Eighteen

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.

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.

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 . . .

Well, perhaps we’ll see. They had made remarkable progress inwards, and the first drilling site they had chosen was nudging the inner edge of the mid-desert, closing on the central reaches. The Scorpions would not go there, so the ruined cities remained free of their scavenging, and Angved only knew that they feared it. Well, we shall see just how much they fear it, then.

Setting up their machinery where they had could not but be viewed as provocation by the Many, and Angved was surprised only that it had taken the locals three clear days to put a force together. Of course, the Many aren’t that ‘many’ any more, not after the Khanaphes debacle. Not only had the Scorpions failed to take the city, despite the Empire handing them every advantage, but they had ended up getting a few thousand of their warriors killed, which was a serious blow to their overall population. And in the end that’s worked out nicely.

Extending his glass, he put his eye to it and let his gaze rake the sandscape, watching the host of Scorpion-kinden advance determinedly, with stragglers still coming out of the dunes to catch up with them. Angved reckoned that there might be perhaps six hundred, a sizeable force indeed, almost three times that of the Wasp Light Airborne currently ranged against them. The Nemean tactics were plain: they were fanning out in a loose crescent already, obviously intending to sweep away anything that stood in their path before pillaging the camp, destroying, killing and stealing whatever presented itself.

The camp itself was not overly ready to oblige them. The Wasps had assembled a travelling fort, the sort of ready-made fortifications that had served the Second Army so well on its march to Collegium during the war. The walls that the soldiers had fitted together were angled, barbed with stakes, defendable by a fraction of the soldiers available, and easily large enough to encompass the drilling and pumping engines. Angved had discussed the best means of defence with the captain in charge of the Airborne, however, and it had been agreed that cringing behind walls was not the Imperial way.

Two-thirds of their Airborne were now standing in loose ranks between the camp and the Scorpions, and Angved knew that they would look like a pitiful force to the eyes of the locals, even those who had fought alongside Wasps at Khanaphes. The Scorpion force was already breaking up into individual war bands, he noticed, the main thrust gaining speed as it rushed for the camp’s defenders, but substantial numbers breaking off left and right, looking to encircle their enemy and fall on them from all sides. Angved noted a remarkable amount of cavalry there – or rather insectry, as the proper term went, for horses were unknown in the Nem. Given his choice of animals, a scorpion would never have been his chosen mount – or any beast that might impale the back of his head if he had to rein it in suddenly. However, the Many of Nem had long ago designed a sort of offset saddle to put them out of harm’s way, and now a full score of these creatures were scuttling along on either flank, not much faster than a running man, but considerably more dangerous.

‘They make quite a show, don’t they,’ Varsec remarked mildly. Angved glanced down to see that he had sketched a bristling dark stain across the desertscape that he had already pencilled out: no details but just a riot of aggressive motion worked into the simple lines of the drawing.

‘A show is all they’ll make,’ Angved declared.

‘I see more than a few crossbows.’

The engineer shrugged. ‘They have no idea, none at all.’

Abruptly, in almost perfect unison, the Wasp soldiers out beyond the walls were airborne. No doubt a few crossbow quarrels were even now winging their way, but the Scorpion-kinden had no experience of hitting targets in the air, and it was unlikely that any of them would be learning any useful lessons here for the future. The Imperial force split off into four groups, as the drill required. Two detachments flew left and right, in order to threaten the Scorpions’ own flank, and the balance ended up in two clusters behind the charging mass of the Many. A good two-thirds of the Scorpions ignored them and continued on towards the walls, while the balance turned to face their relocated enemy.

‘I notice you haven’t sketched that.’ Angved pointed out the single most dramatic feature of their surroundings. To the west stood a great ruin, half sand-swallowed, its maze of walls and the shells of its buildings worn down by the wind, buried in some places and stark like unearthed bones in others, the whole giving the impression of a nest of broken skulls. It meant they had come close enough to the desert’s heart to see one of the cities of the Inner Nem.

‘It’s worth a picture all its own.’ Varsec put down his drawing board with care and took up a snapbow. All around them, those of the Airborne left in the compound were already sighting. Angved himself, as commanding officer, had decided it was beneath his dignity to actually do any of the killing today. And besides, he was not much of a shot.

