The Air War (48 page)

‘I want a vote,’ Stenwold demanded flatly.

Jodry went quite still. ‘Now, come on, Sten.’

‘We are Collegium, and we are ruled by the vote, so let us vote, those of us here.’ Stenwold looked about the table, judging and measuring. ‘I say that our city will be safer
if we rid it of Wasp-kinden. I say that questioning those same Wasps may even lead us to this cursed airfield. We can’t afford to ignore the opportunity. Put it to the vote.’

‘Stenwold, we cannot simply have people arrested – some of them citizens, even – without cause.’

‘We
have
cause,’ Stenwold retorted more sharply. ‘The Empire has given us that cause.’ He tried to make a sort of ghastly joke of it. ‘Are you worried this
will cost you at the next Lots?’

‘No, Stenwold, I am not,’ Jodry snapped. Abruptly he heaved himself to his feet, jowls quivering. ‘I do, however, refuse to be the Speaker who opens that door.’

‘Then we can take it that you vote against.’ Stenwold was standing too, and the rest of the table just stared, seeing these two gears of state, which had run smoothly together for so
long, abruptly clashing teeth. ‘I vote for.’ He turned to Corog Breaker. ‘You?’

‘For,’ Breaker said bluntly.

The merchant beside him looked from Stenwold to Jodry. ‘I abstain.’

Several others followed his lead, with one for and one against before the matter came to Bola Stormall, the aviation artificer.

‘War Master, I have followed your lead for a long time,’ she said, although there was no warmth in her voice. ‘I flew against Vek. I crewed on the
Triumph
when the Wasps
came here last. I’ve worked to your plan now and, between me and Willem and Taki, we’ve got our orthopters off the ground. I will not be part of this.’

‘Bola—’ Stenwold started, but she held him off with a single gesture.

‘Do
not
, Stenwold,’ she warned. ‘I have relatives in Helleron who told me what life was like there under the Empire, during the last war, the imprisonment and
disappearances.’

‘Yes,’ retorted Stenwold. ‘The Wasps torture people and impale them on spears. I’m talking only about arrest and exile. You can’t compare—’

‘The rule of just law makes us who we are, and I am not the only one who has been wondering if we might have made more ground with the Wasps had we not painted them as irredeemable
villains.’

Makerist
, Stenwold heard the word, from his memories. ‘You’ve been listening to students too much,’ he told her.

‘Well, perhaps they’re actually learning something useful for a change,’ she retorted. ‘Besides, you’ve heard yourself that half the army marching along the coast
is Spider-kinden. There are perhaps two dozen Wasps at most within the city, but there are hundreds of Spiders, entire generations of them. Will you round them up as well, adults and old women and
children, when the spying doesn’t stop? And what then?’

Stenwold stared at her, feeling his will strike hers, hammer to hammer. ‘That’s not what I’m proposing—’

‘—today,’ she finished for him. ‘Against, Stenwold.’

He took a deep breath.
It doesn’t matter
, he told himself, because now there were the three Merchant Company officers. ‘Elder?’

‘For.’ Elder Padstock of the Maker’s Own Company, her vote never in question.

‘Janos?’

The squat little Assembler looked from Maker to Jodry, his moustache quivering. ‘I, in all conscience . . .’ He had taken on his current mantle as one of a line of stunts intended to
garner the popularity of the masses, and to ensure his own continuing good fortune. Now he looked as though he bitterly regretted it. ‘Abstain, I abstain.’

Stenwold nodded equably, because that didn’t matter either. ‘Marteus?’ he asked, with finality.

‘There is a Wasp-kinden in my Company,’ the renegade Tarkesh said quietly.

Stenwold blinked at him.

‘He has lived here for more than ten years. He’s a mason,’ Marteus continued, ‘and he wants to fight the Empire more than anyone. Of course, I can understand that. If
those sanctimonious turds from Tark were at the gates, well, I’d be first in line to throw them back, as you can imagine.’ He met Stenwold’s eyes readily. ‘Of course, by
these lights, you’d have locked me up by that point. A man’s not his kinden, and a man’s not his city-state.’

A delicate span of silence held the room for a few seconds, before Jodry said, quietly and without acrimony, ‘Even for and against: the vote is not carried. Stenwold, I’m sure that
you will continue to use all
conventional
measures to deal with the spies we undoubtedly have, spotting who’s being too nosy, working out how they’re exporting this intelligence
of theirs. We have all faith in you. Any other business?’

