The Chosen

Gerard looked up with a smile; the Loyalist Army was still informal in some respects. Jeffrey shook his head.

'The rebels inflicted heavy casualties on the anarchist militia, that's true,' he said judiciously. I'm becoming a politician like John, he thought. 'But that's scarcely my fault. They wanted to fight, and I put them where they could fight. Besides, you were with them, Henri.'

The Unionaise soldier grinned. 'I wanted to win, sir. Which is why I've stuck with you since. And they were a wonderful example, in their way-everyone could see what came of their notions.'

Then his head came up. 'Watch it!' The machine gun swiveled around on its pivot.

* * *

'Listen up, people.'

The selection of Chosen officers who would be supporting the offensive braced to attention inside the green dimness of the tent.

'Colonel Hosten is Military Intelligence for this operation and also our liaison with the Union Nationalist forces. She will conclude the briefing.'

Gerta stepped up in front of the map easel. 'At ease. The situation is as follows. .'

She talked for ten crisp minutes, answering the occasional question. What a relief, she thought. Liaison work was a strain; foreigners chattered, they didn't know how to concentrate on the business at hand, they wandered off into irrelevancies. At last she finished.

'Now, let's go out there and kill.'

'Inspiring and informative,' Heinrich said. The double stars of a general rested easy on his shoulders, standing out from the hybrid uniform of the Eagle Legion, the Land 'volunteer' force fighting with the Nationalists. 'I suppose you'll go collate some reports?'

Gerta smiled. 'Well, actually, Copernik wants detailed reports on the performance of the Von Nelsing two- seater,' she said.

Heinrich shrugged his shoulders ruefully. 'There are times when I think this whole war is nothing but a laboratory experiment,' he said.

'It is,' Gerta said. 'Good on-the-job training, too.'

'True.' He frowned. 'The problem is, the enemy learns as well-and they needed it more than we. So they improve more for an equal amount of experience. If you play chess with good chess players, you get good.'

My darling Heinrich, you are extremely perceptive at times, Gerta thought as she ducked out of the tent and headed for the landing field.

The squadron looked squeaky-clean and factory-new, even the untattered wind sock and the raw pine boards of the messhall. Everything but the pilots. They'd all been transferred from Albatros army-cooperation planes to the new Von Nelsings; Gerta walked around hers admiringly. The fuselage was light plywood, a monocoque hull factory-made in two pieces and then fastened together along a central seam, much stronger than the old fabric models and extremely simple to make, which was crucial these days. There were two engines in cowlings on the lower wings, giving the craft a higher power-to-weight ratio than a fighter; it was heavier than the pursuit planes, but not twice as heavy. Six air-cooled machine guns bristled from the pointed nose, and there was a twin-barreled mount facing backwards from the observer's seat. Protege groundcrew were fastening four fifty-pound bombs under each wing, and then a one-armed Chosen supervisor came along to inspect. Gerta gave the plane a careful going- over herself. They'd set up a multiple checking system, but with all the new camps full of Imperial deportees making components, it paid to be careful.

'All in readiness, sir,' the squadron commander said expressionlessly, saluting.

And it would be even more ready if a hot-dogger from HQ wasn't pushing her way in, Gerta finished for him silently. She didn't mind; she was a hot-dogger from HQ, and she was pushing her way in shamelessly.

She was also a better pilot than any of the youngsters here; she'd been flying since the Land first put heavier-than-air craft into the sky.

'Let's show what these birds can do, then,' she said.

The Protege gunner made a stirrup of her hands and Gerta used it to vault up and climb into the cockpit. Then she stuck a hand down and helped the other woman into the plane. More than half the aircrew were female; they had lower averages on body weight and higher on reflexes, both of which counted on the screening test. This one seemed quite competent, if not a mental giant, and what you needed in an observer-gunner was good eyes and quick hands.

The first planes were already taxiing when she completed her checklist and signaled to the groundcrew to pull the chocks from before the spat-streamlined wheels. This production model seemed very much like the prototypes she'd flown back home, but the airfield was at three thousand feet rather than sea level. She pulled her goggles down over her eyes and followed the crewman with the flags; four more seized the tail of her plane and lifted it around to the proper angle. They held the plane against the growing tug of the motors until she chopped her hand skyward and it leapt forward.

Good acceleration, she noted. There'd been a bit of a tussle between the three aircraft companies over the scarce high-performance engines, with some claiming they were wasted on a cooperation airplane. Smoother on the ground, too. The new oleo shock-absorbers on the wheel struts were reducing the pounding a plane normally took on takeoff. The fabric coverings of the wing rippled slightly, as they always did. Have to see how those experiments with rigid surface wings are going. No reason in theory why the wings shouldn't be load-bearing plywood on internal frames like the body. That would really speed up production.

Up. She pushed the throttles forward and waggled her wings to test the balance of the engines, then banked upward and started glancing down at the ground, smiling to herself with the familiar exhilaration of flight. And there was nothing more fun than strafing missions. There was the Eboreaux River, the town of Selandrons. . and the irregular line of the trenches. Not a solid maze of redoubts and communications lines like some sections of the front, just field entrenchments. Enemy artillery sparkled along it and through it-their offensive was getting off to a good start, penetrating the thin defenses and thrusting for the river.

Ground crawled beneath her, like a map itself from six thousand feet. The cold, thin air slapped at her face, making her cheeks tingle. An occasional puff of black followed the squadron as the converted naval quick-firers the Santies had supplied to the Reds opened up, but there were a lot of targets up here today; aircraft were rising from all along the front, swarming up from the front-line airfields by the hundreds. There were planes on either side as far as she could see, black dots against the blue and white of the sky, the drone of engines filling her ears.

Magnificent, she thought. Even better, the fighter squadron assigned to give them top cover was in place.

Ahead, the squadron commander waggled his wings three times and then banked into a dive. At precise ten-second intervals the others followed. Gerta grinned sharklike as she flipped up the cover on the joystick and put her thumb lightly on the firing button.

* * *

'Those aren't ours,' Gerard said sharply, standing.

No, they aren't, Jeffrey thought with sharp alarm. The Loyalists and Brigades didn't use that double-arrowhead formation.

'Get me some reports,' Gerard said sharply to the communications technician.

She-the Union forces had a Women's Auxiliary now, too-fiddled with the big crackle-finished Santander wireless set that occupied one side of the great car. There weren't many other sets for the tech to talk to; wireless small enough to get into a land vehicle was a recent development. . courtesy of Center. Jeffrey kept his eyes on the growing swarm of dots along the western horizon, but he could hear the pattern of dots and dashes through the tech's headphones. Center translated them for him effortlessly, but he waited until the tech finished scribbling on a pad and handed the result to Gerard.

'Sir. Enemy planes in strength attacking the following positions.'

Gerard took it and flipped through the maps on the table. 'Artillery parks and shell storage areas and fuel dumps behind our lines.'

Another series of dots and dashes. 'And our airfields. Fortunate that most of our planes are already up.'