The Air War

Thirty-Seven

The Fly-kinden scout attracted some notice by diving out of a clear sky, shrugging off the challenges of sentries, her arms held up to ward of reprisals as she skidded to her feet in the centre of the Collegium camp. By that time enough had seen her Maker’s Own sash, and a few more had recognized her face, so she was allowed to pick herself up and take a quick glance to get her bearings. A moment later her wings were skimming her towards the command tent.

Amnon was in conference with her chief officer, the Beetle woman Elder Padstock, when the Fly gasped out her report.

‘They’re coming!’

‘The automotives?’ Padstock beckoned a messenger towards her, about to send orders to ready the artillery. The Collegiates had foreseen such a strike, after the disaster at the trenches.

‘Their entire army, Chief!’ the Fly got out, her chest heaving for breath. ‘All of ’em.’

For a second Amnon watched Padstock freeze, expressionless, and then she was rattling off orders. ‘Tell the mechanics to have all the automotives readied. Pass word round all the officers and sub-officers to assemble, just like for the drills. You,’ and she picked out the exhausted Fly, ‘get me the other chief officers right now.’

It seemed forever before they gathered, though in truth it was barely minutes: Marteus of the Coldstone Company, the Mynan commander Kymene and Amnon’s lover, Praeda Rakespear. With Padstock and the huge Khanaphir they made up the War Council of Collegium’s army, the first such in its history.

‘Report,’ Padstock prompted the grey-faced Fly, and the diminutive woman straightened up, looking soldierly.

‘Saw dust at first, Chief. Got my glass out. Looks like all the fighting bits of the Second are coming our way, double time, right now.’ That her mind was fixated on that inexorable advance was very clear. She had been one of the far pickets, a strong-winged flier with a telescope keeping watch for some gambit of the enemy’s. Now, it seemed, the Wasps had eschewed gambits.

‘Such speed…’ Praeda said, shaking her head. ‘It couldn’t be, surely? How clearly did you-?’

‘Oh, clear,’ the Fly replied belligerently, scowling at the challenge. ‘Believe me, all the dust in the world won’t hide that.’

‘What’s their battle order?’ Marteus snapped.

‘Saw maybe ten, maybe a dozen of those woodlouse auto-motives leading the charge, what looked like transports backing ’em, and on either wing too — carting infantry, it looked to me. Heavier transports at back.’

The Collegiate officers exchanged glances.

‘That’s what we banked on,’ Praeda observed.

‘Then at least something’s going according to plan,’ came Marteus’s mutter.

Kymene drew herself up, as one of her countrymen began buckling on her breastplate: black with two red arrows, one descending, one ascending, the badge of Myna from before they threw off the Wasps in the last war — We have fallen, we will rise again. ‘We have to advance to meet them in the field, or else fall back,’ she declared, brooking no argument. ‘This,’ and her gesture took in the whole sprawling Collegiate camp outside the tent, ‘cannot be considered a defensive position.’

‘We’d not have to retreat far to give our walls over to their artillery,’ Praeda pointed out.

There was a moment of exchanged looks, mirrored grim expressions. No general wanted to have his hand forced, but the realities were stark.

‘The soldiers are mustering, or already mustered. Let’s move them out,’ Marteus concluded. For an Ant going to war there was precious little enthusiasm in his voice.

‘You must speak to them,’ Amnon rumbled, as his first contribution. Kymene was already nodding. After all, the two of them were the only ones present who had actually led an army before.

‘They go to fight, perhaps to die,’ the Khanaphir First Soldier continued. ‘They look to you as their leaders. They trust you to give them the right orders. You must speak to your people, reassure them. Or I will. I have done this many times before. I have the voice for it.’

Padstock and Marteus exchanged glances, but Praeda put a hand on Amnon’s arm.

‘Do it,’ she agreed.

The Collegiate army was still mustering, the last soldiers finding their places as their commanders came out to them, treading the steps of a drill they had practised plenty of times over the last tendays. Amnon glanced about, and then jumped up onto the flat back of a transport automotive, with Marteus and Padstock flanking him. To his left were the cohorts of the Coldstone Company, their motto In Our Enemy’s Robes, with many of the older soldiers still wearing souvenirs from past battles with the Empire or the Vekken. To the right was the Maker’s Own Company, whose words were Through the Gate, commemorating the fearless spirit with which Padstock and her fellows had marched out, along with Stenwold Maker, to confront the Second Army at the end of the last war.

