by Dan Abnett
His control console lit up and alarms blared. Viltry realised he was target locked. He cursed and flipped the Marauder over, hearing Gammil squeal in pain as he was thrown headlong out of the navigator seat.
They were tumbling. The altimeter was spinning like a speeded up chronometer. They were dropping fast, almost beyond the point of recovery.
Viltry hauled on the squad and fired the burners, slamming the Marauder back up and out of its evasive plummet. He tore off his breather mask and vomited as the extreme G forces pumped his guts empty.
His pounding ears suddenly became aware of a screaming on the vox-link. Halo Four.
“He’s behind me! He’s on me! Holy God-Emperor, I can’t lose him! I can’t—”
A wash of white fire blistered across the clouds behind them.
“Halo Leader to Control! Halo Leader to Control! Enemy raiders in the dispersal field! I say again, enemy raiders in the dispersal field!”
The target lock alarm sang out again.
Halo Leader slammed forward so hard Viltry bit through his own lips. He saw his blood spiralling away and spattering against the canopy as the stricken Marauder went into a lengthways spin.
He could smell burning cabling and a cold, hard stink of high altitude air.
He leaned into the controls and levelled the warcraft out.
One of his engines was on fire. Over the vox, he could hear his aft gunner wailing. He turned to look down at Gammil. The navigator was crawling back to his seat.
“Get up! Get up!” Viltry barked.
“I’m trying.”
Viltry’s hands were slick with sweat inside his gloves. He looked up, searching the sky, and saw the lancing shadow right on them.
“For god’s sake—” Gammil began, seeing it in the same instant.
White hot cannon shells sliced down through the cabin, mincing the navigator and his station in a welter of steel splinters, blood and smoke. The entire lower fuselage of Halo Leader sheared off, shredding into the freezing night. Viltry saw Serrikin tumbling away in a cloud of debris, dropping into the corrosive darkness far below.
The freezing air howled around him.
He reached for his ejector lever.
The canopy exploded.
TWO
Ana Curth washed her hands under the infirmary’s chrome faucet for the third time in fifteen minutes and then dusted them with sterilising talc. She was fidgety, restless.
The infirmary hall was a quiet vault, well-lit and ranged with rows of freshly laundered beds.
Curth checked a few drug bottles on the dispensary cart, then sighed and walked down the length of the bay. Her boots rang out cold, empty beats and her red surgical gown billowed out behind her like a lord palatine’s cape.
“You’ll drive yourself mad,” said Dorden.
The Tanith chief medic was lying serenely on his back on one of the beds, staring at the ceiling. Swathed in green scrubs, he lay on top of the well-made sheets so as not to disturb them.
“Mad?”
“Raving. The waiting quite addles the mind.”
Curth paused at the end of the bed Dorden occupied.
“And this is how you deal with it?”
He tilted up his head and looked down the length of his body at her.
“Yes. I meditate. I consider. I ruminate. I serve the God-Emperor, but I’m damned if I’ll waste my life waiting to be of service.”
“You recommend this?”
“Absolutely.”
Curth hesitatingly laid herself out on the bed next to Dorden. She stared at the ceiling, her heels together, her arms by her side.
“This isn’t making me much calmer,” she admitted.
“Patience and you might learn something.”
“Like what?”
“Like… there are five hundred and twenty hexagonal divisions in the pattern of the ceiling.”
Curth sat up. “What?”
“There are five hundred—”
“Okay, I got that. If counting roof tiles does it for you, I’m happy. Me I have to pace.”
“Pace away, Ana.”
She walked away down the length of the bay. At the stern door, the regiment’s medicae troopers Lesp, Chayker and Foskin were grouped outside the plastic door screen, smoking lho-sticks.
“Can I cadge one?” she asked, joining them. Lesp raised his eyebrows and offered her one. She lit up.
“They’ll be almost there by now,” Chayker reflected. “Right at the DZ.”
Lesp looked at his wristwatch. “Yup. Right about now.”
“Emperor help them,” Curth murmured, drawing on her lho-stick. Now she’d have to wash her hands again.
