The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  His gaze pinpointed each of them in turn, seeing how they bore up to the weight of his plan. Esmail decided that one, perhaps two of the people in this room would be found wanting – and shortly thereafter found dead, or not found at all. The extent of Brugan’s treason, however he might dress it up, was such that no faint hearts could be allowed to go on beating once they knew of his schemes.

  ‘Go make your lists,’ the Rekef general instructed them. ‘Men to frighten, men to blackmail and control, men to be made to disappear. We must cut out the rot, and if a little healthy flesh goes with it, well, many a surgeon has made the same decision. Beyond that, give me names of those that I should bring into the Empress’s company, as her immediate retinue. The position is not without risk, but we will need such people in place.’ He paused a moment, and then looked directly at Esmail. ‘She’s asked after your aide, Harvang.’

  Even as Brugan said it, Esmail was thinking back to that unknown Moth Skryre who had set him on this path and was wondering, How much did you know, back then? Did you even foresee this? The conclusion was inescapable. What surprised him more were the corpulent colonel’s murmured words as he stepped forward. ‘You think you’re up to this, Ostrec? She’s quite mad, they say. Mad, and with the power of life and death over all of us. You understand the stakes?’ The almost parental concern was grotesque on the man’s face.

  ‘I’m equal to the task, sir. Don’t worry about me,’ said Esmail in Ostrec’s voice.

  ‘Well then, my man here will do us proud,’ Harvang spoke out. ‘Besides, he’s a fair-looking youngster. You never know, the Empress might be looking for some companionship.’ His leer was vile.

  Esmail braced himself. It was impossible to tell whether Harvang had simply not registered Brugan’s own conflicting feelings about Seda – which were screamingly obvious to Esmail himself – or whether the fat man might be playing Brugan deliberately, engaged in some power game of his own against his superior who, of course, could not admit his emotional position. Whatever the reason, and Esmail was alarmed that he could simply not tell, there was a moment’s blank silence between Brugan and Harvang before the former nodded briefly.

  ‘I’ll see that he’s sent for,’ the general noted, and Esmail could only hope that Harvang’s games weren’t about to get him killed.

  Of course, death at the hands of a jealous General Brugan might be the least of his worries. The Empress’s sheer magical might had already rattled him, and now he was going to meet it head-on. His own magic was one of subterfuge only, distraction, misdirection and disguise. He had a great deal of skill but relatively little power. He would not wish to go before a Skryre of the Moths, for example, or a Spider-kinden Manipula, and ply his trade. They would quickly sniff the magic on him, and have the training and experience to unravel his little spells and look on his true face. The Empress, though: if she had a fraction of their skill then she would crack his deceptions like a snail shell. He could only hope that he could deflect and divert all that thundering strength, preserving his masks in the teeth of the gale.

  There was more business, and Ostrec’s ears took it all in, the anatomy of Brugan’s fifth column being discussed in summary detail. Esmail himself barely registered it, storing it for later. He was more concerned with planning ahead for when he himself should meet Seda’s cool stare.

  He was frightened, and he would defy anyone with a little knowledge of the old ways not to be. There was something else there, too, though. The servant, Shoel Jhin, had spoken of a return to the Days of Lore, a resurgence of magic. Esmail had marked him down for mad, but if there was even the slightest chance of such a thing, if even one part in a hundred of the way the world used to be could be transplanted into the present, then what was going on here was bigger than the games of Skryres, and perhaps Esmail’s instructions did not mean so much any more. After all, he was beyond scrutiny now, beyond interference. What if the Empress was better fitted to be his mistress than the Moths of Tharn were to give him orders?

  ‘Farsphex,’ was all he said, as he showed it to her.

  The Wasp pilot who had been assigned to Pingge was named Scain, and he was the most cadaverous of his kinden that she had ever met: a lean, gangling creature who seemed ill-suited to be any sort of soldier, let alone someone trusted with some top-secret Imperial plan. Like his commander, Aarmon, he spoke very little, although his voice betrayed the remnants of a North-Empire accent, the suggestion of an upbringing amongst the hill tribes, which made his current technically sophisticated post even more of a mystery, of course.

