The Air War

Five

Winter had brought fouler weather than normal, and every hand had been working day and night, slave and free, mending fences and clearing ditches ready for the growing season. Now the spring seemed to have come early, an unwanted stagnant heat that surely belonged to the depths of summer beating down oppressively on all and sundry, sapping strength and shortening tempers.

Still, the dry earth was beginning to submit to the plough. All those irrigation dykes they had so carefully re-dug were distributing the water neatly, only needing a little aid from the pumping well in order to reach every field. This was a dry land, south of Sonn, but his family had worked it for generations. They knew how to wrestle with it, to conquer and command it.

There was an hour and some left before the heat of noon drove everyone into the shade, and he pitched in as though he was nothing but a servant himself, and a young one at that. He might be old, and need a broad-brimmed hat to keep the sun from his bald head, but he took some pride in knowing there was scarcely a stronger man on the farm. Now he straightened up, ignoring the twinge in his back. Something had caught his attention, and he scanned the flat landscape, trying to work out what it was: some discontinuity, something that did not belong.

The ploughing automotive was chugging its slow way back and forth in the next field, slaves following it on foot to strew the seeds, and boys following them with slings and sticks to keep off thieving beetles and roaches that might try to plunder the furrow before it was turned back. All was as it should be, surely, and yet…

A man running. A simple sight, but he ordered his land well, and there was no need for anyone to run. For a moment he wondered if one of the slaves was making a break for it, and he reached inward for his wings and his sting, quite willing to go after the man personally — but, no, the man was running towards him.

It was his overseer, Mylus. The Ant-kinden had served him as an Auxillian for ten years, and performed well enough that he had bought the man’s service from the army in order to bring him here. He had a rare gift for organization and a firm, even hand with the slaves.

If Mylus was running, something was wrong.

‘Lyren!’ he called out, hoping his son was within earshot. Sure enough there was a patter of feet and the boy — boy? He’s past thirty. Must stop thinking of him as the ‘boy’ — was at his elbow.

‘Father?’

‘Get Aetha and the children into the house, son.’ Mylus was skidding to a stop before him now, saluting out of unbreakable habit, but the old man’s eyes were focused past him, watching the great plume of dust raised by an automotive. Not one of mine, that’s for sure. The machine was paying precious little heed to the neat order of his farm, stilting over field and ditch on its six curved legs, gashing the ground and scattering the workers.

‘But, Father-’

‘ Go,’ the old man snapped, and almost everyone in earshot was at attention automatically, Lyren included.

‘At ease,’ he added, when his son had taken off for the house, calling out for his wife. Mylus remained impassive, but the old man knew him well enough and could read worry in the mere way that the Ant stood. ‘What will be, will be. Let us hope it’s only me they’re here for.’ The vengeance of the Imperial throne had been known to encompass entire families before. ‘If that’s so, and the worst happens to me, you’ll have to manage the farm. Lyren will return to service soon enough, and you know the place better than he does, anyway.’

‘Yes, sir.’ To Mylus, everything was still an order.

The automotive was a model that the old man had seen a few other times, a good all-terrain scouting model, swift but exposed. Even as it neared, one of the occupants had kicked off into the air. They must have already picked him out at a distance, for the flier headed right for him, dropping down a few yards away to study him.

‘General Tynan?’ the newcomer enquired.

The old man nodded guardedly. Instinct was calling on him to fight, but he could not fight the whole Empire. He had known that the throne would send for him sooner or later. He was a loose end that must be tied up one way or another. After all, he was the general who had failed to take Collegium.

It had been hard, giving the order. Another tenday, at most, and the Second Army, his glorious Gears, would have been inside the walls. two more tendays, perhaps four, and he would have had the streets secure, or most of them. The city would have been his, for the glory of the Empire.

Except the Empire that he had left behind him had run into difficulties of its own. The Emperor had been murdered, then his sister — A woman? Unthinkable! — had taken power, and what seemed like half the Imperial governors had decided that they could do a better job than her. He had received orders to return home as swiftly as possible, to support the pacification of the traitor-governors. He had known a no-win position when he saw one.

