The Chosen

avoid pain. . and there is so much pain you can feel.' His hand clamped on her jaw. 'No, no, you cannot bite off your tongue. Not yet.'

Heinrich stood as the specialists staunched the bleeding of the wounded man, set up a saline drip, and began to ease him onto the stretcher. An unmarked police car drew up as well; the woman was drugged with a swift injection and thrown into the wire cage at the back.

'My oath, but going back into combat down in the Union looks better and better,' he said.

Gerta looked morosely at the bloodstain on the deserted sidewalk. 'Better and better, but where's it leading?'

'We'll win, of course.'

'We won here.'

Heinrich hesitated. 'You know, you've got a point.' He shrugged. 'It's the Santies behind all this. If we finish them off, we can pacify successfully.'

* * *

'Come on baby, you can do it,' Jeffrey crooned.

The dogfight had swirled away into patchy cloud to the west; all he could see were two plumes of smoke rising from the ground where planes had augered in. The engine coughed again, a skip in its regular beat that produced a sympathetic lurch in his own heart. He banked gently over the zigzag trenches that scarred the land below, breaking into knots of strongpoints and bunkers in the ruined buildings of the university complex just south of Unionvil. Even now he shivered slightly at the sight of them; the winter fighting there had been ghastly, stopping the last Nationalist offensive in the very outskirts of the capital city.

'Come on,' he said again.

Bits of fabric were streaming back from the cowling and upper wing of his Liberty Hawk II, ripping off as the slipstream worried at the bullet holes. That wasn't his main concern; the Mark I had sometimes had the whole wing cover peel off in circumstances like this, giving the remaining fuselage the aerodynamics of a brick in free-fall, but the new model was sturdier. He really didn't like the sound the engine made, though. Slowly, carefully, he brought the little fighter around and began to descend towards the landing field. Only a mile or two now. .

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