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‘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