by Dan Abnett
More shots thumped into the fuselage from the rear. I surged forward again, sweeping around the west side of the trees.
I saw Medea on the auspex. She was running clear of the spinney at the north end, breaking cover. It took me a moment to find her by eye. Just a dot in the long weeds. A bright dot. She was wearing her father's cerise jacket. I realised she must've come out into the open to give me a chance to set down and reach her. The thin trees in the spinney were far too tightly packed.
Las-bolts chased her. She turned and fired back with a handgun, still running.
You're clear! Get down1 .
I saw her turn, seeing where I was. Then she was hurled face first into the grass by a las-shot.
'Medea!' I accelerated hard, pushing us back into our seats. 'Aemos! Get ready with the side hatch!'
I got as close in to the patch of weeds where she had fallen as I dared. The down-thrust of the plane could cause serious injuries. We jolted hard as I set down, throwing the throttles to idle. Aemos was opening the hatch, but he was old and slow and scared. Eleena couldn't reach over because he was blocking her.
I leapt out, pushing Aemos back into his seat, and thumped down into the wet nettles and burry fex-grass. The night air was sudden and cold. Another flare bloomed above us, and I realised the echoing spit I could hear was the enemy guns discharging in my direction.
I ran forward, searching for her.
'Medea! Medea!'
Now I was on the ground, it was nigh on impossible to tell where in the thigh-high grass she'd fallen.
'Medea!'
A las-round stung the air to my left. The closest of the raiders, running across the paddock, was only a few dozen metres away.
I realised I was unarmed. I'd given my boltgun to Sastre, and Bar-barisater and the staff were stowed in the flier behind me.
No, I had Medea's Glavian needle pistol. It was still in my coat pocket. I dragged it out and fired, aiming it with both hands.
My first shot hit the nearest raider and he fell over into the grass. My second shot winged another and he too disappeared into the rough scrub.
I glanced at the needler's mechanical dial. Two rounds left.
Bending low, I searched the grass with increasing frenzy as shots whined in close.
'Medea!'
And there she was, face down in the thick scrub. There was a bloody, burned hole in the back of her silk jacket.
I dragged her up and threw her limp body over my shoulder. The autopistol she had been using slipped heavily from her slack hand.
I stooped and grabbed it. The clip was half-full.
I swung round, trying to keep her from falling, and fired the autopistol wildly at the advancing enemy, relishing the satisfying roar and recoil of the hefty solid-slug weapon. Needle guns were elegant and deadly, but you barely knew you'd fired them.
This thing, chrome and square-nosed, kicked like a yurf, and spent brass cases rang as they flew from the pumping slide.
I started to ran back to the plane, expecting a shot in the back any moment. I heard las fire, but it wasn't coming from behind me. Eleena Koi was braced in the open side hatch of the flier, laying down covering fire with a laspistol I hadn't realised she was carrying. Aemos had got into the back, onto the bench seat, giving Eleena access to the door.
Aemos reached out and gathered Medea in his arms. Eleena seized her too and the three of us bundled the girl into the rear beside Aemos.
I was wishing so hard she wasn't dead.
Eleena fired one last time and fell back into the passenger seats. I jumped in, yelling at her to slam the hatch.
There was no time to strap in. Multiple shots slammed against the aircraft's flank. A window panel burst. Dents appeared in the inner skin, spalling fragments off the hull.
I hoisted us off the ground, and spun us to face the charging raiders.
I think, although I can't be sure, I said something singularly unedifying as I pressed the trigger. Something like: 'eat this, you bastards.'
I don't believe I actually hit any of them but, by the Golden Throne, they took cover.
'Sir!' Eleena yelled over the scream of the turbofans.
A ball of light was approaching from the other side of the spinney. I couldn't see the speeder, just its stablight shining like a white dwarf against the night sky.
Time to go.
I kept it low, but pulled away south across the paddock at full thrust, accelerating all the time. We were doing forty, forty-five knots by the time we reached the road. The woods loomed.
