sheds along the north perimeter.
“Someone’s in trouble,” Blansher muttered.
“There!” one of the Navy pilots called, pointing.
Low in the southern sky, tiny dots. Jagdea heard the distant, burping putter of pulsejets.
“That’s low,” said Asche. Several of the dots were hanging back, but two were moving in. They
could see sunlight flare off canopies. The lead plane, a little dark-green monojet, was dragging a
string of vapour behind it.
“Not good,” said Jagdea, staring.
Beside her, Marquall said, “What?”
“If he’s going to land, let’s hope he gets his cart down.”
Over Theda MAB South, 07.51
The smoke coming out of Hunt Sixteen was getting thicker, and had started to plume out fat and
heavy as their airspeed dropped. Darrow had to adjust height to stop himself flying in blind through
the vapour. Hunt Sixteen was pitching low, and it forced Darrow to sit up high, higher than he
would have preferred for an approach.
There was a slight crosswind. He felt his tail skidding, and he trimmed to compensate.
According to the airspeed indicator, he was getting dangerously near critical stall.
“Come on, Hunt Sixteen!” he cursed. “Come on, Phryse! Get that bird down!”
“Hold your water…” the vox chattered. “I think… think my bloody cart’s hung.”
“Clear it, Phryse!” Darrow heard Hunt Leader urge over the channel.
“Trying… damn thing’s stuck… lever’s jammed. Bent. I think…”
A bleeper sounded in Darrow’s cockpit. Fuel out… even though the damn gauge still read full.
“I’ve got to sit now!” he called.
“Okay, okay! S’all right, Enric. I’ve got it now. Lever’s pulled. Cart down.”
Theda MAB South, 07.51
Even as the Cyclone’s engines whistled down to a dying chop, Scalter wrenched open the window
slider of the canopy and stuck his head out, searching the sky.
“Operations!” he yelled, but then realised that pushing his head out of the window had pulled his
mic-cord to full extent and yanked the plug out of the vox panel.
“Damn it!” he yelled, struggling back inside and banging his head. “Damn it!” He fumbled for
the end of the cord.
“Got it!” cried Artone, ramming the plug back into its socket.
“Operations! Get a flag up! Signal! That Cub’s coming in with its undercart up!”
“Clear the channel, Seeker.”
21
Scalter clunked off his harness, threw open the side hatch and fell out onto the ground. Artone
was fast on his heels. The crews of the Cyclones in the revetment bunkers next to them had
dismounted too.
Scalter ran up the embankment towards the main strip, waving his arms. Red flares had gone up
over the field. Bleeding smoke, one wing hanging heavy, the Wolfcub was really low. The noise of
its pulsejet was a drawn-out, plosive blurt.
Its undercart was locked up in its belly.
“Up! Up!” Scalter yelled. He fell on his face as Artone tackled him and brought him down short
of the rockcrete track.
The Wolfcub came in, over and past them both. Just shy of stall speed, it began to drop its tail,
about to settle onto gear that wasn’t there.
The underside of the tail hit first. There was an abrasive shriek. Metal shards and grit flew up in
a hot grind of friction. Immediately, the tail came back up, bouncing, pitching the Wolfcub down
straight on its nose. The Interceptor came apart, shredding aluminoid off its frame. The port wing
crumpled and flew off. The pulse-jet, coughing flames, sheared off its mounts, crushed the already
buckled cockpit, and detonated as it lifted clear. Liquid flame boiled out across the runway.
High on its six, Darrow stared in disbelief. He’d just lowered his own undercart, and the added
drag had dwindled his speed even more. There was no runway any more, just a lake of fire and a
mass of tangled wreckage.
“Abort, Hunt Four!”
Darrow slammed on full emergency thrust and trimmed for maximum lift. His Cub shook and
fought, tired of flying now. He hauled on the stick.
Jet screaming, Hunt Four cleared the debris by scant metres and zoomed through the leaping
fireball of the crash. Darrow’s canopy blackened with soot. There was smoke everywhere. As he
came clear, he saw loose flame dancing along his wings.
“Request secondary runway!” he yelled.
“Runway is clear—” the vox sang. He came around, rising and turning as tightly as he dared. He
wouldn’t stall. Not now. Not now. The stick was like lead. He came about onto the track, dropping
fast but true. He had it now.
Red lights fluttered across his instruments. He felt a lurch. The engine had flamed out. Zero fuel
or nothing like enough airspeed, he couldn’t tell which. Didn’t have time. Didn’t care.
