She chambered the flare cartridge and closed the gun, then ducked back outside, aimed it at Kaminsky’s truck and—
Hesitated.
Jagdea took several long paces backwards and aimed again. She fired.
The flare barked out, white hot, struck the side of the transport and ricocheted off up into the air, where it spattered out streamers of green fire.
“Shit!” she cried, and ran back into the shed to find another shell.
The clattering noise was getting much louder.
She found another flare and tucked a spare into her belt for good measure. Loading the distress gun, she ran outside again.
The glow of the first flare was beginning to subside. She raised the gun again.
To her right, at the mouth of the yard, a stalk tank strode into view.
It was painted bright red. Its striding metal limbs screwed it around and it galloped in down the access way, hunting for the source of the distress flare.
Clatter clatter clatter
went its feet.
Behind it, Blood Pact troopers ran in squads, weapons raised.
Jagdea fired the distress gun. The flare struck the record boxes and in an instant, the entire vehicle was consumed in broiling fire.
The heat-blast knocked her over.
Approaching, the stalk tank started firing. Its heavy laser batteries recoiled and spat as they fired off volleys at the sheds.
Jagdea got up and ran towards the broken shutter. Inside, she kept running, colliding with a munitions cart and bruising her thigh. She yelped and pulled her head down as the ferocious shots of the stalk tank punched through the flakboard wall behind her, splintering holes, letting in daylight. The air was full of swirling fibres and ash.
She darted through the hatch, onto the catwalk and down the stairs.
“We have to go! Now!” she was shouting.
“We’re not fully fuelled!” Kaminsky yelled back from the open cockpit.
“Tough!” she replied. She ran to the bowser, deactivated the pump, and then struggled to disconnect the line from the cock.
“Just start her up!” she screamed.
“I’ve not connected the primer—” Kaminsky yelled back.
“No time! Just do it!”
Kaminsky threw the starter switches. The port engine growled, turned over and then burst into raging life, kicking out blue smoke from its exhausts.
The starboard engine cycled once and then froze.
Jagdea clambered into the cockpit.
“Come on!” she urged. She could heard sustained lasfire above them.
“Trying!” Kaminsky yelled over the single, roaring engine.
He switched off the starboard power plant, fluffed the throttle, and opened the choke.
“We don’t have much time,” Jagdea said. She closed her door, and snapped up.
Kaminsky turned the starboard engine over again. Dry fire. Again. Another cough. Again.
This time it took. The prop howled into life. They both felt the airframe shaking.
“Okay, we’re good,” Jagdea said.
In the pilot’s seat, Kaminsky seemed to freeze.
“You all right?” asked Jagdea.
“It’s… been a while. Didn’t think I’d ever—”
“Kaminsky, will you shut up? We don’t have time for the whole emotional thing now.”
“Right. Of course.”
Jagdea threw some of the switches. “Launcher at pressure. Current on. Armed.”
“Props at thrust,” he said.
“So… gun it,” she replied with a smile.
The hangar was dogged with dense smoke from the engines.
“Jagdea?”
“What?”
“Help me. Help me fit my hand on the stick.”
“Of course. Sorry.” She leaned over, closing his prosthetic hand around the control stick. His other hand was busy regulating the twin throttles.
“Now I need you to hit the release,” he said.
“Okay. Ready?”
“No. So just do it,” said August Kaminsky.
Jagdea hit the switch. The steam catapult engaged and flicked their Cyclone out of the hangar and into the air with bone-jolting force. For a second, it began to drop, but Kaminsky nursed it, and opened the throttles, lifting the delta wing-up over the coast in a fast ascent.
Jagdea felt the steady pun of the props and smiled.
“How’s that feel, mister?” she asked.
He was grinning. “Like coming home. You torch my truck?”
“As promised.”
They rose, banked around and turned east. “Smooth,” said Jagdea.
“Old habits,” said Kaminsky. He was grinning.
They were rising to about a thousand metres when the Cyclone’s antiquated detector systems emitted a warning beep.
“Someone’s got us!” Jagdea cried.
“Where? I can’t see him?”
“I don’t know! What does the auspex say?”
“This bird isn’t equipped with an auspex.”
