The Air War

Eleven

Kymene stood on the wall at Myna, staring eastwards, and her scouts came and went in a constant flurry of arrivals and just as swift departures. She gripped the crenellations, straight as a spear shaft, her cloak of half black and half red gusting in the wind.

All around her, her city prepared for war. The walls were bustling with soldiers, and the sight was far different from when Myna had first been taken by the Empire. Then they had a little simple artillery up here and, other than that, just a host of soldiers, swords and shields and crossbowmen to face down the Wasp host. Any army marching up to Myna today would meet a more modern response. The walls themselves were essentially the same — the Empire had made no changes during the occupation, and the liberated Mynans had not had the time — but artillery emplacements were set all along the line of the wall, in fortified positions that gave cover against attack from below and above. The machines themselves included the Sarnesh-designed rackthrower ballistae and scrapshotters, designed to fill the air before them with spears or jagged metal, tearing up the Imperial Light Airborne even as it tried to gain the walls. Snapbows were much in evidence, too, swifter and more accurate than crossbows, which went some way to counterbalance the Wasp-kinden’s superior mobility.

We have given them all we could, Stenwold assured himself.

‘Commander.’ A Fly-kinden dropped down almost at Kymene’s feet, wearing the colours of Myna on a sash about his chest. ‘They have completed setting up their artillery on the far side of the Antosine hill country.’

Kymene frowned. ‘But that’s out of sight of the city. Do they expect us to come to them?’

‘The artillery is guarded, but separate to their main force. We’ve not been able to get a good look at what their army is bringing with it, Commander, but spyglass reports suggest there are automotives and other machines there. Perhaps the hill artillery is to cover a retreat.’

Kymene nodded briefly, dismissing him. There was a lull then, perhaps because most of Myna’s scouts had already reported, or were not coming back.

‘Maker,’ she said, descending the stone steps from the wall, and he followed after her, almost walking into her when she stopped.

‘You do not believe that the Wasps have taken such precautions to cover their retreat.’ It was a statement, not a question, and he realized that she had stepped down from the wall so that her soldiers would not overhear her.

‘I cannot think it,’ he agreed. ‘All reports suggest that they have the forces for a serious attack — and to keep an army that size on the field is costly if you don’t intend to use it.’

She looked away from him, and he could almost sense the wheels turning in her mind, plots and counterplots. ‘They wish us to strike the first blow, to break the treaty? Are they mounting their artillery there to provoke an attack, a sally to destroy it?’

‘Possibly.’ But the idea did not feel right to Stenwold. There were better, more tempting places to flaunt those siege engines, if that had been the plan.

‘The Szaren relief column will be with us in a day’s time. More troops are expected from Maynes. The longer the Empire waits, the greater our defending force will be. Their own reinforcements seem to have slowed to a trickle. Perhaps they have been testing our will to fight.’

‘Perhaps,’ Stenwold echoed, in the same doubting tone. When she rounded on him he spread his hands. ‘My gut says no. My instincts tell me that the Empire came here for a fight, and intends to bring it, and soon. We both know this has been brewing since their reunification. I cannot think they would throw so much of men and materiel into simple posturing.’

She shrugged. ‘We are as ready as we can be, and their forces are too far still to try and catch us off guard. If they want to invest the city in siege, they will have to commit themselves, and bring themselves within the range of our wall engines. They will find us ready for them this time.’ She met his eyes again. ‘They hate us, Maker. They hate us for having the temerity to demand our freedom. If this city falls a second time then they will find a hundred ways to make us suffer. We cannot let them back within our walls.’

There was a faint tremor and, in its wake, shouts were going up along the wall, bringing Stenwold and Kymene racing back to the crenellations. For a moment, Stenwold could not work out what had happened, but then he saw the plume of dust rising, five hundred yards and more outside the city. Have they set mines, buried explosives? he wondered. That looks like an artillery strike!

