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Double Eagle – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Day 252

Over the Makanites, 06.32

In the side rush of dawn, the peaks glowed pink, like some travesty of a fondant celebration cake. Hard shadows infilled the cavities like ink. Streamers of white cloud strung out in the freezing air three thousand metres below.

Hunt Leader was just a cruciform speck in the bright air ahead. He started to turn, ten degrees to the north-west. Darrow tilted the stick, following, rolling. The horizon swung up and the world moved around. Slowly, slowly. He heard the knocking sound and ignored it.

At least the inclinometer was still working. As he came around and levelled the column, Darrow reached forward and flicked the brass dial of the fuel gauge again. It still read full, which couldn’t be right. They’d been up for forty-eight minutes.

He took off a gauntlet and flicked the gauge once more with his bare fingers. He felt sure the lined mitten had been dulling his blows.

The dial remained at full.

He saw how pinched and blue his hand had become, and pulled the gauntlet back on quickly. It felt balmy in his insulated flightsuit, but the cabin temp-stat read minus eight.

There was no sound, except for the background rush of the jet stream. Darrow looked up and around, remembering to maintain his visual scanning. Just sky. Sundogs flaring in his visor. Hunt Three just abeam of him, a silhouette, trailing vapour.

The altimeter read six thousand metres.

The vox gurgled. ‘Hunt Leader to Hunt Flight. One pass west and we turn for home. Keep formation tight.’

They made another lazy roll. The landscape rose up in his port vision. Darrow saw brittle flashes of light far below. Artillery fire in the mountain passes.

He heard the knocking again. It sounded as if someone was crouching behind the frame of his armoured seat, tapping the internal spars with a hammer. Pulsejets always made a burbling, flatulent noise, but this didn’t seem right to him.

He keyed his vox. ‘Hunt Leader, this is Hunt Four. I’ve–’

There was a sudden, loud bang. The vox channel squealed like a stabbed pig.

The world turned upside down.

‘Oh God-Emperor! Oh crap! God-Emperor!’ a voice was shouting. Darrow realised it was his own. G-force pummelled him. His Commonwealth K4T Wolfcub was tumbling hard.

Light and dark, sky and land, up and over, up and over. Darrow choked back nausea and throttled down desperately. The vox was incoherent with frantic chatter.

‘Hunt Four! Hunt Four!’

Darrow regained control somehow and levelled. He had lost at least a thousand metres. He got the horizon true and looked around in the vain hope of seeing someone friendly. Then he cried out involuntarily as something fell past his nose cone.

It was a Wolfcub, one wing shorn off in a cascade of torn struts and body plate. Flames were sucking back out of its pulsejet. It arced down and away like a comet, trailing smoke as it went spinning towards the ground. It became a speck. A smaller speck. A little blink of light.

Darrow felt his guts tighten and acid frothed inside him. Fear, like a stink, permeated the little cockpit.

Something else flashed past him.

Just a glimpse, moving so fast. There and gone. A memory of recurve wings.

‘Hunt Four! Break! Break and turn! There’s one right on you!’

Darrow leaned on the stick and kicked the rudder. The world rolled again.

He put his nose up and throttled hard. The Wolfcub bucked angrily and the knocking came again.

Throne of Earth. He’d thought his bird had malfunctioned, but it wasn’t that at all. They’d been stung.

Darrow leant forward against the harness and peered out of his cockpit dome. The aluminoid skin of his right wing was holed and torn. Hell’s-teeth, he’d been shot.

He pushed the stick forward to grab some thrust, then turned out left in a hard climb.

The dawn sky was full of smoke: long strings of grey vapour and little black blooms that looked like dirty cotton. Hunt Flight’s formation had broken apart and they were scattering across the heavens. Darrow couldn’t even see the bats.

No, that wasn’t true. He made one, bending in to chase Hunt Five, tracer fire licking from its gunpods.

He rolled towards it, flipping the scope of his reflector sight into position before resting his thumb on the stick-top stud that activated the quad cannons in the nose.

The bat danced wildly across the glass reticule of the gunsight. It refused to sit.

Darrow cursed and began to utter a prayer to the God-Emperor of Mankind to lift his wings and make his aim true. He waggled the stick, pitching, rolling, trying to correct, but the more he tried, the more the bat slipped wildly off the gunsight to one side or the other.

There was a little smoky flash ahead, and suddenly Darrow’s Wolfcub was riding through a horizontal pelt of black rain.

Not rain. Oil. Then debris. Pieces of glittering metal, buckled machine parts, shreds of aluminoid. Darrow cried out in surprise as the oil washed out his forward view. He heard the pattering impact of the debris striking off his nose plate and wing faces. The bat had chalked Hunt Five and Darrow was running in through the debris stream. Any large piece of wreckage would hole him and kill him as surely as cannon-fire. And if so much as a demi-mil cog went down the intake of his pulsejet…

Darrow wrenched on the stick and came nose-up. Light returned as he came out of the smoke belt, and slipstream flowed the oil away off his canopy. It ran in quivering lines, slow and sticky, like blood.

