Sabbat Worlds Anthology

APOSTLE'S CREED (Graham McNeill)

The Thunderbolt cut through the frigid air like an ivory dagger, trailing white contrails from the leading edges of its wings. Following the manoeuvres of Apostle Seven, Larice Asche executed a perfect quarter roll before inverting and pulling into a shallow turn. She took her time, not pushing the aircraft. After three months strapped down in the hold of a Munitorum mass conveyer, it was never a good idea to ask too much of a plane until you’d given it some time to stretch its wings and get used to being in the air again.

She watched the crisp movements of Apostle Seven through the canopy, a cream-coloured Thunderbolt that hung in the air like an angel basking in the sunlight. Dario Quint was at its controls, his flawless stickwork apparently effortless. Larice knew that wasn’t the case. Quint had logged thousands of hours and flown hundreds of sorties to hone his skill.

‘Level flight, Apostle Five,’ said Quint. ‘There’s murderous shear coming off the Breakers, so use vectors to compensate if you go in close.’

‘Understood, Seven,’ responded Larice. It was the longest single sentence Quint had said to her since Seekan had invited her to join the Apostles back on Enothis. She’d tried to engage him in conversation aboard the Rosencranz, en route to Amedeo, but he’d always ignored her. Not in a way she could get mad about, and not with any rudeness. More like he chose not to engage because he didn’t know how to.

Despite Quint’s warning, the air at nine thousand metres was calm, and it was a simple matter to stay on his wing. Larice scanned the auspex inbetween craning her neck to look around for the telltale glint of sunlight on metal that might indicate a hostile contact.

Nothing. The skies were clear. She was disappointed.

They’d already made kills today, an intercept with some Tormentors returning from a bombing raid on Coriana, foremost city of the Ice, but that tussle had been too easy to be properly interesting. The bombers had already shed their payloads, but that didn’t matter. Bombers that didn’t make it back to their base wouldn’t return with fresh ordnance to crack the Ice.

Cordiale had always said it was bad luck to tangle with the enemy on a shakeout flight, but his luck had run out over the Zophonian Sea, so what did he know? In any case, a Thunderbolt was a weapon of war, a lethal sabre that, once drawn, needed to taste blood before being sheathed.

The Tormentors had been rushing through the valleys of the Breakers, hoping their speed, low flight and the lousy auspex bounces from the peaks would hide them from Imperial retribution.

No such luck.

Apostle Seven had found them, though she had no idea how, since they were running with their auspex silent, and had to rely on Operations to guide them to intercepts. Seekan once told her that Quint, the ace of aces, had an innate sense for where bats were hiding, and she hadn’t questioned it.

The bombers had top cover, a trio of Hell Talons, enough to give most pilots pause, but they were the Apostles. Quint took a line on them before firing up his auspex.

‘Turn and burn,’ he said, his clipped, economical tones muffled by his mask.

His Thunderbolt stood on its wing and dived for the deck.

Coming in high from the east, she and Quint pounced on the Hell Talons, and Larice had relished the panic she’d seen in their desperate scatter. Quint had splashed two bats before they even realised the direction of the attack. He raked the Talons with las before punching through their formation and leaving the last for Larice.

The bat broke high and she turned into it, anticipating its next move and mashing the firing stud on her stick. She had a good angle of deflection, and her bolts tore the bat to burning wreckage. Hauling on the stick, she pulled into a shallow dive to engage the Tormenters themselves.

Quint had already gutted the first bomber and was lining up on his second, viffing and jinking to avoid the turret fire that seemed unable to pin him in place. Larice turned into the third bomber and raked it end to end with her quads. It dropped from the sky, almost cut in two. Pulling a high-g turn, she closed on the last bomber. The pilot was heading for the deck, trying to gain speed, but that was just stupid. There was no way he could outrun her.

It drifted into her firing reticule, and Larice gently lifted the nose of her plane. Quad-fire hammered from her guns and the Tormentor obligingly flew into the lashing bolts. The pilot’s canopy bloomed glass and fire, and the ponderous bird described a lazy arc towards the ground.

It slammed into the mountainside, leaving a blackened teardrop of fire on the snow.

She’d pulled up and they resumed their patrol circuit as though nothing had happened. Seven kills between them, not a bad outing for one day. It had been an easy intercept. The bats hadn’t seen them until it was too late. The glaring white of the ever-present ice and snow made it hellishly difficult to spot incoming craft until they were right on top of you, a situation that had served them well here, but cut both ways.

Looking down past her port wing, Larice saw a dappled black line of giant ice floes detaching from the coastline where the frozen sea had loosened its grip on the land. To her right, the Breakers reared like gleaming white fangs, a jagged rampart of mountains keeping the worst of the razor-ice storms that swept down from the northern polar wastes from ravaging the southern cites.

Archenemy land forces were moving in on those cities from the west, but lately waves of bombers and ground attack fighters had opened up a new flank, striking from the heart of the northern ice wastes. Though it had been declared impossible, it seemed the enemy had managed to establish a base somewhere on the frozen surface of the ocean. Orbital auspex had been unable to locate this base, and the existence of a mass carrier on the ice had been ruled out.

After the war on Enothis, Larice knew that anything high command decided was impossible had an inversely proportional chance of being true.

‘Apostle Five, hold my wing,’ said Quint. ‘You’re drifting.’

Larice returned her focus to her instruments, making a visual check on her positioning.

Quint was right, she had drifted. By a metre.

At first she was irritated – a metre was nothing when you were flying in such an easy pattern – but she cut herself off. She was an Apostle now, and a metre was a big deal. Leave lazy flying to other pilots. The 101st Apostles were the elite flyers of the Navy, and she was better than that.

‘Sorry, Apostle Five,’ she said.

Quint didn’t answer, but she didn’t expect him to. Instead, he rolled and pulled his plane in a steep turn to the north. He was heading out over the frozen surface of the ocean. Larice followed automatically, matching Quint’s turn and keeping tight to his wing.

‘What’s up, Seven?’ she asked.

‘Getting a vector from Operations,’ said Quint. ‘There’s an intercept going on. Indigo Flight from the 235th. They need some help.’

‘Where?’

‘Fifty kilometres over the ocean ice, a thousand metres off the deck.’

‘Auspex?’

‘Yes, light them up,’ voxed Quint.

Larice did so, but all she got was a hissing wash of backscatter from the mountains. The tech-seers had blessed her auspex before takeoff, but it looked like it was still sluggish from its time inactive. She cursed, heightening the gain, and immediately saw the engagement. It looked like a bad one. Four Navy machines, with at least nine bats swarming them.

‘Got them?’

‘Yeah, nine of them,’ said Larice. ‘You sure you want to tangle with that many?’

‘There’s two of us,’ clarified Quint. ‘And we are Apostles. They should be asking that question.’

‘Good point.’

‘Afterburners,’ said Quint. ‘Hit it.’

Larice flipped up the guard on the afterburner trigger, and braced herself for the enormous power of the Thunderbolt’s turbofan in her back. She eased the stick forward, just enough down angle to take them into the upper reaches of the fight.

‘Grip,’ she said, and thumbed the trigger.

A sucking machine breath. A booming roar of jets. A monstrous hand pressed her hard against her seat. The airframe shuddered and the few clouds blurred as the plane leapt forwards like an unleashed colt. The sense of speed was intoxicating. She held the stick, keeping her body braced in the grip position as she felt the blood being forced from her extremities. She held course, feeling the plane straining at her control.

‘Incoming contacts, twelve thousand metres,’ said Quint. ‘Cut burners and go subsonic.’

Larice cut the afterburners and immediately felt the blood return to her hands and feet with a painful prickling sensation. She glanced at the auspex, taking in the shape of the fight in a second. The four Navy flyers were in a dirty scrap, using all their skill to dance out of weapons locks and converging streams of las-fire.

‘Hell Blades,’ said Larice, recognising the enemy flyers’ flight profile. She felt a tremor of excitement. Fast-moving, highly manoeuvrable fighters that could easily match a Thunderbolt in a vector dance, Hell Blades were a far more fearsome prospect than Tormentors.

The vox crackled in her helmet, the voice of a controller in Operations.

‘Apostle Flight, be advised we have nine hostiles north on your location,’ said the controller. ‘Speed and flight pattern indicates–’

‘Hell Blades, yeah we know,’ snapped Larice. ‘Way to keep up, Ops.’

