No, not dead. There he was. The little wretch. He’d somehow flick-rolled the Wolfcub around
the promontory and swung back the way he’d come, gunning low on full thrust.
Obarkon lifted his shiny black-clad hands off the stick and clapped. Very fine indeed.
A warning note sounded and Obarkon snapped it off with a curse. He was down to reserve now,
almost at the critical fuel threshold. That meant he had no more than two minutes left before he had
to turn for home. More than that, and he wouldn’t make it to Natrab echelon aerie.
“Game’s done now,” he hissed through chapped lips. He surged the Hell Razor forward and it
went fluidly, responding perfectly, sure as a shark. “Reacquire,” he told the auto sight. He’d made
five kills already, another ace day, but this boy would make a nice round six. He’d dallied too long,
playing games.
The target pipper chased and bleeped. The Wolfcub was pulling wide rolls and staying low,
keeping the twisting furrows of the peak line between itself and the hunter.
Target denied…
Target denied…
Target denied…
Obarkon cursed in the name of his most foul god. The little bastard was slipping away. By the
skin of his teeth. By the claws. He had allowed too much grace. Now the enemy was mocking him.
He got a partial target, then lost it again as the fugitive Wolfcub banked perilously around a
crag. They both passed so close that snow blizzarded up off the crag in their combined wash.
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.
13
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.”
14
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 Gait, 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, darkhaired,
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.
15
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 coped.
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.
16
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 southwest
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.