Almost immediately, he had to roll hard to port to avoid hitting another Cub head on. He heard a strangled cry over the vox. The little dark-green interceptor filled his field of view for a second and then was gone back over his shoulder.

His violent roll had been too brutal. He inverted for a moment and struggled to right himself as the mountains spread out overhead. That knocking again. That damn knocking. He was bleeding speed now, and the old pulse-engines of the K4T’s had a nasty habit of flaming out if the airflow dropped too sharply. He began to nurse it up and round, gunning the engine as hard as he dared. Two planes rushed by, so fast he didn’t have time to determine their type, then another three went perpendicular across his bow. They were all Wolfcubs. One was venting blue smoke in a long, chuffing plume.

‘Hunt Leader! Hunt Leader!’ Darrow called. Two of the Cubs were already climbing away out of visual. The sun blinded him. The third, the wounded bird, was diving slowly, scribing the sky with its smoke.

He saw the bat clearly then. At his two, five hundred metres, dropping in on the Cub it had most likely already mauled. For the first time in his four weeks of operational flying, Darrow got a good look at the elusive foe. It resembled a long, sharp, elongated axe-head, the cockpit set far back above the drive at the point where the bow of the blade-wings met. A Hell Razor-class Interceptor, the cream of the Archenemy’s air force. In the dispersal room briefs, they’d talked about these killers being blood red or matt black, but this was pearl-white, like ice, like alabaster. The canopy was tinted black, like a dark eye-socket in a polished skull.

Darrow had expected to feel fear, but he got a thrill of adrenaline instead. He leaned forward, hunched down in the Wolfcub’s armoured cockpit, and opened the throttle, sweeping in on the bat’s five. It didn’t appear to have seen him. It was lining up, leisurely, on the wounded Cub.

He flipped the toggle switch. Guns live.

Closing at three hundred metres. Darrow rapidly calculated his angle of deflection, estimated he’d have to lead his shot by about five degrees. God-Emperor, he had it…

He thumbed the firing stud. The Wolfcub shuddered slightly as the cannons lit up. He saw flash-flames licking up from under the curve of the nose cone. He heard and felt the thump of the breechblocks.

The bat had gone.

He came clear, pulling a wide turn at about two hundred and seventy kilometres an hour. The engagement had been over in an instant. Had he killed it? He sat up into the clear blister of the canopy like an animal looking out of its burrow, craning around. If he’d hit it, surely there would be smoke?

The only smoke he could see was about a thousand metres above in the pale blue sky where the main portion of the dogfight was still rolling.

He turned. First rule of air combat: take a shot and pull off. Never stick with a target, never go back. That made you a target.

But still he had to know. He had to.

He dipped his starboard wing, searching the peaks below for a trace of fire.

Nothing.

Darrow levelled off.

And there it was. Right alongside him.

He cried out in astonishment. The bat was less than a wing’s breadth away, riding along in parallel with him. There was not a mark on its burnished white fuselage.

It was playing with him.

Panic rose inside pilot cadet Enric Darrow. He knew his valiant little Cub could neither outrun nor out-climb the Hell Razor. He throttled back hard, and threw on his speed brakes, hoping the sudden manoeuvre would cause the big machine to overshoot him.

For a moment, it vanished. Then it was back, on his other side, copying his brake-dive. Darrow swore. The Hell Razor-class were vector-thrust planes. He was so close to it that he could see the reactive jet nozzles on the belly under the blade-wings. It could out-dance any conventional jet, viffing, braking, even pulling to a near-hover.

Darrow refused to accept he was out-classed, refused to admit he was about to die. He twisted the stick, kicked the rudder right over and went into the deepest dive he dared execute. Any deeper, and the Wolfcub’s wings would shear off its airframe.

The world rushed up, filling his vision. He heard the pulsejet screaming. He saw the glory of the mountains ascending to meet him. His mountains. His world. The world he had joined up to save.

Behind him, the pearl-white enemy machine tucked in effortlessly and followed him down.

Theda MAB North, 07.02

Sometimes – times like this perfect dawn, for instance – it amused August Kaminsky to play a private game. The game was called ‘pretend there isn’t a war’.

It was relatively easy in some respects. It was quiet, and the night chill was giving way to a still cool as the sunrise came up over the city. From where he sat, he could see the wide bay, hazy in the morning mist, and the sea beyond it, blue-grey, glittering. The city of Theda itself – a mix of pale rockcrete towers, low-rise hab-stacks and pylon steeples – was peaceful and quiet, huddled on the wide headland in a quaint, antiquated manner, as it had done for twenty-nine centuries. Sea birds wheeled overhead, which spoiled it slightly, because he envied them their wings and their freedom, but still, at these times, it was easy to play the game.

