“The first wave,” Jagdea said. “A mass onslaught like this is all or nothing. They’ll be coming again as soon as they’ve rearmed and refuelled.”
Viltry nodded. “Of course. I have a feeling they’re going to keep this up until they’ve crushed us. The Archenemy is many things. Subtle is not on the list.”
“Very true,” said Jagdea. “We go up as soon as we can. Hunt stragglers, and steal some altitude before the second mass comes in.”
“I’ll see if Racklae can scare up some rockets,” Viltry said.
“You’ll be lucky,” Jagdea laughed.
“But with rockets, we could seek out a mass-carrier and have a go. I don’t care how many bats they’ve got, they can’t refit and refuel without a carrier.”
“Yes,” said Jagdea. She looked up at the log board that the fitters were keeping. Times of launch, times home, damage, work done. Ranfre’s log line was ominously blank.
“Ranfre?” Viltry asked, guessing what she was thinking.
She nodded. “Hasn’t been seen since about six-thirty. Even flying to conserve fuel, there’s no way he’s still in the air.”
“Maybe he put down at another base?” said Viltry. “Or… ejected… or…”
She appreciated Viltry was trying. She picked up a stylus and wrote “Missing” next to Ranfre’s name.
“It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the last few days,” Viltry said quietly. “You know… death, I mean.”
“You and everyone else,” said Jagdea.
He shook his head. “No, in particular. As far as the Imperium is concerned, Oskar Viltry is dead. I’m just a… a scrap of paper, a pending number to be assigned.”
“So?”
“Will you promise me something, Bree?”
“Yes,” she said immediately.
“You haven’t heard what it is yet. I’m here, at your side, proud to be a member of Umbra. And that’s how it’ll be until the end.”
“I know,” she said. Few men were as loyal and committed as Oskar Viltry.
“But when this is done. When we win this fight. I don’t mean today, I mean however long it takes… will you forget you ever saw me?”
“What are you talking about?” she laughed. Then she saw in his eyes he was entirely serious. Viltry took the paper registration docket the Munitorum had given him out of his pocket and smoothed it flat.
“Forget you ever knew that Oskar Viltry came back from the desert and flew with you. List this pending number as missing in action. Let me disappear here, on Enothis, when the fighting’s done.”
She blinked. “Is that what you want, Viltry?”
“Yes. Not just me. There’s someone…” he paused. “There will be lives to rebuild here, after the war.”
She thought about it for a moment, then picked up the paper.
“I promise,” she said.
Out in the hangar, as the fitters worked feverishly, Darrow sat in silence, his back against the wall. His hands were no longer shaking. They were completely steady. What was shaking now was inside him, some deep core part that had been rocked and rattled and squeezed and slammed and wrenched. In one morning. No clear image remained to him of the day’s fighting. Just a blur. A smell of fuel and fyceline. A sound of thunder.
Nearby, he heard some of the ground crew cheering as they added a third stripe to Marquall’s plane. Marquall looked triumphant. Even in the short time he’d known him, Darrow had been able to tell that Marquall was desperate for glory.
Darrow thought for a moment, and realised, to his shame, that he couldn’t precisely remember how many kills he’d got himself. He tried to picture them all. The fluke the day before, then the bombers…
He realised that his tally was now five. He was an ace.
Darrow decided not to tell Marquall.
Buzzers sounded. Blansher’s element came in at last, shrieking down through the north entry. Darrow leapt up. He saw immediately how damaged the snout of Scalter’s plane was.
Scalter himself seemed all right, but dazed. Jagdea ran out to inspect the damage.
“Las systems completely shot,” said the lead fitter. “It will take hours to mount in a new system. We can replace the plating quick enough, but if you want him up again, he’ll have to make do with quads.”
“Then he’ll have to make do,” Jagdea said. She glanced round as Blansher, Van Tull and Zemmic plodded across from their machines.
She froze. In her concern for Scalter and his bird she’d missed the obvious.
“Where’s Cordiale?” she asked.
Milan Blansher shook his head.
Over the Sea of Ezra, 13.16
The second wave rolled in an hour after noon. Though the day was bright, the pollution of the morning’s combat had now stained the sky with a strange, yellowish opacity. Volcanic columns of smoke rose from Theda, Ezraville and Limbus, visible for hundreds of kilometres.
