The Air War

Thirty

There was some attempt at cheering, but Collegium had no grand tradition of military send-offs, nor did Beetle-kinden have any great belief that dying in battle was in some way better than dying in bed. The proud martial heritage of Ants and Mantids was lost on them. They marched to war with the same pragmatism with which they did everything.

Maker’s Own Company was already assembled into divisions of two hundred each, Collegium’s finest of all kinden moving off along the Pathian Way to reassemble outside the city. Ahead of them, the bulk of the automotives were on the move, deploying left and right of the roadway beyond the walls. Some had been armoured and mounted with weapons for the mechanized attack that was planned, whilst others were little better than livestock carriers to take Collegium’s soldiers to the fray.

The Coldstone Company was still assembling, ordering itself by best guess and rough democracy into the smaller fifty-man maniples that Marteus favoured. As sub-officer, the Antspider had one of these to look after, and she marched up and down in front of her soldiers, barking orders at people and pointing with her sword as though she was a lordly Arista and not just a halfbreed given temporary rank. The dignity was feigned, but she felt that running about and shouting was not fitting for her current station.

Her soldiers were all nervous, their mood on a knife-edge between anticipation and fear. All around them, watching every stumble and jogged elbow, were the crowds, a great mass of Collegium’s citizens, yet quiet, eerily quiet. Straessa watched the men and women of Coldstone Company bid farewell to their families and friends before each finding their place: here was gathered a host of wives and husbands, parents and children, all of whom had lived through the last war. This should have been nothing new to them. Many would remember sending these same soldiers off to fight at Malkan’s Folly with the Sarnesh, whilst others had stayed at home to hold off this same Imperial army two years before. Now, though, they watched in near-silence, as though draining every last moment from the sight, sucking it dry of memory.

It is because they thought they’d won last time, but here the Empire is, indefatiguable and insatiable. Where will it end?

A new train of automotives ground past, their engines shockingly loud in contrast, the subdued crowd eddying back to give them space. The Antspider caught a glimpse of that absurdly big Khanaphir who suddenly seemed to be in charge of the mechanized assault, standing up to survey the city he was leaving, whilst a woman she knew as Mistress Rakespear of the artifice faculty did the driving. In the next vehicle was a youngish woman with the blue-grey skin of Myna, whom Straessa knew must be their leader-in-exile, Kymene. There was a sizeable contingent of Mynan soldiers who would be fighting alongside the Merchant Companies, eager to get their teeth into their hated enemy.

‘All present and correct, Sub,’ the report came to her, dragging her back to the matter in hand. Gerethwy was standing forward from the others. ‘We can march out as soon as the Maker’s Own are through the gates.’

‘Stand ready,’ the Antspider confirmed, officer to subordinate. Then she met his eyes directly. Written there for her eyes to translate was the thought, We are utter fools, aren’t we? and she nodded slowly. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ she enquired, for, carried sloping over his shoulder, was something larger and more complex than a snapbow.

‘Foundry-pattern mechanized snapbow,’ Gerethwy reported proudly. ‘Every squad gets one of these, or else a nailbow, or something like it.’

‘How come you get to carry it?’ she asked, mock-jealous. Their banter cut at some part of her — so like and yet not like the old days that seemed years ago now, but she clung to it.

‘I showed them my accredits as an artificer, didn’t I?’ the Woodlouse-kinden told her proudly.

‘You brought your accredits to a war?’

He shrugged with one shoulder, keeping the fearsome-looking weapon steady. ‘That’s why I have this lovely toy, Sub.’

‘Straessa,’ someone interrupted.

She had been expecting the voice, but something lurched inside her when she heard it. She turned to find them: Eujen and Averic, come at last to see her off.

For all the destruction that had happened and the combat that was due, fighting for calm just then proved the hardest part of all. She wanted to run to them, to embarrass herself in front of her squad by venting the feelings that were boiling up inside her. She wanted to quit the army and simply stay here with Eujen, as if that would be any safer for either of them.

Instead she regarded them with affected coolness and a slight smile, her weight cocked on one hip, her arms folded. ‘Made it, then?’ she observed, and her voice remained steady. ‘Purple’s a good colour for you,’ she added, for they both now wore the sashes of Eujen’s Student Company.

‘It was the only colour we could get in bulk,’ he replied, doing his best to match her reserve, and not quite managing it. ‘Straessa..’

‘How’d you like my soldiers, eh?’ Her smile was fragile and brave.

Eujen just stared at her, and in his eyes was the time, ticking down. It looked as though the whole of the Coldstone Company had milled itself into place now, she reckoned. And still I can’t find the words. Averic was no help, not even meeting her eyes.

