The Wasp scout returned to the sky, winging back towards the front to report on the clash of lines, whereupon Tynan beckoned another over.
‘Send to Colonel Mittoc,’ he directed. ‘Have him keep a close measure of the range to Collegium’s walls. We don’t need to reach the city; we only need to be close enough. Have him get the best use out of these greatshotters we’ve been given.’
The man saluted and was gone, heading for the rear. Even as he did a Fly-kinden took his place.
‘Sir, enemy automotives flanking us.’
Tynan stood up, shading his eyes and peering over to where the Fly directed, seeing only flashes of the sun reflecting off metal at the far edge of his force. ‘What are they doing?’
‘Making inroads, sir. They’re a mongrel lot but they’re all armed. Our troops there are trying to hold them, but we’re taking losses from their artillery and their wheels.’
‘Where are the Sentinels?’ Tynan growled.
Amnon’s automotive bounced and rattled over the scrubby ground in the vanguard of a great straggling wedge of machines that had coursed its way almost unopposed down one side of the Second Army. The enemy had not known what to do with them — and they were gone before any orders could be given. A steady drizzle of opportunistic snapbow bolts and arrows had banged and rattled off the automotives’ sides, and at least one machine had slewed to an halt, its driver hit, but Amnon’s wing of the mechanized assault was almost untouched so far.
They were turning now, beginning to drive in towards the marching formations, and at the same time the Imperial soldiers were mustering their response. He saw units turning to face the Collegiate machines, kneeling or standing with massed snap-bows levelled, but beyond he could see Light Airborne gathering above.
He heard three whistle blasts, keening over the roar of the engines, two short and one long, meaning Charge. Beside him, the artificer manning the smallshotter swung the weapon ahead, squinting through the slot in the metal plate someone had bolted onto the engine to cover her. Amnon took up his own snapbow, though his hands itched for his sword hilt.
‘Down!’ advised the driver, and at the same time they scavenged a burst of speed from somewhere, wheels leaping over the uneven land as they rushed the enemy line. Thus, on both sides, an uneven arrowhead of ramshackle machines were turned into a hammer to crack open then Second Army’s flank.
Amnon had been knocked back by the sudden acceleration, and so he was already out of the way when the snapbow lines loosed. In his mind, the sound was like a sudden squall of rain against the metal plates shielding the vehicle. He saw the low-set automotive to his left suddenly swing towards him, its driver dead at the stick, and a moment later it had flipped over entirely, bouncing and jumping enough to fling out the bodies of its crew.
‘Watch the skies!’ he roared, as loud as he could, but the chances were that nobody heard him over the roar of the machines and the incoming hail of a second snapbow volley. A moment later the Imperial line broke, the soldiers trying to get out of the way of the metal tide. Most had left it too late. They were armoured too heavily to fly, so it became a matter of sheer chance whether they were struck or passed by, buffeted to the ground.
Amnon stood up again, unwisely, but he needed to see what was going on. Over there were the transporters, but they were too far, too deeply buried within the enemy, and the Airborne were coming down. He shot upwards, killing his target neatly, but knowing that he had no time to reload. A moment later his sword was clear of its scabbard, and the Wasp stooping down on him, blade drawn back and off-hand blazing, was cut from the air as soon as he came within reach. All about Amnon, the Airborne were trying desperately to drop onto the automotives, and some even managed it while others missed, either left behind or — for the luckless — caught in front of the rushing machines.
Nevertheless, they were taking their toll. Taking stock for just a moment, Amnon saw at least four machines had gone off course or halted, falling instant prey to the Wasp landbound infantry.
He hacked at another man that came for him, but the Airborne soldier veered out of reach, only to take a snapbow bolt in the back and tumble away — Amnon never knew whether the shot had come from his own people or the Empire. Nobody was doing well out of a skirmish fought at this speed. Then there was a hollow boom audible well over the engines, and one of the Collegiate machines went from full charge to full stop within a moment, its front staved in by the fist of a leadshotter ball, its stern lifting high with frustrated momentum, until it had turned over completely.