Not that long ago the Empire had introduced the Scorpions to their future, gifting them with leadshotters and crossbows and rousing them against their ancient enemies, the Khanaphir. The joke was that the future the Scorpions had then reached out for was already in the Wasps’ past. There was not an Imperial soldier on the field or behind the walls who had not been training for the best part of a year with a snapbow, and most of them had been given plenty of chance to practise during the Empress’s campaigns against the various pretender governors.

Angved had no love for the Scorpions – in fact he had a considerable amount of dislike for them – but even he flinched a little when the first volley of snapbow shot struck home and slapped the Scorpion charge to a standstill by killing them three-deep all the way across their front line. At the same time, the other detachments also began loosing their weapons, sergeants shouting out the orders so that their weapons discharged all at once, not as individual pinpricks but a collective hammerblow.

‘At will,’ bawled the lieutenant commanding the defence, and the Wasp snapbowmen picked their targets, even as the mass of Scorpions seethed and milled. Varsec raised his own weapon, aiming along the length of the barrel with an artificer’s exacting care before loosing a shot, then calmly reloading and recharging.

Out beyond the wall, the Scorpion flanks had caved in, leaving a scatter of dead men and animals. Angved read the patterns in the corpses as though he was a seer, noting where the insectry had tried to charge the newly landed Wasps, only to have their targets simply take to the air again, shooting all the while. The two detachments at the rear had been exacting a similar toll, preventing the Many from retreating to regroup. In all honesty we could wipe them out to a man, right now, and I’m being too clever by half, he told himself, but the plan was laid, and he was going to have his curiosity assuaged whether he liked it or not.

One of the Wasp detachments waited until the Scorpions pulled together some semblance of unity, and then they broke away, taking wing and making a wide circle until they had landed within the walls of the encampment. Abruptly the deadly box had been compromised. The Scorpions now had somewhere to go, away from the lethal needles of the snapbow darts.

They were reluctant to take it, though, and Angved was not surprised. Once they were on the move the survivors of the Many repeatedly tried to break north and south, but the Wasps moved faster, always setting down in front of them and killing a few more – herding the Scorpions ever west.

To the west lay ruin, the half-hidden carcass of a dead city, and Angved wanted to see what would happen when the savages were finally forced to confront their fears.

He had to wait for the captain’s report, for the ruins were some distance away, and by then there was so much dust raised that his glass could not penetrate it. Still, it was not quite dusk when the officer finally presented himself, saluting smartly, as though Angved had not been working as a menial in a factory only tendays before, when Varsec was a prisoner in a cell.

They received the report on the wall, looking out at the ruins that were now slowly sinking into twilight as though the desert itself was swallowing them up.

‘What happened when the Scorpions reached there?’ Angved asked.

‘Not that many of them did, sir. A surprising amount tried to turn and fight, again and again. They were desperate to avoid being driven there. I’d estimate no more than forty or fifty of them reached the first stones.’

‘And then?’

The captain’s expression was that of a man without much imagination being faced with something that troubled him nonetheless. ‘Screaming, sir.’

Angved frowned, and Varsec murmured, ‘Does that pass for a report in the army, these days?’

‘I apologize, sir. It was difficult to make out what happened, and those of my men I’ve questioned tell contradictory stories. The Scorpions scattered amongst the buildings, losing all cohesion, as if each was looking for a different place to hide. Then we heard them start screaming, just some of them, then others. None of them for very long. I did my best to keep some in sight, but amongst the ruins it was difficult. Many of the structures there seem relatively intact, some almost completely so, and I thought I saw . . .’ There was a pause, signifying a soldier trying to couch his experience in permitted language. ‘Movement, sir. Terribly swift movement between buildings. Something large and fast. Others have reported the same . . .’ His tone indicated that there was more, but that it would require prompting.

‘Speak, Captain,’ Angved duly ordered.

‘One squad hasn’t returned, sir. Sergeant Stasric and his people didn’t come back with us.’

‘You passed on my orders for nobody to enter the ruins?’ Angved asked sternly.

‘I did, sir, word for word.’

‘What’s this Stasric like, would you say?’

A diplomatic pause. ‘He is a man who seizes opportunities as they come, sir. He has been reprimanded in the past.’

Angved and Varsec exchanged glances. ‘Any other casualties, Captain?’ the aviator asked.

‘Eleven men lost, sir, all to enemy crossbows,’ the captain confirmed. ‘Twenty-one in total, including Stasric’s men.’

