Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

‘Out here,’ he said finally. Sperra was slowly uncurling as Che put her boots on. Stepping outside made her head swim because of the sheer quantity of movement all around. The entire Ant force was afoot, forming into its traditional tight units of shield and crossbow. There were several thousand infantry in her view alone, and every single one of them knew where he or she should be.

Sperra ducked out after her just as the engines of the flying machines began to settle into a low grumble beyond the tents and the machines themselves to slowly crawl across the ground.

‘Apparently the Wasps tried to attack at dawn,’ Achaeos explained, his voice sounding oddly empty. ‘A strike force of fifty or so intended to destroy the fliers. The Queen had put the Mantis-kinden on guard, though. They can see well in the dark, and their bows can shoot further than any Wasp sting.’

‘Are you all right?’ Che asked him. He sounded shaken and numb.

‘Our scouts came back,’ he said. ‘The Empire outnumbers us by about three to two, but the Ants don’t seem to think it makes much difference. It’s tactics and discipline, not numbers, apparently.’ There was a ragged edge to his words, emerging as though he had not the least interest in the conflict that was about to unfold.

‘Achaeos, what’s wrong? Tell me!’

‘I have dreams, Che,’ he told her. ‘Terrible dreams. The Darakyon is hounding me but I cannot understand it. It is going mad, it seems, over something new that it cannot get through to me. Something terrible is going to happen, Che.’

‘Here? In the battle?’

‘Something dire enough to make this battle look like children brawling,’ he said.

The engines of the automotives roared suddenly, and the entire Ant army set forth together, every single man and woman of the infantry marching precisely in step. Sperra poked her head further out of the tent and swore in a small, lost voice, as thousands of men and women all around them were suddenly on the move and falling into place. It felt as though the whole world was leaving them behind.

Technically, all three of them had been seconded to join the field surgeons, as they each had some experience of medicine in various forms. There would be a blessed pause before any casualties came back, though, and Che wanted to see for herself exactly what was going on. She looked around for a vantage point and picked one of the transport automotives, empty of everything except rations now. With a clumsy flick of her wings she cast herself up at the overreaching cage of struts that defined its cargo area, clung tight and hauled herself up until she could stand on them, looking out over the battlefield. She was just in time for the first of the orthopters to drone overhead, just taking off but still going fast enough for the downbeat of their wings to buffet her. She sat down hurriedly just as Achaeos and Sperra joined her on her perch.

Plated with shields, the units of Ants were themselves like great crawling insects. The centre of the Sarnesh battle array was made up of them, square after square plodding forward with a single will. Interrupting these black metal lines, armoured automotives drove forward at walking pace, their brand-new nailbows glinting proudly in the sun.

On either side, the soldiers of the Ancient League were a diffuse cloud, now getting a little ahead of the line, now being reined in again. Che pictured all those Mantis-kinden, all running as individuals, some with arrows to bowstrings, others brandishing swords, claws or lances. She saw in her mind’s eye the tight clusters of Moth-kinden with short-bows and knives and blank white eyes.

Ahead of the Sarnesh advance, the Wasp army moved like a living thing. Behind their soldiers, blocky flying machines began to lurch into the air.

‘The scouts said they had “armoured heloropters” or some such,’ Achaeos reported.

‘Armoured heliopters,’ Che corrected. ‘A stupid idea, really.’

‘Why?’ Achaeos asked. ‘Not that I don’t think the same about all these machines.’

‘We were all worried that the Ants wouldn’t think like fliers, but it seems the Wasps have been guilty of the same thing. You can armour a heliopter all you like, but you can’t armour the rotors, and that’s what keep the machines in the air. The Sarnesh fixed-wings will be able to shoot them down and-’

Her words failed in her throat, because the Wasp army had just exploded. Its entire front ranks were now in the air, a great buzzing cloud that was sweeping forward on to the patiently advancing Ant line, filling the whole sky.

*

Sperra had a telescope but did not care to use it, handing it mutely to Che instead. Putting her eye to it, Che saw a slice of the world wheel crazily, tilted and blurry. Then she had the battlefront focused, a wall of flying Wasps surging forward like a breaking wave to smash against the front lines of the Sarnesh.

One instant it seemed that no force on earth could withstand that great rushing charge, a thousand men of the light airborne, hands extended to sting, wings sweeping them down the valley of the rail line. Then her point of view was filled with lancing rain, but rain lashing upwards in near-solid sheets, and she heard Sperra gasp and Achaeos curse. Only then did she realize that it was the crossbow quarrels from the leading Ant-kinden, sleeting upwards at a range that the Wasps’ Art weapons could not match. She wished, then, that she had seen it all, as the other two had, that sudden black flash of bolts, shooting in absolute unison, from the forward Ant formations.

And the Wasp charge was now in chaos. It was nothing she could follow with the glass and so she took it from her eye, trying to make sense of the mad buzzing clots of men that the charge had been broken up into. From her vantage point she could see the carpet of dead which that first round of quarrels had produced, still some distance ahead of the inexorable Ant advance, but the remainder of the Wasps were heading in all directions. Some were turning and fleeing back to their own lines, others over on the flanks were still attacking, trying to take the Ants in the side. But as they swung around they met the long arrows of the Mantis-kinden, and the Mantids themselves, wings flashing to life as they drove upwards with blades flashing into the suddenly scattering Wasps. Many of the Wasps just tried to push on through, streaking over the Ant formations with their stings flashing down as points of golden light, mostly to crackle uselessly over raised and overlapping shields. They were being slaughtered even as they flew, for the formations behind the leading edge of the advance had their crossbows too and even at this range Che could hear the bang-bang-bang of nailbows from infantry and from the automotives.

The Wasp heliopters were looming large, now, lumbering through the air to get above the Ant-kinden and bombard their tight formations, but the Ant fixed-wings flashed past them, nailbows blazing. One of the cumbersome machines was clipped from the sky almost instantly, tumbling forards with enough time for half a revolution before its armoured lines split asunder against the ground. With shaking telescope Che saw the sparks of nailbow bolts striking against the armoured hulls of the others, while the heliopters’ ballista and leadshotter fire kept trying to pin down the swifter Sarnesh fliers.

The Ant advance had not slowed, even now that the lead heliopters had begun to drop explosives on them. Flame and shrapnel flowed in broken chains across the Ant soldiers. The formations quickly broke up as the heliopter was directly over them, and then massed back together once it had passed, but there were undoubtedly gaps being blasted into their lines. There were too many soldiers in too close a space to avoid it all. Che saw one of the heliopters falter in the air suddenly, struck by nailbow shot from the automotives, and then plummet down amongst the Ant soldiers without warning, smashing an entire unit apart with the impact.