He died in the doorway, did Cesta, his back turned to the great fighting scrum of people that he had set alight: impaled and scorched with Wasp fire, but still casting one last blade before he fell. In his mind was the sad knowledge that his kinden, his whole race and heritage, might wink out the moment he did.

Nero shuddered at the sight, and only then looked back out over the Exalsee, hearing in the very back of his mind the drone of engines. There he spotted the dark dots that were the flying machines of the free pilots casting themselves across the waters towards the beleaguered city of Solarno.

When the first message had reached the imperial garrison it was so garbled that they had not known what to make of it. Men were sent out on to the streets, others towards the governor’s coronation. Then more word came in, and units of the Wasp army began to form, a coordinated march to clear Galand Square.

Lieutenant Axrad cared nothing for that activity. The moment word came, he had rallied his pilots and rushed for their commandeered airfield. He had sent word to the captain of the Starnest, still up above the city, to expect attack, and then he and his people had leapt to their machines. Some of them were being lifted aloft by the airships, able to drop gracefully into the air. Others, the better fliers, were making their awkward take-off from the ground. Axrad flew to his own cockpit, there starting the engine and feeling the wings thrum so that the machine lurched and lifted as though hastily woken from sleep.

The ground fell away from him and he was free.

Axrad was not a model officer, but things were different in the flying corps. Five years earlier there had not even been such a division, but the Imperial Army was evolving rapidly. Three generations before they had been nothing but barbarians with spears and war-cries. How they had evolved since then to produce Lieutenant Axrad, pilot, aerial duellist and sophisticate. Some foreigners thought that the Wasp’s assurance of their own superiority would prevent them ever learning from the conquered, but that was not so. They saw the achievements of their subject peoples, and they thought: We are superior to them, so we can do better.

The rebels’ attack had been sudden, but the assault force on Solarno was not composed as a normal imperial army. The need for a sudden strike to secure the city, once the Rekef operation had foundered, had required a conquest far swifter and more mobile than all that grinding artillery and slogging infantry. Launching an aerial attack had been a glorious and successful experiment.

Now let us see if we can hold on to what we have gained. The lifting blimps were now in the air – they had been held ready since the invasion, although it was originally anticipated that they would be carrying the airforce west towards Seldis and the Spiderlands to support the army there. Much of the infantry, which had come stomping into Solarno already too late for the conquest, had already stomped right out again, heading to reinforce the besieging of the Spider cities.

There were wings everywhere over the city. Axrad tried a quick count. More than forty flying machines he saw. The numbers would be tight. Under normal circumstances, the air-fight would be over by now, the imperial machines destroyed in their hangars by the sudden strike but, as the airforce had been kept ready to leave the city, every machine had already been in a position to launch.

Behind and above him the sleek and massive bulk of the great dirigible Starnest blotted out the sky. She had nowhere near her complement of soldiers, for they were on the ground already or had marched out days ago, but there were enough engineers to man her weapon emplacements: leadshotters and bombards to thunder into the city, and nimble repeating ballistas to take on the Solarnese aircraft.

Axrad himself had been busy these last few days, not through conquering zeal but from professional curiosity. Flanking the nose of his craft were two rotary piercers, the firepowder weapons that the Solarnese pilots preferred, which were more powerful than the mechanically assisted ballistae the Wasp vessels normally sported.

The Fly-kinden Taki would be amongst that crescent of fliers that was even now sweeping over the Exalsee. He hoped he would spot her Esca Volenti. He owed her a final duel.

If she falls, it should be by my hand, and with respect, he thought. If I fall, I would rather it be due to one of her skill. Axrad had no room in his own head for the mantra of racial superiority that drove the Empire to conquest. He was one of that strange new breed combining soldier and artificer and aviator, a fighting pilot. Skill in the air was the sole qualification for respect in his world, and he did not care what colour of skin or physical frame came with it.

They were all in the air now, clawing for height or already dropping from the lifting blimps. The Imperial Airforce, the daring innovation that had taken Solarno, was about to defend it against all comers.

The free pilots came barrelling in from over the Exalsee with engines ablaze. The battle for the skies of Solarno had begun.

Below them the battle for the streets, the houses, the city proper, would have to be left to the amateur forces of the resistance, the Path of Jade, Odyssa and her Scorpion-kinden mercenaries. They and the Wasp heavy infantry would now grind through Solarno, skirmish after skirmish, until either the spirit went out of the locals or the Imperials cut their losses.

If the Empire gained control of the sky then the rebellion would be over before it began. Just as with the invasion, the Wasp airborne would then be able to descend anywhere across the city with sword and sting, picking the resistance off bit by bit, stopping the Solarnese from unifying. It was Taki’s job to contest the skies with them.

An airborne Empire. She saw now what she should have seen before: how it was that the Wasps had grown so powerful. They had all the fighting spirit of the Solarnese or the Ant-kinden, but they had the air as well, in which to give full rein to it. If only we Flies were fighters by nature, we’d be masters of the world.

Ahead she saw the long grey bulk of the Starnest’s airbag as the great vessel lifted higher. They had all agreed that it must be their target, beyond all else. They even had a plan, or at least some cobbled-together flimsy sort of thing that passed for one. What with the natural enemies that Taki had under her command, it was the best that they could manage.

She was approaching it fast, but it just kept growing. She had not appreciated the sheer scale of the vessel as it rose sluggishly into the air. The smaller carriers were already well above it, and she hauled back on the stick to take the Esca Volenti up towards them, meanwhile starting the motor of her rotary. In order to down the Starnest, they would have to cut through the enemy flying machines, and that was what she and the nimbler of the pilots would now be doing.

The air shuddered, a thunder felt in the sudden tremor of her controls before she actually heard it, and the weapons of the Starnest opened up on them. She saw gouts of powder-smoke from the leadshotters and, to her left, one of the Creev’s mercenary pilots was smashed to splinters, going without transition from a darting heliopter to a… a nothing, within a mere second. It was a lucky strike for the Wasps, since the leadshotters had never been meant as weapons against fliers. There were rapid-firing ballistas there, too, swivel-mounted to cover all angles, and, although they were still clumsy hammers to bring to bear on a swift flyer, Taki knew there would be losses to them also before this was out.

She was now coursing up across the grey vastness of the Starnest’s flank, while above her were Wasp flying machines dropping from their carriers and falling towards the Solarnese vessels.