“You know he was only trying to protect you, don’t you?” Jagdea said.
“Yes, but I think there was something more,” said Darrow. “These last few weeks, he’s lost everything. His command, many of his men and his friends, then the base itself, and all his possessions with it. I think my company was the last thing he had to hold onto.”
“This is war,” said Jagdea. “War calls for sacrifices.”
Lucerna AB, 06.30
“This way, gentlemen,” Jagdea called, walking out into the middle of the hangar three deckway. The four aviators followed her, wearing their flight armour, carrying their helmets. Viltry, Kaminsky, Scalter and Darrow. The latter looked especially nervous. “Relax,” Scalter whispered.
Jagdea stopped beside the ranks of parked planes. “We have no time for proper induction. Apparently, there’s a war on or something.”
The crew laughed.
“This is an orientation flight, a shake-down. It’s the best we can do to get you used to the feel of the real thing before we start hitting combat. When I say you, I mean Mr Darrow, Mr Scalter and Mr Kaminsky. Mr Viltry has already been on one sortie. But I figure the more flying time he can get in a Bolt, the better. Zemmic and I will be flying chaperone. Follow my lead. Any questions?”
“Commander?” said Scalter. “What with the pink feathers you all wear?”
“Lucky feathers!” Cordiale called out. The rest of the Umbra pilots were waiting by the birds. He came forward, stuffed a hand in the pocket of his flight pants and produced several more which he handed out to the newbies. They put them on their lapels dubiously.
“Right,” said Jagdea. “Lucky feathers. That’s got the important stuff out of the way. Let’s mount up.”
“Are we scraping the barrel or what?” Marquall whispered to Ranfre. “Two Commonwealth no-hopers, one of them a kid, that poisonous cripple, and a Marauder pilot who’s been through the ringer. I mean, he’s got that look in his eyes.”
“Viltry did pretty damn well yesterday,” Ranfre said.
“Even so,” said Marquall. Viltry’s score from the previous day still irked him.
Primers began to crackle and fire the engines on the six planes. Scalter settled into his cockpit and ran his hands around the edges of it with a grin on his face. Kaminsky allowed the fitter to fasten his harness, then used his good hand to fix his prosthetic around the stick.
“Okay, sir?” said Racklae.
“The usual nerves.”
Racklae leaned into the cockpit, strapped the speaker phone for the voice system around Kaminsky’s neck, then plugged its trailing leads into the instrument panel on his left.
“Comfortable?”
Kaminsky settled his mask and nodded. Racklae closed the canopy.
Darrow’s heart was bearing fast. He kept licking his lips. Nothing was how he had imagined it. The weight of the kit on his body, the sound of the Lightning engines, the smell of the cockpit as he lowered himself in.
One of the fitters patted his own ears and Darrow nodded, switching on the vox and testing it.
“This is Umbra Leader, let me know you’re ready.”
“Lead, this is Ten, ready.”
“Thank you, Zemmic. I assumed you were.”
“Leader, this is Umbra Four. I’m all set,” voxed Viltry.
“Umbra Five, Leader,” called Kaminsky. “Ready to lift.”
“Umbra Seven, check, Leader,” Scalter said.
“This is Umbra Nine, Umbra Lead,” Darrow said. “Systems clear. I am ready.”
The deck officers waved them go, and ducked down.
“Flight, go to lift,” Jagdea voxed.
The Thunderbolts’ engine pitch increased sharply as they rose into the air.
“Launch to forward flight,” Jagdea instructed.
The flight rushed up and away out of the hangar mouth and into the sky, lifting their landing gear.
Jagdea turned them right, across the atolls, and they spent a while practising formation flying and basic manoeuvres.
Then she started to push them a little harder. Fast ascents, rolls and power dives.
“Keep looking around you, flight,” Jagdea voxed. “Get in the habit of checking both auspex and visual on a regular basis. And get used to what you can’t see from your canopy as much as what you can. Learn how to compensate, how to pitch your plane to get a better view.”
After ninety minutes, she chose a small, uninhabited atoll near the edge of the island chain.
“Line up, flight,” she said. “I want each one of you to test his weapons. To feel how they affect the airframe. Zemmic and Viltry can sit this one out.”
Scalter went in first: a long, low dive, and raked the rock, both las and then quad.
