War Master's Gate (25 page)

For a handful of seconds she was there, the two Stormreaders committing themselves to the false course she had abandoned, and she rattled the bombing fixed-wing with a score of bolts, punching
into its solid hull.
Not enough
. But even as she thought that, the vessel lurched and pulled up, its pilot losing his nerve. Then her shadows were back with her and she threw the Farsphex
up and away, giving up her target for the sake of saving her hide, but knowing that the cargo fixed-wing would circle back for another try, unmolested, unless she or another of her fellows could
stop it.

One of her pilots shouted out a hit: a lumbering, bomb-heavy heliopter clipped out of the sky with broken rotors, tumbling end over end to plough into the earth, spilling crew and munitions. To
her right a Spearflight, which had once been one of the fleetest craft in the air, was gutted by a Stormreader’s bolts, the narrow metal needles cutting open its belly and smashing its motor,
so that the Imperial aircraft slewed sideways in the air, wings stilled, and then fell, with the pilot struggling to get the cockpit open and bail out.

She was fighting to rejoin the battle, risking more and more to break through the cordon that the Stormreaders had thrown up, and dodging between the raking lines of their shot. There was
another bomber now at the edge of her attention, as hard to reach as the centre of a maze. Bolts scattered across her hull, one smashing a cockpit pane. Bergild wrenched her goggles down as the
wind roared about her.

Her target, an orthopter with something of the grace of a fighting craft, was lining itself up with one of the transport auto-motives, and she locked her wings, stilling their beat without
engaging the propellers as the designer had intended. The Farsphex dropped as abruptly as though all Apt flight had been nothing but a tinker’s dream. She took three hits to her underside as
she fell through the metal hail, one of which punched into the bombardier’s compartment behind her and ricocheted wildly –
and how glad I am not to be carrying a passenger
–
and then she was out of it, fighting to restart her wings as the ground yawned to receive her, coming down so swiftly, so true, that she almost collided with her target. The
Stormreaders would already be stooping on her, hunched and deadly machines designed for just that, and she had seconds to strike before she would have to pull away, or die.

Her machine was sluggish in the air, the wings still finding their rhythm, but that only served to let her fall into line behind the bomber. She saw the first flash of its munitions, searing
across whatever luckless segment of the Second was down below. The driver of its automotive target must have seen what was coming, but the machine lurched on over the uneven ground.

Her immaculately timed burst of shot chewed off the long vane of the orthopter’s tail, butchering its smooth approach. Even then its pilot did not try to flee, and she could almost feel
him fighting with suddenly unresponsive controls, determined to strike his mark.
A true pilot, then.
He was veering, though, unable to hold his place in the air with wings alone, as the
killing rain of his bombs stamped blazing footprints across a scattering body of infantry, leaving the transporter untouched. Bergild was already pulling out, rising into a metal-filled sky,
watching another Spearflight ripped apart even as she tried to come to its aid. Then the Stormreaders had her again.

Through the mind of another pilot she saw a bomber strike its target, a trundling automotive that must have been laden with ammunition. The bloom of fire and shrapnel scythed out on all sides,
two score lives smashed beyond recovery, the flame gouting enough that the watching pilot felt the heat buffet his wings.

Another of her pilots shouted in her mind that he was on the cusp of a strike, and she could almost see him lined up behind the labouring bomber. Then he was gone, a storm of bolts cutting open
the cockpit to rip him apart.

Major Oski spotted the plume of fire, and just kept shouting. He had long since run out of anything useful to say, but for a Fly-kinden officer, so easily overlooked, shouting
had become his grease on the wheels of any interaction with Wasp soldiers. His current victims had a repeating ballista mounted on the back of little scouting automotive, and were frantically
wheeling it round to face the onrushing fliers.

