The Air War (Shadows of the Apt 8)

by Tchaikovsky, Adrian

  ‘And do I have your authority, then?’ Stenwold asked him flatly. ‘Can I have the militia make arrests, wherever there is suspicion, even if it means detaining innocents?’

  Jodry regarded him warily. ‘What will you do with those innocents?’

  ‘I will question them. I will have logicians from the College take their stories apart. If we find that they are hiding something, if their evidence does not pass muster, then perhaps you would at least let me have them exiled from the city, whether spies or a criminals or perhaps just very unreliable witnesses.’

  Jodry opened his mouth a couple of times, his thoughts plain on his face: how far did he trust Stenwold on this? What might Stenwold’s interrogation include, what threats, what intimidation? How high would Stenwold set the bar, to catch his spies, and how many others would be cast out unjustly? He met Stenwold’s eyes, and a mute entreaty for mutual trust passed between them.

  ‘Do what you must,’ the Speaker said at last. ‘But, Sten . . . if need be, you’ll stand before the Assembly to justify whatever you do.’

  ‘Gladly,’ Stenwold confirmed, and sat back. ‘Well, then—’

  ‘There’s one more thing,’ Jodry said, sounding even more wretched. ‘We . . . have a prisoner.’

  Stenwold stared at him. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since their last air attack. It’s one of their aviators.’

  ‘Hand him over,’ was Stenwold’s prompt response and, at the same time, Akkestrae hissed, ‘Give him to us.’ Her intentions were absolutely plain in the tone of her voice.

  That at last gave Stenwold pause. The Mantids, of course, would not be interested in intelligence or strategic advantage. They wanted nothing but blood and revenge, and yet his voice had echoed hers so perfectly.

  ‘He’s been in the infirmary since they dragged him from his vessel, but I’m told he’s well enough to face . . . whatever now,’ Jodry told them. ‘Sten . . .’

  ‘A Wasp-kinden, an enemy combatant. Surely you can’t object to my questioning him,’ Stenwold protested.

  ‘A Fly-kinden,’ Jodry corrected. ‘But an enemy combatant certainly. And if I’d objected, I’d not have told you just now. But, Sten . . . in Collegium, we are not simply judged by loyalty to our city. That is one of the reasons we fancy ourselves superior to the Wasps, after all. We have a whole faculty of humanists and philosophers who will apply an objective lens to the choices we make in this war. As I said before, do not do anything that you are not happy to account for, afterwards.’

  The Esca Magni sped over the distant terrain, glimpsed only because the moon was bright tonight: not the cityscape of Collegium but the fields and scrub lying east of it. This was the new battleground that the aviators themselves had chosen.

  The Imperials were only coming by night now, squeezing the utmost advantage from the mindlink that Taki had guessed at, but they had been coming more and more often. The Collegium pilots had been used to a couple of days’ rest at least, but after the first night attack that had narrowed to a day, and now they came almost every night. Their numbers varied each time, and if the Collegiates did particularly well one night, the next attack would be weaker, the enemy fewer and more cautious, but there always seemed to be more available, just as the Collegiates themselves were putting students into the air the moment that Corog Breaker judged them halfway ready. The one saving grace was that they were not short of volunteers, despite the toll the defence had already taken. To defend Collegium from the skies offered an almost supernatural allure to young ground-bound Beetle-kinden, compared to the dreary work of the Merchant Companies.

  At last, the academics Stormall and Reader had cracked all the enemy secrets: as well as having the mindlink, the Wasps had created an engineering marvel in the Farsphex: barely less nimble in the air than the smaller Stormreaders, and carrying a Fly-kinden bombardier as well as the pilot. Beyond that was Willem Reader’s report on the fuel the Imperials were using, which had met with the derision and disbelief of his peers until he had shown them his tests. At last the Collegiates had been forced to admit that there was no hidden base nearby, allowing the Farsphex to strike at them. Instead they were casually exceeding the feat of long-distance flight that Taki had been so proud of. They had been flying in from airfields within the Empire itself, fighting over Collegium and then making their way home, all without needing to refuel. Where the miracle fuel oil came from, nobody seemed to know, but its effects were undeniable. Of course, as soon as the Beetles understood this, the Imperials changed their game again. The attacks came more frequently, and at last it was clear that these were not simply successive, overlapping waves. The Second Army, mopping up the last of the Felyal, was close enough for the Wasp aviators to use it as a safe base to refuel from. Taki guessed that they were now overnighting with the Second for two or three raids before taking the long leg back home.

