'I suppose not.'
"What is it, old friend?'
I paused. Something…
I strode back to the south arch of the Spatian Gate and looked back down the huge river of the Triumph. Madorthene was with me. The War-master's retinue was just then beginning to pass under the Gate. Cymbals and horns clashed and blared. The noise of the crowd boomed in like a tidal wave surging down.
There were petals in the air. I remember that clearly. A blizzard of loose petals gusting up from the flowers the crowd was strewing.
A formation of twelve Lightnings was swooping in low from the south, coming down the length of the Triumph parade, following the Avenue of the Victor Bellum. Coming towards the Gate. They were in line abreast, the tips of their forward-swept wings almost touching. A display of perfect formation flying from the Battlefleet's best pilots. Sunlight glinted on their canopies and on the raked double-vanes of their tailplanes.
The sense of foreboding I had felt now became oppressively real. It was like heavy clouds had passed in front of the sun.
'Olm, I-'
'Emperor's mercy! He's in trouble, look!' Madorthene cried.
The fighters were half a kilometre from the Gate, moving at a high cruising speed. The left hand wingman suddenly wobbled, bucked…
…and veered.
The flier directly inside of him pulled hard to avoid a collision, and his starboard wing clipped the wingtip of the next Lightning in line. There was a bright puff of impact debris.
One by one, like pearls coming off a necklace, each aircraft was knocked out of the formation. The once-sleek line broke in utter disarray
Madorthene hurled me to the ground as the jets shrieked overhead, rattling the world with their afterburners.
The two that I had seen strike each other were spinning in the air, somersaulting like discarded toys, splintering trails of metal scrap behind them. In the confusion, it seemed to me as if several others had also accidentally collided.
One Lightning, over ten tonnes of almost supersonic metal, cartwheeled down and went into the crowd on the west side of the Avenue. It bounced at least once, showering human debris into the air. At its final impact, it became a massive fireball that belched up a blazing mushroom cloud a hundred metres into the air. Shock and berserk panic filled the crowd. The stench of flame and heat and promethium washed over me.
There was a flash and the ground shook as a second stricken Lightning spiralled in under the shadow the Gate. Then, almost simultaneously, a third and louder blast came as a third aircraft, sent lurching out of control, sheared off a wing on the top corner of the Spatian Gate itself, right above us, and began tumbling down, end over end.
In the face of this calamitous accident, the soldiers in the Triumph were scattering in all directions. I dragged Mador-thene back in under the arch as shattered chunks of the stricken aircraft avalanched down.
A catastrophe. A terrible, terrible catastrophe.
And it was just beginning.
SIX
Doom comes to Thracian.
Chaos unslipped.
Headshot.
Even at that stage, gripped by horror and outrage, I knew that a great hollow part of me deep in my soul could not, would not believe that this had simply been a tragic accident.
There were fire and explosions all around, mass panic, screaming.
And another sound. An extraordinary low moaning, a swelling, surging susurration that I realised was the sound two billion people make when they are panicking and in fear for their lives.
The crowds had spilled over onto the Avenue, quite beyond the measure of the arbites to contain them, fleeing both the dreadful crash sites and the fires, and also the imagined risk that to stand still somehow invited more Imperial warcraft to fall upon their heads.
The crowd moved as one, a fluid thing, like water. There was no decision making process, no ringleader. Mass instinct simply compelled the people who swamped the vast street, in awful, trampling tides, overwhelming the ranks of the Triumph, much of which was already breaking up in shocked dismay. There was no sound of music any more, no cheering, no drums or sirens. Just a braying insanity, a world turned on its head.