  The Farsphex, however, was all technical sophistication. Pingge was no aviatrix, but she had a grasp of technology that went a little beyond what was strictly necessary for a factory worker, and she knew she was looking at something different, even if she could not quite work out what was unusual. Before her was a long-bodied orthopter, the wings folded at an angle back along its curved body, the enclosed cockpit sitting over a pair of what she guessed were the rotary piercers she had heard of, brought into the Empire’s arsenal after the original Solarno campaign. The Farsphex was a big machine, half as long again as the Spearflights that had been shoved to the back of the hangar, and its belly seemed overlarge, pregnant with some manner of machinery, or something. More, she could see that there was something odd about its wings, just by looking at it. The designers had managed to give it an air of elegance, despite all that, but it was plainly a different breed to the older orthopters standing nearby.

  She took a few cautious steps closer, then glanced back at Scain.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he nodded briefly, and she let her wings flurry her up to the curving top of the machine’s hull. Thoughtfully, she touched the blade of one of the twin propellers there. Pingge would be the first to admit that her knowledge of aviation was limited, but she hadn’t thought orthopters needed those.

  Scain stalked over to the flier’s side, running his hand along it in a gesture that said far more than the words he used. She thought that he would open the cockpit, but instead he popped a hatch in the Farsphex’s side.

  ‘See,’ he said, pointing. She hung her head over the opening, looking upside down into the cramped interior. There was a brief crawlspace that would take Scain to the pilot’s seat, but immediately inside the hatch was room for someone else, though only someone small because there, on a hinged arm, was a reticule. It was the same toy that she had been training with all this time, but seeing it in this unfamiliar setting sent a chill down her spine.

  ‘In,’ Scain directed, and he went squirming into the orthop-ter’s innards, all elbows and knees as he wriggled through the crawlspace, then contorted himself to get into his seat.

  She hesitated at the hatch’s mouth, until another preremptory ‘In!’ from Scain forced her hand. A moment later she was sitting before the reticule, just as she had so often before, but the walls of the Farsphex’s hull crushed in on her from all sides. Below her, the machine was missing a good area of floor, enough for her to slip through if she was careless, allowing the reticule’s impartial eyes to view the terrain below. At the moment, all its angles and mirrors served only to give her eyepiece a good close view of the hangar floor ahead of the machine’s nose.

  The hatch was shut from outside with a slam, making her jump. All at once she was enclosed by darkness, but Fly-kinden were used to that, from the interconnected underground communities they favoured, or the cramped tenements they were shunted into in the cities.

  ‘Sir, what’s going on now?’ she asked, giving her voice all proper deference.

  ‘Test flight,’ Scain told her. ‘Live one.’ A moment later and he was reaching back down the crawlspace to tug at her sleeve, making her jump. ‘Wear this.’

  It was a shackle, a metal band attached to the hull by a chain. She stared at Scain wordlessly, and he clipped it about her ankle, turning the key awkwardly, one-handed in the confined space.

  ‘What . . . ? Sir?’ she got out, her voice tight.

  ‘Stop you f
alling out.’ It was perhaps the longest single sentence he had said to her, and all it told her was that he was a bad liar. For a moment she looked him in the eyes, under the poor light that came up from the aperture. Instead of staring her down, as a member of the superior race should do, he just shrugged and looked away, plainly feeling a little guilt.

  So they don’t trust us. It was a bitter thought. ‘I’m an Imperial citizen, you know,’ she complained, before she could stop herself. ‘I know about duty. It’s not as though I’ll just desert through the . . . the whatever this hole’s called, the moment we’re in the air. I have family in the city.’

  Scain just shrugged, twisting his way back into the cockpit. Pingge stared at the shackle unhappily, but in the back of her mind she thought of Gizmer and some of the others who were perhaps less diligent servants of the Empire.

  She wondered how Kiin was getting on. She would not trade Scain for Aarmon, certainly: the leader of the new pilots scared her.

