The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  He shrugged, although inwardly he was surprised and then annoyed at letting anything these Spiders did surprise him. ‘I’ve seen less friction than I’d expected.’ He found a camp stool placed neatly beside him, standard army issue, and lowered himself into it, accepting a glass of what turned out to be Imperial brandy.

  ‘It’s in my camp, mostly, the discontent,’ she admitted. ‘The mercenaries get paid more for fighting, so they want to start besieging Collegium yesterday, and even our regular soldiers are . . . impatient. Jadis and Morkaris are keeping discipline, but perhaps your scouts have some news that might settle matters a little.’

  He gave her an amused look. ‘And yours?’

  She matched his expression. ‘Very well, then. As we skirt the Felyal, it looks increasingly as though there’s a fair-sized body of people moving ahead of us – soldiers, not refugees. Much sign of Mantis-kinden, by my trackers’ expert opinion, but others as well in fair numbers, certainly hundreds. If they were simply going to join up with the Collegiates, they’d have outpaced us easily, but they’re hanging about ahead of our advance, and some of my scouts haven’t come back. Some of yours, too, I’d wager? And one of your little airships is late as well, unless you sent it somewhere especially far.’

  He nodded grudgingly. ‘You’re right, of course. Always the bloody Felyal. You weren’t here to see the bloodshed last time. You’d think they’d take a hint. But you’re correct: it’s not just Mantids either. Cherten reckons it’s an advance force from the city come to take a poke at us, while they’ve got the trees to operate from.’

  ‘My intelligence suggests it’s unlikely to be directly from Collegium. But what’s your plan?’

  ‘Depends how much history repeats itself. So far we’ve been moving past the Felyal that I burned the last time, but shortly we’ll be at the green. If there’s going to be trouble, it’ll be then, and at night most likely. Or it could be tonight, for that matter, or it might just as easily have been yesterday. Hence our walls and towers and caution – and your friction. My bet is that your mercenaries get to earn their blood money before a tenday’s out, though. And if we can break the back of the locals, then we can pick up speed again.’

  ‘You’ve thought this out, obviously.’

  He suspected that she was flattering him rather than being overly sincere, but he could not quite suppress a smile. ‘They call my Second Army the Gears, Mycella. We don’t stop grinding until there’s nothing left but pieces. In order to maintain that reputation, in order to make sure nothing does stop us, you have no idea of the amount of forward planning I have to do.’

  ‘Just you? No council of tacticians?’

  ‘Some day I’ll get it wrong, and they’ll bury me and find another name for my army,’ he replied flatly.

  ‘You’re grim all of a sudden.’

  He felt a jab of annoyance that this smooth, elegant woman should presume to know him – but reminded himself that he had spent quite a few nights sharing a bottle of one thing or another with his co-commander. It was not that he disdained the company of his officers, but they all had their own jobs to do, and she was right – he had nobody to share responsibility with. An army needed a single mind to direct it, and growing too familiar with his subordinates, even Mittoc and Cherten, would take the edge of his orders. Mycella represented a rare opportunity to talk matters over with someone outside his chain of command.

  She’s up to something. She’s using her Art on me, manipulating me somehow. Yet he did not feel manipulated, and he found himself fascinated not by her appearance or her charms, but by the odd glimpse of weakness that she let him see, quite calculatedly: her fear of time, or the past failures that had put her where she was – a battlefield general’s role viewed as a spider punishment rather than a Wasp reward.

  And she was beautiful, it was true, and all the more so because she was plainly not making the effort she could have done. She faced him instead as soldier to soldier.

  This is going to turn out very badly, he knew, and he was too old to play that sort of fool. He should, he was well aware, restrict his meetings with her to daylight business: brief, curt discussions over the running of the army. Maybe tomorrow I’ll do that.

  He was gazing at her, he knew – or almost through her, at the warring ghost of his own mind. He brought his eyes back into focus quickly, expecting to find her eyeing him with a touch of mockery, but she was not looking at him at all, just peering into the growing shadows of her tent, weighing her glass in her hand.

