The Air War

Eighteen

‘This is it,’ Gizmer told them, flitting into the Fly-kinden common room at head height.

There were a dozen or so sitting about the floor, Pingge and Kiin amongst them. They had not flown in three days, the routine of their training abruptly broken without explanation. Everyone had felt change on the wind.

‘How do you know?’ someone asked, but Pingge’s question overrode it. ‘Where?’

‘Myna,’ one of the Flies said immediately, but Gizmer shook his head irritably.

‘Myna’s gone,’ he told them. ‘Who’ve you been listening to, that you don’t know Myna’s gone? Szar as well, by now, I’d lay money on it. Maybe we fly against Maynes. Ant-kinden are stubborn.’

‘The Eighth Army has the Spearflights,’ Kiin said quietly. ‘That’s not what we’re trained for.’

‘Then what are we for?’ Pingge demanded. ‘Sitting about and getting fat, right now? Who’d have thought life in the army would be as grand as this?’ It was true, they ate well, had more time to themselves, slept better and drew more pay than they ever had in the factories. There was respect, too: they were with the army, and that meant something — even for Flies.

‘When they’re not chaining us inside the fliers,’ Gizmer muttered darkly, dropping down close to her.

‘Who’s even seen a pilot these last three days?’ Kiin asked.

There was a mutter of discussion: nobody had.

‘Final testing,’ someone put in. ‘I heard talk — some other hoop they wanted to jump the machines through.’

‘The machines aren’t at the airfield, either. They’ve taken them elsewhere, or they’ve flown them off without us,’ Gizmer put in. Of all of them, the yoke of the army chafed him the most. He was forever sneaking off and poking his nose into things, getting where he shouldn’t be and gleaning scraps of information.

‘Three days is a long time to be testing anything,’ Pingge observed. ‘Unless they failed the test and all crashed or something.’

This spurred a general ripple of laughter, but Kiin said, ‘Don’t.’

‘What? Sentiment, for the master race?’ Pingge jibed her. ‘Big bald Aarmon got to you, has he?’

‘Shut up, Pingge,’ Gizmer hissed. A moment later and the Fly-kinden fell silent as Aarmon himself walked into the room. He was wearing his aviator’s uniform, black insulated leathers with gold flashes at the shoulder, a chitin helm and goggles dangling by their straps from one hand. His clothes were creased, the tunic beneath sweat-stained where his cuirass was open down the front. Probably he had not been back in the capital for longer than it took to quit the airfield and march here.

‘Up, all of you,’ he ordered them. If he had heard Pingge talking, he gave no sign of it. As always — and as with all the pilots — his words were sparing, given only grudgingly. ‘Sergeant Kiin, rouse the others. All bombardiers to assemble in the quad, ten minutes.’ His soulless eyes raked across them, but paused on nobody. Then he ducked out of the room, leaving them to follow orders — and trusting them to do it. It had been a long time since the Wasps had needed to guard them.

‘Sergeant now, is it?’ Gizmer observed acidly.

Kiin shrugged desperately. ‘It’s just because I fly with him, it must be.’

Pingge smirked. ‘Oh, he likes you, that one. You always did go for the emotionless, goggle-eyed type.’

‘Come on, you heard him,’ Kiin said. ‘Up.’ She was already on her feet, and there was a general mutinous mutter as most of the Flies followed suit.

‘Going to make me call you “sir” now?’ Pingge goaded her.

‘Look, he’ll take it out of my hide if we’re not formed up within whatever time we have left,’ Kiin pleaded. ‘Come on, set an example.’

‘Right you are, sir.’ But Pingge got to her feet, and then hauled Gizmer up after her. ‘Drill and parades. I could get used to all of it but the standing about.’

Kiin headed into the sleeping quarters and managed to jolly along those Fly-kinden who had been taking the chance for a lie-in, then the entire company was out in the quad just about inside Aarmon’s deadline. The pilots were assembling at the same time, a good half of them plainly just out of their machines, back from whatever three-day test they had been engaged on.

‘Look,’ Pingge hissed. Most of the Flies had now learned the soldier’s trick of whispering on parade, barely moving their lips. Pingge jerked her head to indicate direction, and one by one the Fly-kinden’s eyes flicked over to the newcomers marching in.

