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Interceptor City – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

DAY 86

Oceanic Approach (Safe Lane 345), 16:56

They had been flying through rain for nine hours, following Transoceanic 27, the convoy spread out in a long, straggled line, like migrating geese.

Bree Jagdea was lead stick on the convoy principal, a ponderous Kazin-pattern Firmament. It had been dark for more than an hour; they had flown towards the encroaching terminator and into nightfall. With the darkness, and the rain, visibility was now zero-zero. But the convoy was so spaced out, none of the other birds would have been in sight even in clear conditions. Eased back in the pilot seat, she watched the progress of the tiny amber cross-runes on the scope, a chain of aircraft almost forty miles long. The runes blinked, repositioned, blinked, repositioned…

Rain pissed against the cockpit’s side windows, but the main screen was kept clear by air ducts below the seal. There was nothing to see; just a vacuum of darkness. Somewhere far below, the heaving sea. Somewhere far ahead, the invisible destination.

‘A ping soon, surely?’ murmured Menomar, her co-pilot. He was in the pit space directly behind her, hunched on a pull-down seat, playing tarotti with the payload specialist and two cargomen. The ping came almost at once, a tone bleat from the transponder console.

Jagdea smiled. Klay Menomar was like that. He had an instinctive knack for time and distance logging that ticked over in his head as accurately as any logis-engine. They’d been flying together for eight months. Menomar never set a wake-up alarm.

She yawned, and took her feet down off the instrument panel. Behind her, Menomar picked up his cards, riffled them into a block, and offered his commiserations to the payload boys. They left the pit, grumbling. Menomar latched the bay door behind them, inviting them to try again next run, strapped the pull-downs upright, and damped the cockpit lights. In the blue gloom, he took his place beside her, their faces lit by the coloured constellation of the flight board.

The ping came again. The automated request pulse from Orison Traffic. Jagdea dragged her headset off her neck.

‘OT Control, OT Control, this is Glacier Heavy Five-Nine. Verification request acknowledged, over.’

She threw a switch on the transponder. Her bird was now transmitting its identification signal. She checked the modar screen, watching the chain of runes, and tutted as she switched vox-channels.

‘Glacier Heavy Five-Nine to all elements. Wake the hell up and verify, over.’

On the screen, one by one, green tags blinked into life alongside each amber cross-rune as transponders came on. Twenty-six freightbirds in the line. A couple were slow. She waited until they were all showing. Sometimes bats snuggled into a convoy line, passing as just another link in the chain. There were stories of intercept wings splashing whole convoys because some shithead forgot to activate verification. Orison Hive wasn’t playing games these days. The last thing she needed was the thought of a Thunderbolt pack out there in the zero-zero dark, stalking her with weapons hot.

The vox crackled in her phones.

‘Glacier Heavy Five-Nine, this is OTC. Verifying twenty-six – two, six – elements inbound at this time. Confirm, over.’

She switched channels back to Traffic.

‘Confirm twenty-six – two, six, OTC. Approaching the marker. Request permission to depart Transoceanic Twenty-Seven and join Safe Lane Three-Four-Five, over.’

‘Permission granted, Five-Nine. Make your height four thousand, and join Three-Four-Five. Advise cross-winds, over.’

‘It’s a dirty night, OTC.’

‘It’s always a dirty night here, Five-Nine, over.’

‘Confirming instruction, OTC. Glacier Heavy Five-Nine turning north-north-east to join Safe Lane Three-Four-Five and descending to four thousand, over.’

Jagdea looked at Menomar.

‘Remind them,’ she told him.

He nodded, adjusted the sit of his headset, and began repeating the routing instruction to the other convoy elements. Jagdea took a breath, settled at the controls, and took the multiengine off autoguide.

At once, she sensed its cumbersome weight through the stick, a huge mass sliding, ungainly, in the wet air. Firmaments were among the largest Aeronautica transporters, eight-engine transatmospheric mammoths that dwarfed even the hulking Oneros. They were almost entirely logis-driven. Someone once joked they could fly and land themselves, but Jagdea knew it wasn’t a joke. She’d seen basic-function servitors run them up and down the cargo lanes on Gereon after liberation. She and Menomar were present in what seemed a purely ceremonial role.

