Today was different. Instead of more training, with the wires overhead and the harnesses ready, Pingge found herself marched into a drill hall along with around forty other Fly-kinden, all of whose faces she recognized from her most recent sessions. She caught sight of Kiin immediately, and the pale Fly woman waved to her, entirely against Imperial protocol. At that moment there was a great deal of milling and jostling, and the guards didn’t seem to care.
‘I knew you’d be here,’ Pingge announced, as Kiin wriggled through the throng to get to her. ‘You always did have steady hands.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It’s obvious. We’re the best.’
Kiin looked about her, considering. ‘Best at what?’
‘At whatever this reticule business is,’ Pingge pointed out. ‘We’ve helped them test their new machine, whatever it is. Back to the factories for us now, I’d guess. I’m hoping for a bonus, myself. Keep the folks happy.’
The Fly beside them, a crop-haired, burly man called Gizmer, shook his head in dusgust, but Pingge ignored him blithely.
‘Have they had you in the airship yet?’ she pressed.
Kiin frowned at her, all the while plainly keeping a weather eye out for the authority figure that was surely on his way over. ‘Airship?’
‘They had us up on a pissy little airship — you remember the blow we had a few days back, the storm? We went kicking about in that, tearing about the sky fit to burst, and us in manacles, too. We took turns with the reticule, dropping stuff from way up — worked a treat, too. Those fiddly little lenses are much better when you’re higher up. Makes the game a lot harder.’
‘Game?’ Gizmer butted in, looking even more contemptuous.
‘Game, test, whatever,’ Pingge waved the distinction away, but Kiin interrupted her.
‘Pings, what exactly did you think they wanted you up there for?’
‘Testing their new toy, of course. They seemed happy, anyway. Everything in working order, time to go home.’ Perhaps only Kiin would notice the slight edge of tension to Pingge’s voice.
Or it’s top secret Engineering Corps business, and now they kill us.
Gizmer snorted. ‘Don’t you know anything?’ he hissed. ‘They’re not testing the machines. They’re training us.’
‘A lot you know!’ Pingge retorted, and at the same time Kiin said, ‘Why would they want Fly-kinden, though?’
At that moment, Wasps started coming in — not a few, but tens of them, a small group of officers led by the well-remembered figure of Major Varsec first, then a squad of engineers or soldiers or… something. These last marched in without words, without expressions, silently forming neat ranks facing the muddle of Fly-kinden.
Gizmer leant sideways and murmured, from the corner of his mouth, ‘Because we’re light, idiot, and for no other reason.’
A few ideas connected inside Pingge’s mind, but Varsec was already speaking. She had heard more about him since being co-opted for the reticule project. He had been the man to lose Solarno, most famously, but he seemed to have come out of it well, promoted and in charge of whatever was going on here — and elsewhere too. He seemed to have a dozen projects on the go and was forever being flown about the city and beyond.
‘Captain Aarmon,’ the major said, and the man front and centre of the Wasp formation took a step forward and saluted him. To Pingge — Imperial Fly-kinden became masters of reading Wasp attitudes at a young age — it seemed that there was a distance between these men that was more than of rank, a very complex relationship indeed.
‘Major.’ Aarmon’s voice was soft for a Wasp officer. He seemed to respect Varsec but it was not an active respect, more like that of a man for his ageing father than for his immediate superior. ‘These are the best?’
‘We have others in training, but these have shown the most facility,’ Varsec confirmed carefully, as if anxious not to displease his subordinate.
‘I told you!’ Pingge hissed.
‘What makes you think,’ Gizmer grated, ‘that you want to be the best right now?’
Kiin’s lips were moving silently, and Pingge realized that she was counting. After that, the conclusion was inevitable.
Forty of them, she saw, if she discounted Varsec and a couple of engineers plainly not part of Aarmon’s people. Forty of us.
Varsec gave a nod and stepped back, giving the floor over to Aarmon. He was a pale, broad-shouldered Wasp with a shaved head and oddly flat eyes, as though he was not using them in the normal way but looking out of them as one would through a window.
‘Reticule-men, attention!’ one of Varsec’s aides snapped, and the Fly-kinden automatically shuffled and elbowed their way into rough ranks, a mockery of the perfect Wasp grid facing them. This was part of their daily routine, and they ordered themselves without needing to think about it.
Aarmon stepped forward, casting those lifeless eyes over them, looking from face to face — and looking down, of course: in size they were like children to him and to all of his fellows. He seemed to be assessing them by some incalculable criterion. All the while, his comrades stood absolutely motionless, not a fidget, not a word, not even an expression exchanged. Pingge had seen Wasps on parade before, and she knew all the little ways soldiers had of communicating one to another under the eyes of the drill sergeant. There was none of it here. It was a display to make a disciplinarian weep, presented here in a windowless hall for an audience of one major and a rabble of Fly-kinden.
Aarmon pointed and then, when no reaction was forthcoming, he said, ‘You,’ like an afterthought.
He was indicating Kiin, of course.
Pingge gasped, ‘No!’, but there was nothing for it. If this was some example to be made, crossed pikes or a stingshot to the head or some other warning to keep silent, there was nothing she could do. Captain Aarmon was waiting, his bleak stare fixed on his victim as though it could draw her to him on its own.
Kiin took a deep breath and, none too steady, stepped forward.
No windows in the room, Pingge thought miserably. Is that so nobody can see us here? So we can’t escape? She watched her friend weave her way through the other Flies until she was standing to attention before Aarmon, staring at his belt buckle, a delicate, fair-haired woman of three foot six before a big Wasp man topping six feet.
‘With me,’ he told her, and turned instantly, awaiting neither salute nor acknowledgement, leaving her to stumble mutely in his wake as he stalked from the room. Pingge saw the other Wasps stepping forwards, all at once now, selecting others from the Fly group. She cast a panicked stare back, trying to see what happened to Kiin, and caught a last glimpse of her friend as Kiin’s reluctant march carried her out through the door, tripping after Aarmon’s longer strides.
‘What is she?’ Esmail demanded. ‘What has happened to her?’
His informant shrank away from him, babbling something about not knowing what he meant, but he slammed the man back against the cellar wall, using Ostrec’s borrowed strength and violence. His life was at stake in a way that his briefing had never suggested. Someone was playing him for a fool.
The Empress was something more than a Wasp-kinden woman, more than the mere temporal ruler of a military state.
He had gone along after Colonel Harvang, dogging the obese man’s greasy steps until he stood amidst the great and the good of the Empire: the Rekef’s sole surviving general, another colonel, their chief artificer and some Beetle-kinden who was one of their leading merchants. Ostrec had been well placed, groomed to be Harvang’s aide, to run errands and messages between the great powers of the Empire, circumstances that bore all the fingerprints of Moth foretelling and calculation, but at a level far in excess of anything Esmail had worked with before.
So why had they not told him about the Empress? Because they did not know? Because they wanted his own, unbiased assessment?