‘Shut up, Pingge,’ Gizmer hissed. A moment later and the Fly-kinden fell silent as Aarmon himself walked into the room. He was wearing his aviator’s uniform, black insulated
leathers with gold flashes at the shoulder, a chitin helm and goggles dangling by their straps from one hand. His clothes were creased, the tunic beneath sweat-stained where his cuirass was open
down the front. Probably he had not been back in the capital for longer than it took to quit the airfield and march here.
‘Up, all of you,’ he ordered them. If he had heard Pingge talking, he gave no sign of it. As always – and as with all the pilots – his words were sparing, given only
grudgingly. ‘Sergeant Kiin, rouse the others. All bombardiers to assemble in the quad, ten minutes.’ His soulless eyes raked across them, but paused on nobody. Then he ducked out of the
room, leaving them to follow orders – and
trusting
them to do it. It had been a long time since the Wasps had needed to guard them.
‘Sergeant now, is it?’ Gizmer observed acidly.
Kiin shrugged desperately. ‘It’s just because I fly with him, it must be.’
Pingge smirked. ‘Oh, he likes you, that one. You always did go for the emotionless, goggle-eyed type.’
‘Come on, you heard him,’ Kiin said. ‘Up.’ She was already on her feet, and there was a general mutinous mutter as most of the Flies followed suit.
‘Going to make me call you “sir” now?’ Pingge goaded her.
‘Look, he’ll take it out of my hide if we’re not formed up within whatever time we have left,’ Kiin pleaded. ‘Come
on
, set an example.’
‘Right you are, sir.’ But Pingge got to her feet, and then hauled Gizmer up after her. ‘Drill and parades. I could get used to all of it but the standing about.’
Kiin headed into the sleeping quarters and managed to jolly along those Fly-kinden who had been taking the chance for a lie-in, then the entire company was out in the quad just about inside
Aarmon’s deadline. The pilots were assembling at the same time, a good half of them plainly just out of their machines, back from whatever three-day test they had been engaged on.
‘Look,’ Pingge hissed. Most of the Flies had now learned the soldier’s trick of whispering on parade, barely moving their lips. Pingge jerked her head to indicate direction,
and one by one the Fly-kinden’s eyes flicked over to the newcomers marching in.
For a moment it was as though they were looking back in time, for here they came: two score Wasp-kinden, the same number of Flies following.
Look at them
, they thought –
a bunch
of clueless, untrained factory workers, clerks and servants, frightened and undisciplined and without the faintest idea of what awaits them. Like looking in a mirror.
Only it was not, not any
more. The new Flies could only stare wide-eyed at Pingge, Kiin and the rest standing as straight as spears in their black tunics edged with yellow, soldiers of the Empire every bit as much as were
the Light Airborne.
Then a murmur began amongst Pingge’s peers, not about the new Flies but the Wasps that had preceded them, now standing to attention across from Aarmon’s people.
‘Quiet!’ Kiin meant to hiss, but the word turned into an order somehow, and silenced them.
The new Wasp recruits stood with the same wordless discipline that Aarmon and his fellows had possessed since the Flies had first set eyes on them. Their faces betrayed no uncertainty or fear at
this new assignment – indeed they betrayed little enough emotion at all. When Aamon strode out before them, there was none of the tensing or minute adjustments to the presence of a superior
officer that soldiers would normally show – and it was plain that only some of them were regular soldiers, just as only some of Aarmon’s pilots had been. With these newcomers, though,
the difference was considerably more marked.
Almost half of them were women.
It was unthinkable. Wasp women served and raised children, and perhaps sometimes looked after the family home and wealth while their menfolk fought. Wasp women did not stand impeccably to
attention, in
uniform.
Yet here they were: eighteen women amongst twenty-two men, not standing apart, nor a step behind, but standing there as if they were
equals.
Aarmon made eye contact with one of the new Wasps, and then the newcomers were marching into the barracks without a word, the Flies following behind them in a nervous, eddying mob.
Going to
take up our old rooms?
Pingge wondered.
She knew that she should be nervous, too, but in the pit of her stomach she felt the first fluttering of excitement. All that training was finally about to come to something.
