The Air War (29 page)

She knew him too well, but then she was a born leader and used to reading people quickly, seeing them for what they were. He had tried several times to suggest that she had options other than
dying in the teeth of the Wasp assault, and each time she had cut him off, not wanting to hear the words.

The time will come, though.
Stenwold needed Kymene, because Myna needed Kymene. It had waited almost twenty years for a leader like her, after the first conquest. If she died for her city
now, then Myna might languish in chains for another twenty years before anyone could free it.

Of course, the whole plan does rely on my being able to get out of the city with her.
Muted by distance and depth, the
crump-crump-crump
of the Imperial greatshotters came to their
ears still, patiently turning stretches of Mynan wall to rubble.

Stenwold managed a few hours of fitful sleep that night, before Taki was kicking at his bedroll to rouse him.

‘Wall’s down, Maker!’ she told him. ‘The Mynan foot are trying to get some sort of line together. Wasps could start for them at any moment, they say.’

Stenwold sat up, trying to place the discontinuity.
They can’t have the wall down already because . . . the noise hasn’t stopped.
The dull thump and rumble of the artillery
sounded just as constant as before.

‘They’re still going,’ he pointed out.

‘But not at the
walls
,’ Taki said with some urgency. ‘The barrage is just creeping into the city, striking all over the place, regular as clockwork, but breaking up
everywhere near the breach so they’ll have a good clear run in. Me and the Mynan pilots, we’re heading for our fliers, ’cos we reckon their Spearflights are going to come in when
their Airborne and foot do and, if we’re not in the air to meet them, we’ll just get fried on the ground.’

‘Where’s—?’

‘Your woman, she’s gone to the front, trying to get her people together.’

Stenwold cursed and lurched up. He had slept fully dressed, but he hauled his artificer’s leather on over his clothes, the workman’s armour as old and battered as he himself felt. By
the time he had stumbled out into the night air, Taki had already gone.

The damage to the Mynan wall was worse than he had imagined, two long stretches turned into what looked more like gravel than rubble. Some heaped masses of broken stone were now the only
impediment that Myna could offer the invader, before its soldiers had to shed their own blood. The lone pillar of wall between the two gaping gashes was barely ten yards across, enough to grant a
little cover to incoming enemy foot-soldiers as they closed with the city.

Even as Stenwold approached, the artillery was lighting up the night, dropping shrapnel and incendiary shells in a wide scatter across that third of Myna closest to the breach. All around him
people were being evacuated from their homes, and the streets were scattered with fragments of their lives: abandoned possessions, the sundered stones of their homes, and more than one corpse.

He found Kymene supervising what siege engines she had been able to save from the wall, finding sites for them facing the breach, both on the ground and on the rooftops. She had even called up a
pair of automotives, simple steam-powered vehicles with heavy armour bolted to their fronts and with the stubby barrels of smallshotters mounted on pivots atop them. All about, drawn up in loose
order, were the Mynan soldiers: men and women with Kymene’s blue-grey colouring, wearing breastplates and tall helms halved in red and black. In their hands were swords, shields, crossbows
and snapbows, but the enemy attacking them so methodically had given them no targets on which to take out their frustration.

‘Kymene—’ Stenwold started as he approached her.

The look she turned on him was bleak and stern. ‘We fight,’ she said, brooking no argument.

Stenwold gestured to the sword at his hip, for all the good it would do him. Then a shell landed a hundred yards from them, the sheer sound of it almost throwing them from their feet, blocking
out the screams of those who had been closer. Kymene’s jaw was clenched, her hands knotted into fists. There were tears at the corners of her eyes.

‘Are they coming?’ Stenwold demanded, and she shook her head.

‘Dawn is two hours away,’ she told him, ‘but maybe they’ll come sooner. We have to be ready but . . .’ The punctuation of the bombardment finished her sentence for
her.

Stenwold remembered the first time the Wasps had taken Myna: how terrible that had seemed, with the sky full of flying soldiers, with the gates battered down and Imperial heliopters grinding
through the sky, trailing random scatterings of grenades.
How little our world knew of war back then.

