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,” Agguila 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.
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 exhaust 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.
Others had come this way before them. There were more abandoned vehicles on or by the road, many stripped of equipment. They passed a number of farm stations and agro-complexes that had been deserted by their inhabitants, possibly weeks before. The places had been comprehensively looted of all stock. Store-barns and silos were empty, habs ransacked or burned out. Livestock pens and the huge tin rotundas of poultry hatcheries were broken down and empty.
In some fields, they sighted rows of fresh graves.
The road approached the river, following its course. More ruined farms stood along its banks, homesteads and land-parcel stations, then a whole village, empty and gutted.
At noon, they came up on a line of burned-out, exploded vehicle wrecks, jumbled along kilometres of road that had been badly holed and cratered. The action was at least three days old. Tanks with dozer blades, and the few remaining Atlas tractors, had to clear some of the wrecks aside to permit progress. It had been an air-strike; Viltry could see all the signs.
After that damage became more commonplace. The remains of other convoy elements littered further shot-up sections of highway. Unburied, blackened corpses lay in the roadside ditches. More bodies, swollen, floated face-down in the pools of a ruined roadside hydroponics system. All of the next three townships had been bombed to extinction by heavy raids rather than just looted and forsaken.
This was now an eerie, miserable landscape to drive through. Thousands of hectares of field-systems had been burned black by uncontrolled firebomb damage. Farms, villages, entire townships had been levelled. There were stretches of forest where nothing remained but blast-splintered trunks protruding from cindered earth. Craters, many filled with rainwater, punctured the landscape for kilometres. Smashed hydroponic systems leaked rivers of algae-rich soup down across the roadway from ruptured dykes. The column moved on, hissing water up into the air.
It was no longer mist that stained the sky, it was smoke residue from the days of raiding and firedust kicked up by their wheels and tracks. Down the wide, wounded valley, their scopes identified other communities shelled to death, wreathed with the grey vapour of firestorms that had blazed, unchecked, for days.
At 13.33, an alert was given. Ten kilometres north, bright flashes underlit the clouds, and they heard the crump of munitions. A few minutes later, a formation of enemy warplanes was sighted heading south at medium altitude. The machines, their payloads already dropped, ignored the straggling column, but there was no doubt they had been sighted. The contact would be called in.
The Imperial column had begun crossing a miraculously unscathed bridge over a Lidan tributary, just after 14.00, when a second alert came through.
It had started to rain, and the auspex refused to give a clean track. An air of confusion and panic rose in the convoy around them. LeGuin cleared his weapon batteries, and then got on the vox.
“Say again. Track reading. Confirm track reading for hostiles.”
Just frantic chatter.
“Come on!” LeGuin snarled into the vox. “This is
Line of Death!
Give me a track reading! Get it together!”
Viltry opened the top hatch and craned up at the overcast sky, smelling the cold, wet air, listening. The sound of agitated voices came from all around, throbbing engines, the noise of turret motors as weapons traversed, the timpani of rain pattering off the armour.