Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Air War

Edmon flew so close over her that he blotted out the sky for a blurred second, their wings close to touching, and she neither felt nor heard the impact as he rammed his craft into the vessel behind her, but it echoed in her all the same.

Aarmon cried out in shock in that same instant, a light winking out in his mind. None of his fellows was able to take up the attack, to drag the little Collegiate pilot from his tail, her shot already punching through his craft’s hull.

The building ahead, its crown alive with searing argent fire, was in his sights.

‘Kiin!’ he shouted, and a blistering salvo of shot ripped through the cabin behind him. He heard the Fly-kinden woman shout — not in pain but in rage.

‘Reticule’s smashed!’ the words came to him. ‘Sir-!’

‘Do it by hand!’ he called. ‘I have faith in you.’

And their time was up. He was still in the air and over the target, so surely…

Bolts scythed through the back and top of his vessel. He felt one wing go still instantly, all connection to the engine severed. He heard Kiin’s scream — brief and agonized, cut short almost as as soon as it started.

‘ Kiin! ’

The sky was filled with light.

The sky filled with light for Taki, too.

One moment she was in hot pursuit of the Farsphex, and a moment later she was fighting blindly with every part of the Esca ’s controls, wheeling madly across an unseen roofscape. The gears stuck and stuttered, the wing joints seemed to freeze, falling out of phase, every moving part on the cusp of being welded to its neighbour. And Taki cringed, shrinking into her seat, waiting for the flesh-searing fire that must surely follow.

But the Esca coughed and rattled, and kept on flying, and she could see again, albeit with a great negative blotch before her eyes that was already fading. She nearly died anyway, finding herself pitching downwards in a wild whirl before she could drag the stubborn stick back and get herself level. Then she was still airborne and alive, and as intact as her last skirmish with the enemy had left her.

And all about her the sky was dotted with orthopters, and most of them were the Empire’s — all still there. Only the fading skein of sparks crawling about every part of her machine told that anything had happened at all.

Oh, you stupid bastard, Maker. It didn’t work.

Then came the first explosion, a Farsphex simply erupting from within, and she stared and stared, as the sky over Collegium played host to a new and fleeting constellation.

And, on the ground, Stenwold Maker and his fellows rushed out of Banjacs’s house to stare upwards. The fierce, pale light of the lightning engine behind them was momentarily the god of all shadows, brighter than the sun, and the its charge was gone, hurled impartially into the heavens that were thronging with flying machines.

It was invisible the moment Banjacs’s engine discharged it, and yet every sense screamed with it, a moment of monumental wrongness when each hair stood on end, and the sky seemed to bend and boom with energies never meant to have been chained by the hand of man.

In the next breath, it had all been for nothing, and Stenwold felt his heart almost stop with the unfairness, the bitter knowledge of a defeat that his own actions had made so much worse.

Then Eujen was yelling and pointing, and he saw the first explosion: one of his enemies ripping apart as though old Banjacs’s ghost was up there tearing the machine asunder with invisible hands.

And another. And more, and Stenwold stared up as the skies caught fire over his city.

Scain screamed.

Pingge could not make out the words. He seemed to have gone mad, wrenching at the stick and yet taking them only in circles. But outside…

She saw the sudden bloom of flame as a nearby Farsphex went up, fragments of hull and wing forming momentary silhouettes against the blast.

‘Aarmon!’ Scain cried out, and Pingge thought, Kiin! knowing that her friend of so many years was dead.

Something blew in the engine behind and above her, and she shrieked. Scain was wrestling with his straps, finding them stubborn.

There was no time.

‘Scain!’ she shrilled, and he was turning back towards her, mad desperation in his tear-streaked face. Even as another shudder rocked them, he had his hand extended back, not seeking help but palm held outwards to sting.

She screamed at him. She saw that he was going to kill her in some Wasp idea of mercy. She felt the searing heat as his Art discharged, and then the fuel tank ruptured and the blast picked her up.

In that last moment, unable to get himself free, the fire of his sting had cracked her chain apart, and she was flung bodily from the Farsphex, out past the ballista — the bolts behind her popping and cracking like fireworks — out into the open air, borne away on the vanguard of the explosion.

Her last sight of Scain was a pale face seen through the cockpit’s faceted window, before the flames came.

Taki guided her battered Esca through a slow, spiralling descent — in truth the absolute best the machine was capable of just then, while watching the other Collegiate pilots still aloft follow her down. She had, she confessed to herself, no idea what had just happened, and no leap of inspiration could conquer the gap. Apt as she was, it seemed to her as though some great sorcerer of old had waved a hand, invoking an untold power simply to rid the sky of the enemy, leaving herself and her fellows intact.

Only later would she learn that Banjacs’s machine had not worked as intended, that the grand obliteration had never come, that even a genius’s calculations could harbour errors. Later scholars would suggest that, to fulfil his dream, ten times the charge of raw lightning energy would have been needed, and its backwash would have flash-cooked every living thing in Collegium. As it was, although the Stormreaders that had flown through that particular storm would need refitting, countless small components slightly deformed or melted as the lightning had leapt about them on its way to repatriation with the sky above, they had all landed safely, their pilots shocked and shaky, but alive.

For the Farsphex, however, the residual sparks of that same discharge had, within a varying number of seconds, coursed through the fuel tank and turned all that volatile and devastatingly efficient mineral oil into an instantly detonating bomb.

The Collegiate pilots, those who had reached the ground before then, and those only just now touching down, looked up into a sky that they had won, and around them at a city their path to victory had scarred almost beyond recognition. Even then the messengers were being sent out from Stenwold Maker and Jodry Drillen to tell them their work was not yet done, that the College artificers were waiting for them to complete emergency modifications to the Stormreaders, that the war was still going on.

She had given the order to run once they seemed to have put an acceptable distance between them and the front line — that chaotic tangle of men and vehicles that had given Straessa’s maniple the chance to win clear. There were other maniples that had failed to break free, or whose officers had decided on some misguided stand, and she understood she was abandoning them. There was no right answer.

Shortly after she had allowed her people to break formation and just flee, one of the transport automotives rumbled up, the driver vaguely recognizable from amongst the ranks of the camp artificers.

‘Get in!’ the man said, his face a mask of dust covering goggles and a face scarf.

‘Where are you headed?’ Straessa demanded. Throughout the mass of retreating Collegiate soldiers, she could see other vehicles performing the same service.

She had a horrible feeling that the driver was about to take them back to the fighting, but he just gestured towards the city, and home.