by Dan Abnett
She wanted to break off and go to cover him, but the Locust was back on her, getting intermittent locks as she jinked and twisted.
“Four-One Leader to Umbra Five.”
“Go, Lead!”
“Espere. Cover the boy, for Throne’s sake!”
“On it!”
Espere turned his Bolt over and burned towards Umbra Eight. It was wallowing now, making tentative jinks.
“Eight, this is Five. You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m… yeah.”
“Eight, do you have a weapons malfunction?”
“Negative, Eight.”
“You just nailed the sky with what looked like full batteries.”
“Negative, negative. I’m fine.”
Espere shook his head. He was tense himself. Very tense, and it wasn’t just the fly-fight. Alone amongst the pilots of Umbra Flight, Pers Espere had not settled well with the Thunderbolts. He missed his old Lightning more than he could explain. In dispersal, the others would sit around, lauding their Bolts, and talking about them like they were lovers, wives, husbands. Espere just didn’t feel that way. His machine, serial Nine-Nine, did not suit him. It was an old machine, a veteran bird, lovingly maintained by the fitter teams. Espere didn’t know if it was Thunderbolts in general that disagreed with him, or Nine-Nine in particular. He was fighting with it all the time, wrestling to get it to do what he wanted. He had come to loathe the prospect of each sortie.
In an Imperium where diligently-maintained war machines were often ten, twelve, fifteen times older than their pilots or drivers, there were plenty of tales of particular planes or tanks carrying a jinx. Cursed machines, plaguing the lives of their users until they were themselves destroyed. Serial Nine-Nine had a long and patchy record. Six pilots dead or maimed at the controls, two bad landings, three major refits. Espere had once asked Hemmen, his chief fitter, if Nine-Nine was jinxed. Hemmen had laughed, not altogether reassuringly, and said not. The following morning, there’d been a refuelling mishap. A junior fitter had been torched so badly he’d left the skin of his hands fused to Nine-Nine’s fuselage.
He tried not to think about it, even though he’d made four kills in his old Lightning, and none in this machine. It was constantly coming home with shot-holes to patch.
Espere settled in beside Marquall’s machine. Espere was an expert wingman. He knew how to fly cover and watch a fellow pilot’s back. That’s why Jagdea had called him to do this, and that’s what he’d do. But he was tense. Marquall was alarming him with his antics. There was a gauge light on for a drop in lube-pressure. What was that about? Had he taken a hit he didn’t know about?
Mind on the game, Pers. Mind on the game. The boy needed all his help.
“Come about, Eight. Let’s see if we can’t do some good here.”
He looked over at the machine alongside him, and saw Marquall’s red-helmeted head nod eagerly, his thumb coming up. Sunlight glinted off the canopy.
Sunlight glinted off something else.
“Break! Break! Break!” Espere yelled. The two Bolts scissored up and away violently as the mauve shape snapped by. Espere’s damage recorder started beeping.
“Eight? Where are you?” Espere rasped, struggling with the stick as he tried to right the plane.
“I can’t see it! I can’t see it!”
Espere could see him well enough. Marquall was above and to his right, turning really badly into a terrible climb. Espere hit the juice and started to rise.
“Pull in, Eight! You’re going to stall if you turn that tight!”
Silence. The horrendous weight of high G was preventing the kid from answering.
Don’t black out… don’t black out… Espere willed. Shit! There was the bat again, stooping in from the east, cannons blazing. Marquall’s Bolt shuddered as it was hit, but the impact seemed to settle him out. Or snap him awake.
Espere hit reheat and came around hard in a port turn-and-roll, viffing gently to set himself up on the Locust as it crossed. He’d be damned if he’d let the kid get killed on his virgin run.
Espere opened up. Autocannons. A neat burst with good deflection. The Locust trembled, side hit, and then broke left.
Then, out of nowhere, there was another bat, coming in straight. Espere kicked the rudder and came in tight, shielding Marquall’s bird with his own machine as he tipped his nose towards the attacker.
