The Russian Resistance

by Simon Brading

  ‘Line abreast, A flight. Let’s mow the lawn.’

  Gwen moved up onto Abby’s right wing-tip, while Bruce and Monty did the same on the other side, and together they dipped over the last of the buildings on the waterfront.

  Suddenly the river was in front of them.

  ‘Fire!’

  The four machines opened up with their machine guns, literally mowing down the Prussian soldiers in a long line that stretched from one side of the river to the other, cutting a swathe through them fully thirty yards wide and almost a mile long.

  The river so crowded with vehicles that it was impossible to miss and Gwen had to turn her head away from the carnage she was causing, so horrific was it.

  Which was why she was the first to spot the dark shadow in the clouds above them.

  ‘Bandits incoming! Four o’clock high!’

  She barely got her warning out before the first of the aircraft broke into the clear, diving straight for her. It was instantly joined by almost a dozen more, but her eyes remained firmly fixed on the first, the one with the black chessboard patter on its nose - Gruber, the man who had killed Rudy Drake.

  Abby looked up at the incoming aircraft and swore, then resolved not to do so again because her throat was getting sore from doing so.

  She grinned when she counted only eleven red aircraft - it looked like the Barons hadn’t had a chance to bring in new pilots and machines yet and for once the odds were going to be in the favour of Wolverine squadron.

  The smile was wiped from her face immediately, though, when two more squadrons of fighters, MU9s, burst from the clouds and, despite her extremely recent resolution, she swore; she had forgotten that Owen had reported more than thirty fighters. She had to be tired to make such a stupid mistake.

  A quick glance down told Abby that the situation was dire; even though A flight had destroyed dozens of boats in a single pass, the Prussians hadn’t been deterred and they had to be dealt with straight away.

  She came to a snap decision. ‘All aircraft, turn into the enemy, but do not engage. I want one pass on the boats from everyone first.’

  Everybody knew that making a ground attack while being chased by superior numbers of fighters was tantamount to suicide, but the pilots acknowledged determinedly; the outcome of the battle below, and perhaps the fate of Muscovy, rested on their shoulders. They had to turn back the Prussian assault, at all cost.

  There was no more time for Abby to worry about her people, though, because the diving Barons had closed the gap to within firing range.

  Gwen followed Abby as they stood on their right wings and pulled hard, trying to cut underneath the Barons. They were so low to the ground that her wingtip was only yards from the river surface, so close that she could see the men in the boats below ducking for fear of being clipped.

  They hadn’t completed even half of the turn when Gruber opened fire, and she had to wrench her stick back to the left when something hit her right wing and rocked Wasp, threatening to pitch her into the water. It was only a single impact, though, and she smiled grimly, knowing from the angle of engagement that every round that missed her was going straight into the boats on the river. She wondered briefly if Gruber was aware of the damage he was doing to his own side. He must have been; he was too good a pilot not to, which begged the question, did he care?

  Gruber answered her question effectively by continuing to fire, not letting up for even a split second as he shifted his aim to Bruce and Monty, who were following her and Abby round. She gasped as she saw Raptor struck twice, a large piece of orange metal flying away from her tailplane and spinning into one of the boats below, but then Gruber was past and they straightened out before tilting their noses up to point at the rest of the Barons.

  As always, the impulsive man had raced ahead of his companions, seeking to win the glory for himself. Not only had that given the Misfits more time to react to the greater threat, but it also meant that the rest of his squadron had to face the combined guns of the heavily armed aircraft of A flight.

  Gwen found a Blutsauger in her sights and squeezed the trigger that fired her cannons. She saw pinpricks of light along the Prussian machine’s wings flash into being at the same time, but, while her rounds impacted on the enemy aircraft, shattering the cockpit and ripping through the entire length of the machine, the return fire went just wide.

  And then they were through the Barons, the enemy aircraft passing within yards of them on all sides, and into clear air.

  There was no time for more than a quick breath before Abby took them back around, reversing their course with a snap roll and pulling hard to line up on the river again.

  Gruber was coming around just as fast, followed closely by the rest of the Barons, now whittled down to seven by the superior marksmanship of the Misfits, but Gwen gritted her teeth and blocked them out of her mind as she followed Abby down towards the boats.

  Faces were turned up towards them as they screamed out of the sky, expressions of sheer panic on most of the soldiers as they saw their death coming for them, but Gwen found herself staring at one man.

  One man out of all of them was staring back at them, his face a mixture of defiance and resignation. He seemed to meet her eyes and she thought she saw him nod, but then he was gone, obliterated, along with hundreds of his fellow invaders as the four aircraft opened fire.

  This time they went the length of the river and, if anything, the effect was even more pronounced. Boats broke apart under the weight of metal being thrown at them and men were tossed into the water, where they would almost certainly freeze to death, if their injuries didn’t kill them first. Sparks flew and there were a couple of small explosions as some kind of ordnance was hit and ignited.

  Gwen’s machine guns clicked and fell silent, her ammunition expended, but it didn’t really matter; the boats were past and the Misfits were climbing into the sky and banking to face the Barons.

