He glimpsed brief, mad snatches of the sky over Myna, the circling dots of other machines, more trios of Spearflights trailing their fiery cargoes. Some of the machines he spotted must have been Mynan, fighting as he was fighting. He had no idea how many had even made it into the air.
Another bolt struck, feeling as if it had come from directly behind, but he was casting the Pacemark about randomly enough for only the odd shot to reach him, not any kind of sustained burst. Even so, the Wasp was relentless, refusing to be thrown off. Edmon swung his orthopter back towards the Robannen Square airfield, in the hope of picking up reinforcements there. Even as he did, another Spearflight crossed his view ahead, and he managed to rake a dozen bolts across its hull as he fled onwards, seeing it falter but not quite fall.
The airfield was now completely ablaze, even the stone seeming to crackle furiously. The only Mynan machines were on the ground and half consumed. Another bolt clipped him, striking splinters from the rip of the cockpit.
He threw a lever to fold the Pacemark ’s hindwings down along the tail and dropped.
Follow me, will you, you bastard?
The wooden forewings were labouring, making heavy work of keeping the machine in the air at all. Abruptly his world was a hot glare, the air about him turned instantly to choking smoke.
The Spearflights used wood-framed silk for all four wings, that much he knew. Wood burned, but silk practically disintegrated in a flame.
He dropped, craning back for a second, looking for his enemy.
There! The Wasp was pulling out already, not so brave now he had an enemy he could not hide behind. Edmon closed his eyes for a second against the smoke, against the thought of burning to death, and pulled back hard, the forewings’ clatter reaching a new strained pitch. He was slow with just two wings, so slow he thought he might fall from the air entirely. Slow enough that the Wasp passed overhead and into his sights despite everything the Imperial pilot could do to try and prevent it.
Edmon released the Pacemark ’s hindwings and felt the sudden leap as his flier regained full use of the air, his piercer strafing across the Spearflight’s belly and tail, punching holes but striking nothing vital. Even so, the game had been turned right round, and now it was the Wasp’s turn to flee across the city, with Edmon in fierce pursuit.
The Pacemark ’s wings and body were smouldering, and it was touch and go whether the rush of wind would fan them or put them out. Then the other Spearflights were diving on him, and he had other worries.
Bolts skipped and danced all about him, as though he was flying through rain, and he tipped the Pacemark sideways, turning on the point of one wing just ten feet over the rooftops, then slinging the orthopter back towards the gates. The manoeuvre caught some of the Wasps off guard, or perhaps they simply had other priorities, but there were still three jostling behind him as he broke away across the city.
He felt at least two more impacts, but still the killing scythe of shot never quite found him. Had there been only two of them then he might not have lasted, but they were getting in one another’s way, coming perilously close to clipping each other from the sky in their eagerness to be the one that downed him. His mind was racing, seeing flashes in the corners of his eyes that could only mean more incendiaries falling on his city while he was harried out of the way, unable to defend his people.
He witnessed the moment that the enemy artillery found the walls.
He had lost track of the shelling, but abruptly the lone engine had found the range, and a moment later every one of the Empire’s far-off weapons had loosed. As he sent the Pacemark scudding along the line of the wall, there was an appalling series of cracks and flashes, stone-eater acid shells alternating with wall-cracker explosives. The Mynan defences held under the first thundering salvo, but Edmon knew that there were more coming, and the walls were old, still the same stones that had failed to keep the Empire out the first time.
Three bolts punched splinter-edged holes in his right fore-wing and another clipped his left shoulder, the pain brief and fierce, his teeth clenching. He tried slowing to make them overshoot, but they matched him speed for speed, and they could go slower than he could without stalling and dropping from the sky. Desperately he sent his vessel over the wall, dropping into its shadow for a brief respite, expecting to see the Imperial Light Airborne and ground forces already on the move.
They were not. They still sat well out of the reach of the Mynan wall engines, letting their machines carry the fight to Myna.
The shock of no army at the gates left him numb: the utter contempt for it, and all it said about the way the Wasps saw the attack, and his people. Not even worth drawing a sword over. Fury seized him and shook him in its jaws, and he fought the Pacemark round, believing in that moment that sheer anger would overcome aerodynamics to bring him face to face with the Spearflights. They stayed nimbly behind him, though he lost them their line on him, bolts flying wide as he threw his orthopter about the sky.
Then there was another flying machine cutting across him, not a Wasp craft, nor any he knew from Myna’s airfields. He had a brief glimpse of a small hull, a solitary pair of wings blurring about the hunch of its engine housing, and then one of the pursuing Wasp Spearflights jolted in the air, shuddering under piercer bolts, before coming apart as though someone had magically removed half the screws, as fragments of wing and body became a shattered cloud beneath the pounding.
The remaining two split up, one following Edmon relentlessly, the other rising to meet this new challenger. The little two-winged flier slid sidelong in the air, deft as a rapier, and the Spearflight that had been so agile behind Edmon now seemed to lumber past it like a fat man.
Then a scatter of bolts struck about the Pacemark, at least one holing the main hull before bounding from the engine housing to ricochet about inside. Edmon lost a few yards of height without meaning to, his wings stuttering awkwardly before finding their rhythm, and the Spearflight was stooping on him, driving him into the city wall, not letting him get clear.
For a moment, he and his antagonist were enveloped in fire and stone shards and acrid smoke as they ran the gauntlet of the Imperial artillery’s assault on the wall, cutting through it so fast that the dust scratched Edmon’s goggles, scored his skin raw and blasted the paint from his orthopter’s hull. Then he was out again and skimming the very top of the wall, the lancing silver lines of piercer bolts dancing back and forth as the Spearflight tried to pin him to the stones.
He saw what was ahead and yanked on the stick, feeling a juddering of new impacts, trusting to the Pacemark ’s robust hull to weather it.
Some Mynan artillerist was awake and ready. As Edmon hauled himself out of the way the wall engine he had nearly flown into had come about and, immediately behind him, the Wasp orthopter flew into a wall of scrapshot, disintegrating instantly and utterly.
Free for a moment, Edmon turned the Pacemark back over Myna, trying to encompass all that he was seeing. There were isolated fires across the city, some in strategic areas, most others simply strewn randomly by inaccurate or capricious Wasp pilots. The walls and gate were under a solid, continuous pounding, but some of the Imperial siege engines had now started throwing incendiary shells deeper into the city.
Moments, it’s only been moments since the attack started. We’ve already lost.
He could feel the Pacemark ’s clockwork slowing, too many tight turns meeting damaged gear trains, and he knew he would have to find somewhere to set it down that was not on fire. In that moment he saw the strange orthopter again, coming in ahead and to the right, slowing to match his speed. He caught the brief flash of a heliograph, but had to wait for the message to be repeated before he saw the pilot was signalling a need to land as well.
But the Wasps… He looked around him, but the skies were almost clear. The Wasp pilots had taken their craft back to camp for refuelling, he guessed. The artillery was keeping their work warm for them while they rested.
He did not want to land. He did not want to face the enormity of what was happening to his city, to find out how many of the faces he had seen only this morning were lost forever. The mechanical demands of the Pacemark were becoming more insistent, however, and he let the orthopter drop lower, heading for whichever airfield seemed the most intact.
Twelve
