The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  They were waiting for him to step deeper into the room, which would leave the Empress and her guards in the doorway, barring his retreat. It seemed to him, though, that he had already taken too many steps just by coming here. A few more would make no difference.

  He went in.

  ‘Ostrec, what has your life been to date?’ the Empress’s soft voice asked him, from over his shoulder. ‘Have you found the world empty, unfulfilling. Have you drunk your fill of rank and ambition, and yet remained thirsty? Have you always known that there was more to life, lurking at the edge of vision, in the shadows, on the far side of the mirror?’

  And the answer was ‘no’, of course, as far as the real Ostrec’s memories went, but if he had possessed some atavistic spark of the old ways, then no doubt all that would have been true. Esmail studied the men around him, and in those Wasps, yes, perhaps there was some taint, some residual sense of discontinuity that hinted at an unsettled heritage. It was pitifully little, but then the Wasps had been an Apt kinden for generation on generation, so it was surprising that even these dregs were left.

  He realized that he had nodded, at Seda’s words, and there was a scuffle from behind him. He turned quickly, stepping away from the doorway, ending up almost shoulder to shoulder with the slaver. A newcomer had arrived, but not willingly, for two of the Mantis-kinden were manhandling him, his arms bound behind his back. He was a middle-aged Wasp, and Esmail picked out his face from Ostrec’s memories, identifying him as a Consortium man in Brugan’s pay, just a little cog in the Rekef general’s army of informants.

  ‘Ostrec!’ the man shouted. ‘Help me!’

  Esmail glanced at the Empress, whom he realized was observing him closely.

  ‘I will open the doors of your world.’ Her voice was gentle, yet the shouting of the bound man could not eclipse it. ‘Only follow your instincts, and I will show you what the absence is that has gnawed at your life. I will fill you.’

  Could I have killed her in the museum before? He wondered if she had given him the chance to fulfil his mission as they passed through the galleries: to cut her down and then flee her guards, all the way back to the phalanstery near Tharn. I could even strike now. A moment is all I need, and they are not ready for it. I would die, but perhaps the death of the Empress is worth one killer’s blood.

  But they were empty thoughts, because she had already reached him in the way that she intended. Esmail the spy was as caught up in her as she had meant Ostrec to be, for different reasons. What could she not do, this woman? A Magician-Empress seeking to transform the world.

  The bound man had been forced to his knees in the very shadow of the Mantis icon, and it required no special intuition to see what must now be done. Esmail extended a hand, just as a Wasp should, reaching for Ostrec’s Art. To mimic Art was hard, a real test of a spy’s skill, and he would not have wanted to try this against a moving target, but the Mantis-kinden were holding their victim very still, with so little apparent effort.

  At the last moment he stopped himself, knowing it was wrong. Not mercy, not morality, but wrong by the rules that Seda was playing with. No cauterizing fire here. She wanted blood.

  When he held his hand out for the knife, he sensed a change in them all, a measure of acceptance not present a moment before. Only then did he realize that he had passed a test – one he had been on the very brink of failing merely by playing his stolen role too well.

  The eyes of his victim beseeched him, and he watched the man’s mouth open and shut, calling his borrowed name. One of the Mantids dragged back on the prisoner’s head by the hair, baring his throat for Esmail’s blade.

  A moment’s hesitation would pass muster, for Ostrec the quartermaster was not a habitual killer, and Ostrec the Rekef man was still supposed to be a secret. In himself, Esmail found he cared little enough about one more dead Wasp, but a sacrifice in this place, in this company, would unleash a power that he had no say over. He would be doing her will, feeding her fire.

  He made it quick, professional – and to the pits with what Ostrec would have done. One of the Mantids caught the first of the blood in a chalice as it spilled. The rest was allowed to run over the floor. He could not help but notice that the stone seemed to suck it up, unnatural and greedy. The reek of blood in the air was sharp as spices, and he felt dizzy and nauseous with it. He could feel the rotten wood of the idol sating its thirst.

