War Master's Gate sota-9

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She could feel the eyes of his army fixed on her, some of them doubtless bitter that she — a foreign woman after all — took such pride of place, whilst others would be making lewd jokes later on and drinking to the success of their general’s love life. The Imperial reaction would pale in comparison to the net of gossip, scheming and speculation amongst her own followers.

  Around them, much of the army was already on the move: scouts and Light Airborne taking wing and casting themselves forwards to hunt out traps and ambushes. The slower-moving infantry were marching, having lost much of their own mechanized transport in the retreat from Collegium a month before. The remaining troop automotives were being rotated through the squads of Tynan’s army by some arcane logistical calculations performed by the quartermasters. Mycella’s own forces had fewer machines, but some of them were cavalry, and on average they were faster than the Wasps, if more prone to spread out and lose cohesion.

  ‘Now comes the test!’ Tynan told her, over the engine’s growl. ‘They’ve seen us massing and, if I were them, I’d step up the air attacks now that we’re giving them a better target. If they can take out our new artillery before we arrive, we’ll look like fools in front of their gates.’ A fresh consignment of the vaunted great-shotters had arrived straight from the foundries of the Iron Glove Cartel, but for now the devices lay disassembled on transport automotives, which had been split into groups and scattered throughout the army.

  ‘And how are your new air machines?’ she asked him. There were a few shapes in the sky overhead, but she knew they were the older vessels.

  ‘Ready,’ he told her briefly. ‘They’ll do their best to keep the enemy away from our transporters, but they’ll have a fierce time of it, and it’ll get worse the closer we get to Collegium. At which point we’ll see if we still have artillery superiority.’

  She frowned, because that was a new thought. She had a hard time keeping up with which machines were better, between the Wasps and their foes, but so much evidently turned on this that she was working very hard to understand, Inapt or not. ‘Is there some doubt of that?’ she demanded.

  ‘Don’t underestimate the Collegiates. They’re very clever people, and they’ve seen what we can do. For all the Iron Glove assures us its advances can’t be replicated just from watching the machines in use, or even examining the components, I have a great deal of respect for Beetle ingenuity.’

  ‘And your grand plan for when we get to the walls-’ she flashed him an almost exasperated grin — ‘assuming we still have an army left by then? What about their air power?’ She needed no Aptitude to envisage the long days of a siege under constant bombardment from the air.

  Tynan scowled and leant in close to divulge news he was unwilling to share even by chance. ‘There is a plan, but my own cursed intelligence officer insists he hasn’t been told. Which means that it’s something that the enemy could spike with ease, if they find out what it is. Which means it’s a trick, and nobody in my position wants to rely on their very, very clever enemies not seeing right through some arse-backwards piece of misdirection, when the time comes. And, besides, tricks only work once.’

  ‘I’m relying on you and your Empire a great deal,’ she replied flatly. Seeing him unhappy with his own orders sent a chill down her spine. Is he such a slave to what that woman in Capitas says? Or is it her plan, even? Some Wasp clerk with a grand opinion of his own wit may even now be dooming all of us.

  ‘I’ll strive to be worthy of your trust,’ he told her simply. The army was breaking out from the scorched remnants of the Felyal forest now and, as the ragged tree cover fell away, more and more soldiers were revealed. It was like some conjuror’s trick, some play with mirrors: even though she could have had the precise numbers before her at a word, the sheer scale of the combined Spiderlands-Empire force humbled her. The fact that it was all moving in the same direction was a tribute to a great many hardworking people on both sides.

  Their automotive jolted over the uneven, dusty ground, and then Tynan was pointing to the sky ahead. ‘Here they come,’ he said.

  The few Imperial machines already in the air were changing course, moving to put themselves in the way — and there would be a few of her own motley flying machines up there too, whatever she had been able to scrounge from the Spiderlands’ Apt satrapies. From surprisingly close behind, she heard the deep-throated thunder of the Farsphex, which were being carried, complete and ready for launch, on flatbed automotives that should ideally have been used for food and tents. She craned back to watch them rising, one by one, from within the vast expanse of the army, feeling that familiar disconnection she always did when faced with such ponderously heavy machines defying logic in order to throw themselves at the sky.

  The army itself had orders, so the flanking detachments were already moving aside and making room, whilst those companies towards the army’s centre were spreading out, no longer shoulder to shoulder but trying to adopt a looser formation to minimize potential losses. This inevitably slowed the army down, and different companies would get intermingled, sent into disarray, even scattered completely. She and Tynan had already weighed up the odds and decided they could not afford the casualties if every ill-aimed bomb could wipe out entire squads of close-packed men.

  The Collegiate Stormreaders were skittering overhead even now, and she knew that they would be making for the larger automotives. They could kill soldiers with ease, but the force set against them was so large that they might as well spit into a gale. Collegium’s easiest victory would be to destroy the Empire’s means to mount an attack when it arrived, or to cripple the army’s ability to advance by destroying its supplies.

