Interceptor City, page 31
He sighed, as though he was finally letting go of something he’d held in for too long.
‘So… now you’ve heard my glory story, Jagdea.’
‘They’re all the same, in the end,’ she said. ‘A rather formulaic structure. Hard climb. Fangs out. A nice big finish. No sequel.’
‘Indeed,’ said Gumm.
‘I’m sorry I ever pressed you to hear it,’ she said. ‘You didn’t have to tell it.’
‘And I doubt I’ll ever tell it again,’ he said. ‘But after what you said in the hangar, I felt I had to. The least I could do for a friend. Drink up.’
She picked up her glass.
‘You don’t have to–’ she began.
‘I’m not going to,’ he said. ‘That’s sort of the point of all this.’
His hands were flat on the table. He stared at his glass and the bottle.
‘If I can sit here,’ he said, ‘with that in front of me, and not touch it, then I’ve landed safe. I’m not Sagittarius Gumm. I’m me, in a regrettable situation. I can’t change who I am, but I can stop being who I was. Drink’s not your thing, Jagdea, I know that, but I think the analogy is fair. You’ve had the experience. You know the dangers to avoid. Just like we tell the smokes. If you don’t want to be the hero of the Zophonian Sea again, you know what to fly around. Don’t hide from it. Don’t pretend it wasn’t you. Put it on the table where you can see it, and stare at it.’
She knocked her drink back.
‘Good flying,’ she said.
He nodded back.
Hangar 3, Intercept 66, Vesperus, 22:10
More had come, just as Gumm predicted. Nearly thirty, including Gangster and her boys and, to Jagdea’s surprise, Reaper, Jongleur and Blindside. Wilzar looked the worst for wear. Only Tantrum had not reappeared. Jagdea imagined Glick was asleep somewhere.
They had set up near the dark green Bolt and silver Cypra M belonging to Mischief and Slipstream. The bio-linked pilots had pulled their cots up as close as their umbilicals would allow, and were lounging like nobility viewing some amusement.
Jagdea was about to start when she saw Sister Merry Death walk in. The Sister knelt, rigid, as though praying, at the back of the sprawled huddle. Her eyes were locked on Jagdea.
‘Shall we start with a blessing?’ Jagdea suggested. There were groans from the less devout, but she was determined not to let Meredith’s hawk-stare put her off. ‘Sister?’
‘Kill sinners,’ said Merry Death.
‘Good enough,’ said Jagdea. ‘Gumm’s got a few words to say about weight-to-lift ratios and turn angles. The stuff we were all taught barely applies in Vesperus, so listen to what he’s got to share.’
Steeley pulled out his notebook, and Reaper had brought a slate, but Jagdea could feel the impatience in the group.
‘Before that,’ she said, ‘I want to say I’m pleased to see so many here. And I know why. It’s not the quality of our advice, which is dubious at best. You want to hear about today.’
Gumm glanced at her, surprised. There was a volley of applause, a few whoops, a few sets of hands placed on heads in deference. ‘Three kills!’ Gangster cried, snake-arming cross-legged in the middle row.
‘Thanks, thank you,’ said Jagdea, hands raised. ‘Damp audio. I know you won’t settle until you hear it, so let’s get it out of the way. I dropped. I killed three bats. Bite me.’
More laughter, uproar.
‘I took chances,’ she said, as the noise died down. ‘I took chances. I took too many. The first kill was legit. The second, survival. The third, I shouldn’t even have been there. I ignored an instruct. Never ignore a frigging instruct, no matter how good the glory story you’re going to get to tell. I was frigging Four-A this morning, fangs out, hair on fire. And I was stupid. There’s taking chances and there’s “taking chances”.’
They were quiet now.
‘Could you go a bit slower,’ asked Steeley, looking up from his pad, ‘because I appear to have written the same phrase twice.’
‘We all take chances,’ said Jagdea. ‘It’s part of the spec. We take chances from the moment we drop. Every second of every sortie is an opportunity to eat it. The hive is trying to kill you more than the bats are. I’ve encouraged you to be confident. You have to be. So take those chances. I’m talking about calculated risk. Will my bird fit through that gap? Will I miss that wall? Lack of confidence will kill you. So trust your gut, and be bold.’
