The Air War (Shadows of the Apt 8)

by Tchaikovsky, Adrian

  And then there were the Mynans . . .

  ‘Well, you brought them here,’ Jodry pointed out.

  ‘Speak to Kymene.’

  ‘You speak to her. She scares the sandals off me,’ Jodry muttered. ‘Looks at me like she’s trying to work out what possible good I am. Murderer’s eyes, that one.’

  ‘Her city’s back under the black and gold,’ Stenwold pointed out, somewhat testily. ‘It’s not a situation to inspire levity.’

  ‘But if she wants to work with us to liberate the place, she has to work with us, and so do that rabble of pilots you pulled in, and all their soldiers who’ve turned up at our gates. Little Mistress Aviator’s been training our fliers to work together: formations, tactics, all that sort of thing. She seems to think that’s all very important. Now your Mynans are on the scene and, yes, they have more flying experience than our lads and lasses, what with all that scrapping about on the border over the last year, but they won’t do what they’re told, and Mistress Taki, for reasons of her own, won’t tell them either, and our own pilots are frankly scared of being in the air with them because nobody knows what they’ll do next. And while we’re trying to train them to work alongside our people, they’re trying to wing off to hunt Wasps that, frankly, aren’t even here yet. Either they’re flying off without orders or authorization, or they’re bullying our ground crew into keeping their personal Stormreaders wound and ready, as if the Empire’s already at the gates.’

  ‘Jodry, if you’d seen Myna, you wouldn’t want to be caught unprepared either, believe me.’

  ‘Oh, I know, but then you don’t have to listen to Corog Breaker moaning about how it’s impossible to get them even to march in step.’

  ‘Why would they . . . ? What’s Corog Breaker got to do with it?’ Stenwold pictured the Master Armsman of the Prowess Forum. ‘He’s a pilot?’

  ‘Well actually he is a pilot, thankfully, but mostly he’s a disciplinarian,’ Jodry said primly. ‘And he’s trying to make your Mynans part of a team.’

  ‘They’re not—’

  ‘They are. I’m making them yours. You’re now official liaison with the Mynan exiles. I, as Speaker, command this. There, it’s done.’

  Stenwold looked at him as mutinously, no doubt, as the Mynan pilots were even now looking at Corog Breaker. The man’s logic was faultless, however. ‘Do you have any idea how much else I have to do?’ he complained, somewhat wretchedly. ‘The committees, the engagements, the planning? I’d forgotten how this city runs its wars on bureaucracy.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ the Speaker’s calm slipped a little, ‘Stenwold the martyr. You’ll never know the problems of yours that I’ve solved without your ever hearing of them, because you were in Myna or off mooning over that Sea-kinden woman of yours. But now you’re the War Master, whether you like it or not. During peacetime I could keep you on a long leash because you’d done good work for the city, sterling work, and you’d earned the right to thumb your nose at our committees and our paperwork. Now it’s war again, and you yourself proposed the vote, and you will not simply stride about in a breastplate and leave all the organization to me. I need you, and Collegium needs you. And that means at all hours . . .’ Jodry’s words ground to a halt, for Stenwold was no longer listening to him. ‘What?’

  ‘Quiet,’ Stenwold told him, already at the window and throwing the shutters open.

  Jodry goggled at him. ‘Stenwold, what—?’

  ‘You hear it?’

  ‘I don’t . . .’ Jodry lapsed into silence, and the two men waited. In the air was a distant, ever-increasing drone. ‘They’re training in the Stormreaders . . . ?’

  ‘Clockwork engines don’t sound like that,’ Stenwold said quietly, as the sound built – still far off but not as far as it had been a moment ago. The buzz of engines on the air: many engines.

  A moment later and Stenwold was bolting from the room, the door slamming open as he shouldered into it, leaving Jodry staring after him, his mouth working soundlessly.

  ‘Advance! Advance! Forward! Form shooting lines, two . . . no . . .’ Chief Officer Marteus swore under his breath, holding on to his calm by the slenderest of threads. ‘Two lines, one shooting over the other. You – Fly-kinden – get to the front. What’s the point of you standing there when the Beetle kneeling in front of you’s still taller?’

