Adrian Tchaikovsky - Blood of the Mantis

‘Masterfully done,’ the Spider said. His smile, as always, looked as genuine a smile as Stenwold had ever seen, and more practised than any.

‘I am not meant for this,’ Stenwold sighed.

Teornis shook his head, seeming amused. ‘I only hope that we always remain allies, Master Maker, for you would be a formidable foe.’

‘High praise from the Lord-Martial?’

‘And well deserved.’ Teornis’s smile twitched broader, and even that reaction, seeming so spontaneous, could just as easily have been deliberately contrived. With these Spiders I truly cannot ever know. The thought turned him to reflect on Arianna, and he dismissed the association quickly.

‘You should listen for news from the east, War Master,’ Teornis advised him. ‘It is at least passably pleasing this season.’

‘There is some new winter fashion, is there?’

‘A new fashion in warfare, indeed. One hears on the wind that a certain protege of yours has been causing the Imperial Army some degree of embarrassment.’

Where the Seventh Army had come to rest after the Battle of the Rails there had once stood a Beetle-kinden farmstead. That was gone now, and in its place was a series of wooden fortifications that the Winged Furies had put up during the winter, in anticipation of retaliation from Sarn. They were Wasp field fortifications, though, nothing the Ant-kinden would have recognized: slanting walls and overhanging ledges, bristling with sharpened stakes, to make the camp as difficult to attack, from ground or air, as the Wasp mind could devise.

But there were still losses the walls could not guard against. There always were. Scouts went missing; foraging parties sometimes failed to return. The land beyond the fort was the hunting ground of Sarnesh rangers, of bandits, brigands and desperate refugees. This, though… this latest news had brought General Malkan out to see for himself. He required the evidence of his own eyes to understand the true scale of the attack.

There had been a troop transport coming down the track from Helleron, packed with men and supplies, going at a speed that only well-maintained rails could allow. Three miles from the fort, there had been a series of explosions that ripped apart the engine automotive and suddenly the tracks had been gone, hurled aside into splayed and coiling shapes, and the entire convoy had come off the rails, carriages shunting into carriages, the straight line of the transport’s passage thrashing suddenly like a whip.

The corpses had gone by the time he reached the site. Travelling with a guard of 600 men was time-consuming but Malkan was not a rash sort. He was the youngest general the Empire had and he fully intended to become the oldest, in good time.

‘One hundred ninety-seven men died in the initial impact,’ one of his aides was recounting without emotion. The man was his intelligence officer, almost certainly Rekef, and probably did see this number as nothing more than that. ‘Over four hundred injured, best count.’

‘And then?’ Malkan prompted, though he knew already. The word had run quickly through the entire Seventh.

‘And then the convoy was attacked, sir,’ his aide said. ‘The soldiers trying to exit the train came under shot from both north and south of the tracks. We estimate that another three hundred and twenty men were killed outright before any defence could be mounted.’

‘And that defence consisted mostly of staying under cover and keeping their heads down,’ said Malkan, wondering what he himself would have done in the circumstances. ‘Engineers, I want news!’

‘Sir.’ One of his artificers left the rails and ran up to him. ‘Judging from the wreckage it could have been either a steam-expansion bomb or triggered steam pistons making the tracks jump. Just simple mechanical force to unseat the automotive, nothing flammable until the automotive’s fuel lines ruptured in the impact.’

‘So?’

‘It’s a simple and robust device, sir, but whoever set it would need to be a skilled artificer in order to gauge its precise disposition. It must have been initiated on a pressure trigger, sir. The trains aren’t regular enough for a clockwork timer.’

‘Could you make such a device in the field?’

‘You could assemble it, but the parts must have come in from Sarn.’

‘Or Helleron,’ Malkan mused, ‘or Collegium.’ He had already heard the reports of some soldiers who had survived the attack, reports that gave descriptions of the attackers. No disciplined Sarnesh Ant-infantry, these, but a rabble composed of different kinden. A rabble with a common mind, like bandits but more organized…

‘What of our scouts?’

‘Two have not returned, while the others report no sign of any large force nearby,’ his aide confirmed.

‘They won’t. After you achieve this kind of success, you scatter, then rendezvous later…’ The attackers had taken their own dead with them, but their departure had been hurried. There had still been clues: crossbow bolts, discarded weapons… yet there was no pattern, nothing uniform. Malkan ground his teeth. He could send men after the missing scouts, but whoever had not wished to be seen would have moved on by now, or alternatively it could become an ambush.

‘I want those rails repaired in double time,’ he told the engineer, who saluted and returned to his men. Malkan pondered the situation for a while, putting himself in the position of his enemies as best he could. ‘Keep at least two hundred men here to guard them, though. I’d come back, if I were him, and kill the artificers as they worked.’

‘There is a lot of rail-line between here and Helleron, sir,’ the aide noted.

‘Indeed, so get a messenger off to Helleron… better send three, separately. We need a new way of transporting supplies and men. Just march them overland if they have to.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The Seventh had been relying on the rail-line to Helleron over the winter. It would now be a difficult adjustment to make, going back to old-fashioned methods, but it might be for the best. Simplest done was simplest fixed, as the artificers always said.

The dead men were a waste of resources, the broken rails and automotive an annoyance. What was really concerning General Malkan was the loss of almost 500 snap-bows that the attackers, whoever they were, had made off with, having deliberately targeted the carriage they were in.

‘Explosives… and these new weapons…’ he murmured. ‘If it weren’t for that…’

‘What, sir?’

‘In the Twelve-Year war…’ he began. It had been the cause of his meteoric rise through the ranks, his conduct at that war’s end. ‘… Towards the end, they were always springing surprise attacks, ambushes. They had inferior discipline, inferior equipment. We had broken their field armies by then, so they had to make up for it in tactics, using the land itself… those Dragonfly-kinden… I want to know any news received about Dragonfly-kinden.’

He stared out across the broken ground, hearing the hammering of the artificers as they straightened the rails, and knowing that his enemy was somewhere out there, staring back at him.

There seemed to be a Wasp soldier on every street corner, as though they had already occupied Solarno without the courtesy of letting anyone know. In the open-fronted tavernas the conversation hovered about them like a fly over fruit, but never quite touched on the awkward questions.

Che, Taki and Nero had gone out into the market district to see the true scale of the problem, with the Dragonfly Dalre and a couple of others shadowing them in case of trouble. It was hard to judge accurately, though, as the Wasps were spread out in groups of no more than two or three, but it seemed impossible to go anywhere without at least a glimpse of their black-and-yellow presence.