Just before 16.00, as they were preparing to launch, Operations reported that the second wave had broken short of Zophos. Fought to a near-standstill after four hours, the Archenemy formations had turned back.
If a third wave was intended, they’d see it within the next five hours.
“Third time lucky,” said Zemmic.
“Who for?” asked Kaminsky.
Over the Midwinters, 18.23
They came back early. As if hungry, somehow sensing that they had their enemy on the ropes. Or desperate. That’s what Jagdea told herself.
The third wave came out over the coast in the early and unnatural dusk, seemingly just as immense as before. How could they have shot down so many of the bastards and there be so little sign of a thinning in their ranks?
The remaining eight machines of Umbra Flight climbed with four other Thunderbolt squadrons to nine thousand, and circled in over the archipelago as the enemy formations approached. The other bases had put up their wings.
The line was drawn.
Combat began at 18.45. Another new tactic was immediately revealed. Frustrated by the Navy’s staunch resistance, the Archenemy had committed the front elements of its bomber waves low, to pattern bomb the islands in the hope of annihilating the hidden bases there. From its overall heading, this arm of the wave was intending to cross the Straits of Jabez and target Tamuda once the islands were done. The radiant ripples of furious detonations began to light up the southern part of the island chain.
The Imperial planes went in amongst the bombers, cutting them out of the air even as they dropped their warloads.
“I don’t see fighters,” Marquall called.
“There’ll be fighters,” Blansher said.
Darrow made his eighth kill of the day, then throttled up to join Viltry in an attack on a super-heavy. The tracer patterns were torrential and bright in the stale air.
Jagdea turned in tight. She couldn’t see Zemmic or Van Tull in the mayhem, but she could hear them over the link. Blansher and Kaminsky were attacking a trio of Tormentors. She was about to start a run onto a Hell Talon when she saw the escort bats coming in across them.
“Bats! Twenty-plus! Two o’clock!” Jagdea yelled.
They were Razors. Black and red, a few bright crimson. One pearl-white.
The Killer and his circus came on. Two of his wingmen attacked and destroyed a pair of Navy Thunderbolts from the 96th who didn’t react anything like fast enough.
“Umbra! Split! Split!” Jagdea ordered and opened her throttle, going for the pearl leader. His evasive roll left her wrong-footed, but she turned hard and tried to get on his tail. He refused to sit, vectoring to port and coming up underneath her. Desperately, she flick-rolled and dropped down around him to his right, but he turned off sharply to port.
For a moment she wondered if she had actually scared him into a break, but then saw in dismay that he’d simply been lining her up for his two crimson wingmen. Serial Zero-Two shuddered as laser bolts went through its wings. Jagdea slammed the suck over and tried to barrel under the Razors, but they were as agile as their master, and stuck tight to her tail.
“Throne of Earth!” Jagdea cursed, fighting to break out. Moving far too fast for such close quarters, she almost rammed a Hell Talon, and bled speed miserably as she was forced to duck under it. Another shot clipped her tailfin. Two more ripped through the sensor dusters and her auspex screen flickered and died. She vectored, came round stubbornly and started to climb between a pair of Tormentors that lashed at her with their weapon mounts.
Viltry saw her plight. He pulled away from the superheavy he had just crippled and lit his burners, spearing down through the bomber formation into the denser smoke.
“Jagdea! Come left!” he called. She turned, but the crimson bats would not let her go. Viltry fired on them and tucked in. He couldn’t get a lock. He wasn’t going to get them in time.
Blansher and Kaminsky left the bombers alone and stooped after Jagdea too. Kaminsky saw the pearl-white bat first. It seemed to come out of the vapour of fyceline smoke like a spectre, gun-pods flickering. Umbra Two wrenched violently as gaping wounds punched into its tail plane.
“Blansher!” Kaminsky yelled.
Blansher tried to viff, tried to shake it just the way he had taught Kaminsky. But his vector ports were damaged. The white bat fired again, a stream of illuminated shells, and a spray of flames sheathed Blansher’s entire tail. The shots had penetrated the tanks of the Thunderbolt’s rocket motor, and the hypergolic propellants had ignited. The huge thread of flame was greenish-white with intense heat. Blansher started to dive.
Ignoring the white killer, Kaminsky scream-dived after Umbra Two. Blansher’s plane was now on fire from nose to tail.