  The shooting line had dissolved into chaos, and Marteus felt that same anger rising in him that had seem him leave Tark so ignominiously, years before. It had served him well enough when the Vekken had come to Coldstone Street, or when the Wasps’ Light Airborne were jumping the walls, but training his new recruits was rubbing his temper raw, and any moment now he was going to explode in a wholly unprofessional manner.

  ‘Back to where you were!’ he snapped at them, seeing the motley squad of a score and ten new-minted soldiers stumble and jostle their way across the square. People were watching, he was well aware, lolling out of windows to chuckle – people who didn’t have the guts to enlist themselves, but were content simply to criticize and laugh.

  ‘Now, forward! At the trot, come on!’ This time they managed it, and stopped approximately when he ordered. ‘Shooting line, loose!’ he bellowed hoarsely, hearing the ragged chorus of retorts from their snapbows – charged but not loaded. ‘Now charge, and loose again!’

  That was hoping for too much. Half of them managed a decent turn of speed with the weapons, even miming slotting the bolt in. The others were still fumbling as the first half were shooting. ‘No!’ Marteus roared. ‘No! Stop!’ His voice was failing. Ant-kinden did not have to shout at one another. The old days of service in his home city were suddenly an unexpected source of nostalgia. ‘You shoot as one. Individual shots kill individual soldiers. Shoot together and you stop their advance dead. Ask the Sarnesh – it’s what smashed their line at the Battle of the Rails, and it’s what stopped the Jaspers dead at Malkan’s Folly, eh? Back to where you were.’

  They ran through the exercise again, got to the same point, half the squad out of position, some fumbling, some shooting. Marteus’s voice cracked under the force of his invective and he turned away to take a swig from his waterskin. His ears rang to shouting, however, and for a moment he thought it was still his, or perhaps some private drill officer within his own head.

  But no: a woman’s voice. He lowered the skin, looking round. One of his recruits had plainly endured as much as she could take, too. She was stalking along the line, bellowing in a high, clear voice at the others, correcting their stance, lining them up. ‘Come on, you maggots!’ he heard her shouting. ‘You’re embarrassing your city! That’s it! Bows level and straight – that means you too, Lucco, no enemy down near your feet – ready to loose . . . ?’ And by this time she had realized what she was saying, and that Marteus was staring at her.

  She was a lean, spare woman, some Spider halfbreed sort, and she did not back down before his stare, but simply adopted a stave-straight soldier’s stance. ‘Chief Officer,’ she said and, in those non-committal words he reckoned she’d learned more of soldiering than half the men he’d served with in the Vekken siege.

  ‘You think you can give orders better than I can?’ he demanded.

  ‘No, Chief, but I think I can listen better than these.’

  Halfbreeds, thought Marteus, but the Coldstone Company had never been choosy and, besides, only around half his recruits were Beetle-kinden. Someone was shaming Collegium, but it wasn’t these, who at least had taken up the snapbow or the pike to defend their surrogate home. ‘Go ahead,’ he told the woman, ‘show me.’

  She nodded, surprised and abruptly nervous, but turned back to her fellows. ‘Loose!’ she ordered, and the bows snapped dutifully. ‘Recharge – that’s it, wind steady and you’ll not fumble it. Gerethwy, Barstall, hold your shot – you too, Master Maldredge. When you see three in four up and pointed – now – loose!’ She risked a glance at Marteus, but his face remained as impassive as only an Ant’s could be. ‘Ready to receive a charge!’
she hazarded, and the half-dozen Inapt they had with them – Mantis-kinden mostly – were shouldering forwards. ‘No, not round – cut between like we practised – and why aren’t you recharging your bows? – and – loose! Pikes at the ready!’

  She turned, still in the midst of the tableau she had created, the pikemen in the second and third ranks bracing their weapons, whilst the rows of snapbowmen were recharging now without being told, raggedly but not so far out of step with one another.

  ‘Your name?’ Marteus demanded. He heard one of the other recruits snigger – a tall grey-skinned creature of some lanky kinden he had never seen before.

  ‘Straessa, Chief Officer – called the Antspider,’ the halfbreed reported, reverting to her blank soldier’s demeanour.