  The chalice was pressed into his hands, and he now understood. He was a spy, not some great magician. His talents were great within his own narrow field, but this was beyond him. He had not seen the trap until its jaws began closing on him.

  ‘Drink, and be one of my chosen,’ Seda told him. ‘Cast off all other loyalties; be bound to me, and become greater than you were. Drink.’

  And they were not empty words. Symbols had power. As a man talented in all manner of evasion and misdirection, he might be able to sidestep the worst, but there would be hooks in him, once he drank. What he yielded to the Empress here could never be fully regained. She would have a hold on him. In some sense, no matter the distance, no matter how he twisted and turned, he would remain hers.

  He could refuse, and they would ensure that his blood would be the next offered to the idol. Would such a death be preferably to a life ensnared by this hybrid blood-and-shadow magic that the Empress was building?

  But something twisted in him: Did we not want this? Would the Moths not do this if they could? This is power! Here in the heart of Capitas, in the Empire of the Apt, this is power. If there was ever to be some rebirth of the old days, how else but this way? He looked at the Empress, and saw that she was young and beautiful and strong and bold. Why not her? Where are my loyalties now?

  He drank, and could only trust to his own skills to keep him free – of Seda and the Moths both. The blood was bitter and fierce. It tasted of power.

  Twenty-Three

  The second air attack on Collegium inflicted considerably more damage than the first. Logistics – which the Beetles had always counted themselves so skilled at – had failed them utterly. There were simply too many jobs to be done, too few pilots to do them.

  It had become plain to all that the Wasps had somehow established an airfield within striking distance of the city. Even with the advantage of fixing their wings for additional range, they must still be within a certain radius of Collegium’s walls. Whilst the aviation faculty met to draw circles on maps and argue about flight times, Taki and the other pilots were set to searching an ever-increasing span of countryside. It was bare, sparse terrain, and what cover there was consisted of canyons, sunken streambeds, small stands of stubborn trees, nowhere to hide a field of orthopters or all the necessary clutter for keeping them in the air. And yet they found nothing.

  At the same time, everyone knew the Imperial machines would be back tomorrow, the next day. The city held its breath, and kept holding it. The same logic that had surmised the hidden airfield knew without doubt those concealed fliers could take wing and attack the city within hours of landing and refuelling. While the Collegium aviators flew over the barren countryside, they also left people on standby at the city airfields, ready to leap to Collegium’s defence. At the same time, they were frantically training up the most promising of the student pilots, and they were in turn training the less gifted ones, whilst anyone who applied to the faculty was added to a list for beginner’s lessons, and the machine shops kept turning out the thousand pieces that made up a Stormreader, fitting them together with a desperate balance of speed and care.

  After five days of this without an enemy flier to be seen, the entire system began to become unstuck. The certainty of immediate attack had driven everyone, planners and pilots alike, to ignore human frailties. Aviators remained in the air for hours, then back to rewind their engines for immediate take-off. Nobody was getting much sleep, either pilots or ground crew. There were accidents in the hangars, arguments, fights. One Mynan airman landed while asleep at the controls, nosing his craft into a
grounded vessel hard enough to take both orthopters out of the fight. A young Beetle pilot was less lucky. His crashed Stormreader was found by some of the other airfield-hunters, reduced to a folded, splintered wreck where he had rammed it into a hill. There was much excitement, and the searchers redoubled their efforts, in the belief that he had been shot down, which only worsened the underlying problem of fatigue that had done for their fallen comrade.

  On the seventh day the Imperials came back and nobody was ready for them. The majority of the Collegium pilots were on the ground by then, and most of them asleep. A mere skeleton flight of a half-dozen machines was actually in the air when a fresh score of enemy were spotted coursing towards the city at top speed.

  Taki was shocked into sudden fighting wakefulness by a College functionary standing in the dormitory doorway and ringing a heavy bell over and over, just as though they were all late for class. She tried to kick into the air by instinct, became fouled in her blanket and crashed to the floor. From all around there were demands to know what was going on, loud enough to quite eclipse the answer.

