The Air War (Shadows of the Apt 8)

by Tchaikovsky, Adrian

  There was some debate. The usual voices struck up against Stenwold’s, Helmess Broiler taking the lead as he had ever done, but the ranks of the Empire’s champions had thinned, and sounded hollow amidst the echoes of Stenwold’s words. Honory Bellowern, speaking on behalf of the absent Aagen, rose to speak, but Stenwold had already robbed him of his arguments, and what he was left with sounded much like a threat.

  At Jodry’s insistence, the vote was held at the end of the morning’s session, although, in truth, few enough felt moved to prolong the debate. The usual murmur and gossip that was a ubiquitous backdrop to most Assembly discussions was absent. The great majority of those present had no words to offer. Fear stalked invisibly about the chamber, stilling voices, leaving a trail of drawn, tense expressions. To speak into that silence would be to take a side publicly, to be noted down in the books of the Rekef or the Collegiate Merchant Companies for later investigation.

  Almost four in ten of the Assembly did not vote, even though the ballot was a secret one. The weight of the decision was such that they did not wish themselves to be responsible for the result, whichever way it went.

  Of votes against, there were barely two score. After the tally, Stenwold took the floor once more, and his few closing words would be rattling from every printing press in the city within the hour.

  Before noon the criers were already out in the streets of Collegium, calling out the news. The three extant Merchant Companies put their recruiting officers at street corners, with a plan already being drawn up for more companies to be formed. Word came from the Sarnesh, by rail, that they would stand by their ally, that their own forces were already mustering.

  Collegium was going to war once again.

  ‘“Let no man say that the eyes of Collegium are turned away from the world. Let history record we take upon ourselves this responsibility. Wherever the metal meets, there we will be.” Stenwold Maker has finally got what he wants.’

  Eujen Leadwell’s voice, familiar from so many debates, remained steady throughout the reading: the printers had copies of Stenwold Maker’s speech and the Assembly’s decision for public purchase by mid-afternoon the same day. Now, with evening closing in outside Raullo Mummers’s studio, the little band of students listened as Eujen relayed their future to them.

  Sartaea te Mosca circulated, bringing them bowls of hot Spider-kinden chocolate, an expensive luxury, but, then, she asked them, what was she saving it for?

  At the last, Eujen set down the cheaply printed scroll, his shoulders slumped.

  ‘Founder’s bloody mark.’ Raollo Mummers lit his pipe with slightly shaking hands, letting the sweet smell of tallum pollen seep into the room.

  ‘Eujen,’ te Mosca said softly, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What was I thinking?’ Eujen asked them all.

  ‘You’re going to have to be more specific,’ the Antspider suggested. ‘You have all sorts of mad ideas.’

  ‘Peace with the Empire. Peace with the world. A tenyear going by without another ruinous war.’ He held up a hand to forestall argument. ‘And I’m not a traitor. I’m not even an Imperial sympathizer, and there are plenty of those in the Assembly! I just . . . must it come to this? And when we beat them back – if we do – what then? Do we come round to the same point a few years later? Do we carry the war past their borders? Do we end up enslaving or eradicating Averic’s people so we can be safe from them? Is that all there is?’

  All eyes turned to the Wasp-kinden youth, marking the distance that seemed to have grown between him and them. Averic’s face was expressionless, save for a tightness at the jaw, a token of his self-control. ‘Next time, or the next,’ he murmured and, if there was an edge of desperation buried somewhere in his voice, it seemed more that he was desperate to console his friend Eujen rather than over any fears for his own fate or that of his kin. ‘There are those in the Empire who see the world as more than just something to be conquered, or why was I sent here at all? There will come a time when those people will make their voices heard.’

  ‘If the Empire can be driven from Myna, perhaps,’ the Antspider suggested. ‘A quick defeat might bring the Empress to her senses. If the Assembly can grasp the idea of being gracious in victory.’ She was wearing her Company sash still, and Eujen’s initial horror at it had been dulled, first by familiarity and then by recent events.

  ‘The Coldstone Company’s set to go, are they?’ he asked her.

  ‘So they tell me. First into the breach – that sort of stuff. Maker’s Own are ready, as well. Outright’s lads are staying home to help raise fresh companies.’

