The Air War (81 page)

Straessa risked a glance behind her, because her maniple had now been stripped of a third of its numbers by the skirmishers, and a personal retreat was looking like a good idea, The soldiers
behind her, the reserves and the rear squares, had lost formation, most of them milling, some running. She had never much liked trying to rush through a crowd.

‘Sub!’ someone yelled – possibly a soldier from another maniple calling a different officer altogether, but the cry drew her attention and her heart, already a battered thing,
lost what little hope remained in it.

The Imperial infantry had not rushed her people yet, but only because there was a Sentinel on its way and they did not want to end up underneath it.

‘Anyone got a grenade?’ she shouted, fending off a sword blow, and then the enormous, armour-plated machine surged forwards, absurdly fast for such a weighty thing, and essentially
obliterated the maniple to Straessa’s left, the force of its impact throwing a few boneless bodies high, crushing far more, and the survivors fell almost instantly as the Sentinel loosed a
spray of snapbow shot around it.

Behind it, the Imperial infantry were abruptly in motion, closing the distance.

The Sentinel turned, legs moving in a careful little dance, until its great blind prow was facing Straessa, that covered eye boring into her – specifically her and nobody else, or so it
seemed. Then the eye opened, the metal cover sliding up to reveal the gaping barrel of its leadshotter.

One of her people did have a grenade, and also the good sense to wait until that moment before hurling it, the hatched metal sphere arcing overhead towards that gaping hole. The missile was off
the mark, though, striking the armour and rebounding, exploding pointlessly in the air. With a desperate war-cry the Dragonfly Castre Gorenn leapt into the air, loosing a final arrow that vanished,
without trace or effect, into that gaping eye, her ancient Commonweal skills utterly surpassed by modern artifice, but the silver flecks of snapbow bolts were rebounding from the vehicle’s
metal hide to no greater effect.

I resign my commission
, Straessa decided,
effective immediately
.

Then the Sentinel rocked under a handful of impacts, lurching forwards a few yards, then spinning furiously on the spot to face this new challenge. From behind it, and cutting bloodily through
the Wasp lines, a dozen automotives were on the move, the vanguard of the miscellany that Collegium had used for its strike at the enemy artillery.

Does that mean we won?
was her first mad thought. But she could see only that dozen or so and, even as she watched, one of the machines at the rear simply exploded, and she saw that there
were another handful of Sentinels in hot pursuit.

Oh.
But then she saw what the automotives were actually doing – for the line of their charge cut between the Collegiate forces and the bulk of the Wasp army, ploughing into the
enemy infantry with brutal abandon, forcing the lines apart.

‘Retreat!’ Straessa shouted, then she blew the signal on her whistle for all she was worth. After that, she took her own advice, first killing a final Spider skirmisher who was too
keen for his own good and then turning to run, keeping pace with her maniple because she was still responsible for them. All around her, the Collegiates were doing the same – some retreating
in better order, some simply dropping their weapons and fleeing.

The lead automotive struck the Sentinel at a narrow angle, rocking it back on its legs and rebounding onto a path that churned through the Imperial infantry. The Airborne were already returning
to the fray, shooting at the automotives that were causing such havoc to their lines.

They’re going to destroy the machine!
Stenwold thought, ripping his little snapbow from inside his tunic – the beautiful, vast and yet fragile machine that
Banjacs and the artificers had been so frantically tuning, which was even now poised to wipe the skies clear of Collegium’s enemies. And now the Rekef had arrived to smash it.

He loosed desperately, because there were almost a dozen of the attackers, and the great vulnerable machine was all around them. There was no way that he could stop them all.

But they were not here for the machine, it seemed. Imperial intelligence extended just so far, informed as it was by Spider agents who were almost entirely Inapt. They began shooting hurriedly,
almost wildly, but at the people.

A bolt passed across Stenwold’s scalp and he reeled back, but his own quick shot had taken one of the men down, and he was already loosing the second before the tight knot of enemy could
break apart.