Kymene was already shouting for her scouts. ‘You missed their main engines!’ she was berating them. ‘While you were watching some decoy, they must have brought their leadshotters to bear!’

‘Commander, I was expecting the same thing!’ a Fly-kinden protested. ‘I was watching for just that. There are only the two packs of engines out past the Antosine, and the smaller engines with their main force. None of it could possibly…’

Stenwold leant out, staring across the uneven terrain in the direction that the Imperial artillery had apparently been set up. It was hilly, a little broken with rocks, rugged grazing land from which the farmers had fled when the black and gold flag had been sighted.

Was that a wisp of smoke there, such as a leadshotter might give out? Had he heard a distant, hollow knocking from that quarter even as he vaulted the steps?

A moment later, he heard it for sure and, watching carefully, he saw the smoke as well. Even as his mind was shouting, Impossible! he had already noted a new plume of dust, plain to all eyes, that fountained from the earth noticeably closer to the walls.

For a moment a grand silence fell over all the defenders of Myna, and the voice of a long-dead friend told him, You will know first from the sound.

He had come here to give steel to the Mynan defenders, to assure them that they did not stand alone. He had come too late, however.

The Empire’s assault on the city had begun.

There were flashes of light in the sky, a spotter from the Light Airborne reporting his best guess as to the relationship between city walls and the second ranging shot. Nearby, a lieutenant of the Engineers translated calmly, ‘Two hundred fifty far seventy-five left, calibrate.’

The greatshotter crews turned to their machines, which were to the familiar leadshotters what those devices were to simple catapults. Totho knew leadshotters, having seen them in action many times in the hands of both allies and enemies. Strengthened tubes, metal and bound with metal, in which a large charge of firepowder was detonated to fling a projectile in a shallow arc. The firepowder reaction, which had never produced efficient weapons on a personal scale, was still accurate enough by the standards of siege engines, and those weapons had slowly been replacing more primitive devices that derived their power from torsion engines and the like.

The greatshotters were ten times the size of their little ancestors, and their barrels tilted at a steep angle, as if they sought to make war on the sky itself. He had heard any number of engineers, both Imperial and Iron Glove, tell him that they could not possibly work.

The metallurgy had been the frustrating part, as he was no specialist, and had been forced to rely on others among Drephos’s people to find the precise alloys and construction that would survive the absurd pressures the barrel interior came under each time the weapon was discharged. The wait had given him plenty of time to solve the other major problem: how a weapon able to throw its missiles at a target some miles away could possibly be aimed.

Colonel — formerly Major — Ferric was excitedly explaining the process to the newly arrived General Roder, and Totho was happy to step back and let him do so. Wasps reacted to innovation so much better when it came from their own kind.

‘The thing is that, whilst most engineers can do the calculations for a regular leadshotter in their heads,’ the engineer was enthusing happily, ‘the margin of error for such a distant target is simply too great, and whilst we can, of course, simply keep shooting and adjusting by hand, it would take most of the day to get any useful bearing on the walls, and that’s assuming they let us alone that long.’

Roder nodded, saying nothing and simply listening, which Totho reckoned was a rare and valuable trait in a general.

‘Are you aware of what I mean by a Ratiocinator?’ Ferric asked. It became clear that Roder was not, so the enginer hurried on. ‘They’ve been known about for maybe fifty years — a Helleren invention — they’ve been unreliable for most of that time, and only capable of very simple tasks. Think of it like an abacus or — no, you must have seen a merchant’s reckoning wheel for currency or weights and measures — numbers in, numbers out, and the gearing on the wheel transforms the one to the other?’

Roder glanced sidelong at Totho even as he absorbed the existence of such devices. What’s the matter, General? Ashamed that a pair of halfbreeds has brought you such a bounty?

