Interceptor City, page 22
‘Two at first,’ he said. ‘We got on them. Me and Gangster.’
‘Where was Tantrum?’ she asked.
Blindside glanced aside. The smoke, Tantrum, was sitting at the next table over, trying to eat. He was a stocky young man with thick, dark, curly hair tied back in a pigtail. Jagdea knew he could hear them.
‘Lagging behind, as usual,’ said Blindside.
‘Or… left behind?’ she suggested.
‘If he can’t keep up, he can’t keep up,’ scowled Blindside.
‘Or wing you in a knife-fight?’ said Jagdea.
Blindside sat back and stared at her.
‘The bats were gunning hard,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to make excuses.’
‘Nobody ever does,’ she said. ‘There were more than two, though. Six, in fact. Maybe seven.’
‘The rest came in after, using the smog. Low level. Didn’t see them. Couldn’t track them.’
‘That’s a lot,’ said Jagdea. ‘More than usual.’
Blindside nodded. ‘We were on the first two,’ he said.
‘You and Gangster?’
‘Yeah. Then the rest came out of the soup on our arses. Broke our pattern. By the time we’d pulled around, they were all past us.’
‘So that’s something new then?’ she asked.
‘Yeah.’
Jagdea took a sip of joiliq, then tucked into her food.
‘How’d you pull that turn?’ Blindside asked after a moment. He was watching her eat, his expression somewhere between a brooding frown and a sulk. ‘That hard frigging turn. Non-ballistic. I saw it. How’d you turn like that?’
‘Just lucky, I guess,’ she replied.
‘No such thing as luck,’ said Blindside.
‘We better frigging hope there is,’ she said.
Blindside got up and left. Jagdea finished her food, then stood to clear her tray.
‘How did you make that turn?’ a voice asked her quietly.
She saw it was Tantrum. The boy had swung around in his seat, and was looking up at her nervously, almost cowering. His face was shred-pale.
‘You saw it too?’
‘Yes.’
‘As soon as I know,’ she said, ‘I’ll tell you.’
She turned to go, then hesitated.
‘Did anyone tell the others about Bloodspot?’
‘The others?’ Tantrum asked.
‘Mischief and Slipstream,’ she said. Mischief and Slipstream were the squadron’s other two wet-linked pilots. She didn’t know either of them, but she knew their names. ‘They don’t come up here. They’re stuck in the hangar. Did anyone tell them?’
‘Probably,’ said Tantrum. ‘The fitters, probably.’
‘Not their job,’ said Jagdea.
The sky had gone grey, and torrential rain had set in. Jagdea hoped it might clear the smog. She made her way down to the hangars. Her thigh still ached, and her whole torso from the groin up was sore with g-lock bruising. She realised she was walking with a limp.
She was still alert-ready. She went to check on her bird. On her way through hangar three, she saw Slipstream and Mischief on the opposite side. Their machines, a dark green Bolt and a silver Cypra M, were parked on adjacent stands, and the pilots had drawn their cots together to play cards, each at the limits of their bio-link umbilicals. Mischief was a young woman with prematurely white hair, Slipstream an older man with a wispy beard and a blotchy, shaved scalp. Both looked tired and sickly, bleached out like Sorrentine.
Jagdea paused, and thought about crossing to speak to them. She hesitated. She didn’t know them, and they didn’t know her. Before she could make her mind up, an engine revved, and Boa trundled by carrying Bloodspot’s bone-white Voss in his forked jaws. The plane had been brought back to the deck by the squadron’s recovery Destrier. It seemed limp and sagging in the tractor’s clamp, and it was dripping a wet trail along the deck behind it as rainwater flushed out its guts.
She saw Mischief and Slipstream get up when they saw it. They stood, side by side, their game forgotten, and watched it roll past. Their faces were paler than ever.
Jagdea’s Voss was in hangar one. Tarr and her crew were working on it. The air was damp. Rain was leaking through the ceiling and splashing down into standing water on the steel.
‘This do you?’ Tarr asked as she saw Jagdea approach. She yanked the tarp cover off a munition trolley and revealed a pair of heavy ventral autocannons. They were the same basic pattern, but not matched. Tarr must’ve looted them from the carcasses of two different Cypra M Twins.
