“Good to see you in one piece, lad,” said Blansher.
“What’s the commotion, Mil?” Jagdea asked.
“Deployment orders,” Blansher replied, pulling a data-slate out of his coat. She skim-read it.
“As of 18.00 hours tonight, Umbra are shipping out to a forward strip in the south,” Blansher said. “I think they want to make some room here for the newcomers. We’ll be flying short notice intercepts from a place called Lake Gocel.”
Jagdea looked at the location on the slate map. It was a vulnerable spot, well inside the enemy’s air range. But it would allow them to mount rapid challenges to anything coming north or east out of the Interior Desert, tagging them long before they reached the Peninsula or cities like Theda.
“Operations says that several large sections of our ground forces are now clearing the east of the Makanites on the home run,” Blansher said. “I think the idea is we’ll be protecting them, too.”
“Not just us, surely?” said Marquall.
“No,” said Jagdea, reviewing the slate. “The 409 are going with us, and there’s a Lightning wing already down there.”
“Transports are already starting to ship our crews out,” added Asche. “We’ll be travelling light and fast.”
“We’d better get started,” said Jagdea.
Marquall walked across to the hardstand and looked Nine-Nine in the eye. The fitters had done a fine job of patching her up. A slight blemish to the plating and the paintwork. Nothing really to show the pounding she’d taken.
“You’re mine now,” he said softly. “I’ll treat you right if you treat me the same.” Dark, fierce, the Thunderbolt made no reply.
Over the Cicatrice, 13.43
The search for another mass carrier to pound was going to have to wait.
Viltry turned his wing west and brought them lower over the rushing canyons and gorges of the great rift scar. For the first time, he felt the notorious shake and tear of the Cicatrice winds as they tried to pluck
Greta’s
lift away.
Two kilometres dead ahead, a huge blizzard of fire and smoke was coming off the desert.
A section of the shattered land armada, a line of men and machines seven or eight kilometres long, had been struggling down one of the rift’s wider passes when the ambush had come down on it. Three at a time, Hell Talons were dipping in and tearing down the length of the column, depositing bombs and rockets, or shooting up ground targets. Dozens of tanks and armoured transports were on fire, and in places so were patches of sand where burning debris and fuel had scattered out.
Tiny dots, individual figures, were running for cover in the jumbled stones of the valley sides. The valley air was striped vertically with rising smoke, and horizontally by tracer fire and jet exhaust plumes. The strafing machines made curious vortices and eddies in the smoke palls with their slipstreams.
At the south end of the valley, squadrons of enemy stalk tanks, bright yellow and venomous-looking, were scuttling in, overtaking the hind part of the crawling Imperial mass. Heavy-gauge lasfire flashed and seared from that section of the fight.
Viltry’s Marauders weren’t built to intercept air attacks like this, but he hoped their presence would at least discourage the enemy from its relentless strikes. Lacombe had called in for fighter assist, and there were apparently Thunderbolts eight minutes away.
“Head on, low level!” Viltry ordered. “Drive them off and away from the column, deny their attack runs. If you make it to the south end without having to pull off, unload munitions on those enemy stalkers.”
“Understood, Lead.”
“Right with you.”
Viltry led by example, swinging
Greta
round at the front end of the column and bringing her in down the line in the opposite direction to the raiders’ approaches. He kept as low as he dared, whipping through dense smoke streams, feeling the damned rift-winds screwing and twisting the airframe.
As soon as he had lined up and begun his run, he saw three Talons coming in ahead of him. Bolter fire from the ground chopped the air in their direction.
“Make them change their minds!” he growled, fighting with the stiff, jerking stick.
Top and nose opened fire, aiming high. The tracking tracer lines chewed ahead of the Marauder, sizzling into the trio of enemy machines that powered towards it.
Damaged perhaps, surprised certainly, the Talons banked out wildly, left and right, aborting their runs and pulling off the column. Gaize tracked the turret and kept shooting at one that was slow skipping away.
Viltry kept on track. They were almost at the south end of the pass now. The gates of the gorge were coming up fast. A flash of sun caught yellow metal: stalk tanks. The arachnoid war machines were pelting laser cannon fire into the rear echelon of the Imperial column.
“Judd!”