Theda was not Kaminsky’s birth-town (he’d been delivered, a silent, uncomplaining infant. forty-two years earlier and three thousand kilometres north in the Great Hive of Enothopolis on the far side of the Zophonian Sea), but he had, unilaterally, adopted it. It was smaller than the Great Hive, prettier, a littoral town that understood the mechanisms of the sea and, with its universitariat and its many scholams, was famous as a seat of learning. It was older than the Great Hive too. The Old Town quarter had been standing for three hundred years when the first technocrats began sinking their adamantine pilings into the Ursbond Peninsula to raise Enothopolis. Theda, dear old Theda, was one of the first cities of Enothis.

Kaminsky had adopted Theda partly because of its distinguished past, mostly because he’d been stationed there for six years. He’d come to know it well: its eating houses, its coastal pavilions and piers, its libraries and museums. It was the place he’d always longed to return to every time he snapped the canopy shut and waved the fitters away. And it was the place he always had come back to.

Even the last time.

‘You there! Driver!’

The voice broke through his thoughts. He sat up in the worn leather seat of the cargo transport and looked out. Senior Pincheon, the Munitorum despatcher, was coming over the hard pan towards him, three aides wobbling along in his wake like novice wingmen. Pincheon’s long robes fluttered out behind him and his boots were raising dust from the dry earth. His voice was pitched high, like the seabirds’ calls.

Kaminsky didn’t like Pincheon much. His game was ruined now. The senior’s call had made him drop his eyeline to take in the ground and the airfield. And no one could pretend there wasn’t a war when they saw that.

Kaminsky opened his cab door and climbed down to meet the senior. He’d been up since five waiting for despatch, sipping caffeine from a flask and munching on a coil of whisp-bread.

‘Senior,’ he said, saluting. He didn’t have to. The unctuous man had no military rank, but old habits, like Kaminsky himself, died hard. Pincheon had a data-slate in his hands. He looked up and down Kaminsky, and the grubby transport behind him.

‘Driver Kaminsky, A? Vehicle 167?’

‘As you well know, senior,’ said Kaminsky.

Pincheon made a check in one of the boxes on his slate. ‘Fuelled and roadworthy?’

Kaminsky nodded. ‘As of 05.00. I was issued coupons for sixty litres of two-grade, and I filled up at the depot before I came on duty.’

Pincheon checked another box. ‘Do you have the chit?’

Kaminsky produced the paper slip from his coat pocket, smoothed it flat, and handed it to the senior.

Pincheon studied it. ‘Sixty point zero-zero-three litres, driver?’

Kaminsky shrugged. ‘The nozzle guns aren’t really accurate, senior. I stopped it when it wound over sixty, but the last few drops–’

‘You should take care to be more accurate,’ Pincheon said flatly. One of his aides nodded.

‘Have you ever fuelled a vehicle from the depot tanks, senior?’ Kaminsky said lightly.

‘Of course not!’

‘Well, if you had, you might know how tricky it is to get the wind exact.’

‘Don’t you blame me for your inaccuracies, driver!’ Pincheon sputtered. ‘Essential resources such as fuel must be managed and rationed to the millilitre! That is the task of the Holy Munitorum! There’s a war on, don’t you realise?’

‘I had heard…’

Senior Pincheon ignored him and looked at the nodding aide. ‘What’s zero-zero-three of a litre two-grade at base cost?’

The aide made a quick calculation on his pocket slate. ‘Rounding down, ten and a half credits, senior.’

‘Round up. And deduct it from the next wage slip of driver Kaminsky, A.’

‘So recorded, senior.’

Pincheon turned back to Kaminsky. ‘Transportation run. Personnel. Pick up within thirty minutes from the Hotel Imperial in–’

‘I know where it is.’

‘Good. Convey them to the dispersal point at MAB South. Do you understand? Fine. Then sign here.’

As he signed his name, his stiffened fingers struggling with the stylus, Kaminsky asked: ‘Are they fliers? Navy fliers at last?’

Pincheon huffed. ‘Not for me to say. There’s a war on.’

‘You think I don’t know that, senior?’ Kaminsky asked.

As he took back the slate and the stylus, Pincheon looked up at Kaminsky’s face and made eye contact for the first time. What he saw made him shudder.

‘Carry on, driver,’ he said, and hurried away.

Kaminsky climbed up into his battered transport and turned the engine over. Blue smoke coughed and spurted from the vertical exhausts. Lifting the brake, he rolled the ten-wheeler down the gentle slope of the hardpan and drove off along the field circuit trackway, following the chain link fence.

