thought they had broken, but then she saw another unit of them marching in, the runners simply getting out of their way. No doubt these newcomers would have learned some hard lessons from the last minute of fighting, and it was plain that, if allowed to close, their tighter ranks and superior numbers would crush the Collegiate lines.
‘And loose!’ again and again. No need to tell her soldiers to aim for the invitingly large target that the new formation presented, so that the Wasps were bleeding from the moment they were within range. Despite the distance, they were already running, but still keeping almost shoulder to shoulder, shackled by their out-of-date training. It was a race, then, to see whether simple attrition would turn them aside and snap the spine of their charge before they could arrive. Seeing so many men coming on so fast, Straessa felt her mouth go dry. If they struck, her little band would become like leaves in a storm. The pikemen had their weapons levelled, some straight ahead, others tilted at angles upwards against the Airborne. Bolts were slanting down at them now from the skies above, the Airborne trying to break their firing pattern, but the attention of the squares behind was keeping the bulk of the enemy off the front line.
‘Sub! In from the side, Sub!’ someone called, and she looked about wildly, until she saw what was meant. From either side of the big Wasp formation, a stream of swifter figures was cascading, no battle order to them, just a swift, loose mob outstripping their allies in their haste to get at the Beetle lines.
‘Spider-kinden to our left,’ Gerethwy identified calmly. ‘And that’s, hm, Scorpions to the right.’
Straessa’s square was positioned dead centre of the maniples now facing the Wasp unit’s charge, so the newcomers were not her problem just yet. If they overwhelmed the Collegiates further down the line, she would know about it quickly enough, but she could do nothing to help or hinder, and she had to trust in her fellows. ‘Eyes front! And loose!’ Her voice was beginning to give out.
Thirty-Nine
Still the Great Ear had not sounded. In truth, the specifics of Corog’s instructions were a distant memory now. Taki guessed that the pitched fighting had taken only minutes so far, but if some scholar could measure sheer living, the fear and the fury of it, then lifetimes had been burned.
She dodged about in the air, ramming the stick rapidly through three positions to throw off an enemy, before backing her wings so that the Farsphex went slashing past her. A brief glance about her revealed the ongoing chaos that the battle had become. The Collegiate centre, the idea of holding the enemy to one place, had become impossible almost immediately once the rest of the enemy had come in from north and south. The defenders were abruptly so outnumbered that they surrendered any say over what the enemy might or might not do, or where they might go. Taki guessed that, had the Empire wished to bomb Collegium flat, then she and her fellows could do little even to slow them down.
The Empire didn’t want that. The Empire wanted her blood. That great wheeling host of the Imperial air force had new orders, and they were trying to wipe the skies clean of their opponents.
Taki had given up active attack once the new Wasp machines arrived. Since then she had been concentrating on staying alive, leading any number of enemy on a dance around the city’s rooftops, being passed from hand to hand as they tried to bring their linked minds to bear on her, never being where they calculated but taking shots at any target that presented itself and moving on. If she had committed herself to the fray, narrowed her possibilities down to those few with offensive potential, they would have second-guessed her and killed her in short order, but she was flying like a madwoman and they could not catch her.
They had not caught her yet, anyway. Her dead fellows back in Solarno would scoff if she had told them that this crazed evasion was her finest hour as a pilot, but she knew it to be true.
A brief breath of clear sky and she tried to take stock, half-expecting to find the sky possessed only by the enemy and herself. The sight brought her a swell of hopeless pride, though, for the Collegiate pilots and Mynan airmen were still fighting. Outnumbered and out-coordinated, they still remembered their training and their orders. Just as she was, they were refusing to engage, even the fighting-mad Mynans recognizing the suicidal odds. The Collegiate defence had no cohesion, no pattern or plan, nothing to it but smoke and the swift particles of the Stormreaders as they scattered across the sky. Oh, they were losing — had lost the battle even as it began — but the enemy did not want the sky, and it did not want the city either. It wanted them, and now they were running the Wasp pilots ragged in their attempted pursuit.
And it could not last. Even as she watched, she saw another Collegiate machine downed, caught by crossed piercer shot, crumpling and twisting in the air and then falling helplessly away. The Wasps were good, and all the Collegiate pilots were buying for themselves was some few more minutes of time.
And still the Ear — that signal to throw in the fight and down their orthopters — did not sound.
Abruptly a hail of shot strafed along the side of the Esca Magni, and Taki slung her craft sideways, cursing herself for the momentary distraction. The enemy kept on her tightly, odd bolts still impacting even as she threw her machine through a series of baffling manoeuvres; down and left, edge on to the roofs, then backing madly, then down a broad street almost at head height, then turning on a wingtip down a sidestreet, only hopping above the roofs to miss an archway that would have stripped her wings clean off.
And the Wasp pilot still tracked her — not following the same course but always returning to her, and this time her madness was not enough and, as she burst back out into the sky, he took his place right behind her as though he had booked it in advance.
She felt she knew this opponent, recognizing and admiring his style even as she did her best to string out her remaining seconds. Her enemy was a pilot she had sparred with before, the veteran of many raids just as she was. She tried her old trick of releasing her winding chute, the silk cloth abruptly billowing away behind her, but the enemy was not so incautious and had kept just enough distance to swing aside, and the lightning sideways twitch she had tried simultaneously somehow just brought her back under his rotaries.
Another scatter of hits, the metal shuddering around her, nothing vital yet, but the next shot could spear the cogs of the engine, or the wing mounts. Or her.
Then he was taking off, rising up and abandoning her, and she wondered wildly if there was some mercy to be given her even now, but then she saw that the Wasp himself had come under attack.
She put the Esca into the tightest turn she could manage, hearing a chorus of new creaks and complaints from the abused hull. The Farsphex was rising and dodging, a Stormreader trying to stay with the Wasp but never quite regaining its line of attack.
She recognized the Collegiate craft from the way it flew. It was Corog’s ship, unmistakably. She powered in, trying to catch up with them. Too late, too late: in committing himself to the attack, Corog had narrowed all the possible places in the sky that he could occupy down to one desperate, perfect line, the absolute optimum of vectors that would bring him to gut the enemy craft and destroy it. With a lurch of her heart, Taki realized that, even so, it would not be enough. The Imperial machine danced far more nimbly than any craft that size should be able to, so Corog Breaker’s attack went wide, and then the other Farsphex, brought there by an unheard summons, clipped off Corog’s tail with a scything trail of rotary bolts.
For a moment the Stormreader still maintained its course, still trying to bring its weapons around to its target. Then it slid sideways in the air, the wings wrestling with an element suddenly no longer their friend.
He was spinning. She flung herself closer, looking for the glider wings, imagining the stubborn old man still fighting with the controls. She watched him all the way down to the abrupt, concussive impact with Collegium’s streets.
Scain pulled up and away, looking for another target. His monologue rattled on, passing Pingge by with his one-sided commentary on the battle.
‘Won’t stand and fight… Arlvec requests permission to bomb.. denied. Orders are to…’ Then a grunt through gritted teeth as he tracked down one of the Collegiate craft to shoot at: a few moments of his silence and the hammering of the rotaries, as he tried to keep the bolts on target, and the expected lurch of the craft around them both as he broke off on another course once he lost the trail.
‘Going to try and… may be grouping up west of centre… Arlvec requests permission… denied. Just focus on the job in hand
…’ A whole many-handed conversation relayed through his automatic muttering.
Then ‘Aarmon!’ and they were abruptly dropping from their high vantage and cutting through the sky. Pingge