The whistle signal went up again, just two short blasts: Fall back and regroup. Amnon ground his teeth as his automotive wheeled around — smallshotter still barking out its answer to the Imperial artillery — and rattled back the way it had come, along with its fellows.
‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded. ‘We were reaching them!’ That was a lie and he knew it, but the enemy transporters — with their part-assembled greatshotters — had been within sight at least, and to turn away now was maddening.
‘Their automotives are coming back, Master,’ the driver replied, and a new stillness came over Amnon as he scanned the dust-covered, soldier-cluttered landscape for the Sentinels.
The block of Imperial infantry looming ahead seemed absurdly vast compared to their own modest squares. It came stomping across the plain torwards them in perfect time, the sun glinting on the spearheads and making the gold of their armour flare. In the old days such a unit would have relied entirely on spear and sting, with support from some Auxillian crossbowmen, but some attempt had been made to modernize, and Gerethwy, peering through his glass, now reported that the second rank was armed with snapbows.
‘I make out four ranks,’ Straessa noted. ‘Only the second has ’em, you say?’
‘Is what I see,’ the tall Woodlouse-kinden confirmed.
A whistle blast was sounded, long then short: Halt and loose. Straessa passed it on, hoping very dearly that all these orders were originating from someone who knew what they were doing. She called out, ‘Ready!’ needlessly, for her soldiers knew the signal and their weapons were charged, each bringing snapbow to shoulder, even as they slowed. And then, ‘Loose!’
The maniples to left and right managed to shoot at approximately the same time, catching the Imperial infantry as they were still advancing, and she saw the ranks of the big unit — four hundred soldiers or more in all — rupture and ripple under the impact. They slowed then, and she distantly caught the sound of their officers’ voices, eclipsed almost immediately by her own shout of, ‘And loose!’ She was trusting to her people to have reloaded by now.
They had, their volley ripping into the tight-packed enemy even as they formed up. Straessa was surprised to see just how much damage they had done, the number of sprawled bodies and crawling wounded. And now they shoot back, she thought, and her mouth bellowed, ‘And loose!’ leaving her faintly amazed that her shopkeeper soldiers had got off three complete volleys before the Wasps had managed a reply.
The concerted sound of the Wasp second rank discharging their bows sounded like a great clap of hands, and bolts went whistling past her even as she heard it. The man next to her took one in the eye, a woman in the third rank took one straight through the chest, past breastplate and coat without slowing much. A Mantis-kinden pikeman cursed and dropped with red spreading across his thigh. The call went out for stretchers before Straessa even needed to order it.
She could name all three of the casualties, two of whom were now beyond anything the surgeons could do for them. Yet in her mind was the thought, Is that it? and on her lips, ‘And loose!’ All the while, her eyes kept watching the bludgeoning that her little force — and all the other little bands of Merchant Company soldiers — were inflicting across the front lines of the enemy.
‘I reckon it’s one in three down, for them.’ Gerethwy didn’t trust his mechanized bow at this range, so instead he kept his glass on them, unflinching even when a passing bolt plucked at the
sleeve of his buff coat.
‘And loose! What’s going on?’ Straessa lowered her own weapon, hands automatically palming a bolt from the box at her waist and slipping it into the breach; then cranking the air battery to charge it, the mechanism smooth and easy as if it was new oiled from the workshops. Even as she asked that question she understood. Wasp infantry was the army’s mailed fist, used for breaking the enemy lines by main force, and in close quarters. They were stacked shoulder to shoulder, in contrast to the looser spread of the Collegiates, so that the incoming shot could barely miss them. And the Collegiates had three snapbows per four men, while the Empire had just one.
Sod me, the Antspider thought, slightly awed, we’re winning.
