The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  What the old Inapt powers had lost in strength they had preserved in skill and application. All the power in the world was useless without precision. The Moths could use the little they had with a finesse that would outmanoeuvre her brute force. As her Empire needed to grow and develop, so did she.

  She had called to him, to Tisamon, using his discarded blade as a focus, spilling the blood of a bastard cousin, building him a body of ancient Mantis armour. It had been her first true ritual, the greatest exercise of her nascent authority. She had sought out his ghost and bound it inside the metal, and exacted its oath. Now that tall figure of mail stepped towards her, halting at her elbow, not quite touching, and she felt the faint, cool breath from within his helm. And would any of those old powers have dared do what I have, to bring him back so? She had cast down the gauntlet, in her own mind at least.

  She would not live in fear again, and for that she must become greater, more fearsome, than all others. Her armies and their machines would make her so in the world of the Apt, and she would hunt down the power of the Inapt, the relics of their lost world, and take everything to herself. Only then would she be safe. Only then could she be herself, and live free, and not fear. There will come a time when I am free and do not fear. I promise it. There will be an end to it. I am not my brother.

  She glanced over her shoulder into the visor of Tisamon’s helm, into the darkness beyond. When first she had called him, there had been nothing but night within, but the more she employed him, the more blood she had given him and – most of all – the more she had thought of him, the more real he had become. Now, she lifted the faceplate, and saw those pale, dim features that no lamp could light: severe, handsome in a cold and arrogant way, but his eyes were for her, only for her. He was a man who had lived and died for love, but that meant other things to Mantis-kinden. Now he gave her what jagged love he had left, and it was an icy and barbed thing indeed.

  But he was deadly and savage and hers, and sometimes she wondered what it would feel like to kiss those dead lips. Would I be mad then, truly, if it comes to that? Surely a woman in my position could be excused some madness.

  She passed him the goblet – there was plenty more, after all, and the future held so many exciting new vintages: Mynan, Solarnese, Collegiate . . .

  ‘I shall have work for you soon,’ she whispered, and she felt his anticipation like a tension in the air. He was death and she was his mistress, and the world would soon know all the fear that she denied in herself.

  Eleven

  Kymene stood on the wall at Myna, staring eastwards, and her scouts came and went in a constant flurry of arrivals and just as swift departures. She gripped the crenellations, straight as a spear shaft, her cloak of half black and half red gusting in the wind.

  All around her, her city prepared for war. The walls were bustling with soldiers, and the sight was far different from when Myna had first been taken by the Empire. Then they had a little simple artillery up here and, other than that, just a host of soldiers, swords and shields and crossbowmen to face down the Wasp host. Any army marching up to Myna today would meet a more modern response. The walls themselves were essentially the same – the Empire had made no changes during the occupation, and the liberated Mynans had not had the time – but artillery emplacements were set all along the line of the wall, in fortified positions that gave cover against attack from below and above. The machines themselves included the Sarnesh-designed rackthrower ballistae and scrapshotters, designed to fill the air before them with spears or jagged metal, tearing up the Imperial Light Airborne even as it tried to gain the walls. Snapbows were much in evidence, too, swifter and more accurate than crossbows, which went some way to counterbalance the Wasp-kinden’s superior mobility.

  We have given them all we could, Stenwold assured himself.

  ‘Commander.’ A Fly-kinden dropped down almost at Kymene’s feet, wearing the colours of Myna on a sash about his chest. ‘They have completed setting up their artillery on the far side of the Antosine hill country.’

  Kymene frowned. ‘But that’s out of sight of the city. Do they expect us to come to them?’

  ‘The artillery is guarded, but separate to their main force. We’ve not been able to get a good look at what their army is bringing with it, Commander, but spyglass reports suggest there are automotives and other machines there. Perhaps the hill artillery is to cover a retreat.’

  Kymene nodded briefly, dismissing him. There was a lull then, perhaps because most of Myna’s scouts had already reported, or were not coming back.