‘Sergeant Kiin, we march to Armour Square. Follow my company,’ Aarmon instructed, and Kiin’s voice piped back, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’m still not convinced we’ve not been called here for our own executions,’ Totho muttered as he descended the steps, carefully watched by at least
half a dozen Wasp soldiers and a couple of their engineers.
Drephos turned away from the pair of Consortium men he had been talking to, brushing them aside with a wave of his gauntleted hand and ignoring their surly looks in response.
‘Overly elaborate, don’t you think?’ They had no privacy here in Capitas – with servants spying on them in the quarters they had been assigned, while here in Armour
Square, below the very balcony the Empress would use, it seemed as if someone had detailed an entire army to keep an eye on them. In such conditions, Drephos’s response was simply to speak
his mind and not care who heard him. To his mind, he had the Empire in a vice: the mechanical offspring of his genius were at the forefront of the war, and he considered himself irreplaceable. And,
besides, he was hardly being coy with their engineers: so far they had got everything they had asked him for. If he was wrong, if he was expendable after all, then watching what he said would make
no difference whatsoever, now that they were here, in the heart of Empire.
Being here in the first place was what had put Totho on edge, though. He had argued passionately against obeying the summons. ‘Plenty of Wasp-kinden, even, know to make themselves scarce
when the word comes to return to Capitas,’ he hissed now, trying fruitlessly not to be overheard by their constant escort.
‘I’m assured the purges are over.’ Drephos’s bleak expression belied his words, but his dry smile suggested that such matters as purges were for lesser men to worry
about. ‘Besides, I want a look at their new orthopters. What little I’ve heard is maddening . . . it sounds as though they’ve leapt ahead of the Solarnese models somehow . .
.’ One of the Consortium men coughed pointedly, but Drephos ignored him. ‘You’ve set the similophone up?’ he asked Totho.
‘No thanks to everyone else. They were so worried I might be rigging a bomb or something, it took me three times as long as it should have done.’
The similophone was one of the Iron Glove Cartel’s rare peacetime inventions, a little toy that Drephos and Totho had cooked up together that was only now seeing wider use. It consisted of
an ear that received sound, and a loom that transcribed the sound pattern into silk cloth, which a similophone drum could then decode and speak back. Totho and Drephos had used the device instead
of writing letters, not so much for security but just because they were artificers, and they could.
Now their toy had been requested to bear witness to history in the making.
‘You can understand their caution, surely,’ Drephos said smoothly.
Totho grimaced darkly, leaning in to murmur, ‘I’m serious. We shouldn’t have come. You’re underestimating them, and
you
never met the Empress. She’s
terrifying.’
Troops were marching into Armour Square now: a sample only of the might of the Empire. Totho could make out Light Airborne, infantry, Engineers, Aviation Corps, slavers, representatives from all
the different machines that made the Empire run. The square was large, and there were hundreds of them standing shoulder to shoulder, all those different uniforms, all that armour, the patterns and
designs, and all of it black and gold.
‘Colonel-Auxillian,’ one of the Consortium men put in. ‘If you will – we have so little time before the address.’
Drephos rounded on him grandly. ‘You have our greatshotters and you have our sentinels. What other of my wonders are you about to ask for?’
‘Colonel . . .’ Now it was the Consortium man’s turn to lean in, as though even he feared to be overheard by the ubiquitous guards. ‘The Empire would pay far more for the
formula to the Bee-killer.’
‘The . . .’ And Drephos let the word trail off into a thoughtful pause that ended with, ‘So,’ and nothing more. His smile returned, and probably only Totho could tell
that it was a little too fixed. ‘The Bee-killer, of course,’ he said smoothly, a moment later. ‘The formula did not survive the war. Do you think that I would not have made more,
had I the means?’
‘The coffers of the Consortium—’ the man went on, but Drephos held up his metal hand again, imperiously.
‘It did not survive,’ he said curtly, and then turned away, his attention wholly directed up towards the balcony, where generals and other dignitaries were beginning to make their
appearance.
‘We shouldn’t have come,’ Totho growled again, and this time Drephos said nothing.
From the ranks, Esmail watched a conspiracy assemble, a web being strung. He – which was to say Ostrec – was simply another soldier at this point: an officer of the
Quartermaster Corps amongst his peers, and ostensibly not a sniff of the Rekef about him. All around, the other servants of the Empire marched in to form their serried ranks, all the organs of the
Imperial war machine falling, unit by unit, into an expectant hush.