‘The fixed wing there – the one like a barrel – that one, ready and aim!’ He had his sleeves rolled up, his tunic grease-marked and sweaty from doing all a Fly could do
to help get the artillery piece ready. His crew of three – Ernain and a couple of Light Airborne – were trying to line the piece up with his flying target, which was not a job the
ballista had ever been meant for. ‘Left three turns! Up two turns!’ Oski’s major’s badge was hard-won, his gift for on-the-spot calculations earning him the grudging
commendations of a string of superiors. ‘Now! Get that bastard
shooting
, you morons!’

The repeating ballista began spitting out bolts randomly into the cluttered sky – none of them seeming to go near the approaching fixed-wing. They were explosive-tipped, fused to explode
set seconds after launch, but he knew that some would end up dropping amidst the army –
just have to live with the complaints
. Then the flier was past, and they could not turn fast
enough to follow it.

‘Next target! Ugly bastard orthopter, there!
There!
’

All around him the bombs were landing, and they were all ruining
someone
’s day. He had no chance to assess how much real damage they were doing to the army’s vital
organs.

One landed close by, astray from its target but very nearly too close as far as Oski was concerned, their little automotive rocking with the blast.

‘Should have put your
armour
on!’ Ernain bellowed.

‘No time!’ Oski shot back, though Ernain himself had managed to don a mail hauberk. In truth it was that he just could not
fly
when loaded with an engineer’s heavy
mail, and he felt far less safe without his wings than with a steel skin. ‘Two turns left –
two
! Ready – now!
Now!
’

The approaching orthopter was coming in lower than the last one, the pilot painstaking in lining up his unlikely bomber on some target behind Oski –
I bloody
hope
it’s
behind us anyway
– and the bolts that began bursting all around it rattled it visibly.

‘Good! Keep at it! Good . . .’ Then his makeshift anti-orthopter piece sent a bolt along the side of the approaching flier, impacting with a wing joint, and abruptly the target
wasn’t a flier any more, but was still coming their way.

Hoist with my own petard
, seemed an appropriately engineer-worthy last thought.
So save it for later
. . . and he was shouting ‘Pissing
move
!’ even as his
wings cast him away, sending him hurtling over the heads of the army as though he had been struck by a storm-wind.

Then the actual wind came. The orthopter, one wing still beating vainly, came down nose-first within yards of their little automotive, and its complement of explosives was ripped open, the hot
air of the firestorm battering at him.

Ernain?
‘Ernain!’

‘Here.’ Bee-kinden were not swift or agile in the air, but Ernain could get airborne even with all that metal on him.

‘Stab me, man, I don’t want to lose you. You’re
important
, remember.’ Oski stared at him, feeling shaken. ‘See the quartermaster about new eyebrows after
we’re done.’

Ernain’s slightly scorched face frowned at him, but then another explosion shook the ground beneath them.

‘Let’s go find more artillery.’

Taki chased off another Farsphex, noted that three more Stormreaders had followed her lead, and so she broke off to take stock of the situation. Her internal clock was telling
her that the bombers would have done what they could, shed their loads, and the shorter-ranged craft would be running out of fuel or stored spring. The actual clock set into the
Esca
’s controls had been smashed by some stray bolt along with a window.
Shot through the clock? There’s a new one.

She saw several of the bombers already turned around, one still offloading a few late explosives randomly over the field, as though the pilot would be fined if he carried any home. Even as she
watched, one fell prey to a Farsphex’s sudden fly-by, and she realized that some of her pilots had lost focus, chasing the enemy too far, leaving the civilian craft vulnerable. She twitched
the stick, letting the
Esca Magni
drop to a level where she could intercept, while still trying to work out what they had accomplished.

Do I count six – seven? – of their big transporters down? That probably means maybe ten total – there’s bound to be a few I overlooked.
Then a pause in
calculations while she rose to loose a handful of bolts at a Spearflight, which jinked away from her, suitably chastened.
No idea how many of their actual people, but I reckon that was a grim
business down there.
She still felt that they had not done all they could.
Air defence and ground defence have adapted too cursed well. They’ve not got that much, but they spread it
around.
At least five of the bombers had been brought down, and far more had been put off their targets by the determined resistance of the Air Corps. At the same time the Imperial air
casualties, especially amongst the non-Farsphex machines, had been far heavier than in their previous sorties.
We hurt them either way, but we’ll never get as good a chance as now to make
them smart. We need to make it count, more than we have
.

