Stenwold blinked at him.
‘He has lived here for more than ten years. He’s a mason,’ Marteus continued, ‘and he wants to fight the Empire more than anyone. Of course, I can understand that. If those sanctimonious turds from Tark were at the gates, well, I’d be first in line to throw them back, as you can imagine.’ He met Stenwold’s eyes readily. ‘Of course, by these lights, you’d have locked me up by that point. A man’s not his kinden, and a man’s not his city-state.’
A delicate span of silence held the room for a few seconds, before Jodry said, quietly and without acrimony, ‘Even for and against: the vote is not carried. Stenwold, I’m sure that you will continue to use all conventional measures to deal with the spies we undoubtedly have, spotting who’s being too nosy, working out how they’re exporting this intelligence of theirs. We have all faith in you. Any other business?’
Nobody had any more to say.
That night, Taki woke abruptly out of a dream in which she was being chased through the streets of Collegium by the Tarkesh halfbreed Taxus and, no matter where she flew, he always appeared ahead of her, as preternaturally knowledgeable as the Imperial pilots.
Waking, she gasped, clutching for the sudden understanding that had shocked her out of sleep. One of the medical orderlies, some Beetle-kinden student volunteer, was hurrying over, and she realized that she most have shouted aloud.
She swung her legs out of bed before the Beetle got to her, but a sudden wave of dizziness prevented her making a quick escape.
‘Back into bed, please, Mistress Taki,’ the young man insisted. ‘Not until Doctor Findwell gives you the nod.’
‘Get off me!’ she snapped. ‘I need to speak to Stenwold.’ She made to kick off and take to the air, but a moment later realized that she really wasn’t ready for that after all, as the world swam and shuddered before her eyes. ‘Get me the War Master,’ she insisted. ‘Or get a message to him. Get me pen and paper, anything. I’ve worked it out. I know how they’re doing it. I know the secret of the Empire’s pilots.’
She was already staggering determinedly away, ready to rouse the whole Assembly if need be. ‘And get me Taxus!’ she shouted over her shoulder. ‘I need to shake his cursed hand!’
They told her that Taxus had not come back from his last flight over the city, that the Wasps had caught and killed him in spite of all his idiosyncrasies. It was in a more sober mood that she finally passed on her revelation to Stenwold Maker.
Twenty-Four
‘Te Pelle? I didn’t know her much,’ Pingge said. ‘That’s two of us dead.’
Kiin nodded. She looked worn out, and had only slept for a handful of hours since her return from the second mission over Collegium. The flight had been a mixed squad, half of them Aarmon’s originals, half from the new trainees, but Kiin reported that all the pilots had worked together with the same effortless coordination as before.
Pingge and Gizmer had stolen away from the main body of the bombardiers, now holing up in a store cupboard for a serious discussion of what had happened. It had taken some persuasion for Gizmer to accept Sergeant Kiin into their counsels. Since her promotion he had kept a suspicious eye on her, as though expecting her to metamorphose into a Wasp at any moment. Still, the fact that she actually had first-hand knowledge of what had happened was enough to twist his arm. Gossip was always better for a little fresh information.
‘The pilot was… Bresner, I think. One of the newer ones.’
They considered this information. Te Pelle had been a somewhat haughty girl, not a factory-line worker but an overseer, and of decent family, who had not taken well to being drafted simply for her artificer’s skills. Still, the woman had been one of them, and that should be enough.
‘Aarmon said something odd,’ Kiin added uncertainly.
‘He actually spoke?’ Pingge asked her. ‘Other than to give an order?’
‘He said she had done well — no, not like that. He said that Bresner had said that te Pelle had done well. Even when they were getting shot up, she got the bombs away, blew up the fuel store, right on the mark.’
‘He said that Bresner said?’ Pingge frowned.
Kiin nodded, wide-eyed. ‘His last message, somehow.’
Gizmer looked from one to the other and grinned, unexpectedly. ‘You surprise me, the pair of you. You hadn’t worked that out?’ He cackled at their expressions. ‘Come on, now, look at our lords and masters, eh? Pride of the Air Corps, only not one of them’s a pilot by training save for our Captain Aarmon. The rest are just Light Airborne or artificers, Consortium men, all sorts. By basic inclination we’re more fit for the job than they are. So didn’t you ever wonder why?’
‘I assumed they’d had some test, some latent gift for it, or.. ’ Pingge scowled at him. ‘So tell us, big mouth.’
‘They have an Art,’ Kiin put in, spoiling Gizmer’s moment.
He nodded grudgingly. ‘Worked it out, then?’
‘I’d thought… I wasn’t sure until you put it that way. They have a mindlink.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Pingge said, straight away.
‘What else then, eh?’ Gizmer pressed.
‘But the Rekef… the generals… Who knows?’ Pingge’s voice had descended to a whisper. Everyone knew that the Wasp-kinden sometimes manifested the same Art that enabled Ants to speak mind to mind, but it was rare. More than that, it was dangerous. Back in the reign of Alvric, First Emperor of the Wasps, there had been troubles, perhaps an attempted coup. The Rekef, then led by the same man who had given the service his name, had flexed its muscles for the first time. Anyone suspected of the mindlink had been hunted down, except for those wretched traitors who had thrown their lot in with the hunters. The Rekef Inlander had chosen its first battlefield: it could not countenance a hidden, unified fifth column within the Empire: the danger to the Emperor’s rule was too great to ignore. Hundreds were arrested, tortured for the names of any others they knew, then strung on the crossed pikes. It had been a forging time in the Empire’s history. A great many traditions had been born.
After that, anyone who developed the Art kept quiet about it, and tried never to use it in case some fellow pariah betrayed them. Yet it continued to manifest itself, that part of the Wasps’ collective soul refusing to be ignored.
‘They all know,’ Gizmer stated. ‘It’s a secret but not a conspiracy. Times change. There’s a book out there that I snuck a look at — top-secret air tactics and everything. Colonel Varsec’s work, all of it. He sets out the Farsphex design in it, but he also sets out the new pilots too. He said they used mindlinked troops to coordinate the taking of Solarno, apparently. So people have been thinking for a while, only it took Varsec to shift the idea over to pilots. No bloody wonder our lot have become the wonders of the air, eh, if they’re all inside each other’s minds. No wonder we get such a ragbag of recruits, too — women and all. They must have mindlinkers scouting every city in the Empire for more of the same.’
‘That’s…’ Pingge shivered. ‘So they could be talking to each other all the time, and we’d never know.’
Gizmer gave her a patronizing look. ‘They’re Wasps, so what does it matter? It’s not as though they’d be running everything by us otherwise, eh?’
The door to the store cupboard was abruptly thrown open, and the three of them jumped guiltily, expecting the stern, pale face of Aarmon. Instead it was just one of the newer Fly recruits.
‘Sergeant, been looking all over for you!’ the girl squeaked. ‘Everyone’s to assemble. New orders come in.’
The three of them exchanged looks.
‘Don’t like the sound of that,’ Gizmer muttered, and then they set off, half-running, half-flying, to join their fellows.
They met in the barracks common room that Gizmer had dubbed ‘the wasteland’ because, aside from formal times such as this, neither Fly-kinden nor Wasps spent any time there. A quick head count suggested that just about everyone was there from both camps. Pingge pushed her way into a mob of other Flies, not wanting to be at the back, nor to end up where she might be picked out by Aarmon, who was standing on a table to look them all