For a moment it was as though they were looking back in time, for here they came: two score Wasp-kinden, the same number of Flies following. Look at them, they thought — a bunch of clueless, untrained factory workers, clerks and servants, frightened and undisciplined and without the faintest idea of what awaits them. Like looking in a mirror. Only it was not, not any more. The new Flies could only stare wide-eyed at Pingge, Kiin and the rest standing as straight as spears in their black tunics edged with yellow, soldiers of the Empire every bit as much as were the Light Airborne.

Then a murmur began amongst Pingge’s peers, not about the new Flies but the Wasps that had preceded them, now standing to attention across from Aarmon’s people.

‘Quiet!’ Kiin meant to hiss, but the word turned into an order somehow, and silenced them.

The new Wasp recruits stood with the same wordless discipline that Aarmon and his fellows had possessed since the Flies had first set eyes on them. Their faces betrayed no uncertainty or fear at this new assignment — indeed they betrayed little enough emotion at all. When Aamon strode out before them, there was none of the tensing or minute adjustments to the presence of a superior officer that soldiers would normally show — and it was plain that only some of them were regular soldiers, just as only some of Aarmon’s pilots had been. With these newcomers, though, the difference was considerably more marked.

Almost half of them were women.

It was unthinkable. Wasp women served and raised children, and perhaps sometimes looked after the family home and wealth while their menfolk fought. Wasp women did not stand impeccably to attention, in uniform. Yet here they were: eighteen women amongst twenty-two men, not standing apart, nor a step behind, but standing there as if they were equals.

Aarmon made eye contact with one of the new Wasps, and then the newcomers were marching into the barracks without a word, the Flies following behind them in a nervous, eddying mob. Going to take up our old rooms? Pingge wondered.

She knew that she should be nervous, too, but in the pit of her stomach she felt the first fluttering of excitement. All that training was finally about to come to something.

‘Sergeant Kiin, we march to Armour Square. Follow my company,’ Aarmon instructed, and Kiin’s voice piped back, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’m still not convinced we’ve not been called here for our own executions,’ Totho muttered as he descended the steps, carefully watched by at least half a dozen Wasp soldiers and a couple of their engineers.

Drephos turned away from the pair of Consortium men he had been talking to, brushing them aside with a wave of his gauntleted hand and ignoring their surly looks in response.

‘Overly elaborate, don’t you think?’ They had no privacy here in Capitas — with servants spying on them in the quarters they had been assigned, while here in Armour Square, below the very balcony the Empress would use, it seemed as if someone had detailed an entire army to keep an eye on them. In such conditions, Drephos’s response was simply to speak his mind and not care who heard him. To his mind, he had the Empire in a vice: the mechanical offspring of his genius were at the forefront of the war, and he considered himself irreplaceable. And, besides, he was hardly being coy with their engineers: so far they had got everything they had asked him for. If he was wrong, if he was expendable after all, then watching what he said would make no difference whatsoever, now that they were here, in the heart of Empire.

Being here in the first place was what had put Totho on edge, though. He had argued passionately against obeying the summons. ‘Plenty of Wasp-kinden, even, know to make themselves scarce when the word comes to return to Capitas,’ he hissed now, trying fruitlessly not to be overheard by their constant escort.

‘I’m assured the purges are over.’ Drephos’s bleak expression belied his words, but his dry smile suggested that such matters as purges were for lesser men to worry about. ‘Besides, I want a look at their new orthopters. What little I’ve heard is maddening… it sounds as though they’ve leapt ahead of the Solarnese models somehow..’ One of the Consortium men coughed pointedly, but Drephos ignored him. ‘You’ve set the similophone up?’ he asked Totho.

‘No thanks to everyone else. They were so worried I might be rigging a bomb or something, it took me three times as long as it should have done.’

The similophone was one of the Iron Glove Cartel’s rare peacetime inventions, a little toy that Drephos and Totho had cooked up together that was only now seeing wider use. It consisted of an ear that received sound, and a loom that transcribed the sound pattern into silk cloth, which a similophone drum could then decode and speak back. Totho and Drephos had used the device instead of writing letters, not so much for security but just because they were artificers, and they could.

Now their toy had been requested to bear witness to history in the making.

‘You can understand their caution, surely,’ Drephos said smoothly.

Totho grimaced darkly, leaning in to murmur, ‘I’m serious. We shouldn’t have come. You’re underestimating them, and you never met the Empress. She’s terrifying.’

