Kai screamed as the cutter rolled sharply and Asubha pushed the throttle out. The trailing edge of the cutter’s left wing clipped the edge of the closing blast door, sending it into a wild spin. Centrifugal force pressed Kai into his seat, and he lost all sense of spatial awareness as the cutter boomeranged out into the open air.
Up was down and down was up. Kai lost all sense of whether they were falling or climbing as the walls and floor spun crazily. Sky and mountain flipped sickeningly through the toughened view ports, and Kai closed his eyes. At any moment they would be dashed to a million pieces against the rocks, their shredded remains spread over hundreds of square kilometres of the mountainside.
Warning lights flashed and alarms from the cockpit echoed down the fuselage. Kai heard Asubha yelling obscenities at the controls and avionic cogitator.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry…’ said Kai through gritted teeth, repeating the words over and over again as they tumbled through the air like a dying bird until he felt the pressure of Atharva’s restraining hand lift.
‘To whom are you apologising?’ asked Atharva.
Kai opened his eyes as his lurching senses told him they were flying level again. Hope and amazement vied for centre space in his mind as he saw tall spires of gold and the rugged flanks of the mountain sweeping past through the view ports.
‘The dead,’ said Kai without thinking.
‘The dead need no one to apologise for them,’ said Atharva. ‘It is the living who need forgiveness.’
Though the words were said lightly, Kai sensed the bitterness behind them. Atharva had the bearing of a scholar trapped in a warrior’s body, but there was no mistaking the potential for violence that swelled within his breast.
‘Good flying, Asubha,’ shouted Tagore.
‘We’re not done yet,’ said Asubha. ‘Incoming fighters vectoring in on our position. Firelances by the speed of them.’
‘How far?’ called Atharva.
‘One hundred and eighty kilometres and closing fast.’
‘Fly nap of the earth and hold your course,’ ordered Atharva.
‘That won’t hide us,’ Asubha warned him.
‘I know, but I have wiles beyond your understanding,’ said Atharva, closing his eyes.
FLIGHT LEADER PTELOS Requer eased up on the afterburner, letting Eastern Light flatten out the steep curve of its ascent from Srinagar Station. The roar of the Firelance’s engine was like the bellow of a giant beast, and the force of acceleration was like being kicked in the back by one of the migou labourers that worked in the camps before the palace walls.
Tobias Moshar flew Promethean Ark just off his right wing, and Osirin Falk captained Twilight’s Fade on his left, three flyers with a combined kill count of over two hundred enemy aircraft. Most of their combat flying had been done over two centuries ago, but the pilots remembered and their enhanced cognitive recall had lived those fights scores of times.
Requer was a natural flyer, a man who felt ill at ease when not able to take a warplane into the sky, a man who regarded a life lived on the ground as a waste of potential. The majority of sorties he flew these days were nothing more than routine intercepts of privateers bringing contraband into the mountains aboard prop-driven aircraft that predated the beginning of the wars of Unity.
This flight promised to be different.
A red-ball alert had come down from on high, and Requer had been first to the flight line, running though his pre-flight check in the shortest time before waving away the ground crew and punching the lifter-jet to get him airborne. Operations had vectored them to the target, and checking the readings on the slate before him, Requer felt his initial exhilaration bleed away as he saw how slowly the target was moving.
‘Do you have the contact, Torchlight?’ came the voice of Operations.
‘Got it,’ answered Requer. ‘Bearing two-seven-nine, one hundred and sixty-seven kilometres out, altitude one thousand metres.’
‘That’s it, Torchlight,’ confirmed Operations. ‘Your orders are to close and destroy the target. Visual confirmation of destruction is required.’
‘Understood, operations,’ said Requer. ‘What is the nature of the target?’
‘As I have it, the target is a Cargo 9 escort cutter.’
‘An escort cutter?’
‘That’s what I have here,’ said Operations. ‘Its destruction comes with the highest authority prefix.’
‘I think we can handle an escort cutter,’ said Requer.
‘Understood,’ said Operations. ‘Good hunting.’
