Then, at dawn, the artillery pattern changed, slowly concentrating on the ground before the ruined walls, driving the Mynan defenders back, and forcing Stenwold along with them. Kymene dispersed her forces street by street, anticipating that the barrage would sweep westwards again when the Imperial forces had neared the city. After so many hours of noise and death the actual attack was finally beginning.
She was receiving reports even then, for a few enterprising Fly-kinden had flown up with telescopes to spy out the enemy formations. The news seemed hopeful. ‘They’re leading with automotives,’ she noted. ‘Some model shaped like a woodlouse, running on many legs.’ Even as she said it, the shells began to land closer, and to spread out so as to fan a broader net of streets, and she hurried out to rally her men, to bring them back to the wall, and to man such of their own artillery as they still possessed. By the time Stenwold had caught up with her, the Mynan engines were already launching, catapult arms thudding forward and winding back, and the roar of leadshotters sending their missiles in shallow arcs through the breaches.
‘They’re in range already?’ he demanded over the noise. Kymene, now atop a great cairn of stones that had once been a house, spared him only a brief glance. All around him the Mynan soldiers were readying their weapons — on the streets, from windows, on rooftops — and still the Imperial artillery dropped shells on them and behind them, a constant reminder that nobody was safe at any time.
They can’t be… they must still be marching… I mean automotives, yes, but… Stenwold was well aware of the uses and limitations of such machines in war. Wheeled automotives could have closed the distance that fast, but would have faltered against the banked rubble, and legged automotives were notoriously slow. Besides, unsupported vehicles could be easily mobbed by infantry. It seemed impossible that Kymene’s engines were doing anything but wasting ammunition.
All he could see through the breaches was a pall of dust, the same as hung everywhere in the air, choking in the throat and gritty enough that he pulled on his artificer’s goggles to protect his eyes. There were a few enterprising Fly-kinden calling out to the Mynan artillerists, exhorting them to shoot, but he could not believe…
The first of the Wasp machines took the rubble at a terrible pace, scrabbling up and pausing at the crest, as though surveying its prey, as swift and fierce in its movements as a beast hunting. It presented a carapace of overlapping plates, with a high rounded peak at the front, sloping down towards the tail. A round shallow depression front and centre gave the impression of a single blind eye. Beneath that, closer to ground level, the stubby fingers of paired rotary piercers bristled like mouthparts.
A Mynan leadshotter gave voice close by, and Stenwold saw the missile ricochet off the automotive’s armoured shell without leaving much of a dent, and then the machine was moving again, slithering down the rubble with frightening speed, the plates of its body flexing like a thing alive.
A second automotive loomed from the curtain of dust beyond it, and then a third. The Mynan engines were all loosing now, and many of the soldiers as well. Battle was joined.
Totho adjusted the focus of his glass single-handed from long practice, finger and thumb sliding the telescoping sections while the weight of the instrument was cupped in his palm. His other hand was tight on the rim of the basket, and the shadow of the observation balloon’s canopy was a constant reminder of the penalties of a loose grip. In truth he should not be up here at all, horribly vulnerable to any Mynan pilot that somehow got behind the lines, only the gas-filled bulb of the balloon keeping him up, and only a long rope tether keeping him down. Not for the first time in his life, he wished that one of his parents could have bequeathed him the Art of flight, but it was rare in Beetles and unknown in Ants. In a disaster he would have to rely on the silk glider folded on his back — a cobbled-together piece of wishful thinking that was mostly untested.
He wanted to see, though. He wanted to see progress advanced yet another notch, as his machines clambered over the Mynan walls.
The day before, just ahead of dusk, Drephos had given a lecture to a cadre of Imperial officers, with General Roder at their head. The Empire had been making its preparations for a standard assault, using airborne and medium infantry, despite the groundwork already laid by more visionary men such as Colonel Ferric. And so the Colonel-Auxillian, as they still called him, had felt it necessary to step in and show them the future.
‘We called them Sentinels,’ the master artificer had explained, calling to mind the old heavy-infantry elites who had recently been retired from active service. ‘They fill the same role, after all, and the name of the project has caused some confusion amongst enemy agents who think we’re training infantry.’ His voice, as ever, had been laced with a general contempt for the bulk of humanity. Totho could still picture him stalking before his audience, his robes of black and gold — the same pattern as when he had genuinely been an Imperial subject — fluttering in the breeze against the hastily erected storage sheds from which the Iron Glove conducted its work.
‘You are faced with a routine problem of attackers, General. You must get your men past the walls.’ The Light Airborne could have swarmed the city at any time, of course, but the Mynan soldiers were well protected and armed with crossbows and snapbows, and their defensive position would allow them to make the Wasps pay in blood for every inch of ground. ‘You need to get your armour inside the walls, to meet them, heavies against heavies, where your superior numbers and troops can truly tell. Assaulting a broken wall in the face of respectably armed ranged defence remains a formidable problem, even with air superiority.’
At his gesture, Totho had relayed his signal to the engineers waiting in the shed, and an engine had started up with a metallic growl, closely followed by a clatter of armour plates.
‘What you need,’ Drephos’s voice had lifted over the sound, ‘is something to force the issue!’
On cue, the Sentinel had picked its way out of the shed at a careful, deliberate pace. To a man, the Imperial officers had taken a few steps back as its tall, blind-eyed prow had quested in their direction. They had never seen anything like it, Totho knew. He had watched with pride as its ten legs had moved in steady, complex patterns to haul it along the ground.
After the initial shock at the machine’s appearance, there had been those amongst Roder’s more traditional officers who complained that the vehicle would be easy prey for Mynan leadshotters, or that it would ground itself amidst the rubble, and how heavy it must be, how slow — could it even keep up with walking infantry? Roder had let them cavil and had kept his own counsel, his eyes only on Drephos.
Now Totho saw the truth of it for himself, and his heart leapt with pride: to be a member of the Iron Glove, to be an artificer, to be one of the Apt whose world had built this glory. Ahead of the Imperial infantry, ahead even of the Airborne, the Sentinels tore up the ground towards Myna. Enemy artillery burst about them, landing mostly behind them. They were as swift and agile as animals, the line of their armoured backs flexing and rippling as they jolted over the landscape.
‘When perfecting the greatshotters, we were forced to devise a new material to withstand the concentrated forces involved,’ Drephos had explained to Roder and his officers. ‘We call it spun steel, and it is several times stronger than Solarnese aviation steel, at a fraction of the weight. At the same time, the Sentinel’s legs are mediated by a ratiocinator, meaning that the handler does not have to worry about adjusting each one individually. He simply tells the machine where to go.’