Seekan stood next to him, taking animatedly and using his hands a lot. He seemed to be demonstrating air combat manoeuvres and gesturing over to where the Apostles waited.
Larice had never thought much about the men and women who directed her in the air, assuming they were sitting in a calm, ordered command centre. Watching the chaos surrounding the plotter and hearing the barked flood of information gathered by the ground-based and aerial augurs, she found a new respect for their skill in juggling so many variables.
Ziner Krone lay sprawled in a cot bed, arms crossed over his chest like a body in a funerary parlour. Jeric Suhr and Quint played a bad-tempered game of regicide, and Larice wondered if it was a continuation of the one they’d been playing in the ballroom of the Aquilian. She looked over at the duty roster, confirming that she wasn’t on the rotation for another two hours.
Larice knew she should rest, but she was too wired to sleep, and the noise from the freshly hammered-down runways and launch rails beyond the walls of the market hall made it too difficult to sleep. Some aviators found a natural rhythm in flight operations, snatching sleep when they could, eating on the run and flying in the spaces inbetween. Larice always found it took time to settle into any kind of routine, and they’d flown out of three different bases already.
In any case, she’d hooked up with Laquell, whose squadron was deployed in the same hangars and runways as the Apostles. They’d taken to spending their downtime playing cards and talking of particularly memorable intercepts, and Larice found herself warming to the handsome flyer. Seekan still hadn’t offered him a place in the Apostles, which Larice found baffling. Laquell’s kill count had climbed steadily, now standing at an impressive seventy-three, and he’d provided assists to no fewer than six of the Apostles.
Leena Sharto, Saul Cirksen and Owen Thule were in the sky, running air superiority missions over the Imperial Guard. Three regiments, two Mordian and one Vostroyan, were engaged in a bitter land war two hundred kilometres west of Coriana. Larice had flown on such missions before, finding it hard to imagine waging war without being strapped to the awesome power of a Thunderbolt. To face the guns of the enemy without its speed, armour and powerful guns seemed like a sure-fire way to get yourself killed.
The medicae convoys pouring into Coriana and the number of facilities converted to deal with the dead appeared to back this up.
‘Busy I see,’ said Laquell, returning with a pot of caffeine and two battered tin mugs.
‘Just keeping an eye on things,’ said Larice, accepting a mug and taking a sip. She grimaced.
‘Yeah, I know,’ he said, sitting next to her. ‘I sure do miss the caffeine at Rimfire.’
‘It was that good?’
‘No, but it was better than this. So how’s it going?’ said Laquell, nodding towards the map. Junior flight officers moved coloured tacks around the board as intercepts developed and fresh intelligence became available.
‘A map tacked to the wall isn’t the most efficient way of hearing what’s going on, but it’s better than nothing,’ said Larice. ‘I think something big’s on the way. All the runners got called back to the table and the tech-priests nearly had a frigging fit.’
‘Any idea what’s up?’
‘Not a clue,’ said Larice. ‘You know we’re always the last to know what’s happening.’
‘Looks like Seekan’s in amongst it.’
‘Wing Leader Seekan,’ corrected Larice.
‘Yeah, sorry.’
‘You think he’s putting you in harm’s way?’
‘Him or someone with more medals on their chest.’
Laquell nodded and looked over at the map. ‘Looks like the Guard are getting hit hard.’
‘Not as hard as they’d be without us watching over them from above.’
‘True.’
‘When are you up?’ she asked.
Larice checked her wrist chron. Every pilot had one. They delivered a warning note and a mild electric shock when an alert came in, and were universally hated.
‘Two hours,’ he said. ‘You?’
‘The same.’
‘Looks like the Apostles and Indigo will be flying together again.’
‘Good to know,’ she said, draining her caffeine as Seekan strode from the plotting table towards them. His crisp demeanour was animated and his face flushed with excitement, like a junior pilot after his first kill. Larice didn’t know whether to be amused or scared.
Krone came awake as Seekan approached, but Suhr and Quint continued their game.
Larice took her feet down from the packing crate and said, ‘We’ve got a mission?’
‘That we have, Larice,’ said Seekan. ‘And it’s rather a big one.’
As the Breakers passed beneath her Thunderbolt, Larice began to appreciate Wing Leader Seekan’s gift for understatement. As part of Winter Spear, the name given to the attack force heading out over the ocean ice, the Apostles had been tasked with the toughest job of the sortie. Two hundred and sixty-six aircraft filled the air, a mix of vector jets, ground attack craft, air-superiority fighters, heavy bombers and a pair of converted Marauders equipped with souped-up auspex gear. Designated Orbis Flight, these last two planes would attempt to provide mobile command and control over the coming battle.
Forty Marauders, comprised of aircraft from the 22nd Yysarians and the 323rd Vincamus, growled behind the fighter screen. Their bomb bays were fully laden with armour-penetrating warheads so heavy it seemed like the aircraft might not make it over the peaks. Together with the slower, prop-driven Laredo-class bombers, seventy-two slow movers shook the mountaintops clear of snow, wallowing in the jetwash of the racing fighters.
Ranging ahead of the bombers, the Apostles formed the tip of the spear, eight cream-coloured Thunderbolts flying at seven thousand metres. Fast-moving Lightnings from the 39th Buccaneers prowled the bombers’ flanks, and squadrons from the 666th Devil Dogs and 42nd Prefects provided low and top cover for the formation. Two dozen locally-produced fighters, known as Y-ten-tens but which the Navy flyers had christened Die-ten-tens due to their lack of manoeuvrability and slow speed, flew alongside the bombers. Everyone knew that if it came to these planes defending the bombers, then the assault was as good as defeated.
The three pilots of Indigo Flight cruised behind and below the Apostles. Larice had given Laquell the traditional Navy send-off before a mission.
‘Good hunting,’ she’d said on the hardstands of Coriana.
‘You too,’ he’d replied, and she’d smacked his arse as he climbed the ladder.
‘What was that for?’ he said, climbing in and strapping himself down as the fitters pulled the arming pins on the hellstrike rockets mounted on the pylons beneath his wings.
‘For luck.’
‘Don’t I get to give you one?’
‘When we get back, Laquell,’ she’d said, turning and jogging over to her own plane.
Seekan’s voice crackled over the vox, pulling her back to the present, and she checked her spacing and gripped her stick with hands that were sweating inside her textured gloves.
‘Coming up on Initial Point,’ he said. ‘Combat spread and drop to Angels minus five. The enemy will have been watching for us, and will undoubtedly have their bats airborne by now. Expect contact any minute.’
One by one, the Apostles acknowledged and Larice thumbed her auspex into active search mode, watching as the scope began filling with rapidly ascending contacts. High-speed interceptors, slower close-in defence craft, and heavy ground contacts.
But in the centre of the slate one contact overshadowed all the others, a monstrous return that was far too large to be a flyer. This was what they had come to destroy. This was how the Archenemy had launched their attacks over the Breakers without warning.