The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

‘Chief, I don’t think you know what you’re . . . What do you think it’s going to be like when I tell them – my soldiers, my people – that we’re to be where the metal meets? That we’re standing at the sharp end?’

  His expression – or lack of same – did not alter. ‘I know what it’s like, Sub. Now get a move on. I’ve got plenty more of you to see.’

  ‘Tonight you’ll understand everything,’ said Stenwold. He had kept the two students, Eujen Leadswell and the Wasp Averic, under watch all morning, without them showing any sign of suspicious behaviour. In the afternoon he had sent for them, and he was now heading for Banjacs Gripshod’s machine-gutted house, ready for the last act of the drama. Last night they had seen an inexplicable failure or betrayal, as the city was laid bare before the knives of its enemies. Tonight, though . . .

  Tonight will go down in history, Stenwold thought unhappily. One way or another, and the ‘everything’ that the boys would understand might leave an altogether more bitter taste. If they see the reasons behind the sacrifices we have made then, if they understand nothing else, they will understand some of how difficult it is to lead. Let Leadswell choke on that.

  The citizens of Collegium they saw out on the streets were picking their way through the city as though already living in hostile territory. Stenwold had spent the morning with Jodry, pointlessly going over and over each part of the plan, sending unnecessary orders to confirm to every well-briefed individual what he or she already knew. And each of them knew only their own small part, of course. The grand design remained invisible to anyone but Jodry and himself. Everyone in the city must guess that something was going on, just as the Empire must, but Jodry and Stenwold had kept their secret safe.

  Stenwold thought back to his last look at the Speaker before he set out: the man had been haggard, that great weight of flesh hanging from him like chains, eyes red from drink and tears and lack of sleep. Marching swiftly through Collegium’s streets, Stenwold felt a sudden rush of affection for the man. These were hard times to be Collegium’s Speaker, all responsibility and no reward, but Jodry had risen to the challenge far better than Stenwold might have expected.

  It all comes down, tonight. To win a war in one bold stroke, is that not the tactician’s dream? I’ll wager no war-leader ever foresaw the battle that we have planned.

  ‘Here,’ he snapped back at his two charges, nodding to the two Merchant Company soldiers on the door. They scowled narrowly at Eujen and Averic, but stepped aside to let them all through.

  Once inside, Stenwold passed through the entrance hall that was one of the few untouched rooms in Banjacs’s house, pushing on until he came to the vast chamber that housed the machine, the mad artificer’s ultimate weapon. There were three of the College artificers there, along with Banjacs – the most that Stenwold and Jodry had felt they could trust without hestitation – and they were all hard at work on the machine when he entered.

  He had expected that, for Banjacs’s life’s work was a delicate beast, and they would have no opportunity for a proper testing before they used it. The lightning batteries in the cellars beneath them would take tendays to recharge, according to Banjacs’s notes. That was why Stenwold and Jodry had taken the decision they had. That was why so much of Collegium had been laid out as bait for the Farsphex bombs.

  Now Banjacs and the artificers tinkered and adjusted, calibrating the machine, testing each individual component of it because they could not test the whole. The three College Masters clambered over the brass and bronze and glass, toolbags slung over their shoulders as if they were just tramp artificers hired in for a construction project. Meanwhile the inventor himself was half-hidden within the works of his machine, metal panels hauled off and discarded on the floor around him. The air in the tall chamber crackled and snapped with errant flecks of power, and from every side there came a hissing and a humming as various parts of the colossal device were powered up for testing. Only when Stenwold called his name a second time did Banjacs push himself backwards out of the monstrous mechanical innards to sit up and glower at him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How is progress, Banjacs?’

  ‘It will be ready, yes. You doubt me, Maker? I’ll show you all just how ready I am once night comes. My life’s work, and you come looking to find me wanting now?’ When Stenwold indicated the feverish artificers, Banjacs scowled furiously at him. ‘Go away. We must tune. We must adjust. Had you not imprisoned me then perhaps we might have time to sit about drinking wine like Master the Speaker but, as it is, we must work. We must be perfect. You have no comprehension of the delicacy of my creation.’ Beneath wild eyebrows his eyes bored into Stenwold. ‘All of Collegium shall know my name,’ he said, apparently not as a part of the conversation but just an externalized thought.

