The Air War sota-8

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Go ahead,’ he nodded briefly, and she let her wings flurry her up to the curving top of the machine’s hull. Thoughtfully, she touched the blade of one of the twin propellers there. Pingge would be the first to admit that her knowledge of aviation was limited, but she hadn’t thought orthopters needed those.

  Scain stalked over to the flier’s side, running his hand along it in a gesture that said far more than the words he used. She thought that he would open the cockpit, but instead he popped a hatch in the Farsphex’s side.

  ‘See,’ he said, pointing. She hung her head over the opening, looking upside down into the cramped interior. There was a brief crawlspace that would take Scain to the pilot’s seat, but immediately inside the hatch was room for someone else, though only someone small because there, on a hinged arm, was a reticule. It was the same toy that she had been training with all this time, but seeing it in this unfamiliar setting sent a chill down her spine.

  ‘In,’ Scain directed, and he went squirming into the orthop-ter’s innards, all elbows and knees as he wriggled through the crawlspace, then contorted himself to get into his seat.

  She hesitated at the hatch’s mouth, until another preremptory ‘In!’ from Scain forced her hand. A moment later she was sitting before the reticule, just as she had so often before, but the walls of the Farsphex’s hull crushed in on her from all sides. Below her, the machine was missing a good area of floor, enough for her to slip through if she was careless, allowing the reticule’s impartial eyes to view the terrain below. At the moment, all its angles and mirrors served only to give her eyepiece a good close view of the hangar floor ahead of the machine’s nose.

  The hatch was shut from outside with a slam, making her jump. All at once she was enclosed by darkness, but Fly-kinden were used to that, from the interconnected underground communities they favoured, or the cramped tenements they were shunted into in the cities.

  ‘Sir, what’s going on now?’ she asked, giving her voice all proper deference.

  ‘Test flight,’ Scain told her. ‘Live one.’ A moment later and he was reaching back down the crawlspace to tug at her sleeve, making her jump. ‘Wear this.’

  It was a shackle, a metal band attached to the hull by a chain. She stared at Scain wordlessly, and he clipped it about her ankle, turning the key awkwardly, one-handed in the confined space.

  ‘What…? Sir?’ she got out, her voice tight.

  ‘Stop you falling out.’ It was perhaps the longest single sentence he had said to her, and all it told her was that he was a bad liar. For a moment she looked him in the eyes, under the poor light that came up from the aperture. Instead of staring her down, as a member of the superior race should do, he just shrugged and looked away, plainly feeling a little guilt.

  So they don’t trust us. It was a bitter thought. ‘I’m an Imperial citizen, you know,’ she complained, before she could stop herself. ‘I know about duty. It’s not as though I’ll just desert through the… the whatever this hole’s called, the moment we’re in the air. I have family in the city.’

  Scain just shrugged, twisting his way back into the cockpit. Pingge stared at the shackle unhappily, but in the back of her mind she thought of Gizmer and some of the others who were perhaps less diligent servants of the Empire.

  She wondered how Kiin was getting on. She would not trade Scain for Aarmon, certainly: the leader of the new pilots scared her.

  A moment later she felt the engine turn over and fire, sounding as loud as any factory machine. The Farsphex jolted and swayed as it was pushed out into the open air by the ground crew, and then Scain made a kind of hissing sound and the wings were abruptly unleashed, clapping down towards the ground and springing the machine into the air at a sickening angle.

  She would get used to it all in time, save that part: every time her machine — she would grow possessive of it very soon — took to the air there would be that stomach-lurching moment when she nearly sent her lunch down through the aperture. Somewhere amidst all the trade-offs that had gone into the Farsphex’s finely tuned design, a graceful takeoff had been judged expendable.

  A moment later the city roofs were rushing past, and then were gone, their speed being far greater than she had anticipated; the rhythm of their flight was steady rather than the furious beat of an orthopter’s wings.