Troops were marching into Armour Square now: a sample only of the might of the Empire. Totho could make out Light Airborne, infantry, Engineers, Aviation Corps, slavers, representatives from all the different machines that made the Empire run. The square was large, and there were hundreds of them standing shoulder to shoulder, all those different uniforms, all that armour, the patterns and designs, and all of it black and gold.

‘Colonel-Auxillian,’ one of the Consortium men put in. ‘If you will — we have so little time before the address.’

Drephos rounded on him grandly. ‘You have our greatshotters and you have our sentinels. What other of my wonders are you about to ask for?’

‘Colonel…’ Now it was the Consortium man’s turn to lean in, as though even he feared to be overheard by the ubiquitous guards. ‘The Empire would pay far more for the formula to the Bee-killer.’

‘The…’ And Drephos let the word trail off into a thoughtful pause that ended with, ‘So,’ and nothing more. His smile returned, and probably only Totho could tell that it was a little too fixed. ‘The Bee-killer, of course,’ he said smoothly, a moment later. ‘The formula did not survive the war. Do you think that I would not have made more, had I the means?’

‘The coffers of the Consortium-’ the man went on, but Drephos held up his metal hand again, imperiously.

‘It did not survive,’ he said curtly, and then turned away, his attention wholly directed up towards the balcony, where generals and other dignitaries were beginning to make their appearance.

‘We shouldn’t have come,’ Totho growled again, and this time Drephos said nothing.

From the ranks, Esmail watched a conspiracy assemble, a web being strung. He — which was to say Ostrec — was simply another soldier at this point: an officer of the Quartermaster Corps amongst his peers, and ostensibly not a sniff of the Rekef about him. All around, the other servants of the Empire marched in to form their serried ranks, all the organs of the Imperial war machine falling, unit by unit, into an expectant hush.

Esmail marked the faces: the newcomers, the absences. General Brugan was in place already, just left of centre, even now giving place to the Empress, though she had yet to appear. Further left was the bloated corpulence of Colonel Harvang, the impeccably turned-out Vecter lost in his shadow. There were a couple of new faces, too: majors in the Rekef Outlander arrived from the East-Empire, Brugan’s old stamping ground. True, there were a few up there, overlooking Armour Square, who were not Brugan’s, bought and sold: those who were too useful to dispose of, too doubtful to approach — engineers mostly. General Lien’s bald head gleamed in the sun, whilst beside him that bearded eccentric was presumably the genius aviation Major — no, Colonel, now — Varsec. Aside from these two, and a meagre handful of others, everyone up there whom Esmail could see was firmly in Brugan’s camp.

There had been a very subtle changing of the guard at certain levels of the palace, as men loyal to Brugan had been summoned in from distant posts. Others had received surprising postings — mid-ranking officers sent west to the front, Rekef men posted to the Principalities to spy on the savages. Everything had been above board, nothing irregular; in some cases reassignment had even come with a promotion attached. Only someone with a deep understanding of the hidden loyalties of Capitas would have understood that everyone coming in was Brugan’s man, while everyone going out was not.

The net was drawing tight, by the most delicate of stages. Esmail almost felt that he should hold his breath for it. Brugan was manoeuvring for a time when everyone around the Empress would be loyal to the general of the Rekef first, to the throne second.

Esmail-as-Ostrec was already standing to attention, but he — and every soldier there — still managed to straighten still further, shoulders back and brimming with Imperial pride, for the Empress had made her appearance, walking into the heart of Brugan’s net without seeming to notice.

To his eyes, she seemed to shine like the sun itself, the outpouring of her grand and unbridled power making him wonder that those others could simply stand so close without burning. Of course, they saw none of it: they were blindly Apt, and he must pretend to see none of it either, or else give himself away. Even so, he could not tear his gaze from her: Her Imperial Majesty Seda the First, Empress of all the Wasps, young and beautiful and commanding all eyes, all hearts. Esmail could almost hear the collective mental gasp of the soldiers all around him as Seda strode to the balcony rail and looked down on them. She wore a long gown of velvet, the sleeves loose so that they fell like wings and left her lower arms bare. Over this was buckled a cuirass and, although it was a fine piece of work, light and elegant, its resemblance to the banded mail of the Light Airborne was not by chance. She had a scabbarded sword at her side, such as no Imperial woman had ever openly worn before, and in her right hand was a slender lance, its narrow head a gilded dart. Her skin was like alabaster, her hair of gold. Esmail felt tears come to his eyes, seeing her, and did not know whether they were Ostrec’s or his own.

