On Wings of Blood

by Warhammer 40K

  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.

  In the driving mirror, he saw the fliers in the back do the same.

  Theda Old Town, 07.35

  The service had finished, and the faithful were filing out, most stopping to light candles at the votary shrine. Candles for the lost, or those who might soon be.

  As usual, as she did every morning, Beqa Meyer lit three: one for Gart, one for her brother, Eido, and one for whoever might need it.

  She was tired. Night shift at the manufactory had really taken it out of her. It had been a struggle not to sleep through the hierarch’s reading. If she’d been any warmer, she surely would have dozed off. But her coat was too thin: a second-hand summer coat, not even lined. Perhaps next month, with her next wages and what she had put aside, she’d be able to pick up a thermal jacket or better from the Munitorum almshouse.

  As she turned from the candle-stand, she knocked against someone waiting their turn to light an offering. It was the man she’d seen by the church door on her way in for the service. Tall, dark-haired, an offworlder. He had a sad face. He was dressed like a soldier, and had that scent of machine oil and fyceline about him.

  ‘My pardon, mamzel,’ he said at once. She nodded ‘no harm’, but kept a distance as she went by. He’d been talking to himself when she’d first seen him. A stranger, maybe with battle-psychosis. That was the sort of trouble she didn’t need.

  In fact, the only thing she needed was her rest. She could be home by a quarter to the hour, and that would give her three hours’ sleep before she’d have to rise and dress for her day job at the pier. When that was over, at evening bell, she’d have an hour to nap before the night shift at the manu­factory began.

  She hurried out through the templum doors into a cold street where full daylight now shone, and made her weary way back towards her hab.

  Over the Thedan Peninsula, 07.37

  ‘Hunt Two, you’re making oily smoke.’

  The flight leader’s anxious voice cut over the vox. There was no immediate response from Hunt Two. Darrow sat up in his seat and scanned around in the morning light. The scrub plains and grass breaks of the Peninsula swept by, two thousand metres under him, a wide expanse of greys, dull whites and speckled greens.

  Down at his four were Hunt Eight and Hunt Eleven, with Hunt Leader running to starboard on the same deck as Darrow himself. Hunt Two and Hunt Sixteen were off and low at Darrow’s port.

  Six planes. Six planes were all that was left from the engagement. They’d left all the others as flaming pyres littering the snowcaps of the Makanite Mountains.

  And it might only have been five. Darrow knew he surely would have been chalked by that white killer had not Hunt Leader, sweeping back in a desperate effort to rally his few remaining machines, run in at the last moment, cannons blazing, and driven it off.

  Major Heckel – Hunt Leader – kept asking Darrow if he was okay as they pulled what remained of the formation back together. Heckel sounded extraordinarily worried, as if he felt Darrow might have simply scared himself to death in the frantic chase. But it was probably shock and the ache of responsibility. So many cadets dead. One of the squadron’s black days.

  And there had been so many in the last few months. Darrow wondered how officers like the major co
ped. But then Heckel was only three years Darrow’s senior, and had gained his rank through the accelerated promotion caused by severe losses.

  ‘Hunt Two. Respond.’ Even over the distorting vox, that tone in Heckel’s voice was clear as day.

  ‘Hunt Leader, I’m all right.’

  He wasn’t. Darrow had a good angle down at Hunt Two. Not only was he cooking out a steady stream of grubby smoke, he was losing altitude and speed.

  What was it? Coolant? Smouldering electrics? Some other lethal eventuality Darrow hadn’t even thought of?

  How long had they got? By his own map and bearing they were forty-six minutes out from Theda MAB North, longer if Hunt Two maintained its rate of deceleration. Darrow’s fuel gauge still showed full, but by Heckel’s calculation, none of them were likely to have more than about fifty minutes in them. Especially not Darrow, given his excessive aerobatics.

  ‘Hunt Flight…’ Heckel’s voice came over the comm. He paused, as if frantically trying to make up his mind. ‘Hunt Flight, we’re going to divert to Theda South. That should shave fifteen, maybe twenty minutes off the flying time. Confirm and line up on me.’

  Darrow confirmed and heard the others do so too. It was a good decision. Flight command would rather get six Wolfcubs back at the wrong MAB than none back at all.

