showed her how to open the hatch from within. She dropped out onto the packed dirt of the strip, and the first thing she saw was another dozen Farsphex arranged in a rough line, with hers on the end. There was a scattering of the new pilots and their Fly-kinden henchmen and henchwomen around, and she could hear the drone of other machines still in the air.
A curiously proprietorial feeling came over her, regarding it all. This was more than the factory, where she had been just a small part of a humdrum machine, a tiny ball bearing helping the Empire on its way. This was special, and she and her fellows had become an elite. Looking about her at the busy airstrip she could feel herself and Kiin and all the others help build the future right then, right there. In that moment all of her qualms about whoever might be below the bombs she was preparing to drop were banished.
Fifteen
‘I thought you should hear the news, that’s all,’ Taki explained. ‘Didn’t think I’d drop into the middle of a war. Looks like, no matter how fast I fly, the world moves faster.’
She was perched on a table in what the Mynans were now calling their War Room. It was the third set of walls to bear the name. The first had been in the Consensus building that had proved vulnerable prey to the Wasp incendiaries because the Mynans had not even finished its construction. A quarter of the ruling council had died in the blaze, but at least the rest had settled their differences and were now waiting on Kymene’s word. The second War Room had taken an unlucky shell in the sporadic artillery bombardment that jumped about the city, cracking the walls enough that nobody wanted to stay inside. In the end, Kymene had repaired to a cellar to hold her deliberations. It reminded Stenwold of the places that the Mynan resistance had been driven to when the Wasps had held the city. That Kymene had been reduced to this already was a bad sign.
‘Your news about the Wasp air force comes late,’ the Mynan leader remarked acidly, looking up from her plans. Her face was ashen and drawn: no sleep and too many worries all at once.
‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you,’ Taki shot back. ‘Those lads out there, they’re old news, Spearflights and regular pilots. The Empire’s cooking up something special, though — new men, new machines.’
‘How does this affect us now?’ Kymene asked her. ‘Even their current forces would suffice to keep control of the air.’
In fact, the Empire had at first seemed not to be pressing its advantage. For two days the bulk of the artillery had concentrated on the outer wall, which had cracked in three places and looked as though it would cease to provide a meaningful obstacle very shortly if this concerted and uncannily precise bombardment continued. The balance of the Imperial engines had been throwing incendiaries and explosive shells into the city itself, apparently at random, ensuring that nobody in Myna slept well or felt safe.
After its initial lightning raid over the city, the air force had been absent for a day. Enough orthopters had remained to defend the artillery from Mynan reprisals, as two costly air skirmishes had shown, but the Spearflights had not been seen in the sky since that first sortie. Edmon and the other pilots had been trying to cobble together whatever new fliers they could, co-opting and arming civilian machines and repairing anything that could be dragged largely intact from the ruin of the Mynan airfields and hangars. That the Empire would still possess resounding air superiority was a grim truth nobody wanted to talk about.
The Empire’s actual army, the fighting men who had previously formed the first wave of offence in any Imperial attack, had sat out beyond the hills, far out of range of the Mynan artillery, whilst its greatshotters had inexorably chewed away at the wall. The Wasp assault had so far killed over a thousand Mynans and a handful of Imperial pilots. The Mynan soldiers had milled and gone to the walls and been driven back, and talked endlessly of sorties and counter-attacks, and their Maynesh Ant-kinden allies had very nearly taken to the field alone, unable to countenance simply sitting under the shadow of the Wasp artillery without any recourse at all. Still, the column from Szar was expected to arrive any day to bolster the city’s numbers, and that was anticipated to trigger some manner of reversal in their situation.
Today, though, the remnants of the Szaren relief column had finally arrived, and with it an understanding of where the balance of the Imperial air force had been engaged. Caught in the open, in close formation, the Bee- kinden had been perfect targets for the Spearflights in an attack that nobody had even contemplated a few days ago. Flying machines fought flying machines; that had been the rule. Aside from dropping grenades, usually by hand, their effectiveness on the ground was strictly limited. It had been every tactician’s understanding that only airships could carry a load sufficient to make a serious impact on the ground, and so the strategic effectiveness of orthopters was limited to how well they could attack or defend such slow-moving, vulnerable targets. Surely that was what the fight for Solarno had taught?
Apparently it had taught the Wasps more than their enemies. From destroying half the Mynan air force — such as it was — on the ground, the Wasps had gone on to locate and ruthlessly attack the Szaren infantry, who had no way of fighting back. Indeed, after the first pass of the orthopters, the Szaren response had been to pull in tighter for mutual defence, giving the Spearflights all the more attractive a target.
Thirty-seven Bee-kinden soldiers had reached the Mynan walls, out of almost fifteen hundred that had marched out from Szar. Many more were doubtless still alive, but scattered by the mad rout that had eventually destroyed all of their cohesion, with small parties of Bees fleeing in every direction. There would be no relief column, therefore, and the walls were about to give way.
We will sell our lives dearly, were the words that Kymene was not saying, but they were written plainly on her face whenever Stenwold looked at her. Her name and description would be known to the Imperial army, he was sure, on a list kept by some Rekef agent who would be in charge of hunting down every known Mynan leader. No doubt she planned to die well before they had a chance to capture her.
And I’ll just be an added bonus, if they get me, he considered. The two of them had spent two hours with a map of the city and a list of all the forces Myna could command, and had come to no conclusions save that, at some point, the walls would go down, and the Empire would then have the somewhat more onerous task of actually capturing the city. At that stage, Stenwold knew, the Light Airborne and their heavier ground-bound compatriots would have to get within range of whatever the Mynans could still field against them.
With his mind full of that, Taki’s dire warnings about some new sort of flying machine seemed entirely irrelevant. One crisis at a time…
‘The walls are already fallen in some parts, enough for them to get some infantry inside, if they wanted a pitched battle,’ Kymene stated, a new report in her hand. ‘We’ve done all we can to shore them up with earth and wood, to soften the impacts, but nothing is helping much. My engineers tell me that the walls are likely to suffer multiple breaches within a few hours of dusk, after which any further bombardment is unlikely to grant the Empire much more advantage in an attack. The Empire will have the choice of coming for us tonight, or tomorrow morning.’ Her voice was flat, as though this was all happening to someone else.
‘Then get some sleep,’ Stenwold suggested. He wanted to say, Why would they risk a night attack? save that nothing this army had done so far had been from the rule book he was used to. ‘Kymene…’
‘Don’t say it.’
She knew him too well, but then she was a born leader and used to reading people quickly, seeing them for what they were. He had tried several times to suggest that she had options other than dying in the teeth of the Wasp assault, and each time she had cut him off, not wanting to hear the words.
The time will come, though. Stenwold needed Kymene, because Myna needed Kymene. It had waited almost twenty years for a leader like her, after the first conquest. If she died for her city now, then Myna might languish in chains for another twenty years before anyone could free it.
Of course, the whole plan does rely on my being able to get out of the city with her. Muted by distance and depth, the crump-crump-crump of the Imperial greatshotters came to their ears still, patiently turning stretches of Mynan wall to rubble.
Stenwold managed a few hours of fitful sleep that night, before Taki was kicking at his bedroll to rouse him.
‘Wall’s down, Maker!’ she told him. ‘The Mynan foot are trying to get some sort of line together. Wasps could start for them at any moment, they say.’
Stenwold sat up, trying to place the discontinuity. They can’t have the wall down already because… the noise
