Her machine was sluggish in the air, the wings still finding their rhythm, but that only served to let her fall into line behind the bomber. She saw the first flash of its munitions, searing across whatever luckless segment of the Second was down below. The driver of its automotive target must have seen what was coming, but the machine lurched on over the uneven ground.
Her immaculately timed burst of shot chewed off the long vane of the orthopter’s tail, butchering its smooth approach. Even then its pilot did not try to flee, and she could almost feel him fighting with suddenly unresponsive controls, determined to strike his mark. A true pilot, then. He was veering, though, unable to hold his place in the air with wings alone, as the killing rain of his bombs stamped blazing footprints across a scattering body of infantry, leaving the transporter untouched. Bergild was already pulling out, rising into a metal-filled sky, watching another Spearflight ripped apart even as she tried to come to its aid. Then the Stormreaders had her again.
Through the mind of another pilot she saw a bomber strike its target, a trundling automotive that must have been laden with ammunition. The bloom of fire and shrapnel scythed out on all sides, two score lives smashed beyond recovery, the flame gouting enough that the watching pilot felt the heat buffet his wings.
Another of her pilots shouted in her mind that he was on the cusp of a strike, and she could almost see him lined up behind the labouring bomber. Then he was gone, a storm of bolts cutting open the cockpit to rip him apart.
Major Oski spotted the plume of fire, and just kept shouting. He had long since run out of anything useful to say, but for a Fly-kinden officer, so easily overlooked, shouting had become his grease on the wheels of any interaction with Wasp soldiers. His current victims had a repeating ballista mounted on the back of little scouting automotive, and were frantically wheeling it round to face the onrushing fliers.
‘The fixed wing there — the one like a barrel — that one, ready and aim!’ He had his sleeves rolled up, his tunic grease-marked and sweaty from doing all a Fly could do to help get the artillery piece ready. His crew of three — Ernain and a couple of Light Airborne — were trying to line the piece up with his flying target, which was not a job the ballista had ever been meant for. ‘Left three turns! Up two turns!’ Oski’s major’s badge was hard-won, his gift for on-the-spot calculations earning him the grudging commendations of a string of superiors. ‘Now! Get that bastard shooting, you morons!’
The repeating ballista began spitting out bolts randomly into the cluttered sky — none of them seeming to go near the approaching fixed-wing. They were explosive-tipped, fused to explode set seconds after launch, but he knew that some would end up dropping amidst the army — just have to live with the complaints. Then the flier was past, and they could not turn fast enough to follow it.
‘Next target! Ugly bastard orthopter, there! There!’
All around him the bombs were landing, and they were all ruining someone’s day. He had no chance to assess how much real damage they were doing to the army’s vital organs.
One landed close by, astray from its target but very nearly too close as far as Oski was concerned, their little automotive rocking with the blast.
‘Should have put your armour on!’ Ernain bellowed.
‘No time!’ Oski shot back, though Ernain himself had managed to don a mail hauberk. In truth it was that he just could not fly when loaded with an engineer’s heavy mail, and he felt far less safe without his wings than with a steel skin. ‘Two turns left — two! Ready — now! Now!’
The approaching orthopter was coming in lower than the last one, the pilot painstaking in lining up his unlikely bomber on some target behind Oski — I bloody hope it’s behind us anyway — and the bolts that began bursting all around it rattled it visibly.
‘Good! Keep at it! Good. .’ Then his makeshift anti-orthopter piece sent a bolt along the side of the approaching flier, impacting with a wing joint, and abruptly the target wasn’t a flier any more, but was still coming their way.
Hoist with my own petard, seemed an appropriately engineer-worthy last thought. So save it for later. . and he was shouting ‘Pissing move!’ even as his wings cast him away, sending him hurtling over the heads of the army as though he had been struck by a storm-wind.
Then the actual wind came. The orthopter, one wing still beating vainly, came down nose-first within yards of their little automotive, and its complement of explosives was ripped open, the hot air of the firestorm battering at him.
