I see a skirmish along the line, seven hundred yards thereabouts. One of the others — Pallina’s squad. The Ants reached out their minds to hear the distant echoes from their doomed comrades.
Light Airborne on their way, twenty seconds, concluded the officer, taking the periscope from his eye. I trust we’re all ready. His face was without expression, but the others felt his humour. It was a good man to fight alongside, he who could look upon extremity and laugh.
They were going to die, to a man: all the little squads that Milus had posted out here were ‘lorn detachments’, suicide details. They would spend their lives in slowing down the Wasps.
For Sarn, came the answering thought, first from one, then from all of them. Sarn the mother of us all!
Scorvia. The officer focused his attention on their one sapper-handler. The woman looked at him for a moment, her mind elsewhere and tainted with the alien feel that always came with her particular Art.
Oh, ready, Officer, Scorvia confirmed. For the mother of us all.
The Light Airborne were coursing overhead, and the Ants huddled deeper in their dugout, almost holding their breaths in their wish to deny the Wasps any warning.
The waiting, after they had passed, strung them taut as wires, but the officer would not risk the lens of his periscope being spotted. They relied solely on sound and vibration — and on Scorvia, who had wider senses at her disposal.
The engines of the Wasp automotives could be heard now: a low grumbling as they idled at walking pace to keep alongside the squads of infantry. The skies overhead were busy with airborne and some few flying machines.
And Scorvia looked up and thought, Now.
One of the engineers lit the fuses for the mines, and seconds later the ground around them shook as the charges exploded beneath the approaching Wasps. There were shouts and cries, but the Ants were already on the move, piling out of the dugout with snapbows and grenades ready to hand.
They found a light automotive kicked wholly on to its side by the blast, its undercarriage blackened and cracked, and a squad of infantry still picking itself up, half a dozen of them dead on the ground. With brutal, desperate efficiency the Ants attacked, for all that there were only six of them against an army. Every dead Wasp meant one fewer to storm the gates of Sarn. Snapbows spat, and the officer and engineers threw grenades into the midst of the reforming enemy squad, stretching surprise as far as it would take them.
And further, too, for the ground all around the Wasps was rippling now, hard bodies thrusting their way clear of it, glistening black with serrated mandibles agape, crooked antennae tasting the scent of the enemy. The Sarnesh had brought their beasts to war.
A score of them only, but they were half the size of a man, dark-shelled ants tearing themselves from the ground in response to Scorvia’s thought and hurling themselves at anything that was not their own. Their jaws clamped onto legs and arms, piercing and crushing, even severing hands and feet. Their abdomens stabbed in to sting, driving searing acid into the bodies of their foes. Ferocious, almost mindless, whipped to a rage by Scorvia’s inciting commands, they tore the Wasp soldiers apart even at the cost of their own lives.
Another automotive was already coming close, and the soldier atop it let loose with a swivel-mounted rotary piercer, raking the mass of ants and not caring much if he hit his own allies. The weapon had been designed for a fixed position, though, and its firepowder charges rattled and bounced it around on its pivot, sending most of the bolts wide. Then the Sarnesh officer got his last grenade to drop neatly onto it, blowing apart weapon and crewman alike.
Snapbow shot was coming at them from both sides, more infantry squads now stopping to deal with them. The entire leading edge of the Eighth was falling out of step. It all meant delay, blessed delay, and more time for Sarn.
A bolt caught Scorvia in the chest, punching through her armour, but her scuttling charges were now unleashed, and they would fight until they were all slain, blindly attacking anything of the Empire’s, whether men or machines.
There was another automotive approaching, and the officer saw that it was one of the new kind: those segmented, armoured killers with their single leadshotter eye. It had a pair of rotary piercers set low in front, just right for mowing down soldiers on the ground, and a double hail of bolts ripped into the ants, and into the remaining Sarnesh, too. The last engineer managed to lob a grenade that exploded perfectly against the machine’s curved hull but barely scratched its plating. Then piercer-shot found the man and his mind winked out.
It was better that way, for they already knew that if the Wasps caught any enemies alive, their leader was having his captives impaled on the crossed pikes, a slow and agonizing death. General Roder had explained this to his first victims — the words linking their way back to the other Sarnesh, mind to mind. He wanted the broadcast pain of the few to erode the morale of the many.
Ignorant fool, the officer thought, even as he discharged his snapbow for the last time. The strength of the many combats the pain of the few. He dragged out his sword and ran towards the great armoured machine’s side, keeping out of reach of the rotaries. Perhaps there is a weak spot.
He heard a rattle, as the snapbow barrels set between the plates were triggered, and a bolt tore through his leg, making him stumble. He looked at the nearly sheer side of the machine towering above him, seeing an injured ant trying to climb it, jaws scraping futilely at its metal flank.
He snatched up a Wasp snapbow from the ground, no time to check if it was loaded, and hauled himself to his feet, for a moment leaning against the very machine that had wounded him. He levelled his stolen weapon at the oncoming infantry. The trigger was loose, the air battery uncharged, but the threat had achieved its purpose. Five or six of them shot at the same time, at least two hitting their mark.
For the mother of us all, he thought, and died secure in the knowledge that he had done his best.
Balkus had made his report to the Monarch’s advisers as soon as he got back to Princep Salma. Princep loved its Monarch, the Butterfly-kinden woman named Grief, but the half-built city-state was run by those beneath her, who ensured that the food came in, the waste went out, and who made all the little, vital decisions that would let Princep grow eventually into its full strength.
There had been a lot of frightened faces, as he made his report. Princep had been founded by refugees from the last war — the dispossessed, the impoverished, escaped slaves and reformed criminals. When the Dragonfly-kinden, Salma, had united them, he had given them hope and dreams. Even the presence of his lover, Grief, had sufficed to let those dreams flower. They were working on the perfect city, building by building, law by law. They had imported Collegiate thought and Commonweal aesthetics. Here, they had a place for all.
The one thing that they had not found a place for was war. They had more philosophers than soldiers, it seemed to Balkus, and those men of the sword who had come there did so mainly because they were tired of fighting. The fact that Balkus himself had been made their military commander — a renegade Sarnesh nailbowman whose chief credential was that he had once known Stenwold Maker — showed just how unfit they were for conflict.
He had his troops arrayed before him, and they were a ragged and sorry lot. He had a score of Dragonfly-kinden in their glittering mail that were his elite — a gift from the distant Monarch of the Commonweal to her perceived sister. Beyond that he had a couple of hundred volunteers who formed his militia, better suited to keeping a degree of order on the streets than actually fighting. About half were Roaches, the strong sons and daughters of the influx of that kinden that had come to Princep because it was one of the few places in the Lowlands that welcomed them. The rest were a ragbag drawn from the sweepings of every city from here to Capitas.