Twenty-three six Imperial. Not a bad delay. The pilot of drop 1A listened to his co-seat for a moment over the headset and then turned to give Zhyte a nod.
“Three minutes.”
The Urdeshi commander could still see nothing out of the front ports except vague cloud banks and the light-fizz of other drop-ships surging their engines. The headwind was climbing.
But Zhyte trusted his flight crew.
He moved back into the carrier hold and threw the switch that lit the amber light over the hatch. Make ready.
The men got to their feet in the blue gloom, nursing out the slack on their arrestor hook cords and pulling on their gas-hoods. Zhyte took his own gas-hood out of its pouch, shook it out and fitted it over his head, adjusting it so the plastic eyeslits sat squarely and the cap didn’t foul his vox-set He squeezed shut the popper studs that anchored its skirts to his shoulders and zipped the seal.
Now he was more blind than ever, shrouded in a treated canvas cone that stifled him and amplified the sounds of his own breathing.
“Count off,” he announced into his vox.
The men replied quickly and efficiently by squad order, announcing their number and confirming that their hoods were in place. Zhyte waited until the last few had fastened up the seals.
“Hatches to release.”
“Release, aye!” the point men crackled back over the link.
There was a judder and a lurch as the side hatches were slid open and the craft’s trim altered. Air temperature in the carrier bay dropped sharply, and the light took on an ochre tinge.
“Ready the ropes! Ninety seconds!”
The point men were silhouettes against the gloomy yellow squares of the open hatches, their battledress tugged by the slipstream.
Zhyte took out his bolt pistol, held it up clumsily in front of his face plate to check it, and put it back in his holster. Almost there.
The hard snap of the inflator jerked Captain Viltry back into consciousness. His head swam, and his body felt curiously weightless. He had no idea where he was.
He tried to remember. He tried to work out what the hell he was doing. It was cold and everything was pitch dark. Drunkenly, his neck sore, he looked up and saw the faint shape of the inflator’s spherical sac, from which he hung.
He’d ejected. Now he remembered. God-Emperor, something had taken his bird apart… and his wing men too. He looked around hoping to catch a glimpse of another aircraft. But there was just the high altitude void, the filmy cloud, the curling darkness.
He checked his altimeter, the one sewn into the cuff of his flight suit. He was a good two thousand metres below operational altitude, almost at the envelope of the toxic atmospheric layer. His inflator must have fired automatically, the pressure switch triggered by his fall.
The safety harness was biting into his armpits and chest. He tried to ease it and realised he was injured. His shoulder was cut, and some of the harness straps were severed. He was lucky to still be wearing the rig.
Parachutes were pointless on Phantine. There was nowhere to drop to except corrosive death in the low altitude depths, the Scald, as it was known. Flyers wore bailing rigs that inflated globular blimps from gas bottles that would, unpunctured, keep them drifting above the lethal atmospheric levels of the Scald until rescue.
Vilt
ry was an experienced flyer, but he didn’t need that experience to tell him the coriolis winds, savage at this height, had already carried him far away from the flight paths. He tried to read the gauge on his air tanks, but he couldn’t make the dial out.
Windwaste, he thought. That was him. Windwaste, the worst fate any combat pilot on Phantine could suffer. Drifting away, alive, beyond the possibility of recovery. Flyer lore said that men caught in that doom used their small arms to puncture their inflators so that they could have a quick death in the Scald’s poison acid-gases below.
But there was still a chance he’d get picked up. All he had to do was activate his distress beacon. A toggle pull would do it.
Viltry hesitated. That simple toggle pull might bring him rescue, but it would also be heard by the enemy at Cirenholm.
They’d know that a flyer was in distress. And therefore that at least one Imperial aircraft was up tonight.
He didn’t dare. Ornoff had told the pilot fold that surprise was the key to storming Cirenholm. Short range ship-to-ship vox chatter was safe, but powerful, ranged transmissions like the amplified vox-blink of his distress beacon might rain that surprise. Alert the enemy. Kill thousands of Imperial Guardsmen.