  And she knows all their names, Marteus thought. Another knack that Ant-kinden never needed to learn. ‘Right. Subordinate Officer Antspider.’ He made the decision quickly, the words rushing out before he could regret them. ‘You drill your friends here another dozen times, then break.’ Does this mean I need more subordinates? Probably. Does that mean I need rank badges, like the Empire has? Almost certainly. Ant-kinden needed no rank badges, of course. Everyone knew who everyone else was.

  ‘Right, back to where we were!’ the new Subordinate Officer ordered, and cuffed the tall man as he passed. ‘No bloody smirking, Gerethwy, this is war . . .’

  She stopped speaking, the certainty in her voice draining away. ‘Chief . . . ?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Are they ours?’

  She was looking upwards, and Marteus – and everyone else – followed her gaze.

  Black shapes were passing over the city against the insistent drone of engines, low enough that they could see the flickering wings of orthopters. No strange sight perhaps, given how hard the aviators were training, but these flew in formation, and they were many.

  ‘Clear the square!’ Marteus shouted, and he heard his new junior officer seconding him. ‘Make for the College.’ There was no great rationale in that, save that he could think of nothing else to suggest.

  ‘Wheel left!’ Corog Breaker shouted. ‘Fly straight. Wheel right – keep that distance! You’re moving apart.’

  He had a better voice for it than Marteus ever did, honed by bellowing across classrooms and foundries and tavernas. The Master Armsman of the Prowess Forum was now teaching discipline to airmen rather than fencing to students.

  His class consisted of a score of men and women, some of the local Beetle-kinden – new recruits and the graduates of Taki’s aviation classes – and the others a motley pick of the Mynan newcomers. He had them jogging about the airfield at a fair pace, making formations, manoeuvring on foot, trying to instil into them a basic understanding of working together. The task was frustrating and slow, but if there was one thing that Breaker was good for, it was shouting at length.

  ‘Back into formation!’ he yelled, but two or three of the Mynans had just broken off, running about the field and obviously taking the piss, he reckoned, by miming an attack on some of the grounded aircraft. ‘Form up!’ he shouted. ‘Everyone, ranks before me! What do you think you’re doing?’

  The ‘ranks’ his class formed were split, the Mynans clumped together at one end, and a noticeable gap between them and the Collegiate fliers, who were mostly considerably younger and somewhat scared of them. Corog Breaker was older and scared of nothing, however, and he stomped up to them, glowering.

  ‘Why aren’t we in the air, Master Breaker,’ demanded one of them – Edmon, he thought. They always used his title, since he insisted on it, but they gave it a decidedly derisive spin.

  ‘Because in the air you can’t hear me shouting at you,’ Breaker snapped back.

  ‘We want to fight Wasps.’ This was Franticze, the stocky Bee-kinden woman and his worst discipline problem. ‘This is a waste of time.’

  ‘You think we’d let you fight the Wasps, alongside our pilots?’ Breaker demanded. It was his best card, when working with them, and he saw them scowl and shuffle, saw the sudden fear in their eyes that they might be excluded, cast aside. ‘If you can’t work with us, then you’re liabilities, and no Stormreaders for you,’ he informed them sharply.

  ‘Flying in combat, it is not like this,’ Edmon said quietly, with an almost guilty look at the Collegiate pilots, their youth and uncertainty.

  ‘Well, in the future it will be,’ Breaker told him. ‘Discipline in the air, just like discipline on the ground. Armies are built on it. Ask the Ant-kinden.’

  ‘I never saw an Ant pilot worth a curse,’ Franticze muttered, but a brief gesture from Edmon silenced her.

  ‘Try it again. Follow Pendry Goswell here: turn when she turns, keep your distance, show me you can do it,’ Breaker invited, gesturing for a solid Beetle girl, one of Collegium’s better fliers, to take the lead. As the airmen moved off, he retreated to lean against a grounded orthopter.

  ‘Don’t say it,’ he growled from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘They’re right.’ Taki was sitting atop the machine. Her Esca had come in an hour before and she was watching the ground crew finish winding the motor. ‘Air combat’s too fast.’

