Double Eagle (31 page)

Pulsing air pressure was making the glass shake. Jagdea could see the blistering flashes of pattern bombing detonations underlighting the sky behind the immediate cityscape. Hundreds of smoke plumes were curling up into the murky dawn sky.

In the clinic’s courtyard below, staff members and patients were fleeing in droves.

Jagdea hurried across the room, got down on her knees beside her bed, and started to pull her clothes and effects out of the bedside locker. She found her boots, her flight coat—

At that moment, a high yield bomb landed on a building across the street, levelling it instantly. The entire clinic recoiled as if its foundations were set on bedsprings. The window of Jagdea’s room blew in with the Shockwave, ripping a blizzard of glass across the room.

Jagdea cried out involuntarily, hammered by the concussion, but her bed had shielded her from the shredding force of the glass. She crouched on the floorboards for a moment, tense with shock. She could smell smoke, fyceline and heat scorching. She could hear the crash of rubble, the flames and the screaming coming from outside.

Cursing her sling and the pain in her arm, Jagdea pulled on the trousers of her flightsuit, and then her boots. She had a vest top on, so she put the coat on over that, good arm through the sleeve, slung arm under the coat.

Then she went out into the hallway. Smoke was pouring into the clinic through the smashed windows on the courtyard side. She headed the other way. In the hall, she passed several patients and medicae staff lacerated by window glass. Most were alive, calling out, helpless.

There was nothing she could do. The able-bodied staffers that she saw were simply running for the exits.

Jagdea found the stairs, then made her way out through the half of the building away from the blasted courtyard. Outside, she found herself in a back street. A few people hurried past her. Looking up, she could see strings of enemy bombers creeping overhead.

She ran down the side street and halted at the corner where it joined a main road. Several commercial premises were on fire, and there was debris in the street. People rushed by, some crying and wailing in blind panic.

A truck went by, then a car. She tried to wave them down, but they ignored her. In fact, the car almost hit her, so determined was the driver not to stop. Jagdea yelled in frustration. She’d lost her bearings, and didn’t even know which way the base was from there.

The only thing she did know for sure was that it was more than walking distance.

But she didn’t seem to have much choice.

Theda MAB South, 06.59

Darrow and Scalter hurried Eads onto the northern pads. Some of the Valkyries there had already started lifting clear, fully laden, probably overladen. One had been hit before take-off, and was burning furiously on the hard-pan. Frantic personnel swarmed around the ramps and side doors of the others. The door gunner teams were trying to organise boarding, but the panic was such that fights were breaking out.

Darrow looked around. He felt a knot of panic in his own gut. “Throne’s sake,” he said, aware of a tremulous quality in his voice that he couldn’t help. “There won’t be enough places.”

“We’ll try there,” Scalter said, determinedly holding his nerves together. On the far north edge of the pad area, almost by the field’s blast fences, three old bulk transport-lifters were warming up. The machines were a good distance away from where they stood. But it seemed most of the evacuees wanted a place on one of the faster, better armoured Valkyries. The trio started across the pads towards the transporters. Other individuals, unable to get aboard a combat carrier, or unwilling to endure the fight that would entail, began to break off from the clamouring groups around the Valkyries and head the same way too.

Still moving, Darrow looked round sharply at the sound of small-arms fire. Someone had snapped and drawn a handgun, trying to shoot his way onto a Valkyrie.

In response, the door crew slammed the hatches shut and the carrier lifted off, scattering the crowd that had been trying to get on it. Denied their chance of escape, the mob turned on the man who’d fired the gun.

The Valkyrie went over them, and then, to Darrow’s amazement, came back in to land ahead of them.

The door gunners opened the ramp again and started to wave at them. The machine’s crew had clearly not been able to stomach the idea of leaving Theda empty when lives were wasting.

Darrow and Scalter ran Eads bodily towards the ramp, in under the tail booms and into the embrace of the gunners.

“Get in! Inside! Find a space and a handhold!”

The compartment was dark, a hot metal box. As they got Eads into a scissor-seat, the door crew brought aboard several more stragglers. A buzzer sounded. The ramp began to retract again, and the engine noise rose to a scream.