Ernain? ‘Ernain!’
‘Here.’ Bee-kinden were not swift or agile in the air, but Ernain could get airborne even with all that metal on him.
‘Stab me, man, I don’t want to lose you. You’re important, remember.’ Oski stared at him, feeling shaken. ‘See the quartermaster about new eyebrows after we’re done.’
Ernain’s slightly scorched face frowned at him, but then another explosion shook the ground beneath them.
‘Let’s go find more artillery.’
Taki chased off another Farsphex, noted that three more Stormreaders had followed her lead, and so she broke off to take stock of the situation. Her internal clock was telling her that the bombers would have done what they could, shed their loads, and the shorter-ranged craft would be running out of fuel or stored spring. The actual clock set into the Esca’s controls had been smashed by some stray bolt along with a window. Shot through the clock? There’s a new one.
She saw several of the bombers already turned around, one still offloading a few late explosives randomly over the field, as though the pilot would be fined if he carried any home. Even as she watched, one fell prey to a Farsphex’s sudden fly-by, and she realized that some of her pilots had lost focus, chasing the enemy too far, leaving the civilian craft vulnerable. She twitched the stick, letting the Esca Magni drop to a level where she could intercept, while still trying to work out what they had accomplished.
Do I count six — seven? — of their big transporters down? That probably means maybe ten total — there’s bound to be a few I overlooked. Then a pause in calculations while she rose to loose a handful of bolts at a Spearflight, which jinked away from her, suitably chastened. No idea how many of their actual people, but I reckon that was a grim business down there. She still felt that they had not done all they could. Air defence and ground defence have adapted too cursed well. They’ve not got that much, but they spread it around. At least five of the bombers had been brought down, and far more had been put off their targets by the determined resistance of the Air Corps. At the same time the Imperial air casualties, especially amongst the non-Farsphex machines, had been far heavier than in their previous sorties. We hurt them either way, but we’ll never get as good a chance as now to make them smart. We need to make it count, more than we have.
She was signalling Home, home! to anyone who could see her. The bulk of her pilots already knew it, and the rest would follow, in a fighting retreat against an enemy only too happy to see them gone.
And by now maybe the strike force will have done what it came for, for the Collegiate plan had other parts that she was not involved in, and there was no way to know how that had gone until she was back in the city and hearing the news in person. Oh, to have that mental link the Farsphex pilots’ve got. If only I could get my people to drink a pint of Ant blood before each fight to acquire it — I’d wield the knife myself!
In the end, it could have been worse, but it was bad, nevertheless. They had lost almost no artillery, according to the reports Oski had received, but their supplies and ammunition were seriously dented. He did not ask about lives, that not being engineer’s prerogative, and he honestly did not want to know.
General Tynan had spoken to him — to him and Bergild and a selection of the other officers, delivering a brief, bleak little speech, its hollow commendations echoing with the knowledge that this was just the first, and that the Collegiates would keep at it. After that, the intelligence man, Colonel Cherten, had taken the stand an
d, once Tynan’s back was turned, he had informed them briskly that what the general meant was that they should most definitely do better next time, that in fact they had failed the Empress, that they were all personally responsible for every loss, and that their names would reach Capitas the hard way if they did not start taking their jobs seriously. Oski could not remember seeing Cherten anywhere in evidence during the fight, but no doubt there had been vital intelligence work needing doing. Who am I kidding? Call it Rekef work. Ordinary intelligence men did not raise the spectre of Capitas. Plainly Cherten felt they needed motivating — and the Rekef only had one way of doing that.
At least Ernain survived. Oski had a great deal invested in Ernain. And one day you’ll get yours, Cherten, believe you me. But that was a dangerous thing to even think just then. Plans and plans, yes, but the wheels turned slowly. Conspirators, like engineers, needed patience.
