to conquer and command it.
There was an hour and some left before the heat of noon drove everyone into the shade, and he pitched in as though he was nothing but a servant himself, and a young one at that. He might be old, and need a broad-brimmed hat to keep the sun from his bald head, but he took some pride in knowing there was scarcely a stronger man on the farm. Now he straightened up, ignoring the twinge in his back. Something had caught his attention, and he scanned the flat landscape, trying to work out what it was: some discontinuity, something that did not belong.
The ploughing automotive was chugging its slow way back and forth in the next field, slaves following it on foot to strew the seeds, and boys following them with slings and sticks to keep off thieving beetles and roaches that might try to plunder the furrow before it was turned back. All was as it should be, surely, and yet…
A man running. A simple sight, but he ordered his land well, and there was no need for anyone to run. For a moment he wondered if one of the slaves was making a break for it, and he reached inward for his wings and his sting, quite willing to go after the man personally — but, no, the man was running towards him.
It was his overseer, Mylus. The Ant-kinden had served him as an Auxillian for ten years, and performed well enough that he had bought the man’s service from the army in order to bring him here. He had a rare gift for organization and a firm, even hand with the slaves.
If Mylus was running, something was wrong.
‘Lyren!’ he called out, hoping his son was within earshot. Sure enough there was a patter of feet and the boy — boy? He’s past thirty. Must stop thinking of him as the ‘boy’ — was at his elbow.
‘Father?’
‘Get Aetha and the children into the house, son.’ Mylus was skidding to a stop before him now, saluting out of unbreakable habit, but the old man’s eyes were focused past him, watching the great plume of dust raised by an automotive. Not one of mine, that’s for sure. The machine was paying precious little heed to the neat order of his farm, stilting over field and ditch on its six curved legs, gashing the ground and scattering the workers.
‘But, Father-’
‘ Go,’ the old man snapped, and almost everyone in earshot was at attention automatically, Lyren included.
‘At ease,’ he added, when his son had taken off for the house, calling out for his wife. Mylus remained impassive, but the old man knew him well enough and could read worry in the mere way that the Ant stood. ‘What will be, will be. Let us hope it’s only me they’re here for.’ The vengeance of the Imperial throne had been known to encompass entire families before. ‘If that’s so, and the worst happens to me, you’ll have to manage the farm. Lyren will return to service soon enough, and you know the place better than he does, anyway.’
‘Yes, sir.’ To Mylus, everything was still an order.
The automotive was a model that the old man had seen a few other times, a good all-terrain scouting model, swift but exposed. Even as it neared, one of the occupants had kicked off into the air. They must have already picked him out at a distance, for the flier headed right for him, dropping down a few yards away to study him.
‘General Tynan?’ the newcomer enquired.
The old man nodded guardedly. Instinct was calling on him to fight, but he could not fight the whole Empire. He had known that the throne would send for him sooner or later. He was a loose end that must be tied up one way or another. After all, he was the general who had failed to take Collegium.
It had been hard, giving the order. Another tenday, at most, and the Second Army, his glorious Gears, would have been inside the walls. two more tendays, perhaps four, and he would have had the streets secure, or most of them. The city would have been his, for the glory of the Empire.
Except the Empire that he had left behind him had run into difficulties of its own. The Emperor had been murdered, then his sister — A woman? Unthinkable! — had taken power, and what seemed like half the Imperial governors had decided that they could do a better job than her. He had received orders to return home as swiftly as possible, to support the pacification of the traitor-governors. He had known a no-win position when he saw one.
Conquer the Beetle city and he was betraying the throne. Abandon the siege and he was betraying the military campaign that was the Empire’s lifeblood. But even if he could have taken Collegium in a day, he would have needed the bulk of his army to hold it, at least at the start; and of course the rest of the front had been falling apart even then, had he but known. In marching the Second back home, he had made the correct choice, but history books were cruel arbiters of right and wrong.
