The Air War sota-8

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She broke off, scattering in the opposite direction, expecting the enemy to retreat and continue to cover the bombers, but they stayed with her, and she understood. The game had become something more familiar, but no more comforting. The Imperials had changed their tactics, as she knew they would. She was a priority now. She was the target.

  Stripping Collegium of its air defences was a necessary preliminary for taking the city, and the Second Army was marching ever closer. It all made perfect tactical sense, textbook stuff. But, of course, Taki was the air defences, and abruptly it was all a great deal closer to home.

  She spun and danced over Collegium, confident that she was faster and nimbler, but they were working in perfect tandem, driving her between them, taking turns to fix wings for a sudden burst of speed before reverting to orthopter flight when she tried to out-dance them.

  Time for desperate measures. She released a chute, but unevenly, the sudden drag slewing her machine about in the air, moments from flipping end over end in a total loss of control, but then she had stabilized, momentarily flying backwards, cutting the chute free to billow off into the night, then letting the Esca ’s wings stabilize her, trigger down and raking the two oncoming Farsphex with her rotaries, close enough for her to see the sparks as her bolts hit home.

  She saw one of the leftmost craft’s porthole windows shatter, the brief image of the pilot flinching away. Then she was passing between them, canted right so that their wingtips did not clash, intent on getting some clear air around her.

  Even as the first hole was shot through her wing, she was pulling left and up, dragging the Esca into a tight turn as another Farsphex stooped towards her from the clouds. She could imagine the other two arcing back towards her, in their minds the precise and exacting picture of where she was relative to their comrade. She fled flat out, putting as much distance between her and them as possible, the new attacker right behind her, keeping up a steady stream of shot that flashed and glittered about her, whichever way she turned.

  There was a flash of light ahead of her — a pattern of on and off, and then again. Her mind translated the code automatically: Evade! Evade!

  Her stomach lurched horribly, taking a fraction of a second to appreciate just what that meant. She could not go up — that would cut a course right through the scythe of bolts the Farsphex was training on her. Instead she dropped for the streets, skimming roofs and then lower even than that, skittering along a street just above head height, then wrenching the Esca into a broad, burning city square, spinning the little orthopter on its wing in the firelight to see the sequel.

  Two Stormreaders came blazing in at the Farsphex, their line already taking them through the same air that Taki would have been occupying if she had been a second slower in reacting to their signal, and still on a collision course with the Imperial flier, which was shooting right back at them. She registered Mynans — less by the livery than their flying style — and then the Wasp pilot’s nerve broke, or perhaps he had taken too many hits, for he was pulling away.

  Taki was already speeding back, and she saw one of the Mynans’ nose lift, the Stormreader already seeking for height, looking for the inevitable reinforcements. That was Edmon, she was sure. The other..

  The other was Franticze, the mad Bee-kinden the Mynans had brought with them, and she had clearly run out of patience with the war as it had been fought to date.

  She never adjusted her line, and Taki shouted inside her cockpit, as if the Bee woman could hear, because Franticze was still ploughing straight for the Farsphex, even as it shuddered under her bolts.

  At the last, the Bee changed her line — not pulling away, but tilting her orthopter so that, instead of tangling wings, she let the beating vanes of the Wasp vessel crack against her undercarriage and shatter.

  There were more coming already, and Taki joined Edmon in raking the skies towards them, but a glance back down gave her more heart than she had known for some days. A second’s glimpse showed the Farsphex lurching from the air, its nose striking a roof, flipping the tail up and over, and then the explosion, the fuel tank cracking, catching, one more fire erupting over Collegium.

  Then Taki was in the thick of it, and so were they all. Farsphex kept knifing out of the darkness, scattering bolts at her, trying to box her in but never getting in each other’s way. She spat and spun, dipping and dancing her Esca through the air, feeling the occasional stutter as a shot connected, bullying her way upwards again despite all they could do to pin her to the ground. She lost sight of the two Mynan pilots, then a moment later Franticze was cutting in front of her, rotaries blazing sparks as their firepowder charges ignited, forcing one of the Wasp pilots off — so impelling all of them to readjust their patterns and their plan. Taki could only hope that, between the darkness and the speed that everything over Collegium was moving, their mindlink would miss a few beats, leaving the individual pilots unable to keep track of who was where and what direction they were going.