He saw Banjacs take a bolt in the chest and jerk backwards, a tangle of elbows and knees, blood abruptly appearing bold across his white robes. Almost as valuable as the machine itself was its
creator.

The Imperials were not soldiers, and their skill at arms had played second to their intelligence training. After taking the two Company soldiers at the door, they had expected to face only Maker
and a handful of scholars. They forgot, or never appreciated, that there were few College men or women who were complete strangers to the Prowess Forum, and that Collegium had been through two
sieges over in the last few years.

A heavy workman’s hammer, thrown with remarkable skill, took one man full in the face. Another of the artificers had brought a sword, and rushed to meet the attackers blade to blade.

Then the burn-scarred man spotted Averic.

‘You little bastard!’ he shouted, seeing before him, in the flesh, that fatal miscalculation that had spoiled their operation. What went through the man’s mind then, viewing
this pure-blooded Wasp-kinden of good family who had inexplicably betrayed all the generations of Empire, was written in ugly lines over the Beetle spy’s face. Immediately, he charged the
youth, without thought for any aim beyond killing him.

Stenwold was trying to get to Banjacs, but a swordsman was suddenly upon him, a lean Beetle with a knife in his offhand and enough rough skill to force Stenwold on the defensive, driving him
further away from his allies.

Behind Stenwold’s opponent, the Collegiate swordsman was being forced back by his own adversary, before tripping over the body of another artificer who had fallen to a snapbow bolt. His
enemy reared above him, sword drawn back, and then Eujen appeared beside him, face fixed in a horrified expression, and rammed a blade through the spy’s ribs.

Stenwold pushed forwards again, realizing, after the initial surprise, that he was the better duellist – perhaps the best swordsman in the room for all that it said about the rest of them.
‘Leadswell! Get to Banjacs!’ he yelled. The Beetle boy looked at him briefly, and went sprinting over to the old inventor’s motionless form.

Averic’s wings had carried him up to a gantry, and the burn-scarred man stood below him, raging up at him. ‘You traitor! You coward filth! Can’t even
fight
? A shame to
your own people, curse you!’ Abandoning his comrades to the fight, he found a shaking stairway leading up and took it three steps at a time, only to find the Wasp already balanced on the
rail, ready to glide down.

Banjacs was plainly gone beyond anything that Eujen could do for him. The old man’s ragged form was so thin that it seemed he had died long before, dried out and desiccated until only this
husk remained. And yet, as Eujen knelt beside him, those piercing eyes flew open, and the old man took a hacking breath that sprayed more blood over his robes.

‘My machine!’ he whispered, reaching out for it as if trying to encompass the entire radiant edifice with a clutch of a single hand. ‘Take me – take me . . .’ And,
with the last dregs of a Beetle’s bloodyminded endurance, he began lurching across the floor on hands and elbows, a slick red slug’s trail behind him and his legs limp and useless.

Eujen caught his rasping plea, ‘Help me make it
work.
’

A snapbow in his hand, a second man came at Stenwold, shouting for his fellow to get clear. The weapons were not meant for such close quarters, and the War Master ducked away from a blow to lash
his blade at the barrel, knocking it up and away. Then the snapbowman was down, sitting with hands smeared red as they pressed at a stomach wound, and one of the two Company soldiers huddled in the
doorway was fumblingly trying to reload her bow even though her breastplate had a puncture hole above her left breast.

And the burn-scarred man looked back towards his people and must have seen almost none of them left now, and that this desperate gambit had failed. ‘Traitor,’ he repeated, almost a
whisper. His expression revealed bitter bewilderment, at why this Wasp had turned so far from his people, and why the boy would not now even finish the job. Looking into Averic’s eyes,
perhaps he sought some grand answer, some hint of a greater plan, something to justify the waste and the failure.

‘I’m sorry,’ Averic said, and those two words plainly showed the burned man how Collegium had taken him, body and mind, and corroded all the hard edge of the Empire.

The Beetle spy rushed him, surely without any great hope of achieving anything, because by that time he had nowhere to go and nothing to accomplish. Instead of simply flitting out of reach,
Averic’s hands came up by instinct and, even as the Wasp kicked back from the railing, his Art flashed and seared, and what fell from the balcony was just a singed corpse.