A pilot didn’t ride a Firmament the way she would ride a single-seat fightbird. There was no connection, no synergy, no ongoing contest with the stick. A Bolt was a racing animal, a steed, full of spittle and fury. You clung on and coaxed until it knew you. You tamed it and you broke it, or it broke you. You were in it together, fused as one, every second of the way. The heavies, like the Firmament, had personality too, but it was distant and aloof, the stubborn resentment of a pack animal as sensed through slack reins by a driver on the laden cart behind. It went where it was going, stoic and unspeaking, and you nudged it now and then to keep it true.

Jagdea had been on heavies for ten years and six worlds. Oneros, usually, sometimes Destriers. Occasionally something smaller, on a delivery run, a day out that would remind her of other times, and leave her with both heartache and zero regrets. She missed the spittle and fury, but she remembered the shred that had gone with it, the constant acid hiss of adrenaline, the searing stress, the physical and mental punishment. Combat pilots either died young, or lived long enough to wish they had. Veterans like her, long past their consume-by date, were patched and limping and broken. Fightbirds were a young smoke’s game. You had to be young to be fit enough, to be sharp enough. To be dumb enough.

The chop was getting heavy. The stick twitched in her palm, like a door rattled by the wind. She felt the gale and the driving rain kneeling on the aircraft, pushing it off true with little jerks and bumps, like someone trying to move a sofa that was too big to lift outright. The Firmament scraped the air, shifting and fidgeting.

‘You got it, Jags?’ Menomar asked, glancing at her.

‘Oh, piss off.’

‘Only asking,’ he replied with a grin.

‘It’s Four-A,’ she replied, something she hadn’t said in a long time. And it was. She edged the stick, leaned the big bastard into the wind. Logis-programs adjusted trim for her. It was almost like flying.

Five-Nine had run non-stop from Port Halgart on the Black Glaciers. The southern polar region was Lysander’s main landfall point for orbital supplies: munitions, fuel, consumables, fighting vehicles, spares and sometimes even troops. The glacial region had been the primary war zone back in ’74, when Innokenti’s wounded host had hit the world during the retreat from Herodor. Rand-Huppert had them driven out by ’75, and now the black ice plains had become crusted with city-sized Munitorum depots supporting the second phase of Lysander’s conflicts, known as the Orison Wars or the Mainland Wars, depending on who you asked. They’d begun in ’86, when the Archonate had attempted a take-back in the Cabal Systems, and they had been burning ever since.

Jagdea didn’t really keep up with the minutiae. She was no longer required to appreciate combat objectives. She flew logistics. Her targets were times and destinations and cargoes-by-weight. The crusade was the theatre show, and she and Menomar were, as he liked to put it, stage hands, lugging the scenery so that the show could go on.

That summer, she’d made nineteen runs between Orison and Port Halgart, pretty much all of them freight turnarounds; standard bulk-lifts to the hive, then a run back empty, or with a hold full of blank-eyed Militarum rotating out, many of them carrying wounds.

Nineteen runs, but Orison still impressed. In daylight, it was an urban mountain range, a tiered cliff of a city that ran the length of the gulf coast for some two thousand miles. Ramparts of stone and ocean walls, and behind them, the hazy summits of the main spires further inland. This was the first time she’d seen it at night.

And she could see it, despite the darkness and the rain. Passing the marker forty miles out, she began to see the glow, the smudged fuzz of yellow and white, a smudge that slowly resolved into countless unfocused lights as the Firmament rumbled closer. A billion windows, tower lights, mast lights, search cones, the wash of radiance against curtain walls, the sodium cast of lamps along thoroughfares, the yellow glare of decks, the beady wink of red navigation markers on spire tops. It was like a mass of stars, a generous serving of the local spiral arm, scooped out and served on the black plate of the world. And behind them, the gauzy shimmer of the main spires, upright cities, illuminated staircases leading up to the heavens, and perhaps to some kind of god.

Jagdea wasn’t sure whose.

‘Glacier Heavy Five-Nine, this is Orison Traffic. Reading you now inbound. Slow your approach to one-twenty and descend to one thousand.’

‘Copy that, OTC.’

‘Routing you to Hymnal Four-One for put down. Make your turn zero-two-zero onto guidepath two-one and begin final. Switch to autotrack option, over.’

‘Received, OTC. Turning zero-two-zero on descent, over.’