Conquer the Beetle city and he was betraying the throne. Abandon the siege and he was betraying the military campaign that was the Empire’s lifeblood. But even if he could have taken Collegium in a day, he would have needed the bulk of his army to hold it, at least at the start; and of course the rest of the front had been falling apart even then, had he but known. In marching the Second back home, he had made the correct choice, but history books were cruel arbiters of right and wrong.

‘Your presence is required in Capitas, sir,’ the messenger informed him smartly. Tynan wondered idly if his visitor was Rekef. If he himself had become a serious inconvenience, then he might even disappear conveniently without ever reaching the capital.

‘Of course,’ was all he said. ‘May I bid farewell to my family?’

‘I am sent to fetch you urgently, General,’ said the messenger, without sympathy.

Fight! Run! But he knew he would do neither. It was not his years in themselves, but the ingrained sense of duty they had gifted him with. He would submit to his fate. He would serve the Empire, as always.

‘Let’s go,’ he said, and began to plod towards the automotive.

Across the Empire, soldiers moved: companies on the march or travelling by automotive, airship or rail; specialist detachments from the Engineers or the Slave Corps split off from their strongholds, assigned to one army or another. Materiel was stockpiled and weapons were tested. Quartermasters and Consortium merchants shuffled commodities and supplies like decks of cards.

Outside the Empire itself, what moved was information. The spies and their handlers sent reports in, the tacticians and spymasters sent orders out across the known world. Agents who had lived a comfortable life under a secret identity received word that they should ready themselves to strike, to disappear, to begin manipulating their carefully hoarded contacts. Others, already hard at work, received definite instructions. The time is now.

Not everyone in Solarno was intent on living the high life. Major Garvan lived in a poor garret, a single room whose one window looked onto the wall of the building opposite. Not for Garvan the scintillating waters of the Exalsee. A bed, a rickety desk, poor meals and scraping together a few standards each week for the food and the rent. There was a surprising number of Wasps in Solarno, but the rich ones were always watched. The Solarnese could not imagine an Imperial agent of any standing not living like one of the Aristoi, if only to share in the gossip of the moneyed classes. Most of the Wasp-kinden there were poor, though, refugees from the internal troubles in the Empire, fugitives from the Empress’s wrath. There were enough of them — angry, disenfranchised and sometimes violent — that the Cortas, Solarno’s baffling twin engines of government, were considering making some laws about them. For now, though, they provided a perfect cover for an army intelligence officer.

Army Intelligence had always trodden a narrow line, not regular soldiery but decidedly junior to the Rekef. Before the war, they had served as the eyes and ears of each army, ostensibly more trustworthy than the Rekef Outlander, though in truth many held a rank in both services. During the Lowlands Campaign, however, the Rekef had gone berserk, tearing at itself in a series of brutal culls so that the genuine spy-work had often been left to Army Intelligence. Those officers who had distinguished themselves now found themselves with an uncertain authority, placed in command of important operations like the Solarno gambit, and yet with no assurance that some strutting Rekef man would not turn up and take it all over, the moment results started coming in.

Garvan was better than most at the espionage game. Garvan was used to living with lies and secrets, and the keystone of the major’s secrets was known by not one other living soul, a situation that Garvan intended to maintain. It irked the major that the various Imperial agents in Solarno — many of them not Imperial citizens at all — lived considerably more affluent lives, and even more so when Garvan had to pay out from the Empire’s coffers to keep them that way, while living in this wretched hole. Most of the agents probably found it funny, thinking back on it as they wined and dined and made polite conversation with their opposite numbers.

Intelligence Corps codes were rugged and practical, encrypted by letter substitution and then again by reference to a memorized number sequence. Nothing fancy, and the document itself had looked like nothing but an encrypted message. The army preferred functionality to Rekef subtlety. The slip of paper had been decoded, then burned and, as the flames died, Garvan was smiling a hard smile. At last the orders were in that would wrap up this operation, and where would all those pampered agents go for their next fine meal then?