The game was certainly ruined now. No pretending any more. Here were fuel bowsers, smeared with treacly black promethium waste, armoured hangars, repair sheds reverberating with the noise of power tools, lines of primer coils on their trolleys, electric munitions trains parked and empty on verges of swishing sap-grass.

And airstrips. Cracked rockcrete looking like psoriatic skin in the early light, with eight-engine bombers sulking on their hardstands, props like sabre-blades raised in threat, hook-winged Shrike dive-bombers under tarps, fitters and armourers working around them.

Beyond the strips, facing the sea, lay the long launch ramps of the Wolfcubs, stretched out like exposed spinal chords, glinting and skeletal in the rising sun.

Five Wolfcubs sat on taxi-racks at the head of the ramps. Bottle green with grey undersides, they were tiny, one-man planes with stubby wings and tails, their rocket engines raised above their backs, their nose guns muzzled. They looked squat, leaden.

But Kaminsky knew how they felt to fly. He knew how they rose off those catapult ramps, throttles right back, pulse-engines farting and popping as the airflow fired them to launch velocity. The belly-dropping jink as they cleared the ramp end and lifted up into the blue, raw and throbbing. The cold smell of the cockpit. The reek of rubber and steel, promethium, nitrous, fyceline. The feel of being aloft, alive…

God-Emperor, how he missed it.

At the gate, beside the staked revets and the heavy blast-fences, he pulled over to let a munitions convoy roll in. He glanced up into the driving mirror and, for a moment, saw himself.

More than anything, more than even the airfield full of prepping warplanes, the sight of himself reminded August Kaminsky that his cherished game was only pretend.

There was, inescapably, a war on.

Theda Old Town, 07.09

He couldn’t sleep. It was anticipation mostly, the prospect of a new war to survive, but his body clock was still running on shipboard time, and to him it was late afternoon.

Just before six by the chronograph on his night stand, he gave up on his bed and got up. It was cold and not yet light. In the adjacent rooms, the other men of G for Greta were sleeping. He could hear snoring, particularly the volcanic rumble of Bombardier Judd. The Munitorum had issued them billets in a once-handsome pension on Kazergat Canal, and they’d piled in late the previous afternoon, leaving their packs in a heap in the hallway, eagerly laying claim to rooms. The younger men had broken open liquor and got down to the business of getting drunk so they could better sleep off voyage-lag. He’d had a glass or two, but the cheap escape held little attraction.

He and the other flight officers had swung the best rooms. He’d had to order a disappointed Orsone out to make way for him. ‘Find somewhere else,’ he’d told the young tail-gunner. But the room wasn’t much of a trophy. The carpet had long gone and the plaster was crumbling. Pitch-washed sheets were nailed over the windows in place of curtains. Damp patches blotched the ceiling like sores. There was a smell of fatigue and faded grandeur. That’s what years of warfare did to a place. They certainly did the same to a man, after all.

The old woman who ran the pension had told him that there would be no hot water until after eight, and he hadn’t come that many parsecs to start a tour by standing under a piss-cold shower. He’d got dressed in the half-light – boots, breeches, fleece-vest – and started to pull on his flight coat. But his fingers had then encountered the insignia sewn into the thick quilts of the garment, the captain’s bars, the squadron badge, the name-strip that read ‘Viltry, Oskar’. He had put it aside and opted instead for a more anonymous tan leather coat.

The landing was dark. On the floor above, the crewmen of Hello Hellstorm were slumbering, with the crews of Throne of Terror and Widowmaker on the floor above that. The retinues of K for Killshot and Get Them All Back were billeted on the ground floor. The other six crews of XXI Wing ‘Halo Flight’, Imperial (Phantine) Air Force were tucked up in another pension down the street.

Viltry activated a glow-globe. The light was dim, but enough to light his way down the creaking staircase. In the hall, there were ancient books stacked on the mantel of the ornate but flaking fireplace, but those that he touched in the hope of finding an hour or two’s distraction fell into dust.

He let himself out onto the street. It was chilly and quiet, except for the gurgle of the canal. A van rumbled by on the far side of the canal, its headlights cowled as per blackout procedures. He walked a few paces, noticing the stumps, regularly spaced, where iron lamp stands had been removed from the boulevard for the war effort. He tried to imagine the place in peacetime. Elegant, glass-hooded lamps, purring electric cruisers on the grand canal, prosperous Imperial citizens going about their business, stopping to greet and talk, dining at terrace taverns now long boarded-up. There would have been students too. The briefing documents said that Theda was a scholam town.

In truth, he realised, he knew precious little about Enothis. Precious little apart from three things: it was an old, proud Imperial world; it was strategically vital to this zone of the Sabbat Worlds; and he, and thousands of other aviators like him, had been drafted here from off-world at short notice to save it from extinction.