‘Then it’s a very complicated reckoning wheel — we put our best measurements and numbers in via these dials, you see,’ and Ferric was elbowing the crew aside to demonstrate, revealing an intricate arrangement of brass wheels set into the brass-and-wood box bolted to the greatshotter’s mountings. ‘We have seven different settings to describe the spatial relationship between our battery here — that’s our cluster of engines, General — and the target. The Ratiocinator takes our measurements — our best guesses really — and adjusts elevation and angle accordingly with great precision.’ Even as he said it, Totho heard steam hiss within the machine’s base, driving the gear chains that rotated it slightly on its turntable, whilst pistons ground up the angle of the barrel through a careful increment.

‘How can it know?’ Roder demanded, glancing at Totho again.

‘It doesn’t know anything, General,’ Ferric explained hastily. ‘It’s just numbers in, numbers out, like the reckoning wheel, only the gearing within is far more complicated and able to deal with many more variables. Think of it as though someone sat down with a book of tables and worked out every possible permutation beforehand — then it’s easy to see how, when we show it what our situation is by setting the dials just so, the machinery within will automatically progress through the relevant calculations.’

‘Easy,’ Roder echoed, plainly finding the concept anything but. ‘Carry on,’ he said at last and, even as he did, one of the crew shouted, ‘Loose!’ and the greatshotter spoke, fully half the barrel recoiling out of sight within the other half in order to absorb some of the shock of detonation. The sound was thunderous, but less than Totho might have expected, not so much more than that of two or three leadshotters discharging at once. Even so, everyone present had clapped their hands to their ears when the warning had come.

When he looked up, Roder was staring at him, stepping over, his face unreadable in its immobility. ‘You’re the snapbowman, they tell me,’ he grunted. ‘One of the Colonel-Auxillian’s original crew.’

‘Original crew’ was hardly true, but Totho nodded nonetheless. I will not call you ‘sir’, he promised himself. I save that for one man only. He waited for whatever slight or abuse the general of the Eighth Army would have for him.

‘Your weapons got me to the gates of Seldis, boy,’ Roder told him flatly. ‘I’d have got inside them, too, given time.’ He gave the nod of a man recognizing something of merit. ‘You’ll get me inside Myna with your engines, too. Ferric!’

The colonel of Engineers looked round, ‘Sir?’

‘Why are your shells undershooting the wall? Why not overshoot and them pull back towards us?’

‘It’s harder to judge the adjustments needed when the shots are landing in urban terrain, General,’ Ferric explained. ‘On the open ground, we can make better estimates and find the wall sooner.’

Roder eyed him sternly. ‘Colonel, you’re a grand engineer but you have something to learn about being a soldier. Shoot past the wall, not short of it. I don’t care if it takes longer to crack the city that way. It’ll be time well spent.’

His face, as he glanced briefly back at Totho, was as bland and pitiless as a desert, then he was striding off towards the band of messengers awaiting his convenience, calling, ‘Send word to the Aviation Corps!’

The next phase of the battle was underway already.

While Stenwold was still staring out at the hill country and the far-distant Imperial artillery positions, as though the Empire was a stage conjuror whose tricks might be unravelled by careful observation, Kymene was shouting, ‘Airmen, get our flying machines readied!’ and sending scouts off for the airfields. ‘We need to attack their engines,’ she told Stenwold shortly when he glanced over at her. ‘The fliers are the only way. They’re not intended to fight against ground targets, but our airmen will just have to improvise.’

The scouts had already reported a significant Air Corps presence within the Imperial army, and Kymene nodded, reading his expression. ‘At least this way we’re taking the battle to them,’ she told him.

They both heard the echoing sound of the far-off engine loosing, again just the one but, even as they turned their eyes towards the ground before the gates, soldiers were pointing behind them, deep into the city itself. Myna was built in defensive tiers up a hillside, with the main gate the only easily approachable point. The rising dust and smoke from the missile’s impact was plain to see, more than half the city away.