  ‘Ready!’ It was Scain’s voice, and she guessed she had already missed hearing the word once, against the engine’s racket. For a moment she did not know what he meant, but then her training took over and she had her eye against the reticule.

  They were heading out across farmland now, towards a broken-backed range of hills north-west of the city. The eyepiece showed her a magnification of the view she might have if she were clinging beneath the orthopter’s sharp nose, flanked by the rotary piercers.

  ‘What targets?’ she called forward, forgetting her ‘sir’. Even as she asked, she spotted a plume of smoke, a fire set out on one of the hilltops. The wheeling, unsteady view of the reticule showed her several others rising beyond it.

  She fumbled the first one, failing to get the trigger switch released, despite a faultless record in training. Scain said nothing, but guided the flier towards their next target.

  ‘Remember your navigation?’ he called back, his voice sounding a little taut as he concentrated on the steering, and she realized this was as much a test for him as for her.

  ‘Probably, sir.’ She had her tongue between her lips as she focused, a habit from childhood, watching the smoking target draw nearer as Scain swung towards it.

  ‘We’ll be flying nights as well; you’ll need to direct me to the target. Bear that in mind.’ The words seemed to exhaust him and he hunched over the stick.

  And away! And she got it right this time, and felt something solid clunk directly below her seat, something leaving the belly of the flier. And that ought to be spot on the mark, she decided, hoping that she would get to go back over the same ground herself to see how she’d There was a crack and a bang from behind them and she would have feared something onboard had exploded had the sound not been so distant. She was so rattled that she missed the next target entirely. ‘What was that?’

  ‘ Live flight,’ Scain stressed. ‘Real bombs.’

  Pingge missed the target following that as well, because she could not make her fingers move on the trigger, even though she had the reticule lined up on it perfectly. Bombs, she was thinking numbly, but of course bombs. What else? And who but a Fly-kinden would fit in here with the reticule, and who else would have the eyes for that night-flying Scain said about. Oh, someone has been thinking long and hard about this.

  And: What about the farmers that live down there? Did they clear them out? Did they even warn them that the air force would be blowing them up today?

  And: They’re going to make me drop bombs on people, real people. For a moment she felt ill, thinking of all that training, when it had been a game.

  But Scain shouted at her, and she flicked the trigger seconds-perfect and sent another bomb spiralling away from the undercarriage, imagining it obliterating the bonfire target that some uncomprehending slave had set out.

  Her name. What he had shouted was her name. She had not realized that he actually knew it.

  It changed things, somehow. The Imperial high command didn’t know her name, and it thought she needed to be chained to the hull to stop her flying off in terror. Right then she didn’t give a bent pin for the Empress or her generals, but she didn’t want to let Scain down.

  She got the next three bombs off, all within tolerance of their marks, and then the Wasp was turning them round, not heading for the city but for somewhere else.

  ‘Good,’ was all he said, but she felt a curious bond with him: who else was there, after all, but Scain and herself in this hollow shell in the upper air?

  He brought them down at an airstrip a few miles outside Capitas, and there he unlocked the shackle, and showed her how to open the hatch from within. She dropped out onto the
packed dirt of the strip, and the first thing she saw was another dozen Farsphex arranged in a rough line, with hers on the end. There was a scattering of the new pilots and their Fly-kinden henchmen and henchwomen around, and she could hear the drone of other machines still in the air.

  A curiously proprietorial feeling came over her, regarding it all. This was more than the factory, where she had been just a small part of a humdrum machine, a tiny ball bearing helping the Empire on its way. This was special, and she and her fellows had become an elite. Looking about her at the busy airstrip she could feel herself and Kiin and all the others help build the future right then, right there. In that moment all of her qualms about whoever might be below the bombs she was preparing to drop were banished.

  Fifteen

  ‘I thought you should hear the news, that’s all,’ Taki explained. ‘Didn’t think I’d drop into the middle of a war. Looks like, no matter how fast I fly, the world moves faster.’

