las. The stalk tanks were ready for them this time.
“We’re taking hits!” Lacombe screamed. Terrible noises: fracturing metal, shattering plastek, the
blasting tone of an engine-out alarm. Greta slewed badly, the wind clawing at her, the controls like
iron.
Something exploded in the compartment underneath him. Viltry heard Judd shrieking. A grown
man, heavy as a bear, shrieking like a child.
“We’re losing it!” Lacombe yelled.
Vibrations, shaking them like toys. Viltry’s juddering teeth bit his own tongue-tip. He fought to
hold on. The engines were making a terrible, ailing note.
He saw the gorge mouth, the yellow machines, the lasfire hosing into the sky towards him. Wing
puncture. Tail damage. Naxol was shouting from the nose turret, virtually inaudible over the raging
sounds.
Viltry launched his wing-mounts and saw them puff away on streaks of white smoke. Stalk tanks
tore apart, flung into the air, severed machine-limbs scattering. The cockpit canopy shattered, and
wind slammed into his face, full of glassite chips.
They came out through the gates of the gorge. The engines howled, two of them churning black
smoke. Climb now, climb, climb…
Battered by the wind in his face, Viltry glanced around. Many cockpit instruments were broken,
burned out. Lacombe hung in his harness. One side of his head, and the seat-rest behind it, were
missing.
Fate’s wheel.
The instruments told him nothing. But Viltry had flown Marauders long enough to know the feel
and the sound of a dying bird.
“Eject! Eject!” he ordered, though he knew they were far too low already.
79
The ragged, beige wasteland came up under them rapidly. Slicks of sand, rocky outcrops, saltpans.
So huge, so fast, there didn’t seem to be any sky left any more.
Viltry closed his eyes.
80
DAY 260
Theda Old Town, 00.05
The templum was all but empty. A few glow lamps were lit along the nave. The main light came
from the stand of fluttering votive candles.
“Is there anything you need?” the hierarch asked gently.
Beqa was sitting at the end of a pew stall. She looked up at him. “I’m just waiting,” she said.
“It’s late.”
“I know. I know it is. Can I stay here?”
“Of course, daughter,” he said. “As long as you wish. I will be in the reliquary if you require my
offices.”
When he had gone, she sat where she was for a few minutes more.
Late. It was very late. She’d waited for him past the end of her shift, men waited on the seafront
for another hour as the daylight faded. She knew she should have sent a note to the factory chief.
Her pay would be docked for missing a scheduled shift.
She had thought about going to the airfield, but realised that she didn’t know which one.
Besides, the trams didn’t run out that far any more, and she had no money for hire-transport. And
they’d never let a civilian in through the gates.
She rose and walked to the votive stand. Three small coins in the cup, three fresh candles from
the box. She fixed them in place beside the dozens of others already burning, and took up a taper.
One for Gart, one for Eido.
One for—
A main door opened somewhere and slammed. There was a blast of cold air. All the little candle
flames blew out.
81
THE LAST OASIS
LAKE GOCEL
Imperial year 773.M41, day 261 - day 264
82
DAY 261
Lake Gocel FSB, 05.32
“Get up! Wake the hell up,” the urgent whisper said.
Vander Marquall blinked and rolled over. Van Tull was leaning over him in the violet gloom of
the tent, shaking him by the shoulder.
“What? What?”
“Cover drill!” the older pilot hissed. He tapped the aluminoid bracelet around his wrist. “Didn’t
your alarm wake you?”
Marquall yawned and shook his head. He glanced down at his own metal strap, which was
dormant. Van Tull’s had a red rune illuminated on its cover.
“I think mine’s broken,” Marquall decided.
Van Tull scowled at Marquall, then took him firmly by the wrist and unclasped the bracelet. He
studied it for a moment, then tossed it back to the boy.
“You’ll have to get a new one from stores. Not now, later. Come on.”
Van Tull opened the flap-seal of the habitent and let light and warm air in. He was already
dressed. Marquall pulled on his breeches and looked around for his boots.
“Come on!” Van Tull called. Marquall yanked on his boots, but there was no time to fasten
them. He hurried outside after Van Tull.
The habitent they shared was one of almost a hundred and fifty camo-skinned shelter domes that
clogged the ground under the stands of dripping kinderwood trees. Even though it was early still, the
air was humid. Bright sunlight filtered down through the lacy leaf canopy and the blast nets strung
between the tree trunks, like a roof over the shelters.
The pair of them ran through the molded shadows, keeping carefully to the flakboard planking
where the path crossed the frequent marshy pits and swamp pools. Scops hissed around them like
vox static.
