The Air War (30 page)

The leftmost Sentinel opened its eye, the lid sliding up almost sleepily, and Stenwold stared into the darkness that was revealed.

The machine braced itself, legs abruptly digging in, then it was speaking thunder back at the Mynan artillery, smashing a steam-catapult to pieces. The flash and smoke of a leadshotter were
unmistakable.

Then they were moving and, to Stenwold’s horror, the Mynan soldiers were rushing forward to meet them. He looked around for Kymene, spotting her standing atop a half-fallen wall, directing
the assault, horribly visible, and he began to run for her, shouting her name.

He knew the theory, of course. Once a squad of soldiers had clambered on to an automotive, they could pry its armour apart, break in and kill the crew. The same books of war insisted that no
automotive could be built strong enough to ward off artillery. The Empire had changed the syllabus over a winter.

‘Kymene!’ he yelled, and then was thrown from his feet almost casually, a leadshot smashing down close by as it angled for one of the Mynan engines. For a moment his world was
nothing but dust and falling shards of stone and screaming that was not his own. Then other artillery nearby was trying to answer the assault, thundering from his left and right loud enough to
rattle the air in his lungs, and a thousand other sounds, metal on metal, snapbows loosing, hopelessly shouted orders, the continuing bloody deluge of the Imperial artillery as it continued its
detached dismemberment of the city street by street.

Stenwold could barely breathe. The sheer sound of it was beating down on him, the anguished composite roar of a battle being lost and won. Hands to his ears, his knees striking the jagged rubble
as he tipped forward, he fought for self-possession, and lost. All around him the air was full of splinters. All three Sentinels were discharging their leadshotters: each advancing a few scuttling
yards and then stopping, turning and tilting to aim, then unlidding its single metal eye. Meanwhile, the breach itself, which the Mynans had not even had the chance to contest, was not empty.
Stenwold saw at least another quartet of segmented machines sliding through.

He saw a band of soldiers, twenty at least, close with the nearest machine – already only fifteen, ten yards away – ready to take the monster apart with crowbars, to get to the
vulnerable flesh within. The rotary piercers spoke first, spinning up almost instantly and scything away half the attackers, chewing them into a bloody rain before Stenwold’s eyes, spare
bolts pattering and rebounding from the stones around him. The others tried to get out of the arc of the Sentinel’s frontal weapons, and some of them were cut down almost instantly by the
rotaries of the next machine along. The rest . . . to Stenwold there seemed only a brief shudder that seemed to pass down the length of the lead automotive, and the Mynans were all dead, a row of
snapbow barrels loosing from between its plates, the deadly little bolts quite enough to kill through armour.

Someone was pulling at his arm, and he snapped back to full control of himself, seeing how very close the machine was now. It had turned and braced itself again, its eye seeking out some further
Mynan siege engine. The soldier who clutched his arm was shouting at him, but Stenwold could hear very little of it. The import was clear, though:
We have to go!

‘Kymene!’ he yelled, but she was gone from her wall, her fate unknown. The Mynans were retreating in droves now, not a rout but in a determined fall-back to some prepared position.
Stenwold saw one of the defending automotives, a hopelessly outdated, patched-together thing, drive full tilt into the face of a Sentinel, slamming the invader back a few feet as its feet left
jagged grooves in the ruined flagstones. Then one of the next wave had put a leadshot into the Mynan vehicle, and a moment later its steam boiler exploded, just one more sound, another rain of
pieces in a broken place.

There were flying machines in the air now, wheeling and darting, with wings ablur. Imperial Spearflights were coursing against the ragbag of local fliers, the air glittering with piercer bolts.
For a moment he thought he saw Taki’s
Esca Magni
amidst the fray, but the air was grey with sifting dust, and he had now seen such things, so many, so swift to follow each other, that
he did not want to trust his eyes.

