The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  If he had thought it would work, he would have cheered them to the echo, but he read nothing but greed in their proposition. Now, if we had some Bee-killer handy, that might be a different matter. That near-mythical weapon that had been deployed just the once in the last war was still a subject of heated conjecture. True, the only deaths it had caused had been the Empire’s own garrison at Szar, but for connoisseurs of destruction the results had been remarkable: the entire garrison, every living thing, wiped out in a night, without struggle. And it could so easily have been the Szaren. If we’re going to teach lessons, let us teach them all a lasting one.

  Roder knew that there were some, back in the capital, who believed such a weapon was going too far. He also knew that the star of such white-livered philosophers was on the wane. No weapon was too great, so sang the Engineering Corps, so long as it is in our hands. Roder agreed, being a modern kind of general.

  The path to Helleron had been prepared long ago by Consortium merchants and Rekef agents. Twelve of the Council of Thirteen had met Roder’s delegation willingly, happy to become a protectorate of the Empire and also a free city, as Roder understood Solarno had been declared, down south. Roder himself would rather have locked the entire pack of treacherous vermin up and packed them off to the mines at Shalk, but he had no authority to do so. The job of bringing the Helleren into the Empire’s fold had already been achieved, by pen and coin, long before he arrived. All he managed to do was extort some supplies from the city’s stores and provide some of his soldiers a night’s worth of entertainment, and even then they were kept on a short leash, allowed the bare minimum of violence and pillage, just enough to remind the Helleren of who was now in control. Everything, even the expected casualties of the night’s revelry, was set out in advance by the Consortium magnates in charge. With that sort of bureaucracy tying his hands, Roder was glad to be back on the road.

  Like Tynan’s Second, the Eighth was mechanized, supplies and siege equipment and much of its manpower being moved by automotives and by a flight of airships in this case as Sarn’s aerial capability was reckoned considerably less than Collegium’s. Scout orthopters kept an eye out, day and night, for a Sarnesh army either advancing cross-country or up the rails, but all suggestion was that the Ants had not calculated on the speed of the Imperial advance, and were only just on the point of setting out from their own gates by the time Roder was in sight of Malkan’s Stand.

  He knew how the Lowlanders named the place Malkan’s Folly, as a slap in the face of the Empire that was, he hoped, about to be redressed. The Ants had built their grandest fortress there, as impressive a defensive edifice as Roder had ever seen through a telescope, and he supposed that it said a great deal about the Sarnesh mindset – perhaps the mindset of all Ant-kinden everywhere.

  We could just go round it. A single fortress could not hope actually to hold up an army that was desperate to get to Sarn. All those solid walls would necessitate only a minor detour, Roder knew. However, the Sarnesh strategy was not quite so foolish. The point of the fortress at Malkan’s Stand was to be unassailable, so that the sizeable complement of troops within could use it as a sally-point to attack any enemy force that tried to pass them. If Roder pushed on to Sarn he would find himself engaged front and rear through that peerless ability of the Ants to bring all their forces to bear at the same time. So it was that the Ants would have their wish. He would have no choice but to bring down the walls of Malkan’s Stand before he marched on Sarn.

  He no longer had the Colonel-Auxillian and his protégé to call upon, the pair of them having been called off for some even more urgent business at the capital, but Colonel Ferric was more than competent enough to manage the machines that they had left, and there was already a plan in place for this stage of the war.

  Malkan’s Stand was certainly a formidable prospect, he decided, passing the lens of his glass over the walls. The place bristled with artillery, and all of it ready manned, since the Sarnesh could hardly fail to notice their approach. He wondered what word they had received from the Three-city refugees. He had been informed that a reasonably sized force of Alliance soldiers had already passed this way heading for sanctuary in Sarn, and there would have been civilians strung out all the way from here to Myna; the Slave Corps had taken up a fair few on the road. How well prepared are the Ants, then, eh?

