“Don’t take too long,” LeGuin told him.
LeGuin walked back to his own steed, wiping his brow with a hand that came away black with perspiration and grit. As he walked, he looked up into the relentless sky. Where would the next attack come from? Up there? Or, as the vox-reports from back down the column suggested, were the enemy land forces now beginning to nip at their heels too?
The
Line of Death
sat waiting for its commander. As he climbed up, he patted its flank, even though the sun-roasted metal scorched his hand. The Line was an Exterminator-type assault tank, its chassis the same basic pattern as the heavier Conqueror. Its turret-mounted twin autocannons could produce an astonishingly savage field of rapid firepower. The tank was painted dust-red, though that wash was scuffed down to the chrome base metal in many places. Its name was painted on the turret’s mantlet, and its regiment—8th Pardus Armoured—was embossed above the sponsons beside an Imperial double eagle crest.
LeGuin clambered over the drums of spare munitions webbed to the rear cowling and hopped up into the turret. Matredes, his gunner, was waiting for him in the top hatchway.
“We going?”
“Yeah.”
Matredes shouted down to Emdeen, the driver, and the VI2 engine revved. They lurched onwards, treads clattering, and rejoined the file.
The
Line
had not been LeGuin’s for long and, though he tried to bond with the steed, they were not tight. For most of his career, LeGuin had been a Destroyer man, commander of the tank killer
Grey Venger.
Thirty-four kills they’d shared, until
Venger
had fallen to enemy fire on the shrine world Hagia three years before. LeGuin might have happily burned with his steed, but his life had been saved by the selfless action of an infantry scout called Mkoll, a man LeGuin respected enough not to be angry with.
On his return to regimental headquarters, they’d assigned LeGuin this can. He’d wanted another Destroyer, naturally, for that’s where his skills and training lay, but there were just none available. On the rare occasions one of that ancient marque came up for transfer or reassignment, it was usually a reconditioned hulk with lousy bearings, a rebored engine and some useless firework in place of the precious, specialist L/D cannon.
So, disguising his disappointment, LeGuin had become an assault tanker, riding his new steed in with Humel’s doomed Enothian campaign.
The
Line
spurred forward. Under the present circumstances, the memory of his disappointment seemed ridiculously insignificant and made LeGuin smile. So, he hadn’t been assigned the steed he wanted. Shame. If only that was the worst thing he had to deal with now.
All that mattered at this moment was what was going to get them first: the desert or the enemy.
Even with the internal compartments filter-sealed, it was like an oven in the Exterminator. LeGuin dared not use the air exchanger for fear of depleting fuel even further. Matredes was studying the charts by the light of a red bulb overhead, and he said something. LeGuin had put on his ear-baffles already, and now he switched on the internal intercom.
“Say again?”
“Another forty kilometres, and we should be reaching rougher terrain… open karst. That’ll mark the beginnings of the rift.”
LeGuin nodded. The rift, and the mountains beyond it, represented the second and third of the great barriers the columns would have to overcome in order to reach safe territory. The desert was just the beginning. But it gave him some sense of hope. These were palpable markers that he could tick off.
LeGuin popped the hatch and sat up, taking the electroscope Matredes passed to him. The
Line of Death
was travelling in the forward quarter of the retreating column. According to unconfirmed rumours, some of the Imperial elements had already reached the Makanite passes, on the doorstep of safety. According to other rumours, enemy rapid assault units had reached there too, gunning to deny them.
He scanned ahead through the scope, trying to brace against the lurch of the machine. Every view was filtered by heat haze and whirling dust. But there did now seem to be something far ahead. A slender blue-white line. Mountains, or a daylight dream?
The vox chattered something he didn’t quite catch. A moment later, he didn’t need it repeated. Flickering shadows shot north overhead, and he heard the rush of afterburners above the roar of the tank’s engine.
Two dark red shapes in the bright sky, moving as fast as arrows, curled in low above the column ahead. He saw flashes, sprays of sand, then heard the rolling
crump
of detonating munitions. A kilometre away, something caught fire and began to smudge the sky with a thick spout of oily, black smoke.
“Alarm! Alarm!” he shouted into the vox. The
Line’s
turret weapons were already cranked to maximum elevation, but there was no point wasting ammo at this range. In the distance, he saw the choppy flashes of tracers from Hydra carriers in the front file.