He noticed passers-by suddenly – other pedestrians out in the early light, dressed in dark clothes, all hurrying in the same direction. He heard the chime of a chapel bell ringing out seven of the clock, calling them to worship. Viltry followed them, crossing a bridge over the canal, hanging back.

By the time he reached the Ministorum chapel on the far bank side, the dawn service had already begun. He stood for a moment outside, listening to the plainsong chants. Above him, in the cold, grey light, the bas-relief facade showed the figure of the God-Emperor gazing down on all mankind.

Viltry felt ashamed. He bowed his head. When, eight years earlier, he had sworn to give his life as a warrior in the service of the God-Emperor, he hadn’t realised how damn hard it would be. He’d always wanted to be an aviator, of course. Phantine’s unusual topography bred that instinct into all its sons and daughters. But the cost had been great. Two years before, during the final onslaught to liberate his home world from the toxic clutches of the Archenemy, fighting alongside the Imperial Crusade forces of Warmaster Macaroth, he had almost died twice. Once as wind waste over the Scald, then as a prisoner of the vile warlord Sagittar Slaith at Ouranberg.

In the two years since then, Viltry had been unable to shrug off the idea that he should be dead already. He was living on borrowed time. His tutor at the scholam had drummed into him the concept of Fate’s wheel. He’d said that it spun at the Emperor’s right hand. It spun for balance, for symmetry. What was given would be taken, what was loaned would be paid back. A life saved was only a life spared.

His had been saved twice over. There was a reckoning to be had. And here he was, on another world, charged with the duty of fighting to save it. The reckoning would be here, he was sure of it. Fate’s wheel would turn. He had been spared twice so he could live long enough to see his home world saved. Now he was fighting to save another man’s home world. This, surely, would be where the accounts got squared.

The crew of G for Greta had seen this fatality in his every action, he was sure of that. They knew they were flying on a doomed bird. Doomed by him, cursed by him. He’d lost one crew over the Scald, and he should have gone with them. Now Fate’s wheel would bring another crew down with him in its efforts to even the tally.

He’d asked for a transfer, been refused, asked for a non-operational posting, had that turned over as well. ‘You’re a bloody fine flight officer, Viltry,’ Ornoff had told him. ‘Get rid of this fatalistic nonsense. We need every man-bastard with airtime and combat experience we can get. Enothis will be tough as nails. Our ground forces are in hard retreat from Sek’s legions. It’ll come down to a bloody air war, mark my words. Request denied. Your Navy transport leaves orbit tomorrow at 06.00.’

Viltry looked up at the graven image of the God-Emperor, hard-shadowed in the sluggishly rising sun. It looked disapproving, scowling at his timid soul, fully aware of the cowardice in his heart.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, out loud.

A woman in a long black coat, coming late to the service, looked round at him. He shrugged, bashful, and held the chapel door open for her.

Light, and a chorus of triumph dedicated to the Golden Throne of Earth, washed out on them both. She hurried in.

He followed her, and closed the heavy door behind him.

Over the Makanites, 07.11

This one was good. Daring. Young, most likely, desperate to live. Weren’t they all?

The dive was magnificent, foolhardy. Flight Warrior Khrel Kas Obarkon, chieftain of the fifth echelon, which was of the Anarch, and so sworn to he that is Sek, decided he would like more of this boy’s kind in his echelon come the showdown. The boy flew, as they say, by the claws. Such a scream dive. Obarkon didn’t know the runty little enemy pulsejets could achieve that.

It seemed almost a waste to slay him.

Wound tight in his grav-armour, auto-pumps and cardio-centrifuges compensating his circulation, Obarkon committed his Hell Razor steeper still, adjusting the trim, slicing down through the air like a knife at point eight of mach. His cockpit was dark save for the winking lights of his instruments, which reflected off the black, patent-leather gauntlets encasing his hands. The stooping Wolfcub was a bright orange pip on his auspex display.

How was it surviving? Pilot skill or luck? The young had little of the former and, sometimes, barrels of the latter. The dive was testing the enemy plane right to the limits of its airframe. A single degree deeper and the descent would strip the wings away at the cabane or blow out the inductive motor.

Behind the matt-black glass visor of his full-head helmet, Obarkon smiled. His face, so seldom seen, was a grizzled tissue of fibre and poly-weave reinforcements. His eyes were augmetics, linked directly to the warplane’s gunsights by spinal plugs.

At three hundred metres, the Wolfcub pulled out, dragging a long, aching turn up and away to avoid the ragged peaks, its jet engine spitting and foundering.

Another surprise. Another admirable display of skill. Or luck.

Obarkon tilted his stick and nudged the reactive thrusters, pulling out of the dive non-ballistically, mocking the laboured struggles of the smaller plane. It had been locked in his gunsight for two minutes now. The target finder was chiming over and over again.

