Scain seemed to have forgotten that she was there. He started from his reverie, and reached out to unlock her chain, stretching a long, thin arm into her compartment to free her. ‘Assemble outside with the others,’ he told her. ‘Someone wants to meet us.’
She could not wait to get out of the machine’s interior, which seemed to hold far too many memories just then. If the travelling had been dull, their brief time over Collegium had been all too bloody interesting. People had been shooting at them. It had been frustrating too — getting the reticule on target, ready to drop her next package, and then Scain would go chasing off across the sky while piercer bolts sang and danced in the air around them. It was a wonder that anyone could hit anything at all. She understood, in theory, that some manner of airborne resistance might have been predicted, and that the Beetle-kinden weren’t just going to stand around gaping up with their mouths open but, until the Farsphex had broken formation to evade the incoming enemy, she had not quite made the logical connection.
She had been terrified then. In that moment she had wanted more than anything to be back on the factory line gossiping with Kiin, or back with her family, anything.
But her training had smoothed over that, and soon she had been snatching her opportunities, lining the reticule up faster than she had ever done in practice, getting the bombs away during the brief moments of level flight that Scain allowed her. After that had come the unexpected: she had found within herself what she had always thought the Wasp soldiers must feel all the time: hate, exhilaration, driving determination to win. And if winning meant killing the enemy and destroying their cities, well, then that was war. This fierce little fire in her had ignited after she realized that the enemy, after all, were trying to kill her. The understanding had seemed to remove some blindfold that had been before her eyes every day until that moment.
Now she went over and joined Gizmer, and a few other early escapees. They made a sloppy, weary job of parade-ground order, but were too tired to care. The Wasps were coming out, too, all of them looking as ragged as Scain. Then they were straightening up, every man of them, because they had visitors.
Pingge knew the man in the lead at once now: the bearded, slightly unkempt figure of Colonel Varsec was unmistakable. He was the father of Imperial war aviation, she knew, which made everyone assembled there his children. Behind him came an older officer, another colonel of Engineers, grey-haired and solid and scorched red by a fiercer sun than Capitas normally saw.
Varsec was casting an eye over the untidy clutter of flying machines, and Pingge realized he was counting. At the last a delighted smile spread over his face.
‘All back,’ he said, just loud enough for Pingge to catch. ‘Captain Aarmon?’
‘Here, sir.’ The pale, bald flying officer stalked over.
‘You reached Collegium?’
‘The mission went ahead as planned, sir. Some success against the airfields, but more against the factories.’
‘Resistance?’
‘Strong, sir.’
‘But you brought everyone back.’ Varsec was grinning, maybe a little too broadly. ‘They’ll be onto us eventually. As soon as we lose a Farsphex over Collegium they’ll be all over the wreckage. They’re no fools, the Beetle-kinden, but the longer we can baffle them, the better. Angved, look at them. They’ve been all the way to Collegium, and fought when they were there, and brought everyone back without casualties. Nobody’s done it before, nobody! You see what we’ve managed, together?’
The other officer nodded, more soberly.
‘Excuse me, sir, one casualty,’ Aarmon declared flatly.
The weary crews of the Farsphex were still exiting their craft, dragging their feet over to join the ranks. Pingge was suddenly looking around. Where was Kiin? Was she…? But no, there she was, chivvying the last straggling Fly-kinden into place, barely a glance to spare for her old friend Pingge. But, then, who…?
They were a Fly-kinden short, she realized, and she was partway through her frantic process of elimination when two of the Wasps brought out the body.
The woman’s name had been Forra, and Pingge had not known her particularly well, but they had all formed a kind of family, after so long training together. Her uniform was torn and crusted with dried blood, her body small and stiff in the Wasps’ hands. They handled her with care, though, Pingge noted. They bore her from the hold of her vessel as though she was one of their own.
‘Ludon’s flier got raked from below,’ Aarmon reported dispassionately. ‘Cut apart the bomb bay, destroyed the reticule and killed Bombardier Forra.’
Pingge felt a peculiar shiver go through her. That could have been me. That could have been any of us.
Varsec nodded, but Pingge could see that he could not quite make himself care. The success of the project was all to him, just as she had met plenty of factory overseers who only had eyes for quotas and not for working conditions. The real sympathy, the solemn solidarity, came from Aarmon and the other pilots. One of us, they seemed to say.
Malkan’s Folly was built of sterner stuff than the walls of Myna: close-cut stone over a mortar core intended to absorb the shock of artillery, earthen banks to protect the foundations, walls angled to allow shot to glance off it. Every trick of the modern war architect had been deployed to allow an attacking force to break against the fortress, to allow any besiegers to be hammered down by the Folly’s own leadshotters and catapults. None of those architects had envisaged a siege where the enemy were far enough away to remain out of range of any reprisals, and where those same distant siege engines could boom and thunder day and night, regular and precise as a clock, as they lobbed chemicals and explosives at ever-weakening stone.
Within five days the first outer shell of the fortress had cracked and fallen inwards, but the Ants had used the same construction throughout, a honeycomb of small chambers within massive-stoned interlocking walls, and the defenders simply retreated to the next level immediately around the breach, ready at their arrowslits and murder- holes for the direct attack that they were sure would come. The greatshotters did not care but, with marginal adjustments, continued their remorseless pounding.
Around that time, the Sarnesh expeditionary force arrived, later than they might have done because Roder had sent flying saboteurs to destroy the rails that could have rushed a relief force to the fortress’s aid. By that time, the Eighth Army was well and truly entrenched.
Seeing the inroads the greatshotters had made, the Sarnesh lost no time in mounting an assault, with troops from the fortress itself sallying forth to assist. There was a lot of open ground to cover to reach the Imperial lines, however — the same open ground that the fortress had counted on to make any attackers’ lives difficult. The regular artillery that Roder had brought up, his own leadshotters and ballistae, sent down a withering barrage of canister and shot and explosive bolts, whilst ranks of snap-bowmen waited behind earthworks for the Sarnesh to come closer.
All the while, the greatshotters continued their determined work.
The Sarnesh had brought a flight of orthopters, old Collegium designs and the products of the Ants’ own artificers, workmanlike but unimaginative vessels, mostly still equipped with the repeating ballistae of yesterday’s air forces. The Spearflights outnumbered them more than two to one, but the first day of aerial duelling was not won easily nonetheless, the Ant pilots selling each broken machine dearly, taking a toll on the enemy despite the shortcomings of their technology. At the same time the Sarnesh ground forces advanced the long march towards the Imperial lines, rank upon rank of armoured Ant-kinden armed with shield, sword and snapbow, backed by the trundling of tracked automotives.
The traditional Imperial response should have been to send the Light Airborne out en masse, coursing over the marching formations to lash down on them with their stings — tactics that had failed miserably in living memory. Instead, Roder held the bulk of his force in place, taking full advantage of the cover they had built up.
The automotives formed the initial point of their charge, grinding forwards at the pace of a man running. They met the Imperial Sentinels coming the other way. The articulated machines fairly vaulted the Wasp earthworks, rushing the Ant lines with bolts and light artillery bounding from their shells, only pausing with legs braced to loose a leadshotter round that ploughed through the Ant soldiers or punched into the armour of a Sarnesh automotive. Faster and more agile and vastly better armoured, as the battle progressed they hunted down the Sarnesh machines mercilessly, crushing any soldier luckless enough to get in their way.
When the Ants got within snapbow range they mounted their charge, breaking their solid formations into a scattered skirmish line to best avoid the incoming bolts. It was at that moment that they came closest to winning,
