Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

‘War, is it?’ Alder growled.

‘I hope it need not come to that. Perhaps you would provide us with your maps and we can then correct them,’ suggested Teornis innocently.

‘You have a mere two hundred men here, Lord-Martial. What do you think would happen if I decided I should send a definite message back to your people?’

Teornis shrugged, slinging a leg up over the arm of his chair. ‘Oh, you’d send them my head in a box, no doubt, which is another reason I’m doing this thankless job and not, say, my sister or my mother. And we would then have to muster our armies, which is a tiresome enough proposal to make me glad that I would be dead by that point. And then we would fight, I suppose.’

Alder narrowed his eyes. ‘Perhaps you should be more concerned, Lord-Martial. I have automotives here, flying machines, artillery. Your people are Inapt. Will you bring bows and arrows against us?’

Teornis’s smile broadened. ‘It’s true,’ he replied, ‘I wouldn’t know what to do with a crossbow, if someone should thrust such a distasteful object into my hands. We do not trouble ourselves with all that greasy machine-fondling that some kinden seem to find so irresistible. No, we have — how shall I put it? — people to do that for us. We have plenty of Ant-kinden and Beetle-kinden hired with us, and many more within our satrapies further south. The Empire is not the only one to have subject peoples. Do not think, General, that we cannot field all that clanking metal palaver if we need to.’

‘So your position is clear,’ Alder said grimly.

‘It is, and it is one of the open hand of friendship — or, as you are Wasps, the closed hand, I believe, is more appropriate. We wish nothing but peace and trade with your mighty and admirable Empire.’ Teornis sprang from his chair effortlessly to look Alder in the eye. ‘But if your hand comes against Egel or Merro or any of our holdings, then you and I, General, shall be at war, and nobody shall profit from that in any way.’

Back in his camp, Alder called his officers together and gave them the situation.

‘I think they’re bluffing,’ he explained, but he saw from their faces he had few takers.

‘A war on two fronts would be disastrous, sir,’ Carvoc said. ‘To take Kes we will need to concentrate all our efforts.’

‘Even if we bypass the Fly townships,’ one of his field majors remarked, ‘they could attack anyway, cut our supply lines.’

‘And we just do not know what they can field,’ Major Maan added. Teornis’ people seemed to have particularly impressed him. ‘The Spiderlands are, we know, very large, and they could bring in troops by sea-’

‘Yes, Major,’ Alder interrupted heavily. Just this morning his world had been so simple. Now his conversation with Teornis had struck it a severe blow and crazed it with far too many complications. He was a soldier, not a diplomat, and he did not want to be the man to go to war with an unmeasured enemy nation.

‘Send the fastest messenger we have back to Asta,’ he said. ‘I need to know imperial policy on this.’

And in the meantime the Fourth Army would sit idle.

The Cloudfarer had reached Helleron through clement weather, but it was not the same city that Totho remembered. Not that he remembered it fondly, but the city that came to his mind instead was Myna, with Wasp soldiers and Auxillians everywhere on the streets, and a hunted look in the eyes of the locals.

General Malkan had come to meet them at the airfield in person, clasping Drephos’s gauntleted hand. Filled with enthusiasm, he seemed barely older than Totho himself.

‘Colonel Drephos, a pleasure,’ he said. ‘Since I heard you were expected here I have had clerks taking stock of every foundry and factory in the city.’

‘Most kind, General,’ Drephos said. ‘Have my people arrived yet?’

‘And your machinery. They all came in with the garrison force.’

‘Excellent.’ Drephos turned to Totho. ‘You have had a chance to consider the plans?’

‘I have, sir.’ In the freezing air that the Cloudfarer flew in, he had been hunched close by the windbreak of the clockwork engine, scribbling his alterations and additions. All for Salma he had reflected. I made this bargain, and now I must keep it. But beyond those sentiments his busy mind had been concerned only with the calculations, the mechanical principles.

‘Then let us unleash them on Helleron,’ Drephos said eagerly. ‘It’s not often I have a whole city to work for me. General Malkan, pray show me what you have for us.’

How long I have wished to see the factories of Helleron , was the ironic thought as Totho entered one. I had not thought it would be like this. He meant as an invader, an imperial artificer, but he also meant as a master rather than a menial. As he and Drephos, and Drephos’s ragbag of other picked artificers, came in, the factory work had been totally stilled. A great crowd of workers were gathered there, the staff of three factories waiting to receive their new orders. Malkan had been quick in providing Drephos with whatever he should need and Totho knew that the general was one of a new breed of Wasp officers. Malkan was not just a slave to maps and charts and the slow movements of troop formations. He actually liked artificers and the way they could win wars more efficiently, more quickly, than ever before. Drephos was the Empire’s most gifted artificer on the western front, and Malkan was keen to see that he was kept happy.

‘My name is Colonel-Auxillian Dariandrephos,’ the half-breed announced, his voice ringing from the gantry he stood on across the echoing factory floor. ‘You will refer to me as Master, or Sir. Most importantly, you will do what you are instructed without needless question, without debate, without retort. I want you to have no illusions about your situation here.’ He cast his narrow gaze over them, the working men and women of Helleron. He had his cowl thrown back leaving them no doubts about what he was.

‘These men and women with me,’ Drephos told the workers, ‘are my elite staff. You will address them as ‘sir’ and do exactly what they instruct you. In my absence, they are my voice.’

Totho could feel the resentment boiling up from these hard-working men and women whose lives had come under new management. It was not that this was a new factory owner telling them what to do, nor even that he was a foreigner. What rankled with them was that Drephos was a halfbreed and, worst of all, a Moth halfbreed, born partly from that superstitious, primitive tribe that raided their mine-workings north of the city. Here he was, claiming to be an artificer, and appalling chance had placed him as their superior.

‘I myself will have no illusions here. You hate and resent me,’ Drephos continued. ‘I, on the other hand, have no feelings whatsoever concerning you, collectively or individually. I wish you to think about precisely what that means. It means that if any one of you comes to my notice in a way that displeases me, or any of my people here, then that man or woman shall become my object lesson. Work hard and well and you shall escape my notice, which shall be best for all concerned.’

They still stirred rebelliously, and so he smiled at them lopsidedly. ‘You may have heard from your leaders that some amicable arrangement has been reached between your people and the Wasps of the Empire. It is not so. We own you. You work at our command. I invite any of you here to dispute it.’

He signalled, and a dozen Wasp soldiers came to attention. ‘Now get these people back to their work,’ he said. ‘Bring all the foremen up here, though. I have one final thing to say to them.’ He turned to Totho and the others, seeming very pleased with himself.