The Air War sota-8

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Even as Stenwold approached, the artillery was lighting up the night, dropping shrapnel and incendiary shells in a wide scatter across that third of Myna closest to the breach. All around him people were being evacuated from their homes, and the streets were scattered with fragments of their lives: abandoned possessions, the sundered stones of their homes, and more than one corpse.

  He found Kymene supervising what siege engines she had been able to save from the wall, finding sites for them facing the breach, both on the ground and on the rooftops. She had even called up a pair of automotives, simple steam-powered vehicles with heavy armour bolted to their fronts and with the stubby barrels of smallshotters mounted on pivots atop them. All about, drawn up in loose order, were the Mynan soldiers: men and women with Kymene’s blue-grey colouring, wearing breastplates and tall helms halved in red and black. In their hands were swords, shields, crossbows and snapbows, but the enemy attacking them so methodically had given them no targets on which to take out their frustration.

  ‘Kymene-’ Stenwold started as he approached her.

  The look she turned on him was bleak and stern. ‘We fight,’ she said, brooking no argument.

  Stenwold gestured to the sword at his hip, for all the good it would do him. Then a shell landed a hundred yards from them, the sheer sound of it almost throwing them from their feet, blocking out the screams of those who had been closer. Kymene’s jaw was clenched, her hands knotted into fists. There were tears at the corners of her eyes.

  ‘Are they coming?’ Stenwold demanded, and she shook her head.

  ‘Dawn is two hours away,’ she told him, ‘but maybe they’ll come sooner. We have to be ready but…’ The punctuation of the bombardment finished her sentence for her.

  Stenwold remembered the first time the Wasps had taken Myna: how terrible that had seemed, with the sky full of flying soldiers, with the gates battered down and Imperial heliopters grinding through the sky, trailing random scatterings of grenades. How little our world knew of war back then.

  He found some token shelter, the shell of a house that had already been staved in, a superstitious thought saying, Surely they can’t strike twice in the same place. Inwardly, he was asking himself what he intended. He had come here as a gesture of solidarity, and now it seemed very likely that he would die in this attack — one more casualty unnamed and unremarked. The Empire would never know that they had killed their greatest detractor.

  He had his sword and the little two-shot snapbow that Totho had made for him; experience had made of him a passable warrior, but it would be like spitting into the hurricane. Even with the thought, an incendiary lit up the night close by, enough for him to feel a wash of heat from it. This time the screaming was all too clear.

  The Mynan soldiers kept moving, as though they could cheat the odds that way, clustering and scattering, passing on. The barrage was continuous, but spread over much of the city, and Stenwold thought that it probably claimed more non-combatants than soldiers. Beyond the rough line that Kymene had drawn up, the streets were clogged with the multitude who had become refugees in their own city.

  Then, at dawn, the artillery pattern changed, slowly concentrating on the ground before the ruined walls, driving the Mynan defenders back, and forcing Stenwold along with them. Kymene dispersed her forces street by street, anticipating that the barrage would sweep westwards again when the Imperial forces had neared the city. After so many hours of noise and death the actual attack was finally beginning.

  She was receiving reports even then, for a few enterprising Fly-kinden had flown up with telescopes to spy out the enemy formations. The news seemed hopeful. ‘They’re leading with automotives,’ she noted. ‘Some model shaped like a woodlouse, running on many legs.’ Even as she said it, the shells began to land closer, and to spread out so as to fan a broader net of streets, and she hurried out to rally her men, to bring them back to the wall, and to man such of their own artillery as they still possessed. By the time Stenwold had caught up with her, the Mynan engines were already launching, catapult arms thudding forward and winding back, and the roar of leadshotters sending their missiles in shallow arcs through the breaches.

  ‘They’re in range already?’ he demanded over the noise. Kymene, now atop a great cairn of stones that had once been a house, spared him only a brief glance. All around him the Mynan soldiers were readying their weapons — on the streets, from windows, on rooftops — and still the Imperial artillery dropped shells on them and behind them, a constant reminder that nobody was safe at any time.

