The Air War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  He was far from the sea here but, as he listened to the wind whistling past the hull outside, to the drone of the engines changing pitch, he thought he heard breakers for a moment, on a distant shore.

  Helleron was as he remembered it, save that perhaps there was now more of it. The city’s innards sprawled in mounds and tangles of ghettos, factories, slums and tenements, all beneath the pall of smoke and soot that arose from the belching throats of a thousand chimneys. The grander houses of the magnates themselves were mostly located on higher ground, and where they could hope to remain upwind of the industry for as much of the time as possible.

  Helleron to Myna was not the most reliable journey, as the newly freed Three-city Alliance was not rich enough to make a good export market, nor particularly trusting of where Helleren sympathies lay. The factory-city had rolled over quickly enough when the Empire had reached it the first time, and there was no suggestion that the magnates would put up much more of a fight should the Wasps come again. Whether this was just due to the legendary neutrality of the city, or whether there was something deeper working in those cluttered and grimy streets, was something that Stenwold was hoping to uncover.

  He had secured passage on a freight fixed-wing that was making a quick round-trip to Myna, and that only because he had chartered it and paid for its cargo himself. He had a few hours, though, and furtive messages had brought him to an eating house in a moderately affluent part of town, a street of prosperous artisans and middling shopkeepers, not amongst the great and the good nor yet in the gutter. In Helleron, the distance between the heights of luxury and the depths of despair could be very small indeed.

  Stenwold recognized him immediately, but then the man’s bodyguards did rather draw the eye. Greenwise Artector was a man too grand for this sort of place, and it showed even though he had dressed down. Turning up with a couple of Ant-kinden at his shoulders, who pointedly took a table near the door and stared at every other patron as though they were all assassins, could not help but make an impression, and Greenwise was well known enough that word would soon spread. By that time, however, he and Stenwold would have concluded their business, and the idea was that people would remember the great and wealthy merchant but not the hooded man in the artificer’s canvas whom he spoke to.

  Greenwise Artector had never quite been Stenwold’s friend, but he had been a covert supporter for years. The two of them saw eye to eye on the problem of the Empire, and Artector had done a lot of good hidden work when Helleron had seen Imperial occupation. His information had been vital in fuelling the anti-Imperial resistance.

  He looked thinner than Stenwold recalled, the clothes hanging off him a little, clearly tailored for more expansive days. The expensive cosmetics that smoothed out the signs of age and wear on his dark face no longer quite hid the worry around his eyes.

  ‘Sten,’ he said. ‘Just like old times.’

  ‘The wheel has rather come full circle,’ Stenwold admitted. ‘At least this time round, Collegium will be ready.’ There had been moments, before the war, when it had seemed his home city would simply ignore the entire situation, turn its back on the Imperial advance until the Wasps had reached their very doorstep, and it was too late. ‘Where will Helleron be?’

  ‘Officially?’ Greenwise grimaced. ‘We are proud of our neutrality. We bow to no man. Listen to most of the magnates and you’d never realize we had an Imperial governor not that long ago, and that our factories were given over to their war effort.’

  ‘Unofficially?’

  ‘There are a lot of Imperial dignitaries turning up at the airfields, Consortium merchants mostly. They turn up for a desultory bit of trade, and end up staying on to dine and chat with this magnate or that. More than half the Council plays host to them, and they talk about lucrative contracts, but there’s more going on. I have a few servants here and there that take my coin. Occupation terms for Helleron are already drafted, or as good as. The Empire’s diplomats are getting clever, and everyone’s going to end up subscribing to the same convenient lie: Helleron will get to keep its autonomy, so long as it does everything the Empire tells it.’

  Stenwold nodded soberly, and then they paused while the wine arrived. The nervous waiter’s insistence that it was on the house told them that they had only a short interval before all the spies caught up with them.

  ‘Nothing there to surprise me,’ the War Master noted. ‘Greenwise, what do you hear from Myna in the last few days?’

