War Master's Gate

Three

The mid-morning calm was interrupted by the hammering of engines from nearby, while the ragged tree cover shook under the beating of wings as a dozen Spearflight orthopters scrambled into the air, clawing for height. The curved-bodied machines roared overhead, their wings a blur, rotary piercers already spinning up. A handful of the Light Airborne took wing after them, but only as observers, not as fighters. No general nor artificer had yet found any field of combat in which flying man and flying machine could realistically oppose one another.

General Tynan was not going to be that man, he knew. That aspect of warcraft had already moved beyond his experience. He did not have enough knowledge of the science or specifications of those machines to plan an air war.

Even he, though, knew that the Spearflights hurriedly flown to him from back home were yesterday’s models, and no match for the Collegiate Stormreaders that would even now be speeding through the skies towards his forces. His Second Army had endured daily raids for a month now, and his Spearflights had done little but slow the enemy down. What sent the Beetle pilots home was not the terrible force of the Imperial Air Corps, but the simple fact that the Stormreaders had not been designed with ground attacks in mind, and they soon ran out of munitions.

The irony was that the last time he had been out this way, Tynan had done his best to strip the place of any real cover. Only the coveted jewel that was Collegium had hauled him away before he had finished the job. He had not realized that he himself would need to hide here before the war was done. This was the Felyal, a former Mantis hold and thorn in the side of every Imperial advance up this coast. Tynan had beaten them twice, and had finally ousted them entirely from their forest haunts. Now a quarter of his Second Army was holed up in what dubious cover the forest could provide, with the remainder spread out in camps over several square miles, to deny the Stormreaders a satisfactory target. The forest itself hid the precise location of Tynan’s surviving artillery, his paltry air defences, his supplies and the Sentinel automotives, although those last were probably sufficiently armoured to survive a direct bombing.

He had watchers out between here and Collegium, and if a large ground force marched out to attack, he was betting his life that he could regroup before they reached him. Thus far the Beetles had not tried it. Even though they had retained command of the skies, he had given their forces a bloody enough nose in the accompanying land battle that they were wary of another clash. Instead, their orthopters, smug and inviolate, coursed over his scattered army at any time of the day or night, trailing bombs and making his soldiers endure lives of constant uncertainty and fear.

Such fear was a weapon of war, he knew. He himself had deployed it against the people of Collegium, and there was a certain philosophical interest in being the recipient, now. Go away, the Collegiates were shouting at him, by means of their constant buzzing attacks. Leave our lands. Go away. His orders were to await resupply and then press on; despite the harrowing bombardment, the Second had no intention of retreating. They were the renowned Gears, and it was galling enough that they had been stopped in their tracks.

He heard the solid crump of the first bomb striking, not too far away. The Stormreaders were poor bombers, without the dedicated design needed to be accurate against ground targets, but they got lucky, and he had hundreds of dead to prove it. A moment later, one of the Collegiate machines passed swiftly overhead, and Tynan held himself still, waiting to see if this would be the day his own luck ran out. A second later, it was veering off after one of the Spearflights, which would do its best to lead the enemy on a dance all around the sky until it was shot down, or until the Collegiate broke off to go home or find another target.

Another flying machine passed overhead, this one even slower than the Spearflights: an antiquated four-winged orthopter with a broad, flat hull. It thundered low over the trees, spewing so much smoke that Tynan wondered if it had already been hit. This would be one of the machines found by his Spider-kinden allies, who had no air force of their own save for mercenary aviators. Like the Spearflights, the ragbag of machines the Spiders had come up with were doing nothing but delaying the inevitable.

An army under attack which cannot fight back is a miserable thing, and being on the sharp end of a technology gap for once was a bitter reversal. The soldiers of the Second were finding their morale eroded day by day. So far there had been no desertions, unless those had been covered up as deaths, but Tynan was expecting them. Even as this attack started he had been going through his sergeants’ assessments of their subordinates’ will to endure. There was plenty of angry talk amongst the rank and file, and Tynan could not blame them. They had done their duty, and this was none of their fault.

A bomb landed close to the glade in which he had been working, and he edged further under the cover of the trees — as though that would help should the Collegiates strike lucky. Across their widely separated camps, all his soldiers would be crouching under whatever defences they could find or dig out, and hoping that today was not their final day.

‘General!’ he heard, and he called out his location — a necessary risk, since the army still needed to communicate with itself. He, above all, must be findable, despite the threat of assassination that the Beetles had not quite got round to resorting to yet. The messenger, half-running and half-flying, skidded to a halt before him. ‘General, the supply flight’s incoming.’

