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Air-Base South covered over twenty square kilometres of low land south-west of the city itself. She could smell the coast a few kilometres north, and the sea air had layered a light morning haze across the field that the sun was just beginning to cook off.
    Vast defences ringed the field. Ditches and dykes, blast fences and stake lines, armoured nests for Hydra batteries, pillbox emplacements for raised missile cylinders. There was a patched perimeter track, busy at this hour with military trucks and weapons carriers moving both ways, and a leaner inner ring of anti-air batteries. To the south end of the field stood the great housing hangars and rockcrete armouries, to the north Operations control and the stark derricks and pylons of the vox, auspex and modar systems.
    A hash-shape of crossed airstrips covered the main inner area, the primary runways large enough to manage the big reciprocating-engined bombers the locals flew. Jagdea saw a few of them parked on a hardstand in the distance. Magogs, big and old and ugly. They’d used them back home on Phantine during the final offensive, desperate to get aloft anything that could fly and fight. Here they were a standard bombing mainstay. No wonder Enothis had been punished so hard.
    But most of the local machines had been shipped out to clear the field for the newcomers.
    Jagdea and her flight had arrived in darkness the night before. This was their first proper look at the base. It would serve; it would have to.
    Work gangs from the Munitorum were already busy making field conversions. Labourers were proofing up more hard-wall silos for the arriving machines, and in one place were beginning to dozer up one of the old runways to make additional parking bunkers. The newcomers’ aircraft, over seventy of them already, were dark shapes under netting in the clusters of anti-blast revetments to the east. There was a muddle of activity—chugging generators, clunking excavators, bare-chested rock-drill operators, growing heaps of spoil—all across the inner landscape of the field.
    Jagdea glanced at the chronograph strapped around the thick cuff of her flightsuit. They were right on time. Their transport had left the perimeter track and was bumping towards the nearest of the huge drome hangars.
    “Up and ready. Umbra Flight,” she ordered. The eleven aviators under her command gathered up their kits as the transport rolled to a stop.
    Jagdea jumped down and took a deep breath. “Here we go,” she muttered to Milan Blansher, her number two. Blansher was a grizzled veteran in his forties, his career tally of twenty-two kills the finest in Umbra Flight. He said little, but she trusted him with her life. He had unusually pale, distant eyes for a Phantine and sported a thick grey moustache, partly to lend himself an air of avuncular seniority, mostly to help conceal the ridge of white scar tissue where a piece of shell casing had split his face from his right nostril, down across both lips, to the point of his chin.
    “Here we go indeed,” he murmured, and hoisted his kit onto his shoulder. The others clambered down. Van Tull, Espere, Larice Asche with her hair up in a non-regulation bun, Del Ruth, Clovin, the boy Marquall, Waldon, forever whistling a melody-less tune, Zemmic, jangling with his cluster of lucky charms, Cordiale, Ranfre. Almost all of them made the superstitious bob down to touch the ground.
    Vander Marquall didn’t. He was gazing across the field, watching three machines of the Enothian Commonwealth Air Force crank up for launch. They were powerful, twin-engine delta-form planes, an Interceptor pattern known as Cyclones. Started from trolley-mounted primer coils, their massive piston engines sucked and thundered into life, kicking out plumes of blue smoke from the exhaust vents as the heavy props began to turn to a flickering blur. They rocked impatiently at their blocks as the ground crews rolled the carts aside. Marquall could see the two-man crews in the glass