  ‘Where do I go to sign up?’ Eujen asked her.

  For a moment she just stared at him in silence while, across the room, Raullo Mummers dropped his pipe, grinding hurriedly at the embers as they spilled out.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Straessa the Antspider.

  Eujen’s expression was hurt. ‘You have. Even Gerethwy has.’ He indicated the lanky Woodlouse-kinden bent silently over some sort of schematic, glancing up only as his name was mentioned. He, too, wore the Coldstone Company sash.

  ‘I don’t want you to, Eujen,’ she insisted.

  For a long while, he stared at her. ‘You think I’m a coward, too?’

  ‘Idiot.’ She was across to him quickly, laying a hand on his arm, but he flinched away angrily, then rounded on her again, his mouth open for some angry retort. In a movement like a fencer’s lunge she had kissed him, once but firmly, letting his words drop into the abyss of it. ‘You’re brave enough to say what you believe in every day, Eujen, but if you’re there when we go to Myna, I won’t be able to fight, because I’ll always be worrying about you. Collegium’s going to need you, but later, when we really do have a chance at peace, not now when all we’ve got is war. Join one of the new companies, if you like. Form a student company, even. Please, not the warfront.’

  He stared at her for a long, stretched moment, conflicting emotions fighting beneath his skin. ‘And Gerethwy?’ he said at last.

  ‘As if she cares what happens to me,’ the Woodlouse intoned, and the painfully tense mood was broken.

  ‘Besides, Averic needs you here,’ Straessa added. ‘He’s not exactly going to sign up to slaughter his own people.’

  ‘Unless you’re leaving?’ te Mosca put in, as she passed the Wasp a fresh bowl. ‘Nobody’d blame you.’

  Averic regarded them all coolly and, for a long while, it seemed as if he had metamorphosed, since Eujen’s reading, into something else, something foreign and hostile. The enemy.

  Then something twitched, a muscle tugging in his throat. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said softly. ‘If I go . . . I’m army age. It’ll be straight into the Light Airborne, and up against the snapbows of Collegium, most likely. I’ve had all the training before I came here. All I need’s the uniform. If I stay . . . then am I a traitor? Or will your people just decide that I’m a spy?’ He said the words without much emotion, but his casual arms-folded pose had tightened, hands clutching at his own flesh.

  ‘You’re a student of the Great College,’ Eujen said. ‘That gives you all the rights of a Collegiate citizen except the vote. You’re one of us for as long as you care to be.’

  Only the set of Averic’s eyes showed how much he desperately wished that to be true but, despite Eujen’s reassurances, everyone there was thinking how, in the final analysis, his future was unlikely to be his to choose.

  The next day the first news, contradictory and unclear, began to filter into the city from Solarno.

  Eighteen

  ‘This is it,’ Gizmer told them, flitting into the Fly-kinden common room at head height.

  There were a dozen or so sitting about the floor, Pingge and Kiin amongst them. They had not flown in three days, the routine of their training abruptly broken without explanation. Everyone had felt change on the wind.

  ‘How do you know?’ someone asked, but Pingge’s question overrode it. ‘Where?’

  ‘Myna,’ one of the
Flies said immediately, but Gizmer shook his head irritably.

  ‘Myna’s gone,’ he told them. ‘Who’ve you been listening to, that you don’t know Myna’s gone? Szar as well, by now, I’d lay money on it. Maybe we fly against Maynes. Ant-kinden are stubborn.’

  ‘The Eighth Army has the Spearflights,’ Kiin said quietly. ‘That’s not what we’re trained for.’

  ‘Then what are we for?’ Pingge demanded. ‘Sitting about and getting fat, right now? Who’d have thought life in the army would be as grand as this?’ It was true, they ate well, had more time to themselves, slept better and drew more pay than they ever had in the factories. There was respect, too: they were with the army, and that meant something – even for Flies.

  ‘When they’re not chaining us inside the fliers,’ Gizmer muttered darkly, dropping down close to her.

  ‘Who’s even seen a pilot these last three days?’ Kiin asked.

  There was a mutter of discussion: nobody had.