Even with the planes of the 235th, they were outnumbered two to one, but Quint was right. They were Apostles, the best flyers in the Navy. She flew with the ace of aces, and her own Thunderbolt boasted no shortage of kill markings on its cream-coloured nose. She checked her dials, noting her fuel and armament status. Aerial combat manoeuvres burned fuel at a terrifying rate, but there was enough in the tank for this one fight.

With Quint at her side, Larice was confident they’d turn the bats into dark smudges of wreckage on the sea ice. With relative closing speeds in excess of a thousand kph, the gap between the two forces was shrinking rapidly. It was going to get real ugly, real quick.

There! Nine lean darts with tapered wings like the fins on a seeker missile. The sky filled with light as the bats opened up. The Navy birds, painted a brusque camo-green, were twisting and diving with desperate turns and rolls, using every trick in the book to shake their pursuers. In an evenly matched fight, that might work, but not against so many bats.

One Thunderbolt exploded as a flurry of shots from a darting enemy fighter found its engines and blew it apart.

‘Indigo Flight, Apostles inbound,’ said Quint, and it was the only warning anyone got.

Larice and Quint slashed down into the fight, coming in high and fast. She slipped in behind a Hell Blade taking his sweet time in lining up a shot. Too confident of the kill, the enemy pilot was making the first and last mistake most rookies made.

She squeezed her trigger and the bat flew into her streaming las-bolts, coming apart in a seething fireball. She slipped sideways and barrelled past the dead Hell Blade’s wingman as Quint tore up the fuselage of another bat.

A wing flashed past her canopy and Larice yanked the stick right. She rolled, pushing out the throttle and inverting. She deployed the air brakes and viffed onto the tail of the aircraft that had nearly hit her. A crimson Hell Blade, its tapered nose spiralling as it slid back and forth through the air.

‘Too easy,’ she said, sending a hail of quad-fire into its tail section. The wounded Hell Blade shuddered as though invisible hammers pounded its engine until it ruptured in a spewing blaze of fire.

‘Five, break, break!’ ordered Quint.

Larice sidestepped, viffing up to let the enemy fire paint the air beneath her. A Hell Blade had broken from attacking the Navy flyers and turned into her.

‘He’s good,’ she said, dancing through the air in a dazzling series of rolls, banks and vectored slips. He stuck with her, firing bursts of las as he tried to anticipate her next move. She put her plane into a shallow climb, and slammed the throttle back as the air brakes flared. She was risking a stall, but her manoeuvre worked and the bat zipped past her port wing. She took a snap shot, jinking sideways and ripping her fire along its wing and hull.

Its wing snapped off and it rolled uncontrollably, spinning down towards the ice and leaving a plume of black smoke in its wake.

Five on five, suddenly the odds were evened.

Or they would have been if Quint hadn’t already splashed another two bats.

Two more Navy birds were down, and Larice didn’t see any chutes. Not that the odds of survival punching out over the ocean ice were much better than going down in flames. She’d hit the silk once before and it wasn’t an experience she cared to repeat.

A las-round smacked her Thunderbolt. She jinked low, rolling to bring her guns back on target. She had a fraction of a second to act. Her quads barked, and booming thunder spat from her craft. The deflection was bad and her shots went over the bat. Correction, another burst. This time the bat blew apart in a shredding flicker of mauve and crimson.

She turned hard, pushing the envelope in the race to get behind the last bats. She grunted as heavy g-forces pressed on her, despite the grip position supposed to make it easier to bear. The rubber of her mask flattened against her face, and she tasted the metallic quality of her air mix.

She rolled and pulled hard, feathering her air brakes and flattening out as she caught a flash of a Hell Blade’s vector flare.

‘Got you,’ she hissed, unleashing a brilliant salvo. The Hell Blade blew apart, its engine exploding as her bolts blasted it from the air. Her guns coughed dry, the battery drained, and she switched back to her quads.

‘Apostle, break, break!’ shouted a voice she didn’t recognise.

Larice hauled on the stick and threw out her tail rudder, twisting her plane into a tight loop. A blitz of tracers flew past her port side, a single shell kissing the rear quarter of her canopy and crazing the toughened glass.

She snapped left and right, hunting the bat that had her.

‘On your seven,’ said the voice.

‘I see it,’ she said, pulling into the Hell Blade’s turn and opening out the throttle as she viffed in a jagged sidestep. The bat matched her turn, pushing her outwards, and she knew there was more than likely another aircraft waiting to take the kill shot. Instead of playing that game, she threw her plane around, using the vectors to pull a near one-eighty and reverse her thrust. The pressure pulled the cracks in the canopy wider.

The pursuing Hell Blade filled her canopy and she mashed the trigger, feeling the percussive recoil from the heavy autocannons mounted in the nose. The Hell Blade viffed up over her burst. It had her and there was nothing she could do.

A camo-green shape zipped over her canopy, quad cannons blazing.

The bat ripped in two. Black smoke and a blooming fireball blew outwards. Larice threw her Thunderbolt into a screamingly tight turn and inverted to take the brunt of the explosion on her underside. Air was driven from her lungs, and her vision greyed at the force of the turn. Her fuselage lurched, and hammering blows of metal on metal thudded along its length as debris from the Hell Blade struck her bird.

Warning lights and buzzers filled the canopy. She flipped over, restoring level flight.

Larice loosened the throttle. Her breathing eased and she screwed her eyes shut for a second to throw off the greyness lurking at the edge of her vision. She tasted blood and pulled off her mask, spitting into the footwell.

A dark shape appeared off her starboard wing. She looked up to see the last surviving Navy flyer of Indigo Flight.

‘You okay there?’ said the pilot. ‘Your bird’s pretty banged up.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, though the stick felt sluggish and unresponsive in her hand. It galled her that she’d needed an assist, but it had been a hell of a move coming in over her to take out that bat. Only a pilot supremely sure of himself would try something that risky.

One wrong move from either pilot would have seen them both splashed.

Quint pulled in on her port wing, the ivory of his aircraft untouched and pristine.

‘Indigo Flight, identify,’ said Quint.

‘Flight Lieutenant Erzyn Laquell, 235th Naval Attack Wing,’ said the pilot with a thumbs-up. ‘You’re the Apostles. It’s an honour to fly with you.’

‘You’re not flying with us,’ said Quint. ‘You just happen to be sharing my sky.’

‘Of course I am,’ returned Laquell. ‘I’ll be sure to tell my pilots to steer clear next time one of your high and mighty Apostles needs an assist.’

Though a glossy black visor and rubber air-mix mask covered Laquell’s face, she just knew he was grinning a cocksure grin.

‘Keep talking like that and I’ll make sure you never fly again,’ promised Quint.

Before Laquell could answer, a flurry of winking lights appeared on the auspex and Larice blinked away moisture to be sure she was seeing what it was telling her correctly.

‘Seven, are you getting this?’

‘Affirmative.’

The auspex was a mass of returns. From their speed and height they were clearly fighters. They weren’t squawking on any Imperial frequency, and that made them bad news. Razors most likely. Or more Hell Blades.

‘Ten more bats,’ she said. ‘High and coming in fast. Too many to fight.’

‘Agreed,’ answered Quint. His plane dipped below her wing before coming level once more. He chopped his hand down towards the belly of her Thunderbolt.

‘Five, you’re leaking fluid,’ he said ‘Check your fuel status.’

Larice scanned her gauges, watching with dismay as the numbers unspooled like an altimeter in a power dive. She tapped the dial with her finger, but the numbers kept going.

‘Frig it! I’m losing fuel fast. Must’ve taken a hit to the feed lines.’

‘Do you have enough to return to Coriana?’

‘Negative, Seven,’ said Larice. The airfield where the 101st were stationed was way beyond her range now. ‘At the speed I’m losing fuel, I’ll be lucky to get down in one piece, let alone back to Coriana. I’ll need an alternate.’

‘I’ll get your wounded bird down,’ said Laquell, doing a passable job at keeping the smugness from his tone. ‘Rimfire is only a hundred and ten kilometres east.’

Rimfire was the designation for the airbase set up to face the Archenemy’s newly opened flank. It was a rush job, hardened hangars cut into the ice and honeycomb landing strips laid out on the Ice by Munitorum pioneers. Its tower facilities were mobile command vehicles and its auspex coverage came from airborne surveyor craft originally designed to hunt for ground minerals. Flyers based at Coriana joked that the pilots based at Rimfire were either too dumb or too reckless to be based anywhere else.

‘Will you make it that far?’ asked Quint. ‘That’s a valuable piece of machinery you’re flying and we need all the aircraft we have.’

