‘Back to where you were!’ he snapped at them, seeing the motley squad of a score and ten new-minted soldiers stumble and jostle their way across the square. People were watching, he was well aware, lolling out of windows to chuckle — people who didn’t have the guts to enlist themselves, but were content simply to criticize and laugh.
‘Now, forward! At the trot, come on!’ This time they managed it, and stopped approximately when he ordered. ‘Shooting line, loose!’ he bellowed hoarsely, hearing the ragged chorus of retorts from their snapbows — charged but not loaded. ‘Now charge, and loose again!’
That was hoping for too much. Half of them managed a decent turn of speed with the weapons, even miming slotting the bolt in. The others were still fumbling as the first half were shooting. ‘No!’ Marteus roared. ‘No! Stop!’ His voice was failing. Ant-kinden did not have to shout at one another. The old days of service in his home city were suddenly an unexpected source of nostalgia. ‘You shoot as one. Individual shots kill individual soldiers. Shoot together and you stop their advance dead. Ask the Sarnesh — it’s what smashed their line at the Battle of the Rails, and it’s what stopped the Jaspers dead at Malkan’s Folly, eh? Back to where you were.’
They ran through the exercise again, got to the same point, half the squad out of position, some fumbling, some shooting. Marteus’s voice cracked under the force of his invective and he turned away to take a swig from his waterskin. His ears rang to shouting, however, and for a moment he thought it was still his, or perhaps some private drill officer within his own head.
But no: a woman’s voice. He lowered the skin, looking round. One of his recruits had plainly endured as much as she could take, too. She was stalking along the line, bellowing in a high, clear voice at the others, correcting their stance, lining them up. ‘Come on, you maggots!’ he heard her shouting. ‘You’re embarrassing your city! That’s it! Bows level and straight — that means you too, Lucco, no enemy down near your feet — ready to loose…?’ And by this time she had realized what she was saying, and that Marteus was staring at her.
She was a lean, spare woman, some Spider halfbreed sort, and she did not back down before his stare, but simply adopted a stave-straight soldier’s stance. ‘Chief Officer,’ she said and, in those non-committal words he reckoned she’d learned more of soldiering than half the men he’d served with in the Vekken siege.
‘You think you can give orders better than I can?’ he demanded.
‘No, Chief, but I think I can listen better than these.’
Halfbreeds, thought Marteus, but the Coldstone Company had never been choosy and, besides, only around half his recruits were Beetle-kinden. Someone was shaming Collegium, but it wasn’t these, who at least had taken up the snapbow or the pike to defend their surrogate home. ‘Go ahead,’ he told the woman, ‘show me.’
She nodded, surprised and abruptly nervous, but turned back to her fellows. ‘Loose!’ she ordered, and the bows snapped dutifully. ‘Recharge — that’s it, wind steady and you’ll not fumble it. Gerethwy, Barstall, hold your shot — you too, Master Maldredge. When you see three in four up and pointed — now — loose!’ She risked a glance at Marteus, but his face remained as impassive as only an Ant’s could be. ‘Ready to receive a charge!’ she hazarded, and the half-dozen Inapt they had with them — Mantis-kinden mostly — were shouldering forwards. ‘No, not round — cut between like we practised — and why aren’t you recharging your bows? — and — loose! Pikes at the ready!’
She turned, still in the midst of the tableau she had created, the pikemen in the second and third ranks bracing their weapons, whilst the rows of snapbowmen were recharging now without being told, raggedly but not so far out of step with one another.
‘Your name?’ Marteus demanded. He heard one of the other recruits snigger — a tall grey-skinned creature of some lanky kinden he had never seen before.
‘Straessa, Chief Officer — called the Antspider,’ the halfbreed reported, reverting to her blank soldier’s demeanour.
And she knows all their names, Marteus thought. Another knack that Ant-kinden never needed to learn. ‘Right. Subordinate Officer Antspider.’ He made the decision quickly, the words rushing out before he could regret them. ‘You drill your friends here another dozen times, then break.’ Does this mean I need more subordinates? Probably. Does that mean I need rank badges, like the Empire has? Almost certainly. Ant-kinden needed no rank badges, of course. Everyone knew who everyone else was.
‘Right, back to where we were!’ the new Subordinate Officer ordered, and cuffed the tall man as he passed. ‘No bloody smirking, Gerethwy, this is war…’
She stopped speaking, the certainty in her voice draining away. ‘Chief…?’
‘What is it?’
‘Are they ours?’
She was looking upwards, and Marteus — and everyone else — followed her gaze.
Black shapes were passing over the city against the insistent drone of engines, low enough that they could see the flickering wings of orthopters. No strange sight perhaps, given how hard the aviators were training, but these flew in formation, and they were many.
‘Clear the square!’ Marteus shouted, and he heard his new junior officer seconding him. ‘Make for the College.’ There was no great rationale in that, save that he could think of nothing else to suggest.
‘Wheel left!’ Corog Breaker shouted. ‘Fly straight. Wheel right — keep that distance! You’re moving apart.’
He had a better voice for it than Marteus ever did, honed by bellowing across classrooms and foundries and tavernas. The Master Armsman of the Prowess Forum was now teaching discipline to airmen rather than fencing to students.
His class consisted of a score of men and women, some of the local Beetle-kinden — new recruits and the graduates of Taki’s aviation classes — and the others a motley pick of the Mynan newcomers. He had them jogging about the airfield at a fair pace, making formations, manoeuvring on foot, trying to instil into them a basic understanding of working together. The task was frustrating and slow, but if there was one thing that Breaker was good for, it was shouting at length.
‘Back into formation!’ he yelled, but two or three of the Mynans had just broken off, running about the field and obviously taking the piss, he reckoned, by miming an attack on some of the grounded aircraft. ‘Form up!’ he shouted. ‘Everyone, ranks before me! What do you think you’re doing?’
The ‘ranks’ his class formed were split, the Mynans clumped together at one end, and a noticeable gap between them and the Collegiate fliers, who were mostly considerably younger and somewhat scared of them. Corog Breaker was older and scared of nothing, however, and he stomped up to them, glowering.
‘Why aren’t we in the air, Master Breaker,’ demanded one of them — Edmon, he thought. They always used his title, since he insisted on it, but they gave it a decidedly derisive spin.
‘Because in the air you can’t hear me shouting at you,’ Breaker snapped back.
‘We want to fight Wasps.’ This was Franticze, the stocky Bee-kinden woman and his worst discipline problem. ‘This is a waste of time.’
‘You think we’d let you fight the Wasps, alongside our pilots?’ Breaker demanded. It was his best card, when working with them, and he saw them scowl and shuffle, saw the sudden fear in their eyes that they might be excluded, cast aside. ‘If you can’t work with us, then you’re liabilities, and no Stormreaders for you,’ he informed them sharply.
‘Flying in combat, it is not like this,’ Edmon said quietly, with an almost guilty look at the Collegiate pilots, their youth and uncertainty.
‘Well, in the future it will be,’ Breaker told him. ‘Discipline in the air, just like discipline on the ground. Armies are built on it. Ask the Ant-kinden.’
‘I never saw an Ant pilot worth a curse,’ Franticze muttered, but a brief gesture from Edmon silenced her.
‘Try it again. Follow Pendry Goswell here: turn when she turns, keep your distance, show me you can do it,’ Breaker invited, gesturing for a solid Beetle girl, one of Collegium’s better fliers, to take the lead. As the airmen moved off, he retreated to lean against a grounded orthopter.