The Imperial formation broke up, as she knew it would, and abruptly they were all moving as one, like fish shoaling, heading for the College district.
Attack.
It was a pitiful signal to be sending, but she had already decided that, whatever the Wasps were after, she was committed to opposing it. She let the
Esca
race ahead,
knowing that the others were still with her, left and right. She wanted to say a great deal more, to explain that the Farsphex pack would split once she attacked, some turning to meet her while the
others pressed on with their mission. The Collegiate flash-codes were a language of few words, though. She had to trust that they would predict the future as well as she did.
She had the trigger pressed even before she was in range, seeing their pattern shift into carefully orchestrated chaos, orthopters peeling off and swinging back towards her from above and from
either side. At least half their force was casting itself lightly over the College now, turning in unison to find their target.
Taki swore and dived after them, still shooting, trusting to her swift flying, to the
Esca
’s nimbleness against the larger machines. A scatter of bolts sprayed past her, leaving a
single finger’s-width hole in one wing. Around and behind her, the handful of Stormreaders engaged, fearless by necessity.
She was closing now, watching the craft ahead of her, seeing how their attack run forced them to become predictable, killable, if just for a moment. But then, so did hers as she tunnel-visioned
in on them, desperate for a kill that might make them break off. Even as the silvery trail of her shot swept in towards a flier in the midst of their formation, piercer bolts were abruptly
hammering into her fuselage, the physical impact rocking her, knocking the
Esca
’s tail sideways, spoiling her aim and making her entire orthopter slew in the air. She cursed, wrestling
to get back on target, close now, closer than she had wanted. She actually saw the first bombs drop.
Then another bolt cracked into the engine mounting behind her, the next shattered a pane of her cockpit window, skinning a line of pain down her shoulder as it vanished into her seat. She threw
the
Esca
sideways instinctively, the city beneath her opening up in flames as the bombs struck. She had left it too long, made herself too much of a target. She was going to die.
But she lived. The
Esca
suffered a riddled wing, silk parting, wood slats fracturing as the bolts tore into it, but the expected lethal shock never came. Her machine dropped involuntarily
towards the flames before she could catch it, and the Farsphex that had been after her coursed overhead, banking in the air to dodge the incoming shot of one of the Mynans, who was slinging his
Stormreader through the air like a madman to keep another two Imperial machines off his tail.
The
Esca
regained its hold on the air, and she saw the sky above her turned into a madness of wheeling, duelling orthopters. Instantly she was dragging back on the stick, fighting upwards
to take her place there but, even as she did, she knew she was too late.
One of the Mynans lost a wing suddenly, the Stormreader coming apart as a Farsphex ripped into it from an unexpected angle. The next second, the stricken machine was whirling past Taki, spinning
like a top with its one wing still beating. Taki was shooting by then, setting up a stream of bolts and then trying to find a target to bring it to bear on. Their bombing run had been disrupted
now, but the Wasps had decided to make a fight of it at last, bolstering their impeccably coordination with two-to-one odds.
She had a direct line on one of the enemy and, just for a moment, gave it a solid couple of seconds of shot and saw it lurch in the air, shuddering. The bombs that had been cascading from its
undercarriage, as regular as ants from a hill, abruptly stopped though the machine flew on. Then she was dancing and dodging through the air as a couple of the enemy came for her, keeping out of
the way of their aim but unable to fight back. She saw Edmon’s Stormreader spiralling upwards, chasing one of the enemy even as another tried to bring him down. In the next instant, Pendry
Goswell was scudding past them, scoring a couple of strikes as she did, but she was lurching in the air, her machine already damaged, the beat of her wings erratic. A moment later they simply
stopped, some vital piece of clockwork slipping its train, and Taki watched her helpless and achingly graceful arc as her stalled machine fell into its final dive.
Then, and all together, the Imperial machines were on the run – or at least they were evading pursuit, taking off with wings fixed and heading east.
We’ve driven them away!
Taki exalted, but almost immediately she guessed that the Empire was simply heading to refuel.
So where are they going?
