Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

Totho had to run, to catch up with the line again, but Drephos flew. He flew badly, very awkwardly, like a wounded man, but he put himself through it nonetheless to stay alongside his secret weapon. Totho ’s secret weapon. By the time they arrived, the Wasps were just about in order, forming their two lines, one kneeling and one standing. It was a familiar formation that crossbow units all over the Lowlands used.

‘Stand ready!’ Drephos called. He had officers for this task, of course, but they stood there dumb whilst he made his own voice hoarse. He was quivering with excitement, uneven features stretched in a mad grin. ‘Charge your bows!’

In ragged unison the Wasp snapbowmen cranked back, pressurizing the air in the weapons’ batteries. Totho could see in his head just how they worked, the designs he had made when he was still an apprentice at Collegium.

‘The rest is trimming,’ Drephos had explained to him, after the first test. ‘Your battery is the revolution! We could put a firepowder primer there instead of your device, and use the long tooled barrel, but firepowder is clumsy. The discharge rocks the weapon, and so you have no accuracy at any range, and it’s dangerous and expensive to boot. Your discharge of air barely makes the weapon shudder as it vents, and it is both safe and free. A revolution, Totho! War marches on another step!’

There was something obscene about Drephos’s expression now. The excitement that shook the man was almost sexual.

‘Loose!’ he yelled.

The leading edge of the Ant advance simply disintegrated, men and women collapsing backwards with nothing but surprise and pain. There were round holes punched in shields, split rings in chainmail, and soldiers all the way along the line were abruptly dead without warning, even as the snap-snap-snap of the bows sounded all around Totho.

In a split second, the Ant tacticians must have made their decision, for the Ant lines were abruptly charging forwards with all speed despite the distance, going from a steady plod to an outright run without warning and without confusion. They outstripped their Mantis allies for a moment, and they avoided their own fallen without fail, not even slowing. For any other army, moving in full armour over such a distance, it would have been madness, but they were the strongest soldiers in the world, wearing mail for years until it became a second skin. It could be done, and they did it.

On the flanks the Mantids decided they were not to be outdone, and soon made up the distance, dashing along in their light armour, their leather and their scale, rending the air with their war-cries over the utter silence of the Ants.

They had taken the new weapons as crossbows, imagining the Wasps desperately reloading, winding them back, while seeing the approaching Ants closer and closer. One more round of bolts at close range and then the charging Sarnesh would break them.

The next salvo of snapbow bolts ripped through them, catching men in the second, the third and fourth ranks. Sarnesh soldiers at a full run were brought to an instant halt as their fellows ran into them, too close in their tight formations to stop or turn. On the flanks there were Mantis soldiers spinning and falling, jerked suddenly back by the power of the bolts. The Ant advance stumbled, faltered, and then surged on into the next lash of the snapbows.

Totho’s stomach lurched, and he felt his hands clenching uselessly. He wanted, he wanted so very badly, to look away, but he fixed his eyes upon what was unfolding throughout the Sarnesh lines. I have a responsibility to my victims.

‘The tests already told us, of course,’ Drephos breathed, even as his soldiers reloaded. ‘ This is the true experiment, though. All those Ants in their metal armour, and when our bolts strike metal, they flatten or even bend, and yet they still keep going . They spin, even. A man without armour might have it lance straight through him and leave no more than a hole, if it missed his bones, but any armoured man whose armour fails is a dead man there and then.’

Totho stared. He felt nothing except cold, as if someone had stabbed him somewhere vital, and he was simply waiting to die. He felt nothing, and he realized that meant not even guilt or remorse.

At the Great College they had told him that he would never amount to anything.

‘Loose!’ the master artificer called once again.

At close range, the twin ranks of the snapbowmen stopped the advance in its tracks. So many men and women fell in that one instant that those behind were caught, trapped now with a tangle of dead comrades before them who a moment ago had all been living and breathing, had been kindred minds within theirs.

‘Down bows and back!’ Drephos told his protA©gA©s. ‘General Malkan’s move, I think.’

‘Why stop now?’ Totho asked hopelessly.

Drephos smiled at him. ‘Ammunition, Totho. Have you any idea how many bolts we’ve loosed in the last few seconds? Let Malkan spend his men instead, since they are more easily replaced.’

Already the Wasp soldiers of Malkan’s army were rushing past on either side of the firing line, both on the ground and in the air, descending on the battered Ant-kinden with sword and sting.

Before setting out, General Malkan had left Drephos two thousand soldiers in Helleron, but in the end the foundries, though working day and night, had produced only twelve hundred snapbows, and so Drephos had done the best he could with what he had.

Back among the surgeons, Che was tying another bandage when the invisible wave of news washed over them. In an instant all the Ants were up, and beginning to move the wounded onto the transport automotives. They worked as carefully as they could, but there was an edge of haste to them that she had never seen in Ants before.

‘What is it?’ she asked them. ‘What’s happening?’ but they had no answers, just grimly took up each wounded soldier who still had a chance of survival and stretchered him or her away.

Sperra took her telescope back from Che and leapt into the air, putting it to her eye and holding place with her wings.

‘They’re retreating!’ she called, her voice shaken. ‘The Sarnesh are falling back!’

‘What?’ Che asked. It made no sense. They had been advancing steadily. ‘What’s going on? Tell us, Sperra.’ Beside her, Achaeos patiently strung his bow.

‘The men at the front are standing their ground, but the Wasps are all over them, and the rest are. they’re running. They’re actually running . They’re keeping their shields over their heads, but they’re coming back fast.’

All the remaining automotives were pulling up, and there were men throwing open the doors of the train. Che stared at it all in disbelief. ‘This can’t be happening!’

‘The Mantis-kinden on the right edge are still fighting,’ Sperra was saying, her voice sounding less and less steady. ‘They’re fighting like madmen, I’ve never seen the like, never — but they’re all fighting alone. They’re killing them, killing the Wasps, but there are so many coming at them now — they’re falling! All of them, they’re falling!’

‘What about the left flank?’ Achaeos called up to her.

‘They’ve drawn back with the Ants. The Sarnesh who stayed to hold the line, they. they’re being overrun! What can they do? They can’t get all the way back here before the Wasps catch them!’

The last Ant adjutant assigned to the Mantis left-side company saluted Scelae. He was shaking slightly, but nothing else in pose or voice told anything more of the horror that was in his mind.

‘They suggest you pull back,’ he told her. ‘Two companies are going to stand here and hold them off, to allow our people to reach the automotives and the rail line.’