The Air War (31 page)

It did not escape Stenwold that many of the men and women presenting themselves to Kymene were not wearing the red and black of the Mynan army but a mismatch of everything from civilian tunics
and robes to repainted Imperial armour. The Mynans had spent a long time under the heel of the Empire before they had thrown off their shackles, but they had been a martial people once. They were
not lacking in spirit.

Only in training, he thought gloomily. Only in resources.

‘Kymene!’ he called, but before she could even look at him, someone had run in yelling that the machines were already upon them.

The Maid of Myna looked at the remaining soldiers assembled before her, and told them simply, ‘Fight!’ No time for street maps and strategy: immediately they were splitting up,
dashing from the marketplace by every possible route. Stenwold opened his mouth to call her name again, to try and draw some order from the madness of it all, but the east wall caved in as he did
so, punched through by a Sentinel’s leadshotter, the iron bulk of the machine revealing itself in the jagged gap.

He saw Kymene draw her sword, and for a moment he thought that this was where she meant to end it. In the next moment she had turned and was running, cloak streaming behind her, and he was doing
his best to keep up.

They burst out into the dust-heavy air, a scatter of soldiers running on either side of them. Behind, the Sentinel lurched forward, smashing the wall down and grinding into the now-empty market,
its rotaries hammering. Stray bolts zipped and danced past.

Kymene ran straight for the nearest defended position, a street-wide barricade constructed from the very stones the Wasps had brought down. Stenwold saw a score of soldiers behind it, at least
as many in the flanking tenements, many of them already loosing snapbows upwards as Imperial soldiers darted in at them from the sky.

The Sentinel thundered out of the market, smashing down the near wall, and the entire building began to fold in on itself in the machine’s wake, too many supports and pillars knocked away.
Instantly, a pair of Mynan leadshotters boomed from Stenwold’s left, their paired impact striking the machine’s side hard enough that it skidded several yards. For a moment the Mynans
were cheering, for there was a sizeable dent in the Sentinel’s carapace, and at least one leg trailed uselessly, but then the Imperial machine shook itself and turned against the Mynan
engines. Its single eye unlidded and belched flame, smashing one leadshotter off its carriage, the ton of bronze and steel that was the barrel spinning and cracking, killing at least one of the
artillerists. Then the Imperial soldiers had arrived: men in black and gold armour, rushing forward with snapbows raised even as more were dropping from above. Without the Sentinel, the Mynans
could have made a fight of it, trusted to their weapons and their bloody-minded determination to hold the enemy for just a little more time, but the war automotive was on the move again, slewing
slightly as the damaged leg dragged.

That was the last he saw of organized Mynan resistance. For the rest, he was running through the streets with Kymene, stumbling up the tiered steps, retreating ever westwards. The terrible
machines could not be stopped with any weapons the Mynans possessed, but they could not be everywhere at once. The city’s defenders had spread themselves out across the whole advance of the
Imperial army. Stenwold retained confused images of individual soldiers at windows, on roofs, in doorways, loosing their snapbows and crossbows at the human presence of the enemy, fleeing when
confronted with the steel fist of the Sentinels. The battle became a series of jumbled, unrelated moments in his mind, seeing Wasps and Mynan Beetles trading shots at street corners, Imperial
Airborne making assaults on high windows to flush out snipers, Spearflight orthopters casting a killing shadow over the ground as they coasted in to drop their incendiaries. There were no lines on
that battlefield. The next street that Stenwold stumbled on to could be controlled by either side, or bitterly contested. There was so much dust and smoke in the air that it was difficult even to
tell friend from foe.

Then they were at the airfield, and he saw that Kymene had managed somehow to gather some soldiers together again, not nearly so many as before, but at least a few hundred, sheltering under any
cover that was available.

‘Kymene!’ he shouted – he seemed to have done nothing all day but chase the edge of her cloak and call her name.

She turned on him as if he was the enemy, eyes flashing, sword in hand.

‘It’s over,’ he told her. ‘You have to get clear.’

‘I hear this from
you
?’ she demanded. ‘You, who have been saying the Wasps must be
fought
since before most of your kin had even heard of the Empire?’