  Some of them heard, though. She saw young Pendry Goswell’s face turn abruptly ashen, then she was pushing past the bell-ringer, rushing from the room. Franticze, the Mynan’s Bee-kinden fanatic, was hot on her heels. Then the warning got through to everyone else at once, and they were all pushing for the door. Taki unlatched one of the high windows, bolting out into the open, her wings slinging her towards the neighbouring airfield, hoping that the news had reached the ground crews, and that they were already wheeling the Stormreaders out for take-off.

  As she landed, dropping untidily into the open cockpit of the Esca Magni, she looked up and the sight was terrible, already advanced far beyond her fears. There was smoke rising, at least three separate columns of it, and that wheeling, glittering gnat spinning from the sky was surely a damaged Stormreader plummeting to earth. Over the centre of the city a vast airship, a big merchantman freighting supplies in from the Ant cities to the west, was beginning to fall, its airbag ripped open by persistent rotary volleys, a graceful tumble ever accelerating as it vented its gas, the earth reaching for it. It looked as though the doomed vessel would come down somewhere near the Amphiophos.

  All around Taki there were pilots stumbling and struggling for their seats, the mechanics throwing themselves clear as the wings were freed to start beating. She dragged her cockpit closed and unleashed the engine, the New Clockwork spring instantly placing all of its power at her fingertips, so that the first tremendous clap of the Esca’s wings got her clear of the ground, then she was arrowing away, circling upwards, clawing for height.

  She spotted the first neat formation of the enemy, a dozen of their Farsphex cutting a lean curve away from a boiling cloud of smoke, obviously intending to arc back again as tightly as possible and continue work. Twelve to one were not the best odds, but Taki was already committing herself, trusting that her skill would have found refuge in some part of her mind that was not ragged with sleep deprivation.

  Before she got in range of them, she was no longer alone. To one side she recognized Franticze, because the mad Bee flew with a fierce attacking fury like nobody else, disdaining all suggestion of formation or order. The Collegiate Stormreader on Taki’s left was probably Elser Hardwick, a middle-aged clockwork-maker who had shown a surprising aptitude for flight; and beyond and behind her was surely Taxus, the Tarkesh halfbreed and supposed renegade. Taki was less happy about that, as she had deliberately been keeping the man off any important duties because she didn’t entirely trust him. But that meant he was far more fit for active duty than anyone else, and it seemed he had decided to prove himself, whether she wanted him to or not.

  All this passed through her mind, in the few fleeting seconds before her rotary piercers opened up. The Imperials had already spotted them – they were seemingly impossible to surprise – and their precise formation broke and parted, individual Farsphex seeming to dart off to solitary freedom before all coming back together, aiming to combine again against the attacking Collegiate craft.

  The Wasps were less successful this time, but the reason was hardly to the defenders’ credit. A simple failure of cohesion proved to be the Stormreaders’ greatest asset. Taki and Hardwick followed the pattern they had drilled with, picking out one enemy and following, with Hardwick hanging back a little to watch for the return of the other Farsphex. Franticze, however, had ideas of her own: bolting through the expanding ring of enemy across the city, skimming the rooftops and off after some other target altogether. Taxus, meanwhile, very nearly got himself shot down by Taki herself, throwing his vessel in front of her, within a hand’s span of fouling her attack run. She was close enough to catch a glimpse of the halfbreed gesticulating at her angrily as though she was the one doing it wrong.

  Her piercers hammered, the stick juddering in her hands with the transmitted force of it. The Farsphex under her sights twisted and turned, shrugging off the shot, odd sparks and flashes showing where she had hit. She was almost there, though. She had the sense again, and very strongly, that the enemy were simply not quite so skilled as pilots, that their larger machines were less nimble in the air. This should not be so difficult . . .