  She was perched on a table in what the Mynans were now calling their War Room. It was the third set of walls to bear the name. The first had been in the Consensus building that had proved vulnerable prey to the Wasp incendiaries because the Mynans had not even finished its construction. A quarter of the ruling council had died in the blaze, but at least the rest had settled their differences and were now waiting on Kymene’s word. The second War Room had taken an unlucky shell in the sporadic artillery bombardment that jumped about the city, cracking the walls enough that nobody wanted to stay inside. In the end, Kymene had repaired to a cellar to hold her deliberations. It reminded Stenwold of the places that the Mynan resistance had been driven to when the Wasps had held the city. That Kymene had been reduced to this already was a bad sign.

  ‘Your news about the Wasp air force comes late,’ the Mynan leader remarked acidly, looking up from her plans. Her face was ashen and drawn: no sleep and too many worries all at once.

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you,’ Taki shot back. ‘Those lads out there, they’re old news, Spearflights and regular pilots. The Empire’s cooking up something special, though — new men, new machines.’

  ‘How does this affect us now?’ Kymene asked her. ‘Even their current forces would suffice to keep control of the air.’

  In fact, the Empire had at first seemed not to be pressing its advantage. For two days the bulk of the artillery had concentrated on the outer wall, which had cracked in three places and looked as though it would cease to provide a meaningful obstacle very shortly if this concerted and uncannily precise bombardment continued. The balance of the Imperial engines had been throwing incendiaries and explosive shells into the city itself, apparently at random, ensuring that nobody in Myna slept well or felt safe.

  After its initial lightning raid over the city, the air force had been absent for a day. Enough orthopters had remained to defend the artillery from Mynan reprisals, as two costly air skirmishes had shown, but the Spearflights had not been seen in the sky since that first sortie. Edmon and the other pilots had been trying to cobble together whatever new fliers they could, co-opting and arming civilian machines and repairing anything that could be dragged largely intact from the ruin of the Mynan airfields and hangars. That the Empire would still possess resounding air superiority was a grim truth nobody wanted to talk about.

  The Empire’s actual army, the fighting men who had previously formed the first wave of offence in any Imperial attack, had sat out beyond the hills, far out of range of the Mynan artillery, whilst its greatshotters had inexorably chewed away at the wall. The Wasp assault had so far killed over a thousand Mynans and a handful of Imperial pilots. The Mynan soldiers had milled and gone to the walls and been driven back, and talked endlessly of sorties and counter-attacks, and their Maynesh Ant-kinden allies had very nearly taken to the field alone, unable to countenance simply sitting under the shadow of the Wasp artillery without any recourse at all. Still, the column from Szar was expected to arrive any day to bolster the city’s numbers, and that was anticipated to trigger some manner of reversal in their situation.

  Today, though, the remnants of the Szaren relief column had finally arrived, and with it an understanding of where the balance of the Imperial air force had been engaged. Caught in the open, in close formation, the Bee-kinden had been perfect targets for the Spearflights in an attack that nobody had even contemplated a few days ago. Flying machines fought flying machines; that had been the rule. Aside from dropping grenades, usually by hand, their effectiveness on the ground was strictly limited. It had been every tactician’s understanding that only airships could carry a load sufficient to make a serious impact on the ground, and so the strategic effectiveness of orthopters was limited to how well they could attack or defend such slow-moving, vulnerable targets. Surely that was what the fight for Solarno had taught?

  Apparently it had taught the Wasps more than their enemies. From destroying half the Mynan air force — such as it was — on the ground, the Wasps had gone on to locate and ruthlessly attack the Szaren infantry, who had no way of fighting back. Indeed, after the first pass of the orthopters, the Szaren response had been to pull in tighter for mutual defence, giving the Spearflights all the more attractive a target.

  Thirty-seven Bee-kinden soldiers had reached the Mynan walls, out of almost fifteen hundred that had marched out from Szar. Many more were doubtless still alive, but scattered by the mad rout that had eventually destroyed all of their cohesion, with small parties of Bees fleeing in every direction. There would be no relief column, therefore, and the walls were about to give way.

