A moment later the damaged Mynan flier had bucked in the air — he registered only the irregularity of movement, but knew what it meant. In the next second it had dropped too low, not so much clipping as ramming the upper storey of a house already on fire, its fierce, swift flight instantly transformed into violence, wrecked chassis spinning end over end, its wings flying apart in pieces. The Spearflights split up. As ever, he could only follow the one, and then the other would have him.
Edmon bared his teeth — at the Wasps, at the world — and plunged after one even so, because he wanted another kill, another dead Imperial and wrecked machine before they caught him. Even as he did so, a third Spearflight raked past him, hammering a strip of holes in one of his forewings almost casually, in passing. The Pacemark pitched despite his fighting it, one wingtip coming within ten feet of a wall. He fought for height, losing track entirely of how many enemy might be behind him. Momentarily the draw of the ground seemed insuperable, the Pacemark limping along the rooftops like a dying fish at the water’s surface, lurching and flopping and always on the point of sinking altogether. He felt gears slip, the wings losing their rhythm. In that instant he was all ice, waiting for the ground to reclaim its errant son, but then the engine somehow recovered its stroke and he was still impossibly airborne, casting out over the city streets.
He glanced behind him, gaining only hurried, wheeling snatches of sky, pillars of smoke, the dots of other fliers out over Myna. The enemy had not come with him, and he guessed they must have believed him lost, too bloodthirsty actually to wait out his death throes. For a moment there was not a single Spearflight in sight.
He looked down.
This would be the moment to take with him, if he had any chance to take anything anywhere. Not the aerial dragon-fighting with the Imperial air force, not the moment when the ground reached up for him, but the moment he realized that his city was being taken from beneath him.
Most of the buildings down there were now rubble and ruins, or else blazing pyres as though the Empire had marked out the path of its invasion in fire. Between these churned a great silver maggot, a segmented automotive undulating swiftly along the streets of Myna — his Myna — stopping only to discharge its weapons. He caught glimpses of wrecked artillery that had not been able to keep the monsters out. There were bodies down there. He saw some on the streets, and knew that for every death he marked, a hundred others must have blurred by unseen. He saw the streets he knew, the places where his mother had laboured, the markets his father had haggled in. He saw the houses of his friends, where relatives had worked. He saw his childhood and his memories in those shattered homes and broken workshops, and the corpses strewn like sticks.
There was no room left inside him, then. The pain of it was worse than being shot. He sent the Pacemark into a dive against one of the Imperial machines, trigger down so that the rotaries shot and shot, circling and circling until they had emptied themselves. The sparks wherever his bolts were turned by the enemy armour were like a glittering constellation.
He failed to scratch the machine, although it stopped almost quizzically under his attack, questing left and right, his efforts so trivial that it could not even work out where he was.
He pulled out of the dive and skimmed past, leaving the machine behind. There had been Imperial soldiers coming into the city behind it, and he could have used his ammunition more effectively against them, but even then it would have been throwing stones at an avalanche.
The Pacemark was not handling well, and Edmon needed its spring rewound and the rotaries rearmed. Feeling numb, utterly drained, he coaxed the orthopter back towards the more distant airfields, unsure whether he would even find anything to land on that had not been claimed by the fires.
The war in the air was all around him still, but he had become a mere spectator. He saw the Spearflights dart and swoop, keeping the remnants of the Mynan aviators busy while others dropped their incendiaries across the city. He saw Franticze again, chasing down another enemy — her hatred for Wasps was legendary amongst the Mynan airmen. He even saw the Fly-kinden pilot, Taki of Solarno, with her little killer machine darting and swerving, almost flying backwards to throw a Wasp off her, then slipping behind him to finish him off.
Too little, all of it. The ground battle was moving street by street, and only in one direction. If the Wasps had not been more interested in punishing the city with their bombs, they could have cleared the sky of defenders already.
