The Air War (40 page)

His class consisted of a score of men and women, some of the local Beetle-kinden – new recruits and the graduates of Taki’s aviation classes – and the others a motley pick of
the Mynan newcomers. He had them jogging about the airfield at a fair pace, making formations, manoeuvring on foot, trying to instil into them a basic understanding of working together. The task
was frustrating and slow, but if there was one thing that Breaker was good for, it was shouting at length.

‘Back into formation!’ he yelled, but two or three of the Mynans had just broken off, running about the field and obviously taking the piss, he reckoned, by miming an attack on some
of the grounded aircraft. ‘Form up!’ he shouted. ‘Everyone, ranks before me! What do you think you’re doing?’

The ‘ranks’ his class formed were split, the Mynans clumped together at one end, and a noticeable gap between them and the Collegiate fliers, who were mostly considerably younger and
somewhat scared of them. Corog Breaker was older and scared of nothing, however, and he stomped up to them, glowering.

‘Why aren’t we in the air,
Master
Breaker,’ demanded one of them – Edmon, he thought. They always used his title, since he insisted on it, but they gave it a
decidedly derisive spin.

‘Because in the air you can’t hear me shouting at you,’ Breaker snapped back.

‘We want to fight Wasps.’ This was Franticze, the stocky Bee-kinden woman and his worst discipline problem. ‘This is a waste of time.’

‘You think we’d let you fight the Wasps, alongside our pilots?’ Breaker demanded. It was his best card, when working with them, and he saw them scowl and shuffle, saw the
sudden
fear
in their eyes that they might be excluded, cast aside. ‘If you can’t work with us, then you’re liabilities, and no Stormreaders for you,’ he informed them
sharply.

‘Flying in combat, it is not like this,’ Edmon said quietly, with an almost guilty look at the Collegiate pilots, their youth and uncertainty.

‘Well, in the future it will be,’ Breaker told him. ‘Discipline in the air, just like discipline on the ground. Armies are built on it. Ask the Ant-kinden.’

‘I never saw an Ant pilot worth a curse,’ Franticze muttered, but a brief gesture from Edmon silenced her.

‘Try it again. Follow Pendry Goswell here: turn when she turns, keep your distance, show me you can do it,’ Breaker invited, gesturing for a solid Beetle girl, one of
Collegium’s better fliers, to take the lead. As the airmen moved off, he retreated to lean against a grounded orthopter.

‘Don’t say it,’ he growled from the corner of his mouth.

‘They’re right.’ Taki was sitting atop the machine. Her
Esca
had come in an hour before and she was watching the ground crew finish winding the motor. ‘Air
combat’s too fast.’

‘They’re going to end up shooting our people down, or the other way around. They way they fly, nobody knows where they’ll go.’

‘How do you think they got out of Myna . . . ?’ Taki lifted her head abruptly, frowning. ‘Corog . . . ?’

There were some startled cries from the Collegiate students. The Mynans had broken formation and were pounding across the field, shouting at one another. Breaker saw Franticze take to the air, a
flash of her wings dropping her neatly into the Stormreader that she had reserved. The others were grappling their way into other machines, all those that they had chosen for themselves –
against his orders – and fought off all comers for, now painted with the double red darts of Myna.

‘What . . . ?’ Breaker began, but some of the Mynans were already starting up their motors, shouting at the ground crew to get clear, wings folding out and lifting up with the first
motion of the clockwork. ‘Stop that! What do you think you’re . . . ?’

But then the sound impinged on him, the drone of engines from on high. He turned to Taki, but she was already across the field and scrambling into the seat of her
Esca Magni
.

With a deep buzz of wings and fire, fixed-wing fliers began to pass overhead, a flight of a half-dozen immediately above, but there were others elsewhere over the city. From somewhere close by
there was a flash, a boom immediately afterwards, as the ground shook. A moment later smoke was rising.

‘Get my machine ready to take off! Now!’ Breaker shouted. ‘Get in the air!’ He waved madly to the students, relieved to see that half of them at least were already
following the Mynans’ lead, orders or not.