“Oh frigging great!” Jagdea began craning her head around, turning as far as she could to scan out of the Cyclone’s bubble nose.
“Locust! Eleven o’clock!” she yelled.
She got a brief glimpse of a bright red bat stooping in, cannons lit, then Kaminsky turned the Cyclone over in a suicidal bank.
“Kaminsky! Kaminsky!”
“Will you shut up, woman? Will you ever shut up?” The sea rushed towards them. Kaminsky suddenly leaned on the throttles and rolled the Cyclone. “Guns,” he stammered.
“Uhh!” Negative G was slamming at her. “What?”
“Guns, dammit, Jagdea! I can’t press the gun stud! I don’t have a thumb! You’ll have to do it.”
She wrestled over, all her blood in her feet, fighting against the centrifugal force of the turning Cyclone. She clamped her fist over his dead, prosthetic hand.
“Tell me when!”
“Wait!”
He feathered the Cyclone up on a corkscrew and then wafered it down violently as the Locust slipped under them.
“How the hell did you do that?” she yelled. “You just out-danced a vector-thrust machine!”
“Shut the hell up and shoot,” Kaminsky replied. “Fire! Just fire! Fire!”
He rolled the Cyclone hard and Jagdea heard the sudden, sweet sound of target lock. She clamped her hands around the grip. Around his plastek hand.
Flame-flash blitzed from the Cyclone’s gun ports. The Locust banked out, rising hard.
Then it ignited and blew apart.
“Holy hell!” Jagdea whooped.
“Got him,” hissed Kaminsky.
“Yes you did,” said Jagdea, as Kaminsky banked the Cyclone east. “Yes, you damn well did.”
Lucerna AB, 12.30
Marquall was dozing in his flightsuit when the hooters started their strident blaring throughout the base’s deep, rock-cut hallways and buried decks. He jumped up out of his seat, grabbed his helmet, and ran out of the dispersal room, down the narrow companionway onto the floor of the hangar bay. Zemmic and Ranfre were close behind him, and Van Tull followed them, though more slowly. Van Tull’s airline had taken a hit during the exit from Theda, causing an intermix fault that had allowed carbon dioxide to leak, undetected, into his supply. By the time he’d reached Lucerna, he’d been suffering from borderline hypoxia and had only just made it down.
Marquall paused and let Zemmic and Ranfre go by. “You okay?” he asked Van Tull.
“Four-A,” said the older pilot. He was over the worst effects, or so he said. But he was now suffering with bleeding gums and sinuses, and kept dabbing at his mouth and nose with a folded handkerchief, like a consumptive. “Sure?”
“I’ll be fine once I’m up,” Van Tull said flatly.
They hurried across the bare stone floor onto the rigid deck plating. The entire air-base had been hollowed out of the island’s rock. Hangar three, assigned to Umbra, was a gigantic rectangular cave, its floors and walls smoothed by industrial mason-cutters. Both ends of the cave, north and south, were open to the sky.
The Thunderbolts of Umbra Flight waited, lined up in three ranks facing the south. Fitter teams were disengaging the last of the cables and fuelling lines, and whirring elevator platforms carried the empty munitions trolleys down to lower levels.
Cordiale and Del Ruth were already with their planes. Blansher ran out across the gratings of the deck, reading a wafer of printout paper.
“Air cover, evac protection!” he shouted. “Immediate launch, track six-nine-two, no higher than two thousand.”
There was a chorus of acknowledgements and the pilots dropped into their cockpits. The chief fitter of each plane crew made sure his pilot was secure, closed the canopy then signalled to the primer technician to start as he jumped off the wing. Each primer cart fired and the Thunderbolt engines began to turn over. Within moments, the engine noise in the enclosed space was so loud that it drowned out the screeching hooters.
Deck crews with goggles and ear protectors took up position in front of the formation, directing with lumin paddles. Signal to go.
In the front rank were Blansher and Ranfre. Behind them, Marquall, Cordiale and Del Ruth. The third rank was Van Tull and Zemmic. The flight rose up in a swaying hover almost simultaneously. The deck chief swung both his lumin paddles together and pointed, then dropped down onto one knee, head down in a braced position as the front rank rushed out over him, swiftly followed by the second and the third.
