The Air War sota-8

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘The Sarnesh say this hill of theirs is unbreakable, Colonel,’ Roder observed.

  ‘Perhaps they haven’t checked what the word means, sir.’ Around them, the spirits of the Eighth were high, despite all the digging that needed doing. ‘The Empress’s words have arrived, sir,’ Ferric added. ‘I’ve readied the… similophone.’ Even the engineer stumbled slightly over the unfamiliar word. ‘The actual words of the Empress on a strip of tape, imagine it, sir.’

  Roder was not a man who encouraged familiarity in his subordinates, but he and Ferric shared a look almost of complicity, two men who were bringing about a glorious future.

  The airfield that the Farsphex pilots used was no real secret any more. A score of fixed-wings taking off, one after another, and people were bound to talk. Besides, the time for hiding was past. Everyone involved in this project wanted the Empire to know of their contribution to the war.

  They coasted in one evening, taking turns in circling the field and touching down as well as they could, a little roughly in most cases. They were returning from a very long round trip.

  For a moment they sat strewn, a little haphazardly, about the field, barely enough room for them all. Pingge herself crouched in the hold of Scain’s flier, still chained to it and feeling almost unused to being back on the ground. They had spent almost three days in the air with a pitched battle at the far end. She had never imagined such a thing, and that particular capability of the Farsphex had been so very secret that nobody had thought to forewarn the Fly-kinden bombardiers. How was it done? Even with her artificer’s training, she could hardly guess. The Engineering Corps had hit on something almost magical, beyond belief.

  The mission itself had provided a variety of unpleasantnesses. The food had been meagre, and relieving herself out into the high, chill air had been particularly unpleasant — the only time she had appreciated being chained to the insides of the machine. Mostly the journeying part had been dull, though, enough for her to get Scain talking eventually, parcelling out small parts of his earlier life, all of which suggested that nobody in their right mind would have imagined him as a pilot until he had abruptly been snatched up for the Farsphex training. She had tried to probe that further, and it was plain he knew exactly why he had been chosen, but apparently that was just another secret that Fly-kinden were not fit to know.

  After bringing their craft down into a somewhat shaky landing Scain had just sat there for some time, silent. He looked tired enough to be ill, and she knew that he had been chewing some concoction of the Engineers, just to keep himself going. She, at least, had somehow managed to snatch a little sleep in the air, the cold and the hunger and the drone of the engines eventually becoming as monotonous as a lullaby.

  ‘Sir?’ she asked, after a couple of wordless minutes. ‘We getting out now, or are we about to head off again?’

  Scain seemed to have forgotten that she was there. He started from his reverie, and reached out to unlock her chain, stretching a long, thin arm into her compartment to free her. ‘Assemble outside with the others,’ he told her. ‘Someone wants to meet us.’

  She could not wait to get out of the machine’s interior, which seemed to hold far too many memories just then. If the travelling had been dull, their brief time over Collegium had been all too bloody interesting. People had been shooting at them. It had been frustrating too — getting the reticule on target, ready to drop her next package, and then Scain would go chasing off across the sky while piercer bolts sang and danced in the air around them. It was a wonder that anyone could hit anything at all. She understood, in theory, that some manner of airborne resistance might have been predicted, and that the Beetle-kinden weren’t just going to stand around gaping up with their mouths open but, until the Farsphex had broken formation to evade the incoming enemy, she had not quite made the logical connection.

  She had been terrified then. In that moment she had wanted more than anything to be back on the factory line gossiping with Kiin, or back with her family, anything.

  But her training had smoothed over that, and soon she had been snatching her opportunities, lining the reticule up faster than she had ever done in practice, getting the bombs away during the brief moments of level flight that Scain allowed her. After that had come the unexpected: she had found within herself what she had always thought the Wasp soldiers must feel all the time: hate, exhilaration, driving determination to win. And if winning meant killing the enemy and destroying their cities, well, then that was war. This fierce little fire in her had ignited after she realized that the enemy, after all, were trying to kill her. The understanding had seemed to remove some blindfold that had been before her eyes every day until that moment.