He found some token shelter, the shell of a house that had already been staved in, a superstitious thought saying,
Surely they can’t strike twice in the same place.
Inwardly, he was
asking himself what he intended. He had come here as a gesture of solidarity, and now it seemed very likely that he would die in this attack – one more casualty unnamed and unremarked. The
Empire would never know that they had killed their greatest detractor.

He had his sword and the little two-shot snapbow that Totho had made for him; experience had made of him a passable warrior, but it would be like spitting into the hurricane. Even with the
thought, an incendiary lit up the night close by, enough for him to feel a wash of heat from it. This time the screaming was all too clear.

The Mynan soldiers kept moving, as though they could cheat the odds that way, clustering and scattering, passing on. The barrage was continuous, but spread over much of the city, and Stenwold
thought that it probably claimed more non-combatants than soldiers. Beyond the rough line that Kymene had drawn up, the streets were clogged with the multitude who had become refugees in their own
city.

Then, at dawn, the artillery pattern changed, slowly concentrating on the ground before the ruined walls, driving the Mynan defenders back, and forcing Stenwold along with them. Kymene dispersed
her forces street by street, anticipating that the barrage would sweep westwards again when the Imperial forces had neared the city. After so many hours of noise and death the actual attack was
finally beginning.

She was receiving reports even then, for a few enterprising Fly-kinden had flown up with telescopes to spy out the enemy formations. The news seemed hopeful. ‘They’re leading with
automotives,’ she noted. ‘Some model shaped like a woodlouse, running on many legs.’ Even as she said it, the shells began to land closer, and to spread out so as to fan a broader
net of streets, and she hurried out to rally her men, to bring them back to the wall, and to man such of their own artillery as they still possessed. By the time Stenwold had caught up with her,
the Mynan engines were already launching, catapult arms thudding forward and winding back, and the roar of leadshotters sending their missiles in shallow arcs through the breaches.

‘They’re in range already?’ he demanded over the noise. Kymene, now atop a great cairn of stones that had once been a house, spared him only a brief glance. All around him the
Mynan soldiers were readying their weapons – on the streets, from windows, on rooftops – and still the Imperial artillery dropped shells on them and behind them, a constant reminder
that nobody was safe at any time.

They can’t be . . . they must still be marching . . . I mean automotives, yes, but . . .
Stenwold was well aware of the uses and limitations of such machines in war. Wheeled
automotives could have closed the distance that fast, but would have faltered against the banked rubble, and legged automotives were notoriously slow. Besides, unsupported vehicles could be easily
mobbed by infantry. It seemed impossible that Kymene’s engines were doing anything but wasting ammunition.

All he could see through the breaches was a pall of dust, the same as hung everywhere in the air, choking in the throat and gritty enough that he pulled on his artificer’s goggles to
protect his eyes. There were a few enterprising Fly-kinden calling out to the Mynan artillerists, exhorting them to shoot, but he could not believe . . .

The first of the Wasp machines took the rubble at a terrible pace, scrabbling up and pausing at the crest, as though surveying its prey, as swift and fierce in its movements as a beast hunting.
It presented a carapace of overlapping plates, with a high rounded peak at the front, sloping down towards the tail. A round shallow depression front and centre gave the impression of a single
blind eye. Beneath that, closer to ground level, the stubby fingers of paired rotary piercers bristled like mouthparts.

A Mynan leadshotter gave voice close by, and Stenwold saw the missile ricochet off the automotive’s armoured shell without leaving much of a dent, and then the machine was moving again,
slithering down the rubble with frightening speed, the plates of its body flexing like a thing alive.

A second automotive loomed from the curtain of dust beyond it, and then a third. The Mynan engines were all loosing now, and many of the soldiers as well. Battle was joined.

Totho adjusted the focus of his glass single-handed from long practice, finger and thumb sliding the telescoping sections while the weight of the instrument was cupped in his
palm. His other hand was tight on the rim of the basket, and the shadow of the observation balloon’s canopy was a constant reminder of the penalties of a loose grip. In truth he should not be
up here at all, horribly vulnerable to any Mynan pilot that somehow got behind the lines, only the gas-filled bulb of the balloon keeping him up, and only a long rope tether keeping him down. Not
for the first time in his life, he wished that one of his parents could have bequeathed him the Art of flight, but it was rare in Beetles and unknown in Ants. In a disaster he would have to rely on
the silk glider folded on his back – a cobbled-together piece of wishful thinking that was mostly untested.

