“Besides,” he added. “Did it not occur to you that the Beati must have wanted you to be here?”
Kautas made no reply. Marquall shrugged and headed back up the shore to the base.
“Marquall?”
He turned and looked back. The priest had risen, looking after him. “What, father?”
“That suggests she must have wanted you to be here too.”
Over the desert, 09.35
The sky was dark with bats. Literally, terrifyingly dark. A mass bombing wave, perhaps five hundred machines, was passing over like a slow, heavy storm cloud at about ten thousand metres. Two more great swarms, equally large, were following it, ten kilometres back.
Most of it was simply moving past towards intended target zones in the Littoral, unconcerned by the minor brawl down in the desert verges. But a pack of bombers, twenty or more, had peeled off to attack the retreat column, and several dozen escort fighters had committed with them.
Jagdea heard Del Ruth and one of the Raptor pilots frantically calling in warnings.
“Mass raids! Five hundred-plus, coming in out of the desert, turning north-east, ten thousand.”
Jagdea herself was too busy pulling negative Gs to evade the fighters streaking in. Hell Razors, for the most part, but also machines of another pattern with long, dihedral wings cabaned towards the rear of the hulls, so they looked like long-necked birds. The Gs hung on her hard, and made her gut squirm.
Jagdea levelled out in time to hear Operations ordering the Imperial fliers out.
“This is Umbra Lead,” she voxed. “Negative. I say again negative on that. Get everything up in support or that column is dead.”
As things stood, she and the other Umbra birds had less than twenty minutes left on site before fuel needs would force them to extend for home. The Raptors probably had less than ten.
The enemy fighter-bombers, all of them Hell Talons with lurid paint-schemes, were already screaming down on the beleaguered Imperial ground forces, spilling out munitions pods that lit up the desert with blankets of fuel-air explosive. Tanks, weapons carriers, trucks and men all burned. Frantic Hydra fire stitched up into the air.
She saw a black cruciform shape—one of the Raptors—hammer in under her, gunning for one of the stooping Talons. It missed, then carried on low, strafing the enemy tanks. There was no sign of Del Ruth or Van Tull, but she could hear their urgent calls—both brawling now. They were still in the game.
Jagdea did a high speed barrel-roll, and came in on a Talon that was just commencing its run. Her first las-bursts went wide, but they were enough to scare it and force it to pull out steeply, struggling with the weight of its unreleased payload. She rolled back, corrected her speed, and fired again, ripping las-shots through its aft section. The whole machine disintegrated, a dry, fire-less burst of metal parts and fuselage sections erupting with a cough of smoke. Large pieces of debris whickered backwards across her path, too fast for her to avoid collision. She heard impacts across her armour. Something spinning and black cracked off her canopy and left a star-shaped craze in the armoured glass. Something else smacked across her wing and damaged an elevator, forcing her to compensate hard with trim and rudder. Yet another something—a large piece of drive unit, she guessed—wallowed into her and bounced hard off serial Zero-Two’s snout. That nearly knocked her out of the sky.
Jagdea held on and brought the Thunderbolt true. Sitting up in her harness, she could see the buckled plating of her bird’s nose cone. She had several damage warning tones.
She checked her display. Lascannons off-line. Either the impact had buckled the cannon barrels themselves, or they’d severed the feeds to the ammunition battery.
She cancelled the alerts, then flipped the toggle over to quad. Hard guns it was then, the only ordnance she had left.
A Raptor went over her in the confusion, climbing hard. Right in its wake came three Razors, unloading on it relentlessly, then Van Tull, chasing the chasers.
Jagdea peeled over and hit the burners, rising fast and acute at Van Tull’s four. She closed in time to see him score. Umbra Three’s lascannons sparked brightly and the lead Razor blew out furiously like a dirty, smoky promethium fire. Van Tull had to make a violent bank out to avoid the falling, burning lump as it toppled back into gravity’s embrace.
Jagdea stayed on, sick in her mouth from the terrible stresses. She barked off a hail of fire, but she couldn’t save the Raptor. Struck from behind, it wiggled, then shook. Pieces of it fluttered off and it started to kick out black smoke. It peeled away, straight down, flames encasing it. She saw an eject. A chute in the air.
