Now she was all business, tending to her charges, refusing to take no for an answer. No larger or more obtrusive, but te Mosca seemed to have become almost a force of nature, impossible to argue with. If only she had run her minuscule department with such iron, then she would by now either be a full Master or exiled from Collegium for good.
‘Tell me something comforting,’ Straessa called out to her, as she passed.
‘We can’t possibly lose,’ te Mosca replied promptly. Her smile was grim and small, but at it least it was still in place. ‘The omens have foretold a great victory.’
‘Tell me something comforting and true.’
The Fly shrugged, the smile turning bittersweet. ‘Ah, well, there you have me.’
The air was laden with dust, a choking morass of it that the earthmovers threw up, gritting the eyes and throat, a smothering blanket that only intensified the heat. It’s just as well I know this is important. Seems like the sort of nonsense they’d give out for punishment detail in other armies.
The theory was sound, though. When the armies finally clashed – any day now – the Collegiates would make their stand in these earthworks, shielded from enemy shot and shell, defended by a fence of stakes, currently resting on the beds of the automotives, with entrenched artillery to support them. The broken ground of the trenches would trip up even the new Imperial automotives, whilst the Collegiate machines would sally down pre-planned safe paths in order to attack the enemy supply and siege engines.
Straessa pulled down the neckerchief she was using to screen the dust from her lungs, and took a swig of water, more to forestall a telling-off from te Mosca than because she felt the need for it. The Fly-kinden woman veered off, satisfied, and went to berate Gerethwy instead. The lanky Woodlouse youth stared down at her as though he had never seen anything so impertinent in all his life, but within a few moments he too was uncapping his own flask, giving in to the inevitable.
That was when a call went out from on high. They had a few with them who possessed the Art of flight, and there was a rota of lookouts, but Straessa had not expected to need them. After all, the enemy were miles away, according to the scouts.
A Fly-kinden dropped down hard enough to buckle at the knees.
‘They’re coming!’ he shouted.
She fought back all the stupid things she would have said before some Ant had been fool enough to trust her with a rank, however inferior – all the What? and Who? and Are you sure? – and instead just barked out, ‘Report!’ as she ran over. All around her, soldiers were readying their weapons, charging, loading, not calmly but not panicked either.
‘Half-dozen automotives coming along fast, Sub,’ the Fly choked out.
‘The army?’
‘Just the machines, Sub.’
Six automotives? For a moment she felt like laughing. The Collegiate forces could surely defeat them or drive them off. They had sixty soldiers, three armed transports and the earth-movers. The look on the Fly’s face brought her up short, though. ‘Tell me.’
‘Like woodlice, Sub, but they were moving as fast as a horse can gallop, it looked like, and heading straight for us. Sub, these are the ones we’ve heard of – the ones that did Myna.’
‘Sub!’ someone else called out to her, pointing. There were dustclouds building rapidly to the north-east, the enemy’s machines coming on fast!
‘Everyone to the automotives!’ she shouted. ‘Move it, all of you! That means you on the earthmovers too!’
Technically Straessa did not have overall command, for each detachment was under its own sub-officer. At least one of the other officers was shouting at his men to stand and shoot. And we should have worked this sort of thing out before. The Beetle-kinden had no rigorous tradition of giving and obeying orders, though, being a people who loved discussion.
Still, her own people were on the move, and at least some of the others. The bulk of the earthmover drivers were still at work, though, and Straessa pounded over to them, shouting at them to get going.
‘We’ll never get the machines away in time,’ one of them objected. He was a big Beetle of middle years, and plainly did not want to be told what to do by some halfbreed student.
‘Sod the machines. Get yourselves out!’ she snapped at him.
‘If I lose this machine—’ the Beetle started, plodding to a fault, and then there was a hollow boom nearby, a thunder and a whirling plume of dust, the echo of it almost lifting Straessa from her feet. One of the other earthmovers had been staved in as though an invisible fist had struck it. A moment later its fuel tank exploded with a wretched pop, flames creeping weakly from the burst seams.
The Beetle needed no more encouragement, but was already running for the transports, and then so was almost everyone else. Straessa held on for one moment more, horrified and fascinated, watching the shapes loom out of the dust. Those high-fronted, armoured forms of overlapping armour plates, that single lidded eye that opened only when the machines ground to a skidding halt for a moment, when it flashed and belched as the leadshotter behind it let loose. There was only this half-dozen, but their swift and rushing movement struck a primal fear into Straessa that she had not known she could own to.
A moment later she was pelting towards the transports herself, aware that she had left her escape surely too late. Even as she thought it, though, one of the rugged wheeled vehicles slewed to an untidy halt next to her, its open back crammed with her soldiers. She saw a young Beetle-kinden girl pedalling the mounted ballista around to face the enemy, while Gerethwy had his mechanized snapbow resting on the back rail.