Between them Amnon saw the balance of the Collegiate force. Mostly these were Three-city Alliance fugitives, Mynans reinforced by a handful of Szaren Bee-kinden and grim-faced Ants from Maynes. Kymene was already passing amongst them; not for her the grand oration, but a personal valediction: a hand on the shoulder, confirmation to each that she would be with them. Beside these was a handful of Sarnesh drivers and crew for the automotives they had sent in support.

Beyond all of the massed military strength of Collegium, the cooks, servants, mechanics, entertainers and all the other baggage that the army had collected watched on, and no doubt each of them was trying to decide: Stay, or flee?

Praeda climbed up beside Amnon and handed him a speaking horn, for even his voice would not carry to so many ears. He took a deep breath, feeling a great weight fall from him, as though he was back in his proper place for the first time since leaving his city and his station. These were not his people, but they were cousins of a sort, and if this battle to come was not his battle, the addition of Khanaphes to the Empire made the wider conflict his war.

‘You have heard the call to battle!’ he said, voice loud into the horn, and louder still as it rolled like thunder over them. ‘The enemy of us all brings his strength against us, and I know full well that each of you feels the worm of fear within you. It is what makes us human. Do not think that I have not felt it, too.’ In truth he did not feel it now, but he could dredge up the sense of it from distant memory.

‘At your backs is your city. You have not seen my home of Khanaphes, which styles itself the greatest city of the world. For thousands of years has Khanaphes endured, our stones grown old long before your College was ever built. And yet I say to you: if any city is a wonder of the world, it is Collegium. Was ever there a city more fit to take pride in what it has achieved? Was ever there a city whose people were more capable of steering their destinies than you? Where the Wasps have laboured mightily to imprison the minds and bodies of all who fall under their shadow, so have you laboured to set yourselves free.

‘Hear me, for these things you take for granted: that you may choose your leaders, that you do not go hungry on a poor harvest, that your surgeons and doctors know all wounds and diseases, that your families live each day without fear of tyranny or oppression.’

He was acutely aware of Praeda standing beside him, and he saw the speaking horn shake as she held it up. He put an arm about her, in front of those thousands, embracing one of their own.

‘The Empire will take from you all these things. They know only the chain and the whip and the iron rule of their law which says: Do as you are told, or suffer. Do you ask yourselves why they come? Can you imagine the blow you strike against them simply by being as you are? Can you think how many in the Empire must ask, Why can we not live as they? The Empire comes to rid you of these freedoms, because those same freedoms will unmake the Empire itself, given time.

‘But now, you must march. You must take up the pike and the snapbow, the automotive and the leadshot.’ Words that would have been unfamiliar to him not so long ago, and yet he had learned them well. ‘For all that you own, for all the comfort and the freedom that your city has gifted you with, you must fight. For all those that you have left behind, friends, family and lovers, you must fight and you must not yield. You are scholars and tradesmen and merchants made into soldiers. Now you must make yourselves heroes!’

And on the last word he thrust his sword high. A Khanaphir army would cheer him immediately, but there was a curious pause, a moment where the Collegiate soldiers made up their own minds rather than being blackmailed into a response, and then a few, and more and then all of them roared their approval at him.

It was all he could do for them, that transplanted fighting spirit. Between that encouragement and their training and the weapons the artificers had crafted for them, they would have to manage.

Praeda raised the speaking horn to her own lips. ‘Drivers, to your machines and be ready! Automotives move to the wings, infantry muster in order east of the camp ready for the advance!’ She squeezed Amnon’s arm and jumped down from the bed of the transporter, running for the automotive that she would drive for him as he led the charge on the left flank, powering towards the enemy siege train.

Amnon climbed down more slowly. It was not that he was weary, but the fierce passion that normally filled him in times of war was waning; perhaps he was too far from his home, too far from any battle his people might recognize. All very well to talk of chariots, but still…

There was a brittle crack, and then a thunderous retort, and he felt the very edge of the heatwave as his automotive — Praeda’s automotive — exploded.

