The Air War (72 page)

It was a slightly depressing thought, that he might well have to do away with Harvang’s talents.
Although at least I get that vermin Ostrec with him. We’ll see how much of a
pretty boy he remains after a few rounds with the interrogators.

Seda always liked this level of the palace
, he thought drily, as he mounted a final set of stairs and headed towards sunlight. No dingy Rekef cellars for the conspirators now, but an airy
room with a balcony overlooking a muster square. After all, there was no need for secrecy any more.

He stepped through the doorway with the word, ‘Harvang . . .’ on his lips, and stopped dead.

Colonel Vecter sat on a couch across from the door, or at least he was propped there: his spectacles askew on his nose, eyes wide, his skin deathly pale. Brugan made a sound, just a wordless
noise.

The Consortium magnate, Knowles Bellowern, sprawled to his left, lying on his back, dark skin gone an ashen grey. To Brugan’s right, as if struck down while rushing for the doorway, was an
army major who had been privy to the plot. Only yesterday he had been nagging to receive a reward for his services. Someone had ensured that he had been given it. He lay face down, frozen fingers
clawing at the stone floor.

Despite himself, Brugan took another two paces into the room.

There were others, but in the far corner, slouching in a chair, was the vast dead-leviathan bulk of Colonel Harvang, an appalling sack of flesh bleached white like some sea-thing dragged into
daylight. Bloodless like them all, his sagging, flaccid face bore an expression of horrified disbelief.

Seda stood beside him, and she was not alone. At one shoulder stood a young Wasp with a faint smile on his face, the one notable absence in the corpse-conspiracy that now surrounded them.

‘Ostrec!’ Brugan hissed, and then, without pause, ‘Kill him! Kill Ostrec now!’ for he himself could not raise a hand, not with
her
there.

Something moved very swiftly behind him, and he was spattered by a warm spray. Someone’s elbow struck Brugan in the back, staggering him, and there was some small scuffling, no more than
that. Reeling back, turning with his palm raised, he found himself facing a figure in full armour of ornate Mantis construction, its only weapon a clawed metal gauntlet on one hand.

His men were dead. All his men were all dead. Brugan’s mouth moved, wordlessly. This was one of the Empress’s bodyguards, but had they not all been
women
? The faintly glimpsed
face within the helm seemed as pale as the drained corpses around them.

He turned, hand directed now at the Empress but shaking so wildly that his true aim would have been unguessable. He could not loose, though. His sting was a prisoner of his hand and her eyes.
Her feigning of the night before had been cast aside, as had all his assurances to himself that she was his, that she was just a Wasp woman, that she was in any way
natural.

‘Do you fear, General Brugan?’ she asked him sweetly. ‘Do not, for you are dear to me, after all. I would not harm you. Come.’ She gestured, stepping out onto the
balcony, Ostrec a step after her. The presence of the Mantis loomed large behind him, and Brugan felt himself shepherded, driven until he stood out in the open air.

‘We have much to celebrate, General,’ Seda told him. ‘The Empire is to become great in ways you cannot imagine. Drink with me.’

Ostrec held a goblet to him, and Brugan felt keenly aware of all those pale bodies in the room at his back. He knew what the cup would contain.

He saw soldiers out there on the muster field, perhaps a hundred of them in slightly unfamiliar uniforms, the pauldrons and gorgets of gleaming red offsetting the traditional colours of the
Empire. Each one of them held a clay beaker, and when Seda lifted her own goblet high, so did they.

‘Your Rekef is so prone to plots and divisions,’ Seda told him. ‘I had hoped when I took the throne that ridding you of your rivals would cure the rot, but it appears that
conspiracy is addictive. These men you see before you are
mine
,’ and the way she used the word spoke of far more than simple oaths and orders. ‘They have been chosen by me for
the blood they bear, some last fading touch of a former age that lets me speak to them. They have bound themselves to me and, wherever they go, they shall speak with my voice. They are my Red
Watch, and even the Rekef shall obey them. Is that not so, General?’

He could do nothing then, but apparently silence had doomed him to acquiescence, for Seda nodded, satisfied. Perhaps she had read the surrender in his mind. He would believe anything now.

