The Air War (Shadows of the Apt 8)

by Tchaikovsky, Adrian

  Then the Imperial infantry came. They struck over to Straessa’s right first, shouldering through the skirmishers and smashing into the already battered maniples with their close order and their years of experience; the Collegiate line simply cracked and fell apart, individual maniples disintegrating within moments of their charge, dying or fleeing. The Wasp soldiers, already bloodied in the initial exchange, were now recapturing their honour, solid, disciplined men in good armour going about their trade.

  Straessa risked a glance behind her, because her maniple had now been stripped of a third of its numbers by the skirmishers, and a personal retreat was looking like a good idea, The soldiers behind her, the reserves and the rear squares, had lost formation, most of them milling, some running. She had never much liked trying to rush through a crowd.

  ‘Sub!’ someone yelled – possibly a soldier from another maniple calling a different officer altogether, but the cry drew her attention and her heart, already a battered thing, lost what little hope remained in it.

  The Imperial infantry had not rushed her people yet, but only because there was a Sentinel on its way and they did not want to end up underneath it.

  ‘Anyone got a grenade?’ she shouted, fending off a sword blow, and then the enormous, armour-plated machine surged forwards, absurdly fast for such a weighty thing, and essentially obliterated the maniple to Straessa’s left, the force of its impact throwing a few boneless bodies high, crushing far more, and the survivors fell almost instantly as the Sentinel loosed a spray of snapbow shot around it.

  Behind it, the Imperial infantry were abruptly in motion, closing the distance.

  The Sentinel turned, legs moving in a careful little dance, until its great blind prow was facing Straessa, that covered eye boring into her – specifically her and nobody else, or so it seemed. Then the eye opened, the metal cover sliding up to reveal the gaping barrel of its leadshotter.

  One of her people did have a grenade, and also the good sense to wait until that moment before hurling it, the hatched metal sphere arcing overhead towards that gaping hole. The missile was off the mark, though, striking the armour and rebounding, exploding pointlessly in the air. With a desperate war-cry the Dragonfly Castre Gorenn leapt into the air, loosing a final arrow that vanished, without trace or effect, into that gaping eye, her ancient Commonweal skills utterly surpassed by modern artifice, but the silver flecks of snapbow bolts were rebounding from the vehicle’s metal hide to no greater effect.

  I resign my commission, Straessa decided, effective immediately.

  Then the Sentinel rocked under a handful of impacts, lurching forwards a few yards, then spinning furiously on the spot to face this new challenge. From behind it, and cutting bloodily through the Wasp lines, a dozen automotives were on the move, the vanguard of the miscellany that Collegium had used for its strike at the enemy artillery.

  Does that mean we won? was her first mad thought. But she could see only that dozen or so and, even as she watched, one of the machines at the rear simply exploded, and she saw that there were another handful of Sentinels in hot pursuit.

  Oh. But then she saw what the automotives were actually doing – for the line of their charge cut between the Collegiate forces and the bulk of the Wasp army, ploughing into the enemy infantry with brutal abandon, forcing the lines apart.

  ‘Retreat!’ Straessa shouted, then she blew the signal on her whistle for all she was worth. After that, she took her own advice, first killing a final Spider skirmisher who was too keen for his own good and then turning to run, keeping pace with her maniple because she was still responsible for them. All around her, the Collegiates were doing the same – some retreating in better order, some simply dropping their weapons and fleeing.

  The lead automotive struck the Sentinel at a narrow angle, rocking it back on its legs and rebounding onto a path that churned through the Imperial infantry. The Airborne were already returning to the fray, shooting at the automotives that were causing such havoc to their lines.

  They’re going to destroy the machine! Stenwold thought, ripping his little snapbow from inside his tunic – the beautiful, vast and yet fragile machine that Banjacs and the artificers had been so frantically tuning, which was even now poised to wipe the skies clear of Collegium’s enemies. And now the Rekef had arrived to smash it.

  He loosed desperately, because there were almost a dozen of the attackers, and the great vulnerable machine was all around them. There was no way that he could stop them all.

