They ran through the exercise again, got to the same point, half the squad out of position, some fumbling, some shooting. Marteus’s voice cracked under the force of his invective and he turned away to take a swig from his waterskin. His ears rang to shouting, however, and for a moment he thought it was still his, or perhaps some private drill officer within his own head.
But no: a woman’s voice. He lowered the skin, looking round. One of his recruits had plainly endured as much as she could take, too. She was stalking along the line, bellowing in a high, clear voice at the others, correcting their stance, lining them up. ‘Come on, you maggots!’ he heard her shouting. ‘You’re embarrassing your city! That’s it! Bows level and straight — that means you too, Lucco, no enemy down near your feet — ready to loose…?’ And by this time she had realized what she was saying, and that Marteus was staring at her.
She was a lean, spare woman, some Spider halfbreed sort, and she did not back down before his stare, but simply adopted a stave-straight soldier’s stance. ‘Chief Officer,’ she said and, in those non-committal words he reckoned she’d learned more of soldiering than half the men he’d served with in the Vekken siege.
‘You think you can give orders better than I can?’ he demanded.
‘No, Chief, but I think I can listen better than these.’
Halfbreeds, thought Marteus, but the Coldstone Company had never been choosy and, besides, only around half his recruits were Beetle-kinden. Someone was shaming Collegium, but it wasn’t these, who at least had taken up the snapbow or the pike to defend their surrogate home. ‘Go ahead,’ he told the woman, ‘show me.’
She nodded, surprised and abruptly nervous, but turned back to her fellows. ‘Loose!’ she ordered, and the bows snapped dutifully. ‘Recharge — that’s it, wind steady and you’ll not fumble it. Gerethwy, Barstall, hold your shot — you too, Master Maldredge. When you see three in four up and pointed — now — loose!’ She risked a glance at Marteus, but his face remained as impassive as only an Ant’s could be. ‘Ready to receive a charge!’ she hazarded, and the half-dozen Inapt they had with them — Mantis-kinden mostly — were shouldering forwards. ‘No, not round — cut between like we practised — and why aren’t you recharging your bows? — and — loose! Pikes at the ready!’
She turned, still in the midst of the tableau she had created, the pikemen in the second and third ranks bracing their weapons, whilst the rows of snapbowmen were recharging now without being told, raggedly but not so far out of step with one another.
‘Your name?’ Marteus demanded. He heard one of the other recruits snigger — a tall grey-skinned creature of some lanky kinden he had never seen before.
‘Straessa, Chief Officer — called the Antspider,’ the halfbreed reported, reverting to her blank soldier’s demeanour.
And she knows all their names, Marteus thought. Another knack that Ant-kinden never needed to learn. ‘Right. Subordinate Officer Antspider.’ He made the decision quickly, the words rushing out before he could regret them. ‘You drill your friends here another dozen times, then break.’ Does this mean I need more subordinates? Probably. Does that mean I need rank badges, like the Empire has? Almost certainly. Ant-kinden needed no rank badges, of course. Everyone knew who everyone else was.
‘Right, back to where we were!’ the new Subordinate Officer ordered, and cuffed the tall man as he passed. ‘No bloody smirking, Gerethwy, this is war…’
She stopped speaking, the certainty in her voice draining away. ‘Chief…?’
‘What is it?’
‘Are they ours?’
She was looking upwards, and Marteus — and everyone else — followed her gaze.
Black shapes were passing over the city against the insistent drone of engines, low enough that they could see the flickering wings of orthopters. No strange sight perhaps, given how hard the aviators were training, but these flew in formation, and they were many.
‘Clear the square!’ Marteus shouted, and he heard his new junior officer seconding him. ‘Make for the College.’ There was no great rationale in that, save that he could think of nothing else to suggest.
‘Wheel left!’ Corog Breaker shouted. ‘Fly straight. Wheel right — keep that distance! You’re moving apart.’
He had a better voice for it than Marteus ever did, honed by bellowing across classrooms and foundries and tavernas. The Master Armsman of the Prowess Forum was now teaching discipline to airmen rather than fencing to students.
