Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dragonfly Falling

The harbour at Collegium had been designed to be defended. There was a stubby sea-wall sheltering it, and the two towers flanking the harbour entrance held some serviceable artillery, if not particularly up to date. There was a chain slung between these towers, currently hanging well below any ship’s draft, that would serve when raised to prevent a vessel crossing that gateway, or that was the theory. Defence had been a priority in the minds of the architects, certainly, but they had lived two centuries ago, and had never heard of armourclads, or even of ships that moved by the power of engines rather than under sail or with banks of oars. Since then, defence had been a long way from anyone’s mind right up until the Vekken had turned up with a fleet.

Out-thought by Ant-kinden , he cursed to himself, trying to find some gem of an idea that might save the day. If the Vekken could land their troops, those superbly efficient paragons of Ant-kinden training, then the docks would be lost in half an hour, and the city in just a day.

‘They’re moving!’

The shout roused Stenwold from his ruminations. He rushed over to the expansive window of the harbourmaster’s office and saw that the funnels of the armourclads had now started to fume in earnest. Four smaller vessels were beginning to make headway towards the harbour, whilst the huge flagship had begun to come around with ponderous but irresistible motion. The small ships of the fleet began to tack around it, some by engine power and a few by sail.

‘Is the artillery ready?’ Stenwold demanded. ‘Where’s Cabre?’

‘Gone to get the artillery ready,’ said one of the soldiers with him. ‘It’s in hand, Master Maker. All you need to do is sit here and watch.’

‘No,’ muttered Stenwold, because he had to do something, and yet what was there to do? ‘Master Greatly, is he.?’

‘He said that he was ready, although I don’t believe a word of it,’ said one of his artificers, the man with the underwater explosives. ‘He did say you could go and watch the launch if you wanted.’

‘Yes, I do want,’ Stenwold decided. He looked around for Balkus. ‘Where’s.?’

There was a dull thump from quite close by, and he felt the floorboards shudder. For a mad second he was two decades younger and in the city of Myna, with the Wasps’ ramming engine at the gates.

‘What was that?’ he demanded, but nobody knew, so he rushed to the window and saw three buildings away a warehouse burning merrily, its front staved in.

‘Sabotage!’ someone shouted and, even in the moment that Stenwold was wondering coolly who would sabotage a warehouse, a second missile was lobbed from the great Vekken flagship. It flew in a shallow, burning arc, and it seemed impossible that it would not just drop into the water, but their range was accurate, and in the next moment another of the dockside buildings had exploded.

Most of the Collegium dockside was wood, Stenwold realized dully, and then, They must be sighting for our artillery . There was only a brief stretch of sea-wall at Collegium, but the two stubby towers that projected were already launching flaming ballista bolts and catapult stones towards the approaching armourclads, sizing up the distance. The siege engines on the Vekken flagship must be enormous, though, the entire vessel a floating siege platform. Collegium’s harbour defences could not hope to match the range.

Something flashed overhead, and Stenwold saw a heliopter cornering madly through the smoke. It was a civilian machine, some merchant’s prized cargo carrier, but its pilot was putting it through manoeuvres its designer had never anticipated. Behind it barrelled a sleek fixed-wing flier, propellers buzzing, and then a heavy Helleron-made orthopter painted clumsily with a golden scarab device. The airfield had begun to launch its defences. He should go and see how Master Greatly was doing.

And someone called, ‘Look out!’

He turned, idiotically, towards the window, just in time to see the whole wall in front of him explode. The incendiary blast hurled him away in a raking of splinters, knocking everyone else off their feet. He hit his own map-table, smashed it with his weight, and a wall of heat passed over him. He could hear himself shouting out some order, but he had no idea what.

Then he was being helped to his feet, and for a moment he could not see, and his face and shoulder were one mass of pain.

‘What’s.? Who’s.?’

‘Steady there.’ The voice was Balkus’s but there was a lot of other noise, too — the crackling of flames, the cries of the wounded. He let Balkus guide him blindly away and prop him against a wall.

‘Now hold still,’ the Ant said. People kept running past, jostling him, and he felt stabs of pain as Balkus plucked the worst of the splinters from him. He wiped his face, feeling blood slick on his hand. The injured were still being hauled from the harbourmaster’s office, even as the room burned.

‘Is everyone.?’ he started, and then realized: ‘The fleet! Is the chain up?’

‘No idea,’ Balkus said, and Stenwold staggered away, thumping down the stairs with blood seeping into his eyes again, and Balkus trying to keep up. From somewhere there was another explosion, another flaming missile from the Vekken flagship.

He staggered out into the clearer air, that was nevertheless blotched and stinking with smoke, onto the flat open quayside. Ahead of him was the calm stretch of the harbour, and the two stubby walls with their artillery towers, with the great open space of water between them.

Only it was open no longer, for the first ships of the Vekken navy were fast crowding into it. Three of the armourclads were powering forwards, and he could hear above all of it the thump of their heavy engines. To either side of them, wooden craft knifed through the water, coursing ahead of the cumbersome metal-hulled vessels, their catapults and ballistae launching up at the harbour towers.

The towers were loosing back, however and Stenwold saw one skiff swamped by a direct hit from a leadshotter, its wooden hull simply folding in the middle, the mast toppling sideways. The men that fell from its sides were armoured Vekken soldiers, as were most of the crews of the approaching navy, and Stenwold thought they must be mad to dare a sea assault.

And yet here they came, and the chain was still nowhere to be seen.

‘Raise it!’ he shouted, with no hope of being heard across that expanse of water, amongst such commotion. ‘The chain! Raise the chain!’

Beside him Balkus was slotting a magazine into his nailbow, which at this distance was as futile as Stenwold’s own shouting. By the time the weapon would mean anything, it would be too late.

And then Stenwold saw a gleam in the water as something was cranked up from the seabed: the great spiked chain that closed off the harbour mouth. There were engines three storeys high in the paired towers to drag the great weight of metal through the water, but they were engines fifty years old. Here it came, though, and Stenwold ground his teeth in agony as it seemed that the powering armourclads would be past it before it was up in place. They were bigger ships than he had thought, though, and further away, but the fleetest of the wooden vessels now surged forwards, trying to cross the barrier before it was finally raised.

The chain caught the ship before a quarter of its length had passed, and it abruptly began rising with it in a splintering of wood. The spikes on the chain were busy rotating, each set in opposition to the next one, chewing and biting into the vessel’s hull even as its bows were lifted entirely out of the water. Then the craft began to tip, spilling men out, even as its engine mindlessly pushed it further over the chain. A moment later it slid back, entirely heeling onto its side, to lie awash in the water directly in the path of the armourclads.