A day later, when the supply airship still had not come, everyone began to realize that it really had been worse all along. A scouting Spearflight found the airships’ wreckage — not just shot down but bombed into a charred mess. General Tynan ordered half rations, but Oski had a good head for maths, and began estimating their surviving stores and how many mouths.
The Collegiates may just have won the war. Another thought not safe to have, but he knew that he wasn’t the only one harbouring it.
Fourteen
The attack came at night, heralded by the most appalling sounds Thalric had ever heard. Only in retrospect could he bring himself to believe they had issued from human throats.
Night in the forest was more than just darkness and the sounds of the wood creaking, or of the multitude of unseen things that made the place their home. Huddled down, fireless, with Che and the others and a handful of Zerro’s scouts, the utter sightless blackness was like a solid thing, a weight pressing on his blindly open eyes. He could hear Che sleeping beside him, the rhythms of her breathing erratic enough that he knew she must be dreaming — and what dreams might come creeping in this place, he did not want to think. He was not sure how many others were even able to lay their heads down. The Sarnesh rose each morning looking as hollow-eyed as he himself felt, and Zerro let them rest out the first hour of dawn before having them move on. When they did sleep — when he slept — it was a troubled and intermittent business. He dreamt too, he knew, but he remembered none of it. And for that I’m grateful.
Worse was the fact that he had been in a place like this before, though only the unpleasant familiarity of the sensation had marked it for him: Like being watched, but by something huge. Like being surrounded by enemies I can’t see. Bloody Khanaphes all over again.
Someone moved nearby and his heart leapt. Within the camp. One of us. Surely it’s one of us. I’m so pissing blind here! He had a hand directed out into the void, fingers crooked. ‘Who?’ he hissed.
‘Amnon,’ came the rumbling reply, and no mistaking that voice. Why is it I end up travelling with so many people I don’t like, came another thought, although in truth Amnon had been a firm friend to him, historically, compared to Tynisa. I suppose I shouldn’t switch sides quite so often. But on the tail of that thought came: Better here than with Seda. He had been consort and regent for Seda, at the start of her reign, a convenient man with no power of his own, set up to mollify those Wasps outraged by the idea of a woman ruling over them. And if there are any such left, I’ll bet they’re shut up in Rekef cells.
‘Can’t sleep either, hm?’
‘This is a strange place,’ Amnon’s voice confirmed.
Reminds me of your home, and, even as he thought that, Thalric knew he could not voice it. When Amnon echoed, ‘Reminds me of my home,’ almost word for word, the mere coincidence seemed like evidence for some tightening supernatural noose.
‘Your “Masters”.’ Thalric fought hard to make the word derisory, but the darkness sucked the contempt from it, and his low voice imparted a kind of unwilling reverence.
‘There were no Masters. Or, if so, they were dead centuries before,’ Amnon declared. ‘It was all a trick, even if the Ministers came to believe their own lies at the last. It was simply a trick.’
For a long while Thalric said nothing, disentangling the conflicting tones within the big man’s voice. Surely that was the sound of a man who was trying to believe, and could not quite throw off the shackles of his upbringing. But Apt Amnon had since seen the wider world, and had decided that the old superstitions of his own people were no more than that. This was an inspiring story that might be taught smugly in Collegium, save for one thing. You poor bastard.
‘Che and I met your Masters,’ Thalric declared. It was cruel, but he could be a cruel man sometimes. He was not sure if it was that quality within him prompting the words, or some rarely surfacing need for truth.
Now it was Amnon’s turn for silence, until Thalric reckoned the man might never speak again without further prodding.
‘We went below your city and we met your Masters. They’re. .’ He had no clue as to Amnon’s expression; the man might have cut his own throat by now. And what could Thalric say, now he had started on this course. ‘They’re really fat. They’re fat, slimy, old, and they care piss-all for your people.’ I had forgotten till now that Che hadn’t said anything to the Khanaphir, when we came up from the catacombs. ‘So, you know what? You’re right. You’re absolutely right. It was a trick, and you’re better off without them.’