She was signalling
Home, home!
to anyone who could see her. The bulk of her pilots already knew it, and the rest would follow, in a fighting retreat against an enemy only too happy to
see them gone.

And by now maybe the strike force will have done what it came for
, for the Collegiate plan had other parts that she was not involved in, and there was no way to know how that had gone
until she was back in the city and hearing the news in person.
Oh, to have that mental link the Farsphex pilots’ve got. If only I could get my people to drink a pint of Ant blood before
each fight to acquire it – I’d wield the knife myself!

In the end, it could have been worse, but it was bad, nevertheless. They had lost almost no artillery, according to the reports Oski had received, but their supplies and
ammunition were seriously dented. He did not ask about lives, that not being engineer’s prerogative, and he honestly did not want to know.

General Tynan had spoken to him – to him and Bergild and a selection of the other officers, delivering a brief, bleak little speech, its hollow commendations echoing with the knowledge
that this was just the first, and that the Collegiates would keep at it. After that, the intelligence man, Colonel Cherten, had taken the stand and, once Tynan’s back was turned, he had
informed them briskly that what the general
meant
was that they should most definitely do
better
next time, that in fact they had failed the Empress, that they were all personally
responsible for every loss, and that their names would reach Capitas the hard way if they did not start taking their jobs seriously. Oski could not remember seeing Cherten anywhere in evidence
during the fight, but no doubt there had been vital intelligence work needing doing.
Who am I kidding? Call it Rekef work.
Ordinary intelligence men did not raise the spectre of Capitas.
Plainly Cherten felt they needed motivating – and the Rekef only had one way of doing that.

At least Ernain survived.
Oski had a great deal invested in Ernain.
And one day you’ll get yours, Cherten, believe you me.
But that was a dangerous thing to even
think
just then. Plans and plans, yes, but the wheels turned slowly. Conspirators, like engineers, needed patience.

A day later, when the supply airship still had not come, everyone began to realize that it really had been worse all along. A scouting Spearflight found the airships’ wreckage – not
just shot down but bombed into a charred mess. General Tynan ordered half rations, but Oski had a good head for maths, and began estimating their surviving stores and how many mouths.

The Collegiates may just have won the war.
Another thought not safe to have, but he knew that he wasn’t the only one harbouring it.

The attack came at night, heralded by the most appalling sounds Thalric had ever heard. Only in retrospect could he bring himself to believe they had issued from human
throats.

Night in the forest was more than just darkness and the sounds of the wood creaking, or of the multitude of unseen things that made the place their home. Huddled down, fireless, with Che and the
others and a handful of Zerro’s scouts, the utter sightless blackness was like a solid thing, a weight pressing on his blindly open eyes. He could hear Che sleeping beside him, the rhythms of
her breathing erratic enough that he knew she must be dreaming – and what dreams might come creeping in this place, he did not want to think. He was not sure how many others were even able to
lay their heads down. The Sarnesh rose each morning looking as hollow-eyed as he himself felt, and Zerro let them rest out the first hour of dawn before having them move on. When they did sleep
– when
he
slept – it was a troubled and intermittent business. He dreamt too, he knew, but he remembered none of it.
And for that I’m grateful.

Worse was the fact that he had been in a place like this before, though only the unpleasant familiarity of the sensation had marked it for him:
Like being watched, but by something huge.
Like being surrounded by enemies I can’t see. Bloody Khanaphes all over again.

Someone moved nearby and his heart leapt.
Within the camp. One of us. Surely it’s one of us. I’m so pissing
blind
here!
He had a hand directed out into the void,
fingers crooked. ‘Who?’ he hissed.