The Air War sota-8

  Where is it going to end?

  Someone cleared their throat, and he looked up to see Praeda hovering in the doorway.

  ‘Master Maker, I told Berjek I’d pass on a message for him. As a favour, really.’

  ‘It’s about his brother?’ Stenwold divined. The problem of Banjacs Gripshod had not gone away, but just now nobody cared enough to grasp the nettle. ‘Jodry went to speak to him a while back, I know.’

  ‘He wants to speak to you, Berjek said,’ Praeda told him. ‘Specifically to you. I’m sorry, Stenwold, but Berjek… I just said I’d ask. Now I’ve asked. That’s all.’

  ‘If I should somehow ever find a moment spare then perhaps I’ll go and see him,’ Stenwold told her, ‘although I can’t honestly think what he might have to say to me.’

  ‘Here they come!’ Scain relayed the news for Pingge’s benefit, and a moment later their Farsphex fell sideways in the air, breaking formation smoothly even as the Imperial machines broadened their net, ready to take on the Collegiate fliers as they came in. They were still miles from the Beetle city, and the enemy’s ability to home in on their attacks was being hotly debated by the engineers back home. Meanwhile intelligence from the spies in Collegium was drying up — either the Beetles were keeping a better watch or they were simply keeping more secrets from each other.

  Pingge stared out into the night through her open hatch, watching for the telltale ghosts of movement that would resolve into those vicious, nimble two-winged orthopters the Collegiates built. Before her was the ballista she had recently been saddled with, and if any target presented itself in the small arc of their vessel’s left flank that she could actually shoot at, then possibly she might get off a bolt at it. There was a rack of the explosive-tipped ammunition within arm’s reach, and it terrified her. One spark, from a stray piercer bolt striking the hull of the Farsphex, say, and they might all go up. For the marginal advantage it gave, the risks seemed ridiculous. The Beetles always seemed to be gaining ground technologically, though, and the Engineering Corps was just as keen to load their vaunted new pilots with every new toy they could devise. One day we won’t get off the ground, for all the advantages they’ve given us.

  They pitched violently, and she heard Scain curse. A scattering of bolts sprayed them, punching through the outer hull, but none of them making it through the second inner skin that protected the pilot, the bombardier, the engine and the fuel tank. Just so long as they don’t hit the wings or just shoot me directly through this stupid open doorway I’ve got here. Then she nearly swallowed her tongue because a Collegiate flier had blurred past, in her sights for a fraction of a second, but gone before she could react, leaving her pointlessly swinging the ballista after it.

  She could not remember when she had last slept properly. There was a part of her mind insisting that she should be dropping dead from exhaustion by now. The Chneuma was a merciless mistress, though, goading her on as though it had a handful of hot pokers lodged inside her. The Wasps took far more of the stuff than their Fly-kinden subordinates, too. She didn’t want to think about how Scain would be feeling.

  They lurched in the air again, and she had a sense that they were pulling further off from the fray. Looking out into a chessboard of cloud and moonlight, she caught sight of orthopters driving at one another, looping and turning, but they were some distance away. Are they off course, or are we?

  ‘Hey, sir, what’s up?’

  Scain was silently concentrating on flying, pulling them ever further away. Pingge risked putting her head and shoulders out, the wings a thunder above her. There were other machines close by, but not fighting. All of them were simply putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the conflict.

  And ahead lay geography that had practically written itself on to the back of her eyes: the coast, the harbour… Collegium.

  ‘Sir?’ she tried again.

  ‘Nishaan’s holding them,’ Scain rattled back, tensely. ‘We’re giving the city all we’ve got before they realize we’re mostly past them.’

  Pingge reflected drily that the Wasp woman named Nishaana had mysteriously lost the feminine ending of her name since she had made sergeant. ‘New targets, sir?’

  ‘Use your discretion. Industry and residential,’ Scain reported to her. ‘Attacking their means and their will to fight. You know the drill.’

  ‘Right you are, sir.’

  One of the Collegiate pilots had said to Taki, ‘I even dream about flying now,’ and her immediate thought had been, I always dreamt of flying, every night — it’s just that those used to be good dreams. All of her life all she had ever wanted was to fly. All her other ambitions — the respect of her aviator peers, her victories in dragon-fights over the Exalsee, her status within the city — remained secondary and inextricably bound up with that one thought. Now she wanted to spend a tenday on the ground, not to touch the control stick of the Esca Magni, not to view the world through the glass of her cockpit, not to have her heartbeat fall into step with the beating of her orthopter’s wings.

  The Great Ear had sounded off early that night, and strongly, and she had already been trying to calculate the enemy force incoming even as her Art wings dropped her into place in her pilot’s seat. All about her, the other pilots of her airfield, and her shift, were scrambling for their machines. Around half of them were veterans like Edmon, the other half with only a flight or two to their name, and at least two for whom this would be the acid test, their first combat.

  Taki had always thought of herself as young; fighting in the air was a young woman’s game, after all. Reflexes decayed like everything else, and eventually experience could no longer offset the loss. She still wondered why Corog Breaker had not been killed yet. The old Master Armsman had a warrior’s heart, but she could measure his years in the handling of his machine, that extra second’s lapse in time before he reacted. His glider wings had saved his life twice now.