  They can’t be… they must still be marching… I mean automotives, yes, but… Stenwold was well aware of the uses and limitations of such machines in war. Wheeled automotives could have closed the distance that fast, but would have faltered against the banked rubble, and legged automotives were notoriously slow. Besides, unsupported vehicles could be easily mobbed by infantry. It seemed impossible that Kymene’s engines were doing anything but wasting ammunition.

  All he could see through the breaches was a pall of dust, the same as hung everywhere in the air, choking in the throat and gritty enough that he pulled on his artificer’s goggles to protect his eyes. There were a few enterprising Fly-kinden calling out to the Mynan artillerists, exhorting them to shoot, but he could not believe…

  The first of the Wasp machines took the rubble at a terrible pace, scrabbling up and pausing at the crest, as though surveying its prey, as swift and fierce in its movements as a beast hunting. It presented a carapace of overlapping plates, with a high rounded peak at the front, sloping down towards the tail. A round shallow depression front and centre gave the impression of a single blind eye. Beneath that, closer to ground level, the stubby fingers of paired rotary piercers bristled like mouthparts.

  A Mynan leadshotter gave voice close by, and Stenwold saw the missile ricochet off the automotive’s armoured shell without leaving much of a dent, and then the machine was moving again, slithering down the rubble with frightening speed, the plates of its body flexing like a thing alive.

  A second automotive loomed from the curtain of dust beyond it, and then a third. The Mynan engines were all loosing now, and many of the soldiers as well. Battle was joined.

  Totho adjusted the focus of his glass single-handed from long practice, finger and thumb sliding the telescoping sections while the weight of the instrument was cupped in his palm. His other hand was tight on the rim of the basket, and the shadow of the observation balloon’s canopy was a constant reminder of the penalties of a loose grip. In truth he should not be up here at all, horribly vulnerable to any Mynan pilot that somehow got behind the lines, only the gas-filled bulb of the balloon keeping him up, and only a long rope tether keeping him down. Not for the first time in his life, he wished that one of his parents could have bequeathed him the Art of flight, but it was rare in Beetles and unknown in Ants. In a disaster he would have to rely on the silk glider folded on his back — a cobbled-together piece of wishful thinking that was mostly untested.

  He wanted to see, though. He wanted to see progress advanced yet another notch, as his machines clambered over the Mynan walls.

  The day before, just ahead of dusk, Drephos had given a lecture to a cadre of Imperial officers, with General Roder at their head. The Empire had been making its preparations for a standard assault, using airborne and medium infantry, despite the groundwork already laid by more visionary men such as Colonel Ferric. And so the Colonel-Auxillian, as they still called him, had felt it necessary to step in and show them the future.

  ‘We called them Sentinels,’ the master artificer had explained, calling to mind the old heavy-infantry elites who had recently been retired from active service. ‘They fill the same role, after all, and the name of the project has caused some confusion amongst enemy agents who think we’re training infantry.’ His voice, as ever, had been laced with a general contempt for the bulk of humanity. Totho could still picture him stalking before his audience, his robes of black and gold — the same
pattern as when he had genuinely been an Imperial subject — fluttering in the breeze against the hastily erected storage sheds from which the Iron Glove conducted its work.

  ‘You are faced with a routine problem of attackers, General. You must get your men past the walls.’ The Light Airborne could have swarmed the city at any time, of course, but the Mynan soldiers were well protected and armed with crossbows and snapbows, and their defensive position would allow them to make the Wasps pay in blood for every inch of ground. ‘You need to get your armour inside the walls, to meet them, heavies against heavies, where your superior numbers and troops can truly tell. Assaulting a broken wall in the face of respectably armed ranged defence remains a formidable problem, even with air superiority.’

  At his gesture, Totho had relayed his signal to the engineers waiting in the shed, and an engine had started up with a metallic growl, closely followed by a clatter of armour plates.

  ‘What you need,’ Drephos’s voice had lifted over the sound, ‘is something to force the issue!’

