The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘No, and for two reasons,’ she told him. ‘One, he’s so twitchy about your lot he’d try to stop me coming at all. Two, if he couldn’t stop me he’d give me all sorts of other rubbish to be doing here that would get me arrested or killed, or both. So, no, just me. The pilot.’

  ‘I will tell the pilot things that the spy would kill for. I was a pilot, Bella Taki. I was a pilot.’

  She stared at him: of course he had been a pilot, but she saw his hand clamp on the table rim, the fingers white and shaking with all the emotion his mute face could not show.

  ‘No longer,’ he said at last, his eyes alarmingly wide. ‘This? Oh, this.’ He made such an offhand gesture, dismissing the ruining of his body as though it was a shaving scar. ‘But, even if I were whole, nothing for me. Men who were my equal, the best in the aviation corps – denied the new machines, sidelined, even taken from combat duty and reduced to supply runs, civilian freight or sent in old Spearflights to terrify the savages in the most backward part of the Empire. Or made to teach. They had me teaching.’

  She didn’t want to confess that she had been doing exactly the same at Collegium. Secretly she agreed that it was a poor second to actually flying, but she owed the College a great deal.

  ‘Teaching the junior pilots I knew from before we went to Solarno, though? No,’ he spat out. ‘Listen, Bella Taki, we don’t have much time. Listen to me. They have me teaching clerks and slavers, factory overseers, men plucked from the Consortium or the Light Airborne – oh, lots of the Light Airborne. Have they any flying experience? No, almost without exception: clueless, hopeless, and yet they are the new pilots, the next generation of combat fliers rushed through training, hours and days in Spearflights and whatever else is to hand, More training in a few months than most trainees get in a year.’ His voice sank lower. ‘And there’s something wrong with them,’ he whispered. ‘They sit there . . . like machines. They watch, they learn. Not a twitch, not a shared joke with their classmates: men of all ages, all backgrounds, and yet . . . by the end, I had begun to fear them.’ His hand was shaking again. ‘Then one of their own – he had been a pilot, the only one that had been – took over the teaching. I was no longer required. I have been cast away. All the men I knew, the Empire’s pilots, are being displaced by these . . . freaks.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t sound as though the Lowlands or Solarno have much to worry about, then,’ Taki tried, dismissively, but Axrad’s eyes flared, and he had her by the wrist before she could pull away.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ he threatened, lurching to his feet. In actual fact there was pitifully little strength in that grip, but there was a warmth to his palm that frightened her, because one sting and he could take her hand off.

  As he hauled her out of the drinking den, the looks on the faces of the other Wasp men were mostly approving. At last she was being taught her place, apparently.

  Axrad started stomping haltingly away, and he could not hold her, his fingers weakening and loosening his grip after only a few steps. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said again, less of a threat now. He did not even look back to see if she was following.

  She wanted very much to return to the other foreigners now. She wanted Axrad to come along with her and talk about old times. Her daring had abandoned her without warning. Still, to go now would be to show fear in front of another pilot, for all that he would never fly again. She was the greatest pilot that either Solarno or Collegium had ever known. She had bested the Empire’s own best. This is what she told herself whenever she met life’s obstacles. If she fled now, she would never quite recover that iron self-confidence.

  Axrad was making surprisingly quick progress, his hoarse breath showing that he was pushing himself painfully to do it. She kept pace without difficulty, could have gone twice as fast without resorting to her wings but, even so, his grim determination scared her. Here was a different man to the earnest pilot she had met in Solarno.

  Crashing in flames and becoming a burned cripple will do that.

  ‘Axrad,’ she did not want to raise the issue but it was unavoidable, ‘you should hate me.’

  ‘For Solarno?’ he panted. ‘You were the last person to treat me as an equal. As someone who mattered. I save my hate for others.’

  He took a sharp turn, hissing with sudden pain, and they were at the edge of an airfield, a narrow strip easy to overlook, since the city was strewn with more inviting spots. With a start she realized that they were towards the edge of the city here. They had come further than she thought. Beyond the strip lay a rabble of small houses and two or three big sheds – no, hangars that had been storage sheds not so long ago.