  Now she went over and joined Gizmer, and a few other early escapees. They made a sloppy, weary job of parade-ground order, but were too tired to care. The Wasps were coming out, too, all of them looking as ragged as Scain. Then they were straightening up, every man of them, because they had visitors.

  Pingge knew the man in the lead at once now: the bearded, slightly unkempt figure of Colonel Varsec was unmistakable. He was the father of Imperial war aviation, she knew, which made everyone assembled there his children. Behind him came an older officer, another colonel of Engineers, grey-haired and solid and scorched red by a fiercer sun than Capitas normally saw.

  Varsec was casting an eye over the untidy clutter of flying machines, and Pingge realized he was counting. At the last a delighted smile spread over his face.

  ‘All back,’ he said, just loud enough for Pingge to catch. ‘Captain Aarmon?’

  ‘Here, sir.’ The pale, bald flying officer stalked over.

  ‘You reached Collegium?’

  ‘The mission went ahead as planned, sir. Some success against the airfields, but more against the factories.’

  ‘Resistance?’

  ‘Strong, sir.’

  ‘But you brought everyone back.’ Varsec was grinning, maybe a little too broadly. ‘They’ll be onto us eventually. As soon as we lose a Farsphex over Collegium they’ll be all over the wreckage. They’re no fools, the Beetle-kinden, but the longer we can baffle them, the better. Angved, look at them. They’ve been all the way to Collegium, and fought when they were there, and brought everyone back without casualties. Nobody’s done it before, nobody! You see what we’ve managed, together?’

  The other officer nodded, more soberly.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, one casualty,’ Aarmon declared flatly.

  The weary crews of the Farsphex were still exiting their craft, dragging their feet over to join the ranks. Pingge was suddenly looking around. Where was Kiin? Was she…? But no, there she was, chivvying the last straggling Fly-kinden into place, barely a glance to spare for her old friend Pingge. But, then, who…?

  They were a Fly-kinden short, she realized, and she was partway through her frantic process of elimination when two of the Wasps brought out the body.

  The woman’s name had been Forra, and Pingge had not known her particularly well, but they had all formed a kind of family, after so long training together. Her uniform was torn and crusted with dried blood, her body small and stiff in the Wasps’ hands. They handled her with care, though, Pingge noted. They bore her from the hold of her vessel as though she was one of their own.

  ‘Ludon’s flier got raked from below,’ Aarmon reported dispassionately. ‘Cut apart the bomb bay, destroyed the reticule and killed Bombardier Forra.’

  Pingge felt a peculiar shiver go through her. That could have been me. That could have been any of us.

  Varsec nodded, but Pingge could see that he could not quite make himself care. The success of the project was all to him, just as she had met plenty of factory overseers who only had eyes for quotas and not for working conditions. The real sympathy, the solemn solidarity, came from Aarmon and the other pilots. One of us, they seemed to say.

  Malkan’s Folly was built of sterner stuff than the walls of Myna: close-cut stone over a mortar core intended to absorb the
shock of artillery, earthen banks to protect the foundations, walls angled to allow shot to glance off it. Every trick of the modern war architect had been deployed to allow an attacking force to break against the fortress, to allow any besiegers to be hammered down by the Folly’s own leadshotters and catapults. None of those architects had envisaged a siege where the enemy were far enough away to remain out of range of any reprisals, and where those same distant siege engines could boom and thunder day and night, regular and precise as a clock, as they lobbed chemicals and explosives at ever-weakening stone.

  Within five days the first outer shell of the fortress had cracked and fallen inwards, but the Ants had used the same construction throughout, a honeycomb of small chambers within massive-stoned interlocking walls, and the defenders simply retreated to the next level immediately around the breach, ready at their arrowslits and murder-holes for the direct attack that they were sure would come. The greatshotters did not care but, with marginal adjustments, continued their remorseless pounding.