‘Do they work?’ asked Jagdea.
‘Do they frig,’ growled Tarr. ‘Yes, they work. You owe me, finding them. A brace will balance your wingload.’
‘Appreciate it. How long to hook them up?’
‘Thirty minutes to lock them on the rails, then another hour to wire them in. I presume you want to be able to toggle?’
Jagdea nodded. ‘Yeah, them or the twin-linked K-sixty-eights. And both?’
‘Call it forty-five minutes, then. I can fix an ammo counter too. There’s a spare slot in the F-thirty-one loom. I can run it via logis heads-up, but I can give you a mechanical counter as well. If you want.’
‘How much is this gonna cost me?’ Jagdea asked.
‘All the favours,’ Tarr replied. She scrubbed oil off one of her augmetic hands with a rag. ‘Three-hour fit, all told,’ she said. ‘But you’re alert-ready, so I can’t start the job until you’re stood down.’
Jagdea nodded. If a shout came, she’d be in hot water if her bird was mid-fit.
‘We’re just giving Four-Four a refuel, wash and brush up,’ said Tarr. ‘Got some plate scorching on the wing there.’
‘Took a couple of knocks.’
‘And reloading your countermeasures.’
Tarr nodded to a crate containing the little metal drums of the mag-phos decoy flares.
‘You keep using those things up.’
‘Yes, well,’ said Jagdea, ‘it was a busy day.’
‘Not over yet,’ said Tarr.
Billet, Intercept 66, Vesperus, 16:59
Back in her billet, Jagdea went over sections of the spec-book line by line. It was heavy going, the language both technical and archaic. She’d borrowed a stylus, a crumpled notepad, and a head-torch from the fitters. Without the head-torch, the manual’s small print would have been impossible to read in the billet’s gloom.
She made notes. Nothing she was reading was confirming her idea, but nothing was denying it either. The spec-book was hardly going to state or recommend a non-standard manoeuvre, especially one that bordered on suicidal. But there was a sweet spot, a place in an invisible set diagram where ‘book-recommended application’ and ‘book-outlawed practice’ crossed over. Nowhere did the spec-book specifically state she couldn’t perform that turn, or that the Strike couldn’t take it. It had never occurred to the compilers of the spec-book that any pilot would be dumb enough to try it. What she had discovered, by accident, on her first sortie, was an unexploited aspect of the Lightning Strike’s performance envelope.
And it was deeply counter-intuitive.
She glanced up at the list of priorities she had chalked on the wall. There was a knock, and Gumm came in. He flinched, and shielded his eyes with his hand as she looked up.
‘Sorry,’ she said. She turned off the head-torch and took it off.
‘Busy?’ he asked.
‘Working something out,’ she said. ‘A trick. That turn I mentioned.’
He nodded. ‘Go on.’
‘Once I’m sure. It requires the pilot to bend the shit out of the plane. Outside specs. It would take a degree of confidence. And some praying.’
‘Lot of that here,’ said Gumm. ‘Have you noticed the way this outfit is split? Lead Garrant and some others. Sister Meredith. A lot of hardline faith and Imperial Truth.’
‘We’re defending a templum,’ said Jagdea.
Gumm shook his head. ‘We’re using the ruin of a templum,’ he corrected. ‘I’ve never been part of a unit that’s so strict in observance. Zealous. And yet the other half, Gangster and the rest, they couldn’t be much more profane in their attitude and behaviour.’
‘Some are both,’ said Jagdea. ‘Sister Merry Death, for one. Doesn’t seem to me to be a big difference between her and Gangster, apart from what they say they believe in.’
He nodded. ‘Tribal,’ he said. ‘Feels to me like Six-Six collects two types of pilots. Crusading zealots breathing the fire of the Throne, or crazy heathens with a death wish. You fly here, you become one or the other.’
‘Three types,’ she said. ‘There are the ones like us who didn’t ask to be here.’
‘True,’ he agreed. He sat down on the end of her cot, and sighed. ‘Still, we’ll be going home soon. Word in the fitting shops is that fuel is really low. There’s got to be a replenishment run soon, next few days, or Six-Six is out of business. So we’ll get our ride back.’