  The attack, when it came, justified Tynan’s caution. The first Laszlo knew of it was a confused shouting coming from outside, which could have been just about anything. Despite all that the commanders of the Grand Army did to enforce discipline, Spider and Wasp ethics did not rub along easily. Most especially the Wasps had certain views on women, and many of the Spiders, in all fairness, had equally derogatory opinions about men. There had been brawls, rapes, revenge killings, and the wonder of it was that these incidents were isolated and ruthlessly investigated, rather than becoming so widespread as to swallow the entire camp. Imperial discipline and the Spider officers’ strength of personality held the entire complex organism together, and pointed in the right direction.

  For that reason Laszlo just lay awake listening to the commotion, trying to work out whether it was a diplomatic incident or just some internal Spider dispute. Then Lissart stirred beside him and he realized that the shouting seemed a little too widespread: he could hear voices deep into the camp.

  ‘Get up,’ he hissed.

  ‘Get dressed,’ Lissart urged him almost at the same moment.

  They stared at one another in the darkness, and then they were both scrambling for their clothes, Lissart hissing in pain, as she hunched over the healing scar of her wound.

  Laszlo was just pulling his boots on when the first explosion sounded, just a cracking sound, like wood snapping, but he recognized it at once as some sort of grenade.

  He buckled on his belt, feeling the comforting weight of his knife against his hip. A bow would have been grand, but his role as camp follower and freelance servant had not warranted it. Lissart, at least, was armed by default.

  ‘We go,’ he decided and she nodded with a single, determined jerk of her head. Then they were dropping out of the wagon, as the sleepers around them roused themselves or panicked or hid.

  There are thousands of soldiers here, Laszlo was thinking. You’d be mad to attack an army like this. What can they hope to gain? It was a rhetorical question, though, for so long as the attackers gained him and Lissart a moment’s breathing space to get out of the camp, he could ask for no more.

  General Tynan woke instantly as the first alarms were called. Some part of him had been waiting for this for a tenday or more, sleeping lightly in the absolute certain expectation that just this would happen. The Mantis-kinden are here at last. What kept them?

  There was a plan, of course, and he had made sure that the duty sergeants and lieutenants knew what to do. At this moment his sentries and night watch would be doing everything they could to contain and assess the attack: numbers, direction, intention. They would be fighting for a breathing space in which to take control, just as they had back in the first war. Many of them would even be veterans of that same battle, where the invincible Mantids of the Felyal were taught about the sharp end of progress.

  It came as no surprise that a kinden that had unchanged over five hundred years would not have learnt from that defeat either.

  He dragged on a banded cuirass, standard Airborne issue, and snatched up his sword as he strode outside, even as the first officers arrived to report.

  ‘You,’ he snapped, picking a captain from the pack of messengers, trusting that senior rank equated to more critical news. Even as the man started to speak, though, there were Mantis-kinden amongst them, a handful of warriors just dropping from the sky and laying into whoever was closest. The captain was their first victim.

  Tynan had no time to be
startled by the attack, for there was a lean, savage-looking woman driving for him with a spear in the next moment, her fluid lunge little more than a suggestion of motion in the fickle lantern light. Long years of soldiering lent him enough instinct to save himself, anticipating her attack before he properly saw it, falling aside from the bright dart of the spearhead and lashing at the woman with his left-hand sting, staggering her. His right arm was already slamming forwards, and if he had been the young, strong major of fifteen years ago he would have killed her with the sword blow. As it was, he felt the blade grate off chitin armour, and she jumped back to get him again at her spear’s point, but another of his men blasted her from behind, the fire of his sting landing in the small of her back.

  By that time it was over: four Mantis corpses, half a dozen dead Wasps, but the sounds of fighting still came from all directions.