Attention…

Target found.

Target found.

Target found.

Why hadn’t he killed it?

I want to see what you’ve got, Obarkon thought.

The Wolfcub veered around a peak-top, letting the cross of its shadow flicker across the sunlit snow, then tipped its wings hard to steer around another crag. Obarkon kept his Hell Razor almost level to execute a following path, ripping through the air like a heat-hungry missile. The Wolfcub was still in his crosshairs.

Suddenly, around the next peak, it disappeared. Obarkon frowned and swung about, assuming the boy had finally misadventured and flown into a cliff wall. For the first time in nearly three minutes, the target finder bleeped lock lost… lock lost… lock lost…

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.

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.’

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 Gart, 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, dark-haired, 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.

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.

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 south-west 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.

Jagdea glanced at the chronograph strapped around the thick cuff of her flightsuit. They were right on time. Their transport had left the perimeter track and was bumping towards the nearest of the huge drome hangars.

‘Up and ready, Umbra Flight,’ she ordered. The eleven aviators under her command gathered up their kits as the transport rolled to a stop.

Jagdea jumped down and took a deep breath. ‘Here we go,’ she muttered to Milan Blansher, her number two. Blansher was a grizzled veteran in his forties, his career tally of twenty-two kills the finest in Umbra Flight. He said little, but she trusted him with her life. He had unusually pale, distant eyes for a Phantine and sported a thick grey moustache, partly to lend himself an air of avuncular seniority, mostly to help conceal the ridge of white scar tissue where a piece of shell casing had split his face from his right nostril, down across both lips, to the point of his chin.

‘Here we go indeed,’ he murmured, and hoisted his kit onto his shoulder. The others clambered down. Van Tull, Espere, Larice Asche with her hair up in a non-regulation bun, Del Ruth, Clovin, the boy Marquall, Waldon, forever whistling a melody-less tune, Zemmic, jangling with his cluster of lucky charms, Cordiale, Ranfre. Almost all of them made the superstitious bob down to touch the ground.

Vander Marquall didn’t. He was gazing across the field, watching three machines of the Enothian Commonwealth Air Force crank up for launch. They were powerful, twin-engine delta-form planes, an Interceptor pattern known as Cyclones. Started from trolley-mounted primer coils, their massive piston engines sucked and thundered into life, kicking out plumes of blue smoke from the exhaust vents as the heavy props began to turn to a flickering blur. They rocked impatiently at their blocks as the ground crews rolled the carts aside. Marquall could see the two-man crews in the glass nose cockpits making final checks. Though most Commonwealth wings had been withdrawn to make way for the offworlders, a flight of these Cyclones had been left on station to fly top-cover tours while the Imperials bedded in.

‘Coming, Marquall?’ Jagdea asked. He turned and nodded.

‘Yes, commander.’ Marquall was the youngest aviator in Umbra by four years, and the only one with no operational combat experience. Everyone else had seen at least some action during the Phantine liberation. Marquall had still been in the accelerated program at Hessenville when hostilities ended. He was eager and, Jagdea believed, reasonably gifted, but only time would really tell his worth. He had the classic saturnine good looks of a Phantine male, and a white, toothy grin that people either found winningly charming or unpleasantly cocky.

Umbra Flight strode off across the apron towards the hangar, followed by another flight of aviators spilling down from a second transport. Jagdea took a glance back at their own ride. In the cab, the Munitorum driver nodded briefly to her. She could clearly see how one half of his face was lost in burn scarring, as if soft, pink rose petals had been plastered across his skin.

They walked into the vast drome hangar. The air inside smelled cold and damp, with a tang of promethium. The interior space had been cleared, except for a lone Shrike under tarps in a corner, and a stage of flakboards supported by empty munition crates had been raised along the west wall. A chart stand and a hololithic displayer had been set up on the staging.

A group of more than twenty aviators was already waiting inside. They stood near the stage, their kit bags at their feet. Like the men who had come off the second truck, they were Navy pilots, wearing grey flight armour and black coats. Some of them sported augmetic eyes. They greeted their colleagues from the second truck, but both groups looked dubiously at the Phantine as they came in, and stayed apart from them in segregated groups. Jagdea regarded them casually as Umbra Flight dropped their bags and made a huddle. The Navy fliers kept glancing their way. Jagdea knew the Phantine Corps was unusual, and that set them apart from the regular Imperial aviators. It undoubtedly would mean rivalry and a pecking order, she accepted.

They were tough-looking brutes, sturdy and thickset, with pale skins and cropped hair. Most of their flightsuits were reinforced with plating sections or coats of chainmail, and their heavy leather coats were often fur-trimmed. Many had ugly facial scars. Several displayed medal ribbons and other honour sashes.