‘Thanks for your concern,’ replied Larice. ‘I’ll be flying on fumes and the Emperor’s mercy by then, but, yeah, I think I can make it.’

‘Then head for Rimfire. I’ll see you back at Coriana if you live. Seven out.’

Quint’s plane peeled off, leaving a slick of vapour-white fumes in his wake. His plane surged back towards the Breakers and within seconds it was lost to sight.

‘Friendly sort, isn’t he?’ said Laquell.

‘He’s earned the right to choose his friends with care,’ said Larice.

‘I guess he has.’

‘Okay, Laquell. Lead on,’ said Larice. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed I’m losing fuel.’

‘Sure thing. Make your bearing one-six-five and start climbing.’

‘I know how to extend,’ she snapped, pulling around and aiming her Thunderbolt towards Rimfire. She pulled her stick back, putting her plane into a fuel-efficient climb. When her tanks ran dry she’d be able to glide some of the way in if she had enough altitude.

‘Just trying to help,’ said Laquell. ‘Listen, you know my name, but what do I call you?’

‘Apostle Five,’ said Larice.

‘Yeah, I got that, but what’s your real name? You know, what your friends call you?’

‘Asche,’ she sighed. ‘Call me Larice Asche.’

‘Pleased to meet you Larice Asche,’ said Laquell. ‘Follow my wing and I’ll get you down in one piece. I promise.’

Laquell was as good as his word, and they crossed the Breakers high and with a favourable tailwind that gifted Larice a thousand metres of altitude. There was a nasty squall of ice crystals swelling out over the ocean ice, a skin-shredding storm of frozen blades that would do no end of damage to an aircraft, but the luck of the Emperor was with them and it blew west before reaching the mountains.

Though she tried to keep her flight smooth and level, Larice watched her fuel reserves dwindle like she was in the midst of the most furious engagement imaginable, viffing, pulling high-g turns, escape climbs and power dives. The shear Quint had mentioned clawed up from the wind-sculpted cliffs, buffeting her plane as though an invisible leash tethered to her fuselage was being pulled and tugged.

Then they were over, and the landscape fell away from them, tumbling to the flatlands of Amedeo, a bleak tundra of browns and muted greens. It wasn’t the most welcoming world, but then what she’d seen of Enothis had been mostly desert and swamp, so at least it offered a different view from the canopy.

Located in the trailing arc of the crusade to liberate the Sabbat Worlds, Amedeo had been largely ignored by both the Imperium and the Archenemy, but then the forces of Magister Innokenti had fallen on Herodor. Though the tactical significance of Herodor was, at best, debatable, the soldiers’ rumour mill had it that Innokenti himself had descended to that world’s surface.

And that made Amedeo important. Perfectly positioned to allow a flanking thrust to hamstring the Imperial defence, the planners of the crusade were swift to recognise the danger to Herodor. Naval wings and Guard regiments were deployed with unaccustomed swiftness, alongside, so the rumour-spinners went on to claim, a detachment of Adeptus Astartes.

Larice had seen nothing of any Space Marines, but Amedeo was a big theatre of operations, and entire campaigns were being fought out of sight of the aerial duellists.

Her fuel warning light, which had been hypnotically blinking throughout the crossing of the Breakers, now assumed a more constant aspect. Her engines flamed out and the rpms of her twin turbofans spiralled south.

‘I’m dry,’ she voxed to Laquell. ‘I’m flying fourteen tonnes of scrap metal unless we’re close to Rimfire.’

‘Yeah, we’re not far,’ replied Laquell, his voice calm and reassuring. ‘Switch on your transponder and key it to this frequency or else the base defences will tag you as hostile and shoot you down.’

A data squirt appeared on her slate and she keyed in the corresponding frequency, thumbing the activation switch. An answering light appeared on her tactical plot, thirty kilometres out. Rimfire. But was it close enough? Her altimeter was unwinding fast, and she did a quick mental calculation. It was just within reach.

‘Stay on my wing,’ said Laquell. ‘Keep the nose up and fly steady.’

Larice nodded to herself, holding the stick tight and trying to keep any unnecessary movement from her path. Every second she spent in the air was a few hundred metres closer to safety.

‘You’re doing great, Larice. That’s it, steady and smooth. Gradually ease around to two-seven-seven.’

‘I don’t have time for manoeuvre,’ she said.

‘I know, but there’s some crazy thermals that come up from the southern rift plains. They’ll give you some extra lift. Trust me, I’ve used them before when I’m coming back with a tank of vapour.’

Larice adjusted her course, the stick feeling leaden in her grip and the plane responding like she imagined a tank would manoeuvre. They came down through a light dusting of clouds, and there it was, a down and dirty collection of air-defence vehicles, ad hoc runways, quick-fire launch racks and fuel bowsers clustered around a random scattering of landing mats strewn across the ice.

Rimfire was around three kilometres away, but at the rate she was shedding height it might as well have been three thousand. She wasn’t going to make it.

‘I’m short,’ she said. ‘I don’t have enough–’

A slamming wind hoisted her higher, the spiralling tunnel of warm air Laquell had promised her. Her descent slowed and she saw it might be enough. Her Thunderbolt could transition to vertical landing, but without fuel that wasn’t going to be possible.

‘Rimfire Tower, this is Apostle Five, requesting emergency landing clearance.’

‘Apostle Five, confirmed. You are clear to land on runway six-epsilon. Directing now,’ said an echoing voice that sounded like it was coming from inside a small metal box. Looking at the haphazard collection of vehicles gathered beneath arctic camo-netting at the edge of the runway, Larice decided that was exactly where it was coming from.

‘Emergency vehicles are standing by, Apostle Five,’ said the controller.

‘Thanks for the vote of confidence, Rimfire,’ snapped Larice, wrestling with the stick as vicious crosswinds and random vector gusts bounced up from the ground. She lowered her claws at the last moment, and fought to bring the nose up before she ploughed straight into the runway.

Her wing claws bit and the nose slammed down a second later. Her speed bled off and the ice-crazed surface of the runway threw up a blinding flurry of ice and snow. She was pretty much blind. Larice threw up her arrestors and slammed on the brakes, feeling the Thunderbolt turn in a lazy skid. The plane slid around until it was pointed back the way it had come, and Larice let out a shuddering breath.

On a runway next to hers, she saw Laquell’s plane touch down and make a point-perfect rollout, managing the slipperiness of the runway with the aplomb of a veteran flyer. He taxied over the ice and parked up ten metres from her starboard wing.

Fitters and emergency ground crew ran over to her plane. One drew a finger over his throat, and she nodded, shutting off her armaments panel and disconnecting her fuel lines – not that there was any fuel left to ignite. She popped the canopy and the cold hit her like a blow. Her breath caught in her throat, the raw ice of it like a full-body slap. Fitters propped a ladder against her plane and she unsnapped herself from the cockpit and climbed down. Someone wrapped her in a foil-lined thermal blanket and she took an unsteady step away from her cream-coloured Thunderbolt.

Long and heavily winged, the Thunderbolt wasn’t an elegant flyer, but it had a robust beauty all of its own. The ivory paint scheme was scarred and smeared with oil and scorch marks where her fuel lines had ruptured. She waved away a medicae, watching as red- and yellow-jacketed ground crew milled around her plane, eager to work on a plane belonging to one of the Apostles. She felt a stab of protectiveness towards her damaged bird as fitters began appraising the damage, wincing at the sound of whining power-wrenches and pneumo-hammers.

Armoured plating hung like scabbed skin from its underside, and dribbles of hydraulic fluid and lubricant spotted the ice beneath its belly. A tow rig rumbled towards the planes from a hangar buried beneath ten metres of snow and ice.

She heard footsteps and Laquell’s voice said, ‘Took a beating, but she’ll fly again.’

‘You talking about the plane or me?’ she said without turning.

‘The plane, of course,’ said Laquell. ‘You look just fine.’

She turned and saw him, like her, wrapped in a thermal blanket. He sipped a mug of something hot that steamed in the cold air. He was striking in an Imperial-recruiting-poster kind of way: angular chin, high cheekbones and eyes that radiated trust and courage. His dark hair was cut close to the skull, and he was smiling at her.

‘You want one?’

‘One what?’ she said.

‘Soup,’ said Laquell, holding up his mug and making it sound like a joke. ‘You don’t want a caffeine, you’ll get the jitters, even though the Munitorum actually make a pretty decent brew around here. Soup’ll warm you up and won’t have you bouncing off the flakboard.’

Larice nodded, feeling the strain of her sortie settle upon her. ‘Sure, soup sounds good.’

