‘Don’t say it,’ he growled from the corner of his mouth.
‘They’re right.’ Taki was sitting atop the machine. Her Esca had come in an hour before and she was watching the ground crew finish winding the motor. ‘Air combat’s too fast.’
‘They’re going to end up shooting our people down, or the other way around. They way they fly, nobody knows where they’ll go.’
‘How do you think they got out of Myna…?’ Taki lifted her head abruptly, frowning. ‘Corog…?’
There were some startled cries from the Collegiate students. The Mynans had broken formation and were pounding across the field, shouting at one another. Breaker saw Franticze take to the air, a flash of her wings dropping her neatly into the Stormreader that she had reserved. The others were grappling their way into other machines, all those that they had chosen for themselves — against his orders — and fought off all comers for, now painted with the double red darts of Myna.
‘What…?’ Breaker began, but some of the Mynans were already starting up their motors, shouting at the ground crew to get clear, wings folding out and lifting up with the first motion of the clockwork. ‘Stop that! What do you think you’re…?’
But then the sound impinged on him, the drone of engines from on high. He turned to Taki, but she was already across the field and scrambling into the seat of her Esca Magni.
With a deep buzz of wings and fire, fixed-wing fliers began to pass overhead, a flight of a half-dozen immediately above, but there were others elsewhere over the city. From somewhere close by there was a flash, a boom immediately afterwards, as the ground shook. A moment later smoke was rising.
‘Get my machine ready to take off! Now!’ Breaker shouted. ‘Get in the air!’ He waved madly to the students, relieved to see that half of them at least were already following the Mynans’ lead, orders or not.
The Esca Magni leapt into the air, Taki bringing the machine off the ground lopsidedly in her haste, desperate to gain the air before..
Myna all over again. She registered the explosion without really seeing or hearing it, some consensus of the senses simply informing her. Where was that? That was the field over Luker Street ways. Of course the Empire would try for the same targets: strip Collegium of its air defences: destroy the Beetle orthopters on the ground, and who could defy them? And all the while the question kept hammering away in the back of her mind: Where did the piss-cursed bastards come from? How had the Empire infiltrated a force of fliers within strike of the city, and nobody knew of it?
She watched as the enemy machines banked ahead of her, almost following the line of the street below as they sought their target. They were not the familiar Spearflights, she registered. These were fixed-wing fliers, and almost twice the size of the Imperial orthopters she was used to. Not strange to her, though, because…
For a moment, as she rammed the Esca into a higher gear to close with them, she was back in Capitas — her one and only visit there — watching Axrad die.
Farsphex, the name came to her. The new machines that Axrad had been so insistent that she saw. So what did she recall about the Farsphex?
She recalled that it wasn’t a fixed-wing at all.
She saw it then, as she raced in towards them, eating up the sky between her and the enemy. A pair of Stormreaders was coming in from her left quarter with the same intention — some training patrol returning to the city to find it attacked in their absence. They had the right line of approach, diving from on high, practically out of the sun, but the Imperials saw them nonetheless, their close formation breaking apart into a scatter of separate machines, and abruptly those rigid wings were kicked into a blur, instantly gaining that essential agility in the air that a fixed-wing flier could never aspire to.
Taki picked her target, taking a course that would bring her between the fleeing Farsphex and its comrades, separating it out in preparation for a quick kill. She tried a rapid look left and right, to see how her allies were disposed, catching a glimpse of a scatter of ascending machines from the airfield she had just quit: The Mynans defending the field, letting the others launch. She saw more enemy, too. She reckoned two flights of probably more than half a dozen, and the smoke from the far side of the city told of a third at least.
Then she was yanking the stick over to the right, registering the glitter of rotary bolts sleeting past her, turning the Esca almost on a wingtip. The Farsphex she had gone after had simply run for it — no attempt to double back or engage — but two of its comrades were right on top of her. They had underestimated how nimble her little machine was, and for a moment the three of them shared an uncomfortably small patch of sky as she bolted back between them. Then she had negotiated another turn, feeling every stay and bolt of the Esca thrum with it, and she was behind them, opening up with her rotaries, scoring a few desultory hits as her target — the leftmost — slid sideways in the air out of her sights. The other Wasp craft lifted away, seeking height, but Taki knew she had time to pin its friend down before it could come back for her Except that its other friend, the one she had originally marked, was already returning to the fray, its line on her imperfect but enough to put her off her attack, the flashing hail of its bolts forcing her to abandon her own assault and pull away. Craning over her shoulder, peering past the sleek flank of her machine, she saw the three of them regroup into formation, not coming after her but seeking out their ground targets.
She swore. It was a display of coordination such as she had never seen, not in Solarno nor here, certainly not amongst Imperial pilots. She was struck painfully by the way they handled their machines: not superlative skill but a purely workmanlike ability, such as any Apt artisan or footsoldier could have learned, save that they worked together so well that Corog Breaker would weep to see it.
Taki cut a wide arc over the city, trying to take stock of the fluid situation. The field she had lifted off from was unbombed, and she saw that the Mynans — their red-painted Stormreaders identifiable even at this distance — were sallying out over the city. Some of the Collegiate machines were still circling, waiting to stave off the next bombing run, whilst others were heading across the rooftops, not looking to engage but finding other vulnerable points to defend. Somebody had slapped some sense of tactics into them: someone equipped with a heliograph and a good grasp of the flash-codes had disseminated some useful orders.
Taki threw the Esca across the city. She had lost the trio that had been sparring with her, but she saw another flight moving over Collegium’s centre, and for a moment she feared that they were going to drop their explosive cargo over the domes and spires of the Amphiophos. A moment’s reconsideration showed her that they were moving in on one of the other fields — their targets purely practical, with no thought for symbolism. Not yet. Six against one, but she gave the Esca its head, the fastest thing in the skies as far as she was concerned, climbing as she approached them so that she could make a perfect dive on them. They would see her too late, and probably the one she was stooping on would never see her at all. Except they did — they all did.
Just like before, they were scattering. Her target kept its wings fixed and used all the speed it had, not quite outpacing her even then, but she was only able to clip it a few times before its comrades were on her, transformed from swift fixed-wings to dancing orthopters in a moment. For a moment she seemed to be surrounded by their shot as she dodged and sidestepped in the sky, five of them fighting for the privilege of bringing her down, and surely they would touch wingtips at any moment, slap each other out of the sky in their eagerness.