The Air War (60 page)

‘We need to get out there now in order to have a chance of preparing a stand against them,’ said Marteus of the Coldstone Company. His face was as blank and closed as always, but
there was a tightness in his voice that spoke of stress. ‘We’re not short of recruits, anyway. Seems like half the fugitives from the Felyal have signed up.’

‘Are they ready to fight?’ Jodry asked him.

‘They have no time left to be made more ready,’ Marteus stated flatly.

Jodry was chairing the council. On his left were Marteus and Elder Padstock, the two chief officers who would be taking the fight to the enemy. Corog Breaker slumped on his right, with the Mynan
leader Kymene beyond him, head bowed in thought. Across the table from him was Stenwold Maker, no longer the Speaker’s great friend and ally. Hardly anyone actually knew what had caused the
rift, but tension between them sang in the air like a razor.

‘How are the automotives?’ Jodry asked. These days that seemed to be his role in life, to stumble around between the people to whom the defence of the city had been delegated, asking
them inane questions.

‘As ready as anything else,’ Elder Padstock confirmed. ‘We have quite a fleet of them now, certainly more than the enemy have of the Cyclops machines the War Master told us of,
especially with the help from Sarn.’

‘Sentinels,’ Stenwold reminded her, citing the name that had come in Laszlo’s earlier note of warning delivered by the captain of a merchantman. Where Laszlo had got to was
just one more worry for Stenwold right now. ‘And, armour them how we will, they are not a match for the Imperial vehicles. With the exception of the six Sarnesh automotives, not one of them
was even built for war. Bolting some plates and a repeating ballista on won’t get us very far.’ The aid from Sarn had been an unexpected bonus: a half-dozen boxy, serviceable war
automotives – lumbering tracked machines boasting turret-mounted nailbows and paired smallshotters to the fore. They were not Sentinels, but they were considerably more warlike than any of
the makeshift contraptions that Collegium was intending to field. Stenwold sighed heavily. ‘I have asked some experts to join us,’ he told them. ‘They’re waiting outside.
They’ve put together some idea of how we might win this fight.’

Jodry was too weary for surprise. ‘Well, send them in then. Let’s hear it.’

They were two more Beetle-kinden: a tall austerely handsome woman in a Master’s robes; and man head and shoulders taller than anyone else in the room, vastly broad across the chest,
wearing a Company soldier’s buff coat that must have been made from two garments of the regular size.

‘Mistress Praeda Rakespear of the College faculty of artifice,’ Stenwold introduced them, ‘and Amnon, former First Soldier of Khanaphes.’

There was a reflective pause from around the table, especially from Jodry, who plainly had not received any forewarning, but then Marteus spoke up: ‘Is this a joke? I know this man.
He’s a good fighter, but his city doesn’t even
have
automotives.’

‘Chief Officer Marteus,’ Praeda snapped, even as Stenwold opened his mouth, ‘I would point out that Collegium has no history of fighting wars with automotives either. However,
for hundreds of years the Khanaphir have taken chariots to war.’

‘
Chariots?
’ Marteus demanded.

‘Masters,’ Amnon rumbled, speaking softly and yet quietening the room. ‘It seems to me that your city is about to be attacked by enemies wielding new weapons that you have not
faced before, and have no ready defence against. This I can understand.’ That reminder that his own city had suffered from the Empire, dragged roughly into the modern age when Wasp
leadshotters knocked down its walls, caught their attention. ‘It is true your people have many wonderful inventions that mine lack. Every day there seems some new device to lighten the burden
of life. However, Praeda has shown me these automotives of yours, and I understand they involve no beasts to fall to arrow or spear, that they are armoured so as to be more durable than our
creations of wood but, still, a war with automotives is like a war with chariots, it seems to me. You have prepared your fleet of machines, and the Wasps already have these Sentinels the War Master
has spoken of, together with many more vehicles, for the moving of their soldiers and supplies. What use will they put them to, however? What use will you make of yours?’

Marteus shifted restlessly, still less than convinced, and Jodry’s expression was doubtful as well, but nobody spoke.

‘Chariots – automotives – are in themselves only suited to one thing: attack. They cannot hold, they cannot defend. They must keep moving always to be effective, or they are no
more than one more leadshotter, moved swiftly into place. Their strength is in their motion, and in attack.’