  ‘Maker,’ she said, descending the stone steps from the wall, and he followed after her, almost walking into her when she stopped.

  ‘You do not believe that the Wasps have taken such precautions to cover their retreat.’ It was a statement, not a question, and he realized that she had stepped down from the wall so that her soldiers would not overhear her.

  ‘I cannot think it,’ he agreed. ‘All reports suggest that they have the forces for a serious attack – and to keep an army that size on the field is costly if you don’t intend to use it.’

  She looked away from him, and he could almost sense the wheels turning in her mind, plots and counterplots. ‘They wish us to strike the first blow, to break the treaty? Are they mounting their artillery there to provoke an attack, a sally to destroy it?’

  ‘Possibly.’ But the idea did not feel right to Stenwold. There were better, more tempting places to flaunt those siege engines, if that had been the plan.

  ‘The Szaren relief column will be with us in a day’s time. More troops are expected from Maynes. The longer the Empire waits, the greater our defending force will be. Their own reinforcements seem to have slowed to a trickle. Perhaps they have been testing our will to fight.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Stenwold echoed, in the same doubting tone. When she rounded on him he spread his hands. ‘My gut says no. My instincts tell me that the Empire came here for a fight, and intends to bring it, and soon. We both know this has been brewing since their reunification. I cannot think they would throw so much of men and materiel into simple posturing.’

  She shrugged. ‘We are as ready as we can be, and their forces are too far still to try and catch us off guard. If they want to invest the city in siege, they will have to commit themselves, and bring themselves within the range of our wall engines. They will find us ready for them this time.’ She met his eyes again. ‘They hate us, Maker. They hate us for having the temerity to demand our freedom. If this city falls a second time then they will find a hundred ways to make us suffer. We cannot let them back within our walls.’

  There was a faint tremor and, in its wake, shouts were going up along the wall, bringing Stenwold and Kymene racing back to the crenellations. For a moment, Stenwold could not work out what had happened, but then he saw the plume of dust rising, five hundred yards and more outside the city. Have they set mines, buried explosives? he wondered. That looks like an artillery strike!

  Kymene was already shouting for her scouts. ‘You missed their main engines!’ she was berating them. ‘While you were watching some decoy, they must have brought their leadshotters to bear!’

  ‘Commander, I was expecting the same thing!’ a Fly-kinden protested. ‘I was watching for just that. There are only the two packs of engines out past the Antosine, and the smaller engines with their main force. None of it could possibly . . .’

  Stenwold leant out, staring across the uneven terrain in the direction that the Imperial artillery had apparently been set up. It was hilly, a little broken with rocks, rugged grazing land from which the farmers had fled when the black and gold flag had been sighted.

  Was that a wisp of smoke there, such as a leadshotter might give out? Had he heard a distant, hollow knocking from that quarter even as he vaulted the steps?

  A moment later, he heard it for sure and, watching carefully, he saw the smoke as well. Even as his mind was shouting, Impossible! he had already noted a new plume of dust, plain to
all eyes, that fountained from the earth noticeably closer to the walls.

  For a moment a grand silence fell over all the defenders of Myna, and the voice of a long-dead friend told him, You will know first from the sound.

  He had come here to give steel to the Mynan defenders, to assure them that they did not stand alone. He had come too late, however.

  The Empire’s assault on the city had begun.

  There were flashes of light in the sky, a spotter from the Light Airborne reporting his best guess as to the relationship between city walls and the second ranging shot. Nearby, a lieutenant of the Engineers translated calmly, ‘Two hundred fifty far seventy-five left, calibrate.’

  The greatshotter crews turned to their machines, which were to the familiar leadshotters what those devices were to simple catapults. Totho knew leadshotters, having seen them in action many times in the hands of both allies and enemies. Strengthened tubes, metal and bound with metal, in which a large charge of firepowder was detonated to fling a projectile in a shallow arc. The firepowder reaction, which had never produced efficient weapons on a personal scale, was still accurate enough by the standards of siege engines, and those weapons had slowly been replacing more primitive devices that derived their power from torsion engines and the like.

