The Air War

Twenty-Five

‘Well now, about time,’ Banjacs Gripshod ground out through gritted teeth. ‘I wondered which of you lazy, self-obssessed midgets would finally dare speak to me.’

He had been bearded in his own bedchamber, where house arrest had confined him because the Company men guarding him did not dare let him loose at the machinery that took up so much of his home. The sight of him was not encouraging: skinny, ancient and unwashed, he glowered out at Jodry Drillen as if imprisoned between his fierce eyebrows and wild beard.

‘If we can spare the pleasantries-’ Jodry began, then stopped. ‘ Midget? ’

‘Intellectual midget,’ Banjacs spat. ‘I always knew you’d never amount to anything, Drillen, and now you’re the man who does the Assembly’s dirty work, eh?’

‘I am the Speaker,’ Jodry said, wounded pride replacing his usual composure.

‘Who’d vote for you?’ the old man demanded.

‘You know I’m the Speaker, Banjacs, and this sort of behaviour isn’t helping your case.’

‘Case?’ As if Banjacs had never heard the word before.

‘You murdered Reyna Pullard,’ Jodry reminded him hotly.

‘She was a spy!’ the old artificer hissed.

‘She was my spy, spying on you because you were doing something that might endanger the city. Did you think all those materials and parts you were buying didn’t raise a few eyebrows?’

‘Jodry,’ a new voice came from outside the room, ‘this isn’t achieving anything.’

Jodry sagged massively. ‘Right, well,’ he said, awkwardly. ‘I have been asked to at least give you a hearing.’

‘Well, isn’t that large of you,’ Banjacs snarled. ‘So you drag your carcass over here past midnight because speaking to me’s plainly at the top of your list. Who interceded anyway? Who still cares? Why should I deign to speak with you?’

‘Banjacs, be quiet.’ Another old Beetle man emerged from Jodry’s prodigious shadow. He was at least a decade Banjacs’s junior, but there was a certain resemblance in their faces, had Banjacs only been clean shaven. His presence chastened the older man instantly, the artificer having the grace to look a little shamefaced.

‘Berjek,’ he noted.

‘Banjacs,’ said Berjek Gripshod, his brother. ‘Believe me when I say that Master Drillen has very long list these days. However, he has granted me a favour and come to speak with you. Don’t waste the time.’

Jodry looked about for a chair, and slumped into it with a creak. ‘Right, then, here I am,’ he announced. ‘The city’s fallen down about my ears, the Empire’s fliers are expected with the dawn, there’s an army that’s probably got as far as the Felyal and is now headed right here. What else, Banjacs? What am I supposed to do with you? I’m told you want to help.’

Apparently this was the wrong thing to say. ‘ Help? ’ Banjacs cursed. ‘I won’t waste my time with whatever wretched plan you have, Drillen. You should be helping me! Give me command of the city’s defences, let me complete my machine, and you’ll never worry about anything again, believe me!’

‘I fear that may be true,’ Jodry managed to keep a level tone. ‘As for your machine, well-’

‘Did you truly think I didn’t see it coming?’ Banjacs almost shouted over him, his sudden vehemence rocking Jodry backwards in the chair. ‘From the moment that Lial Morless showed us what was possible, this day has been coming… has been inevitable! But nobody thought it through! Nobody looked ahead! Only me, me! You’ll give me what I want, Drillen, because there’s nobody else. Only I can save the city, but it’s men like you, cowardly men without vision, who stand in my way!’ He had his hands extended, as though trying to strangle Jodry at a distance.

‘Banjacs!’ Berjek snapped and, into the silence that followed, added, ‘Jodry, do you hear…?’

They felt as much as heard the impact, the rumble of it from outside the window, the shudder beneath their feet.

‘They — ah — munitions testing? Over at the College?’ Jodry stammered.

A second blast reached them, more distantly. Berjek was at the window. ‘Jodry,’ he said, his voice abruptly hollow, ‘I see flames.’

Jodry shouldered his way to the window, looking out and seeing a red edge to the night, hearing faint cries, shrieks and a familiar — all too familiar — sound: engines over the city, but in darkness, invisible.

‘No,’ he got out. ‘It’s not dawn yet — only just midnight — I won’t have it!’

But the third booming echo put paid to such illusions, and a moment later he was forcing his bulk out of the room, thundering down the stairs to get out of the mad artificer’s house and go… who knew where?

