War Master's Gate

Thirteen

There was a drug they called Chneuma, which had become a standard part of the Air Corps kit. It kept a pilot awake and alert for days, strung tight like a wire and ready for action. Too ready, perhaps. Bergild was pacing constantly, twitchy and unable to sit, making circuits of the crate-table where Major Oski and his Bee second, Ernain, were trying to play cards. They had hollowed out a nook amongst the disassembled artillery in the back of one of the transport automotives and, at every jolt and lurch, Bergild’s wings would flower for a moment, ready to take to the air.

The Fly engineer cast her a baleful look. ‘I am blaming you for losing the last three hands, you realize?’

For a moment she stopped, clenching and unclenching her fists, blinking at him as though she had never seen him before.

‘Can’t keep your mind in your head, these days?’ was Oski’s verdict, and when she opened her mouth he added, ‘I know, I know, you’ve got worries. We’ve all got worries.’

Bergild’s worries were her fellow pilots operating in shifts over the Second’s advance, their minds touching hers moment to moment. They were overdue another visit from the Collegiate orthopters, so every Imperial pilot was on standby and plugged full of Chneuma. She did not want to think about coming down from the drug afterwards. Nightmares and shakes and dreadful cravings, they said, and none of the chemists really knew how long it was safe to keep using the cursed stuff. But necessary. We are so few that we need all of us, every time.

Then one of her pilots really did have something to report and, wings springing into being, she was at the back of the covered automotive immediately with Oski and Ernain leaping up behind her, for all the good they could do.

‘It’s. . it’s. .’ began her faltering response to their questions, and then, ‘one orthopter. Farsphex. Ours.’ But she was frowning because there was no mindlinked contact with the pilot. Not proper Air Corps, then. A trick? The incoming pilot was signalling with the heliograph codes that had been developed before the new breed of pilots had emerged, but Bergild and most of her people had never learned them. At last someone got hold of one of the older pilots who had, then interpreted an intent to land. Bergild instructed that the visitor be guided in far from anything critical.

So who’s got one of my Farsphex?

She and Oski and Ernain skipped out of the automotive, their wings carrying them above the great marching mass of the Second and its Spider allies, over the labouring transports — wheeled, tracked and walkers — and the articulated forms of the Sentinel automotives. The Farsphex had come down, with one of her own machines still wheeling overhead, and some sergeant had detailed a few squads of Light Airborne to deal with whoever stepped out. By the time Bergild and the others had arrived, the orthopter’s passenger had disembarked and presented his credentials — and was on his way to General Tynan post-haste.

The newly arrived pilot was still standing by his machine, and Bergild saw that his armour boasted a red insignia and pauldrons — nothing she recognized.

Ernain knew, though. The Bee-kinden was so well informed about goings on in the Empire that she would have taken him for Rekef if he wasn’t so free with the information. Although I wouldn’t know what other information he’s not being free with, I suppose.

‘Red Watch,’ the Bee identified. ‘Very new, the Empress’s darlings. Looks like special orders for the general.’

A section of the army had halted for Tynan to receive the orthopter’s passenger, and Major Oski was able to pull sufficient rank to get them within earshot as the man presented himself as one Captain Vrakir, also Red Watch. Looking up dourly after scanning through the newcomer’s papers, Tynan did not appear delighted by this indication that the Empress had not forgotten him.

‘So what does she want?’ the general demanded. ‘There are no orders here.’ He did not suggest that Vrakir had been sent to spy on him, but that was hardly a wild leap of logic. He should have had this meeting in private, Bergild reckoned, but then General Tynan was a blunt-speaking man who did his best to live his life in the open. The Spider commander, the Aldanrael woman, was close by Tynan’s side, though, and who knew what thoughts were passing behind her calm exterior?

‘There will be orders, General, in due course,’ Vrakir replied stoically. ‘For now, I ask you to accept me as the Empress’s voice here.’

For a moment Tynan looked as though he might argue, and surely everyone there was thinking, This is not how you run an army, but whatever the Empress had written on that paper in Tynan’s hand, it was sufficient.