As they ran, Marquall saw dark shapes loom out of the twilight groves around them, dark shapes
deliberately concealed. More shelters, camouflaged supply dumps, Hydra AA batteries where the
crews waited silent and alert, the veiled shapes of warplanes under shimmer netting.
They reached the shelter and scrambled inside. The pilots of Umbra and a gang of fitters were
huddled within.
“Overslept?” asked Jagdea.
“My fault, commander,” said Van Tull.
“Really?”
“Marquall’s tag was defective and I was slow waking him.”
“I think that rather makes it Marquall’s fault, doesn’t it?” Jagdea said, looking sourly at the halfdressed
boy with his unlaced boots.
“Sorry, mamzel.”
“Shut it,” Jagdea said.
Human silence draped them. Outside the blast shelter, the forest trembled with birdsong and odd
animal cries.
Marquall had already decided he didn’t like this place. Hot, wet, stinking of rotten fruit. His skin
itched. He’d seen bugs the size of fingers crawling on the walls of his habitent and, during the night,
swarms of silk-winged beetles flitting around the down-lights of the camp’s stealth lamps.
83
The birds fell silent. Marquall heard the low whir of a nearby Hydra platform as it traversed
slowly. Then the sound of jet wash, low, passing overhead. The distinctive warbling note of enemy
vector-thrusters. In a moment, it was gone.
A muffled vox signal. “Understood,” Blansher said, removing his headset. “All clear,” he
reported. Relieved conversations started up, activity resumed. The occupants of the shelter began to
file out. The runes on all their bracelets had turned green.
“Begin day duties, please,” Jagdea announced. “Briefing at 06.30, but get fed and washed
quickly. Snap calls can come in at any time. Marquall?”
“Yes, commander.”
“Go to the stores right now, and get a new tag. Before you leave stores, press the test switch and
make sure it works. If it doesn’t, get another one. Do you understand?”
“I do, commander.”
“Funny, I thought you’d understood last night when I told you the first time.”
“I was slack, commander. It won’t happen again.”
“Carry on,” she said. He turned. “Wait!”
He sighed, and turned back. She was frowning. “Closer. Right here. Turn round.”
She examined the skin of his shoulders where the vest exposed it, then pulled up the hem and
looked at his back.
“You have a dermal condition I should know about?” she asked.
“No, mamzel.”
“Then it’s scop bites. They say some people get them worse than others. The sweet-tasting ones.
Are you sweet-tasting, Marquall?”
“Don’t know, mamzel.”
“The scops seem to think so. See the base medicae while you’re about it.”
“Yes, mamzel.”
Marquall laced up his boots properly and then trudged through the base. Now the risk of
discovery had passed, the place felt more like a functioning air-base. Personnel hurried about on the
boardwalks, and teams of fitters unwrapped hidden machines and resumed work on them. The smell
of promethium almost overwhelmed the scent of the swamp.
The forward strike base, a makeshift encampment, lurked secretly in the kinderwood forests on
the southern shore of Lake Gocel. The lake itself, immense and nearly a thousand kilometres east to
west, was fed by headwaters coming down from the Makanites, and in turn emptied into the Saroja
River to drain into the sea on the far-away western coast. This great system of rivers and lakes,
around which flourished a gigantic swathe of rainforest, formed a margin between the Interior
Desert to the south and the scrubby, temperate peninsula to the north. An enveloping green belt in
which they could hide and then strike at anything that passed over.
The vast lake itself, so wide the far shore was all but a smudge, was visible between the thinning
shore trees, a broad expanse of sunlit green. The entire territory was swampy and bug-thick:
miasmal black ooze and pools of stagnant water interlacing the jumbled kinder groves. Beyond the
lake, to the east, Marquall glimpsed the lazy flanks of the Makanites, dust-yellow in the rising sun.
Navy pioneer units and Munitorum workcrews had built a surprising amount at Gocel. Prefab
hab modules, defence batteries, bunkers and covered hangars nestled under the trees and the
ubiquitous shimmer nets. Modar stacks and vox masts poked discreetly above the leaf cover, or had
been raised as cable-form aerials, cleated to the trees themselves. Clearings had been cut, dozens of
them, each one levelled and decked with heavyweight vulcanised matting: thick grey material rolled
out to form temporary hardstands. On each stand sat a warplane: the ten Thunderbolts of Umbra
Flight, the twelve of the Navy 409th “Raptors”, and the eight Lightnings from the 786th “Spyglass”
recon. Unless unshrouded for launch or landing, each matt-decked clearing was all but invisible
from the air thanks to the camo-awnings.
