The screen let him see how the bows of each peeled back as the shells hit and exploded—at less than a hundred yards, he was putting them right through the windscreens into the control cabins of each. Some of them caught fire, in a low-intensity way, but none of them blew up.
The big fuel store did blow up when he put a couple of rounds into it; the huge pyre reached into the night, like the funeral of Giovanni Colletta’s blood-thirsty ambitions. It also cast a good deal of light; someone opened up with a light machine gun, and the bullets beat on the hull like iron hail on a bucket. He backtracked along the chain of tracer rounds and discouraged them with a couple of rounds.
“Well, now, do we go help Good Star, or do we just drive out into the desert and watch the lovely fireworks until it’s time to meet up with Jim and Henry?” he said.
“Neither,” Adrienne said tautly. “Nearly half of them got off the ground. There’s still a chance they could pull it off—or at least kill a lot of New Virginians.”
“Damned right,” Sandra called from the bottom of the turret, where she sat with her arms around her knees. “But what the hell can we do about it, Adri? This thing can’t fly.”
“No, but those Mosquitoes can,” she said. “Tully, get us over there.”
Tom opened his mouth to object, then slowly closed it. He knew exactly how that conversation would go: she’d say she was going, and he could come or stay as he pleased. And he’d get into the cockpit right beside her. Why bother having an argument?
The fact is, he thought, while his eyes stayed on the screen, you’re doing this from love of country, and I’m doing it for love of you, my Valkyie. I don’t love this country—not much, and not yet. I may come to, warts and all, if I live here and my children are born here. But you do, and so I have to follow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Owens Valley/Rolfeston
August 2009
The Commonwealth of New Virginia
Tom’s thumb came down on the firing button. The Catamount’s turret vibrated as the rasping growl of the machine gun rattled inside it. The third Mosquito shuddered and splintered as the rounds plowed home in the cockpit; he lifted the button after only a few seconds.
“Don’t want it on fire, not when we’re taking the other two,” he said. “All right, everyone, go!”
The other three left the turret; Tom traversed it and punched up the menu. Right, he thought, and scanned down to: LOCK ON TARGET.
The servos whined slightly as he settled the firing pip on the distant shape of the ranch house. Then he touched:
FIRE.
ALL ROUNDS.
TIME DELAY—8 MINUTES.
As the little sign at the bottom of the screen turned to 7:59, he was already boosting himself out of the gunner’s hatch and leaping down, just in time to see Sandra running up the ramp and swinging into the copilot’s seat of the second Mosquito. Tully was already inside, with Adrienne leaning over him and pointing things out.
She slapped him on the shoulder, vaulted down and ran to meet Tom as he sprinted for the last fighter-bomber.
“They’re both hot!” she called. “Pilots and ground crew must have gone off to join the fight.”
“Good,” he said, as he swung into the cramped confines.
With Good Star’s men ramping through the night like a pack of wolves—wolves with the minds of men—he didn’t envy them one little bit.
“I wish them joy of it, you betcha!”
The Mosquito’s copilot seat adjusted via levers underneath, as awkward as those on most cars; Tom had a lot of experience with that, since seats were never set for someone his height. He buckled himself in as Adrienne went through a quick checklist.
Roy’s voice came through the headphones. “OK, Adri, I think I can get this bitch off the ground. Landing may be a little rough; it ain’t a Beechcraft.”
“Good luck, Roy,” he said. “You too, Sandy.”
“Good luck to us all,” Adrienne said. “We’ve had more than our share tonight, but a little more wouldn’t hurt!” A pause. “Just in case, it’s been a privilege to operate with all of you.”
He watched carefully as she opened the throttles; he might, Jesus help him, have to fly this thing himself. It had the same mix of basic and cutting edge tech he’d noticed on the No Biscuit, although at least the basic stuff was World War Two, rather than Dawn of Aviation. There was a full set of virtual dials on the thin-film display, though; he could track it and use touches to bring up other data. He did; full fuel load, and full ammo. The armament was eight .50 caliber Brownings with six hundred and fifty rounds each—he’d noticed before that the Commonwealth’s military design philosophy tended to the Lots and Lots of Great Big Guns school of thought.