She leapt up, caught at an outstretched hand and was hauled in, even as the driver kicked the vehicle into motion again, wrestling with the gearings until they were grinding away satisfactorily once more. She heard Gerethwy’s weapon discharge with a hammering snap-snap-snap. She had already opened her mouth to tell him to stop, that there was no point wasting ammunition at this range, when the first of the enemy automotives had ploughed alongside them, clattering past on its nest of pistoning legs, in pursuit of one of the other transports.
Her mouth remained open.
Gerethwy trained his weapon on it, the snapbow bolts ricocheting hopelessly, without a chance of penetrating those thick armour plates. A moment later, the ballista loosed, the explosive bolt leaping the narrow gap between the vehicles, to bloom and burst against the side of the enemy, knocking it off course a little but leaving only a soot mark and a shallow scar.
‘Down!’ someone called out, and then their own automotive rocked, veering dangerously towards the enemy machine beside them with its port wheels off the ground. Behind, receding, ascended the plume of a near-miss, and beyond that another of the implacable enemy, getting up speed again.
‘Incredible!’ Gerethwy shouted. ‘Look how fast they accelerate! We couldn’t get up speed in twice that time!’ He shook his head, the student artificer in him clearly taken by the things, however deadly they were. ‘Still, I’ll wager we’re faster on the flat—’
There was the sound of thunder from ahead and to their right, and they saw one of the other transports abruptly flip sideways, its rear axle and wheels disintegrating as it was caught by a low shot from one of the pursuing enemy, and Gerethwy shut up, long face ashen. There had been bodies flung up in that moment, human ragdoll shapes revolving in the dust. Fellow soldiers, comrades, people they knew.
The ballista was shooting again, loosing bolts back at the machines in their wake, every distraction or deviation winning them a few seconds’ grace. If they did not have to stop to shoot, we’d be done for, Straessa realized. But Gerethwy had been right: now they had got up to speed they were pulling away, the two transports. Although a few more geysers of dust and dirt fountained up nearby, the enemy was falling behind.
All they had won here was their lives. They had lost the earthmovers, lost the chance of preparing their ground properly, lost a third of their force or more.
And we have seen the enemy. It was an
uncertain blessing at best.
A small hand touched her arm, and she looked down to see Sartaea te Mosca. There was blood on the Fly’s fingers, and Straessa was surprised to find it was her own, from a shallow line cut into her forearm by some errant shard of metal or broken stone.
‘Tell me something comforting,’ she said to the Fly, sitting down and letting the little woman smear a stinging ointment on the wound. But Sartaea te Mosca had nothing to say.
Thirty-Five
The woman who called herself Gesa – who had for most of her life borne the name Garvan and dressed like a Wasp-kinden man, but who was currently painted and disguised as a halfbreed Beetle woman – was nothing if not a creature of dutiful field-craft. She had been given the means by which to leave messages for her superiors, and by which to receive orders. She was not to be simply a maverick agent working on her own recognizance.
This she now regretted.
It had been imperative that she entered Collegium as a refugee carrying nothing to mark her as a spy. Once in the city, however, she had been able to buy or steal parts, working to a plan that she had memorized. A little dirigible, its airbag no larger than a human head, was easy enough to arrange, and it seemed almost half the army around her was composed of students and engineers and idle tinkerers. She had assembled her toy within plain sight.
That night she had crept to the camp’s perimeter and taken a turn as sentry. The Collegiates were not entirely lax in their security, and indeed their sentries, volunteers mostly, were more diligent and keen than would be the bored, resentful Imperial regulars pressed into such a tedious job. However, they looked only outwards, and were more than happy to be relieved by another. Gesa knew that the Collegiate camp was watched by Spider-kinden agents of the Aldanrael, who had kept pace with the Beetle force’s advance. Now she simply sat with her lantern on the ground beside her, and moved her foot in front of it, just a nervous habit to any watcher within camp; but to the dark-adjusted eyes out there, it provided a simple code of bright and dark that told them to expect a message.
At the third repetition, she’d had to hope that the spies had noticed her, for certainly no answering signal would be risked. As she had chosen a camp boundary with the breeze at her back, she had simply let the tiny, dark-ballooned dirigible drift away, her crabbed reports tucked into its little basket.
Two days later, and she had received her orders in response. She had watched the little trench-digging force return in a great hurry, and depleted, all the eyes of the camp watching them. A few hours after that, the camp still reeling from the news of the Imperial automotives, a further body was picked up by the Collegiate scouts. It was one of those who was believed left dead back at the trenchworks, so the assumption was that the man had managed to stagger and crawl back towards his home camp, dying just out of sight of it. Any medical examination would give the lie to that, and Gesa reckoned that very soon someone would be asking why a dead man had been dragged out and left so prominently within a mile of the camp. It was good odds that someone else – perhaps Kymene, the Mynan general, who seemed one of the sharper blades around when it came to mistrusting people – would guess that some manner of message was intended.
By that time, Gesa had already taken her turn carrying the body, and found the folded message hidden in the dead man’s boot. By the time anyone started asking difficult questions, there would be no evidence left for them to find.
