And the engine coughed again and died. "Shit," he said with resignation, and yanked at the tab to cut the fuel supply. Then: "Shit!" as he looked down and saw a thickening film of gasoline in the bottom of the cockpit. "I hate it when things like that happen!"
Make a note to write to the design team, Raj prompted. If it had been Center, he would have taken that literally. .
A few black puffs of antiaircraft fire blossomed around him. Friendly fire, which was just as dangerous as the opposition's. It petered out; someone must have noticed the red-white-and-blue rondels on his wings, the mark of the Freedom Brigades' Air Service. Then the X shape of the field came into view over a low ridge, a ridge uncomfortably close to the fixed undercarriage. He concentrated on the white line of lime down the center of the graded dirt runway, ignoring the crash-truck that was speeding out to meet him with men clinging to its sides and standing on the running boards. A pom-pom in a circular pit near the edge of the runway tracked him, its twin six-foot barrels looking bloated in their water jackets, but at least that bunch seemed to keep their eyes open-a single fighter of Santander design with its prop stationary was hard to mistake for a Chosen or Nationalist raiding group, but every now and then a gun crew with active imaginations managed it.
Lower. Lower. Wind whistling through the wires and struts, flapping his scarf behind him. Lower. . touch. The hard rims of the wheels ticked at the ground in a scurf of dry dirt and gravel, ticked again, settled with a rattling thud. The unpowered aircraft slowed rapidly to a halt. Jeffrey snapped open his belts and swung out to the lower wing, then to the ground, and lumbered away as fast as the weight of the parachute and the fleece-lined leather flight suit would let him.
"Motherfucking son of a bitch!" he shouted, throwing the leather helmet and goggles to the ground, followed by the parachute.
"You all right?"
That was one of the Wong brothers. Jeffery rounded on him. "The interrupter gear still isn't working right," he said as the crew from the crash truck swarmed over the Hawk, fire extinguishers at the ready.
"My guns both jammed. Which left me a sitting duck. And the fuel lines are still leaking into the pilot's compartment when the integral tank gets cut-do you have any fucking idea how good that is for pilot morale?"
Wong made soothing motions with his hands. "As soon as we can get more rubber, we can make the tanks self-sealing," he said.
Jeffrey snorted. The Land had all the natural rubber on Visager-the only places that could grow it were the Land itself and the northernmost peninsula of what had once been the Empire. John's factories were just beginning to produce a trickle of synthetic rubber from oil, but it was fiendishly expensive and the Land would cut off the natural type the minute their extremely efficient spies caught Santander using it for military purposes.
Crazy war, he thought. We're fighting here in the Union, but it's all "volunteers" and normal trade goes on.
"And the latest Land fighter is still better than ours."
"The triplane?" Wong said with interest.
"Yes, the Skyshark. It's almost as fast as our Mark II and it's got a better turning radius in starboard turns."
Wong took out a notepad and began to scribble as they walked back towards the squadron HQ; behind them the crew hitched up the plane and pulled it away towards the hangar and revetments, half a dozen walking behind with a grip on its wings to steady it. A group was waiting for Jeffrey.
"You should not risk yourself so, General Farr," General Pierre Gerard said.
"You must be really pissed, Pierre; you never call me that otherwise."
The loyalist officer shrugged, a very Unionaise gesture. "Still, it is true. And someone must tell you."
You, John, my wife, and my two invisible friends, Jeffrey thought. And I can never get away from those two.
"I have to have hands-on experience to work effectively with the designers," he said, looking over his shoulder for Wong. The little engineer and ex-bicycle manufacturer was trotting off to take a look at the shot-up Mark II. "Also to help refine our tactics for the pilot schools. We're sending them up with less than thirty hours' flight time, so at least we should be teaching them the right things."
They walked into the HQ, a spare temporary structure of boards and two-by-fours. John stripped out of the flight suit, shivering slightly as the chill spring air of the central plateau hit the sweat-damp fabric of his summer-weight uniform.
"What is your appraisal?" Gerard said.
"The enemy have more and better planes than we do," Jeffrey said, sitting down and accepting the coffee an orderly brought. Coffee was another thing they were going to miss if-when-all trade with the Land was cut off. "And better pilots, more experienced. If it's any consolation, we're improving faster than they are, but we're starting from a lower base."
Gerard frowned, looking down at his hands on the rough table. "My friend, this is bad news. Although perhaps the government will listen now when I tell them the offensive on the eastern front is a bad idea."
Jeffrey halted the coffee cup halfway to his mouth. "They're still going ahead with that?" he asked incredulously.
"And they will strip men, guns, aircraft from every other front for it," he said. "The Committee talks of recapturing Marsai and splitting the rebel zone in half."
"The Committee has its head up its collective butt," Jeffrey said.
Gerard's head swiveled around. Unfair, Jeffrey chided himself. He could say that; the Committee of Public Safety had no jurisdiction over Brigade members, they'd insisted on that from the beginning. Gerard was in high favor after helping to stop Libert's thrust for the capital in the opening months of the war, but even so the Committee's name was nothing to take in vain. Chairman Vincen seemed to think that if he made himself into a worse mad bastard than Libert and the Chosen, he could beat Libert and the Chosen. It didn't necessarily work that way, but desperate men weren't the best logicians.
Gerard cleared his throat "And it will be even more difficult if they can continue to use Land dirigibles to shift troops and supplies at will behind their lines."
"They can as long as they can keep our planes from punching through," Jeffrey said. "Those gasbags are sitting targets for fighters, but we don't have the numbers or the range to penetrate their own fighter screens.
Gerard's bulldog face grew longer. "Then they will be able to shift faster than I can-what is that expression you used?"
Jeffrey sighed. "They can get inside your decision curve. I just hope things are going better back home."
* * *
Admiral Arthur Cunningham was a big, thickset man, with graying blond hair. Right now his face and bull neck were turning red with throttled rage, and he pulled at his walrus mustache as he stared at the ship model in the center of the glossy ebony table.
The hull was a large merchant variety, an eight-thousand-ton bulk carrier of the type used to ferry manganese ore from the Southern Islands under Santander protectorate. The top had been sliced off and replaced with a long flat rectangular surface; the funnels ran up into an island on the port side, and a section had lowered like an elevator to show rows of biplanes in the huge hold below the flight deck.
"Its an abortion," Cunningham said.
"It's what we need for scouting," Maurice Farr corrected.
The rings on his sleeves and the epaulets on his shoulders marked him as a rear admiral, and kept Cunningham superficially respectful. Nobody could mistake his expression, or the meaning in the look he shot John Hosten where he sat beside his father.