Then someone shouted, ‘Fliers coming in,’ and she saw that the Wasp Light Airborne was back to support the infantry. There were a great many of them, a cloud of flying men arching overhead, but this tactic had not worked against the Ants at the Battle of the Rails, and the Collegiates were ready for it. Straessa directed her people to worry about the Imperial infantry, who were plainly realizing that their only hope was a solid charge to get into spear-range. The Collegiate squares behind the front line, mostly unbloodied so far, would be training their snapbows on the incoming Airborne and, though the fliers had the same weapons, shooting on the wing was a challenge for a Fly-kinden marksman, let alone a regular Wasp soldier. And snapbows were quite accurate enough to pick off fast-moving targets.
Straessa saw the Wasp infantry form up to advance — so few of them now compared to just moments ago — but the constant volleys of shot got the better of them, and soon they were pulling back and then disintegrating completely, individual soldiers making their getaway at the best sprint they could manage. For a moment she thought they had broken, but then she saw another unit of them marching in, the runners simply getting out of their way. No doubt these newcomers would have learned some hard lessons from the last minute of fighting, and it was plain that, if allowed to close, their tighter ranks and superior numbers would crush the Collegiate lines.
‘And loose!’ again and again. No need to tell her soldiers to aim for the invitingly large target that the new formation presented, so that the Wasps were bleeding from the moment they were within range. Despite the distance, they were already running, but still keeping almost shoulder to shoulder, shackled by their out-of-date training. It was a race, then, to see whether simple attrition would turn them aside and snap the spine of their charge before they could arrive. Seeing so many men coming on so fast, Straessa felt her mouth go dry. If they struck, her little band would become like leaves in a storm. The pikemen had their weapons levelled, some straight ahead, others tilted at angles upwards against the Airborne. Bolts were slanting down at them now from the skies above, the Airborne trying to break their firing pattern, but the attention of the squares behind was keeping the bulk of the enemy off the front line.
‘Sub! In from the side, Sub!’ someone called, and she looked about wildly, until she saw what was meant. From either side of the big Wasp formation, a stream of swifter figures was cascading, no battle order to them, just a swift, loose mob outstripping their allies in their haste to get at the Beetle lines.
‘Spider-kinden to our left,’ Gerethwy identified calmly. ‘And that’s, hm, Scorpions to the right.’
Straessa’s square was positioned dead centre of the maniples now facing the Wasp unit’s charge, so the newcomers were not her problem just yet. If they overwhelmed the Collegiates further down the line, she would know about it quickly enough, but she could do nothing to help or hinder, and she had to trust in her fellows. ‘Eyes front! And loose!’ Her voice was beginning to give out.
Thirty-Nine
Still the Great Ear had not sounded. In truth, the specifics of Corog’s instructions were a distant memory now. Taki guessed that the pitched fighting had taken only minutes so far, but if some scholar could measure sheer living, the fear and the fury of it, then lifetimes had been burned.
She dodged about in the air, ramming the stick rapidly through three positions to throw off an enemy, before backing her wings so that the Farsphex went slashing past her. A brief glance about her revealed the ongoing chaos that the battle had become. The Collegiate centre, the idea of holding the enemy to one place, had become impossible almost immediately once the rest of the enemy had come in from north and south. The defenders were abruptly so outnumbered that they surrendered any say over what the enemy might or might not do, or where they might go. Taki guessed that, had the Empire wished to bomb Collegium flat, then she and her fellows could do little even to slow them down.
The Empire didn’t want that. The Empire wanted her blood. That great wheeling host of the Imperial air force had new orders, and they were trying to wipe the skies clean of their opponents.
Taki had given up active attack once the new Wasp machines arrived. Since then she had been concentrating on staying alive, leading any number of enemy on a dance around the city’s rooftops, being passed from hand to hand as they tried to bring their linked minds to bear on her, never being where they calculated but taking shots at any target that presented itself and moving on. If she had committed herself to the fray, narrowed her possibilities down to those few with offensive potential, they would have second-guessed her and killed her in short order, but she was flying like a madwoman and they could not catch her.
They had not caught her yet, anyway. Her dead fellows back in Solarno would scoff if she had told them that this crazed evasion was her finest hour as a pilot, but she knew it to be true.
