The Air War
( Shadows of the Apt - 8 )
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Air War
(Shadows of the Apt — 8)
Part One
The Calm
One
Nobody built cities with aviators in mind, and that was a cursed shame, in Taki’s opinion. That those cities had generally been planned before flying machines had been thought of was a poor excuse. She had taken her Esca Magni over to Princep Salma to have a nosy around, seeing a great blank grid of streets where the buildings themselves were still nothing but plots or foundations. A glorious opportunity, she had thought, to get the place properly designed for flight, but no, they had all sorts of ideas about how the place should look, and had set aside one dirty field on the outskirts for any luckless pilots who happened to come calling.
Backward thinking, that’s the problem, she told herself. Now Solarno, her beautiful city beside the Exalsee, had at least made a game try at adapting itself to aviation. There were a dozen private airfields, and the city itself was set into a rolling hillside so that all a flier had to do to get airborne was simply pitch off the edge. The houses immediately beneath such jump-off points were always up for sale, she recalled. She couldn’t imagine why.
She had flown into a lot of cities in her time, especially after the Wasp Empire’s crawling tide of conquest had encompassed her home, driving her thence all the way along the western coast to Collegium. This, however, was a new experience for her, and her heart caught in her mouth at the sheer daring of it.
But she lived for daring. What else was a pilot for, after all?
The Esca Magni was handling beautifully today. The new clockwork was as smooth as butter, measuring out its prodigious stored power with an unprecedented ease and response. It broke her heart to admit it, but her previous machine, the nimble and much-mourned Esca Volenti, could not have matched her new Magni for speed, distance or agility in the air. If there was a machine to challenge her in any contest, she had yet to find it, though the Collegium artificers were constantly nipping at her heels to provide one.
The thought still caught in her like a hook: recalling her poor faithful Volenti ’s brutal fate. It had been during the retaking of Solarno, her band of mercenaries and air-pirates against the Empire’s new-fledged air force. She had duelled their best pilot — dragon-fighting, they called it around the Exalsee, after the fierce aerial battles the Dragonfly-kinden loved. He had been very good and, although she would not acknowledge him as her better, he had met her and met her, time and again, even though his black-and-yellow striped Spearflight had not been equal to her Volenti.
And at the last, with her machine torn and mauled and its rotary piercers jammed, she had taken advantage of his fixation on her, and baited him in too close, leaping from the cockpit before their two fliers crashed and tangled, removing herself from the fight. She had watched, her own wings ablur, as the conjoined machines tumbled and fell — and felt as though she had killed her best friend.
The Esca Magni was some consolation after that. The original design had sprung from the best of Collegium artifice and her own unparalleled understanding of the simple business of flying, and never had there been a more demanding mistress for the artificers than te Schola Taki-Amre, known as Taki to her friends. Even a month ago, she had still been making minute changes to perfect the new flier’s handling. The Esca Magni, as originally built, had surpassed the Volenti by a small but measurable degree — and there had been a great deal of measuring, for the Collegium Beetles were fond of that.
Then had come the new clockwork — or the ‘New Clockwork’, to reflect the reverent way that the artificers talked about it. It involved some mad innovation in metallurgy from somewhere across the sea, some Spiderlands place or other, and it was not exactly common but there was a steady supply of the improved spring steel seeping into Collegium. An artificer called Gainer had begun using it for some boat he was working on, and shortly afterwards one of Taki’s mechanic disciples had brought it to her attention.
The level of precision required to take full advantage of the New Clockwork was formidable, but at around the same time, and apparently from the same source, Collegium began to see machine parts crafted to a frightening exactness, perfect in every tooth no matter how small. The resulting engines were lighter, smaller and considerably more powerful than anything anyone had seen before, and Taki had kicked an awful lot of shins in the College — and got up the noses of a great many ground-bound Beetle-kinden — before she secured a supply for the flying machines. Thankfully, by then, she had her supporters: her students and a ragbag of Collegiates who shared her passion for the air.
She had run the Esca Magni through a lot of paces since then: distance trips and mock-duels, up and down the coast, hops over to Sarn and Princep, even back to her old home of Solarno to show off to those of her friends that were still among the living. This journey was different, though.
She had thought to make it in one long leg, gliding where she could, hitching a ride in the high air currents and testing the New Clockwork to its logical conclusion. She had made good progress at first, but eventually minute changes in the engine’s ticking and a sluggishness in the controls had convinced her that reality was going to fall considerably short of her ambitions — and that was without any hard weather or, most demanding of all, actual air combat. She resolved to try and kick her tame artificers into working on something even better.
She put down in Helleron, and paid for the use of a winding engine to re-tension her flier. She felt bitterly disappointed about having to break her journey, for all that it gave her the chance to eat something that hadn’t been dried half to death.
Taki was the first recorded pilot ever to make the trip from Collegium to Helleron in a single journey in a heavier-than-air machine, but she had failed in her original plan, therefore it still seemed like second prize.