Viltry drifted through the cold air desert, through the dark. Ice was forming on the inside of his goggles.
He had to stay silent. Even though that meant he would be windwaste.
“Umbra Leader to flight, pickle off your tanks,” Jagdea said into her mask.
Umbra flight was threading the rear echelons of the troop ship formations. They were almost over the DZ now. The raised bulk of Cirenholm was a loud blur on her instruments.
The three Lightnings dumped their empty fuel tanks and rose above the drop-ship flocks. They were running on internal tanks now, which meant they had just another sixteen minutes of range left… less if they were called to burn hard into combat.
Jagdea was jumpy. Halo Flight should have made the return ran by now, but there had been no sighting of the overdue Marauder flight.
Commander Bree Jagdea had fifteen thousand hours of combat flight experience. She was one of the best pilots ever to graduate from the Hessenville Combat School. She had instinctive combat smarts that no measure of training could ever teach. Those instincts took over now.
“Umbra Leader to Umbra Flight. Let’s nose ahead for one last burn. Chase the Urdeshi formations. I’ve got a sick feeling there’s opposition aloft tonight.”
“Understood, Umbra Leader.”
The trio of Imperial fighters swung west. Hundreds of lives were about to be lost. But, running on instinct, Jagdea had just saved thousands more.
“Final prep,” said Sergeant Kolea, walking down the carrier hold of drop 2F at the trailing edge of the Tanith formation.
“Three minutes to the DZ. I want hoods in place and hooks ready in thirty. Door duty to active. Point men, stand by.”
The amber rune had not yet come on. Kolea strapped on his gas-hood, and went down the line checking his Ghosts, one by one.
The side hatch of drop 2D was already open. Trooper Garond shivered in the slip-stream blast, and made ready with the rope as Sergeant Obel gave the signal. Outside, he could see cloud whipping past and several drop-ships lying abeam, men crouched in their open hatches, ready and prepped.
Aboard drop 2B, Colm Corbec fitted his gas-hood and ordered the hatches open. The squads took their positions, on their feet. Mkoll was at the head of the second squad, ready to lead the scout fireteam in. Corbec nodded to him and uttered a final prayer.
In drop 2X, Sergeant Ewler looked over at Sergeant Adare. The two squad leaders shook hands. “See you on the far side,” said Adare.
Viltry woke again and found his face and shoulder were beginning to burn with the cold. He didn’t want to die like this. Not alone, discarded, like a wind-blown seed. His numb fingers closed around the toggle.
He snatched his hand away and cursed his selfishness.
Unless…
If dispersal command-control heard his distress beacon, they’d know that something had happened to Halo Flight. They’d realise there were hunters loose.
He’d be warning them.
Filled with a sense of duty, Viltry pulled the toggle. It came away in his hand. Shrapnel had ripped away the beacon’s trigger switch.
Suddenly, there was a creamy glow below them. Available light was reflecting off the primary dome of Cirenholm in frosty midnight shine. The drop-ship’s braking jets wailed so loud Zhyte could hear them through his hood. They were stationary, as stationary as the headwind allowed, right over the drop zone. Zhyte prayed they were low enough.
The green rune lit up.
“Deploy!” Zhyte growled.
There was a bright flash outside. Then another.
Shener, Zhyte’s starboard point man, looked out and saw the drop-ship beside them splinter and fall apart, cascading luminous debris down into the darkness.
“Interceptors!” he screamed into his link.
Another Urdeshi drop-ship suddenly became visible in the night as it caught fire and burned down like a comet. A moment later, Cirenholm’s defences woke up and lit the air with a ferocious cross-stitching of tracer fire.
Shells whacked into drop 1A’s fuselage next to Shener. He had been coiling out the rope. A terrible, exposed cold filled his legs and lower torso and he looked down to see that there was an extraordinarily large, bloody hole in his gut.
Shener toppled out of the hatch wordlessly and fell away into the gloom below.
Zhyte reached the hatchway, battered by the wind. Shener was gone, and the two men first up the squad had been exploded across the bay. There were punctures in the hull.
