The Air War (Shadows of the Apt 8)

by Tchaikovsky, Adrian

  Factory Nine made trousers mostly, although the machines there could be configured for all manner of cloth goods. Its complement per shift was eighty-seven artificers, two overseers, one foreman and five cleaning staff, the latter being Commonweal slaves and the only Inapt that the place had any use for.

  Pingge and Kiin were part of the early shift, arriving every morning three hours before dawn to take over the constant motion of the machines, stepping into the weary shoes of the late shift with a fluid ease born of long practice, so that their mechanical charges need never know that the hands that tended them had changed.

  They were both Fly-kinden – as were a little over half the workers, because they could get into the small spaces around the machines and hover over them, and had quick fingers, and the reflexes to avoid losing them to the teeth and shuttles of the automatic looms when things went wrong. They might not keep the army marching, as they said to one another, but they kept it from marching bare-arsed, and that was surely all the Empire could ask of them.

  The pair entered the factory chattering, a constant patter of banter and gossip that kept them sane through the long stretches of tedium, and stopped only when some mischance of the machines made their job briefly and dangerously interesting. They were deft, skilled, trained hastily by their instructors and then patiently by years of experience, so that they could deal with almost any problem without having to commit the cardinal sin of shutting the machines down. They were the artificers of small things.

  Pingge and Kiin had worked here together, side by side, for eight years. They were of an age, although Kiin was very pale, with hair she dyed fair like a Spider-kinden. She still had a trace of accent from the East-Empire her family had come from, having earned or bribed their way to a travel permit, and gone to seek their fortunes in the capital. Pingge was tanned and more robust, laughing louder, daring more, always a step away from drawing the ire of their overseers. There were rules of conduct in the Empire’s factories: indeed they were written on the wall for all to see. That the machines should run, that the factory should be productive, Pingge and the rest held to be a sacred duty. All the rest of it, about silence and deference and proper place, could go hang as far as they were concerned. They were artificers, after all, and not just slaves or common labourers. So long as they made quota they felt it was no business of anyone’s – no, not the Empress herself – how they went about their lives.

  Or at least, that had been their sentiment until today. The foreman was absent, for a start, which they would have assumed meant he was sick almost to death, but then one of the overseers was missing too and, short of a city-wide plague, that was unthinkable. The remaining overseer, a stooped Beetle-kinden man a few years from retiring, was plainly worried enough that he just let them get on with matters. Had the machines been less of a inviolable trust – a symbol of the elevation of their status, however meagre – then things might have been let slide, and Consortium clerks might have been knocking on the door a tenday later, demanding to know where their trousers had got to.

  The talk was slow to start up, but soon the familiar chatter of the machines soothed their nerves, and the comments began to fly, pitched over and under and beneath the constant hammering of the mechanisms, passing from ear to ear in ripples of hearsay and defamation.

  ‘. . . and she’s not been sleeping in a cold bed these last three nights, despite her man being posted to Shalk . . .’

  ‘. . . ask me, they put something in the water, never known a man less able to . . .’

  ‘. . . came in and stomped about the place and then had his dinner and went out, and never did look in the cupboard . . .’

  ‘. . . all that talk about flying the length and breadth of the city to bring me a bag of flour and he . . .’

  ‘. . . got sick, and her with three children at home, and what can you do . . . ?’

  ‘. . . roach of a housing-master changed her to a smaller room again, all that talk of supporting the troops and it’s still bribe money doing the talking . . .’

  Each train of chatter came down the line to Pingge, or was started by her, and Kiin added nothing, passing it on, her mouth pressed into a careful line to hide the smile, because you never knew who might walk in, and sometimes the Consortium clerks or army quartermasters took offence, and the foreman was forced to make some show of discipline, not that he was even here . . .

  Then abruptly the foreman was there, the broad, stomping Beetle man entering hurriedly with the missing Fly-kinden overseer, and with a stranger in tow: a Wasp-kinden, a sharp young knife of a man looking altogether too keenly down the lines of the machines. Wasps actually visiting the factory almost always meant trouble for someone, but with luck it was trouble that the foreman’s bulk would absorb.

