Dragonfly Falling (73 page)

The Queen considered
this, still surrounded by the silent counsel of her tacticians. She nodded
slowly, a deliberate affectation simply for the benefit of the other kinden
there. ‘The idea has merit, although you take a great deal of risk on your
people. If you yourselves break rank, to charge or pursue, we may not be able
to save you.’

Scelae tilted her head
on one side. ‘We are warriors. We fight. We understand all that means.’

The Queen looked down at
the map-tables, then up at Cheerwell, the shock of eye contact startling in its
intensity.
And how many others now look at me out of her
eyes.
‘Your comments?’

Che opened her mouth,
trying to think, but Sperra said, ‘Messengers, surely.’

‘Little one?’

‘Messengers. If it goes
wrong you can send someone out to the League soldiers,’ the Fly-kinden said.
‘You can call them back, put them elsewhere.’ She spread her small hands. ‘Not
that I know the first thing about war, anyway, but that’s what I’d do.’

‘You wouldn’t need
actual messengers—’ Che broke in suddenly.

The Queen found a smile
for her. ‘Yes, we have the same thought. I shall place a few of my fleetest
soldiers with each half of your warriors,’ she told Scelae. ‘They at least will
be able to hear me, and they can tell you what I . . . suggest that your forces
do. Many things can happen in a battle, and we can never predict them all. I
may have need of your warriors in ways we cannot yet consider.’

Scelae glanced at the Moth-kinden,
who nodded.

‘Agreed,’ she said, and
moved to go, preparing to explain to her people a plan that all the Ants
already understood.

Che coughed pointedly.
‘I have . . . something to say, I think. Something that my uncle himself would
say, if he were here.’

The Mantis stopped,
looking back at her.

‘Speak,’ the Queen
directed.

‘This is something that
stretches beyond the battlefield of tomorrow,’ Che said, sounding to her own
ears unbearably awkward and pompous. ‘We’re writing history, right now, here in
this tent. The three cities of the Ancient League, and Sarn, and Collegium, are
all standing together and of one mind. We must remember our common cause. We
must. If we turn the Wasps back, then it would be all too easy just to go back
to trying to ignore each other, to forget how we have stood here, all together,
for one purpose. We should remember that, for as long as we can.’

Scelae, who had so long
been a spy in the Queen’s city, smiled bleakly. ‘I am not sure even the threat
of the Wasps can bring us to that degree of unity. Let us defeat them first,
and see what remains.’

Che slept that night in
Achaeos’s arms, clutching at him for security, while Sperra lay as a curled and
lonely shape at the other end of the tent. The morning woke Che not with dawn
light but with his absence.

‘Achaeos?’ she called
softly. There was a noise from outside, not loud, but a constant and steady
sound of the Ants getting ready to fight: preparing armour and weapons, the
engines of the automotives, the propellers of the fixed-wing fliers, and not a
single human voice to be heard.

‘Out here,’ he said
finally. Sperra was slowly uncurling as Che put her boots on. Stepping outside
made her head swim because of the sheer quantity of movement all around. The
entire Ant force was afoot, forming into its traditional tight units of shield
and crossbow. There were several thousand infantry in her view alone, and every
single one of them knew where he or she should be.

Sperra ducked out after
her just as the engines of the flying machines began to settle into a low
grumble beyond the tents and the machines themselves to slowly crawl across the
ground.

‘Apparently the Wasps
tried to attack at dawn,’ Achaeos explained, his voice sounding oddly empty. ‘A
strike force of fifty or so intended to destroy the fliers. The Queen had put
the Mantis-kinden on guard, though. They can see well in the dark, and their
bows can shoot further than any Wasp sting.’

‘Are you all right?’ Che
asked him. He sounded shaken and numb.

‘Our scouts came back,’
he said. ‘The Empire outnumbers us by about three to two, but the Ants don’t
seem to think it makes much difference. It’s tactics and discipline, not
numbers, apparently.’ There was a ragged edge to his words, emerging as though
he had not the least interest in the conflict that was about to unfold.

‘Achaeos, what’s wrong?
Tell me!’