  And they were trying to kill her. The gentleman’s war of yesterday was well and truly gone. The Farsphex had new orders, and if abandoning their tight defence would put them at a greater risk, the same would go double for the local aviators.

  At last she won free, spiralling up towards the clouds with the great skirmish still weaving its designs beneath her. The Wasps had brought a lot more to the fight this time, and she had no idea how many Stormreaders were even off the ground. As she reached her apex, poised for a dive, the city beneath her was picked out in flames, new eruptions flashing into life even as she watched. The Wasps were maintaining their bombing even as they fought off the city’s defenders.

  She dropped, arrowing down in a search for targets and for friends. Her keen eyes picked out allies quickly: all over the city, they were fighting alone or in small groups, without reference to each other. Perhaps that was for the best, for it meant the composite enemy mind had to adjust to a dozen separate strategies at once, even if each was a minuscule pinprick.

  She found her target, knowing that some Wasp somewhere would have surely spotted her. As she dived she switched suddenly, tailing a flier that crossed her path, the wings of the Esca straining at this shift in direction. Sparks flew from the enemy fuselage and it lurched in the air, and immediately she was off again, flashing Attack here! in case some other defender was close enough to follow up on her work. Again and again she struck, lightning raids against the larger craft, scattering hits across them, hoping for some narrow strike to hole the fuel tank, or the pilot, and then she was off, skittering across the sky before the enemy formation could close in on her. It was fierce, frustrating work, without a moment for thought, but her little stabs at them were working in other ways, or so she hoped. Each time she made herself a threat, then vanished, she was drawing away their combined concentration, drawing them off her fellows, creating openings.

  Or at least I hope that’s what I’m doing.

  Abruptly she was in the midst of a fierce fight. Some half-dozen Stormreaders were all about her, one of them even punching a few holes in her tail before recognizing the shape of her hull. Edmon was there, and Franticze as well, and she reckoned she spotted Pendry Goswell and Corog Breaker amongst them too. She wheeled with them, and then the Farsphex were all about them, splitting off into pairs to take them on.

  The two flights met like fists. At last there was no dodging away, no escape, and for the moment no reinforcements on either side. The Wasps had greater numbers, two to one, and their cursed linked minds to bring them to bear, but the Collegiates were following Franticze’s lead, and the Bee-kinden’s berserk fury seemed to have infected them all. Taki saw her Stormreader force one of the enemy almost into the rooftops, sticking to it as though she was about to ram, clinging so close that Wasp bolts were tearing impartially into both craft. Pendry Goswell came to her aid, still leading a pair of enemy, but Pendry had taken too many strikes to her engine casing, wings seizing in a sudden choke of gears. Even as she must have been pushing at the co
ckpit to kick her way out, even as her stilled Stormreader’s forward motion segued into a dive, the pursuing Farsphex’s weapons ripped her open — woman and orthopter both — in a shredding ruin of canvas, brass and blood.

  Taki found a target, the two of them passing one another like lancers, her shots spattering across the Farsphex’s flank and the Imperial’s slamming into her undercarriage, her landing legs springing out in a tangled mess of broken metal. It turned but she was fleeter, even as another enemy orthopter was trying to dive on her. Taki’s sudden rush of speed threw off the new attacker’s aim, and she managed to catch her original target mid-turn, a brief second’s worth of glorious open shooting at its side and belly, a dozen shots punching home, so that the turn became a tilt, the tilt a fall. Even as she was dancing away, enemy bolts ripping the air about her, Franticze descended on the faltering Farsphex Taki had crippled, her rotaries smashing in the cockpit, shattering glass, gutting everything beyond.

