looking at something different, even if she could not quite work out what was unusual. Before her was a long-bodied orthopter, the wings folded at an angle back along its curved body, the enclosed cockpit sitting over a pair of what she guessed were the rotary piercers she had heard of, brought into the Empire’s arsenal after the original Solarno campaign. The Farsphex was a big machine, half as long again as the Spearflights that had been shoved to the back of the hangar, and its belly seemed overlarge, pregnant with some manner of machinery, or something. More, she could see that there was something odd about its wings, just by looking at it. The designers had managed to give it an air of elegance, despite all that, but it was plainly a different breed to the older orthopters standing nearby.
She took a few cautious steps closer, then glanced back at Scain.
‘Go ahead,’ he nodded briefly, and she let her wings flurry her up to the curving top of the machine’s hull. Thoughtfully, she touched the blade of one of the twin propellers there. Pingge would be the first to admit that her knowledge of aviation was limited, but she hadn’t thought orthopters needed those.
Scain stalked over to the flier’s side, running his hand along it in a gesture that said far more than the words he used. She thought that he would open the cockpit, but instead he popped a hatch in the Farsphex’s side.
‘See,’ he said, pointing. She hung her head over the opening, looking upside down into the cramped interior. There was a brief crawlspace that would take Scain to the pilot’s seat, but immediately inside the hatch was room for someone else, though only someone small because there, on a hinged arm, was a reticule. It was the same toy that she had been training with all this time, but seeing it in this unfamiliar setting sent a chill down her spine.
‘In,’ Scain directed, and he went squirming into the orthop-ter’s innards, all elbows and knees as he wriggled through the crawlspace, then contorted himself to get into his seat.
She hesitated at the hatch’s mouth, until another preremptory ‘In!’ from Scain forced her hand. A moment later she was sitting before the reticule, just as she had so often before, but the walls of the Farsphex’s hull crushed in on her from all sides. Below her, the machine was missing a good area of floor, enough for her to slip through if she was careless, allowing the reticule’s impartial eyes to view the terrain below. At the moment, all its angles and mirrors served only to give her eyepiece a good close view of the hangar floor ahead of the machine’s nose.
The hatch was shut from outside with a slam, making her jump. All at once she was enclosed by darkness, but Fly-kinden were used to that, from the interconnected underground communities they favoured, or the cramped tenements they were shunted into in the cities.
‘Sir, what’s going on now?’ she asked, giving her voice all proper deference.
‘Test flight,’ Scain told her. ‘Live one.’ A moment later and he was reaching back down the crawlspace to tug at her sleeve, making her jump. ‘Wear this.’
It was a shackle, a metal band attached to the hull by a chain. She stared at Scain wordlessly, and he clipped it about her ankle, turning the key awkwardly, one-handed in the confined space.
‘What…? Sir?’ she got out, her voice tight.
‘Stop you falling out.’ It was perhaps the longest single sentence he had said to her, and all it told her was that he was a bad liar. For a moment she looked him in the eyes, under the poor light that came up from the aperture. Instead of staring her down, as a member of the superior race should do, he just shrugged and looked away, plainly feeling a little guilt.
So they don’t trust us. It was a bitter thought. ‘I’m an Imperial citizen, you know,’ she complained, before she could stop herself. ‘I know about duty. It’s not as though I’ll just desert through the… the whatever this hole’s called, the moment we’re in the air. I have family in the city.’
Scain just shrugged, twisting his way back into the cockpit. Pingge stared at the shackle unhappily, but in the back of her mind she thought of Gizmer and some of the others who were perhaps less diligent servants of the Empire.
She wondered how Kiin was getting on. She would not trade Scain for Aarmon, certainly: the leader of the new pilots scared her.
A moment later she felt the engine turn over and fire, sounding as loud as any factory machine. The Farsphex jolted and swayed as it was pushed out into the open air by the ground crew, and then Scain made a kind of hissing sound and the wings were abruptly unleashed, clapping down towards the ground and springing the machine into the air at a sickening angle.
She would get used to it all in time, save that part: every time her machine — she would grow possessive of it very soon — took to the air there would be that stomach-lurching moment when she nearly sent her lunch down through the aperture. Somewhere amidst all the trade-offs that had gone into the Farsphex’s finely tuned design, a graceful takeoff had been judged expendable.
A moment later the city roofs were rushing past, and then were gone, their speed being far greater than she had anticipated; the rhythm of their flight was steady rather than the furious beat of an orthopter’s wings.
‘Ready!’ It was Scain’s voice, and she guessed she had already missed hearing the word once, against the engine’s racket. For a moment she did not know what he meant, but then her training took over and she had her eye against the reticule.
They were heading out across farmland now, towards a broken-backed range of hills north-west of the city. The eyepiece showed her a magnification of the view she might have if she were clinging beneath the orthopter’s sharp nose, flanked by the rotary piercers.
‘What targets?’ she called forward, forgetting her ‘sir’. Even as she asked, she spotted a plume of smoke, a fire set out on one of the hilltops. The wheeling, unsteady view of the reticule showed her several others rising beyond it.
She fumbled the first one, failing to get the trigger switch released, despite a faultless record in training. Scain said nothing, but guided the flier towards their next target.
‘Remember your navigation?’ he called back, his voice sounding a little taut as he concentrated on the steering, and she realized this was as much a test for him as for her.
‘Probably, sir.’ She had her tongue between her lips as she focused, a habit from childhood, watching the smoking target draw nearer as Scain swung towards it.
‘We’ll be flying nights as well; you’ll need to direct me to the target. Bear that in mind.’ The words seemed to exhaust him and he hunched over the stick.
And away! And she got it right this time, and felt something solid clunk directly below her seat, something leaving the belly of the flier. And that ought to be spot on the mark, she decided, hoping that she would get to go back over the same ground herself to see how she’d There was a crack and a bang from behind them and she would have feared something onboard had exploded had the sound not been so distant. She was so rattled that she missed the next target entirely. ‘What was that?’
‘ Live flight,’ Scain stressed. ‘Real bombs.’
Pingge missed the target following that as well, because she could not make her fingers move on the trigger, even though she had the reticule lined up on it perfectly. Bombs, she was thinking numbly, but of course bombs. What else? And who but a Fly-kinden would fit in here with the reticule, and who else would have the eyes for that night-flying Scain said about. Oh, someone has been thinking long and hard about this.
And: What about the farmers that live down there? Did they clear them out? Did they even warn them that the air force would be blowing them up today?
And: They’re going to make me drop bombs on people, real people. For a moment she felt ill, thinking of all that training, when it had been a game.
But Scain shouted at her, and she flicked the trigger seconds-perfect and sent another bomb spiralling away from the undercarriage, imagining it obliterating the bonfire target that some uncomprehending slave had set out.
Her name. What he had shouted was her name. She had not realized that he actually knew it.
It changed things, somehow. The Imperial high command didn’t know her name, and it thought she needed to be chained to the hull to stop her flying off in terror. Right then she didn’t give a bent pin for the Empress or her generals, but she didn’t want to let Scain down.
She got the next three bombs off, all within tolerance of their marks, and then the Wasp was turning them round, not heading for the city but for somewhere else.
‘Good,’ was all he said, but she felt a curious bond with him: who else was there, after all, but Scain and herself in this hollow shell in the upper air?
He brought them down at an airstrip a few miles outside Capitas, and there he unlocked the shackle, and