In an instant, I weighed my options. Go high, over the trees, and be a clear target for any pursuer. Go through, lights off, and drop speed dramatically to avoid collision. Go through, lights on.
I picked the third way.
The flier's lamps kicked on, lighting a cone of space ahead of us. Even with the lights, and the auspex and the proximity alarm, this course was borderline suicide. Within a few seconds, having only just avoided a head-on smash with a mature spruce, I had to drop the speed to thirty.
'You're… you're gonna get us killed!' Eleena wailed.
'Be quiet!' The black shapes of tree trunks whipped past on either side, forcing me to turn and bank hard, repeatedly, jagging left, then right, then left again. Branches, some as massive as trees in their own right, swept over us like arches or under us like bridges. Several times, we exploded through sprays of canopy, the engine-out alarm pipping as the fans fought to clear away the leaf debris choking them. The phantoms on the scanner screen were almost constantly red.
Eleena started to say an Imperial prayer.
'Say one for us all/ I barked. 'Aemos! What's Medea's condition?'
'She's alive, thank the stars. But her breathing's not right. Perhaps a collapsed lung, or internal cauterisation. She needs a medic, Gregor.'
'She'll get one. Make her as comfortable as you can. There's a medi-pak in the locker behind you. Patch her wound.'
Apart from being an insane death wish, flying at speed through dense, ancient forest at night was baffling. Simply avoiding collision required such concentration, I kept losing my bearings. A few forced turns to the left, say, pointed us east. Correcting that, and evading an oak to the right, and we were turned west. We were zig-zagging through the wild woodland, and a zig-zag is not the fastest route of escape.
At least four of the five speeders I had seen during the raid were after us. Two were following us directly through the trees, about five hundred metres behind us. The other two had gone up and over the tree cover, making much better time, chasing hard to pass over us and get ahead.
They were ex-military models; I'd seen that much from the glimpse I'd got of them parked on the lawns. Bigger power plants than this nimble Urdeshi turbofan; bigger, and better armoured. And their cannons, mounted on racks in the doorframes, meant they could, essentially, fire in any direction. They didn't have to be pointing at their target.
The auspex started to chime and I saw hard light flash down through the leaf cover above us, breaking through in shafts like a sun breaking through low cloud. One of the fliers above the forest was matching us for speed.
I jinked and evaded, not so much to lose him as to avoid instant obliteration against the bole of a tree. I saw the forest floor convulse and ripple as the door gunner fired down at us.
So I banked hard, one wing down, right around a colossal fanewood, and shot off in a westerly direction. The overhead lights disappeared for a moment, but then reappeared, travelling fast, parallel to us, to the left. A tree, flashing past to my right, lost its bark in a blitz of diagonal crossfire.
Damn them. I was fairly certain they had no heat or motion tracking instruments. They were following the glow of my lamps underlighting the canopy.
I killed the lights but unfortunately didn't kill my speed. The proximity alarm squealed, and though I yanked on the stick, we struck a trunk a grazing blow.
We wobbled hard. The engine-out alert shrilled a continuous note. The starboard fan
had stalled.
I went to hover, and pressed restart on the starboard unit, hoping that it had simply been jolted dead by the impact. If the casing or the fan itself were buckled, restarting might be very messy indeed for all of us.
The dead fan turned over and coughed. I tried again. Another mewling wheeze. Twenty metres behind us, the forest was coming to pieces in a deluge of wood pulp, bark scraps and pulverised foliage as the flier high above tried to smoke us out with a sustained salvo.
The starboard fan whipped into life on the third attempt. Staying at hover, I played the stick back and forth and side to side, pitching and yawing the craft, dropping its nose and then its tail, dipping the stubby wings, just to make sure I hadn't lost any attitude control. It seemed alright.
I looked over my shoulder and saw Eleena staring at me, her face corpse-pale. Aemos was cradling Medea.
Are we all right, Gregor?' he whispered.
'Yeah. I'm sorry about that.'
The glade to our left suddenly lit up with vertical shafts of light and was pummelled by cannon fire. They were still searching blindly.