Edmon’s
Pacemark
shuddered its way across the sky, curving around towards a knot of Spearflights that had briefly formed up. A moment later they were splitting off
across the city, and he could only follow the one. The Imperial pilot was good enough to slow down for him, taking his time about lining up his own target, and for once Edmon was able to stoop on
one of them, textbook-perfect, dropping out of the cloudless blue in an exact line, so that his rotary shot hammered all about the enemy canopy, smashing through its glass and wood. The Spearflight
heeled over almost instantly, sliding sideways from the sky. A moment later he felt a scatter of impacts on his hull, guilty of the same complacency as his victim, and saved now only by the
impatience of his attacker.

He skimmed away instantly, veering left and then right to throw off his enemy’s aim, ducking his
Pacemark
low, to rooftop level and further, slinging the flier down the straight
boulevard of the Tradian Way, the length of which he knew by heart. The Imperial pilot behind him was game, bringing his Spearflight in close to follow, and when Edmon made the sudden turn at the
Way’s far end, lurching up and right to claw for the sky again, any surprise intended was countered by the Wasp machine’s agility in the air.

Edmon turned for the gates once more, where the artillery around the gate might be able to help him out again, but then something blurred past him – he had a vision of beating wings and
then the spark and chatter of piercers only. For a moment he was not sure whether he had been hit, or what had just happened, but then he realized that the Wasp tailing him was gone, and he hauled
the
Pacemark
into the tightest turn it would make in time to see the Imperial duelling with another Mynan craft, a squat, box-bodied flier that he recognized as the
Tserinet
, flown by
the Szaren renegade Franticze. The two orthopters were speeding over the city, dancing almost where the wall had once been, the Wasp nimbler, but already damaged from Franticze’s first pass.
Edmon brought the
Pacemark
on to a heading meant to intervene, praying that the Bee-kinden pilot would give him a clear opening to their mutual enemy.

Abuptly the sky around them was busy. Another Mynan craft fled past, smoke already trailing, with a pair of Spearflights tight behind it. Edmon had a moment to make his choice, but Franticze was
one of the best pilots Myna could call on. He had to trust to her skills, as he pulled around and followed the pair of harrying enemies, blazing away wildly with his rotaries just to let them know
he was there.

A moment later the damaged Mynan flier had bucked in the air – he registered only the irregularity of movement, but knew what it meant. In the next second it had dropped too low, not so
much clipping as ramming the upper storey of a house already on fire, its fierce, swift flight instantly transformed into violence, wrecked chassis spinning end over end, its wings flying apart in
pieces. The Spearflights split up. As ever, he could only follow the one, and then the other would have him.

Edmon bared his teeth – at the Wasps, at the world – and plunged after one even so, because he wanted another kill, another dead Imperial and wrecked machine before they caught him.
Even as he did so, a third Spearflight raked past him, hammering a strip of holes in one of his forewings almost casually, in passing. The
Pacemark
pitched despite his fighting it, one
wingtip coming within ten feet of a wall. He fought for height, losing track entirely of how many enemy might be behind him. Momentarily the draw of the ground seemed insuperable, the
Pacemark
limping along the rooftops like a dying fish at the water’s surface, lurching and flopping and always on the point of sinking altogether. He felt gears slip, the wings losing
their rhythm. In that instant he was all ice, waiting for the ground to reclaim its errant son, but then the engine somehow recovered its stroke and he was still impossibly airborne, casting out
over the city streets.

He glanced behind him, gaining only hurried, wheeling snatches of sky, pillars of smoke, the dots of other fliers out over Myna. The enemy had not come with him, and he guessed they must have
believed him lost, too bloodthirsty actually to wait out his death throes. For a moment there was not a single Spearflight in sight.

He looked down.

This would be the moment to take with him, if he had any chance to take anything anywhere. Not the aerial dragon-fighting with the Imperial air force, not the moment when the ground reached up
for him, but the moment he realized that his city was being taken from beneath him.