  We will sell our lives dearly, were the words that Kymene was not saying, but they were written plainly on her face whenever Stenwold looked at her. Her name and description would be known to the Imperial army, he was sure, on a list kept by some Rekef agent who would be in charge of hunting down every known Mynan leader. No doubt she planned to die well before they had a chance to capture her.

  And I’ll just be an added bonus, if they get me, he considered. The two of them had spent two hours with a map of the city and a list of all the forces Myna could command, and had come to no conclusions save that, at some point, the walls would go down, and the Empire would then have the somewhat more onerous task of actually capturing the city. At that stage, Stenwold knew, the Light Airborne and their heavier ground-bound compatriots would have to get within range of whatever the Mynans could still field against them.

  With his mind full of that, Taki’s dire warnings about some new sort of flying machine seemed entirely irrelevant. One crisis at a time…

  ‘The walls are already fallen in some parts, enough for them to get some infantry inside, if they wanted a pitched battle,’ Kymene stated, a new report in her hand. ‘We’ve done all we can to shore them up with earth and wood, to soften the impacts, but nothing is helping much. My engineers tell me that the walls are likely to suffer multiple breaches within a few hours of dusk, after which any further bombardment is unlikely to grant the Empire much more advantage in an attack. The Empire will have the choice of coming for us tonight, or tomorrow morning.’ Her voice was flat, as though this was all happening to someone else.

  ‘Then get some sleep,’ Stenwold suggested. He wanted to say, Why would they risk a night attack? save that nothing this army had done so far had been from the rule book he was used to. ‘Kymene…’

  ‘Don’t say it.’

  She knew him too well, but then she was a born leader and used to reading people quickly, seeing them for what they were. He had tried several times to suggest that she had options other than dying in the teeth of the Wasp assault, and each time she had cut him off, not wanting to hear the words.

  The time will come, though. Stenwold needed Kymene, because Myna needed Kymene. It had waited almost twenty years for a leader like her, after the first conquest. If she died for her city now, then Myna might languish in chains for another twenty years before anyone could free it.

  Of course, the whole plan does rely on my being abl
e to get out of the city with her. Muted by distance and depth, the crump-crump-crump of the Imperial greatshotters came to their ears still, patiently turning stretches of Mynan wall to rubble.

  Stenwold managed a few hours of fitful sleep that night, before Taki was kicking at his bedroll to rouse him.

  ‘Wall’s down, Maker!’ she told him. ‘The Mynan foot are trying to get some sort of line together. Wasps could start for them at any moment, they say.’

  Stenwold sat up, trying to place the discontinuity. They can’t have the wall down already because… the noise hasn’t stopped. The dull thump and rumble of the artillery sounded just as constant as before.

  ‘They’re still going,’ he pointed out.

  ‘But not at the walls,’ Taki said with some urgency. ‘The barrage is just creeping into the city, striking all over the place, regular as clockwork, but breaking up everywhere near the breach so they’ll have a good clear run in. Me and the Mynan pilots, we’re heading for our fliers, ’cos we reckon their Spearflights are going to come in when their Airborne and foot do and, if we’re not in the air to meet them, we’ll just get fried on the ground.’

  ‘Where’s-?’

  ‘Your woman, she’s gone to the front, trying to get her people together.’

  Stenwold cursed and lurched up. He had slept fully dressed, but he hauled his artificer’s leather on over his clothes, the workman’s armour as old and battered as he himself felt. By the time he had stumbled out into the night air, Taki had already gone.

  The damage to the Mynan wall was worse than he had imagined, two long stretches turned into what looked more like gravel than rubble. Some heaped masses of broken stone were now the only impediment that Myna could offer the invader, before its soldiers had to shed their own blood. The lone pillar of wall between the two gaping gashes was barely ten yards across, enough to grant a little cover to incoming enemy foot-soldiers as they closed with the city.