who had recently been retired from active service. ‘They fill the same role, after all, and the name of the project has caused some confusion amongst enemy agents who think we’re training infantry.’ His voice, as ever, had been laced with a general contempt for the bulk of humanity. Totho could still picture him stalking before his audience, his robes of black and gold — the same pattern as when he had genuinely been an Imperial subject — fluttering in the breeze against the hastily erected storage sheds from which the Iron Glove conducted its work.
‘You are faced with a routine problem of attackers, General. You must get your men past the walls.’ The Light Airborne could have swarmed the city at any time, of course, but the Mynan soldiers were well protected and armed with crossbows and snapbows, and their defensive position would allow them to make the Wasps pay in blood for every inch of ground. ‘You need to get your armour inside the walls, to meet them, heavies against heavies, where your superior numbers and troops can truly tell. Assaulting a broken wall in the face of respectably armed ranged defence remains a formidable problem, even with air superiority.’
At his gesture, Totho had relayed his signal to the engineers waiting in the shed, and an engine had started up with a metallic growl, closely followed by a clatter of armour plates.
‘What you need,’ Drephos’s voice had lifted over the sound, ‘is something to force the issue!’
On cue, the Sentinel had picked its way out of the shed at a careful, deliberate pace. To a man, the Imperial officers had taken a few steps back as its tall, blind-eyed prow had quested in their direction. They had never seen anything like it, Totho knew. He had watched with pride as its ten legs had moved in steady, complex patterns to haul it along the ground.
After the initial shock at the machine’s appearance, there had been those amongst Roder’s more traditional officers who complained that the vehicle would be easy prey for Mynan leadshotters, or that it would ground itself amidst the rubble, and how heavy it must be, how slow — could it even keep up with walking infantry? Roder had let them cavil and had kept his own counsel, his eyes only on Drephos.
Now Totho saw the truth of it for himself, and his heart leapt with pride: to be a member of the Iron Glove, to be an artificer, to be one of the Apt whose world had built this glory. Ahead of the Imperial infantry, ahead even of the Airborne, the Sentinels tore up the ground towards Myna. Enemy artillery burst about them, landing mostly behind them. They were as swift and agile as animals, the line of their armoured backs flexing and rippling as they jolted over the landscape.
‘When perfecting the greatshotters, we were forced to devise a new material to withstand the concentrated forces involved,’ Drephos had explained to Roder and his officers. ‘We call it spun steel, and it is several times stronger than Solarnese aviation steel, at a fraction of the weight. At the same time, the Sentinel’s legs are mediated by a ratiocinator, meaning that the handler does not have to worry about adjusting each one individually. He simply tells the machine where to go.’
‘Handler?’ Roder had demanded, staring up at the great sightless eye set into the thing’s peaked prow. ‘Driver or pilot, surely.’
‘Handler seems appropriate, somehow,’ had come Drephos’s dry response.
For a moment the three machines were poised on the heaped rubble of Myna’s walls, a colossal triumvirate regarding its subjects. The Mynans were not so reticent. All their hoarded artillery was loosing, catapults and ballistae, leadshotters, even the scrapshotters were pelting the armoured titans with hundredweights of jagged metal. The lead Sentinel rocked from side to side under the impacts, its legs spreading wider beneath its carapace, sliding slightly on the loose stone. Stenwold watched, waiting for the barrage to tell on them, for that armour to crumple under the hammer. They move so fast, was all he could think. They cannot be so strong. And yet the machines weathered the assault with what seemed like disdain.
The leftmost Sentinel opened its eye, the lid sliding up almost sleepily, and Stenwold stared into the darkness that was revealed.
The machine braced itself, legs abruptly digging in, then it was speaking thunder back at the Mynan artillery, smashing a steam-catapult to pieces. The flash and smoke of a leadshotter were unmistakable.
Then they were moving and, to Stenwold’s horror, the Mynan soldiers were rushing forward to meet them. He looked around for Kymene, spotting her standing atop a half-fallen wall, directing the assault, horribly visible, and he began to run for her, shouting her name.
He knew the theory, of course. Once a squad of soldiers had clambered on to an automotive, they could pry its armour apart, break in and kill the crew. The same books of war insisted that no automotive could be built strong enough to ward off artillery. The Empire had changed the syllabus over a winter.