  Darrow switched channels and heard Heckel banter back and forth with Operations as the reroute was authorised.

  Then he heard the knocking again.

  He was about to call it in when Hunt Eight began screeching over the vox.

  ‘Hunt Two! Look at Hunt Two!’

  Darrow craned his neck around. The wounded Cub was gently arcing down away from the formation. Its smoke trail was thicker and darker now. It looked heavy and sluggish, as if much more gravity was weighing down on it than on the other planes.

  ‘Hunt Two! Respond!’ Darrow heard Hunt Leader call. ‘Hunt Two! Respond!’

  A faint crackle. ‘–think I can hold the–’

  ‘Hunt Two! Bail, for Throne’s sake, Edry! Cadet Edry… Clear your plane now before you lose too much height!’

  Nothing. The Wolfcub was just a dot at the end of a line of smoke far behind and below them now.

  ‘Edry! Cadet Edry!’

  Come on, Edry. Get out of there. Darrow strained to see. With their fuel loads so low, none of them could risk turning back. Come on, Edry. Come on! Let us see a ’chute! Let us see a ’chute, Edry, before–

  A small flash, far away in the grey-green quilt of the landscape. A small flash of fire and no ’chute at all.

  Theda MAB South, 07.40

  By the time the transport turned off the highway onto the field approach way, it had been joined in convoy by three others. They waited in turn to be checked off by weary-looking PDF sentries at the west gate and then rumbled on down a steep cutting onto the field basin.

  Commander Bree Jagdea raised herself up on the hard bench of the jolting transport and looked around. Theda Military Air-Base South covered over twenty square kilometres of low land south-west of the city itself. She could smell the coast a few kilometres north, and the sea air had layered a light morning haze across the field that the sun was just beginning to cook off.

  Vast defences ringed the field. Ditches and dykes, blast fences and stake lines, armoured nests for Hydra batteries, pillbox emplacements for raised missile cylinders. There was a patched perimeter track, busy at this hour with military trucks and weapons carriers moving both ways, and a leaner inner ring of anti-air batteries. To the south end of the field stood the great housing hangars and rockcrete armouries, to the north Operations control and the stark derricks and pylons of the vox, auspex and modar systems.

  A hash-shape of crossed airstrips covered the main inner area, the primary runways large enough to manage the big reciprocating-engined bombers the locals flew. Jagdea saw a few of them parked on a hardstand in the distance. Magogs, big and old and ugly. They’d used them back home on Phantine during the final offensive, desperate to get aloft anything that could fly and fight. Here they were a standard bombing mainstay. No wonder Enothis had been punished so hard.

  But most of the local machines had been shipped out to clear the field for the newcomers.

  Jagdea and her flight had arrived in darkness the night before. This was their first proper look at the base. It would serve; it would have to.

  Work gangs from the Munitorum were already busy making field conversions. Labourers were proofing up more hard-wall silos for the arriving machines, and in one place were beginning to dozer up one of the old runways to make additional parking bunkers. The newcomers’ aircraft, over seventy of them already, were dark shapes under netting in the clusters of anti-blast revetments to the east. There was a muddle of activity – chugging generators, clunking excavators, bare-chested rock-drill operators, growing heaps of spoil – all across the inner landscape of the field.

  Jagdea glanced at the chronograph strapped around the thick cuff of her flightsuit. They were right on time. Their transport had left the perimeter track and was bumping towards the nearest of the huge drome hangars.

  ‘Up and ready, Umbra Flight,’ she ordered. The eleven aviators under her command gathered up their kits as the transport rolled to a stop.

  Jagdea jumped down and took a deep breath. ‘Here we go,’ she muttered to Milan Blansher, her number two. Blansher was a grizzled veteran in his forties, his career tally of twenty-two kills the finest in Umbra Flight. He said little, but she trusted him with her life. He had unusually pale, distant eyes for a Phantine and sported a thick grey moustache, partly to lend himself an air of avuncular seniority, mostly to help conceal the ridge of white scar tissue where a piece of shell casing had split his face from his right nostril, down across both lips, to the point of his chin.

