The Esca regained its hold on the air, and she saw the sky above her turned into a madness of wheeling, duelling orthopters. Instantly she was dragging back on the stick, fighting upwards to take her place there but, even as she did, she knew she was too late.
One of the Mynans lost a wing suddenly, the Stormreader coming apart as a Farsphex ripped into it from an unexpected angle. The next second, the stricken machine was whirling past Taki, spinning like a top with its one wing still beating. Taki was shooting by then, setting up a stream of bolts and then trying to find a target to bring it to bear on. Their bombing run had been disrupted now, but the Wasps had decided to make a fight of it at last, bolstering their impeccably coordination with two-to-one odds.
She had a direct line on one of the enemy and, just for a moment, gave it a solid couple of seconds of shot and saw it lurch in the air, shuddering. The bombs that had been cascading from its undercarriage, as regular as ants from a hill, abruptly stopped though the machine flew on. Then she was dancing and dodging through the air as a couple of the enemy came for her, keeping out of the way of their aim but unable to fight back. She saw Edmon’s Stormreader spiralling upwards, chasing one of the enemy even as another tried to bring him down. In the next instant, Pendry Goswell was scudding past them, scoring a couple of strikes as she did, but she was lurching in the air, her machine already damaged, the beat of her wings erratic. A moment later they simply stopped, some vital piece of clockwork slipping its train, and Taki watched her helpless and achingly graceful arc as her stalled machine fell into its final dive.
Then, and all together, the Imperial machines were on the run — or at least they were evading pursuit, taking off with wings fixed and heading east. We’ve driven them away! Taki exalted, but almost immediately she guessed that the Empire was simply heading to refuel. So where are they going? If they had built a nest so close to the city, then these attacks could be an hourly occurrence.
She sent the Esca after them without even thinking about it, and when she glanced around she saw three Stormreaders joining her in the pursuit, two with Mynan colours and one of the more ambitious local pilots, looking like Corog Breaker himself by the way he flew.
Behind them, smoke rose from a handful of points across Collegium, and Taki felt that she was escaping a report on the damage, as much as chasing the enemy. What did we lose? What people, what machines? And if the Mynans hadn’t been so paranoid as to have their machines standing by at all hours, how much more might we have lost? It was not that the Mynans had known what was going to happen, of course. It was just that, this once, their particular breed of fearful, vengeful craziness had turned out to be entirely justified.
The chase went on for barely fifteen minutes, the Imperials pulling ahead noticeably, forcing Taki to admire the design that allowed them to switch from fixed to mobile wings — and so fluidly! She had seen it, or half-seen it, in Capitas but she had underestimated the applications of the idea.
But, still, they must have a base around here somewhere. Where’s the Wasps’ nest, eh? But the distance between hunters and prey only increased, and the Collegiate orthopters were beginning to tire, springs losing their strength, wings working with less of a will.
The last glimpse Taki had of the Farsphex that day showed them still heading solidly eastwards, with no suggestion at all that they were about to land.
Twenty-One
Taki had asked Corog Breaker to call all the pilots together as soon as they were back on the ground. They had met hurriedly, almost conspiratorially, before any of the great and the good of Collegium could presume to interfere.
We are the elite of the air, Taki told herself. Scanning their faces, some looking determined, some stunned, she hoped that they felt the same way.
The Mynans still clustered together, but the distance between them and the others had decreased. They had shared something now, and it was the Collegiate fliers who had drawn closer to the mindset of their guests. They took a roll-call of their losses. Thyses, one of the Mynans, was dead. Collegium had lost three, although Pendry Goswell was miraculously still among the living, the first of them to have to rely on the new glider chutes that had been developed for those whose Art did not permit them to fly.
By that time they had some representatives of the ground crew with them, listening in, and a couple of academics from the aviation department, including Willem Reader, who had furnished Collegium’s orthopter model with half of its name. Technically, Corog Breaker was in charge, but he deferred to Taki without her having to ask. The man was all pomp and shouting during peacetime, but now the Empire had somehow managed to attack his city, he was purely business.
They made their plans: Taki proposed and, with a minimum of discussion, they approved. There was no suggestion of consulting the Assembly or any higher authority. In a city so bound by bureaucracy and hierarchy, this independence told Taki that they understood. The Assembly wasn’t there; they won’t understand. Only us. Only we are fit to helm the course of the air war.
Well, us and the Wasps, obviously. An unhappy thought, and she would have to talk with the better aeronautical minds about just what the Wasps had achieved in their aviation technology, and in their military practice, to pull off the attack that had just happened.
By the time a messenger had come from the Amphiophos demanding that she attend some council of war, the pilots had already held their own Assembly, passed their own motions and set their own destiny.
The council of war was remarkably restrained, although Taki guessed that it would become larger and more burdened with pointless opinions as time went on. For now she was faced only with Stenwold himself and the leaders of the three Merchant Companies: the Beetle-kinden Janos Outwright and Elder Padstock, and Marteus the Tarkesh renegade.
‘What did we lose?’ she asked, before Stenwold could start interrogating her.
‘The Teremy Square airfield was hit hard,’ Stenwold told her. ‘We lost eight Stormreaders on the ground there, four elsewhere. You and yours managed to keep them from inflicting crippling damage on our air capability, anyway.’
‘So what was the big bang?’ Taki asked him. ‘Just before they took off, they hit something near the College hard.’
‘Factories,’ Stenwold confirmed. ‘Four of them along Read Road were gutted pretty much entirely. They’re still going through the rubble, but all they’re finding are bodies.’
Taki frowned, and then a sudden fear gripped her. ‘The Stormreader factories?’
Stenwold managed a wan smile. ‘It’s strange how things work out, sometimes. If this attack had come just a tenday ago, then we’d have lost most of our ability to replenish our airforce. As it was, three of the factories were being converted to work on automotives. My project. The Stormreader facilities had been moved to the Coalway workshops, on the other side of the College. From a certain point of view, we were very lucky. Their spies are just a little out of date.’
‘We need more machines, as many as we can put in the air,’ Taki told him. ‘Seriously — their army’s still a good way down the coast from here, but somewhere they’ve got an airfield. How they managed that, I have no idea, but we need scouting patrols and, at the same time, we need a strong flight on the airfields ready to fly the moment they come back. That could be tomorrow, Master Maker. That could be later today.’
‘I’m putting a proposal before the Assembly today,’ Stenwold stated. ‘I suspect that it will pass, in light of the attack. I don’t think it would pass any other way, certainly.’ He looked tired, maybe sick. ‘Every workshop and factory in the city must be ready to help the war effort, from the big mercantile concerns to little family-run machine shops. It’s not just your orthopters, and it’s not my automotives, either. We need more snapbows, piercer bolts, spare parts, tools, artillery ammunition, explosives… We’ve seen now how fast the Empire can move, so we need to get ourselves up to the same speed. You’ll have your fliers, and you’ll be run off your feet training people how to use them, too. We’ll have a call for volunteers across the city, and I hope that people will look at the smoke rising from Read Road and realize that it’s now fight or fall.’
You’re not before the Assembly now, Maker, thought Taki, because rhetoric always annoyed her. ‘And if you don’t get your volunteers?’ she asked.
‘Then I go back to the Assembly with an alternative motion,’ he replied grimly.
