Again Taxus almost clipped her nose and, though she swore at him, she realized that he somehow thought she would follow him, as though he had signalled her beforehand and she had not noticed, save that he was the slowest heliograph student she had ever seen.
Hold on Then she had it — rejoining the pack was a Farsphex that limped a little in the air, a touch blackened and handling badly. That’s mine. The part of her mind that made such calculations effortlessly told her that its approach was perfect to make it the same bomber that she had lost sight of amidst the smoke. A bloodymindedness came to her, familiar from the old days over Solarno.
You, you bastard, are going down.
She flashed frantically, the brief pattern for My target! over and over, hoping that someone was watching and able to follow her lead. Then she was committing herself to a long, shallow dive towards the wounded craft.
It saw her far too soon, and abruptly its wheeling formation was adjusting to take her into account, along with the various Stormreaders that were trying their luck, as detachments of Wasp pilots began changing course to cover each other, opening the jaws of a trap that would snap down exactly where she was headed, while her target sought safety beyond.
She asked the Esca for all the speed it could give her, unleashing everything the spring had left, exploiting a design flaw and abusing its engine mercilessly, picking up speed as the entire craft whined and screeched all around her. At the same time, a flurry of Stormreader pilots threw themselves against the Farsphex formation from above and to her right, with Edmon at their head, forcing the enemy to regroup in order to ward them off. Taki bared her teeth: the Collegiate orthopter to Edmon’s left had been cut from the air almost instantly, wings freezing to drop it down onto the city. Then she was blurring through the centre of the enemy, too fast for them to catch her, although bolts pattered across the Esca ’s fuselage, and the unhappy buzz of her right wing was abruptly more pronounced, sounding as if something was working its way loose.
The damaged Farsphex turned across the city, and if it had simply flown straight she might have fallen behind, her motor already flagging, but it was turning back towards its allies, for a moment a slave to its own tactics. Taki opened up.
For the third time she nearly killed Taxus, but this time he held himself back from her line of shot, and then the two of them enjoyed a few seconds of filling the sky around the wounded craft with bolts.
She saw their target lurch and shudder, and suddenly there was a thin line of smoke coming from somewhere around the midsection. Then Taxus peeled off abruptly, again plainly assuming she would simply follow him, and putting himself maddeningly in the wrong place because of it.
Because it’s what he’s used to The sensation was like being punched repeatedly in the back. Three — four — five solid strikes into her Esca by the avenging enemy, then her target, though smoking, was getting away From the sun, from nowhere, Franticze fell on it, a dive so steep that it was doubtful whether she could even pull out of it before making yet another hole in the city she was supposed to be defending. Taki had a brief sense of her swift descent, and then the damaged Farsphex was at last beyond any help its comrades could give it, virtually breaking in half in the air, with the rear segment exploding savagely before it could reach the ground.
Then the Esca ’s own engine stuttered, and abruptly she had to focus merely on staying in the air, a task that was increasingly difficult. Taki dragged on the stick again for height, and this time the orthopter could not oblige her, dropping her to street level unexpectedly, so that her left wing clipped some magnate’s roof garden and the far half of it disintegrated. Then the cobbles themselves were coming right at her, and she could only back with what wings she had left, and release the landing gear, and hope.
Stenwold stared around the table a little blearily. Nobody had got much sleep since yesterday’s attack, and the Collegium War Assembly was looking more like exhumed corpses than the great and the good, just then. To his left was Corog Breaker, ready to report on their aviators. He was pushing them too hard, Stenwold knew, but it was hard to tell him that because Corog was pushing himself hardest of all. He looked ten years more than his real age: a man whose job had been teaching fencing to children, now trying to rise to the challenge of coordinating Collegium’s air defence.
Jodry Drillen sat at the table’s far end, out of bed with the dawn after a late night with the paperwork. Although the war dominated, the business of the Assembly was more important than ever. Even with everyone nominally pulling in the same direction the paperwork proliferated. He had at least thought ahead about this meeting, if only for his own comfort. He had dragged most of his household staff along to this close, high-windowed room at the Amphiophos, where they circulated with honeybread and spiced tea.