  This can’t be a secret airstrip. We’re right in the capital. We’re surrounded by buildings. And yet she guessed that the locals kept their mouths shut and, besides, it was night. The Wasps were not a nocturnal people. They did things by day for preference. Night was for stealth and subterfuge.

  ‘They call them Farsphex,’ the Wasp breathed, and then stared down at her as though he had forgotten she was with him. ‘Hide yourself,’ he snapped. ‘Just watch.’

  She blinked at him, then flitted up to the roof of the nearest building, but the flat roof made her feel exposed, so she darted down again, finding a narrow alley that had been fenced off where it met the airstrip. With a little scrambling and balancing she had found a roost tucked into the shadows where the fence met the alley wall. By then, her ears had already registered the sound.

  It was a familiar drone, which she had lived with all her life: the sound of a fixed-wing flier coming in to land. After a moment she had identified it as a twin-propeller vessel, small enough to be a fighting pilot’s, but bigger than the Esca Magni even so.

  She saw figures moving out on the field. Abruptly there were fires out there: bright white chemical flares in a triangle, illuminating some hurriedly retreating Wasp-kinden, throwing their shadows in long strips of night reaching all the way to the field’s edge. She caught a glimpse of Axrad, his face given a fishlike pallor by the light. His expression was fixed, fatalistic.

  The approaching flier was closer, but something was wrong, and Taki seized on the anomaly quickly. That triangle was a landing spot, but fixed-wing craft could not land on a point like that, not reliably. They could not manage that last-minute arresting of their momentum, that second’s hovering which would allow them to drop neatly to the ground.

  Her eyes – better than the Wasps’ at night – caught a glimpse of the machine as it made a pass, plotting its descent, the long, low turning circle that she would have expected, but then abruptly it was upon them, dropping out of its turn sharply enough to make Taki catch her breath.

  She had been wrong, she realized with annoyance more than anything else. An orthopter, not a fixed-wing. The sound of the propellers had gone, and there was a moment’s silent glide before its wings were backing, thrashing at the air, tilting the whole machine back and fighting to hold its place, before dropping slightly off the mark, a few yards to Taki’s side of the triangle.

  Immediately the ground crew rushed forward to douse the lights, but she had a good chance to study the machine before they did.

  Farsphex, Axrad had said. Bigger than the little air-duelling craft she knew, perhaps enough to carry two at a pinch, but with sleek, elegant lines for all that, its wings folded at an angle, back along the curved sweep of its body and tail. But there were the two props, whose drone she was sure she had heard, where the wings met the body and, now she looked, the styling of the hull was not quite an orthopter’s, concessions being made to other design imperatives . . .

  Instead of the cockpit glass hinging up, a hatch popped in the flier’s side and the pilot scrambled out. Two other Wasps were coming to meet him, striding across the field in a way that suggested this clandestine exercise was over. She expected voices, but not a word was exchanged.

  Taki stared at that flying machine once again, trying to appreciate what she had been brought here to see, trying to reconcile what she
had heard with what she now saw.

  But of course. She started with the revelation, understanding coming to her at last. Perhaps it was not quite enough to justify Axrad’s manner, but still . . . the technical challenge alone was remarkable, but what could the Wasps hope to do with it?

  Then they spotted Axrad. One of the ground crew challenged him, and the sound was all the more shocking because of the utter silence of the men up to that point. Taki saw the crippled pilot step forward.

  ‘Lieutenant Axrad,’ he threw back, ‘Aviation Corps.’

  The two men who had gone over to the flier were storming towards him now, and Taki saw that they were also dressed as pilots. One of them growled something, but too low for her to hear what.

  Time to go. But she stayed, nonetheless, watching.

  For a moment Axrad was angrily dismissing them, pulling rank, facing them down, but then their eyes, both sets, both at once, were turned on Taki.