Twenty-one dead to six hundred of theirs, Angved considered. A mere skirmish, but the numbers would look good when sent home. ‘Have your men stay ready, since we can expect further attacks by the Many. They’re a stupid, brutal people.’

Midnight was approaching when the watch lieutenant awoke Angved, sounding panicked. ‘Something’s outside the wall, sir.’

It took a blinking and blurred moment of recollection before the Engineer remembered where he was and what he was doing there. For a moment he had thought he was back accompanying the first Khanaphir expedition, making war on the city on behalf of the Many of Nem, rather than the other way around.

‘The Scorpions are back?’ he demanded, shrugging his way into a leather cuirass and locating his sword.

‘Sir, we’re . . . we’re not sure what it is. The sentries don’t think so, sir.’

‘We’re under attack?’

‘Not yet, sir.’

Angved sighed, putting him down as the sort of overexcitable type who should never be left in charge of a night watch, for the good of everyone else’s sleep. Still, now that he was awake, it seemed prudent to go and investigate what had spooked the watchmen. He dragged a woollen cloak over his shoulders to keep out the night chill, and shouldered his way out of his tent.

There was barely any moon, and only the torches and lanterns of the camp repelled the night. Angved tugged his cloak closer about him and let the lieutenant lead him to the walls, where a flick of his wings got him up on to the parapet.

‘I don’t see anything,’ he grumbled, scowling into the darkness.

‘Report, soldier,’ the lieutenant instructed, stepping back and patently hoping thus to disappear from the angry major’s notice.

‘There’s something big out there, sir,’ one of the sentries said promptly. ‘It’s been back and forth three times now.’

‘An animal,’ suggested Angved dismissively.

‘The only glimpse I had of it, it seemed like a man, sir. Or at least a little like a man. Most of the other sentries have seen it, too.’ Even as he spoke, there came a shout from further along the wall, and Angved bustled over there to peer out beyond the range of the camp lights.

He saw it then, not very clearly but enough to confirm all that the sentry had said. The movement, as it slunk back into the night, was unpleasant – human but not quite, its limbs out of proportion, not quite on two legs, but not quite on all fours.

The Imperials exchanged unhappy glances.

‘What was it up to, that time?’ the watch lieutenant asked. ‘It was . . . digging, was it?’

‘Can you see something still out there?’ one of the other sentries wondered, squinting. ‘Looks like it left something behind.’

‘Get me a strong flier with a lantern!’ Angved snapped. Once this order was obeyed, he continued, ‘You, fly out there and drop the lantern down where we saw it.’

The soldier looked none too happy at this, but the Imperial Light Airborne did not admit to being scared of the dark, so he kicked off from the wall and swooped in, making the pass as swiftly as he could and letting the lantern drop from ten feet up, ending tipped on its side on the sand, still burning.

At the sight revealed, one of the sentries swore. The rest were silent.

They could see a neat pyramid of human heads out there: Wasp-kinden heads, without a doubt. Angved felt quite equally sure that, asking around, he would find someone able to recognize the twisted features of Sergeant Stasric. Each of the expressions that the lantern picked out suggested that their deaths had not come quickly or easily.

At the far edge of the lantern’s reach, something shifted, a hulking, long-armed thing with its knuckles resting on the ground, its massive fists clublike and thorned. It seemed as big as a Mole Cricket-kinden, but thinner and longer of limb. The head jutted from between broad shoulders heavily knotted with muscle, and although the eyes glinted, even the lantern light seemed reluctant to illuminate its face.

Angved felt its attention focus on him, as though it had somehow managed to identify him as the man in charge. His soldiers were thoroughly spooked, he knew, but they would still launch an attack on his word. And besides, this thing must surely be mortal, susceptible to sword and sting and snapbow bolt.

But still . . . ‘Message understood!’ he called out. ‘You’ll see no more of us in your city. That’s not what we’re here for. And we’ll see no more of you, either. Agreed?’

His voice seemed to roll out for ever across the desert, as if the only sound in the world. He was aware that most of the camp was awake by now, with eyes on him alone.

The thing crouched even lower, leaning forward a little, and Angved caught a brief, stomach-twisting glimpse that made him wish its face had stayed hidden. The skull-like contours, that brutal tusked jaw . . . and yet those eyes were so human that they seemed to be agonized and appalled by the monstrosity that they were set in. Then it was gone, and it was Angved who cursed, this time, as it moved off, vanishing like wind and shadow in an instant.

