The Air War sota-8

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  This meant that, in the moments after the first explosion, individual members of the other two Companies were still stumbling out of bed, pulling on their clothes, pausing to see if they had imagined it, trying to find their armour, then ending up in the streets and searching for an officer, an armoury, a purpose. By that time the Coldstone Company, through the intractability of their leader, was already out in force.

  But not to fight, of course. They had their snapbows, their pikes and most, like the Antspider, had swords at their hip, but they had nothing that would touch an Imperial orthopter. Their city was at war, the civilian casualties already in their scores and Collegium’s army had not so much as loosed a shot in anger.

  ‘The airfield. Come on.’ The warehouse that Marteus had co-opted for this division of his Company was sited where they could at least be on hand to assist the aviators. Straessa and her two dozen had got halfway down the street towards their destination when someone called out, ‘It’s not the airstrip, Antspider!’

  She skidded to a halt. ‘Then they’ll…’ The explosion had been so near, though, and there was nothing else worth bombing out here. ‘Someone get up above and tell me what’s going on!’ She was still learning the whole leadership business, but it always reassured her to know that Marteus used essentially the same technique of shouting at people until things got done.

  One of her Fly-kinden, a tinsmith by trade, sped vertically up past roof level, high enough that Straessa could only find him against the night sky with difficulty. He came down a moment later, looking a little shaken. ‘Redlift Way, chief. Going up like a furnace.’

  ‘But there’s nothing on Redlift Way,’ someone else objected, and the Fly rounded on him, fists balled at being doubted.

  ‘Enough! Let’s go,’ the Antspider snapped at them both, and then led by example. Inside her head she was agreeing with the dissenter, though: Redlift’s no use to anyone, just a terrace of houses and that little taverna with the theatre out back. Maybe someone crashed a flier into it. By that time she had a clear sight down an alley whose far end was limned with the fierce light of flames, and there was a radiance even at roof level from up ahead. It’s on fire, it really is. But what…?

  There had been a few distant crumps, and the night air was droning with the sound of Farsphex, but even then she could not quite reconcile it all in her mind until another bomb struck where Redlift Way met Spurn Street, wholly within her view. She saw the flat roof of one house implode with the impact, and a moment later all the windows blew out, fragments of the shutters raking the air like grenade shrapnel, and the angry glare of flames was abruptly leering out at every quarter, bright enough for the next Farsphex passing over to be plainly visible against the dark sky.

  For a moment she could only stare, even as Gerethwy began calling for someone to summon the firefighters, to fetch a pumping engine. Then she heard the screams start.

  She gave no order, for there was no room in her mind for that. She simply started running towards the stricken house, and some of her people were soon with her, whilst others followed Gerethwy’s advice and went to get a pump to turn on the flames.

  Pingge let the next bomb fall, concentrating hard on only the science of her new profession. Her current assignment presented her with a range of new challenges, most of them not connected to the night flight. Focus was everything.

  As they had neared Collegium, having taken a longer, looped route to come in after dark, she had asked Scain about targets. She’d had a map of Collegium spread across her knees, written and overwritten with prior strikes, but this time nobody had primed her in advance. ‘I mean, I see better in the dark than you, right, but not like a Moth or anything, sir. It’s not going to be precise.’ Through the open bomb-hatch she could see a couple of the other Farsphex. To give the night attack its maximum impact they had increased the size of the flight by half — thirty machines droning their way towards the Beetle city.

  ‘Don’t worry about precise,’ Scain had called back to her over the noise of the engine. ‘Listen, Aarmon has a detail who’re going to go after specific targets, so that’s not your problem. Ludon has a detail that will attack anything the Collegiates get into the air, if they even do. The rest of you are to let fly anywhere that looks promising.’

  ‘Promising like how, sir?’ Pingge had asked him.

  ‘Concentrations of buildings.’

  ‘Yeah, but Collegium’s a city, right, sir? It’s all concentrations of buildings.’ She had raised the pitch of her voice, thinking that she was not hearing him properly but an uncontrollable yawn mangled the last word. Even after taking a couple of naps, bundled up in a blanket against the encroaching cold, she was still bone weary.