He handed her his mug and she took a grateful sip. It tasted of hot vegetables and game.

It was the best thing she’d drunk in months.

‘Come on,’ said Laquell, leading her towards the buried hangar. ‘The mess facilities here don’t look like much, but you can get a halfway decent meal and a hot shower.’

‘Now that sounds better,’ said Larice, disarmed by his easy manner and winning smile.

They passed his plane, and Larice saw the kill markings painted on the nose.

‘You have thirty-seven kills,’ she said.

‘Yeah, it’s been a busy day.’

‘You’re a frigging ace,’ she said.

‘So they tell me,’ said Laquell, as if it was nothing.

‘How long have you been flying?’

‘On Amedeo? Two weeks, but I bagged my first kill about six months ago.’

Larice found herself re-evaluating the cocky young flyer, now seeing a combination of skill and natural ability in his flying.

‘And you’ve thirty-seven kills to your name? Confirmed?’

‘Every one of them,’ he said. ‘One’s even on pict-loop in the officer’s quarters.’

‘Nice work,’ said Larice, impressed despite herself.

Laquell nodded, pleased with her compliment, but too much of an aviator to look too pleased. They stepped into the hangar. Out of the winds whipping across the isolated base, the temperature was at least bearable. Inside, a dozen Thunderbolts in the camo-green paint scheme of the 235th sat in a herringbone pattern, attended by an army of servitors and fitters in orange jumpsuits. Gurneys of missiles and heavy boxes of shells threaded their way between the planes, and a robed priest of the Mechanicus, together with his cybernetic entourage, attended to the guts of a partially disassembled aircraft. Its nose was wreathed in fragrant smoke and hot unguents dripped from an exposed turbofan.

As they walked between the aircraft towards the crew quarters, Larice knew she was attracting stares. Word that one of the Apostles had landed at Rimfire had circulated through the base with a speed normally reserved for the pox after a tour of shore leave. Her jet-black flight suit, compact form and girlish good looks didn’t hurt either.

They looked at her and she looked back, counting no fewer than seven aircraft with kill markings indicating that their pilots were aces. And the rest weren’t too far behind. None of them had thirty-seven kills, though. She saw Laquell notice her appraisal, but said nothing.

There was clear order and discipline to the work going on throughout the hangar, a sense of purpose that was common to most air wings, but which was even more focussed than usual. This far out from support, everyone’s survival depended on keeping these aircraft ready to fly and fight at a moment’s notice. Far from being the dumping ground for reckless or deficient pilots, Rimfire was a base where only the best survived.

‘That was a hell of a piece of flying you did up there,’ said Laquell. ‘You and that other Apostle really pulled us out of it.’

‘Quint’s a hell of a flyer,’ she said.

‘That was Quint?’ said Laquell. ‘The ace of aces? Maybe I shouldn’t have cheeked him.’

‘Maybe not,’ agreed Larice, already wondering what Seekan would make of this young, cocksure colt of a pilot. She looked at him and he returned her gaze with a frankness she found unsettling, like she was a target in the reticule of a quad gun sight.

I remember that look, she thought, and that made her mind up.

‘So tell me about that kill, the one on pict-loop,’ she said.

‘Why?’ he said, faintly embarrassed. ‘It’s not that good, and it’s over too quick.’

‘Sounds like a lot of lovers I’ve had,’ said Larice.

‘Seriously, why do you want to see it?’

She smiled and said, ‘Because if I’m going to recommend you to Wing Leader Seekan, then I’ll need to know I’m not going to be making a damn idiot out of myself.’

They always pick the places that used to be magnificent.

The Aquilian had once been the toast of Coriana’s wealthy gadabouts apparently, a grand folly built in opposition to a rival’s hotel further down the city’s main thoroughfare. Which of the two had come out on top was a mystery now, for Archenemy shock troops had destroyed the other hotel in the opening stages of the war. High command had been using it as their lodgings and strategic planning centre, and only an accident of timing had seen them elsewhere when the blood-masked enemy troopers attacked.

Since then, the brass kept on the move.

Which meant the next grandest structure in Coriana was free for the taking.

Processional steps led up to its columned entrance, the space between each column draped with a gold and black flag of the Imperium. Larice led Laquell up the steps and through the cracked marble-floored vestibule, following the booming sounds of martial music. She recognised the tune, Imperitas Invictus, a rousing tune said to have been written for Lord Helican’s triumphal march through the Spatian Gate. It wasn’t a tune played much any more.

‘I can’t believe I’m going to meet the Apostles,’ said Laquell, and Larice was amused at the star-struck quality to his voice. His eyes were bright and his features eager.

‘Then be prepared to be disappointed,’ she said. ‘They’re just pilots.’

‘You don’t see it because you’re one of them,’ said Laquell. ‘They’re more than “just pilots”: they’re legends, warriors of the air, killers of enemy aces. They’re the best flyers in the Navy. And they want me. I think that’s pretty damn fine.’

‘Hold on there, pilot,’ warned Larice. ‘All I’m doing is putting you forward for consideration. It’ll be Seekan’s decision whether to take you or not.’

‘Come on,’ he said, puffing out his chest and tapping the service ribbons on his chest. ‘Look at me. How could they not want me? I expect they’ll offer me a place on the spot.’

‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ said Larice as the music swelled as a door opened and shut.

‘Are we missing a party?’ asked Laquell, straightening his dress uniform jacket, a deep russet colour with tasteful silver frogging over the shoulders and a stiffened collar of lacquered leather.

Larice didn’t answer.

Her former commanding officer, Bree Jagdea, had told her about the habits of the Apostles, and she knew there was only one reason her new squadron mates would gather like this. She crossed the chequerboard floor and swept down a wide corridor towards a set of walnut-panelled doors. She pushed through them into what had once been a grand ballroom, but was now an echoing empty space hung with blast curtains. Almost every item of furniture was draped in dustsheets, cobwebs laced the spaces between the chandeliers and a faint smell of mildew lurked below the hot crackle of the fire and scent of burning sapwood.

A group of people clad in cream-coloured frock coats gathered around an enormous fireplace. Seven of them, the best and luckiest damn pilots in the Navy.

The Apostles.

They looked small; diminished and alone in a vast space that normally held grand revelries and magnificent dances. The ballroom echoed with unloved music and drunken debate.

Seekan was the first to notice them, turning and favouring her with a quizzical smile. His dark hair was swept back and oiled, his uniform crisp and gleaming with row upon row of medals.

‘Larice,’ he said, crisp like a cold morning. ‘We weren’t expecting you.’

‘Why not?’ she said, glaring at Quint, who perched on a stool opposite Jeric Suhr. A regicide board sat between them. ‘Did you think I was dead?’

‘Not at all,’ said Seekan. ‘We heard the chatter that an Apostle had landed at Rimfire. We knew you were alive.’

‘So why the drink and the dress uniforms?’

‘Because the Rosencranz is gone,’ said Ziner Krone, pushing away from the fire surround and making his way to an isolated drinks cabinet. His dark-skinned cheeks were flushed with amasec and heat. The scar on his cheek twitched and he poured a drink, which he promptly downed. He poured another and thrust it towards Larice with a lascivious grin.

‘Drink it,’ he ordered. ‘Drink to the lost souls of the Rosencranz.’

Larice didn’t want the amasec, but took it anyway. Krone watched her sip it, making no attempt to hide his lingering glance at her chest and hips. He’d propositioned her in the crew barracks aboard the Rosencranz, but Larice had told him where to get off in no uncertain terms. Those days were behind her.

‘The Rosencranz is gone?’ said Laquell. ‘How?’

Krone ignored his question and turned back to the drinks.

Larice had last seen the Munitorum mass carrier when she’d flown her Thunderbolt from its cavernous hold to the planet’s surface. Kilometres long, the mass conveyer was a city adrift in space, a landmass capable of interstellar flight. Bulky and ungainly, it seemed inconceivable that anything so colossal could possibly be destroyed.

‘Who gives a shit?’ snapped Jeric Suhr. He waved his balloon of liquor, spilling some on the board. Quint scowled at Suhr as his wiry opponent rose unsteadily to his feet. Suhr’s chest seemed too narrow to contain all the medals he’d won, and his sharp features were thrown into stark relief by the firelight. ‘Warp core failure, a plasma meltdown, fifth columnists in the dock crews, infiltrators? Who cares, it’s all the same in the end. We’re one carrier and a shitting load of planes and pilots down.’