“Get out! Get out, Milan, eject!”
“…can’t! I… can’t… canopy’s jammed!”
“Blansher!”
The Thunderbolt no longer resembled a plane. It fell like a comet. A meteor. An attenuated ball of fire, almost too bright to look at. But diving with it, Kaminsky could not look away. He knew fire. He knew the terror of a burning plane all too well.
Blansher started screaming. The fire was inside the cockpit now. The voice on the vox no longer seemed human.
Kaminsky was strangely relieved when the inferno hit the sea.
Obarkon watched with curiosity as the Imperial’s wing-man made the strange choice to follow his burning leader down. How odd. As if there was anything he could do.
It rendered the wingman an extraordinarily easy target. Obarkon turned into a dive, feeling the grav armour clench around his body and the cardio-centrifuges throb. He blinked to settle the gunsight focus and put the orange pipper on the wingman’s tail.
Attention…
Target found.
Just a little more.
A warning sounded. Obarkon glanced up and instinctively raised his nose, losing the target immediately. Shots stripped past him.
“Someone’s eager to die,” he muttered.
Darrow came in hard and tight, firing as soon as he dared, but leaving it late enough to be in positive range. The white bat pulled out of his line and banked away.
Darrow turned and chased it. This wasn’t going to be like the last time. He wasn’t going to run, frantic, in an outclassed machine. He was a Thunderbolt pilot now. The bastard white bat that had slaughtered all of Hunt Flight—and Heckel too, in a way—was going to be the one doing the running.
A vector-aided roll and a burst of speed put Darrow closer and closer still, despite the enemy’s excellent out-rolls. Darrow got two brief locks, but lost them both. He waited for the third.
Interesting, Obarkon thought, his pulse not even drifting in its rhythm. This one has some merit. He flies by the claws. If this had been a quieter hour, he would have enjoyed sport with this child. But this was the day of days, and there was still great work to be done. This duel was over.
The white bat dropped down to an altitude of no more than fifty metres and proceeded to whip in and out of the inlets and bays at speeds that Darrow thought he’d never be able to follow. Every turn threatened to smash them into a sheer cliff or clip a rocky outcrop.
He stayed on the bat as long as he could and then was forced to climb by a jutting atoll that he knew he would not otherwise avoid. The white bat let him go over, then sliced up after him, firing. Darrow twisted out, but the bat locked him cold.
Then shots sprayed in from a second Thunderbolt. It was Marquall.
Viltry put all his power into a last turn and fired again. Now at last he disturbed the crimson bats enough to break them from Jagdea’s tail. One looped back to engage him. “Switch out!” Jagdea ordered.
Viltry obeyed. Ignoring the looping attacker, he kept on after the other one, lining up. Jagdea broke wide and turned up to face the threat to Viltry.
Viltry opened fire and the crimson bat empted and came apart.
A moment later, Jagdea caught the other one in a head-on attack and ripped it out of the sky.
Marquall’s flunked attack gave Darrow time to break. The white bat turned out to meet Umbra Eight.
“I’ve got him!” Marquall cried. “I’ve got a score to settle!”
So have I, thought Darrow. And I wouldn’t be so sure that you’ve got him either.
Marquall fired again, but the Razor rolled on its axis and slid under his fire cone. Marquall banked, exactly the right way, but the white bat had already viffed as it looped, and it fell on him. Its gunpods roared.
Darrow watched in horror as shots tore into the midsection of Marquall’s plane.
Marquall wrenched the stick. He saw an engine tube explode off, and felt the airframe shake as rounds went into the hull around him. Two shots buckled his air-mix canisters and punctured the radiator. Two more ripped through his ejector mount and packed chute, shredding the chute and bursting shrapnel from the seat frame. A chunk of metal chopped Marquall’s left calf and another whickered up from under the seat itself and punched clean through the meat of his left thigh.
He screamed in pain and his bird fell into a sharp dive, but he hauled back on the stick and came up again. There was a track of blood spots glued to the inside of his canopy.
Darrow banked. Wounded, Marquall was dead meat. Darrow hit the throttle and shot across the pearl-white bat, deliberately turning out, drawing his aim. The Razor followed him.
The wounded one wasn’t going anywhere. Obarkon knew he should take care of the one with the real merit first. Especially as the child had now made a very basic mistake and lined himself up, vulnerable for the Echelon chieftain’s guns.