  The Farsphex scattered across the sky in packs of two or three, feinting and threatening, and Mycella could see the patterns they made, even if she could not appreciate the machinery behind them. There was a collective grace to the Imperial pilots that their Beetle enemies lacked, for all their skill and the agility of their orthopters. And yet there were so many more Stormreaders clattering overhead.

  Tynan had gripped her hand, still looking upwards. The game was joined, and for all he was a general and she a great lady of the Spiderlands, all they could do was watch.

  The Collegiate fliers were coming in on three distinct fronts, and Bergild cross-referenced their attack pattern with the plan of the army’s advance she had memorized, guessing at the most likely targets.

  A thought from her and two Farsphex were peeling off on her right, gaining height to dive down on the enemy, with a third hanging back.

  Another thought, and a further trio fell away to her left, to fend off what she guessed was probably a feint by the Collegiates, but which would no doubt turn into the real thing if she ignored it.

  Her pilots spoke in her head, each in turn, confirming their assignments. There was no time for anything more. The men and women, Wasps and half-Wasps that she had trained with, were about to be put to the test.

  Behind their words she could hear their confidence in her as a leader. Echoes of long tendays of training, when she and the other women, the halfbreeds too, had started off at the bottom: despised and distrusted by men who had been taught since birth that they were better.

  That mindlink, the fugitive Art that Wasps threw up so rarely, quickly changed all that. Speech mind to mind was shorn of masks, so that she could only wonder why the Ants had not conquered the world and made a perfect paradise of it for themselves. Ants had only their own minds, was her guess. Unlike Bergild and her fellows, they had never been hunted, therefore had never had to hide, never had to work to communicate with others whose minds were closed to them. Ants took for granted what Bergild and her kind were only now able to enjoy.

  She was leader because she understood flying as none of the rest of them did, and that was it: a meritocracy at a stroke. The Engineer officers had tried to place a man over her, but their candidate had refused. In the end, Colonel Varsec, father of the new Air Corps, had pinned the captain’s badge on her h
imself. Of all of them there, all those army officers and engineers and Consortium magnates, only Varsec had understood. When he had designed his Farsphex machines, he had specified who would be needed to fly them, focusing on that inviolable link from pilot to pilot that would make them the masters of the air. He had known what he was doing, even if his superiors had not appreciated it. He was changing the Empire in a small way, but at a fundamental level.

  She veered left, cutting upwards in the air, seeing a knot of Stormreaders break apart, some heading for the artillery transports and others rising up to screen them. Two of her pilots were already stooping down out of the sky, rotary piercers blazing with spent firepowder, and she saw one of the Stormreaders rock and slide, recovering a moment later, but out of place as the Farsphex cut past, heading for the bombers.

  The Stormreaders had never been designed for ground assault, she knew. They were made to fight other orthopters, and they were superb at it. They needed a good, unhindered run to drop an accurate bomb, though, and so the diving Farsphex scattered them, only one charge loosed, and falling wide of the automotives — to the detriment of a unit of infantry. But, then, everything down there was army, and there would always be a loser.

  And away! And her pilots were already dragging out of their dive, not engaging the furiously circling enemy but locking their wings for extra speed and breaking away ready to swing back the moment they were not being chased.

  She set her own course, seeing her targets fall into what must be their final approach. There was a wing of Stormreaders waiting above, she knew, which meant that she and her fellows would have company the moment they tried to intervene. No choice, let’s go.

  She had been a pilot’s daughter. Her mother dead while bearing her, she had sat beside her father from a tender age, watching most of the Twelve-year War from a heliopter’s cockpit. Two years before that war’s end, her father had been killed in the air. A mad dragonfly-rider had actually put an arrow through his viewslit and through his eye as he sat right next to her. She had been fifteen. She had brought the heliopter down — not immediately, but where it had needed to go, perched on her dead father’s lap to reach the controls. After that, a desperate quartermaster, who needed a pilot then and there, had written down the name ‘Bergen’ on his books, and she had been a man for the last two years of the war, drawing pay and flying supplies to the front.

  In the Maynes rebellion that had brought the Commonweal war to a close, ‘Sergeant Bergen’ had dropped grenades on the insurrectionists and fought off their clumsy orthopters in the air.

  They’re right on you, came the thoughts of one of her spotters, packaged with a concise picture of how many and what trajectories, and she returned a response immediately, spreading her calculations to her flanking pilots so that they and she could split and rejoin in perfect coordination, throwing off the pursuing Collegiates, altering course and sheering through the air towards the bombing Stormreaders even as they made their approach. Her weapons hammered away, the vibration of them felt through the stick, through the frame of the machine, entirely distinct from the rapid and regular beats of the engine.

  After Maynes was subdued, she had been arrested, and for three tendays she had sat in a cell awaiting execution, with or without Rekef torture. She had seen it as her last victory then, for it had been a military prison, a man’s place.

  The man who came to let her out had been the same quartermaster who had invented poor Bergen, and later promoted the imaginary soldier to sergeant. She would learn later how hard he had fought to keep her alive, but he was a major by then, in recognition for his keeping his allotted part of the war effort in one piece, and he paid his debts.

  ‘Go home, girl,’ he had told her. For her, the war was now over.