Marquall saw what was happening about a second too late. Espere’s plane rocked wildly. Pieces of plating sheared off, part of the rudder, part of an engine duct. The canopy shattered but stayed on. The Locust went by under them both like a comet, doing well over 500 kph.
“Umbra Five! Umbra Five! Are you all right?”
Umbra Five wobbled and began exuding a trickle of grey smoke.
“Umbra Five?”
“I’m okay,” Espere’s voice answered. “I’m okay.”
Espere had been hit, Jagdea was pretty certain of that. As she threw her bird to and fro, the bat on her neck, she glimpsed Espere take a slice-by.
Where was he now? No way of telling. She was banking and the world was coming round. The bat was right on her.
She pulled into a crisp turn. The auspex collision monitor suddenly squealed.
A Commonwealth Cyclone was flying right across her path.
Jagdea slammed the stick forward to avoid it, and went under the delta-wing, her turbofans shrilling as the Thunderbolt started to power dive. The ground was rushing up at her, the curlicue line of the Lida, the squared-off field beds and hydroponic assemblies. Getting out of this dive was going to be hard.
Target lock wailed. Okay then, harder still. The bat was on her, following her down.
Coming out of this, she’d have to pull three or four Gs. That was possible, provided the pilot was ready for it. She tensed her torso and legs, the recommended “grip” manoeuvre, and yanked the stick.
Here it came. Wham! Already she weighed about a thousand kilos, feeling her heart and lungs pressing on her diaphragm. Spots in front of her eyes. The start of tunnel vision. “Grip” position helped hold the blood in her head so she wouldn’t black out.
She levelled off at around fifty metres, so low over the agricultural waterways her plane raised a bow-wave of spray off the field ponds. She glimpsed water aurochs scattering across a field. Bank to the right, to avoid a pump station’s tower, then left again. Her slipstream ripped the plastek sheeting off a field of waterbeet. The bat was right on her six. Target lock. Ping! Ping! Ping!
She hit the speed brakes, her harness snapped her back into her seat. The bat went right over her, starting to turn and climb desperately.
She viffed into its reactive turn and hammered it with three salvoes from her lascannons. It turned to port, apparently unharmed, then suddenly screwed over into a nosedive and planted itself so hard into the middle of a hydroponics raft, the impact sent a tidal wave ripple flushing out beyond the field boundaries.
Jagdea turned south, rising, as a column of smoke boiled up from the farmland behind her. “Lead, you with us?” Van Tull voxed. “Four-A,” she replied. “Umbra Five, you okay?”
“Fine,” Espere responded.
The remaining Locusts had fled. Jagdea had Four-One turn in to escort the rest of the Cyclones home. She’d made two kills, with one probable, raising her career tally to nineteen. Van Tull had made one, raising his to eleven.
Not too shabby.
Theda MAB South, 16.59
Operations had hoisted blue flags and lit guide-path flares. The day was fading in the sky, turning the cloud cover as mauve as a Locust’s paint-job. Asche’s section was already long home, and Blansher’s had landed about fifteen minutes ahead of them. As Jagdea came in, she saw the svelte ivory machines of the Apostles, prepping on their hardstands, their noses bristling with black, antler-like antennae arrays for night-fighting. All the other Navy wings were in the air somewhere. Busy day.
“Be advised, Operations,” she said as she came in. “Contrary to briefings, the A
rchenemy has air-reach beyond the Makanites.” She’d sent this message four times already, with barely an acknowledgement. The bats were over the mountains now. They had much less time than Ornoff had figured.
“Operations. Please recognise my signal.”
“Recognised, Umbra Leader. It has been sent to Tactical.”
In the fading light, she cleared the bright flare path and settled her Bolt onto its stand, gusting down on swivelled nozzles with barely a bump.
The crews ran out.
Marquall landed, shaking with something between fear and delight. He’d survived, but God-Emperor, how he had screwed up. He was for it, he knew.
Van Tull’s bird went overhead, slowing to a perfect vertical decline on its smoking nozzles.
Espere had put down.