  The war had not all gone the Empire’s way, however. A few nights ago, Taki and Edmon and a couple of others had taken a flight past the Second Army’s camp and brought down two supply airships, which they hoped would set back the ground forces for a few days, putting them on short rations and depriving them of fuel and ammunition. The Farsphex had chased them off soon after, and no doubt there would be a standing force of orthopters running escort from now on, but Taki didn’t mind. That meant fewer to attack the city.

  After that, one of the College artificers installed the Great Ear atop the loftiest dome of the College roofscape, and the game got really interesting.

  The Great Ear – as well as little Ears that all the Stormreaders had been fitting out with – was just one of those branches of artifice that nobody had ever really had much use for previously. This was Collegium’s advantage, for academics of sufficient standing had always been allowed to pursue their pet projects, and at times such as these they came out of the woodwork with inventions that their peers had laughed to scorn only tendays before. The Great Ear had been tuned to the drone of the Farsphex engines, and pointed roughly eastward, and when the first far mumble of those machines came to it – long before any human ear could detect them – the Ear began to moan, emitting a distorted, amplified wail that sent people scattering from the streets into cellars and bunkers and the strongest-walled buildings. At the same time, Taki and her fellows went rushing for their machines, casting them off into the night, listening over the clatter of their clockwork for their fliers’ own little Ear, which caught the sound of the enemy and allowed the Collegiates to home in and tackle them away from the city, to deny the enemy the chance to drop their bombs.

  Sometimes it worked, and they held the enemy off. More often, at least some of the Imperials got through, and Collegium would suffer another night of fire.

  Flying off into the vast trackless night to find and engage the enemy had seemed like a fool’s errand to Taki, but in practice it had proved more effective than it should have, the Imperial pilots’ pinpoint discipline losing its edge during their nocturnal battles, even if some flights of Farsphex were able to break to perform for their bombing run. After the third clash, Taki had realized an extra advantage that the Collegiate tactic had stripped from the enemy. They have maps, of course, to guide their bombardiers. They use the plan of our own city to coordinate with each other. Out over the open ground, they have only their relative positions in the air to rely on.

  She was not sure when Collegium had become ‘our city’, but Solarno these days seemed only a distant dream.

  The Esca Magni’s Ear buzzed louder as Taki searched the skies, looking for moonlight on metal or shapes passing before the stars. There was a stuttering flash from her left – Edmon signalling Enemy sighted – and she trusted his judgement and followed as he changed course, passing on the signal to her right as she did so. With luck, most of the Stormreaders would keep up, especially her tyros. For all the excitement, for all the fact that her blood only sang in her veins this way when she was airborne and fighting, these battles killed. The Empire had lost its share of Farsphex, b
ut the Collegiate pilots were still bearing more of the brunt, and both sides were surely having to bring up recruits who were not truly ready for the war. Some would be honed by such experience, others would falter, and some of those would die. The Wasps had their own support network, the touch of mind to mind to guide their newcomers. For the Collegiates, each experienced pilot was tailed by a pair of tyros who would do their best to stay with them, following their lead. It was an uncertain business, but it was all the nursemaiding that they could afford.

  There. And she caught what Edmon had seen, even as her Ear’s buzz changed tone and grew in urgency, a language she had learned within a single night and precise enough to help her aim her weapons. Edmon was climbing, relaying no signals now in an attempt to remain unseen, but she could tell from their shifting formation that the Farsphex had already spotted at least some of the oncoming Collegiate orthopters. They scattered, spaced out in threes and fours, attempting to widen their formation into a trap for their enemies to fly into. Taki reached for height too, hoping to come down from above them. Each side tried to adjust to the adjustments the other was making, and neither had the advantage as their formations were abruptly passing through one another.