  ‘I’d not go to Myna for all the gold in the mint,’ the magnate told him straight off. Seeing Stenwold’s expression, he nodded grimly. ‘But, as that’s where you’re going now, nothing good, Sten. The Empire’s had troops at the border for months now, on manoeuvres if you can believe it. Myna – the whole Alliance – is strung like a bow, ready to loose at any moment. I hear there have been a dozen separate border incidents in the last two months, crossing both ways, and that’s not to mention the Principalities throwing their lot in with the Empire, which means the Alliance are all over that border, too. The Wasp diplomats are complaining loudly that the Mynans can’t let go and will keep pushing them until there’s another war. Or, to translate, the Wasps will use that logic as their excuse to bring one about. It’s all firepowder over that ways, Sten. One spark will set it all off.’

  ‘But when?’ Stenwold asked him, feeling the sands of their conversation running out. ‘You must have sources there.’

  ‘All I have’s a pair of low-ranking Consortium men with gambling habits, and they know next to nothing. Sten, there’s been most of an army at the border for a good while now, and it’s kept well supplied. They could march at any time. But all the orders come from Capitas. There’s no general on the ground there yet to make the decision. That means that when the call comes . . .’

  ‘It’ll come without warning,’ Stenwold finished. ‘Greenwise, give me your best guess, then?’

  The magnate seemed to have shrunk into his robes even further since the beginning of their conversation. ‘Yesterday.’ He shrugged. ‘Today. Now. I don’t know, Sten. And . . .’

  His new tone caught at Stenwold, sensing real despair in the wreckage of the pleasant, avuncular man he had known all those years ago.

  ‘Sten, it’s all up for me when the Empire gets here. I’m selling everything I can here, shunting it south and west. What I did during the war . . . I got away with it at the time, but I know some of the others have put it all together since. They know where I stand, even if they don’t know all the details. If the Wasps get here, then I get out or my life’s not worth a Moth’s curse.’

  He stood abruptly, and the two Ants were on their feet in the same instant. ‘Goodbye, Sten. See you in Collegium, maybe, or Sarn. Anywhere but here.’

  They were forced down before they even reached Myna, two orthopters sliding across the sky in front of the fixed-wing freighter Stenwold had chartered. There was a scattered flash of light, the heliograph signals that were slowly becoming a crude language between aviators. In this case, Stenwold’s pilot had no idea of the message, but the hostile behaviour of the Mynan fliers was unmistakable, so he brought the freighter down at a dirt airstrip outside a tiny village within sight of Myna’s walls.

  It turned out to be something approximating a customs inspection, with a squad of Mynan soldiers muscling up to the craft with the clear intent of searching every inch of it. Stenwold showed them his papers, and just whose name was at the foot of them. It would be pleasant to say that their attitude turned at once to helpful benevolence, but the best they could manage was a kind of stand-offish annoyance.

  Stenwold considered how this was what Myna seemed like coming from the west. Had they flown in from the Imperial east, he guessed that the freighter would have been shot down without warning.

  They made the short hop to Myna, coming down over its top airfield, of persistent memory. Stepping out onto that open space, seeing the flat-roofed warehouses and merchants’ offices surrounding it, Stenwold was twenty years y
ounger for a second, fleeing here from the city itself even as the Wasp soldiers coursed overhead.

  Ah, Tisamon. His friend, the Mantis Weaponsmaster, had been trying to get himself killed that day, an ambition realized only a few years ago.

  He showed the same papers to the Mynan official that approached him, while his pilot supervised the unloading. There were five modest crates, each containing a dozen snapbows and ammunition. Too little, too late, but what could he do? That Myna would be first on the Empire’s list was clear to anyone who cared to look at a map, whether the Wasps turned for the Lowlands or the Commonweal. The Three-city Alliance sat at the flashpoint of the known world, so Stenwold could excuse them a little paranoia.

  He had almost expected to find the city under siege even as he arrived. He could fool himself that, if he concentrated very hard, he could sense the Imperial forces massing to the east, just across the nebulous and ill-defined border.