The big piston engines roared, each driving the four paddle-shaped blades into a blurred circle; this design had been a hot ship in its time, faster than most single-seat fighters—but that day had been when his grandfather was popping pimples, reading comics about Superman whupping Nazi butt and worrying about growing hair on his palms. The top speed was about the same as that of a fully loaded C-130J transport.
There are two possibilities: we will catch them or we won’t, Tom thought, as they taxied out past the Catamount; he felt a moment’s illogical sadness. It was only an inanimate object after all, but it had served them all well.
As the thought ran through his mind, the Bofors gun in the boxy turret opened up; without his night-sight goggles on, the huge flame of the muzzle flash was surprising, and the red dots of the shells seemed to float away as he and Adrienne gained distance.
Good luck, he thought toward the vehicle, with a wave as they passed and gathered speed.
The tailweel lifted, and suddenly he could look straight ahead, into the darkness. A minute more, and the Mosquito lifted; Adrienne shot the throttles forward to near the redline and banked northward, to give them time to reach altitude—the twelve-thousand-foot wall of the Sierras was only about six miles to the west.
“Gotcha,” Tully’s voice said. “Radar positive. I’ll follow to your right and rear.”
Tom busied himself with the map display; it didn’t have GPS, but the inertial system was good. “We should hit Rolfeston just around dawn,” he said, and looked down.
There were a lot of fires around the little settlement, but not many of the distinctive fire-hose flashes of automatic weapons. That was probably good. He could relax enough to be aware of his surroundings; the rubber taste of the face mask, the stink of blood and dried sweat from his fatigues and Adrienne’s, even the crystal light of the stars outside the canopy on the ice-clad peaks to their left.
It was getting cold, too; he turned up the heater a bit with a tap of one strong index finger. The adrenaline rush of combat died down, leaving the heavy feeling and slight nausea it always did. Work was the best cure for that….
“Where are the sights for air-to-air work?” he said after a minute of flipping through the display menus. The ones for ground-strafing work were excellent.
Adrienne sighed; it sounded a little odd through the face mask. Then she reached over and flipped up a wire ring with a cross in the center.
Tom felt his mouth drop open for an instant; luckily the oxygen mask concealed it. “Isn’t that a bit… basic?”
She shrugged, and sounded a bit embarrassed when she replied: “Well, Tom, we never thought these things would have to shoot down aircraft. The Commonwealth has the only aircraft in the world, and we weren’t planning on any civil wars.”
“Nobody does,” he said gently; there had been an aching bitterness to the her words.
“Giovanni Fucking Colletta did,” she growled. “Sorry.”
“You’ve got a right to be angry,” he said. “I’m in this fight because of you, and because I don’t want Giovanni Fucking Colletta in charge of the Gate. I know it’s more personal for you.”
She glanced over at him; he thought she was grinning but couldn’t be sure. “You know, Tom, one of the things
I like about you is that you don’t try to soft-soap me.”
The Mosquito banked left, turning west now that it was above the highest peaks. “We’re going to get there just around dawn,” she said. “And so are they. We may not have to worry about air-to-air, goddamn it.” A moment, and then: “Ah! I’m getting broadcast.”
The voices in his ears were a chaotic babble to Tom; he didn’t know the names, or the call signs, or the background; the transmissions were from everything: militia communications, domain radio stations, ham radio enthusiasts, CB transmitters.
Adrienne did know; she gave him a running summary. “Nostradamus is down,” she said. “Giovanni—”
“Fucking Colletta,” Tom finished for her.
“—broke into scheduled programming on all channels and started to announce that he’d been forced to take action by a Rolfe conspiracy and that all Settlers should remain calm and ignore ‘unlawful orders,’ quote unquote. Then…”
She whooped, and Tom winced. “Then Grandfather came on, and said, ‘Giovanni, your father would have known better than to try and pull the wool over a Rolfe’s eyes,’ and the whole system went dead the next instant. He must have been working on that ever since my report—he couldn’t get the Collettas out of the system, but he could keep them from using it.”