If they had built a nest so close to the city, then these attacks
could be an hourly occurrence.
She sent the
Esca
after them without even thinking about it, and when she glanced around she saw three Stormreaders joining her in the pursuit, two with Mynan colours and one of the more
ambitious local pilots, looking like Corog Breaker himself by the way he flew.
Behind them, smoke rose from a handful of points across Collegium, and Taki felt that she was escaping a report on the damage, as much as chasing the enemy.
What did we lose? What people,
what machines? And if the Mynans hadn’t been so paranoid as to have their machines standing by at all hours, how much more might we have lost?
It was not that the Mynans had known what
was going to happen, of course. It was just that, this once, their particular breed of fearful, vengeful craziness had turned out to be entirely justified.
The chase went on for barely fifteen minutes, the Imperials pulling ahead noticeably, forcing Taki to admire the design that allowed them to switch from fixed to mobile wings – and so
fluidly! She had seen it, or half-seen it, in Capitas but she had underestimated the applications of the idea.
But, still, they must have a base around here somewhere. Where’s the Wasps’ nest, eh?
But the distance between hunters and prey only increased, and the Collegiate orthopters
were beginning to tire, springs losing their strength, wings working with less of a will.
The last glimpse Taki had of the Farsphex that day showed them still heading solidly eastwards, with no suggestion at all that they were about to land.
Taki had asked Corog Breaker to call all the pilots together as soon as they were back on the ground. They had met hurriedly, almost conspiratorially, before any of the great
and the good of Collegium could presume to interfere.
We are the elite of the air
, Taki told herself. Scanning their faces, some looking determined, some stunned, she hoped that they felt the same way.
The Mynans still clustered together, but the distance between them and the others had decreased. They had shared something now, and it was the Collegiate fliers who had drawn closer to the
mindset of their guests. They took a roll-call of their losses. Thyses, one of the Mynans, was dead. Collegium had lost three, although Pendry Goswell was miraculously still among the living, the
first of them to have to rely on the new glider chutes that had been developed for those whose Art did not permit them to fly.
By that time they had some representatives of the ground crew with them, listening in, and a couple of academics from the aviation department, including Willem Reader, who had furnished
Collegium’s orthopter model with half of its name. Technically, Corog Breaker was in charge, but he deferred to Taki without her having to ask. The man was all pomp and shouting during
peacetime, but now the Empire had somehow managed to attack his city, he was purely business.
They made their plans: Taki proposed and, with a minimum of discussion, they approved. There was no suggestion of consulting the Assembly or any higher authority. In a city so bound by
bureaucracy and hierarchy, this independence told Taki that they understood.
The Assembly wasn’t there; they won’t understand. Only us. Only we are fit to helm the course of the air
war.
Well, us and the Wasps, obviously.
An unhappy thought, and she would have to talk with the better aeronautical minds about just what the Wasps had achieved in their aviation technology,
and in their military practice, to pull off the attack that had just happened.
By the time a messenger had come from the Amphiophos demanding that she attend some council of war, the pilots had already held their own Assembly, passed their own motions and set their own
destiny.
The council of war was remarkably restrained, although Taki guessed that it would become larger and more burdened with pointless opinions as time went on. For now she was faced only with
Stenwold himself and the leaders of the three Merchant Companies: the Beetle-kinden Janos Outwright and Elder Padstock, and Marteus the Tarkesh renegade.
‘What did we lose?’ she asked, before Stenwold could start interrogating her.
‘The Teremy Square airfield was hit hard,’ Stenwold told her. ‘We lost eight Stormreaders on the ground there, four elsewhere. You and yours managed to keep them from
inflicting crippling damage on our air capability, anyway.’
‘So what was the big bang?’ Taki asked him. ‘Just before they took off, they hit something near the College hard.’
‘Factories,’ Stenwold confirmed. ‘Four of them along Read Road were gutted pretty much entirely. They’re still going through the rubble, but all they’re finding are
bodies.’
Taki frowned, and then a sudden fear gripped her. ‘The Stormreader factories?’