  ‘Final testing,’ someone put in. ‘I heard talk – some other hoop they wanted to jump the machines through.’

  ‘The machines aren’t at the airfield, either. They’ve taken them elsewhere, or they’ve flown them off without us,’ Gizmer put in. Of all of them, the yoke of the army chafed him the most. He was forever sneaking off and poking his nose into things, getting where he shouldn’t be and gleaning scraps of information.

  ‘Three days is a long time to be testing anything,’ Pingge observed. ‘Unless they failed the test and all crashed or something.’

  This spurred a general ripple of laughter, but Kiin said, ‘Don’t.’

  ‘What? Sentiment, for the master race?’ Pingge jibed her. ‘Big bald Aarmon got to you, has he?’

  ‘Shut up, Pingge,’ Gizmer hissed. A moment later and the Fly-kinden fell silent as Aarmon himself walked into the room. He was wearing his aviator’s uniform, black insulated leathers with gold flashes at the shoulder, a chitin helm and goggles dangling by their straps from one hand. His clothes were creased, the tunic beneath sweat-stained where his cuirass was open down the front. Probably he had not been back in the capital for longer than it took to quit the airfield and march here.

  ‘Up, all of you,’ he ordered them. If he had heard Pingge talking, he gave no sign of it. As always – and as with all the pilots – his words were sparing, given only grudgingly. ‘Sergeant Kiin, rouse the others. All bombardiers to assemble in the quad, ten minutes.’ His soulless eyes raked across them, but paused on nobody. Then he ducked out of the room, leaving them to follow orders – and trusting them to do it. It had been a long time since the Wasps had needed to guard them.

  ‘Sergeant now, is it?’ Gizmer observed acidly.

  Kiin shrugged desperately. ‘It’s just because I fly with him, it must be.’

  Pingge smirked. ‘Oh, he likes you, that one. You always did go for the emotionless, goggle-eyed type.’

  ‘Come on, you heard him,’ Kiin said. ‘Up.’ She was already on her feet, and there was a general mutinous mutter as most of the Flies followed suit.

  ‘Going to make me call you “sir” now?’ Pingge goaded her.

  ‘Look, he’ll take it out of my hide if we’re not formed up within whatever time we have left,’ Kiin pleaded. ‘Come on, set an example.’

  ‘Right you are, sir.’ But Pingge got to her feet, and then hauled Gizmer up after her. ‘Drill and parades. I could get used to all of it but the standing about.’

  Kiin headed into the sleeping quarters and managed to jolly along those Fly-kinden who had been taking the chance for a lie-in, then the entire company was out in the quad just about inside Aarmon’s deadline. The pilots were assembling at the same time, a good half of them plainly just out of their machines, back from whatever three-day test they had been engaged on.

  ‘Look,’ Pingge hissed. Most of the Flies had now learned the soldier’s trick of whispering on parade, barely moving their lips. Pingge jerked her head to indicate direction, and one by one the Fly-kinden’s eyes flicked over to the newcomers marching in.

  For a moment it was as though they were looking back in time, for here they came: two score Wasp-kinden, the same number of Flies following. Look at them, they thought – a bunch of clueless, untrained factory workers, clerks and servants, frightened and undisciplined and without the faintest idea of what awaits them. Like looking in a mirror. Only it was not, not any more. The new Flies could only stare wide-eyed at Pingge, Kiin and the rest standing as straight as spears in their black tunics edged with yellow, soldiers of the Empire every bit as much as were the Light Airborne.

  Then a murmur began amongst Pingge’s peers, not about the new Flies but the Wasps that had preceded them, now standing to attention across from Aarmon’s people.

  ‘Quiet!’ Kiin meant to hiss, but the word turned into an order somehow, and silenced them.

  The new Wasp recruits stood with the same wordless discipline that Aarmon and his fellows had possessed since the Flies had first set eyes on them. Their faces betrayed no uncertainty or fear at this new assignment – indeed they betrayed little enough emotion at all. When Aamon strode out before them, there was none of the tensing or minute adjustments to the presence of a superior officer that soldiers would normally show – and it was plain that only some of them were regular soldiers, just as only some of Aarmon’s pilots had been. With these newcomers, though, the difference was considerably more marked.

