Some archaic sense of chivalry—or, more plausibly, the peculiar form of stupidity that overcomes young, heterosexually inclined males in the presence of a female they wish to impress—impels Alex forward along the corridor before Cassie has time to step up and play tank. Even as his feet carry him forward, Alex begins to doubt the wisdom of this course of action. He is a halfway-to-certified combat magician, long on theory and short on experience and reflexes, this deficiency partly compensated for by the whole blood-sucking fiend shtick which, he has to admit, has given him reflexes to die for along with the need for alarming nutritional supplements. Cassie, in contrast, is the sort of thing you fire into unknown enemy territory and leave to fend for itself. She’s trained for this job, Alex realizes, while he’s just along because . . . because Cassie wants him along . . . because she wants him to . . .
That’s when the other four incarnate eaters jump him.
* * *
The column of oily smoke is still rolling and churning in the predawn sky above Otley when a phone rings in a small, beige-walled room at RAF Coningsby, fifteen kilometers north of Boston, Lincolnshire.
One side of the room is furnished with battered sofas, recliners, and a table with an electric kettle and tea-making facilities. Four men wait here, watching a DVD on the flat-screen TV or poking at one of the computers that sits on the table against the opposite side of the room, beneath a huge map of England and the surrounding over-water approaches. There are phones everywhere, but all eyes turn to the one that’s ringing, because it’s both red and ostentatiously positioned beneath the map.
One of the aircrew makes a grab for the phone, hitching up the back of his heavy rubberized overall as he leaves his chair. “Yes?” he says. Then he picks up a pen and hastily jots down some notes. “On it,” he says; “I’ll tell them.” He looks over his shoulder. “Got a bad one,” he says. “Airliner down off the end of the runway at Yeadon and there’s something flaky about it.”
“Well damn.” His wingman kills the DVD and the others all stand up. “Let’s get moving—” he starts to say, just as the Telebrief machine at the far side of the room begins to chatter and spits out a SCRAMBLE notice. He hits the red alarm button and runs outside as a siren begins to wail.
RAF Coningsby is one of just two Air Force bases in the UK that operate Eurofighter Typhoon fighters on Quick Reaction standby, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. As the home of 1 Air Combat Group it covers the entire southern half of the British Isles. The pilots jog out into the hangar, where two of the chunky delta-winged fighters are drawn up while their ground crew crawl over them, hastily closing out the preflight check. Two minutes later they’re starting engines and accepting taxi instructions from the tower; five minutes after the SCRAMBLE order they’re screaming northwest at four hundred knots, climbing towards 20,000 feet.
Behind them, Coningsby is preparing another two Typhoons—they can ramp up to twenty-four sorties within six hours, although only two squadrons are available and ready for intercept service over the entire country. Meanwhile, the Control and Reporting Centre at RAF Scampton comes online with new instructions.
There are two unidentified aircraft over West Yorkshire, not squawking but visible on primary radar, traveling east at low altitude. An E3-D Sentry from RAF Waddington will be on its way as soon as it can take off—unlike the QRA Typhoons, the big four-engined AWACS aircraft don’t sit on the apron waiting for a scramble order twenty-four hours a day—but in the meantime, the CRC’s Weapons Controllers are assigning them to intercept and identify.
The Q-force Typhoon FGR4s of Squadron 17 are scrambled to intercept—hopefully not to shoot at—any and all aircraft behaving oddly: from Russian Air Force Tu-95 long-range bombers over the North Sea, to airliners squawking an emergency transponder code or failing to respond to air traffic control instructions. Consequently, they carry a mix of two AMRAAM and four ASRAAM missiles, shells for the Mauser 27mm cannon, and spare fuel tanks. There’s no call for bombs or beyond-visual-range missiles on this duty: opening fire on a target without positively confirming its identity is a wartime action, and apart from the regular Russian visitors nobody has directly threatened British skies for a very long time.