She had managed the flight from Helleron to here in another single bound although, had the political situation been tenser, she would have expected to have to fight her way past half the cities that had glided past below her. She had worried about her navigation as well, and whether she would even recognize her target when she saw it, but her charts and her compass were in agreement, and the view could have been nowhere else on earth.
Capitas, the heart of the Wasp Empire.
This city had not been built with aviators in mind, either, but at least it was planned out by an Apt kinden that could fly, and so she spotted a half-dozen open spaces that looked to be ideal for landing her Esca, and several large fields outside the city as well, mostly attended by louring barracks and presumably given over to the innumerable soldiers of the Imperial army.
She brought her flier in low as she neared, knowing that every city provided a free updraught for the canny flier. She was determined not to end up somewhere on the outskirts: that would be a failure of daring. Besides, the city looked rather flat and, while that detracted from its scenic value, it was a gift to a pilot coming in low.
She revised her assessment of the place very quickly, because she was still coming in low — dangerously low now — and she had not quite reached the sprawling outskirts. Right, so it’s just a little bigger than I thought. She pulled up on the stick, inching a little more height, and then the first suburbs of Capitas were speeding beneath her, close enough that she caught the pale flash of faces peering up. And we’ll see how good that cursed invitation was, too. The spectre of a dozen combat Spearflights lifting straight up from one of the airfields loomed large in her mind.
The sheer number of aircraft she saw was proof positive that she was not here on false pretences, however. Every airfie
ld was cluttered with them, and the sky above Capitas was lumpy with airships and spotter balloons.
When the invitation had arrived, her fellow aviators at the College had thought it was a hoax or a trap, depending on how suspicious their minds were. None of them knew that she had been corresponding sporadically, secretly, with the Wasp capital for over a season. Not even Stenwold Maker was aware of that. In fact, he probably topped the list of people Taki had no intention of telling.
Capitas saw itself as the heart of Aptitude, and it was keenly aware of the longer pedigrees of Collegium and Helleron. Taki had a vague understanding that there had been some changes here in the Empire since that woman took over, but they had held no interest for her until now. Capitas was hosting a grand exhibition of aviation, and notables from the entire known world had been invited. After all, the war was the past, as everyone knew.
Her face abruptly set, Taki slung her Esca Magni past the long flank of an ascending airship, seeing the square ports all the way down the side of its hull. She knew what they were for. The Starnest, which had been the linchpin of the Solarno invasion, had been three times as long, but it had used the same method for dispersing its complement of soldiers across the city: the Wasps simply throwing themselves out of the hatches and gliding down on their Art-fed wings.
But the airships, even the great war-dreadnoughts, had a shamefaced and sheepish air: the Starnest had been unseamed and had fallen from the sky; the Collegiate Triumph had burned. The age of the airship as a great tool of war was done. The air now belonged to the heavy fliers.
Ahead she saw one of the city’s parks, which had been converted to an airstrip. There was precious little space there, but she reckoned she could touch down the Esca without too much jockeying.
A score of different fliers had landed in haphazard rows, most of them looking completely unfamiliar to her. Even as she slowed and banked, achieving a jittery hover over the field, she found herself facing a solid rank of black and gold. One entire edge was composed of a line of Spearflights hunched beneath their folded wings. For a moment she was inclined to touch down in front of them, just to show them how cursed daring she really was, but something in the uniform discipline of their positioning broke her resolve, and she hauled back and had the Esca Magni circle a little, as nonchalantly as she could manage, looking for other lodgings. Capitas was a city dominated by ziggurats, the characteristic form of Wasp architecture. Some were grand and some were squat, and all were surrounded by lower buildings with flat roofs. After a pass around the field, Taki spotted a rather inviting prospect that was probably some mid-ranking official’s little kingdom, and she slid the Esca through the air, folding down the craft’s three legs so that they ghosted across the stone, the entire flying machine poised momentarily, almost still in the air, the tilt of its wings exactly cancelling out her lateral movement, before she let herself drop, with the legs bowing to catch the strain.
Even as she hopped out, a man had already scrambled up onto the roof through a hatch, a lean Dragonfly-kinden wearing a simple tunic — a house slave, she realized. He stared at the flying machine perched on his master’s roof, and she saw a very small smile twitch at his face because here… here was something that he could not possible be blamed for.
She let her wings carry her down the tiered facade of the building and was immediately surrounded by soldiers. They came from all sides, and some dropped from the air onto the building behind her, between her and the Esca. Cursing herself for being too caught up in her daring to keep a basic watch out for trouble, she was reaching for her little knife by instinct, in the face of their stings. Or perhaps she would leap back and try for the sky, trusting that she was swifter and more nimble than they.
She stopped herself, calmed herself. Yes, they were Wasps, but she was already within their city. The protocols were somewhat different.
‘Is this how you treat your guests here, sieurs?’ she demanded, muscling up to the nearest of them as though they were not twice her size. It took physical effort to hold the light smile on her face, because her heart was hammering in her chest and her instincts were screaming at her.