“Ready!”
Viltry clung on, anticipating the jerk-lift of a clean release, but what came was far more violent than that. A sudden, bone-rattling, sideways slam caused by the especially fierce crosswinds at the gorge mouth.
Greta
stumbled. Viltry caught her and held her.
The bombs had gone.
He could hear Judd cursing. The crosswinds had ruined his release.
Greta’s
huge payload had dropped wide, detonating across the upper valley slopes.
Viltry brought the nose up and climbed wide, coming around again in a large circuit. Behind and below him, four of his five wingmen were flying in series to protect the pass.
Consider Yourself Dead
had broken off its run and was turning out over the valley tops, mobbed and chased by three Talons.
He heard Orsone open up in the tail. There was another bat behind them. Fire streaked past like scattering sparks. Viltry dived away, turning against the sun so a shadow rolled slowly through the cockpit.
“Lost it!” Orsone voxed.
Down onto the valley fight again, into the smoke, and against the savage wind shear that was as much an enemy as the bright-painted bats.
Viltry banked hard as two Talons went past the other way, just blurs of colour. What was keeping those damn fighters?
G for Greta
shuddered. Klaxons wailed. They were flying head on into a blitz of ground to air las. The stalk tanks were ready for them this time.
“We’re taking hits!” Lacombe screamed. Terrible noises: fracturing metal, shattering plastek, the blasting tone of an engine-out alarm.
Greta
slewed badly, the wind clawing at her, the controls like iron.
Something exploded in the compartment underneath him. Viltry heard Judd shrieking. A grown man, heavy as a bear, shrieking like a child.
“We’re losing it!” Lacombe yelled.
Vibrations, shaking them like toys. Viltry’s juddering teeth bit his own tongue-tip. He fought to hold on. The engines were making a terrible, ailing note.
He saw the gorge mouth, the yellow machines, the lasfire hosing into the sky towards him. Wing puncture. Tail damage. Naxol was shouting from the nose turret, virtually inaudible over the raging sounds.
Viltry launched his wing-mounts and saw them puff away on streaks of white smoke. Stalk tanks tore apart, flung into the air, severed machine-limbs scattering. The cockpit canopy shattered, and wind slammed into his face, full of glassite chips.
They came out through the gates of the gorge. The engines howled, two of them churning black smoke. Climb now, climb,
climb…
Battered by the wind in his face, Viltry glanced around. Many cockpit instruments were broken, burned out. Lacombe hung in his harness. One side of his head, and the seat-rest behind it, were missing.
Fate’s wheel.
The instruments told him nothing. But Viltry had flown Marauders long enough to know the feel and the sound of a dying bird.
“Eject! Eject!” he ordered, though he knew they were far too low already.
The ragged, beige wasteland came up under them rapidly. Slicks of sand, rocky outcrops, salt-pans. So huge, so fast, there didn’t seem to be any sky left any more.
Viltry closed his eyes.
Theda Old Town, 00.05
The templum was all but empty. A few glow lamps were lit along the nave. The main light came from the stand of fluttering votive candles.
“Is there anything you need?” the hierarch asked gently.
Beqa was sitting at the end of a pew stall. She looked up at him. “I’m just waiting,” she said.
“It’s late.”
“I know. I know it is. Can I stay here?”
“Of course, daughter,” he said. “As long as you wish. I will be in the reliquary if you require my offices.”
When he had gone, she sat where she was for a few minutes more.
Late. It was very late. She’d waited for him past the end of her shift, men waited on the seafront for another hour as the daylight faded. She knew she should have sent a note to the factory chief. Her pay would be docked for missing a scheduled shift.
She had thought about going to the airfield, but realised that she didn’t know which one. Besides, the trams didn’t run out that far any more, and she had no money for hire-transport. And they’d never let a civilian in through the gates.
She rose and walked to the votive stand. Three small coins in the cup, three fresh candles from the box. She fixed them in place beside the dozens of others already burning, and took up a taper.
One for Gart, one for Eido.
One for—
A main door opened somewhere and slammed. There was a blast of cold air. All the little candle flames blew out.
Lake Gocel FSB, 05.32
“Get up! Wake the hell up,” the urgent whisper said.
