'Gregor?' said Aemos, alarmed.
'I'm okay… it was Vance…' A quick, terrible psychic shriek from the direction of the estate. A psyker in pain.
I tried to raise him again, but there was nothing except a blurry wall of background anguish. Then I heard, for a second, his mind urging Medea, urging her to run, run and not to look back.
Again I gasped as a second jolt of agony rippled through the mental spectrum.
'God-Emperor damn it!' I cursed and threw the plane forward. The fans wailed. We were instantly surrounded by a maelstrom of leaves and dead twigs which rattled and pinged off the fuselage and windows. I nursed out just a few centimetres of lift to clear the ground, with the wing fans angled straight down, and we edged forward out of the Storm Oak's root cave on minimum thrust.
I kept one eye on the proximity scanner, which was throbbing red as it detected the structure enclosing us. As soon as it signaled that the tail boom had cleared the overhang of the root ball, I keyed in more lift and we rose, swirling the leaves of the clearing around us in a whirling eddy.
We hovered and turned slowly, once, twice, as I let the auspex's terrain tracker scan the area. Then I lined up.
'Uhm, Gregor?' Aemos said, leaning forward and pointing over my left arm at the illuminated compass ball. 'We're heading north.'
'Yes/
'It, uhm, goes without saying north is the direction we came from.'
'Yes. Sorry. We're going back/
I put the nose down, the wing jets whirred round to an aft three-quarter thrust in their socket mounts, and the craft raced off into the darkness.
I swept us through the forest at something like twenty knots, lights off. Visibility was virtually zero, so I flew using a combination of the auspex and the proximity scanner, reading the green and amber phantoms of
tree boles and branches as they loomed, steering around and under. Every now and then I cut it too fine, and the collision alert sounded as something swept across the screen in vivid red. There were plenty of near misses, but only once did I hit something – a small branch that snapped away, thankfully. Aemos and Eleena both cried out involuntar-
ily-
'Relax/ I urged them.
We'd have made better – and safer – progress above the forest canopy, but I wanted to stay concealed for as long as possible.
In vain, I reached out to find Vance's mind.
Barely avoiding a massive low branch, we came down a long slope under the trees, and the auspex showed me that we'd reached the edge of the woodland. The road was just ahead.
Through the tree-line, I could see light, pulsing white. Another flare. I cut the forward thrust, and crept forward on down-angled jets, just a drifting hover.