She cleared her throat.
‘But uncalculated risk will kill you too,’ she said. ‘That’s what I took today. Yeah, I got three kills, but I was dumb. The second kill was questionable, though I can excuse it by necessity. The third? Just frigging greedy. I should have left it. I knew exactly what I was doing, I knew exactly what my situation was, and I knew exactly what I had to do, which was follow instruct and go for recovery. I was so fired up, I ignored what I knew and everything I had ever been taught. Three kills. Big whoop. I could just as easily have had the bird die under me, and cost the Circus a Voss and a driver. So, disappointing as it will be to hear, my thing tonight is cognitive approach. Be bold enough to do what you know you can do, but be smart enough to avoid the things you can’t. Brains before balls. There’s a fine line.’
‘How will we know it?’ asked Blowout.
‘You know it already. All of you know it, because you’re trained Aeronautica,’ said Jagdea. ‘You just have to remember that you know it. Here’s a hint. We’re not here for personal glory. We’re here to fight a war. If you’re doing the first thing, then you’ve crossed the line.’
‘So, be bold but not too bold?’ asked Camo. ‘Push it but don’t push it?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘This from the pilot who taught us you need to depart control to pull a J-turn?’ asked Slumbag.
‘I never claimed to be consistent,’ said Jagdea.
‘So, too much caution, or too little?’ said Steeley. ‘Everything’s going to kill us?’
‘Yes,’ said Jagdea. ‘You’re all going to die.’
There was silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘does that come as news? You’re all going to die. I’m going to die. All of us. Death is inevitable. The only say you get is how long you keep flying until it happens. Calculated risk versus uncalculated risk.’
‘I don’t want to die!’ said Camo, involuntarily. It was more a blurted whisper, and it surprised even her.
‘I know,’ said Jagdea. ‘Neither do I, Kinny.’
‘Death in the service of the God-Emperor is a service to the God-Emperor,’ said Sister Meredith in cold, clear terms.
‘The Sister makes a good point,’ said Jagdea, ‘so there’s consolation in that. Also, death is easy. It’s fine. It’s nothing to be afraid of. Death is not the worst part.’
‘What is?’ asked Mischief.
‘Dying,’ said Jagdea. ‘That’s the part that you should avoid.’
The huddle broke up, and everyone filed out, talking. No one seemed downcast or scornful. Gumm had made some valuable points, stuff that even Jagdea hadn’t considered, so they hadn’t wasted anybody’s time.
‘That was good,’ Mischief called out to Jagdea and Gumm as they started to leave.
She got up off her cot, pale and sickly, dragging her umbilical around like the train of a dress.
‘It was good,’ she said. ‘Valuable. Good to hear you say it. No one talks about those things.’
‘The tricks?’ Jagdea asked.
‘The tricks, and all the other things you said.’
‘It’s a waste,’ muttered Slipstream. He hadn’t risen from his cot.
‘A waste?’ asked Gumm.
Slipstream looked up at them, bleached out and haggard.
‘I suppose I admire your initiative,’ Slipstream said, ‘but screw them all.’
‘Who?’
‘The smokes. Screw ’em. They can learn this shit for themselves. The hard way. Like we did.’
Gumm took a step forward. Jagdea put a hand on his arm.
‘Is that why you invited us down here?’ Gumm asked. ‘To pick it apart?’
‘We just wanted the company, really,’ said Mischief wistfully. ‘I liked it. I liked what you said.’
‘I didn’t pick at nothing,’ said Slipstream quietly. ‘I didn’t interrupt. I could’ve. I didn’t. You go ahead and tell ’em what you want to tell ’em. But I say to hell with ’em.’
He rose slowly to his feet as though his muscles were wasted and weak.
‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘I gave my life to the Aeronautica. To the God-Emperor. My actual life. Not in theory. For real. I let them make me into this… vampire. You want to see dying, Driver? It looks like this. This is me for the rest of my days. What did those smokes ever do? What did they ever sacrifice? You’re trying to make things easy for them. They should learn the hard way.
‘Besides,’ he added, as an afterthought, ‘you can’t save ’em all. Ask Dicebag.’