‘Fliers!’ someone shouted, and neither Stenwold nor Kymene were naive enough to think they meant the Mynan machines. Stenwold had his glass out first, quickly finding the circling dots that were rising from behind the main Wasp force. A moment later he passed it grimly to Kymene. The sleek, brutal lines of the Imperial Spearflights were hard to mistake, and he counted at least a score of them taking to the air.

‘Get the air defences ready,’ Kymene snapped out, but they both knew the wall engines were designed to keep off an assault by the Light Airborne, not to be pitched against swift and highflying orthopters.

‘Everyone to arms,’ was her next order, quietly now, to be taken by her scouts and scattered throughout the city. Stenwold saw the Ants of the Maynesh contingent already arrayed before the gate, awaiting the traditional start of hostilities that the Wasps had already disdained. Another impact smashed into a street behind them, far closer, so that the screams and cries were clearly audible. So far all the impacts, within and without, had been solid shot, but Stenwold guessed that was only for ranging, just as he supposed that, once the first missile touched near the wall, all the engines out there would be adopting the same trajectory, both Wasp positions beginning a sustained bombardment by way of some artifice he did not understand.

Edmon’s flier was named the Pacemark from the white stripes on the underside of its forewings that flashed pale with each upbeat. It was a solid, barrel-bodied orthopter, the front wings of light wooden slats interwoven, the rear just silk over a frame, with a cross-sectioned tail for stability. A pair of rotary piercers flanked and disfigured the cockpit at the fore, cramping the seat and obscuring the view, but they were far more efficient than the old repeating ballistae that many of his comrades still sported.

The ground crew wheeled his machine out, and he was already thanking his luck that he had rewound the engine himself just an hour ago. It was a nervous habit that infuriated the mechanics, but it meant he had a fully tensioned spring, ready to leap into the air. All about him, across the Robannen Square airfield, other machines of various shapes and designs were being brought into the light, whilst the handful that had already been out in the open air from patrol were being refuelled or rewound.

The cockpit of the Pacemark was open save for a glass-paned baffle to keep the worst of the wind off, so Edmon reached up and hauled himself in, making the undignified struggle look almost smooth with the ease of long experience. Every variant of this design was built too high off the ground for comfort, but none of the airmen wanted to be seen using steps.

‘Target is the enemy artillery that is a little over two miles beyond the walls, out towards the Antosine,’ a militia officer was calling out.

‘ How far?’ called Vorses from the cockpit of his Stonefly, and someone else demanded, ‘What about the artillery that’s actually loosing on the city, then?’

‘Two miles out towards the Antosine,’ the officer repeated. ‘Orders are clear and confirmed. Use your piercers and ballistae, inflict what damage you can, then return here for reassignment.’ He had his mouth open still, more orders on the way, but at that moment a flier screamed overhead in a blur of wings, and the west side of the airfield became a fireball, the hangar mouth there wreathed in instant flames, men rushing out, some burning, with others trying to drag them to the ground. A moment later there was a sharp detonation as an open fuel barrel caught and blew.

‘Get in the air! Get in the air!’ Edmon roared, hands already reaching for his controls, letting slip the gear train that threw his Pacemark ’s wings into life, wrenching the machine vertically into the air and slapping a couple of incautious mechanics to the ground at the same time. He had no opportunity for apologies or regrets. There were Imperial fliers in the skies over Myna, and they were wheeling over all three major airfields. Edmon saw the bright flash of more incendiaries, and imagined the air power of Myna vulnerable on the ground, at the mercy of whatever means the Wasps were using to attack it. The artillery would have to wait.

Beneath him, in the shadow of his wings, the other Mynan airmen — and women — were scrambling to get their fliers off the ground. Edmon had a moment’s glimpse of the city around him — an amalgam of wheeling streets as he hauled his Pacemark up above rooftop level — distinguishing a scattered constellation of flames from the Spearflights’ incendiaries and tall pillars of dust from the ranging shots of the siege engines. He felt his heart cry out against it: his Myna, his city, his nation. He had lived through the last occupation. He knew there was no way back into slavery that would not break his people.