  Around that time, the Sarnesh expeditionary force arrived, later than they might have done because Roder had sent flying saboteurs to destroy the rails that could have rushed a relief force to the fortress’s aid. By that time, the Eighth Army was well and truly entrenched.

  Seeing the inroads the greatshotters had made, the Sarnesh lost no time in mounting an assault, with troops from the fortress itself sallying forth to assist. There was a lot of open ground to cover to reach the Imperial lines, however — the same open ground that the fortress had counted on to make any attackers’ lives difficult. The regular artillery that Roder had brought up, his own leadshotters and ballistae, sent down a withering barrage of canister and shot and explosive bolts, whilst ranks of snap-bowmen waited behind earthworks for the Sarnesh to come closer.

  All the while, the greatshotters continued their determined work.

  The Sarnesh had brought a flight of orthopters, old Collegium designs and the products of the Ants’ own artificers, workmanlike but unimaginative vessels, mostly still equipped with the repeating ballistae of yesterday’s air forces. The Spearflights outnumbered them more than two to one, but the first day of aerial duelling was not won easily nonetheless, the Ant pilots selling each broken machine dearly, taking a toll on the enemy despite the shortcomings of their technology. At the same time the Sarnesh ground forces advanced the long march towards the Imperial lines, rank upon rank of armoured Ant-kinden armed with shield, sword and snapbow, backed by the trundling of tracked automotives.

  The traditional Imperial response should have been to send the Light Airborne out en masse, coursing over the marching formations to lash down on them with their stings — tactics that had failed miserably in living memory. Instead, Roder held the bulk of his force in place, taking full advantage of the cover they had built up.

  The automotives formed the initial point of their charge, grinding forwards at the pace of a man running. They met the Imperial Sentinels coming the other way. The articulated machines fairly vaulted the Wasp earthworks, rushing the Ant lines with bolts and light artillery bounding from their shells, only pausing with legs braced to loose a leadshotter round that ploughed through the Ant soldiers or punched into the armour of a Sarnesh automotive. Faster and more agile and vastly better armoured, as the battle progressed they hunted down the Sarnesh machines mercilessly, crushing any soldier luckless enough to get in their way.

  When the Ants got within snapbow range they mounted their charge, breaking their solid formations into a scattered skirmish line to best avoid the incoming bolts. It was at that moment that they came closest to winning, had they only known.

  The snapbows and the leadshotters tore into them, scattered or not. The Ants were still trusting to their heavy armour that would carry the day if they could only get into the close combat that they were so skilled at, but it weighed them down, and it did little to slow the incoming shot, despite the silk and felt they had lined it with.

  Once the Ants were committed to their charge, Roder sent detachments of Light Airborne out — not over the enemy, where they might be picked off, but in solid groups landing to the left or right flank, shooting directly into the sides of the enemy formations.

  The Ant-kinden tacticians knew all this, of course. They were able to send detachments left and right to chase off the flanking forces, although the Wasps always came down out of reach, shooting even as they landed. They were able to exhort their soldiers onwards into the flaying lash of the massed snapbows, in the knowledge that, if they could only gain the first earthworks, the Empire’s soldiers would surely fold, and the Ant infantry could rush through and reach the incessant greatshotters behind. By then, though, some of the last surviving Sarnesh pilots had relayed their views of the Wasp camp: trench on bank on trench, no fit terrain for armoured soldiers to clamber over into the barrels of snapbows. And, of course, the Wasp Airborne would be able to hop from trench to trench with ease.

  There was a moment, a fulcrum moment, when the casualties mounted to such a level, within mere yards of the first earthworks, that even the tacticians suffered a crisis of faith. The cost was too great. Hearts as solid and dutiful as iron broke in that same moment. They felt every death, and it was too much.

  They tried again over the next few days, sometimes with reinforcements, sometimes with new orthopters, but they never came as close as on that first day. The knowledge of what awaited them blunted each successive attack, never quite able to grasp the nettle now they had felt its sting. Meanwhile, the Wasps made the best use of their undisputed ownership of the sky to send their Spearflights, and even some airships, out to bomb the Sarnesh camp and to bedevil any advance.