‘Sixty-Third Imperial Fighter Wing,’ Blansher whispered discreetly in her ear. ‘The Sundogs, as they like to be styled. I believe that one there, the big fellow with the flight commander pins, is Leksander Godel. Forty kills last count.’

‘Yeah, I’ve heard of him,’ she answered lightly.

‘The other bunch are the 409 Raptors, I believe,’ Blansher went on, ‘which would make that unassuming fellow there Wing Leader Ortho Blaguer.’

‘The same?’

‘The very same. One hundred and ten kills. See, he’s looking at us.’

‘Then let’s look somewhere else,’ Jagdea said and turned away.

‘Orbis at your six!’ Pilot Officer Zemmic suddenly cried out loudly, his voice echoing round the drome. Dismounting from another transport just now drawn up outside, a dozen more Phantine fliers were marching into the hangar. Jagdea felt instant relief at the sight of familiar faces. Orbis Flight, comrades and friends. At the head of them strolled their commander, Wilhem Hayyes.

The two wings clustered together and greeted each other.

‘Nice of you to join us,’ Jagdea grinned as she shook Hayyes by the hand.

‘Nice of you to wait for us,’ Hayyes replied. ‘I trust there are still some bats flying for us to hunt.’

A hush suddenly fell. A final group of aviators, all Navy men, had just entered the hangar, making a late entrance that seemed to Jagdea calculatedly theatrical. There were only eight of them. Their armoured flightsuits were matt black and their suede jackets cloud-white. They wore no insignia or rank markings whatsoever, except silver Imperial aquilae at their collars.

‘Holy crap!’ Jagdea heard Del Ruth whisper. ‘The Apostles!’

The Apostles, indeed. The celebrated wing of aces, the very elite. Jagdea wondered which one was Quint, ace of aces, which one Gettering. The tall one, was that Seekan or Harlsson? Which one was Suhr?

There was no time to ask Blansher. Escorted by a dozen aides and tactical officers, an imposing figure in the uniform of a fleet admiral came in and took the stage. It was Ornoff himself.

All eyes turned to him.

‘Aviators,’ he began, his voice soft but carrying. ‘At 18.00 yesterday evening, I met with Lord Militant Humel in the War Ministry at Enothopolis. The lord militant, as you must be aware, has been prosecuting the war here on Enothis for the last nine months, in the name of Warmaster Macaroth and the God-Emperor of us all.’

‘The Emperor protects!’ one of the Apostles said smartly, and everyone eagerly echoed the words.

Ornoff nodded appreciatively. ‘I hope he does, Captain Gettering. In the meantime, we will have to do. I presented the formal orders sent to me by the Warmaster to lord militant Humel, and at 18.30 hours precisely, the lord militant formally handed command of the Enothis theatre to me.’

Spontaneous applause broke out across the hangar floor.

‘For now, the land war on Enothis is done. Now the air war begins.’

Theda MAB South, 07.46

Major Frans Scalter glanced at the co-pilot alongside him in the cramped bubble canopy of the thundering Cyclone, got a thumbs-up, then turned to wave the ground crew off.

He adjusted his mask. ‘Operations, Operations. This is Seeker One. Seeker Flight is ready for departure. Awaiting permission.’

Scalter had his hand on the wheel-brake lever.

‘Seeker One, Operations. Roll them out. Main is open. Fly true and may the Emperor protect you.’

‘Thank you, Operations. Seeker Flight, on my lead.’

Scalter released the brake, and opened the throttle gently. Bucking, the twin-engined plane began to creep out off the hardstand towards the main runway. Its wingmen followed. The combined roar of the six engines resounded across the field.

Scalter rolled to the start position, and made a final adjustment to the trim. At his side, Artone opened the radiators and made the fuel mix a little richer for a lusty take-off.

‘Seeker Flight–’ Scalter began.

Artone suddenly held up a hand.

‘What?’

‘Red flag!’ said Artone urgently, pointing down the field.

‘Throne! What now?’ snarled Scalter. ‘Operations, this is Seeker One. We’ve got a red flag. Please confirm our clearance.’

There was a pause. Then the vox fizzled. ‘Negative clearance, negative clearance, Seeker Flight. Abort now and clear main. Roll off to revetments fifteen through seventeen and stand down. Repeat – Negative clearance, abort and clear main.’

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Scalter demanded.

‘Wounded birds,’ the vox replied. ‘Wounded birds inbound.’

Twenty kilometres short of Theda MAB South, 07.46

They could see the spread of the field, slightly hazy in the morning light. Guide paths were popping off. The knocking from behind Darrow was now constant.

Major Heckel called in the fuel load from each Cub in turn. All were miserably low. Darrow could only answer full as he had no other reading. Hunt Sixteen had begun to dribble smoke in the last ten minutes, and its pilot reported rapidly dropping hydraulic pressure. Hunt Sixteen had taken at least two hits to the belly during the brawl over the mountains.

