Double Eagle (17 page)

Marquall was almost insensible with rage. He was seething with desire to make a kill, to open his account. Bad enough he was the youngest, the most inexperienced, bad enough that Pers Espere had been maimed wet-nursing him. Marquall had no score. No kills to his name. Now his confidence had returned after that disastrous virgin sortie, he was determined to prove his worth in combat.

Hell, the sky was crawling with enemy machines! Surely he could hit one of them?

“Umbra Eight! Umbra Eight! Break left now!”

That was Van Tull’s voice. Marquall didn’t question it. He stomped the rudder bar and leaned on the stick, inverting as he pulled out to port. A flame yellow Hell Talon rushed over and by him.

“Thanks, Three,” he voxed, coming true and climbing again.

“You okay, Eight?” Van Tull voxed.

“Four-A,” replied Marquall. They were still babysitting him. That rankled. Then again, but for Van Tull’s warning, he’d like as not be dead now.

He turned in. Almost immediately, he picked up a Cyclone, running for its life from a Talon. The Commonwealth prop-plane was weeping smoke. Marquall wondered why Operations kept the Cyclones and Wolfcubs in the air. It was suicide, flying machines like that against the enemy’s vector-thrust predators.

He cranked the throttle, banked wide, clipped off a wasted but satisfying burst at a Tormentor as he went long over its back, and lined up on the Talon.

This time…

The port engine was dead, and so was Artone. Frans Scalter fought with the Cyclone’s leaden stick and called plaintively to his co-pilot and long-time friend. Hard rounds had torn through the machine’s cockpit, shattering the glass nose and ripping Artone’s torso in half. Wind screamed in through the shattered bubble. There was blood everywhere, and the instruments were plastered with sticky flecks of human tissue.

“I’ll get you home! I’ll get you home!” Scalter wailed, denying the scene around him, and imagining some miraculous future where he brought the ruptured Cyclone down, and the crews rushed in, and Artone was patched up and made alive again.

Scalter knew he had to keep evading. The Hell Talon was right on his tail now.

“Seeker One! Seeker One! Someone! Please—”

The Talon’s guns lit up.

Like a feline playing with a mouse, the bastard wasn’t going to let the Cyclone go. It swung from side to side with muscular power, correcting for every frantic jink and twist the Commonwealth pilot tried to make.

It had got the blood scent. It wanted the kill. It was greedy. It was staying on the target.

The first and oldest mistake.

Marquall came around on its five, calculating the deflection angle with almost leisurely brio.

Then he opened up with his quad cannons, feeling the heavy slap of them retard his motion, hearing the breech blocks bang and the autoloaders rattle to feed ammo from the whirring drums.

Somehow, Marquall had expected the enemy machine to explode, or catch fire, or do something equally spectacular.

It simply quivered. Part of one blade-wing deformed, like foil, and a gulp of brown smoke belched out of its engines.

Then it fell out of the air. All lift lost in one shocking instant, it dropped away, turning end over end, like a toy that had been thrown aside by a petulant child.

It spun away below him, smaller, smaller.

Throne, he’d got it. He’d killed it stone dead.

“S-seeker One, Seeker One,” he stammered, rousing from a brief fugue. “This is Umbra Eight. You’re clear, friend. Clear. Get your machine home and down.”

“Umbra Eight, this is Seeker One. Understood.”

Not even a thank you? Marquall didn’t care. He had a fire in his belly, a coal of excitement and satisfaction. He was no longer the kid who needed babysitting.

Something threw him into his seat like a kick in the face.
The Smear
inverted, every alarm screaming. In terror, mystified, Marquall dragged on the stick, but it was slack and dead. He saw flame on his port side, sections of metal plating slipping off like fish scales.

Fire licked into the cockpit.

“No!” he yelled. “Oh no, no, no!”

He fumbled with his harness, trying to reach the eject handle. Half-heard voices blasted out of the vox.

Huge negative G. He was already greying out. He couldn’t lift his hand, let alone reach the lever.

In front of him, like a rapidly-spinning kaleidoscope image, the city was rushing up.

Over the Interior Desert, 09.22

They kissed over the top of a dune headland and there it was. The size of it took their breath away. Judd voiced a particularly florid oath.

