She was leader because she understood flying as none of the rest of them did, and that was it: a meritocracy at a stroke. The Engineer officers had tried to place a man over her, but their candidate had refused. In the end, Colonel Varsec, father of the new Air Corps, had pinned the captain’s badge on her himself. Of all of them there, all those army officers and engineers and Consortium magnates, only Varsec had understood. When he had designed his Farsphex machines, he had specified who would be needed to fly them, focusing on that inviolable link from pilot to pilot that would make them the masters of the air. He had known what he was doing, even if his superiors had not appreciated it. He was changing the Empire in a small way, but at a fundamental level.
She veered left, cutting upwards in the air, seeing a knot of Stormreaders break apart, some heading for the artillery transports and others rising up to screen them. Two of her pilots were already stooping down out of the sky, rotary piercers blazing with spent firepowder, and she saw one of the Stormreaders rock and slide, recovering a moment later, but out of place as the Farsphex cut past, heading for the bombers.
The Stormreaders had never been designed for ground assault, she knew. They were made to fight other orthopters, and they were superb at it. They needed a good, unhindered run to drop an accurate bomb, though, and so the diving Farsphex scattered them, only one charge loosed, and falling wide of the automotives — to the detriment of a unit of infantry. But, then, everything down there was army, and there would always be a loser.
And away! And her pilots were already dragging out of their dive, not engaging the furiously circling enemy but locking their wings for extra speed and breaking away ready to swing back the moment they were not being chased.
She set her own course, seeing her targets fall into what must be their final approach. There was a wing of Stormreaders waiting above, she knew, which meant that she and her fellows would have company the moment they tried to intervene. No choice, let’s go.
She had been a pilot’s daughter. Her mother dead while bearing her, she had sat beside her father from a tender age, watching most of the Twelve-year War from a heliopter’s cockpit. Two years before that war’s end, her father had been killed in the air. A mad dragonfly-rider had actually put an arrow through his viewslit and through his eye as he sat right next to her. She had been fifteen. She had brought the heliopter down — not immediately, but where it had needed to go, perched on her dead father’s lap to reach the controls. After that, a desperate quartermaster, who needed a pilot then and there, had written down the name ‘Bergen’ on his books, and she had been a man for the last two years of the war, drawing pay and flying supplies to the front.
In the Maynes rebellion that had brought the Commonweal war to a close, ‘Sergeant Bergen’ had dropped grenades on the insurrectionists and fought off their clumsy orthopters in the air.
They’re right on you, came the thoughts of one of her spotters, packaged with a concise picture of how many and what trajectories, and she returned a response immediately, spreading her calculations to her flanking pilots so that they and she could split and rejoin in perfect coordination, throwing off the pursuing Collegiates, altering course and sheering through the air towards the bombing Stormreaders even as they made their approach. Her weapons hammered away, the vibration of them felt through the stick, through the frame of the machine, entirely distinct from the rapid and regular beats of the engine.
After Maynes was subdued, she had been arrested, and for three tendays she had sat in a cell awaiting execution, with or without Rekef torture. She had seen it as her last victory then, for it had been a military prison, a man’s place.
The man who came to let her out had been the same quartermaster who had invented poor Bergen, and later promoted the imaginary soldier to sergeant. She would learn later how hard he had fought to keep her alive, but he was a major by then, in recognition for his keeping his allotted part of the war effort in one piece, and he paid his debts.
‘Go home, girl,’ he had told her. For her, the war was now over.
But, of course, she had possessed two maverick gifts, not just the one.
Her shot raked the side of the lead Collegiate flier, and the Stormreader banked violently, almost into the path of one of its fellows. She ignored it, let her shot stray to the next, but its pilot had already realized the danger and was climbing so as not to be caught between the enemy and the ground. Another two had already broken off. That left. .
There was one of them a little more dogged than the others, now alone as it streaked towards the transporters. There was a rapid shuttling of thoughts between Bergild and her companions, which she ended with, Mine.
The pursuing Stormreaders were right behind her, and her flankers split up to draw them away. Two remained with her, because the Collegiates weren’t fools, and she let her Farsphex dance before them, denying them a clear shot whilst calculating her own. The Imperial machines were as fleet and nimble as could be — no bombs, no bombardiers, not a pound of spare weight that might mean the difference between life and death.
Stray shot sparked from her hull, one of her pursuers getting far too close, but then she was ready, falling into that moment when she would have to commit, and thus be at the mercy of her enemy.
Seconds only until the Stormreader would unleash its cargo. All those dumb minds down there watching that swift approach and desperate to live.
Now. And she was on her line, piercers opening up with their juddering roar, and she saw the constellation of sparks about the Stormreader’s engine casing, punching a string of bolts towards the left wing.
Three hard strikes punched into her hull, but then one of her fellows was coming straight at her pursuers, shooting wildly and putting them off their aim.
For a moment, just one of those split seconds she was living between, she thought she had lost it and that the determination of the bomber would surpass the accuracy of her own flying, but then his wing splintered apart as her shot knifed into the joint, and the Stormreader was spinning away, end over end, ploughing into the ground behind its intended target. She saw a sudden plume of fire as his bomb detonated within the bay.
Then came the counter-attack, and she dragged her machine away, taking a half-dozen holes through the silk and wood of one wing. Her fellows were there to cover for her, but abruptly the fighting had become something new — not the fencing match of threat and counter-threat, but life and death as the Collegiates gave up on their ground targets to deal instead with their annoyances in the air. Her pilots had superior coherence and discipline, but the Stormreaders were arguably better machines for this duelling, and they had twice the numbers.
She took in her pilots’ views of the air, formed them into a whole, found their best chance for survival, scattered her people across the sky without any of them ever being alone for a moment, all efforts now concentrated on evasion and yet refusing to be driven away, always there and never ceding the air to the enemy.
As one of her fellows died, she felt the stab of pain as if it was her own. His mind, within hers, was a briefly burning red-hot spark of pain and fear, snuffed out instantly as his Farsphex nosedived into the ground.