"Well, on to the work of the day," she murmured. Then: "Got her ticking over?"
One of the technicians looked up, grinning as the last of an ammunition belt ran across the leather pad on her shoulders and into the drums, the aluminum casings dull against the color-coded shells: red for tracer-incendiary, brown for explosive, blue for armor-piercing.
"She-un loaded fo' lion, Mistis," the serf said. Johanna's mind placed the dialect: Police Zone, but not the Old Territories—Katanga or Angola, perhaps… serf specialists were given a thorough but narrowly technical education, which did not include master-class speech patterns. "Giv't to tha Fritz, raaht up they ass," she continued.
"I intend to, Lukie-Beth," the Draka said, and considered lighting a cigarette. No, a bad example to break regulations around so much high-octane. Instead she threw the package to the crew chief, who tucked one behind his ear and handed the others around. He nodded a salute as she rose, touching the steel hook on the stump of his left wrist to his brow.
"… and engage targets of opportunity on the ground," the briefing officer concluded.
Merarch Anders rose and walked to the edge of the dais. "All right, yo' glory hounds," he said. The harsh voice dampened the slight murmur that had swelled across the ranks of folding chairs.
Here begineth the lecture from the Holy Book of Air
Operations, section V, paragraph
ii
, Johanna thought with resignation.
"A few reminders of the facts of life," the Merarch continued.
"The Air Corps does not exist so yo' can dogfight and rack up kills. It exists to help the Forces win wars. Its most important function is reconnaissance; the second most important is ground support. We have a fighter arm to protect the scouting and ground-support units, and to shoot down any enemy aircraft who try to do the important stuff for the other side.
"Another fact of life: Eagles are
pursuit
craft. They are designed to shoot down
bombers
. The
Falcons
are supposed to shoot down fighters; that's why we have lochoi of the buggers flying cap-cover for us. Yo' will
not
engage enemy fighters except defensively, and then only if n yo' can't run, which should be easy, seeing as the Domination has gone to the trouble of giving yo' the fastest aircraft on earth. I see anyone glory-hunting—" his seamed face jutted forward, one half a pattern of scars, the other smooth "—I goin' to see that he
suffer
. Understood?"
"Sir, yes sir!" the lochos replied.
The cockpit smelled of rubber, oil, and old sweat. Johanna wiggled her shoulders in the straps and folded the seat back into the semi-reclining position that helped you take g-force without blacking out.
Her hand moved the stick, feet pumped the pedals; she glanced back over one shoulder to check the flaps and rudder, and the flipped-up visor of her bone-dome went
clack
against the metal rim of the seat. The synthetic of the face mask rested cool and clammy against her cheeks, and sounds came muted through the headphones of her helmet, even the start-up roar of engines. That faded again as she gave a thumbs-up to the ground crew and the bubble canopy slid down over her head.
Training sent hands and eyes in a final check over the instrument panel: gyrosight, fuel, oil pressure, RPM, pitch-control. Static buzz and click in her ears, sound-offs as each plane called go-condition, her own voice like a stranger's.
"Green board, von Shrakenberg," she said.
The override call of the control center came through: "
Lochos
cleared, two and four, Merarch. Next ten minutes
."
Her fingers touched the throttles, and the
Lover's Bite
rolled out of the revetment and onto the holding strip. She moistened her lips in the cool, rubber-tasting air flowing from the mask, and touched the shoulder pocket of her flight suit that held Tom's picture. They had exchanged special photographs, cased in plastic with a lock of hair: two "Knights of the Air" going into battle with their lover's favor on their sleeve.
Policy let spouses or fiances serve in the same unit if they chose, but suddenly she was glad they had decided against it; he could spend the next few years in safe boredom, deterring the Japanese in China. There would be no war with Nippon, not now; the Domination would let the Americans pour out blood and treasure to break the island empire's strength, then leave the Yankees holding a few South Sea isles while the Draka snapped up Japan's rich Asian provinces.
She saw him, sharply: broad freckled face and hazel eyes cold with that ironic humor; wide thin-lipped mouth; stocky muscled body fitting so comfortably against hers… They had settled the future. A land grant in Italy, Tuscany by preference, Pa could probably swing that, and there were plenty of nice villas that could be renovated easily enough. Children, of course: four, that was enough to do one's duty by the Race. Breeding horses, dabbling in estate-bottled premium wine, snapping up a surplus light transport so they could fly over to Alexandria for big-city amusements now and then.