  ‘Take your Chneuma,’ Scain had ordered promptly. ‘We’re close enough.’

  Reluctantly, she had chewed the bitter pill, but Scain would not relent until she had swallowed it. Immediately she had felt warmer, although uncomfortably aware that she couldn’t really be warmer. The drug made her feel as though she could not sit still, as though she should be doing something with her hands.

  ‘Seriously, though, sir, I mean, concentrations of buildings? Most of it’s just someone’s house or something.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Glancing back at her, there had been a curious expression on Scain’s face. ‘Shops, businesses, homes, mostly homes. With the Second getting closer, Aarmon says we’re attacking their will to fight. It’s the new plan straight from the top. Which means Rekef Outlander, to my thinking.’ She had never known Scain to rattle on like this, but then that was probably his own Chneuma talking, the double dose the pilots had taken.

  ‘But sir…’ she had said. ‘I mean, that’s not… not what we do.’

  ‘We obey orders,’ he had snapped over his shoulder, hunching inwards, and had not countenanced the subject being raised again.

  Now over Collegium, she let the bombs fall, lining up the reticule carefully on a row of roofs so that the precious cargo of destruction would not be wasted on an open street or square. The first impact had almost paralysed her, her imagination running briefly out of control. This was not soldier work. She had just destroyed someone’s home. There would be a family, children. The orders had to be wrong. Someone had made a mistake. And, all the while, her hands were working at the reticule, selecting the next target out of the cityscape ahead, so that she had let the second bomb go as thoughtlessly as if it had been a training exercise, even as she still agonized over the first.

  And its falling line had been perfect, her aim immaculate.

  ‘The thing is… the thing is we’re saving lives,’ came Scain’s voice unexpectedly, as she acquired her next target. ‘The Second will be at the gates soon. Breaking the morale of the city will mean fewer of our people die in the attack; fewer of the enemy as well. They just need to be made to understand.’

  But Pingge was not listening, merely walking a delicate tightrope in her mind. The worst thing was not the horror and empathy she felt, the trap of knowing that there were actual people below, whom she was hurting and killing. The real difficulty was the opposite: because she was so high up, and so detached, and how easy it was to measure everything against her technical performance, the clinical gauge of accuracy and effect. How easy it would be to assess each explosion on how well she had placed it, how grand the result: Look, that was a big one — must have been a workshop or a brewery, plenty for the incendiary to work on! In just the same way, she imagined, a Rekef interrogator would go about his work, and see the agonies of his subject as merely the proper dues of his craft.

  So she concentrated only on the mechanisms and the movements, the calm exercise of her skill, and desperately hoped that the after-effects of the Chneuma would not bring her dreams.

  Castre Gorenn dropped from the sky almost into the midst of the Antspider’s detachment, nearly getting herself spitted on a pike. The Dragonfly-kinden had turned up at Collegium’s gates claiming to be the Commonweal Retaliatory Force, and demanding to
sign up with the city’s defenders. Marteus had assigned her to the Antspider because Straessa was, to quote, ‘Sub-officer in charge of freaks’. Since then Gorenn had refused to use Collegiate weapons or tactics, roving about with her longbow behind the formations of pike and shot. Only her speed and accuracy with the weapon had given the Antspider any hope that this woman would be useful at all.

  Now, however, she was proving her worth, if only because Straessa had few Fly-kinden to call on for quick scouting and messaging, and Gorenn could fly as fast and see as well as they could.

  ‘Whole street gone up that way,’ the Dragonfly reported. ‘Thropters just gone overhead, probably coming back soon.’

  ‘ Which street?’ the Antspider demanded.

  ‘A street. The one over there. Five streets between us and it.’ Because to Castre Gorenn the idea of naming streets — of having a city that was big enough to need it — was wholly new. There were no Flies about, though, and Straessa was trying to sort out her mental map of the city even as she and her followers began to run, the pattering of their boots eclipsed as Gerethwy got the pumping engine under way, clack-clacking on its four clockwork legs.