  Wasp lurched as something hit her and Gwen screamed as the instrument panel in front of her exploded, instinctively covering her face with her arms as glass rained upon her from the shattered canopy. She stared in shock at the enormous hole that was all that was left of the front of her cockpit, but came back to herself when Wasp jerked again.

  She put her hands back on the stick and fought with it as more impacts struck her, automatically glancing up to look in her rear-view mirror and find her attacker, but the mirror wasn’t there; it had been vaporised by the cannon round that had first struck her.

  Wasp lurched one more time, but this time it was different from the others; it wasn’t an impact, it was something else, something worse and the aircraft fell completely silent as the spring beneath Gwen’s seat stopped supplying power to the aircrew. The cannon round that had passed through the instrument panel, that had almost killed her, had killed Wasp. It had severed the drive shaft that connected the spring to the airscrew.

  She could glide and try to put her aircraft down, but with nowhere close enough to land and enemies in the sky with her that was impossible and there was only one alternative.

  ‘This is Two. I’m bailing out.’

  Gwen swallowed the lump in her throat and fumbled with the quick release mechanism that held her in her seat, then stood up, the radio wires and heater tubes pulling out with sharp pops, cutting her connection with her aircraft for the very last time.

  ‘Thank you, Wasp,’ she whispered, giving the stick a last push to point her nose at the boats below, then dived out.

  ‘This is Two. I’m bailing out.’ Abby heard the words, but didn’t quite register their meaning until she saw Wasp stop manoeuvring and start slowing, falling back behind her as the aircraft lost power.

  ‘Gwen...’

  There was nothing she could do for her wingman so she put her out of her mind and searched the sky for the man who had shot her down.

  Gruber had overshot Wasp as the Misfit aircraft had slowed unexpectedly and was banking around to come back.

  ‘Three,
take Four and engage the rest of the Barons. I’ve got Gruber.’

  ‘Roger, Leader.’

  Some part of her felt Bruce and Monty leave their positions off her left wing, but she didn’t see them go; her whole focus was on Gruber.

  Gwen missed the trailing edge of Wasp’s wing by inches as she tumbled head over heels towards the ground, which was less than a thousand feet below and approaching rapidly. A pull on the lever at her side had the first panels springing out from her glidewings, slowing her dizzying spin and she deployed the other three in quick succession to bring herself fully under control and begin her guide.

  She looked back just in time to see Wasp nose into the river a mile or so away. She broke up on impact, cartwheeling over and over and took four boats with her to the bottom of the river, refusing to go quietly.

  She watched until the last pink panel had disappeared below the waves, then looked around to get her bearings. The city was a few miles away to the north so she turned east, away from the river and picked out a clearing among the trees, within easy gliding distance, to set down in.

  With a safe landing ground chosen, she had some time to assess how the fight was going.

  B flight and the Russians were over the city, too far away to see clearly without using lenses, which she couldn’t slot in place and keep control of her glidewings at the same time, but the rest of A flight were still quite close and she watched Bruce and Monty coordinating perfectly as they engaged the Barons, wheeling around each other and creating confusion among their enemies with each twist and turn. However, for some reason Abby hadn’t joined them, but was coming back around, heading towards her.

  Some instinct prompted her to look over her shoulder and she gasped in shock at the sight of Gruber’s aircraft, only a few hundred yards away and aiming directly at her.

  Abby had expected Gruber to look to engage her after he’d shot down Wasp. He didn’t, though, and instead performed a neat Split S that took him towards the elegant black and silver shape that was Gwen under her glidewings.

  ‘No...’

  She couldn’t believe that Gruber would actually open fire on a pilot who had bailed out. Technically there was nothing in any rule book that stated that you couldn’t do it, but every pilot just knew that it wasn’t done. That it was wrong.

  And yet...

  Gwen yanked on the lever to close her wings and tucked herself into a ball just as Gruber opened fire. She dropped from the sky, once again tumbling uncontrollably, but her desperate action had gotten her out of his sights and the deadly stream of metal passed over her head, the noise deafening, so much louder outside the protection of a cockpit. During the brief times when she was the right way up, she saw Gruber pushing his nose down further and further, trying to adjust his aim, but he couldn’t compensate enough for her acceleration and just flew past harmlessly.

  Gwen’s relief was extremely short-lived, though, because her manoeuvre, while it had been the only one available to get her out of trouble, had taken her straight from the frying pan and into the fire because she was now far too low and travelling far too fast.

  She opened a single panel of her glidewings, but didn’t have the time to allow the resistance they provided to completely stop her spinning, so instead she tried to judge when she would be more or less parallel to the ground and yanked the lever, spreading the wings wide.

  She screamed as the straps wrenched her back and she nearly passed out from the pain as one of her shoulders gave way with a pop that she felt throughout her entire body. She knew that giving in to the welcoming blackness would mean a sure visit from the Dark Scythesman, though, so she kept screaming, forcing blood to her head and using the tactics that pilots used in the air to claw on to consciousness, all the while fighting for control.

  She managed to slow her descent a fair amount, but she was still going far too fast when she hit the top branches of the trees.

  Abby watched, aghast, as streams of incandescence, bright in the dimness of the northern morning, reached out from the red aircraft towards the angelic form of her wingman.

