Meanwhile the Spider Arista had called in her man Jadis. ‘Have all our people to arms and ready to fight!’ she ordered. ‘Get the mercenaries up and ready. We’re under attack.’
Even as she said it, a Fly messenger fought her way into the tent and dropped down by Mycella’s feet.
‘Mantis-kinden!’ she got out.
Before they reached the camp, the Fly-kinden returned in her Stormreader, wheeling wildly over the Mantis onrush before setting down practically on top of Kymene’s people, the cockpit already open.
‘Here!’ she called, pitching her voice high over the crump of explosives beyond. ‘Map!’
Straessa struggled over, her chest heaving and already envying the solid endurance of the Beetle-kinden. The Fly proffered a tattered piece of paper, on which she had drawn a rough sketch of the camp’s layout — something she must have done while in the air — marking out whatever looked as if it needed blowing up. ‘Remember, strike fast, then pull out!’ she shouted to Kymene. ‘The airships will be coming in, and we’ll cover them while you get away!’
The Mynan woman took a second to stare at the scribbled map, committing it to memory. She made no promises about the retreat, Straessa noted. Then the Antspider found the map in her own hands, and Kymene and her squad were off again, and so must she be if she did not want to get left behind.
She picked up speed, an extra burst to try and make up lost ground. Ahead, the bright flare of a bomb going off revealed the great Mantis host as stark silhouettes. Beyond them, some of the Second’s camp was on fire, and there was a brief impression of a great many Wasps rushing about, in the air and on the ground, without having a clear idea of what was going on. Then. .
Straessa would remember this moment. She would dream of it: the Mantis-kinden of the Felyal hitting the Second Army’s camp. Not just as a mob of warriors and old men and children, not the last dregs of a culture casting themselves into the fire. In her memories they would be like a tide, a great cresting wave and, although the Wasps put a fair few soldiers in their way, nothing could stop them. They had come to finish their long history with the Second Army, one way or another.
They let nothing stop them. The Wasp sentries were hacked down within seconds, and even though the flashes of stings and the deadly needles of snapbow bolts kept darting out from amidst the camp, there was no suggestion of strategy from the Mantids, nothing so human as a fear of death, or even an acknowledgement of it. They ran and they flew as a great barbed host, and killed everyone they encountered, even as the Wasps pulled back to form up again deeper within their camp.
The air was alive with their arrows, and the night’s darkness to them was merely dusk. As the first reordered force of Wasps advanced to try and hold them, the wave broke, the Mantid onslaught fragmenting into war bands of a dozen or a score, each hunting its own bloody end in the streets of the tent city that the Second had built.
‘What’s first on the shopping list?’ Gerethwy shouted in Straessa’s ear. The bombing had stopped — and just as well! — but the camp was reduced to a chaos of random clashes of arms, with Mantids and Wasps hurling themselves at each other, neither quarter nor hesitation from either side. When Straessa’s squad halted at a crouch, quiet and still, they might as well have been invisible. The Imperials had other problems right then.
‘Fordyke, take a dozen and head left, that way. Velme, you cut left of centre, down that way. And you’ — and I have no idea who you are — ‘you’ve got straight on.’ And she parcelled out her command into tiny vulnerable pieces, just as the plan had called for, so that they could inflict the most damage for the least cost, for if the Wasps caught them all together, they would be butchered to a man. ‘I’m heading deeper in. Looks like something’s there needs setting on fire.’ She squinted again at the pilot’s map and hoped it wasn’t just an inopportune twitch of the pencil. ‘Use your grenades, but make sure you lob them away from your friends. Shoot every damn Imperial you see, and anyone else who isn’t a Mantis and doesn’t wear a sash. Blow things up. Questions? No? Get going.’
All said far too fast to allow objections, of course, and just as well because Straessa herself could feel fear gripping her by the throat, trying to throttle her words, and only by rattling them off that quickly could she get them out at all. The expressions of those Merchant and Student Company soldiers fool enough to volunteer were wide-eyed and horrified, and if she left them a moment they would just lock up, the reality of their situation clenching like a paralysis about them. But she shouted ‘Move!’ for her own benefit as much as theirs, and then they were all going, peeling off on their separate assignments, running as if all the ghosts of the Bad Old Days were after them.
She herself had the Dragonfly Castre Gorenn, who had brought a longbow that even the Mantids might envy. She had Gerethwy, who was holding his snapbow off-handed because he had lost his usual trigger finger in the last big fight. She had another half-dozen Beetles and Fly-kinden, and they were all waiting to follow her lead.
She went, feeling as though she had to put a shoulder to her fear and shove it out of the way by brute force, but she went anyway. There were Mantis-kinden fighting ahead, a handful of them cutting and leaping at Wasps who were trying hard to stay out of reach until reinforcements arrived. Straessa levelled her snapbow even as she ran, her aim shaking and bouncing as she tried to steady the barrel long enough for a shot. She loosed — but her target was already out of her sights, the bolt flying wildly off into the night. Then the man was dead, just pitching over without a Mantis anywhere near him, and she only heard the thrum of Gorenn’s bowstring as the woman’s second shot took an unarmoured Wasp in the small of the back. Straessa herself was trying to reload and recharge without slowing her pace, but the Dragonfly was already ahead of her, plucking another arrow from one of her two quivers, nocking and drawing, then letting her wings lift her from the ground, steady in the air for a heartbeat as she shot, then down and running again without missing a step.
As the Antspider’s little band passed the melee, Gorenn put five arrows into it, each one claiming a Wasp, and two of those victims picked out of the close fighting with the Mantids. The Dragonfly’s face was serene. The Commonweal Retaliatory Army, she had named herself, but Straessa had never taken her seriously before now.
‘Behind us!’ someone shouted, and she risked a glance over her shoulder to see a good score and a half of Wasps bearing down behind them — more intent on wiping out the Mantids than Straessa’s people, but that would only be a matter of time. Then one of her Fly-kinden had kicked off into the air, his wings propelling him back towards the enemy. The Antspider saw a flare as he dragged the fuse of a grenade over the rough catch-strip tab on his belt and, as he swung out of his dive, he left the grenade behind, arcing its way into the Wasps with the momentum of his flight. He timed it perfectly — the bright lash of it hurled the front dozen Wasps in all directions, with only some of them staggering to their feet afterwards. And then the Mantids had rushed them, just four now against so many, but Straessa had no chance to see how they fared. She had her own mission.
She heard the first explosion, one of the sabotage teams either being creditably fast or horribly premature. ‘Gereth, start the clock!’ she ordered. Now the sands were running, and she hoped that all her other teams were counting as well.
The seer said there would be fire and blood.
Mycella regularly had her fortune cast, and seldom paid much heed to it. ‘Fire and blood’ could mean just about anything — the daily Collegiate fly-overs, the continual just-controlled friction between the Empire and its Spider allies. . But this morning her seer had been insistent — not specific but very, very emphatic.