Behind him the shrill tones of Banjacs Gripshod followed him down the street, ‘Coward! Run, why don’t you! You need me! You need me!’

Straessa — Subordinate Officer Antspider to her troops — was already on the streets with as many of her followers as she could muster in a minute and a half. Thankfully, Chief Officer Marteus had insisted that the members of the Coldstone Company sleep in barracks like soldiers. The others, Maker’s Own and Outwright’s, went home to their own beds like proper Collegiate citizens, but the renegade Ant was used to armies, not civilian militias and, now there was a war on, he expected his followers to act like an army too.

This meant that, in the moments after the first explosion, individual members of the other two Companies were still stumbling out of bed, pulling on their clothes, pausing to see if they had imagined it, trying to find their armour, then ending up in the streets and searching for an officer, an armoury, a purpose. By that time the Coldstone Company, through the intractability of their leader, was already out in force.

But not to fight, of course. They had their snapbows, their pikes and most, like the Antspider, had swords at their hip, but they had nothing that would touch an Imperial orthopter. Their city was at war, the civilian casualties already in their scores and Collegium’s army had not so much as loosed a shot in anger.

‘The airfield. Come on.’ The warehouse that Marteus had co-opted for this division of his Company was sited where they could at least be on hand to assist the aviators. Straessa and her two dozen had got halfway down the street towards their destination when someone called out, ‘It’s not the airstrip, Antspider!’

She skidded to a halt. ‘Then they’ll…’ The explosion had been so near, though, and there was nothing else worth bombing out here. ‘Someone get up above and tell me what’s going on!’ She was still learning the whole leadership business, but it always reassured her to know that Marteus used essentially the same technique of shouting at people until things got done.

One of her Fly-kinden, a tinsmith by trade, sped vertically up past roof level, high enough that Straessa could only find him against the night sky with difficulty. He came down a moment later, looking a little shaken. ‘Redlift Way, chief. Going up like a furnace.’

‘But there’s nothing on Redlift Way,’ someone else objected, and the Fly rounded on him, fists balled at being doubted.

‘Enough! Let’s go,’ the Antspider snapped at them both, and then led by example. Inside her head she was agreeing with the dissenter, though: Redlift’s no use to anyone, just a terrace of houses and that little taverna with the theatre out back. Maybe someone crashed a flier into it. By that time she had a clear sight down an alley whose far end was limned with the fierce light of flames, and there was a radiance even at roof level from up ahead. It’s on fire, it really is. But what…?

There had been a few distant crumps, and the night air was droning with the sound of Farsphex, but even then she could not quite reconcile it all in her mind until another bomb struck where Redlift Way met Spurn Street, wholly within her view. She saw the flat roof of one house implode with the impact, and a moment later all the windows blew out, fragments of the shutters raking the air like grenade shrapnel, and the angry glare of flames was abruptly leering out at every quarter, bright enough for the next Farsphex passing over to be plainly visible against the dark sky.

For a moment she could only stare, even as Gerethwy began calling for someone to summon the firefighters, to fetch a pumping engine. Then she heard the screams start.

She gave no order, for there was no room in her mind for that. She simply started running towards the stricken house, and some of her people were soon with her, whilst others followed Gerethwy’s advice and went to get a pump to turn on the flames.

Pingge let the next bomb fall, concentrating hard on only the science of her new profession. Her current assignment presented her with a range of new challenges, most of them not connected to the night flight. Focus was everything.

As they had neared Collegium, having taken a longer, looped route to come in after dark, she had asked Scain about targets. She’d had a map of Collegium spread across her knees, written and overwritten with prior strikes, but this time nobody had primed her in advance. ‘I mean, I see better in the dark than you, right, but not like a Moth or anything, sir. It’s not going to be precise.’ Through the open bomb-hatch she could see a couple of the other Farsphex. To give the night attack its maximum impact they had increased the size of the flight by half — thirty machines droning their way towards the Beetle city.

‘Don’t worry about precise,’ Scain had called back to her over the noise of the engine. ‘Listen, Aarmon has a detail who’re going to go after specific targets, so that’s not your problem. Ludon has a detail that will attack anything the Collegiates get into the air, if they even do. The rest of you are to let fly anywhere that looks promising.’

‘Promising like how, sir?’ Pingge had asked him.

‘Concentrations of buildings.’