Requer shut off the link and opened the vox to his fellow flyers.
‘You all heard that?’ he asked.
‘Someone really wants that cutter brought down,’ said Moshar.
‘Who do you think is aboard?’ asked Falk.
Requer plotted a reverse vector for the cutter and let out a whistling breath of surprise.
‘Looks like it’s come from Khangba Marwu, so I’m thinking there must be some escapees on board,’ answered Requer. ‘Must be some very bad men aboard that cutter, so let’s get this done right. We’re coming up on the initial point, so climb to Angels minus two thousand on my mark.’
Moshar and Falk acknowledged his command with a click on the vox and Requer turned his attention to the countdown unfolding on the ranging scope. When the number reached zero, he pulled back on the stick and pulled the Firelance into a steep climb. Their closure rate would put them in missile range inside two minutes, but Requer wasn’t about to launch until he had a visual on the fleeing cutter.
The mountains flashed past to his right, a blur of icy rock that moved too fast to make out any detail. Despite the novelty of escapees from Khangba Marwu, this mission looked like it would be as routine as any other. After all, a Cargo 9 was no match for even one Firelance, so three was overkill. The structures of the palace below were a blur, a streaking tapestry of gold, silver and white marble. Requer had flown the length, breadth and circumference of the palace a hundred times or more, and every time he found some new wonder at which to marvel. Yet he had no eyes for its magnificence on this flight, he was on a war footing and all his attention was claimed by his target.
The range marker was slipping closer to the centre of his display, and Requer looked down as he saw a flash of silver against the black rock of the mountains. The cutter was jinking left and right, hugging the side of the mountain in the false hope that such manoeuvres would keep it safe from a hunting Firelance. The pilot had skill, weaving in and out of natural rock formations at high speed to keep his pursuer from obtaining missile lock, but it would take more than that to evade Ptelos Requer.
He checked his scopes one last time. The direction was right, and the returns were solid. He craned his neck, twisting left and right to make sure there was nothing else in the air with them. The last thing he needed was an accidental shoot down of some civilian craft straying too close to an engagement zone.
Satisfied this craft below him was the Cargo 9 he had been ordered to kill, Ptelos Requer armed the weapons systems and almost immediately his helmet was filled with the harsh buzzing of a missile lock.
He eased the stick forward, pushing Eastern Light into a shallow attack dive.
‘Target acquired,’ said Requer, flipping up the trigger guard on his control column.
KAI LOOKED UP at Atharva, feeling a build up of psychic power that filled the air with an actinic chill and the bilious taste of metal. The nuncio was nothing compared to this, and even the vatic and the er employed no abilities of this magnitude. Atharva was a battle psychic, a warrior-mystic who wielded his powers for destruction and violence, and Kai had tasted its like only once before, in the mindhall of Choir Primus.
Without thinking, Kai opened himself a fraction to that power, feeling himself dragged along with Atharva’s abilities, seeing the mountainside flash past as though he were a bird flying at impossible speed through the air. He saw the majesty of the palace below them, ten thousand towers and do
mes, a multitude of grand colonnades and the palatial demesnes that housed the billions of loyal servants of the Administratum.
Kai was a comet, a shooting star of thought and purpose. Incandescent, he raced through the sky until he saw three bat-winged specks that arced over the mountains towards them. The shapes grew larger until Kai saw the fighter aircraft clearly, the Firelances Asubha had spoken of: graceful war machines that could jink and spin through the air like dancers.
Their combined essence entered the mind of the lead pilot, and Kai’s thoughts were immediately filled with trajectories, approach vectors and deflection values. It meant nothing to him, but the dominating presence of Atharva absorbed it in a second.
Kai looked through the pilot’s eyes, seeing the ghostly green of a projected display and feeling the constricting grip of his pressurised flight suit. He felt the heaviness of his helm and the exhilaration of making an enemy kill. A warbling tone in his ear told him the missile pods slung beneath the wings had a target lock, and his thumb hovered over the firing trigger.
