been stretched from roof to roof, and whole streets had been set out as common rooms furnished with simple beds. Dour slaves exchanged food and drink for coin that would only go to their masters in the Consortium. A brief but thriving temporary service economy had been created from first principles. Taki bought herself a square of floor and a pallet bed in one of the women’s districts — the separation amused her — and paid a sergeant of the Imperial Engineering Corps to have her Esca Magni rewound, going into some detail so that he would be able to find her machine back on its rooftop. The engineer was more her sort of person than the street guards had been, and was properly impressed by her feats of long-distance flying.
After that, with dusk looking an hour away at best, she let herself wander over to the exhibition itself, a quartet of civic squares that had been given over to aviation demonstrations and contests. Two score of different models of flying machine had been parked there and anatomized, their workings laid open for public inspection. Here, a Spearflight with its guts out, four wings unfolded and poised as though caught in mid-beat. There, the great, blocky shape of the old heliopters that the Empire had once relied on almost exclusively — and not so long ago at that — which seemed laughably primitive to Taki’s eyes. There was a section of the gondola from an airship dreadnought that visitors could walk through and, beyond it, an ear-jarring racket as a dozen different engines were run against each other in a competition to see which had the most staying power.
Everything was of interest, but nothing quite held her attention for long. There was so little of it that she would count as cutting-edge. It made her feel quite patronizing towards the Empire that they had proffered this display so proudly. What meant more to her was that she was surrounded by other pilots, her peers and fellows, and that was something she had missed since leaving Solarno.
She still received invitations to return to her home city for good, but she had left a crashed flier and a lot of dead friends there and, despite the time that had passed, she found such losses too recent. Besides, she was fond of Collegium — honestly, she was — it was just… sometimes she missed having someone on her own level of skill, someone to share the skies with as only another fighting pilot could.
Being free of the demands of the College and being amongst her own kind was all so much fun that she forgot about the Wasp soldiers for whole minutes at a time.
There was not a foreigner there not being watched — watched with the sort of paranoid suspicion normally the preserve of the most insular of Ant cities. They were all potential spies, these visiting aviators and artificers, and everywhere Taki looked were the uniforms of the Imperial army, singly and in small groups, their eyes raking the crowds, looking for the enemy. After a while she decided that at least half of them were watching the citizens of Capitas, in case being around all these foreigners gave the locals any ideas.
After dark, Taki flitted from one canvas-roofed hall to another until she found some faces she knew. Over glasses of some very acceptable brandy, she settled down beside another Collegiate, a diminutive Beetle-kinden by the name of Willem Reader, who had set off considerably earlier than she and yet arrived only the day before. He was an aviation artificer who had authored a number of texts about the New Clockwork, and was now gathering material to present to the College for its next aviation symposium. Across the round table from them was a Solarnese pilot she knew slightly: a man named Shawmair who had been a pirate and outcast for years, but was now back in the city’s good graces due to his part in the liberation. Beside Shawmair was a lean, nervous-looking Ant-kinden with bluish skin, from no city Taki could name. He spent most of his time glancing over his shoulder.
‘You missed a good show this morning, Bella Taki,’ Shawmair declared. ‘They held a contest: teams of fliers against each other. No doubt our hosts were itching to show us how grand they were.’
‘I take it they didn’t succeed?’ she asked cautiously, aware that there would be Imperial ears listening to all of this.
‘Oh, their old Spearflights held up well enough until our fliers came against them. The new Firebugs, Bella, they’ll knock anything else out of the sky. I’d stake them against whatever you’re flying these days, and that’s knowing your exquisite taste.’ He sneered a bit at Reader. ‘No team from Collegium, then? Even your Helleren magnates managed a respectable entry.’
‘Ah, well, organizing academics… what can you say?’ Reader replied mildly. ‘Perhaps next year, if there is one.’ He did not look at Taki, but they both knew that the College’s aviators, the cornerstone of the city’s pilots, were currently training with new machines that were Beetle-sized cousins of Taki’s own orthopter.
