For a handful of seconds she was there, the two Stormreaders committing themselves to the false course she had abandoned, and she rattled the bombing fixed-wing with a score of bolts, punching into its solid hull. Not enough. But even as she thought that, the vessel lurched and pulled up, its pilot losing his nerve. Then her shadows were back with her and she threw the Farsphex up and away, giving up her target for the sake of saving her hide, but knowing that the cargo fixed-wing would circle back for another try, unmolested, unless she or another of her fellows could stop it.
One of her pilots shouted out a hit: a lumbering, bomb-heavy heliopter clipped out of the sky with broken rotors, tumbling end over end to plough into the earth, spilling crew and munitions. To her right a Spearflight, which had once been one of the fleetest craft in the air, was gutted by a Stormreader’s bolts, the narrow metal needles cutting open its belly and smashing its motor, so that the Imperial aircraft slewed sideways in the air, wings stilled, and then fell, with the pilot struggling to get the cockpit open and bail out.
She was fighting to rejoin the battle, risking more and more to break through the cordon that the Stormreaders had thrown up, and dodging between the raking lines of their shot. There was another bomber now at the edge of her attention, as hard to reach as the centre of a maze. Bolts scattered across her hull, one smashing a cockpit pane. Bergild wrenched her goggles down as the wind roared about her.
Her target, an orthopter with something of the grace of a fighting craft, was lining itself up with one of the transport auto-motives, and she locked her wings, stilling their beat without engaging the propellers as the designer had intended. The Farsphex dropped as abruptly as though all Apt flight had been nothing but a tinker’s dream. She took three hits to her underside as she fell through the metal hail, one of which punched into the bombardier’s compartment behind her and ricocheted wildly — and how glad I am not to be carrying a passenger — and then she was out of it, fighting to restart her wings as the ground yawned to receive her, coming down so swiftly, so true, that she almost collided with her target. The Stormreaders would already be stooping on her, hunched and deadly machines designed for just that, and she had seconds to strike before she would have to pull away, or die.
Her machine was sluggish in the air, the wings still finding their rhythm, but that only served to let her fall into line behind the bomber. She saw the first flash of its munitions, searing across whatever luckless segment of the Second was down below. The driver of its automotive target must have seen what was coming, but the machine lurched on over the uneven ground.
Her immaculately timed burst of shot chewed off the long vane of the orthopter’s tail, butchering its smooth approach. Even then its pilot did not try to flee, and she could almost feel him fighting with suddenly unresponsive controls, determined to strike his mark. A true pilot, then. He was veering, though, unable to hold his place in the air with wings alone, as the killing rain of his bombs stamped blazing footprints across a scattering body of infantry, leaving the transporter untouched. Bergild was already pulling out, rising into a metal-filled sky, watching another Spearflight ripped apart even as she tried to come to its aid. Then the Stormreaders had her again.
Through the mind of another pilot she saw a bomber strike its target, a trundling automotive that must have been laden with ammunition. The bloom of fire and shrapnel scythed out on all sides, two score lives smashed beyond recovery, the flame gouting enough that the watching pilot felt the heat buffet his wings.
Another of her pilots shouted in her mind that he was on the cusp of a strike, and she could almost see him lined up behind the labouring bomber. Then he was gone, a storm of bolts cutting open the cockpit to rip him apart.
Major Oski spotted the plume of fire, and just kept shouting. He had long since run out of anything useful to say, but for a Fly-kinden officer, so easily overlooked, shouting had become his grease on the wheels of any interaction with Wasp soldiers. His current victims had a repeating ballista mounted on the back of little scouting automotive, and were frantically wheeling it round to face the onrushing fliers.
‘The fixed wing there — the one like a barrel — that one, ready and aim!’ He had his sleeves rolled up, his tunic grease-marked and sweaty from doing all a Fly could do to help get the artillery piece ready. His crew of three — Ernain and a couple of Light Airborne — were trying to line the piece up with his flying target, which was not a job the ballista had ever been meant for. ‘Left three turns! Up two turns!’ Oski’s major’s badge was hard-won, his gift for on-the-spot calculations earning him the grudging commendations of a string of superiors. ‘Now! Get that bastard shooting, you morons!’
The repeating ballista began spitting out bolts randomly into the cluttered sky — none of them seeming to go near the approaching fixed-wing. They were explosive-tipped, fused to explode set seconds after launch, but he knew that some would end up dropping amidst the army — just have to live with the complaints. Then the flier was past, and they could not turn fast enough to follow it.
‘Next target! Ugly bastard orthopter, there! There!’
All around him the bombs were landing, and they were all ruining someone’s day. He had no chance to assess how much real damage they were doing to the army’s vital organs.
One landed close by, astray from its target but very nearly too close as far as Oski was concerned, their little automotive rocking with the blast.
‘Should have put your armour on!’ Ernain bellowed.
‘No time!’ Oski shot back, though Ernain himself had managed to don a mail hauberk. In truth it was that he just could not fly when loaded with an engineer’s heavy mail, and he felt far less safe without his wings than with a steel skin. ‘Two turns left — two! Ready — now! Now!’
The approaching orthopter was coming in lower than the last one, the pilot painstaking in lining up his unlikely bomber on some target behind Oski — I bloody hope it’s behind us anyway — and the bolts that began bursting all around it rattled it visibly.
‘Good! Keep at it! Good. .’ Then his makeshift anti-orthopter piece sent a bolt along the side of the approaching flier, impacting with a wing joint, and abruptly the target wasn’t a flier any more, but was still coming their way.
Hoist with my own petard, seemed an appropriately engineer-worthy last thought. So save it for later. . and he was shouting ‘Pissing move!’ even as his wings cast him away, sending him hurtling over the heads of the army as though he had been struck by a storm-wind.
Then the actual wind came. The orthopter, one wing still beating vainly, came down nose-first within yards of their little automotive, and its complement of explosives was ripped open, the hot air of the firestorm battering at him.
Ernain? ‘Ernain!’
‘Here.’ Bee-kinden were not swift or agile in the air, but Ernain could get airborne even with all that metal on him.
‘Stab me, man, I don’t want to lose you. You’re important, remember.’ Oski stared at him, feeling shaken. ‘See the quartermaster about new eyebrows after we’re done.’
Ernain’s slightly scorched face frowned at him, but then another explosion shook the ground beneath them.
‘Let’s go find more artillery.’