  ‘They’re going to end up shooting our people down, or the other way around. They way they fly, nobody knows where they’ll go.’

  ‘How do you think they got out of Myna . . . ?’ Taki lifted her head abruptly, frowning. ‘Corog . . . ?’

  There were some startled cries from the Collegiate students. The Mynans had broken formation and were pounding across the field, shouting at one another. Breaker saw Franticze take to the air, a flash of her wings dropping her neatly into the Stormreader that she had reserved. The others were grappling their way into other machines, all those that they had chosen for themselves – against his orders – and fought off all comers for, now painted with the double red darts of Myna.

  ‘What . . . ?’ Breaker began, but some of the Mynans were already starting up their motors, shouting at the ground crew to get clear, wings folding out and lifting up with the first motion of the clockwork. ‘Stop that! What do you think you’re . . . ?’

  But then the sound impinged on him, the drone of engines from on high. He turned to Taki, but she was already across the field and scrambling into the seat of her Esca Magni.

  With a deep buzz of wings and fire, fixed-wing fliers began to pass overhead, a flight of a half-dozen immediately above, but there were others elsewhere over the city. From somewhere close by there was a flash, a boom immediately afterwards, as the ground shook. A moment later smoke was rising.

  ‘Get my machine ready to take off! Now!’ Breaker shouted. ‘Get in the air!’ He waved madly to the students, relieved to see that half of them at least were already following the Mynans’ lead, orders or not.

  The Esca Magni leapt into the air, Taki bringing the machine off the ground lopsidedly in her haste, desperate to gain the air before . . .

  Myna all over again. She registered the explosion without really seeing or hearing it, some consensus of the senses simply informing her. Where was that? That was the field over Luker Street ways. Of course the Empire would try for the same targets: strip Collegium of its air defences: destroy the Beetle orthopters on the ground, and who could defy them? And all the while the question kept hammering away in the back of her mind: Where did the piss-cursed bastards come from? How had the Empire infiltrated a force of fliers within strike of the city, and nobody knew of it?

  She watched as the enemy machines banked ahead of her, almost following the line of the street below as they sought their target. They were not the familiar Spearflights, she registered. These were fixed-wing fliers, and almost twice the size of the Imperial orthopters she was used to. Not strange to her, though, because . . .

  For a moment, as she rammed the Esca into a higher gear to close with them, she was back in Capitas – her one and only visit there – watching Axrad die.

  Farsphex, the name came to her. The new machines that Axrad ha
d been so insistent that she saw. So what did she recall about the Farsphex?

  She recalled that it wasn’t a fixed-wing at all.

  She saw it then, as she raced in towards them, eating up the sky between her and the enemy. A pair of Stormreaders was coming in from her left quarter with the same intention – some training patrol returning to the city to find it attacked in their absence. They had the right line of approach, diving from on high, practically out of the sun, but the Imperials saw them nonetheless, their close formation breaking apart into a scatter of separate machines, and abruptly those rigid wings were kicked into a blur, instantly gaining that essential agility in the air that a fixed-wing flier could never aspire to.

  Taki picked her target, taking a course that would bring her between the fleeing Farsphex and its comrades, separating it out in preparation for a quick kill. She tried a rapid look left and right, to see how her allies were disposed, catching a glimpse of a scatter of ascending machines from the airfield she had just quit: The Mynans defending the field, letting the others launch. She saw more enemy, too. She reckoned two flights of probably more than half a dozen, and the smoke from the far side of the city told of a third at least.

  Then she was yanking the stick over to the right, registering the glitter of rotary bolts sleeting past her, turning the Esca almost on a wingtip. The Farsphex she had gone after had simply run for it – no attempt to double back or engage – but two of its comrades were right on top of her. They had underestimated how nimble her little machine was, and for a moment the three of them shared an uncomfortably small patch of sky as she bolted back between them. Then she had negotiated another turn, feeling every stay and bolt of the Esca thrum with it, and she was behind them, opening up with her rotaries, scoring a few desultory hits as her target – the leftmost – slid sideways in the air out of her sights. The other Wasp craft lifted away, seeking height, but Taki knew she had time to pin its friend down before it could come back for her—