The remaining Razors had broken as soon as they’d got their kill, mainly, she supposed, to shake her off. They dropped below her, wide, turning out. She pulled a neat vertical reverse, and came back down after one of them.
It was red. She glimpsed some sort of nose art that depicted evisceration. It banked wildly, trying to evade as it plunged towards the blazing desert floor. She let it slide through her sights, left to right, then bellied round so it came back again, rolling through right to left. Tone lock.
Her thumb depressed. She felt the shudder and stammer of the autocannons, saw the streaking shells. The Razor, apparently unharmed, levelled out, then folded up, bleeding smoke, and fell out of the air.
Jagdea rolled off. She saw the chute now, the Raptor pilot, swaying down through the coiling smoke.
He burst.
He spurted apart, like vapour, like shredded meat. His chute ripped into tatters and collapsed.
One of the unknown pattern enemy machines whipped past, flank guns still firing.
Rage engulfed her. She hammered around after the long-necked killer, but the G was too much. She only just got her mask off before her breakfast ejected itself, squeezed out of her body by the turning force.
“God-Emperor… God-Emperor…” she gasped, hoarse. She started to grey out, even though she was now steady and level again. She was light-headed.
She vomited again, then pulled the mask back on, sucking in the air-mix. Her mouth tasted foul, acid. She knew she’d been flying level for too long, even before the lock alarm sounded.
There was something on her. She tried to twist out, but her arms were weak, her body feverish. She felt several solid hits.
Taking a deep breath, forcing herself together, she banked to port, and stormed through a quintet of Hell Talons that had been coming in on the column. She didn’t even have time to fire.
Her attacker was evidently good. He stayed with her, maintaining an intermittent lock.
Snaking furiously, she scanned the sky and her rear picters. Where was he? Where was he?
There. Right at her six, textbook. Another of the long-necked raiders. She got a glimpse of it. Enough to see that, whatever these new machines were, they weren’t vector-thrust. No nozzles. Fast, slick, but conventional.
Jagdea rose, viffed, and leap-frogged backwards, forcing the bat to slice in under her.
Then she dropped down on its tail and demonstrated how a gun-kill really worked.
The bat went up like a flare.
Jagdea pulled away, avoiding flak. Over the vox, the two remaining Raptors signalled they were done, fuel limit reached. They were pulling out.
“Three? Six? You still with me?” Jagdea called.
“Affirmative, Lead,” Van Tull replied.
A pause.
“Confirm that, Lead,” voxed Del Ruth. Her voice was brittle. “Little busy…”
Wheeling around, Jagdea saw Del Ruth about a kilometre west and a thousand metres higher. She was dogging it out with two Razors that kept high-turning her and spoiling her attempts to break. Del Ruth’s Thunderbolt was making white smoke.
Jagdea hit the throttle and chopped in right across the bats, forcing them to break instead. She reversed, inverting, seeing the killing ground swing up above her.
“I’ve got them,” she voxed. “Break off and run, Aggie.”
“Yes, mamzel,” Agg
uila Del Ruth replied over the vox. “Sorry.”
“Get home alive,” Jagdea ordered.
She rolled back. With Del Ruth and the Raptors gone, there was only herself and Van Tull left in the air.
Apart from the blizzard of bats.
Three minutes fuel left before critical.
Jagdea saw a Razor and swung onto it, but managed to pick up two or three more behind. She rolled and turned, managing to get a seventy degree deflection on one of them. But when she pulled the trigger, nothing came.
The violent turn was putting nine and a half Gs on her machine, so much that the electric autoloaders couldn’t raise ammunition to the cannons.
In hindsight, Jagdea was glad she’d already lost her breakfast. At nine and a half, so weighty the actual guns had slowed down, she’d have choked and died a messy, stupid death.
She came out of the mashing turn, lined up on a Razor, and wounded it with gunfire.
“Time you were gone,” a voice said over the vox. It was Blansher. He torched in, with Asche, Waldon, Zemmic and Ranfre in his wake.
“Good to see you,” she called.