Umbra was already up. So were all the other wings from Lucerna, Viper Atoll and the other Midwinter bases. The techmages had blessed their craft and sent them on their way.
Umbra climbed high, to about fifteen thousand, and formed two packs. Jagdea, with Viltry, Darrow, Del Rum and Marquall, and Blansher leading Scalter, Kaminsky, Zemmic and Van Tull. Once again, the ominous track on the auspex showed the ride of Archenemy airpower rolling north. Jagdea had heard a flight controller estimate that at the peak of the morning’s activity, the Imperial planes had been outnumbered eleven to one. She wondered how the kill rates had compared.
Reserves had been added. Commonwealth units were mobilised now after the morning’s surprise, and had their machines—mostly pulse-jets and reciprocating-engine birds—standing ready in fields along the northern coast, a last ditch defence. Those old craft wouldn’t stand a chance against the Archenemy’s vector planes, Jagdea knew. The point was, if the enemy wave reached the north coast in any numbers, nothing mattered any more anyway.
That morning, despite terrible losses, the Navy wings had denied the bulk of the enemy wave. The north coast had been hit, but not with the full fury the onslaught had threatened.
Now it was round two.
Tactics had changed. Now spearhead groups of fighters were storming ahead of the bomber strings to disrupt the Navy interceptors and prevent them from flushing the bombers.
Jagdea saw condensation nails crawling out. The bats were clocking in at maximum thrust, lashing forward to meet the Imperial line.
Air flashes lit up to east and west. The first contacts had been made. Operations traffic suddenly became frenetic.
Umbra’s scopes showed a fighter group, nearly thirty strong, coming in at twelve thousand.
“They’re moving bloody fast,” muttered Zemmic.
“Let’s slow them down,” said Jagdea.
In the paired packs, Umbra stooped, and began to fire as soon as the racing bats were in range. They were a squadron of Locusts, some maroon, some yellow, some gold, and they broke upwards into Umbra’s attack.
Viltry killed a bat head on, but Jagdea picked up two that refused to let her go. Darrow and Del Ruth almost converged, and managed to smack las shots into the same hostile, chopping it into fragments. Marquall avoided getting his tail shot off in the first pass, then climbed hard again to help Jagdea.
The two maroon Locusts had locked down on her despite her violent slips and turns. Any tighter and she risked a high-speed stall.
“Can’t shake them!” Jagdea snarled, gripped tight against the lousy G.
“Umbra Leader! Speed brakes and drop out!” Marquall yelled as he came howling in.
Vision closing into a grey tunnel, Jagdea deployed the speed brakes into the slipstream and slammed violently back out under the still-turning Locusts. Immediately, she started to recover with vector thrust. Marquall came in over her guns firing and the Locusts swung out of his way with some haste. One darted up out of sight, but the other went into a dive and Marquall committed after it.
The pilots in Blansher’s half of the flight all made kills within twenty seconds, though Van Tull was himself hit and took wing damage.
“You okay, Three?” Blansher called.
“Four-A,” came the expected response.
Blansher could hear Kaminsky distinctly over the link. “Fire. Fire. Fire. Switch. Fire.”
As he came up, mushing off speed, Blansher looked up and saw Kaminsky’s plane flick-roll, quads firing, and make his second kill of the sortie.
The remaining bats retreated. Marquall came back up from his chase empty-handed. Umbra reformed, and immediately sighted the front edge of the bomber wave, low and south of them. They scoped more fighter escorts. They began their attack run anyway.
Over the Sea of Ezra, 14.02
The batteries of the mass formation opened up as the fighters stooped in amongst them. In the flat, yellow light, the bombers looked like a mezzotint image. Four Thunderbolt wings were now attacking this gigantic string, and two more were duelling with its Razor escorts.
Viltry’s anti-bomber expertise earned him two stings straight off and Jagdea followed his example, damaging a heavy raider that Del Ruth polished off in her wake. Darrow found a Tormentor and blew away part of its engine assembly. It hung in the air for a second, then pitched away as if it had fainted.
Del Ruth did a split-S then swooped onto a super-heavy that was dark red, like carrion. Chains fluttered out behind the huge machine and Del Ruth realised they were strung with human skulls. She banked in, not even waiting for the sights to lock. It would have been difficult to miss. She put eight pulses of lasfire into the swollen flank and, as she pulled away, saw the aluminoid skin shred and burst as fuel-air explosions blew it apart from within.