‘I have dreams, Che,’ he
told her. ‘Terrible dreams. The Darakyon is hounding me but I cannot understand
it. It is going mad, it seems, over something new that it cannot get through to
me. Something terrible is going to happen, Che.’

‘Here? In the battle?’

‘Something dire enough
to make this battle look like children brawling,’ he said.

The engines of the
automotives roared suddenly, and the entire Ant army set forth together, every
single man and woman of the infantry marching precisely in step. Sperra poked
her head further out of the tent and swore in a small, lost voice, as thousands
of men and women all around them were suddenly on the move and falling into
place. It felt as though the whole world was leaving them behind.

Technically, all three
of them had been seconded to join the field surgeons, as they each had some
experience of medicine in various forms. There would be a blessed pause before
any casualties came back, though, and Che wanted to see for herself exactly
what was going on. She looked around for a vantage point and picked one of the
transport automotives, empty of everything except rations now. With a clumsy
flick of her wings she cast herself up at the overreaching cage of struts that
defined its cargo area, clung tight and hauled herself up until she could stand
on them, looking out over the battlefield. She was just in time for the first
of the orthopters to drone overhead, just taking off but still going fast
enough for the downbeat of their wings to buffet her. She sat down hurriedly
just as Achaeos and Sperra joined her on her perch.

Plated with shields, the
units of Ants were themselves like great crawling insects. The centre of the
Sarnesh battle array was made up of them, square after square plodding forward
with a single will. Interrupting these black metal lines, armoured automotives
drove forward at walking pace, their brand-new nailbows glinting proudly in the
sun.

On either side, the
soldiers of the Ancient League were a diffuse cloud, now getting a little ahead
of the line, now being reined in again. Che pictured all those Mantis-kinden,
all running as individuals, some with arrows to bowstrings, others brandishing
swords, claws or lances. She saw in her mind’s eye the tight clusters of
Moth-kinden with short-bows and knives and blank white eyes.

Ahead of the Sarnesh
advance, the Wasp army moved like a living thing. Behind their soldiers, blocky
flying machines began to lurch into the air.

‘The scouts said they
had “armoured heloropters” or some such,’ Achaeos reported.

‘Armoured heliopters,’
Che corrected. ‘A stupid idea, really.’

‘Why?’ Achaeos asked.
‘Not that I don’t think the same about all these machines.’

‘We were all worried
that the Ants wouldn’t think like fliers, but it seems the Wasps have been
guilty of the same thing. You can armour a heliopter all you like, but you
can’t armour the rotors, and that’s what keep the machines in the air. The
Sarnesh fixed-wings will be able to shoot them down and—’

Her words failed in her
throat, because the Wasp army had just exploded. Its entire front ranks were
now in the air, a great buzzing cloud that was sweeping forward on to the
patiently advancing Ant line, filling the whole sky.

*

Sperra had a telescope
but did not care to use it, handing it mutely to Che instead. Putting her eye
to it, Che saw a slice of the world wheel crazily, tilted and blurry. Then she
had the battlefront focused, a wall of flying Wasps surging forward like a
breaking wave to smash against the front lines of the Sarnesh.

One instant it seemed
that no force on earth could withstand that great rushing charge, a thousand
men of the light airborne, hands extended to sting, wings sweeping them down
the valley of the rail line. Then her point of view was filled with lancing
rain, but rain lashing
upwards
in near-solid sheets,
and she heard Sperra gasp and Achaeos curse. Only then did she realize that it
was the crossbow quarrels from the leading Ant-kinden, sleeting upwards at a
range that the Wasps’ Art weapons could not match. She wished, then, that she
had seen it all, as the other two had, that sudden black flash of bolts,
shooting in absolute unison, from the forward Ant formations.

