The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Stenwold saw her lips move, read the words, ‘I can’t . . .’ there, but one of her own was taking her arm, shouting at the top of his voice. The Mynan airmen on the ground had already scattered to their vessels. The roar of fuel-engines sparking up obscured the whirr of clockwork, and the artillery overrode it all.

  At last she nodded agreement, the gesture almost wrenched from her, and the man who had been trying to persuade her was sprinting across the airfield, still shouting. They were wheeling out a fixed-wing flier, a cargo-hauler, but it would now take passengers in lieu of crates.

  ‘Chyses!’ Kymene shouted after him. ‘Gather all the soldiers you can. Gather everyone who’ll go with you. Get them out of the city, as Maker said. There will be a tomorrow!’ Her fiery gaze passed to Stenwold. ‘With me, Maker. If the world can’t spare me, it certainly can’t spare you.’

  ‘All pilots, into the air,’ someone yelled out. ‘The Maid must not be brought down!’

  From nowhere, it seemed, Taki’s Esca Magni thundered down for a hard landing, its extended legs flexing on impact. ‘Rewind me!’ came her high, imperious voice, as though she was on her home fields of Solarno, but the mechanics rushed to obey. She had accounted for herself memorably already, through skill and superior technology.

  ‘We’re going!’ Stenwold shouted at her, but the artillery had quickened, as if sensing a kill. He pointed madly westwards, then gestured broadly at the frenzied activity about the field, and the Fly nodded. Her face, through the cockpit glass, was streaked with grime and sweat, and there were several holes in the Esca’s wings and bodywork.

  There was no more for it, then. The soldiers were already fleeing, each officer taking the survivors of his squad and hoping to get them out of the city any which way, and for whatever destination they could reach. All across the city, the citizens of Myna who could not or would not flee would be slaves of the Empire by dusk, or dead.

  Kymene was already crouching in the hatch of the fixed-wing, with the craft’s civilian pilot firing up the four propeller engines. The craft had swift, sleek lines but it would not move in the air like an orthopter. As Stenwold ran across the field to join her, he knew that their fate would rest in the hands of the fighting airmen, and of Taki.

  A shell landed close enough to scatter debris over the field, the blast knocking a few distant mechanics off their feet. Kymene hauled Stenwold into the fixed-wing’s hold, almost pulling him on top of her. Her expression was venomous, unforgiving, taking her last look at her ravaged city before the hatch closed.

  The machine shuddered around them as the fixed-wing tensed, its legs bunching as the propellers got up to speed. Then, with an explosive snap, its landing gear had hurled it into the air, to catch the wind like a kite, a long low take-off that must have barely cleared the hangar roofs.

  All across the field, every flier that had been held back was now clawing for the sky. Edmon let the battered old Pacemark have its head, almost immediately overtaking the fixed-wing Sweet Fire that was carrying Kymene, as he circled up above to search for the enemy. The Spearflights were all over the city but, in that first flush of ascent, they did not see the scale of the Mynan launch. Then there were a dozen orthopters in the air, cutting up from the airfield in all directions, making a widening spiral of winged shapes that could not be missed. Within a minute there was a score, and other surviving Mynan fliers were being drawn to join them, or retreating to them.

  Their numbers, which spoiled any chance of secrecy, bought them precious moments. The Empire had split its fliers into individuals and pairs, none of which was foolish enough to simply dive straight at the burgeoning Mynan flight. Instead, they took it as a counter-attack, and regrouped to meet it.

  There were more of them than of the defenders, of course. Edmon reckoned the odds were two to one already, and he guessed that minutes more would see the Empire commit some of the machines they had held back to keep their artillery safe.

  He flashed the pattern to split, to attack, not knowing who would come and who would stay. The Empire had taken the city so swiftly by calling the pace, and the Sweet Fire’s only chance at escape would be for Myna to retake the initiative, even briefly.

  He let himself get quite clear of the circling mob of defenders before he glanced back to see precisely who was coming along with him. Otherwise, he knew, his nerve might not stand an empty sky.