“Good aim,” said Jagdea.
“Throne, it really shakes the plane,” Scalter observed, banking away.
“You next, Umbra Nine.”
“Copy that, Lead,” Darrow responded. He switched on his gunsight and armed his weapons with quick, assured flicks. Then he pushed the stick and swung down into a dive. Water and rocky outcrops flashed by under him. He set the sight reticule on the rock, closed to range, then fired his las. The shots streaked ahead of him and he saw the fluff of impacts. He toggled to cannons and chattered off a burst, then brought his bird up.
“Excellent, Nine. Little high with las, but the cannon was good. You might want to calibrate your gunsight down a few points.”
“Copy that, Leader.”
“Umbra Five? You’re up.”
Kaminsky acknowledged and began his run on the target atoll. With his left hand, he threw the arming switch and turned the weapon system on, then returned his grip to the throttle. The sight was in.
“Fire!” he said.
The lascannons blasted.
“Select! Fire! Fire!”
Now the quads blasted, twitching the machine’s track. Kaminsky rolled off the target and started to climb out, disarming his gun system. “Racklae’s little toy seems to work,” he said.
“Very nice,” Jagdea voxed.
She let all three of them do it again a few times, then pulled the whole flight up to five thousand.
“We’ll swing wide on three-three-two and then turn for home,” she voxed.
They’d been going for ten minutes, and Jagdea was about to call the turn, when Zemmic called.
“Auspex contact,” he reported.
“I’m watching it,” Jagdea said.
In another ten seconds, they could make out the flash and smoke of a dogfight ten or fifteen kilometres to the north-west, out over the sea.
“Operations, Operations,” Jagdea called. “This is Umbra training. What are you showing in our vicinity?”
“Umbra Leader, mass intercept underway on a bomber stream. Suspected escort cover. Advise you push it home and clear the area.”
“Acknowledged, Operations,” said Jagdea. “Umbra Flight, what you can see has nothing to do with us today. We’re turning for home. Come about, bearing—”
“Break! Break!” Viltry was shouting.
Jagdea and Zemmic broke at once, Viltry and Kaminsky going the other way. Scalter and Darrow were taken by surprise, but began to turn out the moment they saw the formation scatter.
Jagdea looped up in time to see three Razors run clean through the parted formation. Escort cover no doubt, taking a pop at them.
She engaged. “Zemmic, stick with me. Guns live. The rest of you, pick up Lucerna beacon and follow it home
now
!”
Jagdea and Zemmic burned after the bats, but they were already breaking. She scanned her auspex frantically, and saw one of the Razors descending through the light cloud. She stooped after it.
It dropped to under a thousand metres, then turned up again sharply. Jagdea saw passing shots slip by her wing and realised she’d picked up another of them.
“On him!” Zemmic voxed.
Umbra Ten rolled in on the second bat’s tail and fired three bursts of quad. The Razor caught fire and went into a screaming climb that ended three thousand metres above them in an expanding fireball.
Jagdea was chasing the other bat when she heard Scalter on the vox.
“He just went right over us! Break! Break!” The third bat must have found the trainees.
The four Thunderbolts had split, and now Darrow couldn’t see the hostile at all. The only aircraft in sight was Viltry’s, three hundred metres down to his right.
Darrow’s skin crawled. Eads was right. He wasn’t ready and now, as soon as he’d got into the air, he was going to be killed.
He saw a flash and looked left. Scalter’s bird was climbing and trying to evade. The Razor was on his tail, firing.
“Break! Break!” he heard Viltry shouting.
Kaminsky’s Thunderbolt swept in out of the clouds, guns crackling. His shots went wide, but they were enough to check the bat and allow Scalter to break and dive out. The bat went over Kaminsky, then managed to viff round. Within seconds, Kaminsky had got the bat on his six.
Two shots crashed into Kaminsky’s wing.
“Dammit!” he cursed, imagining the disappointment on Blansher’s face.
Instinctively, feeling it now, he eased the vector thrust, and to his delight, the bat overshot him and started to turn.
Darrow saw it. He’d already turned his gunsight and weapons on.
It was trying to extend, its sport denied by the four pilots. Darrow opened the throttle and gave chase, following its attempts to evade. He let the sights roll through it…
Lock.
He fired.