‘Yeah, but Collegium’s a city, right, sir? It’s all concentrations of buildings.’ She had raised the pitch of her voice, thinking that she was not hearing him properly but an uncontrollable yawn mangled the last word. Even after taking a couple of naps, bundled up in a blanket against the encroaching cold, she was still bone weary.

‘Take your Chneuma,’ Scain had ordered promptly. ‘We’re close enough.’

Reluctantly, she had chewed the bitter pill, but Scain would not relent until she had swallowed it. Immediately she had felt warmer, although uncomfortably aware that she couldn’t really be warmer. The drug made her feel as though she could not sit still, as though she should be doing something with her hands.

‘Seriously, though, sir, I mean, concentrations of buildings? Most of it’s just someone’s house or something.’

‘That’s right.’ Glancing back at her, there had been a curious expression on Scain’s face. ‘Shops, businesses, homes, mostly homes. With the Second getting closer, Aarmon says we’re attacking their will to fight. It’s the new plan straight from the top. Which means Rekef Outlander, to my thinking.’ She had never known Scain to rattle on like this, but then that was probably his own Chneuma talking, the double dose the pilots had taken.

‘But sir…’ she had said. ‘I mean, that’s not… not what we do.’

‘We obey orders,’ he had snapped over his shoulder, hunching inwards, and had not countenanced the subject being raised again.

Now over Collegium, she let the bombs fall, lining up the reticule carefully on a row of roofs so that the precious cargo of destruction would not be wasted on an open street or square. The first impact had almost paralysed her, her imagination running briefly out of control. This was not soldier work. She had just destroyed someone’s home. There would be a family, children. The orders had to be wrong. Someone had made a mistake. And, all the while, her hands were working at the reticule, selecting the next target out of the cityscape ahead, so that she had let the second bomb go as thoughtlessly as if it had been a training exercise, even as she still agonized over the first.

And its falling line had been perfect, her aim immaculate.

‘The thing is… the thing is we’re saving lives,’ came Scain’s voice unexpectedly, as she acquired her next target. ‘The Second will be at the gates soon. Breaking the morale of the city will mean fewer of our people die in the attack; fewer of the enemy as well. They just need to be made to understand.’

But Pingge was not listening, merely walking a delicate tightrope in her mind. The worst thing was not the horror and empathy she felt, the trap of knowing that there were actual people below, whom she was hurting and killing. The real difficulty was the opposite: because she was so high up, and so detached, and how easy it was to measure everything against her technical performance, the clinical gauge of accuracy and effect. How easy it would be to assess each explosion on how well she had placed it, how grand the result: Look, that was a big one — must have been a workshop or a brewery, plenty for the incendiary to work on! In just the same way, she imagined, a Rekef interrogator would go about his work, and see the agonies of his subject as merely the proper dues of his craft.

So she concentrated only on the mechanisms and the movements, the calm exercise of her skill, and desperately hoped that the after-effects of the Chneuma would not bring her dreams.

Castre Gorenn dropped from the sky almost into the midst of the Antspider’s detachment, nearly getting herself spitted on a pike. The Dragonfly-kinden had turned up at Collegium’s gates claiming to be the Commonweal Retaliatory Force, and demanding to sign up with the city’s defenders. Marteus had assigned her to the Antspider because Straessa was, to quote, ‘Sub-officer in charge of freaks’. Since then Gorenn had refused to use Collegiate weapons or tactics, roving about with her longbow behind the formations of pike and shot. Only her speed and accuracy with the weapon had given the Antspider any hope that this woman would be useful at all.

Now, however, she was proving her worth, if only because Straessa had few Fly-kinden to call on for quick scouting and messaging, and Gorenn could fly as fast and see as well as they could.

‘Whole street gone up that way,’ the Dragonfly reported. ‘Thropters just gone overhead, probably coming back soon.’

‘ Which street?’ the Antspider demanded.

‘A street. The one over there. Five streets between us and it.’ Because to Castre Gorenn the idea of naming streets — of having a city that was big enough to need it — was wholly new. There were no Flies about, though, and Straessa was trying to sort out her mental map of the city even as she and her followers began to run, the pattering of their boots eclipsed as Gerethwy got the pumping engine under way, clack-clacking on its four clockwork legs.