A mirror hung on one of the few vertical walls of the garret, an odd piece of vanity but a necessary one. Garvan scrutinized the reflection there, seeing that familiar, slightly weathered face with its constant faint just-shaved blue about the cheeks and chin. Not a striking face, but that made it a good face for a spy.

Garvan sighed, hands slipping under the poor much-darned Wasp’s tunic to adjust the strap that flattened down her breasts. Twenty years living like this, and still it pinched. Her mother had been a camp whore with the Sixth, and she had grown up around soldiers, seen how they spoke, how they walked. She had seen, too that while they swore and complained and died, they still lived better than their enemies — or their women.

The Twelve-year War had been a good time to find spare uniforms, provided you didn’t mind stripping the dead, and there were always soldiers getting separated, then joining up with other detachments. The girl her mother had called Gesa had become the soldier Garvan, a boy too young to need to shave, but who could swear with the best of them. Always she had driven herself harder, taken more soldier’s risks to cover the woman’s risks that nobody knew she was taking. In that way she had been promoted. In that way she had been put to use by the intelligencers. Going alone into enemy territory to spy and scout was dangerous, but the duty relieved her of the constant threat of discovery. She spent her war fighting on two fronts.

For all she knew, there were dozens of women engaged in exactly the same deception, but if she had ever met one, they had not been so poor at it for her to know it.

But now she was a major and, if she had no close friends, she had some very impressed superiors. The Solarno mission was of far greater importance to the Empire than the mere city itself would suggest. She knew there were wheels within wheels, even if she did not know quite who was spinning them. A lot of her work involved ensuring that certain missives reached her superiors in the Empire, and she was not supposed to have worked out that they all came from across the Exalsee.

She straightened her tunic, the very picture of a down-at-heels Wasp-kinden man, a little slighter of build than most, but not unusually so. Living a soldier’s life had made Garvan strong and robust.

Now she would take her other tunic and wash it in a fountain somewhere, to the annoyance of the locals, and hang it out of her window to dry. Soon after that signal she would be meeting with her agents, some of them here in the garret, others elsewhere at pre-set places and times. She felt an old, familiar excitement. The Empire was on the move again, at last.

A few days later, and there were some empty tables at the Taverna te Remi. Just a couple maybe, but the place had been full to the brim all winter, each spot taken by its own band of intelligencing illuminati, the network of loyalties and hostilities drawing a political map of the world in miniature.

‘Te Gressi’s gone, and all that mob,’ Breighl observed. ‘That surprises me.’

‘They were merchant factors out of Dirovashni. They were after aviation designs, but not enough to get knifed,’ Liss declared with confidence.

‘Well, whatever — they’ve gone.’ He was speaking more quietly than usual. Everyone in the taverna was, as though the future might overhear them.

‘That Scorpion Valek,’ te Riel added. ‘Valthek? Vathek, was it?’

‘Back to Toek Station,’ Laszlo said, a guess, although he tried to sound authoritative. ‘Good work to be had keeping watch to the north, but then you’d know that.’

Te Riel stared at him flatly. ‘I don’t work for the Empire, Laszlo. Let it alone.’

‘You’re going to tell me what I know, now, are you?’ Laszlo locked eyes with the man, and mostly because he felt that the layout of their little table had changed slightly. The space between him and te Liss was greater. She had shifted to little closer to te Riel.

‘Boys,’ she said, holding out her hands. ‘Forget who’s not here. Grevaris is gone, who ran that brothel west of the Venodor. Just upped sticks and left. And I hear that clothier’s on Habomil is closed now, that I always — well, probably we all reckoned was a front for someone.’ She looked far more serious than she usually did, glancing from one face to the next. ‘Tervo’s gone, too — that fishmonger, remember? Left unpaid bills and a job lot of old fish.’

‘People are getting out of the game,’ said te Riel stiffly. There was the echo of a tremor in his voice, though, and the same feeling was running through all of them, of thin ice, of sands running down, storms on the move.

