‘No, I was given the set-up, the artillery . . .’ Oski bit his lip, trying to remember exactly what he had been told, because he had been so angry with the whole pointless venture that he hadn’t exactly been taking notes. ‘Listen, there must be a captain, or some army major, or . . . Ah, piss on it.’ Besides, he was well and truly awake now and out of bed, so he might as well blow things up.
‘Let’s shoot at them. What’s the range?’ He could see better by moonlight than any of them, and he had a better head for figures too. And a better flier. Makes you wonder how the Wasps ever got this far, really. The Tseni had come in a host of little metal craft, swift and low to the water. Bergild’s pilots had reported that they had repeating ballistae mounted on them, of some superior design that had actually given the aviators some tough moments when they tried to overfly them too low to the water. Nothing that would trouble the ludicrously overstated defences here, though. Oski hopped up onto the engine next to him and saw several hundred very bored Wasps – some sleeping, others keeping the watch. A couple of Sentinels had pulled up right at the water’s edge, as though about to embark on a trip around the bay. All those engines, the leadshotters and the ballistae and these new toys he’d lifted from the Collegiates were dutifully pointing out into the great emptiness of the sea, across which the Tseni ships were skimming as though happy to oblige his need for some target practice.
‘Right, get this bastard’s engine primed,’ he instructed. The device he was standing on was something like a ballista, with an explosive bolt in the breech, but there was no string, no arms, and the bolt was all metal. Oski’s people had blown up two of these before they had worked out the principles, and it was a diabolical little toy indeed that the Beetles had come up with. The charge of the lightning batteries in the base created some sort of magnetic differential down the length of the engine, which resulted in that metal bolt being thrown . . . basically as far as you like.
‘Primed and ready, sir,’ the sergeant said. ‘Only you’d better—’
‘Right.’ Oski let his wings lift him off the machine, to avoid one of his own feet being sent hurtling at the Tseni fleet at a thousand miles an hour.
There was a curious shiver through the air and the bolt was gone, faster than the eye could follow it. His aim was dead on: one of the Tseni ships instantly blossomed with flame, the explosion seeming to come almost in the instant the engine loosed. Oski grinned broadly and declared, “Hooray for Collegiate engineering,” and then someone screamed.
He swore and was airborne in a moment, cornering over the barricades and the lines of soldiers, hearing a growing murmur in response as men began to wake up. ‘Report!’ he shouted out. ‘Someone report!’
‘Sir!’ A cry from the waterside, on one of the piers. ‘Here, sir!’ And Oski skimmed over the heads of the soldiers, swinging wide around a Sentinel’s great segmented bulk to touch down on the timber of the wharves.
‘Report!’ he demanded again, seeing a cluster of Wasps staring down at the water.
‘Sir, it’s the lieutenant, he’s . . .’ said one, before running out of words, so that another had to fill in, ‘He’s gone, sir.’
‘Do you call that a pissing report?’ Oski shouted.
‘He fell in,’ the first soldier started, but the other spoke over him, ‘He was grabbed, sir – something in the water got him.’
Oski stared at him. The water – and out here on the pier there was a great deal of it on three sides – was very dark, slapping and slopping at the pylons.
A moment later, fighting broke out on one of the neighbouring wharves. He could not see clearly what was going on, just soldiers kicking into the air, or falling back towards the land, because – he could not see because what, just something moving there that his eyes refused to find a name for. He saw stingshot flash and crackle, caught a glimpse of something shelled, many-legged.
‘What . . .?’ he got out, and a man next to him went down, shrieking. A pincer as large as Oski’s whole body had clamped the luckless soldier’s leg, the bone already shattered in its iron grip. As Oski watched, a crab the size of a small automotive began hauling itself up on to the pier, the wood creaking and protesting under its weight.
In a heartbeat he was in the air, seeing stingshot – even snapbow bolts – scatter off the thing’s carapace. And, the next thing he knew, the entire wharf front was heaving, the creatures climbing sideways from the water everywhere, snapping mindlessly at anyone luckless enough to be near. Even as he tried to phrase an appropriate military response, some part of Oski’s mind was shouting, What the pits are they doing? As though there was some naturalist’s explanation, some freak migration that could rationalize what he was seeing.
‘Back, back from the water! Form a shooting line where you can do some good, you morons!’ The order was unnecessary. The entire waterline had come alive, bristling with legs and pincers and stalked eyes as a wave of bafflingly enraged sealife boiled from the surf with a weirdly unhurried inevitability. Some of the creatures were picked apart by bolts from those soldiers already safe behind the barricades, and Oski saw a pair of them just explode into wet shards as one of the leadshotter crews woke up and began doing their job. Vrakir! Did he bring this on? Is this what he saw? How could he . . .?
The Sentinel at the waterfront tilted itself, trying to lower its leadshotter enough to do any good, whilst its rotary piercers began chewing up the emerging crustaceans, the firepowder-charged missiles rapidly disassembling the animals into their component pieces. Then the vehicle was tilting further, at an unhealthy angle, and Oski let his wings speed him over, thinking perhaps that a particularly large beast had somehow got underneath the automotive’s legs.
Even as he closed in, he saw the entire vehicle jerk forwards by a man’s length, an impossible sight as though there was some great magnet beneath it that had just yanked it across the stone of the wharves, halfway onto one of the piers. The Sentinel’s legs were scrabbling, digging in for purchase, and yet it was shuddering closer to the sea even as Oski watched.
He spotted them then, the tentacles that had snared it, four or five thick rubbery cables snaking across the automotive’s armoured shell. A ripple of muscular contraction shivered through them, and the Sentinel lurched again, its front half hanging over the water, legs waving frantically, uselessly.
Before Oski’s eyes, it wavered, caught on the fulcrum of its body, and then whatever unthinkable monster had hold of it just pulled again, as effortlessly irresistible as an earthquake, and the vehicle was gone into the sea.
He swung back towards the Imperial lines, where concerted snapbow volleys were flaying away the slow advance of the sea creatures. Order was being restored, and he was only hoping that the owner of the tentacles wasn’t up to the brief walk that separated his new position from the water.
Even as he touched down, another cry went out, and he turned to see something new emerging from the sea.
It was a man – or the shape of it was something like a man – wearing a colossal suit of armour, and almost as broad as he was tall. Before Oski’s eyes, the apparition hooked its way out of the ocean, water streaming from its joints. The sword it bore was the most mundane thing about it, and even that was the length of a man, curved forwards to a savage point. Seeing the enormous claws of its gauntlets, Oski wondered that it needed the blade at all.