  She could not understand how she had been detected. The two of them had not even been glancing around them.

  Abruptly they were moving, and Axrad tried to get in their way, stumbling forward into their path, hands reaching out for them – to grab or to sting, she would never know. She saw a fierce flash of gold, fire leaping from one of their hands, and Axrad was down the next moment, just a crumpled dark heap.

  In the next moment she was standing on the ridge of the fence, wings springing from her shoulders. She had a brief glimpse of the flying machine – of its pilot, his goggles turned her way, silent but with a palm directed at her.

  She kicked into the air and flew, and knew for sure that they were behind her.

  She was faster and smaller, and their night vision was not the equal of hers, but if she had needed to head for any of the usual airfields, she was sure they would have caught her. She spotted three of them in pursuit, but she had the feeling that the city was bristling with other eyes, that there were hordes of them converging on every likely spot. She concentrated on sheer speed, zipping across the city with no clear destination: just putting distance between her and them, then doubling back, reading the web of streets with a navigator’s eye, just as she would if she were piloting over the city, and getting her bearings by long-honed instinct.

  There had been not a shout when they took off after her, not an alarm bell or warning cry.

  She found the Esca and dropped straight onto it, throwing open the cockpit and almost falling into her seat. One lever disengaged the wing safeties, nudging gear trains in so that their teeth meshed. Another—

  A sting blast crackled from the roof beside her craft, a long-range shot. She thought, They’ve found me, but she felt a horrible certainty that whoever was shooting at her was not one of the men from the airstrip, but some new enemy, brought down on her by . . . what?

  No time to ponder that. She threw another lever and all that stored power in her Esca’s springs slammed the gears into motion, slapping the wings down, throwing the entire craft vertically up in the air. Then the oscillators were hammering with their comforting rhythm and the wings were ablur on either side of her, thrusting the flying machine forward between the buildings of Capitas and the stars.

  It had been a short visit, she reflected, but instructive, and she had made sufficient impression that she guessed the locals did not want her to leave. She slung the Esca sideways in the air until her compass read south, and decided to play dodge over a swathe of the South-Empire, to lose any other machines, before turning east for Collegium and what these days counted as home.

  Two

  Laszlo’s family had once performed a series of services for Stenwold Maker, ending in an arrangement which was continuing to this day and which had resulted in a number of technical advances in Collegium, including the feted New Clockwork. Having shared some remarkable adventures with Maker, and after his family hung up the trappings of their previous profession to become respectable merchants and members of Collegiate society, Laszlo had presented himself to Stenwold again, saying, Make use of me.

  It was not patriotism that had driven him, for he had no strong attachments to anything aside from family. It was not a nose for profit either; his instincts in that direction had been telling him to run in the other direction. He and Stenwold Maker had gone through a great deal together, though: privation, fear and wonder that neither would forget. Laszlo was young, and a chancer by nature, not one to settle for the quiet life. Becoming an agent of Collegium when rumours of war were hanging heavy over every city in the Lowlands seemed a good way to keep his hand in, and Solarno a better place than most.

  The early morning sun had set fire to the waters of the Exalsee, fierce as summer even on a spring day, so that the half-dozen ships out there were mere silhouettes, cruising in towards Solarno docks as they took in sail and prepared to weigh anchor. A few flying machines droned overhead: a decent-sized fixed-wing bringing in small-packet cargo, a smallish airship for heavier freight and a little spotter heliopter, off to pry into someone else’s business, no doubt.

  As Laszlo watched, a new shape skittered across the sky, tracing a long arc out over the water and then banking into a ridiculously sharp turn that sent it scudding back over the city. The sun painted it a deep metallic red, even at this distance, its body resembling a hook balanced between two blurred wings. One of the famous Firebugs, Solarno’s new pride and joy.

  Laszlo kicked off into the air himself, out of the window of his garret lodgings, down the tiered slope of the city towards the waterfront, lazily tacking to avoid other Fly-kinden or the occasional Dragonfly. It was a few hours after dawn, and the city was still sluggish, for sleeping late was a Solarnese tradition.