  ‘Master Maker, you know you’re finding your own way back?’ It was his pilot, at his shoulder. ‘I’m not staying here, you understand.’ There was neither cowardice nor disloyalty in the sentiment. The man was a Helleren merchant, not some partisan.

  ‘Fair weather to you,’ Stenwold told him. ‘The Mynans will get me back to Helleron.’

  ‘Stenwold Maker in the flesh!’ The hailing voice caught his attention, and the pilot took the opportunity to make himself scarce and go to start his engines.

  The woman striding across the airfield, outstripping her retinue and making them run to keep up, was a striking sight. Like the other Mynan Beetles she had blue-grey skin and blue-black hair, but there was something of the Ant-kinden in her physique, leaner and more compact than Beetles usually were. She was young, perhaps closing on thirty these days, though she looked less than that, and had she been anyone else she would have been called beautiful. As it was, the sheer fire and drive to her overrode all other assessments. Here was a woman who had raised a rebellion, endured captivity and driven out the Empire. All of it more complex than that, of course, but she was the woman the Mynans looked to, the reason that their newly liberated state had held together – indeed the reason that the entire Alliance had remained in one piece. Kymene, the Maid of Myna: Stenwold instinctively looked for the mail beneath her black and red robes, and found it, a knee-length hauberk of fine links and a breastplate over that bulking out the cloth. One hand was always close to the hilt of her shortsword, despite the fact she was in the midst of her people and that a half-dozen bodyguards were vainly trying to catch her up.

  She halted, staring at him, her eyes flicking briefly to the crates. ‘I told the Consensus you were coming yourself. They didn’t believe me. They couldn’t see why some rich, fat Collegiate Beetle would bring his hide this close to the Empire, if he didn’t have to. They don’t know you.’

  ‘It’s good to see you too,’ Stenwold replied drily. In fact, the last time he had set eyes on her, her city had been under the Imperial boot and she had only just been freed from the governor’s cells. Since the war’s end, however, there had been a clandestine communication between them, through agents and go-betweens and shipments of arms.

  ‘This is all I could raise, and it’s stretched my funds to the limit,’ he told her.

  She shrugged. ‘I’ll get them distributed. More than half our forces are still using crossbows, and I don’t think Maynes and Szar have much at all in the way of this kind of weaponry.’

  ‘How do you stand with the other members of the Alliance?’ he asked her, as she turned on her heel and stalked back the way she had come, trusting him to follow her.

  ‘Solidly, for now. We have a detachment of Maynesh Ants on our walls already, and if you thought we hated the Empire, you should listen to them. I understand that there are troops on their way from Szar, as well, although they won’t be here for a while.’

  ‘It sounds as though you think this is it, then,’ Stenwold observed.

  She stopped and looked back at him; her expression was a thousand years old. ‘Master Maker, it’s been it every day since the Wasps ousted the last of their traitor-governors. Today, tomorrow, next tenday. Me, I don’t know what they’re waiting for.’

  She monopolized his attention for the next two hours, hauling him into a spartan office that had not a single fingerprint of her personality to mark it. Looked at objectively, Stenwold realized, Kymene was a frightening creation: a child of the occupation, whose every waking moment was still devoted to keeping her city free. The rebellion that had seen the Empire’s garrison thrown out and governor killed had not changed her, and for her it had not changed much in the world either. She had never lost sight of the black and gold horde just over the horizon, and in that Stenwold had to admit to a kinship with her. Still, watching her as she dealt with her underlings, giving them curt orders, receiving their reports with a stern face, dismissing them with new instructions, he felt he was watching a woman on a battlefield, not one safe in her own city. She was so striking, so young, and yet he had no sense that she had any connections with another living soul other than those directly required for the continued existence of her city.