Tynan went cold, because his run of bad days had just got much worse. The Second Army was being supplied via the new Spider-kinden holdings in Tark and Kes, but the Spiders refused to use sea-power since their fleet had somehow been turned back from Collegium before. With that approach barred, and short of building a rail line from scratch, the only way to get sufficient food and materials to the beleaguered Second was by airship.

They had staggered the deliveries and mostly made them at night, playing a lethal guessing game with the Collegiates. The enemy knew full well that their orthopters would easily destroy the slow-moving airships, because neither Tynan’s own fliers nor any escort the Spiders could put together had any chance of stopping them.

He stood there helplessly, a general without a plan, without any means of communicating with his army. ‘Our machines-?’

‘They’re all moving to screen the airships, sir,’ the messenger confirmed.

But that won’t be enough. Now the Collegiates have smelt blood, they won’t rest until they bring the ships down.

‘Tell them. .’ His mind worked wildly. ‘Get the fastest Fly-kinden we have — ours or the Spiders’ — get them up to those airships. They need to put down now, I don’t care how far off. We need those supplies safely on the ground. That way we can salvage something.’ It was a wretched sort of a plan, but he had been forced to spin it from nothing,

The messenger was off without even offering a salute, well aware of the urgency of his job.

‘I want a detachment ready to get to the landing site!’ Tynan snapped at the officers around him, very nearly saying crash site. ‘Automotives, haulers, plenty of men ready to carry loads. Start moving now.’ And all the while, in the back of his mind, Too late, too late.

‘Get me. .’ But what he really wanted to say was, Get me somewhere I can see what’s going on. He might exercise only a pitiful influence on the conflict, but it was his responsibility to watch it happening.

Quickly he made his way through the forest to the nearest tower: one of the makeshift wooden constructions engineered from sections of the travelling fort his men had brought with them, rising barely above tree level and dressed with deadwood to make it less of a visible target. He let his wings drag him up there despite the weight of his armour, though he felt every one of his nigh-on fifty years as he reached the top. The Fly-kinden lookout saluted briskly, making room as half of Tynan’s bodyguards made their laborious way up as well.

‘Send word to the — the Spider colonel,’ he ordered the Fly. He had almost referred to the woman by name, which always disconcerted his soldiers. ‘Have her get ready any automotives she can. Tell her we’re going to retrieve what we can from the airships.’

The Fly was off instantly, wings ablur.

Tynan looked out: the airships were plainly visible as little round shapes in the sky, approaching fast with a following wind and growing larger even as he watched. How much more obvious must they be to the Collegiate pilots whose eyes were trained to scan the sky, and everything in it?

Overhead, the aerial battle was moving away, heading east now towards the approaching supply ships. At least we get spared a pummelling, Tynan considered grimly. Suddenly the enemy had better things to do than scatter bombs randomly in the hope of killing Wasp soldiers.

Perhaps, after this, I can talk Mycella into sending our supplies by sea, although I suppose sea-ships would be just as vulnerable as airships. Mycella of the Aldanrael was rightly the joint commander of the Collegium campaign. Labelling her as a colonel had been the best way to keep Tynan’s own people in line, though, for they had been trained rigorously to observe a rigid command structure: general to colonel to major in command, captains and lieutenants in the middle, sergeants and regular solders to fight and work and complain. An army had only one general. Two heads could not govern the same body, every Wasp knew.

Tynan knew better now, He had been initially surprised at how easy the Spider Arista was to work with. Then he had got to know her better, and to understand that she had been stripped of a great deal of her pomp and pride as a result of the failed armada attack on Collegium. After that, he had come to know her altogether too well by most standards. No doubt his intelligence officer, Colonel Cherten, had sent a few interesting reports back home, but no reprimand had come back to Tynan yet.

Still, amongst the Wasps she was a colonel and he supposed that it was a high honour: unprecedented for a woman, a non-Wasp and not even an Imperial citizen. He also suspected that she privately found this obsession with assigning ranks and titles deeply amusing.

The circular silhouettes presented by the airships against the sky began lengthening as they turned. Perhaps they had some broadsides of artillery ready to deal out, but in truth the Collegiate Stormreaders would be able to skip aside from anything the lumbering dirigibles might throw at them. Impatiently, Tynan flicked out his telescope and tried to make sense of what was going on.

Spying on an air battle was harder than the engineers made out. Tynan’s circle of view wheeled constantly across the sky, catching the little insect shapes of the orthopters as they spun and danced against each other, the new way to fight a war that he was excluded from. The best he could gather was that his own side was putting up a spirited defence of their airships. His shaky viewpoint managed brief images of the Spearflights and the Spiders’ motley collection of fliers throwing themselves against the nimble Stormreaders, clashing with them, loosing their weapons, executing turns that were too wide, too slow. He caught sight of one Spearflight in the very moment of its dissolution, falling away to the summons of the distant ground.