There sounded the tramp of marching feet, altogether too regular for anything under her command, and the Mynan exiles began to pass through: grim, determined men and women, professional in their red and black helms and breastplates. Seeing them, Straessa almost despaired. And we’ve got shopkeepers and tailors and artificers’ apprentices. Dress them in buff coats, it doesn’t make them soldiers.

Us. It doesn’t make us soldiers.

She turned back to Eujen, abruptly fearing that he would be gone, and caught his arm that was held half-out towards her. The casual pose was beginning to hurt, deep inside, but at the same time she could not make herself abandon it.

‘Straessa…’ he began again.

‘Gerethwy brought his accredits, can you believe that?’ she remarked brightly, inwardly appalled at the trite nonsense she was uttering.

Eujen swallowed, and she felt the moment fray and snap, the weight of an army about to march pulling her away from him. Then someone blundered into them both, making Averic start back, hands momentarily raised, and Raullo Mummers, disenfranchised artist, was hugging them both, tears streaming down his face. ‘You hear me? You look after yourself. No more funerals,’ he mumbled. ‘Come back, come back, that’s all.’ He was reeling drunk, as he had been for much of the time since his studio burned, hugging Eujen fiercely enough to force the breath out of him.

‘ I’m not going,’ Eujen snapped at him.

‘No?’ Raullo blinked, bewildered, then he goggled at the Antspider. ‘You, my favourite model, off to the wars?’

Straessa’s gesture managed to indicate all the military motley she wore.

The artist was abruptly transformed into overripe gravitas. ‘Then come back, and I shall sketch you. For you alone, I will sketch. And if you don’t… never, never again.’ He lurched, hands out to forestall any help, then slouched into Averic.

A shout went up, from the head of the column, Marteus calling the lead squads to order.

‘Come back,’ Eujen echoed.

‘Do my best,’ she promised.

Averic muttered something and took a step back, still encumbered by Raullo’s weight.

‘Keep the place in one piece until we see it again,’ Gerethwy called over to them, one hand raised in salute. ‘Come on, Sub, they’re starting to move.’

Her calm snapped at that moment, and she lunged forward and threw her arms about Eujen before he could stop her, a brief, fierce embrace. ‘See you right here, I swear it,’ she hissed, and then she was running back for her own people. ‘Come on, ranks, you slipshod bastards! Oi, Gorenn! You, Commonweal Retaliation Army or whatever you call yourself! Just because you’ve got a bow’s no excuse for being out of position!’ She put some real fire into it, to burn away the tears that were threatening the corners of her eyes. By the time she had rejoined her maniple, they were in as neat a square as she could have wished, snapbows and pikes shouldered.

‘Mind if I march with you, dear?’

The Antspider glanced down to see Sartaea te Mosca, Fly-kinden associate Master of the Inapt studies department, unarmed but hefting a pack about her shoulders that seemed far too large for her.

‘They reckon we might come across some dangerous inscriptions, or something?’ Straessa asked her.

‘Seconded to the faculty of medicine, dear one,’ te Mosca revealed. ‘All hands to the pumps, I think, is the Apt phrase for it.’

‘You’d better be able to keep up,’ Straessa told her mock-sternly, and then there was nothing for it — the squads in front were stuttering into motion, a brief confusion of soldiers trying to find the right foot.

‘And off we go!’ the Antspider snapped out, and a hundred soldiers heard her words, and set out to war.

Averic watched them go, feeling paralysed, the words of the intelligence officer, Gesa, rattling about in his skull like dice. He was even glad for the wine-reeking burden of Raullo on his arm, because his new knowledge was surely written on his face in letters of shame and guilt, so that even Eujen, idealistic to a fault, would read them there.

Traitor, went the cry, and it seemed to him that the blade was cutting both ways: traitor to Collegium for not telling them what he knew; traitor to his own people for harbouring even these eroding doubts. He had tried to stand with a foot in two worlds, and ended up in neither, merely a halfbreed of the mind.

Then he saw her, marching past in the uniform of a Coldstone soldier: the same woman, Gesa the Wasp in halfbreed’s clothing, undetected and unremarked, seemingly just one more soldier. She was marching to war in Straessa’s own Company, one of the rush of recruits that had flocked to the army after the Felyal was burned. Averic felt himself shaking.

There, she’s there! Wasp spy! Wasp spy right there! And yet no words came, no accusing finger. He watched Gesa march off, practically holding a knife to Straessa’s throat, and yet he teetered on the fence between betrayals, and did nothing and let her go.

And, although he was expected now at the gates along with Jodry and the other prime movers of the war effort, Stenwold stood in Banjacs Gripshod’s house and tried to understand.

The machine loomed before him, and he knew that what he could see was only part of it. Beneath his feet the cellar was packed with a battery of glass cells that crackled and roared with stolen lightning, years of painstaking generation hidden down there, lighting up the darkness. The shock that had killed Reyna Pullard had been only an iota of it, the merest spark. Banjacs had indeed been busy. He had enough power down there to wreck more of this city than the Wasp air force already had.