  ‘Here we go indeed,’ he murmured, and hoisted his kit onto his shoulder. The others clambered down. Van Tull, Espere, Larice Asche with her hair up in a non-regulation bun, Del Ruth, Clovin, the boy Marquall, Waldon, forever whistling a melody-less tune, Zemmic, jangling with his cluster of lucky charms, Cordiale, Ranfre. Almost all of them made the superstitious bob down to touch the ground.

  Vander Marquall didn’t. He was gazing across the field, watching three machines of the Enothian Commonwealth Air Force crank up for launch. They were powerful, twin-engine delta-form planes, an Interceptor pattern known as Cyclones. Started from trolley-mounted primer coils, their massive piston engines sucked and thundered into life, kicking out plumes of blue smoke from the exhaust vents as the heavy props began to turn to a flickering blur. They rocked impatiently at their blocks as the ground crews rolled the carts aside. Marquall could see the two-man crews in the glass nose cockpits making final checks. Though most Commonwealth wings had been withdrawn to make way for the offworlders, a flight of these Cyclones had been left on station to fly top-cover tours while the Imperials bedded in.

  ‘Coming, Marquall?’ Jagdea asked. He turned and nodded.

  ‘Yes, commander.’ Marquall was the youngest aviator in Umbra by four years, and the only one with no operational combat experience. Everyone else had seen at least some action during the Phantine liberation. Marquall had still been in the accelerated program at Hessenville when hostilities ended. He was eager and, Jagdea believed, reasonably gifted, but only time would really tell his worth. He had the classic saturnine good looks of a Phantine male, and a white, toothy grin that people either found winningly charming or unpleasantly cocky.

  Umbra Flight strode off across the apron towards the hangar, followed by another flight of aviators spilling down from a second transport. Jagdea took a glance back at their own ride. In the cab, the Munitorum driver nodded briefly to her. She could clearly see how one half of his face was lost in burn scarring, as if soft, pink rose petals had been plastered across his skin.

  They walked into the vast drome hangar. The air inside smelled col
d and damp, with a tang of promethium. The interior space had been cleared, except for a lone Shrike under tarps in a corner, and a stage of flakboards supported by empty munition crates had been raised along the west wall. A chart stand and a hololithic displayer had been set up on the staging.

  A group of more than twenty aviators was already waiting inside. They stood near the stage, their kit bags at their feet. Like the men who had come off the second truck, they were Navy pilots, wearing grey flight armour and black coats. Some of them sported augmetic eyes. They greeted their colleagues from the second truck, but both groups looked dubiously at the Phantine as they came in, and stayed apart from them in segregated groups. Jagdea regarded them casually as Umbra Flight dropped their bags and made a huddle. The Navy fliers kept glancing their way. Jagdea knew the Phantine Corps was unusual, and that set them apart from the regular Imperial aviators. It undoubtedly would mean rivalry and a pecking order, she accepted.

  They were tough-looking brutes, sturdy and thickset, with pale skins and cropped hair. Most of their flightsuits were reinforced with plating sections or coats of chainmail, and their heavy leather coats were often fur-trimmed. Many had ugly facial scars. Several displayed medal ribbons and other honour sashes.

  ‘Sixty-Third Imperial Fighter Wing,’ Blansher whispered discreetly in her ear. ‘The Sundogs, as they like to be styled. I believe that one there, the big fellow with the flight commander pins, is Leksander Godel. Forty kills last count.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve heard of him,’ she answered lightly.

  ‘The other bunch are the 409 Raptors, I believe,’ Blansher went on, ‘which would make that unassuming fellow there Wing Leader Ortho Blaguer.’

  ‘The same?’

  ‘The very same. One hundred and ten kills. See, he’s looking at us.’

  ‘Then let’s look somewhere else,’ Jagdea said and turned away.

  ‘Orbis at your six!’ Pilot Officer Zemmic suddenly cried out loudly, his voice echoing round the drome. Dismounting from another transport just now drawn up outside, a dozen more Phantine fliers were marching into the hangar. Jagdea felt instant relief at the sight of familiar faces. Orbis Flight, comrades and friends. At the head of them strolled their commander, Wilhem Hayyes.