Jagdea eased the stick, watching the azimuth dial. On the display, the cross-runes had begun to bunch up as the convoy closed its spacing. They were crossing the coastline, coming in over the glow of the sea ramparts. They were close enough to buildings, either side and below, that the proximity warnings went off briefly. The cross-shear grew worse. The night gale was planing off the armoured walls and creating an eddying river of turbulence and backwash. Something loose in a cubby behind her seat started to rattle.

The transponder pinged. She ignored it, calmly cupping the stick as if she was raising a pot from wet clay on a wheel.

It pinged again.

‘Autotrack?’ Menomar asked.

She shook her head. Hymnal 41 Field was transmitting an autotrack datastream that would guide the bird in on full automatic via logis-engines. The complete, hands-free, autoglide experience, what Klay Menomar liked to call the ‘full hat to sack service’, micro-adjusting in real-time to smooth the buffet and shear.

‘Autotrack, Jags?’ Menomar asked again.

‘Autotrack option,’ she replied, eyes on the dials. ‘Means it’s optional. I like to earn my pay once in a while.’

‘You do?’

‘Keeps me honest,’ she said.

Menomar chuckled. He leaned over and threw a switch on the transponder. A panel lit up: A/TRACK REJECTED.

She could see the strip lights ahead. The tower’s voice was in her ear. The shear was really strong, and irregular. The enormous mass of the multiengine amplified the effect. It was pushing at the tail, causing both pitch and yaw. Jagdea corrected, each touch on the stick imperceptible, a little pressure, a little ease, smooth yet firm, not allowing an ounce of over-response.

Almost like actually flying.

The heavy was ducted, but only an idiot tried to set down a capacity-laden Firmament at night, in a storm, on vector only. Textbook recommended a short conventional down, with vector assist, and Jagdea was nothing but textbook.

Except for those few pages that, now and then, got stuck together.

She had the leviathan balanced at the happy edge of stall. Chin up, the phosphor glow of the Militarum field, and the glittering city beyond, flashing by at what seemed like a suicidal rate. The world was ripping past, breakneck, but she felt like she was floating, like a mote of dust.

‘Cart down,’ she said.

‘Lowering cart,’ Menomar replied. He slunked over the oiled steel levers. There was a thump, and they both heard the slow, straining groan of the gear extending. Lights flicked on over the levers, all green and prime.

‘Cart clean, cart down,’ Menomar said.

‘Copy,’ she replied. The stripway was rushing up at her, marker lights flitting past on either side, like tracers from a surface battery. She could see the veil of rain, the shimmer of standing water on the rockcrete. A little more chin, a squeeze less power. Vector ducts around to two-seventy, down forward, front. She did that manually, overriding logis-control, not even looking as she turned the rotary dial with her left hand.

The ground proximity alert started sounding. Menomar muted it.

‘Ducts at five per cent, build to ten,’ she instructed.

‘Copy,’ said Menomar. He smoothly switched in the vector thrust secondary system, diverting five per cent of thrust from the eight massive turbofans to the ducts aimed down and forward. A little judder as the ducts took up the slack and robbed out more speed. Menomar increased output to ten, and the Firmament felt like it was stuck to the air, way below stall speed.

‘Little more,’ said Jagdea. He obliged. They barely felt the touch as the wheels kissed the ground. Jagdea powered back and applied reverse thrust to arrest the roll. The Firmament hissed forward on its massive wheels, and gently came to a stop in less than sixty yards.

Menomar began the power down. Jagdea cross-checked, and damped the ducts. A cargo-4 ran out onto the bright stripway, swung in ahead of their nose, and lit up a bright, flashing ‘follow me’ indication display. She eased off the brakes, and taxied the heavy after it, steering off the strip onto the wide hardpan of a parking stand.

Behind them, the rest of the convoy began to thunder in, one at a time, two more Firmaments, a Destrier, three Oneros; gear down, nav-lights blinking, ducts wailing, home to roost.

Hymnal 41 Field, Orison, 19:03

They were idly looking at the routing board in the sickly glare of the wire-domed lamps when the assistant deck officer approached them. His name was Dillady, and he wore his dark blue battlefleet uniform with a fastidious attention to detail. The pins on his sleeve and collar, well-polished, indicated Imperial Navy, the Aeronautica Warfare Arm, and Logistics. He was career Aeronautica, which meant he had spent most of his time on the ground. He had data-plug ports over his left ear, and a moustache that looked like a crow that had failed to notice a cliff. He also had a data-slate, and Jagdea was always wary of career men with data-slates.

