He swung his weight to the left, trying to steer the chute away from the trees below and towards a stretch of grass. Was he over Confederate-held territory, or did the USA still have a grip here? He didn't know. Pretty damn soon, he'd find out.
He passed over a pine almost close enough to kick it on the way down. There was the meadow, coming up. He bent his knees, braced for the impact-and twisted his ankle anyhow. "Son of a bitch!" he said loudly. The chute tried to drag him across the field. He pulled out his knife and sawed at the shrouds. After what seemed a very long time, he cut himself free. He tried to get to his feet. The ankle didn't want to bear his weight. He could hobble, but that was about it.
From behind him, somebody said, "Hold it right there, asshole!" Moss froze. Was that a U.S. or a C.S. accent? He hadn't been able to tell. The soldier said, "Turn around real slow, and make sure I can see both hands are empty."
Moss couldn't turn any way but slowly. He whooped when he saw the man pointing a rifle at him wore green-gray. "I'm Jonathan Moss, major, U.S. Army Air Force," he said.
"Yeah, sure, buddy, and I'm Queen of the May," the U.S. soldier said. For a dreadful moment, Moss thought his career would end right there, finished by someone on his own side. But then the soldier said, "I see you're heeled. Drop your piece, and don't do anything stupid or you'll never find out who wins the Champions' Cup this year."
"Whatever you say." Moss fished his pistol out of the holster with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He dropped it on the ground, then took a couple of limping steps away from it. "Get me back to your CO. I'll show him I'm legit."
The soldier came forward and scooped up the.45. Never for an instant did his Springfield stop pointing at Moss' brisket. "Maybe you will and maybe you won't," he said. "But all right-I've pulled your teeth. Come along. You better not try anything funny, or that's all she wrote."
"I'm coming," Moss said. "I can't run, not on this leg." The soldier in green-gray only shrugged. Maybe he thought Moss was faking. Moss wished he were. He asked, "Where the hell are we, anyway? I flew out of Indiana, and I got all turned around in the last dogfight."
"If my lieutenant wants you to know, he'll tell you," the soldier answered. "Can't you move any faster than that?"
"Now that you mention it," Moss said, "no." Behind him, the soldier scattered unprintables the way Johnny Appleseed had scattered seeds. The sputter of bad language eased but didn't stop when they got in under the trees. Moss was glad to get out of the meadow, too; one of those Hound Dogs might have paid a return visit, and shooting up soldiers caught in the open was any pilot's sport.
"Halt!" an unseen voice called. "Who goes there?"
"No worries, Jonesy-it's me," Moss' captor (rescuer?) replied. "I got me a flyboy-says he's one of ours. He don't talk like a Confederate, but he don't quite talk like one of us, neither." That's what I get for living in Canada for most of twenty years-I started sounding like a Canuck, Moss thought unhappily.
"Well, bring him on," Jonesy said. "Lieutenant Garzetti will figure out what the hell to do with him."
Lieutenant Giovanni Garzetti was a little dark man in his late twenties who looked as if he'd never smiled in his whole life. He made his headquarters in a barn that had had one corner blown off by a shell. He looked Moss and his gear over, asked him a few questions, and said, "Yeah, you're the goods, all right." He turned to the soldier who'd brought in the fighter pilot. "Give him back his sidearm, Pratt."
"Yes, sir," the soldier said. This was the first time Moss had heard his name. Pratt took the.45 off his belt and handed it back. "Here you go. I didn't want to take any chances with you, you know what I mean?"
Moss could tell he wouldn't get any more of an apology than that. He nodded as he slid the pistol into the holster again. "Don't worry about it."
"So what can we do for you, Major?" Lieutenant Garzetti asked.
"A bandage for my ankle and a lift to the closest airstrip would be good," Moss answered. "I can't walk for beans, but I expect I can still fly."
"Pratt, go chase down a medic," Garzetti said. The soldier sketched a salute and departed. Garzetti nodded to Moss. "We'll get you wrapped up good. Meanwhile…" He pulled a little silver flask out of his pocket. "Have a knock of this."
This was some of the best-certainly the most welcome-bourbon Moss had ever drunk. "Anesthetic," he said solemnly, and Garzetti nodded. The lieutenant took a drink from the flask when Moss returned it. Then he put it in his pocket once more. Was he a quiet lush? He didn't act like one. If he fancied a drink every now and then… well, Moss fancied a drink every now and then, too. "Boy, that hit the spot. You sure you aren't part St. Bernard?"
Lieutenant Garzetti still didn't smile. His eyes twinkled, though. "If you said on my mother's side, you'd've called me a son of a bitch."
"That's not what I meant!" Moss exclaimed.
"I know it's not, and I'm not flabbling about it," Garzetti said. A man with a Red Cross armband came in through the missing corner of the barn. "Here's the medic. Let's see what he can do."
After poking and prodding at Moss' ankle, the medic said, "I don't think it's busted, Major, but you sure as hell ought to get it X-rayed first chance you find."
Moss only laughed. "And when's that likely to be?"
"Beats me, sir, but you ought to. You can mess yourself up bad, trying to do too much on a busted ankle. In the meantime…" In the meantime, the medic used what seemed a mummy's worth of gauze to wrap the injured part. "There you go. Try that. Tell me how it is. If you're not happy, I'll put some more on."
How? Moss wondered. He got to his feet. The ankle still complained when he put weight on it, but it didn't scream so loud. He could walk, after a fashion. "Thanks," he said. "It's not perfect, but it's an awful lot better. And as long as I can get into a fighter, what else do I need?" Neither the medic nor Lieutenant Garzetti had anything to say to that.
Scipio watched bored cops herd colored factory workers onto their buses near the edge of the Terry. He'd got used to that. It bothered him less than it had when he first saw it. The buses brought the workers back every evening. They really did take the men and women to do war work. They didn't haul them off to those camps from which nobody ever came back. "Come on. Keep moving," a cop said. "You got to-"
The world blew up.
That was how it seemed to Scipio, anyhow. One minute, he was walking along the streets, watching the workers board the buses and thinking about what he'd be doing once he got to the Huntsman's Lodge. The next, he was rolling on the ground, tearing out both knees of his tuxedo pants and clapping his hands to his ears in a useless, belated effort to hold out that horrible sound.
Afterwards, he realized that the buses had shielded him from the worst of the blast. The motorcar bomb went off across the street from them. If they hadn't been in the way, the twisted metal junk screeching through the air in all directions probably would have cut him down, too. As things were, he got a couple of little cuts from flying glass, but nothing worse than that.
Head ringing from the force of the explosion, he staggered upright again. He heard everything as if from very far away. He knew his hearing could come back to normal in a couple of days. A hell of a country, he thought, when you know how things are after a bombing on account of you've been through them before.
When he looked at what the bomb had done to the buses and to the people waiting for them, his stomach did a slow lurch. All four buses were burning furiously. That would have been even worse if they'd had gasoline engines rather than using diesel fuel, but it was plenty bad enough as things were. One of them lay on its side; another had been twisted almost into a right angle. And the people…