  On cue, the Sentinel had picked its way out of the shed at a careful, deliberate pace. To a man, the Imperial officers had taken a few steps back as its tall, blind-eyed prow had quested in their direction. They had never seen anything like it, Totho knew. He had watched with pride as its ten legs had moved in steady, complex patterns to haul it along the ground.

  After the initial shock at the machine’s appearance, there had been those amongst Roder’s more traditional officers who complained that the vehicle would be easy prey for Mynan leadshotters, or that it would ground itself amidst the rubble, and how heavy it must be, how slow — could it even keep up with walking infantry? Roder had let them cavil and had kept his own counsel, his eyes only on Drephos.

  Now Totho saw the truth of it for himself, and his heart leapt with pride: to be a member of the Iron Glove, to be an artificer, to be one of the Apt whose world had built this glory. Ahead of the Imperial infantry, ahead even of the Airborne, the Sentinels tore up the ground towards Myna. Enemy artillery burst about them, landing mostly behind them. They were as swift and agile as animals, the line of their armoured backs flexing and rippling as they jolted over the landscape.

  ‘When perfecting the greatshotters, we were forced to devise a new material to withstand the concentrated forces involved,’ Drephos had explained to Roder and his officers. ‘We call it spun steel, and it is several times stronger than Solarnese aviation steel, at a fraction of the weight. At the same time, the Sentinel’s legs are mediated by a ratiocinator, meaning that the handler does not have to worry about adjusting each one individually. He simply tells the machine where to go.’

  ‘Handler?’ Roder had demanded, staring up at the great sightless eye set into the thing’s peaked prow. ‘Driver or pilot, surely.’

  ‘Handler seems appropriate, somehow,’ had come Drephos’s dry response.

  For a moment the three machines were poised on the heaped rubble of Myna’s walls, a colossal triumvirate regarding its subjects. The Mynans were not so reticent. All their hoarded artillery was loosing, catapults and ballistae, leadshotters, even the scrapshotters were pelting the armoured titans with hundredweights of jagged metal. The lead Sentinel rocked from side to side under the impacts, its legs spreading wider beneath its carapace, sliding slightly on the loose stone. Stenwold watched, waiting for the barrage to tell on them, for that armour to crumple under the hammer. They move so fast, was all he could think. They cannot be so strong. And yet the machines weathered the assault with what seemed like disdain.

  The leftmost Sentinel opened its eye, the lid sliding up almost sleepily, and Stenwold stared into the darkness that was revealed.

  The machine braced itself, legs abruptly digging in, then it was speaking thunder back at the Mynan artillery, smashing a steam-catapult to pieces. The flash and smoke of a leadshotter were unmistakable.

  Then they were moving and, to Stenwold’s horror, the Mynan soldiers were rushing forward to meet them. He looked around for Kymene, spotting her standing atop a half-fallen wall, directing the assault, horribly visible, and he began to run for her, shouting her name.

  He knew the theory, of course. Once a squad of soldiers had clambered on to an automotive, they could pry its armour apart, break in and kill the crew. The same books of war insisted that no automotive could be built strong enough to ward off artillery. The Empire had changed the syllabus over a winter.

  ‘Kymene!’ he yelled, and then was thrown from his feet almost casually, a leadshot smashing down close by as it angled for one of the Mynan engines. For a moment his world was nothing but dust and falling shards of stone and screaming that was not his own. Then other artillery nearby was trying to answer the assault, thundering from his left and right loud enough to rattle the air in his lungs, and a thousand other sounds, metal on metal, snapbows loosing, hopelessly shouted orders, the continuing bloody deluge of the Imperial artillery as it continued its detached dismemberment of the city street by street.

  Stenwold could barely breathe. The sheer sound of it was beating down on him, the anguished composite roar of a battle being lost and won. Hands to his ears, his knees striking the jagged rubble as he tipped forward, he fought for self-possession, and lost. All around him the air was full of splinters. All three Sentinels were discharging their leadshotters: each advancing a few scuttling yards and then stopping, turning and tilting to aim, then unlidding its single metal eye. Meanwhile, the breach itself, which the Mynans had not even had the chance to contest, was not empty. Stenwold saw at least another quartet of segmented machines sliding through.

