defence batteries were hurling everything they had at the sky. Tracers spiked up and danced, flak
turned the air into a broiling mass of flame-lit smoke.
Fighters were already lifting off the field, either to fight or flee. Darrow heard mounting engineroar
from several Oneros and other mass lifters. Figures mobbed across the landscape.
“Extraction?” Darrow yelled at a Navy officer.
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“Everything, now!” the man yelled back, still running. “We’re pulling out now!”
Darrow looked to his left in time to see the Apostles lift off. They’d been prepped for a first light
call, and now they launched, climbing north-east in the turmoil of the air. Their cream paintjobs
made them look like blades of ice in the fire-lit sky.
A sonic boom split the air like the muzzle bang of an artillery piece. A Hell Talon streaked long
and low over the field, and left a crop of furious blasts in its wake. Two Marauders were blown up
on their hardstands. Darrow was one of the many who threw themselves flat as the Talon thundered
over.
The wind was full of smoke and scraps of airborne ash. The furious metallic hammering of a
nearby Hydra almost drowned out the background roar of explosions and jet engines.
Darrow got up and started running again. Another aircraft went over, and he saw running
personnel not twenty metres away from him thrown into the air by cannon fire. Then there was a
tremendous, vibrating roar and a prickling wash of heat as a laden Onero took off and crawled past
overhead.
There was blood in Darrow’s left eye. He’d caught a scratch in the left eyebrow, shrapnel
probably, and blood was running down into his vision. He kept running. Another big transport took
off, kicking up dust and grit.
Darrow saw bodies on the ground. Two Navy airmen and three ground crew. The force of the
strafing fire that had claimed them had punctured the ground in a long, broken gouge, snipped most
of their garments clean off, and left them lying in impossible, dislocated poses.
Darrow glanced away. It was a hard thing to look at.
People still ran past in all directions. Some were wounded and being helped by others. Two
pilots staggered past carrying a fitter upright between them. The fitter was making an odd, sobbing
noise. His face was—
Again, Darrow turned his eyes aside. Over on the hard-stands, the latest enemy strafing run hit a
bowser, and a huge sheet of yellow flame splashed up into the air.
On the northern-most pads, squadrons of Valkyrie carriers were warming up, their stem hatches
open. Personnel streamed towards them from the base buildings.
More planes launched, mainly Thunderbolts. One of them was hit by a seeker-rocket as it tried
to lift, caught fire violently, and belly flopped down into a loading bay, killing at least twenty
ground crew. Darrow winced at the heat of the blasts.
Then he saw Eads. Feeling with his cane, Eads was approaching the entrance of the Operations
building. Navy crew ran past him. A low-flying Locust chewed a line of shots up into the side of
Operations ripping out brick dust and pieces of tile and shutter. Protecting his face, Darrow ran
towards Eads. “Sir!”
“Is that you, Darrow?”
“Yes, sir. Come on. I’ll get you onto an evacuation flight.”
“I should go to Operations. This attack needs proper—”
“There’s no point, sir!” Darrow yelled above the concussive noise of the bombing. “It’s all
gone! Everything’s gone! The enemy is here, right at the gates! We’re pulling out now!”
A clutch of submunitions detonated forty metres away, killing a dozen people. The pressure of
the blast-wave knocked Eads and Darrow flat. Scrambling up, Darrow fought to get Eads on his
feet.
“Someone help me!” he cried at the figures running past. Most just ignored them. One went by,
then stopped and ran back.
It was Scalter.
He helped Darrow lift Eads and they started moving. Scalter yelled something about the Blood
Pact over the din.
“What?” said Darrow.
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“They’re saying Blood Pact are dropping into the suburbs. Ground forces, certainly.”
“God-Emperor protect us all,” Eads said.
“Pardon me, sir,” said Scalter. “But right now it feels like he’s forgotten all about us.”
Western District Theda, 06.40
The sirens woke Jagdea. Her room in the hab clinic was cold and damp. The window was rattling.
She lay still for a moment, listening. Apart from the blare of the sirens outside, there was a
murmur of disquiet in the old building. Her window rattled again. No, it was more than a rattle. The
glass in the old wooden frame was vibrating.
She got out of bed, and went to look.