‘Shame,’ she said. ‘I was just starting to enjoy it.’
He looked at her, no expression on his porcelain face, but shock in his eyes.
‘I was joking,’ she said. ‘The only thing I want more than a ticket out of this place is a shower.’
‘This rain keeps up,’ he said, ‘the tanks should fill. Maybe they’ll lift the washroom ban.’
He toyed with a loose button on his jacket.
‘I may have devised a trick of my own,’ he said.
‘Share?’
‘Target systems,’ he replied. ‘Shooting range in this environment is really short, in most instances. This is guns I’m talking about, not seeking munitions. Shooting ranges are short, shorter than any open war sky. We’ve got the weapons lock system, and modarlock. Both tied, usually.’
‘Belt and braces.’
‘Right. But they’re both calibrated for prediction and lag. A lock tone isn’t a solid lock. It’s a lock on wherever logis is predicting the target will be by the time you’ve actually shot.’
‘That’s a reaction time lag way less than a second, Gumm,’ she said.
‘Agreed. We never notice it. But Vesperus is so tight, that tiny lag matters. I think our targeters have a pre-programmed lead that is too generous for local conditions.’
‘A lead and draw designed for open sky? By how much?’
‘Far less than a second,’ he said, ‘so less than a metre, would be my guess. It would take a tech-priest to calculate it. But our weapons locks are infinitesimally overcompensating, which means we’re missing more than we should.’
‘How did you figure this?’
‘Today,’ he said. ‘I was winging Merry Death and Tailend out at Regulus Cross. We scared up two bats. I had a clean murderlock at one point, but my burst went wide. Nothing wrong with my guns. It got me thinking.’
‘I hear you lost Tailend.’
‘We had these two bats,’ Gumm said. ‘Hard chase. Tailend was way back. That poor kid had no idea. Then four more hostiles came in from nowhere. It turned into a rolling scrap. Harlot’s flight caught up with us. Harlot, Rockcrete and Slumbag. It got very messy. Harlot bagged one, and the Sister splashed another. Somewhere, in the middle of all that, Tailend went down. Didn’t even see it, or the bat that nailed him.’
Jagdea exhaled slowly.
‘Sounds like the knife-fight I went through. Six bats at least. Which is new.’
‘New tactic, do you think?’ Gumm asked.
‘What do you think?’
‘Felt like it,’ he said. ‘The enemy knows we’re here, and it knows we’re getting decent kills on the singletons and duos they’ve been using. So they’re lifting larger groups. Two chasers out front, acting like bait to trigger an intercept, then the others to jump us when we commit.’
‘Double formation?’
‘No, one staggered formation,’ he replied. ‘Some of the Razors I met today were turning fast and tight. I don’t think they were carrying payloads for ground targets. Too light on their feet. They were there, with unladen dynamics, to hunt interceptors.’
‘That’s a happy thought,’ she said. ‘What do we do about the target systems? Turn the damn things off and go boresight?’
‘Maybe not,’ said Gumm. ‘I’m going to talk to the enginseers. There may be a zero-value default we can reset to, and wipe any logis compensations.’
‘Our aim will be off, long range.’
‘There is no long range, Jagdea,’ he said.
An alarm sounded. Jagdea got up and grabbed her helmet.
‘I’m alert-ready,’ she said.
‘Me too,’ he replied.
By the time they were in the corridor, they could hear their names on the call-list crackling over the vox-speaker. They started to run.
Jagdea saw Wilzar up ahead. ‘Hangar bay!’ she yelled at him as she ran past. ‘Tonight! New tricks!’
‘New tricks?’
‘Bring any smoke you know who wants to learn! Twenty-two hundred, Wilzar!’
Wilzar stood and watched them race away down the corridor.
‘What if…’ he said to no one. ‘What if you don’t come back?’
Fourth drop, Intercept 66, Vesperus, 17:51
Engine primed but unstarted, she dropped nose-first off the Campanile into free-fall. Into heavy rain. Into gathering darkness.
Gumm went a second after her. Merry Death led the way.