I had a sudden moment of recall. A void duel. Seriously outnumbered. Midas flying by the seat of his well-tailored pants. I remember him glancing at me from the controls of the gun-cutter, and saying: 'Mouse becomes cat.'
Mouse becomes cat.
Still hovering, I rotated the flier towards the blitzed glade and then raised the nose slowly, pointing it at the light source above the trees. Aiming it at the light source.
I squeezed the toggle, just for a second.
The lance beam seared up into the backlit canopy. There was a brief flash and then a nine tonne metal fireball that had once been a speeder simply dropped down into the clearing, smashing through the branches, ripping apart and hurling flaming debris in all directions.
'Scratch one/1 said, smugly. Well, it's what Midas would have said.
There were lights behind us, zooming closer through the forest. Keeping the lamps off, I nudged us away from the wreckage inferno and turned in behind a twisted antlerbark that had slumped sideways in old age. Curtains of moss draped from its weary branches.
I watched the lights approach, easing the nose around to follow the nearest one. They had slowed down, hunting for signs of us. The nearest lights were tantalisingly close, but obscured by a line of fat oaks.
The other one zipped in towards the blazing crash site.
I swung us up, leading the flier's nose towards the coasting speeder.
It came into view, stablights sweeping the woodland floor.
I fired again.
The shot was pretty good. It sheared the tail boom off the speeder. With its rear end discharging blue electrical arcs, it spun out of control, end over end. It made a mess of a giant fanewood, and vice versa.
The other speeder came out from the cover of the oaks, firing right at us. The shots rent aside the curtains of moss.
I realised someone had had the sense to bring night vision goggles. They could see us.
I tried one shot, missed and then turned tail, kicking in the floods and raising the speed as high as I dared. The proximity alert screen was just an overlapping red blur now, and we were all thrown around by the violent turns I was forced to make.
The pilot of the speeder chasing us was good. Distressingly good. Like the mere foot troops, he was clearly the best of his kind money could buy.
He stuck to my tail like a leech.
Pushing thirty-eight knots, I caroomed through the dense trees, pulling gees sometimes when the turns demanded it. He raced after me, following my lead and enjoying the gain of my turbowash slip stream
The chase was verging on balletic. We snaked and criss-crossed between trees, banked and looped like dancing partners. Several times I stood on a wingtip coming round one side of a big tree and he mirrored the move coming round the other. Fans screaming, I pulled a hard turn to the north, and then rolled, reversing, turning south. He overshot, but was back a moment later, accelerating fast onto my tail. Tracer rounds winked past me.
Two hard jolts came in quick succession, and the instruments confirmed what I suspected. We'd been hit. I was losing power: not much, but enough to suggest a battery had been ruptured or disconnected. He was firing again. Stitching lines of tracer shells spat past the cockpit. Now I had distress runes lighting up on my control panels.
Something drastic was needed, or we'd be his latest cockpit stripe. I thought about cutting the fans and dropping to make him overshoot, but at the speed we were going, we'd crash and burn.
'Hold on!' I yelled.
'Oh shit/ said Eleena Koi.
I killed the thrust and went vertical.
We exploded up through the canopy into the sky, shredding branches around us. The speeder shot by underneath. Astonished, he tried to bank round to re-engage, but my manoeuvre had flummoxed him. Just for a moment, but long enough.
He didn't trim his thrust as he tried to make the turn. A tree took one stabiliser wing clean off and that was the last I saw of him except for the series of impact explosions he made under the trees below us.
I was shaking, my hands numb. Exhaustion punched into me. The concentration had been so terribly intense.
But Midas, I was sure, would have been proud of me. He'd forever been trying to teach me his skills, and he'd declared on more than one occasion that I'd never make a combat pilot.
In his opinion, I had the essential reflexes and strength, but I never saw the big picture. And it was always that last, overlooked detail that got you killed.
That last, overlooked detail came in from the north, across the treetops, autocannons flashing.
TEN
Down.