  We’re on Fen Way, now crossing Parthell, next is Worry Lane, then the Broads, then… but the Antspider’s mind was already racing ahead, because these were familiar names, not so far from the College. She could name tavernas and chop houses, a music hall she had been to, closer and closer to…

  She doubled her speed abruptly, heedless of the heft of her Company-issue breastplate, leaving the rest of them behind in a clatter of pikes and snapbows. ‘Gerethwy!’ she was shouting, as though only he mattered, but he was busy guiding the pumping engine, and surely they’d need the pumping engine…

  She burst on to Wallender Street, skidding on the uneven paving, a blast of heat striking her as though it were a fist. No, no, no — there was the Wall Taverna, tongues of flame roaring from the sockets of its windows, that brightly coloured awning she knew so well already nothing more than floating, embering scraps of cloth, and the chairs and tables like bright skeletons within the crackling interior. That was the tenement next to it, four storeys converted to five, where all the Fly-kinden had lived: the factory workers and the rail-side workers and the musicians who had practised late evenings out on the roof. And now the same little people were frantically darting in and out with whatever possessions they could salvage, or being driven back by the fire and the smoke.

  Castre Gorenn was already touching down next to her, a bow in her hand as though she could fight any of this. Her long, golden face was cast in ruby by the leaping flames.

  There, beyond the tenement, blazing like a pyre, was Raullo Mummers’s studio, and the apartments above it, all leaping with gorging fire, the artist’s circular window blazing forth like a raging eye. The Antspider tried to yell some order, at who she knew not, but all that came out was a choked sob as she rushed forward, heedless of the heat. Elsewhere in the city, other bombs were falling, and not so far away, but she barely registered them.

  The street was clogged with people, hurt and frightened, panicking about those they could not find, milling and screaming and shouting at each other. Straessa passed from face to face, grabbing out to spin people so that the fire could light up their features, shouldering her way through the crowd. She was trying to shout out names, but nothing coherent would emerge. Then she stood before the building itself, and the fire shouted right back at her, roaring and consuming, gutting everything down to the bare stone. The Empire’s incendiaries burned as no natural fire could have done.

  Can there be anyone inside there? She braced herself, but there couldn’t, of course. It was impossible. Nothing could have lived and yet, and yet Gorenn grabbed her as she pushed forwards, the roasting air like a physical barrier. For a moment she was wrestling with the Dragonfly, then thrusting her away, not to the ground but upwards, as Gorenn’s wings flashed to regain her balance. Then someone else had hold of Straessa, trying to manhandle her away, shouting something meaningless over and over, and the Antspider punched the newcomer in the shoulder, and then had her sword out because she couldn’t just stand there — she had to do something, surely, or who else would?

  The sound the interfering man uttered resolved itself into ‘Straessa!’ and his face into Eujen’s, smoke-smeared, with a livid bruise at one temple. Heedless of her blade he gripped her by her arms. ‘You can’t!’ he was insisting. ‘It’s too late!’

  ‘How can you say that?’ she shrieked at him. ‘Raullo… he’s-’

  ‘He’s out, I got him out!’ Eujen insisted. ‘He’s over there, just look!’

  At last he got through to her, but she had almost to wrench her eyes off the hungry blaze, hunting the crowd until she spotted the crumpled form. The artist huddled against a wall on the street’s far side, shoulders shaking, his hands before him, fingers crooked into claws. There was a small figure beside him, barely a grey shadow — the Fly te Mosca, trying to comfort him. There was not comfort enough to be had. Raullo’s entire world was burning, feeding the flames with his history, the sketches he had layered his walls with.

  When Straessa looked away, her detachment were already there at hand, Gerethwy detailing them to start clearing the street. The pumping engine rattled to itself as he directed it — but not at the studio or the taverna or the tenement. The jet of water shot out onto the workshop beside the doomed Wall Taverna, whose shutters were just starting to catch fire. For those buildings already alight, their little engine could do nothing but waste what precious water they had.