As Quebec-1 and Quebec-2 begin a banking turn to the west, skirting the edge of the controlled airspace around Leeds Bradford Airport, CRC’s provisional identification of the two unknowns—heading east at roughly 120 knots, two thousand feet up—is that they are either helicopters or light planes. Their presence is suspicious because they’re not responding to Air Traffic Control in any way, and they’re minutes away from the site of an ongoing aviation emergency. Q-1 and Q-2 can see them clearly on their CAPTOR-M radar, using reflected energy from the airport’s approach radar in active mode, but can’t identify their type. Q-1 and Q-2 intend to close for a visual inspection and will try to hail the unidentified aircraft, then escort them to land at an airport with appropriate facilities—depending on what they turn out to be.
But all that is about to change: Q-1 and Q-2 are about to become the first RAF fighters to engage in air combat over England since 1945.
* * *
A door opens onto the rooftop of Quarry House beneath the stainless steel–clad spire. In the predawn light Colonel Lockhart’s figure is a hunched silhouette, looking out across the low guard rail down onto the bus station and the gentle slope up towards Vicar Lane. “They’re coming,” he says quietly, fingering his bluetooth headset.
“Still nothing from OCCULUS One.” Jez follows him, hands thrust deep in her pockets. Below him, the shuffling figures of a squad of Residual Human Resources are piling sandbags up on the edge of the roof and stacking ammunition boxes and spare barrels for a pair of M60 machine guns. “OCCULUS Two is inbound via the M1 and should be here in about half an hour. Catterick Garrison are throwing together a couple of recce squadrons, and they’ll be double-timing it down the A1(M) as soon as they’re ready. The Highways Agency is closing the northbound carriageway to facilitate, and Army HQ down south are waking up and kicking First Armoured Div and AAC for a squadron of Longbows, although the choppers are at least four hours away. Even if they close the motorway grid to civilian traffic, the first CB2s can’t get here before late afternoon.”
“Tanks.” Lockhart closes his eyes for a moment. “I seem to remember a time when we kept Challengers at Catterick. None of this nonsense about centralizing everything in the home counties. Talk about keeping all the eggs in one basket . . .”
“Blame the 2010 defense review.” Jez looks away. “We need to be prepared to hold out for at least twelve hours.” They’ve already discussed—and discounted—any hope of help from the police and regular emergency services. The civil authorities will be too busy saving civilians. In any case, if Forecasting Ops are right about the scale of the threat barreling towards the center of Leeds the local Armed Response Units will be as much use as a wet rag in a nuclear firestorm. It’s hard to be certain, though: the threat seems to be invisible, insofar as eyeballs or cameras that see it simply stop reporting. Maybe when Pinky and his forlorn hope make contact there’ll be some more hard information, but until then all they’ve got is BBC News 24’s and Sky News 24’s rolling speculation on TV sets in one of the offices, plus the usual reliable fallbacks: Twitter and Facebook. The shocked voices of the TV newsreaders talking over the burning funeral pyres of airliners tell their own tale. The oppo have theater anti-airborne capability, which suggests something frightening about the scale of the attack; a squadron of helicopter gunships and a battalion of light armored vehicles certainly won’t be enough to stop them. “I’ve got most of the machine guns set up under the car park top deck, and OCCULUS Two should arrive before contact, but we don’t have enough people to defend the site against an effective assault force.” She takes a deep breath. “I changed my mind and I think you’re right about the cameras.”
“Tell the Highways Agency to lock down all the approach
roads on the north and west of the city first,” Lockhart says curtly. “Set the signaling to red at the Armley Gyratory, down at Elland Road, and all around the outer ring road. Close down the inner ring road to stop anyone driving into the city center. A couple of hours of gridlock is a cheap price to pay if it keeps everyone off the roads.” He pauses. “And get the bloody railways stopped. The last thing we need is a couple of intercity expresses dumping a thousand passengers in the middle of a battle.”
The dawn light is beginning to cast a long shadow from the truncated tower at Bridgewater Place when Lockhart goes downstairs and returns to the makeshift operations room. If only they’d had another few months to get their feet under the table this might be a survivable situation, he thinks. The Laundry’s migration plan includes provisions to turn the regional continuity of government center in the nuclear bunker under Quarry Hill into a properly hardened defensible location. But they’re not ready yet. Expecting a skeleton staff to defend a barely prepared civilian office complex against a thuamaturgically equipped military force is madness and folly. Not for the first time, Lockhart wonders if it wouldn’t make more sense to retreat down the motorway towards London. But that would leave a metropolitan complex—two major cities and outlying towns totaling over two million people—at the mercy of a hostile occupying force.
