Double Eagle by Dan Abnett Read Free Book Online

batteries, vox, pintle weapons, any water or fuel in the reserves. Strip it out and transfer it to transports. Make it fast, trooper.”
    “Yes, captain.”
    LeGuin glanced round at Lieutenant Klodas, the Fury’s commander. His driver, loader and gunners stood nearby in a shabby, respectful group, caps in their hands, like mourners at a funeral. LeGuin saw that Klodas was trying not to cry.
    “No wasting surplus water, please, Klodas,” he said. “We’ve got a bloody long way to go yet.”
    Klodas sniffed and nodded. LeGuin felt bad for being so hard on the junior officer. Losing a steed, as LeGuin well knew, was like losing a best friend, sibling, parent and faithful hound all in one go. The average tanker lived in his machine, fought with it, killed from it and had been saved by it. He owed it, he trusted it and knew its foibles. To leave it for dead at the side of a desert track seemed… criminal.
    Besides, simply as a piece of military technology, these tanks were priceless. Precious few of the original units remained in active service. The great forge worlds were manufacturing modem pattern copies as fast as they were able, but the craft was getting lost, many of the tech secrets were being forgotten, or had never been recorded. LeGuin himself knew, as a bitter certainty, virtually no forge worlds were now capable of hand-crafting the specialist L/D cannon for a tank hunter.
    Fury of Pardua was one of the 8th’s oldest Leman Russ examples, painstakingly maintained and repaired for twenty-three centuries. Even in its current pitiful state—seized up, burnt-out and fried dry—it deserved to be recovered and hauled away for full salvage or refit.
    But that wasn’t going to happen. There was no time, no resources and—if they all stood there much longer—no one left alive.
    LeGuin looked back down the trail. In the glare of the blow-torch sun, a column of men and machines wound towards him across the sandpaper terrain, blurred by heat and dust. Every ten seconds, another tank or carrier grumbled past, kicking up grit. LeGuin’s eyes were at a permanent squint. The retreat column stretched back as far as he could see, and it was only one of a hundred or more threading their way desperately across the scorched earth and billowing dunes of the north-western sief. Such was the fate of Lord Militant Humel’s great “land armada”, which had almost reached the gateways of the Trinity Hives to purge Enothis, before being turned back by the unbelievable ferocity of replenished Archenemy forces.
    The abject wreck of the Fury of Pardua seemed to Captain LeGuin an appropriate symbol for this disastrous retreat: a great, proud beast from another age, beaten to extinction by the foe and the climate, left to rot into the consuming sands where only future archaeologists might ever expose its dry bones again.
    LeGuin looked north, watching the dust trail of the vehicles that had passed ahead. Men trudged beside crawling machines, as thirsty for water as the vehicles were for oil. Some rode on fenders or straddled body plating. Every few kilometres something needed to be repaired, dug free or pulled out of soft sand by the Atlas teams. The Fury was not the first piece of armour to be abandoned at the roadside. The miserable route back to the Trinity Hives was marked with the corpses of machines that had died along the way.
    Died or been killed. The Archenemy was not letting them run unmolested.
    Klodas had flagged down a half-track weapons carrier, and his crew was formed into a human chain to ship what was salvageable from the Conqueror.
    “Don’t take too long,” LeGuin told him.
    LeGuin walked back to his own steed, wiping his brow with a hand that came away black with perspiration and grit. As he walked, he looked up into the relentless sky. Where would the next attack come from? Up there? Or, as the vox-reports from back down the column suggested, were the enemy land forces now beginning to nip at their heels