Here, on the ground floor, were the controls: wheels and locks to direct the movement of that primal energy, as if it were something as tame and easily domesticated as steam. Even steam engines exploded once in a while, Stenwold reminded himself. Behind those crude-seeming controls spread the vast mechanical heart of the device, he knew, for Banjacs had shown him the designs, taken from a hidden drawer in the man’s desk that nobody had even guessed at. Stenwold himself had not been able to follow the details — his artificing was a decade out of date — but he was willing to bet that the best the College had to offer would have difficulties with Banjacs’s close script and his brilliant, cracked mind.

All this time, working on a way out of our current predicament — that’s foresight even the Moths wouldn’t credit. And Banjacs made no secret that he despised a great deal of what Collegium was, or had become during his long life, most of all because it had not given him due adulation as a genius. Stenwold had steered him away from that topic more than once, for the old man practically foamed at the mouth once he got going. His list of names — the men and women who had held him back, not given him credit, or been preferred over him — was so long that Stenwold had not heard the end of it. Half of the man’s rivals and enemies were dead, long dead in some cases, but the old artificer had no intention of forgetting any one of them.

The mechanisms of Banjacs’s machine did all that science could do to trap and channel and focus the unleashed lightning, which otherwise would have simply levelled several streets about his house, and probably turned him and his stone walls into some sort of matter that artificers had yet to discover or describe. Above them was a forest of great glass pipes, mirrors, refractors, prisms; a work of art cast in light and bound in bronze; a vast, clear, many-limbed entity frozen in mid-reach and about to burst the roof asunder.

Stenwold surveyed it all, and knew that it was all for something — not just a madman’s insane assembly of parts, but a working machine, almost finished according to its creator, ready to… to do what?

Banjacs claimed it would save the city but, if it was a weapon, there was no suggestion that it could even be aimed. The old man had been desperate to convince, spitting out sincerity and conviction. Stenwold had read no falsehood in him, but Banjacs was plainly partway mad, even if he was telling the truth — perhaps especially then — and Stenwold could not rule out the possibility that his machine would be more of a terror than the Wasps to the city Banjacs plainly felt betrayed by.

Stenwold had called therefore for the College’s most theoretical artificers to come and take their best guess, but in the end the decision would rest on his shoulders as much as anyone’s, and they had so little time.

By that evening the artificers’ reports were in. Stenwold had them on the table in front of him, sitting in a disused office in the Amphiophos. Words such as ‘colossal discharge of lightning energy’, ‘near-perfect light conductivity’ and ‘requiring flawless vertical channelling’ were underlined, alongside complex calculations comparing volumes of space with assessments of the stored power that Banjacs had accumulated. One artificer had even sketched a plan of the city in profile, lines and arcs above and around, to outline the potential for disaster.

Or for victory.

‘Or for victory,’ Stenwold murmured, forcing his own thoughts into words, and at that moment Jodry came in, and stopped. Stenwold had not been entirely sure the man would even turn up when asked. Certainly he did not look best pleased to be alone in a room with Stenwold Maker.

‘So,’ said the Speaker for the Assembly. ‘Here you are. You were looked for, when the Companies departed. You might at least have been there for your Own.’

‘I offered to march with them. They turned me down.’ Stenwold bit back on his words. ‘No, wait, Jodry: this isn’t what I wanted to talk about.’

‘What then?’ Jodry was still standing in the doorway, unwilling to commit to staying. ‘Some new way of treating prisoners? Should Spider-kinden and Wasps have to wear-’

‘Jodry!’ Stenwold snapped. ‘Listen, it’s nothing of that, I don’t want to open that wound right now. Time enough after — drag me before the Assembly, as you said. I’ll answer to anything you put before me, I swear. For the good of the city, though, I have something new and I need your help.’

For a moment Jodry looked about to go, and Stenwold said, ‘For old times’ sake, Jodry, please.’

The fat man gave a sigh every bit as big as himself, and stepped in, hauling a chair out and slumping into it. ‘Be quick.’

‘I don’t know if I can. Read these.’

Jodry glanced down at the reports. ‘I’m no artificer.’

‘Neither am I, any more. The important parts are written in language plain enough for the Inapt, so just read.’

And for almost twenty minutes, Jodry proceeded to read: first dismissively, then absorbedly, then with wide-eyed alarm. At the end he looked up at Stenwold and said, ‘Madness.’

‘And yet?’

‘Stenwold, what’s proposed here… Even if we had the time and resources to build something like this, I’m not sure that-’

‘We already have one, or as good as,’ Stenwold told him. ‘It’s built, Jodry.’

