The Air War

Thirty-Nine

Still the Great Ear had not sounded. In truth, the specifics of Corog’s instructions were a distant memory now. Taki guessed that the pitched fighting had taken only minutes so far, but if some scholar could measure sheer living, the fear and the fury of it, then lifetimes had been burned.

She dodged about in the air, ramming the stick rapidly through three positions to throw off an enemy, before backing her wings so that the Farsphex went slashing past her. A brief glance about her revealed the ongoing chaos that the battle had become. The Collegiate centre, the idea of holding the enemy to one place, had become impossible almost immediately once the rest of the enemy had come in from north and south. The defenders were abruptly so outnumbered that they surrendered any say over what the enemy might or might not do, or where they might go. Taki guessed that, had the Empire wished to bomb Collegium flat, then she and her fellows could do little even to slow them down.

The Empire didn’t want that. The Empire wanted her blood. That great wheeling host of the Imperial air force had new orders, and they were trying to wipe the skies clean of their opponents.

Taki had given up active attack once the new Wasp machines arrived. Since then she had been concentrating on staying alive, leading any number of enemy on a dance around the city’s rooftops, being passed from hand to hand as they tried to bring their linked minds to bear on her, never being where they calculated but taking shots at any target that presented itself and moving on. If she had committed herself to the fray, narrowed her possibilities down to those few with offensive potential, they would have second-guessed her and killed her in short order, but she was flying like a madwoman and they could not catch her.

They had not caught her yet, anyway. Her dead fellows back in Solarno would scoff if she had told them that this crazed evasion was her finest hour as a pilot, but she knew it to be true.

A brief breath of clear sky and she tried to take stock, half-expecting to find the sky possessed only by the enemy and herself. The sight brought her a swell of hopeless pride, though, for the Collegiate pilots and Mynan airmen were still fighting. Outnumbered and out-coordinated, they still remembered their training and their orders. Just as she was, they were refusing to engage, even the fighting-mad Mynans recognizing the suicidal odds. The Collegiate defence had no cohesion, no pattern or plan, nothing to it but smoke and the swift particles of the Stormreaders as they scattered across the sky. Oh, they were losing — had lost the battle even as it began — but the enemy did not want the sky, and it did not want the city either. It wanted them, and now they were running the Wasp pilots ragged in their attempted pursuit.

And it could not last. Even as she watched, she saw another Collegiate machine downed, caught by crossed piercer shot, crumpling and twisting in the air and then falling helplessly away. The Wasps were good, and all the Collegiate pilots were buying for themselves was some few more minutes of time.

And still the Ear — that signal to throw in the fight and down their orthopters — did not sound.

Abruptly a hail of shot strafed along the side of the Esca Magni, and Taki slung her craft sideways, cursing herself for the momentary distraction. The enemy kept on her tightly, odd bolts still impacting even as she threw her machine through a series of baffling manoeuvres; down and left, edge on to the roofs, then backing madly, then down a broad street almost at head height, then turning on a wingtip down a sidestreet, only hopping above the roofs to miss an archway that would have stripped her wings clean off.

And the Wasp pilot still tracked her — not following the same course but always returning to her, and this time her madness was not enough and, as she burst back out into the sky, he took his place right behind her as though he had booked it in advance.

She felt she knew this opponent, recognizing and admiring his style even as she did her best to string out her remaining seconds. Her enemy was a pilot she had sparred with before, the veteran of many raids just as she was. She tried her old trick of releasing her winding chute, the silk cloth abruptly billowing away behind her, but the enemy was not so incautious and had kept just enough distance to swing aside, and the lightning sideways twitch she had tried simultaneously somehow just brought her back under his rotaries.

Another scatter of hits, the metal shuddering around her, nothing vital yet, but the next shot could spear the cogs of the engine, or the wing mounts. Or her.

Then he was taking off, rising up and abandoning her, and she wondered wildly if there was some mercy to be given her even now, but then she saw that the Wasp himself had come under attack.

She put the Esca into the tightest turn she could manage, hearing a chorus of new creaks and complaints from the abused hull. The Farsphex was rising and dodging, a Stormreader trying to stay with the Wasp but never quite regaining its line of attack.

