some days before. He wasn’t expected to perform any tasks. He was simply a passenger.
LeGuin took a turn driving in the mid-period, to relieve the weary Emdeen. Emdeen climbed
into the commander’s turret seat and immediately fell asleep. In the bare-metal rocker-seat of the
sponson below, Viltry found slumber harder to achieve. The noise of the Pardus tank was ferocious,
and its motion far more violent than any plane, even under bad turbulence. It was a vibration, a
shaking, not at all like the fluid variances of flight. Loose rocks thrown up by the treads clattered
against the heavy hull and the track guards. It was hot, despite the night-chill outside, and the moist
air reeked of smoke and oil and unwashed flesh. There was also nothing to see. The night was
moonless, the dark enclosing. The convoy elements moved with hooded lamps. Within the tank,
there was merely the red cabin light and the glow of the thick-glassed displays.
When LeGuin called out that they had at last passed over the top of the Makanite Ridge, Viltry
simply had to take the tanker’s word for it.
Dawn came in, grey and heavy. Emdeen resumed his driving, and LeGuin and Viltry sat in the
turret with the hatches open. The air, cold and damp and filled with exhaust from the long line of
trundling machines, was at least refreshing after the stuffy interior.
There was still very little to see.
The trail curled down through bare, grey foothills, snaking through a boulder-strewn landscape
that seemed devoid of natural growth. Mist choked the valley beyond, stealing away any distant
view. Behind them, the Makanites were towers of shadow against a bleached, starved sky.
The sun rose, but the mist refused to clear, and they bore on down into a layer of haze and poor
visibility.
They passed by three Imperial troop trucks, abandoned by the side of the track, evidence of a
previous column fleeing this way, and then, at about ten, overhauled the tail end of it. It was twice
the size of LeGuin’s contingent, and moving much more slowly.
They fell in pace with it. LeGuin moved his machine right to the head of his section of the
formation, and made vox contact with the second column’s leaders. From the exchanges Viltry
could overhear, their new companions were travelling under the same sort of ad hoc command as
LeGuin’s segment. Proper lines of command through the tank and infantry forces had long since
been lost. It appeared the tankers like LeGuin—due to the fact that they were now the defending
escort of thousands of truck-bound troops—were calling the shots by necessity.
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LeGuin seemed particularly pleased to hear that several tank crews from his own regiment were
riding with the other column. He exchanged tart, joking vox conversations with a captain called
Woll.
“Good to hear his voice,” LeGuin said to Viltry as he settled the vox-horn back onto its cradle.
“I’d heard rumours that Old Strontium had been destroyed at the Trinity Gates. The old rascal.”
Viltry understood LeGuin’s delight. He too would have been happy to hear from old friends
presumed dead.
Not that it was going to happen.
The mist began to thin, but the day did not lighten. They had reached sparse forest, and the
limits of what seemed to be a metalled roadway. The valley of the Lida, heading down all the way to
the coast.
Others had come this way before them. There were more abandoned vehicles on or by the road,
many stripped of equipment. They passed a number of farm stations and agro-complexes that had
been deserted by their inhabitants, possibly weeks before. The places had been comprehensively
looted of all stock. Store-barns and silos were empty, habs ransacked or burned out. Livestock pens
and the huge tin rotundas of poultry hatcheries were broken down and empty.
In some fields, they sighted rows of fresh graves.
The road approached the river, following its course. More ruined farms stood along its banks,
homesteads and land-parcel stations, then a whole village, empty and gutted.
At noon, they came up on a line of burned-out, exploded vehicle wrecks, jumbled along
kilometres of road that had been badly holed and cratered. The action was at least three days old.
Tanks with dozer blades, and the few remaining Atlas tractors, had to clear some of the wrecks aside
to permit progress. It had been an air-strike; Viltry could see all the signs.
After that damage became more commonplace. The remains of other convoy elements littered
further shot-up sections of highway. Unburied, blackened corpses lay in the roadside ditches. More
bodies, swollen, floated face-down in the pools of a ruined roadside hydroponics system. All of the
next three townships had been bombed to extinction by heavy raids rather than just looted and
forsaken.