‘I dearly hope it understood you, sir,’ said the lieutenant, standing at his elbow. Angved had feared that his actions might have made him seem weak before his men, but he realized then that he had gained their unexpected approval. Not one of them had wanted to go out and fight that thing, whatever it was, and no amount of tactical or technological superiority would change that.

There was nobody else at the camp either disobedient enough or venturesome enough to go treasure hunting, and their nocturnal visitor remained conspicuous by its absence, although Angved himself set up a searchlight for the night watch, just in case.

Subsequently it took them a single day to get the drill working, and a day after that to start the pumps. The machinery was designed to work in primitive conditions, sandstorms included, it being solid Beetle-kinden workmanship from Sonn that could survive being dragged all over the world by rough and ready Imperial soldiers. They were soon packing barrels with the mineral oil that generations of Scorpions had used for lighting lamps. Angved remembered them explaining its properties to him: wood was hard to come by, but the oil welled up in numerous places around the desert. If ignited, it would burn for days.

He had never come across mineral oil that would burn so steadily, in the quantities the Scorpions decanted into the bowls of their lamps. He had performed his tests and that simple artificer’s inquisitiveness had led inexorably to this current pumping operation – and the similar stations that would soon be set up across the Nem.

He sent a messenger back to Khanaphes, and a few days later the first airship appeared, sailing serenely across the disc of the glaring sun, then scudding sideways in the crosswind as it tacked lower. Angved had the filled barrels ready for collection, and the airship crew and his own off-duty soldiers made quick work of hoisting them on board the vessel, which sagged a fraction lower in the sky with each additional load. The pilot brought news, too, together with supplies for the men and even three Dragonfly-kinden slave girls. The visit made a pleasant change from the brisk orders and hard looks that Angved had grown used to.

With evening coming on, he and Varsec stood outside his tent and watched the airship leave with its first consignment. The pumps were still going and everyone would have to learn to live with their noise, but the two engineers themselves were used to that sort of privation.

‘There goes the future,’ Angved observed, holding up a bottle to the fading light. It was good Imperial brandy, and the label denoted a vintage that he had only heard of, never been able to afford. ‘If I were a more suspicious man, I’d think Colonel Lien was trying to poison us both with this.’ The bottle had been marked for the two majors’ personal attention.

Varsec smiled and shook his head. ‘General Lien hates the pair of us, as upstarts and troublemakers,’ he mused, ‘but he also knows full well that he needs us. Besides, the Empress knows our names, Angved. We can’t just be made to vanish so someone else takes credit for our work. And Lien knows that I could have written how the Aviation Corps shouldn’t be subject to the Engineers, but I was loyal enough not to. This is him saying that so long as we keep to our side of the deal, he’ll keep his, Major Angved.’

‘Why, thank you, Major Varsec.’ Angved plucked from his toolstrip something that had not been particularly intended for extracting corks from bottles, but which artificers had been using for that purpose for two generations. The brandy was darker than blood, rich and smoky on the tongue, burning at the back of the throat.

‘They’re training the new pilots,’ Varsec observed softly, once he had taken a first sip.

Angved remembered that other proposition to be found in Varsec’s little book, regarding the sort of man they would need at the controls of one of his revolutionary new fliers. ‘I didn’t think they’d go for it,’ he said, his tone hushed. ‘You’ve put yourself out of a job, you know. Didn’t you use to be an aviator yourself?’

‘For me, it was never the flying, just the fact of us having the machines. I’ll not miss it,’ Varsec replied, although there was a touch of regret in his voice. ‘Still, there will be plenty of jobs for the old batch of pilots – civilian roles, support roles. It’s just that for our new type of air combat, we need the new type of men.’

His proposals had shocked Angved, visionary to the point of lunacy. ‘It’s going to be a very different place by the time we get home.’

‘It was always going to be,’ Varsec said philosophically. ‘The only difference is that we will have made it so. The future, Angved – we’re making the future right here, you and I. Even if nobody remembers our names, and the historians jabber on about how General Lien and Empress Seda revolutionized the world, it will be us, only us, behind it all.’ He raised his bowl, and clinked it against Angved’s own. ‘The future,’ he repeated.

‘Our future,’ Angved agreed.

He sipped his brandy. Life was good.