‘You believe your army is coming to save you,’ the woman said. Varmen tilted his head up a little, listening. Music, like music. He’d not had a Dragonfly woman yet, was probably one of the few men of the Sixth who hadn’t. It wasn’t as though the Slave Corps hadn’t been touting a sorry collection of Commonwealer whores about the camps, but Varmen had no taste for women who wept, or cursed him, or tried to kill him. Well-made man like me shouldn’t need to rent it from the Slavers.

She had stopped speaking, and he realized he had been nodding along without actually absorbing any of the words. ‘I suppose you think that scares me,’ he hazarded.

‘You have your once-only chance to cast your weapons down,’ the Dragonfly man snapped, icy voiced. ‘I suggest you take it.’

Yeah, I thought it was something like that. ‘Nothing doing,’ Varmen said, talking to her and not to him. ‘Sorry, girl, but the first thing they teach you when you put on this armour is not to go knock-kneed with fear, ’cos of how everyone can hear you.’ Was that a bit of a smile? I think it was. Shame we all have to kill each other now, really. We were getting along famously.

‘Bring your worst,’ he finished.

‘Oh, we shall,’ the Dragonfly man promised. Varmen could see him raging inside, desperate to bring the fight to the Wasps. And you with a bow on your shoulder. Angry men make rotten archers, I know that much.

‘Bring your worst!’ Varmen repeated, ‘’Cos we’re the best – Pride of the Sixth!’

The words rose up from behind him in a chorus of imperial solidarity.

The man stalked away, and Varmen was mildly surprised that one of the Fly-kinden didn’t put an arrow in his oh-so-inviting back. The woman regarded him for a moment more, that very-nearly-almost-amused look still on her face, and then followed after. Varmen carefully stepped backwards until he could see Pellrec from the very corner of his visor.

‘How’d I do?’ he muttered.

‘Oh, I’m amazed the Emperor didn’t come round and hand out medals,’ the other sentinel told him. ‘What now?’

‘We fight.’

‘And when the Sixth doesn’t come, like she said?’

‘Feh.’ Varmen shrugged. ‘And why won’t they come?’

‘Well…’ There was a pained pause, but Varmen wouldn’t look at him, so Pellrec went on, ‘There was the little thing about the whole Grand Army of three principalities currently beating on the Sixth like a man with a sick slave.’

There was, was there? ‘And you believed it?’ Varmen raised his voice to carry to the men around them. ‘Of course they’re going to tell us that. Why would they even come here to ask for surrender, unless they were scared of us, eh?’

He heard a subdued rustle of laughter as his tone rescued a little morale. Pellrec wasn’t fooled. Pellrec never was. Still, Pellrec would stand and fight alongside him whether he believed it or not. Sentinels didn’t break. ‘Pride of the Sixth,’ Varmen murmured to himself.

‘And here they come,’ Tserro said, and to his credit his voice was steady. Varmen dropped into his fighting stance, keeping his shield up, and the arrows began to arc into the firelight. He felt an impact on his shoulder, two or three on his shield. A sharp rap knocked his head to one side but he brought it back, waiting. The gash in the crashed heliopter was mostly filled with Varmen and his sentinels, and it would be a fine archer who could spin an arrow into a narrow eyeslit or up under an armpit at the range they were shooting at. Varmen heard a shout of pain from behind him, an errant missile catching one of the Fly-kinden in the leg after clipping Pellrec’s pauldron. Another splintered on a sentinel’s halberd blade.

‘Spears now,’ Tserro said. He must have been crouching high aloft, just behind and beside Varmen’s head.

‘Brace!’ Varmen shouted. Arrows began to dance the other way, the short shafts that the scouts used. Fly-kinden weren’t good for much, in Varmen’s estimation, but they were decent shots when their nerve held.

The firelight caught movement, and then the Commonwealer soldiers were on them. They came running: lithe spearmen with thin leather cuirasses, archers in amongst them with arrows to the string, a rushing rabble of golden-skinned faces. Even as they hit the firelight, half of them were airborne, the wings of their Art flaring from their backs and shoulders, launching them up and forward. Their arrows kept coming, loosed on the run or on the wing. One struck Pellrec’s breastplate and bounded up into the mail under his chin, sticking and hanging there like a beard. Varmen heard several cries behind him as the missiles punched through the banded armour of Arken’s medium infantry. The Wasps were returning shot for shot. The light arrows of the scouts were cut through with crackling bolts of gold fire. Varmen saw a half-dozen of the Commonwealers go straight down. No decent armour and not a shield amongst them, he thought. The Dragonflies did have a few good military traditions, but most of their army was merely levy like this.

‘Pride of the Sixth!’ he called out and stepped forward just as the first spearman got to him. The Commonwealer’s wings flashed as he charged and the spear slammed into Varmen’s shield hard enough to stop both of them in their tracks. Varmen’s sword flashed down, knowing where the spear-shaft would be through the surface of the shield, hacking the head clean off it. The Dragonfly reached for a dagger but one of the Fly-kinden arrows lanced him through the throat and he dropped. Another two spears were coming in but Varmen’s shield was dancing on its own, his reflexes keeping it moving, covering throat and groin. An arrow clipped his helm and a spearhead was briefly lodged between the plates of his tassets. He swung his sword, tireless as an automaton, breaking spears and keeping them back while their friends tried to push forwards, and the Wasps behind him launched their sting-shot over his shoulders. It was an archer’s war. The sentinels stood as firm as a wall, and everyone else died at range, not even seeing the face of their killers. If Varmen and his fellows had fallen back, it would all have been over, the mob of Dragonfly levy swirling forward to run each Wasp and Fly onto a pike. They held against the ground troops, though, and those who tried to force through between the sentinels’ flashing weapons and the jagged edge of the heliopter’s top wall were picked off by the men behind.

Abruptly as they had come, the Dragonflies broke off the attack, disappearing into the darkness, chased by a few hopeful arrows. Varmen made a quick count and saw a score of bodies. No counting how many dead and wounded they took away with them.

‘What’s our losses?’ he called back.

‘Two scouts, one infantry,’ came Arken’s dutiful voice. ‘Two others wounded.’

‘They’ll be back,’ Pellrec said.

‘Oh, surely.’ Varmen shrugged his shoulders, settling the plates back into place. Pellrec murmured to him and he added, ‘They’ll take a few shots at us now… hope we’ve forgotten about them. Stay sharp.’

‘Sergeant…’ Something in Arken’s tone promised complications.

Varmen sighed. ‘Watch the front,’ he told Pellrec and ducked into the wrecked heliopter. ‘What? What now?’

Arken said nothing, but he was stepping back from the prone form of Lieutenant Landren.

‘Don’t suppose we’re lucky enough that he died in his sleep?’ Varmen said. There was an awkward pause, several seconds’ worth, before he noticed the arrow.

‘Ah, right.’ He knelt by the body: dead, all right, no mistaking that. It was dim back there, too dim to get a look at the wound, not that it would have told him much. But he could feel a tension behind him. Sounds like he was alive and well when Arken did his count the first time round. ‘You must have missed him in the dark,’ Varmen said absently.

There was a distinct pause before the ‘Yes, Sergeant.’