  They remained near the door, which let in only a pre-dawn greyness, not enough to rival the lamps. The echoing noise all around masked what they were saying, but it was quickly evident that they had brought an argument in with them. The foreman was shaking his head until his jowls quivered, making quick, angry gestures towards the workers. They caught some notion of quotas, of penalties.

  ‘They’re going to raise us,’ Pingge observed, meaning that the quota would go up. ‘Bound to happen.’

  Kiin nodded. Life would get harder in direct proportion to the new requirements, but they had lived through it before. The trick was to come out the other side with all your fingers still on your hands.

  The foreman had made some particularly angry point, and abruptly the Wasp had a palm to the man’s forehead, freezing the Beetle into immobility, face now utterly still, almost expressionless save for a slight frown of concentration, no more than the girls might show, watching the repetitive round of their machines.

  Abruptly Pingge fell quiet, and a peculiar focus had come over all the workers, bent over their machines as though oblivious, dearly not wanting to become involved.

  The Wasp had to ask three times, louder and louder, before they heard him. ‘Stop the machines!’

  It was unthinkable, unheard of, but now the Fly overseer had gone to the Big Lever, the one they never used unless the end of the world was only a yammer of the looms away, and had dragged it down with all the force of his wings and bodyweight.

  One by one the great machines fell silent, stopped in mid leap, ruining an entire batch. It was a disaster. Nobody could think what the matter might be. Did the Empire no longer need trousers?

  The silence that now fell on Factory Nine had never been known in living memory. The Wasp strode down the line unhurriedly, eyes sharp. He was not quite in uniform, or not any specific uniform, although a lieutenant’s rank badge was pinned carelessly to the sleeveless robe he wore over his tunic.

  ‘All of them women, really?’ he called back to the foreman.

  Pingge exchanged an uneasy glance with Kiin, because there were indeed a few men working there, Beetle-kinden and a couple of halfbreed slaves; but of the Fly-kinden, yes, women all.

  The foreman shrugged. ‘As you see, sir.’ He had not quite recovered from being a second away from death.

  ‘You, you, you.’ The finger stabbed out, selecting prey. ‘You, you and you, with me now.’ The last two at his finger’s end had been Pingge and Kiin.

  For a moment nobody moved. Pingge’s eyes were on the foreman, whose face was a picture of misery. Losing his workforce – but not just for the day, she read there. Losing a half-dozen skilled workers for good. She felt a terrible sinking feeling in her stomach, her instincts crying for her to fly, seek the sky and get out of the city. But of course that was out of the question. She had family here and, besides, where was there to go?

  ‘Move!’ the Wasp lieutenant snapped, and the half-dozen were reluctantly leaving their stations, gathering in a fearful huddle close to him, but not too close. Pingge squeezed Kiin’s hand for mutual courage, as the Wasp turned on his heel and marched out.

  Rekef, he must be Rekef, she thought. What have we done? It seemed impossible that anything
anybody had done in Factory Nine could possibly have brought down the wrath of the Rekef Inlander. Was somebody using the machines for something else? Something subversive. Or maybe it was some other factory? You hear all sorts about Factory Five down on General Malik Street. The idea that the Rekef would just round up and shoot a few random factory girls because someone somewhere had done something wrong seemed entirely plausible. You heard about it happening all the time, in the next city, in the neighbouring district, on some other street.

  They kept within six feet of the Wasp’s heels, and not one of them made a break for it. In retrospect that was what surprised Pingge the most.

  Within two streets they had picked up company, another little gaggle of Fly-kinden, mostly women still but also a couple of men. Soon there were more than a score of them, pattering behind a few striding Wasp-kinden like orphans behind a matron, the occasional straggler flying to keep up.

  ‘But where are we going?’ whispered Kiin, the first words anyone had dared utter.