With a lurch, they left the ground, nose down, and began to accelerate and climb.

Theda MAB South, 07.02

Before the trucks had even come to a halt, the last three pilots of Umbra Flight had jumped clear and started to run towards their hardstand shelters. The fitters followed them.

“I need just five of you!” Racklae bellowed above the raging bombardment. “The rest… get going. Evac transport over there!”

Racklae turned and kept running with the five men who’d volunteered. The others started sprinting towards the last two Oneros that were loading near the main drome hangar.

The truck drivers ran with them.

The whole airfield seemed to be on fire. There were bodies and shell-holes everywhere, overturned vehicles, buckled munitions carts. Some handstands were ablaze, and in some burned the wrecks of planes that had never made it up. Two Lightnings launched, and swept away north. Marquall fully expected to find
Double Eagle
in pieces.

But it was intact, and so was Blansher’s bird. Del Ruth’s, however, had been caught by strafing fire. The engines and cockpit were just mangled ribbons of metal.

All the other Umbra machines were gone. Cordiale, Ranfre, Zemmic and Van Tull must have made it out. Into the air, at least.

Three Razors went over, low, drives shrieking. In the western sector of the airfield, Tormentors were drizzling submunitions on the machine shops.

Racklae sent two of his men to ready Marquall’s plane, and two to do the same for Blansher’s. “Basic checks, clear them off, and then head for the transports!” he emphasised.

With Del Ruth and the remaining fitter, Racklae ran across to the adjacent row of hardstand shelters. The Thunderbolt wing that had occupied this area, the 76th Firedrakes, had already quit, but they’d left two of their mustard-yellow Bolts behind. Bodies on the ground nearby left little doubt that both pilots had been thrown down, along with members of the ground crew, on the way to their machines.

One of the abandoned Bolts had tail and elevator damage, but the other seemed okay. Racklae started work getting Del Ruth airborne.

Marquall dropped into his own cockpit, and switched primary systems on with one hand as he wrestled to strap up his harness. One of the fitters rolled the primer cart close for connection as the other disengaged the fuel and data-feed lines, and then jumped up on the wing plates to pass Marquall his helmet.

The primer fired and surged, and after a second, Nine-Nine’s mighty turbofans began to turn. Marquall leaned out.

“Unhook the primer and get out of here!” he yelled at the fitters over the rising whine. “Just go!”

They ducked out of view under the cowling. Marquall closed and locked his own lid, fastened his mask, and then did a last preflight overview of vitals. Pressure, coolant, fuel, electronics, air-mix, ammunition. Green all around.

The fitters reappeared, and waved him double thumbs. He signalled back okay, and the two men turned and began to run.

The last Marquall saw of them, they were crossing the asphalt apron towards the heavy lifters.

Ducts angled to vertical, Marquall eased open the throttle and brought
Double Eagle
up and away from the ground.

“Two, this is Eight. I’m going clear.”

“Copy that, Eight. Just get out of here.”

In the present circumstances, no pilot needed to be dawdling about on lift. Still low, he swung the nose, and lit the burners as he wound the ducts round to level.

Marquall’s Thunderbolt crossed the blazing airfield at rooftop height, power building. He glimpsed bats crossing behind him, but he ignored them. No tone warnings.

He turned into a wide climb north, and in thirty seconds was crossing the coastal ramparts and the long white seam of the shoreline strand. Sea was under him now.

“Two? This is Eight. Are you clear?”

“Confirm that, Eight. Coming up at your five. Don’t wait for me. Turn and punch it.”

A thousand metres below, Blansher watched Marquall’s Bolt blasting eastwards. He waited, then banked firmly, turning back towards the field he had only just left.

“Four? Where are you? Aggie, are you launching?”

From his high vantage point, the true extent of the destruction was finally clear. Blansher could only half-see the ruined airfield through the blanket of black smoke and the sudden blooms of white and yellow flame. Beyond it, Theda City was encased in a vast nimbus of smoke. The air to the south was crawling with formations of enemy planes, dots that caught the sunlight and twinkled against the dark clouds.

“Aggie? Where are you?”

