again, but then something blurred past him — he had a vision of beating wings and then the spark and chatter of piercers only. For a moment he was not sure whether he had been hit, or what had just happened, but then he realized that the Wasp tailing him was gone, and he hauled the Pacemark into the tightest turn it would make in time to see the Imperial duelling with another Mynan craft, a squat, box-bodied flier that he recognized as the Tserinet, flown by the Szaren renegade Franticze. The two orthopters were speeding over the city, dancing almost where the wall had once been, the Wasp nimbler, but already damaged from Franticze’s first pass. Edmon brought the Pacemark on to a heading meant to intervene, praying that the Bee-kinden pilot would give him a clear opening to their mutual enemy.
Abuptly the sky around them was busy. Another Mynan craft fled past, smoke already trailing, with a pair of Spearflights tight behind it. Edmon had a moment to make his choice, but Franticze was one of the best pilots Myna could call on. He had to trust to her skills, as he pulled around and followed the pair of harrying enemies, blazing away wildly with his rotaries just to let them know he was there.
A moment later the damaged Mynan flier had bucked in the air — he registered only the irregularity of movement, but knew what it meant. In the next second it had dropped too low, not so much clipping as ramming the upper storey of a house already on fire, its fierce, swift flight instantly transformed into violence, wrecked chassis spinning end over end, its wings flying apart in pieces. The Spearflights split up. As ever, he could only follow the one, and then the other would have him.
Edmon bared his teeth — at the Wasps, at the world — and plunged after one even so, because he wanted another kill, another dead Imperial and wrecked machine before they caught him. Even as he did so, a third Spearflight raked past him, hammering a strip of holes in one of his forewings almost casually, in passing. The Pacemark pitched despite his fighting it, one wingtip coming within ten feet of a wall. He fought for height, losing track entirely of how many enemy might be behind him. Momentarily the draw of the ground seemed insuperable, the Pacemark limping along the rooftops like a dying fish at the water’s surface, lurching and flopping and always on the point of sinking altogether. He felt gears slip, the wings losing their rhythm. In that instant he was all ice, waiting for the ground to reclaim its errant son, but then the engine somehow recovered its stroke and he was still impossibly airborne, casting out over the city streets.
He glanced behind him, gaining only hurried, wheeling snatches of sky, pillars of smoke, the dots of other fliers out over Myna. The enemy had not come with him, and he guessed they must have believed him lost, too bloodthirsty actually to wait out his death throes. For a moment there was not a single Spearflight in sight.
He looked down.
This would be the moment to take with him, if he had any chance to take anything anywhere. Not the aerial dragon-fighting with the Imperial air force, not the moment when the ground reached up for him, but the moment he realized that his city was being taken from beneath him.
Most of the buildings down there were now rubble and ruins, or else blazing pyres as though the Empire had marked out the path of its invasion in fire. Between these churned a great silver maggot, a segmented automotive undulating swiftly along the streets of Myna — his Myna — stopping only to discharge its weapons. He caught glimpses of wrecked artillery that had not been able to keep the monsters out. There were bodies down there. He saw some on the streets, and knew that for every death he marked, a hundred others must have blurred by unseen. He saw the streets he knew, the places where his mother had laboured, the markets his father had haggled in. He saw the houses of his friends, where relatives had worked. He saw his childhood and his memories in those shattered homes and broken workshops, and the corpses strewn like sticks.
There was no room left inside him, then. The pain of it was worse than being shot. He sent the Pacemark into a dive against one of the Imperial machines, trigger down so that the rotaries shot and shot, circling and circling until they had emptied themselves. The sparks wherever his bolts were turned by the enemy armour were like a glittering constellation.
He failed to scratch the machine, although it stopped almost quizzically under his attack, questing left and right, his efforts so trivial that it could not even work out where he was.
He pulled out of the dive and skimmed past, leaving the machine behind. There had been Imperial soldiers coming into the city behind it, and he could have used his ammunition more effectively against them, but even then it would have been throwing stones at an avalanche.
The Pacemark was not handling well, and Edmon needed its spring rewound and the rotaries rearmed. Feeling numb, utterly drained, he coaxed the orthopter back towards the more distant airfields, unsure whether he would even find anything to land on that had not been claimed by the fires.
The war in the air was all around him still, but he had become a mere spectator. He saw the Spearflights dart and swoop, keeping the remnants of the Mynan aviators busy while others dropped their incendiaries across the city. He saw Franticze again, chasing down another enemy — her hatred for Wasps was legendary amongst the Mynan airmen. He even saw the Fly-kinden pilot, Taki of Solarno, with her little killer machine darting and swerving, almost flying backwards to throw a Wasp off her, then slipping behind him to finish him off.
Too little, all of it. The ground battle was moving street by street, and only in one direction. If the Wasps had not been more interested in punishing the city with their bombs, they could have cleared the sky of defenders already.
There had been a fierce battle over the highest airfield, he learned later, but the enemy had yet to burn it when he touched down there, and any flier downed for repairs or refuelling was being kept in hangars, out of sight. He brought the Pacemark in for an untidy landing, handling it by instinct, his mind still trying to find some interpretation for the images that did not mean that Myna was being lost even as he sat there.
The ground crew ran out and began to haul his flier into the shadow of the hangars. He hinged the canopy back and began to instruct them, his voice as hoarse and ragged as if he had been shouting on a parade ground all day. ‘Rewind the spring and reload the weapons. I’m going straight back up. I’m going…’ and his voice broke, and he sat there, holding the stick, mouth open, trying to work out what it was that he was going to do, because he had not the first idea.
Someone was calling to him, but they had to say his name three or four times before he would even cast a dull gaze their way.
‘Stay on the ground; change of orders. We’re gathering pilots for a strike. Stay on the ground while we build up the numbers.’ The ground officer’s voice was almost hysterical, and he spoke the words as though they were just some meaningless babble.
An artillery shell landed three streets away, making the ground shudder.
Stenwold found himself in the midst of a constant flow of soldiers, men abandoning their positions closer to the wall, running or limping in, being given orders, being sent out again. Some were sent further back, to the field hospitals being set up in taverns and workshops and backrooms, but there were few who were able enough to present themselves but yet not able enough to be thrown back into the jaws of the Imperial advance.
Kymene stood at the centre of it with her officers. They had commandeered a covered market to evade the eyes of the enemy orthopters, the stalls shoved aside to make room for the turmoil of war.
She was swift, efficient, a map of the city before her that she barely had to refer to, allotting each new consignment of soldiers an address, a junction, a street. She ordered barricades, she assigned the little artillery that had been saved. The Wasps were in the city — not just their killer machines but their soldiers, their infantry washing through the streets of Myna, the Light Airborne taking rooftops and dropping into the undefended city behind them.
It did not escape Stenwold that many of the men and women presenting themselves to Kymene were not wearing the red and black of the Mynan army but a mismatch of everything from civilian tunics and robes to repainted Imperial armour. The Mynans had spent a long time under the heel of the Empire before they had thrown off their shackles, but they had been a martial people once. They were not lacking in spirit.
Only in training, he thought gloomily. Only in resources.
‘Kymene!’ he called, but before she could even look at him, someone had run in yelling that the machines were already upon them.
The Maid of Myna looked at the remaining soldiers assembled before her, and told them simply, ‘Fight!’ No time for street maps and strategy: immediately they were splitting up, dashing from the marketplace by every possible route. Stenwold opened his mouth to call her name again, to try and draw some order from the madness of it all, but the east wall caved in as he did so, punched through by a Sentinel’s leadshotter, the iron bulk of the machine revealing itself in the jagged gap.
