Double Eagle

by Dan Abnett

  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.

  EPILOGUE

  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.

  The Battle of the Zophonian Sea, as the history texts now call it, was not the final fight of the Enothian War, but it was the most decisive. In the weeks that followed, Lord Militant Humel’s counter-offensive began and, with reinforcements from the Khan Group, the Imperial Guard began to strike back into the south, into a demoralised enemy. The Trinity Hives finally fell, after months of savage fighting, on the 62nd day of 774.M41. By that time, the Archenemy Magister Sek had fled the planet. Records show that the first unit to breach the Trinity Gates was an armoured regiment commanded by a Captain Robart LeGuin.

  During the Battle of the Zophonian Sea, Imperial air losses were nine hundred and forty-eight compared to seven thousand eight hundred and forty confirmed Archenemy machines. Of the Navy wings involved, the highest kill tally per individual pilot was achieved by the 101st Apostles, but three other fighter wings, including the Phantine XX, exceeded the Apostles’ combined score of kills.

  The records show that Captain Oskar Viltry, a Marauder pilot, was killed in action in the interior desert on the 260th day of the Imperial year 773.M41.

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