He backed his machine’s wings, trying to wait over the field while Vorses and the others got aloft, but the Pacemark would never hover at the best of times, and he felt it slide sideways in the air, forcing him to jerk its nose up and claw for more height. Then a trio of Spearflights were darting across the face of the city towards him, pulling higher as they reached the airfield.

He wrestled with the controls for a moment, hearing that vicious knocking sound the Pacemark always made when he tried to yank it into a sudden turn. The piercers spun up nicely, Solarnese machinery five years old shaming the Mynan machine they were set into. Even as he found a line that would intercept the Imperial fliers, flames were gouting along an adjacent street, just washing out on to the airfield. They must be dropping grenades, but no grenade ever lifted by man could hold such an incendiary charge.

He clenched on the trigger, cutting upwards at their bellies as they rattled overhead. The leftmost of the Wasp fliers bucked, wings stilled for a second before thundering into life again, but none of them stopped. Edmon wrenched at the stick savagely, trying to drag the Pacemark round so that he could attack them from behind.

Fire bloomed across the airfield. He imagined he could feel the wash of heat, high up as he was. He saw Vorses’s Stonefly instantly ablaze, even twenty feet off the ground, its wings shedding fire in a trail of embers, matchwood and crisping silk. Its ascent became a dive, almost graceful, as though Vorses, in the midst of the inferno, had decided to quit his life in the same style that he had lived it. Another orthopter was clipped, the silk of one wing instantly charring and unravelling, tilting all the way over as its pilot fought for control, the burning wingtip gently touching the smouldering grass of the airfield and instantly flying apart, the impact whiplashing up through the machine itself. Edmon could hear a voice, no words but just a sound of horror that nobody had ever had the heart to name. It was his own, he knew. It was his, and he could not stop it.

Another two fixed-wings had caught the brunt of a second explosion, one of them still lazily taxiing for a take-off that would never come. Others of his countrymen had got into the air by the skin of their teeth, fleeing the fire, desperate for height lest another flight of Imperial machines pass overhead any moment. Then Edmon could spare his comrades no more time. He had somehow brought the Pacemark into a messy line behind a Spearflight, jockeying and nudging to bring the piercers to bear.

He had flown against the Empire in a few border skirmishes around the end of last year, more posturing than killing. He knew, though — and the understanding sat like lead on his stomach — that the Spearflights were faster and more nimble than his Pacemark and most of the mishmash that was the Mynan air force. After all, what could Myna do, liberated into a callous world so abruptly, and with so little time to prepare for this moment? The Consensus had begged and borrowed, and bought what they could with the little credit the city could raise: securing the cast-offs of Helleron and Sarn and Collegium. Edmon had spent most of his savings on the piercers the Pacemark was armed with. The city could not afford them.

He saw it then: there had been a little finned bulk clutched to the Spearflight’s belly by stubby legs, and now they flexed open and the missile was falling, wildly at first but then stabilizing, coming down towards the government district where the Consensus was no doubt meeting to shout at one another and demand that something must be done. Even before the flames began erupting, another bulb had slipped into that exacting metal grip, ready for a new target.

Edmon found his line, feeling himself drawn into place by sheer rage and hatred and desperation, and his piercers hammered back and forth, silvering the air between him and the Wasp with a lancing train of bolts. The Spearflight was more sluggish than he recalled them being, weighed down by the load of death it was carrying, and although its pilot tried to pitch it sideways to avoid his shot, Edmon held his place beautifully, neater than he ever had in training, seeing his bolts flay the enemy orthopter’s hooked tail, and then smash one of the wings to splinters, the Spearflight abruptly falling into a spin, out of control and plummeting.