  Taki let fly with her rotaries, spitting silver bolts into the darkness, trailing one target, then abruptly switching to lead the next, feeling in her gut that she had scored at least a few solid strikes, but with no evidence to back her up. Her tyros clung to her, shooting intermittently, and she only hoped that they wouldn’t get too keen and shoot her while they were at it. She had lost Edmon and his entourage, but to her right she had a glimpse of a wheeling shape turning too tightly to be the enemy, and she followed that turn, coming in to support whoever it was.

  Somewhere up ahead there erupted a flash that hurt her eyes, the accompanying retort of it following a moment later. Then one of the Collegiate craft was on fire, instantly transformed into a blazing wreck and dropping into a steep dive, wings still battering even as they burned. Some new weapon. A numb thought: that the Imperial artificers still had more to give. Then something bright lashed past her, a miss by thirty yards but still feeling too close, and she turned towards its origin, opening up with a steady stream of bolts and seeing the Farsphex there trying to pull up above her aim, but too slowly, letting her latch on like a tick and bore away at it. Another bright flare, and she jerked aside instinctively, reflexes saving her as something blazed past her wingtips. Incendiary ballista set amidships, operated by the bombardier, registered briefly in her mind, filed for later consideration. No time now.

  One of her tyros got ahead of her – the Beetle youth with the gap teeth whose name she could not recall. He was swinging hard to keep on the Farsphex’s tail, out of reach of its weapons, and she saw sparks fly where his shots hit their mark. Then the other Imperials struck, two of them stooping from the starlit sky. She flashed an urgent message, but fumbled the code, casting gibberish. At the last moment the Beetle pilot dropped away, falling sideways through the sky as he tried to evade the new enemy. They were onto him tight, though, not an inch of give in their manoeuvring as they tried to bring him down. Taki darted in after them, trying to return the favour, desperate to keep the Beetle alive, realizing that she had lost her other tyro somehow, and not even sure when that might have happened.

  She was aware of the damaged Farsphex coming back, her mind tracking its most likely approach even as she fought to focus the line of her bolts onto the vessels in front of her. She saw the pursued tyro’s Stormreader lurch in the air – how badly hit, she couldn’t say. Then shot was dancing past her like raindrops: the original target now trying to fall in behind her. Any moment and she would have to pull up, and then the Beetle was as good as dead.

  Almost, almost . . . Trying to pin down at least one of the craft ahead of her, as the entire ensemble flashed through the air with all the speed their combined engines – fuel against clockwork – could give. If she hit one badly enough, it would break off to draw her away, and then she could switch to the other and maybe – maybe—

  The Beetle’s orthopter abruptly changed direction, and for a moment her mind held only the thought: I don’t think I could have pulled that turn off, and she was impressed. But then he was dropping, nose down, and she realized that he had lost a wing at least. So get out, jump, jump! And impacts began along the length of the Esca, the original target coming in from above, a different line to the one that she had guessed at, even as her own bolts finally made a perfect line between her and her target, flaying it down the ridge of its back and then striking – how precise or how lucky? – into the piston chamber, the hammering heart that kept the Farsphex’s four wings moving. Abruptly its mechanisms were flying apart with the force of their own impetus, and the enemy was falling, falling . . .

  She wrenched at the stick, casting herself sideways into the night, then upwards, feeling the hand of the enemy’s aim reaching for her again as she sought that tiny finger’s breadth of extra space to make a turn that would remake her from hunted into hunter.

  No chance, not this time, for the enemy was on her like a lover, too close for manoeuvre. When Edmon’s Stormreader came plunging in, he was diving on both Taki and her enemy, his bolts within a hair of taking her out of the sky even as his piercers ripped across the sky around the enemy cockpit, the effect instantaneous.

