The Air War (Shadows of the Apt 8)

by Tchaikovsky, Adrian

  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.