  On the twelfth day, even as another attack was aborted before it even reached snapbow range, the inner walls of Malkan’s Folly suddenly caved in, changing from impregnable fortress to stone eggshell in a minute of cracking and dust. It was enough. The Sarnesh army fell back, and continued falling back because the greatshotter artillerists were already gambling with new calculations, trying to chase them back towards Sarn.

  As one of the younger armies, the Eighth had not yet earned a name for itself but, with the fortress fallen and the Ants in full retreat, Roder put out the word. From now on, the glorious Eighth Army would be ‘the Hammer’, just as Tynan’s Second was ‘the Gears’ and the fallen Seventh that Malkan had commanded — that Roder had now avenged — had earned the name of ‘the Winged Furies’.

  The men of the Eighth were ecstatic, and Roder let them celebrate because he did not want them thinking too much about what was to come. The game only got harder, the further west they marched. Partly this was because of supply lines. Partly it was that, the closer they got to Sarn, the more the Ant-kinden themselves could complicate a day’s travel. Mostly, however, it was the great brooding mass of trees that would shortly eclipse their northern horizon.

  This was the joke, the limitation of the Sarnesh tactical view on the world. Ant-kinden were self-sufficient, in this case actually to a fault. Their great fortress, in which they had placed so much faith, was the least of Roder’s worries, for the land beyond it was guarded by a threat he took far more seriously: the Mantis-kinden.

  In the last war, the Mantids of the Felyal, on the southern coast, had essentially destroyed the Imperial Fourth Army, and when General Tynan had marched that way with his Second, he had taken a great many precautions to ensure that history did not repeat itself. His advance had been slowed by the need to fortify every night, until he actually got the Mantids where he wanted them, killed their warriors and burned their forest.

  The Etheryon was the largest single forest north of the Alim, containing two separate Mantis holds and a population several times that of the Felyal, and all of them killers by nature who could walk as silently as the breeze and see in the dark. Roder had dealt with his fill of assassins when he had fought the Spiders at Seldis, but it was a matter of recent record that enough Mantis-kinden could assassinate an entire army. It was g
oing to be a long road to Sarn, and that was even before he considered the surprise the Ants themselves had managed to leave for him.

  After the fortress fell, the Sarnesh relief force had quit the field, but the defenders of Malkan’s Folly had not. Those who had survived — an uncertain number, and Roder had no way of finding out just how many — were still there because, of course, the Ants had undermined their own creation with cellars and tunnels and subterranean barracks, and probably a living ant-colony as well, full of vicious three-foot biting insects ready to scuttle to their masters’ bidding. The fortress had fallen, but its architects had the last laugh: it still fulfilled its function as a threat that Roder was unwilling to leave at his back. For all he knew, those tunnels could run all the way to Sarn itself.

  He had conferred with Ferric on whether sustained greatshotter bombardment could cave the earth in on the whole nest of them, but the engineer was not optimistic, and the idea of sending troops into those tunnels to try and root an unknown number of Ants, quite possibly many hundreds of the tenacious bastards, was not appealing as a use of either time or materiel. Ants couldn’t see in the dark, but their mindlink would give them a good enough picture of their surroundings, built up from a consensus of sound and touch and shared proximity.

  Roder let his men celebrate — save for those drawn as sentries, of course — because it was an excuse not to move on while he wrestled with the main problem. He did not want the Eighth to realize that they were not yet done here.

  Then, on the dusk of the second day, his visitor arrived. The first he knew of it was a watch sergeant bursting into his tent, as he sat with plans and notes regarding a tentative assault with sappers.

  ‘Sir!’ A smart salute. ‘Someone here with papers, sir.’

  Roder knew what that normally meant — some off-the-books Imperial dignitary, Rekef likely as not, come to make his life more complicated. He suppressed his sour look and nodded tiredly. ‘Send him in,’ he said, clearing up his papers.