Two more bats went over, using the convoy’s long dust wake as a marker to line up on their targets. Matredes was rotating the turret, but LeGuin shook his head. A troop truck three vehicles forward of them leapt into the air in a brilliant eruption of flame, and showered burning debris in all directions.
They hadn’t even seen that one coming.
The vehicles ahead of them swerved. The hit truck was a stricken mass of blazing, twisted metal. Burnt bodies, some stripped naked by the blast, littered the sand.
Another troop truck, turning to avoid the ruin, hit soft sand and dug in. It rocked violently, wheels spinning and digging deeper, engine over-revving. The infantrymen in the back leapt down with spades and chains.
“Full stop! Get the cable!” LeGuin yelled to Matredes, who clambered out at once with Mergson, one of the sponson gunners.
“Tie it up! Tie it up!” LeGuin shouted at the men on the ground as Matredes and the gunner fetched the hawser coil from the starboard panniers. They had to be quick. The enemy warplanes habitually dumped their payloads on the head of the column to slow it down. Then they delighted in coming about down the stationary line, strafing as they went home.
“Come on!”
Surface-to-air from the column ahead. Tracer, some wild cannon fire, small-arms. Some idiot tried a shoulder rocket. It went up, useless as a white flare in daylight. Where were they? Where the bloody hell w—
Booom!
One went right over at zero altitude, rocking the tank on its torsion bars with the Shockwave. By the time it had gone by them, it was already pulling off. The track five hundred metres ahead was swathed in fyceline smoke from the deluge of cannon fire it had stitched down the line. New fires had started. Something big—a tank’s magazine, most likely—blew up with a dry roar.
“Come on, Matredes!” LeGuin bawled. Most of the troopers had thrown themselves flat when the bat went over, but LeGuin’s men had got the cable lashed around the truck’s bull-bars.
“Ease off! Get him to ease off!” LeGuin shouted to Matredes, indicating the truck driver, a Munitorum drone who was still thrashing the daylights out of the vehicle’s drive shaft in an effort to self-right.
“Emdeen?” LeGuin voxed to his driver. “Nice and easy back step, no jerks, or you’ll amputate its rear end.”
“Understood, captain,” Emdeen voxed back. “Fifteen segs, mind.”
Fifteen segs. LeGuin laughed despite the situation. A Pardus tanker was permitted to sew a little stylised track segment to the edge of his uniform collar for every year served active. Emdeen was reminding his captain that he was a fifteen year vet and didn’t need to be told how to tow a cargo-10 successfully.
LeGuin had thirteen segs of his own.
His laughter stopped as he saw the next bat. Low, head on, red as an open wound. Weapon ports flashed as it came on. Tormentor-class, LeGuin presumed. Maybe a Hell Talon. He didn’t care. He knew tanks. Planes looked all the same to him. It might as well have been a frigging flying pixie, it was still intent on murder.
The bat’s cannon fire chewed along the track, kicking dirt up in man-high bursts with the rapid precision of an industrial belt press. A STeG armoured car wearing the dusty livery of the Enothian PDF ruptured like an eggshell and rolled on its side. The raking blasts atomised the front end of the water tanker.
Then the shots stitched right across them. Half a dozen of the troopers from the stranded truck were thrown down, their bodies flung aside, or into the air, or into pieces. The air filled with up-flung dust and dirt. LeGuin lost sight of Matredes, but saw Mergson clearly as he was hit. Everything below Mergson’s waist vaporised in a blitz of flame and fibres.
“No!” LeGuin screamed as he dropped back into the turret for cover, three shells spanking off the
Line’s
top armour.
The bat had already hammered past, but as he’d dropped, LeGuin had seen a second one right behind it.
Raging, he seized the yokes of the main turret’s twin mount, threw the autoloader lever and began to fire.
The turret rocked. He couldn’t see a thing through the prismatic sight, certainly not a target.
A waste of munitions? Let me miss first, LeGuin reasoned,
then
tell me that.
Over the Makanites, 12.01
Flight time was coming up on one hour. Twenty thousand metres of clear air down to the frosted mountains below them, three-tenths cloud. Visibility clear to forty-plus.
Strapped in his flight armour and breathing air-mix through his mask, Viltry looked up out of his Marauder’s shadowed cockpit into the bright realm of the sky. Ahead, and slightly high,
Hello Hellfire
was cruising smoothly, leaving long, straight, pure-white condensation trails behind her. The sunlight glinted off her polished-alloy silver.
