Darrow refused to accept he was out-classed, refused to admit he was about to die. He twisted the stick, kicked the rudder right over and went into the deepest dive he dared execute. Any deeper, and the Wolfcub’s wings would shear off its airframe.
The world rushed up, filling his vision. He heard the pulsejet screaming. He saw the glory of the mountains ascending to meet him. His mountains. His world. The world he had joined up to save.
Behind him, the pearl-white enemy machine tucked in effortlessly and followed him down.
Theda MAB North, 07.02
Sometimes—times like this perfect dawn, for instance—it amused August Kaminsky to play a private game. The game was called “pretend there isn’t a war”.
It was relatively easy in some respects. It was quiet, and the night chill was giving way to a still cool as the sunrise came up over the city. From where he sat, he could see the wide bay, hazy in the morning mist, and the sea beyond it, blue-grey, glittering. The city of Theda itself—a mix of pale rockcrete towers, low-rise hab-stacks and pylon steeples—was peaceful and quiet, huddled on the wide headland in a quaint, antiquated manner, as it had done for twenty-nine centuries. Sea birds wheeled overhead, which spoiled it slightly, because he envied them their wings and their freedom, but still, at these times, it was easy to play the game.
Theda was not Kaminsky’s birth-town (he’d been delivered, a silent, uncomplaining infant, forty-two years earlier and three thousand kilometres north in the Great Hive of Enothopolis on the far side of the Zophonian Sea), but he had, unilaterally, adopted it. It was smaller than the Great Hive, prettier, a littoral town that understood the mechanisms of the sea and, with its universitariat and its many scholams, was famous as a seat of learning. It was older than the Great Hive too. The Old Town quarter had been standing for three hundred years when the first technocrats began sinking their adamantine pilings into the Ursbond Peninsula to raise Enothopolis. Theda, dear old Theda, was one of the first cities of Enothis.
Kaminsky had adopted Theda partly because of its distinguished past, mostly because he’d been stationed there for six years. He’d come to know it well: its eating houses, its coastal pavilions and piers, its libraries and museums. It was the place he’d always longed to return to every time he snapped the canopy shut and waved the fitters away. And it was the place he always had come back to.
Even the last time.
“You there! Driver!”
The voice broke through his thoughts. He sat up in the worn leather seat of the cargo transport and looked out. Senior Pincheon, the Munitorum despatcher, was coming over the hard pan towards him, three aides wobbling along in his wake like novice wingmen. Pincheon’s long robes fluttered out behind him and his boots were raising dust from the dry earth. His voice was pitched high, like the seabirds’ calls.
Kaminsky didn’t like Pincheon much. His game was ruined now. The senior’s call had made him drop his eyeline to take in the ground and the airfield. And no one could pretend there wasn’t a war when they saw that.
Kaminsky opened his cab door and climbed down to meet the senior. He’d been up since five waiting for despatch, sipping caffeine from a flask and munching on a coil of whisp-bread.
“Senior,” he said, saluting. He didn’t have to. The unctuous man had no military rank, but old habits, like Kaminsky himself, died hard. Pincheon had a data-slate in his hands. He looked up and down Kaminsky, and the grubby transport behind him.
“Driver Kaminsky, A? Vehicle 167?”
“As you well know, senior,” said Kaminsky.
Pincheon made a check in one of the boxes on his slate. “Fuelled and roadworthy?”
Kaminsky nodded. “As of 05.00. I was issued coupons for sixty litres of two-grade, and I filled up at the depot before I came on duty.”
Pincheon checked another box. “Do you have the chit?”
Kaminsky produced the paper slip from his coat pocket, smoothed it flat, and handed it to the senior.
Pincheon studied it. “Sixty point zero-zero-three litres, driver?”
Kaminsky shrugged. “The nozzle guns aren’t really accurate, senior. I stopped it when it wound over sixty, but the last few drops—”
“You should take care to be more accurate,” Pincheon said flatly. One of his aides nodded.
“Have you ever fuelled a vehicle from the depot tanks, senior?” Kaminsky said lightly.
“Of course not!”
“Well, if you had, you might know how tricky it is to get the wind exact.”
“Don’t you blame me for your inaccuracies, driver!” Pincheon sputtered. “Essential resources such as fuel must be managed and rationed to the millilitre! That is the task of the Holy Munitorum! There’s a war on, don’t you realise?”