She recognized the Collegiate craft from the way it flew. It was Corog’s ship, unmistakably. She powered in, trying to catch up with them. Too late, too late: in committing himself to the attack, Corog had narrowed all the possible places in the sky that he could occupy down to one desperate, perfect line, the absolute optimum of vectors that would bring him to gut the enemy craft and destroy it. With a lurch of her heart, Taki realized that, even so, it would not be enough. The Imperial machine danced far more nimbly than any craft that size should be able to, so Corog Breaker’s attack went wide, and then the other Farsphex, brought there by an unheard summons, clipped off Corog’s tail with a scything trail of rotary bolts.

For a moment the Stormreader still maintained its course, still trying to bring its weapons around to its target. Then it slid sideways in the air, the wings wrestling with an element suddenly no longer their friend.

He was spinning. She flung herself closer, looking for the glider wings, imagining the stubborn old man still fighting with the controls. She watched him all the way down to the abrupt, concussive impact with Collegium’s streets.

Scain pulled up and away, looking for another target. His monologue rattled on, passing Pingge by with his one-sided commentary on the battle.

‘Won’t stand and fight… Arlvec requests permission to bomb.. denied. Orders are to…’ Then a grunt through gritted teeth as he tracked down one of the Collegiate craft to shoot at: a few moments of his silence and the hammering of the rotaries, as he tried to keep the bolts on target, and the expected lurch of the craft around them both as he broke off on another course once he lost the trail.

‘Going to try and… may be grouping up west of centre… Arlvec requests permission… denied. Just focus on the job in hand

…’ A whole many-handed conversation relayed through his automatic muttering.

Then ‘Aarmon!’ and they were abruptly dropping from their high vantage and cutting through the sky. Pingge held on to the ballista as their course changed yet again, almost falling from the air, but caught abruptly by a beat of the Farsphex’s four wings, then arrowing straight over the rooftops. And all the while Scain’s words still came to her: ‘I’m coming, I’m coming, almost there, just stave the bastard off. Aarmon…’

She clawed her way to where she could see over his shoulder, but the wheeling, whirling view meant nothing to her, and then suddenly there was a Stormreader there, in ferocious pursuit of another Farsphex. Aarmon.

Kiin, she thought, clinging to the wall. Be safe, Kiin. For once she could see all the pilot’s art laid bare, Scain’s hands jockeying the machine into place, matching the Stormreader turn for turn, precisely because it was trying to match Aarmon’s own aerobatics, and Aarmon and Scain were linked in perfect tandem, the one telling the other where he would lead their mutual enemy.

And Scain clutched at the trigger, coming in from a little above the Stormreader’s line, and clipped its tail off entirely, and Aarmon flew free and unharmed. Pingge grinned fiercely at the sight, but Scain was still reciting.

‘See her? No sign of her… I know, the one that’s not a Stormreader at all… like a ghost, that one… keep an eye out

… Arlvec requests permission to commence bombing. Draven seconds it… Sir, if we begin on their city, they have to take notice and engage…’

Then there was a pause, a silence she could detect despite the sound of the engines and the rotary piercers, as Scain tried to pin down another fleeting enemy. She realized that not a single voice was speaking within that shared mindscape, that everyone was now waiting to see what Aarmon would say.

And then Scain was muttering in a different tone, ‘No, no, no, come on, no, man, no, we have our orders, come on Aarmon, we don’t need to, we don’t,’ and Pingge realized with shock that these were his own thoughts, unbroadcast and unlinked, the private contents of his head that his traitorous mouth was still churning out.

He slung the Farsphex about for a few mad seconds of chase, loosing a brief salvo of bolts, but his heart was not in it. He was waiting, and so was she, aware that she might soon have more work to do than she could handle, if Aarmon gave the order.

‘Do it,’ Scain spat. ‘Arlvec and Droven and all of your wings, begin work on the ground. Everyone else be ready for the Collegiates to step in and try to stop it.’