There had been a fierce battle over the highest airfield, he learned later, but the enemy had yet to burn it when he touched down there, and any flier downed for repairs or refuelling was being kept in hangars, out of sight. He brought the Pacemark in for an untidy landing, handling it by instinct, his mind still trying to find some interpretation for the images that did not mean that Myna was being lost even as he sat there.
The ground crew ran out and began to haul his flier into the shadow of the hangars. He hinged the canopy back and began to instruct them, his voice as hoarse and ragged as if he had been shouting on a parade ground all day. ‘Rewind the spring and reload the weapons. I’m going straight back up. I’m going…’ and his voice broke, and he sat there, holding the stick, mouth open, trying to work out what it was that he was going to do, because he had not the first idea.
Someone was calling to him, but they had to say his name three or four times before he would even cast a dull gaze their way.
‘Stay on the ground; change of orders. We’re gathering pilots for a strike. Stay on the ground while we build up the numbers.’ The ground officer’s voice was almost hysterical, and he spoke the words as though they were just some meaningless babble.
An artillery shell landed three streets away, making the ground shudder.
Stenwold found himself in the midst of a constant flow of soldiers, men abandoning their positions closer to the wall, running or limping in, being given orders, being sent out again. Some were sent further back, to the field hospitals being set up in taverns and workshops and backrooms, but there were few who were able enough to present themselves but yet not able enough to be thrown back into the jaws of the Imperial advance.
Kymene stood at the centre of it with her officers. They had commandeered a covered market to evade the eyes of the enemy orthopters, the stalls shoved aside to make room for the turmoil of war.
She was swift, efficient, a map of the city before her that she barely had to refer to, allotting each new consignment of soldiers an address, a junction, a street. She ordered barricades, she assigned the little artillery that had been saved. The Wasps were in the city — not just their killer machines but their soldiers, their infantry washing through the streets of Myna, the Light Airborne taking rooftops and dropping into the undefended city behind them.
It did not escape Stenwold that many of the men and women presenting themselves to Kymene were not wearing the red and black of the Mynan army but a mismatch of everything from civilian tunics and robes to repainted Imperial armour. The Mynans had spent a long time under the heel of the Empire before they had thrown off their shackles, but they had been a martial people once. They were not lacking in spirit.
Only in training, he thought gloomily. Only in resources.
‘Kymene!’ he called, but before she could even look at him, someone had run in yelling that the machines were already upon them.
The Maid of Myna looked at the remaining soldiers assembled before her, and told them simply, ‘Fight!’ No time for street maps and strategy: immediately they were splitting up, dashing from the marketplace by every possible route. Stenwold opened his mouth to call her name again, to try and draw some order from the madness of it all, but the east wall caved in as he did so, punched through by a Sentinel’s leadshotter, the iron bulk of the machine revealing itself in the jagged gap.
He saw Kymene draw her sword, and for a moment he thought that this was where she meant to end it. In the next moment she had turned and was running, cloak streaming behind her
, and he was doing his best to keep up.
They burst out into the dust-heavy air, a scatter of soldiers running on either side of them. Behind, the Sentinel lurched forward, smashing the wall down and grinding into the now-empty market, its rotaries hammering. Stray bolts zipped and danced past.
Kymene ran straight for the nearest defended position, a street-wide barricade constructed from the very stones the Wasps had brought down. Stenwold saw a score of soldiers behind it, at least as many in the flanking tenements, many of them already loosing snapbows upwards as Imperial soldiers darted in at them from the sky.
The Sentinel thundered out of the market, smashing down the near wall, and the entire building began to fold in on itself in the machine’s wake, too many supports and pillars knocked away. Instantly, a pair of Mynan leadshotters boomed from Stenwold’s left, their paired impact striking the machine’s side hard enough that it skidded several yards. For a moment the Mynans were cheering, for there was a sizeable dent in the Sentinel’s carapace, and at least one leg trailed uselessly, but then the Imperial machine shook itself and turned against the Mynan engines. Its single eye unlidded and belched flame, smashing one leadshotter off its carriage, the ton of bronze and steel that was the barrel spinning and cracking, killing at least one of the artillerists. Then the Imperial soldiers had arrived: men in black and gold armour, rushing forward with snapbows raised even as more were dropping from above. Without the Sentinel, the Mynans could have made a fight of it, trusted to their weapons and their bloody-minded determination to hold the enemy for just a little more time, but the war automotive was on the move again, slewing slightly as the damaged leg dragged.
