by Dan Abnett
“I know where it is.”
“Good. Convey them to the dispersal point at MAB South. Do you understand? Fine. Then sign here.”
As he signed his name, his stiffened fingers struggling with the stylus, Kaminsky asked: “Are they fliers? Navy fliers at last?”
Pincheon huffed. “Not for me to say. There’s a war on.”
“You think I don’t know that, senior?” Kaminsky asked.
As he took back the slate and the stylus, Pincheon looked up at Kaminsky’s face and made eye contact for the first time. What he saw made him shudder.
“Carry on, driver,” he said, and hurried away.
Kaminsky climbed up into his battered transport and turned the engine over. Blue smoke coughed and spurted from the vertical exhausts. Lifting the brake, he rolled the ten-wheeler down the gentle slope of the hardpan and drove off along the field circuit trackway, following the chain link fence.
The game was certainly ruined now. No pretending any more. Here were fuel bowsers, smeared with treacly black promethium waste, armoured hangars, repair sheds reverberating with the noise of power tools, lines of primer coils on their trolleys, electric munitions trains parked and empty on verges of swishing sap-grass.
And airstrips. Cracked rockcrete looking like psoriatic skin in the early light, with eight-engine bombers sulking on their hardstands, props like sabre-blades raised in threat, hook-winged Shrike dive-bombers under tarps, fitters and armourers working around them.
Beyond the strips, facing the sea, lay the long launch ramps of the Wolfcubs, stretched out like exposed spinal chords, glinting and skeletal in the rising sun.
Five Wolfcubs sat on taxi-racks at the head of the ramps. Bottle green with grey undersides, they were tiny, one-man planes with stubby wings and tails, their rocket engines raised above their backs, their nose guns muzzled. They looked squat, leaden.
But Kaminsky knew how they felt to fly. He knew how they rose off those catapult ramps, throttles right back, pulse-engines farting and popping as the airflow fired them to launch velocity. The belly-dropping jink as they cleared the ramp end and lifted up into the blue, raw and throbbing. The cold smell of the cockpit. The reek of rubber and steel, promethium, nitrous, fyceline. The feel of being aloft, alive…
God-Emperor, how he missed it.
At the gate, beside the staked revets and the heavy blast-fences, he pulled over to let a munitions convoy roll in. He glanced up into the driving mirror and, for a moment, saw himself.
More than anything, more than even the airfield full of prepping warplanes, the sight of himself reminded August Kaminsky that his cherished game was only pretend.
There was, inescapably, a war on.
Theda Old Town, 07.09
He couldn’t sleep. It was anticipation mostly, the prospect of a new war to survive, but his body clock was still running on shipboard time, and to him it was late afternoon.
Just before six by the chronograph on his night stand, he gave up on his bed and got up. It was cold and not yet light. In the adjacent rooms, the other men of G for Greta were sleeping. He could hear snoring, particularly the volcanic rumble of Bombardier Judd. The Munitorum had issued them billets in a once-handsome pension on Kazergat Canal, and they’d piled in late the previous afternoon, leaving their packs in a heap in the hallway, eagerly laying claim to rooms. The younger men had broken open liquor and got down to the business of getting drunk so they could better sleep off voyage-lag. He’d had a glass or two, but the cheap escape held little attraction.
He and the other flight officers had swung the best rooms. He’d had to order a disappointed Orsone out to make way for him. “Find somewhere else,” he’d told the young tail-gunner. But the room wasn’t much of a trophy. The carpet had long gone and the plaster was crumbling. Pitch-washed sheets were nailed over the windows in place of curtains. Damp patches blotched the ceiling like sores. There was a smell of fatigue and faded grandeur. That’s what years of warfare did to a place. They certainly did the same to a man, after all.
The old woman who ran the pension had told him that there would be no hot water until after eight, and he hadn’t come that many parsecs to start a tour by standing under a piss-cold shower. He’d got dressed in the half-light—boots, breeches, fleece-vest—and started to pull on his flight coat. But his fingers had then encountered the insignia sewn into the thick quilts of the garment, the captain’s bars, the squadron badge, the name-strip that read “Viltry, Oskar”. He had put it aside and opted instead for a more anonymous tan leather coat.
