"How not? If there was ever anyone who fought with His blessing, it is here and now."
"Damn," Jeffrey said softly, watching the Unionaise walk towards his staff car. "I hate sending men out to die."
If you didn't, you wouldn't be the man you are, Raj said. But you'll do it, nonetheless.
Maurice Hosten stamped on the rudder pedal and wrenched the joystick sideways.
His biplane stood on one wing, nose down, and dove into a curve. The Land fighter shot past him with its machine guns stuttering, banking itself to try and follow his turn. He spiraled up into an Immelmann and his plane cartwheeled, cutting the cord of his opponent's circle. His finger clenched down on the firing stud.
"Fuck!" The deflection angle wasn't right; he could feel it even before the guns stuttered.
Spent brass spun behind him, sparkling in the sunlight, falling through thin air to the jagged mountain foothills six thousand feet below. Acrid propellant mingled with the smells of exhaust fumes and castor oil blowing back into his face. Land and cloud heeled crazily below him as he pulled the stick back into his stomach, pulled until gravity rippled his face backward on the bone and vision became edged with gray.
Got the bastard, got him-
Something warned him. It was too quick for thought; stick hard right, rudder right. . and another Land triplane lanced through the space he'd been in, diving out of the sun. His leather-helmeted head jerked back and forth, hard enough to saw his skin if it hadn't been for the silk scarf. The rest of his squadron were gone, not just his wingman-he'd seen the Land fighter bounce Tom-but all the rest as well. The sky was empty, except for his own plane and the two Chosen pilots.
Nothing for it. He pushed the throttles home and dove into cloud, thankful it was close. Careful, now. Easy to get turned around in here. Easy even to lose track of which way was up and end up flying upside down into a hillside convinced you were climbing. There was just enough visibility to see his instruments' radium glow: horizon, compass, airspeed indicator. One hundred thirty-eight; the Mark IV was a sweet bird.
When he came out of the cloudbank there was nobody in sight. He kept twisting backward to check the sun; that was the most dangerous angle, always. The ground below looked strange, but then, it usually did. Check for mountain peaks, check for rivers, roads, the spaces between them.
"That's the Skinder," he decided, looking at the twisting river. "Ensburg's thataway."
Ensburg had been under siege from the Chosen for a month. So that train of wagons on the road was undoubtedly a righteous target. And he still had more than half a tank of fuel.
Maurice pushed the stick forward and put his finger back on the firing button. Every shell and box of hardtack that didn't make it to the lines outside Ensburg counted.
* * *
"Damn, that's ugly," Jeffrey said, swinging down from his staff car.
The huge Land tank was burnt out, smelling of human fat melted into the ground and turning rancid in the summer heat. The commander still stood in the main gun turret, turned to a calcined statue of charcoal, roughly human-shaped.
"This way, sir," the major. . Carruthers, that's his name. . said. "And careful-there are Lander snipers on that ridge back there."
The major was young, stubble-chinned and filthy, with a peeling sunburn on his nose. From the way he scratched, he was never alone these days. He'd probably been a small-town lawyer or banker three months ago; he was also fairly cheerful, which was a good sign.
"We caught it with a field-gun back in that farmhouse," he said, waving over one shoulder.
Jeffrey looked back; the building was stone blocks, gutted and roofless, marked with long black streaks above the windows where the fire has risen. There was a barn nearby, reduced to charred stumps of timbers and a big stone water tank. The orchard was ragged stumps.
"Caught it in the side as it went by." He pointed; one of the powered bogies that held the massive war machine up was shattered and twisted. "Then we hit it with teams carrying satchel charges, while the rest of us gave covering fire."
The ex-militia major sobered. "Lost a lot of good men doing it, sir. But I can tell you, we were relieved. Those things are so cursed hard to stop!"
"I know," Jeffrey said dryly, looking to his right down the eastward reach of the valley. The Santander positions had been a mile up that way, before the Chosen brought up the tank.
"This is dead ground, sir. You can straighten up."
Jeffrey did so, watching the engineers swarming over the tank, checking for improvements and modifications. "The good news about these monsters, major, comes in threes," he said, tapping its flank. "There aren't very many of them; they break down a lot; and now that the lines aren't moving much, the enemy don't get to recover and repair them very often."
"Well, that's some consolation, sir," Carruthers said dubiously. "They're still a cursed serious problem out here."
"We all have problems, Major Carruthers."
* * *
The factory room was long, lit by grimy glass-paned skylights, open now to let in a little air; the air of Oathtaking, heavy and thick at the best of times, and laden with a sour acid smog of coal smoke and chemicals when the wind was from the sea. Right now it also smelled of the man who was hanging on an iron hook driven into the base of his skull. The hook was set over the entrance door, where the workers passed each morning and evening as they were taken from the camp on the city's outskirts. The body had been there for two days now, ever since the shop fell below quota for an entire week. Sometimes it moved a little as the maggots did their work.
There was a blackboard beside the door, with chalked numbers on it. This week's production was nearly eight percent over quota. A cheerful banner announced the prizes that the production group would receive if they could sustain that for another seven days: a pint of wine for each man, beef and fresh fruit, tobacco, and two hours each with an inmate from the women's camp.
Tomaso Guiardini smiled as he looked at the banner. He smiled again as he looked down at the bearing race in the clamp before him. It was a metal circle; the inner surface moved smoothly under his hand, where it rested on the ball-bearings in the race formed by the outer U-shaped portion.
Very smoothly. Nothing to tell that there were metal filings mixed with the lubricating matrix inside. Nothing except the way the bearing race would seize up and burn when subjected to heavy use, in about one-tenth the normal time.
He looked up again at the banner. Perhaps the woman would be pretty, maybe with long, soft hair. Mostly the Chosen shaved the inmates' scalps, though.
He glanced around. The foreman was looking over somebody else's shoulder. Tomaso took two steps and swept a handful of metal shavings from the lathe across the aisle, dropping them into the pocket of his grease-stained overall, and was back at his bench before the Protege foreman-he was a one-eyed veteran with a limp, and a steel-cored rubber truncheon thonged to his wrist-could turn around.
* * *
"Dad!" Maurice Hosten checked his step. "I mean, sir. Ah, just a second."
He pulled off the leather flyer's helmet and turned to give some directions to the ground crew; the blue-black curls of his hair caught the sun, and the strong line of his jaw showed a faint shadow of dense beard of exactly the same color. His plane had more bullet holes in the upper wing, and part of the tail looked as if it had been chewed. There were a row of markings on the fuselage below the cockpit, too-Chosen sunbursts with a red line drawn through of them. Eight in all, and the outline of an airship.
John Hosten's blond hair was broadly streaked with gray now, and as he watched the young man's springy step he was abruptly conscious that he was no longer anything but unambiguously middle-aged. He still buckled his belt at the same notch, he could do most of what he had been able to-hell, his biological father was running the Land's General Staff with ruthless competence and he was thirty years older-but doing it took a higher price every passing year.