In the dark, from many kilometres distant, the city itself was invisible because of black-out regulations, but the shape of it was defined against the sky by the ruddy glow of firestorms throbbing in its heart.
“Holy Throne…” he’d breathed.
“Told you it was bad,” the driver had said.
Viltry had made the journey along the coast overnight, begging lifts from a series of transport drivers. There was activity all along the seaboard, part of the frenzy of evacuation. Munitorum transit fleets were pouring out of Theda and the surrounding towns, laden with materiel and personnel for the evacuation ports, and then streaming back to depot empty for another run. The vast night sky was a maelstrom of tracer, flak bursts and burner trails. At Madenta, trying to find a ride to hitch amongst the chaos of traffic in the town centre, Viltry had been about three hundred metres from a bomb strike that had destroyed a templum, nine habs and a machine shop. Everywhere he went, he could hear the drone of the Archenemy’s engines in the sky.
The cargo-10 drove into Theda’s outskirts at first light, stopping at several Munitorum or Commissariat checkpoints. The streets were deserted, apart from other military traffic. The slowly rising light, pale and thin, revealed a dusty, smoky world. They passed row after row of bombed-places, fire control teams fought with blazing tenements and hab stacks gripped by swirling infernos. Some streets were closed. Medicae shuttles, bells clattering, rushed by.
Just after five thirty, they reached the Old Town area. Like everywhere else, it had taken a pasting. Viltry had a clawing, sick feeling in his chest.
“I’m due at the assembly yards in Danzerplatz,” the driver said. “Any good to you?”
“No. Uh, just let me out here.”
The driver pulled the truck up at a street corner.
“Thanks,” Viltry said, climbing down.
“No problem. Good luck rejoining your unit. Shoot some of them bastards down for me.”
“I’ll try.”
The driver nodded, and then pulled the truck away.
Viltry began to walk. His tattered flight jacket still had the emergency compass sewn into the cuff, so he followed the needle and went north. It took him about thirty minutes to skirt up through the ruins of the Old Town to the seafront.
The air was cooler here, fresher, despite the cloying smoke that wrapped the whole city. He heard the strange yet familiar sound of rushing breakers, the clatter of pebbles. He smelled the sea. How ironic that a smell, so recently new, so alien to his background, should now be so evocative.
He wandered down the broad seafront road for a while, trying to get his bearings. He was sure he should be able to see the piers. Finally, almost by accident, he realised he was standing by the familiar entrance arch. There was the chalkboard, propped up against the ironwork gate. “Palace Refreshments. Table service, sea views.”
Beyond the arch, there was nothing, except a tangled mess of black iron and charred wood sprawled out into the surging tide. The piers were gone, destroyed, all three of them.
I think it’d take a lot to bring the palace down,
Beqa Mayer had said.
Oskar Viltry felt his legs go numb and weak. He leaned against the cast iron railing and closed his weary eyes.
Theda Old Town, 06.30
There’d been a plan. A trip down to the Hydra on Voldney, all of Umbra, and the fitters too, to toast Asche on her way. Blansher had sent a message, ordering cases of joiliq and the private hire of the main bar.
But then the snap call had come in at 20.00, and they’d gone aloft into the night, into the mayhem of darkness and fire. By the time
they’d
returned, debriefed, showered and been stood down, Larice Asche had already packed her bags and departed to meet her report time. She’d left a note.
Good flying, Umbra. See you up there, somewhere. Larice.
There was an empty feeling in the billet. A dark mood, somehow worse than if they’d lost a comrade in action. “We’re going anyway,” Blansher said.
They’d reached the Hydra at four in the morning, just as the staff were hoping to close, and tried their level best to rouse a party mood. But it was like a wake. Blansher said a few words about Asche, and they were good words too, but they’d have sounded better coming from Jagdea. The crew of Umbra sat around, morose. The fitters, always up for a free drink, got drunk and loud, but kept themselves to themselves. Van Tull and Cordiale left after an hour. Zemmic, who had been discarded by Larice Asche as quickly as Marquall, got brutally intoxicated and then violently ill. Ranfre took pity on him, found a driver with a truck, and took him back to the base.
Which left Marquall, Del Ruth and Blansher.