Amnon stared, unable to put the various pieces of the scene together. The drivers had all rushed to start their machines, spin up their gyroscopes, release their flywheels, fire their engines. Now the two of them either side of her were partly staved in, as though punched by some giant, their sides raked with broken shrapnel, and between them a sort of fiercely burning framework peeling outwards like the petals of a flower. And Amnon bellowed something wordless and rushed towards the flames, arms outstretched, shouting her name, but it was too late, already too late.

People were shouting at each other, soldiers breaking formation. The few drivers whose machines had yet to start were leaping clear of their seats. Cries for surgeons arose from those struck by pieces of Praeda’s machine.

Nobody noticed the Wasp woman with the snapbow.

Rigging an automotive to explode — one that relied on a fuel engine — was simpler than Gesa had thought. After all, the thing was almost a bomb already, save that it relied on its explosions to be controlled. Adding all the additional firepowder she could get hold of, and linking the ignition flame to that and to the fuel tank had fallen within the level of artifice that any Army Intelligence agent was trained to. She only regretted that she had not been able to rig more of them, and that the big Khanaphir himself had not been in the machine when it was started.

Now she was stretched out to full length atop one of the big transporters that the army would be leaving behind them, sighting along a Collegiate snapbow at their commanding officers, waiting for a clear shot whilst the tenuous discipline of her enemies disintegrated all around her.

She could feel the sands running out for her. She had decided to fulfil her orders, but that did not mean she could not get out alive as well. She had just killed one of the Collegiate leaders on her list. She would not be able to get them all, but she reckoned that she could make a good enough showing, and then make a stab at escaping too. And wouldn’t Colonel Cherten look sour about that.

She wanted to take down the Mynan woman, but Kymene was now in the midst of her people, offering no clear shot, so she took the next most dangerous.

A squeeze of the trigger, and abruptly Marteus the Ant was falling backwards, clean kill or just a wound she could not say. She had never been intended as a markswoman.

Next target, now: the other Company chief officer, the woman Padstock. Gesa dropped her spent snapbow onto the transporter cab’s roof and took up the other loaded weapon she had left ready. There was a cluster around the downed Marteus, most of them staring about them, but the general panic had obscured the sharp sound of the snapbow.

She sighted up, heart hammering within but all outward calm… then there was a scrabbling immediately behind her, and she twisted reflexively, raising the weapon.

Had it not been a Fly-kinden, she would have been able to kill her attacker right then, but the small man was already within the arc of her barrel, elbowing it aside and sweeping something round towards her. She had a glimpse of the knife’s blade, and got a knee in his stomach just as it came in, so that it only raked her side, instead of gutting her. He was not even wearing Company colours, just some ragged little renegade.

She kicked him hard in the chest, knowing that she had accomplished all she could and that now was her last chance to get clear. The man was shouting loudly and enough people were taking notice.

She took flight, for already the odd snapbow bolt was heading her way, and there would be enemies in the air, too, at any moment. Her wings cast her over the ridges of tents, through an increasingly busy sky, and then dropped her down amongst the canvas, briefly out of sight. She ducked inside a tent-mouth, pausing to hear the hunt getting nearer. Could she hide here, let them rush past her? No, even the Collegiates were not that incompetent. She backed further in, almost to her knees, and cut a slit down the tent’s back to peer out, seeing that the search was organizing itself dangerously fast.

She widened the slit, working swiftly yet patiently until she was holding closed a gap she could push her way through. The first chaotic impetus of the hunt was past her, but those coming after were being more methodical. Timing would be everything.

She took a deep breath, ripped the canvas open and took to the air. Now, only speed would save her.

The snapbow shot hammered into her from above, a colossal slap to her shoulder that shocked her more than it hurt, the bolt tearing its way in and then out of her, hurtling her from the air. Landing with breath knocked from her, and the wound abruptly a ball of complaining fire, she saw the self-same Fly descend on her, holding her own second snapbow. He had simply flown up and waited, guessing at her best chance of escape.