That was the last he saw of organized Mynan resistance. For the rest, he was running through the streets with Kymene, stumbling up the tiered steps, retreating ever westwards. The terrible machines could not be stopped with any weapons the Mynans possessed, but they could not be everywhere at once. The city’s defenders had spread themselves out across the whole advance of the Imperial army. Stenwold retained confused images of individual soldiers at windows, on roofs, in doorways, loosing their snapbows and crossbows at the human presence of the enemy, fleeing when confronted with the steel fist of the Sentinels. The battle became a series of jumbled, unrelated moments in his mind, seeing Wasps and Mynan Beetles trading shots at street corners, Imperial Airborne making assaults on high windows to flush out snipers, Spearflight orthopters casting a killing shadow over the ground as they coasted in to drop their incendiaries. There were no lines on that battlefield. The next street that Stenwold stumbled on to could be controlled by either side, or bitterly contested. There was so much dust and smoke in the air that it was difficult even to tell friend from foe.
Then they were at the airfield, and he saw that Kymene had managed somehow to gather some soldiers together again, not nearly so many as before, but at least a few hundred, sheltering under any cover that was available.
‘Kymene!’ he shouted — he seemed to have done nothing all day but chase the edge of her cloak and call her name.
She turned on him as if he was the enemy, eyes flashing, sword in hand.
‘It’s over,’ he told her. ‘You have to get clear.’
‘I hear this from you?’ she demanded. ‘You, who have been saying the Wasps must be fought since before most of your kin had even heard of the Empire?’
‘Look where we are!’ Stenwold told her. ‘Get your fighters out of the city, get them to Szar or Maynes or the Lowlands. Get yourself out. Today is lost.’ The words were so pitiful, to describe what he had seen that day, that he almost choked on them. ‘Please, Kymene. Your people need you free.’
She started to answer, defiance blazing in her expression, but then artillery struck within streets of them and swallowed her words with its fury. Overhead, two orthopters roared past, Imperial chasing Mynan.
‘Kymene!’ he shouted again, but the artillery was closing in on them, pound-pound-pound, a seemingly random pattern: near then far, near, then closer, in a net of calculation that was drawing tighter.
Stenwold saw her lips move, read the words, ‘I can’t…’ there, but one of her own was taking her arm, shouting at the top of his voice. The Mynan airmen on the ground had already scattered to their vessels. The roar of fuel-engines sparking up obscured the whirr of clockwork, and the artillery overrode it all.
At last she nodded agreement, the gesture almost wrenched from her, and the man who had been trying to persuade her was sprinting across the airfield, still shouting. They were wheeling out a fixed-wing flier, a cargo-hauler, but it would now take passengers in lieu of crates.
‘Chyses!’ Kymene shouted after him. ‘Gather all the soldiers you can. Gather everyone who’ll go with you. Get them out of the city, as Maker said. There will be a tomorrow!’ Her fiery gaze passed to Stenwold. ‘With me, Maker. If the world can’t spare me, it certainly can’t spare you.’
‘All pilots, into the air,’ someone yelled out. ‘The Maid must not be brought down!’
From nowhere, it seemed, Taki’s Esca Magni thundered down for a hard landing, its extended legs flexing on impact. ‘Rewind me!’ came her high, imperious voice, as though she was on her home fields of Solarno, but the mechanics rushed to obey. She had accounted for herself memorably already, through skill and superior technology.
‘We’re going!’ Stenwold shouted at her, but the artillery had quickened, as if sensing a kill. He pointed madly westwards, then gestured broadly at the frenzied activity about the field, and the Fly nodded. Her face, through the cockpit glass, was streaked with grime and sweat, and there were several holes in the Esca ’s wings and bodywork.
