Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [101]
What will you do, Beetle child?
I will stop you, she told him flatly. Tynisa does not deserve this.
She is mine. What can you do to stop me?
From nowhere, or perhaps from some forgotten conversation with Achaeos, the word surfaced. I shall bind you in a tree perhaps. I shall lock you away.
I shall kill you before you have the chance, came his cold reply.
Will you so? She had thought long and hard on how she might compel this creature, on the journey from Khanaphes. Would you kill Stenwold’s kin?
The silence that followed told her that she was right; that some vestige of the man he had once been still remained within Tisamon.
She gathered her strength then, while he seemed uncertain, for she was not sure herself how long such a leash would hold him. She tried to reach out again. Almost, almost there, and then at least Tynisa can find her own way . . .
—she was hiding under her bed, because she knew the bad man was coming, the man that had called her father ‘friend’ and never meant it—
‘No!’ cried Che, feeling the shade of Tisamon slip away from her. ‘Thalric!’
‘I’m right here,’ the Wasp snapped in frustration. ‘Che, what is happening to you?’
—steps echoed outside the children’s bedchamber, and the door pushed open—
The world was sliding away from her, or she was falling aside from it, as though some giant hand had tilted it upon its side. She clutched impotently at Thalric, trying to stay with him. ‘Hold me! Don’t let me go, please!’
His arms were about her, but she could feel his bafflement in every movement. ‘Che, I’m right here . . .’
‘I’m losing you . . .’ she got out.
And then she was gone.
Eighteen
Airborne war has been conducted for too long by airship. The fates of our Starnest and the Collegiate Triumph show how foolish that is. The age of the war-dirigible is past. Orthopters and fixed wings will rule the skies . . .
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.
Approximately half the Solarnese air fleet was composed of orthopters, compared to perhaps eight out of ten among the Imperial flying machines. At the end of the battle, according to my personal observations, perhaps two fixed-wing fliers remained operational – with the entire balance of the surviving machines on both sides being orthopters. It is my experience and that of every fellow aviator I have spoken with, and the inescapable conclusion from examining the reports of other conflicts where flying machines have confronted one another, that mobile-winged aeromotive craft have a substantial superiority in manoeuvrability that will, all things being equal, give them command of the air.
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