Double Eagle by Dan Abnett

say he hadn’t done that! Please!
    “Eight! Have you got a malfunction? Marquall?” Van Tull’s voice exploded out of the speakers.
    Marquall snapped awake. He’d only been staring at the Cyclone for a second or two, but that was more than enough. His dive had punched him down through the fight layer. A miserable overshoot.
    “I’m okay, I’m okay!” he yelled, and instinctively pulled on the stick. It was a rookie mistake. He was coming up far too hard, bleeding off all the power he’d gained from the dive as his machine struggled to climb again. His airspeed dropped to a crawl.
    “You stupid fool!” he cried aloud.
    “Eight? Say again?”
    “I’m all right!” he snapped, swinging into a wide, curving turn to nurse some speed back into his wings. Almost at once, a Locust went past in front of him. With a jolt, he fired wildly, missed.
    Pearly las-shot dwindled away in front of him. A tone sounded. Weapons batteries out. He’d just done it again. He hadn’t deselected, and now his primary weapons were spent and dry. All thirty shots wasted in two futile bursts.
    Jagdea had looked up as her three wingmen came stooping into the fight. Van Tull’s machine went over across her two, and expertly splashed a banking Locust. The bat fire-balled, and Van Tull’s Thunderbolt rolled as it swept through the flame wash, its slipstream sucking fire and debris out behind it in a curious string. Espere made a fine pass, but his chosen target viffed at the last moment and went wide. Espere flattened neatly, dummied, and then rolled out left chasing another bat.
    Jagdea wasn’t quite sure what was going on with Marquall. The kid had come in like his arse was on fire, and unloaded a ridiculous quantity of las-power. Virgin nerves? Maybe. Maybe that explained why he’d also dropped long and then mushed off all his power in the worst dive recovery she’d seen outside of flight school.
    She wanted to break off and go to cover him, but the Locust was back on her, getting intermittent locks as she jinked and twisted.
    “Four-One Leader to Umbra Five.”
    “Go, Lead!”
    “Espere. Cover the boy, for Throne’s sake!”
    “On it!”
    Espere turned his Bolt over and burned towards Umbra Eight. It was wallowing now, making tentative jinks.
    “Eight, this is Five. You okay?”
    “Yeah, I’m… yeah.”
    “Eight, do you have a weapons malfunction?”
    “Negative, Eight.”
    “You just nailed the sky with what looked like full batteries.”
    “Negative, negative. I’m fine.”
    Espere shook his head. He was tense himself. Very tense, and it wasn’t just the fly-fight. Alone amongst the pilots of Umbra Flight, Pers Espere had not settled well with the Thunderbolts. He missed his old Lightning more than he could explain. In dispersal, the others would sit around, lauding their Bolts, and talking about them like they were lovers, wives, husbands. Espere just didn’t feel that way. His machine, serial Nine-Nine, did not suit him. It was an old machine, a veteran bird, lovingly maintained by the fitter teams. Espere didn’t know if it was Thunderbolts in general that disagreed with him, or Nine-Nine in particular. He was fighting with it all the time, wrestling to get it to do what he wanted. He had come to loathe the prospect of each sortie.
    In an Imperium where diligently-maintained war machines were often ten, twelve, fifteen times older than their pilots or drivers, there were plenty of tales of particular planes or tanks carrying a jinx. Cursed machines, plaguing the lives of their users until they were themselves destroyed. Serial Nine-Nine had a long and patchy record. Six pilots dead or maimed at the controls, two bad landings, three major refits. Espere had once asked Hemmen, his chief fitter, if Nine-Nine was jinxed. Hemmen had laughed, not altogether reassuringly, and said not. The following morning, there’d been a refuelling mishap. A junior fitter had been torched so badly he’d left the skin of his hands