The Air War (47 page)

Again Taxus almost clipped her nose and, though she swore at him, she realized that he somehow thought she would follow him, as though he had signalled her beforehand and she had not noticed,
save that he was the slowest heliograph student she had ever seen.

Hold on—

Then she had it – rejoining the pack was a Farsphex that limped a little in the air, a touch blackened and handling badly.
That’s mine.
The part of her mind that made such
calculations effortlessly told her that its approach was perfect to make it the same bomber that she had lost sight of amidst the smoke. A bloodymindedness came to her, familiar from the old days
over Solarno.

You, you bastard, are going down.

She flashed frantically, the brief pattern for
My target!
over and over, hoping that someone was watching and able to follow her lead. Then she was committing herself to a long, shallow
dive towards the wounded craft.

It saw her far too soon, and abruptly its wheeling formation was adjusting to take her into account, along with the various Stormreaders that were trying their luck, as detachments of Wasp
pilots began changing course to cover each other, opening the jaws of a trap that would snap down exactly where she was headed, while her target sought safety beyond.

She asked the
Esca
for all the speed it could give her, unleashing everything the spring had left, exploiting a design flaw and abusing its engine mercilessly, picking up speed as the
entire craft whined and screeched all around her. At the same time, a flurry of Stormreader pilots threw themselves against the Farsphex formation from above and to her right, with Edmon at their
head, forcing the enemy to regroup in order to ward them off. Taki bared her teeth: the Collegiate orthopter to Edmon’s left had been cut from the air almost instantly, wings freezing to drop
it down onto the city. Then she was blurring through the centre of the enemy, too fast for them to catch her, although bolts pattered across the
Esca
’s fuselage, and the unhappy buzz
of her right wing was abruptly more pronounced, sounding as if something was working its way loose.

The damaged Farsphex turned across the city, and if it had simply flown straight she might have fallen behind, her motor already flagging, but it was turning back towards its allies, for a
moment a slave to its own tactics. Taki opened up.

For the third time she nearly killed Taxus, but this time he held himself back from her line of shot, and then the two of them enjoyed a few seconds of filling the sky around the wounded craft
with bolts.

She saw their target lurch and shudder, and suddenly there was a thin line of smoke coming from somewhere around the midsection. Then Taxus peeled off abruptly, again plainly assuming she would
simply follow him, and putting himself maddeningly in the wrong place because of it.

Because it’s what he’s used to—

The sensation was like being punched repeatedly in the back. Three – four – five solid strikes into her
Esca
by the avenging enemy, then her target, though smoking, was
getting away—

From the sun, from nowhere, Franticze fell on it, a dive so steep that it was doubtful whether she could even pull out of it before making yet another hole in the city she was supposed to be
defending. Taki had a brief sense of her swift descent, and then the damaged Farsphex was at last beyond any help its comrades could give it, virtually breaking in half in the air, with the rear
segment exploding savagely before it could reach the ground.

Then the
Esca
’s own engine stuttered, and abruptly she had to focus merely on staying in the air, a task that was increasingly difficult. Taki dragged on the stick again for height,
and this time the orthopter could not oblige her, dropping her to street level unexpectedly, so that her left wing clipped some magnate’s roof garden and the far half of it disintegrated.
Then the cobbles themselves were coming right at her, and she could only back with what wings she had left, and release the landing gear, and hope.

Stenwold stared around the table a little blearily. Nobody had got much sleep since yesterday’s attack, and the Collegium War Assembly was looking more like exhumed
corpses than the great and the good, just then. To his left was Corog Breaker, ready to report on their aviators. He was pushing them too hard, Stenwold knew, but it was hard to tell him that
because Corog was pushing himself hardest of all. He looked ten years more than his real age: a man whose job had been teaching fencing to children, now trying to rise to the challenge of
coordinating Collegium’s air defence.

Jodry Drillen sat at the table’s far end, out of bed with the dawn after a late night with the paperwork. Although the war dominated, the business of the Assembly was more important than
ever. Even with everyone nominally pulling in the same direction the paperwork proliferated. He had at least thought ahead about this meeting, if only for his own comfort. He had dragged most of
his household staff along to this close, high-windowed room at the Amphiophos, where they circulated with honeybread and spiced tea.

