‘General!’ he heard, and he called out his location — a necessary risk, since the army still needed to communicate with itself. He, above all, must be findable, despite the threat of assassination that the Beetles had not quite got round to resorting to yet. The messenger, half-running and half-flying, skidded to a halt before him. ‘General, the supply flight’s incoming.’
Tynan went cold, because his run of bad days had just got much worse. The Second Army was being supplied via the new Spider-kinden holdings in Tark and Kes, but the Spiders refused to use sea-power since their fleet had somehow been turned back from Collegium before. With that approach barred, and short of building a rail line from scratch, the only way to get sufficient food and materials to the beleaguered Second was by airship.
They had staggered the deliveries and mostly made them at night, playing a lethal guessing game with the Collegiates. The enemy knew full well that their orthopters would easily destroy the slow-moving airships, because neither Tynan’s own fliers nor any escort the Spiders could put together had any chance of stopping them.
He stood there helplessly, a general without a plan, without any means of communicating with his army. ‘Our machines-?’
‘They’re all moving to screen the airships, sir,’ the messenger confirmed.
But that won’t be enough. Now the Collegiates have smelt blood, they won’t rest until they bring the ships down.
‘Tell them. .’ His mind worked wildly. ‘Get the fastest Fly-kinden we have — ours or the Spiders’ — get them up to those airships. They need to put down now, I don’t care how far off. We need those supplies safely on the ground. That way we can salvage something.’ It was a wretched sort of a plan, but he had been forced to spin it from nothing,
The messenger was off without even offering a salute, well aware of the urgency of his job.
‘I want a detachment ready to get to the landing site!’ Tynan snapped at the officers around him, very nearly saying crash site. ‘Automotives, haulers, plenty of men ready to carry loads. Start moving now.’ And all the while, in the back of his mind, Too late, too late.
‘Get me. .’ But what he really wanted to say was, Get me somewhere I can see what’s going on. He might exercise only a pitiful influence on the conflict, but it was his responsibility to watch it happening.
Quickly he made his way through the forest to the nearest tower: one of the makeshift wooden constructions engineered from sections of the travelling fort his men had brought with them, rising barely above tree level and dressed with deadwood to make it less of a visible target. He let his wings drag him up there despite the weight of his armour, though he felt every one of his nigh-on fifty years as he reached the top. The Fly-kinden lookout saluted briskly, making room as half of Tynan’s bodyguards made their laborious way up as well.
‘Send word to the — the Spider colonel,’ he ordered the Fly. He had almost referred to the woman by name, which always disconcerted his soldiers. ‘Have her get ready any automotives she can. Tell her we’re going to retrieve what we can from the airships.’
The Fly was off instantly, wings ablur.
Tynan looked out: the airships were plainly visible as little round shapes in the sky, approaching fast with a following wind and growing larger even as he watched. How much more obvious must they be to the Collegiate pilots whose eyes were trained to scan the sky, and everything in it?
Overhead, the aerial battle was moving away, heading east now towards the approaching supply ships. At least we get spared a pummelling, Tynan considered grimly. Suddenly the enemy had better things to do than scatter bombs randomly in the hope of killing Wasp soldiers.
Perhaps, after this, I can talk Mycella into sending our supplies by sea, although I suppose sea-ships would be just as vulnerable as airships. Mycella of the Aldanrael was rightly the joint commander of the Collegium campaign. Labelling her as a colonel had been the best way to keep Tynan’s own people in line, though, for they had been trained rigorously to observe a rigid command structure: general to colonel to major in command, captains and lieutenants in the middle, sergeants and regular solders to fight and work and complain. An army had only one general. Two heads could not govern the same body, every Wasp knew.
Tynan knew better now, He had been initially surprised at how easy the Spider Arista was to work with. Then he had got to know her better, and to understand that she had been stripped of a great deal of her pomp and pride as a result of the failed armada attack on Collegium. After that, he had come to know her altogether too well by most standards. No doubt his intelligence officer, Colonel Cherten, had sent a few interesting reports back home, but no reprimand had come back to Tynan yet.
Still, amongst the Wasps she was a colonel and he supposed that it was a high honour: unprecedented for a woman, a non-Wasp and not even an Imperial citizen. He also suspected that she privately found this obsession with assigning ranks and titles deeply amusing.
The circular silhouettes presented by the airships against the sky began lengthening as they turned. Perhaps they had some broadsides of artillery ready to deal out, but in truth the Collegiate Stormreaders would be able to skip aside from anything the lumbering dirigibles might throw at them. Impatiently, Tynan flicked out his telescope and tried to make sense of what was going on.
Spying on an air battle was harder than the engineers made out. Tynan’s circle of view wheeled constantly across the sky, catching the little insect shapes of the orthopters as they spun and danced against each other, the new way to fight a war that he was excluded from. The best he could gather was that his own side was putting up a spirited defence of their airships. His shaky viewpoint managed brief images of the Spearflights and the Spiders’ motley collection of fliers throwing themselves against the nimble Stormreaders, clashing with them, loosing their weapons, executing turns that were too wide, too slow. He caught sight of one Spearflight in the very moment of its dissolution, falling away to the summons of the distant ground.
The airships were parting company, diverging enough to buy a few of them time to close another mile with the Second, perhaps. His own Fly messenger, be he ever so swift, would still be far from delivering Tynan’s orders — he could not possibly have outstripped the orthopters in their chase towards the supply ships. And I should have some small, fleet flying machine ready for that sort of messenger work — the old ways aren’t good enough any more.
Grinding his teeth with the impotent frustration of it, he wrestled with the telescope, desperate to see the end, no matter how disastrous.
He was rewarded by spotting the swift, hunched shape of a Stormreader go flitting across his view, another craft in hot pursuit, the two of them cornering agilely in the air and slipping out of his vision almost instantly, leaving his mind to interpret that brief glimpse. What have I just seen?
The aerial contest remained maddeningly opaque, his lens continually finding handfuls of empty sky wherever he took it. Then he found one of the airships — the only reference point that vast world had to offer — and was able to watch the swift darting of the orthopters all about it as its fate was decided.
He watched the Stormreaders dive in, bringing themselves into line to attack the gondola itself; and the defending fliers rise to meet them.
There was a moment of utter clarity, in which the hull shapes and wing patterns unshelled their secrets to him, as if he had been born an engineer, and he shouted out in a bark of triumph so violent that his bodyguards feared he had been shot.