The maniple to their left held firm, pikes levelled at the onrushing Spider-kinden skirmishers, and the square’s snapbows on that side turning easily to track them, picking off just a scattering of them, but enough that the Spiders faltered, and then lost more of their number as they slowed. Then another square beyond started shooting into the Spiderlands troops as well, whereupon they broke entirely and fled back behind the Wasp lines.

Straessa saw the square on the right crumple like paper. In amidst a swirl of lightly armoured Spider-kinden had come a solid core of Scorpions, heavily mailed and brandishing great-swords and halberds, and led by a rake-thin Spider in dark plate wielding a huge two-handed axe. The snapbow shot flayed away the first rush of Spiders, but by then the Scorpions were up to charging speed, pelting faster than anything so heavily armoured should have been able to. They lost a half-dozen coming in, mostly to the brief stutter of a nailbow, and then the axe of their Spider-kinden leader smashed down two pikes, the man hurling himself shoulder-first into the teeth of his enemies, not to kill but to break up their order just enough. After that, the Scorpions were on them, hacking and smashing at every foe that came in front of their blades. The square disintegrated, and the Antspider saw nobody escape the carnage, not from any grand courage in holding to the last man, but because they were not given a chance.

The Collegiate square in the second rank was already trying to move into position, pikes levelled while suffering the attentions of the Light Airborne’s bolts and stings. The Scorpions reformed, from bloody butchery to battle order at a shout from their Spider master, and then they were pressing further — Straessa could barely believe it — throwing themselves in the way of the Collegiate reinforcements.

And, of course, the Wasp formation in front of them was advancing now at a run, rushing into the hole punched in the Beetle lines. Straessa supposed the same game must now be being played all the way down the front, with the cohesion of the Collegiate army as the stake.

‘Rear rank, get some shot into them!’ she rasped, because the Scorpions’ backs were broad targets. Then: ‘Gerethwy, if you wanted to test your toy, now’s your chance.’

Her people were ramming bolts into the approaching Wasps with a desperation that was fraying the edges of their speed, making them fumble with their ammunition and shake their aim. Castre Gorenn, the one-woman Commonweal Retaliatory Army, sent shaft after shaft at the enemy, each a sure hit, but it was just spitting into the tide. A brief glance told Straessa that her left flank was still secure, but if her maniple fell or fled, there would be a great open road leading to the innards of the Collegiate army.

Gerethwy levelled the heavy weapon, a long-barrelled snap-bow with a great mess of clockworks half-exposed, about no fewer than four air batteries. A long strip of tape tailed away into the hands of another soldier, bearing a long rank of bolts. A third soldier rested the barrel on her shoulder, loosing her own snapbow one-handed as she took the weight, while Gerethwy hunched himself against the weapon’s stock and pulled the trigger.

There was the brief clatter of tens of gears all working at once, and then the Foundry-pattern mechanized snapbow began its Apt magic. A dozen tightly wound new-metal springs — a quarter of the entire weight of the piece — drove the recharging of each battery as soon as it was emptied, the first ready to loose the moment the fourth was emptied. The tape was dragged through the teeth with a sound like cloth tearing — bolts rattling into the slot on one side, then cast into the enemy at the rate of a handful a second, with the empty strip trailing away, relieved of its burden as abruptly as a conjuror’s trick. Gerethwy’s job then was to conquer the rebellious shaking and yammering of the machine and keep it aimed, pivoting it on his comrade’s shoulder, as she tried to hold the barrel in place.

It would have been useless at long range, for the famous accuracy of the regular snapbows was something this ungainly weapon could never aspire to. This close, though, and with a great mass of men available to bring it to bear on, it was indeed like magic. Even as the individual shots of the rest of the maniple lanced and stung and downed their single targets, so Gerethwy became a maniple to himself. In the twenty seconds of constant metal hammering that he managed, he cored the Wasp charge like an apple, leaving the combatants on both sides appalled by the sight, as though some invisible reaping engine had run through the Wasp lines.

‘Out of spring?’ Straessa called to him, watching the Imperial formation as it wavered and tried to reform.

‘Jammed,’ came his terse reply, and she looked round to see Gerethwy already kneeling to prise open the weapon’s casing.