  ‘Eujen, help get these people out of here,’ she snapped. ‘Get them off the streets. Get them into the College cellars.’

  She saw the outrage on his face, his eyes taking in her breastplate, her buff coat, all the trappings of her office. Rhetoric welled up inside him, and she wished she had not spoken, but then in an instant his anger was gone.

  ‘I’m deputized, am I?’ he asked, and she barely caught the words.

  ‘Please.’

  But he was already nodding, heading towards Raullo and te Mosca, waving his arms at them, and at everyone, shooing them as though they were sheep.

  Then the next Farsphex barrelled overhead, low enough for its underside to reflect the firelight, and Gorenn had an arrow to her bow, trying to aim even as the flying machine flashed past.

  Someone shouted a warning. It might have been Straessa herself.

  The bomb hit a building on the side of Wallender Street that was as yet untouched, striking its roof off-centre. Beetles knew how to build solidly in stone, but not even Ants would have made their everyday homes proof against bombardment. The sheer impact cracked the house’s facade, and then half the upper storey’s front was sloughing away in a great sheet of bricks, into the street, onto the crowd. A moment later the incendiary itself touched off, gouting a broad sheet of searing orange across the sky overhead, dropping flaming chemical gobbets impartially on everything and everyone below.

  Raullo was standing now, raising his hands after the orthopter as though he had some Art that would call it back, enact vengeance on it. His mouth was open and screaming, his face contorted by grief and rage, even as te Mosca frantically stripped away his burning tunic. His invective, his howling, whatever sound he made, was lost utterly in the chorus of pain and panic on all sides.

  ‘Get these bloody people off the streets!’ Straessa shouted, and it was just as well that her followers were already engaged in just that, because nobody could have heard her.

  Another flying machine dashed overhead, but Straessa saw enough of it: the two wings, the more compact frame. One of ours, thank Providence.

  ‘Pump’s out of water!’ Gerethwy communicated by yelling in her ear. ‘We’re doing nothing here! If there was more wind we’d be dead already!’

  People were starting to move at last, the able doing what they could to support the wounded. The faces all around the Antspider were marked not with hatred, or even with simple shock, but with
incomprehension: men and women and children who could not understand what the world had become.

  Taki skipped her refitted Esca Magni through the dark air, straining her eyes for the swift movement that would indicate the Farsphex. Had someone told her a tenday ago that she would enter this battle then she would have been exultant. She was no Moth, but her eyes were far better than any Wasp’s at night. She would have vaulted into the darkness with the intention of picking every single enemy from the sky.

  Now she knew what she knew, now she understood the secret of the Imperial discipline, she recognized that the conflict was going to be horribly uneven the other way. The Sarnesh had proved, in the last war, that a large army could manoeuvre swiftly and quietly in the dark to the fatal surprise of its enemies if it was only linked mind to mind. What one saw, all saw, each man aware of the next in a way that no outsider could appreciate; all at the same pace, nobody stepping on anyone else’s feet, perfect coordination making up for any lack of light. Now the Empire had that weapon, too, and it was deployed over the rooftops of Collegium. There would be no surprising any of them, unless Taki could somehow surprise all of them, and they would always know which way to turn, and where their allies were. They would find her, too, comparing their mental maps, triangulating, hunting her down.

  She had no idea even how many Collegiate orthopters were in the air. The aviators were getting themselves off the ground the moment they could, scattering out across the city in the desperate hope of fending off some of the terror that was raining down.

  She saw a trio of Farsphex pass before her, but their formation broke even as she accelerated towards them, and with a chill she guessed some other enemy had seen her, someone she had not spotted. She let off a brief spray of rotary shot and was already pulling out of her attack, reaching for height. The attacking Farsphex was a brief, blurred presence to her left, already levelling out in response, and she knew, from years of accrued instinct, that there would be at least one more moving in on her. She was hauling left, coming out on a wingtip and almost directly over the Wasp who had just passed her. The original three were long gone, turning into their next bombing run.