The Air War

Fifteen

‘I thought you should hear the news, that’s all,’ Taki explained. ‘Didn’t think I’d drop into the middle of a war. Looks like, no matter how fast I fly, the world moves faster.’

She was perched on a table in what the Mynans were now calling their War Room. It was the third set of walls to bear the name. The first had been in the Consensus building that had proved vulnerable prey to the Wasp incendiaries because the Mynans had not even finished its construction. A quarter of the ruling council had died in the blaze, but at least the rest had settled their differences and were now waiting on Kymene’s word. The second War Room had taken an unlucky shell in the sporadic artillery bombardment that jumped about the city, cracking the walls enough that nobody wanted to stay inside. In the end, Kymene had repaired to a cellar to hold her deliberations. It reminded Stenwold of the places that the Mynan resistance had been driven to when the Wasps had held the city. That Kymene had been reduced to this already was a bad sign.

‘Your news about the Wasp air force comes late,’ the Mynan leader remarked acidly, looking up from her plans. Her face was ashen and drawn: no sleep and too many worries all at once.

‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you,’ Taki shot back. ‘Those lads out there, they’re old news, Spearflights and regular pilots. The Empire’s cooking up something special, though — new men, new machines.’

‘How does this affect us now?’ Kymene asked her. ‘Even their current forces would suffice to keep control of the air.’

In fact, the Empire had at first seemed not to be pressing its advantage. For two days the bulk of the artillery had concentrated on the outer wall, which had cracked in three places and looked as though it would cease to provide a meaningful obstacle very shortly if this concerted and uncannily precise bombardment continued. The balance of the Imperial engines had been throwing incendiaries and explosive shells into the city itself, apparently at random, ensuring that nobody in Myna slept well or felt safe.

After its initial lightning raid over the city, the air force had been absent for a day. Enough orthopters had remained to defend the artillery from Mynan reprisals, as two costly air skirmishes had shown, but the Spearflights had not been seen in the sky since that first sortie. Edmon and the other pilots had been trying to cobble together whatever new fliers they could, co-opting and arming civilian machines and repairing anything that could be dragged largely intact from the ruin of the Mynan airfields and hangars. That the Empire would still possess resounding air superiority was a grim truth nobody wanted to talk about.

The Empire’s actual army, the fighting men who had previously formed the first wave of offence in any Imperial attack, had sat out beyond the hills, far out of range of the Mynan artillery, whilst its greatshotters had inexorably chewed away at the wall. The Wasp assault had so far killed over a thousand Mynans and a handful of Imperial pilots. The Mynan soldiers had milled and gone to the walls and been driven back, and talked endlessly of sorties and counter-attacks, and their Maynesh Ant-kinden allies had very nearly taken to the field alone, unable to countenance simply sitting under the shadow of the Wasp artillery without any recourse at all. Still, the column from Szar was expected to arrive any day to bolster the city’s numbers, and that was anticipated to trigger some manner of reversal in their situation.

Today, though, the remnants of the Szaren relief column had finally arrived, and with it an understanding of where the balance of the Imperial air force had been engaged. Caught in the open, in close formation, the Bee-kinden had been perfect targets for the Spearflights in an attack that nobody had even contemplated a few days ago. Flying machines fought flying machines; that had been the rule. Aside from dropping grenades, usually by hand, their effectiveness on the ground was strictly limited. It had been every tactician’s understanding that only airships could carry a load sufficient to make a serious impact on the ground, and so the strategic effectiveness of orthopters was limited to how well they could attack or defend such slow-moving, vulnerable targets. Surely that was what the fight for Solarno had taught?

Apparently it had taught the Wasps more than their enemies. From destroying half the Mynan air force — such as it was — on the ground, the Wasps had gone on to locate and ruthlessly attack the Szaren infantry, who had no way of fighting back. Indeed, after the first pass of the orthopters, the Szaren response had been to pull in tighter for mutual defence, giving the Spearflights all the more attractive a target.

Thirty-seven Bee-kinden soldiers had reached the Mynan walls, out of almost fifteen hundred that had marched out from Szar. Many more were doubtless still alive, but scattered by the mad rout that had eventually destroyed all of their cohesion, with small parties of Bees fleeing in every direction. There would be no relief column, therefore, and the walls were about to give way.

We will sell our lives dearly, were the words that Kymene was not saying, but they were written plainly on her face whenever Stenwold looked at her. Her name and description would be known to the Imperial army, he was sure, on a list kept by some Rekef agent who would be in charge of hunting down every known Mynan leader. No doubt she planned to die well before they had a chance to capture her.

And I’ll just be an added bonus, if they get me, he considered. The two of them had spent two hours with a map of the city and a list of all the forces Myna could command, and had come to no conclusions save that, at some point, the walls would go down, and the Empire would then have the somewhat more onerous task of actually capturing the city. At that stage, Stenwold knew, the Light Airborne and their heavier ground-bound compatriots would have to get within range of whatever the Mynans could still field against them.

With his mind full of that, Taki’s dire warnings about some new sort of flying machine seemed entirely irrelevant. One crisis at a time…

‘The walls are already fallen in some parts, enough for them to get some infantry inside, if they wanted a pitched battle,’ Kymene stated, a new report in her hand. ‘We’ve done all we can to shore them up with earth and wood, to soften the impacts, but nothing is helping much. My engineers tell me that the walls are likely to suffer multiple breaches within a few hours of dusk, after which any further bombardment is unlikely to grant the Empire much more advantage in an attack. The Empire will have the choice of coming for us tonight, or tomorrow morning.’ Her voice was flat, as though this was all happening to someone else.