  But they were not here for the machine, it seemed. Imperial intelligence extended just so far, informed as it was by Spider agents who were almost entirely Inapt. They began shooting hurriedly, almost wildly, but at the people.

  A bolt passed across Stenwold’s scalp and he reeled back, but his own quick shot had taken one of the men down, and he was already loosing the second before the tight knot of enemy could break apart.

  He saw Banjacs take a bolt in the chest and jerk backwards, a tangle of elbows and knees, blood abruptly appearing bold across his white robes. Almost as valuable as the machine itself was its creator.

  The Imperials were not soldiers, and their skill at arms had played second to their intelligence training. After taking the two Company soldiers at the door, they had expected to face only Maker and a handful of scholars. They forgot, or never appreciated, that there were few College men or women who were complete strangers to the Prowess Forum, and that Collegium had been through two sieges over in the last few years.

  A heavy workman’s hammer, thrown with remarkable skill, took one man full in the face. Another of the artificers had brought a sword, and rushed to meet the attackers blade to blade.

  Then the burn-scarred man spotted Averic.

  ‘You little bastard!’ he shouted, seeing before him, in the flesh, that fatal miscalculation that had spoiled their operation. What went through the man’s mind then, viewing this pure-blooded Wasp-kinden of good family who had inexplicably betrayed all the generations of Empire, was written in ugly lines over the Beetle spy’s face. Immediately, he charged the youth, without thought for any aim beyond killing him.

  Stenwold was trying to get to Banjacs, but a swordsman was suddenly upon him, a lean Beetle with a knife in his offhand and enough rough skill to force Stenwold on the defensive, driving him further away from his allies.

  Behind Stenwold’s opponent, the Collegiate swordsman was being forced back by his own adversary, before tripping over the body of another artificer who had fallen to a snapbow bolt. His enemy reared above him, sword drawn back, and then Eujen appeared beside him, face fixed in a horrified expression, and rammed a blade through the spy’s ribs.

  Stenwold pushed forwards again, realizing, after the initial surprise, that he was the better duellist – perhaps the best swordsman in the room for all that it said about the rest of them. ‘Leadswell! Get to Banjacs!’ he yelled. The Beetle boy looked at him briefly, and went sprinting over to the old inventor’s motionless form.

  Averic’s wings had carried him up to a gantry, and the burn-scarred man stood below him, raging up at him. ‘You traitor! You coward filth! Can’t even fight? A shame to your own people, curse you!’ Abandoning his comrades to the fight, he found a shaking stairway leading up and took it three steps at a time, only to find the Wasp already balanced on the rail, ready to glide down.

  Banjacs was plainly gone beyond anything that Eujen could do for him. The old man’s ragged form was so thin that it seemed he had died long before, dried out and desiccated until only this husk remained. And yet, as Eujen knelt beside him, those piercing eyes flew open, and the old man took a hacking breath that sprayed more blood over his robes.

  ‘My machine!’ he whispered, reaching out for it as if trying to encompass the entire radiant edifice with a clutch of a single hand. ‘Take me – take me . . .’ And, with the last dregs of a Beetle’s bloodyminded endurance, he began lurching across the floor on hands and elbows, a slick red slug’s trail behind him and his legs li
mp and useless.

  Eujen caught his rasping plea, ‘Help me make it work.’

  A snapbow in his hand, a second man came at Stenwold, shouting for his fellow to get clear. The weapons were not meant for such close quarters, and the War Master ducked away from a blow to lash his blade at the barrel, knocking it up and away. Then the snapbowman was down, sitting with hands smeared red as they pressed at a stomach wound, and one of the two Company soldiers huddled in the doorway was fumblingly trying to reload her bow even though her breastplate had a puncture hole above her left breast.