He made another pass over the MAB. Below, Blansher saw two fat Oneros plough up out of the boiling vapour and thunder away in a tight track eastwards. Then a smaller transport plane came up, but it seemed to be in trouble. His blood chilled as he saw a pair of Locusts streak over it diagonally and turn it into a fireball.

“Two? Two, are you receiving? This is Four.”

“Go ahead, I hear you.”

“Coming up now.”

Blansher banked again and saw the tiny, cruciform shape of Del Ruth’s yellow Thunderbolt as it emerged from the smoke line. It was rising cleanly. Instinctively, Blansher turned his rudder and rolled down so that he was coming in behind her as she climbed.

A Hell Talon, having just emptied its payload onto the field’s main drome, swept out of the smoke and saw the flare of her burners. Opportunistic, it lined up immediately, using its pull-out momentum to propel it into a rear attack.

It was five hundred metres lower than Blansher, and about the same distance ahead. Blansher hit the throttle, punched back into his seat, and dropped low, flicking on his targeters and activating his gunsight. He selected quad. He didn’t want to risk hitting Del Ruth with lasfire if he missed.

All Thunderbolts had their own feel, their own temperament. Del Ruth was still getting used to the individual character of her new machine, and as a result was flying slightly erratically.

It saved her life.

The Talon’s first bursts, which looked like the sparks of a striking tinderbox from Blansher’s position, went wide.

Blansher tore down, levelled out, viffed slightly to adjust, and got the tone ping he’d been praying for.

His thumb pressed hard.

A cone of smoke gouted out around the nose of his bird as the quads chattered.

A sudden, savage spray of fragments burst out of the Hell Talon. Blansher kept firing, smacking his shots into its midsection. Fire guttered out, then the enemy machine split into two large sections, almost divided along its centreline. The shorn segments fluttered away below him.

“You’re clear, Four. Get moving,” he voxed.

“You shouldn’t have come back for me, Mil,” her reply crackled. “You should already be gone.”

Not true, he thought. Not true at all. As acting flight commander, it was his duty to make sure all his pilots got clear, even if it meant his own life.

And the real tragedy was Umbra Flight had left one pilot behind, and there was now nothing any of them could do about it.

Western District Theda, 07.26

Jagdea struggled along the transitway between hab stacks, yelling at every vehicle that rumbled by. Nothing stopped. There were people in the streets, and a penetrating, sickly air of distress, something which the word “panic” no longer did justice to. Every few seconds there was a flash or a rumble from the east, and the ground shook several times. One particularly large detonation away to the south was followed by a failure in power supply betrayed only by the sudden cessation of the raid sirens. After that, in the strange quiet, there was just the distant booming, the whistle and crump of munitions, the drone of aviation engines. Once or twice, Jagdea thought she heard distant gunfire, small-arms. She put that down to her imagination.

Her wound throbbed. She’d brought no meds with her, and she had managed to knock her sling half a dozen times during dashes for cover when bombers came over.

Fatigue overcame her, quite suddenly. Fatigue, and a sense of hopelessness. She sat down on a kerb and felt tears running down her cheeks. How weak was that? How bloody weak was that?

A truck went past. She didn’t even look up. She heard a screech of brakes.

Jagdea lifted her head. A Munitorum transporter, laden with packing cartons, had pulled to a halt twenty metres away, and the driver was dismounting.

Jagdea rose to her feet. It was the driver, the man with the burn-scarred face. What was his name? She couldn’t remember. She wondered if he’d told her. She wondered if she’d ever bothered to ask.

“Commander Jagdea? Is that you?”

She nodded. He hurried over to her. “I saw the jacket. Recognised an aviator’s uniform. God-Emperor, are you all right?”

“No,” she said.

“You need a lift?”

“Of course I bloody do.”

He helped her over to the cab and supported her as she climbed up. Then he ran around to the driver’s side and got in.

“What are you doing here?” he asked as he threw the truck into forward gear.

“I was in a hab clinic. Wounded on a sortie. I heard the raid begin and… I started to walk.”

“What? To MAB South?”

She wiped her face. “I’m not sure I know where I was going. Just… trying to rejoin my unit.”