‘Then get some sleep,’ Stenwold suggested. He wanted to say, Why would they risk a night attack? save that nothing this army had done so far had been from the rule book he was used to. ‘Kymene…’

‘Don’t say it.’

She knew him too well, but then she was a born leader and used to reading people quickly, seeing them for what they were. He had tried several times to suggest that she had options other than dying in the teeth of the Wasp assault, and each time she had cut him off, not wanting to hear the words.

The time will come, though. Stenwold needed Kymene, because Myna needed Kymene. It had waited almost twenty years for a leader like her, after the first conquest. If she died for her city now, then Myna might languish in chains for another twenty years before anyone could free it.

Of course, the whole plan does rely on my being able to get out of the city with her. Muted by distance and depth, the crump-crump-crump of the Imperial greatshotters came to their ears still, patiently turning stretches of Mynan wall to rubble.

Stenwold managed a few hours of fitful sleep that night, before Taki was kicking at his bedroll to rouse him.

‘Wall’s down, Maker!’ she told him. ‘The Mynan foot are trying to get some sort of line together. Wasps could start for them at any moment, they say.’

Stenwold sat up, trying to place the discontinuity. They can’t have the wall down already because… the noise hasn’t stopped. The dull thump and rumble of the artillery sounded just as constant as before.

‘They’re still going,’ he pointed out.

‘But not at the walls,’ Taki said with some urgency. ‘The barrage is just creeping into the city, striking all over the place, regular as clockwork, but breaking up everywhere near the breach so they’ll have a good clear run in. Me and the Mynan pilots, we’re heading for our fliers, ’cos we reckon their Spearflights are going to come in when their Airborne and foot do and, if we’re not in the air to meet them, we’ll just get fried on the ground.’

‘Where’s-?’

‘Your woman, she’s gone to the front, trying to get her people together.’

Stenwold cursed and lurched up. He had slept fully dressed, but he hauled his artificer’s leather on over his clothes, the workman’s armour as old and battered as he himself felt. By the time he had stumbled out into the night air, Taki had already gone.

The damage to the Mynan wall was worse than he had imagined, two long stretches turned into what looked more like gravel than rubble. Some heaped masses of broken stone were now the only impediment that Myna could offer the invader, before its soldiers had to shed their own blood. The lone pillar of wall between the two gaping gashes was barely ten yards across, enough to grant a little cover to incoming enemy foot-soldiers as they closed with the city.

Even as Stenwold approached, the artillery was lighting up the night, dropping shrapnel and incendiary shells in a wide scatter across that third of Myna closest to the breach. All around him people were being evacuated from their homes, and the streets were scattered with fragments of their lives: abandoned possessions, the sundered stones of their homes, and more than one corpse.

He found Kymene supervising what siege engines she had been able to save from the wall, finding sites for them facing the breach, both on the ground and on the rooftops. She had even called up a pair of automotives, simple steam-powered vehicles with heavy armour bolted to their fronts and with the stubby barrels of smallshotters mounted on pivots atop them. All about, drawn up in loose order, were the Mynan soldiers: men and women with Kymene’s blue-grey colouring, wearing breastplates and tall helms halved in red and black. In their hands were swords, shields, crossbows and snapbows, but the enemy attacking them so methodically had given them no targets on which to take out their frustration.

‘Kymene-’ Stenwold started as he approached her.

The look she turned on him was bleak and stern. ‘We fight,’ she said, brooking no argument.

Stenwold gestured to the sword at his hip, for all the good it would do him. Then a shell landed a hundred yards from them, the sheer sound of it almost throwing them from their feet, blocking out the screams of those who had been closer. Kymene’s jaw was clenched, her hands knotted into fists. There were tears at the corners of her eyes.

‘Are they coming?’ Stenwold demanded, and she shook her head.

‘Dawn is two hours away,’ she told him, ‘but maybe they’ll come sooner. We have to be ready but…’ The punctuation of the bombardment finished her sentence for her.

Stenwold remembered the first time the Wasps had taken Myna: how terrible that had seemed, with the sky full of flying soldiers, with the gates battered down and Imperial heliopters grinding through the sky, trailing random scatterings of grenades. How little our world knew of war back then.

He found some token shelter, the shell of a house that had already been staved in, a superstitious thought saying, Surely they can’t strike twice in the same place. Inwardly, he was asking himself what he intended. He had come here as a gesture of solidarity, and now it seemed very likely that he would die in this attack — one more casualty unnamed and unremarked. The Empire would never know that they had killed their greatest detractor.

He had his sword and the little two-shot snapbow that Totho had made for him; experience had made of him a passable warrior, but it would be like spitting into the hurricane. Even with the thought, an incendiary lit up the night close by, enough for him to feel a wash of heat from it. This time the screaming was all too clear.

The Mynan soldiers kept moving, as though they could cheat the odds that way, clustering and scattering, passing on. The barrage was continuous, but spread over much of the city, and Stenwold thought that it probably claimed more non-combatants than soldiers. Beyond the rough line that Kymene had drawn up, the streets were clogged with the multitude who had become refugees in their own city.

Then, at dawn, the artillery pattern changed, slowly concentrating on the ground before the ruined walls, driving the Mynan defenders back, and forcing Stenwold along with them. Kymene dispersed her forces street by street, anticipating that the barrage would sweep westwards again when the Imperial forces had neared the city. After so many hours of noise and death the actual attack was finally beginning.

