sides. Instead she drove upwards, straight at one of the enemy, forcing him aside because she was feeling madder than he — then she slung the Esca right. She found the flank of a Farsphex before her just as she imagined she would, bobbing up ten feet to avoid the bolt the Fly-kinden bombardier loosed at her, then unleashing everything her weapons had to give.
She drew a line of punctures across the top of the enemy’s hull before tracking into its open side-hatch. Then she was close enough to discern the red ruin she had just made of the bombardier, a man of her own kinden torn apart by weapons meant to destroy machines. She pulled up hurriedly, sick in her stomach and desperately trying to unsee what she had just witnessed.
But it’s war. What did I think would happen? The thought did nothing to erase that bloody image.
Then bolts were falling on her like the patter of rain, and reflexes kicked sentiment aside and slung her, almost upside down, looping out of the way of the oncoming enemy and aside from his friend, who was trying to pinion her — and she was past the two of them, knowing that neither had the angle to get on her tail. Already she was looking for a new target.
Scain swore as the Farsphex rattled about, bouncing Pingge away from the ballista, forcing her to climb uphill towards it one moment, fall past it the next. She was only glad that she was not being ordered to bomb anything right then. The way her aim was being shaken about, the good people of Collegium wouldn’t know which was was up.
That thought stuck in her throat, suddenly not funny. Then Scain was cursing again, muttering reports from the other pilots, requests for assistance, attempts to bring their formation together and destroy the enemy. For a moment a Stormreader flashed past the open hatch and she dragged the ballista about, but the target was gone as soon as she had registered it.
Then they were in an abruptly deserted sky, coasting over the silent and seemingly empty city as if this was a dream, and they the only thing in it. Scain was still muttering, and she caught fragments of his constant stream of consciousness: ‘… massing over the centre…’ ‘refusing to engage…’ ‘Aarmon scores a hit…’ ‘Tarsic’s down…’ ‘why are they all…?’ The pilots were all on extra rations of Chneuma to make up for having had almost no sleep since the night’s bombing raid.
There was a rattle, and three points of sky opened up in the hull beside Pingge, making her scream more with shock than with fear. Instantly Scain was hauling the machine into a tight turn, and she expected more damage, the enemy right behind them, but it seemed the Collegiate flier had fled as soon as Scain reacted. A moment later — peering down the narrow neck of the craft and over Scain’s shoulder — she saw the sky full of duelling monsters. The entire strength of both sides, practically every orthopter Collegium and the Second Army could muster, was now engaged in a deadly, graceful sparring, vicious and brutal for the men and women within the cockpits, and yet, seeing it from her detached perspective, as they plunged towards it, it seemed a dance where everyone knew the steps, a beautiful interweaving such as the darting shuttles of the looms back in her factory could never have managed.
Scain roared something wordless, and she felt the hammering of the rotaries through the metal floor beneath her. Past his head, in that great populated skyscape, a Stormreader shuddered and lurched, twisting desperately to be rid of him, but he followed its evasions like a Rekef man scenting treason, and abruptly the target’s two wings were not beating — were shredding apart under the ferocity of his attack — and then Scain was breaking off and letting his victim make the long fall alone.
A single bolt struck somewhere behind, near the tail, and Scain was already slinging the Farsphex sideways hard enough to make every rivet groan. Another Collegiate machine flashed by, already clutching at the air for an equally tight turn, and Scain thrust their flier forward to put distance between them and their enemy, whilst in his mind he had already summoned help.
Pingge knew she should now be crouching behind her ballista, waiting for that absurd chance that would allow her a shot, but she could not tear her eyes away. Everywhere she looked, the aviators were coming towards the final engagement of their pure and private war, trying to kill each other with every scrap of skill and mechanical genius their respective sides possessed. Stormreaders whirled away with shattered hulls, dead hands still resting on the stick, Farsphex trailed smoke from burning engines or broke up as the convolutions of their pilots and the damage they had taken passed some critical tolerance. It was terrible, it was awe-inspiring. She could not look away.
A fierce flash of flame showed an orthopter consumed, flaming and dropping, either a Stormreader struck by a lucky bolt from a bombardier’s ballista, or a Farsphex taken by an even luckier strike from the roof-mounted repeaters the Collegiates were using. Watching the disintegrating, burning thing whirl towards the city below, Pingge could not even tell whether it had been friend or foe.
Thirty-Eight
Standing east of the Collegiate camp, guessing that behind her most of the non-combatants were making their escape already, Straessa recognized a bad idea when she saw it. The last of her people was falling into position, and it seemed the explosion that had killed Praeda Rakespear was still echoing in her ears. She had not even been able to discover if her chief officer was dead or alive.
There was a tug at her sleeve and she glanced down to see Sartaea te Mosca, who should have been with the surgeons. The Fly woman, friend and hostess and occasional lecturer in Inapt studies, looked desperately grave, out of all proportion to her size.
‘Keep safe, now.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ Straessa said. ‘No promises.’
The hoped-for smile flickered ghostlike over te Mosca’s face, then faded. ‘There will be stretcher teams following behind the lines, so get your wounded sent back immediately, if you can. Just call out “Stretcher” and, if they hear, they’ll come, no matter what.’
‘Where did you find them?’ Straessa demanded. ‘You’ve learned how to magic people out of thin air, now? Wish you’d taught that in class.’
‘Oh, volunteers,’ the Fly said casually. ‘From the camp, you know: artificers, cooks, prostitutes, whoever we had. I was surprised, really. So many of them wanted to help. It’s their Collegium, too, after all.’
Straessa made to reply, but then three clear, shrilling blasts reached her, and she reached for her own whistle, relaying the order even before her mind had decoded it. Advance. Ah, right. She squeezed te Mosca’s hand, and then the Fly was half-slipping, half-flying away, back to the camp where the surgeons were already preparing themselves for the butchery to come.
Her maniple knew the sign, and for a moment she thought that they would not go with her, would just watch her march off on her own and then quietly slip away. Then they were falling into step, remembering their training in fits and starts. The majority had their snapbows, but about a third — the Inapt or the plain bad shots — had pikes upright and ready. In the second rank, Gerethwy had the considerable weight of his mechanized snapbow shouldered.
To their left and right, other maniples of the Coldstone were making a similar advance, doing their best to keep up with the swiftest of their neighbours — a piecemeal uniformity of movement being achieved by army-wide committee, in true Collegiate fashion. Unlike the traditional shield line that Ant-kinden had been so keen on, right up to the invention of the snapbow, each square was loose-knit, and there were gaps between the formations, because to be tight-packed and unable to move would be suicide in this war.
They were the front line — the anvil, as Straessa had said — and that image was foremost in her mind as she led her men out, with a snapbow slung at her side and her rapier at her belt. Ahead was only dust, and then, even as she looked there were shapes smashing their way out of it: the enemy automotives.
She remembered how fast they were, from the trench-works, but here, from on foot, they seemed a good deal faster.
‘Ready to disperse!’ she yelled out, watching their approach and trying to calculate trajectory. They really are coming in very fast now.
This was the Collegiate plan, on facing with the Sentinel automotives: plain avoidance and a stark admission that they had nothing to stop them. On the other hand, there were only around twelve of the machines with the