His class consisted of a score of men and women, some of the local Beetle-kinden — new recruits and the graduates of Taki’s aviation classes — and the others a motley pick of the Mynan newcomers. He had them jogging about the airfield at a fair pace, making formations, manoeuvring on foot, trying to instil into them a basic understanding of working together. The task was frustrating and slow, but if there was one thing that Breaker was good for, it was shouting at length.
‘Back into formation!’ he yelled, but two or three of the Mynans had just broken off, running about the field and obviously taking the piss, he reckoned, by miming an attack on some of the grounded aircraft. ‘Form up!’ he shouted. ‘Everyone, ranks before me! What do you think you’re doing?’
The ‘ranks’ his class formed were split, the Mynans clumped together at one end, and a noticeable gap between them and the Collegiate fliers, who were mostly considerably younger and somewhat scared of them. Corog Breaker was older and scared of nothing, however, and he stomped up to them, glowering.
‘Why aren’t we in the air, Master Breaker,’ demanded one of them — Edmon, he thought. They always used his title, since he insisted on it, but they gave it a decidedly derisive spin.
‘Because in the air you can’t hear me shouting at you,’ Breaker snapped back.
‘We want to fight Wasps.’ This was Franticze, the stocky Bee-kinden woman and his worst discipline problem. ‘This is a waste of time.’
‘You think we’d let you fight the Wasps, alongside our pilots?’ Breaker demanded. It was his best card, when working with them, and he saw them scowl and shuffle, saw the sudden fear in their eyes that they might be excluded, cast aside. ‘If you can’t work with us, then you’re liabilities, and no Stormreaders for you,’ he informed them sharply.
‘Flying in combat, it is not like this,’ Edmon said quietly, with an almost guilty look at the Collegiate pilots, their youth and uncertainty.
‘Well, in the future it will be,’ Breaker told him. ‘Discipline in the air, just like discipline on the ground. Armies are built on it. Ask the Ant-kinden.’
‘I never saw an Ant pilot worth a curse,’ Franticze muttered, but a brief gesture from Edmon silenced her.
‘Try it again. Follow Pendry Goswell here: turn when she turns, keep your distance, show me you can do it,’ Breaker invited, gesturing for a solid Beetle girl, one of Collegium’s better fliers, to take the lead. As the airmen moved off, he retreated to lean against a grounded orthopter.
‘Don’t say it,’ he growled from the corner of his mouth.
‘They’re right.’ Taki was sitting atop the machine. Her Esca had come in an hour before and she was watching the ground crew finish winding the motor. ‘Air combat’s too fast.’
‘They’re going to end up shooting our people down, or the other way around. They way they fly, nobody knows where they’ll go.’
‘How do you think they got out of Myna…?’ Taki lifted her head abruptly, frowning. ‘Corog…?’
There were some startled cries from the Collegiate students. The Mynans had broken formation and were pounding across the field, shouting at one another. Breaker saw Franticze take to the air, a flash of her wings dropping her neatly into the Stormreader that she had reserved. The others were grappling their way into other machines, all those that they had chosen for themselves — against his orders — and fought off all comers for, now painted with the double red darts of Myna.
‘What…?’ Breaker began, but some of the Mynans were already starti
ng up their motors, shouting at the ground crew to get clear, wings folding out and lifting up with the first motion of the clockwork. ‘Stop that! What do you think you’re…?’
But then the sound impinged on him, the drone of engines from on high. He turned to Taki, but she was already across the field and scrambling into the seat of her Esca Magni.
With a deep buzz of wings and fire, fixed-wing fliers began to pass overhead, a flight of a half-dozen immediately above, but there were others elsewhere over the city. From somewhere close by there was a flash, a boom immediately afterwards, as the ground shook. A moment later smoke was rising.
‘Get my machine ready to take off! Now!’ Breaker shouted. ‘Get in the air!’ He waved madly to the students, relieved to see that half of them at least were already following the Mynans’ lead, orders or not.
