“Am I? Shit.”
There was another long pause. Kautas helped himself to another swig.
“Okay then,” Marquall said. “You go. Why are
you
so screwed up?”
Kautas scratched his head, then sighed. At length, he said, “Because I wanted to be there. Right there. When she came back. And I can’t, because I’m stuck here.”
“Who?” Marquall asked.
“The Beati, Vander Marquall. The Beati.”
Over the desert, 09.32
They came in low and hard, engines really cooking. Jagdea was pleased to see that they’d shaved nearly a minute off the projected intercept time.
Raptor Flight had found a retreat convoy in the open desert, and had been watching over it when an attack had thundered in. Stalk tanks and heavier tread armour, fully powered and fuelled, coming up hard on the limping Imperial group.
The Raptors had already loosed their rocket complement, securing some decent kills. Burning armour wreckage littered the dunes.
“Good to see you, Umbra,” voxed Raptor One. “We could do with a little more Hellstrike over here.”
“Roger that leader. Coming around,” Jagdea replied.
The Raptors, which had been doing their damnedest with cannon runs, pulled off high, leaving the air open for Umbra. The Raptors were stark, black machines. They had refused a respray on arrival at Gocel. It was a pride thing, apparently.
Below, the enemy tank squadrons were pluming across the desert, lurching over dunes, firing shot after shot from their main weapons at the scurrying Imperials.
Jagdea saw a Chimera go up, and a Hydra platform shred into flames. Blast vapour sheened the air: white smoke trails, puffs of chalky flare from barrel discharges, rising scuds of black flame-smoke from wrecks.
Sporadic tracer fire rose from the enemy AA carriers.
“Let’s get lucky,” Jagdea said.
Van Tull went in first, whipping through the mosaic of smoke and vapour. Tracer shot laddered over at him, falling short. He loosed his missile load and pulled out hard at the same moment.
A blitz of flame lit up the desert floor. Two enemy tanks atomised, their warloads kicking off.
Del Ruth was right on his tail, snaking in. She flew edgy, nicking around the flares of flak. Her rockets seared out, and crippled a tank, shredding off its tracks. Instead of pulling out, she stayed low and opened up with her quad-cannons, raking a troop carrier to bits. Then she pulled out wide, whooping over the vox.
Jagdea barrel-rolled onto the approach, setting her wing-load live. She felt like heaving, but suppressed her stomach.
A tank… too close. Another, lined up. She let it slide through her scope and fired. On twists of white smoke, her rockets lit off.
She was already rising off the targets when the tank detonated.
She came up long. Right into the bats.
Lake Gocel FSB, 09.33
Kautas sniffed thoughtfully. “Do you know what’s happening on Herodor right now?” he asked.
“Herodor? Where’s that?”
“Down in the Khan Group, about nine weeks from here.”
Marquall shrugged. “No idea. More fighting?”
Kautas sighed. “It’s a trait I’ve often observed in the—excuse me saying this—common fighting man. He seems to have precious little idea of the big picture. Of the great scheme of things. He seems content to leave that to tacticians and nobility, and the priesthood.”
“The common fighting man tends to have a lot of filings to occupy his immediate attention,” said Marquall.
Kautas smiled. “Fair point.”
“Isn’t the true calling of the Imperial warrior to serve and fight? Not to question?” asked Marquall.
“Yes. But a little curiosity never went astray. Why are you fighting?”
“To wrest Enothis back from the clutches of the Archenemy.”
“Of course. And beyond that?”
“To… to prosecute the great Crusade and liberate the Sabbat Worlds?”
“So your greater purpose is…?”
“To win.”
Kautas took a drink from his flask. This time, he offered it to Marquall. The Phantine shook his head.
“Why are the Sabbat Worlds important?” the ayatani asked.
“Well, strategically—”
“No, Marquall. What is their significance?”
“Thousands of years ago, Saint Sabbat purged these worlds of Chaos in the name of the God-Emperor. We are reclaiming what she once established for us.”
“Exactly. These worlds are Saint Sabbat’s. They are blessed with her touch. My first duty, as an ayatani, is to the God-Emperor, but I am specifically a priest of Sabbat, the Beati. We ayatani come in two kinds. Those that dwell in the great templums and shrineholds, and those, like me, who are ‘imhava’—roving priests, sworn to follow her path through the stars and spread her teachings.”
“Okay,” said Marquall.
“This Crusade’s been going on for almost twenty years. Warmaster Macaroth, if my information is correct, has pressed ahead, taking a huge gamble in directing an attack into the heart of the Archenemy’s core systems. But his flanks are exposed, and the enemy has driven his forces into those weaknesses, hoping to behead the thrusting Crusade force, and leave Macaroth alone and vulnerable. We are those flanks, Marquall: Enothis, the Khan Group. It is the fighting here that will determine the overall success or failure of the Crusade. If we fail here, it doesn’t matter if Macaroth achieves victory at the front line. All will be for naught. The enemy knows this. But now, according to rumours, the enemy has an even greater incentive. On Herodor, it is said, the Beati has been reborn.”
Marquall blinked. “Is that… possible?”
Kautas pursed his lips. “It tests even the faith of an imhava ayatani, but it seems to be the truth. Right now, Herodor, like Enothis, is under desperate assault by the hosts of Chaos. If either world falls, then the flank is ripped open and the Crusade is doomed. If Herodor falls, and the Beati dies with it, then the Imperium suffers an even greater loss.”
“And you wish you were there?” asked Marquall.
“Oh, indeed. How I wish. In his heart, every ayatani longs to be on Herodor, at Sabbat’s side. But it is my luck, my lot in life, to be stuck here, pinned fast by duty and the turmoil of another combat, unable to make the final pilgrimage to her person.”
A breeze picked up, and played across the lake. The frond-trees along the shore swayed and hissed.
“That makes my own problems seem meagre,” said Marquall. “Maybe you’re better at this priestly advice-giving thing than I thought.”
Kautas shook his head. “I’m good for two things, Vander Marquall. Drinking and being bitter. I waste every miserable day waiting for the end.”
“What end?”
“The end of this war. The end of this world. My own end. Whatever comes first to free me so that I can be with the Beati.”
Marquall got to his feet. “Don’t think that way. It smells too much of pessimism. We can still win, tell yourself that. Here, and on Herodor. The Crusade can still triumph. The Beati can still live. Even one man’s sour thoughts can lend the enemy strength.”
“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.