The landing was dark. On the floor above, the crewmen of Hello Hellstorm were slumbering, with the crews of Throne of Terror and Widowmaker on the floor above that. The retinues of K for Killshot and Get Them All Back were billeted on the ground floor. The other six crews of XXI Wing “Halo Flight”, Imperial (Phantine) Air Force were tucked up in another pension down the street.
Viltry activated a glow-globe. The light was dim, but enough to light his way down the creaking staircase. In the hall, there were ancient books stacked on the mantel of the ornate but flaking fireplace, but those that he touched in the hope of finding an hour or two’s distraction fell into dust.
He let himself out onto the street. It was chilly and quiet, except for the gurgle of the canal. A van rumbled by on the far side of the canal, its headlights cowled as per blackout procedures. He walked a few paces, noticing the stumps, regularly spaced, where iron lamp stands had been removed from the boulevard for the war effort. He tried to imagine the place in peacetime. Elegant, glass-hooded lamps, purring electric cruisers on the grand canal, prosperous Imperial citizens going about their business, stopping to greet and talk, dining at terrace taverns now long boarded-up. There would have been students too. The briefing documents said that Theda was a scholam town.
In truth, he realised, he knew precious little about Enothis. Precious little apart from three things: it was an old, proud Imperial world; it was strategically vital to this zone of the Sabbat Worlds; and he, and thousands of other aviators like him, had been drafted here from off-world at short notice to save it from extinction.
He noticed passers-by suddenly—other pedestrians out in the early light, dressed in dark clothes, all hurrying in the same direction. He heard the chime of a chapel bell ringing out seven of the clock, calling them to worship. Viltry followed them, crossing a bridge over the canal, hanging back.
By the time he reached the Ministorum chapel on the far bank side, the dawn service had already begun. He stood for a moment outside, listening to the plainsong chants. Above him, in the cold, grey light, the bas-relief facade showed the figure of the God-Emperor gazing down on all mankind.
Viltry felt ashamed. He bowed his head. When, eight years earlier, he had sworn to give his life as a warrior in the service of the God-Emperor, he hadn’t realised how damn hard it would be. He’d always wanted to be an aviator, of course. Phantine’s unusual topography bred that instinct into all its sons and daughters. But the cost had been great. Two years before, during the final onslaught to liberate his home world from the toxic clutches of the Archenemy, fighting alongside the Imperial Crusade forces of Warmaster Macaroth, he had almost died twice. Once as wind waste over the Scald, then as a prisoner of the vile warlord Sagittar Slaith at Ouranberg.
In the two years since then, Viltry had been unable to shrug off the idea that he should be dead already. He was living on borrowed time. His tutor at the scholam had drummed into him the concept of Fate’s wheel. He’d said that it spun at the Emperor’s right hand. It spun for balance, for symmetry. What was given would be taken, what was loaned would be paid back. A life saved was only a life spared.
His had been saved twice over. There was a reckoning to be had. And here he was, on another world, charged with the duty of fighting to save it. The reckoning would be here, he was sure of it. Fate’s wheel would turn. He had been spared twice so he could live long enough to see his home world saved. Now he was fighting to save another man�
��s home world. This, surely, would be where the accounts got squared.
The crew of G for Greta had seen this fatality in his every action, he was sure of that. They knew they were flying on a doomed bird. Doomed by him, cursed by him. He’d lost one crew over the Scald, and he should have gone with them. Now Fate’s wheel would bring another crew down with him in its efforts to even the tally.
He’d asked for a transfer, been refused, asked for a non-operational posting, had that turned over as well. “You’re a bloody fine flight officer, Viltry,” Ornoff had told him. “Get rid of this fatalistic nonsense. We need every man-bastard with airtime and combat experience we can get. Enothis will be tough as nails. Our ground forces are in hard retreat from Sek’s legions. It’ll come down to a bloody air war, mark my words. Request denied. Your Navy transport leaves orbit tomorrow at 06.00.”
Viltry looked up at the graven image of the God-Emperor, hard-shadowed in the sluggishly rising sun. It looked disapproving, scowling at his timid soul, fully aware of the cowardice in his heart.