‘And who the hell is this anyway?’ said Krone, finally acknowledging Laquell’s presence and pouring another drink. ‘This is a private party. For Apostles only. Get out before I throw you out.’

Larice felt Laquell bristle and said, ‘Krone, this is Flight Lieutenant Erzyn Laquell of the 235th Naval Attack Wing.’

‘Ah, the Navy flyboy who hauled your backside out of the fire,’ said Suhr, slumping back onto his stool, though he’d plainly abandoned interest in the regicide board.

‘Shut your mouth, Jeric,’ said Seekan.

‘Well he did, didn’t he?’

‘Flight Lieutenant Laquell came to my assistance, yes,’ said Larice. ‘He has thirty-seven confirmed kills in less than six months of flying time.’

‘Ah, I see,’ noted Seekan, turning away towards the fire. Saul Cirksen, the pilot he’d recruited on Enothis, stood there, nursing his drink. He’d been an Apostle for only slightly longer than Larice, but had already adopted the disaffected mannerisms of his adopted wing. He didn’t look at Laquell, as though he didn’t want to acknowledge his presence, like he was someone who’d go away if only they pretended he wasn’t there.

Likewise Owen Thule and Leena Sharto, the two pilots Seekan had recruited at the very end of the war on Enothis, ignored him. Thule was a big-boned flyer from the 43rd Angels, a pugnacious man with heavy jowls and bushy sideburns. Leena Sharto had been tagged from the 144th Typhoons, and affected an air of disinterest that she couldn’t quite pull off. Larice had tried to get to know them, seeking solace in the solidarity of their shared newness to the Apostles, but none of her overtures had been returned, and she had eventually given up.

‘Larice, am I given to understand that you have brought the Flight Lieutenant here as a potential candidate for elevation to the Apostles?’

‘Yeah, take a look at his jacket and you’ll see what I mean.’

‘I am quite familiar with Flight Lieutenant Laquell’s record.’

‘You are?’

‘Of course he is,’ slurred Krone. ‘You think he’s not always on the lookout for flyers that’ve slipped beneath fate’s gaze? Some lucky bastard who’s fallen off death’s auspex?’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Larice. ‘If you know his jacket, you must know that–’

‘He has the highest flight to kill ratio on Amedeo, greater even that that of Quint here?’ said Seekan. ‘Yes, I am well aware of that.’

Quint looked up from the board at the mention of his name, but said nothing.

‘Then why wouldn’t you invite him to become an Apostle?’ asked Larice.

‘Because the Apostles are a unique group, Larice,’ said Seekan. ‘Even to those newly promoted to its ranks. And every new member dilutes that exclusivity, makes us less select. I know, I know, it makes no sense, of course.’

Seekan turned to his fellow flyers. ‘After all, of the Apostles that went to Enothis, only four of us survive, and by the end of this crusade, I do not expect any of us to be alive. Death is, at heart, a tallyman, and all the books must balance eventually.’

‘He’s a hell of a flyer,’ pressed Larice. ‘I’ve seen captures from his gun-picters.’

‘As have I, Larice, but I sense there is more to this than simply Flight Lieutenant Laquell’s skill in the cockpit.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘He means you like him,’ snapped Suhr. ‘And we don’t need anyone likeable in the Apostles. Only odious shits like me, lechers like Krone or misery magnets like Quint.’

Seekan sighed and said, ‘I’m thankful I was left off that list, but for all his boorishness, Jeric is right. I told Commander Jagdea this, and I’ll tell you too, Larice. It doesn’t do to have friends when you’ve flown as long as us and seen as much death through your canopy as we have. It’s a liability, a weakness that slows you down and clouds your judgement. And you know as well as I, that anything that keeps you from the top of your game in the air gets you killed.’

‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ insisted Larice. ‘It wasn’t like that in the Phantine XX, and they exceeded your combined kills on Enothis.’

‘Then why don’t you go back to them?’ said Krone.

Larice hesitated, suddenly missing the easy back and forth of the crew dorms perched on the rock above the Scald or the card schools Milan Blansher used to run in the hold of whatever Munitorum transport they were travelling within.

‘I don’t know where they are,’ she said, now realising how much that hurt to say.

‘You’re an Apostle now, Larice,’ said Seekan. ‘I know it’s hard to adjust to our way of thinking, but if you want to survive, it’s the best way.’

‘It’s the only way,’ said Quint, surprising them all. ‘It’s the Apostles’ Creed. Live by it or get the hell out.’

Laquell returned to Rimfire and Larice took her place in the rotation as the war on Amedeo continued at its brutal pace. The flyers at Rimfire found themselves under ever more pressure as the attacks over the Breakers increased in frequency and the cities of the Ice were hit by more and more bomber waves. The Apostles flew a dozen intercepts in three days, splashing sixty-eight craft between them.

As expected, Quint took the highest tally. Larice was a hair’s breadth behind him.

Nothing more was said of the night Larice brought Laquell to the Aquilian, yet it festered like a splinter of rotten wood beneath her skin. In the short period between flights she checked the Operations logs for any mention of Laquell, and was gratified to see his kill count climb steadily.

Eight days passed before she saw him again, amid a furious intercept in the skies ten kilometres north of Coriana. A huge wave of bombers and fighter escorts, two hundred and ten aircraft in total, appeared without warning over the snow-lashed Breakers, and the Lightnings and Thunderbolts based at Rimfire had only moments to scramble.

Less than three-quarters of the planes managed to get airborne before the first bombs hit, flattening the makeshift runways and obliterating what little infrastructure there was. The Imperial aircraft immediately tangled with the bombers’ escort planes, a mix of Razors, Talons and Hell Blades, and a furious engagement began.

The Thunderbolts danced with the escorts while the faster Lightnings powered through the low-flying formations to target the slow movers above. Like wolves in the fold, the Lightnings savaged the packs of bombers, sending twenty to the ice in palls of smoke and fire, before the Archenemy escorts could break from the fight below to come to their aid.

The Thunderbolts followed them up, but before the two groups of fighters locked horns, another forty enemy fighters screamed down from the north. Operations at Coriana screamed a warning to the pilots, unable to believe that so many bats had simply popped into existence on their auspex.

The arrival of so many enemy aircraft forced the flyers from Rimfire to disengage.

And with their base now a volcanic crater in the ice, they turned south for Coriana.

Larice yanked the stick hard right, viffing down and barely avoiding a drifting stream of cannon fire from a diving Hell Talon. The pilot had misjudged his deflection, and she rolled back and deployed her air brakes, coming in around behind the bat as it slashed through the formation. She pushed out the throttle, lining up her shot, when she heard the shrill warning tone of a weapons lock.

‘Five, break left!’ shouted Leena Sharto.

Her target forgotten, Larice pulled left and down, driving the engine to full military power and weaving in and out of the morass of duelling planes. A Razor flashed in front of her, a Navy bird in hot pursuit, and she squeezed off a short burst of las. The pilot’s canopy disintegrated in a shower of diamond splinters as it spun away.

Larice didn’t watch it die. She twisted left and right, trying to locate her pursuer. It was still locked on to her, but she couldn’t see it. An eye-wateringly bright blizzard of las-fire flashed over her and she threw her aircraft down, finally catching the blaze of light from the enemy guns.

Larice flew like a flock of Killers were on her tail, jinking and viffing through the air like an aerial acrobat. Her pursuer stayed with her, but there were few who understood how a Thunderbolt danced as well as Larice Asche, and it couldn’t match her turns.

‘You’re fixated,’ she said, grunting as a high-g turn drove the breath from her. ‘And that’s gotten you killed.’

She hauled back on the stick and flexed her plane through a screaming hammerhead turn, pulling vertical before rolling her tail section over and aiming her aircraft straight down. It was a risky manoeuvre, bleeding speed and leaving her hanging in the air. The Razor was right below her, lining up its shot, but Larice fired first.

Her quads banged and thumped, and the Razor split open in a storming burst of debris. Larice dropped through the flaming wreckage, her canopy awash with fire and the fuselage thumping with impacts. Nothing flashed red and she pulled out of her dive, coming level and increasing speed in case any other enemy craft were waiting to pounce.

None were, and she rolled back into the fight. The sky was thick with bats, swarming, razor-winged darts that flew aggressively and protected the slower bombers with the tenacity of a mother grox defending her offspring.

They outnumbered the Imperial aircraft, but that advantage wasn’t counting for much. Larice knew the Archenemy were careless with their craft, preferring overwhelming numbers to skill and talent in the air. With every passing minute, the bombers were getting closer to Coriana, but their numbers were thinning as they went. The Apostles and sixty other planes were dancing with them at low altitude, screaming over the ice and outlying industrial complexes surrounding the city.

