that there might be perhaps six hundred, a sizeable force indeed, almost three times that of the Wasp Light Airborne currently ranged against them. The Nemean tactics were plain: they were fanning out in a loose crescent already, obviously intending to sweep away anything that stood in their path before pillaging the camp, destroying, killing and stealing whatever presented itself.
The camp itself was not overly ready to oblige them. The Wasps had assembled a travelling fort, the sort of ready-made fortifications that had served the Second Army so well on its march to Collegium during the war. The walls that the soldiers had fitted together were angled, barbed with stakes, defendable by a fraction of the soldiers available, and easily large enough to encompass the drilling and pumping engines. Angved had discussed the best means of defence with the captain in charge of the Airborne, however, and it had been agreed that cringing behind walls was not the Imperial way.
Two-thirds of their Airborne were now standing in loose ranks between the camp and the Scorpions, and Angved knew that they would look like a pitiful force to the eyes of the locals, even those who had fought alongside Wasps at Khanaphes. The Scorpion force was already breaking up into individual war bands, he noticed, the main thrust gaining speed as it rushed for the camp’s defenders, but substantial numbers breaking off left and right, looking to encircle their enemy and fall on them from all sides. Angved noted a remarkable amount of cavalry there – or rather insectry, as the proper term went, for horses were unknown in the Nem. Given his choice of animals, a scorpion would never have been his chosen mount – or any beast that might impale the back of his head if he had to rein it in suddenly. However, the Many of Nem had long ago designed a sort of offset saddle to put them out of harm’s way, and now a full score of these creatures were scuttling along on either flank, not much faster than a running man, but considerably more dangerous.
‘They make quite a show, don’t they,’ Varsec remarked mildly. Angved glanced down to see that he had sketched a bristling dark stain across the desertscape that he had already pencilled out: no details but just a riot of aggressive motion worked into the simple lines of the drawing.
‘A show is all they’ll make,’ Angved declared.
‘I see more than a few crossbows.’
The engineer shrugged. ‘They have no idea, none at all.’
Abruptly, in almost perfect unison, the Wasp soldiers out beyond the walls were airborne. No doubt a few crossbow quarrels were even now winging their way, but the Scorpion-kinden had no experience of hitting targets in the air, and it was unlikely that any of them would be learning any useful lessons here for the future. The Imperial force split off into four groups, as the drill required. Two detachments flew left and right, in order to threaten the Scorpions’ own flank, and the balance ended up in two clusters behind the charging mass of the Many. A good two- thirds of the Scorpions ignored them and continued on towards the walls, while the balance turned to face their relocated enemy.
‘I notice you haven’t sketched that.’ Angved pointed out the single most dramatic feature of their surroundings. To the west stood a great ruin, half sand-swallowed, its maze of walls and the shells of its buildings worn down by the wind, buried in some places and stark like unearthed bones in others, the whole giving the impression of a nest of broken skulls. It meant they had come close enough to the desert’s heart to see one of the cities of the Inner Nem.
‘It’s worth a picture all its own.’ Varsec put down his drawing board with care and took up a snapbow. All around them, those of the Airborne left in the compound were already sighting. Angved himself, as commanding officer, had decided it was beneath his dignity to actually do any of the killing today. And besides, he was not much of a shot.
Not that long ago the Empire had introduced the Scorpions to their future, gifting them with leadshotters and crossbows and rousing them against their ancient enemies, the Khanaphir. The joke was that the future the Scorpions had then reached out for was already in the Wasps’ past. There was not an Imperial soldier on the field or behind the walls who had not been training for the best part of a year with a snapbow, and most of them had been given plenty of chance to practise during the Empress’s campaigns against the various pretender governors.
Angved had no love for the Scorpions – in fact he had a considerable amount of dislike for them – but even he flinched a little when the first volley of snapbow shot struck home and slapped the Scorpion charge to a standstill by killing them three-deep all the way across their front line. At the same time, the other detachments also began loosing their weapons, sergeants shouting out the orders so that their weapons discharged all at once, not as individual pinpricks but a collective hammerblow.
‘At will,’ bawled the lieutenant commanding the defence, and the Wasp snapbowmen picked their targets, even as the mass of Scorpions seethed and milled. Varsec raised his own weapon, aiming along the length of the barrel with an artificer’s exacting care before loosing a shot, then calmly reloading and recharging.
Out beyond the wall, the Scorpion flanks had caved in, leaving a scatter of dead men and animals. Angved read the patterns in the corpses as though he was a seer, noting where the insectry had tried to charge the newly landed Wasps, only to have their targets simply take to the air again, shooting all the while. The two detachments at the rear had been exacting a similar toll, preventing the Many from retreating to regroup. In all honesty we could wipe them out to a man, right now, and I’m being too clever by half, he told himself, but the plan was laid, and he was going to have his curiosity assuaged whether he liked it or not.
One of the Wasp detachments waited until the Scorpions pulled together some semblance of unity, and then they broke away, taking wing and making a wide circle until they had landed within the walls of the encampment. Abruptly the deadly box had been compromised. The Scorpions now had somewhere to go, away from the lethal needles of the snapbow darts.
They were reluctant to take it, though, and Angved was not surprised. Once they were on the move the survivors of the Many repeatedly tried to break north and south, but the Wasps moved faster, always setting down in front of them and killing a few more – herding the Scorpions ever west.
To the west lay ruin, the half-hidden carcass of a dead city, and Angved wanted to see what would happen when the savages were finally forced to confront their fears.
He had to wait for the captain’s report, for the ruins were some distance away, and by then there was so much dust raised that his glass could not penetrate it. Still, it was not quite dusk when the officer finally presented himself, saluting smartly, as though Angved had not been working as a menial in a factory only tendays before, when Varsec was a prisoner in a cell.
They received the report on the wall, looking out at the ruins that were now slowly sinking into twilight as though the desert itself was swallowing them up.
‘What happened when the Scorpions reached there?’ Angved asked.
‘Not that many of them did, sir. A surprising amount tried to turn and fight, again and again. They were desperate to avoid being driven there. I’d estimate no more than forty or fifty of them reached the first stones.’
‘And then?’
The captain’s expression was that of a man without much imagination being faced with something that troubled him nonetheless. ‘Screaming, sir.’
Angved frowned, and Varsec murmured, ‘Does that pass for a report in the army, these days?’
‘I apologize, sir. It was difficult to make out what happened, and those of my men I’ve questioned tell contradictory stories. The Scorpions scattered amongst the buildings, losing all cohesion, as if each was looking for a different place to hide. Then we heard them start screaming, just some of them, then others. None of them for very long. I did my best to keep some in sight, but amongst the ruins it was difficult. Many of the structures there seem relatively intact, some almost completely so, and I thought I saw…’ There was a pause, signifying a soldier trying to couch his experience in permitted language. ‘Movement, sir. Terribly swift movement between buildings. Something large and fast. Others have reported the same.. .’ His tone indicated that there was more, but that it would require prompting.
‘Speak, Captain,’ Angved duly ordered.
‘One squad hasn’t returned, sir. Sergeant Stasric and his people didn’t come back with us.’
‘You passed on my orders for nobody to enter the ruins?’ Angved asked sternly.
‘I did, sir, word for word.’
‘What’s this Stasric like, would you say?’
A diplomatic pause. ‘He is a man who seizes opportunities as they come, sir. He has been reprimanded in the