There was no more for it, then. The soldiers were already fleeing, each officer taking the survivors of his squad and hoping to get them out of the city any which way, and for whatever destination they could reach. All across the city, the citizens of Myna who could not or would not flee would be slaves of the Empire by dusk, or dead.
Kymene was already crouching in the hatch of the fixed-wing, with the craft’s civilian pilot firing up the four propeller engines. The craft had swift, sleek lines but it would not move in the air like an orthopter. As Stenwold ran across the field to join her, he knew that their fate would rest in the hands of the fighting airmen, and of Taki.
A shell landed close enough to scatter debris over the field, the blast knocking a few distant mechanics off their feet. Kymene hauled Stenwold into the fixed-wing’s hold, almost pulling him on top of her. Her expression was venomous, unforgiving, taking her last look at her ravaged city before the hatch closed.
The machine shuddered around them as the fixed-wing tensed, its legs bunching as the propellers got up to speed. Then, with an explosive snap, its landing gear had hurled it into the air, to catch the wind like a kite, a long low take-off that must have barely cleared the hangar roofs.
All across the field, every flier that had been held back was now clawing for the sky. Edmon let the battered old Pacemark have its head, almost immediately overtaking the fixed-wing Sweet Fire that was carrying Kymene, as he circled up above to search for the enemy. The Spearflights were all over the city but, in that first flush of ascent, they did not see the scale of the Mynan launch. Then there were a dozen orthopters in the air, cutting up from the airfield in all directions, making a widening spiral of winged shapes that could not be missed. Within a minute there was a score, and other surviving Mynan fliers were being drawn to join them, or retreating to them.
Their numbers, which spoiled any chance of secrecy, bought them precious moments. The Empire had split its fliers into individuals and pairs, none of which was foolish enough to simply dive straight at the burgeoning Mynan flight. Instead, they took it as a counter-attack, and regrouped to meet it.
There were more of them than of the defenders, of course. Edmon reckoned the odds were two to one already, and he guessed that minutes more would see the Empire commit some of the machines they had held back to keep their artillery safe
.
He flashed the pattern to split, to attack, not knowing who would come and who would stay. The Empire had taken the city so swiftly by calling the pace, and the Sweet Fire ’s only chance at escape would be for Myna to retake the initiative, even briefly.
He let himself get quite clear of the circling mob of defenders before he glanced back to see precisely who was coming along with him. Otherwise, he knew, his nerve might not stand an empty sky.
Eleven other fliers had answered the call. He saw Franticze’s Tserinet at the fore, almost overtaking him with the Bee-kinden woman’s lust for Wasp blood. Looking forward again, his memory found names for some of the others: Bordes’s Wanderer, Marsene’s Fierce Lady, the Cranefly, the Red Anvil and several others he could not immediately name. There were far too many Spearflights ahead to worry about the odds now, but they had the same difficulties in communication that Edmon himself did. He saw flashes between them, officers trying to convey a response to a situation that had already changed.
Here we go, and he had chosen a target and kicked the Pacemark for every ounce of speed the ailing orthopter could give him. As the rotaries burst into life, he bellowed something wordless and primal, full of the death of his city.
His target skipped in the air under the battering it received, nose turning for the ground as the hammer of his bolts smashed its engine through the wooden hull. Then he was in their midst and, although many were trying to turn to follow his line, they were in each other’s way, and could not shoot for fear of hitting one another. All around him the other pilots were following his suicidal lead. Franticze smashed the port wings of one Spearflight to matchwood and was needling another even before she had cut into their formation. The Wanderer had taken a higher line, the lean, light flier missing with its single piercer but diving into the Wasp flock from above, bringing confusion in his wake. The Cranefly… Edmon was watching when it happened, just a moment’s flick of his eyes left and the image of the angular Mynan vessel steering left just when a Wasp pilot made a mirror decision, the two craft striking shoulder to shoulder, wheeling about each other like dance partners, wings stilled and broken, then dropping, still spinning, from the air.
The Air War sota-8 Page 23