Dicebag was a smoke Jagdea hadn’t even met. What with her exploits, the day’s big tally, and the fuel resupply from Intercept 43, things had been so busy she’d missed the news that Dicebag had been lost on an afternoon sortie, splashed by an unseen bat.
DAY 94
Seventh drop, Intercept 66, Vesperus, 10:11
Wilzar’s second kill was such a fine execute, the sight of it almost took Jagdea’s mind off her new bird.
They’d dead dropped into fine rain and fretting mist, and turned south towards Helot Bay on the scent of a track. Her, Wilzar and Gumm. Jagdea had been assigned Tail 011, the only flyable bird Tarr could drag out of the Tomb. It was a Voss Strike. The Tomb was the sub-hangar where recovered machines were stored. Most were wrecks, slowly skeletonised for parts and spares, but a few were intact enough for reconditioning. Tail 011 had been patched, strip-serviced, and fitted with a recycled ram. It was Sorrentine’s bird, the bone-white Voss he had died in.
When she first saw it, Jagdea had almost refused it. It felt unseemly to touch it or make it fly again. But by then, it was already tail-up in dead drop position on the platform lip, and they were go-ready.
‘Best I could do,’ Tarr had said, seeing the expression on Jagdea’s face. Jagdea had climbed in, the fitters clearing away the hoses. Tail 011 was in all respects identical to Four-Four, yet it seemed utterly unfamiliar. It was more worn and scuffed, and there had been no time to tape-mask any of the instruments, or adjust anything to Jagdea’s preferences. Jagdea had started to walk the parish quickly, making refinements. The cockpit stank of counterseptic wash and cleaning gel, which only seemed to enhance an underlying scent of stale sweat and organic residue. The seat had been crudely reupholstered.
‘Checks Four-A,’ Tarr had said. ‘All prime, but the ram’s a recyc, and the burner has a cranky take-up lag I can’t iron out. Some good news, though. Look.’
Jagdea had flipped on the voltaics. Tarr was pointing proudly at the hydraulics indicator. It was green.
‘You’re racking stores,’ Tarr added.
Jagdea hadn’t even looked.
‘Relax,’ said Tarr. ‘Intercept Four-Three brought some actual Skystrikes with the fuel, so I’ve racked you two.’
Jagdea had nodded. She went to arm the seat.
‘No seat,’ Tarr reminded her.
Bloodspot’s Voss, like all the bio-impulse birds, had been stripped of its ejection system to make room for the wet-link system’s plasma reservoirs. They’d been removed, but there had been nothing to put in their place. Jagdea could see the redundant, capped valves for the neuroreactive feeds below and beside her position in the seat box.
‘Done this before?’ Tarr had asked.
‘Not willingly,’ said Jagdea.
‘That’s the spirit,’ Tarr had replied, and latched the canopy.
They came through the hive structure at high rate, nose-to-tail, and dropped into the rockcrete outflow canyon that ran along the inside of Helot Bay’s massive seawall. The seawall girdled the southern edge of the hive, a barrier half a mile high to keep the ocean out. But it had been breached in several places along its two hundred mile run during the hive-death. This was the main source of the hive’s sub-level flooding. The outflow trench was a mirror of black water dotted with emerging debris and prismatic slicks, like the foetid moat of some wizard’s castle. Every time they zipped past a major breach in the seawall, Jagdea glimpsed the bleak, grey emptiness of the Western Ocean beyond.
The hostiles had either turned back to meet them, or Jagdea’s flight had come up on the trap part of their bait-and-trap formation first. Two bats, both Talons, had rolled into the trench to greet them.
She reminded herself of the advice she’d given the huddle the previous night. Cognitive approach. No matter how much she might want to use Sorrentine’s bird to stake a little payback for him, she wasn’t going to let the old gunfighter take over. By the regs. Note enemy state – altitude, airspeed, direction of attack. Guns live, lock running.
‘Driver, split left,’ Gumm voxed.
‘Copy, in hot.’
The Talons were approaching for a head-on pass down the trench. One was so low it was kicking a wake in the dead water. Jagdea broke line wide, gunning for the higher bat. Gumm and Wilzar stayed low.
Chief Tarr had warned her about One-One’s burn delay, but the hesitation at the top of the throttle still surprised her and spoiled what should have been a perfect set up. By the time she fired, climbing, the bat had kissed through her envelope.