“I’m sorry,” he said, out loud.
A woman in a long black coat, coming late to the service, looked round at him. He shrugged, bashful, and held the chapel door open for her.
Light, and a chorus of triumph dedicated to the Golden Throne of Earth, washed out on them both. She hurried in.
He followed her, and closed the heavy door behind him.
Over the Makanites, 07.11
This one was good. Daring. Young, most likely, desperate to live. Weren’t they all?
The dive was magnificent, foolhardy. Flight Warrior Khrel Kas Obarkon, chieftain of the fifth echelon, which was of the Anarch, and so sworn to he that is Sek, decided he would like more of this boy’s kind in his echelon come the showdown. The boy flew, as they say, by the claws. Such a scream dive. Obarkon didn’t know the runty little enemy pulsejets could achieve that.
It seemed almost a waste to slay him.
Wound tight in his grav-armour, auto-pumps and cardio-centrifuges compensating his circulation, Obarkon committed his Hell Razor steeper still, adjusting the trim, slicing down through the air like a knife at point eight of mach. His cockpit was dark save for the winking lights of his instruments, which reflected off the black, patent-leather gauntlets encasing his hands. The stooping Wolfcub was a bright orange pip on his auspex display.
How was it surviving? Pilot skill or luck? The young had little of the former and, sometimes, barrels of the latter. The dive was testing the enemy plane right to the limits of its airframe. A single degree deeper and the descent would strip the wings away at the cabane or blow out the inductive motor.
Behind the matt-black glass visor of his full-head helmet, Obarkon smiled. His face, so seldom seen, was a grizzled tissue of fibre and poly-weave reinforcements. His eyes were augmetics, linked directly to the war-plane’s gunsights by spinal plugs.
At three hundred metres, the Wolfcub pulled out, dragging a long, aching turn up and away to avoid the ragged peaks, its jet engine spitting and foundering.
Another surprise. Another admirable display of skill. Or luck.
Obarkon tilted his stick and nudged the reactive thrusters, pulling out of the dive non-ballistically, mocking the laboured struggles of the smaller plane. It had been locked in his gunsight for two minutes now. The target finder was chiming over and over again.
Attention…
Target found.
Target found.
Target found.
Why hadn’t he killed it?
I want to see what you’ve got, Obarkon thought.
The Wolfcub veered around a peak-top, letting the cross of its shadow flicker across the sunlit snow, then tipped its wings hard to steer around another crag. Obarkon kept his Hell Razor almost level to execute a following path, ripping through the air like a heat-hungry missile. The Wolfcub was still in his crosshairs.
Suddenly, around the next peak, it disappeared. Obarkon frowned and swung about, assuming the boy had finally misadventured and flown into a cliff wall. For the first time in nearly three minutes, the target finder bleeped lock lost… lock lost… lock lost…
No, not dead. There he was. The little wretch. He’d somehow flick-rolled the Wolfcub around the promontory and swung back the way he’d come, gunning low on full thrust.
Obarkon lifted his shiny black-clad hands off the stick and clapped. Very fine indeed.
A warning note sounded and Obarkon snapped it off with a curse. He was down to reserve now, almost at the critical fuel threshold. That meant he had no more than two minutes left before he had to turn for home. More than that, and he wouldn’t make it to Natrab echelon aerie.
“Game’s done now,” he hissed through chapped lips. He surged the Hell Razor forward and it went fluidly, responding perfectly, sure as a shark. “Reacquire,” he told the auto sight. He’d made five kills already, another ace day, but this boy would make a nice round six. He’d dallied too long, playing games.
The target pipper chased and bleeped. The Wolfcub was pulling wide rolls and staying low, keeping the twisting furrows of the peak line between itself and the hunter.
Target denied…
Target denied…
Target denied…
Obarkon cursed in the name of his most foul god. The little bastard was slipping away. By the skin of his teeth. By the claws. He had allowed too much grace. Now the enemy was mocking him.
He got a partial target, then lost it again as the fugitive Wolfcub banked perilously around a crag. They both passed so close that snow blizzarded up off the crag in their combined wash.