Tom grinned himself. The old bastard has style, at least.
Adrienne went on: “There’s fighting at the Gate complex—the Gate Security Force is split—no communications in the last hour, but a militia patrol from Rolfeston was fired on by the GSF checkpoints…. Rolfeston’s mayor has proclaimed martial law, and called out the town’s militia units to fight for ‘Our Founder and the legitimate Commission’… good… Colletta and Batyushkov militia units moving toward the Gate… bad…”
She gave another whoop.
“Adri, could you not do that?” Tom asked. “And what’s happening?”
“Karl von Traupitz tried to declare for the Collettas and send men over the Vaca hills against the Rolfe domain,” she said. “But his son Siegfried’s got control of the domain’s militia HQ and is telling everyone to disregard his father’s orders! They’re fighting each other—the Rolfe domain’s safe, and the militia’s massing at Napa…. The Pearlmutters are sending theirs against Colletta Hall from the north….”
“It’s certainly no smooth coup,” Tom said.
“Chaos and Old Night,” Adrienne said. “But if we lose the Gate, the wheels could still come off. It’s still too close.”
“They’re landing them on the road,” Tom said incredulously.
There was a two-lane highway along the coastal plain; the Hercules transports were dipping down toward it, the section nearest the Gate complex. The first had already landed and run itself off the roadway and into the long grass and trees; one wing hit an oak and the plane spun sideways, but slowly. The ramp dropped, and ant-tiny figures spilled out, deploying as they ran. Darkness covered the Gate area, although the lights of Rolfeston to the north were bright. And muzzle flashes lit up the ground around the big warehouse complex, and came from within it; fires burned, and the little stick-doll figures of dead men lay amid the planters and parking lots and burning trucks.
“He must have planned on combat-lossing the transports,” Tom said half-admiringly. “He’d own a whole world if he won.”
“He’s not going to,” Adrienne said. Her hand reached out and brought the ground-attack screen live. “I’ll bring us in. You fire.”
“Wilco,” he said. Then: “Jesus!”
Someone was firing at them from the ground, someone with a heavy automatic weapon; twenty millimeter at least. He felt the plane lurch as Adrienne stamped on the rudder pedals and whipped the yoke left; but he also felt the thudding shudder as the heavy rounds struck and exploded.
“Right engine’s out,” he said, stabbing the control that feathered it; the prop stopped, and flames blew back into the night.
Then his right leg felt cold and hot at the same time. He looked down and saw his hand come away from it glistening wet.
“I’m hit,” he said calmly.
Adrienne looked over at him, cursed sharply and whipped her eyes back to the control panel. “We’re losing hydraulics… fuel’s dropping fast; we must be spraying like a water-bomber…. I’m going to have to take her down, Tom.”
“Yah,” he said mildly; it didn’t seem all that important, and the world was turning gray at the edges. There was something he wanted to say, but he couldn’t.
Blackness.
Adrienne Rolfe shook her head, feeling a desperate urgency she couldn’t put a name to. Where was she? What was it she had to do?
Then the pain in her head reminded her. She was hanging down from the harness that held her to the pilot’s seat of a Mosquito; the plane had pancaked, slid and then run into something that didn’t quite turn it over. Bits and pieces of the landing came back to her, and why she could hear shooting. And flame-light licked through the canopy; there were slow fires in both the engines, and fuel dripping over her feet and calves.
“Got to get out,” she muttered.
Tom was hanging limp beside her. She hit the catches of the canopy, but nothing happened. She undid her restraints, slid, and nearly passed out as a wave of fire-shot gray swept across her vision. Tears slid down her cheeks as she sobbed in breath, brought both legs up and kicked, kicked. Every impact seemed to jar small bones loose from the inside of her skull.