Before the pilot could fire, a conflicting impulse arose in his mind.
PTELOS REQUER FELT a sudden conviction that the aircraft on which he was about to fire was not an enemy craft at all, but an Imperial one. His thumb slid away from the trigger and he re-engaged the safeties on his missiles.
He blinked in confusion, pulling out of his attack dive and flying over the target. His breathing was laboured and his flight suit hissed as it compensated for his elevated heart rate and increased blood pressure.
‘Requer? What happened?’ asked Moshar. ‘Do you have a weapons failure?’
He tried to answer, but he couldn’t remember what had happened, only that he had an undeniable urge not to fire. A grey fog filled his head, making it impossible to think clearly. Flickering images of things he didn’t understand flashed in his mind, painful and intrusive.
‘Ptelos?’ said Falk. ‘Talk to me, what happened?’
Requer shook his head, trying to push the cacophony of thoughts from his head. He banged the side of his helmet in an attempt to clear his head, but the images kept coming.
‘I’m fine,’ he said, but the fug of confusion pressed even deeper into his thoughts. ‘I had a fire control glitch. Coming around for another pass. Hold station.’
He rolled his Firelance and pulled into a wide turn that brought him in behind the Cargo 9 once more. Promethean Ark and Twilight’s Fade followed the cutter, their blue hot engines burning like bright pulsars in the early evening sky. Their light was so bright he had trouble focusing, and his mouth dropped open as the blood drained from his head.
Requer checked his scopes again, and let out a breath two threat icons appeared on his scope, enemy aircraft right in front of him. He was right on top of the enemy and they hadn’t seen him! His wingmen were gone, shot down in all likelihood, and he had the drop on the enemy aircraft that had blown them from the sky.
With calm, methodical precision, Requer tagged all three contacts in front of him – the two new ones and the Cargo 9 – and once again armed his missiles.
‘Requer! What are you doing?’ yelled a garbled voice that sounded familiar yet completely alien to him. An enemy trick, no doubt.
‘I have good tone,’ he said as the trill of a target lock sounded in his helmet.
‘Ptelos, your weapons are glitching again!’ shouted Moshar, pulling away and climbing.
‘Requer, stand down!’ shouted another voice that was unknown to him.
Three missiles leapt from the rails in a bloom of smoke and peeled off in search of their targets. The first sliced up on a perfect trajectory and flew right into the engine of Promethean Ark. The warhead exploded deep in the guts of the Firelance and blew it apart in a spinning fireball of orange flame and silver wreckage. The remains of the blazing fuselage spun down towards the mountain, trailing thick black smoke and blisteringly bright flares of exploding munitions.
The second enemy pilot cut in his afterburners, but against missiles launched at such close range, he had no chance to evade. Every jink and roll was met and countered by the missile’s seeker head until the aircraft could run no more. The pilot cut his burners and threw out the air brakes in an attempt to cause an overshoot, but the missile was already too close and its proximity fuse detonated less than ten metres from its yawning air intakes.
Flames and thousands of razor-sharp pieces of spinning shrapnel were sucked into the aircraft’s engines, tearing them apart in a thunderous, chugging explosion that ripped the aircraft in two. The sight of an enemy craft so comprehensively destroyed would normally have sent a surging thrill of adrenaline through Requer’s body, but he felt nothing as he watched the burning remains of his victim plummeting downwards.
Requer released his control column as he searched his scope for the third contact. Had his missile downed it already? He couldn’t see it, but it had been close to where his second kill had gone down. Requer knew he should make a visual check for the third target, but it was all he could do to keep his eyes focused on the landscape around him. The idea that an enemy craft might be lining up a shot on him concerned him not at all, and a vacant smile spread across his face. The grey fog that filled his mind soothed him and kept any thoughts of the aircraft he had shot down at bay.
That contented smile never left Ptelos Requer’s face as he flew his Firelance into the side of the mountain.
