The Air War sota-8

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  After that, with dusk looking an hour away at best, she let herself wander over to the exhibition itself, a quartet of civic squares that had been given over to aviation demonstrations and contests. Two score of different models of flying machine had been parked there and anatomized, their workings laid open for public inspection. Here, a Spearflight with its guts out, four wings unfolded and poised as though caught in mid-beat. There, the great, blocky shape of the old heliopters that the Empire had once relied on almost exclusively — and not so long ago at that — which seemed laughably primitive to Taki’s eyes. There was a section of the gondola from an airship dreadnought that visitors could walk through and, beyond it, an ear-jarring racket as a dozen different engines were run against each other in a competition to see which had the most staying power.

  Everything was of interest, but nothing quite held her attention for long. There was so little of it that she would count as cutting-edge. It made her feel quite patronizing towards the Empire that they had proffered this display so proudly. What meant more to her was that she was surrounded by other pilots, her peers and fellows, and that was something she had missed since leaving Solarno.

  She still received invitations to return to her home city for good, but she had left a crashed flier and a lot of dead friends there and, despite the time that had passed, she found such losses too recent. Besides, she was fond of Collegium — honestly, she was — it was just… sometimes she missed having someone on her own level of skill, someone to share the skies with as only another fighting pilot could.

  Being free of the demands of the College and being amongst her own kind was all so much fun that she forgot about the Wasp soldiers for whole minutes at a time.

  There was not a foreigner there not being watched — watched with the sort of paranoid suspicion normally the preserve of the most insular of Ant cities. They were all potential spies, these visiting aviators and artificers, and everywhere Taki looked were the uniforms of the Imperial army, singly and in small groups, their eyes raking the crowds, looking for the enemy. After a while she decided that at least half of them were watching the citizens of Capitas, in case being around all these foreigners gave the locals any ideas.

  After dark, Taki flitted from one canvas-roofed hall to another until she found some faces she knew. Over glasses of some very acceptable brandy, she settled down beside another Collegiate, a diminutive Beetle-kinden by the name of Willem Reader, who had set off considerably earlier than she and yet arrived only the day before. He was an aviation artificer who had authored a number of texts about the New Clockwork, and was now gathering material to present to the College for its next aviation symposium. Across the round table from them was a Solarnese pilot she knew slightly: a man named Shawmair who had been a pirate and outcast for years, but was now back in the city’s good graces due to his part in the liberation. Beside Shawmair was a lean, nervous-looking Ant-kinden with bluish skin, from no city Taki could name. He spent most of his time glancing over his shoulder.

  ‘You missed a good show this morning, Bella Taki,’ Shawmair declared. ‘They held a contest: teams of fliers against each other. No doubt our hosts were itching to show us how grand they were.’

  ‘I take it they didn’t succeed?’ she asked cautiously, aware that there would be Imperial ears listening to all of this.

  ‘Oh, their old Spearflights held up well enough until our fliers came against them. The new Firebugs, Bella, they’ll knock anything else out of the sky. I’d stake them against whatever you’re flying these days, and that’s knowing your exquisite taste.’ He sneered a bit at Reader. ‘No team from Collegium, then? Even your Helleren magnates managed a respectable entry.’

  ‘Ah, well, organizing academics… what can you say?’ Reader replied mildly. ‘Perhaps next year, if there is one.’ He did not look at Taki, but they both knew that the College’s aviators, the cornerstone of the city’s pilots, were currently training with new machines that were Beetle-sized cousins of Taki’s own orthopter.

  ‘I remember when Solarno’s strength was its pilots, as individuals,’ she noted. Indeed, a few years ago it would only have been the Empire, and perhaps some plodding Ant city-states, who produced a standard model of flying machine.