‘Drink,’ she said, and brought the cup up to her lips, and Brugan felt his own arm move, as if accepting that it had no choice. In the square below, the Red Watch drank too, renewing
their pact with the Empress, and all that she represented.

The Eighth Army under General Roder had been making determined but dragging progress towards Sarn, constantly plagued by the attentions of the Mantis-kinden. The forest north
of them seemed to throng with inexhaustible numbers of the creatures, and all their unpleasant pets, and every night they would sally forth to plague him in some manner. The army carried its
fortress with it, just as General Tynan had pioneered against the Felyal in the last war, constructing it every evening before dark, taking every wall down each morning by dawn. This on its own had
slowed progress, but Roder was beginning to wonder if he should not have found a way to lay siege to the forest itself. The Felyal, with its warlike natives, was tiny in comparison, and these two
Mantis holds of Etheryon and Nethyon fielded a formidable number of inventive and determined killers.

If they had offered a direct assault, then Roder had no doubt that he would have smashed them. Superior tactics and technology would have sent the savages packing without difficulty. Instead,
the Mantids crept in, as ones and twos and small bands, their stealth and their Art evading the eyes of the sentries, however much artificial light the Wasps were able to call upon. They slipped
into the camp and killed whoever opportunity put across their path, but they were subtler than mere assassins. In the same way as the Moths of Tharn had plagued the mine owners of Helleron for
generations, so the Mantids destroyed everything they could find. Without a shred of the artificer’s craft, they were still able to damage vehicles, carts and artillery, to hole water and
fuel barrels, and to lay thorny caltrops, snares and spikes for the unwary. During the day, after the army finally got underway, Mantis warbands would shadow them constantly, always on the lookout
for an opening to swoop in, loose their deadly arrows and then retreat. They presented Roder with a perfect mathematical challenge. He could defend completely, arraying his men so that the Mantids
did not even try an assault, but then the Eighth would proceed at a mere crawl. The faster he advanced, however, the more opportunities he presented to the enemy, and they took them without
fail.

He had hoped for howling savages, but the Mantis-kinden here were cunning and patient, and he knew that behind them would be their Moth masters and military advisers from Sarn, which was being
given plenty of time to prepare for his assault.

Still, even if he was slowed down, his progress was inexorable, and the casualties and damage had all been within tolerance. He had always known that the Eighth would have to run this gauntlet,
even if he had not quite appreciated that they would have to
walk
it.

This morning, though, even as his army was dismantling the previous night’s defences, he heard the drone of a flying machine on the air.

The Sarnesh had tried one air attack, a tenday ago. Their machines and pilots were inferior to the Wasp Spearflights that Roder carried with him, but their mindlink made them troublesome
opponents, even so. They had not adapted their machines for the sort of ground attacks that Roder knew the Imperial air force was carrying out over Collegium, and so the overall damage was slight,
but there was every chance that the Ants would come back with something more effective. He had issued standing orders, so even now a dozen of his own aviators were rushing for their machines.

There was only a single flier incoming, though, and it came from the east, from home. The Spearflights escorted it in, and Roder saw that it was a new long-bodied machine, presumably one of the
Farsphex model raiders that were committed to the Collegium offensive.

He knew that these machines carried would carry a passenger, but he did not expect the apparition that unfolded itself awkwardly out of the passenger compartment. Tall, hunched and lanky, grey
skin banded with white, and bundled up in a scholar’s robe edged with Imperial colours, Roder recognized the Imperial adviser, Gjegevey. If asked to prepare a list of the last men he would
expect to see out here, the ancient Woodlouse-kinden would certainly have appeared on it.

Once Gjegevey was tottering on his feet and moving out of the way, the pilot made himself known, and at that point Roder would not have been overly surprised to see the Empress herself. Instead,
though, he saw a young man with a captain’s rank badge, the uniform of the Light Airborne adorned with red pauldrons and gorget, denoting some unfamiliar unit.

‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ Roder asked, though with nothing pleasant in his tone. Men like Gjegevey unsettled him. The old creature had no fixed place in the world, being
simultaneously a slave and a great power within the Empire.

‘Orders, General. I, mmn, bear the Empress’s word.’ Gjegevey extracted a somewhat creased scroll from within his robe, and Roder accepted it reluctantly.

