‘Fliers!’ someone shouted, and neither Stenwold nor Kymene were naive enough to think they meant the Mynan machines. Stenwold had his glass out first, quickly finding the circling dots that were rising from behind the main Wasp force. A moment later he passed it grimly to Kymene. The sleek, brutal lines of the Imperial Spearflights were hard to mistake, and he counted at least a score of them taking to the air.
‘Get the air defences ready,’ Kymene snapped out, but they both knew the wall engines were designed to keep off an assault by the Light Airborne, not to be pitched against swift and highflying orthopters.
‘Everyone to arms,’ was her next order, quietly now, to be taken by her scouts and scattered throughout the city. Stenwold saw the Ants of the Maynesh contingent already arrayed before the gate, awaiting the traditional start of hostilities that the Wasps had already disdained. Another impact smashed into a street behind them, far closer, so that the screams and cries were clearly audible. So far all the impacts, within and without, had been solid shot, but Stenwold guessed that was only for ranging, just as he supposed that, once the first missile touched near the wall, all the engines out there would be adopting the same trajectory, both Wasp positions beginning a sustained bombardment by way of some artifice he did not understand.
Edmon’s flier was named the Pacemark from the white stripes on the underside of its forewings that flashed pale with each upbeat. It was a solid, barrel-bodied orthopter, the front wings of light wooden slats interwoven, the rear just silk over a frame, with a cross-sectioned tail for stability. A pair of rotary piercers flanked and disfigured the cockpit at the fore, cramping the seat and obscuring the view, but they were far more efficient than the old repeating ballistae that many of his comrades still sported.
The ground crew wheeled his machine out, and he was already thanking his luck that he had rewound the engine himself just an hour ago. It was a nervous habit that infuriated the mechanics, but it meant he had a fully tensioned spring, ready to leap into the air. All about him, across the Robannen Square airfield, other machines of various shapes and designs were being brought into the light, whilst the handful that had already been out in the open air from patrol were being refuelled or rewound.
The cockpit of the Pacemark was open save for a glass-paned baffle to keep the worst of the wind off, so Edmon reached up and hauled himself in, making the undignified struggle look almost smooth with the ease of long experience. Every variant of this design was built too high off the ground for comfort, but none of the airmen wanted to be seen using steps.
‘Target is the enemy artillery that is a little over two miles beyond the walls, out towards the Antosine,’ a militia officer was calling out.
‘ How far?’ called Vorses from the cockpit of his Stonefly, and someone else demanded, ‘What about the artillery that’s actually loosing on the city, then?’
‘Two miles out towards the Antosine,’ the officer repeated. ‘Orders are clear and confirmed. Use your piercers and ballistae, inflict what damage you can, then return here for reassignment.’ He had his mouth open still, more orders on the way, but at that moment a flier screamed overhead in a blur of wings, and the west side of the airfield became a fireball, the hangar mouth there wreathed in instant flames, men rushing out, some burning, with others trying to drag them to the ground. A moment later there was a sharp detonation as an open fuel barrel caught and blew.
‘Get in the air! Get in the air!’ Edmon roared, hands already reaching for his controls, letting slip the gear train that threw his Pacemark ’s wings into life, wrenching the machine vertically into the air and slapping a couple of incautious mechanics to the ground at the same time. He had no opportunity for apologies or regrets. There were Imperial fliers in the skies over Myna, and they were wheeling over all three major airfields. Edmon saw the bright flash of more incendiaries, and imagined the air power of Myna vulnerable on the ground, at the mercy of whatever means the Wasps were using to attack it. The artillery would have to wait.
Beneath him, in the shadow of his wings, the other Mynan airmen — and women — were scrambling to get their fliers off the ground. Edmon had a moment’s glimpse of the city around him — an amalgam of wheeling streets as he hauled his Pacemark up above rooftop level — distinguishing a scattered constellation of flames from the Spearflights’ incendiaries and tall pillars of dust from the ranging shots of the siege engines. He felt his heart cry out against it: his Myna, his city, his nation. He had lived through the last occupation. He knew there was no way back into slavery that would not break his people.