‘Glacier Heavy Five-Nine?’ he asked.

They turned, her and Menomar. They had just walked in off the field, ready-bags over their shoulders, and water was dripping off their coats. Outside, under the floods, servitors were unloading cargo from the whale jaws of their Firmament. The off-load would take another four hours, and one of them was supposed to stay on site until it was done, but those were pages in Jagdea’s textbook that had stuck, and they’d left supervision to the payload officer because it seemed far more like his job. First down, first out, first look at the routing board. The other crews were starting to wander in. If there was anything remotely decent, Jagdea and Menomar wanted to stake it.

But, as ever, there wasn’t.

‘Yes,’ Jagdea answered, with slight reluctance. She didn’t know Dillady. She usually flew into Hymnal 32 or Spire Field 19. But she had a feeling she knew his type.

‘Non-standard,’ said Dillady. He glanced at his slate as though to confirm the diagnosis. ‘Non-standard,’ he repeated.

Jagdea and Menomar exchanged glances. It wasn’t clear what Dillady was referring to. They were wet, tired and cold. Almost everything about their flight gear was non-regulation. Both wore heavy flight boots, black leather coats, and quilted flight bottoms with high waists and braces over thick, white knitted sweaters. Was it possible that they were too wet for indoor use? Or was it the sweaters? It was the sweaters, Jagdea decided.

‘Your approach and landing,’ said Dillady.

‘I seem to remember landing intact,’ Menomar said. He looked at Jagdea, widening his eyes. ‘Shit, Jags, did we crash? Are we dead? Is this… paradise?’

Jagdea hid her smirk.

‘What’s the problem?’ she asked.

Dillady looked at her, yearning for a ‘sir’ that would never come.

‘Non-standard approach and landing,’ he said. He checked his slate again. ‘Which one of you is Jagdea?’

Jagdea pointed to herself. Menomar pointed at her too.

‘Pilot Officer Jagdea,’ Dillady said. ‘You had craft command. You were also element lead. You were at the stick.’

‘I was.’

‘You did not engage autotrack.’

‘Must’ve forgot,’ she said.

‘OTC instructed you. Logis would have prompted you. You did not engage.’

‘Slipped my mind,’ she said.

Dillady consulted his slate.

‘It didn’t slip your mind, pilot officer. System data shows that you manually rejected it.’ He held up the slate to show her, and pointed at a line of metadata.

‘Oh, that was me,’ said Menomar. ‘I turned it off. I’ll be honest, it was bothering her. Very persistent. Borderline harassment, if you ask me. It kept making these advances, making suggestions, all kinds of stuff. So I said, no, that’s got to stop. I’m not having it–’

‘What?’ said Dillady.

‘I just shut it down,’ said Menomar. ‘It was the gentlemanly thing to do, really–’

‘Is this a bit?’ Dillady asked, frowning. ‘Is this a bit you do?’

‘It could be,’ said Menomar.

‘I decided on a manual landing,’ said Jagdea. ‘I didn’t see the harm.’

‘It was non-standard,’ said Dillady. ‘It was contrary to field protocol, and contrary to Orison Traffic regulations.’

‘Still,’ said Jagdea. She shrugged. ‘Landed it.’

‘In these conditions?’ Dillady said. ‘Night flight. Storm advisory. Precipitation. Over an urban zone. Eighteen hundred tons of aircraft. Use of autotrack is a safety countermeasure, which is why it is mandated. Guidance and guidepath regulations are fully enforced by Wing Command, and circulated on a more than regular basis to all multiengine drivers, including pool reservists like you. Besides which, you were element lead. You’re supposed to set an example to the other pilots in your convoy. What do you have to say?’

‘I felt like flying,’ said Jagdea. She knew her reply was off-hand, but she just wanted to be left alone.

‘If you’d misjudged,’ said Dillady, ‘and piled that bird in, we’d have had to close the stripway. Probably the field. We’d have lost a valuable air asset, and a vast tonnage of materiel. And we’d be frantically trying to reroute twenty-five other freight elements, all low on fuel after a transoceanic run, to other fields with capacity before they fell out of the sky.’

‘And eight personnel,’ said Menomar.

‘What?’

‘A valuable air asset, a vast tonnage of materiel, and eight personnel,’ said Menomar.

Dillady stared back at him.