‘Look where we are!’ Stenwold told her. ‘Get your fighters out of the city, get them to Szar or Maynes or the Lowlands. Get yourself out. Today is lost.’ The words were
so pitiful, to describe what he had seen that day, that he almost choked on them. ‘Please, Kymene. Your people need you
free
.’

She started to answer, defiance blazing in her expression, but then artillery struck within streets of them and swallowed her words with its fury. Overhead, two orthopters roared past, Imperial
chasing Mynan.

‘Kymene!’ he shouted again, but the artillery was closing in on them,
pound-pound-pound
, a seemingly random pattern: near then far, near, then closer, in a net of calculation
that was drawing tighter.

Stenwold saw her lips move, read the words, ‘I can’t . . .’ there, but one of her own was taking her arm, shouting at the top of his voice. The Mynan airmen on the ground had
already scattered to their vessels. The roar of fuel-engines sparking up obscured the whirr of clockwork, and the artillery overrode it all.

At last she nodded agreement, the gesture almost wrenched from her, and the man who had been trying to persuade her was sprinting across the airfield, still shouting. They were wheeling out a
fixed-wing flier, a cargo-hauler, but it would now take passengers in lieu of crates.

‘Chyses!’ Kymene shouted after him. ‘Gather all the soldiers you can. Gather everyone who’ll go with you. Get them out of the city, as Maker said. There
will
be a
tomorrow!’ Her fiery gaze passed to Stenwold. ‘With me, Maker. If the world can’t spare me, it certainly can’t spare you.’

‘All pilots, into the air,’ someone yelled out. ‘The Maid must not be brought down!’

From nowhere, it seemed, Taki’s
Esca Magni
thundered down for a hard landing, its extended legs flexing on impact. ‘Rewind me!’ came her high, imperious voice, as though
she was on her home fields of Solarno, but the mechanics rushed to obey. She had accounted for herself memorably already, through skill and superior technology.

‘We’re going!’ Stenwold shouted at her, but the artillery had quickened, as if sensing a kill. He pointed madly westwards, then gestured broadly at the frenzied activity about
the field, and the Fly nodded. Her face, through the cockpit glass, was streaked with grime and sweat, and there were several holes in the
Esca
’s wings and bodywork.

There was no more for it, then. The soldiers were already fleeing, each officer taking the survivors of his squad and hoping to get them out of the city any which way, and for whatever
destination they could reach. All across the city, the citizens of Myna who could not or would not flee would be slaves of the Empire by dusk, or dead.

Kymene was already crouching in the hatch of the fixed-wing, with the craft’s civilian pilot firing up the four propeller engines. The craft had swift, sleek lines but it would not move in
the air like an orthopter. As Stenwold ran across the field to join her, he knew that their fate would rest in the hands of the fighting airmen, and of Taki.

A shell landed close enough to scatter debris over the field, the blast knocking a few distant mechanics off their feet. Kymene hauled Stenwold into the fixed-wing’s hold, almost pulling
him on top of her. Her expression was venomous, unforgiving, taking her last look at her ravaged city before the hatch closed.

The machine shuddered around them as the fixed-wing tensed, its legs bunching as the propellers got up to speed. Then, with an explosive snap, its landing gear had hurled it into the air, to
catch the wind like a kite, a long low take-off that must have barely cleared the hangar roofs.

All across the field, every flier that had been held back was now clawing for the sky. Edmon let the battered old
Pacemark
have its head, almost immediately overtaking
the fixed-wing
Sweet Fire
that was carrying Kymene, as he circled up above to search for the enemy. The Spearflights were all over the city but, in that first flush of ascent, they did not
see the scale of the Mynan launch. Then there were a dozen orthopters in the air, cutting up from the airfield in all directions, making a widening spiral of winged shapes that could not be missed.
Within a minute there was a score, and other surviving Mynan fliers were being drawn to join them, or retreating to them.

Their numbers, which spoiled any chance of secrecy, bought them precious moments. The Empire had split its fliers into individuals and pairs, none of which was foolish enough to simply dive
straight at the burgeoning Mynan flight. Instead, they took it as a counter-attack, and regrouped to meet it.