A brief breath of clear sky and she tried to take stock, half-expecting to find the sky possessed only by the enemy and herself. The sight brought her a swell of hopeless pride, though, for the Collegiate pilots and Mynan airmen were still fighting. Outnumbered and out-coordinated, they still remembered their training and their orders. Just as she was, they were refusing to engage, even the fighting-mad Mynans recognizing the suicidal odds. The Collegiate defence had no cohesion, no pattern or plan, nothing to it but smoke and the swift particles of the Stormreaders as they scattered across the sky. Oh, they were losing — had lost the battle even as it began — but the enemy did not want the sky, and it did not want the city either. It wanted them, and now they were running the Wasp pilots ragged in their attempted pursuit.
And it could not last. Even as she watched, she saw another Collegiate machine downed, caught by crossed piercer shot, crumpling and twisting in the air and then falling helplessly away. The Wasps were good, and all the Collegiate pilots were buying for themselves was some few more minutes of time.
And still the Ear — that signal to throw in the fight and down their orthopters — did not sound.
Abruptly a hail of shot strafed along the side of the Esca Magni, and Taki slung her craft sideways, cursing herself for the momentary distraction. The enemy kept on her tightly, odd bolts still impacting even as she threw her machine through a series of baffling manoeuvres; down and left, edge on to the roofs, then backing madly, then down a broad street almost at head height, then turning on a wingtip down a sidestreet, only hopping above the roofs to miss an archway that would have stripped her wings clean off.
And the Wasp pilot still tracked her — not following the same course but always returning to her, and this time her madness was not enough and, as she burst back out into the sky, he took his place right behind her as though he had booked it in advance.
She felt she knew this opponent, recognizing and admiring his style even as she did her best to string out her remaining seconds. Her enemy was a pilot she had sparred with before, the veteran of many raids just as she was. She tried her old trick of releasing her winding chute, the silk cloth abruptly billowing away behind her, but the enemy was not so incautious and had kept just enough distance to swing aside, and the lightning sideways twitch she had tried simultaneously somehow just brought her back under his rotaries.
Another scatter of hits, the metal shuddering around her, n
othing vital yet, but the next shot could spear the cogs of the engine, or the wing mounts. Or her.
Then he was taking off, rising up and abandoning her, and she wondered wildly if there was some mercy to be given her even now, but then she saw that the Wasp himself had come under attack.
She put the Esca into the tightest turn she could manage, hearing a chorus of new creaks and complaints from the abused hull. The Farsphex was rising and dodging, a Stormreader trying to stay with the Wasp but never quite regaining its line of attack.
She recognized the Collegiate craft from the way it flew. It was Corog’s ship, unmistakably. She powered in, trying to catch up with them. Too late, too late: in committing himself to the attack, Corog had narrowed all the possible places in the sky that he could occupy down to one desperate, perfect line, the absolute optimum of vectors that would bring him to gut the enemy craft and destroy it. With a lurch of her heart, Taki realized that, even so, it would not be enough. The Imperial machine danced far more nimbly than any craft that size should be able to, so Corog Breaker’s attack went wide, and then the other Farsphex, brought there by an unheard summons, clipped off Corog’s tail with a scything trail of rotary bolts.
For a moment the Stormreader still maintained its course, still trying to bring its weapons around to its target. Then it slid sideways in the air, the wings wrestling with an element suddenly no longer their friend.
He was spinning. She flung herself closer, looking for the glider wings, imagining the stubborn old man still fighting with the controls. She watched him all the way down to the abrupt, concussive impact with Collegium’s streets.
Scain pulled up and away, looking for another target. His monologue rattled on, passing Pingge by with his one-sided commentary on the battle.
‘Won’t stand and fight… Arlvec requests permission to bomb.. denied. Orders are to…’ Then a grunt through gritted teeth as he tracked down one of the Collegiate craft to shoot at: a few moments of his silence and the hammering of the rotaries, as he tried to keep the bolts on target, and the expected lurch of the craft around them both as he broke off on another course once he lost the trail.
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