The Wolfcub fell out of the air onto the ragged runway. The undercart survived the first hard
bounce, but not the second. It disintegrated in a scatter of chrome struts and torn rubber. The
machine made a third bounce on its belly, cascading sparks into the air. Body plating ripped away.
The slide went wide, turning the dented nosecone right, folding a wing like paper. Darrow
screamed, his arms over his face, shaken like a bead in a tin.
They came running from all directions, from the silos, from the fitter barns, from the main
hangar. Recovery trucks, their hooters blaring, kicked up dust and stones as they raced over the
verge sides.
Jagdea and Blansher were amongst the first of the aviators to reach the wreck.
“Back! Get back!” a tender driver screamed at them.
“Get him out then!” Jagdea yelled back, slamming past the barrier of the man’s outstretched
arms.
The canopy hood of the downed Cub wrenched backwards, and the pilot dragged himself out.
His plane was almost on its side, pinning a broken wing under it, surrounded by debris. He
staggered towards them, shaking his head dizzily as the crash-crews ran in towards the wreck with
retardant sprays.
The young man’s face was black with soot and oil. When he pulled off the breather mask, his
lower face was pink and clean. He blinked at Jagdea and Blansher.
22
“Shit,” he said.
“Good landing,” Blansher said, offering an arm to support him. The pilot sagged heavily,
shaking.
“Good… landing…?” he coughed.
Blansher smiled. “You walked away from it, didn’t you?”
23
DAY 253
Interior Desert, 10.10
The Fury of Pardua was dead. Its power plant had been running sore and hoarse for the last hundred
kilometres, and the coolant needles had been buried in red for the last twenty. The driver had
managed to get it just about off the main track before the engine uttered its death-rattle, and now the
venerable Conqueror-type battle tank was slumped as if in repose.
The fine, dry sand was slowly dimpling under its sixty-two tonnes and it was beginning to keel,
submerged up to the axles on the port side.
LeGuin walked around it once, feeling the heat radiating off its metal hull on his face. There was
a clatter of tools and one of the regimental aux techs appeared out of the rear hatch, his face red and
shiny from exertion.
“Well?” asked LeGuin.
“Coolant’s dry and the main cylinder block has just fused. Running too hard, too long. And
there’s sand in everything.”
LeGuin nodded. “Strip out anything portable or consumable. Munitions, batteries, vox, pintle
weapons, any water or fuel in the reserves. Strip it out and transfer it to transports. Make it fast,
trooper.”
“Yes, captain.”
LeGuin glanced round at Lieutenant Klodas, the Fury’s commander. His driver, loader and
gunners stood nearby in a shabby, respectful group, caps in their hands, like mourners at a funeral.
LeGuin saw that Klodas was trying not to cry.
“No wasting surplus water, please, Klodas,” he said. “We’ve got a bloody long way to go yet.”
Klodas sniffed and nodded. LeGuin felt bad for being so hard on the junior officer. Losing a
steed, as LeGuin well knew, was like losing a best friend, sibling, parent and faithful hound all in
one go. The average tanker lived in his machine, fought with it, killed from it and had been saved by
it. He owed it, he trusted it and knew its foibles. To leave it for dead at the side of a desert track
seemed… criminal.
Besides, simply as a piece of military technology, these tanks were priceless. Precious few of the
original units remained in active service. The great forge worlds were manufacturing modem pattern
copies as fast as they were able, but the craft was getting lost, many of the tech secrets were being
forgotten, or had never been recorded. LeGuin himself knew, as a bitter certainty, virtually no forge
worlds were now capable of hand-crafting the specialist L/D cannon for a tank hunter.
Fury of Pardua was one of the 8th’s oldest Leman Russ examples, painstakingly maintained and
repaired for twenty-three centuries. Even in its current pitiful state—seized up, burnt-out and fried
dry—it deserved to be recovered and hauled away for full salvage or refit.
But that wasn’t going to happen. There was no time, no resources and—if they all stood there
much longer—no one left alive.
LeGuin looked back down the trail. In the glare of the blow-torch sun, a column of men and
machines wound towards him across the sandpaper terrain, blurred by heat and dust. Every ten
seconds, another tank or carrier grumbled past, kicking up grit. LeGuin’s eyes were at a permanent
squint. The retreat column stretched back as far as he could see, and it was only one of a hundred or
more threading their way desperately across the scorched earth and billowing dunes of the northwestern
sief. Such was the fate of Lord Militant Humel’s great “land armada”, which had almost
24
reached the gateways of the Trinity Hives to purge Enothis, before being turned back by the
unbelievable ferocity of replenished Archenemy forces.
