Adrian Tchaikovsky - Blood of the Mantis

‘And they’ve scared the Crystal Standard into helping them,’ Taki added. ‘But if they keep dropping that many men from that ship for much longer, they won’t need any help from anyone. Come on.’

‘Come on where?’ Che asked.

‘What do you think they’ll do to you when they catch you, Lowlander?’ Taki demanded. ‘We need to get both of you out of here – to the Lowlands, to Princep, to anywhere.’

‘The docks?’ Che suggested. ‘A boat?’

‘No, the airfield, before it’s too late,’ Taki insisted. ‘Now follow me. Nobody knows a quicker way from here to the airfield than me.’

Solarno was a city turned mad and thrashing. A hundred yards from the Destiavel house, another noble’s mansion was in flames, with fighting at its doorways so fierce that Che could not tell whether those inside were trying to escape or those outside only wanted to throw themselves into the fire. She saw no distinctive sashes on any of them, suggesting some private grudge meeting a settlement of opportunity. Everywhere the Solarnese were busy killing each other, and occasionally Wasps stood looking on, heedless of whether their supposed allies were winning or not.

All those factions, all that talk about their ruling councils, and in the end it was just a barrel of firepowder waiting for the spark. The parties of Solarno had finally been galvanized, after the initiative forced on the Crystal Standard by the Wasps had broken the fragile balance. Left to themselves, Che guessed, it would have been a simple night of violence, and then stability would follow the sunrise. But this time the Wasps would fan the flames and, in the morning, Solarno would have become an imperial city. The people at each other’s throats would blink in the dawn light and realise that they were no longer free.

Taki had been leading them swift and straight, sometimes running and sometimes flying, but without warning she stopped, staring ahead of her. In front of them was some taverna or other, which did not seem to Che in any way special, except that it was being looted. The front door was broken in, with young men and women tearing up the interior in search of valuables. Che noticed the sashes of at least two parties involved, and guessed that this was again a private venture and not the work of political partisans.

‘Taki?’ she asked. ‘What is it.’

‘Just… you can’t understand,’ the Fly said. ‘It’s not ever going to be the same, is it?’

‘You can fight the Wasps-’ Che started.

‘It isn’t the Wasps. You really don’t know. You’ve only been here a few days. I’m Solarnese, and this is my home. That… that was where we all used to meet: me and Niamedh and Amre and the rest. That was where he died.’

Her half-brother, Che recalled, killed by the Wasps. Now the very planks of her memories were being torn up.

‘Hey now, if we’re going to move we should move,’ said Nero edgily. He had a knife in his hand. ‘This is getting worse than at Tark.’

‘Look!’ Che gasped. A flight of Wasp soldiers was feathering down 200 yards ahead of them, blocking their path. They fell from the sky in eerie silence, glimmering wings outspread, and as the first few touched down, a handful of others ran from a side-street to join them. One seemed to be giving hurried orders, pointing down alleys and indicating precise sections of the street. Che recalled Nero’s suspicion about there being Wasps in Solarno with a mindlink. How else could such a tidy operation be controlled?

The Wasps were now advancing directly down the street, and as soon as they reached the looters they simply started blasting away with their stings, killing half a dozen and instantly scattering the rest. They were shouting something, and Che picked out the words, ‘Curfew!’ and then, ‘Everyone inside!’

‘We have to leave!’ she urged Taki, and saw with a shock the tears glinting on the Fly woman’s face. The expression itself remained resolute, though, and Taki glanced quickly about them and then chose a side-street that would lead them around and beyond the advancing Wasp squad.

Che glanced up, as the rattle of an approaching orthopter grew loud, seeing the flying machine skim the rooftops as if keeping a watch on progress below.

‘Taki, if we take off, they’ll see.’

‘That they will!’ the Fly called back.

‘But they’ll come to try and stop us,’ Che told her. ‘They’ll fight us.’

‘They’ll fight me ,’ said Taki grimly. ‘And so let them!’

Further away, across the rooftops, a Solarnese fixed-wing, none that Che recognized, was making a tight circle, duelling with a Wasp orthopter in a complex tangle of loops that eventually took them both out over the Exalsee. The flying machine that had just passed overhead made a ponderous turn and set out to give its colleague aid, passing so low that it rattled the tiles of the roofs.

‘What about your mistress?’ Che suddenly realized. ‘What about Genissa? Shouldn’t you be looking after her?’

‘She’s off already,’ Taki replied. ‘She’s gone to rally the Satin Trail, and she’s got guards enough. You two are my responsibility.’

There was a slight hitch in her voice, though, which told Che that this responsibility was self-imposed.

Over them the bloated length of the Starnest hung like a great deformed moon, and still there were soldiers descending from it, like seeds drifting in the wind. In their squads they fell on the city, and wherever they landed they took control, killing any citizens who were under arms out on the streets, loudly proclaiming their curfew and then setting off to bring ever-greater sections of the city of Solarno under imperial rule. Despite their orders, and the mindlinked men who tried to coordinate them, they were Wasp-kinden soldiers still. With the city of Solarno now helpless against them, they broke down doors, they looted and raped. They put the brand of the Empire on yet another lesser people, and believed only that their ability to do so was all the right they needed.

At the airfield Taki and her charges arrived at the hangar just before the Wasps did. Even as the aviatrix went rushing for the safety of the Esca Volenti , they were dropping onto the airfield beyond, their ready-drawn swords glittering in the hangar lamps.

The three fugitives were not the only ones to seek sanctuary here. There were at least a dozen mechanics caught out by the airborne invasion, several others who were most likely pilots on the same mission as Taki, and some who were simply ordinary people of Solarno who had hoped that the elevated field might prove safer than the city below.

There was at least a score of Wasps spiralling down outside. Taki paused, with the cockpit of the Esca half open, biting her lip.

Che called out to her. ‘Where do we go now?’

The Fly glanced back at them, and Che realized that, in the rush of relief at seeing her machine undamaged, Taki had almost forgotten about the people she was escorting to safety. The Fly boosted herself up onto the Esca ’s hull and turned to look at the dozen other flying machines sheltering under the hangar’s roof.

‘That one!’ she pointed, and Che saw a squat, barrel-bodied machine, a four-vaned orthopter that could only be a cargo-hauler. It looked sturdier than the Stormcry had been, but also slower and surely destined for the same sorry fate.

‘Isn’t there something fleeter?’ Che demanded.

‘Just get in it!’ Taki ordered her. The first crackle of a Wasp sting sounded outside. The engineers and pilots, and whoever else was armed, had formed up on either side of the hangar door. Several of them had crossbows, and Che saw Taki reach into the Esca ’s cockpit and come out with a little double-strung bow of her own. Nero had already unslung and tensioned his bow, and now hopped up onto the hood of a half-dismantled fixed-wing, so as to get a clear shot at the enemy. Che noticed him wince with the effort.