Even as the giant craft died and burned, its turrets kept firing. Del Ruth felt her bird shudder as something hit the underside of her nose with huge force, tearing the stick out of her hands for a moment and knocking the plane’s attitude through twenty degrees.
She recovered control.
“Six, are you okay?”
“Yes, Leader,” Del Ruth responded. She checked her instruments and saw two warning lights lit, indicating damage to the starboard autoloaders. “Hit, but not critical.”
Kaminsky and Zemmic had both taken out bombers on the first pass, but Blansher, Scalter and Van Tull were intercepted by the Razor escort before they could do any harm. Van Tull had to fly an almost complete figure of eight before he shook a purple Razor, then almost immediately got the drop on another, chequered black and white, that had lined up on Scalter. As the chequered hostile vaporised, Scalter peeled away towards a heavy bomber, firing on it from its seven.
The purple Razor that Van Tull had shaken reappeared, swooping steeply and opening fire on Scalter’s machine. Bolt rounds sliced down into the starboard engine, the midsection, and the tail, shredding part of the rudder. The impacts destroyed Scalter’s auspex, ruptured his coolant system and crazed the side screens of his canopy white.
“Umbra Seven! Umbra Seven!” Van Tull yelled.
Dazed, Scalter heard the voice and looked around. The air of his cockpit was full of blue smoke. He stared at the shattered instruments. The few panels still functioning were a mass of warning lights.
Overheat, leak, pressure loss, power failure…
“Scalter, can you hear me?”
Scalter looked down and let out a sob. At least one of the rounds had gone clean through his lower torso. He couldn’t believe the bloody mess was anything to do with him. He couldn’t feel his legs. He couldn’t feel anything much at all.
“Scalter!”
“Four-A…” he whispered. “Taken a little damage.”
“Seven, if you’re not flyable, eject for Throne’s sake!”
With effort, Scalter touched the stick. It was dead, slack, all control gone. His ruined machine was just flying straight. He looked down again. There was no way he could eject. No point, either.
He looked up. The heavy bomber he’d been targeting was still ahead, cruising on.
Scalter put his hand on the throttle. “For Enothis and the Emperor,” he murmured and pushed the throttle open.
Umbra Seven accelerated in a straight, unswerving line and hit the heavy bomber in the port ribs. A huge halo of flames engulfed them both.
“Seven’s gone! Scalter’s gone!” Marquall could hear Van Tull yelling. Negative G was preventing him from replying. He was cranking round in a murderous loop with a mauve Razor on his back. He felt hits skinning off his armour. He banked hard—a bone-shaking shudder—and managed to force the Razor to fly past under him. Now he was behind it. It would break at any second, Marquall knew. But which way?
Which way would you go?
Jagdea had always told them. Marquall went right, and the Razor did just that in the same instant. Target lock.
Marquall was screaming as he fired. He knew it was a kill before
Double Eagle
had even started firing. The mauve Hell Razor started to spin, then spiralled away like a leaf.
Marquall hoped someone had seen that. He dearly hoped that someone—
“Umbra Six! Umbra Six! Status?” Jagdea started shouting over the vox.
There was no obvious hostile on her, but Del Ruth’s Thunderbolt looked like it was taking hits to the nose. Explosive crackles rocked her airframe and plating blew out.
“I don’t know—” she began. It was the hit she’d taken in the autoloaders just minutes before. Overheated damage or a late detonating round wedged into the mechanism had explosively cooked off the drums of ammunition. The rippling blasts were her own shells exploding in the caissons. In horror, Jagdea saw several detonate up through the main hull, blowing out both sets of engine pipes, and another flurry wrecked her radiator.
Mortally wounded, the Thunderbolt began to dive.
“Aggie! Pull out! Pull out!” Jagdea yelled.
“I can’t! Negative! Dead stick!” Del Ruth screamed back.
“Eject, Aggie! For Throne’s sake, eject!”
The machine plunged away. Jagdea saw a flash of glitter and a shape in the air. Far below her, a chute opened, a tiny dot against the tungsten sea.
Lucerna AB, 15.20
As they refuelled and reloaded, no one spoke much. Fatigue and nerves had almost wrung them out, but the losses made it much worse. Their hearts ached as much as their joints. For most of the pilots, circulation and balance were seriously impaired. Just walking around the hangar was difficult.