There was a scattering of other Assemblers there, a piecemeal selection of those who were responsible for the logistics of the war: merchants, clerks, academics. No doubt all the questions of the day would be answerable only by those who had not made it to the meeting. Two of the War Assembly were dead, killed in the bombing, and neither had left adequate notes.
Filling out the table were all three commanders of the Merchant Companies: Marteus the Ant sat pale and still as a statue. Elder Padstock sipped at her tea left-handed, her right still bandaged from the burns she had sustained trying to get people out of the wreckage of their homes. Janos Outwright, a plump, moustached Beetle who had never looked this far ahead when setting himself up as a chief officer, gripped the table just to stop his hands trembling. On Outwright’s left there was a stocky Beetle College Master named Bola Stormall, one of the two to donate a name to the Collegiate orthopter model, and a leading aviation engineer; next to her was a newcomer, a dun-skinned Ant who had arrived with messages from their allies in Sarn.
Stenwold realized that they had all been sitting here staring dully at one another for far too long, each one willing someone else to speak. ‘Corog, tell us about yesterday,’ he managed to intervene.
Breaker grunted. ‘We lost seven orthopters, four pilots. The chutes are lifesavers, literally, given that most of ours have no Art for flying. If the Empire comes tomorrow, then we’re that many craft down. If they leave the same sort of gap then we can repair and replace in order to keep our numbers high — we can have another five or ten maybe, over and above yesterday’s numbers, if we call up the next class of pilots — and we’ve more being trained.’ Untried machines, untried aviators, were the words he did not say.
‘That doesn’t sound too bad,’ Jodry murmured.
‘Because of them and their tactics,’ Corog Breaker spat bitterly. ‘Jodry, they’re not trying to shoot us down. Given the number of armed orthopters up there, it’s nothing more than a slapping war for our pilots so far. The enemy… their priority is keeping themselves alive. They organize in the air, but it’s to defend each other, rallying against any attack so that our people have to break off or else commit suicide. All of our losses have been people caught by surprise or people pushing their luck. The Wasps are prioritizing targets on the ground, and they’re being cursed successful with it, too, but they’re playing very safe against our fliers. It won’t last.’
‘What do you mean?’ Jodry himself probably understood, Stenwold reckoned, but he asked the question so that everyone was clear.
‘They’re on the defensive so far. If they turn that discipline into an attack, they’ll cut a bloody swathe through us. We’ll take more of them than we have so far, for certain, but, if they come three or four days on the trot with the idea of smashing us in the air, they could strip us of every orthopter we’ve got, for a loss of perhaps half as many of their own, maybe less. They’ll do it, too, because if it makes sense to me, it makes sense to them.’
‘Assuming they hold their own lives so cheap,’ Outwright put in, desperately. Nobody could be bothered to answer him.
‘What about Taki?’ Stenwold asked softly.
‘Conscious now,’ Corog said curtly. ‘Possibly concussed. Confined to bed under protest while our engineers patch up her machine.’
‘Ah, well, then,’ Jodry said, with false heartiness. ‘To happier matters: what about our prize? Stormall?’
Bola Stormall started on hearing her name. ‘Still on fire,’ she got out, and took a swallow of tea. ‘Willem had it brought to the workshop, but he’s letting it burn.’
‘A little, ah, wasteful?’ Jodry pressed.
‘We put most of it out, and I’ve got a lot of broken pieces to pick over — but Willem has a pack of artificers and chemists who reckon they can get something out of the rest, so we’ve left it to burn,’ Stormall visibly sagged even as she spoke. ‘We already know their big trick, the fixed-to-mobile-wing business, from that Taki woman. Which, of course, gives them enough range that we’ve still not found their airfield, I understand.’
‘We’re still looking,’ Corog growled. ‘We think they must move it around.’
‘Nobody’s criticizing you, Corog,’ Jodry said, raising his hands placatingly. ‘Next?’
‘My men are still holding Banjacs Gripshod under house arrest, which is starting to get tiresome,’ Janos
