tow a cargo-10 successfully.
LeGuin had thirteen segs of his own.
His laughter stopped as he saw the next bat. Low, head on, red as an open wound. Weapon ports flashed as it came on. Tormentor-class, LeGuin presumed. Maybe a Hell Talon. He didn’t care. He knew tanks. Planes looked all the same to him. It might as well have been a frigging flying pixie, it was still intent on murder.
The bat’s cannon fire chewed along the track, kicking dirt up in man-high bursts with the rapid precision of an industrial belt press. A STeG armoured car wearing the dusty livery of the Enothian PDF ruptured like an eggshell and rolled on its side. The raking blasts atomised the front end of the water tanker.
Then the shots stitched right across them. Half a dozen of the troopers from the stranded truck were thrown down, their bodies flung aside, or into the air, or into pieces. The air filled with up-flung dust and dirt. LeGuin lost sight of Matredes, but saw Mergson clearly as he was hit. Everything below Mergson’s waist vaporised in a blitz of flame and fibres.
“No!” LeGuin screamed as he dropped back into the turret for cover, three shells spanking off the Line’s top armour.
The bat had already hammered past, but as he’d dropped, LeGuin had seen a second one right behind it.
Raging, he seized the yokes of the main turret’s twin mount, threw the autoloader lever and began to fire.
The turret rocked. He couldn’t see a thing through the prismatic sight, certainly not a target.
A waste of munitions? Let me miss first, LeGuin reasoned, then tell me that.
Over the Makanites, 12.01
Flight time was coming up on one hour. Twenty thousand metres of clear air down to the frosted mountains below them, three-tenths cloud. Visibility clear to forty-plus.
Strapped in his flight armour and breathing air-mix through his mask, Viltry looked up out of his Marauder’s shadowed cockpit into the bright realm of the sky. Ahead, and slightly high, Hello Hellfire was cruising smoothly, leaving long, straight, pure-white condensation trails behind her. The sunlight glinted off her polished-alloy silver.
It was almost serenely quiet apart from the background thrum of G for Greta’s four ramjets. According to the auspex, there was nothing in the air except their six plane formation for a hundred kilometres.
Viltry clicked his intercom. “Gee Force, check in.”
That was G for Greta’s other nickname. Gee Force Greta. Orsone had coined it, and it had stuck.
“Bombardier, aye.”
“Nose, aye.”
“Tail, check.”
“Turret, aye.”
Lacombe, Viltry’s navigator, looked round from his position and made a finger-and-thumb “O” with his gloved hand.
“How far?” Viltry asked the navigator.
“Coming up on the waypoint, sir. We want to make a turn bearing east ten in the next five.”
“What’s it called again?”
“Irax Passage. I believe, named after a local species of alpine herbivore that—”
“Thanks, Lacombe. War first, history later.”
“Sir.”
Viltry switched channels. “Halo Flight, this is Halo Leader. Prepare to come about bearing east ten on my mark… three, two, one… mark.”
The angle of the sun tilted. The tactical bombers turned. G for Greta, Hello Hellfire, Throne of Terror, Mamzel Mayhem, Get Them All Back and Consider Yourself Dead. Except for heavy operations, Halo seldom lofted all of its dozen birds for one sortie. Six was standard, and these six had been picked by straw poll. Widowmaker had been drawn, but then switched out because of a vector duct problem. Mamzel Mayhem had taken her place. The Mamzel was Halo Two, Kyrklan’s bird. As Viltry’s second-in-command, Wassimir Kyrk
lan usually led sorties with the other half of the flight while Viltry’s half was in turnaround. It was unusual for them to be flying together.
“Make your descent by five thousand,” Lacombe said.
“Copy all flight, descent by five thousand.”
There was a change in engine tone as they began to drop. The ice-capped peaks began to seem terribly close.
“Lacombe?”
The navigator’s sharp eyes switched between the terrain-scanning auspex and the cockpit view. “Looking for a point turn. Yacob’s Peak. Plot brief says it stands at the mouth of the pass.”
Another slow minute. “Come on, Lacombe.”
“There it is. Twelve kilometres and closing. We need to lose another two thousand now. Brief advises wind shear once we enter the pass.”
Viltry nodded, easing the stick. “Halo Flight, Halo Flight. Point marker twelve kilometres and closing. Stoop by three, and watch for crosswind.”
