Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1), Adrian Tchaikovsky [13 ebook reader .txt] 📗

neck met his shoulder. If that had been her strongest she might have set him back, with that, but her strength was leaching from her, step by step, as he forced her ahead of him. There would be a bruise, but there and then he did not even slow for her.

She was over his head, wings a blue and green blur. He turned with her, felt his sword clip something. She was within the view of his eyeslit once more, sword drawn back.

She stabbed. With all that length of sword she stabbed for his eyes. It was a good move, but he tilted his head as the lunge came in and the blade grated along the side of his helm and accomplished nothing. She was within his sword’s reach, was close enough, almost, to embrace. The edge of his shield smashed across her face, shattering part of her helm and dropping her to the floor.

Her sword had spun from her hands, she crouched before him, bloody-mouthed and defiant, and he held his blade point-down over her.

There had been a sound, these last minutes, only he had not noted it. Her head snapped up to look at something, and he saw that she, too, had been so taken with the fight she’d missed it.

The ugly box-shape of the Imperial heliopter thundered overhead a moment later, impossible to ignore now. As it passed over the trees he saw the glint of what they threw from its belly, and the fire a moment later, grenades shivering tree-trunks and shrapnelling through the forest. Then there were men in the air, not the nimble Commonwealers but the good old familiar sight of the light airborne: Wasp-kinden men in their stripped-down armour, landing all around with sting-fire and the sword.

Felipe Daless was still crouched before him, her face a mask of battered bitterness. Varmen lowered his sword. She could not see his expression, but she would have seen his helm nod, once. She took flight, not up but straight away, into the trees. I am too soft, he knew, but it would not have sat well, silencing that voice.

He turned back to the crashed flying machine. There were already a couple of the airborne there, one of them with lieutenant’s insignia. Varmen trudged over, feeling abruptly exhausted, as he always did when the fighting spirit bled away from him.

He saw Tserro there, and Arken. They had sour looks on them, and he asked, “What’s the stone in your shoe? They came, didn’t they? We’re rescued.”

“If you can call it that,” Arken said sullenly, and then, when Varmen did not see. “It’s not our people, Sergeant, not the Sixth. These bastards are the Gears, the pissing Second.”

The main body of the Imperial Sixth had been caught unawares by the Grand Army of the Commonweal and almost completely wiped out, save for such detachments as had been sent away for other duties. It was the Commonweal’s only significant victory of the war, and the Sixth’s remnants, dug in and stubborn, held the Dragonflies long enough for Imperial relief forces to put the Commonwealers to flight.

Pellrec survived his wound, and of matters such as a dead Rekef lieutenant and the perfidy of Fly-kinden scouts, nothing was ever said. If the Rekef took any interest in the matter, Varmen never found out. He recommended Arken for sergeant, but nothing came of that, either. His superiors knew too well how much his recommendations were worth.

Pellrec would die later, outside Mian Lae, in what would turn out to be practically the last large engagement of the Twelve Year War. Varmen would survive to march on the Lowlands with the newly reconstituted Sixth under General Praetor. All that was to come, though.

After the Second Army’s intervention, and after the subsequent brutal assault on every Commonweal village and position within ten miles of the heliopter crash, Varmen toured the slave markets. He had the time, while the Sixth was in shreds. He saw every female Dragonfly the Slave Corps had taken, every prisoner of war awaiting disposal or execution.

He never did find Felipe Daless.

The Twelve-year War is the focus of most of the stories in this volume: the cataclysmic battle in which the Commonweal ceased to be the inviolable closed state it was for ‘To Own the Sky’ and lost half its land, hundreds of thousands of its people and its pride to the Empire. This was one of the very first shorts I wrote for Shadows and Varmen stuck with me – to a second story ‘The Last Ironclad’ and then to his appearance as a major character in Heirs of the Blade where the events of this story still haunt him.

Spoils of War

“You know, Yot, this is particularly fine wine,” the Wasp-kinden officer said, swilling the dregs round in his bowl. Sfayot obediently leant forwards to pour him another before setting the jug back on the upturned barrel that served them as a table.

“The Thorn Bugs make it, in the North-Empire,” he explained.

The Wasp man gave a surprised snort. “Who’d have thought a people so ugly could make something so pleasant.” He leant back in his seat, an elaborate thing of cane and dyed wicker that had presumably been some Commonweal noble’s pride and joy before it became spoils of war. The hut they were in, the Empire’s makeshift clearing house for its plunder, was piled high with all manner of goods that the Commonwealers had once held dear, some of it already boxed up and some of it loose: silks and fine cloth, rolled artwork, statuary, books and scrolls. Only the gold was missing. The gold was being sent back to the Empire as a priority, to pay for the ongoing war.

“You came with a cart, Yot,” the Wasp noted, “filled with jars. Of wine, one imagines?”

“The Imperial army is thirsty,” Sfayot observed. He was used to Wasps cutting his name short for their convenience.

“One might wonder why the Imperial army should not simply appropriate your cart, wine and