‘Hunt Flight, this is Hunt Leader. Sixteen and Four have landing priority. Let them go in first and we’ll follow as soon as they’re down. Confirm.’

Darrow stretched his shoulders against the harness. Heckel wanted Sixteen down before it died, and he wanted Darrow down as quickly because he was most likely flying on empty.

‘After you, Hunt Sixteen,’ Darrow voxed, allowing the Wolfcub to come around ahead of him. The Cub’s streamer of smoke pulsed clear then white, clear then white, like a ticker tape.

The knocking grew yet more insistent. Darrow began his approach.

Theda MAB South, 07.47

‘Your fighter wings,’ Ornoff told them, ‘are five of the first to arrive on station here along the southern coast. In the next seventy-two hours, a total of fifty-eight wings of the Imperial Navy… and its affiliates…’ he added, with a nod to the Phantine, ‘will be deployed at airfields along the entire littoral. Forty-two fighter wings, sixteen bomber flights. To say that you will be supporting the local Commonwealth squadrons here is a mis-statement. You will form the front line in the air. The stalwart Commonwealth forces who have, let me remind you, been fighting this theatre for months now, will take a supportive role. God-Emperor willing, this may allow them precious time to repair, refit, recrew and rest.’

He turned to the chart behind him. ‘I don’t need to tell you to familiarise yourself with the topography, channel use, and the location of friendly fields. Encryption codes will be changed on a daily basis. The Archenemy is listening.’

Ornoff paused and slid his open hand down the chart pensively. ‘The situation here is grave. Lord Militant Humel’s land forces, ably supported by the Commonwealth armies, almost succeeded in driving the Archenemy off this world. However, in the last two months, fortunes have reversed disastrously. The Archenemy, whose remaining surface stronghold is around the Southern Trinity Hives – here – has resupplied in great force as part of the counter-offensive launched last year through the Khan Group as a whole. The lord militant’s land forces are now in harried retreat northwards through the Interior Desert… this region, here. Some have already reached the Makanite Range, and are struggling through the passes there. Our task – your task – is to help as many of them reach the safety of the Zophonian Coast as possible. We are to supply comprehensive air cover to the retreating columns of armour and infantry. That means denying the enemy airspace, and prosecuting their land forces with aerial strikes. Enothis will only be saved if sufficient portions of allied land forces can be brought back to the coast intact. There, with resupply, they can make a stand, a counter-attack to meet the Archenemy invasion.’

Ornoff looked back at them all. ‘Expect to be flying sorties round the clock. A thorough strategic plan will be executed as soon as all the wings are on station, at which point your wings may be reassigned to other fields. In the meantime, you will be flying ad hoc missions at the discretion of Operations to supply cover until we are at full strength.’

Ornoff raised a hand and beckoned one of the staffers who had entered the hangar with him onto the stage, an older man in the flight kit of a Commonweath pilot officer. ‘I’ve invited Commander Parrwood here to brief you on climate and terrain peculiarities. Before he does, any questions?’

Godel, the Sundogs’ flight commander, raised a gloved hand. ‘What are we to expect here, admiral?’

‘Superior air power,’ Ornoff replied crisply. ‘Hell Razor and Locust-class fighters, Tormentor and Hell Talon-class fighter-bombers. The Archenemy is flying a large number of locally-made machines. There are also reports of heavy bombers, of a type yet undetermined. Many of their planes exhibit extended range, which may indicate mass carriers in the desert.’

‘When do we get in their reach?’ one of the Apostles asked.

‘Unless you deny them, Major Suhr, at their present rate of progress, the Archenemy wings will have range enough to begin attacking these coastal bases within the month. That is an eventuality I don’t want to see.’

‘And you won’t, admiral,’ said Suhr, ‘because we will deny them.’ There was a general murmur of approval.

‘Now, if Commander Parrwood would be so kind we–’

Ornoff’s words were cut off as a hooter began to drone outside. In a moment, it was chorused by others. A deep, ominous moaning wailed out across the field.

The aviators exchanged glances. Ornoff looked at his aides and hurried off the stage, heading for the hangar doors. Everyone followed.

Outside, in the bright sunlight, they clustered on the rockcrete apron, scanning the glassy sky. Path lights had been lit along the main runway track, and recovery vehicles were growling out of 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 hoving 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.’

Over 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.’

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 pulsejet, 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.

‘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?’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2004.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Adam Tooby.
Map by Nuala Kinrade.

Double Eagle © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. Double Eagle, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78999-442-1

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For my father with love and plastic cement.

A special note of thanks to Tony Cottrell
for his advice, suggestions and patience.

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o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.