She was receiving reports even then, for a few enterprising Fly-kinden had flown up with telescopes to spy out the enemy formations. The news seemed hopeful. ‘They’re leading with automotives,’ she noted. ‘Some model shaped like a woodlouse, running on many legs.’ Even as she said it, the shells began to land closer, and to spread out so as to fan a broader net of streets, and she hurried out to rally her men, to bring them back to the wall, and to man such of their own artillery as they still possessed. By the time Stenwold had caught up with her, the Mynan engines were already launching, catapult arms thudding forward and winding back, and the roar of leadshotters sending their missiles in shallow arcs through the breaches.

‘They’re in range already?’ he demanded over the noise. Kymene, now atop a great cairn of stones that had once been a house, spared him only a brief glance. All around him the Mynan soldiers were readying their weapons — on the streets, from windows, on rooftops — and still the Imperial artillery dropped shells on them and behind them, a constant reminder that nobody was safe at any time.

They can’t be… they must still be marching… I mean automotives, yes, but… Stenwold was well aware of the uses and limitations of such machines in war. Wheeled automotives could have closed the distance that fast, but would have faltered against the banked rubble, and legged automotives were notoriously slow. Besides, unsupported vehicles could be easily mobbed by infantry. It seemed impossible that Kymene’s engines were doing anything but wasting ammunition.

All he could see through the breaches was a pall of dust, the same as hung everywhere in the air, choking in the throat and gritty enough that he pulled on his artificer’s goggles to protect his eyes. There were a few enterprising Fly-kinden calling out to the Mynan artillerists, exhorting them to shoot, but he could not believe…

The first of the Wasp machines took the rubble at a terrible pace, scrabbling up and pausing at the crest, as though surveying its prey, as swift and fierce in its movements as a beast hunting. It presented a carapace of overlapping plates, with a high rounded peak at the front, sloping down towards the tail. A round shallow depression front and centre gave the impression of a single blind eye. Beneath that, closer to ground level, the stubby fingers of paired rotary piercers bristled like mouthparts.

A Mynan leadshotter gave voice close by, and Stenwold saw the missile ricochet off the automotive’s armoured shell without leaving much of a dent, and then the machine was moving again, slithering down the rubble with frightening speed, the plates of its body flexing like a thing alive.

A second automotive loomed from the curtain of dust beyond it, and then a third. The Mynan engines were all loosing now, and many of the soldiers as well. Battle was joined.

Totho adjusted the focus of his glass single-handed from long practice, finger and thumb sliding the telescoping sections while the weight of the instrument was cupped in his palm. His other hand was tight on the rim of the basket, and the shadow of the observation balloon’s canopy was a constant reminder of the penalties of a loose grip. In truth he should not be up here at all, horribly vulnerable to any Mynan pilot that somehow got behind the lines, only the gas-filled bulb of the balloon keeping him up, and only a long rope tether keeping him down. Not for the first time in his life, he wished that one of his parents could have bequeathed him the Art of flight, but it was rare in Beetles and unknown in Ants. In a disaster he would have to rely on the silk glider folded on his back — a cobbled-together piece of wishful thinking that was mostly untested.

He wanted to see, though. He wanted to see progress advanced yet another notch, as his machines clambered over the Mynan walls.

The day before, just ahead of dusk, Drephos had given a lecture to a cadre of Imperial officers, with General Roder at their head. The Empire had been making its preparations for a standard assault, using airborne and medium infantry, despite the groundwork already laid by more visionary men such as Colonel Ferric. And so the Colonel-Auxillian, as they still called him, had felt it necessary to step in and show them the future.

‘We called them Sentinels,’ the master artificer had explained, calling to mind the old heavy-infantry elites who had recently been retired from active service. ‘They fill the same role, after all, and the name of the project has caused some confusion amongst enemy agents who think we’re training infantry.’ His voice, as ever, had been laced with a general contempt for the bulk of humanity. Totho could still picture him stalking before his audience, his robes of black and gold — the same pattern as when he had genuinely been an Imperial subject — fluttering in the breeze against the hastily erected storage sheds from which the Iron Glove conducted its work.

‘You are faced with a routine problem of attackers, General. You must get your men past the walls.’ The Light Airborne could have swarmed the city at any time, of course, but the Mynan soldiers were well protected and armed with crossbows and snapbows, and their defensive position would allow them to make the Wasps pay in blood for every inch of ground. ‘You need to get your armour inside the walls, to meet them, heavies against heavies, where your superior numbers and troops can truly tell. Assaulting a broken wall in the face of respectably armed ranged defence remains a formidable problem, even with air superiority.’

At his gesture, Totho had relayed his signal to the engineers waiting in the shed, and an engine had started up with a metallic growl, closely followed by a clatter of armour plates.

‘What you need,’ Drephos’s voice had lifted over the sound, ‘is something to force the issue!’

On cue, the Sentinel had picked its way out of the shed at a careful, deliberate pace. To a man, the Imperial officers had taken a few steps back as its tall, blind-eyed prow had quested in their direction. They had never seen anything like it, Totho knew. He had watched with pride as its ten legs had moved in steady, complex patterns to haul it along the ground.