‘Kymene!’ he yelled, and then was thrown from his feet almost casually, a leadshot smashing down close by as it angled for one of the Mynan engines. For a moment his world was nothing but dust and falling shards of stone and screaming that was not his own. Then other artillery nearby was trying to answer the assault, thundering from his left and right loud enough to rattle the air in his lungs, and a thousand other sounds, metal on metal, snapbows loosing, hopelessly shouted orders, the continuing bloody deluge of the Imperial artillery as it continued its detached dismemberment of the city street by street.
Stenwold could barely breathe. The sheer sound of it was beating down on him, the anguished composite roar of a battle being lost and won. Hands to his ears, his knees striking the jagged rubble as he tipped forward, he fought for self-possession, and lost. All around him the air was full of splinters. All three Sentinels were discharging their leadshotters: each advancing a few scuttling yards and then stopping, turning and tilting to aim, then unlidding its single metal eye. Meanwhile, the breach itself, which the Mynans had not even had the chance to contest, was not empty. Stenwold saw at least another quartet of segmented machines sliding through.
He saw a band of soldiers, twenty at least, close with the nearest machine — already only fifteen, ten yards away — ready to take the monster apart with crowbars, to get to the vulnerable flesh within. The rotary piercers spoke first, spinning up almost instantly and scything away half the attackers, chewing them into a bloody rain before Stenwold’s eyes, spare bolts pattering and rebounding from the stones around him. The others tried to get out of the arc of the Sentinel’s frontal weapons, and some of them were cut down almost instantly by the rotaries of the next machine along. The rest… to Stenwold there seemed only a brief shudder that seemed to pass down the length of the lead automotive, and the Mynans were all dead, a row of snapbow barrels loosing from between its plates, the deadly little bolts quite enough to kill through armour.
Someone was pulling at his arm, and he snapped back to full control of himself, seeing how very close the machine was now. It had turned and braced itself again, its eye seeking out some further Mynan siege engine. The soldier who clutched his arm was shouting at him, but Stenwold could hear very little of it. The import was clear, though: We have to go!
‘Kymene!’ he yelled, but she was gone from her wall, her fate unknown. The Mynans were retreating in droves now, not a rout but in a determined fall-back to some prepared position. Stenwold saw one of the defending automotives, a hopelessly outdated, patched-together thing, drive full tilt into the face of a Sentinel, slamming the invader back a few feet as its feet left jagged grooves in the ruined flagstones. Then one of the next wave had put a leadshot into the Mynan vehicle, and a moment later its steam boiler exploded, just one more sound, another rain of pieces in a broken place.
There were flying machines in the air now, wheeling and darting, with wings ablur. Imperial Spearflights were coursing against the ragbag of local fliers, the air glittering with piercer bolts. For a moment he thought he saw Taki’s Esca Magni amidst the fray, but the air was grey with sifting dust, and he had now seen such things, so many, so swift to follow each other, that he did not want to trust his eyes.
Edmon’s Pacemark shuddered its way across the sky, curving around towards a knot of Spearflights that had briefly formed up. A moment later they were splitting off across the city, and he could only follow the one. The Imperial pilot was good enough to slow down for him, taking his time about lining up his own target, and for once Edmon was able to stoop on one of them, textbook-perfect, dropping out of the cloudless blue in an exact line, so that his rotary shot hammered all about the enemy canopy, smashing through its glass and wood. The Spearflight heeled over almost instantly, sliding sideways from the sky. A moment later he felt a scatter of impacts on his hull, guilty of the same complacency as his victim, and saved now only by the impatience of his attacker.
He skimmed away instantly, veering left and then right to throw off his enemy’s aim, ducking his Pacemark low, to rooftop level and further, slinging the flier down the straight boulevard of the Tradian Way, the length of which he knew by heart. The Imperial pilot behind him was game, bringing his Spearflight in close to follow, and when Edmon made the sudden turn at the Way’s far end, lurching up and right to claw for the sky again, any surprise intended was countered by the Wasp machine’s agility in the air.
Edmon turned for the gates once more, where the artillery around the gate might be able to help him out