“I had heard…”
Senior Pincheon ignored him and looked at the nodding aide. “What’s zero-zero-three of a litre two-grade at base cost?”
The aide made a quick calculation on his pocket slate. “Rounding down, ten and a half credits, senior.”
“Round up. And deduct it from the next wage slip of driver Kaminsky, A.”
“So recorded, senior.”
Pincheon turned back to Kaminsky. “Transportation run. Personnel. Pick up within thirty minutes from the Hotel Imperial in—”
“I know where it is.”
“Good. Convey them to the dispersal point at MAB South. Do you understand? Fine. Then sign here.”
As he signed his name, his stiffened fingers struggling with the stylus, Kaminsky asked: “Are they fliers? Navy fliers at last?”
Pincheon huffed. “Not for me to say. There’s a war on.”
“You think I don’t know that, senior?” Kaminsky asked.
As he took back the slate and the stylus, Pincheon looked up at Kaminsky’s face and made eye contact for the first time. What he saw made him shudder.
“Carry on, driver,” he said, and hurried away.
Kaminsky climbed up into his battered transport and turned the engine over. Blue smoke coughed and spurted from the vertical exhausts. Lifting the brake, he rolled the ten-wheeler down the gentle slope of the hardpan and drove off along the field circuit trackway, following the chain link fence.
The game was certainly ruined now. No pretending any more. Here were fuel bowsers, smeared with treacly black promethium waste, armoured hangars, repair sheds reverberating with the noise of power tools, lines of primer coils on their trolleys, electric munitions trains parked and empty on verges of swishing sap-grass.
And airstrips. Cracked rockcrete looking like psoriatic skin in the early light, with eight-engine bombers sulking on their hardstands, props like sabre-blades raised in threat, hook-winged Shrike dive-bombers under tarps, fitters and armourers working around them.
Beyond the strips, facing the sea, lay the long launch ramps of the Wolfcubs, stretched out like exposed spinal chords, glinting and skeletal in the rising sun.
Five Wolfcubs sat on taxi-racks at the head of the ramps. Bottle green with grey undersides, they were tiny, one-man planes with stubby wings and tails, their rocket engines raised above their backs, their nose guns muzzled. They looked squat, leaden.
But Kaminsky knew how they felt to fly. He knew how they rose off those catapult ramps, throttles right back, pulse-engines farting and popping as the airflow fired them to launch velocity. The belly-dropping jink as they cleared the ramp end and lifted up into the blue, raw and throbbing. The cold smell of the cockpit. The reek of rubber and steel, promethium, nitrous, fyceline. The feel of being aloft, alive…
God-Emperor, how he missed it.
At the gate, beside the staked revets and the heavy blast-fences, he pulled over to let a munitions convoy roll in. He glanced up into the driving mirror and, for a moment, saw himself.
More than anything, more than even the airfield full of prepping warplanes, the sight of himself reminded August Kaminsky that his cherished game was only pretend.
There was, inescapably, a war on.
Theda Old Town, 07.09
He couldn’t sleep. It was anticipation mostly, the prospect of a new war to survive, but his body clock was still running on shipboard time, and to him it was late afternoon.
Just before six by the chronograph on his night stand, he gave up on his bed and got up. It was cold and not yet light. In the adjacent rooms, the other men of
G for Greta
were sleeping. He could hear snoring, particularly the volcanic rumble of Bombardier Judd. The Munitorum had issued them billets in a once-handsome pension on Kazergat Canal, and they’d piled in late the previous afternoon, leaving their packs in a heap in the hallway, eagerly laying claim to rooms. The younger men had broken open liquor and got down to the business of getting drunk so they could better sleep off voyage-lag. He’d had a glass or two, but the cheap escape held little attraction.
He and the other flight officers had swung the best rooms. He’d had to order a disappointed Orsone out to make way for him. “Find somewhere else,” he’d told the young tail-gunner. But the room wasn’t much of a trophy. The carpet had long gone and the plaster was crumbling. Pitch-washed sheets were nailed over the windows in place of curtains. Damp patches blotched the ceiling like sores. There was a smell of fatigue and faded grandeur. That’s what years of warfare did to a place. They certainly did the same to a man, after all.