‘Your presence is required in Capitas, sir,’ the messenger informed him smartly. Tynan wondered idly if his visitor was Rekef. If he himself had become a serious inconvenience, then he might even disappear conveniently without ever reaching the capital.
‘Of course,’ was all he said. ‘May I bid farewell to my family?’
‘I am sent to fetch you urgently, General,’ said the messenger, without sympathy.
Fight! Run! But he knew he would do neither. It was not his years in themselves, but the ingrained sense of duty they had gifted him with. He would submit to his fate. He would serve the Empire, as always.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, and began to plod towards the automotive.
Across the Empire, soldiers moved: companies on the march or travelling by automotive, airship or rail; specialist detachments from the Engineers or the Slave Corps split off from their strongholds, assigned to one army or another. Materiel was stockpiled and weapons were tested. Quartermasters and Consortium merchants shuffled commodities and supplies like decks of cards.
Outside the Empire itself, what moved was information. The spies and their handlers sent reports in, the tacticians and spymasters sent orders out across the known world. Agents who had lived a comfortable life under a secret identity received word that they should ready themselves to strike, to disappear, to begin manipulating their carefully hoarded contacts. Others, already hard at work, received definite instructions. The time is now.
Not everyone in Solarno was intent on living the high life. Major Garvan lived in a poor garret, a single room whose one window looked onto the wall of the building opposite. Not for Garvan the scintillating waters of the Exalsee. A bed, a rickety desk, poor meals and scraping together a few standards each week for the food and the rent. There was a surprising number of Wasps in Solarno, but the rich ones were always watched. The Solarnese could not imagine an Imperial agent of any standing not living like one of the Aristoi, if only to share in the gossip of the moneyed classes. Most of the Wasp-kinden there were poor, though, refugees from the internal troubles in the Empire, fugitives from the Empress’s wrath. There were enough of them — angry, disenfranchised and sometimes violent — that the Cortas, Solarno’s baffling twin engines of government, were considering making some laws about them. For now, though, they provided a perfect cover for an army intelligence officer.
Army Intelligence had always trodden a narrow line, not regular soldiery but decidedly junior to the Rekef. Before the war, they had served as the eyes and ears of each army, ostensibly more trustworthy than the Rekef Outlander, though in truth many held a rank in both services. During the Lowlands Campaign, however, the Rekef had gone berserk, tearing at itself in a series of brutal culls so that the genuine spy-work had often been left to Army Intelligence. Those officers who had distinguished themselves now found themselves with an uncertain authority, placed in command of important operations like the Solarno gambit, and yet with no assurance that some strutting Rekef man would not turn up and take it all over, the moment results started coming in.
Garvan was better than most at the espionage game. Garvan was used to living with lies and secrets, and the keystone of the major’s secrets was known by not one other living soul, a situation that Garvan intended to maintain. It irked the major that the various Imperial agents in Solarno — many of them not Imperial citizens at all — lived considerably more affluent lives, and even more so when Garvan had to pay out from the Empire’s coffers to keep them that way, while living in this wretched hole. Most of the agents probably found it funny, thinking back on it as they wined and dined and made polite conversation with their opposite numbers.
Intelligence Corps codes were rugged and practical, encrypted by letter substitution and then again by reference to a memorized number sequence. Nothing fancy, and the document itself had looked like nothing but an encrypted message. The army preferred functionality to Rekef subtlety. The slip of paper had been decoded, then burned and, as the flames died, Garvan was smiling a hard smile. At last the orders were in that would wrap up this operation, and where would all those pampered agents go for their next fine meal then?
A mirror hung on one of the few vertical walls of the garret, an odd piece of vanity but a necessary one. Garvan scrutinized the reflection there, seeing that familiar, slightly weathered face with its constant faint just- shaved blue about the cheeks and chin. Not a striking face, but that made it a good face for a spy.
Garvan sighed, hands slipping under the poor much-darned Wasp’s tunic to adjust the strap that flattened