He wanted to see, though. He wanted to see progress advanced yet another notch, as his machines clambered over the Mynan walls.

The day before, just ahead of dusk, Drephos had given a lecture to a cadre of Imperial officers, with General Roder at their head. The Empire had been making its preparations for a standard
assault, using airborne and medium infantry, despite the groundwork already laid by more visionary men such as Colonel Ferric. And so the Colonel-Auxillian, as they still called him, had felt it
necessary to step in and show them the future.

‘We called them Sentinels,’ the master artificer had explained, calling to mind the old heavy-infantry elites who had recently been retired from active service. ‘They fill the
same role, after all, and the name of the project has caused some confusion amongst enemy agents who think we’re training infantry.’ His voice, as ever, had been laced with a general
contempt for the bulk of humanity. Totho could still picture him stalking before his audience, his robes of black and gold – the same pattern as when he had genuinely been an Imperial subject
– fluttering in the breeze against the hastily erected storage sheds from which the Iron Glove conducted its work.

‘You are faced with a routine problem of attackers, General. You must get your men past the walls.’ The Light Airborne could have swarmed the city at any time, of course, but the
Mynan soldiers were well protected and armed with crossbows and snapbows, and their defensive position would allow them to make the Wasps pay in blood for every inch of ground. ‘You need to
get your armour inside the walls, to meet them, heavies against heavies, where your superior numbers and troops can truly tell. Assaulting a broken wall in the face of respectably armed ranged
defence remains a formidable problem, even with air superiority.’

At his gesture, Totho had relayed his signal to the engineers waiting in the shed, and an engine had started up with a metallic growl, closely followed by a clatter of armour plates.

‘What you need,’ Drephos’s voice had lifted over the sound, ‘is something to force the issue!’

On cue, the Sentinel had picked its way out of the shed at a careful, deliberate pace. To a man, the Imperial officers had taken a few steps back as its tall, blind-eyed prow had quested in
their direction. They had never seen anything like it, Totho knew. He had watched with pride as its ten legs had moved in steady, complex patterns to haul it along the ground.

After the initial shock at the machine’s appearance, there had been those amongst Roder’s more traditional officers who complained that the vehicle would be easy prey for Mynan
leadshotters, or that it would ground itself amidst the rubble, and how
heavy
it must be, how slow – could it even keep up with walking infantry? Roder had let them cavil and had kept
his own counsel, his eyes only on Drephos.

Now Totho saw the truth of it for himself, and his heart leapt with pride: to be a member of the Iron Glove, to be an artificer, to be one of the
Apt
whose world had built this glory.
Ahead of the Imperial infantry, ahead even of the Airborne, the Sentinels tore up the ground towards Myna. Enemy artillery burst about them, landing mostly behind them. They were as swift and agile
as animals, the line of their armoured backs flexing and rippling as they jolted over the landscape.

‘When perfecting the greatshotters, we were forced to devise a new material to withstand the concentrated forces involved,’ Drephos had explained to Roder and his officers. ‘We
call it spun steel, and it is several times stronger than Solarnese aviation steel, at a fraction of the weight. At the same time, the Sentinel’s legs are mediated by a ratiocinator, meaning
that the handler does not have to worry about adjusting each one individually. He simply tells the machine where to
go
.’

‘Handler?’ Roder had demanded, staring up at the great sightless eye set into the thing’s peaked prow. ‘Driver or pilot, surely.’

‘Handler seems appropriate, somehow,’ had come Drephos’s dry response.

For a moment the three machines were poised on the heaped rubble of Myna’s walls, a colossal triumvirate regarding its subjects. The Mynans were not so reticent. All
their hoarded artillery was loosing, catapults and ballistae, leadshotters, even the scrapshotters were pelting the armoured titans with hundredweights of jagged metal. The lead Sentinel rocked
from side to side under the impacts, its legs spreading wider beneath its carapace, sliding slightly on the loose stone. Stenwold watched, waiting for the barrage to tell on them, for that armour
to crumple under the hammer.
They move so fast
, was all he could think.
They cannot be so strong.
And yet the machines weathered the assault with what seemed like disdain.