  Pingge frowned. There were maybe a dozen places across the city that you emphatically Did Not Go because the Rekef worked there, but they were nowhere near those. Instead, this looked like . . .

  ‘Severn Hill,’ she said abruptly, and loud enough to draw an angry frown from one of the Wasps.

  The Fly-kinden milled and clustered, and slowed noticeably until the Wasps shouted at them to keep up. Severn Hill was Engineering Corps territory, and that raised an entirely different spectre: not execution or torture perhaps, but everyone knew the Engineers got through a steady supply of slaves in testing their inventions. Perhaps they had run short of slaves?

  Severn Hill itself was a grand ziggurat, the outside bustling with a few hundred Wasp artificers who spared the straggling Fly-kinden not a glance. The air was loud with strange mechanisms, not the familiar patter of the looms, and the drone of flying machines was a constant background noise as they shuttled to and from a pair of nearby airfields.

  ‘In,’ snapped the lieutenant, and they entered the shadow of the ziggurat, were hustled down low-ceilinged corridors until they were disgorged into a square, windowless room over-lit by the rearing flames of gas lamps.

  There was a man there, another Wasp but a strange-looking one, bearded like a Spider-kinden and with a slightly manic look in his eyes, and yet with a major’s badge at his collar. He regarded them from the far side of a vast desk, the top of which was entirely invisible beneath a clutter of papers.

  ‘As requested, Major Varsec,’ the lieutenant reported. ‘All the Consortium would spare us at this time. All factory artificers, and used to handling machines.’

  The major regarded them coolly. ‘Do you think Captain Aarmon will take to them?’ he asked, smiling slightly.

  Pingge saw the lieutenant twitch at the question, for all it was plainly rhetorical. Whoever ‘Captain Aarmon’ was, he was not well liked.

  ‘Take them to the new machines,’ Major Varsec ordered. ‘Let’s see who has the knack of it.’ He stood abruptly, looking them over as though they had become soldiers. ‘Your old work is done. They’ll manage without you. You’re in the Engineers now, and you’re mine.’

  This audience chamber was much too grand just for waiting in. Abandoned there, General Tynan stood at near attention, suspecting eyes peering at him from every wall. He was deep within the palace, some part of it beyond the known haunt of soldiers, sycophants and foreign diplomats.

  The walls were hung with tapestries showing interlacing Spider-kinden arabesques, gold and red and black, that did strange things to the eye. There was daylight from shafts in the ceiling and there was a flaring white glare from chemical burners on the walls, but the tapestries ate it all and smouldered sullenly, holding on to a darkness that the room should have been rid of. The rugs beneath his feet were from Vesserett, he guessed, woven bee-fur now slightly threadbare from too many marching boots. The furniture – a long table alongside one wall, and the single seat at the far end of the room – was local work but very fine, ornate black wood with gilded highlights, some slave craftsman’s masterpieces.

  It put him off his stride: not a cell, but a long way from freedom. Where now for General Tynan of the inexorable Second Army?

  There was the sound of bootsteps behind him, and he shifted to one side as another man was led in. They exchanged glances, reading a great deal into one another’s presence.

  ‘General Roder,’ Tynan noted, and the other man nodded.

  Roder had been only a colonel when Tynan had last seen him, but then the Eighth had gone up against the Spider-kinden at Seldis, and a lucky assassin had attempted to throw it into disarray by killing its leader, a practice that the Imperial rank structure was there to blunt. He made a young general, did Roder, a solid, soldierly man more than ten years Tynan’s junior but showing every sign that he would be just as bald soon enough, his dark hair on the retreat from his forehead. The left side of his face was stiff and expressionless courtesy of a failed poisoning attempt.

  We are two of a kind. Tynan did not need to say it. Roder had hauled the Eighth Army off the Spiders’ doorstep when the Emperor had died, just as the Second had come hotfoot from investing Collegium. They were both men who had missed out on their chance to be the great heroes, failing the Empire by serving their new Empress.

