The Air War (82 page)

He hauled the Farsphex about, wings pausing for a moment in their beat, to let it hang and slew in the air, then regaining their pace as he slung his craft towards his mark.

A moment later the first impact rattled against them, and he knew, without needing confirmation, that his former prey had rounded on him; one of those precise dancing-step turns putting her on
his tail the moment he abandoned the chase.

Get her off me!
He sent to his fellows, because the roof ahead was spitting and flashing like a miniature storm now, and he knew that there could be only one chance.

Taki felt the absence of pursuit as a physical void behind her, freedom from shackles, and her instant thought was to find a place to put down. She was surely in that
seconds-long limbo that must come just before whatever storm Stenwold Maker would now unleash on their enemies. And yet . . . and yet . . .

And yet the Collegiate pilots had ceded the skies to the Empire, and nothing had happened. No great stroke of genius from the War Master had manifested itself.

The ground screamed out for her, but she was a thing of the air first and foremost, and she flipped the
Esca
about for one last glance at her erstwhile pursuer.

She picked him out immediately, taking a recklessly straight course so that she found herself following him by sheer fighting pilot’s instinct, and ahead she saw a bright flare and spray
of pure white light
. A bomb? No, that’s something he’s aiming for. He’s on an attack run.

She was already flying in his wake and she saw the whole picture, stitched into whole cloth partly from her guesses at Maker’s plan, partly just from the Wasp’s reaction.

A moment later, she let fly with her rotary piercers, seeing at least a scatter of hits reaching the enemy and knowing that the sky was full of his friends.

The sky was full of her friends, too, those who had not been able to get clear. The sky was about to become a very dangerous place, probably a fatal one. She could only hope that enough of the
defenders had managed to touch the ground before now, and that there was someone left who could lead them.

At least I’ll end in the air.
And she loosed again, her twinned weapons hammering, feeling the vibration coming to her through her feet. Her enemy was trying to dodge her, but at
the same time was committed to his own attack. If she could nudge him just a little way, he would lose his chance.

He would have just the one chance, that much she had guessed.

Then she felt the impact of shot punching into her own hull, and she knew that one of the Wasp’s friends was on her, and close, so she was abruptly in the same trap as her enemy, caught by
her own dedication to her offensive. Her pitiful twists and lurches – all she could allow herself, without losing her line – shrugged off some of the incoming bolts, but she felt a
punishing rain against her poor
Esca
’s shell, the tail riddled and shot striking around the gears of the engine, against the pistons of the wings, whose silk spans were instantly
peppered with holes, each one a tiny wound bleeding away her machine’s grace in the air.

Then there was another Collegiate craft coming in from ahead of her, and she thought,
No! Don’t help me! Just take my target!
But she had no mindlink, as the Wasps did, and the
Mynan-painted Stormreader – it was Edmon’s own – flashed past the Farsphex she was chasing, two more Imperial orthopters in hot pursuit of him, his rotaries ablaze with bolts as
he came to her rescue. For a fragment of a second, Taki saw them all like flies in a web, locked into their individual destinies, each devoted to their chosen attack, and each defenceless as the
price of that devotion.

Edmon’s shot must have rattled the pilot behind her, at least temporarily, for she felt no further impact on her hull, but she saw a hail of sparks and broken wood and metal as his own
machine suffered for it under the weapons of his shadows. She did not know, then, whether the damage to his machine was so great that he could not pull away, or whether Edmon chose his path, simply
trusting that, whatever she was about, it
had
to be done and so her pursuer had to be stopped.

Edmon flew so close over her that he blotted out the sky for a blurred second, their wings close to touching, and she neither felt nor heard the impact as he rammed his craft into the vessel
behind her, but it echoed in her all the same.

Aarmon cried out in shock in that same instant, a light winking out in his mind. None of his fellows was able to take up the attack, to drag the little Collegiate pilot from
his tail, her shot already punching through his craft’s hull.