Flash-start. The turboram lit.
All three of them raked up on a hard burn and turned west into the rain.
There was less than an hour of daylight left, but the rain and undercast had reduced the light levels to a murky dusk. At least the rainstorm had cleared the worst of the smog.
‘Merry Death to wings. De-conflict auspex.’
‘Driver, copy,’ Jagdea replied.
‘Dollface, copy.’
‘ROP Four-Two has a track,’ the Sister voxed. ‘Passing the refinery belt, moving south-west. Two hundred and forty-six seconds out. Accept track and form on me, over.’
‘Driver, accepting track,’ Jagdea voxed, throwing a switch to let the plot load on her auspex display. The CAD display, in all its multi-coloured headache, seemed too bright. In the lousy light, she was getting reflections on her canopy, and without her visor lowered for optic boost, the brilliance of the display was going to mess with her night vision.
‘Dollface, accepting track,’ she heard Gumm report.
Could she dim the display? There had to be a dial for that, but the CAD was so damn complicated, she couldn’t remember where. Maybe, though it was fitted with everything else, the Voss didn’t have one. The headache was called the headache for a reason.
They climbed a little, whipping between the huge and blackened flanks of the mid-hive spires. Flying the hive in poor vis was a whole new kind of nasty. Everything was a hard jerk on the stick to maintain clearance and take hard turns. Shadows snatched at her. Some of the shadows were solid: gantries, derricks, pylons and spars. She kept her focus on the amber burn of Merry Death’s bobbing, jerking exhaust.
Sister Meredith’s voice came over the link.
‘Offer now reverence and thanks to the Saint of the Sabbat and her brother-in-light Kiodrus, hallowed be, that we may find the sinners and castigate them, in the name of the God-Emperor.’
A blessing huddle? In the air? The dead drop had been a slam, with no time for talk on the deck.
‘May we find the foe, and the sinners who defy the light of all truth,’ Merry Death continued. ‘May we seek them out with all fury, and may we smite them with your wrath. Bless us this hour with your strength that we might not fail you. Grant that we may kill sinners as the God-Emperor has asked of us, copy.’
She was waiting for a response.
‘The Emperor protects,’ she heard Gumm reply.
‘The Aeronautica remembers,’ Jagdea said.
They banked left at Westphor Union, and tore down the mile-long Union Transit tunnel in single file, their power plants echoing and howling off the vast rockcrete chute. Jagdea glimpsed torn roadway and burned-out ground transports below. The tunnel was big, a long tube, but it felt painfully tight. The shred was riding behind her again, and licking the back of her neck. She could smell the stink of her own breath and sweat.
‘Stay low on exit,’ Merry Death advised.
They were reaching the end of the road tunnel, rating hard. Jagdea saw Merry Death dip a little. She nudged down.
They shot out of the tunnel, directly onto the span of the Union Suspension Bridge beyond. The bridge was a massive superstructure, joining the mid-hive with the western conurbs. It crossed a four-mile-wide vent basin, but the basin had long since flooded, and was swamped with toxic black water almost up to span level.
There were heavy steel spars at regular intervals above the bridge road, fifty yards up. That was why Merry Death had told them to stay low. If they’d come out of the tunnel too high, they would have hit the spars. As it was, they were gunning across the bridge, boxed in; the buckled roadway below them, suspension cables and girder-work to either side, spars above. Though grand in scale, the bridge had not been built for aerial transit. They were in a cage. The spars strobed past overhead. High-tension bridge cables moaned and whined at the thunder of their engines. There was a ringing noise like a stick being held to spinning metal spokes.
‘On exit, climb hard,’ voxed Merry Death.
No shit. The end of the bridge was coming up fast. The roadway exit ramp sloped down into an unflyable street zone. The second they cleared the bridge spars, Jagdea pulled the stick hard back and hit burn to avoid spitting straight out into the buildings ahead. G-lock. Grip position. Her breath clamped. The shred chuckled. She followed Merry Death in a near-vertical ascent up the face of a soaring hab-block.
Ahead, Merry Death’s black-and-white Bolt banked out across the roofline, and levelled. Jagdea matched her. Gumm followed her tail.