  ‘Master Maker,’ came Eujen Leadswell’s hushed voice, ‘what is going on? This is Banjacs Gripshod.’

  ‘So it is.’ Stenwold glanced back at him. ‘You see, Master Gripshod, how your fame is already spreading.’ The humour welled up in lieu of bleaker emotions, tainted by Stenwold’s assessment of Banjacs’s character and sanity. What frail things we put our faith in.

  The Wasp, Averic, was staring at Banjacs, perhaps not recognizing the name.

  ‘Master Maker, you said we’d understand. I don’t.’

  ‘Tell them what your creation is for, Master Gripshod,’ Stenwold suggested.

  Banjacs grinning was worse than Banjacs glowering. ‘With this, boy, I control the lightning – the greatest engine of its kind the world has ever seen. When active, it shall throw its force straight upwards, charging the very skies over the city. Everything above us will face utter destruction.’

  Eujen’s expression was familiar to Stenwold, because he himself had worn it when this idea had first been revealed to him. If he had not had artificers go over the plans, he would not have believed it for a moment. He could see the student putting the pieces together steadily, and soon the boy would come to understand the chaos of the previous night, even if Stenwold suspected he would never condone it.

  Banjacs was already nodding: the old artificer had fully understood the absence of Stormreaders the previous night, without ever having to be told, and had accepted the decision automatically. After all, it would give his machine a more suitable testing ground. ‘When the machines of our enemies have fully gathered over us, we shall annihilate them in a moment.’

  Something was dawning on Eujen’s face, his mouth opening but the words slow to emerge, but even as he began, ‘Master Maker,’ in a strangled tone, Banjacs interrupted, hushing him.

  ‘Stop! That sound is wrong! Cease work, you morons!’ the old man bellowed at some of the College’s most eminent artificers. ‘What . . . what is making that sound?’ He cast about, as though trying to sniff out the noise.

  Stenwold could hear it too, something entirely discordant. Not now! Don’t let the bastard machine go wrong now . . . It was a great buzzing drone and, in the midst of all this artifice gone mad, it seemed curiously familiar.

  ‘Master Maker,’ said Eujen, his face frozen, all condemnation vanished from it. ‘It’s the Ear.’

  Stenwold blinked, his mind taking a moment to catch up on what the boy was saying. The Ear was sounding. The Great Ear, their warning mechanism, was calling out the city’s pain, as it had during so many nights before. But outside, the sky was light, the sun still high over the west.

  The enemy were coming. The enemy were coming now.

  ‘Banjacs!’ Stenwold bellowed. ‘Get it working – all of it. Get it ready to loose!’

  Banjacs goggled at him, hands describing the mess, the missing panels, all the little tasks the artificers were still engaged in.

  ‘Just work!’ Stenwold almost screamed at him. They were coming, all of them, the air-storm that he had called down upon his people, and he was not ready. The Empire had out-thought him, in the end. In his mind he was calculating time and action, plans, orders . . . ‘Messenger!’

  As if from
nowhere, a Fly-kinden in Company sash dropped down beside him, a snapbow seeming over large in his hands.

  ‘Listen carefully: I need this taken to every airfield word for word.’ Stenwold felt out of breath, his heart painful in his chest. ‘Tell them this: they are to engage the enemy . . .’

  The Beetle-kinden man with the burn scar, Army Intelligence’s senior man in Collegium, had spent that day counting up the cost of the night’s work. That matters had not gone according to plan was an understatement. The modest number of agents under his command had accounted for a mere handful of targets. Some teams had been cut down. Others had found their subjects too well defended.

  The aggrieved feeling hung heavy on him that he was labouring under someone else’s errors, but he himself had felt that the Wasp boy was securely under the Imperial colours, as had Garvan, his superior. After all, Averic was a Wasp and of good family, and there was a natural order to the world that the burned man had learned long ago. Wasps were the Empire. That the boy might have spat in the face of his proud heritage, rejected his own and betrayed his people to Collegium was repugnant to the Beetle with the burn scar. The irony was lost on him.

