Las-bolts slashed the air over our heads. A few at first, then more, from at least four sources. They lowered their aim and the bright orange shots ripped into the nettles, kicking up mists of sap and pulp. Two young larches by the fence ditch were splintered. Dry gorse and fintle shuddered and burst into flames.
A flare went up, bursting like a star, and damning us all with its invasive light.
'The fence! Come on!' I cursed.
Behind us, by the light of die flare, I could see dark figures wading mrough the nettles and emerging from the trees. Every few moments, one of the figures would halt and raise his weapon, spitting dazzling pulses at us.
Further away, back at the bright pyre of Spaeton House, 1 saw two white blobs of light rise and disengage themselves from the fireglow. Speeders, called in, heading this way, chasing their beams across the paddocks and woods.
We were at the fence. I channeled my fury into Barbarisater and slashed open a hole two metres wide.
'Get through!' I yelled. Aemos went through the gap. Sastre stumbled and fell, losing his grip on Eleena's arm. I pushed her through the gap too and went back for the wounded man.
Sastre had trained his pistol at the advancing killers, and was firing. He was sitting down, leaning his back against the fence. He made two kills as
I remember, cutting down figures struggling forward in the weeds and undergrowth fifty metres away.
'Go, sir!' he said.
'Not without you!'
'Go, damn it! You won't get far unless someone slows them down!'
A rain of las-fire fell around us, puncturing the fence and throwing up wet clods of earth. I was forced to turn and use Barbarisater to deflect several shots. The blade hummed as it twitched and soaked up the power.
'Go!' Sastre repeated. I realised he had been hit again and was trying to hide it. He coughed blood.
'I can't leave you like this-'
'Of course you can't!' he snapped. 'Give me a bloody weapon! This damn las-cell is nearly spent/
I crouched beside him and handed him my boltgun and my spare clips.
The Emperor will remember you, even if I don't live to/ I told him.
'You damn well better had, sir, or I'm wasting my efforts/
There was no time for anything further, no time even to take his hand. As I clambered through the fence, I heard the first roaring blasts of the boltgun.
Eleena and Aemos were waiting for me on the far side of the road in the fringes of the wild woods. I gathered them up and we ran into the darkness, stumbling over gnarled roots, clambering up loamy slopes, surrounded by the midnight blackness of the primordial forest.
The boltgun continued to fire for some time. Then it fell silent.
May the God-Emperor rest Xel Sastre and show him peace.
MINE
The Storm Oak.
Going back.
Making Midas proud.
For almost an hour, we plunged into the great darkness of the forest, blind and desperate. In what seemed an alarmingly short time, we lost all sight of the great conflagration we had left behind. The woodland, dense and ancient, blocked it out.
'Are we lost?' Eleena mumbled in a faltering voice.
'No/ I assured her. Kircher, Medea and I had spent many hours hunting and tracking in the wild woodlands, and I knew these fringes well enough, though in darkness, there was an unhelpful depth of mystery and unfa-miliarity.
Once in a while, I noticed a landmark: a jutting tooth of stone, an old tree, a turn in the terrain. Usually, I recognised such things once we were right on them, and took a moment to adjust our bearings.
Twice, speeders passed overhead, their stablights backlighting the dense foliage. If they'd possessed heat trackers, we would have been dead. But they were hunting by searchlight alone. At last, I privately rejoiced, the enemy has made an error.
We reached the oak.
Medea had named it the Storm Oak. It had been hundreds of years old when lightning had killed it and left it a splintered, leafless giant, like a shattered castle turret. The bark was peeling from its dead wood, and the area around it was crawling with grubs and rot-beetles. It had grown in a hollow, sprouting from the dark soil overhang of a scarp twenty metres
high. The oak itself was fifty metres tall from its vast, partly exposed root mass to its shattered crown, and fifteen metres across the trunk.
I scrambled down into the hollow beneath its roots. When the lightning had struck it, ages past, it had partially ripped the massive tree from the ground, creating a cavern under its mighty foundations. The dank hole was like a natural chapel, with roots serving as the crossmembers for the ceiling. The previous owners of Spaeton House had, I had been told, used it as a chancel for private ceremonies.
Medea and I had decided to use it as a hangar.
No one else knew about this, except Kircher. We had all agreed it was a dark, secret place to stow a light aircraft. A bolt hole. I don't think we ever really imagined a doom falling on Spaeton House like the one that overwhelmed it that night, but we had played along with the idea it might be wise to keep one transport tucked out of sight.
The transport in question was a monocoque turbofan flier, handmade on Urdesh. Light, fast, ultra-manoeuvrable. Medea had purchased it ten years before when she was bored, and had stored it in the main hangar at Spaeton until one notorious night while we were away on a case when several junior staff members had decided to take it for a spin, it being so much more racey than the house shuttles and bulk speeders.
They'd had the damage repaired by the time we got home, but Medea had noticed. Reprimands had followed.
Weeks later, when we found the Storm Oak during a hunting trip, and devised the notion of a last ditch transport, Medea had moved the craft here. We never actually thought we'd have to use it for escape. It was just an excuse to park it away from the envious juniors.
I stripped off the tarp and popped open the hatch. The cabin interior smelled of leather and the faint dampness of the forest.
Six metres long and finished in slate grey, the craft had a wedge-shaped cabin that tapered to a short, V-vaned tail. There were three turbofan units, one fixed behind the cabin under the tail for main thrust, the other two mounted on stubby wings that projected from the cabin roof on either side. The wing units were gimble-mounted for lift and attitude control. The cabin was snug, with three rows of seats: a single pilot's seat in the nose, with two high-backed passenger seats behind it and a more functional bench seat behind them against the cabin's rear partition.
I strapped myself into the pilot's seat and ran a pre-flight to wake the systems up as Eleena and Aemos installed themselves in the pair of seats behind me. The instrument panel lit up green and there was a low sigh as the fans began to turn.
Eleena closed the hatch. The leaf-litter in the root cave began to twitch and flutter.
We'd heard nothing from Vance since we entered the wild woodland. I reached