The swordsman artificer – the only one of the three still living – dropped his blade with a harsh clang. In the doorway, the soldier leant back with a groan, pulling weakly at the
straps of her breastplate until Stenwold hurried over to help her.

And, before the lambent majesty of the machine, Eujen propped Banjacs up, the old man’s ashen face borrowing a radiance from the great assembly of glass above him. There were no words, but
a trembling thrust of the inventor’s hands picked out a bronze lever from amidst the chaos of dials and wheels, and Eujen hoisted him higher until he could seize on it.

Banjacs summoned some last strength then, from some inner well or perhaps from the unseen source of all Beetle Art. He shrugged himself free of Eujen’s grip, and let his own weight pull
down the lever.

What are they doing?

The question flashed at Aarmon from all sides as the battlefield in the air disintegrated. Everywhere the Collegiate orthopters were breaking away, even braving the Imperial shot to ditch in the
streets of their city. Aarmon’s aviators reported the enemy pilots scrambling from their machines and simply running, leaving the downed Stormreaders as sitting targets for bolt or bomb.
Several orthopters were clipped from the sky in their frantic attempts to get clear.

Aarmon put the Farsphex through two more tight turns, swinging wild of the line his target was taking but dragging his craft back on course with a sure hand, pushing his skill and his
machine’s tolerances to their limits but feeling his quarry start to tire, the panic of the chase in her throat. She was trying to get free, too – she tried to reach the ground again
and again, but he was waiting for her each time, as his cohorts hedged her in on either side.

They know they’ve lost. They’re hoping to preserve their air strength for the siege
, came the offering from one of his pilots.

They’re out of power, their clockwork’s run down
, from another.

Other speculations kept battering at his mind, when he needed all his concentration to stay with her, his prize.

How he knew it was a
she
he could not say, but this enemy pilot he knew intimately, through a bond as close as that he shared with his comrades. Her orthopter was different, a slighter,
nimbler piece of elegance than the admittedly admirable Collegiate standard, and her style was impeccable: a fierce, thrilling blend of excellence and inspiration that took possession of the sky
wherever she flew.

She had been responsible for more deaths amongst his fellows than any other Collegiate pilot, her unique ship putting that knowledge beyond doubt. He had sought her out, and sought her out,
night after night in the frenzied chaos of their aerial engagements. Now here she was, fleeing him in broad daylight.

It is not revenge
; the thought passed through his mind and he knew it had gone out to his fellows, that Scain would be mouthing it even now. It was not hatred that moved him, either, or a
desire for conquest. He remembered, when he was a boy, watching the hunting wasps take their prey on the wing, and feeling that
moment
where the destinies of predator and prey intersected,
as though by consensus, each to its role. The dream of living that moment had taken him through the Light Airborne, and into the Aviation Corps when that new institution had formed. Not vengeance
nor spite, but perfection.

His comrades were still engaging the enemy, of whom fewer and fewer were left to engage. Two-thirds of the surviving Collegiate force had reached the ground, or died trying, and the rest would
plainly join them if the Wasps allowed them the opportunity. Still shifting his craft through the impossibly tight and dancing turns that his opponent sped into, he felt a clutching sensation
inside him.
A trap. But what?
They had control of the skies, with the Second on its way, and what could Collegium do about it?

Commence bombing as soon as you’re free to do so
, he ordered.
Let’s see if we can’t sting them into the air again.

Then he saw something flash in the heart of the city: a tall house capped with a dome, nothing out of the ordinary save for a circular skylight that—

Lightning leapt and flashed from there, darting and reaching for the vault of sky above. And Aarmon’s mind said,
Weapon
.

He had a fraction of a second to realize, out of all his flight, that it was he whose course could be twisted to pass by that sparking roof, and he broke his pursuit off instantly, with only a
moment’s regret, for sentiment was something he could suddenly not afford to indulge.

‘Sergeant!’ he snapped back towards Kiin, ‘Ready bombs, target domed house dead ahead.’