Then the word came, and Bergild called out, ‘General, orthopters inbound!’ because he was right there and it would save time. Everyone was looking at her instantly — perhaps all the more so in shock at a woman’s voice daring to accost their leader — but she was already in the air and racing for the automotive that carried her machine ready for launch.

Behind her, Tynan was shouting out for everyone to get moving again — no stationary targets for the Collegiate bombs — and for the infantry to spread out as best they could. Everything fell into a well-rehearsed chaos, familiar from every previous day of this march. Bergild, herself, had thoughts only for the sky.

Taki had never flown a bombing run. She understood the necessity of the work, but it was not her work. She was a pilot of Solarno and she took her prey in the air. There was no glory in attacking an enemy that could not fight back. When she had explained that — the one time she had tried, anyway — to the Collegiate pilots, most of them had looked at her as if she was mad.

Beetle-kinden were a practical-minded lot. If they were forced to fight, then most of them would far rather build machines to do it for them, ideally in a way that precluded retaliation. That made Taki think of the Empire, the way it had brought Myna to its knees, with so little danger to its own side, by orthopter and artillery. Collegium would not be taken so readily, but the whole business brought a sour taste to the mouth. Where were those sunlit days in Solarno, when she would joust in the skies against her brothers, air-pirates, free pilots, Princep Exilla dragonfly-riders, and all bound by their common kinship? Here she was now at the cutting edge of Apt warfare and already mourning a lost way of life.

Mantis-kinden would understand, she thought, even as she adjusted her course to head against one of the Farsphex, as the Imperial machines rose out of the great marching host. They wouldn’t understand the machines, but the thoughts behind them. Oh, for an Apt Mantis to teach to fly. . Clouds of the Light Airborne were scattering upwards, wings aflare — not that they would be any real good in the fighting, but they would be out of the way of the bombs. The heavier infantry, the Spiderlands troops, and all the rest still shackled to the earth, they were dispersing as much as they could, losing cohesion and slowing their advance to do so. Well, fine, we’re not exactly here to bomb them to death, just to break their toys and kick over their larder. For there was a multitude of automotives with the Imperial force, though not half as many as when they had come this way the first time. All the important loads that the Empire could not do without had been split up across the army — more good sense from the Wasps — but it meant that any vehicle over a certain size became a target.

And this time they’ll know it. The plan was typical committee-born Collegiate nonsense, and Taki had argued fiercely against it, but it was a good plan nonetheless. Still doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Then the Farsphex was flashing into her sights, already turning aside as she began to shoot, obviously warned by some other Imperial pilot. Taki slung her Esca Magni into as tight a turn as she could, unhappily aware that she had managed it tighter in her time. Her prized craft had taken its share of knocks in the fighting over Collegium a month before and, although the mechanics had done their best, she was going to have to give up on it soon. Sentiment was something she had been indulging in, and could not truly afford. She needed a new orthopter.

The enemy pilot threw the Farsphex into a surprisingly nimble climb, but changed course suddenly, and Taki knew that the Imperial mind — the collected thoughts of its mindlinked pilots — had seen what new game Collegium had brought.

The Stormreaders were quartering the sky, seeking out the Imperial fighting craft and driving them mercilessly, but not one of them heading for the ground. They were making all-out war on the Farsphex, the Spearflights, the rabble of other machines the Empire had mustered, whilst at the same time the rest of Collegium’s air force was hoping for a clear attack on the ground.

They had put a surprising amount of craft in the air, for such a grounded folk. The Collegiates had given Taki orthopters and fixed-wings and heliopters, and most of them were as lumbering and bulky as their owners — flying barrels, flying crates, all wood-hulled and unlovely things that had been drawn from a life of cargo-hauling or flying courier duty, or lugging complaining passengers from city to city in the Lowlands. There were more than two score of them, and most were loaded with bombs where the Stormreaders could only carry a handful. Each had a civilian pilot willing to make the run — no reluctant draftees here by Taki’s insistence — and another man or woman in the hold ready to rain fire and death on the Empire. Some of these craft had hastily fitted mechanisms to release their cargo, whilst others would rely on holes cut into the floor, or shoving bombs out of a side-hatch.