“Halo Two, understood.”
“Following your lead, Halo Leader.”
A photo-scout Lightning from the 1267th Navy (recon) had run this pathway at dawn, identifying a cluster of Imperial armour and artillery units halfway up the pass, with Archenemy heavies tight on its tail. Apparently, a local squadron had spotted the area the day before, shortly before getting stung by enemy air cover.
“Halo Flight, watch the air,” Viltry voxed. He switched to intercom. “Gunners? Locks off. Eyeball scans now, like your lives depend on it. For they surely do. Judd?”
A crackle. “Captain, sir?”
“Kiss the children for me, bombardier.”
Crackle. “I’ll tell them you said night-night.”
In the bomb bay below Viltry, Judd gently armed the payload, and then snuggled up to the foresight reticule on his belly.
The ragged pinnacle of Yacob’s Peak rose up ahead of them, a snow-caked jab of rock. Viltry could see the mouth of the pass now. His heart began to beat faster. It was going to be tight.
“Halo Flight, Halo Flight. On it now.” He tried to keep his voice calm. “Come about the point marker and drop hard by number sequence. The Emperor protects.”
All of the planes repeated that catechism.
Three… two… one…
The six Marauders, now formed in line astern, banked hard around the rock spire and followed Gee Force down the chute, swinging low and chasing hard. The promised wind shear rattled them brutally. Then, for a few moments, the canyon walls were so close on either side that the pilots expected to see friction sparks at their wingtips. But the chasm began to widen out. The pass descended. Snow cover, a ridgeway, a well of black rock with curling ice-sheets. It widened to five hundred metres-plus. Viltry kicked in some throttle, dropping Gee Force down to a sense-whizzing low fifty. At the stick of Mamzel Mayhem, right behind Gee Force, Kyrklan grinned. Low fifty, in a Marauder doing 400 kph, boxed in by a granite canyon. Only Oskar Viltry had the balls to lead off like that.
Kyrklan had been flying Marauders for just a year less than Viltry, and for the last six had been Viltry’s second in Halo. He loved the man, and would follow him anywhere. In Wassimir Kyrklan’s opinion, no one quite knew how to play a four-ram bird the way Viltry did. It was a gut thing, a nerve thing. Like he was born to it. When Viltry had gone missing, presumed lost, over the Scald in 771, Kyrklan had mourned not just for his friend but for the generations of Phantine pilots to come. They would never see Viltry fly, never learn, never understand. The fact that Kyrklan had gained flight command was no consolation. He’d had to lead the wing in on the Ouranberg raid. Viltry would have done that job better. Now the captain was back and everything would be four-A.
Kyrklan pushed his dangling mask up to his face. “Slow down, eh, Osk?” he laughed into the vox.
“Say again, Halo Two?”
“Nothing, Halo Leader. Let’s go get.”
In the juddering cockpit of Halo Lead, Viltry shivered. Inside his armoured gauntlets, his knuckles were white. This is it. This is the one. Fortune’s frigging wheel. This is the payback. Death. Death now. Death now—
“Target sighted!” Judd sang out.
They had just whipped over a straggled formation of Imperial armour, over two hundred vehicles hemmed in on a shelf of the steep pass. Up ahead, mobile batteries and heavy cannon began to punch the air with shot.
Viltry’s hands were quivering on the stick. “I can’t…” he began.
“Captain?” Lacombe asked, looking round at him.
Holy Throne! Just do it. Just do it! Viltry shook himself, and screamed into his mic. “Forward guns fire now! Now! Judd! Fry them!”
Naxol, in the bow turret, began firing, kicking out backwashing flame around the plane’s nose as he raked the ground positions.
“Load away!” Judd reported. Gee Force lifted suddenly as the belly and wing weight let go.
A ripple of flame below. Then Mamzel Mayhem added to it, then Hello Hellfire. It whipped up into a firestorm. The others, in swift succession, followed.
By then, G for Greta was banking up out of the pass, the crystal mountainscape under her. Sucked back into their harness rigs by the extreme G, her crew was still cheering.
Levelling out at five kilometres over the peaks, Viltry sagged over the controls for a moment, breathing hard.
“We cooked them! We cooked the bastards and—”
The voice was shrilling from Gaize, the turret gunner.
