Behind and above him the sleek and massive bulk of the great dirigible Starnest blotted out the sky. She had nowhere near her complement of soldiers, for they were on the ground already or had marched out days ago, but there were enough engineers to man her weapon emplacements: leadshotters and bombards to thunder into the city, and nimble repeating ballistas to take on the Solarnese aircraft.
Axrad himself had been busy these last few days, not through conquering zeal but from professional curiosity. Flanking the nose of his craft were two rotary piercers, the firepowder weapons that the Solarnese pilots preferred, which were more powerful than the mechanically assisted ballistae the Wasp vessels normally sported.
The Fly-kinden Taki would be amongst that crescent of fliers that was even now sweeping over the Exalsee. He hoped he would spot her Esca Volenti. He owed her a final duel.
If she falls, it should be by my hand, and with respect, he thought. If I fall, I would rather it be due to one of her skill. Axrad had no room in his own head for the mantra of racial superiority that drove the Empire to conquest. He was one of that strange new breed combining soldier and artificer and aviator, a fighting pilot. Skill in the air was the sole qualification for respect in his world, and he did not care what colour of skin or physical frame came with it.
They were all in the air now, clawing for height or already dropping from the lifting blimps. The Imperial Airforce, the daring innovation that had taken Solarno, was about to defend it against all comers.
The free pilots came barrelling in from over the Exalsee with engines ablaze. The battle for the skies of Solarno had begun.
Below them the battle for the streets, the houses, the city proper, would have to be left to the amateur forces of the resistance, the Path of Jade, Odyssa and her Scorpion-kinden mercenaries. They and the Wasp heavy infantry would now grind through Solarno, skirmish after skirmish, until either the spirit went out of the locals or the Imperials cut their losses.
If the Empire gained control of the sky then the rebellion would be over before it began. Just as with the invasion, the Wasp airborne would then be able to descend anywhere across the city with sword and sting, picking the resistance off bit by bit, stopping the Solarnese from unifying. It was Taki’s job to contest the skies with them.
An airborne Empire. She saw now what she should have seen before: how it was that the Wasps had grown so powerful. They had all the fighting spirit of the Solarnese or the Ant-kinden, but they had the air as well, in which to give full rein to it. If only we Flies were fighters by nature, we’d be masters of the world.
Ahead she saw the long grey bulk of the Starnest’s airbag as the great vessel lifted higher. They had all agreed that it must be their target, beyond all else. They even had a plan, or at least some cobbled-together flimsy sort of thing that passed for one. What with the natural enemies that Taki had under her command, it was the best that they could manage.
She was approaching it fast, but it just kept growing. She had not appreciated the sheer scale of the vessel as it rose sluggishly into the air. The smaller carriers were already well above it, and she hauled back on the stick to take the Esca Volenti up towards them, meanwhile starting the motor of her rotary. In order to down the Starnest, they would have to cut through the enemy flying machines, and that was what she and the nimbler of the pilots would now be doing.
The air shuddered, a thunder felt in the sudden tremor of her controls before she actually heard it, and the weapons of the Starnest opened up on them. She saw gouts of powder-smoke from the leadshotters and, to her left, one of the Creev’s mercenary pilots was smashed to splinters, going without transition from a darting heliopter to a… a nothing, within a mere second. It was a lucky strike for the Wasps, since the leadshotters had never been meant as weapons against fliers. There were rapid-firing ballistas there, too, swivel-mounted to cover all angles, and, although they were still clumsy hammers to bring to bear on a swift flyer, Taki knew there would be losses to them also before this was out.
She was now coursing up across the grey vastness of the Starnest’s flank, while above her were Wasp flying machines dropping from their carriers and falling towards the Solarnese vessels.
Right.
Her first target had not even seen her, simply an unwary pilot who still thought he was the predator and not the prey. Just as the Wasp jockeyed his orthopter into position for a shot at one of her colleagues, Taki let her rotary spin and simply ripped the underside of his vessel out from under him. He lurched in the air, dropping sideways with engines still running, so that she realized that one of her shots must have reached the pilot himself. Beneath the whir of her own engines and the concussive bang of the rotating piercer his descent towards the city was silent.
All around, her attacking fleet of fliers had split off to tackle the Wasps in individual duel. In the moment’s grace before she found her next target, Taki saw the iron-clad bulk of the Creev’s Nameless Warrior clip one of the Wasp fliers in passing, suffering barely a shudder but sending the smaller enemy ship spinning. Meanwhile Niamedh’s Executrix lanced through a scatter of circling ships with rotaries blazing.
There were men in the air as well, for the Wasps had sent up some of the light airborne to support their airships. That was a tactical mistake, Taki knew. Men and machines did not go well against each other, pitching small and agile targets against swift hulls that were proof against their little weapons. She was glad of it: the more soldiers despatched impotently into the sky left fewer that could do real damage on the ground.
She flung the Esca straight through a crowd of them, scattering Wasp soldiers left and right, but then a shadow swept over her and, craning back she spotted a gap, a hole in their formation that the others were still reeling away from. Just then a second shape passed her, and she recognized the sleek lines of a hunting dragonfly, a creature that was born to take live prey in the air. A red and gold banner fluttered alongside the arrow-straight length of its tail, and she caught a glimpse of its rider, one of Drevane Sae’s people, turning back to loose an arrow even as the beast clutched a victim to itself.
Taki sent the Esca Volenti across the sky, leaving the plume of a failing Wasp flier to fall behind her. It was as if her mind was split in two. One part continued to grip the controls and sent her darting through the cluttered skies, hunting targets, striking at Wasp pilots and evading their reprisals, and all the time trying to find a clear path towards the Starnest in order to bring the giant dirigible down. But there was another part of her that had gone numb, for she had never seen aerial war conducted on this scale. It seemed unthinkable.
Te Frenna’s elegant Gadaway lay shredded across a forty-foot extent of the city, unrecognizable now, the fate of its pilot unknown. A downed Wasp craft had rammed the 500-year-old Celenza gallery, which was now in flames, only one of a dozen fires across the city. The fighters on the ground were in constant danger from a sporadic rain of broken machines, dead men and crippled insects. This was a horror surely never meant to be inflicted on her poor home.
The Esca turned on her wingtip, and she found another Wasp vessel cutting through the air before her. Its twinned repeating ballistas were already loosing, and she saw a Solarnese fixed-wing abruptly shudder in the air as the bolts struck. It was Scobraan’s heavy Mayfly Prolonged and Taki realized that her friend was making his own run at the Starnest now, either tired of waiting or spotting some chance she had overlooked. She unleashed the fury of her rotary on the Wasp, seeing her enemy falter, then dive and dart away to try and escape her, abandoning its prey. She swung into line behind it, matching swoop for swoop, unhurried and cool-headed, whilst her stomach sank in worry over the fate of Scobraan as he dived in towards the gigantic airship.