  ‘Get the towers lit, you idiots!’ Tynan shouted at his army in general, judging that the time for receiving reports was probably past. In that moment he heard the sharp retort of a grenade, and his mind flipped the scenario it had been devising, turning it on its head. Mantis-kinden were among the Inapt, grenades were not in their arsenal. Mycella said there were others. Mantis-kinden are insane, and they’d attack a thousand with a dozen, but why would anyone in their right mind go along with them for the ride? What are they after?

  ‘All of you!’ he snapped at the men still present. ‘Get men to defend the baggage train – the munitions, fuel stores, automotives, supplies. Go, go!’

  A runner came in, and nearly got himself killed by some of the more eager soldiers keen to guard their general now that he had no immediate need of them. Thankfully the long march with the Spider-kinden had given their allies just enough familiarity to slow the Wasps’ instinctive responses.

  ‘General, message from the Lady-Martial.’ The Spider was a lean, long-limbed youth, presumably picked for his running speed. ‘Large force of Mantis-kinden are in the north-camp.’ He was breathing heavily, forcing the words out.

  ‘Lieutenant!’ Tynan called, on the good officer’s principle that there was always a lieutenant within earshot. ‘Get me—’

  ‘General, no. We have them contained. I am to say that the flank is secure. My lady urges you to look to the east. Our spotters have seen other movement there.’

  East? That’s their quickest route to the supplies and vehicles. ‘Already being taken care of,’ Tynan told him. ‘What do you mean “contained”?’ Even as he asked it, one of the tower lamps flared up, casting a bright white glare across the camp, Tynan looked about for the other two towers, finding one standing but dark, the last one . . . He blinked, for the easternmost tower was down, somehow. The attack there must be fiercer than he had realized.

  ‘We know about fighting Mantis-kinden, general. We have numbers and we can see in the dark as well as they.’ The Spider messenger bowed. ‘I must rejoin my lady.’

  Tynan waved him away. ‘You heard him,’ he growled. ‘Get men over to the east. Form up and sweep the vermin out of camp – and take some prisoners.’

  ‘But, General, we’re to trust these Spiders to hold?’ one of his bolder officers demanded.

  ‘We’re marching to war alongside them, so we’ll have to lean on them eventually. Now’s better than before the Collegiate gates,’ Tynan snapped. ‘Now move!’

  How close did I just come to dying? a tiny voice said at the back of his mind, but he was a soldier and he fought it down.

  All around them, in the maze of alleys and pathways running between the tents of the Spider camp, the fighting twisted and turned. There seemed to be Mantis-kinden everywhere, singly or small packs of them, and wherever the attackers went they met the Spiders, sallying forth to defend their own. That the Mantids wanted nothing more than to shed the blood of their most hated enemies was abundantly clear. This was no line-against-line soldier’s engagement, but a mad whirling skirmish, hundreds of individual duels and brawls, small bands of Spiders against smaller number of Mantis-kinden, whilst the more heavily armoured mercenaries formed up into solid units that became reference points for the fluid, unpredictable conflict going on around them. The Mantis-kinden were the deadlier, practically berserk, swifter than sight and utterly intent on blood. The Spiders gave before them, surged in on flanks and from behind, feinted and feigned and lured them into ambushes. The toll on both sides was fearsome.

  Laszlo and Lissart dashed from shadow to shadow, tent to tent. The nearest edge of the camp was where the Mantis-kinden were coming from – so no escape to that quarter for certain. Instead they were forced further into the camp, looking for some other way out.

  Then the tower lamp flared on, and its blinding glare froze the two Flies in their tracks, instantly feeling guilty as though the whole business was aimed only at them. It was an impartial beacon, though, and it stripped away half the hiding places they had been counting on, exposing them under its fierce fire. Above them and before them were Wasp-kinden, the night shift assembling into detachments and deploying, ground or air, wherever the sergeants sent them, the day shift donning their armour as swiftly as they could.

  ‘You! Identify yourselves!’ a Wasp sergeant snapped at them, palm forward and plainly keen to remove any further complications the night might offer him.

  ‘Messengers from the Aldanrael,’ Lissart shot back at him. ‘Which way to the general?’

