Taki slid her Esca Magni into a smooth curve that took her up against the flank of a passing Farsphex. As expected, the Imperial craft pulled aside, coursing across the great canvas of the airship’s balloon and leading her away. But she lazily broke away and crested the rounded summit of the dirigible, as if to loose a bomb, and sure enough the enemy came back, unable to lead her off on a chase, forced to put itself in harm’s way to protect this lumbering offence to aeronautics. She hauled sharply on the stick, stopping her wings dead for a second despite her gear trains’ complaints, switching from flying machine to hurtling dead weight for an eye blink, until she set one wing beating to sling her about. Flying backwards, both wings fighting with gravity and her own thwarted momentum, she let loose at the returning Farsphex with a full burst from her rotaries, catching it about the cockpit and wings. It jinked sideways with impressive agility, but she moved along with it, making minute, unconscious adjustments to the stick. A moment later, one of the Farsphex’s wings was simply gone, and it was fast parting company with the sky. Taki pulled away, no need to see the end result.
A Spearflight tried to get in her way, with desperate courage, and she chewed its tail off, effortlessly twitching aside from its own shot. Then somehow a pair of Farsphex had joined together to hunt her, and she led them off down the length of the balloon, putting a few bolts in for good measure. If she’d come loaded with bombs she would have dropped one right then, to see if it would take hold on the envelope, but Collegium used its bigger, slower orthopters for bombing work these days, and a good half of the Stormreader pilots had followed her lead in refusing the extra weight.
She dropped out into the vast and busy sky ahead of the airship, and immediately a quartet of Stormreaders were onto her pursuers. With deft practice she reversed her direction again — something this current rebuild of the Esca was very suited for, for some reason — and took a more careful look at the airship itself. It was still wallowing through the air at its sedate pace, as though heedless of the air-duelling that went on all around it. She could see the gondola’s upper deck passing almost close enough for the crew to loose a sting at her — a handful of airmen crouched low for cover, and some weirdly dressed Wasps standing near the front.
What’s that noise?
Over the wind, over the clatter of her wings, reaching her as a tremor in her bones more than through her ears: a deep, pulsating thunder.
From the airship?
No engine, though. Nothing she had ever heard before, except. . fear. It struck fear into her, at a base and childish level. She had to fight herself to keep the Esca level for a second. What? There’s nothing. There’s nothing. Only. .
A heliopter looking like something put together by a clumsy child tried to challenge her with a repeating ballista, barely fitter for the air than the airship itself, and she sliced off its rotors almost contemptuously. Please, we were building better than that machine on the Exalsee thirty years back.
She let the Esca circle the stern of the airship, and a Stormreader rose up and crossed her path, signalling furiously with its lamp. She tried to decipher the message, but the pilot was hammering the shutters so fast that whatever signals were intended just ran together and got lost. That insistent vibration was still assaulting her insides, an unreasoning unease encroaching on her despite all rational thought, and she dropped down to see where the Stormreader had come from, to see what it had seen.
She swung a wide course about the belly of the airship.
The hatches had opened, all of them.
But they’re two miles short of the city. Are they going to bomb their own army now? A mad thought: what if they had all somehow misunderstood? What if this was a friendly airship under attack from the Empire, and she was supposed to be protecting it? She had gone short on sleep recently, but it hardly seemed possible that she could get it that wrong. .
The sound was so much louder now.
Another Farsphex flashed by, under pursuit, but she let it go, drawing further away from the airship’s port-riddled underside. And they couldn’t have got more hatches there if they’d tried. Looks like the whole hull’s been attacked by giant woodworm. .
Oh.
Oh, mother help me.
There was a head pushing out of one of the holes. It was triangular, dominated by two oval eyes and a set of saw-edged mandibles. Segmented antennae sprang forward as soon as they were free, and then it had forced its hunching thorax clear of the hole and began flexing its wings.
She was bringing the Esca back in the tightest turn she could manage, so she could draw a line on the thing and kill it before it could drag that curved black and yellow abdomen from its resting place. But by then there were heads pushing out from every hole across the breadth of the airship’s underside: tens of them, hundreds of them, emerging in a second hatching and tasting the air. Tasting the enemy.
Each was not so much smaller than the Esca — from its serrated jaws to the barbed sting on its tail. When they stirred their wings into life together, the thunderous buzz rattled every part of Taki and her orthopter, and spoke terror to her in a language she had obviously been born with, all unknowing.
She had her line, and her piercers raked across the airship’s hull, and a handful of the host just exploded into wet shards of chitin and wing fragments at the touch of her bolts. But then they were airborne. They were coming for her.
Nistic’s body jerked with exaltation as his soldiers took wing and filled the air, mad with rage, desperate to drive their stings into the enemy that was all around them. The scent that the Imperial vessels had been daubed with reeked with sheer incitement, the concentrated musk of alarm and retribution that the hornets themselves would respond to in the wild. Perhaps it would keep the Empire’s orthopters safe, perhaps not. It only helped lash the swarm into a berserk frenzy.
Killkillkillkillkillkillkill. .
‘Kill!’ Nistic screamed, and all of his fellows screamed in unison: no mindlink here, but their Art made them part of the swarm and that was as good — indeed was better.
He took a hand from the rail — the other was white-knuckled in its efforts to keep him still on deck — and drew his blade. The old ways knew: a price must be paid to buy the service of the swarm, a price and a reward. In Nistic’s mind the host’s hundreds raged, waiting only for him to become a true part of them.
At last he let go of the rail, hanging suspended between the deck beneath his feet and the murder-storm of the swarm’s collective mind. One hand found where his corselet of chitin scales left off, and he wrenched it up to expose the hollow beneath his ribs.
The swarm was strong and mad, but he would give it direction. For as long as it raged, it would share some fragment of his human mind, and fall upon the enemies of the Empire in blood and fury.
He poised his knife, letting its point hover over his flesh like a stinger.
With a great shout he drove it home, and let his mind fly free.
Taki spun frantically out of the way, but the sky was already full of them — everywhere she turned there were frantic, insanely angry insects battering and stooping and attacking everything in sight, and her mind was running over and over with the mantra: You can’t do this. Everyone knows this isn’t how it’s done. Insect against orthopter never worked — the insects were too nimble to be shot, the orthopters proof against the arrows and spears of their riders. But that was wisdom from flying against the dragonfly cavalry of Princep Exilla, over the Exalsee, and these hornets didn’t even have riders to control them.