  She caught a flash of light in the corner of her eye: Hardwick signalling frantically. The others were on her already. A moment later the Beetle pilot peeled off to engage, her weapons glittering the air with bolts.

  Just a second more . . . but the Farsphex she was trying to bring down was throwing itself all over the sky, the pilot seeming to have eyes in the back of his head as she tried to predict him, to trick him into cutting across the stream of her bolts. The first enemy shot holed her wing, another striking the engine casing, making her Esca shudder. She had already lost sight of Hardwick.

  Taxus came back then, trying to draw the enemy away from her, his status as ally changing instantly from dubious to invaluable. Her own target was flying low, almost below the rooftops, taking a straight line down the Pathian Way at an unwise speed, heading straight for the . . .

  Refining vats.

  The Farsphex had fixed its wings, less agile but faster, outpacing her, and the shots from the however-many enemy still on her were starting to fall like sleet all around her. This single-minded pursuit was making her a target in turn. To her left, two craft spiralled away: Taxus forcing a Wasp from the pack by physically blocking him, matching the Imperial’s twists and turns, neither of them getting a shot in. In that glimpse she saw more fliers coming in, without any notion of whose they were.

  She had the triggers down still, at an unconscionable cost of ammunition, but she had only this chance to bring the enemy down. She almost felt, rather than saw, her shots impact about the enemy tail, tattering and shredding it, but all without denting the Farsphex’s handling. A bolt impacted somewhere behind her, piercing the Esca’s casing, canting her entire world to the left as something gave way in one wing.

  Too late, too late.

  She actually saw the bombs fall, and then her world was smoke and flame, the fuel vats going up like bonfires, gouting thirty feet up as she frantically clawed for height, praying that the silk of her wings would not catch, because that would—

  And then she was amongst the enemy. Gaining height had lost her forward momentum, and the Farsphex were all about her without warning, one pulling sharply right to avoid a collision. She had a view of the gaping hatch in its underbelly – was that someone she saw there, crouching at a machine and staring back? Then she had fought her way high enough to find herself in the thick of it.

  The Farsphex had regrouped, at least a score of them, and she counted fewer Collegiate pilots than that. The city was pillared with smoke, and she had the sense that the Imperials had already accomplished most of what they had come for.

  Again Taxus almost clipped her nose and, though she swore at him, she realized that he somehow thought she would follow him, as though he had signalled her beforehand and she had not noticed, save that he was
the slowest heliograph student she had ever seen.

  Hold on—

  Then she had it – rejoining the pack was a Farsphex that limped a little in the air, a touch blackened and handling badly. That’s mine. The part of her mind that made such calculations effortlessly told her that its approach was perfect to make it the same bomber that she had lost sight of amidst the smoke. A bloodymindedness came to her, familiar from the old days over Solarno.

  You, you bastard, are going down.

  She flashed frantically, the brief pattern for My target! over and over, hoping that someone was watching and able to follow her lead. Then she was committing herself to a long, shallow dive towards the wounded craft.

  It saw her far too soon, and abruptly its wheeling formation was adjusting to take her into account, along with the various Stormreaders that were trying their luck, as detachments of Wasp pilots began changing course to cover each other, opening the jaws of a trap that would snap down exactly where she was headed, while her target sought safety beyond.

  She asked the Esca for all the speed it could give her, unleashing everything the spring had left, exploiting a design flaw and abusing its engine mercilessly, picking up speed as the entire craft whined and screeched all around her. At the same time, a flurry of Stormreader pilots threw themselves against the Farsphex formation from above and to her right, with Edmon at their head, forcing the enemy to regroup in order to ward them off. Taki bared her teeth: the Collegiate orthopter to Edmon’s left had been cut from the air almost instantly, wings freezing to drop it down onto the city. Then she was blurring through the centre of the enemy, too fast for them to catch her, although bolts pattered across the Esca’s fuselage, and the unhappy buzz of her right wing was abruptly more pronounced, sounding as if something was working its way loose.