When he had broken the seal, checked the signatures and read the contents, his face lost all expression. ‘This cannot be,’ he said flatly.

‘A temporary measure only, General,’ Gjegevey assured him, ‘but essential. Think of it as part of a greater plan, the, hm, Empress’s own.’

‘Impossible. I cannot give these orders.’

‘They are from the Empress’s own hand, sir,’ the pilot said, imbuing that ‘sir’ with precious little respect.

‘And who are you?’ Roder demanded of the young man, who had the sort of smug confidence he associated only with the Rekef.

‘I am of the Red Watch,’ the pilot replied. ‘I am the voice of the Empress.’

Roder stared at him, and Gjegevey added, in a low voice, ‘There have been changes back in Capitas. Believe me, these orders are not negotiable.’

The general sagged slightly, looking about him at his busy army. In a moment he was going to have to tell them, all of them, that they were to withdraw some several miles east and there make
camp and wait for further orders. And all the while still within the Mantis-kinden’s reach.

Gjegevey, though, who had brought such bad tidings, already seemed to have forgotten him. Instead he was staring north towards the great, engulfing shadow that was the Etheryon– Nethyon
forest, with a speculative expression on his face.

The tent of Chief Officer Marteus looked spartan, with merely a bedroll slung in one corner and a wooden stand for the man’s armour. No map table, for he held his plans
in his head, and sharing them with others was not something he was good at. No chair even: he would sit on the floor with his soldiers. Only the fact that he had a tent to himself showed any
indication of rank.

Straessa had been called in without warning at first light, and she was not sure whether she had done something wrong. Certainly there had been a fair amount of larking around amongst her
troops, which she had hoped was good for morale, or some similar military virtue, for she was not the right officer to quell it.

‘Subordinate Officer the Antspider,’ Marteus acknowledged her with a nod. The renegade Tarkesh Ant was in full uniform: breastplate and buff coat, even the lobster-tail helm dangling
from one hand as though he would don it any moment and charge off to war alone.

‘Chief Officer Marteus.’ Straessa could not say that she
liked
this man overmuch: he was distant and unsociable, as most Ants were in the company of other kinden. Her respect
for him, though, had only grown, for he was so much more the born warrior and logistician than the Collegium locals.

‘We’ll engage the enemy tomorrow, most likely,’ he told her. ‘They’re keeping a steady progress and, if they chose, they could hit us before dawn, or earlier. They
made a fierce pace from Tark to the Felyal. We don’t know precisely what time they could manage, if they pushed.’

‘I understand, Chief.’

He took a deep breath. ‘Battle order, Sub. Bitter as it is to have to spell it out for you, but there’s none of you who could work it out for yourself or take it from my mind.
It’s a simple plan, though. Just keep repeating it to yourself until it sinks in.’ He was overdoing the gruff, and that made Straessa nervous. ‘The automotives are going to form
our wings, flying out left and right to assault the enemy in the flanks. Some will carry light artillery, others just troops. They will do their best not to engage the enemy automotives, for
reasons you’ll understand full well.’

‘Yes, Chief.’

‘Their objective is the enemy siege train, specifically anything that looks like a giant leadshotter. That’s the word from the Mynans for what took their walls down. From what they
say, the Second won’t need to get that much closer to Collegium’s walls in order to deploy them. As for our centre, you’re it.’

Straessa digested all this, standing very still, her face carefully calm, while she played it out in her mind against the backdrop of the desperate retreat from the entrenching works. The more
she thought calmly about it, the more her insides churned and twisted, until her mouth came out with, ‘Hammer and anvil, Chief?’ She did her best to make the words sound casual, because
that was how she preferred to think of herself, but the tremor emerged despite her best efforts.

‘As you say, Sub.’

‘Chief.’
I have fifty comrades who will follow me, and most of them are friends.
‘I can’t help noticing,’ fighting with each word to keep her voice level,
hands clenched into tight fists, ‘that their hammer is likely to be their automotives, Chief, And our a-anvil is going to be
us
, Chief, flesh and blood.’ And she snapped her
mouth shut because to say more than that would be to invite a sundering of her composure.