  He still had a small but respectable team working with him, thanks to the prudence that Army Intelligence instilled in its people. Instead of Rekef men raised in a climate of fear and terrified of the consequences of failure, most of his people had simply weighed up the odds and not chanced carrying out attacks. That meant they were still on hand for the night to come.

  He had been waiting for contact from the Spider agents in the city, an uncertain prospect, but a lean Fly-kinden man had found them in the early evening in the working man’s taverna they were holed up in. The building was missing most of a wall, and all the windows had been smashed, but the landlord was still serving.

  They adjourned to an enclosed backroom, after slinging the landlord a few coins. The burned man expected the Fly to waste time and mince words, weaving a web of allusions and hints, as seemed the Spider way, but instead the report was brutally direct.

  ‘Things have changed. You have a new priority target.’

  The Beetle bristled. ‘You’re not in a position to dictate that.’

  ‘What if we told you that we’d overlooked something until now. Earlier, we’d report that to your general. Now there’s no time and we’re reporting it to you.’

  The burned man sat back, considering. ‘What is it?’

  ‘There was a man – he’s on your list, but far down it – who’s an artificer. There had been some official interest in him recently, but there was a murder; we thought it was just internal Collegiate business carrying on despite the war, you know.’ The Fly shrugged. ‘We now think it’s not that. We think they’ve played us.’

  ‘Why? Our orders are to kill Stenwold Maker above all others—’

  ‘Good. Fine. He’s there now with this man, Banjacs Gripshod. So’s your Wasp boy. You need to get out your knives and get moving.’

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ the Fly hissed, ‘but the patterns are all wrong. It’s something important, and it’s at Gripshod’s place it’s happening. It’s . . .’ The difficulty of explaining screwed the little man’s face up. ‘We have our methods. We look for patterns, feel for the connections between people. But patterns can be deceptive – look at them from a different vantage, you might see something entirely other. That’s what’s happened here. It wasn’t about the murder after all. It’s all about the war. Whatever they’re doing there in that house is vital, and you need to stop it. I swear on my mistress’s honour you do.’

  The burn-scarred man stared at him levelly. He had memorized all sorts of places in the city, the dwellings of potential victims amongst them. Part of him was already working out which streets to lead his people down to so as get to Banjacs Gripshod’s place as soon as possible. ‘And you’ll help, will you?’

  The Fly spread his hands. ‘That is not a part of our mystery,’ he said, with a tired smile. ‘Besides, surely you won’t need us?’

  She was gone when Laszlo returned, her sleeping roll disordered, her few personal possessions just smaller absences about her larger one. None of the surgeons or nurses could tell him just when she had slipped out, and he could not know whether she had been feigning her injury, or fooling herself, or whether she had simply been that desperate to be rid of him.

  Lissart had vanished, abandoned him after all they had been through. Laszlo could only stare in utter disbelief, and then argue with everyone around him because there were few enough casualties yet for the doctors that surely one of them must have noticed a badly wounded Fly or not-quite-Fly woman pack up her things and leave.

  But none of them had. Her tradecraft had been her pass in the end. She was gone.

  He wasted a great deal of time then, by dashing about the outside of the tent, making sudden rushes in this direction, then in that, as if he would find her just a few paces away, pausing for breath and clutching her wound, waiting for him. First, though, before all that furious, undirected, futile action, he just stood and hurt. Laszlo the pirate, grinning factor for the Tidenfree crew, a girl in every port so long as he had the coin, and he was hurting for her, for his lost te Liss. He had never felt such a tearing before. In its wake, he felt that he would never quite see the world in the same way.

  After all that, all the futile battering at the windowpanes of fate, he returned to where she had slept and there found her message.

  It was tucked into her discarded bedroll, and anyone could have found it, but nobody else would have understood.

  She is here. I can’t stay.

  She is painted brown and disguised as a Beetle soldier-woman.