84
Bulk landers, for support crew transfers, base supply, and fuel and munitions deliveries, used the
wide, muddy beach of the lake shore, not needing to stay on station for more than a few minutes.
There was no way a permanent large-scale matt-deck could be concealed from the air. Sentinel
power lifters, striding through the mire, did all the base’s heavy lifting and carrying.
The FSB had a decent ring of Tarantula sentry guns watching the forest around it, as well as two
dozen Manticore and Hydra anti-aircraft batteries. With the PDF troopers needed to man all these,
the thirty pilots, the fitter teams and forward operations personnel, Lake Gocel FSB had a
population of over two hundred.
“Hey, killer. Where you going?”
Marquall looked round and saw Larice Asche jogging up behind him along the flak boarding.
“Stores,” he said.
Privately, he was in awe of Flight Lieutenant Larice Asche. She seemed so damn tough. Jagdea
was a multi-kill vet too, but he mainly respected her because she was in charge. Asche, an ace
before the liberation of Phantine had even finished, was the real thing, respected by all for her sheer
talent. And young, too. Blansher had a huge tally, but he was an old guy. Larice seemed not much
older than Marquall himself.
She was lean and gamine, with bony cheeks and a vicious, toothy grin. The previous afternoon,
before they’d shipped out to Gocel, she’d had her famous blonde hair shaved down to a finger
width. “Jungle lice,” she’d announced, adding, “do not want them.”
“The med-station’s near stores, isn’t it?” she asked him.
“I think so.”
“I’ll tag along. So much for precautions.”
“What?”
She ran a hand through her brutally cropped hair. “For this.”
“How so?”
She pulled off her jacket and showed him the multiple bites on her bare forearms. “Scops,” he
said. “So they say.”
“Me too,” he said, dropping his flight coat off one arm and showing her his shoulder.
“Bitching,” she said.
The Munitorum station was a ring of hardened prefabs standing in the blue shadows of a
massive frond-tree. They went inside, into the air-scrubbed cool. The duty attendant, his face full of
ancient augmetics, looked up from his cogitator.
“I need a new tag,” Marquall said.
“I believe, pilot officer, you mean you need a new tag please, senior.”
“Ah… what?”
“I am Senior Lirek. You will address me civilly,” Marquall glanced at his chronometer. “There’s
a war on,” he said. Asche sniggered.
“Indeed there is. And has civility run out? Where would the Navy be without the constant efforts
of the Munitorum?”
“I have no idea,” said Marquall.
“Ah! Indeed!” Lirek said, rising to his feet and adjusting his heavy optics manually. “You expert
us to be at your beck and call, and want this and want that but—”
“Do you know who that is?” Larice hissed at the old man.
“Uh… no.”
“Larice—” Marquall began nervously.
“That’s only Marquall,” Asche continued, her eyes fake-wide. “Killer Marquall. The one who…
you know…”
“No,” mumbled Lirek. “I’m not sure I do—”
“The one who made the kill!” said Asche.
85
“The kill?”
“The kill. The kill. For Throne’s sake, and you talk about respect…”
“No, well, yes,” stammered the Munitorum senior suddenly. “I forget myself. Your device, sir?”
“It doesn’t work,” said Marquall, handing his bracelet over.
“So it doesn’t. A terrible oversight. Wait one moment, if you will.”
Lirek came back with a fresh tag unit. “Here, sir. I have tested it. In the event of a cover
warning, it will illuminate, and, as required, silently alert or wake you by a gentle, non-harmful
electric pulse.”
Marquall signed for it. “Thank you,” he said.
“I live to serve, sir,” Lirek said, his tortoise-head bowing.
Outside, Asche started sniggering.
“What did you do that for?”
“It got you your tag, didn’t it?” she asked.
“Yeah. But you lied.”
“Have you made a kill or not?”
“Yes…”
“Then I didn’t lie. What does he know?”
“You’re bad, Larice Asche.”
“So they say.”
Next door to the stores, a long prefab huddled under the shimmer hoods. A tall man in early
middle age, well-made and masculine, sat on the entrance steps. His arms were folded on his knees,
and his head rested on his arms. His hair was matted with what looked like dry clay, forming
dreadlocks. He wore the blue silk robes of an ayatani, one of the Bead’s priesthood.
“Father,” said Marquall. “Is the medicae in?”
“He’s out,” answered the priest.
“Maybe we can leave him a note?” Marquall suggested to Asche.
