‘Get on!’ shouted Kiron. ‘Hurry, the close-in defence guns are coming online!’

Subha dispensed with any pretence of courtesy and picked Kai up as though he were a recalcitrant child. The World Eater sprinted towards the open hatchway as the rest of the Outcast Dead climbed aboard.

‘Atharva!’ shouted Subha. ‘Catch.’

Kai yelled as he sailed through the air, but Atharva caught him without difficulty and swung him around to plant him in a crew seat bolted to the fuselage. Kai felt as though every single bone in his body had been battered, and bit back a vulgar insult as Atharva pressed him into his seat.

‘Don’t move,’ he said. ‘This will not be a smooth ride.’

Subha threw himself on board as Asubha feathered the engines of the craft with a sudden shriek of power injection. The cutter leapt into the air and spun around as the crew door slid shut with a pressurising hiss of pneumatics.

‘Go!’ shouted Kiron. ‘Get us out of here, World Eater.’

The cutter leapt forward like an unleashed colt, and but for Atharva’s restraining hand, Kai would have been hurled down the length of the compartment. The craft lurched and he heard hammering blows on the aircraft’s hull.

‘Are they firing on us?’ he yelled over the screaming engines and battering impacts.

Atharva nodded, bracing himself with his free hand on the ceiling of the cutter’s crew compartment. Gythua slumped against the bulkhead, as Kiron held a stanchion beside him. Subha lay prone on the metal decking, and Tagore clung to the bulkhead at the entrance to the cockpit while Severian simply stood in the centre of the compartment as though this was just a routine lift off.

Kai screamed as the cutter rolled sharply and Asubha pushed the throttle out. The trailing edge of the cutter’s left wing clipped the edge of the closing blast door, sending it into a wild spin. Centrifugal force pressed Kai into his seat, and he lost all sense of spatial awareness as the cutter boomeranged out into the open air.

Up was down and down was up. Kai lost all sense of whether they were falling or climbing as the walls and floor spun crazily. Sky and mountain flipped sickeningly through the toughened view ports, and Kai closed his eyes. At any moment they would be dashed to a million pieces against the rocks, their shredded remains spread over hundreds of square kilometres of the mountainside.

Warning lights flashed and alarms from the cockpit echoed down the fuselage. Kai heard Asubha yelling obscenities at the controls and avionic cogitator.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry…’ said Kai through gritted teeth, repeating the words over and over again as they tumbled through the air like a dying bird until he felt the pressure of Atharva’s restraining hand lift.

‘To whom are you apologising?’ asked Atharva.

Kai opened his eyes as his lurching senses told him they were flying level again. Hope and amazement vied for centre space in his mind as he saw tall spires of gold and the rugged flanks of the mountain sweeping past through the view ports.

‘The dead,’ said Kai without thinking.

‘The dead need no one to apologise for them,’ said Atharva. ‘It is the living who need forgiveness.’

Though the words were said lightly, Kai sensed the bitterness behind them. Atharva had the bearing of a scholar trapped in a warrior’s body, but there was no mistaking the potential for violence that swelled within his breast.

‘Good flying, Asubha,’ shouted Tagore.

‘We’re not done yet,’ said Asubha. ‘Incoming fighters vectoring in on our position. Firelances by the speed of them.’

‘How far?’ called Atharva.

‘One hundred and eighty kilometres and closing fast.’

‘Fly nap of the earth and hold your course,’ ordered Atharva.

‘That won’t hide us,’ Asubha warned him.

‘I know, but I have wiles beyond your understanding,’ said Atharva, closing his eyes.

FLIGHT LEADER PTELOS Requer eased up on the afterburner, letting Eastern Lightflatten out the steep curve of its ascent from Srinagar Station. The roar of the Firelance’s engine was like the bellow of a giant beast, and the force of acceleration was like being kicked in the back by one of the migoulabourers that worked in the camps before the palace walls.

Tobias Moshar flew Promethean Arkjust off his right wing, and Osirin Falk captained Twilight’s Fadeon his left, three flyers with a combined kill count of over two hundred enemy aircraft. Most of their combat flying had been done over two centuries ago, but the pilots remembered and their enhanced cognitive recall had lived those fights scores of times.

Requer was a natural flyer, a man who felt ill at ease when not able to take a warplane into the sky, a man who regarded a life lived on the ground as a waste of potential. The majority of sorties he flew these days were nothing more than routine intercepts of privateers bringing contraband into the mountains aboard prop-driven aircraft that predated the beginning of the wars of Unity.

This flight promised to be different.

A red-ball alert had come down from on high, and Requer had been first to the flight line, running though his pre-flight check in the shortest time before waving away the ground crew and punching the lifter-jet to get him airborne. Operations had vectored them to the target, and checking the readings on the slate before him, Requer felt his initial exhilaration bleed away as he saw how slowly the target was moving.

‘Do you have the contact, Torchlight?’ came the voice of Operations.

‘Got it,’ answered Requer. ‘Bearing two-seven-nine, one hundred and sixty-seven kilometres out, altitude one thousand metres.’

‘That’s it, Torchlight,’ confirmed Operations. ‘Your orders are to close and destroy the target. Visual confirmation of destruction is required.’

‘Understood, operations,’ said Requer. ‘What is the nature of the target?’

‘As I have it, the target is a Cargo 9escort cutter.’

‘An escort cutter?’

‘That’s what I have here,’ said Operations. ‘Its destruction comes with the highest authority prefix.’

‘I think we can handle an escort cutter,’ said Requer.

‘Understood,’ said Operations. ‘Good hunting.’

Requer shut off the link and opened the vox to his fellow flyers.

‘You all heard that?’ he asked.

‘Someone reallywants that cutter brought down,’ said Moshar.

‘Who do you think is aboard?’ asked Falk.

Requer plotted a reverse vector for the cutter and let out a whistling breath of surprise.

‘Looks like it’s come from Khangba Marwu, so I’m thinking there must be some escapees on board,’ answered Requer. ‘Must be some very bad men aboard that cutter, so let’s get this done right. We’re coming up on the initial point, so climb to Angels minus two thousand on my mark.’

Moshar and Falk acknowledged his command with a click on the vox and Requer turned his attention to the countdown unfolding on the ranging scope. When the number reached zero, he pulled back on the stick and pulled the Firelance into a steep climb. Their closure rate would put them in missile range inside two minutes, but Requer wasn’t about to launch until he had a visual on the fleeing cutter.

The mountains flashed past to his right, a blur of icy rock that moved too fast to make out any detail. Despite the novelty of escapees from Khangba Marwu, this mission looked like it would be as routine as any other. After all, a Cargo 9was no match for even one Firelance, so three was overkill. The structures of the palace below were a blur, a streaking tapestry of gold, silver and white marble. Requer had flown the length, breadth and circumference of the palace a hundred times or more, and every time he found some new wonder at which to marvel. Yet he had no eyes for its magnificence on this flight, he was on a war footing and all his attention was claimed by his target.