If the Farsphex got through to them — even if the older Spearflights did — then the result would be a massacre, but there were more Collegiate fighter craft in the air than Imperial, by some margin.

The Farsphex she was chasing twisted round and tried to double back, but another Stormreader was already there and arrowing in so sharply that Taki had to slacken her own pursuit or risk running into its bolts. She saw the Farsphex take a spray of hits, tilt a little in the air and then level out. By then she and her newfound wingman were both on its tail, harrying it away from the bombers and daring it to brave their shot.

Below them, the first bombs landed — delivered too hastily, with the rosy fire of their explosions cracking open ahead of the Imperial advance. But there were more where that came from, a great deal more.

Bergild’s mind was full of the voices of her fellows, all of them trying to get past the Stormreaders in order to reach the bombers, and all of them being driven in every direction across the sky by the Collegiate fliers. They were doing their best to assist one another, to stay calm and coordinate their movements, but she could feel the desperation creeping in.

She corkscrewed her Farsphex groundwards, a dangerously steep descent at the best of times, bolts flashing past her from the craft following on her tail. Then another Stormreader was rushing at her, flat and low over the heads of the Second Army, its piercers stuttering. She had to jerk away: it was that or end up with shredded wings and unable to pull out of the dive she had been in. There was one of the clumsy Collegiate bombers in her eye, though, and she had pulled out not so far from it; and so she feigned reaching for height, pulling her nose up, and then letting the Farsphex fall away to the right, towards her target, hoping against hope that her attackers would be fooled just long enough.

For a handful of seconds she was there, the two Stormreaders committing themselves to the false course she had abandoned, and she rattled the bombing fixed-wing with a score of bolts, punching into its solid hull. Not enough. But even as she thought that, the vessel lurched and pulled up, its pilot losing his nerve. Then her shadows were back with her and she threw the Farsphex up and away, giving up her target for the sake of saving her hide, but knowing that the cargo fixed-wing would circle back for another try, unmolested, unless she or another of her fellows could stop it.

One of her pilots shouted out a hit: a lumbering, bomb-heavy heliopter clipped out of the sky with broken rotors, tumbling end over end to plough into the earth, spilling crew and munitions. To her right a Spearflight, which had once been one of the fleetest craft in the air, was gutted by a Stormreader’s bolts, the narrow metal needles cutting open its belly and smashing its motor, so that the Imperial aircraft slewed sideways in the air, wings stilled, and then fell, with the pilot struggling to get the cockpit open and bail out.

She was fighting to rejoin the battle, risking more and more to break through the cordon that the Stormreaders had thrown up, and dodging between the raking lines of their shot. There was another bomber now at the edge of her attention, as hard to reach as the centre of a maze. Bolts scattered across her hull, one smashing a cockpit pane. Bergild wrenched her goggles down as the wind roared about her.

Her target, an orthopter with something of the grace of a fighting craft, was lining itself up with one of the transport auto-motives, and she locked her wings, stilling their beat without engaging the propellers as the designer had intended. The Farsphex dropped as abruptly as though all Apt flight had been nothing but a tinker’s dream. She took three hits to her underside as she fell through the metal hail, one of which punched into the bombardier’s compartment behind her and ricocheted wildly — and how glad I am not to be carrying a passenger — and then she was out of it, fighting to restart her wings as the ground yawned to receive her, coming down so swiftly, so true, that she almost collided with her target. The Stormreaders would already be stooping on her, hunched and deadly machines designed for just that, and she had seconds to strike before she would have to pull away, or die.

Her machine was sluggish in the air, the wings still finding their rhythm, but that only served to let her fall into line behind the bomber. She saw the first flash of its munitions, searing across whatever luckless segment of the Second was down below. The driver of its automotive target must have seen what was coming, but the machine lurched on over the uneven ground.