‘But that’s ridiculous. Where…?’ Jodry’s face greyed with sudden realization. ‘Founder’s Mark, this? This is Banjacs Gripshod’s device?’ At Stenwold’s nod, he returned to the reports. ‘And it does..?’ For a moment he was very still, not seeing anything outside his own head. ‘Stenwold, what are you proposing?’

‘That we can’t go on like this. That was what Taki said to me. We need to win the air war, or we won’t be able to win the war at all. And we’ve tried it all, Jodry — you know we have. We’re turning out pilots and orthopters as fast as we can, we’ve applied every innovation our artificers have come up with, yet we’re losing. Losing machines and losing the city.’

‘But, Stenwold, you’ve seen what they’ve written here. This isn’t just a bow to aim at the enemy: this is a bomb. Once we release all that lightning he’s got stored away, it’s not as though we can keep popping away at them whenever they show themselves.’ In the shadow of Banjacs’s machine, and all that it implied, Jodry’s animosity had drained away.

‘I know, Jodry. That’s why I need you. I…’ Stenwold rubbed at his eyes, tired beyond belief, but sick at himself even beyond that. ‘You don’t like my ideas, I know. Well, I have one more for you to hate, Jodry. The worst one of them all, the most terrible… Let’s get Taki in here.’

‘You scare me, Stenwold,’ Jodry said quietly, and he looked as if he meant it.

‘Not as much as I frighten myself.’

Taki did not want to be there at all, and she made that plain. She wanted to be in bed or, if that was not an option, she wanted to be in with her fellow pilots waiting for the inevitable sound of the Great Ear amplifying the engine drone of approaching Farsphex.

‘We’ll be quick,’ Stenwold told her, and she glanced between him and Jodry, noting how they were on the same side again, and plainly disliking the idea from base instinct.

‘The Wasp orthopters are coming every night now,’ Jodry started and, before any sharp retort, ‘and I don’t need to tell you that, obviously. We all know how the proximity of the Second is allowing them to land and rest up within easy reach of the city. Does that mean we’re facing all their airpower every night?’

Stenwold guessed Jodry already knew the answer, but Taki was plainly relieved to be asked a sensible question. ‘No, sieur, in fact I’d guess that we see about a third of their pilots each night. We’re getting to recognize a fair number of them by the way they fly — the veterans mostly. They add new blood just like we do. They’re taking it easy, rotating their aviators, giving themselves time to rest so that they stay sharp when they fight us. We’ve bought Collegium that, at least. I think that, when the Second start their artillery assault, we’ll get a much more sustained air attack.’ She managed the words without a tremor.

‘And can we hold that off?’ Jodry asked, the patient lecturer.

‘No, sieur, we cannot. But we’ll try.’

‘They’re holding back at the moment, though?’ Jodry pressed, and a twitch of irritation showed on the Fly-kinden’s face.

‘That’s what I said, sieur.’

‘And…’ Even though he knew the question was coming, Stenwold felt a lurch in his stomach as Jodry spoke the words, ‘If our aerial resistance decreased, they’d be in a position to take advantage, I imagine.’

Taki just glanced from Stenwold to Jodry and then back, looking unhappy and uncertain.

‘After all, if they committed even two-thirds of their strength, they could cause appalling damage in a single night.’ Jodry was almost whispering now.

‘Are you… you’re sending us off to…?’ Taki frowned. ‘We’re going to attack the Second while they’re over the city? Sieur — Stenwold, Jodry, listen. We are holding them at bay. We’re showing them we can bite, just enough that they’re wary of putting their hand into our mouth. You can’t take us away from defending the city! Take advantage? They’ll flatten every building in the place! What have we been fighting and dying for, if not to stop that happening?’

‘And yet we can’t stop that happening,’ Stenwold said flatly. ‘We can only stave it off.’

‘Then we stave it off!’ she snapped. ‘What are you… this isn’t even my city! What are you thinking?’

‘Thank you, Mistress Taki,’ Jodry said heavily.

‘We can hold them!’ the little pilot insisted. ‘Listen to me: we’re doing our best-!’

‘Nobody doubts you, any of you. You’ve worked wonders,’ Jodry assured her, but his voice offered no comfort. ‘That’s all, thank you. You can go.’

When Taki had gone, shaking with bewilderment and injured pride, he gazed at Stenwold across the table.

‘We can’t do this.’

‘What we can’t do is tell anyone — anyone — what we are going to do. We give the orders to the pilots only on the night itself, and on the day after I will do everything in my power to bottle any word up. Secrecy is paramount, Jodry. The knowledge will be ours to bear,’ Stenwold told him. ‘Yours and mine. No other.’

‘I am not strong enough,’ Jodry protested, but then: ‘I will try.’