‘I remember when Solarno’s strength was its pilots, as individuals,’ she noted. Indeed, a few years ago it would only have been the Empire, and perhaps some plodding Ant city-states, who produced a standard model of flying machine.
‘Past times,’ Shawmair said dismissively. ‘After the retaking of our city, everyone can see how any future war will be won or lost and, with all that riding on it, how can you trust to just some bunch of pilots, and what they may or mayn’t, can or can’t do?’ The former rogue and criminal put on a virtuous face. ‘Solarno needs to know for sure it has a force that can take on the Empire…’ Here he stopped and realized at last, even through the brandy, that he had gone too far. ‘Take on the enemy, I mean, and give him a thrashing, without having to worry about whether our people’ll feel like it, or be up to it. And the Solarnese air force has the finest pilots and machines in the world, as this morning’s games have proved. The Emp- other cities may have more to put in the sky, but skill triumphs over numbers any day. We stand on the shores of the Exalsee, and our Firebugs say, “You shall not touch us.”’
He was drunk and talking too loud, and the Ant beside him was growing increasingly worried about what attention Shawmair was attracting. He was a useful diversion, though, so nobody was listening to Taki when she murmured to Reader, ‘You’ve made contact?’
‘He approached me,’ the Beetle whispered back, his brandy bowl close to his lips to mask them. ‘He’ll be here. And I’m nothing to do with it, remember. I barely know you. Some of us can’t just skip off into the sky.’
She had wanted to sit and wait, but Shawmair was still expounding the virtues of Solarno’s new machines, and she was curious. When he offered to show her, she glanced at Reader and he nodded slightly. He had been making notes, she saw, for whatever talk he was preparing to give here.
Shawmair’s craft was standing close by, one of an untidy semicircle of visiting machines scattered about a garden park that was now badly in need of re-landscaping. The stocky-bodied machine was painted red, fading to darker hues towards the tail, which curved sharply down and forward, and its wings, at rest, were vertical, tips touching. She recognized parts of it: oddments of shape that mirrored elements of her Esca, others that had been drawn from fliers she had known or flown against. Her eyes weighed it at once, not needing Shawmair’s commentary, and she felt a tinge of envy — not that she would admit it was better than her Esca, but nonetheless she saw a dozen little innovations she was itching to reverse-engineer.
‘Fuel engine, triple-action, with halteres to balance the wings,’ Shawmair was saying. ‘The beat is four times what a Spearflight would give you, so it just guzzles the mineral oil, won’t keep in the air for all that long, but nothing else has the speed and power. And they reckon those villains in Chasme have an improved engine design if we want to pay their price for it. Four-way rotary piercers from a central drum, and, look, this slide here stops jamming in the bolt-feed…’
His voice droned on, but she was aware that she was being watched: a feeling that she had been expecting for some time. From the corner of her eye she marked a dark, thin figure at the far end of the grounded fliers.
‘Excuse me,’ she broke into Shawmair’s bragging. ‘You wait here, and I’ll be right back.’ It was a lie, but he was a bore, so she didn’t feel too bad about it.
She hopped into the night sky, her wings casting herself over the head of her watcher, knowing that he would mark her, assuming automatically that he would be able to plot her course and trajectory, to work out that she would end up with her feet on the ground a street away.
She hoped that this figure was who she thought it was, and not just some Rekef snoop clumsy enough to be spotted.
In the dark street beyond, she touched down, then shrugged back against a wall on hearing multiple footsteps. Within moments, a trio of soldiers passed by, but they did not seem to be acting as city watch, instead talking quietly amongst themselves, and passing a little metal flask from hand to hand. On their way back to barracks, perhaps, or on to some nocturnal assignment.
After they had gone she waited. And then she continued waiting beyond the point when her internal timekeeping, which had always been keen, told her that any watcher should have caught her up. At last she caught a faint shuffle and, after an unexpectedly long gap, the same figure appeared.
I should have thought. He was not as she remembered him, but then she could have predicted that, had she only put her mind to it. The newcomer was a Wasp, lean and bundled in a greatcoat that had been standard