The building ahead, its crown alive with searing argent fire, was in his sights.

‘Kiin!’ he shouted, and a blistering salvo of shot ripped through the cabin behind him. He heard the Fly-kinden woman shout – not in pain but in rage.

‘Reticule’s smashed!’ the words came to him. ‘Sir—!’

‘Do it by hand!’ he called. ‘I have faith in you.’

And their time was up. He was still in the air and over the target, so surely . . .

Bolts scythed through the back and top of his vessel. He felt one wing go still instantly, all connection to the engine severed. He heard Kiin’s scream – brief and agonized, cut
short almost as as soon as it started.

‘
Kiin!
’

The sky was filled with light.

The sky filled with light for Taki, too.

One moment she was in hot pursuit of the Farsphex, and a moment later she was fighting blindly with every part of the
Esca
’s controls, wheeling madly across an unseen roofscape. The
gears stuck and stuttered, the wing joints seemed to freeze, falling out of phase, every moving part on the cusp of being welded to its neighbour. And Taki cringed, shrinking into her seat, waiting
for the flesh-searing fire that must surely follow.

But the Esca coughed and rattled, and kept on flying, and she could see again, albeit with a great negative blotch before her eyes that was already fading. She nearly died anyway, finding
herself pitching downwards in a wild whirl before she could drag the stubborn stick back and get herself level. Then she was still airborne and alive, and as intact as her last skirmish with the
enemy had left her.

And all about her the sky was dotted with orthopters, and most of them were the Empire’s – all still there. Only the fading skein of sparks crawling about every part of her machine
told that anything had happened at all.

Oh, you stupid bastard, Maker. It didn’t work.

Then came the first explosion, a Farsphex simply erupting from within, and she stared and stared, as the sky over Collegium played host to a new and fleeting constellation.

And, on the ground, Stenwold Maker and his fellows rushed out of Banjacs’s house to stare upwards. The fierce, pale light of the lightning engine behind them was
momentarily the god of all shadows, brighter than the sun, and the its charge was gone, hurled impartially into the heavens that were thronging with flying machines.

It was invisible the moment Banjacs’s engine discharged it, and yet every sense screamed with it, a moment of monumental wrongness when each hair stood on end, and the sky seemed to bend
and boom with energies never meant to have been chained by the hand of man.

In the next breath, it had all been for nothing, and Stenwold felt his heart almost stop with the unfairness, the bitter knowledge of a defeat that his own actions had made so much worse.

Then Eujen was yelling and pointing, and he saw the first explosion: one of his enemies ripping apart as though old Banjacs’s ghost was up there tearing the machine asunder with invisible
hands.

And another. And more, and Stenwold stared up as the skies caught fire over his city.

Scain screamed.

Pingge could not make out the words. He seemed to have gone mad, wrenching at the stick and yet taking them only in circles. But outside . . .

She saw the sudden bloom of flame as a nearby Farsphex went up, fragments of hull and wing forming momentary silhouettes against the blast.

‘Aarmon!’ Scain cried out, and Pingge thought,
Kiin!
knowing that her friend of so many years was dead.

Something blew in the engine behind and above her, and she shrieked. Scain was wrestling with his straps, finding them stubborn.

There was no time.

‘Scain!’ she shrilled, and he was turning back towards her, mad desperation in his tear-streaked face. Even as another shudder rocked them, he had his hand extended back, not seeking
help but palm held outwards to sting.

She screamed at him. She saw that he was going to kill her in some Wasp idea of mercy. She felt the searing heat as his Art discharged, and then the fuel tank ruptured and the blast picked her
up.

In that last moment, unable to get himself free, the fire of his sting had cracked her chain apart, and she was flung bodily from the Farsphex, out past the ballista – the bolts behind her
popping and cracking like fireworks – out into the open air, borne away on the vanguard of the explosion.

Her last sight of Scain was a pale face seen through the cockpit’s faceted window, before the flames came.

