Double Eagle by Dan Abnett Read Free Book Online Page B

north overhead, and he heard the rush of afterburners above the roar of the tank’s engine.
    Two dark red shapes in the bright sky, moving as fast as arrows, curled in low above the column ahead. He saw flashes, sprays of sand, then heard the rolling crump of detonating munitions. A kilometre away, something caught fire and began to smudge the sky with a thick spout of oily, black smoke.
    “Alarm! Alarm!” he shouted into the vox. The Line’s turret weapons were already cranked to maximum elevation, but there was no point wasting ammo at this range. In the distance, he saw the choppy flashes of tracers from Hydra carriers in the front file.
    Two more bats went over, using the convoy’s long dust wake as a marker to line up on their targets. Matredes was rotating the turret, but LeGuin shook his head. A troop truck three vehicles forward of them leapt into the air in a brilliant eruption of flame, and showered burning debris in all directions.
    They hadn’t even seen that one coming.
    The vehicles ahead of them swerved. The hit truck was a stricken mass of blazing, twisted metal. Burnt bodies, some stripped naked by the blast, littered the sand.
    Another troop truck, turning to avoid the ruin, hit soft sand and dug in. It rocked violently, wheels spinning and digging deeper, engine over-revving. The infantrymen in the back leapt down with spades and chains.
    “Full stop! Get the cable!” LeGuin yelled to Matredes, who clambered out at once with Mergson, one of the sponson gunners.
    “Tie it up! Tie it up!” LeGuin shouted at the men on the ground as Matredes and the gunner fetched the hawser coil from the starboard panniers. They had to be quick. The enemy warplanes habitually dumped their payloads on the head of the column to slow it down. Then they delighted in coming about down the stationary line, strafing as they went home.
    “Come on!”
    Surface-to-air from the column ahead. Tracer, some wild cannon fire, small-arms. Some idiot tried a shoulder rocket. It went up, useless as a white flare in daylight. Where were they? Where the bloody hell w—
    Booom! One went right over at zero altitude, rocking the tank on its torsion bars with the Shockwave. By the time it had gone by them, it was already pulling off. The track five hundred metres ahead was swathed in fyceline smoke from the deluge of cannon fire it had stitched down the line. New fires had started. Something big—a tank’s magazine, most likely—blew up with a dry roar.
    “Come on, Matredes!” LeGuin bawled. Most of the troopers had thrown themselves flat when the bat went over, but LeGuin’s men had got the cable lashed around the truck’s bull-bars.
    “Ease off! Get him to ease off!” LeGuin shouted to Matredes, indicating the truck driver, a Munitorum drone who was still thrashing the daylights out of the vehicle’s drive shaft in an effort to self-right.
    “Emdeen?” LeGuin voxed to his driver. “Nice and easy back step, no jerks, or you’ll amputate its rear end.”
    “Understood, captain,” Emdeen voxed back. “Fifteen segs, mind.”
    Fifteen segs. LeGuin laughed despite the situation. A Pardus tanker was permitted to sew a little stylised track segment to the edge of his uniform collar for every year served active. Emdeen was reminding his captain that he was a fifteen year vet and didn’t need to be told how to tow a cargo-10 successfully.
    LeGuin had thirteen segs of his own.
    His laughter stopped as he saw the next bat. Low, head on, red as an open wound. Weapon ports flashed as it came on. Tormentor-class, LeGuin presumed. Maybe a Hell Talon. He didn’t care. He knew tanks. Planes looked all the same to him. It might as well have been a frigging flying pixie, it was still intent on murder.
    The bat’s cannon fire chewed along the track, kicking dirt up in man-high bursts with the rapid precision of an industrial belt press. A STeG armoured car wearing the dusty livery of the Enothian PDF ruptured like an eggshell and rolled