  Eleven other fliers had answered the call. He saw Franticze’s Tserinet at the fore, almost overtaking him with the Bee-kinden woman’s lust for Wasp blood. Looking forward again, his memory found names for some of the others: Bordes’s Wanderer, Marsene’s Fierce Lady, the Cranefly, the Red Anvil and several others he could not immediately name. There were far too many Spearflights ahead to worry about the odds now, but they had the same difficulties in communication that Edmon himself did. He saw flashes between them, officers trying to convey a response to a situation that had already changed.

  Here we go, and he had chosen a target and kicked the Pacemark for every ounce of speed the ailing orthopter could give him. As the rotaries burst into life, he bellowed something wordless and primal, full of the death of his city.

  His target skipped in the air under the battering it received, nose turning for the ground as the hammer of his bolts smashed its engine through the wooden hull. Then he was in their midst and, although many were trying to turn to follow his line, they were in each other’s way, and could not shoot for fear of hitting one another. All around him the other pilots were following his suicidal lead. Franticze smashed the port wings of one Spearflight to matchwood and was needling another even before she had cut into their formation. The Wanderer had taken a higher line, the lean, light flier missing with its single piercer but diving into the Wasp flock from above, bringing confusion in his wake. The Cranefly . . . Edmon was watching when it happened, just a moment’s flick of his eyes left and the image of the angular Mynan vessel steering left just when a Wasp pilot made a mirror decision, the two craft striking shoulder to shoulder, wheeling about each other like dance partners, wings stilled and broken, then dropping, still spinning, from the air.

  Then he had more to worry about, clearing the Wasp pack and forcing the Pacemark into a complaining turn that was tighter than anything it had tried before, feeling every joint and bolt of its protest. Piercer shot sleeted past him like foul weather, a handful of impacts shunting him sideways in the air and nearly losing him control over the machine entirely. He let his rotaries blaze away, scything back through the air that the Wasps had taken, impossible to take aim at this speed, but he saw at least one Spearflight clipped by his shot, rattled, if not brought down.

  Franticze’s Tserinet leapt up past him, absurdly close. There were Wasps on her tail, but her squat and ugly-looking flier moved through the air like a hunting insect, as though the woman’s sheer murderous passion could override aerodynamics. He saw another Spearflight take the full brunt of her rotaries from below, knocked from the sky just soon enough for Franticze to skip through the space it had been occupying.

  He flashed the code for Retreat!, without knowing who might be able to see it. He had spotted Spearflights breaking off from the pack, and there could only be one destination for them.

  The Sweet Fire would be out past the western wall already, and a cargo fixed-wing could give a combat orthopter a run for its money on the straight, but there were already Imperial fliers harrying its escape, not an organized assault but – just as Edmon’s sally had been – a pack of individual pilots who had spotted the opportunity. Edmon sent the Pacemark back after them, not even knowing if he could catch up.

  Had the Sweet Fire’s pilot taken a straight line then he and his pursuers would be out of Edmon’s reach, but the man was unused to other pilots trying to kill him, and was twisting left and right to try and evade pursuit, giving the Spearflights the chance to outstrip him and come at him from the front and both sides.

  Edmon had no idea how many Spearflights were in his own personal retinu
e, or whether any of his fellows had broken off with him. The Mynan pilots who had gone with the Sweet Fire were taking the enemy away in ones and twos, duelling savagely in the air, with no quarter given, airman against airman to the death.

  Edmon felt some shocks against his hull, but only a handful – once again he had avoided the full force of some enemy’s hail of bolts, but for how much longer? If he turned to shake the pursuer off, then he would not be able to help Kymene.

  He screamed again as he dived on the Wasps circling the Sweet Fire, trigger down and rotaries blazing. Most of them saw him coming, scattering before him, which bought more time for the fixed-wing than if he had actually taken one down. He kept to no sane line, made no plans, simply slinging the Pacemark around so sharply that he felt the wires of the wings strain to breaking point. Stray shots were still finding him, but he was making no serious attempt to attack, merely shooting blind and diving again and again, looping the Sweet Fire like an erratic satellite and throwing the Wasps off at every turn. His weapons ran out of ammunition on the third pass, but that no longer seemed to matter. He did not let it dictate his tactics.