And the Wasp charge was
now in chaos. It was nothing she could follow with the glass and so she took it
from her eye, trying to make sense of the mad buzzing clots of men that the
charge had been broken up into. From her vantage point she could see the carpet
of dead which that first round of quarrels had produced, still some distance
ahead of the inexorable Ant advance, but the remainder of the Wasps were
heading in all directions. Some were turning and fleeing back to their own
lines, others over on the flanks were still attacking, trying to take the Ants
in the side. But as they swung around they met the long arrows of the
Mantis-kinden, and the Mantids themselves, wings flashing to life as they drove
upwards with blades flashing into the suddenly scattering Wasps. Many of the
Wasps just tried to push on through, streaking over the Ant formations with
their stings flashing down as points of golden light, mostly to crackle
uselessly over raised and overlapping shields. They were being slaughtered even
as they flew, for the formations behind the leading edge of the advance had
their crossbows too and even at this range Che could hear the bang-bang-bang of
nailbows from infantry and from the automotives.

The Wasp heliopters were
looming large, now, lumbering through the air to get above the Ant-kinden and
bombard their tight formations, but the Ant fixed-wings flashed past them,
nailbows blazing. One of the cumbersome machines was clipped from the sky
almost instantly, tumbling forards with enough time for half a revolution
before its armoured lines split asunder against the ground. With shaking
telescope Che saw the sparks of nailbow bolts striking against the armoured
hulls of the others, while the heliopters’ ballista and leadshotter fire kept
trying to pin down the swifter Sarnesh fliers.

The Ant advance had not
slowed, even now that the lead heliopters had begun to drop explosives on them.
Flame and shrapnel flowed in broken chains across the Ant soldiers. The
formations quickly broke up as the heliopter was directly over them, and then
massed back together once it had passed, but there were undoubtedly gaps being
blasted into their lines. There were too many soldiers in too close a space to
avoid it all. Che saw one of the heliopters falter in the air suddenly, struck
by nailbow shot from the automotives, and then plummet down amongst the Ant
soldiers without warning, smashing an entire unit apart with the impact.

Beyond it, a fixed-wing
exploded in mid-air, showering burning metal. The Wasps had pivot-mounted
leadshotters behind their lines and were starting to lob missiles at the flying
machines, and also in long curving arcs over the heads of their own men and
into the Sarnesh advance.

And yet the Ants did not
falter, not even for a moment. Their formations flowed like water, breaking
under attack, reforming a moment later. They were still moving at the steady,
patient pace that they had started with, despite the casualties that were
starting to mount.

The Wasps had drawn up a
battle-line now, with five score of armoured sentinels in the centre, and shield-bearing
infantry with spears on either side. More of the light airborne were flocking
over to the flanks, and Che saw them swing wide of the Ant advance, coming to
attack the rear. On one side the Mantis warriors were holding back
deliberately, sending out their arrows but keeping their places. On the other
the Ant liaisons had been killed, and about half of the Mantids suddenly dashed
out – on the ground or in the air – and attacked the Wasp airborne as they
passed over, making an entirely separate swirling battle that quickly fled away
from the main one.

The opposing lines were
closing, the telescope told her. She felt Sperra and Achaeos take wing to drop
down from the automotive, and realized that the first casualties were being
carried in, but she could not stop watching. There was crossbow- and sting-shot
being exchanged all the way down the line, with the Wasps taking the worst of
it. Their shields were smaller, and they lacked the Ants’ great advantage that
every man was looking out for all the others as the enemy shot came in.

The Ants at the rear of
the advance suddenly reversed face, raising their shields against incoming
airborne that had swung round behind them, and the crossbow quarrels started
sleeting up again. Then the Mantis-kinden who had been holding back were
suddenly there, dashing across the ground more swiftly than Che could believe,
or leaping into the air with a flare of wings, and the Wasp light airborne
broke as the Mantids tore through it, and individual Wasps were darting away, trying
to get back to their own side.

She dragged her
attention to the lines, and caught them just as they clashed, the Sarnesh
suddenly upping their pace to a thundering run, hundreds of armoured men
throwing their weight behind their shields and crashing into the Wasp line.
Some fell to the Wasps’ levelled spears but their shields managed to turn most
of the spearheads or even shattered the shafts, and then they were smashing
into the Wasp line, swords stabbing frenziedly, and to either side the second-rank
formations were deploying, turning the line of the Ant army into a pincering
curve.