At last the side of the canopy gave a protesting squeal and the flap came up; a Mosquito had two, one by each seat. Noise flooded in from the outside; gunfire mostly, the boom of a heavier weapon now and then, explosions, screams, and the crackle of fire. Not far away a Catamount armored car lay on its side, the long auto-cannon bent like a pretzel.
“This is going to be tricky,” she said, and winced at the croak that came out, and what it did to her throat. Her brain felt like hot sand had been stuffed up her nose until the whole front of her head was heavy with it; a touch showed that the nose was broken, swollen… and possibly something else there too.
“Oh, shit. Oh, shit,” she gasped, waiting as the wave of pain in her face receded… a little.
When she unbuckled Tom, he was going to drop straight down into the front of the cockpit. There was only one thing to do; the problem was she didn’t know if she could do it.
I have to do it. Therefore I can, right? Right. I’m a Rolfe, God damn it. We can do anything! Pocahontas forever!
She pulled the first-aid kit out from its container and threw it out into the night first. Then she turned and backed until she was underneath Tom, with her buttocks braced against the side of the cockpit to his right and her right hand bent back over her own neck to grab him by the front of his tunic. Her left scrabbled with the release of his restraints.
Click.
Two hundred and twenty pounds of man and another ten of equipment fell on her back and side; she bent and pulled, and the front of her face rapped sharply against the control column. She did scream then, long and shrill. She didn’t let go of her grip, pulling and shifting with her shoulders until the big man’s weight rested across her upper back.
“And… out… you… go!” she wheezed, straightening. “I’ve… lifted… more!”
Not when she was in this shape, though. Her thighs trembled, tensed, straightened an inch more. The small of Tom’s back touched the side of the open canopy door. She straightened an inch more, twisting and pushing at his stomach with her left hand. He toppled forward, his boots and legs going out and dragging the rest of him around, and fell to the ground below with a thud. She might just have broken his neck… but that was better than burning to death.
“Don’t you die on me, you great goddamned Scanahoovian lump, don’t you dare,” she wheezed, and crawled out herself.
Dragging Tom’s weight took so much concentration she almost went past the aid kit. That was far enough from the dying aircraft that he wouldn’t be hurt if it went up, particularly as a chunk
of concrete provided a little shelter. She pulled the knife out of her boot and slit his sopping trouser leg. Blood was flowing but not spurting… but flowing fast…
She held the edges of the wound together, sprayed and strapped and sealed, her hands wet and slippery. His pulse was rapid and thready, but it didn’t seem to be getting any worse, and the bleeding was under control… and she didn’t have a clue about any other injuries. A injection of painkiller relaxed him and helped to fight shock.
Another hypodermic, this time for her: she stripped off the cover and jabbed it into the meat of her thigh, pressing the plunger with her thumb. A wave of heat seemed to flow from it, driving back the grayness from the edges of her vision. Unfortunately, as things became clearer, so did the pain—the great throbbing mass of pain that was the front of her face, and a dozen others. One was the little finger of her left hand, sticking out almost at a right angle—Toni Bosco, you are avenged—she thought half-hysterically, and then she grabbed it and straightened it with a single swift wrench.
“Oh, shit,” she gasped, as she bound it to the one next to it with tape from the kit.
Dry-swallowing a couple of painkillers was all she could do for the rest of it; and not too many, or it would fight the stimulant that made it possible for her to move. Now she could look around her….
The nearest wall of the Gate complex was blown out, its sheet metal tattered. She could see that quite well….
Because two Hercules were burning on the coastal highway, not three hundred yards from where she lay. Others were wheeled off the roadway, their ramps down, but two had definitely been destroyed as they landed.
Tully, she thought, after a moment when her brain simply spun in place. Roy Tully, you little gargoyle, you are worthy of Sandy, and I hope you both live through this. And Henry Villers, and Jim Simmons, and Kolo too.
She looked down at Tom; the square rugged face was relaxed in unconsciousness, looking younger than his years for a change. You could see what he’d been as a fresh-faced farm boy just out of high school and waiting for the bus that would take him to boot camp.
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