Night's engines

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“Victory is certain.”

The words crackled and spat, springing from loudspeakers all along the front line and from loudhailers built into the shining bellies of the military class airships or clutched in the jagged-toothed fighting flagella of the Aerokin that floated, stately and predatory, above.

General Bowen's voice possessed such conviction that, for a moment, it was true and not a single soldier could doubt it.

Behind them the grand city of McMahon emptied. Its great bridges and northern roads strained with refugees — all fleeing, now that this last battle for their city was to begin. Smoke blackened McMahon’s sky, and everything stank of it, there had been riots that morning and into the afternoon. But as the Roil’s approach quickened, they’d quietened down. New laws (the Peace and Order Precepts, or as they were more popularly known, the Laws of Knife) were coming aggressively into play, as the dark curtain closed. Still, riots continued in some quarters, perhaps a final expression of denial or rage at what was being lost to them.

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