  She caught his look, and held his gaze for a moment, almost hostile despite everything, meeting everything in the world as though it was just one more challenge. Then business resumed, and she was explaining what they knew of Imperial troop positions, their distances from Myna, their expected marching time and how much warning her city might receive. Myna was the most easterly of the Alliance’s three cities, for all that its strength at the time had made it the last to fall in the Empire’s first invasion. This time, the hammer would fall here first, and the border was not so very far away. Myna was on high alert, all the reserves called up, orthopters standing ready on the airfields, artillerists constantly manning the walls.

  She introduced Stenwold to a close-faced Ant-kinden from Maynes, the officer in charge of the detachment that had already arrived. The man had little to say to Stenwold, little use for anyone except soldiers: polite enough, but it was plain that his mind was forever focused beyond the walls, watching and waiting. Stenwold understood that there were a few score Ant-kinden scattered out towards the border, forming a chain of linked minds that would relay word of any hostile move back to the city as fast as thought.

  ‘What good is he? What is he here for?’ the Ant asked, at last, having endured several minutes of strained conversation.

  Stenwold sighed, thinking how Ant-kinden were the same the world over. ‘If nothing else, I’m here to show the Alliance that you’re not alone. Kymene has asked me to speak to the Mynan Consensus, and I’ll do so. I’ll show them that the Treaty of Gold means something more than just paper.’ The thought took him back to that windswept day outside the gates of Collegium – the Empire, the Lowland cities, the Alliance, Solarno and the Spiderlands, all of them putting their mark to a great-worded document of peace. A hostile move by the Empire against one signatory would mean war with all, or so said the treaty. Such documents mouldered quickly, however, and Stenwold hoped – he dearly hoped – that Collegium would remember the signing of it as vividly as he did.

  The hour was late when he managed to barter some time for himself, heading out into Myna to catch up with another old friend, and mostly because he had heard that his truant niece Cheerwell had passed through Myna at the start of winter, possibly heading into the Commonweal by underhand means. That meant Hokiak’s Exchange, of course. Hokiak was a decrepit old Scorpion, and Stenwold had known him years ago, back before the Empire’s first invasion. He was a fixture of Myna, venal and greedy, selling to both sides during the occupation and yet always walking a fine line that had avoided reprisals from either. He would know all the details of where Che Maker had gone, and Stenwold was willing to bet that he would know something new worth hearing about the Imperial forces, too. Hokiak had always been one to keep his options open.

  Stenwold had known for some time that he stood on the brink of a great fall, and all the world with him. Eve
ry figure on Myna’s streets seemed to be in a desperate hurry, rushing for shelter, for loved ones. There were soldiers everywhere, many of them obviously new to the uniform, and the recruiting still going on. Even back in Collegium the murmur was of war just over the horizon, casting a faint shadow over everyone, subtly changing the investments merchants made, the books the scholar read, the goods the artisan crafted. Here, though, was the true sign of the times, an omen he needed no seer to interpret for him.

  Hokiak’s Exchange was boarded up. The old man, who had weathered conquest, occupation and liberation with equanimity, had seen the writing on the wall, wrapped up his business of over twenty years, and gone.

  The orthopter descending on the makeshift landing field was of a design none of the watching Wasps had seen, although if any of them had been posted to Solarno recently they might have found it familiar: two-winged, with a hook of a body balancing between. Almost vertical in flight, it tacked and backed as it came down, adjusting its positioning minutely, skilled pilot and well-calibrated machine working in tandem. The Imperial aviators there exchanged glances, wondering if they could have jockeyed their own Spearflights down as neatly, especially at night.

  The machine’s landing gear snapped out, and it came down neatly on a tripod of slender legs, leaving it upright, the round windows of its cockpit seeming to survey the other fliers there with a predatory air. Then they were hingeing upwards, and two men emerged, one clambering heavily to the ground and the other coasting awkwardly down on Art wings.

  They were not exactly unexpected, but the assembling Imperial Eighth Army was in sufficient flux that they were aggressively challenged anyway, a score of the Light Airborne dropping down all around them with palms out. The duty sergeant muscled up to them, ready to demand answers; poor communications meant that he, of all people, had not been forewarned.