Taki guided her battered
Esca
through a slow, spiralling descent – in truth the absolute best the machine was capable of just then, while watching the other
Collegiate pilots still aloft follow her down. She had, she confessed to herself, no idea what had just happened, and no leap of inspiration could conquer the gap. Apt as she was, it seemed to her
as though some great sorcerer of old had waved a hand, invoking an untold power simply to rid the sky of the enemy, leaving herself and her fellows intact.

Only later would she learn that Banjacs’s machine had not worked as intended, that the grand obliteration had never come, that even a genius’s calculations could harbour errors.
Later scholars would suggest that, to fulfil his dream, ten times the charge of raw lightning energy would have been needed, and its backwash would have flash-cooked every living thing in
Collegium. As it was, although the Stormreaders that had flown through that particular storm would need refitting, countless small components slightly deformed or melted as the lightning had leapt
about them on its way to repatriation with the sky above, they had all landed safely, their pilots shocked and shaky, but alive.

For the Farsphex, however, the residual sparks of that same discharge had, within a varying number of seconds, coursed through the fuel tank and turned all that volatile and devastatingly
efficient mineral oil into an instantly detonating bomb.

The Collegiate pilots, those who had reached the ground before then, and those only just now touching down, looked up into a sky that they had won, and around them at a city their path to
victory had scarred almost beyond recognition. Even then the messengers were being sent out from Stenwold Maker and Jodry Drillen to tell them their work was not yet done, that the College
artificers were waiting for them to complete emergency modifications to the Stormreaders, that the war was still going on.

She had given the order to run once they seemed to have put an acceptable distance between them and the front line – that chaotic tangle of men and vehicles that had
given Straessa’s maniple the chance to win clear. There were other maniples that had failed to break free, or whose officers had decided on some misguided stand, and she understood she was
abandoning them. There was no right answer.

Shortly after she had allowed her people to break formation and just flee, one of the transport automotives rumbled up, the driver vaguely recognizable from amongst the ranks of the camp
artificers.

‘Get in!’ the man said, his face a mask of dust covering goggles and a face scarf.

‘Where are you headed?’ Straessa demanded. Throughout the mass of retreating Collegiate soldiers, she could see other vehicles performing the same service.

She had a horrible feeling that the driver was about to take them back to the fighting, but he just gestured towards the city, and home.

Straessa did not even need to give the order. By the time she had hauled her aching body on board, most of her maniple were already there, and the nearest stragglers from other units were
heading over as well. The driver kept his eye on the churning dust that must be the Imperial forces on the march again. The sky to the east was dark with the Airborne, beginning to range out over
the fleeing Beetles to pick them off.

Oh I’m not going to enjoy learning about this in history classes
, thought Straessa, because humour had always before been her armour against the world. The following thought was
even less funny:
I don’t think Collegium’s going to be writing the histories
.

When the transport was full, with soldiers hanging off the sides, the driver wrenched it about and headed for the camp at best speed. There were no orders, Straessa understood. Everyone who
could was trying to assist with the retreat, to preserve some vestige of armed strength for . . . nobody seemed to be sure for what.

She was the highest-ranking officer on the automotive, which was to say the only one.

‘What the blazes is this?’ their driver demanded. Ahead of them was a block of soldiers that seemed to be forming up, as though they had arrived late and somehow contrived to
overlook what was happening all around them. The sheer idiocy of it offended their driver enough for him to grind the transport to a halt and begin shouting at them.

‘What are you doing? Get moving, you fools. They’re right behind us!’

There were a fair number of them, Straessa saw – a few hundred at least – and although they were as dust-smothered as everything else she saw that they were mostly all of a piece.
These were Mynans, standing in a close block, shoulder to shoulder just as though the snapbow had never been invented, falling back on what they knew.

Someone was approaching the automotive, and Straessa blinked to recognize the Mynan leader, Kymene. The woman looked exhausted, her right arm bandaged up and a sword in her left hand, but a mad
fire burned in her eyes.