Esmail marked the faces: the newcomers, the absences. General Brugan was in place already, just left of centre, even now giving place to the Empress, though she had yet to appear. Further left
was the bloated corpulence of Colonel Harvang, the impeccably turned-out Vecter lost in his shadow. There were a couple of new faces, too: majors in the Rekef Outlander arrived from the
East-Empire, Brugan’s old stamping ground. True, there were a few up there, overlooking Armour Square, who were not Brugan’s, bought and sold: those who were too useful to dispose of,
too doubtful to approach – engineers mostly. General Lien’s bald head gleamed in the sun, whilst beside him that bearded eccentric was presumably the genius aviation Major – no,
Colonel, now – Varsec. Aside from these two, and a meagre handful of others, everyone up there whom Esmail could see was firmly in Brugan’s camp.
There had been a very subtle changing of the guard at certain levels of the palace, as men loyal to Brugan had been summoned in from distant posts. Others had received surprising postings
– mid-ranking officers sent west to the front, Rekef men posted to the Principalities to spy on the savages. Everything had been above board, nothing irregular; in some cases reassignment had
even come with a promotion attached. Only someone with a deep understanding of the hidden loyalties of Capitas would have understood that everyone coming
in
was Brugan’s man, while
everyone going
out
was not.
The net was drawing tight, by the most delicate of stages. Esmail almost felt that he should hold his breath for it. Brugan was manoeuvring for a time when everyone around the Empress would be
loyal to the general of the Rekef first, to the throne second.
Esmail-as-Ostrec was already standing to attention, but he – and every soldier there – still managed to straighten still further, shoulders back and brimming with Imperial pride, for
the Empress had made her appearance, walking into the heart of Brugan’s net without seeming to notice.
To his eyes, she seemed to shine like the sun itself, the outpouring of her grand and unbridled power making him wonder that those others could simply stand so close without burning. Of course,
they saw none of it: they were blindly Apt, and he must pretend to see none of it either, or else give himself away. Even so, he could not tear his gaze from her: Her Imperial Majesty Seda the
First, Empress of all the Wasps, young and beautiful and commanding all eyes, all hearts. Esmail could almost hear the collective mental gasp of the soldiers all around him as Seda strode to the
balcony rail and looked down on them. She wore a long gown of velvet, the sleeves loose so that they fell like wings and left her lower arms bare. Over this was buckled a cuirass and, although it
was a fine piece of work, light and elegant, its resemblance to the banded mail of the Light Airborne was not by chance. She had a scabbarded sword at her side, such as no Imperial woman had ever
openly worn before, and in her right hand was a slender lance, its narrow head a gilded dart. Her skin was like alabaster, her hair of gold. Esmail felt tears come to his eyes, seeing her, and did
not know whether they were Ostrec’s or his own.
The building she had commandeered for this address was a flat-roofed, three-storey counting house of the Quartermaster Corps, previously just an abode of clerks and their numerate slaves. After
today it would be known as the Little Palace, never again to be profaned by the murky business of commerce. The clerks would have to find themselves another haunt.
‘My people.’ Her voice was strong and clear, and the great mass of soldiers, almost two thousand of them all told, kept silent for her. Esmail was well aware that there must be at
least another thousand in the buildings all around the square, looking out from windows and lesser balconies, or listening intently from within: Consortium merchants, craftsmen, the wealthy of good
family, retired officers, slaves and the women of all of the above – here was the Empire in miniature.
‘I am to ask great things of you,’ Seda told them, as if she was speaking to each Wasp individually. ‘Our Empire has fought through many trying times, but our trials are not
over; indeed, they are barely begun.
‘Your blood and sweat has recaptured the Empire and returned it to its rightful ruler,’ she told them. ‘You have held your loyalty firm, when a dozen voices tried to prise you
away from your convictions. You have marched on the traitor-governors, who fancied themselves a dozen little emperors, and who would have diluted the grandeur of our state until we had become
nothing better than the Lowlands: so many little cities fighting one another. I speak to you, therefore, as heroes of the Empire, saviours of its pride and peace. Do you ask: is my work not
done?’