  Looking at the new pilots sent to her by the College, she felt old now, as if the gap between her days and Breaker’s was slender compared to what separated her from the tyros. Not just raw time, of course, but distance measured in that compressed and saw-edged period she spent in the air, pitting her skills against the enemy and betting her life on it every time. It was a bastard of a way to grow old, but she was beginning to feel it was the only way that she ever would.

  The drone of her own craft’s Ear increased suddenly, and she spotted the enemy formation as moonbeams darted across them. She held off signalling until she saw them breaking up, splitting off from the pack in readiness, and then sent terse flashes of light towards the fliers on her left and right, the coded orders now coming as naturally as speech. Left climb, separate off, attack. Right with me, follow, guard. She had to hope that they had understood her, as she was beginning her attack run even then.

  If only I could slow this moment down. For of course she was flying into a chaos of vessels, bringing a wave-front of disorder that seemed to scatter the enemy ahead of her. There must be a point where the onrush of the Collegiate Stormreaders impacting into the widening Farsphex formation was like a stone shattering glass. Beautiful, it must be beautiful to witness, if only I could. But, being the stone, she had no such luxury.

  She went after three targets, one after the other, loosing a brief burst of shot and then away, imagining the other Wasp pilots out of position — moving in to deflect an attack that was only a feint. Yes, yes, they were in each other’s minds, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t fool them all with an elegant enough deception, and they were still bound by the limits of speed and momentum and mechanical tolerance. Out of position was out of position, and all their mindlink would do was make them fully understand that they had got it wrong.

  Now. She had her target, chasing and chasing, and the Farsphex fleeing before her, with a tyro clinging to her back-right quarter, gamely following each twist and turn, and one of the better Collegiate pilots — you know, that boy with the long hair and the
smile — guarding from behind and above, waiting ready to fend off the inevitable counterstrike by the Imperials.

  And yet she seemed to have out-skipped them for the moment, the reprisal never coming, as she nipped and nipped away at the enemy, and the Farsphex flinging itself about the sky to keep her off it, and it was almost like old times, in a duel over the Exalsee. As her hands threw the Esca Magni after her opponent, her mind could step back, admiring the nimbleness of the larger craft in the air, reaching for that brotherhood of flier against flier that she had lived on and thrived on.

  She was alive and awake and fierce, and knew joy, because she had forgotten Collegium, the lives at stake, the fires and the fear. That was what she missed most from the old days. Back then she had nobody else she need care about. She never cared about her own life, and nobody else’s was at stake.

  She realized that the pilot watching the skies above wasn’t that boy with the long hair, because he’d been killed three nights ago, a Wasp pilot’s bolt piercing his cockpit even as he tried to cut in front of Taki for a killing shot. She had seen a flash of darkness as his blood sprayed the inside of the glass.

  She also realized that she was wide of where she reckoned the main fight must be, and that nobody was coming to save her elusive target. Further realizations followed.

  She flashed, Break off, break off, to both sides, and then, fumbling with the toggle, Retreat, retreat, even before she had wheeled back and scanned a sky that was far too empty. What she could see of the enemy were scattered all over, and so few. Where were the reinforcements that always swooped in to save their fellows? Unless they were above the clouds, there were none to be seen.

  No, no no. And she slung her Esca past the nearest Collegiate flight, flashing, Retreat, retreat! and knowing they must think her mad.

  There was no code for ‘Gather other pilots’, and to spell it out would be too awkward and take too long. She plotted a course that might pass within sight of a few more, but that would see her turned back towards Collegium, in the vain hope she might do some good. Then she was forcing every inch of tension from her engine, flitting through the sky with the ground below a darkened blur.

  The streets of Collegium were rushing below them sooner than Pingge had anticipated, lightless now, with even the windows blacked out, as if a single visible candle or lantern would call down a fiery oblivion on the incautious. And not too far from the truth. She settled herself by the reticule, glanced into its lens, looked again out of the gaping hatch beside her.

  ‘What the piss is that?’

  She had a good look at it, in the moment before it opened up on them, for the Farsphex were coming in low to give the bombardiers the best run. Sitting on the roof of a building they were passing was something like a ballista with a big circular magazine positioned behind the arms, set within a frame of steam-pistons that were abruptly thudding into life. Pingge couldn’t have asked for a better demonstration of the device, and the only shame was that it was pointing at them.

  Pull up, but the words died in her throat as the thing loosed, the magazine ratcheting round at a rate of knots, and the air was instantly full of big ten-foot bolts, falling upwards towards the Farsphex in a killing rain, then lighting the night sky with their explosions, a thunder and a roar all around them. Scain cursed and fought the controls, pitching violently right so that Pinggie slammed into the wall and almost ended up dangling out of the hatch.

