This was why their aerial armada was sweeping down over the mountains.
Though it was over ten kilometres away, Larice saw it clearly; its stark blackness a stain on the ocean ice. It was locked in the ice by the rapidly freezing water and huddled, though it seemed impossible that something so vast could huddle, in the midst of ice spires pushed up from the water by undersea volcanic activity.
Nearly two thousand metres long and glossy black with a flat topside bristling with crooked towers, sloped takeoff ramps and jet blast deflectors, the Archenemy mass carrier swarmed with bats.
And Larice saw how it had evaded detection for so long.
It was a submersible mass carrier.
‘Apostle Lead, this is Orbis One. We are reading strong auspex bands low on the ice, five kilometres from your position,’ said the monotone voice of one of the tech-priests. ‘Identification: six outlying super-heavies on the ice equipped with surface-to-air rockets between Winter Spear and its objective.’
‘Understood, Orbis One,’ said Seekan. ‘The Apostles will clear the way.’
Seekan’s plane dropped from the formation and the seven cream-coloured Thunderbolts followed him down towards the ocean ice. As the Apostles dived, the fighter element of Winter Spear surged forward, ready to engage and destroy the enemy screen of bats before they could splash the bombers.
Target information from Orbis inloaded onto Larice’s armaments panel, the target of her Thunderbolt’s wrath blinking a taunting red. Six multiple rocket-launching batteries surrounded the mass carrier, each capable of throwing up a lethal screen of seeker rockets. They had to be taken out before any slow movers could reach the carrier.
‘You all heard what I heard,’ said Seekan over the vox to his pilots. ‘Switch your targeting auspex to ground engagement. We will be going low and fast. Pair off. Odds will be on unmasking duty, Evens on termination.’
He spoke with crisp authority, and as Larice heard the confirmations coming over the vox she was again struck by the machine-like obedience of her fellow Apostles. There was no verbal roughhousing like you’d find in most Navy wings, no wishes of good hunting or benedictions to the Emperor. The Apostles were all about the task, anything else was a liability.
‘You and me, Asche,’ said Jeric Suhr, sliding into view on her port wing. ‘Let’s go.’
Larice nodded and pushed the stick straight down, diving for the ice. No point in giving the rocket batteries an easier target until it was time to kill them. The ice roared up to meet her, and she found herself relying on her altimeter to gauge her pull-out. The immensity of the glaring pack-ice filled her canopy, a blank vision of emptiness that made it next to impossible to judge exactly how high she was.
The numbers unspooled, and when they hit two hundred metres, she yanked back on the stick and feathered her engines, viffing her vectors hard and flaring out with a thunderous boom that split the ice. She shot off at ninety degrees to her dive, and a slashing V of ice crystals ripped up from the ice in her flashing wake.
She flew a mere twenty metres above the ocean ice with Suhr a hundred metres behind on her starboard wing. Such flying required the coolest of hands on the stick as the slightest miscalculation would send her plane ploughing into the ice.
Nap-of-the-ice flight was necessary if they were going to take out these rocket batteries. Thunderbolts and Lightnings could outrun missiles and outfly gunners, but the Marauders would have no chance against them.
Larice had trained in fire suppression missions, but had never actually flown one before.
In theory it was simple.
The aircraft worked in pairs. One pilot would fly their plane into the arc of anti-aircraft fire and allow the rocket battery to acquire him. Once the battery had ‘unmasked’ itself in this way, the second aircraft would swoop in to attack the gun battery and blow it to pieces.
In theory.
Flying fire suppression was one of the most testing and dangerous missions a pilot could undertake. Playing chicken with streams of shells and missiles was a task few had the stomach for, requiring the most fearless, skilful and, some would say, reckless flyers.
Truth be told, Larice was thrilled to be flying into harm’s way.
As a native of Phantine, she was, literally, born to fly. Any moment she wasn’t in the cockpit of an armed aircraft was a moment wasted.
‘Apostle Six,’ said Larice.
‘Six here,’ replied Suhr. ‘Go ahead, Five.’
‘You ready to do this?’
‘Of course,’ replied Suhr, sounding insulted she’d even asked.
The Thunderbolts were fast approaching the mass carrier and its ring of protection. Her low-level approach would make it difficult for the enemy gunners to achieve weapons lock. The auspex feed from Orbis showed the rocket battery, but Larice didn’t need it to see the ugly construction of black metal, blades and the rearing templum-organ of its launch tubes fastened to the ice by extended clamps like a raptor’s claws. A number of armoured vehicles and stalk tanks clustered around the battery, and red-armoured warriors with raised rifles spread out from it. Larice ignored them. Only the rocket battery mattered.
She thumbed the vox.
‘Apostle Five inbound and ready.’
Larice armed her quads, pushing the throttle out and dropping her fighter suicidally close to the ice. Meltwater blasted from the pack-ice flashed by her canopy as she flew at high speed along her approach vector.
‘Asche!’ cried the normally unflappable Jeric Suhr. ‘You’re too low!’
‘Shut up, and don’t frigging miss,’ snapped Larice, hauling violently on the stick, pulling the Thunderbolt into an almost vertical climb. Her ivory plane roared into view above the rocket battery, flashing its underside and largest surface area. She eased into an unforgivably lazy banking turn and waited on the shoom, shoom, shoom of smoke from the battery.
A bloom of yellow-stained propellant exploded from the battery’s rear and a trio of seeker warheads leapt from the launch tubes. Slaved autocannons followed her passage, banging high explosive shells in a near-constant stream into the air.
She rolled over and dived for the ice as shots blasted around her. She twisted and looped the plane like a lunatic. The autocannon shells were well wide and Larice grinned as adrenaline dumped into her system, keeping the effects of her high-g turns at bay.
She pulled the Thunderbolt into a long, slow climb, allowing the rockets to close before throwing the aircraft into a dazzling pirouette, hammering the throttle and pumping out clouds of decoy flares. The Thunderbolt shot away at almost ninety degrees to its original course and two rockets overshot, exploding as their seeker warheads fell for the flares.
The third rocket twisted round and followed her down, the gap closing. Jeric Suhr’s Thunderbolt overflew the battery and fired two of his hellstrike missiles. Even as the Archenemy crew realised that they were now the hunted, the missiles slammed into the rocket vehicle’s topside.
The battery exploded in a searing white fireball, burning fuel and wreckage flying in all directions. Three other vehicles detonated, caught in the blast and veering across the ice to crush the soldiers gathered around them. Lumbering stalk-tanks fired their heavy guns, but the Thunderbolts were too quick for the gunners and every one of their shots missed.
The rockets in the battery’s magazine cooked off explosively. Warheads blew in a string of roaring booms. Razor-sharp fragments sprayed out and enemy soldiers ran from the destruction, their grossly misshapen bodies twisting in agony as they burned.
Larice let out a yell of exultation as the explosions lit up the ice and flew through the expanding mushroom cloud of fire rising from the destroyed battery. Flames rippled over her canopy like liquid orange light and the last rocket followed her into the fire. It detonated in the midst of the explosion and Larice pulled her Thunderbolt into a looping, inverted climb.