It had all gone off very smoothly indeed, and she had experienced a flush of pride at being part of Army Intelligence, which had taken the time to devise dozens of such stratagems while the Rekef just bickered and carried out purges and suffered from internal unrest.
Then she had read the orders.
She had reported to them earlier on the structure and the leadership of the Collegium camp, stating that they were divided irregularly, Maker’s Own Company into larger units, the Coldstone into smaller, various hangers-on such as the Mynans operating each to their own; that they had no clear chain of command, with decisions being made by a council consisting of the Mynan leader, the big Khanaphir, the two Company chief officers, and whoever they chose to invite along; that their infantry was well armed, armoured and supplied, but that their automotives looked hastily converted for war. She had made plain, in her report, that she was well placed for a variety of mischief within the camp, as well as providing further reports when possible. There was no other Imperial agent within the camp that she was aware of. She had made of herself a prized asset.
And they had thrown it all away. Here then was her order, and it was a kill list of majestic proportions, nothing more sophisticated than the thug’s work that her compatriots were tasked with back inside the city. Amongst all the ingenuity they could have set her to, this was the result. All the names she had mentioned were echoed back to her, mocking. Kill them. Kill them all.
She was just one woman, and not a trained assassin. Yet here were the orders: kill Kymene, kill Amnon, kill Marteus, kill Elder Padstock, and a half-dozen other names along with them, work enough for a whole team of specialists. Suicide for a single spy.
And that was exactly what these orders were, she realized. They were a death sentence pronounced on her, and finally she understood.
Her service, her beloved Army Intelligence, had overstepped the mark. By virtue of its efficiency, by the way its successes showed up others’ past failures, it had come under the red and angry eye of the Rekef, and this was punishment for her and for who could know how many others. Orders that could not be carried out, inviting disobedience or outright failure. Elimination, therefore, of those Intelligence agents who had shown themselves capable servants of the Empire. I’ve been sold, she thought numbly. After all my work, just sold down the road, cast off. Cherten, she realized, must be a Rekef man after all, one of many, surely, ensconced within Intelligence ranks. Despite the stakes, despite the battle to come, the Rekef had not changed at all since the last war. It was more concerned with infighting than with the Empire’s success.
For a moment the mad thought gripped her – to run, head for Capitas, expose the whole shabby plot to . . . But there was nobody to whom she could go, and Capitas was the haunt of General Brugan, whose vengeful hand lay all over these orders.
She could ignore the commands. She could pretend she had never received them. Unless there was another agent, who had seen her take them. Now that the breath of the Rekef was on the back of her neck, she suspected everyone and everything.
Or she could obey, take at least a bite out of that kill list, and surely die in return, unknown and despised by friend and enemy alike.
She crumpled up the orders, then found a fire to consign them to, but she could not burn them out of her mind.
General Brugan had slept well last night, for the first time in months, in fact. The Empress had called him to her bed, but their lovemaking had been markedly different. He could almost persuade himself that all those memories, the nights of terror and helpless desire, had been just a nightmare. Seda had behaved as the demure Imperial wife that befitted a general’s station, anxious to please, demure and needful.
He had not gloated, nor mistreated her. What need to, when she was telling him that he had won?
With Vecter and Harvang, and Harvang’s man Ostrec, and all the other willing tools who had flocked to Brugan’s banner, it had been a simple piece of Rekef machination to isolate the Empress. Her favourites had been arrested, men such as Gjegevey now peopling the cells below the palace and waiting for Brugan to decide how best to dispose of them. Palace staff and higher-ranking functionaries of dubious loyalty had been redeployed, or sometimes just made to disappear. A silent coup had taken place, for the good of the Empire. Seda, who had momentarily escaped from the role that Brugan – and history – had intended for her, was now back in her place.
And the rest of it – the blood, the nights, the queasy, squeamish terror of it all – he could forget. He could write it off as an aberration, the pressure of office over
whelming the woman’s mind for a moment, but now put right. Even on his way to meet with Harvang and the others, with a half-dozen men at his back, Brugan paused a moment and shook his head, feeling unsettled.
All done with, he promised himself. All dealt with. It’s over.
And, of course, with the resumption of the world’s ways came the chance to deal with other irritations that had crept up on him while he had been distracted. It was true that the last war had torn some holes in the cloak the Rekef cast over the Empire and beyond, what with Brugan and his two rivals struggling against one another for control. Now it was time to stitch them closed again, to draw down the impenetrable Rekef veil of fear and secrecy, and to cut off whatever might try to crawl through the gaps. Such as Army Intelligence: those upstarts, the second sons, who had always been little more than a mouthpiece for the Rekef’s views, hands to undertake the tasks the Rekef disdained, and a source of convenient placements for Rekef agents. They had got above themselves. Without a stern Rekef eye on them, they had begun to imagine that they could actually do the Rekef’s job.
The Air War (Shadows of the Apt 8) Page 54