The airships were parting company, diverging enough to buy a few of them time to close another mile with the Second, perhaps. His own Fly messenger, be he ever so swift, would still be far from delivering Tynan’s orders — he could not possibly have outstripped the orthopters in their chase towards the supply ships. And I should have some small, fleet flying machine ready for that sort of messenger work — the old ways aren’t good enough any more.

Grinding his teeth with the impotent frustration of it, he wrestled with the telescope, desperate to see the end, no matter how disastrous.

He was rewarded by spotting the swift, hunched shape of a Stormreader go flitting across his view, another craft in hot pursuit, the two of them cornering agilely in the air and slipping out of his vision almost instantly, leaving his mind to interpret that brief glimpse. What have I just seen?

The aerial contest remained maddeningly opaque, his lens continually finding handfuls of empty sky wherever he took it. Then he found one of the airships — the only reference point that vast world had to offer — and was able to watch the swift darting of the orthopters all about it as its fate was decided.

He watched the Stormreaders dive in, bringing themselves into line to attack the gondola itself; and the defending fliers rise to meet them.

There was a moment of utter clarity, in which the hull shapes and wing patterns unshelled their secrets to him, as if he had been born an engineer, and he shouted out in a bark of triumph so violent that his bodyguards feared he had been shot.

After he had reassured them, he tried to focus again, but by that time the aerial tide had turned. The Stormreaders were already speeding off for home: not because they feared the fray — he had more than enough evidence of their fanatical tenacity when it was called for — but because Collegium would need to know that the Second Army had recovered some fragment of its air power.

Defending the airships had been a flight of the new Farsphex models that had come close to winning the air war once before. Tynan had no illusions that the fight was decided, but his army could at least put up a fight in the air. They were back in the war.

After the airships had set down safely, to the general enthusiasm of the Second Army, the flight of Farsphex made their landing — long, elegant machines, larger than the Spearflights and yet more agile in the air, representing a whole different generation of flying machine. Their four wings could be fixed for longdistance flight, they were designed to make use of the Empire’s new and efficient mineral fuel and they were equally ready to duel in the air or to bombard a city.

Tynan saw only a dozen of them. The Stormreaders could probably have destroyed the lot, with losses, had they kept at it. The Collegiates valued knowledge over bloodshed, though, and Tynan suspected that they were right to do so.

Where are the rest? he asked himself, but he had a feeling this was all he was getting for now. No great strikes against the enemy, then. Perhaps just enough, with the Spearflights and the rest, to make taking to the skies over the Second costly for the Collegiate pilots.

‘There will be new officers,’ he told his staff. ‘Some from the Air Corps at the least. Bring them to my tent. I want to know what’s going on.’

The last batch of pilots he had worked with had proven a law unto themselves, clannish and close-mouthed, but of course he knew the reason for that now, although it had taken him a while to get his intelligence officer to reveal it.

The Empire keeping secrets from its own generals, but at least that’s nothing new.

His tent, nothing grander than those of his subordinates since the Second’s camp had been hit by the first Collegiate bombing, was a cramped place in which to hold a command conference, but Tynan wanted his own slice of secrecy this time. He felt a keen need to get to grips with this changing war before his soldiers were allowed time to speculate about it. Old, I know — and getting older by the second, the way this war’s going. The future of the Empire was in the hands of cleverer men than he: artificers, pilots, diplomats, all innovating, changing the rules of his profession. Some days he felt surprised that the Empress had not replaced him.

He thought of sending for Mycella. Relations between her people and the Wasps had been fractious these last tendays, the enforced waiting and the bombing leading to much blame being cast about. Wasp soldiers were always ready to hold their allies of lesser kinden responsible when things went wrong. Usually, in Tynan’s experience, they were right to do so, but in this case the assistance of the Spiders had proved invaluable in espionage and strategy, as well as in the actual fighting. Still, there had been skirmishes and brawls, and his sergeants were stretched to their limit in keeping discipline — those of them who were not themselves nursing a resentment against the Spider-kinden.

Having Mycella alongside him when he met the new arrivals would send a strong message of unity, but in the end he shied away from it. One never knew, after all, what orders might be coming from home. Instead he summoned Colonel Cherten of Army Intelligence, just in case he needed the man’s sidelong perspective.

