Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Air War

Straessa did not even need to give the order. By the time she had hauled her aching body on board, most of her maniple were already there, and the nearest stragglers from other units were heading over as well. The driver kept his eye on the churning dust that must be the Imperial forces on the march again. The sky to the east was dark with the Airborne, beginning to range out over the fleeing Beetles to pick them off.

Oh I’m not going to enjoy learning about this in history classes, thought Straessa, because humour had always before been her armour against the world. The following thought was even less funny: I don’t think Collegium’s going to be writing the histories.

When the transport was full, with soldiers hanging off the sides, the driver wrenched it about and headed for the camp at best speed. There were no orders, Straessa understood. Everyone who could was trying to assist with the retreat, to preserve some vestige of armed strength for… nobody seemed to be sure for what.

She was the highest-ranking officer on the automotive, which was to say the only one.

‘What the blazes is this?’ their driver demanded. Ahead of them was a block of soldiers that seemed to be forming up, as though they had arrived late and somehow contrived to overlook what was happening all around them. The sheer idiocy of it offended their driver enough for him to grind the transport to a halt and begin shouting at them.

‘What are you doing? Get moving, you fools. They’re right behind us!’

There were a fair number of them, Straessa saw — a few hundred at least — and although they were as dust-smothered as everything else she saw that they were mostly all of a piece. These were Mynans, standing in a close block, shoulder to shoulder just as though the snapbow had never been invented, falling back on what they knew.

Someone was approaching the automotive, and Straessa blinked to recognize the Mynan leader, Kymene. The woman looked exhausted, her right arm bandaged up and a sword in her left hand, but a mad fire burned in her eyes.

‘We attack!’ she snapped. ‘What else is there?’

The driver just gaped at her, but Straessa leant past him. ‘Commander, we’ve lost! We have to get back behind our walls before they catch us in the open.’

‘They’re not trying to catch us in the open, and your walls will not save you,’ Kymene declared flatly. She pointed out towards the enemy ‘They’ve halted, Sub-officer.’

Straessa stood, frowning, then stepped on the back of the driver’s seat. The trailing mass of fugitive soldiers was still being harried by the Airborne but, now that she looked, the main body of the Imperial army did seem to be holding their ground.

‘Well that’s…’ she began uncertainly. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means their artillery is in range of the city,’ Kymene informe her. ‘There is no other reason for them to stop.’

‘But they’re…’ She could just about make out what might be Collegium over to the west, although the dust made that uncertain. ‘You can’t… Seriously?’ And then came the unwelcome knowledge that, of course, Kymene had been through all this before.

‘If we do not act now, the city is lost,’ Kymene said, and it was plain that she had no intention of finding herself in this position again, one way or the other. ‘We will break into the enemy camp and destroy their engines, just as the automotives were supposed to do. It is the only way. Or else, if you decide to run, just keep running. There’s no point stopping once you reach Collegium.’

Coward, was her unspoken implication, just as Straessa’s mind was screaming, Madwoman. But it stung, that accusation. It stung beyond any veneer of common sense or tactical consideration. And the woman was right, as well, as far as Straessa could weigh the odds.

‘Sub?’ asked one of her people, or perhaps one of those from another maniple.

‘I resign my commission,’ said the Antspider, only realizing afterwards that she’d said it aloud. A lot of people were staring at her.

‘I’m staying,’ she called out, pitching her voice to carry. ‘I’m giving no orders. Your choice.’ With that inspiring speech, she slung herself over the side of the automotive and went to stand by the Mynans.

Perhaps a little under half made the same choice, forming themselves into makeshift, patchwork maniples. Their entire armed strength was just a mote before the great storm that the Empire was bringing.

Punch our way in. Destroy artillery. Get out. Oh, yes, can see all of that happening. Straessa was beginning to hope that Chief Officer Marteus really was dead, because otherwise she was going to kill him for promoting her.

‘Let’s go,’ ordered Kymene, and a moment later the Mynans were moving off: black and red armour and peaked helms, blue-grey faces set in expressions that spoke of being driven to the wall one too many times. After an awkward pause, the rallied Company soldiers followed suit. Straessa shouted at them to spread out, to make themselves more difficult targets, but she barely had the voice for it, nor the heart.

Then there was a buzzing, a murmuring sound that swelled behind them, familiar to them but new to the battlefield, and a moment later the orthopters were racing overhead, wings ablur. The soldiers began to scatter immediately, fearing the worst, but Kymene just stood and stared upwards. Then her sword was pointing high in triumph.

‘They’re ours!’ she cried, to those already with her, and to the others who were still streaming past. ‘Collegium to me!’

Amnon hauled himself to his knees, wiping blood from his mouth.

We gave them a chase, though, didn’t we?

His surviving automotives had simply not slowed, but rushed like maddened animals back and forth, a mobile barrier of steel to shield the Collegiate retreat, moving swiftly to give the Imperial artillery — and the Sentinels — a difficult time in bringing their weapons to bear. The Airborne had swooped on them. The infantry had tried to board them. Vehicles had been falling out of the chase from the start, swarmed or smashed. They had failed from the beginning, Amnon understood. They had not been able to get close to the artillery that was even now being erected in the heart of the Imperial camp.

The last wreckage of the Collegiate automotive assault was strewn all around him. His own machine, faithful to the last, had thrown him clear as it turned over, the engine and front axle destroyed by a Sentinel’s leadshot, and the driver along with it.

Amnon lurched to his feet. Barely a hundred yards away, well within snapbow range, were the enemy. They had ceased their advance and were putting up slanting barriers of wood and metal about their perimeter, against any Collegiate counterattack.

Closer, outside that evolving compound, was one of the Sentinels, probably the very one that had finally brought down his automotive. It shifted position minutely as he looked at it. Whatever slots or lenses the driver used to view the world were, he felt, fixed on him. He, who knew the secrets of hunting every living thing in the Jamail delta back home, understood when he had become the quarry.

He found a sword amidst the wreckage — not the leaf-bladed Khanaphir implement he would have preferred, nor even a crescent-guarded Collegium weapon, but a cross-hilted Imperial piece. It would be enough.

The Sentinel came closer, many feet picking a path through the strewn metal. The great blind eye regarded him imperiously.

He was not First Soldier of Khanaphir now, nor was he the partner of Praeda Rakespear, whom he had loved. He was not even an officer of the Collegiate army, given that it was either dead or fled. He was Amnon, though, the warrior and the hunter, and he still had a sword.