panicked either.
‘Half-dozen automotives coming along fast, Sub,’ the Fly choked out.
‘The army?’
‘Just the machines, Sub.’
Six automotives? For a moment she felt like laughing. The Collegiate forces could surely defeat them or drive them off. They had sixty soldiers, three armed transports and the earth-movers. The look on the Fly’s face brought her up short, though. ‘Tell me.’
‘Like woodlice, Sub, but they were moving as fast as a horse can gallop, it looked like, and heading straight for us. Sub, these are the ones we’ve heard of — the ones that did Myna.’
‘Sub!’ someone else called out to her, pointing. There were dustclouds building rapidly to the north-east, the enemy’s machines coming on fast!
‘Everyone to the automotives!’ she shouted. ‘Move it, all of you! That means you on the earthmovers too!’
Technically Straessa did not have overall command, for each detachment was under its own sub-officer. At least one of the other officers was shouting at his men to stand and shoot. And we should have worked this sort of thing out before. The Beetle-kinden had no rigorous tradition of giving and obeying orders, though, being a people who loved discussion.
Still, her own people were on the move, and at least some of the others. The bulk of the earthmover drivers were still at work, though, and Straessa pounded over to them, shouting at them to get going.
‘We’ll never get the machines away in time,’ one of them objected. He was a big Beetle of middle years, and plainly did not want to be told what to do by some halfbreed student.
‘Sod the machines. Get yourselves out!’ she snapped at him.
‘If I lose this machine-’ the Beetle started, plodding to a fault, and then there was a hollow boom nearby, a thunder and a whirling plume of dust, the echo of it almost lifting Straessa from her feet. One of the other earthmovers had been staved in as though an invisible fist had struck it. A moment later its fuel tank exploded with a wretched pop, flames creeping weakly from the burst seams.
The Beetle needed no more encouragement, but was already running for the transports, and then so was almost everyone else. Straessa held on for one moment more, horrified and fascinated, watching the shapes loom out of the dust. Those high-fronted, armoured forms of overlapping armour plates, that single lidded eye that opened only when the machines ground to a skidding halt for a moment, when it flashed and belched as the leadshotter behind it let loose. There was only this half-dozen, but their swift and rushing movement struck a primal fear into Straessa that she had not known she could own to.
A moment later she was pelting towards the transports herself, aware that she had left her escape surely too late. Even as she thought it, though, one of the rugged wheeled vehicles slewed to an untidy halt next to her, its open back crammed with her soldiers. She saw a young Beetle-kinden girl pedalling the mounted ballista around to face the enemy, while Gerethwy had his mechanized snapbow resting on the back rail.
She leapt up, caught at an outstretched hand and was hauled in, even as the driver kicked the vehicle into motion again, wrestling with the gearings until they were grinding away satisfactorily once more. She heard Gerethwy’s weapon discharge with a hammering snap-snap-snap. She had already opened her mouth to tell him to stop, that there was no point wasting ammunition at this range, when the first of the enemy automotives had ploughed alongside them, clattering past on its nest of pistoning legs, in pursuit of one of the other transports.
Her mouth remained open.
Gerethwy trained his weapon on it, the snapbow bolts ricocheting hopelessly, without a chance of penetrating those thick armour plates. A moment later, the ballista loosed, the explosive bolt leaping the narrow gap between the vehicles, to bloom and burst against the side of the enemy, knocking it off course a little but leaving only a soot mark and a shallow scar.
‘Down!’ someone called out, and then their own automotive rocked, veering dangerously towards the enemy machine beside them with its port wheels off the ground. Behind, receding, ascended the plume of a near-miss, and beyond that another of the implacable enemy, getting up speed again.
‘Incredible!’ Gerethwy shouted. ‘Look how fast they accelerate! We couldn’t get up speed in twice that time!’ He shook his head, the student artificer in him clearly taken by the things, however deadly they were. ‘Still, I’ll wager we’re faster on the flat-’
There was the sound of thunder from ahead and to their right, and they saw one of the other transports abruptly flip sideways, its rear axle and wheels disintegrating as it was caught by a low shot from one of the pursuing enemy, and Gerethwy shut up, long face ashen. There had been bodies flung up in that moment, human ragdoll shapes revolving in the dust. Fellow soldiers, comrades, people they knew.
The ballista was shooting again, loosing bolts back at the machines in their wake, every distraction or deviation winning them a few seconds’ grace. If they did not have to stop to shoot, we’d be done for, Straessa realized. But Gerethwy had been right: now they had got up to speed they were pulling away, the two transports. Although a few more geysers of dust and dirt fountained up nearby, the enemy was falling behind.
All they had won here was their lives. They had lost the earthmovers, lost the chance of preparing their ground properly, lost a third of their force or more.
And we have seen the enemy. It was an uncertain blessing at best.
A small hand touched her arm, and she looked down to see Sartaea te Mosca. There was blood on the Fly’s fingers, and Straessa was surprised to find it was her own, from a shallow line cut into her forearm by some errant shard of metal or broken stone.
‘Tell me something comforting,’ she said to the Fly, sitting down and letting the little woman smear a stinging ointment on the wound. But Sartaea te Mosca had nothing to say.
Thirty-Five
The woman who called herself Gesa — who had for most of her life borne the name Garvan and dressed like a Wasp-kinden man, but who was currently painted and disguised as a halfbreed Beetle woman — was nothing if not a creature of dutiful field-craft. She had been given the means by which to leave messages for her superiors, and by which to receive orders. She was not to be simply a maverick agent working on her own recognizance.
This she now regretted.
It had been imperative that she entered Collegium as a refugee carrying nothing to mark her as a spy. Once in the city, however, she had been able to buy or steal parts, working to a plan that she had memorized. A little dirigible, its airbag no larger than a human head, was easy enough to arrange, and it seemed almost half the army around her was composed of students and engineers and idle tinkerers. She had assembled her toy within plain sight.
That night she had crept to the camp’s perimeter and taken a turn as sentry. The Collegiates were not entirely lax in their security, and indeed their sentries, volunteers mostly, were more diligent and keen than would be the bored, resentful Imperial regulars pressed into such a tedious job. However, they looked only outwards, and were more than happy to be relieved by another. Gesa knew that the Collegiate camp was watched by Spider- kinden agents of the Aldanrael, who had kept pace with the Beetle force’s advance. Now she simply sat with her lantern on the ground beside her, and moved her foot in front of it, just a nervous habit to any watcher within camp; but to the dark-adjusted eyes out there, it provided a simple code of bright and dark that told them to expect a message.
At the third repetition, she’d had to hope that the spies had noticed her, for certainly no answering signal would be risked. As she had chosen a camp boundary with the breeze at her back, she had simply let the tiny, dark-ballooned dirigible drift away, her crabbed reports tucked into its little basket.
Two days later, and she had received her orders in response. She had watched the little trench-digging force return in a great hurry, and depleted, all the eyes of the camp watching them. A few hours after that, the camp still reeling from the news of the Imperial automotives, a further body was picked up by the Collegiate scouts. It was one of those who was believed left dead back at the trenchworks, so the assumption was that the man had managed to stagger and crawl back towards his home camp, dying just out of sight of it. Any medical examination
