Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

Che reached out, trying to ascertain how far ahead the spectre was, though in truth she was unsure whether such a concept had any real meaning for what Tisamon now was. Again, as she touched him, there was a feeling of bitterness and ashes, but this time she heard his voice inside her head.

What will you do, Beetle child?

I will stop you, she told him flatly. Tynisa does not deserve this.

She is mine. What can you do to stop me?

From nowhere, or perhaps from some forgotten conversation with Achaeos, the word surfaced. I shall bind you in a tree perhaps. I shall lock you away.

I shall kill you before you have the chance, came his cold reply.

Will you so? She had thought long and hard on how she might compel this creature, on the journey from Khanaphes. Would you kill Stenwold’s kin?

The silence that followed told her that she was right; that some vestige of the man he had once been still remained within Tisamon.

She gathered her strength then, while he seemed uncertain, for she was not sure herself how long such a leash would hold him. She tried to reach out again. Almost, almost there, and then at least Tynisa can find her own way…

– she was hiding under her bed, because she knew the bad man was coming, the man that had called her father ‘friend’ and never meant it

‘No!’ cried Che, feeling the shade of Tisamon slip away from her. ‘Thalric!’

‘I’m right here,’ the Wasp snapped in frustration. ‘Che, what is happening to you?’

– steps echoed outside the children’s bedchamber, and the door pushed open -

The world was sliding away from her, or she was falling aside from it, as though some giant hand had tilted it upon its side. She clutched impotently at Thalric, trying to stay with him. ‘Hold me! Don’t let me go, please!’

His arms were about her, but she could feel his bafflement in every movement. ‘Che, I’m right here…’

‘I’m losing you…’ she got out.

And then she was gone.

Airborne war has been conducted for too long by airship. The fates of our Starnest and the Collegiate Triumph show how foolish that is. The age of the war-dirigible is past. Orthopters and fixed wings will rule the skies…

Varsec’s treatise, Towards an Efficient Mechanized Air Force, was a light enough burden in Angved’s hands, but he found that if he read it for too long, his fingers began to tremble ever so slightly. Between the cheaply printed words, History was waiting. Angved wondered how much he would be able to sell this crude copy for, by the time he finally retired. The book itself would be required reading for the Engineering Corps, but a discerning collector would no doubt advance a considerable sum for one of its very few first editions. He turned the page, needing no lamp: the thick material of his tent still admitted enough light in the mid-afternoon to read by.

He could not imagine the promises and bribes or the favours Varsec must have called in to get this work printed in even so coarse a form. Yet the man had known what he had been about, for both his future and the Empire’s were set out in that book. The words had secured the former, and would now go about building the latter.

Approximately half the Solarnese air fleet was composed of orthopters, compared to perhaps eight out of ten among the Imperial flying machines. At the end of the battle, according to my personal observations, perhaps two fixed-wing fliers remained operational – with the entire balance of the surviving machines on both sides being orthopters. It is my experience and that of every fellow aviator I have spoken with, and the inescapable conclusion from examining the reports of other conflicts where flying machines have confronted one another, that mobile-winged aeromotive craft have a substantial superiority in manoeuvrability that will, all things being equal, give them command of the air.

Angved was no aviator, but then Varsec had not been writing for his fellow pilots. He had been writing instead for the technically educated body of the Engineers as a whole, those men like Colonel Lien that he would have to convince. Still, his cool language somehow managed to convey the strength of his belief in the future. Angved looked down over the man’s figures, anecdotes, facts and comparisons: airships could carry greater loads but were too vulnerable to aerial attack; the heliopters that the Imperial army had relied on from the first could achieve a delicacy of positioning in the air but were slow and cumbersome compared with other fliers, unable to escape or give chase and incapable of engaging in the aerial duelling that Varsec was a personal exponent of.

Angved flicked on towards the book’s heart, those key paragraphs that had set his own heart racing.

And yet the demands of a future aerial war are more than simply about which flying machine will outperform its rivals in an airborne fight. There is a world of potential in air war that remains untapped, because the mechanical capabilities of the machines that we rely on, even our most sophisticated designs such as the Spearflight orthopters that were used at Solarno, are too limited. While they are so greatly limited in range, orthopters will only ever hold a supporting role. The fuel demands of mobile-winged flight are great, resulting in an air force tied closely to a ground base of operations: a flying force with clipped wings, therefore. Conversely, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that fixed-wing engines are capable of a far greater fuel efficiency, and therefore a greater striking range from their base, had they only the ability to survive against enemy air resistance once they arrived…

After that, the book descended into theory and dream: Varsec’s hypotheses, his ‘if only’ thoughts, his tentative sketches of joints and mechanisms, his list of requisite developments that would make his future come to pass.

If I had not come along, with what I know, he would be in a prison cell still, or dead. He had spoken with Varsec on that very subject, and they both knew it, just as the reverse was surely true. Their projects were mutually reinforcing innovations, and they had fallen into the hands of ambitious Colonel Lien, who was aware that the Engineers should have been taking a greater place on the Imperial stage, but had previously been at a loss as to how to further his cause. The resurrection of Drephos, not dead but only defected, could have been the death knell for the Engineers’ rise, with the Empire coming to lean more and more on outside inventions and becoming dependent on creatures like the loathed halfbreed. Even though Drephos seemed to have won the argument as far as ground-based machines went, however, Varsec and Angved had given Lien just enough ammunition to paint the skies of the future in pure black and gold.

A soldier tugged the tent flap open a little, but without looking inside. ‘Sir, the enemy’s moving. You said you wanted to see.’

‘I did, thank you, Lieutenant.’ Angved closed the book and stuffed it back into one of his belt pouches. A true artificer could never have too many pouches.

He let his wings carry him to the wooden parapet so that he could get a commanding look at the surrounding terrain. There he discovered the book’s author sitting in a folding chair, one hand holding a little board with a sheet of paper tacked on to it, the other wielding a pencil. When not revolutionizing the world of mechanical flight, Varsec fancied himself as a landscape artist.

The landscape here was not what Angved considered inspirational, however. They had made considerable progress towards the heart of the Nem, the desert lying between Khanaphes and the cities of the Exalsee. Angved knew it well, for he had lived out here for tendays as a guest of the violent and unruly Many of Nem, the local Scorpion-kinden, while his then commander had armed them and pointed them towards Khanaphes. The Imperial force was now in what was referred to as the mid-Nem, which the Scorpions claimed as their own territory. The fringe of the desert remained a constant skirmishing zone between the Many and their neighbours, whereas the desert’s heart…