‘I am not letting this kind of laxity slip through,’ Dillady said. ‘Inexperienced pilots making poor judgements when–’

‘Inexperienced?’ said Menomar. ‘Do you know who this is?’

‘Don’t,’ said Jagdea quietly. She felt a spike of anxiety. Menomar leaping to her defence was the last thing she wanted to handle.

‘Pilot Officer Jagdea,’ said Dillady, using his slate to make sure he got it right, ‘Aeronautica Logistics Reserve.’

‘Wing Commander Bree Jagdea, Phantine Twentieth Fighter Squadron,’ said Menomar, taking a small but aggressive step forward.

‘Don’t, Klay,’ said Jagdea.

‘Flew Bolts, flew Lights, flew every last damn thing,’ Menomar went on heedlessly. ‘Flew the Cirenholm Air War, flew U-Minor, flew Lotun, flew Khan IV. Flew Srady Bay and Zinc Hill under Hydun. Flew Enothis in ’73. The frigging Battle of the frigging Zophonian Sea. That one must ring a bell, for f–’

‘Stop it,’ said Jagdea.

Dillady looked at her. ‘You were combat?’

Jagdea nodded.

Dillady glanced down at his slate.

‘I don’t pull up biographical data,’ he said, the crow on his upper lip expressing mild curiosity. ‘You were a wing commander? A squadron lead?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you don’t use the rank or the pins?’

‘I drive cargo,’ she said. ‘A squadron leader only exists when there’s a squadron to lead.’

Dillady paused, then nodded. ‘New routings will be posted at oh-six-thirty tomorrow,’ he said. ‘There are bunks and washrooms on level four. Carry on.’

Jagdea picked up her ready-bag, and pulled the still-glaring Menomar away by the arm. As they turned, Dillady called out to her.

‘Jagdea? Report to the deck officer at twenty-two hundred. His office is East Block, level five. Be prompt.’

‘The deck officer?’ Jagdea said.

‘You heard me.’

‘Over this?’ she asked. ‘About this?’

‘Follow instruction when issued, please,’ said Dillady, and walked away. His ‘please’ irked her. People always treated her differently when they discovered her past. The courtesy rankled, but not as much as being sent up in front of the deck officer.

East Block, Hymnal 41 Field, 21:58

Deck officer. Such a mild, insipid title. But ‘deck’, more properly ‘war deck’, was a basic unit of measurement in the mighty Imperial Navy, referring literally to the carrier deck or decks of a battlefleet warship, and by extension to any field, ground base, port or platform out of which the Aeronautica ran squadrons. Hymnal 41 Field was a deck. On a big ship of the line, the ‘deck’ might mean thirty full wings or more. It was the deck officer’s purview, his domain, his command. On a war deck, the deck officer was god, or at least a proxy, local god. He was base command, operations oversight, and wing commander, all rolled into one. On a war deck, even admirals and wing leaders saluted the deck officer.

She waited in the corridor outside the suite of offices. Most had shut down for night operation. Lights were only on in a few. She could smell food, decent food, from somewhere close by. Her stomach growled.

Klay had insisted on coming with her, to take his share of the heat, but she had out-insisted. Rank had its privileges. She’d sent him to catch some sleep. One of them had to be fresh in the morning to snag a half-decent routing.

The corridor was gloomy. Large ports on the opposite side to the offices overlooked the stripway. The windows were flushed with rain, like someone had turned a pressure hose on them. If she pressed close and squinted, she could see multiengines lined up on the rockcrete, crews working to unload them in the downpour. More distant lit pinpricks suggested the swell of the towering hive. She saw the wink of a wing light as a bird came in on an outside strip. Something big, maybe an Onero. Too far away to tell. Too much rain.

She turned her gaze back to the hive again, the glow of it. Orison wasn’t really a hive. It was a hive-plex, and not even the biggest on Lysander. As far as she could remember, there were nine major conurbations. Orison was one of the key densities. It was a family of hives, hives that had prospered and grown to the point where they had started to blend into one. They covered the western seaboard and large territories inland, like thick lichen encasing a rocky outcrop. Like all families, some members had done well for themselves, and grown old and fat, while others were still young and breeding. And, like all families, there had been deaths.