She smiled more widely and touched the pocket on the other shoulder. Rahksan had presented her with a favor, too: a silk handkerchief, with a lock of
her
hair and an inked pawprint from Omar, Johanna's cat—"
jist't' get us awl in they ah, Jo'
darlin
." Johanna sighed: it was good to have that gentle and undemanding affection to hand, and Rahksan would make a good nursemaid, she was marvelous with children.
Oh, what a happy little Draka I shall be
, she thought mordantly.
I'll survive
—so
stop woolgathering, woman
!
The planes of the 211th Lochos taxied in file down the approach lane; an orange-uniformed flight launcher waited with signal paddles in hand to key them on to the take-off runway.
Engine roar rose to a grating howl as the dozen Eagles boosted their craft from idle. Her turn came; she glanced across at her wing-man, young de Grange, and gave a clenched-fist salute. He answered with exaggerated decisiveness.
Natural
, she thought. A newbi—this was only his second combat mission. In air-to-air combat the minority of veterans did most of the killing, the novices most of the dying. Unfair, like life. The solution was to
win;
and as the old saying went, if you couldn't win,
cheat
.
She pressed the throttles forward, props biting the air at coarse pitch, then released the brakes. Acceleration pushed her back into the padding of the seat; the tailwheel came up; the controls went light as the
Lover's Bite
left the earth, with a tiny slip-sway as her hand firmed on the stick.
Formation came automatically, a tight box of pairs here in the crowded airspace over Kars. The airfields were laid out in circles, neat as a map beneath her as she gained altitude: rings of silver thousand-foot transport dirigibles; rows of six-engined Helot cargo planes, like boxes with great slab wings; rank after rank of Rhino ground-strike craft, shuttling back and forth at low altitude to the front. And the vehicle parks of the armored legions, huge blunt wedges stacked beside the roads, flat beetle shapes of the tanks and infantry carriers, flashes as their heavy self-propelled guns fired, tasked to support the Janissary units in contact with the the enemy.
The Eagles climbed, clawing at the thin air with whining turbochargers, through a layer of cirrus clouds into a high brightness under a sky that seemed ready to bleed lapis lazuli as the props sliced it. Four thousand meters altitude, and the front was invisible as they passed, only a ragged pattern of explosions pale in the bright sunlight, lines and clumps that must indicate Fritz strongpoints, fading to scatterings on road junctions behind the lines. Columns of smoke rose, black pillars fraying at their tops, brutal and emphatic in the cool pastels of the upper air. Ahead were the mountains, through the clouds and ringed by them, snow-peaked islands lapped by fleece-surf and patches of darkness where earth showed through.
Johanna waggled her craft and her wingman closed up with a guilty spurt of acceleration. The lochos had spread out into the loose pairs-of-pairs formation that was most effective for combat, and she began a constant all-around scan. That was the reason pilots wore silk scarves, to prevent chafing; not derring-do, but survival. The electrodetectors in the dirigible warning and control craft hovering south of the mountains were supposed to pick up enemy aircraft long before visual contact, but electrodetection was in its infancy. You could still get jumped…
Minutes stretched. She concentrated on her breathing, keying into the state of untense alertness that kept you alive. If you let your glands pump adrenaline into the bloodstream you could end up wringing wet and exhausted in minutes, even standing still. They reached cruising altitude at six thousand meters and crossed the mountain peaks; there was less cloud cover north of the Caucasus, a clear view of forested slopes rippling down to an endless steppe, bright-green squares of young grass and coal-black ploughland. And…
"Target," the Merarch's voice spoke in her ears. "Three o'clock; Stukas. Follow me."
Christ, he's got good eyes
, she thought, tilting her craft to scan down and to the right. Black dots crawling north; they must be hedgehopping to avoid detection, moving up to support the Fritz units trying to clear the passes, or even hoping to cross the mountains. Smoothly, the lochos peeled off and began a power dive toward their prey.