All the alternatives are unthinkable. And so, as he returns to his desk, Lockhart is already on his mobile phone to the Ops Center down south, requesting authorization for the first ever operational activation of the SCORPION STARE system.
* * *
The Host has been riding for three and a half hours as they count time—nearly four urük hours—following one or another of the broad, eerily flat stone roads that the urük use for their carts. For a while now the ugly fired-clay and stone hovels of the underpeople have been clustering densely alongside the road, although it is still possible to glimpse open fields through the gaps between them. The Host leaves a trail of darkened windows and stopped urük-carts in its wake, bodies tumbling where they fall: the primitives have no defenses against mana-powered weapons, and the cavalry have only drawn their knives to cut through tangles of wires and fences.
But their mounts have been running at an extended canter for too long, covering ground at a pace that would have been a full gallop for regular horses. Even though their steeds are supernaturally strong (this pace would have killed a horse within an hour) they need to pause occasionally to reject heat and drink water, especially when laden with armor and riders. Thus, shortly after the first and second battalions pass Otley, Third of Heavy Cavalry commands a brief respite. The riders dismount from their steeds and lead them down the embankment to a river that runs beside the road for a short while, covered by the force’s air defense detachment and heavy weapon teams. Once the mounts are watered, their riders feed them a few kilos of meat, still raw and bleeding from the stasis cocoons. Then they take a few minutes to stretch their legs beneath the shelter of the defensive shield that the magi hold overhead.
“Well, that was the easy part,” Sixth of Second Battalion remarks to her adjutant as she extends first one leg then the other, watching the small cluster of knights around Third of Heavy, who is already back in the saddle. (His enthusiasm is unwise, she thinks: it does no good to be first on the battlefield if you arrive too sore to be fully effective.) “Tell your troopers to stay close and keep their weapons in hand. We’ll be in the thick of these slums before long and we can’t count on the lack of resistance continuing.”
“Yes, my Liege.” The adjutant glances round, taking in the field of riderless mounts slobbering and snarling over their fodder and the soldiers variously rubbing sore joints, stretching, and sitting down on the grass. “I can’t believe the foe hasn’t noticed us. How can they be so passive?”
“Oh, some of them noticed us all right!” Sixth glowers. “I believe First Battalion only stopped collecting scalps when Third threatened to crucify the next idiot who broke formation.” Her frown subsides. “Clearly All-Highest’s plan was sound, and I suppose there’ll be plenty of trophies to go round later. But remember Spies and Liars said that the enemy don’t use mana much, not that they’re defenseless.”
Adjutant of Second Battalion’s ears flatten thoughtfully. “Indeed? If they don’t use mana what do their warriors use instead?”
“Look to your sword,” Sixth says sharply. “That flying engine was no toy, was it? And from the fireball when it crashed, it had some sort of energetic power source. The fact that we couldn’t sense it notwithstanding, we shouldn’t underestimate them.”
“Undetectable high energy propulsion?” Her adjutant’s expression is queasy. “I will warn my vassals to keep their eyes open. If they can use it to project missiles or darts as well—”
“Yes.” Sixth pauses for a moment. “Also, you have observed the lights along these roads, and the lightning-bearer wires?” (The Host has lost more than two soldiers in the process of learning the hard way that steel armor and electricity distribution cables are best kept apart.) “They don’t use mana but there’s clear evidence of organization here, a civilization of sorts. And the lightning-powered eyes on poles we keep having to burn out—who are the watchers, and what are they planning?”
Adjutant of Second pulls out her mirror and peers into its glassy depths. She tucks a stray lock of sweat-dampened black hair back under her helmet (for when exposed to the gaze of basilisk weapons, even wet hair will burn), then frowns at what she sees. “We pass them every two-fifths of a league along these ways. The blue ones, I mean. The small black eyes are irregular, and the yellow boxes seem to be random but are associated with symbol-bearing steel signs.” She slides her recording mirror back into its case, where it briefly illuminates the interior before it falls asleep.