Nobody had any more to say.

That night, Taki woke abruptly out of a dream in which she was being chased through the streets of Collegium by the Tarkesh halfbreed Taxus and, no matter where she flew, he
always appeared ahead of her, as preternaturally knowledgeable as the Imperial pilots.

Waking, she gasped, clutching for the sudden understanding that had shocked her out of sleep. One of the medical orderlies, some Beetle-kinden student volunteer, was hurrying over, and she
realized that she most have shouted aloud.

She swung her legs out of bed before the Beetle got to her, but a sudden wave of dizziness prevented her making a quick escape.

‘Back into bed, please, Mistress Taki,’ the young man insisted. ‘Not until Doctor Findwell gives you the nod.’

‘Get off me!’ she snapped. ‘I need to speak to Stenwold.’ She made to kick off and take to the air, but a moment later realized that she really wasn’t ready for
that after all, as the world swam and shuddered before her eyes. ‘Get me the War Master,’ she insisted. ‘Or get a message to him. Get me pen and paper, anything. I’ve worked
it out. I know how they’re doing it. I know the secret of the Empire’s pilots.’

She was already staggering determinedly away, ready to rouse the whole Assembly if need be. ‘And get me Taxus!’ she shouted over her shoulder. ‘I need to shake his cursed
hand!’

They told her that Taxus had not come back from his last flight over the city, that the Wasps had caught and killed him in spite of all his idiosyncrasies. It was in a more sober mood that she
finally passed on her revelation to Stenwold Maker.

‘Te Pelle? I didn’t know her much,’ Pingge said. ‘That’s two of us dead.’

Kiin nodded. She looked worn out, and had only slept for a handful of hours since her return from the second mission over Collegium. The flight had been a mixed squad, half of them
Aarmon’s originals, half from the new trainees, but Kiin reported that all the pilots had worked together with the same effortless coordination as before.

Pingge and Gizmer had stolen away from the main body of the bombardiers, now holing up in a store cupboard for a serious discussion of what had happened. It had taken some persuasion for Gizmer
to accept
Sergeant
Kiin into their counsels. Since her promotion he had kept a suspicious eye on her, as though expecting her to metamorphose into a Wasp at any moment. Still, the fact that
she actually had first-hand knowledge of what had happened was enough to twist his arm. Gossip was always better for a little fresh information.

‘The pilot was . . . Bresner, I think. One of the newer ones.’

They considered this information. Te Pelle had been a somewhat haughty girl, not a factory-line worker but an overseer, and of decent family, who had not taken well to being drafted simply for
her artificer’s skills. Still, the woman had been one of them, and that should be enough.

‘Aarmon said something odd,’ Kiin added uncertainly.

‘He actually spoke?’ Pingge asked her. ‘Other than to give an order?’

‘He said she had done well – no, not like that. He said that Bresner had said that te Pelle had done well. Even when they were getting shot up, she got the bombs away, blew up the
fuel store, right on the mark.’

‘He said that
Bresner
said?’ Pingge frowned.

Kiin nodded, wide-eyed. ‘His last message, somehow.’

Gizmer looked from one to the other and grinned, unexpectedly. ‘You surprise me, the pair of you. You hadn’t worked that out?’ He cackled at their expressions. ‘Come on,
now, look at our lords and masters, eh? Pride of the Air Corps, only not one of them’s a pilot by training save for our Captain Aarmon. The rest are just Light Airborne or artificers,
Consortium men, all sorts. By basic inclination we’re more fit for the job than they are. So didn’t you ever wonder
why
?’

‘I assumed they’d had some test, some latent gift for it, or . . .’ Pingge scowled at him. ‘So tell us, big mouth.’

‘They have an Art,’ Kiin put in, spoiling Gizmer’s moment.

He nodded grudgingly. ‘Worked it out, then?’

‘I’d thought . . . I wasn’t sure until you put it that way. They have a mindlink.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Pingge said, straight away.

‘What else then, eh?’ Gizmer pressed.