“Not exactly what I’d planned,” Blansher said. The three of them sat around a table, toying with shot glasses. On the other side of the bar, Racklae and the fitters were playing drinking games, roaring out with laughter and good humour. The red-eyed bar staff sat behind the counter, longing for them all to go home.
“We could join them,” Del Ruth suggested, tipping her head in the direction of the fitters.
“And spoil their fun?” Blansher said. “Pilots need fitters and fitters need pilots, and there is a bond close to love between them. But socially? No. Different worlds. Different classes. We go over there, try to join in, we’ll be as welcome as a turd in a foot bath.”
Agguila Del Ruth had been halfway through a sip, and snorted with laughter, choking so hard Marquall had to slap her on the back.
It was the best laugh they’d had all night.
“Throne save me,” Blansher sighed. “This is so not what I’d planned.”
“Story of my life,” muttered Marquall, pouring out another measure of joiliq for each of them.
“What’s this now?” said Del Ruth. “Self-directed misery too?”
Marquall shrugged. “Do you know, I was top of my class at Hessenville.”
“Weren’t we all?” said Del Ruth, raising her eyebrows at Blansher.
“No, not me,” said Blansher sadly, reaching for his drink. “I was… bottom. Pilot-cadet voted most likely to wash out. I failed every exercise. Not just failed, mind. Failed dismally. One day, my instructor took me to one side, led me out to an obs deck overlooking the Scald. He pointed to it. He said, “Milan, this is your birth-world. Plenty of sky, not very much land. If you can’t fly, boy, what the frig else do you think you’re going to do? Swim for the Emperor?”
Del Ruth snorted her drink again and started coughing.
“Damn you!” she gagged, wiping her mouth on a napkin. “That’s twice.”
Blansher smiled.
“I was top of my class,” Marquall said. “Accelerated program, right at the end of the liberation war. I mean, I was good. I longed to fly combat. Kill bats. But now I’m in it, in the combat zone… I screw up. I can’t hit a thing. My birds break down on me. I get people hurt.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Blansher said.
“There’s another way?”
“Well, for a start there’s the matter of two fine kills. Besides that, you’ve saved my life in the air, and I can’t speak for others. You survived an eject from a slain machine… not many do that. And there’s that heroic use of rocket drive to break out of a kill-shot. That last thing alone, Vander, that’s one for the archives. I don’t know of anyone who’s even tried that, let alone come back to talk about it. Seekan should have come to you, not Larice.”
Marquall managed a smile. “Thanks,” he said.
“I mean it.”
“You’re a very good exec, sir. Just what Jagdea expects. You say the right things and boost morale.”
“Maybe,” said Blansher. “Personally, I think there’s an up side to everything. You just have to see it. Say to yourself, is the glass half full or half empty?”
“They’re shot glasses,” said Del Ruth flatly, staring at her own. “They’re either full or empty. Anything else, and someone isn’t trying.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Blansher, and reached for the bottle.
The three of them left the Hydra at twenty past six in the morning, dim light filling the sky. The fitters were still carousing. Blansher led them to the nearest Munitorum depot, booked out three transports and drivers from the pool, and then returned to the Hydra to collect the reluctant ground crew.
They drove out along the highway. It seemed otherwise deserted. The strip of road was littered with trash and discarded possessions. Some broken down vehicles sat on the hard shoulder. Marquall was riding in the back of one of the trucks with Racklae and a group of the ground crew.
“You hear that?” he said suddenly.
Racklae turned and cocked his head, trying to hear above the noise of the truck engine. “Fan drives. Lots of them.”
“Another raid?” asked one of the men. “Doesn’t sound like bombers,” said Racklae. “Heavier…”
“Oh shit… look!” Marquall cried, pointing to the southern sky.
Massive, multi-vectored drop-ships were sliding in across skies above the eastern suburbs. Thousands of dots were showering out of them, like windblown pollen.
Storm troopers, on jump packs.
From the depths of the war-torn city behind them, sirens began to rise into a howl. The mass invasion had begun.
Theda MAB South, 06.39
The flashes of the detonations were coming so fast the early daylight appeared to be strobing. There was a gritty, sizzling noise from the continuous bombardment. How could the sky hold up so many aircraft?