Her immaculately timed burst of shot chewed off the long vane of the orthopter’s tail, butchering its smooth approach. Even then its pilot did not try to flee, and she could almost feel him fighting with suddenly unresponsive controls, determined to strike his mark. A true pilot, then. He was veering, though, unable to hold his place in the air with wings alone, as the killing rain of his bombs stamped blazing footprints across a scattering body of infantry, leaving the transporter untouched. Bergild was already pulling out, rising into a metal-filled sky, watching another Spearflight ripped apart even as she tried to come to its aid. Then the Stormreaders had her again.

Through the mind of another pilot she saw a bomber strike its target, a trundling automotive that must have been laden with ammunition. The bloom of fire and shrapnel scythed out on all sides, two score lives smashed beyond recovery, the flame gouting enough that the watching pilot felt the heat buffet his wings.

Another of her pilots shouted in her mind that he was on the cusp of a strike, and she could almost see him lined up behind the labouring bomber. Then he was gone, a storm of bolts cutting open the cockpit to rip him apart.

Major Oski spotted the plume of fire, and just kept shouting. He had long since run out of anything useful to say, but for a Fly-kinden officer, so easily overlooked, shouting had become his grease on the wheels of any interaction with Wasp soldiers. His current victims had a repeating ballista mounted on the back of little scouting automotive, and were frantically wheeling it round to face the onrushing fliers.

‘The fixed wing there — the one like a barrel — that one, ready and aim!’ He had his sleeves rolled up, his tunic grease-marked and sweaty from doing all a Fly could do to help get the artillery piece ready. His crew of three — Ernain and a couple of Light Airborne — were trying to line the piece up with his flying target, which was not a job the ballista had ever been meant for. ‘Left three turns! Up two turns!’ Oski’s major’s badge was hard-won, his gift for on-the-spot calculations earning him the grudging commendations of a string of superiors. ‘Now! Get that bastard shooting, you morons!’

The repeating ballista began spitting out bolts randomly into the cluttered sky — none of them seeming to go near the approaching fixed-wing. They were explosive-tipped, fused to explode set seconds after launch, but he knew that some would end up dropping amidst the army — just have to live with the complaints. Then the flier was past, and they could not turn fast enough to follow it.

‘Next target! Ugly bastard orthopter, there! There!’

All around him the bombs were landing, and they were all ruining someone’s day. He had no chance to assess how much real damage they were doing to the army’s vital organs.

One landed close by, astray from its target but very nearly too close as far as Oski was concerned, their little automotive rocking with the blast.

‘Should have put your armour on!’ Ernain bellowed.

‘No time!’ Oski shot back, though Ernain himself had managed to don a mail hauberk. In truth it was that he just could not fly when loaded with an engineer’s heavy mail, and he felt far less safe without his wings than with a steel skin. ‘Two turns left — two! Ready — now! Now!’

The approaching orthopter was coming in lower than the last one, the pilot painstaking in lining up his unlikely bomber on some target behind Oski — I bloody hope it’s behind us anyway — and the bolts that began bursting all around it rattled it visibly.

‘Good! Keep at it! Good. .’ Then his makeshift anti-orthopter piece sent a bolt along the side of the approaching flier, impacting with a wing joint, and abruptly the target wasn’t a flier any more, but was still coming their way.

Hoist with my own petard, seemed an appropriately engineer-worthy last thought. So save it for later. . and he was shouting ‘Pissing move!’ even as his wings cast him away, sending him hurtling over the heads of the army as though he had been struck by a storm-wind.

Then the actual wind came. The orthopter, one wing still beating vainly, came down nose-first within yards of their little automotive, and its complement of explosives was ripped open, the hot air of the firestorm battering at him.

Ernain? ‘Ernain!’

‘Here.’ Bee-kinden were not swift or agile in the air, but Ernain could get airborne even with all that metal on him.