Another partial. Obarkon fired. Dazzling tracers laddered away from his machine and cut the cold, mountaintop air. Miss.
Another turn, another partial, another futile burst. Obarkon throttled up and soared around, using reactive thrust to viff his machine out wide on the Wolfcub’s eight.
It was running for all it was worth, burning at full thrust. Obarkon got a true tone at last.
Target lock.
Target lock.
Target lock.
“Goodnight,” he muttered, bored of the game now. Hardwired thumbs dug at the trigger paddle.
Cannon fire lanced down through the air ahead of him. Obarkon felt a tiny vibration and a sudden display told him he’d been holed in one wing-sweep. Out of the sun, a second Wolfcub was diving on his tail, its nose lit up with muzzle flash. Just a glance told the expert chieftain that this second Cub was piloted by an idiot, a man far less capable than the spirited boy he had been chasing. It was coming over too shallow, wobbling badly, desperately. It had no real target lock.
But still, it was behind him and gunning madly.
The warning sounded again, impatient. He’d reached critical fuel threshold.
He was done here. Enough. Obarkon traversed the reactor ducts and powered off almost vertical, pulling out of the chase. The second Wolfcub went by under him as he climbed, bemused by the sudden exit.
Obarkon climbed into the sunlight, gaining altitude and speed. He turned his beloved Hell Razor south.
This broiling air war was just getting started. There would be another day.
And another kill.
Hotel Imperial, Theda, 07.23
Kaminsky made a good run across the northern sectors and arrived outside the Hotel Imperial well inside the time Senior Pincheon had allocated for the job. The only slight delay had been a queue of market stallers lining up to get onto Congress Plaza for the midweek moot. These days, it seemed to Kaminsky, the Old Town kept to its bed until after eight, as if afraid of what horrors might roam in the dark hours of night.
He rolled in under the wrought iron frame of the hotel’s awning, quietly wondering how long it would be before even that was taken for war metal, and glanced around. There was no one about except for an ancient old porter dozing on a folding chair amongst a half-dozen deactivated cargo servitors, and a gaggle of housekeepers smoking lho-sticks together by the service door down the side of
the building.
Kaminsky was about to get down out of the cab when the glass and varnished wood of the hotel’s front doors flashed in the early sunlight, and a mob of dark figures strode out purposefully towards him.
They were fliers, he knew that at once by the swagger of them, but not locals. Nor were they wearing the black and grey coats and flight armour of Navy aviators. There was at least a dozen, dressed in quilted taupe flightsuits and brown leather coats, carrying equipment packs loosely over their shoulders. They were unusually tall and well-proportioned individuals, slender and uniformly black-haired where the average Enothian was robust and fair.
And they weren’t all male. At least three of them—including, it seemed, the figure leading them towards the transport—were women.
Kaminsky got out and walked round to the back of the transport to drop the tailgate. He nodded a greeting to the first of the newcomers, trying to get a decent look at the insignia on the coat sleeve, but the young man spared him not a second glance and simply hoisted in his kit bag and climbed up after it.
Only the woman paused. She had cold, searching eyes and a slim jaw that seemed to be set permanently in a gritted clench. Her black hair was cut unflatteringly short.
“Transport to Theda MAB South?” she asked Kaminsky. She spoke with an offworld accent that sounded rather odd and nasal to him.
“Yes, mamzel. To the dispersal station.”
“That’s ‘commander’,” she corrected, hauling her lithe figure up into the transport. “Carry on.”
Kaminsky waited for the last of them to climb aboard, then shut the gate. He limped back round to the cab and started the engine.
Phantine. That’s what it had said on the woman’s silver shoulder badge. Phantine XX, embossed on a scroll backed by a double-headed eagle that clutched lightning bolts in its talons.
Kaminsky had been a student of aviation history since childhood and, though he’d heard of a world called Phantine, he had no idea why a flight wing should bear the name.
He drove them through Vilberg borough and turned south towards the base. On Scholastae Street, a pair of Commonwealth Cyclones went over at about five hundred metres, turning north and west. Kaminsky looked up to watch them pass.