  More Farsphex were joining the fray, and more Stormreaders too, though fewer. Taki zigzagged her way through the aerial melee, trying both to find a target and to shake her pursuers at the same time. Nobody was free to relieve her, and she felt as though she would be dragging these two killers after her for the rest of her life — or until her springs lost enough tension that she would have to make a landing, which felt more imminent than she would like.

  All around her the pride of Collegium’s aviation department and the most skilled of the Mynan refugees fought the elite of the Imperial Air Corps, no quarter given. Whirling, fleeting glimpses were all she had of the conflict. She had no idea of its overall shape or structure, simply latching from target to target and letting the enemy behind her continue to waste their ammunition. She saw Corog Breaker go down, with no time to see whether the old man managed to jump clear in time. She saw a Farsphex, burning, smash into the dome of the College philosophy department. She saw two Stormreaders attack each other, blinded by the night, strung too high on panic and desperation. Then, at last, the Imperial craft were pulling back, even their discipline left ragged by the night’s attrition. Taki was already flashing for Retreat! Retreat! but she had no idea who saw or followed her. She had a sense of other orders glittering across the sky, trying to call back some who were still chasing the enemy. Her own engine was dangerously loose now, and she would need all the power and control she could muster to get the Esca safely down without its shattered landing legs. She turned for home.

  With morning came the count: they had downed all of seven Farsphex, while Collegiate losses stood at seventeen fallen Stormreaders, twelve pilots dead, one missing. Edmon brought her that last news: Franticze had not retreated. Franticze had hated the Wasps too much for that. She had gone after them as they fled across the sky, refusing to give up the fight, oblivious to the orders that Edmon had tried to give her.

  The long-range patrols trying to track down the supposed enemy base, who were going out less and less frequently, found her at last: the shattered corpse of her Stormreader intermeshed with the bent frame of a Farsphex — and no survivors.

  Twenty-Six

  Whenever Seda dreamt, she was always there: the other, the twin, her sister and her rival. As she wrestled with her own sleeping mind, trying to recapture the ancient techniques that had allowed the Moth-kinden to parse the future through their nightmares, always there was that presence, sometimes near, sometimes far, but always there. Then the clarity of divination would fragment and crack, the stress of two kindred powers too much for such fragile visions to sustain.

  She woke into rage and frustration yet again. I will destroy you! But there was a tinge of fear as well. She was the Empress of all the Wasps, and she was crowned the heir to yesterday’s lost magic but, so long as she must share the throne, she could not be easy in her mind, and every triumph, every victory would taste like ashes. She had lived in fear most of her life, in the shadow of her vengeful, petty-minded brother, but now she understood the fear that he himself had lived in, the power of his office exposing him to threats that would pass over the head of a lesser man.

  I will not become Alvdan. And yet one ordinary Beetle-kinden girl, a child of wretched Collegium, was haunting her.

  When Seda had been gifted — or cursed — with this inheritance, so too had this Cheerwell Maker. When Seda had gone to the ancient seat of power in Khanaphes and bullied the Masters there into making her their heir, so too had the ignorant, stupid girl also been crowned. Too late Seda had realized what she had created: an equal, an opposite, an enemy. All the power that she had worked so hard for had been divided between her and this witless Beetle. However great Seda had become, so too had Cheerwell Maker, if she only understood it. And Seda knew that the other girl would understand all too soon.

  I tried to kill her. She should be dead. Yet the girl lived, and Seda felt her like a thorn, every minute. Worse, the Beetle was even now in the Commonweal, where surely magicians lived who would be teaching her their secrets, and although the Beetle had been made Seda’s peer, any new power she coaxed from the Dragonflies would make her stronger.

  There was only one way out now: Seda must unearth powers that the girl had no claim to. I would rip out the heart of history if it would but serve me.

