Helleron had been a joke. The Eighth Army had marched in from what had recently been Three-city Alliance land, leaving behind it the shattered walls of Myna and Szar, and a battle still raging at Maynes, where elements of the Fifth had been moved in to free Roder for his advance. The Ants of Maynes were no more technologically accomplished than their allies, Roder knew, but they were certainly more stubborn. There was talk of razing the city entirely, by way of a lesson, deporting the whole population to remote corners of the Empire as slaves. It had never been done before, to even the most rebellious of cities, but times were changing. The Slave Corps had seen all the advances that real soldiers were making to the Empire’s prosperity, Roder thought sourly, and were trying to introduce an innovation or two of their own.
If he had thought it would work, he would have cheered them to the echo, but he read nothing but greed in their proposition. Now, if we had some Bee-killer handy, that might be a different matter. That near-mythical weapon that had been deployed just the once in the last war was still a subject of heated conjecture. True, the only deaths it had caused had been the Empire’s own garrison at Szar, but for connoisseurs of destruction the results had been remarkable: the entire garrison, every living thing, wiped out in a night, without struggle. And it could so easily have been the Szaren. If we’re going to teach lessons, let us teach them all a lasting one.
Roder knew that there were some, back in the capital, who believed such a weapon was going too far. He also knew that the star of such white-livered philosophers was on the wane. No weapon was too great, so sang the Engineering Corps, so long as it is in our hands. Roder agreed, being a modern kind of general.
The path to Helleron had been prepared long ago by Consortium merchants and Rekef agents. Twelve of the Council of Thirteen had met Roder’s delegation willingly, happy to become a protectorate of the Empire and also a free city, as Roder understood Solarno had been declared, down south. Roder himself would rather have locked the entire pack of treacherous vermin up and packed them off to the mines at Shalk, but he had no authority to do so. The job of bringing the Helleren into the Empire’s fold had already been achieved, by pen and coin, long before he arrived. All he managed to do was extort some supplies from the city’s stores and provide some of his soldiers a night’s worth of entertainment, and even then they were kept on a short leash, allowed the bare minimum of violence and pillage, just enough to remind the Helleren of who was now in control. Everything, even the expected casualties of the night’s revelry, was set out in advance by the Consortium magnates in charge. With that sort of bureaucracy tying his hands, Roder was glad to be back on the road.
Like Tynan’s Second, the Eighth was mechanized, supplies and siege equipment and much of its manpower being moved by automotives and by a flight of airships in this case as Sarn’s aerial capability was reckoned considerably less than Collegium’s. Scout orthopters kept an eye out, day and night, for a Sarnesh army either advancing cross-country or up the rails, but all suggestion was that the Ants had not calculated on the speed of the Imperial advance, and were only just on the point of setting out from their own gates by the time Roder was in sight of Malkan’s Stand.
He knew how the Lowlanders named the place Malkan’s Folly, as a slap in the face of the Empire that was, he hoped, about to be redressed. The Ants had built their grandest fortress there, as impressive a defensive edifice as Roder had ever seen through a telescope, and he supposed that it said a great deal about the Sarnesh mindset — perhaps the mindset of all Ant-kinden everywhere.
We could just go round it. A single fortress could not hope actually to hold up an army that was desperate to get to Sarn. All those solid walls would necessitate only a minor detour, Roder knew. However, the Sarnesh strategy was not quite so foolish. The point of the fortress at Malkan’s Stand was to be unassailable, so that the sizeable complement of troops within could use it as a sally-point to attack any enemy force that tried to pass them. If Roder pushed on to Sarn he would find himself engaged front and rear through that peerless ability of the Ants to bring all their forces to bear at the same time. So it was that the Ants would have their wish. He would have no choice but to bring down the walls of Malkan’s Stand before he marched on Sarn.
He no longer had the Colonel-Auxillian and his protege to call upon, the pair of them having been called off for some even more urgent business at the capital, but Colonel Ferric was more than competent enough to manage the machines that they had left, and there was already a plan in place for this stage of the war.