One of the soldiers stepped forward, their sergeant or something. ‘Is this how you think guests are supposed to behave?’ he demanded, seeing only a lesser kinden — and a woman to boot — but a foreigner and yet not a slave, and so outside of the hierarchy he was used to.
‘What?’ she asked brightly. ‘Don’t tell me these nice flat roofs aren’t meant for landing on?’
For a moment she could not read him, and she was ready for him to give his next order: it was the blessing of opposing a military group, rather than just some band of rogues, that they would considerately tip you off by having to instruct each other when to kill you. Then she marked an extremely grudging smile, fighting for purchase at the corner of his mouth — not unlike the slave’s, in fact — and she guessed that whoever owned this house, he was both well known and not popular.
‘You’re here for the exhibition?’ the soldier asked her gruffly, and yet a certain degree of tension had ebbed away.
By way of reply, Taki gestured towards the Esca Magni. ‘I’m come from Collegium — aviation department of the Great College.’
This did not produce the sort of automatic respect that most College Masters always assumed it would. ‘You have papers?’ the soldier enquired.
She blinked. ‘What, you mean like College accredits? Only, I’m sort of an honorary assistant scholar, and…’
‘Papers. Visitor’s papers.’
That seemed too much even for a military bureaucracy. ‘I’ve only just arrived,’ she pointed out.
He took in a deep breath and she saw, with an involuntary spark of sympathy, that the people who had organized the Imperial Air Exhibition — their merchant Consortium and engineers — were not the people who were having to put a great deal of it into practice. She wondered how many obstinate, ignorant, irreverent foreigners these soldiers had so far rounded up.
‘Fly-kinden,’ the soldier addressed her, ‘anywhere between the Three Cities and here could have drawn up papers for you. Most of your fellows procured theirs in Sonn or Shalk.’
She folded her arms and tossed her head back, a minuscule study in pride. ‘That would require me to come down to land somewhere between Helleron and Capitas.’
His expression remained wholly unimpressed, and she realized that he had little understanding of either the distances or the technical feat involved in her journey. She was just a foreigner who was making his life difficult, an invader in the Empire’s heart, and yet he couldn’t do anything about it. She was sure he wanted to kill her or enslave her, or take her prisoner and lock her up. His entire world view was based on that shortlist of responses towards strangers. That he was restraining himself now indicated why he had made sergeant, she suspected.
‘Show me where to go to get these papers, then,’ she suggested, somewhat more meekly, and at last she was behaving as he expected, and shortly thereafter some Consortium clerk had drawn up her visitor’s pass, cautioning her to keep it about her person at all times or she might not be so lucky next time. She bit back a sarcastic jibe about Imperial hospitality, because the truth was that this was Imperial hospitality, the best there had ever been. A hundred or so aviators and several hundred more pedestrians had come from across the Apt world to their capital, absentmindedly breaking their laws, offending their sense of racial superiority and threatening their security, and the Wasps were somehow allowing them to do so without ordering a general massacre. Yet.
Her papers stuffed in the inside pocket of her tunic, Taki strode out into the city of her enemies — or at least they had been her enemies not so very long ago, and would be again soon enough, most likely. She was a striking woman of her kinden, small and slender, her chestnut hair falling past her shoulders. In her pilot’s overalls of canvas, a pilot’s helm of chitin over leather dangling from her belt beside her flying goggles, she would have looked foreign anywhe
re outside Solarno, but most especially here. Still, there were a great many foreigners being tolerated in Capitas during these few days of the exhibition. The city had gone to some lengths to accommodate them, and still it was an unwelcoming place.
Any other city, and Taki would have looked for wayhouses, tavernas, chop houses, all the necessaries that accompanied trade and travellers. The citizens of the Empire still traded and travelled, of course, although perhaps not quite so much of either as most others, but they were never out of place, not in any Imperial city. It was a humbling, disturbing thought, but everyone in the Empire had their place assigned to them, like it or not. When one of them journeyed to somewhere else within the Empress’s realm they would stay at their Consortium’s factora, or the local garrison barracks, or in guest chambers prepared by the governor. Their way was pre-paved, both easier and less free. Along the road there were inns, although they were regulated and administered by the civic governors. In the cities there were only homes away from home. Anyone left to wander the streets without fitting into this great pattern would soon be obligingly found a place by the Slave Corps.
There were neighbourhoods of Capitas that had been turned into impromptu inns, she found. Canvas had been stretched from roof to roof, and whole streets had been set out as common rooms furnished with simple beds. Dour slaves exchanged food and drink for coin that would only go to their masters in the Consortium. A brief but thriving temporary service economy had been created from first principles. Taki bought herself a square of floor and a pallet bed in one of the women’s districts — the separation amused her — and paid a sergeant of the Imperial Engineering Corps to have her Esca Magni rewound, going into some detail so that he would be able to find her machine back on its rooftop. The engineer was more her sort of person than the street guards had been, and was properly impressed by her feats of long-distance flying.
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