He was already hauling back on the stick, forcing the Pacemark into a reluctant climb out of the sights of a notional enemy that turned out to be a real one. He felt a single solid impact somewhere behind him, the robust barrel of his craft’s hull earning its keep, and gyred his orthopter back across the breadth of Myna, avoiding shot and seeking a new target all at the same time, hoping that one of the others would spot his pursuer and put enough pressure on so that Edmon could escape. Bolts zipped past him to the right, and then above, so that he dropped from the climb, veering steeply right and downwards, then pulling up almost immediately, hoping to fool the Wasp into overshooting.

He glimpsed brief, mad snatches of the sky over Myna, the circling dots of other machines, more trios of Spearflights trailing their fiery cargoes. Some of the machines he spotted must have been Mynan, fighting as he was fighting. He had no idea how many had even made it into the air.

Another bolt struck, feeling as if it had come from directly behind, but he was casting the Pacemark about randomly enough for only the odd shot to reach him, not any kind of sustained burst. Even so, the Wasp was relentless, refusing to be thrown off. Edmon swung his orthopter back towards the Robannen Square airfield, in the hope of picking up reinforcements there. Even as he did, another Spearflight crossed his view ahead, and he managed to rake a dozen bolts across its hull as he fled onwards, seeing it falter but not quite fall.

The airfield was now completely ablaze, even the stone seeming to crackle furiously. The only Mynan machines were on the ground and half consumed. Another bolt clipped him, striking splinters from the rip of the cockpit.

He threw a lever to fold the Pacemark ’s hindwings down along the tail and dropped.

Follow me, will you, you bastard?

The wooden forewings were labouring, making heavy work of keeping the machine in the air at all. Abruptly his world was a hot glare, the air about him turned instantly to choking smoke.

The Spearflights used wood-framed silk for all four wings, that much he knew. Wood burned, but silk practically disintegrated in a flame.

He dropped, craning back for a second, looking for his enemy.

There! The Wasp was pulling out already, not so brave now he had an enemy he could not hide behind. Edmon closed his eyes for a second against the smoke, against the thought of burning to death, and pulled back hard, the forewings’ clatter reaching a new strained pitch. He was slow with just two wings, so slow he thought he might fall from the air entirely. Slow enough that the Wasp passed overhead and into his sights despite everything the Imperial pilot could do to try and prevent it.

Edmon released the Pacemark ’s hindwings and felt the sudden leap as his flier regained full use of the air, his piercer strafing across the Spearflight’s belly and tail, punching holes but striking nothing vital. Even so, the game had been turned right round, and now it was the Wasp’s turn to flee across the city, with Edmon in fierce pursuit.

The Pacemark ’s wings and body were smouldering, and it was touch and go whether the rush of wind would fan them or put them out. Then the other Spearflights were diving on him, and he had other worries.

Bolts skipped and danced all about him, as though he was flying through rain, and he tipped the Pacemark sideways, turning on the point of one wing just ten feet over the rooftops, then slinging the orthopter back towards the gates. The manoeuvre caught some of the Wasps off guard, or perhaps they simply had other priorities, but there were still three jostling behind him as he broke away across the city.

He felt at least two more impacts, but still the killing scythe of shot never quite found him. Had there been only two of them then he might not have lasted, but they were getting in one another’s way, coming perilously close to clipping each other from the sky in their eagerness to be the one that downed him. His mind was racing, seeing flashes in the corners of his eyes that could only mean more incendiaries falling on his city while he was harried out of the way, unable to defend his people.

He witnessed the moment that the enemy artillery found the walls.

He had lost track of the shelling, but abruptly the lone engine had found the range, and a moment later every one of the Empire’s far-off weapons had loosed. As he sent the Pacemark scudding along the line of the wall, there was an appalling series of cracks and flashes, stone-eater acid shells alternating with wall-cracker explosives. The Mynan defences held under the first thundering salvo, but Edmon knew that there were more coming, and the walls were old, still the same stones that had failed to keep the Empire out the first time.