‘That is convenient given that the Empire will be attacking us,’ Marteus pointed out acidly.

‘They will not be,’ Amnon corrected him patiently, and a look passed between him and Praeda. She set out a long scroll and made some quick marks with a reservoir pen.

‘Collegium here,’ she noted. ‘Second Army’s line of approach from the north-east. Now, where is the attack?’

The others leant forward, and Jodry made a vague gesture towards the curved line that was Collegium’s wall.

‘You haven’t been listening to Master Maker, or to me for that matter,’ Kymene spoke up, barely glancing at the sketch. ‘These automotives did not bring my city’s
walls down. They were used to break up our positions inside the city only.’

Jodry exchanged a glance with Marteus. ‘The artillery.’

‘These farshotters, or whatever they’re calling them,’ Stenwold confirmed. ‘Amnon?’

‘The Empire will not be attacking. The Empire will be defending,’ the Khanaphir explained. ‘They need to bring their weapons into range, and then they need to prevent any harm
befalling them. It is just as it was with my city. For this they must rely on the sort of makeshift fortification your people say they used around your forest Felyal. They will use their chariots
– these automotives – to counter-attack your force, but if you can strike at their leadshotter weapons, you strip them of their chiefest advantage. Now do you see?’

This time Marteus was silent, and everyone else was nodding appreciatively.

‘So,’ Amnon continued, satisfied. ‘The novice chariot commander orders his vehicles straight for the enemy, against their shields. The Empire is yet a novice, so this is most
likely what it will do. The wise charioteer brings his forces to the enemy’s flanks, even encircling to his rear, using his speed to the fullest, allowing him to strike at his enemy’s
weakest point. I have seen maps of the land you are most likely to fight on – it is hilly, but flat enough to give you room to move – the path the enemy will attack along means nothing,
for you have all the land you need to manoeuvre. You understand?’

After that the discussion became more technical, and Stenwold sat back and watched as the former First Soldier, whose introduction to modern artifice was only a few years old, now tutored those
who had lived with it all their lives. This was a part of the war that Stenwold felt himself well rid of. Perhaps in his younger days he would have thrown himself into the planning of it. Now he
felt just like the Khanaphir; time and progress moving at a pace that he could not keep up with. He could not do it all. He had to trust to people like Amnon, Marteus and Taki each to hold up their
own corner of the war.

Afterwards, he let them drift away, Jodry, Kymene and the others. Night was drawing in. Already the Great Ear would be primed, the airmen and women waiting for the call, their machines wound and
ready. Stenwold the historian had a great sense of history, not momentous but merely inexorable.
Could we ever actually defeat the Empire? Should we have mobilized the Lowlands and struck at
them while they dealt with their own internal problems, the ink on our treaty still wet? And then what? By the time we finished fighting them all the way across the Empire, what would we create?
How many of those freed subject cities would be at each other’s throats, and blaming us. Or would we take the Empire’s place, forcing them to accept our grand enlightenment down the
barrel of a snapbow?

Where is it going to end?

Someone cleared their throat, and he looked up to see Praeda hovering in the doorway.

‘Master Maker, I told Berjek I’d pass on a message for him. As a favour, really.’

‘It’s about his brother?’ Stenwold divined. The problem of Banjacs Gripshod had not gone away, but just now nobody cared enough to grasp the nettle. ‘Jodry went to speak
to him a while back, I know.’

‘He wants to speak to
you
, Berjek said,’ Praeda told him. ‘Specifically to
you
. I’m sorry, Stenwold, but Berjek . . . I just said I’d ask. Now
I’ve asked. That’s all.’

‘If I should somehow ever find a moment spare then perhaps I’ll go and see him,’ Stenwold told her, ‘although I can’t honestly think what he might have to say to
me.’

‘Here they come!’ Scain relayed the news for Pingge’s benefit, and a moment later their Farsphex fell sideways in the air, breaking formation smoothly even as
the Imperial machines broadened their net, ready to take on the Collegiate fliers as they came in. They were still miles from the Beetle city, and the enemy’s ability to home in on their
attacks was being hotly debated by the engineers back home. Meanwhile intelligence from the spies in Collegium was drying up – either the Beetles were keeping a better watch or they were
simply keeping more secrets from each other.

