‘Help?’ demanded Oski. ‘Lieutenant, this is. . what is this? It’s a bad joke. The Second has been attacked for tendays now, day in, day out, by a foe with superior air power, and one which’ll make short work of our entire army once a siege begins. We’ve been promised some means of defending ourselves, of taking back the air!’
‘And you shall have it, Major,’ the lieutenant told him grandly. ‘Tell your general so.’
Oski glanced up at his companions, feeling as if he and the Red Watch man were simply having two quite separate conversations. ‘I’m headed below decks,’ he announced. ‘I’m going to see how far this stupidity goes.’
‘I’ll show you myself, Major,’ the lieutenant offered, with mocking smile. ‘Please follow me, sir.’
‘You keep your stinging hands ready,’ Oski murmured back to Bergild. ‘This reeks. First sign that it’s a set-up, we’re out of the nearest bomb-hatch, or whatever they are, and we’ll take our chances.’
‘My flier-’
‘Your life, Captain. You can’t requisition a new one of those from stores.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Under Nistic’s barbed gaze, they descended into the interior of the vessel, which turned out to be minute.
The entire innards had been reworked. Oski knew what he had expected from this pattern of vessel, but he found almost none of it. It was as though the interior of a far smaller gondola had been transplanted inside, offering narrow corridors and cabins, a galley and the engine room, all cramped enough to make a Fly-kinden feel at home. And no windows, save for portholes at the very rear, where the engines were. Everything else was as closed in as a cave.
‘How do we get to the bomb deck?’ Oski demanded, once they had traversed the entire little warren twice.
‘There is no bomb deck,’ the lieutenant told him smoothly. ‘Have you seen enough, sir?’
‘Enough is just what I haven’t seen,’ Oski insisted. ‘There must be a way. How do we get the other side of this?’ And he banged on the curve of the wall.
The gesture had just been to make a point: he had not expected anything to come of it. A moment after his small fist thudded against the wood, though, there was a sound. It froze them in their tracks, a deep rumble growling out from behind the wall, like the muted roar of some manner of engine which Oski had never encountered before. There was something about the pitch of sound, too — something that affected him at a deep and primal level. It spoke only one word to him: fear. Abruptly he was sweating in those claustrophobic quarters — afraid without understanding why — as that deep throbbing sound built and built. .
And it multiplied. All around them, through that false wall, they heard a legion of voices, soft at first, but rising to an air-trembling thunder that shook the very substance of the ship.
Not leadshots, not bombs. . Oski tried to think. Machines? Some manner of machines designed to fight orthopters? His head swam with half-formed ideas. Can you make a flying machine without a pilot? Can they do that with ratiocinators, now? Or is the sound itself the weapon? Will this drive them mad, or shake their machines apart? What have we created here? He found he did not know. His own trade had outstripped him.
By then he had his hands clamped to his ears, because the sound was virtually shaking the very air around them. But then someone was shaking his shoulder hard enough almost to batter him against the wall.
Ernain: he saw Ernain. The Bee-kinden looked ashen, his eyes as wide with fear as Oski had ever seen on any man — not just the instinctive reaction which this resonating pitch had struck in all of them, but more. Ernain plainly knew what was going on, and it terrified him beyond all reason.
Oski could see his mouth working and, although the words went unheard, he read: ‘We have to get out of here! Now!’
Moments later the three of them were stumbling out on deck again, that terrible sound following them — and, at its heart, the laughter of the Red Watch lieutenant.
When the Second Army was approaching along the sea road, where its path curved south about the bay on its final leg to Collegium, it met the Vekken.
Repeated air attack meant that the army was still scattered, but Tynan had men watching out for a sortie from the city. The Ant-kinden had been in place for days, though, concealing themselves in dugouts and holes and waiting with the silent patience of their kind, unsuspected until it was too late.
They let the airborne scouts pass over them, each hiding Ant almost blind, but together combining hundreds of little scraps and pinholes of sight to put together a picture of the world outside. When the main body of the Wasp force got close, the entire Vekken force, a good eight hundred Ant-kinden soldiers, attacked as one, springing out with crossbows and Collegiate snapbows and butchering every Wasp within reach.
The loose marching order of the Second Army meant that the casualties were lighter than might have been expected, but the Wasps could not bring their forces together to bottle up the Ants, not in the time they had. Though the Light Airborne did their best, they took heavy losses from the Vekken marksmanship, and were unable to contain the more heavily armoured Ants on the ground. Wasp orders were reaching parts of the Second Army piecemeal, and for over an hour this solid block of Ants effectively held off an army many times its own size.
By then someone had sent for the Sentinels, and the Vekken were well enough briefed to know that they had outstayed their welcome. Their formation disintegrated, spreading out into a far-flung net of Ants more efficiently than the Wasps had managed, but grouping in squads of twenty and fifty when threatened. They made short work of the miles to Collegium, and made the vanguard of the pursuing Light Airborne regret their diligence. Ant casualties totalled just under one hundred.
To the Beetle-kinden this was an education. Stenwold stood on the walls with the Vekken commander, Termes, knowing that two thoughts would dominate every Collegiate mind at that moment. Firstly, Isn’t it a good thing that the Vekken are on our side just now? and secondly, When did they learn to do that? It seemed that defeat at the hands of mere Beetles could spur even the most insular of Ants to innovate.
The Second was bloodied. The Second was slowed. The army was named ‘the Gears’, though, and it ground on, visible from the walls, marching south towards the great maze of earthworks that defended the city from its enemies.
Everything we have thrown at them — burning their orthopters over the city, all those air assaults, destroying their supply airships, the Felyen, the Vekken, and yet here they are.
Madagnus of the Coldstone Company had readied the wall artillery — the new magnetic bows with a range to match the greatshotters of the Empire — save that the Empire seemed not to have any left. The Collegiate attacks had devastated the enemy siege engines, and those losses did not seem to have been replaced. Stenwold was left to scan his telescope over the arriving enemy and think, What do they know that we do not? Because, if I were in the position I see them in, I would not have come. Or is that because I am a Beetle, and sane, and these Wasps are so mad for battle they would throw themselves into a fire for it? Are they worse even than the Mantids?
He heard Madagnus make a disgusted sound nearby, and glanced up. The cadaverous Ant had his own glass out and trained on the enemy.
‘Far enough away that we’d fall short, by my calculation,’ the man declared. ‘I was hoping to give them a bit of fun, after they’d set camp.’
‘And their own range?’ Stenwold called over to him.
‘They were a good two hundred yards closer when they set up their artillery last time,’ Madagnus told him. ‘They were hurrying, back then, so we reckoned they’d put the shotters at their extreme range — which is comparable to ours. If they do manage to hit us from right out there, though. .?’ He shrugged. ‘Then the aviators get to take them. Either way, anything as big and stationary as those artillery pieces of theirs isn’t going to last long.’