  ‘Gain height! Gain height!’ She knew Scain was not talking to her, but recently his internal conferences with Aarmon and the others had become external ones, the increased Chneuma dose cracking the barriers between the spoken and what was merely thought. Pingge clung on, the reticule forgotten, and hoped and hoped, feeling the craft rock and shudder with each near-miss. From her viewpoint through the hatch she saw a sudden bonfire in the sky, the blazing shape of a Farsphex leaping out from the blackness for a second before the fuel tank erupted, the rear half of the stricken machine almost disintegrating, leaving the guttering cockpit and wings to plummet.

  ‘Get to work!’ Scain snapped, and this time he really was addressing her. They had a little height now, but still low enough for Pingge to pick her targets from the distorted, onrushing view the reticule gave her of the city ahead. There seemed to be quite a few of those repeating ballistae about, the bolts bursting in the air suddenly — crack-boom! — at isolated intervals, without pattern or warning.

  She forced herself to concentrate on the reticule, trusting to Scain, blinding herself to the dangerous skies. From then on the work was grim and mechanical — spot a target, line up the reticule, release the bomb, all within the few seconds she had between seeing the image and it passing below them. There was never time to look back at the fire in their wake.

  Bolts rattled across their hull, one punching a hole within a foot of her, coming in through the open hatch. The Collegiates had put some fresh orthopters in the air. She scrambled for her own little ballista, but Scain snapped at her to leave it alone.

  ‘Just get your job done,’ he told her. He sounded sick. For the next few passes, he was throwing their vessel jaggedly about so as to lose whatever was tracking them, or to give Aarmon or one of the others the chance to cut in. She lost her target over and over, and was on the point of shouting at him to hold a level course when she thought that through and decided she would rather he threw them all across the Collegiate sky, after all, and she’d just have to make do.

  The minimal air resistance — pilots no doubt woken in a panic, hurling themselves desperately into the sky, in their ones and twos, against an overwhelming force — soon passed, leaving her to get on with her job. That would have been fine, except Scain was talking again.

  ‘It’s vile,’ he muttered, and she had no idea whether he was talking to her or not. But then: ‘When we fly against their machines, that’s war. What’s this?’ And she realized she was hearing his side of a mental conversation with the other pilots.

  ‘I know,’ he said, and ‘I know that, too. They say we’re saving lives for the Second, that we’re crushing their will to fight. Is that true? Have we seen any evidence that they’re losing will, as opposed to machines and pilots and civilian lives?’ And: ‘I know! But what are we, if this is all we’re for?’ His voice sounded raw, shouting without realizing he was making a sound.

  ‘I want it to end,’ he told whoever was on the receiving end of this. He suddenly sounded so lost that Pingge wanted to reach out to him, but she thought that, if he knew he had been heard, he would kill her.

  Then they were under attack again, and Scain cut them loose, reaching for height as the city diminished below them. She guessed that the Collegiate attackers that had tried to bottle them up beyond the city’s walls had finally realized their error and come back with a vengeance. Then the Farsphex were regrouping, turning to head for the Second Army camp, wherever that had crept to by tonight.

  We can’t go on like this.

  The words were Taki’s, and the end of her mumbled report to Stenwold before shunning the grey light of dawn for her bed. The sentiments could have been anyone’s of a certain level of seniority within Collegium — those who sat on the right committees and could piece together all the disparate facts.

  The foundries of Collegium were still constructing Stormreaders as swiftly as they could, although only as a result of of fresh shipments of raw materials from unexpected quarters — the first ever Vekken trading cog had turned up with a hold full of metal ingots, and the Tidenfree had arrived with superior alloys supposedly from across the sea but in reality from beneath it. Still, the pilots that were putting out in those craft were younger and less experienced each time — if the average age of a flying combatant had been plotted by some scholar on a graph, the downward curve would be steep — which meant that the investment in each orthopter was correspondingly riskier. The rooftop artillery was another drain on resources, and had struck down only two enemies, and those in the first salvo. Stenwold had to hope that the
simple existence of such a defence might at least complicate matters for the Wasp pilots, putting them off their aim and resulting in fewer bombs dropped, or in bombs dropped less accurately. But of course ‘less accurately’ meant little consolation to the family whose home was destroyed by a bomb falling wide.

  And the Second Army was near. The ground forces — Coldstone Company and Maker’s Own and all the automotives the city had been able to furnish — were marching out any day now, as ready as they would ever be, and another drain on the city, in materiel and in lives.

  If the Empire get its artillery set up within range of the walls, then we’re done for. And, competing with that, If the Empire wears down our air defences, then we’re done for, too.

  So why am I here?

  Ahead of Stenwold rose the imposing edifice of Banjacs Gripshod’s townhouse, and it was impossible to know from the facade that the artificer’s killing machine had eaten away so much of its innards.

  He was here because Praeda had asked him, but, more than that, he was here because there was no need for him anywhere else, which was a bitter realization. Matters had advanced sufficiently that there was no more need for the grand plan. He had sat on his last committee, he knew, and the work was now in the hands of the specialists: Corog Breaker, Taki, Marteus, Kymene, even Amnon. Statesmen such as Stenwold and Jodry Drillen had spoken their piece and taken their final opportunity to adjust the rudder of history. The future would judge them, but their decisions had finally acquired sufficient momentum to break free of the earth and fly, and there would be no calling one word of it back.