  And the burn-scarred man looked back towards his people and must have seen almost none of them left now, and that this desperate gambit had failed. ‘Traitor,’ he repeated, almost a whisper. His expression revealed bitter bewilderment, at why this Wasp had turned so far from his people, and why the boy would not now even finish the job. Looking into Averic’s eyes, perhaps he sought some grand answer, some hint of a greater plan, something to justify the waste and the failure.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Averic said, and those two words plainly showed the burned man how Collegium had taken him, body and mind, and corroded all the hard edge of the Empire.

  The Beetle spy rushed him, surely without any great hope of achieving anything, because by that time he had nowhere to go and nothing to accomplish. Instead of simply flitting out of reach, Averic’s hands came up by instinct and, even as the Wasp kicked back from the railing, his Art flashed and seared, and what fell from the balcony was just a singed corpse.

  The swordsman artificer – the only one of the three still living – dropped his blade with a harsh clang. In the doorway, the soldier leant back with a groan, pulling weakly at the straps of her breastplate until Stenwold hurried over to help her.

  And, before the lambent majesty of the machine, Eujen propped Banjacs up, the old man’s ashen face borrowing a radiance from the great assembly of glass above him. There were no words, but a trembling thrust of the inventor’s hands picked out a bronze lever from amidst the chaos of dials and wheels, and Eujen hoisted him higher until he could seize on it.

  Banjacs summoned some last strength then, from some inner well or perhaps from the unseen source of all Beetle Art. He shrugged himself free of Eujen’s grip, and let his own weight pull down the lever.

  Forty-One

  What are they doing?

  The question flashed at Aarmon from all sides as the battlefield in the air disintegrated. Everywhere the Collegiate orthopters were breaking away, even braving the Imperial shot to ditch in the streets of their city. Aarmon’s aviators reported the enemy pilots scrambling from their machines and simply running, leaving the downed Stormreaders as sitting targets for bolt or bomb. Several orthopters were clipped from the sky in their frantic attempts to get clear.

  Aarmon put the Farsphex through two more tight turns, swinging wild of the line his target was taking but dragging his craft back on course with a sure hand, pushing his skill and his machine’s tolerances to their limits but feeling his quarry start to tire, the panic of the chase in her throat. She was trying to get free, too – she tried to reach the ground again and again, but he was waiting for her each time, as his cohorts hedged her in on either side.

  They know they’ve lost. They’re hoping to preserve their air strength for the siege, came the offering from one of his pilots.

  They’re out of power, their clockwork’s run down, from another.

  Other speculations kept battering at his mind, when he needed all his concentration to stay with her, his prize.

  How he knew it was a she he could not say, but this enemy pilot he knew intimately, through a bond as close as that he shared with his comrades. Her orthopter was different, a slighter, nimbler piece of elegance than the admittedly admirable Collegiate standard, and her style was impeccable: a fierce, thrilling blend of excellence and inspiration that took possession of the sky wherever she flew.

  She had been responsible for more deaths amongst his fellows than any other Collegiate pilot, her unique ship putting that knowledge beyond doubt. He had sought her out, and sought her out, night after night in the frenzied chaos of their aerial engagements. Now here she was, fleeing him in broad daylight.

  It is not revenge; the thought passed through his mind and he knew it had gone out to his fellows, that Scain would be mouthing it even now. It was not hatred that moved him, either, or a desire for conquest. He remembered, when he was a boy, watching the hunting wasps take their prey on the wing, and feeling that moment where the destinies of predator and prey intersected, as though by consensus, each to its role. The dream of living that moment had taken him through the Light Airborne, and into the Aviation Corps when that new institution had formed. Not vengeance nor spite, but perfection.

  His comrades were still engaging the enemy, of whom fewer and fewer were left to engage. Two-thirds of the surviving Collegiate force had reached the ground, or died trying, and the rest would plainly join them if the Wasps allowed them the opportunity. Still shifting his craft through the impossibly tight and dancing turns that his opponent sped into, he felt a clutching sensation inside him. A trap. But what? They had control of the skies, with the Second on its way, and what could Collegium do about it?

  Commence bombing as soon as you’re free to do so, he ordered. Let’s see if we can’t sting them into the air again.