There was a scattering of other Assemblers there, a piecemeal selection of those who were responsible for the logistics of the war: merchants, clerks, academics. No doubt all the questions of
the day would be answerable only by those who had not made it to the meeting. Two of the War Assembly were dead, killed in the bombing, and neither had left adequate notes.

Filling out the table were all three commanders of the Merchant Companies: Marteus the Ant sat pale and still as a statue. Elder Padstock sipped at her tea left-handed, her right still bandaged
from the burns she had sustained trying to get people out of the wreckage of their homes. Janos Outwright, a plump, moustached Beetle who had never looked this far ahead when setting himself up as
a chief officer, gripped the table just to stop his hands trembling. On Outwright’s left there was a stocky Beetle College Master named Bola Stormall, one of the two to donate a name to the
Collegiate orthopter model, and a leading aviation engineer; next to her was a newcomer, a dun-skinned Ant who had arrived with messages from their allies in Sarn.

Stenwold realized that they had all been sitting here staring dully at one another for far too long, each one willing someone else to speak. ‘Corog, tell us about yesterday,’ he
managed to intervene.

Breaker grunted. ‘We lost seven orthopters, four pilots. The chutes are lifesavers, literally, given that most of ours have no Art for flying. If the Empire comes tomorrow, then
we’re that many craft down. If they leave the same sort of gap then we can repair and replace in order to keep our numbers high – we can have another five or ten maybe, over and above
yesterday’s numbers, if we call up the next class of pilots – and we’ve more being trained.’
Untried machines, untried aviators
, were the words he did not say.

‘That doesn’t sound too bad,’ Jodry murmured.

‘Because of them and their tactics,’ Corog Breaker spat bitterly. ‘Jodry, they’re not trying to shoot us down. Given the number of armed orthopters up there, it’s
nothing more than a slapping war for our pilots so far. The enemy . . . their priority is keeping themselves alive. They organize in the air, but it’s to defend each other, rallying against
any attack so that our people have to break off or else commit suicide. All of our losses have been people caught by surprise or people pushing their luck. The Wasps are prioritizing targets on the
ground, and they’re being cursed successful with it, too, but they’re playing very safe against our fliers. It won’t last.’

‘What do you mean?’ Jodry himself probably understood, Stenwold reckoned, but he asked the question so that everyone was clear.

‘They’re on the defensive so far. If they turn that discipline into an attack, they’ll cut a bloody swathe through us. We’ll take more of them than we have so far, for
certain, but, if they come three or four days on the trot with the idea of smashing us in the air, they could strip us of every orthopter we’ve got, for a loss of perhaps half as many of
their own, maybe less. They’ll do it, too, because if it makes sense to me, it makes sense to them.’

‘Assuming they hold their own lives so cheap,’ Outwright put in, desperately. Nobody could be bothered to answer him.

‘What about Taki?’ Stenwold asked softly.

‘Conscious now,’ Corog said curtly. ‘Possibly concussed. Confined to bed under protest while our engineers patch up her machine.’

‘Ah, well, then,’ Jodry said, with false heartiness. ‘To happier matters: what about our prize? Stormall?’

Bola Stormall started on hearing her name. ‘Still on fire,’ she got out, and took a swallow of tea. ‘Willem had it brought to the workshop, but he’s letting it
burn.’

‘A little, ah, wasteful?’ Jodry pressed.

‘We put most of it out, and I’ve got a lot of broken pieces to pick over – but Willem has a pack of artificers and chemists who reckon they can get something out of the rest,
so we’ve left it to burn,’ Stormall visibly sagged even as she spoke. ‘We already know their big trick, the fixed-to-mobile-wing business, from that Taki woman. Which, of course,
gives them enough range that we’ve still not found their airfield, I understand.’

‘We’re still looking,’ Corog growled. ‘We think they must move it around.’

‘Nobody’s criticizing you, Corog,’ Jodry said, raising his hands placatingly. ‘Next?’

‘My men are still holding Banjacs Gripshod under house arrest, which is starting to get tiresome,’ Janos Outwright thrust in, before Jodry could continue. ‘He says he wants to
fight the Wasps, too. Why not let him, rather that than waste people keeping him indoors, especially given the death machine or whatever that takes up half his house?’