A mass carrier. It was almost a kilometre long, a huge slab of burnished decking and raised ramps, bronze in the desert light. Vast wheel assemblies rolled it across the dust. Viltry had been told the enemy called these behemoths
aeries,
as if they were home roosts for the murderous bats. It was a feat of mechanical genius, a juggernaut, a giant amongst machines.

Nothing could kill something that big. Nothing could—

He caught himself. They would have to try. That was the job the God-Emperor had decreed for them.

“No hesitation, Halo,” he cried. “We’re committed. Line up and shed, then come around with wing-loads for the second pass. The Emperor protects.”

He could see the Talons they had been following sweeping in to the fluted arrestor runs on the carrier’s top side. They looked tiny by comparison, little gaudy specks.

The carrier had seen the inbound Marauders, coming down onto it at zero height. Hundreds of anti aircraft batteries tracked round, alert, like the alarmed tails of scorpions, and the air was filled with bursting flak and zipping tracers. A hailstorm of fire.

“Stay on it, stay on it…” Viltry ordered.

A siren screeched. Amongst the blizzard of flak bursts, Viltry glimpsed the trail smoke of missiles banging off from the carrier.

Wordlessly, he hit the chaff switch, and clouds of glittering, distorting material puffed out of
Greta’s
launchers. Then heat-flares too. Near-miss explosions shook the airframe. The space between the onrushing planes and the vast carrier was muddy with flash flowers and blooms of black and white smoke.

A rocket struck
Miss Adventure
and killed her dead. The torn wreckage and hull sections, moving at close to mach one, cartwheeled over the desert floor, raking the sand, spitting flame like a firework.

“Nose and top. Anytime you like,” Viltry said.

The turrets opened up, playing fire along the carrier’s starboard hull. Viltry, concentrating as hard as he could, saw bats trying to launch from the lower chutes. Naxol had seen them too. A Locust came off its ion catapult and burst like a flare.

Ten seconds. Five. Flak damage to the port wing. Ignore it, hold her true. Two seconds. One.

Release.

Halo pulled off over the giant carrier. Every single bombardier had placed his drop perfectly. Vast eruptions lit up the deck, puncturing the armoured ramps, blasting flak mounts out of their sockets, toppling lifter assemblies and crane gantries. Someone—Viltry’s guess was
Widowmaker—
dropped their clutch into the command spire that rose over the top deck section. A massive fireball spread out, felling the spire in ragged chunks.

Four Marauders pulled clear of the blazing carrier.
Throne of Terra,
bombs gone, had been hit by flak. In his rear-picter, Viltry saw it flip onto its back and crash into the sands.

The four remaining planes arced round in formation, turning high, and began their second pass. Monumental palls of smoke rose from the stricken carrier.

They came in with rockets now, turrets blasting again. The wing-loads loosed, and snaked off on spiralling trails of smoke. There was nothing like the same weight of flak on them now.

The rockets splashed, sheeting fire and hull fragments into the desert sky as the Marauders went over.

They began to pull away, climbing.

Something primal and catastrophic happened to the carrier. Most likely, one of the rockets had penetrated the magazine or the drive section. The carrier spasmed, shook, and then incinerated in one stupendously bright flash.

The Shockwave almost knocked Halo out of the air.

They soared out, stabilising. A giant cloud of smoke, shaped like a forest mushroom, filled the sky behind them.

Theda MAB South, 09.30

The Operations rotunda was frantic with activity and chatter. Between them, the flight controllers were overseeing four major air-fights and nine intercept sorties. “Darrow?”

Darrow was staring up at the roof dome, where sunlight was spilling in through the collar of stained glass.

“Darrow? Junior?” Eads sounded tetchy.

Darrow started. “Sir, I’m sorry. My mind was drifting. No excuses. What were you saying, Flight?”

Eads turned his face towards the young man. There was sympathy in its sightless look. Eads held out a scrap of printout wafer. “I thought you might like to announce this, son,” he said. “Proof that not just bad things happen in this life.”

“Flight?”

“They told me about Heckel, son. I’m sorry that it had to be you who found him. Think about something else now. Announce that.”

Darrow looked down at the flimsy printout, then smiled. He looked up and cleared his throat. He’d heard junior flight controllers and assistants make proud announcements like this. Now it was his turn. And it beat them all.