A moment later the Scorpions and their leader ploughed back through the gap towards the Wasp lines and safety, the rearmost of them still fighting. Straessa saw a flurry of savage exchanges there, the huge Scorpions turning to fend off their smaller, fleeter antagonists, the Mantis-kinden. Those sons and daughters of the Felyal who had not signed up for the Companies were not to be denied their war and their revenge. Little warbands of them — no more than six or eight in each — were running riot all over the Collegiate front, meeting the enemy skirmishers and taking them on, driving them away and thus giving the battered squares a chance to reform and step up to the line. Straessa saw at least three of the savage Felyen Mantids fall beneath the Scorpions’ blades, but soon the enemy had been driven away, and left a handful of their own in the dust behind as well.

The Wasp infantry were falling back now, on seeing that. She heard two long blasts of the whistle from somewhere behind: Stand and fight. The advance had now stalled, some would-be tactician weighing the odds and seeing the enemy forces too strong to push against. Which scares me because, if we’re not pushing them, they can push us back. Straessa wanted to find someone to argue the point with. She wanted to counter the order with her own whistle. Instead she just hovered over Gerethwy as he worked at the mechanism of the Foundry snapbow, and watched the Wasp infantry blocks reform.

Onrushing plumes of dust showed the Sentinels tearing along the flanks of the Collegiate army, shrugging off shot and shell as they followed up the tracks of their automotive rivals.

Amnon stared at them bleakly as the Collegiate train wheeled about him, still exchanging light artillery barrages with the few batteries that the Imperial engineers had set up.

He heard shouting, as someone tried to get a message across over the mutinous thunder of the engines, something too complex for the whistles to communicate. Then one of the big boxy Sarnesh automotives had pulled up, the hatch on top open for a crewman to lean out.

‘We’ll go after them!’ the Ant bellowed. ‘You get yours stuck in! We’re taking some of yours and going after them!’ His jabbing finger made the Sentinels his plain target.

Amnon had no idea of the odds involved, but the Sarnesh machines were designed for war, tracked and armour-plated and mounted with an artillery piece little short of a full leadshotter. The Sarnesh drove on, shouting his message hoarsely to everyone it could reach, and meanwhile the other four Ant-kinden machines formed up with a half-dozen Collegiate automotives, ready to meet the Sentinels, charge for charge.

‘You heard him!’ Amnon bellowed at his driver. ‘Get us moving!’ He wished this was a chariot, where he could whip at the beasts himself as need be.

The driver directed an ashen glance at him, and then at the Sarnesh and their allies, who were just moving off, even as the Sentinels’ dust rolled fast towards them. For a moment Amnon thought the man’s nerve had gone, but their artillerist yelled, ‘Come on!’ and at last the man turned their machine back towards the Wasp host, and the balance of their machines were following.

Amnon raised his sword high, just as when commanding chariots or cavalry, and the ramshackle wedge of war-adapted machines drove towards the Wasp lines, gaining speed as they went.

The Imperial artillery found them first — larger pieces with a longer range than those the Collegiates had been able to mount — and the machine to the right of Amnon exploded without warning, a leadshot landing directly on it and almost folding it in two. Ballista bolts arced overhead, exploding where they struck, leaving charred craters in the ground but striking nothing. Another automotive towards the back took a leadshot hard on one wheel and spun out of control.

There was some attempt at an infantry line ahead, a wavering wall, but they were clearing out of the way early now, orders or not. Snapbow bolts began to fall amongst the automotives, rattling off metal or driving deep into wooden panels. Behind Amnon, the artillerist woman gave a single bark of surprise, and then she was gone, pitched over the side by the force of the shot that killed her.

Amnon swung himself grimly into her place, behind the weapon, something magical and terrible by his peoples’ standards, but simple by the lights of Praeda’s instruction. His dead mistress had done her best to equip him for the world he now found himself in, and she had known he would be going to war.