  That artillery had sufficient elevation to out-range anything that General Malkan’s own Seventh Army might have brought to the original battle fought on this ground. Any attempt to bring such engines to bear on the fortress walls would be doomed, the machines smashed to pieces before they could ever launch their first missile.

  General Malkan had not possessed Drephos’s greatshotters, of course. Nor did he have the improved stone-eater acids, the rock-breaker explosives, the pinpoint accuracy of the ratiocinators that could deliver alternating rounds of each to the same precise point over and over for as long as it took.

  ‘Colonel?’ he grunted.

  ‘Range is extreme, but viable,’ Ferric reported. Behind him the construction of the greatshotters was proceeding swiftly, the cities of the Alliance having granted the artificers sufficient practice. ‘We can expect them to make a sortie, I would imagine, once they realize what we’re doing, sir.’

  ‘We’re ready for them,’ Roder murmured, lowering the telescope at last. The rank and file of the Eighth were already throwing up earthworks, forming their own makeshift fortress to slow any Sarnesh attack enough so that the massed snapbows could have their way with as many Ants as the enemy chose to send out. Conventional artillery, such as leadshotters, were being emplaced to take on automotives, and the Spearflight wings were ready to fly, either to take on Sarnesh air power or to bomb the fortress itself.

  ‘The Sarnesh say this hill of theirs is unbreakable, Colonel,’ Roder observed.

  ‘Perhaps they haven’t checked what the word means, sir.’ Around them, the spirits of the Eighth were high, despite all the digging that needed doing. ‘The Empress’s words have arrived, sir,’ Ferric added. ‘I’ve readied the . . . similophone.’ Even the engineer stumbled slightly over the unfamiliar word. ‘The actual words of the Empress on a strip of tape, imagine it, sir.’

  Roder was not a man who encouraged familiarity in his subordinates, but he and Ferric shared a look almost of complicity, two men who were bringing about a glorious future.

  The airfield that the Farsphex pilots used was no real secret any more. A score of fixed-wings taking off, one after another, and people were bound to talk. Besides, the time for hiding was past. Everyone involved in this project wanted the Empire to know of their contribution to the war.

  They coasted in one evening, taking turns in circling the field and touching down as well as they could, a little roughly in most cases. They were returning from a very long round trip.

  For a moment they sat strewn, a little haphazardly, about the field, barely enough room for them all. Pingge herself crouched in the hold of Scain’s flier, still chained to it and feeling almost unused to being back on the ground. They had spent almost three days in the air with a pitched battle at the far end. She had never imagined such a thing, and that particular capability of the Farsphex had been so very secret that nobody had thought to forewarn the Fly-kinden bombardiers. How was it done? Even with her artificer’s training, she could hardly guess. The Engineering Corps had hit on something almost magical, beyond belief.

  The mission itself had provided a variety of unpleasantnesses. The food had been meagre, and relieving herself out into the high, chill air had been particularly unpleasant – the only time she had appreciated being chained to the insides of the machine. Mostly the journeying part had been dull, though, enough for her to get Scain talking eventually, parcelling out small parts of his earlier life, all of which suggested that nobody in their right mind would have imagined him as a pilot until he had abruptly been snatched up for the Farsphex training. She had tried to probe that further, and it was plain he knew exactly wh
y he had been chosen, but apparently that was just another secret that Fly-kinden were not fit to know.

  After bringing their craft down into a somewhat shaky landing Scain had just sat there for some time, silent. He looked tired enough to be ill, and she knew that he had been chewing some concoction of the Engineers, just to keep himself going. She, at least, had somehow managed to snatch a little sleep in the air, the cold and the hunger and the drone of the engines eventually becoming as monotonous as a lullaby.

  ‘Sir?’ she asked, after a couple of wordless minutes. ‘We getting out now, or are we about to head off again?’

  Scain seemed to have forgotten that she was there. He started from his reverie, and reached out to unlock her chain, stretching a long, thin arm into her compartment to free her. ‘Assemble outside with the others,’ he told her. ‘Someone wants to meet us.’