The Esca Magni leapt into the air, Taki bringing the machine off the ground lopsidedly in her haste, desperate to gain the air before..
Myna all over again. She registered the explosion without really seeing or hearing it, some consensus of the senses simply informing her. Where was that? That was the field over Luker Street ways. Of course the Empire would try for the same targets: strip Collegium of its air defences: destroy the Beetle orthopters on the ground, and who could defy them? And all the while the question kept hammering away in the back of her mind: Where did the piss-cursed bastards come from? How had the Empire infiltrated a force of fliers within strike of the city, and nobody knew of it?
She watched as the enemy machines banked ahead of her, almost following the line of the street below as they sought their target. They were not the familiar Spearflights, she registered. These were fixed-wing fliers, and almost twice the size of the Imperial orthopters she was used to. Not strange to her, though, because…
For a moment, as she rammed the Esca into a higher gear to close with them, she was back in Capitas — her one and only visit there — watching Axrad die.
Farsphex, the name came to her. The new machines that Axrad had been so insistent that she saw. So what did she recall about the Farsphex?
She recalled that it wasn’t a fixed-wing at all.
She saw it then, as she raced in towards them, eating up the sky between her and the enemy. A pair of Stormreaders was coming in from her left quarter with the same intention — some training patrol returning to the city to find it attacked in their absence. They had the right line of approach, diving from on high, practically out of the sun, but the Imperials saw them nonetheless, their close formation breaking apart into a scatter of separate machines, and abruptly those rigid wings were kicked into a blur, instantly gaining that essential agility in the air that a fixed-wing flier could never aspire to.
Taki picked her target, taking a course that would bring her between the fleeing Farsphex and its comrades, separating it out in preparation for a quick kill. She tried a rapid look left and right, to see how her allies were disposed, catching a glimpse of a scatter of ascending machines from the airfield she had just quit: The Mynans defending the field, letting the others launch. She saw more enemy, too. She reckoned two flights of probably more than half a dozen, and the smoke from the far side of the city told of a third at least.
Then she was yanking the stick over to the right, registering the glitter of rotary bolts sleeting past her, turning the Esca almost on a wingtip. The Farsphex she had gone after had simply run for it — no attempt to double back or engage — but two of its comrades were right on top of her. They had underestimated how nimble her little machine was, and for a moment the three of them shared an uncomfortably small patch of sky as she bolted back between them. Then she had negotiated another turn, feeling every stay and bolt of the Esca thrum with it, and she was behind them, opening up with her rotaries, scoring a few desultory hits as her target — the leftmost — slid sideways in the air out of her sights. The other Wasp craft lifted away, seeking height, but Taki knew she had time to pin its friend down before it could come back for her Except that its other friend, the one she had originally marked, was already returning to the fray, its line on her imperfect but enough to put her off her attack, the flashing hail of its bolts forcing her to abandon her own assault and pull away. Craning over her shoulder, peering past the sleek flank of her machine, she saw the three of them regroup into formation, not coming after her but seeking out their ground targets.
She swore. It was a display of coordination such as she had never seen, not in Solarno nor here, certainly not amongst Imperial pilots. She was struck painfully by the way they handled their machines: not superlative skill but a purely workmanlike ability, such as any Apt artisan or footsoldier could have learned, save that they worked together so well that Corog Breaker would weep to see it.
Taki cut a wide arc over the city, trying to take stock of the fluid situation. The field she had lifted off from was unbombed, and she saw that the Mynans — their red-painted Stormreaders identifiable even at this distance — were sallying out over the city. Some of the Collegiate machines were still circling, waiting to stave off the next bombing run, whilst others were heading across the rooftops, not looking to engage but finding other vulnerable points to defend. Somebody had slapped some sense of tactics into them: someone equipped with a heliograph and a good grasp of the flash-codes had disseminated some useful orders.
