‘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.
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