We’re on Fen Way, now crossing Parthell, next is Worry Lane, then the Broads, then… but the Antspider’s mind was already racing ahead, because these were familiar names, not so far from the College. She could name tavernas and chop houses, a music hall she had been to, closer and closer to…

She doubled her speed abruptly, heedless of the heft of her Company-issue breastplate, leaving the rest of them behind in a clatter of pikes and snapbows. ‘Gerethwy!’ she was shouting, as though only he mattered, but he was busy guiding the pumping engine, and surely they’d need the pumping engine…

She burst on to Wallender Street, skidding on the uneven paving, a blast of heat striking her as though it were a fist. No, no, no — there was the Wall Taverna, tongues of flame roaring from the sockets of its windows, that brightly coloured awning she knew so well already nothing more than floating, embering scraps of cloth, and the chairs and tables like bright skeletons within the crackling interior. That was the tenement next to it, four storeys converted to five, where all the Fly-kinden had lived: the factory workers and the rail-side workers and the musicians who had practised late evenings out on the roof. And now the same little people were frantically darting in and out with whatever possessions they could salvage, or being driven back by the fire and the smoke.

Castre Gorenn was already touching down next to her, a bow in her hand as though she could fight any of this. Her long, golden face was cast in ruby by the leaping flames.

There, beyond the tenement, blazing like a pyre, was Raullo Mummers’s studio, and the apartments above it, all leaping with gorging fire, the artist’s circular window blazing forth like a raging eye. The Antspider tried to yell some order, at who she knew not, but all that came out was a choked sob as she rushed forward, heedless of the heat. Elsewhere in the city, other bombs were falling, and not so far away, but she barely registered them.

The street was clogged with people, hurt and frightened, panicking about those they could not find, milling and screaming and shouting at each other. Straessa passed from face to face, grabbing out to spin people so that the fire could light up their features, shouldering her way through the crowd. She was trying to shout out names, but nothing coherent would emerge. Then she stood before the building itself, and the fire shouted right back at her, roaring and consuming, gutting everything down to the bare stone. The Empire’s incendiaries burned as no natural fire could have done.

Can there be anyone inside there? She braced herself, but there couldn’t, of course. It was impossible. Nothing could have lived and yet, and yet Gorenn grabbed her as she pushed forwards, the roasting air like a physical barrier. For a moment she was wrestling with the Dragonfly, then thrusting her away, not to the ground but upwards, as Gorenn’s wings flashed to regain her balance. Then someone else had hold of Straessa, trying to manhandle her away, shouting something meaningless over and over, and the Antspider punched the newcomer in the shoulder, and then had her sword out because she couldn’t just stand there — she had to do something, surely, or who else would?

The sound the interfering man uttered resolved itself into ‘Straessa!’ and his face into Eujen’s, smoke-smeared, with a livid bruise at one temple. Heedless of her blade he gripped her by her arms. ‘You can’t!’ he was insisting. ‘It’s too late!’

‘How can you say that?’ she shrieked at him. ‘Raullo… he’s-’

‘He’s out, I got him out!’ Eujen insisted. ‘He’s over there, just look!’

At last he got through to her, but she had almost to wrench her eyes off the hungry blaze, hunting the crowd until she spotted the crumpled form. The artist huddled against a wall on the street’s far side, shoulders shaking, his hands before him, fingers crooked into claws. There was a small figure beside him, barely a grey shadow — the Fly te Mosca, trying to comfort him. There was not comfort enough to be had. Raullo’s entire world was burning, feeding the flames with his history, the sketches he had layered his walls with.

When Straessa looked away, her detachment were already there at hand, Gerethwy detailing them to start clearing the street. The pumping engine rattled to itself as he directed it — but not at the studio or the taverna or the tenement. The jet of water shot out onto the workshop beside the doomed Wall Taverna, whose shutters were just starting to catch fire. For those buildings already alight, their little engine could do nothing but waste what precious water they had.

‘Eujen, help get these people out of here,’ she snapped. ‘Get them off the streets. Get them into the College cellars.’

She saw the outrage on his face, his eyes taking in her breastplate, her buff coat, all the trappings of her office. Rhetoric welled up inside him, and she wished she had not spoken, but then in an instant his anger was gone.

‘I’m deputized, am I?’ he asked, and she barely caught the words.

‘Please.’

But he was already nodding, heading towards Raullo and te Mosca, waving his arms at them, and at everyone, shooing them as though they were sheep.

