chance for a lie-in, then the entire company was out in the quad just about inside Aarmon’s deadline. The pilots were assembling at the same time, a good half of them plainly just out of their machines, back from whatever three-day test they had been engaged on.
‘Look,’ Pingge hissed. Most of the Flies had now learned the soldier’s trick of whispering on parade, barely moving their lips. Pingge jerked her head to indicate direction, and one by one the Fly-kinden’s eyes flicked over to the newcomers marching in.
For a moment it was as though they were looking back in time, for here they came: two score Wasp-kinden, the same number of Flies following. Look at them, they thought — a bunch of clueless, untrained factory workers, clerks and servants, frightened and undisciplined and without the faintest idea of what awaits them. Like looking in a mirror. Only it was not, not any more. The new Flies could only stare wide-eyed at Pingge, Kiin and the rest standing as straight as spears in their black tunics edged with yellow, soldiers of the Empire every bit as much as were the Light Airborne.
Then a murmur began amongst Pingge’s peers, not about the new Flies but the Wasps that had preceded them, now standing to attention across from Aarmon’s people.
‘Quiet!’ Kiin meant to hiss, but the word turned into an order somehow, and silenced them.
The new Wasp recruits stood with the same wordless discipline that Aarmon and his fellows had possessed since the Flies had first set eyes on them. Their faces betrayed no uncertainty or fear at this new assignment — indeed they betrayed little enough emotion at all. When Aamon strode out before them, there was none of the tensing or minute adjustments to the presence of a superior officer that soldiers would normally show — and it was plain that only some of them were regular soldiers, just as only some of Aarmon’s pilots had been. With these newcomers, though, the difference was considerably more marked.
Almost half of them were women.
It was unthinkable. Wasp women served and raised children, and perhaps sometimes looked after the family home and wealth while their menfolk fought. Wasp women did not stand impeccably to attention, in uniform. Yet here they were: eighteen women amongst twenty-two men, not standing apart, nor a step behind, but standing there as if they were equals.
Aarmon made eye contact with one of the new Wasps, and then the newcomers were marching into the barracks without a word, the Flies following behind them in a nervous, eddying mob. Going to take up our old rooms? Pingge wondered.
She knew that she should be nervous, too, but in the pit of her stomach she felt the first fluttering of excitement. All that training was finally about to come to something.
‘Sergeant Kiin, we march to Armour Square. Follow my company,’ Aarmon instructed, and Kiin’s voice piped back, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’m still not convinced we’ve not been called here for our own executions,’ Totho muttered as he descended the steps, carefully watched by at least half a dozen Wasp soldiers and a couple of their engineers.
Drephos turned away from the pair of Consortium men he had been talking to, brushing them aside with a wave of his gauntleted hand and ignoring their surly looks in response.
‘Overly elaborate, don’t you think?’ They had no privacy here in Capitas — with servants spying on them in the quarters they had been assigned, while here in Armour Square, below the very balcony the Empress would use, it seemed as if someone had detailed an entire army to keep an eye on them. In such conditions, Drephos’s response was simply to speak his mind and not care who heard him. To his mind, he had the Empire in a vice: the mechanical offspring of his genius were at the forefront of the war, and he considered himself irreplaceable. And, besides, he was hardly being coy with their engineers: so far they had got everything they had asked him for. If he was wrong, if he was expendable after all, then watching what he said would make no difference whatsoever, now that they were here, in the heart of Empire.
Being here in the first place was what had put Totho on edge, though. He had argued passionately against obeying the summons. ‘Plenty of Wasp-kinden, even, know to make themselves scarce when the word comes to return to Capitas,’ he hissed now, trying fruitlessly not to be overheard by their constant escort.
‘I’m assured the purges are over.’ Drephos’s bleak expression belied his words, but his dry smile suggested that such matters as purges were for lesser men to worry about. ‘Besides, I want a look at their new orthopters. What little I’ve heard is maddening… it sounds as though they’ve leapt ahead of the Solarnese models somehow..’ One of the Consortium men coughed pointedly, but Drephos ignored him. ‘You’ve set the similophone up?’ he asked Totho.
‘No thanks to everyone else. They were so worried I might be rigging a bomb or something, it took me three times as long as it should have done.’
The similophone was one of the Iron Glove Cartel’s rare peacetime inventions, a little toy that Drephos and Totho had cooked up together that was only now seeing wider use. It consisted of an ear that received sound, and a loom that transcribed the sound pattern into silk cloth, which a similophone drum could then decode and speak back. Totho and Drephos had used the device instead of writing letters, not so much for security but just because they were artificers, and they could.
Now their toy had been requested to bear witness to history in the making.
‘You can understand their caution, surely,’ Drephos said smoothly.
Totho grimaced darkly, leaning in to murmur, ‘I’m serious. We shouldn’t have come. You’re underestimating them, and you never met the Empress. She’s terrifying.’
Troops were marching into Armour Square now: a sample only of the might of the Empire. Totho could make out Light Airborne, infantry, Engineers, Aviation Corps, slavers, representatives from all the different machines that made the Empire run. The square was large, and there were hundreds of them standing shoulder to shoulder, all those different uniforms, all that armour, the patterns and designs, and all of it black and gold.
‘Colonel-Auxillian,’ one of the Consortium men put in. ‘If you will — we have so little time before the address.’
Drephos rounded on him grandly. ‘You have our greatshotters and you have our sentinels. What other of my wonders are you about to ask for?’
‘Colonel…’ Now it was the Consortium man’s turn to lean in, as though even he feared to be overheard by the ubiquitous guards. ‘The Empire would pay far more for the formula to the Bee-killer.’
‘The…’ And Drephos let the word trail off into a thoughtful pause that ended with, ‘So,’ and nothing more. His smile returned, and probably only Totho could tell that it was a little too fixed. ‘The Bee-killer, of course,’ he said smoothly, a moment later. ‘The formula did not survive the war. Do you think that I would not have made more, had I the means?’
‘The coffers of the Consortium-’ the man went on, but Drephos held up his metal hand again, imperiously.
‘It did not survive,’ he said curtly, and then turned away, his attention wholly directed up towards the balcony, where generals and other dignitaries were beginning to make their appearance.
‘We shouldn’t have come,’ Totho growled again, and this time Drephos said nothing.
From the ranks, Esmail watched a conspiracy assemble, a web being strung. He — which was to say Ostrec — was simply another soldier at this point: an officer of the Quartermaster Corps amongst his peers, and ostensibly not a sniff of the Rekef about him. All around, the other servants of the Empire marched in to form their serried ranks, all the organs of the Imperial war machine falling, unit by unit, into an expectant hush.
Esmail marked the faces: the newcomers, the absences. General Brugan was in place already, just left of centre, even now giving place to the Empress, though she had yet to appear. Further left was the bloated corpulence of Colonel Harvang, the impeccably turned-out Vecter lost in his shadow. There were a couple of new faces, too: majors in the Rekef Outlander arrived from the East-Empire, Brugan’s old stamping ground. True, there were a few up there, overlooking Armour Square, who were not Brugan’s, bought and sold: those who were too useful to dispose of, too doubtful to approach — engineers mostly. General Lien’s bald head gleamed in the sun, whilst beside him that bearded eccentric was presumably the genius aviation Major — no, Colonel, now — Varsec. Aside from these two, and a meagre handful of others, everyone up there whom Esmail could see was firmly in Brugan’s camp.
There had been a very subtle changing of the guard at certain levels of the palace, as men loyal to Brugan had been summoned in from distant posts. Others had received surprising postings — mid-ranking officers sent west to the front, Rekef men posted to the Principalities to spy on the savages. Everything had been above board,
