storm now, and he knew that there could be only one chance.
Taki felt the absence of pursuit as a physical void behind her, freedom from shackles, and her instant thought was to find a place to put down. She was surely in that seconds-long limbo that must come just before whatever storm Stenwold Maker would now unleash on their enemies. And yet… and yet…
And yet the Collegiate pilots had ceded the skies to the Empire, and nothing had happened. No great stroke of genius from the War Master had manifested itself.
The ground screamed out for her, but she was a thing of the air first and foremost, and she flipped the Esca about for one last glance at her erstwhile pursuer.
She picked him out immediately, taking a recklessly straight course so that she found herself following him by sheer fighting pilot’s instinct, and ahead she saw a bright flare and spray of pure white light. A bomb? No, that’s something he’s aiming for. He’s on an attack run.
She was already flying in his wake and she saw the whole picture, stitched into whole cloth partly from her guesses at Maker’s plan, partly just from the Wasp’s reaction.
A moment later, she let fly with her rotary piercers, seeing at least a scatter of hits reaching the enemy and knowing that the sky was full of his friends.
The sky was full of her friends, too, those who had not been able to get clear. The sky was about to become a very dangerous place, probably a fatal one. She could only hope that enough of the defenders had managed to touch the ground before now, and that there was someone left who could lead them.
At least I’ll end in the air. And she loosed again, her twinned weapons hammering, feeling the vibration coming to her through her feet. Her enemy was trying to dodge her, but at the same time was committed to his own attack. If she could nudge him just a little way, he would lose his chance.
He would have just the one chance, that much she had guessed.
Then she felt the impact of shot punching into her own hull, and she knew that one of the Wasp’s friends was on her, and close, so she was abruptly in the same trap as her enemy, caught by her own dedication to her offensive. Her pitiful twists and lurches — all she could allow herself, without losing her line — shrugged off some of the incoming bolts, but she felt a punishing rain against her poor Esca ’s shell, the tail riddled and shot striking around the gears of the engine, against the pistons of the wings, whose silk spans were instantly peppered with holes, each one a tiny wound bleeding away her machine’s grace in the air.
Then there was another Collegiate craft coming in from ahead of her, and she thought, No! Don’t help me! Just take my target! But she had no mindlink, as the Wasps did, and the Mynan-painted Stormreader — it was Edmon’s own — flashed past the Farsphex she was chasing, two more Imperial orthopters in hot pursuit of him, his rotaries ablaze with bolts as he came to her rescue. For a fragment of a second, Taki saw them all like flies in a web, locked into their individual destinies, each devoted to their chosen attack, and each defenceless as the price of that devotion.
Edmon’s shot must have rattled the pilot behind her, at least temporarily, for she felt no further impact on her hull, but she saw a hail of sparks and broken wood and metal as his own machine suffered for it under the weapons of his shadows. She did not know, then, whether the damage to his machine was so great that he could not pull away, or whether Edmon chose his path, simply trusting that, whatever she was about, it had to be done and so her pursuer had to be stopped.
Edmon flew so close over her that he blotted out the sky for a blurred second, their wings close to touching, and she neither felt nor heard the impact as he rammed his craft into the vessel behind her, but it echoed in her all the same.
Aarmon cried out in shock in that same instant, a light winking out in his mind. None of his fellows was able to take up the attack, to drag the little Collegiate pilot from his tail, her shot already punching through his craft’s hull.
The building ahead, its crown alive with searing argent fire, was in his sights.
‘Kiin!’ he shouted, and a blistering salvo of shot ripped through the cabin behind him. He heard the Fly-kinden woman shout — not in pain but in rage.
‘Reticule’s smashed!’ the words came to him. ‘Sir-!’
‘Do it by hand!’ he called. ‘I have faith in you.’
And their time was up. He was still in the air and over the target, so surely…
Bolts scythed through the back and top of his vessel. He felt one wing go still instantly, all connection to the engine severed. He heard Kiin’s scream — brief and agonized, cut short almost as as soon as it started.
‘ Kiin! ’
The sky was filled with light.
The sky filled with light for Taki, too.
One moment she was in hot pursuit of the Farsphex, and a moment later she was fighting blindly with every part of the Esca ’s controls, wheeling madly across an unseen roofscape. The gears stuck and stuttered, the wing joints seemed to freeze, falling out of phase, every moving part on the cusp of being welded to its neighbour. And Taki cringed, shrinking into her seat, waiting for the flesh-searing fire that must surely follow.
But the Esca coughed and rattled, and kept on flying, and she could see again, albeit with a great negative blotch before her eyes that was already fading. She nearly died anyway, finding herself pitching downwards in a wild whirl before she could drag the stubborn stick back and get herself level. Then she was still airborne and alive, and as intact as her last skirmish with the enemy had left her.
And all about her the sky was dotted with orthopters, and most of them were the Empire’s — all still there. Only the fading skein of sparks crawling about every part of her machine told that anything had happened at all.
Oh, you stupid bastard, Maker. It didn’t work.
Then came the first explosion, a Farsphex simply erupting from within, and she stared and stared, as the sky over Collegium played host to a new and fleeting constellation.
And, on the ground, Stenwold Maker and his fellows rushed out of Banjacs’s house to stare upwards. The fierce, pale light of the lightning engine behind them was momentarily the god of all shadows, brighter than the sun, and the its charge was gone, hurled impartially into the heavens that were thronging with flying machines.
It was invisible the moment Banjacs’s engine discharged it, and yet every sense screamed with it, a moment of monumental wrongness when each hair stood on end, and the sky seemed to bend and boom with energies never meant to have been chained by the hand of man.
In the next breath, it had all been for nothing, and Stenwold felt his heart almost stop with the unfairness, the bitter knowledge of a defeat that his own actions had made so much worse.
Then Eujen was yelling and pointing, and he saw the first explosion: one of his enemies ripping apart as though old Banjacs’s ghost was up there tearing the machine asunder with invisible hands.
And another. And more, and Stenwold stared up as the skies caught fire over his city.
Scain screamed.
Pingge could not make out the words. He seemed to have gone mad, wrenching at the stick and yet taking them only in circles. But outside…
She saw the sudden bloom of flame as a nearby Farsphex went up, fragments of hull and wing forming momentary silhouettes against the blast.
‘Aarmon!’ Scain cried out, and Pingge thought, Kiin! knowing that her friend of so many years was dead.
Something blew in the engine behind and above her, and she shrieked. Scain was wrestling with his straps, finding them stubborn.
There was no time.
‘Scain!’ she shrilled, and he was turning back towards her, mad desperation in his tear-streaked face. Even as another shudder rocked them, he had his hand extended back, not seeking help but palm held outwards to sting.
She screamed at him. She saw that he was going to kill her in some Wasp idea of mercy. She felt the searing heat as his Art discharged, and then the fuel tank ruptured and the blast picked her up.
In that last moment, unable to get himself free, the fire of his sting had cracked her chain apart, and she was flung bodily from the Farsphex, out past the ballista — the bolts behind her popping and cracking like fireworks — out into the open air, borne away on the vanguard of the explosion.
Her last sight of Scain was a pale face seen through the cockpit’s faceted window, before the flames