  Roder gathered himself to say something, but at that point everyone else trooped in, judge and jury and all.

  I could have asked for some of these faces to have fallen from favour during the infighting, Tynan considered, but there was a certain class of man who never seemed to misstep, clinging to power like a leech.

  He knew General Brugan, of course, and would reluctantly admit that he was glad the Rekef had ended up in that man’s hands rather than those of either of his late rivals. Still, it was a rare army officer who had any love for the Rekef Inlander, and generals had as much – or more – to fear from a purge than common soldiers. Brugan, at least, could pass for a fighting man, still strong and fit even though he was greying. The lancing gaze of his piercing grey eyes was often all he needed to draw confessions from the fearful, and obedience from his underlings.

  To his left was Colonel Vecter, who had served with Brugan in the East-Empire before the war: a deceptively scholarly looking man with neatly parted hair and spectacles, a skilled artificer who was a constant innovator of the interrogation machines. On Brugan’s right was Colonel Harvang, as though some magician had taken two whole men, swept some small quality of discipline one way to make Vecter, and then shovelled all the fat and sloth and idleness the other. In straining tunic, the gross colonel was chewing constantly at some piece of gristle, with some smug young major at his heels – to feed him sweetmeats, no doubt.

  There were more: lean, bald Colonel Lien of the Engineers had stolen a general’s rank badge from somewhere, and was looking insufferably pleased about it, whilst Knowles Bellowern’s dark Beetle face held an expression of mild indifference, masking the fact that the Consortium colonel was one of the richest men in the Empire and head of a powerful and ambitious dynasty. Tynan looked on them all without love.

  Well, at least we know where we are. But he was wrong about that. Despite the two former generals being faced with as imposing a clique of power-mongers as they had ever seen in one place before, everyone there was still waiting. There could be only one person able to bring these dignitaries together and force them to fidget and shuffle at her pleasure.

  Tynan was ready for her when she swept into the room: the Empress Seda the First, whose throne he and Roder had saved by abandoning their respective campaigns, at her command. He had never actually met the woman before. His fall from grace had been too immediate, his army disbanded, his soldiers redeployed. He had thought it merely due to his failure, at the time. In retrospect he had realized that it was simple mistrust. A general with an army, in those turbulent days of secession and civil war, might have been just a little too tempted to try for the throne himself.

  Seda was absu
rdly young – years younger than any of them, even than Harvang’s protégé. A frail and slender girl, and as beautiful as nature’s gifts and Spider cosmetics could make her, and when she entered the room she held all their attention utterly captive. Tynan, older and wiser than most, saw from the corners of his eyes just how she affected them: Bellowern’s moistened lips, Vecter removing his spectacles to clean them, an unnameable, hungry expression nakedly apparent on General Brugan’s face. Harvang’s young follower started noticeably, flinching away the moment she entered the room.

  She was slim and delicate, but her presence filled every inch of space there, forcing itself on them.

  ‘General Tynan,’ she acknowledged, and his name on her lips jolted something within him, despite himself. ‘General Roder.’ Her smile was painful to behold, like looking at the sun.

  General Brugan cleared his throat. ‘It has so pleased Her Imperial Majesty Seda the First to summon you to her presence,’ he began, but the Empress had taken her seat by then, and now waved him to silence with a brief gesture. Tynan had heard many theories about the precise balance of power at court, and many of them claimed that Brugan, lord of the Rekef, held the reins, and that the Empress was his puppet.

  Oh, not true at all, he understood now. For a moment, examining her, he found himself locking eyes with the woman. The sense of power was palpable: the entire might of the Empire balanced on her shoulders.

  ‘Enough formalities,’ she said softly. ‘You must have known this day would come. Since being removed from your commands you have waited faithfully for our call, and whatever fate it should summon you to. Unlike others with guiltier consciences, you have not gathered your riches and tried to flee our borders. Well, then, the Empire has called. It requires its heroes once again.’