  She could not wait to get out of the machine’s interior, which seemed to hold far too many memories just then. If the travelling had been dull, their brief time over Collegium had been all too bloody interesting. People had been shooting at them. It had been frustrating too – getting the reticule on target, ready to drop her next package, and then Scain would go chasing off across the sky while piercer bolts sang and danced in the air around them. It was a wonder that anyone could hit anything at all. She understood, in theory, that some manner of airborne resistance might have been predicted, and that the Beetle-kinden weren’t just going to stand around gaping up with their mouths open but, until the Farsphex had broken formation to evade the incoming enemy, she had not quite made the logical connection.

  She had been terrified then. In that moment she had wanted more than anything to be back on the factory line gossiping with Kiin, or back with her family, anything.

  But her training had smoothed over that, and soon she had been snatching her opportunities, lining the reticule up faster than she had ever done in practice, getting the bombs away during the brief moments of level flight that Scain allowed her. After that had come the unexpected: she had found within herself what she had always thought the Wasp soldiers must feel all the time: hate, exhilaration, driving determination to win. And if winning meant killing the enemy and destroying their cities, well, then that was war. This fierce little fire in her had ignited after she realized that the enemy, after all, were trying to kill her. The understanding had seemed to remove some blindfold that had been before her eyes every day until that moment.

  Now she went over and joined Gizmer, and a few other early escapees. They made a sloppy, weary job of parade-ground order, but were too tired to care. The Wasps were coming out, too, all of them looking as ragged as Scain. Then they were straightening up, every man of them, because they had visitors.

  Pingge knew the man in the lead at once now: the bearded, slightly unkempt figure of Colonel Varsec was unmistakable. He was the father of Imperial war aviation, she knew, which made everyone assembled there his children. Behind him came an older officer, another colonel of Engineers, grey-haired and solid and scorched red by a fiercer sun than Capitas normally saw.

  Varsec was casting an eye over the untidy clutter of flying machines, and Pingge realized he was counting. At the last a delighted smile spread over his face.

  ‘All back,’ he said, just loud enough for Pingge to catch. ‘Captain Aarmon?’

  ‘Here, sir.’ The pale, bald flying officer stalked over.

  ‘You reached Collegium?’

  ‘The mission went ahead as planned, sir. Some success against the airfields, but more against the factories.’

  ‘Resistance?’

  ‘Strong, sir.’

  ‘But you brought everyone back.’ Varsec was grinning, maybe a little too broadly. ‘They’ll be onto us eventually. As soon as we lose a Farsphex over Collegium they’ll be all over the wreckage. They’re no fools, the Beetle-kinden, but the longer we can baffle them, the better. Angved, look at them. They’ve been all the way to Collegium, and fought when they were there, and brought everyone back without casualties. Nobody’s done it before, nobody! You see what we’ve managed, together?’

  The other officer nodded, more soberly.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, one casualty,’ Aarmon declared flatly.

  The weary crews of the Farsphex were still exiting their craft, dragging their feet over to join the ranks. Pingge was suddenly looking around. Where was Kiin? Was she . . . ? But no, there she was, chivvying the last straggling Fly-kinden into place, barely a glance to spare for her old friend Pingge. But, then, who . . . ?

  They were a Fly-kinden short, she realized, and she was partway through her frantic process of elimination when two of the Wasps brought out the body.

  The woman’s name had been Forra, and Pingge had not known her particularly well, but they had all formed a kind of family, after so long training together. Her uniform was torn and crusted with dried blood, her body small and stiff in the Wasps’ hands. They handled her with care, though, Pingge noted. They bore her from the hold of her vessel as though she was one of their own.

  ‘Ludon’s flier got raked from below,’ Aarmon reported dispassionately. ‘Cut apart the bomb bay, destroyed the reticule and killed Bombardier Forra.’