Her hands moved on the controls, and the
Lover's Bite
banked, turned, fell. There was a moment of weightlessness while the world swung about her, then a giant soft hand lifting and pushing. Her own gloved palm rammed the throttles forward, and the engines answered with a banshee shriek. They were diving head-on toward the Germans, a three-thousand-meter swoop that closed at the combined speed of the two formations.
Acceleration pushed her back into the padding of the seat; she could feel it stretching the tissues of her face, spreading lips into a death's-head grin beneath her face mask. The airplane began to buck and rattle, the stick quivering and then shuddering in her hand.
Mach limit
, she thought, easing back slightly on the throttles until the hammer blows of air driven to solidity died down to a bearable thrumming. Air compression just under the speed of sound could break an aircraft apart or freeze the controls. They were closing fast now, altimeter unreeling in a blurr, the Germans turning from specks to shapes. Stuka dive-bombers, single-engined craft with the unmistakable "cranked" gull-wing and spatted undercarriage. Johanna's thumb flicked back the cover over the firing button on the head of her joystick, and the gyrosight automatically projected a circle on the windscreen ahead of her.
Dream target
, went through her gleefully. Only a single rear-mounted machine gun for defensive armament, slow, unhandy.
Less than a thousand meters, and the Germans spotted the Draka fighters stooping out of the sun and scattered, their formation breaking apart like beads of mercury on glass, diving to hug the ground even more closely. Johanna braced and pulled back on the stick, grey creeping in at the edges of sight as the g-force mounted. The black wings grew, filling the center ring of the gunsight, then overlapping the outer circle. Time slowed; her thumb came down on the firing button as the Stuka's fuselage touched the outer rim. The aircraft were closing at well over seven hundred kph; the burst was on target for barely four-tenths of a second. Beneath her the revolver-breeches of the cannon whirled, and two hundred shells hosed out as her thumb tapped the button; more than half of them struck.
The Stuka exploded in a globe of orange light, folded in half and tumbled to leave a burning smear on the ground a hundred meters below, all at once. The shock wave slapped the Draka Eagle upwards, even as Johanna pulled back on the stick, rolling up in an Immelman and trading speed for height.
"
Ngi dHa
!" she shouted, the old triumph cry her ancestors had borrowed from the tribes they overran:
I
have eaten
. The sudden jolt of exultation ran belly-deep, raw and primitive.
"Warning." The voice cut through the static and chatter on the lochos circuit, cool and distant; from the control dirigible south of the mountains. "Hostiles approaching from northeast your position, altitude ten thousand meters. Speed indicates fighters; estimated intercept, two minutes." Johanna could feel the excitement wash out of her in a wave, replaced by a prickling coldness that tasted of copper and salt. She worked pedals and stick, snapped the
Lovers Bite
back level, scanned about. Most of the Stukas were splotches of black smoke and orange flame on the rumpled landscape below, the Eagles were scattered to the limits of visibility and beyond, and her wingman was nowhere to be seen.
"
Shitl"
That was Merarch Anders. She could imagine what was running through his mind; height and speed were interchangeable, and the Fritz had too much. Too much for the Draka to run for it.
"Anders, control.
Where are our Falcons
?"
"Sorry, Merarch: diverted on priority."
The lochos commander wasted no time on complaints. "Form on me, prepare for climb," he said. 'One pass through them, then we turn and head south."
Johanna closed in, climbing, and keyed her microphone. "De Grange, close up.
De Grange
!"
"I've almost got him—"
"Leave the fucking rabbit and close up!"
"Yessir… ah… where are you?"
She could imagine his sudden frightened glance around a sky empty of motion. "Look for the
smoke plumes
, de Grange." She switched to lochos frequency. "Merarch, my wingman's got himself out of visual."
"He'll have to find his own way home. Radio silence."
The lochos climbed steeply, clawing for altitude as they drove northeast to meet the approaching Germans. A head-on passing engagement was quick, and would leave the Draka above their opponents, able to turn and head for home.
If we live
, Johanna thought, moistening her lips as she flipped down the sun visor of her helmet and squinted into the brightness ahead: pale blue sky and white haze and the sun like a blinding tic at the corner of her eye. The insides of her gloves were wet, and she worked the fingers limber around the molded grip of the joystick.