He swung the weapon round to seek out enemy artillery, finding a leadshotter whose three-man crew was already tilting it to drop a shot towards the back of the automotive column. With sure hands he aimed, and absorbed the thunderous kick of the compact little killer with the great strength of his arms and shoulders. He saw one of the Wasp engineers simply explode as the ball passed through him to punch the artillery piece in the rear, spinning its barrel round to catch at least one of the other crewmen as it did so.

He fumbled with reloading, shoving another fist-sized ball down the barrel and wadding it tight, before prising out the spent firepowder cartridge and replacing it with a new one. Then he spared a glance for the battle with the Sentinels.

It was practically over, and his heart lurched just to see it. There were only three Sentinels there, those great plated mechanical woodlice with their high single-eyed prows, but the wreckage of most of the Collegiate force was strewn around them. As he watched, he saw a Sarnesh machine plough in, smoke gouting as its weapons loosed, and one of the Sentinels rocked under the impact, but no more. A moment later the larger leadshotter within a Sentinel’s body spoke out, its eye flashing fire. The side of the Sarnesh machine was staved in, its headlong charge turned into a mad circling as one set of its tracks locked. Then another Sentinel rammed it, aiming for the crumpled side, and tipped the doomed machine over, smashing the Sarnesh automotive onto its side. Amnon saw the third machine lining up carefully to send a leadshot round into the stricken machine’s unarmoured undercarriage.

His driver began shouting that something was ahead, and he swung the loaded smallshotter around, hoping to see the great enemy artillery that was their target.

There were three more Sentinels in the way and, even as he watched, smoke exploded from one open eye, and an automotive on his left flank was abruptly flung in the air, fuel tank rupturing in a brief ball of fire.

The first bomb had landed close enough for the resounding roar of it to sing through every glass component of Banjacs’s machine.

The artificers ceased work a moment as the impact shook the chamber, but Banjacs’s own shouting whipped them back to it. The inventor might as well not even have noticed that the city was under attack.

‘If you have somewhere to go or people you would be with,’ Stenwold addressed the two students with him, ‘then go. Nothing’s keeping you here.’

Eujen Leadswell’s idealistic indignation had retreated into an iron core deep within him. ‘No, Master Maker, I’ll stay.’ And it was plain that the Wasp would stay there with him. Stenwold could not decide whether he would rather have Averic just get out of his sight, or whether remaining where an eye could be kept on him was the best thing.

‘Banjacs!’ he shouted, as another, more distant explosion ruptured somewhere out beyond the walls. ‘How long?’

The old man had been up a stepladder, refitting a rack of metal tubes that looked like miniature organ pipes, after two abortive attempts had so far failed to coax any life out of his machine at all. At Stenwold’s words, he jumped down, looking about him wildly.

‘Get off the machine, you fools!’ he shouted at the artificers, as though they had not been scurrying there to his explicit instructions a moment before. He gave them scant time to scramble clear before fitting the last components back into place and taking a large step back.

Still nothing happened, and Stenwold was about to curse the man furiously, when Eujen pointed upwards. The great glass tubes that formed the lightning engine’s main body were now glowing with a pale light, a mere reflection of the enormous storm imprisoned down in Banjacs’s cellar.

‘It’s ready! At last, it’s ready!’ the inventor whooped, a young man again for just a moment. ‘My machine is at your service, Maker.’ As he rounded on Stenwold, there was enough passion in those eyes to spark tears, but also a sanity as though the completion of his long-awaited project had given something back to him that he had been missing for many years.

‘Messenger!’ Stenwold called instantly, and a Fly-kinden who had been watching all this activity with utter vacant bafflement was instantly before him, glad to find himself of some use.

‘Go to the Great Ear and tell them to sound,’ the War Master ordered. ‘Now! Let’s get our pilots out of the air.’

The Fly-kinden was off in a moment, wings taking him straight up and through the gaping skylight that would serve as the aperture of Banjacs’s great weapon.

‘Let us only be in time,’ Stenwold added, so quietly that perhaps only the two students overheard him.

There was a shout from the doors, and a moment later they were kicked in. The body of a Company soldier fell through them and, the next second, a band of men came forcing their way in, snapbows and swords in hand, with a burn-scarred Beetle leading the charge.