  ‘Past times,’ Shawmair said dismissively. ‘After the retaking of our city, everyone can see how any future war will be won or lost and, with all that riding on it, how can you trust to just some bunch of pilots, and what they may or mayn’t, can or can’t do?’ The former rogue and criminal put on a virtuous face. ‘Solarno needs to know for sure it has a force that can take on the Empire…’ Here he stopped and realized at last, even through the brandy, that he had gone too far. ‘Take on the enemy, I mean, and give him a thrashing, without having to worry about whether our people’ll feel like it, or be up to it. And the Solarnese air force has the finest pilots and machines in the world, as this morning’s games have proved. The Emp- other cities may have more to put in the sky, but skill triumphs over numbers any day. We stand on the shores of the Exalsee, and our Firebugs say, “You shall not touch us.”’

  He was drunk and talking too loud, and the Ant beside him was growing increasingly worried about what attention Shawmair was attracting. He was a useful diversion, though, so nobody was listening to Taki when she murmured to Reader, ‘You’ve made contact?’

  ‘He approached me,’ the Beetle whispered back, his brandy bowl close to his lips to mask them. ‘He’ll be here. And I’m nothing to do with it, remember. I barely know you. Some of us can’t just skip off into the sky.’

  She had wanted to sit and wait, but Shawmair was still expounding the virtues of Solarno’s new machines, and she was curious. When he offered to show her, she glanced at Reader and he nodded slightly. He had been making notes, she saw, for whatever talk he was preparing to give here.

  Shawmair’s craft was standing close by, one of an untidy semicircle of visiting machines scattered about a garden park that was now badly in need of re-landscaping. The stocky-bodied machine was painted red, fading to darker hues towards the tail, which curved sharply down and forward, and its wings, at rest, were vertical, tips touching. She recognized parts of it: oddments of shape that mirrored elements of her Esca, others that had been drawn from fliers she had known or flown against. Her eyes weighed it at once, not needing Shawmair’s commentary, and she felt a tinge of envy — not that she would admit it was better than her Esca, but nonetheless she saw a dozen little innovations she was itching to reverse-engineer.

  ‘Fuel engine, triple-action, with halteres to balance the wings,’ Shawmair was saying. ‘The beat is four times what a Spearflight would give you, so it just guzzles the mineral oil, won’t keep in the air for all that long, but nothing else has the speed and power. And they reckon those villains in Chasme have an improved engine design if we want to pay their price for it. Four-way rotary piercers from a central drum, and, look, this slide here stops jamming in the bolt-feed…’

  His voice droned on, but she was aware that she was being watched: a feeling that she had been expecting for some time. From the corner of her eye she marked a dark, thin figure at the far end of the grounded fliers.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she broke into Shawmair’s bragging. ‘You wait here, and I’ll be right back.’ It was a lie, but he was a bore, so she didn’t feel too bad about it.

  She hopped into the night sky, her wings casting herself over the head of her watcher, knowing that he would mark her, assuming automatically that he would be able to plot her course and trajectory, to work out that she would end up with her feet on the ground a street away.

  She hoped that this figure was who she thought it was, and not just some Rekef snoop clumsy enough to be spotted.

  In the dark street beyond, she touched down, then shrugged back against a wall on hearing multiple footsteps. Within moments, a trio of soldiers passed by, but they did not seem to be acting as city watch, instead talking quietly amongst themselves, and passing a little metal flask from ha
nd to hand. On their way back to barracks, perhaps, or on to some nocturnal assignment.

  After they had gone she waited. And then she continued waiting beyond the point when her internal timekeeping, which had always been keen, told her that any watcher should have caught her up. At last she caught a faint shuffle and, after an unexpectedly long gap, the same figure appeared.

  I should have thought. He was not as she remembered him, but then she could have predicted that, had she only put her mind to it. The newcomer was a Wasp, lean and bundled in a greatcoat that had been standard Imperial issue during the Twelve-year War with the Commonweal. For Taki the Capitas night was mild, spring already well under way, but it seemed that winter still clung to this man. Or perhaps the coat was simply to hide what was beneath, for one of his shoulders was higher than the other and there was a terrible lopsidedness to all of him, inherent in the very way he stood. His gait, as he stepped onto the street, had been an uneven limp, with one leg stiff as a stilt.