After the initial shock at the machine’s appearance, there had been those amongst Roder’s more traditional officers who complained that the vehicle would be easy prey for Mynan leadshotters, or that it would ground itself amidst the rubble, and how heavy it must be, how slow — could it even keep up with walking infantry? Roder had let them cavil and had kept his own counsel, his eyes only on Drephos.

Now Totho saw the truth of it for himself, and his heart leapt with pride: to be a member of the Iron Glove, to be an artificer, to be one of the Apt whose world had built this glory. Ahead of the Imperial infantry, ahead even of the Airborne, the Sentinels tore up the ground towards Myna. Enemy artillery burst about them, landing mostly behind them. They were as swift and agile as animals, the line of their armoured backs flexing and rippling as they jolted over the landscape.

‘When perfecting the greatshotters, we were forced to devise a new material to withstand the concentrated forces involved,’ Drephos had explained to Roder and his officers. ‘We call it spun steel, and it is several times stronger than Solarnese aviation steel, at a fraction of the weight. At the same time, the Sentinel’s legs are mediated by a ratiocinator, meaning that the handler does not have to worry about adjusting each one individually. He simply tells the machine where to go.’

‘Handler?’ Roder had demanded, staring up at the great sightless eye set into the thing’s peaked prow. ‘Driver or pilot, surely.’

‘Handler seems appropriate, somehow,’ had come Drephos’s dry response.

For a moment the three machines were poised on the heaped rubble of Myna’s walls, a colossal triumvirate regarding its subjects. The Mynans were not so reticent. All their hoarded artillery was loosing, catapults and ballistae, leadshotters, even the scrapshotters were pelting the armoured titans with hundredweights of jagged metal. The lead Sentinel rocked from side to side under the impacts, its legs spreading wider beneath its carapace, sliding slightly on the loose stone. Stenwold watched, waiting for the barrage to tell on them, for that armour to crumple under the hammer. They move so fast, was all he could think. They cannot be so strong. And yet the machines weathered the assault with what seemed like disdain.

The leftmost Sentinel opened its eye, the lid sliding up almost sleepily, and Stenwold stared into the darkness that was revealed.

The machine braced itself, legs abruptly digging in, then it was speaking thunder back at the Mynan artillery, smashing a steam-catapult to pieces. The flash and smoke of a leadshotter were unmistakable.

Then they were moving and, to Stenwold’s horror, the Mynan soldiers were rushing forward to meet them. He looked around for Kymene, spotting her standing atop a half-fallen wall, directing the assault, horribly visible, and he began to run for her, shouting her name.

He knew the theory, of course. Once a squad of soldiers had clambered on to an automotive, they could pry its armour apart, break in and kill the crew. The same books of war insisted that no automotive could be built strong enough to ward off artillery. The Empire had changed the syllabus over a winter.

‘Kymene!’ he yelled, and then was thrown from his feet almost casually, a leadshot smashing down close by as it angled for one of the Mynan engines. For a moment his world was nothing but dust and falling shards of stone and screaming that was not his own. Then other artillery nearby was trying to answer the assault, thundering from his left and right loud enough to rattle the air in his lungs, and a thousand other sounds, metal on metal, snapbows loosing, hopelessly shouted orders, the continuing bloody deluge of the Imperial artillery as it continued its detached dismemberment of the city street by street.

Stenwold could barely breathe. The sheer sound of it was beating down on him, the anguished composite roar of a battle being lost and won. Hands to his ears, his knees striking the jagged rubble as he tipped forward, he fought for self-possession, and lost. All around him the air was full of splinters. All three Sentinels were discharging their leadshotters: each advancing a few scuttling yards and then stopping, turning and tilting to aim, then unlidding its single metal eye. Meanwhile, the breach itself, which the Mynans had not even had the chance to contest, was not empty. Stenwold saw at least another quartet of segmented machines sliding through.

He saw a band of soldiers, twenty at least, close with the nearest machine — already only fifteen, ten yards away — ready to take the monster apart with crowbars, to get to the vulnerable flesh within. The rotary piercers spoke first, spinning up almost instantly and scything away half the attackers, chewing them into a bloody rain before Stenwold’s eyes, spare bolts pattering and rebounding from the stones around him. The others tried to get out of the arc of the Sentinel’s frontal weapons, and some of them were cut down almost instantly by the rotaries of the next machine along. The rest… to Stenwold there seemed only a brief shudder that seemed to pass down the length of the lead automotive, and the Mynans were all dead, a row of snapbow barrels loosing from between its plates, the deadly little bolts quite enough to kill through armour.

Someone was pulling at his arm, and he snapped back to full control of himself, seeing how very close the machine was now. It had turned and braced itself again, its eye seeking out some further Mynan siege engine. The soldier who clutched his arm was shouting at him, but Stenwold could hear very little of it. The import was clear, though: We have to go!

‘Kymene!’ he yelled, but she was gone from her wall, her fate unknown. The Mynans were retreating in droves now, not a rout but in a determined fall-back to some prepared position. Stenwold saw one of the defending automotives, a hopelessly outdated, patched-together thing, drive full tilt into the face of a Sentinel, slamming the invader back a few feet as its feet left jagged grooves in the ruined flagstones. Then one of the next wave had put a leadshot into the Mynan vehicle, and a moment later its steam boiler exploded, just one more sound, another rain of pieces in a broken place.

There were flying machines in the air now, wheeling and darting, with wings ablur. Imperial Spearflights were coursing against the ragbag of local fliers, the air glittering with piercer bolts. For a moment he thought he saw Taki’s Esca Magni amidst the fray, but the air was grey with sifting dust, and he had now seen such things, so many, so swift to follow each other, that he did not want to trust his eyes.