“Attention, attention. Halo Flight confirms it has destroyed a mass carrier in the north desert. That is confirmed. Enemy carrier destroyed.”

Darrow’s smile widened as the rotunda broke out in cheers and applause. The first carrier found and killed. Even Banzie was clapping and grinning.

Eads said something. Darrow leaned forward to hear him over the tide of applause.

“Say again, Flight?”

“I said,” Eads whispered, “we might just do this. We might just win this against the odds.”

Palace Pier, 14.02

It was a grey, flat afternoon, and no one was in. Hardly a surprise, as the smoke wash from Ezraville had been fuming down the straits since daybreak.

The cafe door opened. Beqa looked up from the slates she was reading at the counter and saw Viltry in the doorway. Thirty empty tables stood between them. A Thracian waltz idled in the background.

He smiled, and took off his cap.

“Hello. You look pleased with yourself,” she said, rising. He walked between the vacant tables to reach her and slid a haversack off his shoulder.

“A big success today. A really big one. My crews are away celebrating, madly. They will be draining the vats of Theda dry tonight. And woe betide any ladies of easy virtue…”

“Have you been drinking?” Beqa asked.

“Um, a little, maybe. In dispersal. I do apologise.”

“Why are you here, Viltry? It sounds to me like you’re missing parties and celebrations and—”

Viltry opened his haversack. He pulled out two paper-wrapped haunches of vere, a bag of sweet tubers, bunches of fresh greens, dessert biscuits and a bottle of sjira red.

Beqa’s eyes widened. Her mouth watered. She’d never seen the like, not even before rationing.

“I was given these. Sort of a tribute. Ornoff sent a hamper down to reward the unit. The men had away with most of the drink, obviously. But I kept the rest. I thought you might know what to do with it. I mean, food-wise. As a cook.”

He looked at her. His eyes were wide and honest.

He added, “And I couldn’t think of anyone else I’d rather share it with.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Is that all right?”

“Yes,” she said. “I think it is.”

Ezraville MAB, 11.31

“Thanks!” Jagdea shouted, and jumped down off the transport. She strode across the mud to the hut and ducked as she went in through the door. Behind her, Imperial machines thundered up off their hardstands into the smoke-stained sky.

He was sitting on a fuel drum, gazing at his boots.

“You all right?” she asked. He looked, saw it was her, and rose with a quick salute.

“I guess,” said Marquall.

“Tough break, there. Good kill, I hear.”

“Then I got stung. A Talon, I think. Right on my tail. I didn’t see it. I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“Don’t be. You ejected. You came down alive. That’s all that matters to me.”

“Can I fly again?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Uhm… if you want to.”

“What does that mean?”

“The only available bird is Nine-Nine. She’s been repaired. You may not want her.”

“Nine-Nine?” Marquall asked.

“Yes.”

Marquall laughed dryly. He couldn’t decide which was worse—the fact it was Espere’s old bird, or the fact it was rumoured to be badly jinxed.

Then, after a moment’s consideration, he realised that the worse thing of all was the prospect of not flying again.

“I’ll take Nine-Nine,” he said. “Maybe my jinx and hers will cancel each other’s out.”

Theda MAB South, 16.10

They’d seen them from the coastal highway, and the sight had filled both of them with hope. Wings of Navy machines, in line formations, moving down over the sea towards the Thedan fields. Reinforcements, flying in from mass landing centres in the Northern Affiliation.

Jagdea and Marquall had both got to their feet in the back of the rocking transport, pointing to the sights and talking. Thunderbolt wings turning gently towards Theda North. Two packs of Vulture gunships slimming south into the Peninsula. The afternoon was clear and blue and, despite the sooty sky behind them over Ezraville, and the distant moan of raid warning sirens, they almost felt like cheering.

The mood was buzzing in the base when the transport dropped them off. Eager pre-flight activity around Umbra’s hardstands, and dozens of carriers and freight-tractors hurtling to and fro.

With Marquall at her side, Jagdea jogged across the rockcrete, dodging through a slow-striding queue of Sentinel power lifters carrying cargo pods to waiting transport lifters. Blansher and Asche were standing with some of the chief fitters.

“Welcome back, killer,” Asche said to Marquall playfully. He blushed slightly.