Ignoring Racklae and the fitters, Marquall jumped off his Bolt and ran over to Espere’s machine.
He slowed down as he approached it. The flank was raked to hell, the armour buckled and burst. Huge holes, scorched black, peppered the rudder and the wing edge.
A fitter was running towards the bird, but Marquall pushed him aside and jumped up on the wing, hauling back the shattered canopy frame himself.
“Espere? Espere, are you all right?”
Pers Espere looked up at him. The cockpit armour was splintered. Every dial in the display was cracked. Espere’s left arm was a tattered shred, his right a fused lump, glued by the heat of the las-shots to the stick. The left side of his face was a pincushion of canopy fragments.
“I’m fine,” said Espere.
DAY 254
Theda MAB South, 04.10
Kaminsky wasn’t due on until six, but the birds were disturbing his slumber. He’d learned to sleep through regular jet sounds, the ruckus that had been going on every night for the last nine months. What bothered his sleep now were the new noises the Navy machines had brought with them: the shrill wails and spitting roars of vector-thrust craft coming and going. He wasn’t used to those sounds, and his sleeping self hadn’t yet learned to screen them out.
And, Throne, weren’t they busy? Kaminsky had counted at least three sortie launches since nightfall, and there’d also been a hell of a noise around midnight, which he was sure was a new wing arriving for deployment.
Things were hotting up. Kaminsky had heard rumours—a friend of a friend in the motor pool, who knew a guy, who’d got talking to a Navy fitter – rumours that there had already been a few air-brawls this side of the mountains. Some business had gone down over the Lida Valley the day before. Someone else said they’d seen bats over the Peninsula. That was probably crap. Kaminsky hoped so, because if it was true, that meant they really were near the end. But the Lida Valley, that was possible. And bad enough. The bats had got reach. Maybe even the vaunted Imperial Navy wings couldn’t stop them now.
They were trying, though. Kaminsky left his bunk in the Munitorum dorm and walked down the dimly-lit and blast-hardened hallway to section post. The five guys who were meant to be on standby were asleep in chairs. The jet roar hadn’t woken them. They were all Munitorum drivers, born and bred. They were oblivious to the subtle changes in the noise over the field.
Kaminsky helped himself to some caffeine from the pot on the stove, and went out into the motor pool yard. The air was cold and the night still very black. Several tech-priests were working on some cargo-8s, lighting the corner of the yard with the tremulous glow of their welding wands and incense burners.
Sipping his drink, Kaminsky strolled up the ramp until he was overlooking the main field. Guide path flares had just been lit, filling the night with a lambent green light. Thanks to this, he could see a row of Thunderbolts hunched under mesh-tents to the west. His guess had been right. They hadn’t been there the day before. A newly arrived wing. More reinforcements.
A shuddering rush swept over him out of the south, and he turned to watch another wing come in, returning from a sortie. Thunderbolts too. He liked the look of those big brutes and wondered how they felt to fly. The twelve machines came in low, following the guide path, and began to slow, turning their forward rate into a gentle hover as they adjusted their vector jets and settled down onto their designated pads. The monstrous, combined howl of their engines made his diaphragm shake.
“Good day, guys?” he called to them, out loud. “Many kills?” He toasted the distant planes with his cup. He could remember the buzz so clearly: riding home, guns empty, flying on fumes, the rush of a combat survived still twitching in his gut.
As the throb of the mighty turbofans began to fade, Kaminsky turned, hearing voices suddenly audible back in the yard. He wandered back that way, and saw Senior Pincheon standing in conversation with a Navy flier.
Pincheon looked flustered, which was never good for anyone else. The senior noticed Kaminsky approaching and called out to him.
“I need a driver!”
“Ready and willing, senior,” Kaminsky replied. Though he wasn’t due on yet, he knew he wouldn’t be doing any more sleeping now. He fancied a little distraction. Besides, he didn’t want Pincheon blithering into the section post and finding all the standbys asleep. The poor bastards would be on penalty shifts until doomsday. Which, of course, might be just a few days away…
“I’ll take it,” he said.
