Aarmon cried out in shock in that same instant, a light winking out in his mind. None of his fellows was able to take up the attack, to drag the little Collegiate pilot from his tail, her shot already punching through his craft’s hull.
The building ahead, its crown alive with searing argent fire, was in his sights.
‘Kiin!’ he shouted, and a blistering salvo of shot ripped through the cabin behind him. He heard the Fly-kinden woman shout – not in pain but in rage.
‘Reticule’s smashed!’ the words came to him. ‘Sir—!’
‘Do it by hand!’ he called. ‘I have faith in you.’
And their time was up. He was still in the air and over the target, so surely . . .
Bolts scythed through the back and top of his vessel. He felt one wing go still instantly, all connection to the engine severed. He heard Kiin’s scream – brief and agonized, cut short almost as as soon as it started.
‘Kiin!’
The sky was filled with light.
The sky filled with light for Taki, too.
One moment she was in hot pursuit of the Farsphex, and a moment later she was fighting blindly with every part of the Esca’s controls, wheeling madly across an unseen roofscape. The gears stuck and stuttered, the wing joints seemed to freeze, falling out of phase, every moving part on the cusp of being welded to its neighbour. And Taki cringed, shrinking into her seat, waiting for the flesh-searing fire that must surely follow.
But the Esca coughed and rattled, and kept on flying, and she could see again, albeit with a great negative blotch before her eyes that was already fading. She nearly died anyway, finding herself pitching downwards in a wild whirl before she could drag the stubborn stick back and get herself level. Then she was still airborne and alive, and as intact as her last skirmish with the enemy had left her.
And all about her the sky was dotted with orthopters, and most of them were the Empire’s – all still there. Only the fading skein of sparks crawling about every part of her machine told that anything had happened at all.
Oh, you stupid bastard, Maker. It didn’t work.
Then came the first explosion, a Farsphex simply erupting from within, and she stared and stared, as the sky over Collegium played host to a new and fleeting constellation.
And, on the ground, Stenwold Maker and his fellows rushed out of Banjacs’s house to stare upwards. The fierce, pale light of the lightning engine behind them was momentarily the god of all shadows, brighter than the sun, and the its charge was gone, hurled impartially into the heavens that were thronging with flying machines.
It was invisible the moment Banjacs’s engine discharged it, and yet every sense screamed with it, a moment of monumental wrongness when each hair stood on end, and the sky seemed to bend and boom with energies never meant to have been chained by the hand of man.
In the next breath, it had all been for nothing, and Stenwold felt his heart almost stop with the unfairness, the bitter knowledge of a defeat that his own actions had made so much worse.
Then Eujen was yelling and pointing, and he saw the first explosion: one of his enemies ripping apart as though old Banjacs’s ghost was up there tearing the machine asunder with invisible hands.
And another. And more, and Stenwold stared up as the skies caught fire over his city.
Scain screamed.
Pingge could not make out the words. He seemed to have gone mad, wrenching at the stick and yet taking them only in circles. But outside . . .
She saw the sudden bloom of flame as a nearby Farsphex went up, fragments of hull and wing forming momentary silhouettes against the blast.
‘Aarmon!’ Scain cried out, and Pingge thought, Kiin! knowing that her friend of so many years was dead.
Something blew in the engine behind and above her, and she shrieked. Scain was wrestling with his straps, finding them stubborn.
There was no time.
‘Scain!’ she shrilled, and he was turning back towards her, mad desperation in his tear-streaked face. Even as another shudder rocked them, he had his hand extended back, not seeking help but palm held outwards to sting.
She screamed at him. She saw that he was going to kill her in some Wasp idea of mercy. She felt the searing heat as his Art discharged, and then the fuel tank ruptured and the blast picked her up.
In that last moment, unable to get himself free, the fire of his sting had cracked her chain apart, and she was flung bodily from the Farsphex, out past the ballista – the bolts behind her popping and cracking like fireworks – out into the open air, borne away on the vanguard of the explosion.
Her last sight of Scain was a pale face seen through the cockpit’s faceted window, before the flames came.
Taki guided her battered Esca through a slow, spiralling descent – in truth the absolute best the machine was capable of just then, while watching the other Collegiate pilots still aloft follow her down. She had, she confessed to herself, no idea what had just happened, and no leap of inspiration could conquer the gap. Apt as she was, it seemed to her as though some great sorcerer of old had waved a hand, invoking an untold power simply to rid the sky of the enemy, leaving herself and her fellows intact.
Only later would she learn that Banjacs’s machine had not worked as intended, that the grand obliteration had never come, that even a genius’s calculations could harbour errors. Later scholars would suggest that, to fulfil his dream, ten times the charge of raw lightning energy would have been needed, and its backwash would have flash-cooked every living thing in Collegium. As it was, although the Stormreaders that had flown through that particular storm would need refitting, countless small components slightly deformed or melted as the lightning had leapt about them on its way to repatriation with the sky above, they had all landed safely, their pilots shocked and shaky, but alive.
For the Farsphex, however, the residual sparks of that same discharge had, within a varying number of seconds, coursed through the fuel tank and turned all that volatile and devastatingly efficient mineral oil into an instantly detonating bomb.