It was almost serenely quiet apart from the background thrum of
G for Greta’s
four ramjets. According to the auspex, there was nothing in the air except their six plane formation for a hundred kilometres.
Viltry clicked his intercom. “
Gee Force,
check in.”
That was
G for Greta’s
other nickname.
Gee Force Greta.
Orsone had coined it, and it had stuck.
“Bombardier, aye.”
“Nose, aye.”
“Tail, check.”
“Turret, aye.”
Lacombe, Viltry’s navigator, looked round from his position and made a finger-and-thumb “O” with his gloved hand.
“How far?” Viltry asked the navigator.
“Coming up on the waypoint, sir. We want to make a turn bearing east ten in the next five.”
“What’s it called again?”
“Irax Passage. I believe, named after a local species of alpine herbivore that—”
“Thanks, Lacombe. War first, history later.”
“Sir.”
Viltry switched channels. “Halo Flight, this is Halo Leader. Prepare to come about bearing east ten on my mark… three, two, one… mark.”
The angle of the sun tilted. The tactical bombers turned.
G for Greta, Hello Hellfire, Throne of Terror, Mamzel Mayhem, Get Them All Back
and
Consider Yourself Dead.
Except for heavy operations, Halo seldom lofted all of its dozen birds for one sortie. Six was standard, and these six had been picked by straw poll.
Widowmaker
had been drawn, but then switched out because of a vector duct problem.
Mamzel Mayhem
had taken her place. The
Mamzel
was Halo Two, Kyrklan’s bird. As Viltry’s second-in-command, Wassimir Kyrklan usually led sorties with the other half of the flight while Viltry’s half was in turnaround. It was unusual for them to be flying together.
“Make your descent by five thousand,” Lacombe said.
“Copy all flight, descent by five thousand.”
There was a change in engine tone as they began to drop. The ice-capped peaks began to seem terribly close.
“Lacombe?”
The navigator’s sharp eyes switched between the terrain-scanning auspex and the cockpit view. “Looking for a point turn. Yacob’s Peak. Plot brief says it stands at the mouth of the pass.”
Another slow minute. “Come on, Lacombe.”
“There it is. Twelve kilometres and closing. We need to lose another two thousand now. Brief advises wind shear once we enter the pass.”
Viltry nodded, easing the stick. “Halo Flight, Halo Flight. Point marker twelve kilometres and closing. Stoop by three, and watch for crosswind.”
“Halo Two, understood.”
“Following your lead, Halo Leader.”
A photo-scout Lightning from the 1267th Navy (recon) had run this pathway at dawn, identifying a cluster of Imperial armour and artillery units halfway up the pass, with Archenemy heavies tight on its tail. Apparently, a local squadron had spotted the area the day before, shortly before getting stung by enemy air cover.
“Halo Flight, watch the air,” Viltry voxed. He switched to intercom. “Gunners? Locks off. Eyeball scans now, like your lives depend on it. For they surely do. Judd?”
A crackle. “Captain, sir?”
“Kiss the children for me, bombardier.”
Crackle. “I’ll tell them you said night-night.”
In the bomb bay below Viltry, Judd gently armed the payload, and then snuggled up to the foresight reticule on his belly.
The ragged pinnacle of Yacob’s Peak rose up ahead of them, a snow-caked jab of rock. Viltry could see the mouth of the pass now. His heart began to beat faster. It was going to be tight.
“Halo Flight, Halo Flight. On it now.” He tried to keep his voice calm. “Come about the point marker and drop hard by number sequence. The Emperor protects.”
All of the planes repeated that catechism.
Three… two… one…
The six Marauders, now formed in line astern, banked hard around the rock spire and followed
Gee Force
down the chute, swinging low and chasing hard. The promised wind shear rattled them brutally. Then, for a few moments, the canyon walls were so close on either side that the pilots expected to see friction sparks at their wingtips. But the chasm began to widen out. The pass descended. Snow cover, a ridgeway, a well of black rock with curling ice-sheets. It widened to five hundred metres-plus. Viltry kicked in some throttle, dropping
Gee Force
down to a sense-whizzing low fifty. At the stick of
Mamzel Mayhem,
right behind
Gee Force,
Kyrklan grinned. Low fifty, in a Marauder doing 400 kph, boxed in by a granite canyon. Only Oskar Viltry had the balls to lead off like that.