This was now an eerie, miserable landscape to drive through. Thousands of hectares of fieldsystems
had been burned black by uncontrolled firebomb damage. Farms, villages, entire townships
had been levelled. There were stretches of forest where nothing remained but blast-splintered trunks
protruding from cindered earth. Craters, many filled with rainwater, punctured the landscape for
kilometres. Smashed hydroponic systems leaked rivers of algae-rich soup down across the roadway
from ruptured dykes. The column moved on, hissing water up into the air.
It was no longer mist that stained the sky, it was smoke residue from the days of raiding and
firedust kicked up by their wheels and tracks. Down the wide, wounded valley, their scopes
identified other communities shelled to death, wreathed with the grey vapour of firestorms that had
blazed, unchecked, for days.
At 13.33, an alert was given. Ten kilometres north, bright flashes underlit the clouds, and they
heard the crump of munitions. A few minutes later, a formation of enemy warplanes was sighted
heading south at medium altitude. The machines, their payloads already dropped, ignored the
straggling column, but there was no doubt they had been sighted. The contact would be called in.
The Imperial column had begun crossing a miraculously unscathed bridge over a Lidan
tributary, just after 14.00, when a second alert came through.
It had started to rain, and the auspex refused to give a clean track. An air of confusion and panic
rose in the convoy around them. LeGuin cleared his weapon batteries, and then got on the vox.
“Say again. Track reading. Confirm track reading for hostiles.”
Just frantic chatter.
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“Come on!” LeGuin snarled into the vox. “This is Line of Death! Give me a track reading! Get it
together!”
Viltry opened the top hatch and craned up at the overcast sky, smelling the cold, wet air,
listening. The sound of agitated voices came from all around, throbbing engines, the noise of turret
motors as weapons traversed, the timpani of rain pattering off the armour.
And there, concealed behind it all, the warble of vector-thrust engines. Viltry glanced anxiously
down at LeGuin.
“What?” LeGuin asked, standing up.
“Hear it?”
“Where? Wait… yes. It’s ahead of us.”
“No,” said Viltry. “That’s an acoustic bounce off the valley. It’s behind us.”
LeGuin instantly began spinning the Executioner’s turret to face rear.
“Get us off the bridge!” he yelled at Emdeen.
“Get moving!” Viltry shouted from the hatch to the trucks all around. “Come on! Clear the way!
Get these vehicles rolling!”
Over two-thirds of the column had still to cross the bridge’s ancient pilings.
Viltry heard a change in the vector note.
“Here they come!” he yelled.
Someone back down the convoy had at last got a decent track too. From the end of the long line
of vehicles forward, weapon mounts began to fire at the sky. Pintle-weapons, elevated cannons, the
few Hydra platforms still carrying munitions. Small-arms opened up as well, men standing up in the
back of trucks to unload las-rifles into the sky. Hundreds of other Guardsmen, unarmed or too
scared to make such a bold defiance, scrambled out of their transports and ran for cover in the trees
and amongst the reed beds of the tributary.
The firing was intense. The convoy’s elevated shooting filled the rainy sky with a blizzard of
white hot or illuminated rounds. There was still no sign of the hostiles.
“They’re wasting most of it…” Viltry said, noticing that LeGuin at least had not started firing.
LeGuin was about to speak.
Something went over, northwards, low and very fast. The jet wash shook them and their ears
popped. A brief hint of something mauve or dark red.
Less than a second later, there was a dull, hollow thump. Rippling around itself, a large ball of
flame boiled up into the sky on a neck of smoke and sparks some three hundred metres behind them.
Viltry saw the second bat, a Hell Talon. It had just sat its bomb load on the very tail end of the
column, and had clearly hit something significant… a tank, an ammo-carrier, maybe. A curtain of
bright, almost neon-white flame rushed into the air way behind them. Small black specks, which
Viltry realised were very probably large pieces of detonating vehicle, flew sideways out of the flashwake.
The Talon kept low, switching to cannon to rake the convoy. The noise of its jets was terrifying.
Crouched in what seemed like a very fragile drum of metal, Viltry experienced the psychological
impact of an air attack for the first time. He virtually froze, his body refusing to respond. His teeth
chattered.
No, his teeth were chattering because LeGuin had opened fire with the main weapons, the twinlinked
autocannons, adding his force to the AA storm. The whole turret shook, and started to turn as
it tracked. Gripping the edges of the hatch, Viltry stared at the incoming Talon. A stream of green
tracer-shot from a Hydra nearly struck it. It banked slightly, almost daintily, refusing to be deterred
from its long, hammering run.