Most of the buildings down there were now rubble and ruins, or else blazing pyres as though the Empire had marked out the path of its invasion in fire. Between these churned a great silver
maggot, a segmented automotive undulating swiftly along the streets of Myna –
his
Myna – stopping only to discharge its weapons. He caught glimpses of wrecked artillery that had
not been able to keep the monsters out. There were bodies down there. He saw some on the streets, and knew that for every death he marked, a hundred others must have blurred by unseen. He saw the
streets he knew, the places where his mother had laboured, the markets his father had haggled in. He saw the houses of his friends, where relatives had worked. He saw his childhood and his memories
in those shattered homes and broken workshops, and the corpses strewn like sticks.

There was no room left inside him, then. The pain of it was worse than being shot. He sent the
Pacemark
into a dive against one of the Imperial machines, trigger down so that the rotaries
shot and shot, circling and circling until they had emptied themselves. The sparks wherever his bolts were turned by the enemy armour were like a glittering constellation.

He failed to scratch the machine, although it stopped almost quizzically under his attack, questing left and right, his efforts so trivial that it could not even work out where he was.

He pulled out of the dive and skimmed past, leaving the machine behind. There had been Imperial soldiers coming into the city behind it, and he could have used his ammunition more effectively
against them, but even then it would have been throwing stones at an avalanche.

The
Pacemark
was not handling well, and Edmon needed its spring rewound and the rotaries rearmed. Feeling numb, utterly drained, he coaxed the orthopter back towards the more distant
airfields, unsure whether he would even find anything to land on that had not been claimed by the fires.

The war in the air was all around him still, but he had become a mere spectator. He saw the Spearflights dart and swoop, keeping the remnants of the Mynan aviators busy while others dropped
their incendiaries across the city. He saw Franticze again, chasing down another enemy – her hatred for Wasps was legendary amongst the Mynan airmen. He even saw the Fly-kinden pilot, Taki of
Solarno, with her little killer machine darting and swerving, almost flying backwards to throw a Wasp off her, then slipping behind him to finish him off.

Too little, all of it. The ground battle was moving street by street, and only in one direction. If the Wasps had not been more interested in punishing the city with their bombs, they could have
cleared the sky of defenders already.

There had been a fierce battle over the highest airfield, he learned later, but the enemy had yet to burn it when he touched down there, and any flier downed for repairs or refuelling was being
kept in hangars, out of sight. He brought the
Pacemark
in for an untidy landing, handling it by instinct, his mind still trying to find some interpretation for the images that did not mean
that Myna was being lost even as he sat there.

The ground crew ran out and began to haul his flier into the shadow of the hangars. He hinged the canopy back and began to instruct them, his voice as hoarse and ragged as if he had been
shouting on a parade ground all day. ‘Rewind the spring and reload the weapons. I’m going straight back up. I’m going . . .’ and his voice broke, and he sat there, holding
the stick, mouth open, trying to work out what it was that he was going to do, because he had not the first idea.

Someone was calling to him, but they had to say his name three or four times before he would even cast a dull gaze their way.

‘Stay on the ground; change of orders. We’re gathering pilots for a strike. Stay on the ground while we build up the numbers.’ The ground officer’s voice was almost
hysterical, and he spoke the words as though they were just some meaningless babble.

An artillery shell landed three streets away, making the ground shudder.

Stenwold found himself in the midst of a constant flow of soldiers, men abandoning their positions closer to the wall, running or limping in, being given orders, being sent out
again. Some were sent further back, to the field hospitals being set up in taverns and workshops and backrooms, but there were few who were able enough to present themselves but yet not able enough
to be thrown back into the jaws of the Imperial advance.

Kymene stood at the centre of it with her officers. They had commandeered a covered market to evade the eyes of the enemy orthopters, the stalls shoved aside to make room for the turmoil of
war.

She was swift, efficient, a map of the city before her that she barely had to refer to, allotting each new consignment of soldiers an address, a junction, a street. She ordered barricades, she
assigned the little artillery that had been saved. The Wasps were in the city – not just their killer machines but their soldiers, their infantry washing through the streets of Myna, the
Light Airborne taking rooftops and dropping into the undefended city behind them.