  The greatshotters were ten times the size of their little ancestors, and their barrels tilted at a steep angle, as if they sought to make war on the sky itself. He had heard any number of engineers, both Imperial and Iron Glove, tell him that they could not possibly work.

  The metallurgy had been the frustrating part, as he was no specialist, and had been forced to rely on others among Drephos’s people to find the precise alloys and construction that would survive the absurd pressures the barrel interior came under each time the weapon was discharged. The wait had given him plenty of time to solve the other major problem: how a weapon able to throw its missiles at a target some miles away could possibly be aimed.

  Colonel – formerly Major – Ferric was excitedly explaining the process to the newly arrived General Roder, and Totho was happy to step back and let him do so. Wasps reacted to innovation so much better when it came from their own kind.

  ‘The thing is that, whilst most engineers can do the calculations for a regular leadshotter in their heads,’ the engineer was enthusing happily, ‘the margin of error for such a distant target is simply too great, and whilst we can, of course, simply keep shooting and adjusting by hand, it would take most of the day to get any useful bearing on the walls, and that’s assuming they let us alone that long.’

  Roder nodded, saying nothing and simply listening, which Totho reckoned was a rare and valuable trait in a general.

  ‘Are you aware of what I mean by a Ratiocinator?’ Ferric asked. It became clear that Roder was not, so the enginer hurried on. ‘They’ve been known about for maybe fifty years – a Helleren invention – they’ve been unreliable for most of that time, and only capable of very simple tasks. Think of it like an abacus or – no, you must have seen a merchant’s reckoning wheel for currency or weights and measures – numbers in, numbers out, and the gearing on the wheel transforms the one to the other?’

  Roder glanced sidelong at Totho even as he absorbed the existence of such devices. What’s the matter, General? Ashamed that a pair of halfbreeds has brought you such a bounty?

  ‘Then it’s a very complicated reckoning wheel – we put our best measurements and numbers in via these dials, you see,’ and Ferric was elbowing the crew aside to demonstrate, revealing an intricate arrangement of brass wheels set into the brass-and-wood box bolted to the greatshotter’s mountings. ‘We have seven different settings to describe the spatial relationship between our battery here – that’s our cluster of engines, General – and the target. The Ratiocinator takes our measurements – our best guesses really – and adjusts elevation and angle accordingly with great precision.’ Even as he said it, Totho heard steam hiss within the machine’s base, driving the gear chains that rotated it slightly on its turntable, whilst pistons ground up the angle of the barrel through a careful increment.

  ‘How can it know?’ Roder demanded, glancing at Totho again.

  ‘It doesn’t know anything, General,’ Ferric explained hastily. ‘It’s just numbers in, numbers out, like the reckoning wheel, only the gearing within is far more complicated and able to deal with many more variables. Think of it as though someone sat down with a book of tables and worked out every possible permutation beforehand – then it’s easy to see how, when we show it what our situation is by setting the dials just so, the machinery within will automatically progress through the relevant calculations.’

  ‘Easy,’ Roder echoed, plainly finding the concept anything but. ‘Carry on,’ he said at last and, even as he did, one of the crew shouted, ‘Loose!’ and the greatshotter spoke, fully half the barrel recoiling out of sight within the other half in order to absorb some of the shock of detonation. The sound was thunderous, but less than Totho might have expected, not so much more than that of two or three leadshotters discharging at once. Even so, everyone present had clapped their hands to their ears when the warning had come.

  When he looked up, Roder was staring at him, stepping over, his face unreadable in its immobility. ‘You’re the snapbowman, they tell me,’ he grunted. ‘One of the Colonel-Auxillian’s original crew.’

  ‘Original crew’ was hardly true, but Totho nodded nonetheless. I will not call you ‘sir’, he promised himself. I save that for one man only. He waited for whatever slight or abuse the general of the Eighth Army would have for him.