Taki threw the Esca across the city. She had lost the trio that had been sparring with her, but she saw another flight moving over Collegium’s centre, and for a moment she feared that they were going to drop their explosive cargo over the domes and spires of the Amphiophos. A moment’s reconsideration showed her that they were moving in on one of the other fields — their targets purely practical, with no thought for symbolism. Not yet. Six against one, but she gave the Esca its head, the fastest thing in the skies as far as she was concerned, climbing as she approached them so that she could make a perfect dive on them. They would see her too late, and probably the one she was stooping on would never see her at all. Except they did — they all did.
Just like before, they were scattering. Her target kept its wings fixed and used all the speed it had, not quite outpacing her even then, but she was only able to clip it a few times before its comrades were on her, transformed from swift fixed-wings to dancing orthopters in a moment. For a moment she seemed to be surrounded by their shot as she dodged and sidestepped in the sky, five of them fighting for the privilege of bringing her down, and surely they would touch wingtips at any moment, slap each other out of the sky in their eagerness.
She was worried now. She had not felt like this since… She had never felt like this before, not while in the seat of a good orthopter. She lived for flight. Even facing down Axrad over Solarno, she had not felt like this. This was all wrong: enemy fliers who came from nowhere, flying with such coordination. Breaker had been right about what would win an aerial war, but neither had guessed that the Empire had been so far ahead of them.
She bared her teeth. I am better than all of you! The Esca could do things that even the Stormreaders could not, let alone these big Farsphex machines. If she fought the controls with sufficient dogged determination and contrived to ignore the insistent demands of aeronautics for just a moment, backing her wings so that their joints squealed, she could even fly backwards.
It was an innovative theory, at the speed she was going, but she felt only confidence as she rammed the stick backwards and disengaged the wing gearing for a second — the vanes beating at ten times the usual speed, for a few crazed seconds, as their gears meshed with nothing — before trying to back them.
The manoeuvre was a qualified success. She dropped like a stone for a moment, seemingly having no control whatsoever, and the Farsphex pack must have assumed that she had been hit, abandoning her immediately to go in pursuit of their next target. A moment later she had her wings working — forwards still and not backwards at all, and almost went through someone’s roof as she struggled to regain the sky, coming up behind them and catching th
e trailing Farsphex with a solid handful of bolts that at least made it judder in the air.
Then she was not alone. Left and right there were Storm-readers with red-painted wings. They attacked as individuals, and she joined them by instinct, not even thinking it through. That saved them, she decided later. The air discipline of the Wasps was such that their flight would have outmatched an attack by a rigid formation, but Taki and her flanking allies each had different ideas as to what they were going to do, three entirely uncoordinated strikes by skilled pilots in top-class fighting orthopters.
They still failed to bring one down. The Farsphex were away again, splitting up and fixing their wings for extra speed if they were pursued. They refused to engage or to fight the aerial duels that Taki had been dreaming of ever since Solarno. Those not pursued were already wheeling back to come to the aid of their comrades. Taki could almost taste the frustration of the Mynans as they did everything they could to latch onto their enemy, only to be driven off again and again.
Then the Farsphex flight was abruptly coming together — all of them, flocking from every quarter of the city to rise in a dark column of machines, massing over the very centre of Collegium.
To strike where? But there was nothing in their disposition that hinted at their target. Taki skated her Esca across the face of their rising formation, pulling her orthopter round in as tight a turn as she could, because they were about to break and she wanted them in front of her and not behind. In mid-wheel she did her best to locate the other Collegiate fliers, flashing a quick signal for Form on me! and hoping that somebody would see it. She had company even before she had finished her turn, a full half-dozen Stormreaders converging on her, cutting a wider arc in the air so as to match her when she drove back at the Imperials. She noted four Mynans — Edmon and three others she couldn’t name. Keeping pace were two of Collegium’s own, and she knew them, from the way they flew, as the Goswell girl and the Fly-kinden, Haldri. It hardly counted as overwhelming odds, but the other local machines were scattered all about the sky, some hanging back to defend the airfields still, others just adrift over the city, losing the thread of the fight, lost over their own home.
The Air War sota-8 Page 30