  A moment later she felt the engine turn over and fire, sounding as loud as any factory machine. The Farsphex jolted and swayed as it was pushed out into the open air by the ground crew, and then Scain made a kind of hissing sound and the wings were abruptly unleashed, clapping down towards the ground and springing the machine into the air at a sickening angle.

  She would get used to it all in time, save that part: every time her machine – she would grow possessive of it very soon – took to the air there would be that stomach-lurching moment when she nearly sent her lunch down through the aperture. Somewhere amidst all the trade-offs that had gone into the Farsphex’s finely tuned design, a graceful takeoff had been judged expendable.

  A moment later the city roofs were rushing past, and then were gone, their speed being far greater than she had anticipated; the rhythm of their flight was steady rather than the furious beat of an orthopter’s wings.

  ‘Ready!’ It was Scain’s voice, and she guessed she had already missed hearing the word once, against the engine’s racket. For a moment she did not know what he meant, but then her training took over and she had her eye against the reticule.

  They were heading out across farmland now, towards a broken-backed range of hills north-west of the city. The eyepiece showed her a magnification of the view she might have if she were clinging beneath the orthopter’s sharp nose, flanked by the rotary piercers.

  ‘What targets?’ she called forward, forgetting her ‘sir’. Even as she asked, she spotted a plume of smoke, a fire set out on one of the hilltops. The wheeling, unsteady view of the reticule showed her several others rising beyond it.

  She fumbled the first one, failing to get the trigger switch released, despite a faultless record in training. Scain said nothing, but guided the flier towards their next target.

  ‘Remember your navigation?’ he called back, his voice sounding a little taut as he concentrated on the steering, and she realized this was as much a test for him as for her.

  ‘Probably, sir.’ She had her tongue between her lips as she focused, a habit from childhood, watching the smoking target draw nearer as Scain swung towards it.

  ‘We’ll be flying nights as well; you’ll need to direct me to the target. Bear that in mind.’ The words seemed to exhaust him and he hunched over the stick.

  And away! And she got it right this time, and felt something solid clunk directly below her seat, something leaving the belly of the flier. And that ought to be spot on the mark, she decided, hoping that she would get to go back over the same ground herself to see how she’d—

  There was a crack and a bang from behind them and she would have feared something onboard had exploded had the sound not been so distant. She was so rattled that she missed the next target entirely. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Live flight,’ Scain stressed. ‘Real bombs.’

  Pingge missed the target following that as well, because she could not make her fingers move on the trigger, even though she had the reticule lined up on it perfectly. Bombs, she was thinking numbly, but of course bombs. What else? And who but a Fly-kinden would fit in here with the reticule, and who else would have the eyes for that night-flying Scain said about. Oh, someone has been thinking long and hard about this.

  And: What about the farmers that live down there? Did they clear them out? Did they even warn them that the air force would be blowing them up today?

  And: They’re going to make me drop bombs on people, real people. For a moment she felt ill, thinking of all that training, when it had been a game.

  But Scain shouted at her, and she flicked the trigger seconds-perfect and sent another bomb spiralling away from the undercarriage, imagining it obliterating the bonfire target that some uncomprehending slave had set out.

  Her name. What he had shouted was her name. She had not realized that he actually knew it.

  It changed things, somehow. The Imperial high command didn’t know her name, and it thought she needed to be chained to the hull to stop her flying off in terror. Right then she didn’t give a bent pin for the Empress or her generals, but she didn’t want to let Scain down.

  She got the next three bombs off, all within tolerance of their marks, and then the Wasp was turning them round, not heading for the city but for somewhere else.

  ‘Good,’ was all he said, but she felt a curious bond with him: who else was there, after all, but Scain and herself in this hollow shell in the upper air?

  He brought them down at an airstrip a few miles outside Capitas, and there he unlocked the shackle, and showed her how to open the hatch from within. She dropped out onto the packed dirt of the strip, and the first thing she saw was another dozen Farsphex arranged in a rough line, with hers on the end. There was a scattering of the new pilots and their Fly-kinden henchmen and henchwomen around, and she could hear the drone of other machines still in the air.