“Shut up. Shut up!” Viltry yelled. “Shut up for Throne’s sake! Pick up your visual scanning right now or we won’t get home! Do you hear me? We won’t frigging well get home!”
Theda MAB South, 12.12
The sky was empty, but Pilot Officer Vander Marquall wasn’t looking at it. He was looking at his bird.
The I-XXI Thunderbolt sat on its skids in an anti-blast revetment on the east side of the Theda South field. It was a hefty beast, fourteen tonnes dead weight without fuel, with a blunt group of cannons for a nose and a body that swelled out into forward swept wings around the thrust tunnels of the double turbofan engines. The canopy was set amidships, giving the Bolt a reclined, louche look.
It was painted matt grey, with the marks of the Phantine XX on its tail and nose. Its exposed engine ducts glinted copper.
Racklae, Marquall’s chief fitter, looked up from under one of the gun housings. “Be good as new, I promise,” he said.
Marquall grinned. Racklae’s subs were just finishing up the nose art paint job on the bird. The Phantine stylised eagle, clasping the jagged lightning bolt, with the name “Double Eagle” beneath it in inverted commas.
Marquall became aware of someone coming up behind him. He turned, and stiffened in surprise.
It was Captain Guis Gettering of the Apostles, his white suede flight coat almost glowing in the midday sunlight.
“Sir, I—” Marquall began.
Gettering calmly removed one of his chainmail gauntlets and slapped Marquall across the face with it so hard that the young man was knocked down onto one knee.
Dazed, stunned, his face grazed by the chain, Marquall looked up.
Guis Gettering was striding back to his hardstand.
“What…” gasped Marquall, rising with the assistance of his fitters. “What the bloody hell was that about?”
Theda MAB North, 12.26
When Darrow finally got back to his station, it seemed like the place had been abandoned. He stood for a few minutes on the sunlit assembly yard and looked out across the main field. A kilometre away, along the western side of the area, he could see rows of big machines under nets. Imperial birds, Marauders. Darrow could just make out fitter crews at work on the heavy fighter-bombers. To his north, Munitorum crews were dismantling six of the twelve launching ramps used by the Wolfcubs. Activity, but all of it remote.
The complex of operations and barrack buildings behind him felt deserted and empty. He wandered up the main steps and into the cool gloom of the main hall. Darrow was wearing a borrowed pair of old overalls. His clot
hing had been ruined in the crash. He’d managed to keep hold of his aviator boots, and his heavy leather flying coat, though one sleeve of it had been badly torn. He’d refused to let the medics toss it away.
They’d insisted on keeping him in Theda South’s infirmary overnight for observation, even though it was clear to anybody that he was fine apart from a few scratches and bruises. In the morning, he’d been forced to wait, twitchy with impatience, to fill out forms and incident statements. Only then had he been written up cleared and allowed to snag the first available transport back to North.
He just wanted to get back, get into the routine again and put the previous day, that terrible day, behind him.
No one seemed to want to let him do that. The forms, the medical checks, the incident statements. Even the transport driver who’d brought him back from Theda South seemed like a sick jibe. The man’s face had been a mess of pink scar tissue.
The entry hall was empty. Nobody hurried past along the polished wood-tile floor. He walked past the gilt-lettered rolls of honour on the panelled walls, one for each Commonwealth squadron, including his own, the 34th General Intercept, and under the brooding hololith of the late Air Commander Tenthis Belks. It was a time-honoured custom for all pilots to salute the old man’s portrait as they went past. Darrow didn’t feel like such frippery today.
There was no one in the day office, or behind the desk at company and area. Darrow went down to the dispersal room, but there was nobody there either. The air smelled of over-brewed caffeine and stale smoke. A circular regicide board, its game unfinished, sat on one of the small tables, Darrow went back out into the hall, and walked down to the station chapel. On the wall beside the double doors hung a blackboard where the names of the dead and missing were written up prior to the morning service. He stood for a moment and stared at the list written there now. The dead cadets of Hunt Flight. Such a damnably long list. But for five names, it was a roll call for the entire wing.
He opened the doors and looked into the chapel. It was quiet and very dark, save for the daylight falling in multi-coloured rays through the lancet windows at the far end. There was an odour of wood-wax and floor polish, and also fading flowers. Someone was sitting down at the front, at the end of the first pew. Darrow couldn’t make out who it was, and felt reluctant to disturb them.