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.