Axrad broke away from the spiral, casting his flier over the city in a long, broad arc that gave Taki plenty of time to see that he had begun the fight.
Honour amongst Wasps, whatever next? She threw the nimbler Esca away from him, flitting back above the airfield, noticing the ponderous bulk of the Cleaver at last get airborne.
Good, she thought. Now I fight. She thumbed the lever that uncovered the rotating piercer and then danced across the sky, looking for Axrad.
He was above her already, swinging in from the sun, just as a good pilot should. She knew that he would do so and the Esca danced aside from the glittering lance of his repeating ballistae, and then ascended straight up without warning, as poised in flight as any insect, so that Axrad swept right past her, pulling furiously out of his dive even as he did. She put the Esca through three turns, spinning in the air, and shot at him, the piercer clunking over and over, sending its long bolts past his cockpit. But he was better than that, for he dropped his orthopter almost to street level, so that she had to stop shooting for fear of killing some innocent citizen. He then fell out of sight altogether, hidden momentarily by the roofs of Solarno, and no doubt terrifying anyone who happened to be passing beneath.
Taki soared overhead, searching for him, and without warning his flier flurried up out of the city, repeater firing as fast as it could reload itself. A bolt tore a narrow hole in her wing before she rolled the Esca out of the way, and then they were chasing over the rooftops, him directly behind her, and Taki always keeping out of the line of his ballistae.
She then saw that they did not have the sky to themselves. There were at least a dozen other vessels, of differing loyalties, flying above Solarno in this dawning light. Dragon-fighting! The phrase had reached Solarno from the people of Princep Exilla, who enacted the same kind of duels astride their insect mounts, but it was among the pilots of Solarno that the practice had found its true home.
And amongst the Wasps, too, because Axrad was proving very, very good.
In a moment the city was gone from beneath them, and Taki was skittering across the dawn-reddened expanse of the Exalsee. Can’t get too far from Che, she realized, and threw in one of her special tricks. It would normally be impossible in anything other than a heliopter, except that of course the Esca Volenti was special, endowed as it was with its little beating halteres that gave it more control and balance than any other man-made thing around that inland sea. With a single flip of her wings the Esca was simply facing the other way, for a moment speeding impossibly backwards, away from the city, until the wings wrestled the orthopter to a momentarily stuttering halt and then plunged, back towards Axrad.
She held down the trigger, watching the piercer bolts flash towards him, striking sparks wherever they struck. His orthopter faltered in the air and seemed to drop, and then she had passed over it, and a craning look backwards showed her that he was gaining height again, holed but not damaged, swinging in behind her doggedly.
She was enjoying herself now. Her city was being invaded, and her friends were fleeing it and needed her help and guidance, but it had been a long time since anyone had given her a run as good as this.
Then Axrad was soaring away, deliberately breaking off his pursuit, and she was instantly looking about her, towards all quarters of the sky.
There they were: two more Wasp orthopters angling in, lining up on her. Axrad had given her the only warning that he could, and she now turned to aim at them, flying right in their faces with her rotary piercer blazing, firepowder spitting the bolts at them far faster than any ballista’s tensioned string.
These were not Axrad, however, just Wasp pilots with basic training and no great skill. One of them dropped almost instantly, so swiftly that she must have struck straight through the cockpit and killed the pilot. The other swung wide of her, but she turned within his turn and her rotary raked the underside of his craft, scoring several hits but nothing that hampered him.
The Wasp orthopter rocked again, as another craft flashed past before them, causing both Taki and the Wasp pilot to haul their fliers out of the way. It was a big, armoured fixed-wing, and Taki knew it at once for Scobraan’s resilient ship, the Mayfly Prolonged. She dropped aside and saw the Wasp pilot take the bait, pointing on the apparently ponderous ship and shooting. A few of the bolts stuck, but most simply rattled from the Mayfly’s armour, and the Wasp was getting so close, so very close. Taki herself would never have fallen for it, but then she was already wise to the tricks Scobraan kept concealed within the Mayfly’s plated hull.
It was over before she knew it, the Wasp orthopter ripping into fragments without warning, as Scobraan’s incendiary struck it and exploded, and for a hundred yards the blazing wreck continued on its course before losing its integrity and dropping from the sky.
Then the Mayfly Prolonged shook and shuddered, and Taki saw a line of holes being punched in its wing as Axrad dived on it from above. Scobraan threw the fixed-wing in a straight dash across the rooftops, trying to use his engine’s greater power to offset the nimbler orthopter, and Taki put the Esca pointedly behind Axrad, not shooting, but inviting attention. He broke off his chase of the Mayfly and made a surprisingly tight turn, so that they were for a moment heading straight at one another.
Perhaps he thought that she would be the first to flinch, but they shot at the same time, repeating ballista against rotary piercer, bolts flashing swiftly between them.
There were very few Fly-kinden amongst the fighting pilots, as the martial mindset did not sit well with their race. Those there were, though, were very good indeed. They were lighter than other pilots, so they could fly defter machines. Their reflexes were second to none.
A bolt ripped into the Esca’s hull, ripping apart the canvas and narrowly missing the motor beyond. Another gashed the right wing, and a third shuddered to a halt somewhere amid the folded landing legs. She saw the impact of her piercer bolt even before the ensuing flash of flames, and knew that she had landed a successful strike in Axrad’s engine. Only then did she dart aside, pulling the Esca round in a steep turn to come back and check what she had done.
She spotted Axrad’s machine by the smoke, as she came back to it, saw it falter in the air, and held off her attack. Before she had flown past, she spotted the man as he climbed out of his cockpit and jumped, wings flaring to catch him, and she found that she was glad he had survived.
Another time, she told herself, and went to look for Che and Nero in the Cleaver.
They found land at Porta Mavralis, the sole outpost of the Spiderlands situated on the shores of the Exalsee. Here Taki called on favours and raised credit in the name of the Destiavel, and obtained barrels of mineral oil for the Cleaver and a winding engine that the Cleaver could carry to retension the Esca Volenti’s clockwork engine.
‘We must fly to your home, you and I,’ Taki explained to them. ‘We have a common cause now.’
‘Ain’t you worried about what’s going on back home?’ Nero asked her.
‘I shall return to Solarno, but first I want to see your war. I want to understand what the Wasps are fighting. And perhaps I want to find help for us.’
While she was waiting for her fuel, the battered bulk of Scobraan’s Mayfly Prolonged dragged itself into port, listing dangerously. The burly Solarnese had only bad news: names of the pilots killed or fled, the well-known buildings burnt, the imperial flag of black and gold unfurled over the houses of the great and the good.