Vander Marquall blinked and rolled over. Van Tull was leaning over him in the violet gloom of the tent, shaking him by the shoulder.
“What? What?”
“Cover drill!” the older pilot hissed. He tapped the aluminoid bracelet around his wrist. “Didn’t your alarm wake you?”
Marquall yawned and shook his head. He glanced down at his own metal strap, which was dormant. Van Tull’s had a red rune illuminated on its cover.
“I think mine’s broken,” Marquall decided.
Van Tull scowled at Marquall, then took him firmly by the wrist and unclasped the bracelet. He studied it for a moment, then tossed it back to the boy.
“You’ll have to get a new one from stores. Not now, later. Come on.”
Van Tull opened the flap-seal of the habitent and let light and warm air in. He was already dressed. Marquall pulled on his breeches and looked around for his boots.
“Come on!” Van Tull called. Marquall yanked on his boots, but there was no time to fasten them. He hurried outside after Van Tull.
The habitent they shared was one of almost a hundred and fifty camo-skinned shelter domes that clogged the ground under the stands of dripping kinderwood trees. Even though it was early still, the air was humid. Bright sunlight filtered down through the lacy leaf canopy and the blast nets strung between the tree trunks, like a roof over the shelters.
The pair of them ran through the molded shadows, keeping carefully to the flakboard planking where the path crossed the frequent marshy pits and swamp pools. Scops hissed around them like vox static.
As they ran, Marquall saw dark shapes loom out of the twilight groves around them, dark shapes deliberately concealed. More shelters, camouflaged supply dumps, Hydra AA batteries where the crews waited silent and alert, the veiled shapes of warplanes under shimmer netting.
They reached the shelter and scrambled inside. The pilots of Umbra and a gang of fitters were huddled within.
“Overslept?” asked Jagdea.
“My fault, commander,” said Van Tull.
“Really?”
“Marquall’s tag was defective and I was slow waking him.”
“I think that rather makes it Marquall’s fault, doesn’t it?” Jagdea said, looking sourly at the half-dressed boy with his unlaced boots.
“Sorry, mamzel.”
“Shut it,” Jagdea said.
Human silence draped them. Outside the blast shelter, the forest trembled with birdsong and odd animal cries.
Marquall had already decided he didn’t like this place. Hot, wet, stinking of rotten fruit. His skin itched. He’d seen bugs the size of fingers crawling on the walls of his habitent and, during the night, swarms of silk-winged beetles flitting around the down-lights of the camp’s stealth lamps.
The birds fell silent. Marquall heard the low whir of a nearby Hydra platform as it traversed slowly. Then the sound of jet wash, low, passing overhead. The distinctive warbling note of enemy vector-thrusters. In a moment, it was gone.
A muffled vox signal. “Understood,” Blansher said, removing his headset. “All clear,” he reported. Relieved conversations started up, activity resumed. The occupants of the shelter began to file out. The runes on all their bracelets had turned green.
“Begin day duties, please,” Jagdea announced. “Briefing at 06.30, but get fed and washed quickly. Snap calls can come in at any time. Marquall?”
“Yes, commander.”
“Go to the stores right now, and get a new tag. Before you leave stores, press the test switch and make sure it works. If it doesn’t, get another one. Do you understand?”
“I do, commander.”
“Funny, I thought you’d understood last night when I told you the first time.”
“I was slack, commander. It won’t happen again.”
“Carry on,” she said. He turned. “Wait!”
He sighed, and turned back. She was frowning. “Closer. Right here. Turn round.”
She examined the skin of his shoulders where the vest exposed it, then pulled up the hem and looked at his back.
“You have a dermal condition I should know about?” she asked.
“No, mamzel.”
“Then it’s scop bites. They say some people get them worse than others. The sweet-tasting ones. Are you sweet-tasting, Marquall?”
“Don’t know, mamzel.”
“The scops seem to think so. See the base medicae while you’re about it.”
“Yes, mamzel.”
Marquall laced up his boots properly and then trudged through the base. Now the risk of discovery had passed, the place felt more like a functioning air-base. Personnel hurried about on the boardwalks, and teams of fitters unwrapped hidden machines and resumed work on them. The smell of promethium almost overwhelmed the scent of the swamp.