The Collegiate pilots, those who had reached the ground before then, and those only just now touching down, looked up into a sky that they had won, and around them at a city their path to victory had scarred almost beyond recognition. Even then the messengers were being sent out from Stenwold Maker and Jodry Drillen to tell them their work was not yet done, that the College artificers were waiting for them to complete emergency modifications to the Stormreaders, that the war was still going on.
She had given the order to run once they seemed to have put an acceptable distance between them and the front line – that chaotic tangle of men and vehicles that had given Straessa’s maniple the chance to win clear. There were other maniples that had failed to break free, or whose officers had decided on some misguided stand, and she understood she was abandoning them. There was no right answer.
Shortly after she had allowed her people to break formation and just flee, one of the transport automotives rumbled up, the driver vaguely recognizable from amongst the ranks of the camp artificers.
‘Get in!’ the man said, his face a mask of dust covering goggles and a face scarf.
‘Where are you headed?’ Straessa demanded. Throughout the mass of retreating Collegiate soldiers, she could see other vehicles performing the same service.
She had a horrible feeling that the driver was about to take them back to the fighting, but he just gestured towards the city, and home.
Straessa did not even need to give the order. By the time she had hauled her aching body on board, most of her maniple were already there, and the nearest stragglers from other units were heading over as well. The driver kept his eye on the churning dust that must be the Imperial forces on the march again. The sky to the east was dark with the Airborne, beginning to range out over the fleeing Beetles to pick them off.
Oh I’m not going to enjoy learning about this in history classes, thought Straessa, because humour had always before been her armour
against the world. The following thought was even less funny: I don’t think Collegium’s going to be writing the histories.
When the transport was full, with soldiers hanging off the sides, the driver wrenched it about and headed for the camp at best speed. There were no orders, Straessa understood. Everyone who could was trying to assist with the retreat, to preserve some vestige of armed strength for . . . nobody seemed to be sure for what.
She was the highest-ranking officer on the automotive, which was to say the only one.
‘What the blazes is this?’ their driver demanded. Ahead of them was a block of soldiers that seemed to be forming up, as though they had arrived late and somehow contrived to overlook what was happening all around them. The sheer idiocy of it offended their driver enough for him to grind the transport to a halt and begin shouting at them.
‘What are you doing? Get moving, you fools. They’re right behind us!’
There were a fair number of them, Straessa saw – a few hundred at least – and although they were as dust-smothered as everything else she saw that they were mostly all of a piece. These were Mynans, standing in a close block, shoulder to shoulder just as though the snapbow had never been invented, falling back on what they knew.
Someone was approaching the automotive, and Straessa blinked to recognize the Mynan leader, Kymene. The woman looked exhausted, her right arm bandaged up and a sword in her left hand, but a mad fire burned in her eyes.
‘We attack!’ she snapped. ‘What else is there?’
The driver just gaped at her, but Straessa leant past him. ‘Commander, we’ve lost! We have to get back behind our walls before they catch us in the open.’
‘They’re not trying to catch us in the open, and your walls will not save you,’ Kymene declared flatly. She pointed out towards the enemy ‘They’ve halted, Sub-officer.’
Straessa stood, frowning, then stepped on the back of the driver’s seat. The trailing mass of fugitive soldiers was still being harried by the Airborne but, now that she looked, the main body of the Imperial army did seem to be holding their ground.
‘Well that’s . . .’ she began uncertainly. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means their artillery is in range of the city,’ Kymene informe her. ‘There is no other reason for them to stop.’
‘But they’re . . .’ She could just about make out what might be Collegium over to the west, although the dust made that uncertain. ‘You can’t . . . Seriously?’ And then came the unwelcome knowledge that, of course, Kymene had been through all this before.
‘If we do not act now, the city is lost,’ Kymene said, and it was plain that she had no intention of finding herself in this position again, one way or the other. ‘We will break into the enemy camp and destroy their engines, just as the automotives were supposed to do. It is the only way. Or else, if you decide to run, just keep running. There’s no point stopping once you reach Collegium.’
Coward, was her unspoken implication, just as Straessa’s mind was screaming, Madwoman. But it stung, that accusation. It stung beyond any veneer of common sense or tactical consideration. And the woman was right, as well, as far as Straessa could weigh the odds.
‘Sub?’ asked one of her people, or perhaps one of those from another maniple.
‘I resign my commission,’ said the Antspider, only realizing afterwards that she’d said it aloud. A lot of people were staring at her.
‘I’m staying,’ she called out, pitching her voice to carry. ‘I’m giving no orders. Your choice.’ With that inspiring speech, she slung herself over the side of the automotive and went to stand by the Mynans.
Perhaps a little under half made the same choice, forming themselves into makeshift, patchwork maniples. Their entire armed strength was just a mote before the great storm that the Empire was bringing.
Punch our way in. Destroy artillery. Get out. Oh, yes, can see all of that happening. Straessa was beginning to hope that Chief Officer Marteus really was dead, because otherwise she was going to kill him for promoting her.