  The fight was now spread over several miles of open ground, and there had to be a limit to the enemy’s mindlink, each successive division and subdivision eating away at the Imperial advantage, even while it would allow some clutches of Farsphex free access to Collegium as they slipped past the blockade.

  With Edmon following her up, Taki went hunting in the dark.

  The Fly-kinden seemed a frail, small figure, dwarfed even by the small room he was confined to, guards at the door and the shutters locked despite the fact that he could barely walk, and certainly not fly. He had a lean face that spoke of a certain amount of privation even before his injuries had further hollowed his cheeks. His hair had been cut short, close to the skull, and was only just beginning to grow out again.

  He had suffered a broken arm, several fractured ribs, a broken ankle. Half his face was one broad bruise. When Stenwold walked in, though, he forced himself to his feet, wincing as the cast took some of his weight, a brief ghost of wings about his shoulders as his Art adjusted his balance.

  Outside the room, Stenwold knew, stood two of the Maker’s Own Company, Elder Padstock’s people, and with them was Akkestrae, newly in Outwright’s livery but Mantis to the core. He had only to call out and they would march in and explain to this small man just how some of Collegium’s citizens felt right now.

  He folded his arms, a luxury not open to the Fly-kinden, but the little man instead put a great deal of work into returning his stare, meeting Stenwold’s eyes readily.

  ‘You have a name?’ the Beetle asked him.

  ‘Gizmer.’ The Fly’s light voice came out a little thickly around the bruising.

  ‘Rank?’

  ‘Pissing general. What about you?’

  ‘I’m Stenwold Maker, Master of the College.’

  It was evident, beyond any possibility of acting, that the Fly had no idea who that was supposed to be. Inwardly Stenwold felt a flash of frustration – not wounded vanity, but at the wider ignorance it probably signalled. What, then, would an Imperial aviator know? What would a Collegiate pilot know, if captured? Precious little of any use to an interrogator.

  ‘You know why I’m here.’

  ‘Yeah, figured that.’ Gizmer’s gaze dropped at last. ‘And you can stuff it.’

  ‘Can I, now?’ Stenwold replied ponderously, dragging a chair from the corner of the room and reversing it, leaning against the back as he had seen Tisamon do once, although the wood had not creaked quite so alarmingly on that occasion. ‘You’re our prisoner now. What do we do with you?’

  Gizmer blinked. ‘I heard they ran things like a madhouse over here, but shouldn’t you already know t
hat?’

  ‘Why? We’re not used to having enemy soldiers at hand,’ Stenwold told him. It was true. When he had dismantled the Rekef presence in Collegium on the eve of the Spider armada’s appearance, the spies had been detained for a time, while detailed sketches and descriptions were made, and had then simply been thrown on a rail automotive to Helleron. During the Vekken siege, any enemy still living had been swiftly butchered by the Tarkesh and Spider soldiers – also by some of the residents of Coldstone Street, which had borne the brunt of their incursion, it was true. The Wasps had not got inside the city, and had taken their wounded away with them. ‘What would the Empire do, I wonder?’ Stenwold added, and then, before Gizmer could respond, ‘Interrogation machines and crossed pikes, I know.’

  The Fly looked up again, eyes blazing, but said nothing.

  ‘I know you think we’re soft here in Collegium. I’m sure it’s preached to you by the Wasp-kinden, how they’re the superior race, and you’re better serving them than living free over here. But, believe me, I can’t ignore the likelihood that you possess knowledge that will save Collegiate lives. Knowledge about your masters, their plans, their machines. You’re an artificer, I’d guess, if they put you in one of those flying machines.’

  ‘What are you asking?’ Gizmer enquired bleakly.

  ‘I’m asking for your help, given willingly,’ Stenwold told him. ‘Yes, because otherwise I will have to find some other way of securing your help. But that’s not our way; it’s not what Collegium is built on. Our strength is elsewhere. If you want, I’ll get you out into the open air and you can see for yourself the city the Wasps are trying to destroy, see the people who live here. I’ve seen the Empire myself. Life here may surprise you. There are ways to be strong other than by military force.’