  Then one of the enemy had his line at last, and the impact almost took him down on its own, skewing his flight so that he was side-on to the ground, then falling upside down before he could complete the roll and get his craft under control again. The Spearflight was well and truly with him, though, and now the Pacemark was not handling at all well, abruptly incapable of the aerobatics that had saved it until now.

  He tried to find a Wasp to ram, but the sky seemed mockingly clear of them, save for the pilot diligently trying to kill him.

  A moment later he realized that this meant he had won. There was him, and the Sweet Fire, and the lone Spearflight that had not been stripped from the pursuit by his distractions or by the actions of other pilots.

  He was just deciding that this represented a satisfactory end to his life, when Franticze came from out of the sun and chewed the tail off his enemy, sending the Spearflight tumbling away. The Bee then followed it down, trying to kill the pilot when he bailed out to trust his Art wings, but that was how deeply she hated the Wasps, and Edmon could hardly blame her just then.

  Sixteen

  Laszlo slipped into the backroom of the naval surgeon’s house, after leaving a bag of bread, dried fruit and a little jerky on the old Bee-kinden’s table – all that he had managed to scrape together in a day’s foraging. At first he had paid the man in silver, but the city had been locked in stalemate for five days now, with no traffic coming in by land or sea. Food was worth more than coin. The Spiders held the docks and those streets nearest the water. The Wasps held the high ground, the mansions of the wealthy. Both sides seemed to be waiting for the other to make a move.

  Lissart drew back as he entered, clutching the blanket close to her, on her face the same expression as every other time he had come in to see her, after she recovered consciousness. It was the tense, desperate look of a woman under a death sentence.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said weakly. His day had been sufficiently frustrating, scuffling and shoving and stealing to put bread on the table. He didn’t need this. ‘You’re looking stronger.’

  Again that flinch, and he saw guilt there. He supposed she was probably looking at matters in a saner and more logical way than he was. He had left her alone so far, so as not to put more strain on her wound, which the surgeon had confirmed had come close to killing her. The old man knew his trade, though, and, even if she would not be running or flying anywhere in the immediate future, she was at least on the right side of the grave.

  ‘Let’s talk,’ he said, and that was something more like she was expecting.

  She almost relaxed at the prospect of a good old interrogation. Probably she expected him to get his knife out, right about now.

  ‘Lissart, is it?’ he pressed.

  She nodded.

  ‘I’m Laszlo. Well, all right, you knew that, but I really am. I didn’t think I needed a joke name for this business. Nobody told me. Please smile at that. I’m not expecting a belly laugh, for obvious reasons.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Her voice was like a faint echo of the tones he remembered.

  ‘Good question. You work for the Empire?’

  ‘I think I’m freelance just now.’ The smile, when it came, was infinitesimal, but he returned it in strength.

  ‘I was for the Lowlands,’ he said. ‘Probably still am, assuming I can get out of this mess.’

  ‘What’s going on out there?’ She struggled to prop herself on her elbows.

  ‘Everyone’s waiting for the Spiders and the Empire to tear each other’s throats out, but nothing of the sort’s happening.’

  ‘The Solarnese aren’t fighting?’

  ‘Fighting which? If it’d been just the Empire, sure, but with the Spider navy clogging the bay, and Satrapy soldiers on every street corner from here to the Venodor? Oh, a bunch of Solarnese pilots had a crack at the airships, but they weren’t working together, and the Empire shot them down, after a bit of a dance. The Cortas seem paralysed. Nobody’s giving orders, and meanwhile the food supplies are running low because nobody in this city thought to lay in any surplus.’ He bared his teeth in frustration, and she shrank back. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

  ‘Why not?’ she asked flatly. ‘The hangar . . .’ She coughed, then hissed at the pain. ‘Hurt me. At least I’d know where we stand. I’m used to that.’

  Laszlo eyed her sadly for long enough that the haunted, hunted look came back to her features. ‘I killed Breighl,’ he said at last. ‘Didn’t want to, but I did.’ When she made no response he added, ‘I’m guessing you killed te Riel.’