Then the next Farsphex barrelled overhead, low enough for its underside to reflect the firelight, and Gorenn had an arrow to her bow, trying to aim even as the flying machine flashed past.

Someone shouted a warning. It might have been Straessa herself.

The bomb hit a building on the side of Wallender Street that was as yet untouched, striking its roof off-centre. Beetles knew how to build solidly in stone, but not even Ants would have made their everyday homes proof against bombardment. The sheer impact cracked the house’s facade, and then half the upper storey’s front was sloughing away in a great sheet of bricks, into the street, onto the crowd. A moment later the incendiary itself touched off, gouting a broad sheet of searing orange across the sky overhead, dropping flaming chemical gobbets impartially on everything and everyone below.

Raullo was standing now, raising his hands after the orthopter as though he had some Art that would call it back, enact vengeance on it. His mouth was open and screaming, his face contorted by grief and rage, even as te Mosca frantically stripped away his burning tunic. His invective, his howling, whatever sound he made, was lost utterly in the chorus of pain and panic on all sides.

‘Get these bloody people off the streets!’ Straessa shouted, and it was just as well that her followers were already engaged in just that, because nobody could have heard her.

Another flying machine dashed overhead, but Straessa saw enough of it: the two wings, the more compact frame. One of ours, thank Providence.

‘Pump’s out of water!’ Gerethwy communicated by yelling in her ear. ‘We’re doing nothing here! If there was more wind we’d be dead already!’

People were starting to move at last, the able doing what they could to support the wounded. The faces all around the Antspider were marked not with hatred, or even with simple shock, but with incomprehension: men and women and children who could not understand what the world had become.

Taki skipped her refitted Esca Magni through the dark air, straining her eyes for the swift movement that would indicate the Farsphex. Had someone told her a tenday ago that she would enter this battle then she would have been exultant. She was no Moth, but her eyes were far better than any Wasp’s at night. She would have vaulted into the darkness with the intention of picking every single enemy from the sky.

Now she knew what she knew, now she understood the secret of the Imperial discipline, she recognized that the conflict was going to be horribly uneven the other way. The Sarnesh had proved, in the last war, that a large army could manoeuvre swiftly and quietly in the dark to the fatal surprise of its enemies if it was only linked mind to mind. What one saw, all saw, each man aware of the next in a way that no outsider could appreciate; all at the same pace, nobody stepping on anyone else’s feet, perfect coordination making up for any lack of light. Now the Empire had that weapon, too, and it was deployed over the rooftops of Collegium. There would be no surprising any of them, unless Taki could somehow surprise all of them, and they would always know which way to turn, and where their allies were. They would find her, too, comparing their mental maps, triangulating, hunting her down.

She had no idea even how many Collegiate orthopters were in the air. The aviators were getting themselves off the ground the moment they could, scattering out across the city in the desperate hope of fending off some of the terror that was raining down.

She saw a trio of Farsphex pass before her, but their formation broke even as she accelerated towards them, and with a chill she guessed some other enemy had seen her, someone she had not spotted. She let off a brief spray of rotary shot and was already pulling out of her attack, reaching for height. The attacking Farsphex was a brief, blurred presence to her left, already levelling out in response, and she knew, from years of accrued instinct, that there would be at least one more moving in on her. She was hauling left, coming out on a wingtip and almost directly over the Wasp who had just passed her. The original three were long gone, turning into their next bombing run.

She broke off, scattering in the opposite direction, expecting the enemy to retreat and continue to cover the bombers, but they stayed with her, and she understood. The game had become something more familiar, but no more comforting. The Imperials had changed their tactics, as she knew they would. She was a priority now. She was the target.

Stripping Collegium of its air defences was a necessary preliminary for taking the city, and the Second Army was marching ever closer. It all made perfect tactical sense, textbook stuff. But, of course, Taki was the air defences, and abruptly it was all a great deal closer to home.

She spun and danced over Collegium, confident that she was faster and nimbler, but they were working in perfect tandem, driving her between them, taking turns to fix wings for a sudden burst of speed before reverting to orthopter flight when she tried to out-dance them.

Time for desperate measures. She released a chute, but unevenly, the sudden drag slewing her machine about in the air, moments from flipping end over end in a total loss of control, but then she had stabilized, momentarily flying backwards, cutting the chute free to billow off into the night, then letting the Esca ’s wings stabilize her, trigger down and raking the two oncoming Farsphex with her rotaries, close enough for her to see the sparks as her bolts hit home.