Larice saw a stretched V of aircraft taking the low-level approach to Coriana and thumbed the vox.

‘This is Five, seven plus heavy bombers with escort going in low over the refineries.’

‘I see them, Five.’ Seekan.

‘Take the lead, Five. I’m right behind you.’ Suhr.

‘Lead us in, Larice,’ said a familiar voice and she smiled as she recognised the laconic tones.

She smiled. ‘Good to have you on board, Laquell.’

‘I’ve got Schaw and Ysor from Indigo with me,’ voxed Laquell. ‘On your left wing.’

Larice looked over, seeing Laquell’s trio of fighters, and pushed her stick forwards and surged power to the afterburners.

‘Five on lead,’ said Larice, switching to quads.

‘Bear in mind that we’re flying over incredibly volatile structures,’ advised Seekan as though informing them of light cloud cover. ‘Short, controlled bursts only.’

‘Diving in now,’ said Larice. ‘Stoop and sting those escorts!’

Almost as soon as she’d armed her guns, the two groups of aircraft were tangled up in a madly spinning, close-range dogfight. Larice rolled hard left, catching sight of a Razor’s tail section, and followed it down.

Every move the Razor made, Larice was with him, the planes spinning around the sky like insects in a bizarre mating ritual. The plane spun right, but Larice was waiting for it. It flashed across her gunsight and she pulled the cannon trigger.

‘Got you,’ she hissed as bright laser bolts tore into the enemy plane’s fuselage and ripped the darting craft in two. The plane spewed smoke and flames, tumbling downwards, and Larice caught a glimpse of the blood-splattered pilot as he struggled weakly with his doomed aircraft.

She rolled out of her attack, turning back into the fight. Aircraft swooped and dived around her, and she watched Seekan saw the tail off a Tormentor with a precise burst of las-fire. Owen Thule peppered a Hell Blade with his quads and lit up a Razor seconds later as he viffed over the wreckage and stood his plane on its wing to shred a spinning Hell Talon.

A diving Razor slotted itself in on his six and gunfire punched holes in his right wing.

‘Eight, break right!’ yelled Larice as her threat board lit up. She slammed the stick right and feathered the engines as a white rocket contrail speared past her canopy.

Red metal suddenly filled her vision and she swore, pushing the plane down and left as the belly of a Hell Blade screamed over her canopy, so close she felt she could reach out and touch it. Its jetwash threw her around for a moment until she was able to bring herself level again and come back on Owen Thule. She breathed deeply, amazed at how close the near miss had been.

‘He’s stuck to my six!’ shouted Thule.

‘I’m on him,’ shouted Laquell, spinning his Thunderbolt into a rolling S to come in on the bat’s five. His deflection was perfect and the bat flew straight into his storm of shells, blowing apart as its engine detonated.

‘Thanks,’ voxed Thule, turning into another engagement.

‘Laquell! Heads up!’ called Larice, ‘You got one on your high six!’

Cannon shells spat from a Hell Blade’s guns, a couple raking the topside armour of the Thunderbolt. Larice saw it was armed with underslung rockets too.

‘Damn! Bad guy on my tail! Schaw, get him off me!’

‘I’m on it,’ replied his wingman.

The rear of Laquell’s Thunderbolt spat brightly burning flares in an attempt to prevent the enemy rocket from locking onto his engine emissions. He threw the plane into a series of wild manoeuvres to try and shake his pursuer.

‘Damn, this guy’s good!’ swore Laquell as the bat matched him move for move.

‘Rocket away!’ shouted Schaw.

‘Breaking left!’ answered Laquell, rolling hard and down.

‘Come on...’ prayed Larice, kicking in the afterburner and diving hard. She felt her vision greying under the pressure of the increased g-forces. Her flight suit expanded and she felt the composition of her air-mix change as she pushed the craft to the edge of the envelope.

She mashed the cannon trigger and filled the air behind Laquell’s plane with las-fire.

The missile detonated prematurely as one of Larice’s shots clipped its warhead. She felt the shockwave of its detonation and laughed in relief.

Laquell spun his plane round in a screaming turn and chopped the throttle, almost stalling the craft. The pilot of the Hell Blade tried to stay with him, but the explosion had concealed Laquell’s survival, and its pilot couldn’t match the Thunderbolt’s turn.

The cocky pilot of the 235th rolled inverted and pulled in behind the red aircraft, slotting it neatly between his gunsights. Quad-fire banged from the nose guns, shredding the bat’s tailpipe and blowing the aircraft apart in a spectacular orange fireball.

Laquell hollered his triumph over the vox and flew over the debris.

Larice checked the auspex and saw the remaining five bombers had broken through the fighter cordon and were heading towards the civilian areas of Coriana. A screen of twelve bats lingered in their wash, ready to turn on any pursuit.

‘Apostle Five in pursuit,’ said Larice. ‘Who’s with me?’

‘Apostle Lead,’ said Seekan.

‘Indigo Lead,’ replied Laquell.

‘Apostle Nine,’ said Ziner Krone.

‘Apostle Six,’ said Saul Cirksen.

‘Indigo Two,’ said Schaw.

‘Rise to Angels minus five hundred and dive on burners,’ ordered Seekan, asserting his natural authority over this ad hoc squadron. A flight’s destination altitude was never given in the open, and ‘Angels’ was a set altitude that changed every day. In this case it had been set at a thousand metres.

The Thunderbolts, a mix of camo-green and cream, snapped up in a sharp climb before aiming their guns down upon the bats.

‘Turn and burn,’ ordered Seekan.

Larice hit her afterburners, closing the distance to the bombers and their escort in a matter of moments. The bats broke into a combat spread and the Thunderbolts slashed through their formation. Larice tagged one plane, shearing its left wing off with her quads. It tumbled end over end into the ground, and ploughed a fiery gouge through a maze of pipework extending from an aluminium-skinned structure.

Laquell splashed another and each of the Apostles claimed a kill before they vectored back into the fight. Now it was one on one, and Larice shot her quads at a crimson Hell Talon with bloody teeth painted on its swept wings. The Talon threw itself into a low dive, sweeping under an aqueduct of pipes, and Larice followed him down. The bat slashed through the air, jinking past flame-topped towers, around vast, portal-framed fabriks and between enormous cylindrical ore-silos.

Larice kept to her quads, loosing a sharp burst every time she got weapons lock, but the bat was good. He kept her at arm’s length, always anticipating her deflections and viffing out of the way in time.

‘Stand still, frig you,’ she hissed, deploying air brakes and vectoring right to sidestep around the tall lifter derricks of a Leman Russ assembly yard. Swaying pallets of building materials flashed past her canopy and she caught the terrified ‘O’ of the derrick’s crewman, passing within a metre of her wingtip. The bat spun around a blazing plume of venting gases from a promethium refinery and a host of las-bolts exploded around her. She felt the hammer blows on her fuselage and jinked down.

Whip aerials on the roof of a manufactory snapped off on her underside and she snagged a trailing cord from a Mechanicus banner. It burned up in her heat bloom, and Larice couldn’t decide what kind of omen that was. The bat arced past her canopy, and she stood her plane on its end, rolling inverted and hitting the burners again to get on its tail.

The gases from the refinery surged in her jetwash and punched her after the bat like she’d been launched from the rails with her rocket assist. The acceleration slammed her back in her seat, but seconds later she was right on the bat’s tail. Larice cut her burners and mashed the firing trigger. A stream of autocannon shells ripped into the bat’s engines and sliced through its entire length. Literally sawn in two, the shorn halves of the bat fell out of the sky in flames.

Larice pulled up, hearing triumphant shouts from the other pilots as they splashed their targets. Only Schaw failed to take down his bat, misjudging a turn and ending up with a bat on his tail instead. Seekan shot down the bat, and the Imperial planes roared after the rising bombers as they started their attack runs.

Too slow to evade the Imperial pursuit, the Tormentors unloaded their bombs early and aimed their aircraft towards the ground. Each one ploughed into the tangle of pipes, bridges and construction yards of Coriana’s industrial hinterland, leaving a trail of devastation hundreds of metres long. Fires raged in the swathes of burning jet fuel wreckage, and Larice pulled up through banks of shimmering thermals and buffeting winds of exploding ordnance.

It wasn’t pretty, but looking towards the untouched hab-stacks, residential sprawls and commercia districts, she knew it could have been a lot worse.