Edmon’s Pacemark shuddered its way across the sky, curving around towards a knot of Spearflights that had briefly formed up. A moment later they were splitting off across the city, and he could only follow the one. The Imperial pilot was good enough to slow down for him, taking his time about lining up his own target, and for once Edmon was able to stoop on one of them, textbook-perfect, dropping out of the cloudless blue in an exact line, so that his rotary shot hammered all about the enemy canopy, smashing through its glass and wood. The Spearflight heeled over almost instantly, sliding sideways from the sky. A moment later he felt a scatter of impacts on his hull, guilty of the same complacency as his victim, and saved now only by the impatience of his attacker.

He skimmed away instantly, veering left and then right to throw off his enemy’s aim, ducking his Pacemark low, to rooftop level and further, slinging the flier down the straight boulevard of the Tradian Way, the length of which he knew by heart. The Imperial pilot behind him was game, bringing his Spearflight in close to follow, and when Edmon made the sudden turn at the Way’s far end, lurching up and right to claw for the sky again, any surprise intended was countered by the Wasp machine’s agility in the air.

Edmon turned for the gates once more, where the artillery around the gate might be able to help him out again, but then something blurred past him — he had a vision of beating wings and then the spark and chatter of piercers only. For a moment he was not sure whether he had been hit, or what had just happened, but then he realized that the Wasp tailing him was gone, and he hauled the Pacemark into the tightest turn it would make in time to see the Imperial duelling with another Mynan craft, a squat, box-bodied flier that he recognized as the Tserinet, flown by the Szaren renegade Franticze. The two orthopters were speeding over the city, dancing almost where the wall had once been, the Wasp nimbler, but already damaged from Franticze’s first pass. Edmon brought the Pacemark on to a heading meant to intervene, praying that the Bee-kinden pilot would give him a clear opening to their mutual enemy.

Abuptly the sky around them was busy. Another Mynan craft fled past, smoke already trailing, with a pair of Spearflights tight behind it. Edmon had a moment to make his choice, but Franticze was one of the best pilots Myna could call on. He had to trust to her skills, as he pulled around and followed the pair of harrying enemies, blazing away wildly with his rotaries just to let them know he was there.

A moment later the damaged Mynan flier had bucked in the air — he registered only the irregularity of movement, but knew what it meant. In the next second it had dropped too low, not so much clipping as ramming the upper storey of a house already on fire, its fierce, swift flight instantly transformed into violence, wrecked chassis spinning end over end, its wings flying apart in pieces. The Spearflights split up. As ever, he could only follow the one, and then the other would have him.

Edmon bared his teeth — at the Wasps, at the world — and plunged after one even so, because he wanted another kill, another dead Imperial and wrecked machine before they caught him. Even as he did so, a third Spearflight raked past him, hammering a strip of holes in one of his forewings almost casually, in passing. The Pacemark pitched despite his fighting it, one wingtip coming within ten feet of a wall. He fought for height, losing track entirely of how many enemy might be behind him. Momentarily the draw of the ground seemed insuperable, the Pacemark limping along the rooftops like a dying fish at the water’s surface, lurching and flopping and always on the point of sinking altogether. He felt gears slip, the wings losing their rhythm. In that instant he was all ice, waiting for the ground to reclaim its errant son, but then the engine somehow recovered its stroke and he was still impossibly airborne, casting out over the city streets.

He glanced behind him, gaining only hurried, wheeling snatches of sky, pillars of smoke, the dots of other fliers out over Myna. The enemy had not come with him, and he guessed they must have believed him lost, too bloodthirsty actually to wait out his death throes. For a moment there was not a single Spearflight in sight.

He looked down.

This would be the moment to take with him, if he had any chance to take anything anywhere. Not the aerial dragon-fighting with the Imperial air force, not the moment when the ground reached up for him, but the moment he realized that his city was being taken from beneath him.

Most of the buildings down there were now rubble and ruins, or else blazing pyres as though the Empire had marked out the path of its invasion in fire. Between these churned a great silver maggot, a segmented automotive undulating swiftly along the streets of Myna — his Myna — stopping only to discharge its weapons. He caught glimpses of wrecked artillery that had not been able to keep the monsters out. There were bodies down there. He saw some on the streets, and knew that for every death he marked, a hundred others must have blurred by unseen. He saw the streets he knew, the places where his mother had laboured, the markets his father had haggled in. He saw the houses of his friends, where relatives had worked. He saw his childhood and his memories in those shattered homes and broken workshops, and the corpses strewn like sticks.

There was no room left inside him, then. The pain of it was worse than being shot. He sent the Pacemark into a dive against one of the Imperial machines, trigger down so that the rotaries shot and shot, circling and circling until they had emptied themselves. The sparks wherever his bolts were turned by the enemy armour were like a glittering constellation.

He failed to scratch the machine, although it stopped almost quizzically under his attack, questing left and right, his efforts so trivial that it could not even work out where he was.

He pulled out of the dive and skimmed past, leaving the machine behind. There had been Imperial soldiers coming into the city behind it, and he could have used his ammunition more effectively against them, but even then it would have been throwing stones at an avalanche.

The Pacemark was not handling well, and Edmon needed its spring rewound and the rotaries rearmed. Feeling numb, utterly drained, he coaxed the orthopter back towards the more distant airfields, unsure whether he would even find anything to land on that had not been claimed by the fires.