  He saw a band of soldiers, twenty at least, close with the nearest machine — already only fifteen, ten yards away — ready to take the monster apart with crowbars, to get to the vulnerable flesh within. The rotary piercers spoke first, spinning up almost instantly and scything away half the attackers, chewing them into a bloody rain before Stenwold’s eyes, spare bolts pattering and rebounding from the stones around him. The others tried to get out of the arc of the Sentinel’s frontal weapons, and some of them were cut down almost instantly by the rotaries of the next machine along. The rest… to Stenwold there seemed only a brief shudder that seemed to pass down the length of the lead automotive, and the Mynans were all dead, a row of snapbow barrels loosing from between its plates, the deadly little bolts quite enough to kill through armour.

  Someone was pulling at his arm, and he snapped back to full control of himself, seeing how very close the machine was now. It had turned and braced itself again, its eye seeking out some further Mynan siege engine. The soldier who clutched his arm was shouting at him, but Stenwold could hear very little of it. The import was clear, though: We have to go!

  ‘Kymene!’ he yelled, but she was gone from her wall, her fate unknown. The Mynans were retreating in droves now, not a rout but in a determined fall-back to some prepared position. Stenwold saw one of the defending automotives, a hopelessly outdated, patched-together thing, drive full tilt into the face of a Sentinel, slamming the invader back a few feet as its feet left jagged grooves in the ruined flagstones. Then one of the next wave had put a leadshot into the Mynan vehicle, and a moment later its steam boiler exploded, just one more sound, another rain of pieces in a broken place.

  There were flying machines in the air now, wheeling and darting, with wings ablur. Imperial Spearflights were coursing against the ragbag of local fliers, the air glittering with piercer bolts. For a moment he thought he saw Taki’s Esca Magni amidst the fray, but the air was grey with sifting dust, and he had now seen such things, so many, so swift to follow each other, that he did not want to trust his eyes.

  Edmon’s Pacemark shuddered its way across the sky, curving around towards a knot of Spearflights that had briefly formed up. A moment later they were splitting off across the city, and he could only follow the one. The Imperial pilot was good enough to slow down for him, taking his time about lining up his own target, and for once Edmon was able to stoop on one of them,
textbook-perfect, dropping out of the cloudless blue in an exact line, so that his rotary shot hammered all about the enemy canopy, smashing through its glass and wood. The Spearflight heeled over almost instantly, sliding sideways from the sky. A moment later he felt a scatter of impacts on his hull, guilty of the same complacency as his victim, and saved now only by the impatience of his attacker.

  He skimmed away instantly, veering left and then right to throw off his enemy’s aim, ducking his Pacemark low, to rooftop level and further, slinging the flier down the straight boulevard of the Tradian Way, the length of which he knew by heart. The Imperial pilot behind him was game, bringing his Spearflight in close to follow, and when Edmon made the sudden turn at the Way’s far end, lurching up and right to claw for the sky again, any surprise intended was countered by the Wasp machine’s agility in the air.

  Edmon turned for the gates once more, where the artillery around the gate might be able to help him out again, but then something blurred past him — he had a vision of beating wings and then the spark and chatter of piercers only. For a moment he was not sure whether he had been hit, or what had just happened, but then he realized that the Wasp tailing him was gone, and he hauled the Pacemark into the tightest turn it would make in time to see the Imperial duelling with another Mynan craft, a squat, box-bodied flier that he recognized as the Tserinet, flown by the Szaren renegade Franticze. The two orthopters were speeding over the city, dancing almost where the wall had once been, the Wasp nimbler, but already damaged from Franticze’s first pass. Edmon brought the Pacemark on to a heading meant to intervene, praying that the Bee-kinden pilot would give him a clear opening to their mutual enemy.

  Abuptly the sky around them was busy. Another Mynan craft fled past, smoke already trailing, with a pair of Spearflights tight behind it. Edmon had a moment to make his choice, but Franticze was one of the best pilots Myna could call on. He had to trust to her skills, as he pulled around and followed the pair of harrying enemies, blazing away wildly with his rotaries just to let them know he was there.