She was worried now. She had not felt like this since… She had never felt like this before, not while in the seat of a good orthopter. She lived for flight. Even facing down Axrad over Solarno, she had not felt like this. This was all wrong: enemy fliers who came from nowhere, flying with such coordination. Breaker had been right about what would win an aerial war, but neither had guessed that the Empire had been so far ahead of them.
She bared her teeth. I am better than all of you! The Esca could do things that even the Stormreaders could not, let alone these big Farsphex machines. If she fought the controls with sufficient dogged determination and contrived to ignore the insistent demands of aeronautics for just a moment, backing her wings so that their joints squealed, she could even fly backwards.
It was an innovative theory, at the speed she was going, but she felt only confidence as she rammed the stick backwards and disengaged the wing gearing for a second — the vanes beating at ten times the usual speed, for a few crazed seconds, as their gears meshed with nothing — before trying to back them.
The manoeuvre was a qualified success. She dropped like a stone for a moment, seemingly having no control whatsoever, and the Farsphex pack must have assumed that she had been hit, abandoning her immediately to go in pursuit of their next target. A moment later she had her wings working — forwards still and not backwards at all, and almost went through someone’s roof as she struggled to regain the sky, coming up behind them and catching the trailing Farsphex with a solid handful of bolts that at least made it judder in the air.
Then she was not alone. Left and right there were Storm-readers with red-painted wings. They attacked as individuals, and she joined them by instinct, not even thinking it through. That saved them, she decided later. The air discipline of the Wasps was such that their flight would have outmatched an attack by a rigid formation, but Taki and her flanking allies each had different ideas as to what they were going to do, three entirely uncoordinated strikes by skilled pilots in top-class fighting orthopters.
They still failed to bring one down. The Farsphex were away again, splitting up and fixing their wings for extra speed if they were pursued. They refused to engage or to fight the aerial duels that Taki had been dreaming of ever since Solarno. Those not pursued were already wheeling back to come to the aid of their comrades. Taki could almost taste the frustration of the Mynans as they did everything they could to latch onto their enemy, only to be driven off again and again.
Then the Farsphex flight was abruptly coming together — all of them, flocking from every quarter of the city to rise in a dark column of machines, massing over the very centre of Collegium.
To strike where? But there was nothing in their disposition that hinted at their target. Taki skated her Esca across the face of their rising formation, pulling her orthopter round in as tight a turn as she could, because they were about to break and she wanted them in front of her and not behind. In mid-wheel she did her best to locate the other Collegiate fliers, flashing a quick signal for Form on me! and hoping that somebody would see it. She had company even before she had finished her turn, a full half-dozen Stormreaders converging on her, cutting a wider arc in the air so as to match her when she drove back at the Imperials. She noted four Mynans — Edmon and three others she couldn’t name. Keeping pace were two of Collegium’s own, and she knew them, from the way they flew, as the Goswell girl and the Fly-kinden, Haldri. It hardly counted as overwhelming odds, but the other local machines were scattered all about the sky, some hanging back to defend the airfields still, others just adrift over the city, losing the thread of the fight, lost over their own home.
The Imperial formation broke up, as she knew it would, and abruptly they were all moving as one, like fish shoaling, heading for the College district.
Attack. It was a pitiful signal to be sending, but she had already decided that, whatever the Wasps were after, she was committed to opposing it. She let the Esca race ahead, knowing that the others were still with her, left and right. She wanted to say a great deal more, to explain that the Farsphex pack would split once she attacked, some turning to meet her while the others pressed on with their mission. The Collegiate flash-codes were a language of few words, though. She had to trust that they would predict the future as well as she did.
She had the trigger pressed even before she was in range, seeing their pattern shift into carefully orchestrated chaos, orthopters peeling off and swinging back towards her from above and from either side. At least half their force was casting itself lightly over the College now, turning in unison to find their target.
Taki swore and dived after them, still shooting, trusting to her swift flying, to the Esca ’s nimbleness against the larger machines. A scatter of bolts sprayed past her, leaving a single finger’s-width hole in one wing. Around and behind her, the handful of Stormreaders engaged, fearless by necessity.
She was closing now, watching the craft ahead of her, seeing how their attack run forced them to become predictable, killable, if just for a moment. But then, so did hers as she tunnel-visioned in on them, desperate for a kill that might make them break off. Even as the silvery trail of her shot swept in towards a flier in the midst of their formation, piercer bolts were abruptly hammering into her fuselage, the physical impact rocking her, knocking the Esca ’s tail sideways, spoiling her aim and making her entire orthopter slew in the air. She cursed, wrestling to get back on target, close now, closer than she had wanted. She actually saw the first bombs drop.
Then another bolt cracked into the engine mounting behind her, the next shattered a pane of her cockpit window, skinning a line of pain down her shoulder as it vanished into her seat. She threw the Esca sideways instinctively, the city beneath her opening up in flames as the bombs struck. She had left it too long, made herself too much of a target. She was going to die.
But she lived. The Esca suffered a riddled wing, silk parting, wood slats fracturing as the bolts tore into it, but the expected lethal shock never came. Her machine dropped involuntarily towards the flames before she could catch it, and the Farsphex that had been after her coursed overhead, banking in the air to dodge the incoming shot of one of the Mynans, who was slinging his Stormreader through the air like a madman to keep another two Imperial machines off his tail.
The Esca regained its hold on the air, and she saw the sky above her turned into a madness of wheeling, duelling orthopters. Instantly she was dragging back on the stick, fighting upwards to take her place there but, even as she did, she knew she was too late.
One of the Mynans lost a wing suddenly, the Stormreader coming apart as a Farsphex ripped into it from an unexpected angle. The next second, the stricken machine was whirling past Taki, spinning like a top with its one wing still beating. Taki was shooting by then, setting up a stream of bolts and then trying to find a target to bring it to bear on. Their bombing run had been disrupted now, but the Wasps had decided to make a fight of it at last, bolstering their impeccably coordination with two-to-one odds.
She had a direct line on one of the enemy and, just for a moment, gave it a solid couple of seconds of shot and saw it lurch in the air, shuddering. The bombs that had been cascading from its undercarriage, as regular as ants from a hill, abruptly stopped though the machine flew on. Then she was dancing and dodging through the air as a couple of the enemy came for her, keeping out of the way of their aim but unable to fight back. She saw Edmon’s Stormreader spiralling upwards, chasing one of the enemy even as another tried to bring him down. In the next instant, Pendry Goswell was scudding past them, scoring a couple of strikes as she did, but she was lurching in the air, her machine already damaged, the beat of her wings erratic. A moment later they simply stopped, some vital piece of clockwork slipping its train, and Taki watched her helpless and achingly graceful arc as her stalled machine fell into its final dive.