The war in the air was all around him still, but he had become a mere spectator. He saw the Spearflights dart and swoop, keeping the remnants of the Mynan aviators busy while others dropped their incendiaries across the city. He saw Franticze again, chasing down another enemy — her hatred for Wasps was legendary amongst the Mynan airmen. He even saw the Fly-kinden pilot, Taki of Solarno, with her little killer machine darting and swerving, almost flying backwards to throw a Wasp off her, then slipping behind him to finish him off.

Too little, all of it. The ground battle was moving street by street, and only in one direction. If the Wasps had not been more interested in punishing the city with their bombs, they could have cleared the sky of defenders already.

There had been a fierce battle over the highest airfield, he learned later, but the enemy had yet to burn it when he touched down there, and any flier downed for repairs or refuelling was being kept in hangars, out of sight. He brought the Pacemark in for an untidy landing, handling it by instinct, his mind still trying to find some interpretation for the images that did not mean that Myna was being lost even as he sat there.

The ground crew ran out and began to haul his flier into the shadow of the hangars. He hinged the canopy back and began to instruct them, his voice as hoarse and ragged as if he had been shouting on a parade ground all day. ‘Rewind the spring and reload the weapons. I’m going straight back up. I’m going…’ and his voice broke, and he sat there, holding the stick, mouth open, trying to work out what it was that he was going to do, because he had not the first idea.

Someone was calling to him, but they had to say his name three or four times before he would even cast a dull gaze their way.

‘Stay on the ground; change of orders. We’re gathering pilots for a strike. Stay on the ground while we build up the numbers.’ The ground officer’s voice was almost hysterical, and he spoke the words as though they were just some meaningless babble.

An artillery shell landed three streets away, making the ground shudder.

Stenwold found himself in the midst of a constant flow of soldiers, men abandoning their positions closer to the wall, running or limping in, being given orders, being sent out again. Some were sent further back, to the field hospitals being set up in taverns and workshops and backrooms, but there were few who were able enough to present themselves but yet not able enough to be thrown back into the jaws of the Imperial advance.

Kymene stood at the centre of it with her officers. They had commandeered a covered market to evade the eyes of the enemy orthopters, the stalls shoved aside to make room for the turmoil of war.

She was swift, efficient, a map of the city before her that she barely had to refer to, allotting each new consignment of soldiers an address, a junction, a street. She ordered barricades, she assigned the little artillery that had been saved. The Wasps were in the city — not just their killer machines but their soldiers, their infantry washing through the streets of Myna, the Light Airborne taking rooftops and dropping into the undefended city behind them.

It did not escape Stenwold that many of the men and women presenting themselves to Kymene were not wearing the red and black of the Mynan army but a mismatch of everything from civilian tunics and robes to repainted Imperial armour. The Mynans had spent a long time under the heel of the Empire before they had thrown off their shackles, but they had been a martial people once. They were not lacking in spirit.

Only in training, he thought gloomily. Only in resources.

‘Kymene!’ he called, but before she could even look at him, someone had run in yelling that the machines were already upon them.

The Maid of Myna looked at the remaining soldiers assembled before her, and told them simply, ‘Fight!’ No time for street maps and strategy: immediately they were splitting up, dashing from the marketplace by every possible route. Stenwold opened his mouth to call her name again, to try and draw some order from the madness of it all, but the east wall caved in as he did so, punched through by a Sentinel’s leadshotter, the iron bulk of the machine revealing itself in the jagged gap.

He saw Kymene draw her sword, and for a moment he thought that this was where she meant to end it. In the next moment she had turned and was running, cloak streaming behind her, and he was doing his best to keep up.

They burst out into the dust-heavy air, a scatter of soldiers running on either side of them. Behind, the Sentinel lurched forward, smashing the wall down and grinding into the now-empty market, its rotaries hammering. Stray bolts zipped and danced past.

Kymene ran straight for the nearest defended position, a street-wide barricade constructed from the very stones the Wasps had brought down. Stenwold saw a score of soldiers behind it, at least as many in the flanking tenements, many of them already loosing snapbows upwards as Imperial soldiers darted in at them from the sky.

The Sentinel thundered out of the market, smashing down the near wall, and the entire building began to fold in on itself in the machine’s wake, too many supports and pillars knocked away. Instantly, a pair of Mynan leadshotters boomed from Stenwold’s left, their paired impact striking the machine’s side hard enough that it skidded several yards. For a moment the Mynans were cheering, for there was a sizeable dent in the Sentinel’s carapace, and at least one leg trailed uselessly, but then the Imperial machine shook itself and turned against the Mynan engines. Its single eye unlidded and belched flame, smashing one leadshotter off its carriage, the ton of bronze and steel that was the barrel spinning and cracking, killing at least one of the artillerists. Then the Imperial soldiers had arrived: men in black and gold armour, rushing forward with snapbows raised even as more were dropping from above. Without the Sentinel, the Mynans could have made a fight of it, trusted to their weapons and their bloody-minded determination to hold the enemy for just a little more time, but the war automotive was on the move again, slewing slightly as the damaged leg dragged.