Two more attacks came in over the mountains, again with little warning until they’d crossed the Breakers, and the Apostles flew round-the-clock sorties with the regrouped diaspora of aircraft from the forward airbases. It was brutal flying, the Archenemy planes battering at the gates of Coriana as though it were the ultimate prize in the war.

Larice supposed it was, looking up at the map pinned to the wall of the market hall. The air carried the taste of spoiled fruit and dairy products, of decay and abandonment. She sat on a camp chair with her booted feet resting on a packing crate that had once contained Mark V magazines for lasguns.

Pilots on the rotation hustled back and forth between mission briefings and Munitorum supply depots where cold caffeine and hot food were on offer. The abandoned market hall now served as a makeshift Operations centre. At the far end of the vaulted, echoing chamber, a heaving mass of cogitators and logic engines were hooked up to a series of coughing generators. A gaggle of uniformed officers and tech-priests surrounded an illuminated plotting table. It bathed their faces in a bleaching light, and a fug of incense hung over their deliberations. Runners sped back and forth, updating senior flight officers on developments over the Ice, and commands were barked into vox-horns to scramble this flight, divert that flight or assist another. One particular flight officer, a fat man in a voluminous robe, seemed to be the centre of attention, and Larice wondered how he’d ever managed to fit in the cockpit of an aircraft.

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.

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.

‘Good shooting, Suhr,’ she said, feeling her heart rate climbing down from its rapid tattoo.

‘What else did you expect?’ replied Suhr, closing on her wing. Larice called up the auspex feed from Orbis and tallied off the destroyed rocket batteries.

One, two, three, four, five...

Before she could get to six, the live feed flickered and died.

‘Orbis Flight is down!’ shouted the voice of a panicked Marauder pilot. ‘Orbis is down!’

Larice looked up, seeing a sky thick with swarming bats and Imperial craft. A major air battle was going on above their heads and it wasn’t clear who had the upper hand. Slashing red Hell Talons and Razors filled the air with las and the dance of fighters above was a blazing free-fire zone.

Larice switched vox channel, and the cockpit was filled with the frantic chatter of pilots screaming at each other to break, dive, roll, cover and eject.

Seekan’s voice cut through the babble.

‘Apostles,’ he said, ‘take back the sky.’

Larice stood her plane on its tail and hit her burners, melting a ten-metre-wide crater in the ice as her Thunderbolt leapt skyward.

Larice picked her target, a spiralling Hell Talon flying an aggressive pursuit against one of the 42nd Prefects. The Lightning was dancing through the sky, but the Talon was stuck to it like glue. Larice waited until the Lightning rolled over on an escape turn and the Talon bled off speed to follow it round. A spurt of las tore a wing from its body and the madly spinning craft looped down towards the ice. She broke off and fanned her aircraft down after a flash of a crimson wing. A Hell Blade swished past her wing, its speed a match for hers, and she looked into the cockpit of the enemy pilot.

His helmet was a carved, daemonic leer and hellish red light lit his masked face. A long, reptilian tongue slid from his mouth, and Larice recoiled as she realised the pilot wasn’t wearing a helmet. She punched her air brakes and cut her thrust, viffing in behind the enemy plane. He broke right and stepped down with a flutter of vector thrust. Larice angled her plane down, knowing he would surge forward.

Her quads banged, the recoil fierce and loud.

Shells streamed from the nose guns and tore up that damnable cockpit, erasing that monstrous visage from existence. Her breathing stoked shallow, spiking pulse rate high. A pilot never normally saw the face of the enemy, and to know the hideous things they were flying against had shaken her. It took her a moment to regain her calm, but in an aerial fight, a moment can be too long.

Heavy fire thumped her wings and fuselage, tearing over the armour behind her canopy. Red icons winked to life and she threw the Thunderbolt into a looping roll. A sidestepping viff put her back level and she twisted in her seat, hunting her hunter.

‘Larice, break right!’ shouted a voice over the vox. Laquell.

She hauled around, narrowly avoiding a collimated blaze of las-fire. Left, right, up, roll left. Her attacker was still with her. She saw it behind her, a gleam of purple and gold. Hell Blade. She saw a flicker of camo-green and the enemy plane lit up like a sunflare shell as Laquell’s guns shredded it and its engine core went critical.

‘Thanks, Laquell,’ said Larice, rising up above the engagement and getting her breath back under control.

‘You all right?’ asked Laquell, pulling out alongside her.

‘Fine.’

‘Where’s your wingman?’

‘Suhr? I don’t know. Where’s yours?’

‘Ysor got tagged. A bat tore up his wings and his missiles cooked off on the pylon.’

‘Damn,’ hissed Larice.

‘Yeah,’ agreed Laquell. ‘I’ll watch your wing if you watch mine.’

‘Deal,’ she said, turning her aircraft back down into the madly swirling engagement.

Their aircraft slashed down through a wedge of attacking Razors, splitting them and blowing two to fragments. Larice pulled wide and splashed a Hell Blade as it lined up a shot on Apostle Eight.

‘You’re welcome, Thule,’ she said as his aircraft zoomed back into the fight.

The two mobs of fighters were well and truly enmeshed now, like starving hounds locked in a cage, the battle an impossible-to-follow tangle of explosions, missile contrails, air-bursting flak, las-fire and vector flare. Larice and Laquell danced through the battle with muscular turns and delicate spins, dancers in the midst of a stampede. They made a good team, instinctively understanding how the other flew, matching turns and viffs with the accuracy of flyers who’d fought together for years.

Larice lost count of how many kills she took, mashing the firing trigger on the stick until the battery of her las coughed dry. She switched to quads, claiming another three kills. This engagement alone would make every pilot an ace in a day.

Flashing wings, speeding tail sections and spirals of engine noise. Snap shots and desperate breaks. Larice was sweating and her body ached from gripping on hard turns. Every muscle burned and she was in for a hell of an adrenal comedown when she put her plane back on the deck.

A shadow shimmered over her canopy, and she saw a trailing formation of bombers coming in, diving and looking like a flock of migrating birds coming into nest.

Seekan’s voice came over the vox. ‘Apostles, this is Lead,’ he said. ‘The door is open, so while the Lightnings have the bats’ attention, we’ll escort the Marauders in.’

‘Laquell,’ she voxed, aiming her Thunderbolt towards the mass carrier. ‘You want to fly with the Apostles?’

‘Sure, Larice,’ replied Laquell. ‘I could do with another heart attack today.’

Larice flipped her aircraft over and pushed its nose down. The two fighters spread out and increased power, diving for the deck at high speed. She saw the enormous carrier was wallowing in the ocean, industrial-grade meltas flaring around its edges to melt the ice and allow it to escape beneath the water. The bats in the air would have nowhere to land if it submerged, but that didn’t seem to matter to the Archenemy commanders.

Autocannon shots burst around them and Larice grinned as she jinked the Thunderbolt up and down, avoiding the flak as though it was coming at her in slow motion. She flew instinctively, not even consciously aware of any decision-making process, just flying as though she knew, just knew, where the streams of tracers would be.

‘There’s too much fire!’ shouted Laquell.

‘You might be right,’ agreed Larice, calmly lining up her cannon’s gunsight on the command spire of the mass carrier. Her quads opened up, and drifting blooms of fire erupted across the surface of the black tower like orange-petalled flowers with every impact.

‘We’ve got to pull up, Larice! We’re too close!’ screamed Laquell, hauling his plane away in a desperate climb that cost him valuable speed.

Three rockets leapt from the deck of the carrier as Larice pulled the trigger on her control column again. The quad-mounted autocannon thundered and blazed, the noise like a roaring chainsaw. The shells impacted ten metres in front of one of the carrier’s launch batteries before tearing into it and ripping it messily in half.

She pushed out the throttle to full military power and executed a tight, rolling spin, flipping up and over the deck of the carrier. Masked warriors fired pistols and rifles at her, and the rockets streaked across the deck in pursuit of her furnace-hot turbofans. Booming waves of icy water surged up from the carrier’s sides as it began to submerge.

Her auspex screamed warnings at her. She pulled a recklessly tight turn around the carrier’s command spire, spitting a string of incandescent flares as she punched the engines.

The rockets couldn’t match a vector turn and two of them slammed into the control spire of the carrier, gutting its upper levels with fire and high explosives. Its top section keeled over drunkenly, falling slowly, like the tallest tree in the forest. It slammed into the deck as Larice pulled higher and aimed her Thunderbolt towards the heavens as the Marauders swooped down like sharks with the scent of blood.