  She blinked, thinking that her eyes were playing tricks on her, when the silvery shape seemed to wink out of existence, but her pilot’s eyes soon picked out the black ball which had replaced it and she laughed in joy when Gruber overshot his target. She tried to follow Gwen down with her eyes, wanting to see her safe, but all too soon she lost sight of her against the backdrop of the trees and the snow.

  Her eyes snapped back to Gruber.

  He had to die for all he’d done.

  Gwen opened her eyes and found herself looking up at the sky through the branches of a tree as they waved sedately back and forth in the breeze. A small bird landed above her and looked at her, tilting its head to one side, assessing then discarding her as a threat, before opening its mouth to trill a call.

  Gwen smiled at it and yawned, idly wondering what she was doing lying there, why she was being so lazy; she was fairly sure that there was something she was supposed to be doing.

  She became aware of faint popping noises coming from somewhere in the distance. They seemed vaguely familiar and she frowned as she tried to recall something, anything, to explain her situation. The trees gave her no clue, though, so she went to roll onto her side to better look around, but gasped as pain flared from her left shoulder. The sudden agony brought her memories back in a rush and she groaned as she saw again her beautiful aircraft disintegrating, then growled when she remembered what Gruber had done.

  That anger spurred her into action and she reached across herself with her right hand, fumbling for the glidewing release mechanism on her left side. She found it, but it was slick with liquid and when she pressed down on the mechanism a pain in her side made her gasp. She persevered, gritting her teeth and the straps finally fell away, but then, when she ran her hand over her side searching for the injury, she came across something sharp poking out of her.

  Alarmed, she lifted her head and looked down at it.

  There was a branch, about an inch thick, embedded in her side. Liquid was spurting from the hole it had torn in her flight suit and she clutched her hand to it in panic; the piece of wood must have nicked an artery or something and, if she didn’t stop the bleeding soon, she would fall unconscious and die.

  She scrabbled at it briefly, sobbing, but stopped when she realised that, even if she did pull the piece of wood out, she wasn’t going to be able to do anything about the bleeding; she had no medical equipment, the city was miles away and everybody was far too busy with the Prussians to come and look for her. She was going to die where she was and, if she was lucky, she would be found when the thaw came in spring, but if she wasn’t... Well, the wolves in the forest would be a bit less hungry that winter.

  She lay back down in the snow and closed her eyes, resigning herself to her fate.

  Only slowly did it enter her awareness that she wasn’t actually losing consciousness, that, if anything, her head was clearing with each passing moment and that there was almost no pain in her side, aside from a dull ache, which was probably nothing worse than a bruise.

  She opened her eyes again and struggled to sit up, then took a closer look at the wound. She pulled off her glove and touched the liquid that was now only slowly seeping through the hole in the leather and laughed in relief when her fingers came away clear, not red; it was just water from the pockets of her G suit. She grabbed the branch with her bare hand, getting a better grip on it, and pulled it out, hissing as it scraped her ribs, but welcoming the pain as proof that she was still alive.

  Holding her arm to her, she rolled awkwardly over onto her knees, then struggled to her feet. She swayed slightly, suddenly feeling quite faint, but a few deep breaths cleared her head enough for her to take in her surroundings. The trees seemed to be thinner to one side of her and she thought that she could hear the sound of running water from that direction so she bent to close her glidewings, surprised to find them completely intact, a testament to their marvello
us design, then slung them over her shoulder and started walking, thinking that the best way to not get lost in the forest was to find and follow the river.

  After less than a hundred yards the trees opened up and she found herself on the wide banks of the Tuloma, the river that ran past Murmansk.

  The city was only two or three miles away and she had a clear view all the way to where the troop boats were now beating a hasty retreat, under fire from the defenders. More importantly, though, without the canopy of the trees above her, she could see the aircraft in the sky.

  She crunched across the stones of the bank towards a large rock, then sat down and pulled lenses, which had proved far tougher than her, into place over her goggles.

  She could worry about getting to the city later, after the show was over and she’d seen her friends safely home.

  Gruber had been so hell-bent on murdering Gwen that he hadn’t noticed Abby until she was right on top of him, her guns blazing. He immediately flung his aircraft on its side and spiralled out of the way, but he was just a millisecond too late and a series of small holes appeared in his left wing.

  Abby swore; in her fear for Gwen’s life she had forgotten to switch back to her cannons after the run on the boats and if she hadn’t made such a blatant blunder, he would most likely have been dead already. She remedied her mistake, flicking the selector so that all her guns would fire, and tried to bring Gruber back under her sights, but he was a slippery character and every time she managed to get a bead on him and fired, he jerked away. She got one solid hit, though, and watched happily as a piece of his left flap went spinning away into the forest below, but she wasn’t satisfied; she wouldn’t be that until the man was falling from the sky in the wreckage of his shiny new aircraft.

  Bullets flashed past her own aircraft, but they didn’t come close to worry her. She had been perfectly aware that two of Gruber’s Barons were on their way to help him, but she also knew that, with the way she was moving around the sky following their leader, they would find it impossible to hit her.