towards the camp.
Over the forests, 09.02
Kitting up fast, as if it was a snap call, Jagdea lifted her waiting Bolt off its matt on a standard
vector launch, and climbed to join Del Ruth and Van Tull, who were in a holding pattern as per
Operations’ advice.
“Three, Six? Umbra Lead. Sorry for the delay. Marquall suffered a misfire and he’s out. So
you’ll have to make do with me.”
“No problem, Lead,” Van Tull voxed.
“Always a pleasure, mamzel,” Del Ruth came back.
“Let’s get on with the game,” Jagdea said. Serial Zero-Two felt fine, loose and finessed despite
the unexpected scramble. “Let’s make our level four thousand, cruise speed, turning one-one-nine.”
“Got that, Lead.”
“Understood.”
“Umbra Three, take the point.”
“Four-A, Lead,” Van Tull voxed back.
They formed a flat V as they climbed hard, with Van Tull at the apex, Jagdea at his port eight.
The air was clear and visibility generous, but it was still cold enough for them to be making vapour
from wingtips and exhausts. Auspex showed nothing in the sky, except the three Raptors sixty
kilometres east.
Jagdea felt uncomfortable. She hadn’t expected to be flying so soon, not before midday, given
the original schedule. She’d eaten a full breakfast and was still digesting. Pressure was doing
nauseous things to her guts. She tweaked the air-mix and felt a little better.
They cruised for an hour, snagging a wide arc eastwards, until the thickness of the forest cover
petered away and they were out across the scrublands of the sierra that marked the hinterland
between rainforest and desert. The view was huge. Sundogs from the bright daylight hovered in the
canopy lense. Open, coarse land slipped by underneath them, scabbed with rocks, thistle, cactus
trees.
“I have a hard metal return, point two west, four kilometres,” Van Tull voxed. “It’s cold.”
“Let’s check it,” Jagdea replied. They turned tight, pulling a quarter G, but it was enough for
Jagdea to feel a twinge of cramp in her stomach.
“You okay, One?” Del Ruth called.
“Four-A,” Jagdea replied.
“Little late on the turn there, s’all I was wondering.”
“Too much breakfast,” Jagdea said.
96
They came up on the contact, and made a low pass. Straggled out over the ragged crest of a dune
sea basin, two Imperial tanks and four troop carriers, silent and still. No sign of damage. Some
hatches were open. Auspex showed no heat sources. No engines, no life.
“They’re dead,” Van Tull voxed.
“Let’s come around again,” Jagdea said.
They banked west, and came in a second time, lower now, throttles idling so they were almost
gliding in. A lingering look. Jagdea saw how the wind-blown sands had begun to cover the
machines. She saw what could have been a body, a lump in the dust beside one of the carriers.
The enemy hadn’t done this, or rather, it hadn’t done this directly. This was not the aftermath of
an air strike or an ambush. This was extinction brought on by the unforgiving desert. What had they
run out of? Fuel? Water? Either one would have killed them. Jagdea supposed it had been fuel first.
Grinding to a halt, dry and gritty, power gone. Then heat and thirst. Had any of them tried to walk?
The bodies would never be found now.
How miserable. How pointless. Had they known how close they’d come? Another sixty
kilometres, and they’d have reached the forest line. She hoped they hadn’t. Death was one thing.
Death tormented by the knowledge that salvation was just out of reach…
The vox burbled, snapping her alert.
“Umbra, Umbra. Assist request from Raptor Flight, urgent!”
“Coordinates, please,” Jagdea replied. The squirted data flashed up on her main display.
“Received, Operations. We are inbound, nine minutes.”
They banked away and started to climb, opening their throttles.
“Punch it,” Jagdea said.
Lake Gocel FSB, 09.31
“Bites still bothering you?”
Marquall, sitting by the lake shore, glanced up. It was the priest, Kautas. The brisk inshore wind
tugged at his blue vestments.
“I was under the impression you scarcely cared,” Marquall replied.
The ayatani shrugged. “I never asked for this. Actually, I’m not sure what it was I asked for. Not
this, anyway. But it is my lot. I am reminded by the regular dispatches from my church that I have a
job to do. A calling. So try me.”
“You seem very jolly this morning.”
Kautas sat down beside Marquall. “An illusion, I assure you. I’m the very same noxious bastard
as I was yesterday.”
Kautas slid a metal flask from his robe pocket and swigged. Marquall smelled liquor. The priest
didn’t offer any to him.
“Ah,” said Marquall.
“Ah what?”
“Nothing.”
“Sounded to me like you’d had some great epiphany, fly-boy.”