Outside, a storm of enemy fire bloomed up at them.
Zhyte clipped his arrestor hook to the rope. He should have been last man out but his point was gone and the troopers were milling, disorientated.
“Go!” yelled Zhyte. “Go! Go! Go!”
He leapt into space.
Drop 1C rocked as its neighbour exploded. Whinnying scraps of outflung debris punched through the drop’s hull. Sergeant Gwill and three other troopers were killed instantly. Corporal Gader, half-blinded in his hood, suddenly realised he was in charge.
The green rune was on.
He ordered the men out.
Two thirds of the squads had exited when cannon shells ripped drop 1C open. Gader was thrown out of the hatch.
He gestured tragically with his arrestor hook as he fell. But there was no rope.
Gader dropped like a stone, right down the face of Cirenholm’s primary dome, bouncing once off an aerial strut.
Drop 1K misjudged the headwind and came in too low, mashing against the side of the dome in a seething blister of fire.
Just behind it drop 1N braked backwards in a flurry of jets and then trembled as a rain of cannon shells peeled off its belly, spilling men out into the darkness.
Drop 1M faltered, and tried to gain height. Its men were already deploying out of the hatches. Sliding down the ropes, they discovered that the drop was not only too high, it was also fifty metres short of the DZ. Each man in turn came off the end of the dangling rope and fell away into the void.
The pilot of drop 1D saw the enemy cloud-fighter with perfect clarity as it powered in, weapons flickering. He had no room to either pull up or bank. His troops were already on the ropes and heading down. Drop 1D exploded under the withering fire of the passing interceptor. Men were still hooked to the ropes as they snapped and fell away from the detonation.
“Targets! Targets! Targets!” Jagdea urged as she swept down across the Urdeshi troop ships. Drops were exploding all around, picked off by the Phantom interceptors or hit by Cirenholm’s defence batteries.
The night had lit up. It was flickering hell here, beneath the vast dome of Cirenholm’s primary hab.
Jagdea smoked in wide, avoiding a drop that blew apart in the air. She had target lock on a spinning cloud-fighter and the guns squealed as sh
e let rip.
It was turning so hard it evaded her fire, though her marching tracers pummelled their way up the curve of the dome.
Jagdea inverted and, pulling two Gees, flipped round onto the cloud-fighter’s tail. It was heading out to pick off more of the vulnerable troop ships in the van of the flock.
She jinked, lined it up, and hit the afterburner so that her streams of gunfire would rake its length as she swept past it.
The enemy fighter became a fireball with wings, that arced away down into the poisonous Scald below.
Jagdea banked around. Her wingmen were shouting in her headset.
Halo Two had just splashed an enemy interceptor, dogging it turn for turn and chewing off its tail with sustained cannon fire. The stricken fighter tried to end its death dive by ramming a drop, but it missed and trailed fire away into the clouds.
Jagdea hung on her wingtip, and dropped, hunting visually and instrumentally for targets. She powered down through the drop-ship fleet, her target finder pinging ever more rapidly as she bottomed out and swung in on the tail of a cloud-fighter that was flaring around to fire up at the bellies of the troop ships.
Jagdea killed it with a fierce burst of fire.
She yawed to port, out-running the tail of the troop ship dispersal before banking back to come in again beneath it. Her Lightning screwed over and her instruments wailed as cannon shots battered into her flank.
Red runes on all systems. She’d been killed.
She peddled out, pulled back, and gave the dead craft all the lift its wingspan would permit. She was now gliding towards the bulk of Cirenholm, about to stall out.
Jagdea squeezed the weapon toggles on her yoke and emptied her magazines into the dome, for what good it would do.
Her engines blew, and fire streamed along one wing.
She ejected.
Hell was reaching up to them with thousands of fingers made of fire. The night was a strobing miasma of darkness and flashes. The wind was screaming, a dull roar through the gas-hoods. Every few seconds, there was a shell burst so bright the descending Urdeshi could see forever: the great domed face of Cirenholm; the swarming drop-ships; the dangling strings of men, hanging like fruit-heavy vines from the tightly packed ships.