‘But the Rekef . . . the generals . . . Who knows?’ Pingge’s voice had descended to a whisper. Everyone knew that the Wasp-kinden sometimes manifested the same Art that enabled
Ants to speak mind to mind, but it was rare. More than that, it was dangerous. Back in the reign of Alvric, First Emperor of the Wasps, there had been troubles, perhaps an attempted coup. The
Rekef, then led by the same man who had given the service his name, had flexed its muscles for the first time. Anyone suspected of the mindlink had been hunted down, except for those wretched
traitors who had thrown their lot in with the hunters. The Rekef Inlander had chosen its first battlefield: it could not countenance a hidden, unified fifth column within the Empire: the danger to
the Emperor’s rule was too great to ignore. Hundreds were arrested, tortured for the names of any others they knew, then strung on the crossed pikes. It had been a forging time in the
Empire’s history. A great many traditions had been born.

After that, anyone who developed the Art kept quiet about it, and tried never to use it in case some fellow pariah betrayed them. Yet it continued to manifest itself, that part of the
Wasps’ collective soul refusing to be ignored.

‘They all know,’ Gizmer stated. ‘It’s a secret but not a conspiracy. Times change. There’s a book out there that I snuck a look at – top-secret air tactics
and everything. Colonel Varsec’s work, all of it. He sets out the Farsphex design in it, but he also sets out the new pilots too. He said they used mindlinked troops to coordinate the taking
of Solarno, apparently. So people have been thinking for a while, only it took Varsec to shift the idea over to pilots. No bloody wonder our lot have become the wonders of the air, eh, if
they’re all inside each other’s minds. No wonder we get such a ragbag of recruits, too – women and all. They must have mindlinkers scouting every city in the Empire for more of
the same.’

‘That’s . . .’ Pingge shivered. ‘So they could be talking to each other all the time, and we’d never know.’

Gizmer gave her a patronizing look. ‘They’re Wasps, so what does it matter? It’s not as though they’d be running everything by us otherwise, eh?’

The door to the store cupboard was abruptly thrown open, and the three of them jumped guiltily, expecting the stern, pale face of Aarmon. Instead it was just one of the newer Fly recruits.

‘Sergeant, been looking all over for you!’ the girl squeaked. ‘Everyone’s to assemble. New orders come in.’

The three of them exchanged looks.

‘Don’t like the sound of that,’ Gizmer muttered, and then they set off, half-running, half-flying, to join their fellows.

They met in the barracks common room that Gizmer had dubbed ‘the wasteland’ because, aside from formal times such as this, neither Fly-kinden nor Wasps spent any time there. A quick
head count suggested that just about everyone was there from both camps. Pingge pushed her way into a mob of other Flies, not wanting to be at the back, nor to end up where she might be picked out
by Aarmon, who was standing on a table to look them all over. It really was
everyone
here, she realized, including the trainees, because she could spot the female Wasp recruits interspersed
amongst the men. That had been an arrangement that everyone had thought would go badly wrong, and in fact there had been one incident, when an engineer – an outsider serving as ground crew
– had tried to rape one of the Wasp girls. What happened next only really made sense to Pingge now with the benefit of what Gizmer had told her. The assaulted woman had not even cried out,
but Aarmon and another two pilots had appeared almost immediately. They had stung the rapist to death without sparing a moment for his panicky denials.

‘Listen up,’ Aarmon stated flatly. ‘New orders. We’re to step up the attacks.’

Everyone waited, but Pingge could sense a stir amongst the Wasps, some additional information passing between them.

‘From now on, returning crews get one day of turnaround and then they’re out again. The engineers reckon the Farsphex can be repaired and refuelled in time. We’ll be rolling
missions so, even before one’s back, the next shift will be in the air. Collegium’s had it too easy, they tell me.’

Collegium’s too cursed good at defending itself
, Pingge added, thinking of te Pelle. One of the Wasps must have had the same idea, because Aarmon was nodding.

‘Yes, the Collegiates are good in the air, better than anyone thought. Yes, we’re going to take losses. It’s war.’ His voice was hard, flat, bleak. ‘Do you think
that when the land battle starts, none of our soldiers will die? We have a duty to perform. We will look after our own as much as is humanly possible,’ and his gaze made no distinction
between Wasp or Fly, man or woman, ‘but we will do our duty nonetheless. We will make the Empire proud of us.’

There was something behind his words, and Pingge knew enough to understand now:
They culled the mindlinkers once and they can do it again, especially now they’re all here and out in the
open. If we get it wrong, if we give them cause, then this whole experiment could end up in the Rekef cells.
She shivered.
And it’ll be us along with them, sure enough. I know how the
Rekef think.