The auto-sight reconfigured. The orange pipper drifted in.
Darrow went low through the atolls. He’d made himself a target for Marquall’s sake. Running for his life did not seem like the best way to fight the enemy.
But he remember what Eads had said.
Retreat is a hard thing to deal with, but you’ll be a better warrior, Enric, if you realise that sometimes that’s the only way to win.
“Come on! That’s right! Come on!” Darrow yelled. “You couldn’t catch me before, you won’t catch me now!”
Darrow raced between the islets and the jagging rocks, lifting spray in his wake, flying on pure nerve and instinct. He had no idea how he avoided some obstacles. There was no time to think. The pearl-white bat was right at his heels. It fired twice, three times, missing Umbra Nine and spraying chunks of rock from the island stacks.
By the claws indeed. Such skill. It reminded Obarkon of a chase he’d once enjoyed in the Makanites. Another young pup with promethium in his veins.
But the game had to end.
Attention…
Target found.
“Goodnight,” said Obarkon, as his hardwired thumbs dug at the trigger paddle.
Darrow heard the target lock shrilling.
“Umbra Eight, for Throne’s sake! How long have I got to keep him occupied?”
The pearl-white bat fired.
Two shots tore into Darrow’s tail fin.
Vander Marquall, travelling at over nine hundred kph, came up over an atoll’s flat top, head on. He went right across Darrow’s plane and blazed his quads on sustain at the white bat dead ahead.
The furious fire needed no angle of deflection. Obarkon’s machine flew straight into it, without any time to evade.
For a millisecond, the pearl-white Razor deformed. Its multi-punctured hull shredded. Stress fractures peeled away armour like dead skin. The blitzing cannon shell vaporised the pilot. Then the engine and weapons batteries detonated in a cataclysmic flash.
Marquall rode out of the sheet of fire and came clear on the other side. Fluttering hunks of pearl-white armour scattered wide and rained down across the lagoon.
“I think,” said Vander Marquall, “that makes me an ace.”
Over the Midwinters, 19.30
Darrow climbed back into the raging air brawl. “I thought we’d lost you, Nine,” Jagdea voxed.
“Copy Leader, I’m okay. Marquall’s been hit. I told him to turn for home.”
“Copy that.”
“Umbra Lead, he got the bat. He stung the white bat. Definite kill.”
Jagdea rolled Zero-Two through the streaming tracer. That news was the only thing worth smiling about she’d heard all day.
The sky was full of aircraft and fire, like some great scene of damnation on a templum frieze. With Viltry turning high to her left, she stooped into the pandemonium and started to avenge Blansher.
Lucerna AB, 21.00
It was now almost dark, and strangely quiet. The third wave had faltered and broken half an hour before, and some gut instinct told Bree Jagdea that there would be no fourth wave. Not that day.
The fitters had to almost carry her out of her battered Thunderbolt. Zemmic and Van Tull had just landed. Van Tull, sneezing blood, had lost a third of one wing. Viltry and Kaminsky sat with their backs to the hangar wall, drained of all strength.
She crouched down with them. She wanted to speak, but there was nothing to say and no effort left to say it with anyway.
Darrow was last back. He had taken fifteen of the enemy. A triple ace.
He climbed out of his aircraft, dropped his helmet from his trembling fingers, and made the sign of the blessed aquila. The sacred double eagle.
“Commander?” he called out. “Commander Jagdea?”
She rose. “What’s the matter, Darrow?”
“Where’s Marquall?” he asked.
Over the Straits, 21.01
Still flying level and true, Thunderbolt serial Nine-Nine
Double Eagle
crossed the Straits of Jabez at six thousand metres, cruising, with the fuel dwindling in its tanks. The ocean lay before it.
Vander Marquall sat in his seat, his head hung forward slightly.
The vox crackled. “Umbra Eight? Umbra Eight? This is Lucerna Operations? Do you copy?”
Marquall did not answer. The damaged air-mix system had filled his cockpit with carbon dioxide over half an hour earlier.
The plane flew on, true to its nature at the very last, out across the ocean and into the folds of the night.
No fourth wave came. Not that day or any day. Though the air war on Enothis continued for three further weeks, the losses suffered by the Archenemy air force on the 270th were so severe that a willingness to try such a venture again seemed to leave them.