The bat blew up. Just like that. A vivid backdraft of flame and flying scrap.
Jagdea saw an aerial explosion underlight the clouds ahead and screamed in rage. She let the bat she was chasing pull out and flee, and raced towards the flash.
“Flight? Flight? What was that?” she voxed.
“Hello, Leader,” she heard Viltry respond. “That was Darrow making his first kill.”
Lucerna AB, 10.20
They’d all made a big fuss, which had made Darrow blush. All of them, that is, except the young pilot called Marquall, who just looked sick or something.
Darrow stood by his Thunderbolt in the hangar for a long while, just staring at it.
He could do this. Starting tomorrow, he was going to be flying and killing for Enothis and the Emperor.
He felt certain that after a day or two, he’d begin to get a real feel for it.
Natrab Echelon Aerie, Theda, 19.10
The Imperial city was burning.
From the deck of the giant carrier which now occupied a headland above the sea, a site that had once been an enemy air-base, Flight Warrior Khrel Kas Obarkon gazed upon what the forces of the Anarch had wrought.
The sky had turned black, and the flames from the burning habs were stark and red. The sea itself glowed amber with their reflection.
Overhead, the echelons of war machines flew past, gleaming in the firelight. He listened to the lusty purr of their engines and smiled. As much as his woven face would allow him to, anyway.
His litter carriage awaited. The slaves abased themselves as he stepped into it, then earned him down into the deck space of the giant aerie.
In their hundreds, the other senior echelon leaders and flight warriors had gathered. The bronze horns were sounding and the kettle drums beating. Obarkon drew back the silk drapes of his litter and greeted the nearest of his fellows. Sacolther, his armour engraved like alabaster. Coruz Shang, clad in chrome, his fingers sheathed in golden claws. Nazarike Komesh, echelon ace, impassive behind his green visor.
The drums and horns fell silent, and there was only the expectant murmur of the company. In the centre of the great chamber, the giant hololith projector rippled into life, projecting a translucent blue image ten metres into the air. The flight warriors howled in adoration, their augmetic voices shaking the hangar’s rune-scribed walls.
The image was of a face. Obarkon thought the face quite beautiful, though it also terrified him. He knew it was appearing simultaneously on every other mass carrier and command base in the conquered southlands. Hundreds of thousands of warriors, echelon chieftains, Blood Pact officer-lords and death-priests were all seeing it, and worshipping it.
But as usual, Obarkon felt it was looking directly and only at him.
The face of Anakwaner Sek, Magister Warlord, great and awesome Anarch, sworn lieutenant of the mighty Urlock Gaur himself, began to speak.
“Tomorrow,” it boomed. “The day of days. Who will find blood in the air?”
“We will!” they howled as one.
“Prepare! And let the enemy fall in flames!”
Lucerna AB, 05.01
“Jagdea? Jagdea?”
She woke, heavy-headed and slow, and for one fleeting moment, forgot where she was. Then she remembered and it was like a lead weight in her stomach.
“Jagdea?” Blansher was standing over her. The ready room was half-lit. Jagdea had been slumbering on the couch, wearing most of her kit. Aggie Del Ruth was asleep in the armchair.
“Give me a second, Mil,” Jagdea said, sitting up and dropping her feet to the floor.
“I don’t think I can,” he said.
She followed him into the briefing room. Viltry stood there, arms folded. The big, glass-screened auspex, which relayed tracks from the main systems in Operations, lit the room with its pulsing green light.
There was nothing on the screen, except for a half dozen returns that the system had identified as Imperial patrols.
“It’s been quiet for three hours,” said Viltry. “Totally quiet.”
“You’ve been watching it for three hours?” Jagdea yawned.
“I couldn’t sleep,” said Viltry.
“I think it’s a woman,” Blansher smiled.
Viltry laughed, but for some reason Jagdea thought Blansher might have touched a nerve.
“You got me up to see nothing?” she said.
“Since when has it been this quiet?” Viltry asked. “They’ve been coming thick and fast since the moment we deployed on this world. Before that even. Ask Kaminsky.”
“So?” she shrugged. “They wanted a night off. All that murder and destruction can take it out of you.”
“Bree…” Blansher said, a touch of disapproval in his tone.
“I apologise. Extreme fatigue makes me flippant. You think something’s coming?”