He slung the emptied weapon at her as he landed, and she batted it away as an agonizing flurry of her wings hauled her to her feet like a puppet. Then he was on her with his knife, and she stumbled out of reach, hurling her own at him. Even as he flinched back, her hand was open, palm outwards. One last blow for the Empress.

Someone punched her hard in the back and abruptly she was lying on her side, and it hurt terribly to breathe. The Fly was standing out of reach — as if that could have saved him! — but it seemed that her Art had now deserted her. She had no strength for it any more.

Someone knelt beside her, rolling her over onto her back so that she gasped in pain, blood spattering out of her mouth. She saw the Mynan commander, the woman Kymene, with a snap-bow cradled in one arm.

Just one sting…

But all she could do was cough, and the coughing was all blood, and at last she gave up her tenacious hold on life, with the thought, I have done enough of my duty.

‘What are you all doing, standing around here?’ Kymene’s high voice cut through the babble of voices as she stormed back through the camp, snapbow in one hand and the blood of the enemy spy on her armour. ‘Infantry, muster to the east of the camp as ordered. Automotives — those that have started take your positions, mechanics to check over any yet to start! Move! The enemy is still coming! You think they will have stopped for this?’

She found Amnon kneeling by the still-burning wreck of the automotive. By then the surgeons had got all of Praeda that was left from the twisted metal, but no science of Collegium nor mystery of the Inapt could do anything for her.

‘Come on,’ Kymene urged more softly, a woman well acquainted with loss. ‘This is no time for grief, Amnon. Not when so many are looking to you. Not when there are Wasps to kill.’

He straightened up slowly. ‘Is that it, then? Is that all there is?’

‘Until my people are free, I will kill every Wasp and Spider and any other kinden that stands between me and my home. If you must grieve, let your enemy grieve with you. If you want vengeance then they now bring you all the opportunity you need. If you would lose yourself, then lose yourself in duty.’

Amnon glanced around and saw that the armed host of Collegium was finally on the move, assembling in proper battle order east of the camp, ready to advance. The far north-eastern horizon was already dim with the first dust of the Imperial forces.

With a great roar, he leapt for the next automotive to grumble past, swinging himself up beside its artillerist and the smallshotter mounted there.

The Esca Magni kicked into the air, that first beat of the orthopter’s wings hammering at the ground, throwing the craft straight up, clawing itself away from the yawning pull of the ground. All around Taki, and below her, the rest of Collegium’s air power was launching, their Stormreaders ungainly and impossible for that first moment, before transforming into things native to the sky.

She gave the Esca its head, let it find its path over the city, her eyes fixed on the eastern sky. The bright sunlight seemed alien to her after so many battles in darkness. Glancing left, she saw a flight of Mynan machines painted in their black and red, whilst a long string of Collegiate pilots trailed off on her far side. She spotted Corog’s machine powering ahead, the tip of a great broad arrow that was slowly forming behind him.

Contact! came the flash from one of the locals, and a moment later Taki revised her picture of the sky, for the enemy were far closer than the had anticipated, already diving out of the sun on their first attack run. She cursed herself for falling into useless patterns, for today’s fight would owe precious little to any of their previous engagements.

Her lamps stuttered and glowed as she tried to shove a mass of orders into the minds of her fellows, in a pitiful echoing of the interplay of thought amongst the enemy. On me; attack full forwards; break off; circle back; drawn them with us. Knowing, even as she made the attempt, that they would lose the thread of the message before getting halfway through it. In the end she just sent Follow my lead! three times, as she made her run.

Piercer bolts flashed and danced about her, the closest Farsphex spotting her — probably they even knew her by now, by her smaller, fleeter craft and her flying style. She jinked left, trusting to the skill of her fellows to adjust, opening up with her own rotaries and scoring a handful of glancing strikes before she and her opponent were past one another, just flashing blurs gleaming in the sun. Her enemy would have to deal with her allies, she with his.

She abandoned her line immediately, because the sky before her was being cut into pieces by shot from both sides. Instead she drove upwards, straight at one of the enemy, forcing him aside because she was feeling madder than he — then she slung the Esca right. She found the flank of a Farsphex before her just as she imagined she would, bobbing up ten feet to avoid the bolt the Fly-kinden bombardier loosed at her, then unleashing everything her weapons had to give.