  For a second the man was not buying, but then he nodded briefly, gesturing further into the camp, seeing they had nothing more than knives on them. They passed through the Wasp ranks, constantly jostled and pushed as the soldiers formed ranks.

  ‘We need to get a good look around,’ Laszlo stated. ‘From down here it’s impossible to guess where we can make a break for.’ He glanced up, but the sky was busy with Light Airborne and Mantis-kinden both, and flying into that kind of meat-grinder did not appeal to him.

  ‘Head for the tower!’ Lissart told him sharply.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just go!’ She shoved him towards the light, her face looking pale and strained. Even as they passed through, utterly beneath the Wasps’ notice, a surge of fighters broke away from the fighting about the Spider camps – more Mantids but others, too: Flies, Beetles, Ants, in a ragged but determined mob. They were making for the functioning tower, and the Wasps were instantly on to them, the Airborne taking to the sky whilst stings and snapbows began to rake into the attackers even as they rushed in.

  The pair of them ran, or Laszlo ran and buoyed Liss up enough for her to match his pace. Hiding was out of the question now – speed their only friend, which got them to the foot of the tower without challenge.

  ‘Up,’ she instructed him. ‘See what the blazes is going on, won’t you? Find us a way out of this mess.’

  Even as he ascended, she turned sharply, jabbing her hand out just as a Wasp would, and he caught a flash of fire from the corner of his eye. I hope that wasn’t one of ours, came the thought, and then he felt a wrenching sense of dissociation because, of course, nobody out there was one of theirs. There were just two contending groups who might have good cause to kill the pair of them.

  He was not the first up the tower, for a dozen Wasp snapbowmen were already perched there, taking long-range potshots at any enemy target that came close enough. They glanced at Laszlo, but he made a grand show of not being up to anything suspect, and apparently he passed muster. Businesslike, with nothing in his pose admitting guilt, he took a good look to all quarters, just as if he were up the topmast back on the Tidenfree. There was fighting to the east as well, a vicious melee swirling about the Imperial supply wagons there, and he guessed immediately that everything else was probably just to cover getting that strike in place. The Wasps were all over that part of the camp, though, ground and air, and the fighting was dwindling and dwindling, the remaining attackers a diminishing ripple as the Wasps stamped them out.

  Then there was a savage roar, and a plume of fire launching high into the air as something exploded.
It had come from the very midst of the fighting, and Laszlo flinched despite the distance. The lamp immediately above him was hot enough to slick the back of his neck with sweat, but he almost kidded himself that he could feel an extra wash of boiled air from that eruption to the north.

  It’s not my business, he had to remind himself, turning his attention elsewhere, because the attack was plainly running out of steam, and the camp would be impossible to get out of once order was restored.

  Moments later he had picked his compass direction and he dropped from the tower top, finding Lissart swiftly and pulling her after him. Freedom or death, he thought dramatically, though it was probably not too far from the truth.

  In the aftermath, Colonel Cherten made his report: a mere hundred Mantis-kinden and around twice as many of various other insurgent kinden had fallen in or near the Spider tents, with perhaps a miscellaneous hundred breaking free and retreating in the direction of the Felyal. They were all from the forest or nearby communities, Cherten believed, who had seen the Empire burn their homes once, and had obviously thought they might make a difference with this sudden strike. Under cover of their noise, a determined band of Mynans had come in from another direction, attacking the towers and then turning towards the supplies. They had been utterly ruthless, fearless, each one selling his life as dearly as possible. As well as the towers, they had managed to ignite one fuel dump, which in itself made a spectacular end to most of the Mynans who had survived to that point, and a painful number of Tynan’s soldiers as well. The sabotage only went to prove Colonel Mittoc’s wisdom in ensuring that their fuel and munitions were not all kept in one place, as Imperial policy would normally have dictated.

  Possibly more serious a loss was the discovery that one of the Sentinels had been left near that fuel store, and the explosion had tipped the machine entirely over and damaged its underside, wrecking several of its legs. Tynan’s immediate plans for the Felyal, thankfully, allowed time for repairs.