Its cannons were firing. Fast blinks of light-flash flickered around the recessed weapon mounts.
Whipping, concussive impacts stripped up the line of the road. A cargo-8 shuddered violently, as if
men with rock-drills were working in its flatbed. Its canvas cargo hood shredded, its windows blew
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out and its tyres burst. Bodywork seams split and exhaled dust and smoke. A second cargo-8, just
ahead of it, lurched and immediately caught fire. Viltry saw men burning like brush torches
staggering out of the cab. Still running, the truck left the road, bounced down the embankment, and
rolled on its side in the reed beds, hissing up a thick cloud of steam as river water hit fire.
The Talon rushed overhead. Viltry flinched as one of its shells glanced off the Line’s forearmour.
LeGuin’s shots streamed after it, but missed.
“Not enough deflection!” Viltry shouted.
“What?”
“Deflection! You’re not anticipating him right!”
“Can you do better?” LeGuin asked.
“I can try,” Viltry replied.
LeGuin ordered Mattedes down into the lower compartment to free an autoloader that was
sticking. He himself switched seats to the commander’s position and allowed Viltry to drop into the
gunner’s seat.
“Bear in mind this isn’t a dedicated AA vehicle,” LeGuin cautioned.
“I know,” said Viltry.
“I mean, we don’t have a Hydra’s elevation, or targeters. I’m just trying to throw up some fire.”
“I know,” Viltry repeated. He was looking around the turret fixtures, familiarising himself with
them. “Traverse?”
“There,” said LeGuin, pointing to a two-way clutch lever. “You know what you’re doing?”
“Well, there are some differences, but it’s not that different from a Marauder turret.” Viltry sat
back, getting used to the prismatic sight, and test-swung the turret about. “You were doing pretty
well, by the way,” Viltry said. “But it’s a predictive thing. You’re not used to airborne targets.
You’re thinking they’re going to move like an arrow or a dart, but vector-thrust don’t do that.
They’ll come up or to the side in a weird way.”
Emdeen had them off the bridge now. Parts of the rearward column was burning fiercely.
“More coming,” LeGuin called, one hand up to his earphones. The Hydra batteries on the road
started up again. Viltry strained to see out of the limited scope.
“They’re coming for the bridge. They want this column stopped right here.”
Viltry started the turret turning, and then began firing. God-Emperor, it was slow and lumbering,
and almost like firing blind. The Talon went over, unharmed. Viltry began to realise why LeGuin
had been struggling. The Line of Death had been built for savage anti-personnel action, not air
cover.
He swung the turret back fast, immediately picking up a second Talon on its inward path. Viltry
used the smoke plumes from burning wrecks along the road as a scale, then began firing again at the
air above the bridge, the point at which he was sure the hostile would start to lift out.
Elevated as high as they would go, the Line of Death’s twin cannons punched heavy fire at the
clouds, and that stream began to swish in a horse-tail as Viltry dragged the turret around, aiming not
for the Talon, but for where the Talon would be when the rounds had covered the distance. Nearly,
nearly…
The Hell Talon, blue striped with bone-white, tried to viff hard at the last second, but its forward
rate was too high for any kind of instant adjustment. It flew right through the Line’s fusillade.
Riddled, the airframe tore open, fragments flying off. The tank rocked as it went over. The Talon
sliced across the main river on one wing-tip, then pancaked and hit the far shore. A throaty
explosion followed.
Matredes, Emdeen and the other crewmen started whooping and cheering. LeGuin punched
Viltry on the shoulder.
“That was mainly luck,” said Viltry.
“Another one!” the loader shouted, looking at an auspex repeater.
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Viltry swung around again. It was coming in much lower. He wasn’t going to get anything like
as good a lead on this shot. He fired anyway, washing the turret back and forth to extend the cone,
an old tail-gunner’s trick.
All of it missed, but the raking fire restricted the Talon’s line of attack, and it flew straight into
sustained fire from a Hydra. The moment the four long-barrelled autocannons of the Hydra found
the enemy machine, the targeter system took over and held the guns right on it. On powered
traverse, the Hydra managed to maintain heavy hits for over one hundred and five degrees of turn.
The Talon began to climb and then blew up in a ragged yellow flash, raining debris down over the