Jagdea gripped and pulled into a loop, the trench and its stagnant waterway swinging over her head. Her prey, a black Talon, was inverting too. Just from its lithe turn, she knew it was a hunter. It wasn’t payloading anything that required a low-g tolerance.
But it wasn’t coming for her. It cut past her again, diving back on Wilzar and Gumm, who had just crossed and exchanged with the second bat and were peeling up for round two.
‘Break, break,’ she called. The second bat had just rated below her, entering a climb. She pushed over onto its heels rather than bleeding performance to scissor around after the black Talon.
Behind her, the black Talon was now hounding Gumm, having tried to bounce him from above. Gumm rolled out, knowing not to hold a heading or position for more than four seconds. Wilzar was racing up at the Talon’s eight, trying to get inside the pursuit curve.
She lost sight of them. The second Talon, scarlet and silver, had her full attention. It banked out of the trench space and back into the hive. She gave chase, determined not to lose it. They bulleted under a processional arch, over a powerduct, then through the gutted superstructure of a free trader embassy. It was a dark volume, with only the main rockcrete verticals still standing inside the building’s shell. She was visor only. She went for guns, but the rockcrete dust they were raising with their ramwash was as thick as chaff and denied her lock.
Exit. Sunlight. Hard left. The Talon cranked down, trying to lose her in a freight wharf that led back towards the sea. She bent onto it, gripping into negative g, eyelids closing like heavy shutters, trying to avoid full red-out. Blood pushed into her head. It felt like her sutures were about to pop.
The scarlet Talon managed to dump her.
She lost sight of it. She levelled, cursing herself.
‘Lose the sight, lose the fight’ was pretty much a day one basic. She was almost back at the seawall, knowing she must already be past its turn point. It was somewhere behind her now, about to recover her quickly.
She flashed back into the trench, turning to run it. Gumm zipped past her at once, trailing a ragged, torn curl of plating from his port wing. The black Talon was on his six, firing, but the separation was poor, and the las-bolts were passing off Gumm’s starboard flank. Both Gumm and the Talon were moving faster than her, so she let both go by and then flopped deftly onto the Talon’s back end and throttled up.
Tone lock. Slippy, but enough. She toggled to stores, awaiting a hard heat-lock on the bat’s efflux plume. It tried to shake her.
‘Dollface, break high in three,’ she voxed.
‘Copy.’
‘Two, one–’
Gumm turned high to avoid secondary heat lock. The bat rolled left, but her lock was positive. The Skystrike thumped off her starboard rail with a shriek and a release bang that rattled her airframe. The bat rolled harder, but the running heater had him and would not let go. The detonation splashed a flower of fire across the inside of the seawall.
There was no time to call the kill. The scarlet bat was suddenly on her six, and firing. Jagdea flat-planed One-One, trying to pull the bat through between her legs, but the Talon matched her, making a big speed brake out of its belly. The Talons seemed more agile than the rapid Blades. More agile than the Voss. She had reversed heading but was still being chased.
Threat lock. Missile alarm.
She couldn’t even see the heater it had sent after her. She rolled high, dispensing countermeasures, sowing a dazzling trail of decoys for the heater to sniff. The sun came out briefly behind her head, and her bird rocked.
The scarlet Talon blew past her port side, confident it had killed her. When it realised it hadn’t, it broke away inland, darting under the rotting vanes of a coastal wind turbine. Wilzar, coming the other way out of nowhere, J-turned perfectly onto it, air-skidding around the turbine’s huge mast.
The turbine was the first of thirty that were spaced down a rockcrete berm which bent inland, away from the seawall, like giant flowers in a titanic cultivation trough. The Talon wound back and forth between the massive stems, trying to use them for cover as it scrammed. Wilzar did the same, but at higher speed, to keep on it. Jagdea, well behind them, followed the inside curve of the turbine row. She saw the Talon and Wilzar’s Voss criss-cross around the masts as though they were threading bootlaces, their tracks describing an insane double helix. The Talon was good, but nothing like as fast as Smoke. It was magnificent flying from Wilzar. Jagdea was stunned by his kick-and-change rate of weave and twist. He was gaining.