The abject wreck of the Fury of Pardua seemed to Captain LeGuin an appropriate symbol for
this disastrous retreat: a great, proud beast from another age, beaten to extinction by the foe and the
climate, left to rot into the consuming sands where only future archaeologists might ever expose its
dry bones again.
LeGuin looked north, watching the dust trail of the vehicles that had passed ahead. Men trudged
beside crawling machines, as thirsty for water as the vehicles were for oil. Some rode on fenders or
straddled body plating. Every few kilometres something needed to be repaired, dug free or pulled
out of soft sand by the Atlas teams. The Fury was not the first piece of armour to be abandoned at
the roadside. The miserable route back to the Trinity Hives was marked with the corpses of
machines that had died along the way.
Died or been killed. The Archenemy was not letting them run unmolested.
Klodas had flagged down a half-track weapons carrier, and his crew was formed into a human
chain to ship what was salvageable from the Conqueror.
“Don’t take too long,” LeGuin told him.
LeGuin walked back to his own steed, wiping his brow with a hand that came away black with
perspiration and grit. As he walked, he looked up into the relentless sky. Where would the next
attack come from? Up there? Or, as the vox-reports from back down the column suggested, were the
enemy land forces now beginning to nip at their heels too?
The Line of Death sat waiting for its commander. As he climbed up, he patted its flank, even
though the sun-roasted metal scorched his hand. The Line was an Exterminator-type assault tank, its
chassis the same basic pattern as the heavier Conqueror. Its turret-mounted twin autocannons could
produce an astonishingly savage field of rapid firepower. The tank was painted dust-red, though that
wash was scuffed down to the chrome base metal in many places. Its name was painted on the
turret’s mantlet, and its regiment—8th Pardus Armoured—was embossed above the sponsons beside
an Imperial double eagle crest.
LeGuin clambered over the drums of spare munitions webbed to the rear cowling and hopped up
into the turret. Matredes, his gunner, was waiting for him in the top hatchway.
“We going?”
“Yeah.”
Matredes shouted down to Emdeen, the driver, and the VI2 engine revved. They lurched
onwards, treads clattering, and rejoined the file.
The Line had not been LeGuin’s for long and, though he tried to bond with the steed, they were
not tight. For most of his career, LeGuin had been a Destroyer man, commander of the tank killer
Grey Venger. Thirty-four kills they’d shared, until Venger had fallen to enemy fire on the shrine
world Hagia three years before. LeGuin might have happily burned with his steed, but his life had
been saved by the selfless action of an infantry scout called Mkoll, a man LeGuin respected enough
not to be angry with.
On his return to regimental headquarters, they’d assigned LeGuin this can. He’d wanted another
Destroyer, naturally, for that’s where his skills and training lay, but there were just none available.
On the rare occasions one of that ancient marque came up for transfer or reassignment, it was
usually a reconditioned hulk with lousy bearings, a rebored engine and some useless firework in
place of the precious, specialist L/D cannon.
So, disguising his disappointment, LeGuin had become an assault tanker, riding his new steed in
with Humel’s doomed Enothian campaign.
The Line spurred forward. Under the present circumstances, the memory of his disappointment
seemed ridiculously insignificant and made LeGuin smile. So, he hadn’t been assigned the steed he
wanted. Shame. If only that was the worst thing he had to deal with now.
All that mattered at this moment was what was going to get them first: the desert or the enemy.
25
Even with the internal compartments filter-sealed, it was like an oven in the Exterminator.
LeGuin dared not use the air exchanger for fear of depleting fuel even further. Matredes was
studying the charts by the light of a red bulb overhead, and he said something. LeGuin had put on
his ear-baffles already, and now he switched on the internal intercom.
“Say again?”
“Another forty kilometres, and we should be reaching rougher terrain… open karst. That’ll mark
the beginnings of the rift.”
LeGuin nodded. The rift, and the mountains beyond it, represented the second and third of the
great barriers the columns would have to overcome in order to reach safe territory. The desert was
just the beginning. But it gave him some sense of hope. These were palpable markers that he could
tick off.
LeGuin popped the hatch and sat up, taking the electroscope Matredes passed to him. The Line