  A curiously proprietorial feeling came over her, regarding it all. This was more than the factory, where she had been just a small part of a humdrum machine, a tiny ball bearing helping the Empire on its way. This was special, and she and her fellows had become an elite. Looking about her at the busy airstrip she could feel herself and Kiin and all the others help build the future right then, right there. In that moment all of her qualms about whoever might be below the bombs she was preparing to drop were banished.

  Fifteen

  ‘I thought you should hear the news, that’s all,’ Taki explained. ‘Didn’t think I’d drop into the middle of a war. Looks like, no matter how fast I fly, the world moves faster.’

  She was perched on a table in what the Mynans were now calling their War Room. It was the third set of walls to bear the name. The first had been in the Consensus building that had proved vulnerable prey to the Wasp incendiaries because the Mynans had not even finished its construction. A quarter of the ruling council had died in the blaze, but at least the rest had settled their differences and were now waiting on Kymene’s word. The second War Room had taken an unlucky shell in the sporadic artillery bombardment that jumped about the city, cracking the walls enough that nobody wanted to stay inside. In the end, Kymene had repaired to a cellar to hold her deliberations. It reminded Stenwold of the places that the Mynan resistance had been driven to when the Wasps had held the city. That Kymene had been reduced to this already was a bad sign.

  ‘Your news about the Wasp air force comes late,’ the Mynan leader remarked acidly, looking up from her plans. Her face was ashen and drawn: no sleep and too many worries all at once.

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you,’ Taki shot back. ‘Those lads out there, they’re old news, Spearflights and regular pilots. The Empire’s cooking up something special,though – new men, new machines.’

  ‘How does this affect us now?’ Kymene asked her. ‘Even their current forces would suffice to keep control of the air.’

  In fact, the Empire had at first seemed not to be pressing its advantage. For two days the bulk of the artillery had concentrated on the outer wall, which had cracked in
three places and looked as though it would cease to provide a meaningful obstacle very shortly if this concerted and uncannily precise bombardment continued. The balance of the Imperial engines had been throwing incendiaries and explosive shells into the city itself, apparently at random, ensuring that nobody in Myna slept well or felt safe.

  After its initial lightning raid over the city, the air force had been absent for a day. Enough orthopters had remained to defend the artillery from Mynan reprisals, as two costly air skirmishes had shown, but the Spearflights had not been seen in the sky since that first sortie. Edmon and the other pilots had been trying to cobble together whatever new fliers they could, co-opting and arming civilian machines and repairing anything that could be dragged largely intact from the ruin of the Mynan airfields and hangars. That the Empire would still possess resounding air superiority was a grim truth nobody wanted to talk about.

  The Empire’s actual army, the fighting men who had previously formed the first wave of offence in any Imperial attack, had sat out beyond the hills, far out of range of the Mynan artillery, whilst its greatshotters had inexorably chewed away at the wall. The Wasp assault had so far killed over a thousand Mynans and a handful of Imperial pilots. The Mynan soldiers had milled and gone to the walls and been driven back, and talked endlessly of sorties and counter-attacks, and their Maynesh Ant-kinden allies had very nearly taken to the field alone, unable to countenance simply sitting under the shadow of the Wasp artillery without any recourse at all. Still, the column from Szar was expected to arrive any day to bolster the city’s numbers, and that was anticipated to trigger some manner of reversal in their situation.

  Today, though, the remnants of the Szaren relief column had finally arrived, and with it an understanding of where the balance of the Imperial air force had been engaged. Caught in the open, in close formation, the Bee-kinden had been perfect targets for the Spearflights in an attack that nobody had even contemplated a few days ago. Flying machines fought flying machines; that had been the rule. Aside from dropping grenades, usually by hand, their effectiveness on the ground was strictly limited. It had been every tactician’s understanding that only airships could carry a load sufficient to make a serious impact on the ground, and so the strategic effectiveness of orthopters was limited to how well they could attack or defend such slow-moving, vulnerable targets. Surely that was what the fight for Solarno had taught?