“You might not think so when we get home,” Blansher advised, shooting his way through a loose formation of Hell Talons. “This is simply extrication. You and Van Tull and Del Ruth… get out now.”
“Del Ruth has already gone. We have to cover the column.”
“Get serious, Bree. Have you seen how many bats are in the air? Besides, there’s not much left of it.”
Peeling out, Jagdea looked down. On the desert floor below, there was an awful lot of fire and wreckage, but only a few Imperial vehicles still moving. Despite the fighters’ best efforts, the Hell Talons had bombed most of the column into the hereafter.
“Can we go?” Blansher called.
“Yeah. Yes. Umbra, disengage and quit.”
The seven Phantine Thunderbolts broke out of the sky-fight and lit up eastwards. Behind them, the crust of the desert blazed.
Lake Gocel FSB, 12.02
Now Bree Jagdea understood the full meaning of Milan Bansher’s remark. Showered and cleaned up, she stood in the dispersal chamber of the FSB’s main prefab, listening to the air coolers hum. Facing her was the base commander, Marcinon, and Wing Leader Ortho Blaguer, the Raptors’ chief. Blaguer, a tight-faced, high cheek-boned man in his fifties, had air command over Jagdea in the base. His flight armour was as black as his wing’s planes.
“You were ordered to pull out,” said Marcinon.
She hadn’t liked him from the start. Reedy voice, gangly frame, an adam’s apple that appeared larger than his nose. Augmetics down his left side. “I was, sir. However, I appreciated the situation differently, as is the purview of a flight commander. There were lives to be saved.”
“And to be lost,” said Blaguer. Jagdea didn’t like him either. Oily, groomed, aloof, the worst stereotype of Navy aviators.
“Indeed, sir,” said Jagdea.
“Gocel Operations decided that was a fight not worth the winning and called you off,” said Marcinon. “However, five of your pilots… let me see now… Milan Blansher, Larice Asche, Katry Waldon, Orlonz Zemmic and Goran Ranfre… disobeyed Operations. They launched, committed, and fought.”
“To get me and Van Tull free,” said Jagdea.
“Because you had suggested they should. This is not good enough, Jagdea. I intend to discipline all of you, particularly you, commander. Throne, if we didn’t need pilots so badly, I’d have you all off active.”
Marcinon’s face had become flushed. A vein bulged in his forehead.
“Actually, I don’t think you can,” a voice said.
Jagdea looked round. An ayatani priest had stepped into the room, followed by Blansher and Marquall.
“Kautas?” Blaguer sneered. “Go away father, there’s no booze here.”
Ayatani Kautas grinned at the Raptor chief. “Don’t worry, boss. I’ve had plenty to get me going. I’ve been chatting with Mister Blansher here. Fine fellow. Second-in-command of Umbra, so Mister Marquall tells me. This is Marquall. Stout fellow. He introduced me to Mister Blansher.”
Marcinon shuffled his papers and slates. “You’re drunk, father. Go away.”
“Drunk? Yes. Right… well, who’d have thought it?” Kautas smirked. “You can’t discipline Umbra Flight. In fact you can’t order them around at all. Know why?”
“Oh, please, illuminate me,” said Marcinon wearily.
“You’re Navy. Imperial Navy. Every last one of you. You’ve zero authority over the Phantine.”
“This is ridiculous,” Blaguer began, rising.
“Shut it, hair-oil,” snapped Kautas. Jagdea had to cover a snigger. “Sit the hell down. You’re Imperial Navy.”
“Yes, father,” Marcinon said, evidently ill at ease.
“Right. Navy. No authority over the Imperial Guard whatsoever.”
“None,” said Marcinon, his teeth gritted, suddenly aware of where this was going.
“Then shut up,” said Kautas. “The Phantine fliers are Imperial Guard. An exception. An oddity. Their world is—how can I put it—just sky. So when they raise Guard fundings, most of them are airborne. They’re not Navy. Not now, never will be. You have no jurisdiction.”
“Thank you for enlightening us, father,” Marcinon said. “Commander Jagdea?”