They came out into the open, exiting the hangar through a rectangular slot in the sheer cliff face. The sea was two hundred metres below them. The seven machines immediately started to turn and come onto their track.
The sky was greenish-blue with two-tenths of long, wispy cloud. The sea was a richer, more intense green. Lucerna Island dropped away behind them, a plateau of craggy pink granite jutting out of the water. Marquall could see the AA defences nested in the cliffs and on the headlands. Two more flights of Thunderbolts were coming up after Umbra from other hangar mouths. Far below, he could see the masses of shipping and barges that had been arriving at the island’s jetties for the last twelve hours.
They climbed higher, steady. Marquall adjusted his nitrous mix carefully. He watched the formation around him, and kept his eyes on the auspex returns of the other Thunderbolt wings that were running below and behind them. From this altitude, he could see out across the range of the Midwinter Islands, an archipelago of pink atolls that filled nearly seven hundred thousand square kilometres of ocean at the eastern end of the Zophonian Sea. It was to the larger of these islands, places like Lucerna which had airbases and ports, that the majority of the planes, transports and extraction barges from Theda had fled.
The islet-speckled sea below him was full of shipping, powering east towards safe ports in the island chain. The auspex was also alive with air contacts. A few Imperial machines were still heading in from the mainland retreat, but the rest of the activity was Navy wings, coming back out of their new island bases to guard sea convoys or hunt for Archenemy intruders. Marquall could see the patterns of a large dogfight going on, twelve kilometres south of them, and another, more condensed, nineteen kilometres to the south-west. To the east, there was a progressive intercept on a bomber formation, and another large air-brawl, down at low level amongst the islands.
Visually, the southern horizon line was a smudged belt of black, at odds with the clarity of the clean sky and the sparkling sea. That was the smoke line, the vapour of death and destruction that crowned the Thedan coast for hundreds of kilometres. The filthy mark of the Archenemy, branded across his newly-taken territory.
Blansher called them to focus. They were closing on the designated target. A convoy of thirty-seven mass-barges and VTRPs out of St Chryze was moving up one of the archipelago’s clear-water channels, under attack from enemy raiders.
“Brief said sixty-plus bats,” Blansher voxed.
“I have visual on the convoy,” reported Ranfre.
“Copy that.”
Down through the clouds, the mighty vessels were now in plain view. Some were staining the air with trails of exhaust smoke from their turbines, but others were pouring out cones of black and white smoke.
“Auspex contacts,” Del Ruth reported. “Two groups of hostiles. One high at six thousand, circling, the other low, crossing the convoy.”
Marquall checked his own auspex screen and got a similar report. Multiple contacts were milling around the surface vessels like flies around a wound. He could even see them now, lime flitting dots against the sea, catching the sunlight.
“Umbra Leader to other flights. The contacts showing high could be a second wave of attack planes waiting their turn to come in, or they could be top cover. Suggest Umbra and Sabre go in after the raiders; Cobalt stays high to watch for fighters.”
The split made sense. Sabre Flight, part of the 333rd Navy wing, was short four machines, and so under-strength like Umbra. Cobalt, also part of the 333rd, was twelve strong.
“Umbra, this is Cobalt Lead. Acknowledged.”
“Umbra Leader, Sabre will comply.”
“Stoop and sting,” Blansher ordered.
The two flights committed down, rolling off from the front of the formation to the rear in a formal cascade. Marquall tried to keep his breathing even as the power dive began. He switched on the targeters and lit his gunsight. Guns on, las selected.
The glittering water was coming up fast.
He saw the great black hulks of the convoy vessels, trailing wakes of white water, and the tall, thin spurts of foam around them where detonations were hitting the sea. And there were the bats, streaking in on horizontal approaches against the sides of the ships, attacking with rockets and cannon.
They were Hell Talons, painted in various red, black and coral-pink shades.
The Thunderbolts tore into the mob of them. For a second, there were aircraft and gunfire tracks going in all directions around Marquall. He pulled the stick back slightly and brought Nine-Nine up level. A Talon swept by, heading across onto one of the barges, and Marquall banked around after it.
It started to fire, churning up a track of impacts across the water towards the barge’s hull, and Marquall opened fire too. He missed, but the Talon broke off to starboard, trying to get out of his cone of fire.