Double Eagle Read Online Free Page A

uniformly black-haired where the average Enothian was robust and fair.
    And they weren’t all male. At least three of them—including, it seemed, the figure leading them towards the transport—were women.
    Kaminsky got out and walked round to the back of the transport to drop the tailgate. He nodded a greeting to the first of the newcomers, trying to get a decent look at the insignia on the coat sleeve, but the young man spared him not a second glance and simply hoisted in his kit bag and climbed up after it.
    Only the woman paused. She had cold, searching eyes and a slim jaw that seemed to be set permanently in a gritted clench. Her black hair was cut unflatteringly short.
    “Transport to Theda MAB South?” she asked Kaminsky. She spoke with an offworld accent that sounded rather odd and nasal to him.
    “Yes, mamzel. To the dispersal station.”
    “That’s ‘commander’,” she corrected, hauling her lithe figure up into the transport. “Carry on.”
    Kaminsky waited for the last of them to climb aboard, then shut the gate. He limped back round to the cab and started the engine.
    Phantine. That’s what it had said on the woman’s silver shoulder badge. Phantine XX, embossed on a scroll backed by a double-headed eagle that clutched lightning bolts in its talons.
    Kaminsky had been a student of aviation history since childhood and, though he’d heard of a world called Phantine, he had no idea why a flight wing should bear the name.
    He drove them through Vilberg borough and turned south towards the base. On Scholastae Street, a pair of Commonwealth Cyclones went over at about five hundred metres, turning north and west. Kaminsky looked up to watch them pass.
    In the driving mirror, he saw the fliers in the back do the same.
     
    Theda Old Town, 07.35
    The service had finished, and the faithful were filing out, most stopping to light candles at the votary shrine. Candles for the lost, or those who might soon be.
    As usual, as she did every morning, Beqa Meyer lit three: one for Gait, one for her brother, Eido, and one for whoever might need it.
    She was tired. Night shift at the manufactory had really taken it out of her. It had been a struggle not to sleep through the hierarch’s reading. If she’d been any warmer, she surely would have dozed off. But her coat was too thin: a second-hand summer coat, not even lined. Perhaps next month, with her next wages and what she had put aside, she’d be able to pick up a thermal jacket or better from the Munitorum almshouse.
    As she turned from the candle-stand, she knocked against someone waiting their turn to light an offering. It was the man she’d seen by the church door on her way in for the service. Tall, dark-haired, an offworlder. He had a sad face. He was dressed like a soldier, and had that scent of machine oil and fyceline about him.
    “My pardon, mamzel,” he said at once. She nodded “no harm”, but kept a distance as she went by. He’d been talking to himself when she’d first seen him. A stranger, maybe with battle-psychosis. That was the sort of trouble she didn’t need.
    In fact, the only thing she needed was her rest. She could be home by a quarter to the hour, and that would give her three hours’ sleep before she’d have to rise and dress for her day job at the pier. When that was over, at evening bell, she’d have an hour to nap before the night shift at the manufactory began.
    She hurried out through the templum doors into a cold street where full daylight now shone, and made her weary way back towards her hab.
     
    Over the Thedan Peninsula, 07.37
    “Hunt Two, you’re making oily smoke.”
    The flight leader’s anxious voice cut over the vox. There was no immediate response from Hunt Two. Darrow sat up in his seat and scanned around in the morning light. The scrub plains and grass breaks of the Peninsula swept by, two thousand metres under him, a wide expanse of greys, dull whites and speckled greens.
    Down at his four were Hunt Eight