  She approached cautiously because, if he was like that, what would his reaction to her be? Had this all been a trap, a plan for revenge? Even crippled as he was, he could still sting.

  She coughed to draw his attention, ready to trust to her wings at a moment’s notice.

  His face, as it turned to her, was shiny with burn scars. ‘Bella Taki?’ came a coarse voice. There was no hatred or hostility in it.

  ‘Sieur Axrad,’ she named him, and then, ‘Lieutenant Axrad, I mean.’ She approached cautiously, less from fear of him than a reluctance to see what she had made of him. He had been the Empire’s pre-eminent pilot in Solarno and, when she had flown during the liberation, it had been against him. His Spearflight had crashed and mangled into her Esca Volenti. She had assumed he had died.

  It was a long time later when his first letter reached her, a halting missive reintroducing himself, stiffly offering his congratulations on her victory over him.

  They had exchanged a few letters since, and she had read, between his words, that he was lonely. The Empire might be a fierce and Apt state, but it lacked the pilot’s society of Solarno, that exclusive and peerless fraternity of those who could. Axrad had more in common with her than with his own.

  His face was blank as he gazed at her, but after a while she noticed that his eyes looked as though they should be smiling, and realized that the burn had left him without much range of expression.

  ‘Come with me,’ he rasped, and went limping off without another word, leaving her to patter after him, still not convinced that it wasn’t all a trap.

  He took her to a Capitas drinking den — not like the place that Reader and the other foreigners had been guided into, but the real thing. It was in the cellar of a squat, square house, almost twice the size of the cramped ground floor above. Everyone else there was Wasp-kinden, and all men, some of them in uniform. All were drinking, and most of them seemed to be there for nothing else, save for one huddle playing cards on the floor. There were a few tables available, and she saw that Axrad was known because they cleared one for him. By the way he levered himself painfully into a chair it was plain that sitting on the floor would not have been possible for him.

  There was no other chair. She sat on the table, close to him and keenly aware of the baleful looks she was getting: wrong kinden, wrong gender, wrong nationality. Still, nobody had bolted out of the door to tell the Rekef, just yet.

  ‘So, how…?’ She could not ask the question, stupid as it was. She knew from his letters that he was bitter and frustrated. She had known he was unable to fly, although he had not been clear, in his writing, just why. Asking him how he was getting on now would be sheer insult. ‘Still “lieutenant”, though?’

  His nod was jerky. ‘Don’t assume that I asked you here to catch up on old times,’ he told her. ‘Though I’d like to. They’re all I have. But I wouldn’t call Collegium and Solarno’s greatest pilot all this way just to indulge me.’ He sounded like an old, old man, and moved like one too. He was probably only a few years her senior. ‘You wonder if I’ve lured you here for the Rekef?’ Without needing an answer he went on, ‘I wonder if you’ve come here as a pilot or a spy. Are you here with your Stenwold Maker’s blessing?’ His eyes were still mobile and young, as he probed her face.

  ‘No, and for two reasons,’ she told him. ‘One, he’s so twitchy about your lot he’d try to stop me coming at all. Two, if he couldn’t stop me he’d give me all sorts of other rubbish to be doing here that would get me arrested or killed, or both. So, no, just me. The pilot.’

  ‘I will tell the pilot things that the spy would kill for. I was a pilot, Bella Taki. I was a pilot. ’

  She stared at him: of course he had been a pilot, but she saw his hand clamp on the table rim, the fingers white and shaking with all the emotion his mute face could not show.

  ‘No longer,’ he said at last, his eyes alarmingly wide. ‘This? Oh, this.’ He made such an offhand gesture, dismissing the ruining of his body as though it was a shaving scar. ‘But, even if I were whole, nothing for me. Men who were my equal, the best in the aviation corps — denied the new machines, sidelined, even taken from combat duty and reduced to supply runs, civilian freight or sent in old Spearflights to terrify the savages in the most backward part of the Empire. Or made to teach. They had me teaching.’