Lysander had been free of the Archenemy for just over ten years when the enemy take-back began in ’86. Jagdea had been on Gereon then, working with the occupation forces after the liberation nine years earlier, but she’d heard word of the big hit that Lysander had taken. An orbital attack, a year of land war, and then Great Haven, the easternmost hive of the Orison hive-plex, had fallen to the Archonate. Its neighbour, Vesperus, had followed a year later. Crusade forces, pushing out of the main Orison zone, had driven the onslaught back. Vesperus, already partly evacuated, had been smoked and killed outright. A whole hive, nearly as big as the one she was staring at, dead and empty, a city grave. Great Haven had survived. Since then, Great Haven and Orison had been slugging it out, a massive surface war mainly, but a major air fight too. Significant Aeronautica assets had been committed, some said as much as on Lyubov. There was glory out there in the rainswept darkness, glory to be chased and snatched by the brave and the reckless, the bat-killers and the gunfighters, the veterans who should know better, and the over-confident smokes who didn’t, and who probably wouldn’t live long enough to learn.

There was nowhere to sit. She waited. She leaned against the wall, easing the pins in her left hip. So many holes, so many patches, each one the souvenir of some shitfest or other. Jagdea believed she could make a popular mess game out of it: match the scar to the theatre. The burn tissue on her bicep? Tracer shot over Cirenholm, well done, sir! The blue, fibreweave grafts on her left arm, lower throat and shoulder? Cannon fire from a hell-bat over the Enothian littoral that had brought her down and opened her to the bone. Congratulations, everything still to play for. The scar on her thin cheek? Bursting canopy plex, Srady Bay, well spotted. The stipples on her belly? Aluminoid fragments, Urdesh Minor, correct. The hip, the ribs, the herniated spinal discs? Well, that crash on Lyubov, of course. Spectacular. The kind where they had to cut you out of the burning wreck of your career. The fibreweave patches on her throat, wrists, left forearm, groin, right calf and ankles? All elective reinforcements done at various times to armour circulation points against high-g compression, or repair thromboses or deep-vein collapses caused by high-g compression. Take your pick, but full marks to you, thank you for playing. Let’s move to round two…

Dillady’s words haunted her.

No, not his words at all. Klay’s. Frigging Klay Menomar’s. His angry defence of her. His roll call of her life. None of it fresher than a decade or more, all of it ancient history. Glory stories. She wasn’t ashamed of them, of any of it. But actually hearing it, hearing it spill into the air out of somebody else’s mouth, that had knocked the stick out of her hands. It had made all the faces come back.

They came back from time to time, but only when she let them, when she was ready for them. If she let herself remember, or was telling a story, like the ones she’d told to Klay, then she’d call them up and let them come to her.

Standing in front of Dillady, she hadn’t been ready at all, not even slightly braced. And they had all come at once. Van Tull and Zemmic. Milan Blansher, of course. Espere. Clovin and Waldon. Darrow, always eager, and Viltry with his sad eyes. Scalter. August Kaminsky. Aggie Del Ruth. Larice, with her shit-eating grin. Marquall and Ranfre and Cordiale, laughing about something. Padmus, Rodine, Alia Tan, and all Jagdea’s other peers from the Cirenholm days and the Urdesh Minor tour, from Halo Flight, and Orbis, and Talon, and always, always Umbra Flight, in each and every incarnation, like old flight-room picts, dwindling in the brutal years after Enothis. Zeto and Lal Mullane and the Dancers from Khan IV, the laughing boys and girls of the Bat Pack on Lyubov, gunfighters with their hair on fire and their claws out, forever fewer and fewer.

It had almost overwhelmed her. She had felt as though tears were about to explode her eyes. All the faces. All those years. All those fleeting friendships that were less than actual friendships, but far, far more all the same. Born out of the shred. Born out of the fire, and the stress, and the necessity. Bright and hot and gone, like las-bolts. Her combat years, and she’d had more than most and been blessed with far too many, had been a constant, extreme state, relentlessly high on adrenaline. For almost ten years, she had never come down, never, not once. She had stayed high in the shred until she couldn’t stay up any more.

Did that make her lucky, or the unluckiest one of all?

She’d had friends since, co-pilots, wingmen. Menomar was one of the best. But the friends you make in the fire melt into you and fuse, and leave their marks on you like scars.

A door opened along the hall. A bar of light spilled across the corridor floor and up the wall.

‘Pilot Officer Jagdea?’