  Almost half of them were women.

  It was unthinkable. Wasp women served and raised children, and perhaps sometimes looked after the family home and wealth while their menfolk fought. Wasp women did not stand impeccably to attention, in uniform. Yet here they were: eighteen women amongst twenty-two men, not standing apart, nor a step behind, but standing there as if they were equals.

  Aarmon made eye contact with one of the new Wasps, and then the newcomers were marching into the barracks without a word, the Flies following behind them in a nervous, eddying mob. Going to take up our old rooms? Pingge wondered.

  She knew that she should be nervous, too, but in the pit of her stomach she felt the first fluttering of excitement. All that training was finally about to come to something.

  ‘Sergeant Kiin, we march to Armour Square. Follow my company,’ Aarmon instructed, and Kiin’s voice piped back, ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I’m still not convinced we’ve not been called here for our own executions,’ Totho muttered as he descended the steps, carefully watched by at least half a dozen Wasp soldiers and a couple of their engineers.

  Drephos turned away from the pair of Consortium men he had been talking to, brushing them aside with a wave of his gauntleted hand and ignoring their surly looks in response.

  ‘Overly elaborate, don’t you think?’ They had no privacy here in Capitas – with servants spying on them in the quarters they had been assigned, while here in Armour Square, below the very balcony the Empress would use, it seemed as if someone had detailed an entire army to keep an eye on them. In such conditions, Drephos’s response was simply to speak his mind and not care who heard him. To his mind, he had the Empire in a vice: the mechanical offspring of his genius were at the forefront of the war, and he considered himself irreplaceable. And, besides, he was hardly being coy with their engineers: so far they had got everything they had asked him for. If he was wrong, if he was expendable after all, then watching what he said would make no difference whatsoever, now that they were here, in the heart of Empire.

  Being here in the first place was what had put Totho on edge, though. He had argued passionately against obeying the summons. ‘Plenty of Wasp-kinden, even, know to make themselves scarce when the word comes to return to Capitas,’ he hissed now, trying fruitlessly not to be overheard by their constant escort.

  ‘I’m assured the purges are over.’ Drephos’s bleak expression belied his words, but his dry smile suggested that such matters as purges were for lesser men to worry about. ‘Besides, I want a look at their new orthopters. What little
I’ve heard is maddening . . . it sounds as though they’ve leapt ahead of the Solarnese models somehow . . .’ One of the Consortium men coughed pointedly, but Drephos ignored him. ‘You’ve set the similophone up?’ he asked Totho.

  ‘No thanks to everyone else. They were so worried I might be rigging a bomb or something, it took me three times as long as it should have done.’

  The similophone was one of the Iron Glove Cartel’s rare peacetime inventions, a little toy that Drephos and Totho had cooked up together that was only now seeing wider use. It consisted of an ear that received sound, and a loom that transcribed the sound pattern into silk cloth, which a similophone drum could then decode and speak back. Totho and Drephos had used the device instead of writing letters, not so much for security but just because they were artificers, and they could.

  Now their toy had been requested to bear witness to history in the making.

  ‘You can understand their caution, surely,’ Drephos said smoothly.

  Totho grimaced darkly, leaning in to murmur, ‘I’m serious. We shouldn’t have come. You’re underestimating them, and you never met the Empress. She’s terrifying.’

  Troops were marching into Armour Square now: a sample only of the might of the Empire. Totho could make out Light Airborne, infantry, Engineers, Aviation Corps, slavers, representatives from all the different machines that made the Empire run. The square was large, and there were hundreds of them standing shoulder to shoulder, all those different uniforms, all that armour, the patterns and designs, and all of it black and gold.

  ‘Colonel-Auxillian,’ one of the Consortium men put in. ‘If you will – we have so little time before the address.’

  Drephos rounded on him grandly. ‘You have our greatshotters and you have our sentinels. What other of my wonders are you about to ask for?’

  ‘Colonel . . .’ Now it was the Consortium man’s turn to lean in, as though even he feared to be overheard by the ubiquitous guards. ‘The Empire would pay far more for the formula to the Bee-killer.’