‘Let’s go,’ ordered Kymene, and a moment later the Mynans were moving off: black and red armour and peaked helms, blue-grey faces set in expressions that spoke of being driven to the wall one too many times. After an awkward pause, the rallied Company soldiers followed suit. Straessa shouted at them to spread out, to make themselves more difficult targets, but she barely had the voice for it, nor the heart.
Then there was a buzzing, a murmuring sound that swelled behind them, familiar to them but new to the battlefield, and a moment later the orthopters were racing overhead, wings ablur. The soldiers began to scatter immediately, fearing the worst, but Kymene just stood and stared upwards. Then her sword was pointing high in triumph.
‘They’re ours!’ she cried, to those already with her, and to the others who were still streaming past. ‘Collegium to me!’
Amnon hauled himself to his knees, wiping blood from his mouth.
We gave them a chase, though, didn’t we?
His surviving automotives had simply not slowed, but rushed like maddened animals back and forth, a mobile barrier of steel to shield the Collegiate retreat, moving swiftly to give the Imperial artillery – and the Sentinels – a difficult time in bringing their weapons to bear. The Airborne had swooped on them. The infantry had tried to board them. Vehicles had been falling out of the chase from the start, swarmed or smashed. They had failed from the beginning, Amnon understood. They had not been able to get close to the artillery that was even now being erected in the heart of the Imperial camp.
The last wreckage of the Collegiate automotive assault was strewn all around him. His own machine, faithful to the last, had thrown him clear as it turned over, the engine and front axle destroyed by a Sentinel’s leadshot, and the driver along with it.
Amnon lurched to his feet. Barely a hundred yards away, well within snapbow range, were the enemy. They had ceased their advance and were putting up slanting barriers of wood and metal about their perimeter, against any Collegiate counterattack.
Closer, outside that evolving compound, was one of the Sentinels, probably the very one that had finally brought down his automotive. It shifted position minutely as he looked at it. Whatever slots or lenses the driver used to view the world were, he felt, fixed on him. He, who knew the secrets of hunting every living thing in the Jamail delta back home, understood when he had become the quarry.
He found a sword amidst the wreckage – not the leaf-bladed Khanaphir implement he would have preferred, nor even a crescent-guarded Collegium weapon, but a cross-hilted Imperial piece. It would be enough.
The Sentinel came closer, many feet picking a path through the strewn metal. The great blind eye regarded him imperiously.
He was not First Soldier of Khanaphir now, nor was he the partner of Praeda Rakespear, whom he had loved. He was not even an officer of the Collegiate army, given that it was either dead or fled. He was Amnon, though, the warrior and the hunter, and he still had a sword.
He gathered himself with all his strength and then he was running, a handful of swift steps towards the Sentinel and then a leap, even as its rotary piercers started spitting bolts.
The shots almost clipped his heels, then he was grappling with the smooth side of the machine, finding purchase between plates in the moments before those gaps clenched shut. He kept kicking and scrabbling until he was crouched atop the Sentinel, the one place that it could not attack him.
It spun left and right in search of him, then began bucking and lurching, somehow knowing where he was. Amnon clung on, though, hacking at its steel hide until the sword broke, and then slamming his hands down against the metal shell. The first snapbow bolt skipped off the hull nearby, Light Airborne wondering what he thought he could achieve.
Praeda was dead, and Amnon knew he would follow her soon enough, but he had one thing to accomplish first. Getting his fingers underneath one of the great articulated plates of the Sentinel’s casing, he planted his feet firmly and
heaved. There had never been a beast so fierce that he could not kill it, nor so well armoured that he had not found its weak spot. He refused to give in, or admit that his life and skills were obsolete.
Another couple of bolts struck nearby, indicating that the Imperial soldiers were taking more of an interest. Amnon ignored them and continued to strain at the metal, the prodigious strength that had made him the wonder of the age in Khanaphes focusing in the single task of prising the machine’s armour up and exposing its innards.
In his mind was Praeda, and his city, and Collegium, all hovering over a solid core of effort, every sinew and every muscle pushed to its limit in seeking the impossible.
It gave an inch in his grip, bolts shearing, and he bellowed, a great anguished yell of loss and defiance, and ripped up the casing in a scream of tortured metal. Triumph flared within him: he was again the First Soldier of Khanaphes and, in that moment, he was the equal of anything this new world could throw at him.
He looked down, and almost laughed at feeling the hope drain out of him. Beneath the armour was just steel, more steel, as invulnerable as the rest.
Then the Wasp soldiers, who had suddenly begun taking him seriously, put a bolt through his leg and another through his shoulder, punching him off his perch atop the machine. He never saw the Stormreaders coming.
Speeding across the bright open sky felt like being in another world: no longer the ravaged city below them, but Collegium’s army forming a blurred host, and the enemy ahead.
Oh, now, here we go, Taki thought, because she could see some Farsphex already lurching into the air with unseemly haste, desperate to intercept the oncoming Collegiate fliers. She gritted her teeth, waiting to see whether the Empire had somehow mustered yet another great assembly of orthopters to stop them in their tracks. If they could not carry out their mission here, then the war was lost, despite every price they had paid so far.
The Air War Page 63