He backed his machine’s wings, trying to wait over the field while Vorses and the others got aloft, but the Pacemark would never hover at the best of times, and he felt it slide sideways in the air, forcing him to jerk its nose up and claw for more height. Then a trio of Spearflights were darting across the face of the city towards him, pulling higher as they reached the airfield.
He wrestled with the controls for a moment, hearing that vicious knocking sound the Pacemark always made when he tried to yank it into a sudden turn. The piercers spun up nicely, Solarnese machinery five years old shaming the Mynan machine they were set into. Even as he found a line that would intercept the Imperial fliers, flames were gouting along an adjacent street, just washing out on to the airfield. They must be dropping grenades, but no grenade ever lifted by man could hold such an incendiary charge.
He clenched on the trigger, cutting upwards at their bellies as they rattled overhead. The leftmost of the Wasp fliers bucked, wings stilled for a second before thundering into life again, but none of them stopped. Edmon wrenched at the stick savagely, trying to drag the Pacemark round so that he could attack them from behind.
Fire bloomed across the airfield. He imagined he could feel the wash of heat, high up as he was. He saw Vorses’s Stonefly instantly ablaze, even twenty feet off the ground, its wings shedding fire in a trail of embers, matchwood and crisping silk. Its ascent became a dive, almost graceful, as though Vorses, in the midst of the inferno, had decided to quit his life in the same style that he had lived it. Another orthopter was clipped, the silk of one wing instantly charring and unravelling, tilting all the way over as its pilot fought for control, the burning wingtip gently touching the smouldering grass of the airfield and instantly flying apart, the impact whiplashing up through the machine itself. Edmon could hear a voice, no words but just a sound of horror that nobody had ever had the heart to name. It was his own, he knew. It was his, and he could not stop it.
Another two fixed-wings had caught the brunt of a second explosion, one of them still lazily taxiing for a take-off that would never come. Others of his countrymen had got into the air by the skin of their teeth, fleeing the fire, desperate for height lest another flight of Imperial machines pass overhead any moment. Then Edmon could spare his comrades no more time. He had somehow brought the Pacemark into a messy line behind a Spearflight, jockeying and nudging to bring the piercers to bear.
He had flown against the Empire in a few border skirmishes around the end of last year, more posturing than killing. He knew, though — and the understanding sat like lead on his stomach — that the Spearflights were faster and more nimble than his Pacemark and most of the mishmash that was the Mynan air force. After all, what could Myna do, liberated into a callous world so abruptly, and with so little time to prepare for this moment? The Consensus had begged and borrowed, and bought what they could with the little credit the city could raise: securing the cast-offs of Helleron and Sarn and Collegium. Edmon had spent most of his savings on the piercers the Pacemark was armed with. The city could not afford them.
He saw it then: there had been a little finned bulk clutched to the Spearflight’s belly by stubby legs, and now they flexed open and the missile was falling, wildly at first but then stabilizing, coming down towards the government district where the Consensus was no doubt meeting to shout at one another and demand that something must be done. Even before the flames began erupting, another bulb had slipped into that exacting metal grip, ready for a new target.
Edmon found his line, feeling himself drawn into place by sheer rage and hatred and desperation, and his piercers hammered back and forth, silvering the air between him and the Wasp with a lancing train of bolts. The Spearflight was more sluggish than he recalled them being, weighed down by the load of death it was carrying, and although its pilot tried to pitch it sideways to avoid his shot, Edmon held his place beautifully, neater than he ever had in training, seeing his bolts flay the enemy orthopter’s hooked tail, and then smash one of the wings to splinters, the Spearflight abruptly falling into a spin, out of control and plummeting.
He was already hauling back on the stick, forcing the Pacemark into a reluctant climb out of the sights of a notional enemy that turned out to be a real one. He felt a single solid impact somewhere behind him, the robust barrel of his craft’s hull earning its keep, and gyred his orthopter back across the breadth of Myna, avoiding shot and seeking a new target all at the same time, hoping that one of the others would spot his pursuer and put enough pressure on so that Edmon could escape. Bolts zipped past him to the right, and then above, so that he dropped from the climb, veering steeply right and downwards, then pulling up almost immediately, hoping to fool the Wasp into overshooting.