She saw the first bombs shedding from their bellies, falling like black raindrops towards the carrier. A few streams of close-in defence fire licked upwards. Some of the bombs would be caught in the flak storm, but nowhere near enough of them to make a difference.

Larice turned away from the doomed carrier, bleeding off airspeed in time to see the last rocket explode five metres from the engine of Erzyn Laquell’s Thunderbolt.

The blast sheared off his aircraft’s port wing and tail section, sending the aircraft into an uncontrolled downward spin.

‘Punch out!’ screamed Larice, ‘Come on, damn you! Eject!’

But the Thunderbolt continued to fall. It smashed into a spire of ice, cartwheeling end over end in a brilliant fireball. It slammed into the ice in a blizzard of silvered shrapnel.

‘Damn you, Laquell, I told you to punch out!’ she yelled at the wreckage of the burning aircraft. She cut her speed as low as she dared, flying over the crash site even though she knew there was no way anyone could have survived so fierce an impact. Hot tears pricked her eyes and she pulled up and away from the carrier as thunderous detonations rocked the air with hammerblows of searing air and percussive shockwaves.

Behind her, the Archenemy mass carrier shuddered like a dying beast as the Marauders spilled their load of iron and fire upon it. Bombs punched through its decks and exploded in the hangars, the dark temples and the slave pens. They vaporised the engines, the ballast tanks, the supply halls and the torture cells.

Blazing columns of tar-black smoke coiled from its ruptured innards, hundred-metre flames roaring from its wounds like elemental blood. The air went phosphor white as a collection of incendiaries, dropped from a Marauder of the 22nd Yysarians named Give ’em Hell, sailed through the cratered deck of the sinking carrier and exploded in the midst of its ruptured engine core.

Larice didn’t see it break in two and didn’t watch as it came apart in cracking splits of unclean metal. She didn’t watch it upend and spill its thousands-strong crew into the freezing water beneath the sea. She didn’t watch the greatest victory any of the men and women on Amedeo had ever seen.

She flew with her wings dipped over the remains of Erzyn Laquell’s Thunderbolt and felt her heart turn as cold as the ocean ice below.

‘Get up,’ said Seekan.

‘Get out,’ replied Larice.

‘I said get up, Apostle Five,’ said Seekan. ‘And if it makes things clearer, that’s an order.’

Larice rolled over, seeing Seekan silhouetted by the door of her room with a suit bag slung over his shoulder. Dressed in his heavily-medalled cream frock coat, dress blue trousers and polished boots, he looked every inch the Wing Leader of an elite squadron of Navy flyers. His hair was immaculately oiled and his thin features were almost expressionless.

Almost, but not quite.

Seekan came into the room and sat on the edge of the bed, laying the linen fabric of the suit bag across his lap. One of the advantages of taking the Aquilian as their billet meant there was plenty of space for each pilot to have their own room. What would once have housed wealthy off-world socialites now sheltered weary Naval aviators. In case of flash alerts, all their rooms were on the first floor, and Larice heard the booming strains of Laude Beati Triumphia coming from the ballroom. Clearly Krone was in charge of the music again: he favoured rousing marching tunes.

‘Another carrier destroyed?’ she asked, pulling the bed sheets around her naked body.

‘No,’ said Seekan. He didn’t elaborate.

‘Then what? None of the Apostles died.’

Winter Spear had been an unqualified success, with a combined tally of three hundred and ninety-six enemy bats accounted for in the air, together with however many were aboard the mass carrier when it sank. A total of one hundred and six Imperial craft were shot down, mostly the Die-ten-tens and Laredo bombers, but none of the attacking squadrons had come through without losses.

No squadron but the Apostles.

‘None of the Apostles died, that’s true,’ agreed Seekan. ‘But one of them learned a valuable lesson.’

‘That’s why you didn’t offer Laquell a place, isn’t it?’

Seekan nodded. ‘I’m not as unfeeling as I appear, Larice. We don’t have the camaraderie of other Naval wings, and now you know why. We can’t afford to be friends with the people we fly alongside. Out of all the wings that fought in the attack on the carrier, we are the only ones to escape loss. Fate’s wheel has turned, and once again we escape its notice. The galaxy isn’t ready for us to die, and you need to show it that you don’t care one way or another. You need to show it that you don’t fear it, to spit into the darkness and say that nothing it can do will make the slightest bit of difference.’

Larice bunched the sheets in her fists. ‘I don’t know if I can.’

‘You have to,’ said Seekan. ‘The minute you start to care, that’s when they get you.’

‘They?’

He shrugged. ‘Fate, Death, whatever’s out there in the darkness.’

‘And that’s what you do? Not care?’

‘I do what I have to. I drink and I sing and I rage at the stars, whatever really. Each of us has his own way. You’ve seen that.’

‘Does it help?’

‘It makes it easier. I don’t know if that’s the same thing, but it means I can climb into the cockpit of a Thunderbolt and not care if I come back.’

Larice felt tears brimming on her eyelids, but forced them back with a swallow and grim nod. She reached for the suit bag draped across Seekan’s lap.

‘Give me it,’ she said. ‘I’ll be down in ten minutes.’

Attired in her full dress uniform, Larice strode into the ballroom, her heels clicking on the hardwood floor in time with the clashing timpani of Krone’s music. The Apostles gathered around the fire, drinking, arguing and behaving like naval ratings on their first shore leave in a year. Saul Cirksen had his pistol drawn and was taking potshots at the busts of forgotten notables of Amedeo.

Leena Sharto smoked a huge cigar and burned holes in the armrest of her chair, while Owen Thule knocked back shot after shot of hard liquor. Seekan gave her the briefest nod of acknowledgement as she approached. Jeric Suhr and Quint continued their endless game of regicide. Ziner Krone pressed a heavy balloon of amber-coloured liquor into her hand.

His skin gleamed dark, dangerous and powerful, and the scarring on the side of his face pulled tight in a grin as she downed the entire glass in one long swallow. It burned her, but it felt good. The heat and pain in her chest reminded her that she was alive. She looked at her fellow flyers and felt nothing for them. No emotions at all, not even contempt.

She threw the glass into the fire and it shattered with a brittle explosion.

Larice gripped Krone’s jacket. She pulled his face to hers and kissed him hard on the mouth. He responded hungrily and pulled her to his wide chest.

‘About time,’ he said.

‘Shut your mouth,’ she snapped, turning and pulling him towards the stairs.

Crisp sunlight beat down on the hardstands of Coriana, heating the honeycombed landing mats, but leaving the day cold. Pilots, fitters and armourers milled back and forth between the planes, dodging speeding tow-rigs and flashing gurneys laden with missiles and ammo boxes. Peristaltic fuel lines snaked from juddering bowsers to feed the thirsty aircraft, and ground crew directed taxiing fighters and bombers to their designated runways.

Larice clambered over the upper fuselage of her cream Thunderbolt, checking the repair job the fitters had done and watching the controlled dance of military might as the Imperium took the fight to the Archenemy. With the defeat of the northern flanking thrust, all assets were being directed to aid the ground war in the west. Confidence was high that the newly established air superiority would soon result in victory.

She knelt beside an opened panel behind the canopy. The damaged armour plates had been replaced and a tangle of cables ran from the exposed mechanisms of the aircraft to a diagnostic calculus-logi servitor. One of the Martian priesthood studied the tickertape clattering from the brass-rimmed slate fitted to its chest, a soft burble of binary spilling from the shadows beneath his hood.

Larice slid over the wing to the crew ladder and swung her leg around to hook the top rung. She climbed down and dropped to the hardstand, slapping her palm on the warmed flank of her plane.

Seven Thunderbolts in the same pristine colour scheme as hers were parked in a neat row, just one of a dozen squadrons being prepped and made ready to fly. Three Lightnings surged from launch rails, powering skywards on blazing plumes of firelit smoke. She watched them go, shielding her eyes from the low sun as they rolled over their port wings to head west.

Her gaze lowered as she saw a young, good-looking pilot in a camo-green uniform approaching her. He cocked his head to one side as he drew near, like he wasn’t sure he had the right person, but was going to ask anyway.

‘Flight Lieutenant Asche?’ he said. ‘Larice Asche?’

‘Yeah, who wants to know?’ she said, walking down the line of her plane’s fuselage.

The young man jogged after her and held out his hand.

‘Flight Officer Layne Schaw,’ he said with a beaming smile. ‘It’s an honour to meet you.’

Larice looked at the proffered hand and Schaw’s earnest smile.

‘Get the frig away from me,’ she hissed. ‘And don’t tell me your name.’