Darrow ran towards the Operations centre. Bombs were falling on the inner city, and several Tormentors had swung over the field wide, loads gone, turning out over the sea. The airfield’s defence batteries were hurling everything they had at the sky. Tracers spiked up and danced, flak turned the air into a broiling mass of flame-lit smoke.
Fighters were already lifting off the field, either to fight or flee. Darrow heard mounting engine-roar from several Oneros and other mass lifters. Figures mobbed across the landscape.
“Extraction?” Darrow yelled at a Navy officer.
“Everything, now!” the man yelled back, still running. “We’re pulling out now!”
Darrow looked to his left in time to see the Apostles lift off. They’d been prepped for a first light call, and now they launched, climbing north-east in the turmoil of the air. Their cream paintjobs made them look like blades of ice in the fire-lit sky.
A sonic boom split the air like the muzzle bang of an artillery piece. A Hell Talon streaked long and low over the field, and left a crop of furious blasts in its wake. Two Marauders were blown up on their hardstands. Darrow was one of the many who threw themselves flat as the Talon thundered over.
The wind was full of smoke and scraps of airborne ash. The furious metallic hammering of a nearby Hydra almost drowned out the background roar of explosions and jet engines.
Darrow got up and started running again. Another aircraft went over, and he saw running personnel not twenty metres away from him thrown into the air by cannon fire. Then there was a tremendous, vibrating roar and a prickling wash of heat as a laden Onero took off and crawled past overhead.
There was blood in Darrow’s left eye. He’d caught a scratch in the left eyebrow, shrapnel probably, and blood was running down into his vision. He kept running. Another big transport took off, kicking up dust and grit.
Darrow saw bodies on the ground. Two Navy airmen and three ground crew. The force of the strafing fire that had claimed them had punctured the ground in a long, broken gouge, snipped most of their garments clean off, and left them lying in impossible, dislocated poses.
Darrow glanced away. It was a hard thing to look at.
People still ran past in all directions. Some were wounded and being helped by others. Two pilots staggered past carrying a fitter upright between them. The fitter was making an odd, sobbing noise. His face was—
Again, Darrow turned his eyes aside. Over on the hard-stands, the latest enemy strafing run hit a bowser, and a huge sheet of yellow flame splashed up into the air.
On the northern-most pads, squadrons of Valkyrie carriers were warming up, their stem hatches open. Personnel streamed towards them from the base buildings.
More planes launched, mainly Thunderbolts. One of them was hit by a seeker-rocket as it tried to lift, caught fire violently, and belly flopped down into a loading bay, killing at least twenty ground crew. Darrow winced at the heat of the blasts.
Then he saw Eads. Feeling with his cane, Eads was approaching the entrance of the Operations building. Navy crew ran past him. A low-flying Locust chewed a line of shots up into the side of Operations ripping out brick dust and pieces of tile and shutter. Protecting his face, Darrow ran towards Eads. “Sir!”
“Is that you, Darrow?”
“Yes, sir. Come on. I’ll get you onto an evacuation flight.”
“I should go to Operations. This attack needs proper—”
“There’s no point, sir!” Darrow yelled above the concussive noise of the bombing. “It’s all gone! Everything’s gone! The enemy is here, right at the gates! We’re pulling out now!”
A clutch of submunitions detonated forty metres away, killing a dozen people. The pressure of the blast-wave knocked Eads and Darrow flat. Scrambling up, Darrow fought to get Eads on his feet.
“Someone help me!” he cried at the figures running past. Most just ignored them. One went by, then stopped and ran back.
It was Scalter.
He helped Darrow lift Eads and they started moving. Scalter yelled something about the Blood Pact over the din.
“What?” said Darrow.
“They’re saying Blood Pact are dropping into the suburbs. Ground forces, certainly.”
“God-Emperor protect us all,” Eads said.
“Pardon me, sir,” said Scalter. “But right now it feels like he’s forgotten all about us.”
Western District Theda, 06.40
The sirens woke Jagdea. Her room in the hab clinic was cold and damp. The window was rattling.
She lay still for a moment, listening. Apart from the blare of the sirens outside, there was a murmur of disquiet in the old building. Her window rattled again. No, it was more than a rattle. The glass in the old wooden frame was vibrating.
She got out of bed, and went to look.