That was the last he saw of organized Mynan resistance. For the rest, he was running through the streets with Kymene, stumbling up the tiered steps, retreating ever westwards. The terrible machines could not be stopped with any weapons the Mynans possessed, but they could not be everywhere at once. The city’s defenders had spread themselves out across the whole advance of the Imperial army. Stenwold retained confused images of individual soldiers at windows, on roofs, in doorways, loosing their snapbows and crossbows at the human presence of the enemy, fleeing when confronted with the steel fist of the Sentinels. The battle became a series of jumbled, unrelated moments in his mind, seeing Wasps and Mynan Beetles trading shots at street corners, Imperial Airborne making assaults on high windows to flush out snipers, Spearflight orthopters casting a killing shadow over the ground as they coasted in to drop their incendiaries. There were no lines on that battlefield. The next street that Stenwold stumbled on to could be controlled by either side, or bitterly contested. There was so much dust and smoke in the air that it was difficult even to tell friend from foe.

Then they were at the airfield, and he saw that Kymene had managed somehow to gather some soldiers together again, not nearly so many as before, but at least a few hundred, sheltering under any cover that was available.

‘Kymene!’ he shouted — he seemed to have done nothing all day but chase the edge of her cloak and call her name.

She turned on him as if he was the enemy, eyes flashing, sword in hand.

‘It’s over,’ he told her. ‘You have to get clear.’

‘I hear this from you?’ she demanded. ‘You, who have been saying the Wasps must be fought since before most of your kin had even heard of the Empire?’

‘Look where we are!’ Stenwold told her. ‘Get your fighters out of the city, get them to Szar or Maynes or the Lowlands. Get yourself out. Today is lost.’ The words were so pitiful, to describe what he had seen that day, that he almost choked on them. ‘Please, Kymene. Your people need you free.’

She started to answer, defiance blazing in her expression, but then artillery struck within streets of them and swallowed her words with its fury. Overhead, two orthopters roared past, Imperial chasing Mynan.

‘Kymene!’ he shouted again, but the artillery was closing in on them, pound-pound-pound, a seemingly random pattern: near then far, near, then closer, in a net of calculation that was drawing tighter.

Stenwold saw her lips move, read the words, ‘I can’t…’ there, but one of her own was taking her arm, shouting at the top of his voice. The Mynan airmen on the ground had already scattered to their vessels. The roar of fuel-engines sparking up obscured the whirr of clockwork, and the artillery overrode it all.

At last she nodded agreement, the gesture almost wrenched from her, and the man who had been trying to persuade her was sprinting across the airfield, still shouting. They were wheeling out a fixed-wing flier, a cargo-hauler, but it would now take passengers in lieu of crates.

‘Chyses!’ Kymene shouted after him. ‘Gather all the soldiers you can. Gather everyone who’ll go with you. Get them out of the city, as Maker said. There will be a tomorrow!’ Her fiery gaze passed to Stenwold. ‘With me, Maker. If the world can’t spare me, it certainly can’t spare you.’

‘All pilots, into the air,’ someone yelled out. ‘The Maid must not be brought down!’

From nowhere, it seemed, Taki’s Esca Magni thundered down for a hard landing, its extended legs flexing on impact. ‘Rewind me!’ came her high, imperious voice, as though she was on her home fields of Solarno, but the mechanics rushed to obey. She had accounted for herself memorably already, through skill and superior technology.

‘We’re going!’ Stenwold shouted at her, but the artillery had quickened, as if sensing a kill. He pointed madly westwards, then gestured broadly at the frenzied activity about the field, and the Fly nodded. Her face, through the cockpit glass, was streaked with grime and sweat, and there were several holes in the Esca ’s wings and bodywork.

There was no more for it, then. The soldiers were already fleeing, each officer taking the survivors of his squad and hoping to get them out of the city any which way, and for whatever destination they could reach. All across the city, the citizens of Myna who could not or would not flee would be slaves of the Empire by dusk, or dead.

Kymene was already crouching in the hatch of the fixed-wing, with the craft’s civilian pilot firing up the four propeller engines. The craft had swift, sleek lines but it would not move in the air like an orthopter. As Stenwold ran across the field to join her, he knew that their fate would rest in the hands of the fighting airmen, and of Taki.

A shell landed close enough to scatter debris over the field, the blast knocking a few distant mechanics off their feet. Kymene hauled Stenwold into the fixed-wing’s hold, almost pulling him on top of her. Her expression was venomous, unforgiving, taking her last look at her ravaged city before the hatch closed.

The machine shuddered around them as the fixed-wing tensed, its legs bunching as the propellers got up to speed. Then, with an explosive snap, its landing gear had hurled it into the air, to catch the wind like a kite, a long low take-off that must have barely cleared the hangar roofs.

All across the field, every flier that had been held back was now clawing for the sky. Edmon let the battered old Pacemark have its head, almost immediately overtaking the fixed-wing Sweet Fire that was carrying Kymene, as he circled up above to search for the enemy. The Spearflights were all over the city but, in that first flush of ascent, they did not see the scale of the Mynan launch. Then there were a dozen orthopters in the air, cutting up from the airfield in all directions, making a widening spiral of winged shapes that could not be missed. Within a minute there was a score, and other surviving Mynan fliers were being drawn to join them, or retreating to them.

Their numbers, which spoiled any chance of secrecy, bought them precious moments. The Empire had split its fliers into individuals and pairs, none of which was foolish enough to simply dive straight at the burgeoning Mynan flight. Instead, they took it as a counter-attack, and regrouped to meet it.

There were more of them than of the defenders, of course. Edmon reckoned the odds were two to one already, and he guessed that minutes more would see the Empire commit some of the machines they had held back to keep their artillery safe.