Doctor Berschilde of Ravello.
Khanjar the Sharp.
It was the fourth speeder that had been hunting us. Before I could even let out a curse, its streaming cannon fire had severed our tail boom and mangled the aft fan, shredding off its cover and twisting the still-spinning props.
We started to rotate violently. The cabin vibrated like a seizure victim. Eleena screamed.
I wrestled with the controls, fighting the bucking stick. I cranked the wing fans to vertical and throttled up to break the drop. The flier crunched down through upper branches, glanced off a main bough, and nose dived.
I stood on the rudder and yanked back the stick.
'Brace!' 1 yelled. That was all I had time to say.
We side-swiped a fanewood's trunk, a collision that ripped off the port fan and stripped the monocoque's hull paint down to the bare metal and bounced once off a peaty ridge of moss and leaf mould. Then we rose again, yawing to the left as the remaining turbofan screamed to the edge of its tolerance trying to gain some sort of lift. The engine-out alarm shrilled as the fan stalled, overcome by the pressure. We fell then, sideways, survived a headlong impact with an oak that crazed the windshield and slammed into the loamy earth, slithering a good fifty metres before we rocked to a halt on our side.
I didn't black out but the long silence following the crash made it feel like I had. I blinked, lying on my shoulder against the side hatch. Eleena
moaned and Aemos started coughing. The only other sound was the tinkling patter of the shattered windscreen scads gradually collapsing into the cabin.
1 got up and clambered over the seats.
'Eleena? Are you hurt?'
'No, sir… I don't think so…'
'We have to get out. Help me.'
Together we dragged the coughing Aemos clear and went back for Medea who was still, mercifully, unconscious.
The searchlights of the speeder lanced down through the hole we had made in the canopy, poking around.
Any moment now…
Eleena and I dragged the other two into the shelter of a hollow a good distance from the downed aircraft.
'Stay here,' I whispered to her. 'Give me your weapon.'
Silently, she offered me her stubby laspistol.
'Stay down/ I advised a
nd ran back to the wreck, retrieving my staff and my sword. I tossed the runestaff into the undergrowth to keep it out of sight and drew Barbarisater.
The speeder was coming down through the upper branches, trying to pick out the flier with its stablight. I tucked the sword and pistol into my belt and lunged up into the lower branches of the gros beech that overlooked our crash site.
The tree was huge and gnarled. Grunting, I swung myself up into the main boughs and then further up into the web of thinner branches.
The speeder hovered into view, crawling slowly towards the smoking wreck, its searchlight playing back and forth. I could see the masked side-gunner in the open door, one hand on the yoke of the pintle-mounted autocannon, the other on the bracket of the lamp.
The speeder descended. I climbed higher, up into the lofty reaches of the beech, until I could climb no further and the hovering speeder was directly below me.
The pilot said something. I distinctly heard the crackle of his intervox. The door gunner replied and let go of the lamp, setting both hands on the cannon's grips, turning it to aim down at the crumpled flier.
The glade below me filled with flashes and booms as he riddled the airplane with his cannon fire. The valiant little Urdeshi craft shredded like tinfoil.
The door gunner stopped shooting and called down to his pilot.
Now or never.
I let go of the branches and dropped straight onto the roof of the speeder. It rocked slightly beneath me. I steadied myself, crouched down, gripped the upper frame of the door hatch and swung in, boots first.
The gunner was bent over with his back to the hatch, getting a fresh ammunition box from the wall rack. My boots connected with his lower back and shunted him face-first against the cabin wall. I landed beside
him as he staggered backwards, his hands clutching at his broken face, grabbed him by the arm and propelled him backwards out of the hatch. We were ten metres up.
The pilot gave a muffled grunt as he looked round and saw me. A second later, the muzzle of the laspistol was pressed against the corner of his jaw.
'Set down. Now/1 said.
I prayed I was dealing wim a mercenary and not a cultist. A mere would know when to cut his losses, and bargain to live for another day and another paycheck. A cultist would fly us into the nearest tree, gun or no gun.