Breighl sighed deeply. ‘Te Rorvo — Tervo — was fished out of the harbour last night. I heard it from the militia. Whoever did him in didn’t even bother to weight the body.’ His gaze passed over the three Fly-kinden, judging them. ‘But I suspect one of you knew that already.’

Te Riel flushed although, in all honesty, Brieghl’s eyes had not especially fallen on him. ‘I am not,’ he insisted in a hushed voice, ‘for the Empire. I am a freelancer.’

‘Like all of us,’ said Breighl. ‘Like Tervo, for that matter. I reckon the freelancers are getting out of the city, those that can. For those that know too much… Solarno isn’t a city for freelancers any more.’

‘And yet here we all are,’ Laszlo finished for him. ‘True colours yet, anyone?’ He pinned te Riel with his glare. ‘Hover-fly?’

The man met and matched his hostility. ‘I am going to gut you one of these days.’

‘Enough,’ te Liss snapped. ‘No more of this.’ She pursed her lips for a moment. ‘We all know what’s happening. Let’s not bring it on any sooner by fighting. We all know that we’ll be at daggers drawn soon enough. I don’t care whether te Riel’s with the Empire or not. Not yet. Not now.’

Laszlo reached for her hand beneath the table, as he had sometimes before, but that extra distance between them suddenly seemed insurmountable. He felt she was drawing further away, even while sitting there before his eyes.

‘What I hear,’ said Breighl, in a overly casual tone, ‘is that the Empire might just be the least of it.’ He was watching them all carefully again, but they all did that when ostentatiously dropping a titbit of information into the ring. ‘I hear about interests from across the Exalsee, instead. Chasme has been getting very bold since their Iron Glove took over. And there’s the Spiderlands…’ He finished up looking directly at Laszlo.

‘What? I don’t work for the Spiderlands.’ The reversal of fortunes made him indignant.

‘Oh, no — just for some Aristoi family or other. I mean, who could work for the whole Spiderlands?’ te Riel put in.

‘I’m…’ A freelancer, but of course everyone said that, and nobody believed it, for all it must be true in many cases. ‘I’m not for the Spiders,’ he finished lamely. ‘Believe me, out of anyone who might have eyes on Solarno, I’m not for them.’

There was a shout from outside, and a Fly-kinden woman popped her head around the door, passing a quick word to someone at a nearby table. The Solarnese mob who had been drinking there bolted up immediately and were out of the door on the instant, and within moments the entire clientele of the Taverna te Remi had gone after them. Nobody knew why or what was happening, whether invasion or a militia raid or who knew what, but everyone was so jumpy that they were cramming the door in moments, clawing for the outside.

Two streets away, in a little square within sight of the Corta chambers, Laszlo and the others alit on the rooftops to watch a hanging.

Hanging was for traditional Spider-kinden executions, and Solarno was a Spider city at heart: a dozen militia in their plated white leathers had strung up a halfbreed in plain view. Spider-kinden, of course, could not fly, but it turned out that their victim could, and in the end the spectators were treated to the hideously incongruous spectacle of three soldiers hanging off the wretch’s legs like men trying to wrestle a kite down in strong winds. Their weight told, though, and abruptly the man’s wings were gone, and the snap of his neck was audible across the square.

Breighl was bold enough to make enquiries, trusting to his militia contacts to shield him. The dead man had been a spy, he was told. A spy for whom? Nobody seemed to know.

The crowed was dispersing rapidly, most especially those who had come out from the taverna. The square seemed an unhealthy place to be, and Laszlo looked about for te Liss, reaching for her arm. ‘Come on,’ he told her, envisaging a quick jaunt back to his lodgings: wine and safety and an attempt to forget.

That distance between them was still there, though, and a moment later she was inexplicably with te Riel: on his arm, an inseparable part of him, as the man looked smugly over at Laszlo.

The Empire, Laszlo thought numbly. The Empire’s coming. A city-wide tragedy for Solarno, a personal tragedy for himself. Liss, like all freelancers, wanted to end up on the right side, after all.