There were five of them, and they were all fifties.
'I am sorry, but that's impossible, sir.'
Rudi paused to buy himself time to find the words he needed. Standing up in front of the CO to brief him on a tool they'd never used before was hard work: How to explain? 'The Saber 16 is an
Earl Riordan raised an eyebrow. 'I thought you could carry a passenger, or cargo?'
The question, paradoxically, made it easier to keep going. 'It's true I can lift a passenger or maybe a hundred pounds of cargo, sir, but dropping stuff-anything I drop means taking a hand off the controls and changing the center of gravity, and that's just asking for trouble. I can dump a well-packaged box of paper off the passenger seat and hit a courtyard, sure, but a twohundred-pound bomb? That's a different matter. Even if I could figure out a way to rig it so I could drop it without tearing the wing off or stalling, I'd have to be high enough up that the shrapnel doesn't reach me, and fast enough to clear the blast radius, and the Saber's got a top speed of only fifty-five, so I'd have to drop it from high up, so I'd need some kind of bombsight-and they don't sell them down at Wal-Mart. Sorry. I can drop grenades or flares, and given a tool shop and some help we might even be able to bolt an M249 to the trike, but that's all. In terms of military aviation we're somewhere round about 1913, unless you've got something squirreled away somewhere that I don't know about.'
Earl Riordan stared at him for a few seconds, then shook his head. 'No such luck,' he grunted. 'Damn their eyes.' The CO wasn't swearing about him, for which Rudi was grateful.
'So what
Rudi shrugged. The cornet had maybe had a drop too much rum in his coffee. Not terribly clever when you'd been summoned into the CO's office for a quiet chat, but then again nobody ever accused Vince of being long on brains: That wasn't much of an asset in a cavalryman.
'Fair-weather observation. Dropping small packets, accurate to within a hundred feet or so. If you can find me somewhere to land that isn't under the usurper's guns I can carry a single passenger in and out, or up to a hundred and fifty pounds of luggage.'
'A single passenger.' Hmm. The earl looked distracted. 'Hold that thought. Out of curiosity, is it possible to parachute from the passenger seat?'
'Maybe, but it'd be very dangerous.' Rudi didn't need to search for words anymore: they were coming naturally. 'It's a pusher prop so you couldn't use a static line. It'd have to be free fall, which would mean close to maximum altitude-I can only reach five thousand feet with a passenger-and if their primary chute didn't open they wouldn't have time to try a secondary, and I'd have fun keeping control, too.'
'So scratch that idea.' Riordan raised his mug and took a mouthful of coffee. 'Okay. Suppose you need to land somewhere, pick up a passenger, and fly out. What do you need?'
'A runway.' Rudi glanced into his own coffee mug: It was still empty, dammit. 'With a passenger, depends on the weather, but a minimum thousand feet to be safe. I can probably get airborne in significantly less than that, but if anything goes wrong you need the extra room to slow down again. Ideally it needs to be clear-cut for the same again, past the end of the runway-most engine problems show up once you're just airborne.'
'A thousand feet?' Vincenze looked surprised. 'But you took off from the courtyard!'
'That was me, without a passenger,' Rudi pointed out. 'At two-thirds maximum takeoff weight you get in the air faster and you can stop a lot faster, too, if something goes wrong. If you want to take off with less than five hundred feet of runway, you really need an ultralight helicopter or preferably a gyrocopterultralight choppers are dangerous. Oh, and a pilot who knows how to fly them. It was on my to-do list.'
'Noted.' Riordan jotted a note on his pad. 'Assume bad people with guns are shooting at you when you take off. How vulnerable would you be?'
Rudi shivered. He'd been shot at before, in his previous flight. 'Very. The Saber-16 can only climb at about six hundred feet per minute. Takeoff is about thirty miles per hour. Handguns or musketry I could risk, but if they've got rifles? Or M60s? I'm toast. I'd be in range for minutes.'
'So we won't ask you to do that, then,' Riordan muttered to himself. Louder: 'Right. So, if we asked you to deliver a cargo weighing about a hundred and fifty pounds into the Hjalmar Palace you could land in the courtyard- as long as we've got the usurper's men out of that gatehouse-you could probably fly out of it on your own, but if you had a problem on takeoff you'd hit the wall, and again, the usurper's men would have you in rifle range for a minute or two. You can't fly at night, and you can't fly low enough to drop anything useful on the enemy without them riddling you with bullets. Am I missing anything? Is that a fair summary of your limitations?'
Rudi blinked. 'Yes, sir, I think so. Uh, that and, we need more gas. Sorry.' He shrugged. 'I think we've got about five gallons left. Avgas, not regular.'
'Damn.' Riordan glanced round. 'Steward? More coffee.' He turned back to the table. 'Have Joachim and Stefan reported in yet?'
Vincenze looked thoughtful. 'Not unless they've come in since we started in here.'
'Go and chase them up, then.'
Dismissed, Vincenze rose. He nodded at Rudi. 'Good luck, cuz.'
Startled, Rudi watched him leave.
'The cornet has no need to know what I'm about to tell you,' Riordan said quietly. He paused while the steward placed fresh mugs of coffee in front of them. 'That will be all.'
'Sir.' The steward bowed then left the room.
Rudi waited until the door was shut. 'Sir, you obviously have something in mind?'
'Yes.' Riordan fell silent. Then: 'I sent Joachim and Stefan out to buy some office equipment. Most of a print shop, in fact-a laptop, graphics software, a printer, a scanner, and equipment for making badges.'
'Badges?'
'You know of our long lost cousins, I take it?'
Rudi nodded cautiously. 'I've never met any of them.'
'Hmm.' Riordan raised one eyebrow. 'You will, soon enough.' He picked up his coffee mug and blew on it. 'When Joachim gets back he's to run off two hundred laminated color cards with our lost cousin's knotwork seal on it.'
'Their-'Rudi stopped. 'It's not the same as ours, is it?' he asked.
'No.' Riordan put his mug down. 'According to the duke, they became lost two centuries ago when-you know the story about how the seventh brother went west, to make a home for himself in the outer kingdom, what the Americans call California? He fell on hard times, and lost his sigil. Later, he tried to recreate it from memory, and got it subtly wrong. That's why neither he nor his descendants could visit the United States; they found themselves in another world, only slightly different at that time. Anyway, we have a copy of the lost family's sigil, and we are going to make enough duplicates of it to equip every world-walker in the Hjalmar Palace. As its doppelganger site in Massachusetts is crawling with federal agents, and we have not accurately surveyed the terrain in the other world, you're going to fly the badges in.'
Rudi's thoughts spun. 'So I won't need to fly out?…'
'No. The duke's men will help you dismantle your aircraft and carry it with them when they leave. Lady Olga is developing the evacuation plan and will organize your logistics. The larger goal is to present the usurper with a tempting target, and then give him a nasty surprise when he tries to take it. Do you understand?'
'Yes, I think so. But I thought he knew about our talent? And is clearly taking pains to avoid situations where we can use it?'
'Indeed.' The earl grinned humorlessly. 'I'm counting on it. Egon knows about world-walking, and plans his moves accordingly. Which makes his behavior predictable… and I'm going to use that fact to kill him.'
Mike Fleming was trapped in the basement of his apartment, trying to figure out how to get out, when the phone rang.
It was the colonel's fault. 'Son, I'm relying on you to stay home and convalesce,' he'd said sternly, after handing over a brown paper bag containing an anonymous mobile phone and a semiautomatic pistol. 'I want you back in the