There were more of them than of the defenders, of course. Edmon reckoned the odds were two to one already, and he guessed that minutes more would see the Empire commit some of the machines they
had held back to keep their artillery safe.

He flashed the pattern to split, to attack, not knowing who would come and who would stay. The Empire had taken the city so swiftly by calling the pace, and the
Sweet Fire
’s only
chance at escape would be for Myna to retake the initiative, even briefly.

He let himself get quite clear of the circling mob of defenders before he glanced back to see precisely who was coming along with him. Otherwise, he knew, his nerve might not stand an empty
sky.

Eleven other fliers had answered the call. He saw Franticze’s
Tserinet
at the fore, almost overtaking him with the Bee-kinden woman’s lust for Wasp blood. Looking forward
again, his memory found names for some of the others: Bordes’s
Wanderer
, Marsene’s
Fierce Lady
, the
Cranefly
, the
Red Anvil
and several others he could not
immediately name. There were far too many Spearflights ahead to worry about the odds now, but they had the same difficulties in communication that Edmon himself did. He saw flashes between them,
officers trying to convey a response to a situation that had already changed.

Here we go
, and he had chosen a target and kicked the
Pacemark
for every ounce of speed the ailing orthopter could give him. As the rotaries burst into life, he bellowed something
wordless and primal, full of the death of his city.

His target skipped in the air under the battering it received, nose turning for the ground as the hammer of his bolts smashed its engine through the wooden hull. Then he was in their midst and,
although many were trying to turn to follow his line, they were in each other’s way, and could not shoot for fear of hitting one another. All around him the other pilots were following his
suicidal lead. Franticze smashed the port wings of one Spearflight to matchwood and was needling another even before she had cut into their formation. The
Wanderer
had taken a higher line,
the lean, light flier missing with its single piercer but diving into the Wasp flock from above, bringing confusion in his wake. The
Cranefly . . .
Edmon was watching when it happened, just
a moment’s flick of his eyes left and the image of the angular Mynan vessel steering left just when a Wasp pilot made a mirror decision, the two craft striking shoulder to shoulder, wheeling
about each other like dance partners, wings stilled and broken, then dropping, still spinning, from the air.

Then he had more to worry about, clearing the Wasp pack and forcing the
Pacemark
into a complaining turn that was tighter than anything it had tried before, feeling every joint and bolt
of its protest. Piercer shot sleeted past him like foul weather, a handful of impacts shunting him sideways in the air and nearly losing him control over the machine entirely. He let his rotaries
blaze away, scything back through the air that the Wasps had taken, impossible to take aim at this speed, but he saw at least one Spearflight clipped by his shot, rattled, if not brought down.

Franticze’s
Tserinet
leapt up past him, absurdly close. There were Wasps on her tail, but her squat and ugly-looking flier moved through the air like a hunting insect, as though the
woman’s sheer murderous passion could override aerodynamics. He saw another Spearflight take the full brunt of her rotaries from below, knocked from the sky just soon enough for Franticze to
skip through the space it had been occupying.

He flashed the code for
Retreat!
, without knowing who might be able to see it. He had spotted Spearflights breaking off from the pack, and there could only be one destination for
them.

The
Sweet Fire
would be out past the western wall already, and a cargo fixed-wing could give a combat orthopter a run for its money on the straight, but there were already Imperial fliers
harrying its escape, not an organized assault but – just as Edmon’s sally had been – a pack of individual pilots who had spotted the opportunity. Edmon sent the
Pacemark
back after them, not even knowing if he could catch up.

Had the
Sweet Fire
’s pilot taken a straight line then he and his pursuers would be out of Edmon’s reach, but the man was unused to other pilots trying to kill him, and was
twisting left and right to try and evade pursuit, giving the Spearflights the chance to outstrip him and come at him from the front and both sides.

Edmon had no idea how many Spearflights were in his own personal retinue, or whether any of his fellows had broken off with him. The Mynan pilots who had gone with the
Sweet Fire
were
taking the enemy away in ones and twos, duelling savagely in the air, with no quarter given, airman against airman to the death.