  ‘Your weapons got me to the gates of Seldis, boy,’ Roder told him flatly. ‘I’d have got inside them, too, given time.’ He gave the nod of a man recognizing something of merit. ‘You’ll get me inside Myna with your engines, too. Ferric!’

  The colonel of Engineers looked round, ‘Sir?’

  ‘Why are your shells undershooting the wall? Why not overshoot and them pull back towards us?’

  ‘It’s harder to judge the adjustments needed when the shots are landing in urban terrain, General,’ Ferric explained. ‘On the open ground, we can make better estimates and find the wall sooner.’

  Roder eyed him sternly. ‘Colonel, you’re a grand engineer but you have something to learn about being a soldier. Shoot past the wall, not short of it. I don’t care if it takes longer to crack the city that way. It’ll be time well spent.’

  His face, as he glanced briefly back at Totho, was as bland and pitiless as a desert, then he was striding off towards the band of messengers awaiting his convenience, calling, ‘Send word to the Aviation Corps!’

  The next phase of the battle was underway already.

  While Stenwold was still staring out at the hill country and the far-distant Imperial artillery positions, as though the Empire was a stage conjuror whose tricks might be unravelled by careful observation, Kymene was shouting, ‘Airmen, get our flying machines readied!’ and sending scouts off for the airfields. ‘We need to attack their engines,’ she told Stenwold shortly when he glanced over at her. ‘The fliers are the only way. They’re not intended to fight against ground targets, but our airmen will just have to improvise.’

  The scouts had already reported a significant Air Corps presence within the Imperial army, and Kymene nodded, reading his expression. ‘At least this way we’re taking the battle to them,’ she told him.

  They both heard the echoing sound of the far-off engine loosing, again just the one but, even as they turned their eyes towards the ground before the gates, soldiers were pointing behind them, deep into the city itself. Myna was built in defensive tiers up a hillside, with the main gate the only easily approachable point. The rising dust and smoke from the missile’s impact was plain to see, more than half the city away.

  ‘Fliers!’ someone shouted, and neither Stenwold nor Kymene were naive enough to think they meant the Mynan machines. Stenwold had his glass out first, quickly finding the circling dots that were rising f
rom behind the main Wasp force. A moment later he passed it grimly to Kymene. The sleek, brutal lines of the Imperial Spearflights were hard to mistake, and he counted at least a score of them taking to the air.

  ‘Get the air defences ready,’ Kymene snapped out, but they both knew the wall engines were designed to keep off an assault by the Light Airborne, not to be pitched against swift and highflying orthopters.

  ‘Everyone to arms,’ was her next order, quietly now, to be taken by her scouts and scattered throughout the city. Stenwold saw the Ants of the Maynesh contingent already arrayed before the gate, awaiting the traditional start of hostilities that the Wasps had already disdained. Another impact smashed into a street behind them, far closer, so that the screams and cries were clearly audible. So far all the impacts, within and without, had been solid shot, but Stenwold guessed that was only for ranging, just as he supposed that, once the first missile touched near the wall, all the engines out there would be adopting the same trajectory, both Wasp positions beginning a sustained bombardment by way of some artifice he did not understand.

  Edmon’s flier was named the Pacemark from the white stripes on the underside of its forewings that flashed pale with each upbeat. It was a solid, barrel-bodied orthopter, the front wings of light wooden slats interwoven, the rear just silk over a frame, with a cross-sectioned tail for stability. A pair of rotary piercers flanked and disfigured the cockpit at the fore, cramping the seat and obscuring the view, but they were far more efficient than the old repeating ballistae that many of his comrades still sported.

  The ground crew wheeled his machine out, and he was already thanking his luck that he had rewound the engine himself just an hour ago. It was a nervous habit that infuriated the mechanics, but it meant he had a fully tensioned spring, ready to leap into the air. All about him, across the Robannen Square airfield, other machines of various shapes and designs were being brought into the light, whilst the handful that had already been out in the open air from patrol were being refuelled or rewound.