  Pingge felt a peculiar shiver go through her. That could have been me. That could have been any of us.

  Varsec nodded, but Pingge could see that he could not quite make himself care. The success of the project was all to him, just as she had met plenty of factory overseers who only had eyes for quotas and not for working conditions. The real sympathy, the solemn solidarity, came from Aarmon and the other pilots. One of us, they seemed to say.

  Malkan’s Folly was built of sterner stuff than the walls of Myna: close-cut stone over a mortar core intended to absorb the shock of artillery, earthen banks to protect the foundations, walls angled to allow shot to glance off it. Every trick of the modern war architect had been deployed to allow an attacking force to break against the fortress, to allow any besiegers to be hammered down by the Folly’s own leadshotters and catapults. None of those architects had envisaged a siege where the enemy were far enough away to remain out of range of any reprisals, and where those same distant siege engines could boom and thunder day and night, regular and precise as a clock, as they lobbed chemicals and explosives at ever-weakening stone.

  Within five days the first outer shell of the fortress had cracked and fallen inwards, but the Ants had used the same construction throughout, a honeycomb of small chambers within massive-stoned interlocking walls, and the defenders simply retreated to the next level immediately around the breach, ready at their arrowslits and murder-holes for the direct attack that they were sure would come. The greatshotters did not care but, with marginal adjustments, continued their remorseless pounding.

  Around that time, the Sarnesh expeditionary force arrived, later than they might have done because Roder had sent flying saboteurs to destroy the rails that could have rushed a relief force to the fortress’s aid. By that time, the Eighth Army was well and truly entrenched.

  Seeing the inroads the greatshotters had made, the Sarnesh lost no time in mounting an assault, with troops from the fortress itself sallying forth to assist. There was a lot of open ground to cover to reach the Imperial lines, however – the same open ground that the fortress had counted on to make any attackers’ lives difficult. The regular artillery that Roder had brought up, his own leadshotters and ballistae, sent down a withering barrage of canister and shot and explosive bolts, whilst ranks of snap-bowmen waited behind earthworks for the Sarnesh to come closer.

  All the while, the greatshotters continued their determined work.

  The Sarnesh had brought a flight of orthopters, old Collegium designs and the products of the Ants’ own artificers, workmanlike but unimaginative vessels, mostly still equipped with the repeating ballistae of yesterday’s air forces. The Spearflights outnumbered them more than two to one, but the first day of aerial duelling was not won easily nonetheless, the Ant pilots selling each br
oken machine dearly, taking a toll on the enemy despite the shortcomings of their technology. At the same time the Sarnesh ground forces advanced the long march towards the Imperial lines, rank upon rank of armoured Ant-kinden armed with shield, sword and snapbow, backed by the trundling of tracked automotives.

  The traditional Imperial response should have been to send the Light Airborne out en masse, coursing over the marching formations to lash down on them with their stings – tactics that had failed miserably in living memory. Instead, Roder held the bulk of his force in place, taking full advantage of the cover they had built up.

  The automotives formed the initial point of their charge, grinding forwards at the pace of a man running. They met the Imperial Sentinels coming the other way. The articulated machines fairly vaulted the Wasp earthworks, rushing the Ant lines with bolts and light artillery bounding from their shells, only pausing with legs braced to loose a leadshotter round that ploughed through the Ant soldiers or punched into the armour of a Sarnesh automotive. Faster and more agile and vastly better armoured, as the battle progressed they hunted down the Sarnesh machines mercilessly, crushing any soldier luckless enough to get in their way.

  When the Ants got within snapbow range they mounted their charge, breaking their solid formations into a scattered skirmish line to best avoid the incoming bolts. It was at that moment that they came closest to winning, had they only known.

  The snapbows and the leadshotters tore into them, scattered or not. The Ants were still trusting to their heavy armour that would carry the day if they could only get into the close combat that they were so skilled at, but it weighed them down, and it did little to slow the incoming shot, despite the silk and felt they had lined it with.