The
Esca Magni
leapt into the air, Taki bringing the machine off the ground lopsidedly in her haste, desperate to gain the air before . . .

Myna all over again
. She registered the explosion without really seeing or hearing it, some consensus of the senses simply informing her.
Where was that? That was the field over Luker
Street ways.
Of course the Empire would try for the same targets: strip Collegium of its air defences: destroy the Beetle orthopters on the ground, and who could defy them? And all the while
the question kept hammering away in the back of her mind:
Where did the piss-cursed bastards
come
from?
How had the Empire infiltrated a force of fliers within strike of the city, and
nobody knew of it?

She watched as the enemy machines banked ahead of her, almost following the line of the street below as they sought their target. They were not the familiar Spearflights, she registered. These
were fixed-wing fliers, and almost twice the size of the Imperial orthopters she was used to. Not strange to her, though, because . . .

For a moment, as she rammed the
Esca
into a higher gear to close with them, she was back in Capitas – her one and only visit there – watching Axrad die.

Farsphex, the name came to her. The new machines that Axrad had been so insistent that she saw. So what did she recall about the Farsphex?

She recalled that it wasn’t a fixed-wing at all.

She saw it then, as she raced in towards them, eating up the sky between her and the enemy. A pair of Stormreaders was coming in from her left quarter with the same intention – some
training patrol returning to the city to find it attacked in their absence. They had the right line of approach, diving from on high, practically out of the sun, but the Imperials saw them
nonetheless, their close formation breaking apart into a scatter of separate machines, and abruptly those rigid wings were kicked into a blur, instantly gaining that essential agility in the air
that a fixed-wing flier could never aspire to.

Taki picked her target, taking a course that would bring her between the fleeing Farsphex and its comrades, separating it out in preparation for a quick kill. She tried a rapid look left and
right, to see how her allies were disposed, catching a glimpse of a scatter of ascending machines from the airfield she had just quit:
The Mynans defending the field, letting the others
launch.
She saw more enemy, too. She reckoned two flights of probably more than half a dozen, and the smoke from the far side of the city told of a third at least.

Then she was yanking the stick over to the right, registering the glitter of rotary bolts sleeting past her, turning the
Esca
almost on a wingtip. The Farsphex she had gone after had
simply run for it – no attempt to double back or engage – but two of its comrades were right on top of her. They had underestimated how nimble her little machine was, and for a moment
the three of them shared an uncomfortably small patch of sky as she bolted back between them. Then she had negotiated another turn, feeling every stay and bolt of the
Esca
thrum with it, and
she was behind them, opening up with her rotaries, scoring a few desultory hits as her target – the leftmost – slid sideways in the air out of her sights. The other Wasp craft lifted
away, seeking height, but Taki knew she had time to pin its friend down before it could come back for her—

Except that its
other
friend, the one she had originally marked, was already returning to the fray, its line on her imperfect but enough to put her off her attack, the flashing hail of
its bolts forcing her to abandon her own assault and pull away. Craning over her shoulder, peering past the sleek flank of her machine, she saw the three of them regroup into formation, not coming
after her but seeking out their ground targets.

She swore. It was a display of coordination such as she had never seen, not in Solarno nor here, certainly not amongst Imperial pilots. She was struck painfully by the way they handled their
machines: not superlative skill but a purely workmanlike ability, such as any Apt artisan or footsoldier could have learned, save that they worked
together
so well that Corog Breaker would
weep to see it.

Taki cut a wide arc over the city, trying to take stock of the fluid situation. The field she had lifted off from was unbombed, and she saw that the Mynans – their red-painted Stormreaders
identifiable even at this distance – were sallying out over the city. Some of the Collegiate machines were still circling, waiting to stave off the next bombing run, whilst others were
heading across the rooftops, not looking to engage but finding other vulnerable points to defend. Somebody had slapped some sense of tactics into them: someone equipped with a heliograph and a good
grasp of the flash-codes had disseminated some useful orders.