  Look for me in another place.

  Laszlo felt his heart leap at that last line. We’ll meet again. I’ll find her or she’ll find me. And then the first two lines took on meaning and his eyes widened.

  She could mean only one thing: the Wasp agent who had dealt Lissart such a wound in the first place, she was here in the camp.

  He glanced about him. There were Beetle women everywhere, of course there were. But he had already seen the Wasp spy – seen her come after Lissart to finish her off. He calmed himself, unhinged his memories, sorting through them for that night that was surely engraved on his mind.

  A moment later and he was outside the infirmary tent and peering about him, from face to face. There was a spy in the camp, up to unknowable mischief, and only he could find her.

  In her fragmentary and barely remembered dream she was in the air, in a storm, the high winds battering at the framework of the Esca Volenti until every part of the loyal machine seemed on the point of coming away from every other. In the midst of wrestling with controls that were suddenly unresponsive in her grip, she was yanked from sleep, shaken into abrupt and uncomprehending wakefulness, unsure of where she was or why.

  ‘Taki! Mistress Taki!’ someone was shouting. Mistress? But of course, that was how the Collegiates talked, not knowing any better, and what was that dreadful noise?

  She sat bolt upright, slapping away the Beetle girl who had woken her. The Ear! ‘How long did you let me sleep?’

  In a moment she was out of her bunk, standing barefoot on the cold floor, in just her shift. She felt leadenly tired, disoriented, as though she had gone to bed only a moment before.

  ‘Mistress Taki, they’re coming!’ The girl – Taki could not recall her real name but identified her as ‘Still-too-fat-to-be-a-pilot’, one of the newer recruits – was a study in wide-eyed panic.

  Taki cursed, dragging on her canvas overalls and snagging her chitin and leather helm from the floor. ‘You should have woken me an hour ago at least,’ she snapped, storming up out of the underground barracks into the common room . . . and stopping.

  Broad, glorious daylight sang through the high windows.

  ‘Right,’ she said, to nobody in particular. A score of pilots were looking at her expectantly, most of their field
’s complement.

  ‘Where’s Corog? Master Breaker, I mean. Where’s everyone else?’ she demanded, striving to clear her head.

  ‘Out on the field with their machines,’ someone told her, and another put in, ‘The Mynans want to take off, but we’ve no orders . . .’

  ‘Orders?’ Taki demanded. ‘Just go, morons! Get into the air!’ And she herself led the charge, wings skimming her up and out to the airfield, darting for the open cockpit of the Esca Magni. She saw the rest of the pilots all around, some arguing with ground crew, others already in their machines, wings warming up slowly. Edmon gave her a nod, before bringing his hatch down.

  ‘Hold! Nobody take to the air!’ Corog Breaker was rushing across the field, waving his arms like a man trying to catch a departing airship. ‘I’ll have the hide off anyone that dares fly!’

  Edmon rammed his hatch up again, staring at the old man with disgust. ‘No,’ he shouted back, ‘this time we fly. This time we fight the Wasps, even if your people won’t. Who’s with me, eh?’

  There was a lot of shouting then from Mynans and Collegiates both, and Edmon had clearly carried the vote.

  ‘You just listen to me!’ Corog Breaker still had a fine old voice, when he needed to use it. ‘Yes, we fight! But you listen here, special orders from Stenwold Maker. Nobody gets aloft until they’ve heard them.’

  Edmon scowled belligerently, but waited.

  ‘Just listen, because you have to get this right,’ Corog urged them all. ‘We’re not bearding them beyond the walls this time. We let them come to us.’ As the murmur of discontent started up again he raised his arms to quieten them. ‘Oh, we fight. When they come over the city, we hold them, but it’s more than that. We need to concentrate them, as much as we can. Engage, take the bastards down if you can, but bring all of them over the city’s heart.’ He glanced back at the scroll he was clutching, breath catching from the run, trying himself to assimilate the instructions. ‘Now listen,’ he continued. ‘The Ear is going to sound again, you understand. You have to listen for it. During the fight, the Ear will sound, and that’s your signal.’