  ‘Te Berro, his name was. He was ex-Imperial and he’d pretty much worked out who I was working for. He was going to stop me. He didn’t leave me much choice.’ Her tone was dull, and he wondered just how true that was. He hardly needed more evidence that Lissart was a very dangerous piece of work indeed.

  ‘And then we have the hangars,’ he continued. ‘And we’ll never know what might have happened if the Solarnese could have got those Firebugs into the air. I reckon the Imperial airships would have had a bad time of it certainly, maybe even the Spider ships as well.’

  He expected her to look away, but instead she met his eyes with a little of her old spirit returning. ‘Do you expect me to say I’m sorry?’

  He left that one to hang in the silence building between them, until she was moved to go on: ‘This is what I do, what I am. I’m a saboteur, a spy. I won’t claim it as a noble calling, but I do what I’m asked, for the craft of it. That’s something you never understood, though I’ll wager te Berro always did.’ Her words got fainter towards the end, as she had to pause to draw breath. ‘If I take back what I did at the hangars, I betray myself, and then what do I have left? But I’m sorry you were there and I’m sorry you . . . got hurt.’ That I burned you, hung on the air like smoke. ‘What are you going to do with me? Hand me over to your masters in Collegium?’

  Chance’d be a fine thing, right now, but he could not muster any vitriol. That spark, that defiance, there was the Liss he remembered from the Taverna te Remi.

  She was a killer, although that was probably the only commodity not in short supply in Solarno. Worse, he had the uneasy feeling that somewhere in her there was a beautiful and perfect little monster, a woman for whom the values of life and death were irrevocably skewed, or perhaps simply not given any reliable weight at all.

  He reached out to take her hand and, to his surprise she did not draw it back. Of course, she was no more capable of being disarmed than was a Wasp-kinden, and her hands thronged with deadly Art. Despite all that, despite her condition, despite everything that was going on outside, holding her hand right then seemed the best thing that had happened to him in several days.

  She was studying his face, and he wondered just what emotions he had allowed to roam over it, just then. ‘You utter fool,’ she said, but gently. ‘Is that it?
I tried to kill you.’

  He shrugged. ‘You said you were sorry. Besides, I’m a pirate. I’m used to that.’

  ‘A pirate?’ She did smile then. ‘Well then, what now, pirate? Steal me away on your sailing ship?’

  ‘I’m getting out of the city first chance,’ he told her. ‘Come with me – no obligations. Although if you promise not to try and kill me again that would be a good start.’

  ‘Go to your masters in the Lowlands?’

  ‘Just come with me.’ He squeezed her hand gently. ‘Please – or I won’t go at all.’

  ‘You are the emperor of the idiots,’ she whispered. ‘Let me take you away from all this? I never thought I’d fall for that one in a thousand years.’

  Two days later and there was still no sign of anyone being allowed to leave the city. Operating on his own, Laszlo was confident he could have evaded the Wasps’ sentries and flying patrols, trusting to his wings to get him out of the city and away. Of course, Liss would not be able to go with him and, besides, he was out here on the Exalsee, with a long and complicated road to follow back to Collegium.

  Then the great face-off between the Empire and the Spiderlands happened, which changed everything.

  He had been out on the streets that day, not so much seeking food as information, because the uneasy peace between the two occupying forces had been sustained beyond reason and he wanted to know what was going on. There had been a few skirmishes between Wasp Light Airborne and Spider soldiers, it was true, but far fewer than he would have expected, given the temper of the former and the pride of the latter. Instead, it seemed that the strongest orders from above were holding both in check.

  He made covert enquiries about the provenance of both forces but received no intelligence that he was happy with. The Wasps had brought in their Second Army, known as the Gears, which had previously rolled all the way to the gates of Collegium during the war. The Spider force was not such a united piece of business, of course, being a collusion of various different families, interests and mercenary units, but the name at its head was Aldanrael, the very family that had given Laszlo and Stenwold such a hard time not so long ago.