“Good. Transportation run. Conveyance needed to the Old Town and back. Fill this in.”
Kaminsky took the proffered data-slate and entered his work number and details. He wrote as quickly and neatly as his hand would allow.
“I need to go to a bar called the Hydra,” the Navy flier said. “Do you know it?”
Kaminsky looked up at the sound of the voice, and saw to his surprise that the tall flier was female. It was the woman whose mob he’d transported in two days earlier.
“Yes, mamzel… forgive me, commander. I know it.”
“Good,” she said. She nodded thanks to Pincheon and fell into step beside Kaminsky as they headed for his transport. “You’ll ride in the cab?” he asked.
“Thanks. Yes.”
He opened the cab door for her and she climbed up. Then he went round to the driver’s side, boarded, and turned the engine over.
Lamps blazing, they rumbled out of the compound and left the airfield, joining the empty highway strip into the city. She said nothing, just gazed out at the hooded lights of the field as they went by and receded.
It felt funny having company in the cab. He usually shipped teams of personnel around, loaded in the back. The cab was his private space. He felt embarrassed suddenly by the litter of disposable cups in the footwell, the fact that someone could see the way he had to lock his prosthetic hand around the wheel spoke.
But it would have been rude to expect her to ride in the rear.
At length, uncomfortable, he cleared his throat and said, “The Hydra, you said?”
“Yes. On Voldney.”
“Yeah.”
Did she recognise him? Half of him presumed not. Just another Munitorum drone. The other half was outraged. With a face like his?
The thought made him smile. Suddenly, August, vain about your looks!
“Something the matter, driver?” she asked.
“No, commander,” he said. “I’m to wait for you at the Hydra, is that right?”
“Yes. I shouldn’t be more than five minutes.”
“Not going out for a celebratory drink, then?”
“No. Why?”
“Oh, you know. A flier, back from a mission, wanting to wind down. The Hydra is popular with pilots.”
“So I’ve heard.”
So what’s this about, then, he wanted to ask? But he stopped himself. It wasn’t his place. He wasn’t one of them any more, and he couldn’t get away with insolence. He was a Munitorum drone.
As if she sensed his curiosity, she suddenly said, “I’m looking for an FTR.”
“Ah,” he said. Understanding, he smiled again. He was flattered that she should bother to make even that much conversation. She said not
hing else until they were pulling up outside the Hydra.
“Wait here,” she instructed, and jumped down out of the cab.
Five minutes passed. Ten. A trio of drunken Commonwealth troopers staggered out of the bar like a six-legged beast and blundered off down the pavement, singing. It was dark. Just the lights of his truck, the neon bar sign, a few still-lit windows overlooking the narrow street.
He saw her re-emerge, alone. She looked up and down the street, annoyed. She crossed back to the driver’s side and he wound down his window.
“Not there?”
“No. Is there anywhere else you know?”
“A few places. Get in.”
He drove down through the Gillehal Plaza, and, as there was no one around, took a shortcut up a one-way ramp onto the shelving streets of the Zagerhanz. The truck’s gears wallowed as he downshifted on the steep slope.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“There are a couple of places up here. The Lullabye and the Midwinter. They’re often open after hours.”
She nodded.
“How long’s he been gone?”
“Since 22.00 yesterday.”
“And you don’t want to make this official?”
“No, I—No.”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Jagdea,” she said, reluctantly.
He waited for her at the Lullabye and the Midwinter, but she came back from both on her own.
“One last idea. There’s a place on the Grand Canal.”
He drove the truck expertly along the narrow Old Town streets. There was just the tiniest hint of dawn in the air now. When they got to the place, he turned off the engine and climbed down with her.
“You can stay with the transport, driver.”
Kaminsky shook his head. “Actually no, Commander Jagdea. You’ll need me to get in.”
“Why?”
“Zara’s is an old drinking den. Not a bar. Women are only allowed in if they are the companions of male clientele.”
She stared at him.
“It’s true,” he said. “Maybe… maybe that’s why your FTR came here.”