“My name is Vander Marquall. And no, it wasn’t a… whatever you just said. I just realised why
you were in a better mood.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Enlighten me, Vander Marken.”
“Marquall. If you start drinking at breakfast, father, no wonder you’re happy by nine o’clock.”
Kautas chuckled and took another swig. “Who said I started drinking at breakfast? That’s the
behaviour of a hopeless drunkard. Young man, I started drinking many years ago.”
Marquall shook his head. “With respect, what are you doing here?”
97
“I saw you here, alone on the beach, looking pissed off, so I thought I’d come and share your
gloom. I have an appetite for melancholy.”
“I meant here. Enothis. Lake Gocel.”
Kautas prised a pebble from the shoreline mud and tossed it out into the lake. He had a good
arm. It went a long way, and sent a ripple out across the oily green water.
“Why did that stone land there?” Kautas asked.
“You threw it.”
“Yes but…” his voice trailed off. “No, you’re right. I threw it. It’s too bloody early for clever
philosophical analogies. Or too late. Whatever. I’m here because this is where I stopped. It’s a
matter I intend to bring up with the God-Emperor, when at last I am granted celestial audience
before the Golden Throne as part of the Beati’s magnificent host.”
“Good luck.”
“Luck has nothing to do with it. It’s all about faith.”
“You don’t seem to have much, father. You seem very… bitter.”
“Do I? How crap is that? I meant to supply spiritual reinforcement to this station. And medical
assistance. Actually, I think the latter is why they sent me here. I was a medicae first, before I
became an ayatani.”
Marquall looked at him. “Take it from me, you’re not excelling at either.”
“Yeah, well…” sighed Kautas. “Stuff you too.”
They sat in silence for a long moment. Scops hissed around them. At length, Kautas cleared his
throat and said, “Go on, then. Test my worth. What’s this mood about?”
Marquall smiled sourly. “A plane. A woman.”
“Planes I don’t do,” said Kautas. “Noisy great buggers. Can’t help you there. Women, more my
field. Spurned? Unrequited? Inadequate?”
“Whoah, whoah… the first. Spurned. Last night she was all over me like a body bag. This
morning—”
“Well, you must learn to get over it…”
“I hadn’t finished.”
“Well. Uhm. Even given that, just get over it.”
“Get over it?”
Kautas nodded sagely.
“Father, you’re really bad at this.”
“Am I? Shit.”
There was another long pause. Kautas helped himself to another swig.
“Okay then,” Marquall said. “You go. Why are you so screwed up?”
Kautas scratched his head, then sighed. At length, he said, “Because I wanted to be there. Right
there. When she came back. And I can’t, because I’m stuck here.”
“Who?” Marquall asked.
“The Beati, Vander Marquall. The Beati.”
Over the desert, 09.32
They came in low and hard, engines really cooking. Jagdea was pleased to see that they’d shaved
nearly a minute off the projected intercept time.
Raptor Flight had found a retreat convoy in the open desert, and had been watching over it when
an attack had thundered in. Stalk tanks and heavier tread armour, fully powered and fuelled, coming
up hard on the limping Imperial group.
The Raptors had already loosed their rocket complement, securing some decent kills. Burning
armour wreckage littered the dunes.
98
“Good to see you, Umbra,” voxed Raptor One. “We could do with a little more Hellstrike over
here.”
“Roger that leader. Coming around,” Jagdea replied.
The Raptors, which had been doing their damnedest with cannon runs, pulled off high, leaving
the air open for Umbra. The Raptors were stark, black machines. They had refused a respray on
arrival at Gocel. It was a pride thing, apparently.
Below, the enemy tank squadrons were pluming across the desert, lurching over dunes, firing
shot after shot from their main weapons at the scurrying Imperials.
Jagdea saw a Chimera go up, and a Hydra platform shred into flames. Blast vapour sheened the
air: white smoke trails, puffs of chalky flare from barrel discharges, rising scuds of black flamesmoke
from wrecks.
Sporadic tracer fire rose from the enemy AA carriers.
“Let’s get lucky,” Jagdea said.
Van Tull went in first, whipping through the mosaic of smoke and vapour. Tracer shot laddered
over at him, falling short. He loosed his missile load and pulled out hard at the same moment.
A blitz of flame lit up the desert floor. Two enemy tanks atomised, their warloads kicking off.
Del Ruth was right on his tail, snaking in. She flew edgy, nicking around the flares of flak. Her
rockets seared out, and crippled a tank, shredding off its tracks. Instead of pulling out, she stayed
low and opened up with her quad-cannons, raking a troop carrier to bits. Then she pulled out wide,
whooping over the vox.