She straightened up. She rubbed her eyes, and shook out the sleeves of her coat. She had thought about changing for this, putting on a uniform, but there was nothing in her ready-bag except two pairs of clean shorts, two fairly clean pairs of wool socks, a definitely-not-clean vest, and a rolled compression bodyglove. So she’d settled for a strip-wash in the billet sink. Menomar had offered her a comb, which was a typical Klay Menomar joke, because Jagdea’s hair was about as short as hair could get and still deserve the name.

She walked down to the door, went in, and closed it behind her. She saluted, then stood, head up, hands behind her back. The room was a large command office, with hooded lamps over the desk, charts on the wall, and giant observation ports running with rain. The smell of food was stronger. She ignored her stomach.

The Hymnal 41 deck officer wore a clean, battlefleet regulation uniform that someone had probably pressed for him. He was standing with his back to her, pouring an amasec from a drink cart. She noticed his augmetic hand gripping the decanter.

‘How are you?’ he asked.

‘Well, sir. Thank you,’ she replied.

He put the decanter down and turned to look at her.

‘You probably don’t remember me,’ he said.

Her eyes widened. It was hard to process what was happening. She felt like she was back in the hall with Dillady, the faces swarming back against her will.

‘Shit,’ she said.

‘Oh, charming,’ he said. ‘It’s hardly a face you forget, I confess, but still.’

‘Kaminsky?’ she whispered.

‘Hello, Bree,’ said August Kaminsky. ‘How’s the Emperor been protecting you?’

‘I was trying to work it out,’ said Kaminsky, handing her a second amasec. ‘What is it? Nineteen years? Twenty?’

‘Twenty, I think,’ she said. She had taken an armchair by the desk before he’d even offered it. ‘Twenty. ’75. Khan IV.’

‘The Dancers,’ he said, raising his glass. His smile made an odd crease in the burn tissue of his face. ‘My last go-around.’

‘I was sorry to lose you.’

‘Don’t be,’ he replied. ‘I was done, and no good to you, or Umbra Flight. It was time. Thanks to you, I got, what, two extra years combat rotation I never thought I’d see? Three tours, and I wouldn’t give them back. But the shred gets you. The smart ones know when it’s time to step back. Yet you went on.’

‘Which makes me not one of the smart ones?’ she asked wryly.

Kaminsky laughed. ‘No, you weren’t ready. You had tour-time left in you.’

‘Umbra didn’t,’ she said. ‘It lasted about four months after you went. Not enough of us left. Wing Command retired us as a unit, but offered places to pilot officers, because they were desperate for decent sticks. So I signed off and folded into the Aeronautica. Two more tours with Fifty-Eight Aquila, then on to Twelfth Squadron Stratoraptors, and Lyubov.’

‘Some show,’ he said. ‘And I question the adjective “decent” in that account. The Aeronautica was lucky to have you. Any of you.’

‘What about you?’ Jagdea asked.

Kaminsky shrugged.

‘Same story but from the other side of the desk,’ he said. ‘Put in for transfer to Aeronautica after I stepped down from active combat, got accepted, served in munitions on the Clarion, then made junior deck. Then assistant deck on the Grace And Majesty Of Khulan. Eight years doing that, then four on the Imperator Resurgam. Then here.’

‘So what rank are you?’

‘Senior deck officer, Hymnal Forty-One Field, please and thank you and where’s my salute?’

‘You run the frigging place. I get it. But what rank does that make you?’

‘Well, technically,’ he mused, ‘that makes me a wing commander, wing commander.’

‘Good for you,’ she said, and tipped her glass to him.

‘I just can’t quit the smell of aviation fuel,’ he said, ‘but this is as close as I’m prepared to get any more.’

‘So,’ she said, ‘a question, senior deck officer… Dillady?’

‘Good question.’

‘Answer?’

‘Oh, arsehole.’

‘Good answer.’

‘But I didn’t appoint him,’ said Kaminsky. ‘Turns out you don’t get to choose these things. We are obliged to get along. One does not join the Aeronautica to make friends.’

‘Or keep them,’ she said.

‘Brutally true,’ he replied. ‘Look, Bree, I saw your name on the day log when I was reviewing the inbounds this morning. I had to call you in, just to say hello.’

‘I would have been offended if you hadn’t.’

‘Glacier Heavy Five-Nine, was it?’ he asked. ‘What the hell are you doing driving multis and running airlifts?’