Stenwold managed a wan smile. ‘It’s strange how things work out, sometimes. If this attack had come just a tenday ago, then we’d have lost most of our ability to replenish our
airforce. As it was, three of the factories were being converted to work on automotives. My project. The Stormreader facilities had been moved to the Coalway workshops, on the other side of the
College. From a certain point of view, we were very lucky. Their spies are just a little out of date.’
‘We need more machines, as many as we can put in the air,’ Taki told him. ‘Seriously – their army’s still a good way down the coast from here, but
somewhere
they’ve got an airfield. How they managed that, I have no idea, but we need scouting patrols and, at the same time, we need a strong flight on the airfields ready to fly the moment they come
back. That could be tomorrow, Master Maker. That could be later today.’
‘I’m putting a proposal before the Assembly today,’ Stenwold stated. ‘I suspect that it will pass, in light of the attack. I don’t think it would pass any other
way, certainly.’ He looked tired, maybe sick. ‘Every workshop and factory in the city must be ready to help the war effort, from the big mercantile concerns to little family-run machine
shops. It’s not just your orthopters, and it’s not my automotives, either. We need more snapbows, piercer bolts, spare parts, tools, artillery ammunition, explosives . . . We’ve
seen now how fast the Empire can move, so we need to get ourselves up to the same speed. You’ll have your fliers, and you’ll be run off your feet training people how to use them, too.
We’ll have a call for volunteers across the city, and I hope that people will look at the smoke rising from Read Road and realize that it’s now fight or fall.’
You’re not before the Assembly now, Maker
, thought Taki, because rhetoric always annoyed her. ‘And if you don’t get your volunteers?’ she asked.
‘Then I go back to the Assembly with an alternative motion,’ he replied grimly.
Helleron had been a joke. The Eighth Army had marched in from what had recently been Three-city Alliance land, leaving behind it the shattered walls of Myna and Szar, and a
battle still raging at Maynes, where elements of the Fifth had been moved in to free Roder for his advance. The Ants of Maynes were no more technologically accomplished than their allies, Roder
knew, but they were certainly more stubborn. There was talk of razing the city entirely, by way of a lesson, deporting the whole population to remote corners of the Empire as slaves. It had never
been done before, to even the most rebellious of cities, but times were changing. The Slave Corps had seen all the advances that real soldiers were making to the Empire’s prosperity, Roder
thought sourly, and were trying to introduce an innovation or two of their own.
If he had thought it would work, he would have cheered them to the echo, but he read nothing but greed in their proposition.
Now, if we had some Bee-killer handy, that might be a different
matter.
That near-mythical weapon that had been deployed just the once in the last war was still a subject of heated conjecture. True, the only deaths it had caused had been the Empire’s
own garrison at Szar, but for connoisseurs of destruction the results had been remarkable: the entire garrison, every living thing, wiped out in a night, without struggle.
And it could so easily
have been the Szaren. If we’re going to teach lessons, let us teach them all a lasting one.
Roder knew that there were some, back in the capital, who believed such a weapon was going too far. He also knew that the star of such white-livered philosophers was on the wane.
No
weapon was too great, so sang the Engineering Corps, so long as it is in
our
hands. Roder agreed, being a modern kind of general.
The path to Helleron had been prepared long ago by Consortium merchants and Rekef agents. Twelve of the Council of Thirteen had met Roder’s delegation willingly, happy to become a
protectorate of the Empire and also a free city, as Roder understood Solarno had been declared, down south. Roder himself would rather have locked the entire pack of treacherous vermin up and
packed them off to the mines at Shalk, but he had no authority to do so. The job of bringing the Helleren into the Empire’s fold had already been achieved, by pen and coin, long before he
arrived. All he managed to do was extort some supplies from the city’s stores and provide some of his soldiers a night’s worth of entertainment, and even then they were kept on a short
leash, allowed the bare minimum of violence and pillage, just enough to remind the Helleren of who was now in control. Everything, even the expected casualties of the night’s revelry, was set
out in advance by the Consortium magnates in charge. With that sort of bureaucracy tying his hands, Roder was glad to be back on the road.