Jagdea barrel-rolled onto the approach, setting her wing-load live. She felt like heaving, but
suppressed her stomach.
A tank… too close. Another, lined up. She let it slide through her scope and fired. On twists of
white smoke, her rockets lit off.
She was already rising off the targets when the tank detonated.
She came up long. Right into the bats.
Lake Gocel FSB, 09.33
Kautas sniffed thoughtfully. “Do you know what’s happening on Herodor right now?” he asked.
“Herodor? Where’s that?”
“Down in the Khan Group, about nine weeks from here.”
Marquall shrugged. “No idea. More fighting?”
Kautas sighed. “It’s a trait I’ve often observed in the—excuse me saying this—common fighting
man. He seems to have precious little idea of the big picture. Of the great scheme of things. He
seems content to leave that to tacticians and nobility, and the priesthood.”
“The common fighting man tends to have a lot of filings to occupy his immediate attention,”
said Marquall.
Kautas smiled. “Fair point.”
“Isn’t the true calling of the Imperial warrior to serve and fight? Not to question?” asked
Marquall.
“Yes. But a little curiosity never went astray. Why are you fighting?”
“To wrest Enothis back from the clutches of the Archenemy.”
“Of course. And beyond that?”
“To… to prosecute the great Crusade and liberate the Sabbat Worlds?”
“So your greater purpose is…?”
“To win.”
Kautas took a drink from his flask. This time, he offered it to Marquall. The Phantine shook his
head.
99
“Why are the Sabbat Worlds important?” the ayatani asked.
“Well, strategically—”
“No, Marquall. What is their significance?”
“Thousands of years ago, Saint Sabbat purged these worlds of Chaos in the name of the God-
Emperor. We are reclaiming what she once established for us.”
“Exactly. These worlds are Saint Sabbat’s. They are blessed with her touch. My first duty, as an
ayatani, is to the God-Emperor, but I am specifically a priest of Sabbat, the Beati. We ayatani come
in two kinds. Those that dwell in the great templums and shrineholds, and those, like me, who are
‘imhava’—roving priests, sworn to follow her path through the stars and spread her teachings.”
“Okay,” said Marquall.
“This Crusade’s been going on for almost twenty years. Warmaster Macaroth, if my information
is correct, has pressed ahead, taking a huge gamble in directing an attack into the heart of the
Archenemy’s core systems. But his flanks are exposed, and the enemy has driven his forces into
those weaknesses, hoping to behead the thrusting Crusade force, and leave Macaroth alone and
vulnerable. We are those flanks, Marquall: Enothis, the Khan Group. It is the fighting here that will
determine the overall success or failure of the Crusade. If we fail here, it doesn’t matter if Macaroth
achieves victory at the front line. All will be for naught. The enemy knows this. But now, according
to rumours, the enemy has an even greater incentive. On Herodor, it is said, the Beati has been
reborn.”
Marquall blinked. “Is that… possible?”
Kautas pursed his lips. “It tests even the faith of an imhava ayatani, but it seems to be the truth.
Right now, Herodor, like Enothis, is under desperate assault by the hosts of Chaos. If either world
falls, then the flank is ripped open and the Crusade is doomed. If Herodor falls, and the Beati dies
with it, then the Imperium suffers an even greater loss.”
“And you wish you were there?” asked Marquall.
“Oh, indeed. How I wish. In his heart, every ayatani longs to be on Herodor, at Sabbat’s side.
But it is my luck, my lot in life, to be stuck here, pinned fast by duty and the turmoil of another
combat, unable to make the final pilgrimage to her person.”
A breeze picked up, and played across the lake. The frond-trees along the shore swayed and
hissed.
“That makes my own problems seem meagre,” said Marquall. “Maybe you’re better at this
priestly advice-giving thing than I thought.”
Kautas shook his head. “I’m good for two things, Vander Marquall. Drinking and being bitter. I
waste every miserable day waiting for the end.”
“What end?”
“The end of this war. The end of this world. My own end. Whatever comes first to free me so
that I can be with the Beati.”
Marquall got to his feet. “Don’t think that way. It smells too much of pessimism. We can still
win, tell yourself that. Here, and on Herodor. The Crusade can still triumph. The Beati can still live.
Even one man’s sour thoughts can lend the enemy strength.”
“Besides,” he added. “Did it not occur to you that the Beati must have wanted you to be here?”
Kautas made no reply. Marquall shrugged and headed back up the shore to the base.
“Marquall?”
He turned and looked back. The priest had risen, looking after him. “What, father?”
