She didn’t want to confess that she had been doing exactly the same at Collegium. Secretly she agreed that it was a poor second to actually flying, but she owed the College a great deal.
‘Teaching the junior pilots I knew from before we went to Solarno, though? No,’ he spat out. ‘Listen, Bella Taki, we don’t have much time. Listen to me. They have me teaching clerks and slavers, factory overseers, men plucked from the Consortium or the Light Airborne — oh, lots of the Light Airborne. Have they any flying experience? No, almost without exception: clueless, hopeless, and yet they are the new pilots, the next generation of combat fliers rushed through training, hours and days in Spearflights and whatever else is to hand, More training in a few months than most trainees get in a year.’ His voice sank lower. ‘And there’s something wrong with them,’ he whispered. ‘They sit there… like machines. They watch, they learn. Not a twitch, not a shared joke with their classmates: men of all ages, all backgrounds, and yet… by the end, I had begun to fear them.’ His hand was shaking again. ‘Then one of their own — he had been a pilot, the only one that had been — took over the teaching. I was no longer required. I have been cast away. All the men I knew, the Empire’s pilots, are being displaced by these… freaks.’
‘Well, it doesn’t sound as though the Lowlands or Solarno have much to worry about, then,’ Taki tried, dismissively, but Axrad’s eyes flared, and he had her by the wrist before she could pull away.
‘I’ll show you,’ he threatened, lurching to his feet. In actual fact there was pitifully little strength in that grip, but there was a warmth to his palm that frightened her, because one sting and he could take her hand off.
As he hauled her out of the drinking den, the looks on the faces of the other Wasp men were mostly approving. At last she was being taught her place, apparently.
Axrad started stomping haltingly away, and he could not hold her, his fingers weakening and loosening his grip after only a few steps. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said again, less of a threat now. He did not even look back to see if she was following.
She wanted very much to return to the other foreigners now. She wanted Axrad to come along with her and talk about old times. Her daring had abandoned her without warning. Still, to go now would be to show fear in front of another pilot, for all that he would never fly again. She was the greatest pilot that either Solarno or Collegium had ever known. She had bested the Empire’s own best. This is what she told herself whenever she met life’s obstacles. If she fled now, she would never quite recover that iron self-confidence.
Axrad was making surprisingly quick progress, his hoarse breath showing that he was pushing himself painfully to do it. She kept pace without difficulty, could have gone twice as fast without resorting to her wings but, even so, his grim determination scared her. Here was a different man to the earnest pilot she had met in Solarno.
Crashing in flames and becoming a burned cripple will do that.
‘Axrad,’ she did not want to raise the issue but it was unavoidable, ‘you should hate me.’
‘For Solarno?’ he panted. ‘You were the last person to treat me as an equal. As someone who mattered. I save my hate for others.’
He took a sharp turn, hissing with sudden pain, and they were at the edge of an airfield, a narrow strip easy to overlook, since the city was strewn with more inviting spots. With a start she realized that they were towards the edge of the city here. They had come further than she thought. Beyond the strip lay a rabble of small houses and two or three big sheds — no, hangars that had been storage sheds not so long ago.
This can’t be a secret airstrip. We’re right in the capital. We’re surrounded by buildings. And yet she guessed that the locals kept their mouths shut and, besides, it was night. The Wasps were not a nocturnal people. They did things by day for preference. Night was for stealth and subterfuge.
‘They call them Farsphex,’ the Wasp breathed, and then stared down at her as though he had forgotten she was with him. ‘Hide yourself,’ he snapped. ‘Just watch.’
She blinked at him, then flitted up to the roof of the nearest building, but the flat roof made her feel exposed, so she darted down again, finding a narrow alley that had been fenced off where it met the airstrip. With a little scrambling and balancing she had found a roost tucked into the shadows where the fence met the alley wall. By then, her ears had already registered the sound.
It was a familiar drone, which she had lived with all her life: the sound of a fixed-wing flier coming in to land. After a moment she had identified it as a twin-propeller vessel, small enough to be a fighting pilot’s, but bigger than the Esca Magni even so.
She saw figures moving out on the field. Abruptly there were fires out there: bright white chemical flares in a triangle, illuminating some hurriedly retreating Wasp-kinden, throwing their shadows in long strips of night reaching all the way to the field’s edge. She caught a glimpse of Axrad, his face given a fishlike pallor by the light. His expression was fixed, fatalistic.
The approaching flier was closer, but something was wrong, and Taki seized on the anomaly quickly. That triangle was a landing spot, but fixed-wing craft could not land on a point like that, not reliably. They could not manage that last-minute arresting of their momentum, that second’s hovering which would allow them to drop neatly to the ground.
Her eyes — better than the Wasps’ at night — caught a glimpse of the machine as it made a pass, plotting its descent, the long, low turning circle that she would have expected, but then abruptly it was upon them, dropping out of its turn sharply enough to make Taki catch her breath.
She had been wrong, she realized with annoyance more than anything else. An orthopter, not a fixed-wing. The sound of the propellers had gone, and there was a moment’s silent glide before its wings were backing, thrashing at the air, tilting the whole machine back and fighting to hold its place, before dropping slightly off the mark, a few yards to Taki’s side of the triangle.
Immediately the ground crew rushed forward to douse the lights, but she had a good chance to study the machine before they did.
Farsphex, Axrad had said. Bigger than the little air-duelling craft she knew, perhaps enough to carry two at a pinch, but with sleek, elegant lines for all that, its wings folded at an angle, back along the curved sweep of its body and tail. But there were the two props, whose drone she was sure she had heard, where the wings met the body and, now she looked, the styling of the hull was not quite an orthopter’s, concessions being made to other design imperatives…
Instead of the cockpit glass hinging up, a hatch popped in the flier’s side and the pilot scrambled out. Two other Wasps were coming to meet him, striding across the field in a way that suggested this clandestine exercise was over. She expected voices, but not a word was exchanged.
Taki stared at that flying machine once again, trying to appreciate what she had been brought here to see, trying to reconcile what she had heard with what she now saw.
But of course. She started with the revelation, understanding coming to her at last. Perhaps it was not quite enough to justify Axrad’s manner, but still… the technical challenge alone was remarkable, but what could the Wasps hope to do with it?
Then they spotted Axrad. One of the ground crew challenged him, and the sound was all the more shocking because of the utter silence of the men up to that point. Taki saw the crippled pilot step forward.
‘Lieutenant Axrad,’ he threw back, ‘Aviation Corps.’
The two men who had gone over to the flier were storming towards him now, and Taki saw that they were also dressed as pilots. One of them growled something, but too low for her to hear what.
Time to go. But she stayed, nonetheless, watching.