Pingge stared out into the night through her open hatch, watching for the telltale ghosts of movement that would resolve into those vicious, nimble two-winged orthopters the Collegiates built.
Before her was the ballista she had recently been saddled with, and if any target presented itself in the small arc of their vessel’s left flank that she could actually shoot at, then
possibly she might get off a bolt at it. There was a rack of the explosive-tipped ammunition within arm’s reach, and it terrified her. One spark, from a stray piercer bolt striking the hull
of the Farsphex, say, and they might all go up. For the marginal advantage it gave, the risks seemed ridiculous. The Beetles always seemed to be gaining ground technologically, though, and the
Engineering Corps was just as keen to load their vaunted new pilots with every new toy they could devise.
One day we won’t get off the ground, for all the advantages they’ve given
us.

They pitched violently, and she heard Scain curse. A scattering of bolts sprayed them, punching through the outer hull, but none of them making it through the second inner skin that protected
the pilot, the bombardier, the engine and the fuel tank.
Just so long as they don’t hit the wings or just shoot me directly through this stupid open doorway I’ve got here.
Then
she nearly swallowed her tongue because a Collegiate flier had blurred past, in her sights for a fraction of a second, but gone before she could react, leaving her pointlessly swinging the ballista
after it.

She could not remember when she had last slept properly. There was a part of her mind insisting that she should be dropping dead from exhaustion by now. The Chneuma was a merciless mistress,
though, goading her on as though it had a handful of hot pokers lodged inside her. The Wasps took far more of the stuff than their Fly-kinden subordinates, too. She didn’t want to think about
how Scain would be feeling.

They lurched in the air again, and she had a sense that they were pulling further off from the fray. Looking out into a chessboard of cloud and moonlight, she caught sight of orthopters driving
at one another, looping and turning, but they were some distance away.
Are they off course, or are we?

‘Hey, sir, what’s up?’

Scain was silently concentrating on flying, pulling them ever further away. Pingge risked putting her head and shoulders out, the wings a thunder above her. There were other machines close by,
but not fighting. All of them were simply putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the conflict.

And ahead lay geography that had practically written itself on to the back of her eyes: the coast, the harbour . . . Collegium.

‘Sir?’ she tried again.

‘Nishaan’s holding them,’ Scain rattled back, tensely. ‘We’re giving the city all we’ve got before they realize we’re mostly past them.’

Pingge reflected drily that the Wasp woman named Nishaana had mysteriously lost the feminine ending of her name since she had made sergeant. ‘New targets, sir?’

‘Use your discretion. Industry and residential,’ Scain reported to her. ‘Attacking their means and their will to fight. You know the drill.’

‘Right you are, sir.’

One of the Collegiate pilots had said to Taki, ‘I even dream about flying now,’ and her immediate thought had been,
I always dreamt of flying, every night
– it’s just that those used to be good dreams.
All of her life all she had ever wanted was to fly. All her other ambitions – the respect of her aviator peers, her victories in
dragon-fights over the Exalsee, her status within the city – remained secondary and inextricably bound up with that one thought. Now she wanted to spend a tenday on the ground, not to touch
the control stick of the
Esca Magni
, not to view the world through the glass of her cockpit, not to have her heartbeat fall into step with the beating of her orthopter’s wings.

The Great Ear had sounded off early that night, and strongly, and she had already been trying to calculate the enemy force incoming even as her Art wings dropped her into place in her
pilot’s seat. All about her, the other pilots of her airfield, and her shift, were scrambling for their machines. Around half of them were veterans like Edmon, the other half with only a
flight or two to their name, and at least two for whom this would be the acid test, their first combat.

Taki had always thought of herself as young; fighting in the air was a young woman’s game, after all. Reflexes decayed like everything else, and eventually experience could no longer
offset the loss. She still wondered why Corog Breaker had not been killed yet. The old Master Armsman had a warrior’s heart, but she could measure his years in the handling of his machine,
that extra second’s lapse in time before he reacted. His glider wings had saved his life twice now.