She saw one of the leftmost craft’s porthole windows shatter, the brief image of the pilot flinching away. Then she was passing between them, canted right so that their wingtips did not clash, intent on getting some clear air around her.

Even as the first hole was shot through her wing, she was pulling left and up, dragging the Esca into a tight turn as another Farsphex stooped towards her from the clouds. She could imagine the other two arcing back towards her, in their minds the precise and exacting picture of where she was relative to their comrade. She fled flat out, putting as much distance between her and them as possible, the new attacker right behind her, keeping up a steady stream of shot that flashed and glittered about her, whichever way she turned.

There was a flash of light ahead of her — a pattern of on and off, and then again. Her mind translated the code automatically: Evade! Evade!

Her stomach lurched horribly, taking a fraction of a second to appreciate just what that meant. She could not go up — that would cut a course right through the scythe of bolts the Farsphex was training on her. Instead she dropped for the streets, skimming roofs and then lower even than that, skittering along a street just above head height, then wrenching the Esca into a broad, burning city square, spinning the little orthopter on its wing in the firelight to see the sequel.

Two Stormreaders came blazing in at the Farsphex, their line already taking them through the same air that Taki would have been occupying if she had been a second slower in reacting to their signal, and still on a collision course with the Imperial flier, which was shooting right back at them. She registered Mynans — less by the livery than their flying style — and then the Wasp pilot’s nerve broke, or perhaps he had taken too many hits, for he was pulling away.

Taki was already speeding back, and she saw one of the Mynans’ nose lift, the Stormreader already seeking for height, looking for the inevitable reinforcements. That was Edmon, she was sure. The other..

The other was Franticze, the mad Bee-kinden the Mynans had brought with them, and she had clearly run out of patience with the war as it had been fought to date.

She never adjusted her line, and Taki shouted inside her cockpit, as if the Bee woman could hear, because Franticze was still ploughing straight for the Farsphex, even as it shuddered under her bolts.

At the last, the Bee changed her line — not pulling away, but tilting her orthopter so that, instead of tangling wings, she let the beating vanes of the Wasp vessel crack against her undercarriage and shatter.

There were more coming already, and Taki joined Edmon in raking the skies towards them, but a glance back down gave her more heart than she had known for some days. A second’s glimpse showed the Farsphex lurching from the air, its nose striking a roof, flipping the tail up and over, and then the explosion, the fuel tank cracking, catching, one more fire erupting over Collegium.

Then Taki was in the thick of it, and so were they all. Farsphex kept knifing out of the darkness, scattering bolts at her, trying to box her in but never getting in each other’s way. She spat and spun, dipping and dancing her Esca through the air, feeling the occasional stutter as a shot connected, bullying her way upwards again despite all they could do to pin her to the ground. She lost sight of the two Mynan pilots, then a moment later Franticze was cutting in front of her, rotaries blazing sparks as their firepowder charges ignited, forcing one of the Wasp pilots off — so impelling all of them to readjust their patterns and their plan. Taki could only hope that, between the darkness and the speed that everything over Collegium was moving, their mindlink would miss a few beats, leaving the individual pilots unable to keep track of who was where and what direction they were going.

And they were trying to kill her. The gentleman’s war of yesterday was well and truly gone. The Farsphex had new orders, and if abandoning their tight defence would put them at a greater risk, the same would go double for the local aviators.

At last she won free, spiralling up towards the clouds with the great skirmish still weaving its designs beneath her. The Wasps had brought a lot more to the fight this time, and she had no idea how many Stormreaders were even off the ground. As she reached her apex, poised for a dive, the city beneath her was picked out in flames, new eruptions flashing into life even as she watched. The Wasps were maintaining their bombing even as they fought off the city’s defenders.

She dropped, arrowing down in a search for targets and for friends. Her keen eyes picked out allies quickly: all over the city, they were fighting alone or in small groups, without reference to each other. Perhaps that was for the best, for it meant the composite enemy mind had to adjust to a dozen separate strategies at once, even if each was a minuscule pinprick.