Pulsing air pressure was making the glass shake. Jagdea could see the blistering flashes of
pattern bombing detonations underlighting the sky behind the immediate cityscape. Hundreds of
smoke plumes were curling up into the murky dawn sky.
In the clinic’s courtyard below, staff members and patients were fleeing in droves.
Jagdea hurried across the room, got down on her knees beside her bed, and started to pull her
clothes and effects out of the bedside locker. She found her boots, her flight coat—
At that moment, a high yield bomb landed on a building across the street, levelling it instantly.
The entire clinic recoiled as if its foundations were set on bedsprings. The window of Jagdea’s room
blew in with the Shockwave, ripping a blizzard of glass across the room.
Jagdea cried out involuntarily, hammered by the concussion, but her bed had shielded her from
the shredding force of the glass. She crouched on the floorboards for a moment, tense with shock.
She could smell smoke, fyceline and heat scorching. She could hear the crash of rubble, the flames
and the screaming coming from outside.
Cursing her sling and the pain in her arm, Jagdea pulled on the trousers of her flightsuit, and
then her boots. She had a vest top on, so she put the coat on over that, good arm through the sleeve,
slung arm under the coat.
Then she went out into the hallway. Smoke was pouring into the clinic through the smashed
windows on the courtyard side. She headed the other way. In the hall, she passed several patients
and medicae staff lacerated by window glass. Most were alive, calling out, helpless.
There was nothing she could do. The able-bodied staffers that she saw were simply running for
the exits.
Jagdea found the stairs, then made her way out through the half of the building away from the
blasted courtyard. Outside, she found herself in a back street. A few people hurried past her.
Looking up, she could see strings of enemy bombers creeping overhead.
She ran down the side street and halted at the corner where it joined a main road. Several
commercial premises were on fire, and there was debris in the street. People rushed by, some crying
and wailing in blind panic.
A truck went by, then a car. She tried to wave them down, but they ignored her. In fact, the car
almost hit her, so determined was the driver not to stop. Jagdea yelled in frustration. She’d lost her
bearings, and didn’t even know which way the base was from there.
The only thing she did know for sure was that it was more than walking distance.
But she didn’t seem to have much choice.
Theda MAB South, 06.59
Darrow and Scalter hurried Eads onto the northern pads. Some of the Valkyries there had already
started lifting clear, fully laden, probably overladen. One had been hit before take-off, and was
burning furiously on the hard-pan. Frantic personnel swarmed around the ramps and side doors of
the others. The door gunner teams were trying to organise boarding, but the panic was such that
fights were breaking out.
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Darrow looked around. He felt a knot of panic in his own gut. “Throne’s sake,” he said, aware of
a tremulous quality in his voice that he couldn’t help. “There won’t be enough places.”
“We’ll try there,” Scalter said, determinedly holding his nerves together. On the far north edge
of the pad area, almost by the field’s blast fences, three old bulk transport-lifters were warming up.
The machines were a good distance away from where they stood. But it seemed most of the
evacuees wanted a place on one of the faster, better armoured Valkyries. The trio started across the
pads towards the transporters. Other individuals, unable to get aboard a combat carrier, or unwilling
to endure the fight that would entail, began to break off from the clamouring groups around the
Valkyries and head the same way too.
Still moving, Darrow looked round sharply at the sound of small-arms fire. Someone had
snapped and drawn a handgun, trying to shoot his way onto a Valkyrie.
In response, the door crew slammed the hatches shut and the carrier lifted off, scattering the
crowd that had been trying to get on it. Denied their chance of escape, the mob turned on the man
who’d fired the gun.
The Valkyrie went over them, and then, to Darrow’s amazement, came back in to land ahead of
them.
The door gunners opened the ramp again and started to wave at them. The machine’s crew had
clearly not been able to stomach the idea of leaving Theda empty when lives were wasting.
Darrow and Scalter ran Eads bodily towards the ramp, in under the tail booms and into the
embrace of the gunners.
“Get in! Inside! Find a space and a handhold!”
The compartment was dark, a hot metal box. As they got Eads into a scissor-seat, the door crew
brought aboard several more stragglers. A buzzer sounded. The ramp began to retract again, and the
engine noise rose to a scream.
With a lurch, they left the ground, nose down, and began to accelerate and climb.
Theda MAB South, 07.02
Before the trucks had even come to a halt, the last three pilots of Umbra Flight had jumped clear and
started to run towards their hardstand shelters. The fitters followed them.
