There was more business, and Ostrec’s ears took it all in, the anatomy of Brugan’s fifth column being discussed in summary detail. Esmail himself barely registered it, storing it for later. He was more concerned with planning ahead for when he himself should meet Seda’s cool stare.
He was frightened, and he would defy anyone with a little knowledge of the old ways not to be. There was something else there, too, though. The servant, Shoel Jhin, had spoken of a return to the Days of Lore, a resurgence of magic. Esmail had marked him down for mad, but if there was even the slightest chance of such a thing, if even one part in a hundred of the way the world used to be could be transplanted into the present, then what was going on here was bigger than the games of Skryres, and perhaps Esmail’s instructions did not mean so much any more. After all, he was beyond scrutiny now, beyond interference. What if the Empress was better fitted to be his mistress than the Moths of Tharn were to give him orders?
‘Farsphex,’ was all he said, as he showed it to her.
The Wasp pilot who had been assigned to Pingge was named Scain, and he was the most cadaverous of his kinden that she had ever met: a lean, gangling creature who seemed ill-suited to be any sort of soldier, let alone someone trusted with some top-secret Imperial plan. Like his commander, Aarmon, he spoke very little, although his voice betrayed the remnants of a North-Empire accent, the suggestion of an upbringing amongst the hill tribes, which made his current technically sophisticated post even more of a mystery, of course.
The Farsphex, however, was all technical sophistication. Pingge was no aviatrix, but she had a grasp of technology that went a little beyond what was strictly necessary for a factory worker, and she knew she was looking at something different, even if she could not quite work out what was unusual. Before her was a long-bodied orthopter, the wings folded at an angle back along its curved body, the enclosed cockpit sitting over a pair of what she guessed were the rotary piercers she had heard of, brought into the Empire’s arsenal after the original Solarno campaign. The Farsphex was a big machine, half as long again as the Spearflights that had been shoved to the back of the hangar, and its belly seemed overlarge, pregnant with some manner of machinery, or something. More, she could see that there was something odd about its wings, just by looking at it. The designers had managed to give it an air of elegance, despite all that, but it was plainly a different breed to the older orthopters standing nearby.
She took a few cautious steps closer, then glanced back at Scain.
‘Go ahead,’ he nodded briefly, and she let her wings flurry her up to the curving top of the machine’s hull. Thoughtfully, she touched the blade of one of the twin propellers there. Pingge would be the first to admit that her knowledge of aviation was limited, but she hadn’t thought orthopters needed those.
Scain stalked over to the flier’s side, running his hand along it in a gesture that said far more than the words he used. She thought that he would open the cockpit, but instead he popped a hatch in the Farsphex’s side.
‘See,’ he said, pointing. She hung her head over the opening, looking upside down into the cramped interior. There was a brief crawlspace that would take Scain to the pilot’s seat, but immediately inside the hatch was room for someone else, though only someone small because there, on a hinged arm, was a reticule. It was the same toy that she had been training with all this time, but seeing it in this unfamiliar setting sent a chill down her spine.
‘In,’ Scain directed, and he went squirming into the orthop-ter’s innards, all elbows and knees as he wriggled through the crawlspace, then contorted himself to get into his seat.
She hesitated at the hatch’s mouth, until another preremptory ‘In!’ from Scain forced her hand. A moment later she was sitting before the reticule, just as she had so often before, but the walls of the Farsphex’s hull crushed in on her from all sides. Below her, the machine was missing a good area of floor, enough for her to slip through if she was careless, allowing the reticule’s impartial eyes to view the terrain below. At the moment, all its angles and mirrors served only to give her eyepiece a good close view of the hangar floor ahead of the machine’s nose.
The hatch was shut from outside with a slam, making her jump. All at once she was enclosed by darkness, but Fly-kinden were used to that, from the interconnected underground communities they favoured, or the cramped tenements they were shunted into in the cities.
‘Sir, what’s going on now?’ she asked, giving her voice all proper deference.
‘Test flight,’ Scain told her. ‘Live one.’ A moment later and he was reaching back down the crawlspace to tug at her sleeve, making her jump. ‘Wear this.’
It was a shackle, a metal band attached to the hull by a chain. She stared at Scain wordlessly, and he clipped it about her ankle, turning the key awkwardly, one-handed in the confined space.
‘What…? Sir?’ she got out, her voice tight.
‘Stop you falling out.’ It was perhaps the longest single sentence he had said to her, and all it told her was that he was a bad liar. For a moment she looked him in the eyes, under the poor light that came up from the aperture. Instead of staring her down, as a member of the superior race should do, he just shrugged and looked away, plainly feeling a little guilt.
So they don’t trust us. It was a bitter thought. ‘I’m an Imperial citizen, you know,’ she complained, before she could stop herself. ‘I know about duty. It’s not as though I’ll just desert through the… the whatever this hole’s called, the moment we’re in the air. I have family in the city.’
Scain just shrugged, twisting his way back into the cockpit. Pingge stared at the shackle unhappily, but in the back of her mind she thought of Gizmer and some of the others who were perhaps less diligent servants of the Empire.
She wondered how Kiin was getting on. She would not trade Scain for Aarmon, certainly: the leader of the new pilots scared her.
A moment later she felt the engine turn over and fire, sounding as loud as any factory machine. The Farsphex jolted and swayed as it was pushed out into the open air by the ground crew, and then Scain made a kind of hissing sound and the wings were abruptly unleashed, clapping down towards the ground and springing the machine into the air at a sickening angle.
She would get used to it all in time, save that part: every time her machine — she would grow possessive of it very soon — took to the air there would be that stomach-lurching moment when she nearly sent her lunch down through the aperture. Somewhere amidst all the trade-offs that had gone into the Farsphex’s finely tuned design, a graceful takeoff had been judged expendable.
A moment later the city roofs were rushing past, and then were gone, their speed being far greater than she had anticipated; the rhythm of their flight was steady rather than the furious beat of an orthopter’s wings.
‘Ready!’ It was Scain’s voice, and she guessed she had already missed hearing the word once, against the engine’s racket. For a moment she did not know what he meant, but then her training took over and she had her eye against the reticule.
They were heading out across farmland now, towards a broken-backed range of hills north-west of the city. The eyepiece showed her a magnification of the view she might have if she were clinging beneath the orthopter’s sharp nose, flanked by the rotary piercers.
‘What targets?’ she called forward, forgetting her ‘sir’. Even as she asked, she spotted a plume of smoke, a fire set out on one of the hilltops. The wheeling, unsteady view of the reticule showed her several others rising beyond it.
She fumbled the first one, failing to get the trigger switch released, despite a faultless record in training. Scain said nothing, but guided the flier towards their next target.
‘Remember your navigation?’ he called back, his voice sounding a little taut as he concentrated on the steering, and she realized this was as much a test for him as for her.