He flashed the pattern to split, to attack, not knowing who would come and who would stay. The Empire had taken the city so swiftly by calling the pace, and the Sweet Fire ’s only chance at escape would be for Myna to retake the initiative, even briefly.

He let himself get quite clear of the circling mob of defenders before he glanced back to see precisely who was coming along with him. Otherwise, he knew, his nerve might not stand an empty sky.

Eleven other fliers had answered the call. He saw Franticze’s Tserinet at the fore, almost overtaking him with the Bee-kinden woman’s lust for Wasp blood. Looking forward again, his memory found names for some of the others: Bordes’s Wanderer, Marsene’s Fierce Lady, the Cranefly, the Red Anvil and several others he could not immediately name. There were far too many Spearflights ahead to worry about the odds now, but they had the same difficulties in communication that Edmon himself did. He saw flashes between them, officers trying to convey a response to a situation that had already changed.

Here we go, and he had chosen a target and kicked the Pacemark for every ounce of speed the ailing orthopter could give him. As the rotaries burst into life, he bellowed something wordless and primal, full of the death of his city.

His target skipped in the air under the battering it received, nose turning for the ground as the hammer of his bolts smashed its engine through the wooden hull. Then he was in their midst and, although many were trying to turn to follow his line, they were in each other’s way, and could not shoot for fear of hitting one another. All around him the other pilots were following his suicidal lead. Franticze smashed the port wings of one Spearflight to matchwood and was needling another even before she had cut into their formation. The Wanderer had taken a higher line, the lean, light flier missing with its single piercer but diving into the Wasp flock from above, bringing confusion in his wake. The Cranefly… Edmon was watching when it happened, just a moment’s flick of his eyes left and the image of the angular Mynan vessel steering left just when a Wasp pilot made a mirror decision, the two craft striking shoulder to shoulder, wheeling about each other like dance partners, wings stilled and broken, then dropping, still spinning, from the air.

Then he had more to worry about, clearing the Wasp pack and forcing the Pacemark into a complaining turn that was tighter than anything it had tried before, feeling every joint and bolt of its protest. Piercer shot sleeted past him like foul weather, a handful of impacts shunting him sideways in the air and nearly losing him control over the machine entirely. He let his rotaries blaze away, scything back through the air that the Wasps had taken, impossible to take aim at this speed, but he saw at least one Spearflight clipped by his shot, rattled, if not brought down.

Franticze’s Tserinet leapt up past him, absurdly close. There were Wasps on her tail, but her squat and ugly-looking flier moved through the air like a hunting insect, as though the woman’s sheer murderous passion could override aerodynamics. He saw another Spearflight take the full brunt of her rotaries from below, knocked from the sky just soon enough for Franticze to skip through the space it had been occupying.

He flashed the code for Retreat! without knowing who might be able to see it. He had spotted Spearflights breaking off from the pack, and there could only be one destination for them.

The Sweet Fire would be out past the western wall already, and a cargo fixed-wing could give a combat orthopter a run for its money on the straight, but there were already Imperial fliers harrying its escape, not an organized assault but — just as Edmon’s sally had been — a pack of individual pilots who had spotted the opportunity. Edmon sent the Pacemark back after them, not even knowing if he could catch up.

Had the Sweet Fire ’s pilot taken a straight line then he and his pursuers would be out of Edmon’s reach, but the man was unused to other pilots trying to kill him, and was twisting left and right to try and evade pursuit, giving the Spearflights the chance to outstrip him and come at him from the front and both sides.

Edmon had no idea how many Spearflights were in his own personal retinue, or whether any of his fellows had broken off with him. The Mynan pilots who had gone with the Sweet Fire were taking the enemy away in ones and twos, duelling savagely in the air, with no quarter given, airman against airman to the death.

Edmon felt some shocks against his hull, but only a handful — once again he had avoided the full force of some enemy’s hail of bolts, but for how much longer? If he turned to shake the pursuer off, then he would not be able to help Kymene.

He screamed again as he dived on the Wasps circling the Sweet Fire, trigger down and rotaries blazing. Most of them saw him coming, scattering before him, which bought more time for the fixed-wing than if he had actually taken one down. He kept to no sane line, made no plans, simply slinging the Pacemark around so sharply that he felt the wires of the wings strain to breaking point. Stray shots were still finding him, but he was making no serious attempt to attack, merely shooting blind and diving again and again, looping the Sweet Fire like an erratic satellite and throwing the Wasps off at every turn. His weapons ran out of ammunition on the third pass, but that no longer seemed to matter. He did not let it dictate his tactics.

Then one of the enemy had his line at last, and the impact almost took him down on its own, skewing his flight so that he was side-on to the ground, then falling upside down before he could complete the roll and get his craft under control again. The Spearflight was well and truly with him, though, and now the Pacemark was not handling at all well, abruptly incapable of the aerobatics that had saved it until now.

He tried to find a Wasp to ram, but the sky seemed mockingly clear of them, save for the pilot diligently trying to kill him.

A moment later he realized that this meant he had won. There was him, and the Sweet Fire, and the lone Spearflight that had not been stripped from the pursuit by his distractions or by the actions of other pilots.

He was just deciding that this represented a satisfactory end to his life, when Franticze came from out of the sun and chewed the tail off his enemy, sending the Spearflight tumbling away. The Bee then followed it down, trying to kill the pilot when he bailed out to trust his Art wings, but that was how deeply she hated the Wasps, and Edmon could hardly blame her just then.