Still silence. Maybe Amnon had just walked away while Thalric was speaking. But then: ‘I. .’ and, after another dragging pause, ‘I must speak with Che on this.’
Sorry, Che. ‘Probably for the best, as I can’t claim to really understand it.’ Thalric found himself grinning into the darkness, unhappily aware that it was probably just the mean satisfaction of having ruined someone else’s night. Oh, yes, and sleep well on that. He had exceeded by some margin his actual antipathy to Amnon, now, and was left with the self-knowledge that all this needling was just because he himself felt so helpless.
Then the cacophony broke out: a hideous, confused yammering and screeching that seemed to come from all around them, sudden and shocking and close by. Thalric’s involuntary yell was lost in it, but then he was scrambling for a sword he could not find. Those were seconds of utter confusion for him, but in which the Sarnesh had pulled themselves together and drawn blade, and then the night flashed with the brief sear of a Wasp sting — not mine — and someone triggered a chemical lamp, throwing out a bright, greenish light that the Sarnesh all closed their eyes against.
He was briefly blinded all over again, looking too closely towards the lamp when it flared, but then the camp was being overrun.
Wasps. A few Mantids too, possibly, but the bulk of the attackers were Wasps, somehow already penetrating this far into Etheryen territory. Light Airborne make a better pace than plodding Ants, every time. Thalric threw out his hand to direct a sting. In that moment he caught the expressions on the faces of the enemy, as blinded and surprised as he had been — and not running to but from. This was a clash of ill chance that there had been no need for, but no way to avoid it now, and there looked to be a fair number of them.
His sting flashed, striking one down — the Sarnesh were shooting, bolts punching running Wasps from their feet. The attackers were already in the camp, though, and it was down to swords almost instantly. Thalric saw Amnon — a huge dark shape of nightmare in the unhealthy light — discharge a snapbow virtually into one man’s face and then club another down with the same weapon, before taking a sword from one of his victims to continue the fight.
Where’s Che? But of course the Beetle girl was already up and utterly in control, standing in the centre of the camp with drawn blade, and not rushing off anywhere or doing anything stupid. It’s as if I don’t know her any more. Tynisa passed by in a blur of speed, clad only in her shift against the muggy night, but her blade already dissecting the air about her.
Thalric remained at a crouch, stinging at targets of opportun
ity, trusting that the Wasps would not be expecting such an attack from their enemies, and so might overlook him. The sword-to-sword fighting was furious, with the Wasps already in a frenzy, panicking and dangerous. The Sarnesh met them calmly, outnumbered but fighting as one. He could hear Zerro’s high voice shouting orders, but could not make out what the Fly was saying.
Maure and Bartrer stayed with Che, practically hiding behind her, he saw, as though she was some sort of supernatural guardian. Ludicrous thought. And yet there was something there, a strength that had been growing in the girl, which made him think again.
Then a pair of Wasps tripped over him.
In that moment of confusion on their part — and because he knew all others of his kind were his enemies at this point — he killed one with a hand to the man’s side, sting scorching where the light armour left off. The other man hacked at Thalric’s head, so close that it was the crosspiece of his guard that gashed Thalric’s temple and knocked him back to the forest floor. He was already stinging blindly in return with one hand, even as his head rattled, rolling over and feeling the enemy’s stabbing blade pin his tunic rather than his chest. Then its wielder was gone, the sword left behind. He dragged it from the earth, seeing his attacker with a knife in his thigh, hands wide, looking around for his foes, utter despair on his face. Thalric killed him.
The Moth, Terastos, dropped to his knees by the corpse to retrieve his throwing blade. He looked a little scorched about his shoulder, which counted as a near miss for a stingshot wound. Hope that wasn’t me.
There was a knot of Wasps still up, backs against a tree, sword and sting against Amnon and Tynisa and some of the Sarnesh. By this time Thalric had stopped fighting. The outcome was not in doubt and the expressions on his erstwhile countrymen left a sick taste in his mouth: Men who do not want to be here.
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