Three bolts punched splinter-edged holes in his right fore-wing and another clipped his left shoulder, the pain brief and fierce, his teeth clenching. He tried slowing to make them overshoot, but they matched him speed for speed, and they could go slower than he could without stalling and dropping from the sky. Desperately he sent his vessel over the wall, dropping into its shadow for a brief respite, expecting to see the Imperial Light Airborne and ground forces already on the move.

They were not. They still sat well out of the reach of the Mynan wall engines, letting their machines carry the fight to Myna.

The shock of no army at the gates left him numb: the utter contempt for it, and all it said about the way the Wasps saw the attack, and his people. Not even worth drawing a sword over. Fury seized him and shook him in its jaws, and he fought the Pacemark round, believing in that moment that sheer anger would overcome aerodynamics to bring him face to face with the Spearflights. They stayed nimbly behind him, though he lost them their line on him, bolts flying wide as he threw his orthopter about the sky.

Then there was another flying machine cutting across him, not a Wasp craft, nor any he knew from Myna’s airfields. He had a brief glimpse of a small hull, a solitary pair of wings blurring about the hunch of its engine housing, and then one of the pursuing Wasp Spearflights jolted in the air, shuddering under piercer bolts, before coming apart as though someone had magically removed half the screws, as fragments of wing and body became a shattered cloud beneath the pounding.

The remaining two split up, one following Edmon relentlessly, the other rising to meet this new challenger. The little two-winged flier slid sidelong in the air, deft as a rapier, and the Spearflight that had been so agile behind Edmon now seemed to lumber past it like a fat man.

Then a scatter of bolts struck about the Pacemark, at least one holing the main hull before bounding from the engine housing to ricochet about inside. Edmon lost a few yards of height without meaning to, his wings stuttering awkwardly before finding their rhythm, and the Spearflight was stooping on him, driving him into the city wall, not letting him get clear.

For a moment, he and his antagonist were enveloped in fire and stone shards and acrid smoke as they ran the gauntlet of the Imperial artillery’s assault on the wall, cutting through it so fast that the dust scratched Edmon’s goggles, scored his skin raw and blasted the paint from his orthopter’s hull. Then he was out again and skimming the very top of the wall, the lancing silver lines of piercer bolts dancing back and forth as the Spearflight tried to pin him to the stones.

He saw what was ahead and yanked on the stick, feeling a juddering of new impacts, trusting to the Pacemark ’s robust hull to weather it.

Some Mynan artillerist was awake and ready. As Edmon hauled himself out of the way the wall engine he had nearly flown into had come about and, immediately behind him, the Wasp orthopter flew into a wall of scrapshot, disintegrating instantly and utterly.

Free for a moment, Edmon turned the Pacemark back over Myna, trying to encompass all that he was seeing. There were isolated fires across the city, some in strategic areas, most others simply strewn randomly by inaccurate or capricious Wasp pilots. The walls and gate were under a solid, continuous pounding, but some of the Imperial siege engines had now started throwing incendiary shells deeper into the city.

Moments, it’s only been moments since the attack started. We’ve already lost.

He could feel the Pacemark ’s clockwork slowing, too many tight turns meeting damaged gear trains, and he knew he would have to find somewhere to set it down that was not on fire. In that moment he saw the strange orthopter again, coming in ahead and to the right, slowing to match his speed. He caught the brief flash of a heliograph, but had to wait for the message to be repeated before he saw the pilot was signalling a need to land as well.

But the Wasps… He looked around him, but the skies were almost clear. The Wasp pilots had taken their craft back to camp for refuelling, he guessed. The artillery was keeping their work warm for them while they rested.

He did not want to land. He did not want to face the enormity of what was happening to his city, to find out how many of the faces he had seen only this morning were lost forever. The mechanical demands of the Pacemark were becoming more insistent, however, and he let the orthopter drop lower, heading for whichever airfield seemed the most intact.