  One of the old counterproductive superstitions that could still be found sometimes in some out-of-the-way parts of the Empire was the belief that, when twins were born, their father must kill one soon after the birth or else, when grown, each would destroy the other, neither able to countenance the existence of so close a mirror to themselves. It was a foolish belief, and the practice had been outlawed on pain of death — why deny the Empire its soldiers, after all? — but Seda understood it now. Even if the Beetle girl bore her no ill will, even if she went away and never returned to trouble Seda’s ambitions, the simple knowledge that there existed that other self, that counterpart, was to her unbearable.

  I will never be free of her unless I destroy her, and to destroy her I must acquire strength.

  Where is Gjegevey?

  She kicked her way out of bed angrily, shouting for the servants, who entered reluctantly. Being a body servant to Empress Seda was an uncertain prospect. To the cringing women who dared present themselves, Seda shouted, ‘Get me Gjegevey, now!’ and they rushed out, grateful for an errand that took them away from their mistress almost immediately.

  Seda stood naked in the centre of her bedchamber, quivering slightly from the dregs of the terror and revulsion the dream had left her with.

  Something scraped — the husk of a metal sound seeming to come from a greater distance than her bedchamber would allow. When she looked round, an armoured figure stood statue-still in one corner, and she could not have said whether he was there before or not. Certainly, the servants had not noted him, but then Tisamon was very good at passing unseen, and his armour was no hindrance. The armour was him, as much the focus of his physical presence as anything else.

  ‘So, you’re back,’ she said, her tone carefully casual. ‘I trust General Roder appreciated your assistance.’

  I want to kill him, came the stony rattle of his voice, more felt than heard.

  ‘Of course you do. Sometimes I envy how simple your desires are, how easily satisfied. She stepped towards him like a dancer, feeling the chill of his dead eyes on her bare skin. ‘You would kill us all — all of my kinden — I know.’ For in life he had hated Wasps, which made her taming of him all the sweeter.

  Not you. Never you. She stood well within his reach now, and his bladed gauntlet was donned. A single swift strike, far faster than she could react to, and she would follow her brother and Uctebri into the final dark. She reached out and touched the elegant lines of his mail, following the contours of his carapace. Oh, he was bound to her, and eagerly he followed her commands, but it was not a soldier’s loyalty that moved him, nor a slavish obedience, but something stronger and weaker than either. The closest word language had for it was love, but what could such a dreadful thing as this revenan
t make of that idea? She had bound him by holding his blade that was a part of him through the mysteries of the Weaponsmasters. She had bound him by feeding him blood, and she continued to do so, to keep him strong and close. All that was just the foundation, though, preliminaries that had allowed her to open negotiations with his will. She had bound him after that with promises to the heart of his Inapt nature — Inapt by kinden, and Inapt by his very existence now — that she and only she might bring back the old days when magic, and his people, were strong.

  Greatest of all, though, she had bound him by understanding the razor edges of his true nature, seeing where they would bend and twist until he was a weapon that would fit her hand only. Passion and death made up the essence of Tisamon. He had been a hero fit for all the old Mantis romances, tragic and doomed and bloody-handed. So it was that what he felt for her was something like love and, if she handled him poorly, if she took a false step in toying with his bitter feelings, he might kill her despite — because of — all the chains of magic that linked them.

  And if I take him to my bed? The thought was irresistible. It was possible, she suspected, but the old stories were full of those who had been lured to lie with a ghost, and had found only death. The fools in the tales were all in love themselves, though, and Seda had no such vulnerability. The thought only excited her, and it would bind the revenant to her all the more thoroughly, for good or for ill.

  She nearly gave in to the temptation there and then, because there was a challenge that she could meet with her eyes open — not like the sly, sneaking threat that the Beetle girl posed. But, no, she had summoned Gjegevey, after all, and if the old man walked in on that it might kill him. She smirked at the thought, for a moment just a Wasp girl of good family treasuring a risque thought. Then her main purpose returned to her, the lurking presence of the other, and her need to secure some source of strength that Cheerwell Maker could not touch. Gjegevey was being coy with her, she knew, holding back information because he thought he knew what was best for her. She would have to disabuse him of that notion.