Malkan’s Stand was certainly a formidable prospect, he decided, passing the lens of his glass over the walls. The place bristled with artillery, and all of it ready manned, since the Sarnesh could hardly fail to notice their approach. He wondered what word they had received from the Three-city refugees. He had been informed that a reasonably sized force of Alliance soldiers had already passed this way heading for sanctuary in Sarn, and there would have been civilians strung out all the way from here to Myna; the Slave Corps had taken up a fair few on the road. How well prepared are the Ants, then, eh?
That artillery had sufficient elevation to out-range anything that General Malkan’s own Seventh Army might have brought to the original battle fought on this ground. Any attempt to bring such engines to bear on the fortress walls would be doomed, the machines smashed to pieces before they could ever launch their first missile.
General Malkan had not possessed Drephos’s greatshotters, of course. Nor did he have the improved stone- eater acids, the rock-breaker explosives, the pinpoint accuracy of the ratiocinators that could deliver alternating rounds of each to the same precise point over and over for as long as it took.
‘Colonel?’ he grunted.
‘Range is extreme, but viable,’ Ferric reported. Behind him the construction of the greatshotters was proceeding swiftly, the cities of the Alliance having granted the artificers sufficient practice. ‘We can expect them to make a sortie, I would imagine, once they realize what we’re doing, sir.’
‘We’re ready for them,’ Roder murmured, lowering the telescope at last. The rank and file of the Eighth were already throwing up earthworks, forming their own makeshift fortress to slow any Sarnesh attack enough so that the massed snapbows could have their way with as many Ants as the enemy chose to send out. Conventional artillery, such as leadshotters, were being emplaced to take on automotives, and the Spearflight wings were ready to fly, either to take on Sarnesh air power or to bomb the fortress itself.
‘The Sarnesh say this hill of theirs is unbreakable, Colonel,’ Roder observed.
‘Perhaps they haven’t checked what the word means, sir.’ Around them, the spirits of the Eighth were high, despite all the digging that needed doing. ‘The Empress’s words have arrived, sir,’ Ferric added. ‘I’ve readied the… similophone.’ Even the engineer stumbled slightly over the unfamiliar word. ‘The actual words of the Empress on a strip of tape, imagine it, sir.’
Roder was not a man who encouraged familiarity in his subordinates, but he and Ferric shared a look almost of complicity, two men who were bringing about a glorious future.
The airfield that the Farsphex pilots used was no real secret any more. A score of fixed-wings taking off, one after another, and people were bound to talk. Besides, the time for hiding was past. Everyone involved in this project wanted the Empire to know of their contribution to the war.
They coasted in one evening, taking turns in circling the field and touching down as well as they could, a little roughly in most cases. They were returning from a very long round trip.
For a moment they sat strewn, a little haphazardly, about the field, barely enough room for them all. Pingge herself crouched in the hold of Scain’s flier, still chained to it and feeling almost unused to being back on the ground. They had spent almost three days in the air with a pitched battle at the far end. She had never imagined such a thing, and that particular capability of the Farsphex had been so very secret that nobody had thought to forewarn the Fly-kinden bombardiers. How was it done? Even with her artificer’s training, she could hardly guess. The Engineering Corps had hit on something almost magical, beyond belief.
The mission itself had provided a variety of unpleasantnesses. The food had been meagre, and relieving herself out into the high, chill air had been particularly unpleasant — the only time she had appreciated being chained to the insides of the machine. Mostly the journeying part had been dull, though, enough for her to get Scain talking eventually, parcelling out small parts of his earlier life, all of which suggested that nobody in their right mind would have imagined him as a pilot until he had abruptly been snatched up for the Farsphex training. She had tried to probe that further, and it was plain he knew exactly why he had been chosen, but apparently that was just another secret that Fly-kinden were not fit to know.
After bringing their craft down into a somewhat shaky landing Scain had just sat there for some time, silent. He looked tired enough to be ill, and she knew that he had been chewing some concoction of the Engineers, just to keep himself going. She, at least, had somehow managed to snatch a little sleep in the air, the cold and the hunger and the drone of the engines eventually becoming as monotonous as a lullaby.
‘Sir?’ she asked, after a couple of wordless minutes. ‘We getting out now, or are we about to head off again?’