The two men who came to see Tynan and Cherten first were not pilots, nor even Wasps. In the lead was a bold little Fly-kinden man with a major’s badge, wearing an outdoorsman’s hard-wearing leathers with a striped tabard thrown over them. Studying him, Tynan would have taken him for an officer of scouts.

‘Major Oski.’ The salute was haphazard, but at least it was there. ‘Engineers, and come with some fresh artillery for you.’ He jerked a thumb at the larger man standing behind him. Tynan saw a stocky Bee-kinden, older than Oski, younger than Tynan himself, dark-skinned and flat-faced but with none of the sullen slave mindset that he was used to seeing in Bees. He wore a uniform of halved black and gold, but with an engineer’s insignia at the chest.

‘Captain-Auxillian Ernain,’ Oski named him. ‘He’s my second.’ He waited to see if Tynan would make something of that, because an Auxillian engineer holding that rank was a fair-sized stone likely to cause ripples.

‘As long as he knows what he’s doing,’ Tynan remarked, because for him it was competence that was the paramount military virtue.

‘That he does, sir. I’ve orders for you, also.’ The little man handed over a sealed package. ‘How do you like our entrance, by the way?’ He seemed very pleased with himself.

‘You must have been very sure of your escort, Major,’ Tynan noted, breaking the seal. ‘We were all set to pick over your corpses, since the Air Corps has failed me before.’ He fixed the small major with a scowl before breaking the seal.

The orders were unambiguous: more space was devoted to the stamps, codes and signatures of authenticity than to the Empress’s will.

‘We’re to march,’ Tynan announced, his eyes seeking out Oski’s. ‘What the pits am I supposed to do about their air power, Major? I can assure you, unless those Farsphex have some new sky-clearing secret weapon, they’ll not win the skies over Collegium. Perhaps Capitas underestimates just how tenacious the Beetles are, land or air.’

‘I’m just artillery, sir,’ Oski said with an easy shrug, an engineer passing up on another man’s problem. ‘I’ve been knocking walls down since the Twelve-year War and I’m looking forward to Collegium getting within greatshotter range.’

‘So was your predecessor,’ Tynan warned him. ‘And the fact of your being here should tell you how that went. How many. .’ He stopped then, because a new voice was addressing his guards outside.

‘Inside, now,’ he snapped, and his new pilot officer ducked into the tent, shouldering Ernain the Bee aside.

Tynan registered the captain’s insignia and the pilot’s chitin helm and goggles dangling from the belt. In truth, he should have been ready for the rest of it, but still required a moment to recover his balance before he acknowledged the salute.

‘Captain Bergild reporting for duty, sir,’ said the Air Corps officer, a Wasp-kinden woman aged no more than twenty. But, of course, the older pilots had mostly died over Collegium in trying to break the Beetles’ air defences. The supply of new pilots ready for combat was limited, and the Empire could not stand on ceremony when throwing them into the fray. But of course. .

Of course the new pilots, that insular elite, were those possessing the Art that Ant-kinden took for granted, but which Wasps developed so rarely. They could speak mind to mind, these pilots, and that was the secret of their skill every bit as much as their improved machines and training. The mindlinking Art was hard to find, these days, after generations of it being rooted out. Anyone who possessed it — no matter who they were and despite centuries of Wasp traditions — was required to fly. There had been women in the last batch, and one of them had given her life trying to defend the Second when the Stormreaders came.

The newcomer was staring at him almost defiantly, and he guessed that she had endured her share of hostility in getting where she was and that, to be made leader of pilots over Wasp men, she must be very good at her job.

‘Sir,’ she repeated, waiting for his response, and he finally managed to remember his maxim — competence above all — and demanded of her, ‘Where’s the rest of you? What can I do with this handful, now that I’ve been ordered forwards?’ A general berating a junior officer, nothing more.

‘Not in my orders, sir. I’m here to provide you with air defence as you march. More Farsphex are on the way, but.’ Her inflection closed the sentence firmly on that word.

‘But?’ Tynan pressed.

She exchanged a glance with Major Oski: this was something they had obviously discussed previously. ‘Rumour, sir.’

Tynan’s heavy gaze swung from face to face: the Bee, the woman, the little man who probably held the highest rank a Fly had ever attained in the Imperial army — assembled here as though someone had wanted to rub his nose in the changing times. ‘Someone say something,’ he growled.

‘Rumour, sir,’ Oski echoed, ‘but there’s something that’s been brewed up at home to solve the air war problem. Search me for what, but the engineers are keeping some strange company these days. There’s something planned, General, but it sounds as though you’ll have to take it on faith, if they want you to march.’

Tynan was silent as the seconds ticked by, feeling his thoughts inexorably swing towards: What option do I have?