Jodry made placating gestures. ‘I’ll deal with it,’ he said. ‘I’ll speak to him myself. Whatever. Now, next on the agenda – by which I mean the list I have
inside my head – news from Sarn.’

Nobody had been given the opportunity to sound out the Sarnesh messenger before the meeting. The young Ant had turned up at the gate only moments before and been ushered into this august company
without introductions. It was a misstep that Jodry would not have made under normal circumstances.

The Ant-kinden looked as weary as they all felt, but he stood up stiffly to deliver his report. ‘Sarn sends to its allies in Collegium the news that the fortress at Malkan’s Folly
has fallen to the Imperial Eighth Army, which has now continued its advance towards Sarn. The Empire has deployed various new weapons, the nature of which are not wholly understood. Sarn is not in
a position to tender any substantial aid to Collegium in its time of trouble.’

The Collegiates absorbed this.

‘New weapons?’ Stenwold prompted. ‘You mean their orthopters? The artillery and the automotives we saw at Myna?’

‘No, Master Maker, we do not,’ the Sarnesh told him, and for a moment there was a slight uncertainty in the Ant’s level tone. ‘Some weapon was used to clear the survivors
of the fortress garrison from the underground bunkers. Those that escaped make a . . . disturbing report. A new weapon, its nature unknown.’ The Ant spoke the words with his eyes fixed
straight ahead, and Stenwold wondered what mental images he had inherited from those who had escaped the doomed fortress.

‘Well, the upshot of
that
is clear enough, anyway,’ Jodry rumbled. ‘We’re on our own. What else? Other business?’

‘Yes,’ Stenwold said flatly, as the Ant sat down. ‘Corog, may we take it that the ground damage from yesterday’s attack was similarly precise?’

‘They knew what they were doing,’ Breaker confirmed. ‘Several workshops were damaged, all of them contributing to our war preparations in some way. The packing plant on Stoner
Street that was turning out rations is gutted entirely. Plus a number of private residences, probably simply bad luck, for the most part. The worst blow was the fuel depot. We’re lucky that
our fliers are all clockwork, but we were relying on the fuel for our automotives, for when the Second get closer. Nobody knows if we can refine more in time.’

Stenwold nodded because all this was preamble, and he had already put plans in motion to deal with the problem. ‘I have sent to certain . . . allies of mine who may be able to procure a
supply,’ he said carefully, catching Jodry’s eye. ‘I’m not sure if it’s possible, but they have a sample of what we lack and, if they can produce it, they will.’
The Sea-kinden, his little secret, had some remarkable Art to produce both raw materials and finished goods, but mineral oil fuels might yet be beyond them.

There were plenty of questions about
that
, of course, but he waved them away. ‘Meanwhile we have a more pressing problem. It’s plain the Empire has spies aplenty in Collegium,
despite all we’ve done in the past to thin their ranks. They’re feeding the Imperial air force information, telling them where to strike. So we need to take action.’

‘You’ve identified these spies?’ Stormall asked him hopefully.

Stenwold shook his head. ‘We are the victims of our own open society, and the industry that they prey on can hardly be kept a secret. We need to take a sterner line. I want every
Wasp-kinden in the city under lock and key by tomorrow evening, first for questioning and then exile.’

There was a pause as the others considered this. Raking the table, Stenwold caught as many eyes as possible.
You know I’m right
, he thought, as though he was an Ant and could place
the words in their minds.

‘Stenwold, you do know that most of their people will just be Beetle-kinden, or Flies – no shortage of either in the Empire,’ Jodry remarked mildly.

Stenwold shrugged. ‘The Wasps don’t trust “lesser races” as much as you think. Somewhere there will be a Wasp holding their leashes. We can cut the head off the Rekef
operation in Collegium by this single step. We need to deny them every advantage we can.’

His gaze was fixed on Jodry now, but the Speaker for the Assembly was not discomfited.

‘Oh, no, I don’t think so,’ the fat Beetle replied, and then managed a wan smile. ‘That’s not the Collegiate way, Sten.’ He looked brightly about the table.
‘Any other business?’