FIRE AND SMOKE filled the crew compartment, and Kai gagged, his consciousness returning to his body with a violent jolt. His flesh felt suddenly heavy, and he let out a cold breath as he looked up into Atharva’s eyes. Flecks of winter white danced in his pupils, fading like a dream as their natural colours restored themselves.
A long tear in the aircraft’s fuselage billowed smoke and Kai saw the jagged stub of the cutter’s wing hanging by a collection of thick cables and dangling struts. The heavy cutter shuddered and lurched like a dying bird, dropping through the sky at high speed towards an unforgiving ground. The breath was snatched from Kai’s throat and the cold of the mountains hit him like a physical blow. Roaring winds tore through the crew compartment, fanning the flames and doing its best to sweep its occupants from within.
Kiron and Gythua clung onto broken stanchions, and Severian pressed himself to the side of the aircraft. Tagore and Subha were braced against the aircraft’s interior, while Atharva stood before him. The Thousand Sons warrior held onto the stowage racks above him and pressed himself against Kai to keep him from being snatched away by the wind.
‘I can’t hold her in the air!’ shouted Asubha from the cockpit. ‘We’re going down!’
‘How did you do that?’ shouted Kai over the deafening howl of the wind.
Atharva ignored the question and said, ‘Do not do that again. You could have stranded both our consciousnesses out there in that pilot’s skull when he hit the mountain.’
‘You made that pilot shoot down his own aircraft.’
Atharva shook his head. ‘No, all I did was show him something that more closely matched his parameters of an enemy target and let him make the decision. I altered nothing of his own essential thought processes. I am powerful, but I am not that powerful.’
Kai thought back to what Evander Gregoras had told him of the cognoscynths, but realised that Atharva’s abilities had only steered the pilot’s thought processes, not altered them.
A subtle, but important difference.
Right now it seemed irrelevant, as the ground rushed to meet them with terrible inevitability. Towers that seemed tiny and distant from the air were now horribly close, and Kai could see a rushing collage of ramshackle structures speeding below them, close enough to make out individual buildings and streets as Asubha fought to control their descent.
The cutter made a last ditch effort to evade gravity’s clutches, but that was a fight it could never win. With one wing missing and a hole blown in its side, the cutter slammed into the ground with a thunderous impact of splintering metal that seemed to g
o on for ever and ever.
FIFTEEN
The Hunters Assemble
Reluctant Petitioners
The Clan Lord
YASU NAGASENA IS well known in this city, and no one challenges him when he passes beneath the Obsidian Arch on his way towards the tower at its heart. It has been a long time since he trod its empty boulevards and gazed in admiration at the sublime constructions that no one beyond its walls even knows exists. The palace masons, perhaps knowing that the City of Sight’s inhabitants seldom venture beyond the walls of their prison, spared no expense and employed every subtlety of their art to render a city as beautiful and harmonious as it was isolated.
‘I wonder who named this place,’ muses Nagasena, looking up at the gilded capitals and ornamented pediment of the Emerald Ossuary. The bones of Terra’s astro-telepaths are interred within, together with those who did not survive the final rituals to render them fully capable of service. It is a place of sadness rendered in joyous architecture.
‘The Ossuary?’ asks Kartono.
‘No, the City of Sight.’
‘Someone with a perverse sense of humour.’
‘Perhaps,’ replies Nagasena. ‘Or perhaps someone who appreciated the true value of what these poor, blind souls do here.’
Kartono shrugs, uncaring and uncomfortable at being here. Nagasena does not blame him. To his bondsman, this place is anathema. Kartono is hated by most people, for reasons they can never fully articulate, but in this place, those who encounter him hate him and know exactly why.
Kartono makes them truly blind.
The streets are deserted. Everyone in the City of Sight knows they here, sensing the empty hole in the constant chatter that throngs the air with invisible voices. They are a silence in a city of voices, and they do not pass unnoticed.
Nagasena sees them first, but it is Kartono that gives them name.
‘Black Sentinels,’ he says, watching the armoured squad marching towards them with rifles held at their shoulders. ‘Golovko’s men.’
The Outcast Dead Page 25