“They serve different lieges,” Sixth says slowly. “And they’re seen along the larger roads, not the smaller paths.” She smiles again, ears stirring under the fine metal weave of her mail coif. “Once we are underway, instruct all unit commanders that they are to avoid dense concentration of lightning-powered eyes, if necessary detouring into side streets. They haven’t struck at us yet, but . . .”
Adjutant of Second’s eyes go wide and her ears flatten. “Oh yes,” she breathes. “I’ll warn them at once!” And with that, she scrambles into her saddle and nudges her mad-eyed steed into motion.
* * *
Highest Liege of Airborne Strike does not fly in the morning, for she is attached to All-Highest’s staff, in overall command of the air defense and strike assets of the Host. The two active firewyrms that skim the hilltops due north of Bradford are commanded by First Wing of Airborne Strike and his wing-sister. They fly with bat-like wings fully extended, enclosed canopies covering the pilots strapped to their backs. Their flight-magi sit below them in mirror-finished cages, able to see the world around them without being burned to a crisp by the early morning light; behind and below the flight crews’ howdahs numerous steel-jacketed packages are strapped to the dragons’ side-harnesses.
To an observer with the right kind of eyes—eyes capable of looking straight at a pair of airborne strike wyrms without being struck blind—the dragons leave a faint exhaust trail of pale yellow-green vapor, exudate from their digestive tracts that drools from the incendiary glands located just behind their second set of circular jaws. It’s only a few drops every few seconds, and most of it evaporates before it hits the ground, but where it settles the liquid burns away the morning dew and the pale fumes of combustion scorch the leaves and ground below.
The two dragons are following an approximation of the Host’s course, but moving considerably faster as they circle and turn south towards the vast urük-hive around the enemy palace. The pilots are tense, minds sunk deep within the sensoria of the brain leeches through which they control their mounts. They experience the world as firewyrms perceive it, while their magi maintain a perpetual watch for signs of hostile thaumatu
rgic emissions. But the urük don’t use mana in combat, which is why the first warning of trouble the dragonriders get is when their mounts see the approaching sky-daggers directly with the light-sensitive scales coating their hides.
“Contact,” First Wing announces, a moment before Fourth Wing agrees. “Targets approaching,” followed by a bearing and distance loosely translatable as, “seven o’clock high and four hundred knots.”
The dragons, being largely biological constructs (if somewhat heavily augmented by mana-powered weapons systems and countermeasures), are traveling at a relatively sedate hundred knots. The sky-daggers are closing the distance terrifyingly fast, and there’s no way dragons can outrun them. It’s more evidence of the urük penchant for inanimate not-magic witchery, if evidence were needed. Contact is inevitable within ten minutes: but the dragons have evolved in hostile skies where to be seen is to be eaten, and the Host’s airborne combat doctrine has developed under similar circumstances, so they have certain advantages over their pursuers.
Meanwhile the crew of Quebec-1 and Quebec-2 have an unexpected problem.
“I’m looking for Contact One but I get nothing.” Quebec-2’s pilot says over the data link. “CAPTOR lock is firm but my head hurts when I try to eyeball them. Visual distortions.”
“Roger that.” Quebec-1 agrees. “My eyes are going funny, too. Countermeasures, go head-down.”
“Confirm optical countermeasures,” echoes the combat controller at Scampton. Eyeballs are a euphemism here: the fighter pilots each have a quarter of a million pounds of advanced electronic imaging equipment strapped to their heads. If they look at the floor of their cockpits they can see right through the airframe thanks to the high-resolution cameras plastered all over the aircraft and feeding their helmet-mounted displays. But where there’s a sensor there’s a jammer, and optical countermeasures are unwelcome but hardly unprecedented. Going head-down and closing on an unidentified target using instruments is something that fighter pilots hate; it means sacrificing situational awareness and ceding the initiative to whoever’s in your blind spot. But on the other hand—
The Nightmare Stacks Page 33