  She didn’t want to confess that she had been doing exactly the same at Collegium. Secretly she agreed that it was a poor second to actually flying, but she owed the College a great deal.

  ‘Teaching the junior pilots I knew from before we went to Solarno, though? No,’ he spat out. ‘Listen, Bella Taki, we don’t have much time. Listen to me. They have me teaching clerks and slavers, factory overseers, men plucked from the Consortium or the Light Airborne — oh, lots of the Light Airborne. Have they any flying experience? No, almost without exception: clueless, hopeless, and yet they are the new pilots, the next generation of combat fliers rushed through training, hours and days in Spearflights and whatever else is to hand, More training in a few months than most trainees get in a year.’ His voice sank lower. ‘And there’s something wrong with them,’ he whispered. ‘They sit there… like machines. They watch, they learn. Not a twitch, not a shared joke with their classmates: men of all ages, all backgrounds, and yet… by the end, I had begun to fear them.’ His hand was shaking again. ‘Then one of their own — he had been a pilot, the only one that had been — took over the teaching. I was no longer required. I have been cast away. All the men I knew, the Empire’s pilots, are being displaced by these… freaks.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t sound as though the Lowlands or Solarno have much to worry about, then,’ Taki tried, dismissively, but Axrad’s eyes flared, and he had her by the wrist before she could pull away.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ he threatened, lurching to his feet. In actual fact there was pitifully little strength in that grip, but there was a warmth to his palm that frightened her, because one sting and he could take her hand off.

  As he hauled her out of the drinking den, the looks on the faces of the other Wasp men were mostly approving. At last she was being taught her place, apparently.

  Axrad started stomping haltingly away, and he could not hold her, his fingers weakening and loosening his grip after only a few steps. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said again, less of a threat now. He did not even look back to see if she was following.

  She wanted very much to return to the other foreigners now. She wanted Axrad to come along with her and talk about old times. Her daring had abandoned her without warning. Still, to go now would be to show fear in front of another pilot, for all that he would never fly again. She was the greatest pilot that either Solarno or Collegium had ever known. She had bested the Empire’s own best. This is what she told herself whenever she met life’s obstacles. If she fled now, she would never quite recover that iron self-confidence.

  Axrad was making surprisingly quick progress, his hoarse breath showing that he was pushing himself painfully to do it. She kept pace
without difficulty, could have gone twice as fast without resorting to her wings but, even so, his grim determination scared her. Here was a different man to the earnest pilot she had met in Solarno.

  Crashing in flames and becoming a burned cripple will do that.

  ‘Axrad,’ she did not want to raise the issue but it was unavoidable, ‘you should hate me.’

  ‘For Solarno?’ he panted. ‘You were the last person to treat me as an equal. As someone who mattered. I save my hate for others.’

  He took a sharp turn, hissing with sudden pain, and they were at the edge of an airfield, a narrow strip easy to overlook, since the city was strewn with more inviting spots. With a start she realized that they were towards the edge of the city here. They had come further than she thought. Beyond the strip lay a rabble of small houses and two or three big sheds — no, hangars that had been storage sheds not so long ago.

  This can’t be a secret airstrip. We’re right in the capital. We’re surrounded by buildings. And yet she guessed that the locals kept their mouths shut and, besides, it was night. The Wasps were not a nocturnal people. They did things by day for preference. Night was for stealth and subterfuge.

  ‘They call them Farsphex,’ the Wasp breathed, and then stared down at her as though he had forgotten she was with him. ‘Hide yourself,’ he snapped. ‘Just watch.’

  She blinked at him, then flitted up to the roof of the nearest building, but the flat roof made her feel exposed, so she darted down again, finding a narrow alley that had been fenced off where it met the airstrip. With a little scrambling and balancing she had found a roost tucked into the shadows where the fence met the alley wall. By then, her ears had already registered the sound.

  It was a familiar drone, which she had lived with all her life: the sound of a fixed-wing flier coming in to land. After a moment she had identified it as a twin-propeller vessel, small enough to be a fighting pilot’s, but bigger than the Esca Magni even so.