  Then he saw something flash in the heart of the city: a tall house capped with a dome, nothing out of the ordinary save for a circular skylight that—

  Lightning leapt and flashed from there, darting and reaching for the vault of sky above. And Aarmon’s mind said, Weapon.

  He had a fraction of a second to realize, out of all his flight, that it was he whose course could be twisted to pass by that sparking roof, and he broke his pursuit off instantly, with only a moment’s regret, for sentiment was something he could suddenly not afford to indulge.

  ‘Sergeant!’ he snapped back towards Kiin, ‘Ready bombs, target domed house dead ahead.’

  He hauled the Farsphex about, wings pausing for a moment in their beat, to let it hang and slew in the air, then regaining their pace as he slung his craft towards his mark.

  A moment later the first impact rattled against them, and he knew, without needing confirmation, that his former prey had rounded on him; one of those precise dancing-step turns putting her on his tail the moment he abandoned the chase.

  Get her off me! He sent to his fellows, because the roof ahead was spitting and flashing like a miniature storm now, and he knew that there could be only one chance.

  Taki felt the absence of pursuit as a physical void behind her, freedom from shackles, and her instant thought was to find a place to put down. She was surely in that seconds-long limbo that must come just before whatever storm Stenwold Maker would now unleash on their enemies. And yet . . . and yet . . .

  And yet the Collegiate pilots had ceded the skies to the Empire, and nothing had happened. No great stroke of genius from the War Master had manifested itself.

  The ground screamed out for her, but she was a thing of the air first and foremost, and she flipped the Esca about for one last glance at her erstwhile pursuer.

  She picked him out immediately, taking a recklessly straight course so that she found herself following him by sheer fighting pilot’s instinct, and ahead she saw a bright flare and spray of pure white light. A bomb? No, that’s something he’s aiming for. He’s on an attack run.

  She was already flying in his wake and she saw the whole picture, stitched into whole cloth partly from her guesses at Maker’s plan, partly just from the Wasp’s reaction.

  A moment later, she let fly with her rotary piercers, seeing at least a scatter of hits reaching the enemy and knowing that the sky was full of his friends.

  The sky was full of her friends, too, those who had not been able to get clear. The sky was about to become a very dangerous place, probably a fatal one. She could only hope that enough of the defenders had managed to touch the ground b
efore now, and that there was someone left who could lead them.

  At least I’ll end in the air. And she loosed again, her twinned weapons hammering, feeling the vibration coming to her through her feet. Her enemy was trying to dodge her, but at the same time was committed to his own attack. If she could nudge him just a little way, he would lose his chance.

  He would have just the one chance, that much she had guessed.

  Then she felt the impact of shot punching into her own hull, and she knew that one of the Wasp’s friends was on her, and close, so she was abruptly in the same trap as her enemy, caught by her own dedication to her offensive. Her pitiful twists and lurches – all she could allow herself, without losing her line – shrugged off some of the incoming bolts, but she felt a punishing rain against her poor Esca’s shell, the tail riddled and shot striking around the gears of the engine, against the pistons of the wings, whose silk spans were instantly peppered with holes, each one a tiny wound bleeding away her machine’s grace in the air.

  Then there was another Collegiate craft coming in from ahead of her, and she thought, No! Don’t help me! Just take my target! But she had no mindlink, as the Wasps did, and the Mynan-painted Stormreader – it was Edmon’s own – flashed past the Farsphex she was chasing, two more Imperial orthopters in hot pursuit of him, his rotaries ablaze with bolts as he came to her rescue. For a fragment of a second, Taki saw them all like flies in a web, locked into their individual destinies, each devoted to their chosen attack, and each defenceless as the price of that devotion.

  Edmon’s shot must have rattled the pilot behind her, at least temporarily, for she felt no further impact on her hull, but she saw a hail of sparks and broken wood and metal as his own machine suffered for it under the weapons of his shadows. She did not know, then, whether the damage to his machine was so great that he could not pull away, or whether Edmon chose his path, simply trusting that, whatever she was about, it had to be done and so her pursuer had to be stopped.