“I need just five of you!” Racklae bellowed above the raging bombardment. “The rest… get
going. Evac transport over there!”
Racklae turned and kept running with the five men who’d volunteered. The others started
sprinting towards the last two Oneros that were loading near the main drome hangar.
The truck drivers ran with them.
The whole airfield seemed to be on fire. There were bodies and shell-holes everywhere,
overturned vehicles, buckled munitions carts. Some handstands were ablaze, and in some burned the
wrecks of planes that had never made it up. Two Lightnings launched, and swept away north.
Marquall fully expected to find Double Eagle in pieces.
But it was intact, and so was Blansher’s bird. Del Ruth’s, however, had been caught by strafing
fire. The engines and cockpit were just mangled ribbons of metal.
All the other Umbra machines were gone. Cordiale, Ranfre, Zemmic and Van Tull must have
made it out. Into the air, at least.
Three Razors went over, low, drives shrieking. In the western sector of the airfield, Tormentors
were drizzling submunitions on the machine shops.
Racklae sent two of his men to ready Marquall’s plane, and two to do the same for Blansher’s.
“Basic checks, clear them off, and then head for the transports!” he emphasised.
With Del Ruth and the remaining fitter, Racklae ran across to the adjacent row of hardstand
shelters. The Thunderbolt wing that had occupied this area, the 76th Firedrakes, had already quit,
but they’d left two of their mustard-yellow Bolts behind. Bodies on the ground nearby left little
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doubt that both pilots had been thrown down, along with members of the ground crew, on the way to
their machines.
One of the abandoned Bolts had tail and elevator damage, but the other seemed okay. Racklae
started work getting Del Ruth airborne.
Marquall dropped into his own cockpit, and switched primary systems on with one hand as he
wrestled to strap up his harness. One of the fitters rolled the primer cart close for connection as the
other disengaged the fuel and data-feed lines, and then jumped up on the wing plates to pass
Marquall his helmet.
The primer fired and surged, and after a second, Nine-Nine’s mighty turbofans began to turn.
Marquall leaned out.
“Unhook the primer and get out of here!” he yelled at the fitters over the rising whine. “Just go!”
They ducked out of view under the cowling. Marquall closed and locked his own lid, fastened
his mask, and then did a last preflight overview of vitals. Pressure, coolant, fuel, electronics, airmix,
ammunition. Green all around.
The fitters reappeared, and waved him double thumbs. He signalled back okay, and the two men
turned and began to run.
The last Marquall saw of them, they were crossing the asphalt apron towards the heavy lifters.
Ducts angled to vertical, Marquall eased open the throttle and brought Double Eagle up and
away from the ground.
“Two, this is Eight. I’m going clear.”
“Copy that, Eight. Just get out of here.”
In the present circumstances, no pilot needed to be dawdling about on lift. Still low, he swung
the nose, and lit the burners as he wound the ducts round to level.
Marquall’s Thunderbolt crossed the blazing airfield at rooftop height, power building. He
glimpsed bats crossing behind him, but he ignored them. No tone warnings.
He turned into a wide climb north, and in thirty seconds was crossing the coastal ramparts and
the long white seam of the shoreline strand. Sea was under him now.
“Two? This is Eight. Are you clear?”
“Confirm that, Eight. Coming up at your five. Don’t wait for me. Turn and punch it.”
A thousand metres below, Blansher watched Marquall’s Bolt blasting eastwards. He waited,
then banked firmly, turning back towards the field he had only just left.
“Four? Where are you? Aggie, are you launching?”
From his high vantage point, the true extent of the destruction was finally clear. Blansher could
only half-see the ruined airfield through the blanket of black smoke and the sudden blooms of white
and yellow flame. Beyond it, Theda City was encased in a vast nimbus of smoke. The air to the
south was crawling with formations of enemy planes, dots that caught the sunlight and twinkled
against the dark clouds.
“Aggie? Where are you?”
He made another pass over the MAB. Below, Blansher saw two fat Oneros plough up out of the
boiling vapour and thunder away in a tight track eastwards. Then a smaller transport plane came up,
but it seemed to be in trouble. His blood chilled as he saw a pair of Locusts streak over it diagonally
and turn it into a fireball.