  There was a cool breeze coming off the lake, and Laszlo leant into it, changing his course abruptly to hang out over the Exalsee and enjoy it, dipping almost low enough to reach down and trail his fingers in the water. Out further from the shoreline there were aquatic denizens that would have made him regret that, but they would never come so close to the city. The water was clear and inviting enough that he almost decided on an impromptu dip; only the reaction of the others, if he turned up drenched from head to foot, dissuaded him. Ridicule was a game they played constantly with one another here and he had no wish to hand out any free ammunition.

  He changed bearings with a thought, angling back towards the land just as the Firebug had done. Even as he did so he spotted another three of the new fliers cutting across the sky, heading out over the lake in formation. Perhaps they were off pirate-hunting, or keeping an eye on one of the other city-states, but Laszlo suspected that it was all about nothing but showing off. That was another long-held Solarnese tradition.

  He was still going at a fair rate as he nipped in through the open frontage of the Taverna te Remi, fast enough that he needed a tight circuit of the common room to burn off speed before he could drop down into his seat, as theatrical a piece of self-promotion as any native Solarnese could wish. The other three were already there, which was good because being the last to turn up was worth extra points. It showed that you didn’t need to work at the job; that you already had everything under control.

  After the war, having taken advantage of the Empire’s commitments elsewhere to reclaim its pawned freedom, Solarno had been left in an odd position. For those very few families deeply involved in the city’s governance, this was mostly important because of the unbalancing effect it had on Solarno’s party system, with the formerly dominant Crystal Standard becoming almost an irrelevance, whilst the once-marginal Path of Jade – and several other minor parties – had gained a great deal of influence. To everyone else, and to anyone with a grain of common sense, the liberation of the city had set a clock in motion. How long now until the Empire took its revenge?

  Solarno was unique in its position. The Exalsee was not the Lowlands, for those cities had been forced into an uneasy union by the war, and had come out the stronger for it, ready to lock shields the moment the Empire even glanced their way. Although fighters
from several Exalsee cities had assisted in the liberation – in the air and on the ground – there was no such unity to be found here. Exalsee rivalries ran deep, and any brief alliances were affairs of convenience only. Solarno was one city standing alone, on the southern border of the most powerful Apt state the world had ever known.

  But the Solarnese were proud, and they were inventive. Unlike many of the cities the Empire had preyed on, they were every bit as technically adept as the Wasps and the Lowlanders, and perhaps more so. Specifically, faced with the aerial predation of hostile Dragonfly-kinden neighbours, they had pushed the science of aeronautics much further than had either Capitas or Collegium.

  The old system of a rabble of individual pilots – skilled but disorganized – that had served to defeat the Imperial air force in the liberation had been seen as insufficient, and in a rare moment of cooperation the two current leading parties and over half the local Spider-kinden Aristoi families had thrown a great deal of money at Solarno’s artificers, refining their techniques to produce a standing civic-defence force of flying machines. Three Crystal Standard leaders had been indicted for collaborating with the Wasps, and the grounds of their confiscated mansions – which just happened to neighbour one another – had been converted into the city’s first municipal hangar. Solarnese pilots were now vying for the privilege of serving their city – not just a family or faction – by flying a Firebug. Solarno had turned to face the Empire with open defiance: Touch us if you dare.

  The Empire itself had reasserted control of its various rebel provinces now, and everyone could feel the eyes of the Empress roving the map, looking for her next meal. Solarno’s fierce little show was to demonstrate just how indigestible it had become.

  The war was in abeyance, so the tools of statesmanship were the telescope, the bribe, the secret identity and the coded missive. Every key city near the Imperial borders was the rightful prey of the spymaster just now, and every nation scattered its agents there, putting out trembling feelers for the first move of the enemy. Helleron, Myna, Seldis – all of them hotbeds of espionage after their own fashion. And, of course, Solarno.