The old woman who ran the pension had told him that there would be no hot water until after eight, and he hadn’t come that many parsecs to start a tour by standing under a piss-cold shower. He’d got dressed in the half-light—boots, breeches, fleece-vest—and started to pull on his flight coat. But his fingers had then encountered the insignia sewn into the thick quilts of the garment, the captain’s bars, the squadron badge, the name-strip that read “Viltry, Oskar”. He had put it aside and opted instead for a more anonymous tan leather coat.
The landing was dark. On the floor above, the crewmen of
Hello Hellstorm
were slumbering, with the crews of
Throne of Terror
and
Widowmaker
on the floor above that. The retinues of
K for Killshot
and
Get Them All Back
were billeted on the ground floor. The other six crews of XXI Wing “Halo Flight”, Imperial (Phantine) Air Force were tucked up in another pension down the street.
Viltry activated a glow-globe. The light was dim, but enough to light his way down the creaking staircase. In the hall, there were ancient books stacked on the mantel of the ornate but flaking fireplace, but those that he touched in the hope of finding an hour or two’s distraction fell into dust.
He let himself out onto the street. It was chilly and quiet, except for the gurgle of the canal. A van rumbled by on the far side of the canal, its headlights cowled as per blackout procedures. He walked a few paces, noticing the stumps, regularly spaced, where iron lamp stands had been removed from the boulevard for the war effort. He tried to imagine the place in peacetime. Elegant, glass-hooded lamps, purring electric cruisers on the grand canal, prosperous Imperial citizens going about their business, stopping to greet and talk, dining at terrace taverns now long boarded-up. There would have been students too. The briefing documents said that Theda was a scholam town.
In truth, he realised, he knew precious little about Enothis. Precious little apart from three things: it was an old, proud Imperial world; it was strategically vital to this zone of the Sabbat Worlds; and he, and thousands of other aviators like him, had been drafted here from off-world at short notice to save it from extinction.
He noticed passers-by suddenly—other pedestrians out in the early light, dressed in dark clothes, all hurrying in the same direction. He heard the chime of a chapel bell ringing out seven of the clock, calling them to worship. Viltry followed them, crossing a bridge over the canal, hanging back.
By the time he reached the Ministorum chapel on the far bank side, the dawn service had already begun. He stood for a moment outside, listening to the plainsong chants. Above him, in the cold, grey light, the bas-relief facade showed the figure of the God-Emperor gazing down on all mankind.
Viltry felt ashamed. He bowed his head. When, eight years earlier, he had sworn to give his life as a warrior in the service of the God-Emperor, he hadn’t realised how damn hard it would be. He’d always wanted to be an aviator, of course. Phantine’s unusual topography bred that instinct into all its sons and daughters. But the cost had been great. Two years before, during the final onslaught to liberate his home world from the toxic clutches of the Archenemy, fighting alongside the Imperial Crusade forces of Warmaster Macaroth, he had almost died twice. Once as wind waste over the Scald, then as a prisoner of the vile warlord Sagittar Slaith at Ouranberg.
In the two years since then, Viltry had been unable to shrug off the idea that he should be dead already. He was living on borrowed time. His tutor at the scholam had drummed into him the concept of Fate’s wheel. He’d said that it spun at the Emperor’s right hand. It spun for balance, for symmetry. What was given would be taken, what was loaned would be paid back. A life saved was only a life spared.
His had been saved twice over. There was a reckoning to be had. And here he was, on another world, charged with the duty of fighting to save it. The reckoning would be here, he was sure of it. Fate’s wheel would turn. He had been spared twice so he could live long enough to see his home world saved. Now he was fighting to save another man’s home world. This, surely, would be where the accounts got squared.
The crew of
G for Greta
had seen this fatality in his every action, he was sure of that. They knew they were flying on a doomed bird. Doomed by him, cursed by him. He’d lost one crew over the Scald, and he should have gone with them. Now Fate’s wheel would bring another crew down with him in its efforts to even the tally.
He’d asked for a transfer, been refused, asked for a non-operational posting, had that turned over as well. “You’re a bloody fine flight officer, Viltry,” Ornoff had told him. “Get rid of this fatalistic nonsense. We need every man-bastard with airtime and combat experience we can get. Enothis will be tough as nails. Our ground forces are in hard retreat from Sek’s legions. It’ll come down to a bloody air war, mark my words. Request denied. Your Navy transport leaves orbit tomorrow at 06.00.”