  But, of course, she had possessed two maverick gifts, not just the one.

  Her shot raked the side of the lead Collegiate flier, and the Stormreader banked violently, almost into the path of one of its fellows. She ignored it, let her shot stray to the next, but its pilot had already realized the danger and was climbing so as not to be caught between the enemy and the ground. Another two had already broken off. That left. .

  There was one of them a little more dogged than the others, now alone as it streaked towards the transporters. There was a rapid shuttling of thoughts between Bergild and her companions, which she ended with, Mine.

  The pursuing Stormreaders were right behind her, and her flankers split up to draw them away. Two remained with her, because the Collegiates weren’t fools, and she let her Farsphex dance before them, denying them a clear shot whilst calculating her own. The Imperial machines were as fleet and nimble as could be — no bombs, no bombardiers, not a pound of spare weight that might mean the difference between life and death.

  Stray shot sparked from her hull, one of her pursuers getting far too close, but then she was ready, falling into that moment when she would have to commit, and thus be at the mercy of her enemy.

  Seconds only until the Stormreader would unleash its cargo. All those dumb minds down there watching that swift approach and desperate to live.

  Now. And she was on her line, piercers opening up with their juddering roar, and she saw the constellation of sparks about the Stormreader’s engine casing, punching a string of bolts towards the left wing.

  Three hard strikes punched into her hull, but then one of her fellows was coming straight at her pursuers, shooting wildly and putting them off their aim.

  For a moment, just one of those split seconds she was living between, she thought she had lost it and that the determination of the bomber would surpass the accuracy of her own flying, but then his wing splintered apart as her shot knifed into the joint, and the Stormreader was spinning away, end over end, ploughing into the ground behind its intended target. She saw a sudden plume of fire as his bomb detonated within the bay.

  Then came the counter-attack, and she dragged her machine away, taking a half-dozen holes through the silk and wood of one wing. Her fellows were there to cover for her, but abruptly the fighting had become something new — not the fencing match of threat and counter-threat, but life and death as the Collegiates gave up on their ground targets to deal instead with their annoyances in the air. Her pilots had superior coherence and discipline, but the Stormreaders were arguably better machines for this duelling, and they had twice the numbers.

  She took in her pilots’ views of the air, formed them into a whole, found their best chance for survival, scattered her people across the sky without any of them ever being alone for a moment, all efforts now concentrated on evasion and yet refusing to be driven away, always there and never ceding the air to the enemy.

  As one of her fellows died, she felt the stab of pain as if it was her own. His mind, within hers, was a briefly burning red-hot spark of pain and fear, snuffed out instantly as his Farsphex nosedived into the ground.

  One less. And they could hardly spare it. Her thoughts rallied the others, spurred them on. The Empire is counting on us.

  Her father had possessed the same poisoned gift: that mindlink Art whose known practitioners had been rounded up and executed just a generation before, by the Rekef secret police. Never tell, he had insisted. You must never let them know. But when she heard what the Empire wanted her kind for, she had turned herself in to the Engineers without a second thought.

  Give me back the sky, had been her only desire,

  The intervention of the other Imperial machines came as a surprise, not a part of her mental battle plan at all. They had most of them not been ready for immediate launch but, the moment the Stormreaders had been spotted, the ground crews would have been working towards it. Now that uneven clutter of old Spearflights and the flying rabble of the Spiderlands was all about, still not quite evening the numbers, but complicating matters for the Collegiates. The Stormreaders outmatched them badly, but there had been a clock ticking ever since the attack started. Most Stormreaders had a limited fighting range, and their forays over the Sec
ond Army were on a strict leash — and the more they had to fight, the more spring-stored power their clockwork hearts used up. The older Imperial machines could refuel when they needed it, and the Farsphex had been able to fly from the Empire to fight over Collegium itself, and then return in safety, so efficient was their fuel.

  Her pilots called it in all at once, the moment the Stormreaders began flashing their signals to each other. Fall back, she instructed. No heroics. They could not risk losing another Farsphex to a sudden ambush. Defence of the army was all.

  She pictured the pilot who had died, not so much the face as the feel of his mind. What they would do when they got closer to Collegium, when the Stormreaders would be able to fight for as long as they needed, she did not know.

  So I hear that command has a plan: the thought of one of her fellows, filled with discontent.

  We can only hope, came her reply.

  Ten

  ‘The problem, basically, is that the Mantis-kinden never fought a traditional battle in their lives. When we fight, we go in, we take and hold land, consolidate, press on. Them? They attack, kill, fade away. They don’t stay where they were. Their only strongpoints are their actual holds, which are basically villages built into the trees, which you could pretty well miss if you walked right through them — until they killed you, anyway.’

  Tynisa nodded, remembering her journey to the Felyal with her father. He had been bringing her there to see her people’s way of life. Since then she felt she had run into more than her fair share of the Mantis way, and yet here she was again.

  The speaker was an Ant-kinden named Sentius, placed in command of the Etheryen relief force by Tactician Milus. He was a lean, weathered Sarnesh with some grey in his dark hair, and he had ventured into the forest before to liaise with Sarn’s allies.