She drew a line of punctures across the top of the enemy’s hull before tracking into its open side-hatch. Then she was close enough to discern the red ruin she had just made of the bombardier, a man of her own kinden torn apart by weapons meant to destroy machines. She pulled up hurriedly, sick in her stomach and desperately trying to unsee what she had just witnessed.

But it’s war. What did I think would happen? The thought did nothing to erase that bloody image.

Then bolts were falling on her like the patter of rain, and reflexes kicked sentiment aside and slung her, almost upside down, looping out of the way of the oncoming enemy and aside from his friend, who was trying to pinion her — and she was past the two of them, knowing that neither had the angle to get on her tail. Already she was looking for a new target.

Scain swore as the Farsphex rattled about, bouncing Pingge away from the ballista, forcing her to climb uphill towards it one moment, fall past it the next. She was only glad that she was not being ordered to bomb anything right then. The way her aim was being shaken about, the good people of Collegium wouldn’t know which was was up.

That thought stuck in her throat, suddenly not funny. Then Scain was cursing again, muttering reports from the other pilots, requests for assistance, attempts to bring their formation together and destroy the enemy. For a moment a Stormreader flashed past the open hatch and she dragged the ballista about, but the target was gone as soon as she had registered it.

Then they were in an abruptly deserted sky, coasting over the silent and seemingly empty city as if this was a dream, and they the only thing in it. Scain was still muttering, and she caught fragments of his constant stream of consciousness: ‘… massing over the centre…’ ‘refusing to engage…’ ‘Aarmon scores a hit…’ ‘Tarsic’s down…’ ‘why are they all…?’ The pilots were all on extra rations of Chneuma to make up for having had almost no sleep since the night’s bombing raid.

There was a rattle, and three points of sky opened up in the hull beside Pingge, making her scream more with shock than with fear. Instantly Scain was hauling the machine into a tight turn, and she expected more damage, the enemy right behind them, but it seemed the Collegiate flier had fled as soon as Scain reacted. A moment later — peering down the narrow neck of the craft and over Scain’s shoulder — she saw the sky full of duelling monsters. The entire strength of both sides, practically every orthopter Collegium and the Second Army could muster, was now engaged in a deadly, graceful sparring, vicious and brutal for the men and women within the cockpits, and yet, seeing it from her detached perspective, as they plunged towards it, it seemed a dance where everyone knew the steps, a beautiful interweaving such as the darting shuttles of the looms back in her factory could never have managed.

Scain roared something wordless, and she felt the hammering of the rotaries through the metal floor beneath her. Past his head, in that great populated skyscape, a Stormreader shuddered and lurched, twisting desperately to be rid of him, but he followed its evasions like a Rekef man scenting treason, and abruptly the target’s two wings were not beating — were shredding apart under the ferocity of his attack — and then Scain was breaking off and letting his victim make the long fall alone.

A single bolt struck somewhere behind, near the tail, and Scain was already slinging the Farsphex sideways hard enough to make every rivet groan. Another Collegiate machine flashed by, already clutching at the air for an equally tight turn, and Scain thrust their flier forward to put distance between them and their enemy, whilst in his mind he had already summoned help.

Pingge knew she should now be crouching behind her ballista, waiting for that absurd chance that would allow her a shot, but she could not tear her eyes away. Everywhere she looked, the aviators were coming towards the final engagement of their pure and private war, trying to kill each other with every scrap of skill and mechanical genius their respective sides possessed. Stormreaders whirled away with shattered hulls, dead hands still resting on the stick, Farsphex trailed smoke from burning engines or broke up as the convolutions of their pilots and the damage they had taken passed some critical tolerance. It was terrible, it was awe-inspiring. She could not look away.

A fierce flash of flame showed an orthopter consumed, flaming and dropping, either a Stormreader struck by a lucky bolt from a bombardier’s ballista, or a Farsphex taken by an even luckier strike from the roof-mounted repeaters the Collegiates were using. Watching the disintegrating, burning thing whirl towards the city below, Pingge could not even tell whether it had been friend or foe.