Taki threw the
Esca
across the city. She had lost the trio that had been sparring with her, but she saw another flight moving over Collegium’s centre, and for a moment she feared
that they were going to drop their explosive cargo over the domes and spires of the Amphiophos. A moment’s reconsideration showed her that they were moving in on one of the other fields
– their targets purely practical, with no thought for symbolism.
Not yet.
Six against one, but she gave the
Esca
its head, the fastest thing in the skies as far as she was
concerned, climbing as she approached them so that she could make a perfect dive on them. They would see her too late, and probably the one she was stooping on would never see her at all. Except
they did – they all did.

Just like before, they were scattering. Her target kept its wings fixed and used all the speed it had, not quite outpacing her even then, but she was only able to clip it a few times before its
comrades were on her, transformed from swift fixed-wings to dancing orthopters in a moment. For a moment she seemed to be surrounded by their shot as she dodged and sidestepped in the sky, five of
them fighting for the privilege of bringing her down, and surely they would touch wingtips at any moment, slap each other out of the sky in their eagerness.

She was worried now. She had not felt like this since . . . She had never felt like this before, not while in the seat of a good orthopter. She lived for flight. Even facing down Axrad over
Solarno, she had not felt like this. This was all wrong: enemy fliers who came from nowhere, flying with such coordination. Breaker had been right about what would win an aerial war, but neither
had guessed that the Empire had been so far ahead of them.

She bared her teeth.
I am better than all of you!
The
Esca
could do things that even the Stormreaders could not, let alone these big Farsphex machines. If she fought the controls
with sufficient dogged determination and contrived to ignore the insistent demands of aeronautics for just a moment, backing her wings so that their joints squealed, she could even fly
backwards.

It was an innovative theory, at the speed she was going, but she felt only confidence as she rammed the stick backwards and disengaged the wing gearing for a second – the vanes beating at
ten times the usual speed, for a few crazed seconds, as their gears meshed with nothing – before trying to back them.

The manoeuvre was a qualified success. She dropped like a stone for a moment, seemingly having no control whatsoever, and the Farsphex pack must have assumed that she had been hit, abandoning
her immediately to go in pursuit of their next target. A moment later she had her wings working – forwards still and not backwards at all, and almost went through someone’s roof as she
struggled to regain the sky, coming up behind them and catching the trailing Farsphex with a solid handful of bolts that at least made it judder in the air.

Then she was not alone. Left and right there were Storm-readers with red-painted wings. They attacked as individuals, and she joined them by instinct, not even thinking it through. That saved
them, she decided later. The air discipline of the Wasps was such that their flight would have outmatched an attack by a rigid formation, but Taki and her flanking allies each had different ideas
as to what they were going to do, three entirely uncoordinated strikes by skilled pilots in top-class fighting orthopters.

They still failed to bring one down. The Farsphex were away again, splitting up and fixing their wings for extra speed if they were pursued. They refused to engage or to fight the aerial duels
that Taki had been dreaming of ever since Solarno. Those not pursued were already wheeling back to come to the aid of their comrades. Taki could almost taste the frustration of the Mynans as they
did everything they could to latch onto their enemy, only to be driven off again and again.

Then the Farsphex flight was abruptly coming together – all of them, flocking from every quarter of the city to rise in a dark column of machines, massing over the very centre of
Collegium.

To strike where?
But there was nothing in their disposition that hinted at their target. Taki skated her
Esca
across the face of their rising formation, pulling her orthopter round
in as tight a turn as she could, because they were about to break and she wanted them in front of her and not behind. In mid-wheel she did her best to locate the other Collegiate fliers, flashing a
quick signal for
Form on me!
and hoping that somebody would see it. She had company even before she had finished her turn, a full half-dozen Stormreaders converging on her, cutting a wider
arc in the air so as to match her when she drove back at the Imperials. She noted four Mynans – Edmon and three others she couldn’t name. Keeping pace were two of Collegium’s own,
and she knew them, from the way they flew, as the Goswell girl and the Fly-kinden, Haldri. It hardly counted as overwhelming odds, but the other local machines were scattered all about the sky,
some hanging back to defend the airfields still, others just adrift over the city, losing the thread of the fight, lost over their own home.