‘Stab me, man, I don’t want to lose you. You’re important, remember.’ Oski stared at him, feeling shaken. ‘See the quartermaster about new eyebrows after we’re done.’

Ernain’s slightly scorched face frowned at him, but then another explosion shook the ground beneath them.

‘Let’s go find more artillery.’

Taki chased off another Farsphex, noted that three more Stormreaders had followed her lead, and so she broke off to take stock of the situation. Her internal clock was telling her that the bombers would have done what they could, shed their loads, and the shorter-ranged craft would be running out of fuel or stored spring. The actual clock set into the Esca’s controls had been smashed by some stray bolt along with a window. Shot through the clock? There’s a new one.

She saw several of the bombers already turned around, one still offloading a few late explosives randomly over the field, as though the pilot would be fined if he carried any home. Even as she watched, one fell prey to a Farsphex’s sudden fly-by, and she realized that some of her pilots had lost focus, chasing the enemy too far, leaving the civilian craft vulnerable. She twitched the stick, letting the Esca Magni drop to a level where she could intercept, while still trying to work out what they had accomplished.

Do I count six — seven? — of their big transporters down? That probably means maybe ten total — there’s bound to be a few I overlooked. Then a pause in calculations while she rose to loose a handful of bolts at a Spearflight, which jinked away from her, suitably chastened. No idea how many of their actual people, but I reckon that was a grim business down there. She still felt that they had not done all they could. Air defence and ground defence have adapted too cursed well. They’ve not got that much, but they spread it around. At least five of the bombers had been brought down, and far more had been put off their targets by the determined resistance of the Air Corps. At the same time the Imperial air casualties, especially amongst the non-Farsphex machines, had been far heavier than in their previous sorties. We hurt them either way, but we’ll never get as good a chance as now to make them smart. We need to make it count, more than we have.

She was signalling Home, home! to anyone who could see her. The bulk of her pilots already knew it, and the rest would follow, in a fighting retreat against an enemy only too happy to see them gone.

And by now maybe the strike force will have done what it came for, for the Collegiate plan had other parts that she was not involved in, and there was no way to know how that had gone until she was back in the city and hearing the news in person. Oh, to have that mental link the Farsphex pilots’ve got. If only I could get my people to drink a pint of Ant blood before each fight to acquire it — I’d wield the knife myself!

In the end, it could have been worse, but it was bad, nevertheless. They had lost almost no artillery, according to the reports Oski had received, but their supplies and ammunition were seriously dented. He did not ask about lives, that not being engineer’s prerogative, and he honestly did not want to know.

General Tynan had spoken to him — to him and Bergild and a selection of the other officers, delivering a brief, bleak little speech, its hollow commendations echoing with the knowledge that this was just the first, and that the Collegiates would keep at it. After that, the intelligence man, Colonel Cherten, had taken the stand and, once Tynan’s back was turned, he had informed them briskly that what the general meant was that they should most definitely do better next time, that in fact they had failed the Empress, that they were all personally responsible for every loss, and that their names would reach Capitas the hard way if they did not start taking their jobs seriously. Oski could not remember seeing Cherten anywhere in evidence during the fight, but no doubt there had been vital intelligence work needing doing. Who am I kidding? Call it Rekef work. Ordinary intelligence men did not raise the spectre of Capitas. Plainly Cherten felt they needed motivating — and the Rekef only had one way of doing that.

At least Ernain survived. Oski had a great deal invested in Ernain. And one day you’ll get yours, Cherten, believe you me. But that was a dangerous thing to even think just then. Plans and plans, yes, but the wheels turned slowly. Conspirators, like engineers, needed patience.

A day later, when the supply airship still had not come, everyone began to realize that it really had been worse all along. A scouting Spearflight found the airships’ wreckage — not just shot down but bombed into a charred mess. General Tynan ordered half rations, but Oski had a good head for maths, and began estimating their surviving stores and how many mouths.

The Collegiates may just have won the war. Another thought not safe to have, but he knew that he wasn’t the only one harbouring it.