And she knows all their names, Marteus thought. Another knack that Ant-kinden never needed to learn. ‘Right. Subordinate Officer Antspider.’ He made the decision quickly, the words rushing out before he could regret them. ‘You drill your friends here another dozen times, then break.’ Does this mean I need more subordinates? Probably. Does that mean I need rank badges, like the Empire has? Almost certainly. Ant-kinden needed no rank badges, of course. Everyone knew who everyone else was.
‘Right, back to where we were!’ the new Subordinate Officer ordered, and cuffed the tall man as he passed. ‘No bloody smirking, Gerethwy, this is war…’
She stopped speaking, the certainty in her voice draining away. ‘Chief…?’
‘What is it?’
‘Are they ours?’
She was looking upwards, and Marteus — and everyone else — followed her gaze.
Black shapes were passing over the city against the insistent drone of engines, low enough that they could see the flickering wings of orthopters. No strange sight perhaps, given how hard the aviators were training, but these flew in formation, and they were many.
‘Clear the square!’ Marteus shouted, and he heard his new junior officer seconding him. ‘Make for the College.’ There was no great rationale in that, save that he could think of nothing else to suggest.
‘Wheel left!’ Corog Breaker shouted. ‘Fly straight. Wheel right — keep that distance! You’re moving apart.’
He had a better voice for it than Marteus ever did, honed by bellowing across classrooms and foundries and tavernas. The Master Armsman of the Prowess Forum was now teaching discipline to airmen rather than fencing to students.
His class consisted of a score of men and women, some of the local Beetle-kinden — new recruits and the graduates of Taki’s aviation classes — and the others a motley pick of the Mynan newcomers. He had them jogging about the airfield at a fair pace, making formations, manoeuvring on foot, trying to instil into them a basic understanding of working together. The task was frustrating and slow, but if there was one thing that Breaker was good for, it was shouting at length.
‘Back into formation!’ he yelled, but two or three of the Mynans had just broken off, running about the field and obviously taking the piss, he reckoned, by miming an attack on some of the grounded aircraft. ‘Form up!’ he shouted. ‘Everyone, ranks before me! What do you think you’re doing?’
The ‘ranks’ his class formed were split, the Mynans clumped together at one end, and a noticeable gap between them and the Collegiate fliers, who were mostly considerably younger and somewhat scared of them. Corog Breaker was older and scared of nothing, however, and he stomped up to them, glowering.
‘Why aren’t we in the air, Master Breaker,’ demanded one of them — Edmon, he thought. They always used his title, since he insisted on it, but they gave it a decidedly derisive spin.
‘Because in the air you can’t hear me shouting at you,’ Breaker snapped back.
‘We want to fight Wasps.’ This was Franticze, the stocky Bee-kinden woman and his worst discipline problem. ‘This is a waste of time.’
‘You think we’d let you fight the Wasps, alongside our pilots?’ Breaker demanded. It was his best card, when working with them, and he saw them scowl and shuffle, saw the sudden fear in their eyes that they might be excluded, cast aside. ‘If you can’t work with us, then you’re liabilities, and no Stormreaders for you,’ he informed them sharply.
‘Flying in combat, it is not like this,’ Edmon said quietly, with an almost guilty look at the Collegiate pilots, their youth and uncertainty.
‘Well, in the future it will be,’ Breaker told him. ‘Discipline in the air, just like discipline on the ground. Armies are built on it. Ask the Ant-kinden.’
‘I never saw an Ant pilot worth a curse,’ Franticze muttered, but a brief gesture from Edmon silenced her.
‘Try it again. Follow Pendry Goswell here: turn when she turns, keep your distance, show me you can do it,’ Breaker invited, gesturing for a solid Beetle girl, one of Collegium’s better fliers, to take the lead. As the airmen moved off, he retreated to lean against a grounded orthopter.
‘Don’t say it,’ he growled from the corner of his mouth.
‘They’re right.’ Taki was sitting atop the machine. Her Esca had come in an hour before and she was watching the ground crew finish winding the motor. ‘Air combat’s too fast.’
‘They’re going to end up shooting our people down, or the other way around. They way they fly, nobody knows where they’ll go.’
‘How do you think they got out of Myna…?’ Taki lifted her head abruptly, frowning. ‘Corog…?’
There were some startled cries from the Collegiate students. The Mynans had broken formation and were pounding across the field, shouting at one another. Breaker saw Franticze take to the air, a flash of her wings dropping her neatly into the Stormreader that she had reserved. The others were grappling their way into other machines, all those that they had chosen for themselves — against his orders — and fought off all comers for, now painted with the double red darts of Myna.
‘What…?’ Breaker began, but some of the Mynans were already starting up their motors, shouting at the ground crew to get clear, wings folding out and lifting up with the first motion of the clockwork. ‘Stop that! What do you think you’re…?’
But then the sound impinged on him, the drone of engines from on high. He turned to Taki, but she was already across the field and scrambling into the seat of her Esca Magni.
With a deep buzz of wings and fire, fixed-wing fliers began to pass overhead, a flight of a half-dozen immediately above, but there were others elsewhere over the city. From somewhere close by there was a flash, a boom immediately afterwards, as the ground shook. A moment later smoke was rising.
‘Get my machine ready to take off! Now!’ Breaker shouted. ‘Get in the air!’ He waved madly to the students, relieved to see that half of them at least were already following the Mynans’ lead, orders or not.
The Esca Magni leapt into the air, Taki bringing the machine off the ground lopsidedly in her haste, desperate to gain the air before..
Myna all over again. She registered the explosion without really seeing or hearing it, some consensus of the senses simply informing her. Where was that? That was the field over Luker Street ways. Of course the Empire would try for the same targets: strip Collegium of its air defences: destroy the Beetle orthopters on the ground, and who could defy them? And all the while the question kept hammering away in the back of her mind: Where did the piss-cursed bastards come from? How had the Empire infiltrated a force of fliers within strike of the city, and nobody knew of it?
She watched as the enemy machines banked ahead of her, almost following the line of the street below as they sought their target. They were not the familiar Spearflights, she registered. These were fixed-wing fliers, and almost twice the size of the Imperial orthopters she was used to. Not strange to her, though, because…
For a moment, as she rammed the Esca into a higher gear to close with them, she was back in Capitas — her one and only visit there — watching Axrad die.
Farsphex, the name came to her. The new machines that Axrad had been so insistent that she saw. So what did she recall about the Farsphex?
She recalled that it wasn’t a fixed-wing at all.
She saw it then, as she raced in towards them, eating up the sky between her and the enemy. A pair of Stormreaders was coming in from her left quarter with the same intention — some training patrol returning to the city to find it attacked in their absence. They had the right line of approach, diving from on high, practically out of the sun, but the Imperials saw them nonetheless, their close formation breaking apart into a scatter of separate machines, and abruptly those rigid wings were kicked into a blur, instantly gaining that essential agility in the air that a fixed-wing flier could never aspire to.
Taki picked her target, taking a course that would bring her between the fleeing Farsphex and its comrades, separating it out in preparation for a quick kill. She tried a rapid look left and right, to see how her allies were disposed, catching a glimpse of a scatter of ascending machines from the airfield she had just quit: The Mynans defending the field, letting the others launch. She saw more enemy, too. She reckoned two flights of probably more than half a dozen, and the smoke from the far side of the city told of a third at least.
Then she was yanking the stick over to the right, registering the glitter of rotary bolts sleeting past her,