She found her target, knowing that some Wasp somewhere would have surely spotted her. As she dived she switched suddenly, tailing a flier that crossed her path, the wings of the Esca straining at this shift in direction. Sparks flew from the enemy fuselage and it lurched in the air, and immediately she was off again, flashing Attack here! in case some other defender was close enough to follow up on her work. Again and again she struck, lightning raids against the larger craft, scattering hits across them, hoping for some narrow strike to hole the fuel tank, or the pilot, and then she was off, skittering across the sky before the enemy formation could close in on her. It was fierce, frustrating work, without a moment for thought, but her little stabs at them were working in other ways, or so she hoped. Each time she made herself a threat, then vanished, she was drawing away their combined concentration, drawing them off her fellows, creating openings.

Or at least I hope that’s what I’m doing.

Abruptly she was in the midst of a fierce fight. Some half-dozen Stormreaders were all about her, one of them even punching a few holes in her tail before recognizing the shape of her hull. Edmon was there, and Franticze as well, and she reckoned she spotted Pendry Goswell and Corog Breaker amongst them too. She wheeled with them, and then the Farsphex were all about them, splitting off into pairs to take them on.

The two flights met like fists. At last there was no dodging away, no escape, and for the moment no reinforcements on either side. The Wasps had greater numbers, two to one, and their cursed linked minds to bring them to bear, but the Collegiates were following Franticze’s lead, and the Bee-kinden’s berserk fury seemed to have infected them all. Taki saw her Stormreader force one of the enemy almost into the rooftops, sticking to it as though she was about to ram, clinging so close that Wasp bolts were tearing impartially into both craft. Pendry Goswell came to her aid, still leading a pair of enemy, but Pendry had taken too many strikes to her engine casing, wings seizing in a sudden choke of gears. Even as she must have been pushing at the cockpit to kick her way out, even as her stilled Stormreader’s forward motion segued into a dive, the pursuing Farsphex’s weapons ripped her open — woman and orthopter both — in a shredding ruin of canvas, brass and blood.

Taki found a target, the two of them passing one another like lancers, her shots spattering across the Farsphex’s flank and the Imperial’s slamming into her undercarriage, her landing legs springing out in a tangled mess of broken metal. It turned but she was fleeter, even as another enemy orthopter was trying to dive on her. Taki’s sudden rush of speed threw off the new attacker’s aim, and she managed to catch her original target mid-turn, a brief second’s worth of glorious open shooting at its side and belly, a dozen shots punching home, so that the turn became a tilt, the tilt a fall. Even as she was dancing away, enemy bolts ripping the air about her, Franticze descended on the faltering Farsphex Taki had crippled, her rotaries smashing in the cockpit, shattering glass, gutting everything beyond.

More Farsphex were joining the fray, and more Stormreaders too, though fewer. Taki zigzagged her way through the aerial melee, trying both to find a target and to shake her pursuers at the same time. Nobody was free to relieve her, and she felt as though she would be dragging these two killers after her for the rest of her life — or until her springs lost enough tension that she would have to make a landing, which felt more imminent than she would like.

All around her the pride of Collegium’s aviation department and the most skilled of the Mynan refugees fought the elite of the Imperial Air Corps, no quarter given. Whirling, fleeting glimpses were all she had of the conflict. She had no idea of its overall shape or structure, simply latching from target to target and letting the enemy behind her continue to waste their ammunition. She saw Corog Breaker go down, with no time to see whether the old man managed to jump clear in time. She saw a Farsphex, burning, smash into the dome of the College philosophy department. She saw two Stormreaders attack each other, blinded by the night, strung too high on panic and desperation. Then, at last, the Imperial craft were pulling back, even their discipline left ragged by the night’s attrition. Taki was already flashing for Retreat! Retreat! but she had no idea who saw or followed her. She had a sense of other orders glittering across the sky, trying to call back some who were still chasing the enemy. Her own engine was dangerously loose now, and she would need all the power and control she could muster to get the Esca safely down without its shattered landing legs. She turned for home.

With morning came the count: they had downed all of seven Farsphex, while Collegiate losses stood at seventeen fallen Stormreaders, twelve pilots dead, one missing. Edmon brought her that last news: Franticze had not retreated. Franticze had hated the Wasps too much for that. She had gone after them as they fled across the sky, refusing to give up the fight, oblivious to the orders that Edmon had tried to give her.

The long-range patrols trying to track down the supposed enemy base, who were going out less and less frequently, found her at last: the shattered corpse of her Stormreader intermeshed with the bent frame of a Farsphex — and no survivors.