‘Probably, sir.’ She had her tongue between her lips as she focused, a habit from childhood, watching the smoking target draw nearer as Scain swung towards it.
‘We’ll be flying nights as well; you’ll need to direct me to the target. Bear that in mind.’ The words seemed to exhaust him and he hunched over the stick.
And away! And she got it right this time, and felt something solid clunk directly below her seat, something leaving the belly of the flier. And that ought to be spot on the mark, she decided, hoping that she would get to go back over the same ground herself to see how she’d There was a crack and a bang from behind them and she would have feared something onboard had exploded had the sound not been so distant. She was so rattled that she missed the next target entirely. ‘What was that?’
‘ Live flight,’ Scain stressed. ‘Real bombs.’
Pingge missed the target following that as well, because she could not make her fingers move on the trigger, even though she had the reticule lined up on it perfectly. Bombs, she was thinking numbly, but of course bombs. What else? And who but a Fly-kinden would fit in here with the reticule, and who else would have the eyes for that night-flying Scain said about. Oh, someone has been thinking long and hard about this.
And: What about the farmers that live down there? Did they clear them out? Did they even warn them that the air force would be blowing them up today?
And: They’re going to make me drop bombs on people, real people. For a moment she felt ill, thinking of all that training, when it had been a game.
But Scain shouted at her, and she flicked the trigger seconds-perfect and sent another bomb spiralling away from the undercarriage, imagining it obliterating the bonfire target that some uncomprehending slave had set out.
Her name. What he had shouted was her name. She had not realized that he actually knew it.
It changed things, somehow. The Imperial high command didn’t know her name, and it thought she needed to be chained to the hull to stop her flying off in terror. Right then she didn’t give a bent pin for the Empress or her generals, but she didn’t want to let Scain down.
She got the next three bombs off, all within tolerance of their marks, and then the Wasp was turning them round, not heading for the city but for somewhere else.
‘Good,’ was all he said, but she felt a curious bond with him: who else was there, after all, but Scain and herself in this hollow shell in the upper air?
He brought them down at an airstrip a few miles outside Capitas, and there he unlocked the shackle, and showed her how to open the hatch from within. She dropped out onto the packed dirt of the strip, and the first thing she saw was another dozen Farsphex arranged in a rough line, with hers on the end. There was a scattering of the new pilots and their Fly-kinden henchmen and henchwomen around, and she could hear the drone of other machines still in the air.
A curiously proprietorial feeling came over her, regarding it all. This was more than the factory, where she had been just a small part of a humdrum machine, a tiny ball bearing helping the Empire on its way. This was special, and she and her fellows had become an elite. Looking about her at the busy airstrip she could feel herself and Kiin and all the others help build the future right then, right there. In that moment all of her qualms about whoever might be below the bombs she was preparing to drop were banished.
Fifteen
‘I thought you should hear the news, that’s all,’ Taki explained. ‘Didn’t think I’d drop into the middle of a war. Looks like, no matter how fast I fly, the world moves faster.’
She was perched on a table in what the Mynans were now calling their War Room. It was the third set of walls to bear the name. The first had been in the Consensus building that had proved vulnerable prey to the Wasp incendiaries because the Mynans had not even finished its construction. A quarter of the ruling council had died in the blaze, but at least the rest had settled their differences and were now waiting on Kymene’s word. The second War Room had taken an unlucky shell in the sporadic artillery bombardment that jumped about the city, cracking the walls enough that nobody wanted to stay inside. In the end, Kymene had repaired to a cellar to hold her deliberations. It reminded Stenwold of the places that the Mynan resistance had been driven to when the Wasps had held the city. That Kymene had been reduced to this already was a bad sign.
‘Your news about the Wasp air force comes late,’ the Mynan leader remarked acidly, looking up from her plans. Her face was ashen and drawn: no sleep and too many worries all at once.
‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you,’ Taki shot back. ‘Those lads out there, they’re old news, Spearflights and regular pilots. The Empire’s cooking up something special, though — new men, new machines.’
‘How does this affect us now?’ Kymene asked her. ‘Even their current forces would suffice to keep control of the air.’
In fact, the Empire had at first seemed not to be pressing its advantage. For two days the bulk of the artillery had concentrated on the outer wall, which had cracked in three places and looked as though it would cease to provide a meaningful obstacle very shortly if this concerted and uncannily precise bombardment continued. The balance of the Imperial engines had been throwing incendiaries and explosive shells into the city itself, apparently at random, ensuring that nobody in Myna slept well or felt safe.
After its initial lightning raid over the city, the air force had been absent for a day. Enough orthopters had remained to defend the artillery from Mynan reprisals, as two costly air skirmishes had shown, but the Spearflights had not been seen in the sky since that first sortie. Edmon and the other pilots had been trying to cobble together whatever new fliers they could, co-opting and arming civilian machines and repairing anything that could be dragged largely intact from the ruin of the Mynan airfields and hangars. That the Empire would still possess resounding air superiority was a grim truth nobody wanted to talk about.
The Empire’s actual army, the fighting men who had previously formed the first wave of offence in any Imperial attack, had sat out beyond the hills, far out of range of the Mynan artillery, whilst its greatshotters had inexorably chewed away at the wall. The Wasp assault had so far killed over a thousand Mynans and a handful of Imperial pilots. The Mynan soldiers had milled and gone to the walls and been driven back, and talked endlessly of sorties and counter-attacks, and their Maynesh Ant-kinden allies had very nearly taken to the field alone, unable to countenance simply sitting under the shadow of the Wasp artillery without any recourse at all. Still, the column from Szar was expected to arrive any day to bolster the city’s numbers, and that was anticipated to trigger some manner of reversal in their situation.
Today, though, the remnants of the Szaren relief column had finally arrived, and with it an understanding of where the balance of the Imperial air force had been engaged. Caught in the open, in close formation, the Bee-kinden had been perfect targets for the Spearflights in an attack that nobody had even contemplated a few days ago. Flying machines fought flying machines; that had been the rule. Aside from dropping grenades, usually by hand, their effectiveness on the ground was strictly limited. It had been every tactician’s understanding that only airships could carry a load sufficient to make a serious impact on the ground, and so the strategic effectiveness of orthopters was limited to how well they could attack or defend such slow-moving, vulnerable targets. Surely that was what the fight for Solarno had taught?
Apparently it had taught the Wasps more than their enemies. From destroying half the Mynan air force — such as it was — on the ground, the Wasps had gone on to locate and ruthlessly attack the Szaren infantry, who had no way of fighting back. Indeed, after the first pass of the orthopters, the Szaren response had been to pull in tighter for mutual defence, giving the Spearflights all the more attractive a target.