“I think it’s all been said, sir,” she replied. “The Phantine XX are Imperial Guard. We stand here, on this world, willing and eager to fly alongside the fine aviators of the Navy, in a cooperative venture for the good of mankind. In the spirit of that cooperation, I accept your censure and offer my apologies. But please do not presume to lecture me again. It would open a can of worms, sirs, and likely involve the offices of the Lord Militant and the Commissariat. Our lives are too full and too urgent for such wasteful complications.”
She saluted and turned on her heels.
DAY 263
The Makanites, 13.33
The previous day, fate—or the beneficence of the God-Emperor of Man—had decreed them clear passage up through the cold winding passes through the mountains. Not a hint of war had touched them, not an auspex contact, not even the distant murmur of a warplane overhead. Their flasks and cans replenished with cool, brackish water from mountain rills, they had raced ahead, buoyed with a sense of sudden expectation and hope. At nightfall, where previously LeGuin had ordered a rest stop to take advantage of the lower temperatures, they had pressed on, edging on through the dark, grinding along the bottoms of gorges and rock cuts, thundering up across pebble-strewn slopes.
At some hour after midnight, the column passed over the spine of the mountains at a place called Ragnar’s Cut, and began its descent into the broad foothills of the north.
Viltry rode with the Line of Death. He had been offered the place of a gunner killed on the road some days before. He wasn’t expected to perform any tasks. He was simply a passenger.
LeGuin took a turn driving in the mid-period, to relieve the weary Emdeen. Emdeen climbed into the commander’s turret seat and immediately fell asleep. In the bare-metal rocker-seat of the sponson below, Viltry found slumber harder to achieve. The noise of the Pardus tank was ferocious, and its motion far more violent than any plane, even under bad turbulence. It was a vibration, a shaking, not at all like the fluid variances of flight. Loose rocks thrown up by the treads clattered against the heavy hull and the track guards. It was hot, despite the night-chill outside, and the moist air reeked of smoke and oil and unwashed flesh. There was also nothing to see. The night was moonless, the dark enclosing. The convoy elements moved with hooded lamps. Within the tank, there was merely the red cabin light and the glow of the thick-glassed displays.
When LeGuin called out that they had at last passed over the top of the Makanite Ridge, Viltry simply had to take the tanker’s word for it.
Dawn came in, grey and heavy. Emdeen resumed his driving, and LeGuin and Viltry sat in the turret with the hatches open. The air, cold and damp and filled with ex
haust from the long line of trundling machines, was at least refreshing after the stuffy interior.
There was still very little to see.
The trail curled down through bare, grey foothills, snaking through a boulder-strewn landscape that seemed devoid of natural growth. Mist choked the valley beyond, stealing away any distant view. Behind them, the Makanites were towers of shadow against a bleached, starved sky.
The sun rose, but the mist refused to clear, and they bore on down into a layer of haze and poor visibility.
They passed by three Imperial troop trucks, abandoned by the side of the track, evidence of a previous column fleeing this way, and then, at about ten, overhauled the tail end of it. It was twice the size of LeGuin’s contingent, and moving much more slowly.
They fell in pace with it. LeGuin moved his machine right to the head of his section of the formation, and made vox contact with the second column’s leaders. From the exchanges Viltry could overhear, their new companions were travelling under the same sort of ad hoc command as LeGuin’s segment. Proper lines of command through the tank and infantry forces had long since been lost. It appeared the tankers like LeGuin—due to the fact that they were now the defending escort of thousands of truck-bound troops—were calling the shots by necessity.
LeGuin seemed particularly pleased to hear that several tank crews from his own regiment were riding with the other column. He exchanged tart, joking vox conversations with a captain called Woll.
“Good to hear his voice,” LeGuin said to Viltry as he settled the vox-horn back onto its cradle. “I’d heard rumours that Old Strontium had been destroyed at the Trinity Gates. The old rascal.”
Viltry understood LeGuin’s delight. He too would have been happy to hear from old friends presumed dead.
Not that it was going to happen.
The mist began to thin, but the day did not lighten. They had reached sparse forest, and the limits of what seemed to be a metalled roadway. The valley of the Lida, heading down all the way to the coast.