Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

‘Since when were you a tactician, lad?’ Nero asked him.

‘I don’t have to be. There was a man. a slave of the Wasps. He told me. He warned me, I think. “Airships,” he said. I would use airships, if I could.’

Staring at Totho, Parops had gone very still. ‘Airships,’ he echoed.

Totho shrugged, still finding it difficult to concentrate. None of it seemed that important. ‘That was what he said. I think it was what he said.’

‘Totho!’ Salma took him by the shoulders and pulled at him. ‘Come back to us,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying, but if it’s important. ’

The world shifted and slid sideways in Totho’s head, and he blinked. ‘He said airships,’ he told Salma softly. ‘I pulled him out from under the engine. He was an artificer, Salma, like me.’

‘You’d better come with me,’ said Parops, and set off for his guard tower at a jog.

He took them up to his arrowslit, noticeably slanted now. Parops’s entire tower seemed to be at a slight tilt. His commandership there might be living on borrowed time, Salma reckoned.

Out beyond the wall they could see the broad swathe of the imperial camp, and there was little new there, save that their numbers seemed barely touched by the atrocities of the previous night.

At the camp’s far end, though, lay the enemy’s makeshift airfield, where a few of the heliopters could be made out. There, beyond those blocky, graceless things, something was now rising up.

Several things, in fact. Half a dozen bloated shapes were slowly, imperceptibly swelling. Already they were bigger than the heliopters ranged before them, and Salma had the impression they still had a way to expand yet.

Parops had passed round his telescope, which Salma had no idea what to do with. It showed him nothing but blurs but Totho took it and peered into it keenly, seeming more focused than he had been since Skrill had first found him.

‘They would do the job,’ the artificer observed. ‘I can see that. Now there are no air defences left.’

‘Little enough,’ Parops agreed. ‘Most of the nest crop is gone, and we only have a couple of orthopters that could even be repaired on time. They threw a lot at us last night.’

‘Of course, and for that very reason,’ Totho murmured, still scrutinizing the distant gasbags. ‘An artificer’s war.’ He looked back at the others, seeming more himself, more the avid student Salma had known. The animation with which he spoke of his trade was macabre. ‘Airships are very vulnerable to any flying attack. That’s why they’ve not been used much in warfare.’ Right now he might have been a College master delivering his lecture.

‘So what are those things out there?’ Skrill demanded. Totho gave her a frustrated look.

‘They’re airships , of course, because there will be no airborne opposition to them now. They just have to float them over the city. It makes perfect sense. It’s just that the Tarkesh don’t think like Wasps. Parops, your people fight ground wars, and so your air power is secondary, kept just for spotting and the occasional surprise attack, but the Wasps think like you should think, Salma. They think in the air and now they’ve opened the city on the ground, and stripped its wings away, they’ll proceed to attack it from above. Those heliopters are too heavy, and they fly too low. You could shoot them down with your wall artillery, maybe even with sufficient crossbows. The airships, though. they can go so high, only the best fliers could reach them. So what will you do?’

‘But what can they do?’ Nero asked. ‘They can spy us out, but we can shoot their troops if they drop down-’

‘They can do whatever they want,’ Totho said, leaning back against the wall, his mind still full of airships. ‘The whole of Tark will be spread below them. Explosives, incendiaries — it would be like dropping boiling oil onto a map, you see. Drop — drop — drop, and three buildings gone. And all we will be able to do is shake our fists at them.’

Che had never before seen an Ant-kinden who was actually fat. If it were not for Plius’s distinctive Ant features she would have thought him some kind of halfbreed. That was not the only surprise about him. He was not a Sarnesh Ant, which was even more remarkable given the Ants’ propensity to make war on others of their own kind. His skin was icy blue-white while the irises of his eyes were dead black, which had the effect of making them seem huge. She had seldom seen such colouring before, and had no idea what city-state he might have come from.

‘Scuto,’ he called out from the table he had to himself in the taverna, leaning back in a capacious chair. He wore an open robe over an expensive-looking tunic that strained over his belly, but there was a shortsword slung over the chair-back, to show he had not entirely left his belligerent roots behind.

Scuto glanced about, but none of the other patrons, few enough of them, seemed interested. It was still before midday and most of the inhabitants of Sarn’s foreign quarter were out taking care of business.

‘It’s been a while,’ Plius remarked, as the Thorn Bug approached. He kicked another chair out for him, and then glanced quickly from Che’s face to Sperra’s. ‘Pimping now, are you?’ he asked. Despite his louche appearance, he spoke in an Ant’s voice, with its characteristic clipped precision.

‘This lady here is Cheerwell Maker. You remember Sten Maker? Well this is his niece. The other’s called Sperra.’

Plius waved the introductions away. ‘So I heard you were looking for me, Scuto. It’s been a while,’ he repeated.

‘It has that,’ Scuto admitted. ‘Didn’t know how much of the old cadre would still be here for me.’

Plius shrugged. ‘There’s Dola over at the Chop Ketcher Importing place but, if you’ve not heard from her, she’s probably keeping her head down. As I said, Scuto, it’s been a while since then, and we’ve all had the chance to make some money here in Sarn.’

Scuto’s pause for breath, his moment of hesitation, opened a book for Che on his relations with Plius: revealing that they had never really trusted one another, and that Scuto had no guarantee that the other man would be of any use to them.

‘So where are we now?’ Scuto asked.

Plius shrugged. ‘We’re in a city where I have a good business going, Scuto, but if you want something, then ask and, if it’s not too much out of my way, maybe it will happen.’

‘What is your business, if I can ask?’ Che put in. This man seemed so corrupt, but she knew the Ants were ruthless with crime, even here in Sarn.

‘Ah, well.’ Plius coughed and grinned. ‘It happens I’m the most successful milliner in Sarn.’

‘The most successful what? ’ Che asked.

‘I used to be the only one, but now there are two more, which shows you how profitable the trade’s become.’

‘A milliner? You mean hats?’

Plius’s grin widened. ‘The way it was, you see, there weren’t any here, because Ants would wear helms or go bare-headed, but of course Sarn has a foreign quarter that covers almost a third of the city these days, and Sarn is half again as big as most Ant states. So there was a call for them, and business was good. And you know what? Now the Ants have started buying as well. Now they can see the foreigners having a good time, they themselves start to change how they dress and the like. They still all look like they’re ready for a funeral, but at least they’re not all dressed exactly the same.’ He turned his attention back to Scuto. ‘So what is it, then? What brings you back here for me?’

‘You know what,’ Scuto told him. ‘It’s happening, Plius. It’s time.’