Double Eagle Read Free

electric munitions trains parked and empty on verges of swishing sap-grass.
    And airstrips. Cracked rockcrete looking like psoriatic skin in the early light, with eight-engine bombers sulking on their hardstands, props like sabre-blades raised in threat, hook-winged Shrike dive-bombers under tarps, fitters and armourers working around them.
    Beyond the strips, facing the sea, lay the long launch ramps of the Wolfcubs, stretched out like exposed spinal chords, glinting and skeletal in the rising sun.
    Five Wolfcubs sat on taxi-racks at the head of the ramps. Bottle green with grey undersides, they were tiny, one-man planes with stubby wings and tails, their rocket engines raised above their backs, their nose guns muzzled. They looked squat, leaden.
    But Kaminsky knew how they felt to fly. He knew how they rose off those catapult ramps, throttles right back, pulse-engines farting and popping as the airflow fired them to launch velocity. The belly-dropping jink as they cleared the ramp end and lifted up into the blue, raw and throbbing. The cold smell of the cockpit. The reek of rubber and steel, promethium, nitrous, fyceline. The feel of being aloft, alive…
    God-Emperor, how he missed it.
    At the gate, beside the staked revets and the heavy blast-fences, he pulled over to let a munitions convoy roll in. He glanced up into the driving mirror and, for a moment, saw himself.
    More than anything, more than even the airfield full of prepping warplanes, the sight of himself reminded August Kaminsky that his cherished game was only pretend.
    There was, inescapably, a war on.
     
    Theda Old Town, 07.09
    He couldn’t sleep. It was anticipation mostly, the prospect of a new war to survive, but his body clock was still running on shipboard time, and to him it was late afternoon.
    Just before six by the chronograph on his night stand, he gave up on his bed and got up. It was cold and not yet light. In the adjacent rooms, the other men of G for Greta were sleeping. He could hear snoring, particularly the volcanic rumble of Bombardier Judd. The Munitorum had issued them billets in a once-handsome pension on Kazergat Canal, and they’d piled in late the previous afternoon, leaving their packs in a heap in the hallway, eagerly laying claim to rooms. The younger men had broken open liquor and got down to the business of getting drunk so they could better sleep off voyage-lag. He’d had a glass or two, but the cheap escape held little attraction.
    He and the other flight officers had swung the best rooms. He’d had to order a disappointed Orsone out to make way for him. “Find somewhere else,” he’d told the young tail-gunner. But the room wasn’t much of a trophy. The carpet had long gone and the plaster was crumbling. Pitch-washed sheets were nailed over the windows in place of curtains. Damp patches blotched the ceiling like sores. There was a smell of fatigue and faded grandeur. That’s what years of warfare did to a place. They certainly did the same to a man, after all.
    The old woman who ran the pension had told him that there would be no hot water until after eight, and he hadn’t come that many parsecs to start a tour by standing under a piss-cold shower. He’d got dressed in the half-light—boots, breeches, fleece-vest—and started to pull on his flight coat. But his fingers had then encountered the insignia sewn into the thick quilts of the garment, the captain’s bars, the squadron badge, the name-strip that read “Viltry, Oskar”. He had put it aside and opted instead for a more anonymous tan leather coat.
    The landing was dark. On the floor above, the crewmen of Hello Hellstorm were slumbering, with the crews of Throne of Terror and Widowmaker on the floor above that. The retinues of K for Killshot and Get Them All Back were billeted on the ground floor. The other six crews of XXI Wing “Halo Flight”, Imperial (Phantine) Air Force were tucked up in another pension down the street.
    Viltry activated a