‘I have one skill,’ she said. ‘I fly things. And I’m too broken for combat. So I wound up in the Logistics reserve pool, doing whatever jobs needed to be done.’

‘Well, I think that’s a crime. You know what, recon’s crying out for decent sticks. A little mono fightbird, high alt, picters in place of guns, no shooting guaranteed? That’s more you.’

She shook her head.

‘Oh, come on. Bree Jagdea flying freightbirds?’

‘They don’t fly themselves,’ she said.

‘Well, I hate to break it to you…’ he began, and they both laughed.

He got up.

‘Hungry?’ he asked.

‘Hell, yes. I’ve been smelling food since I got up here. Good food, too. Is the canteen still open?’

He walked over to a sideboard and took the steel domes off two warming plates.

‘Oh, Throne,’ she said. ‘That’s what I could smell.’

‘I took the liberty of ordering supper from the officers’ refectory,’ said Kaminsky. ‘I mean, if a senior deck officer can’t treat an old friend to a good meal, where’s the frigging justice in life?’

Kaminsky had been Enothian Commonwealth Aviation Corps when she’d first met him, invalided to service duties. In the crunch, before the Battle of the Zophonian Sea, she’d dragged him back into combat duty, got him a brevet assignment to the Phantine Air Corps, and handed him a place in Umbra Flight. Kaminsky had stayed there, through the rest of Enothis, then through Lotun, and most of Khan IV.

‘I was junked,’ he said as they ate. ‘But you brought me back from the dead, and gave me a lease of life I never expected.’

‘That’s an overly generous description of what happened,’ she replied. ‘I pulled strings and bent more than a few rules to give you a chance to kill yourself. Because I needed a stick. That’s not what friends do.’

‘One does not join the Aeronautica to make friends,’ he said.

‘Who said we were friends?’ Jagdea grinned, raising a forkful of steak.

‘I was just thinking,’ Kaminsky said, ‘maybe I can return the favour this time around? Bring you back from the dead. I have connections.’

‘I’m happy being dead,’ she said.

‘How long since you flew combat?’

‘Not long enough, August.’

‘But when? Lyubov?’

She nodded.

‘Long time,’ Kaminsky mused, refilling their wine glasses from the carafe. ‘But still…’

‘Drop it, Kaminsky. It’s a young bastard’s game. A smoke’s game. I am well past my prime.’

‘You were the hottest stick I ever saw.’

‘Yeah, well, thanks, but that was then. I wore out. And I’m old. Reactions don’t get faster.’

‘But you miss it?’

‘No,’ she said firmly.

‘You do.’

‘It was what I did. Combat pilots burn bright and fast. What, five, six years, if they’re lucky? Much less, usually. The attrition is brutal. If you survive, by some miracle, the mental cost is too much. Remember Viltry?’

‘I do.’

‘Well, then.’ Jagdea sipped her wine. ‘Those are the career arcs. Physical burn-out, mental shred, or just plain, old-fashioned fiery death.’

‘The same could be said of the Astra Militarum,’ he said. ‘More so, in the meat-grinder. But there are Guard veterans pushing sixty, seventy… more, even, with augmetics and enhancement juvenat.’

‘Yeah, but a seventy-year-old colonel in the Guard doesn’t get out of bed each morning, strap himself to a ramjet, and fire himself at the enemy, does he?’

‘I believe there are a lot of people who would like to see that happen.’

‘I’m sure,’ she said, smiling. ‘My point is that the only gunslingers who last more than a decade, by means of luck or damnation, are freaks. Crazy, psychopathic freak-monsters. And they are, thankfully, a rare breed. No, the only outs are switching to non-combat stick work, or desk duties, or promotion to Navy Command.’

‘Or death.’

‘Or that.’

Kaminsky paused, glass in hand, and studied her across the table.

‘No, you miss it,’ he decided. ‘I know this because I chose to fly a desk, Bree, but you’re still flying actual birds.’

‘Multis,’ she corrected.

‘And you reject autotrack during a class-three gale. I saw the report. Why would you do that, unless you still wanted to be tested?’

‘It was a cheap thrill,’ she said. ‘Change the subject.’

He shrugged. ‘Do you ever wonder what happened to them?’ he asked.

‘Who?’

‘The ones that aren’t here. Those friends we didn’t make?’

‘Now and then,’ she said.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2025.
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