The building she had commandeered for this address was a flat-roofed, three-storey counting house of the Quartermaster Corps, previously just an abode of clerks and their numerate slaves. After today it would be known as the Little Palace, never again to be profaned by the murky business of commerce. The clerks would have to find themselves another haunt.

‘My people.’ Her voice was strong and clear, and the great mass of soldiers, almost two thousand of them all told, kept silent for her. Esmail was well aware that there must be at least another thousand in the buildings all around the square, looking out from windows and lesser balconies, or listening intently from within: Consortium merchants, craftsmen, the wealthy of good family, retired officers, slaves and the women of all of the above — here was the Empire in miniature.

‘I am to ask great things of you,’ Seda told them, as if she was speaking to each Wasp individually. ‘Our Empire has fought through many trying times, but our trials are not over; indeed, they are barely begun.

‘Your blood and sweat has recaptured the Empire and returned it to its rightful ruler,’ she told them. ‘You have held your loyalty firm, when a dozen voices tried to prise you away from your convictions. You have marched on the traitor-governors, who fancied themselves a dozen little emperors, and who would have diluted the grandeur of our state until we had become nothing better than the Lowlands: so many little cities fighting one another. I speak to you, therefore, as heroes of the Empire, saviours of its pride and peace. Do you ask: is my work not done?’

She actually paused for an answer, and Esmail felt it well up within him, despite himself. He opened his mouth, terrified by his loss of control, about to single himself out in all this great throng.

‘ No! ’ The shout arose from hundreds of throats all around him.

‘No,’ she agreed quietly, in the echo, but every man there heard her. ‘For there are those who look upon all we have built with envious eyes. There are those lesser kinden, little men, who know that they can never achieve what we have achieved, and whose only response is to try and tear down what we have made. They have worked against us, sometimes even amongst us, for many years. Perhaps there are even some here now whose loyalties are bought by the enemies of the Empire.’

Esmail quashed a sudden up-welling of panic, feeling the mood of the men around him respond to the Empress’s tone, ugly and fierce. He wondered if there would be another purge soon, people dragged from their homes and workshops and barracks, branded disloyal, traitors. The men who stood here would cheer that to the echo. Until their own time came.

‘Do you think the traitor-governors worked alone?’ Seda demanded of them. ‘No! For there are those beyond our borders who encouraged them, and gave them aid.’ She let the words ring off the walls for a moment before continuing. ‘Do you think that Myna and its allies would dare raid our borders without help? No! For they were armed and instructed by our enemies. And now, now that we have regained our strength despite all of their schemes and machinations, they have declared their intent to destroy us utterly. They cannot abide to live in a world where we are strong, and where we are not dependent on them, as they have made their neighbours dependent upon them. They cannot tolerate the fact that we are stronger than them, and prouder than them, that we are better than them. My people, Collegium and its allies have declared war.’

She left another pause there, but not for words, and the angry roar of the crowd sounded like thunder, like the leadshotters, like war.

‘So I must call upon you once again,’ Seda urged them, her clear voice cutting through the sound of their anger. ‘The Empire calls on you, for the Empire is beset on all sides by its enemies, by the envy of lesser kinden. The Empire must be defended, and there is only one way to defeat the Collegiate threat once and for all!

‘I call upon you, each and every one of you, to return to your armies, to your subordinates, to your fellows. Tell them that the Empress has need of them. Tell them that the Empire has need of them.’ She thrust her spear into the air, and the sun flashed on its gilded tip. ‘Either we must spread our wings over the Lowlands and bring them within our shadow, or everything we have worked for will be for nothing. Either they will destroy us, with their cunning and their lies, or we must conquer them. Every soldier must do his duty if the Empire is to survive. The Empire places its trust in each and every one of you and all your comrades. Will you stand?’

‘ Yes! ’ There was no hesitation. Every throat was shouting out the word.

‘Will you defend the Empire?’ Seda cried.

‘Yes!’

‘Will you take war to the very gates of Collegium?’

‘Yes!’

‘Then you are my heroes, and because of you the Empire shall last a thousand years!’ she declared. ‘Go from here now! March out and spread the word! You have a duty but, more, you have a destiny. The Empire cannot fall! The Empire will not kneel! The Empire shall prevail, and it shall prevail through you, its champions!’

The roar of approval that followed must have been heard all the way across the city, and Esmail cheered too and, in that moment, forgot that he was not one of them.