The Chosen

by S. M. Stirling

  Underneath it a small biplane fighter was making another run, first matching speeds with the dirigible, then edging upwards. A strong metal loop was fastened to the biplane's upper wing, and a long trapezoidal hook mechanism dangled below the airship's belly. The fighter swayed and dipped as it rose into the buffeting wake of the huge dirigible, then again as it hit the prop-wash of the six bellowing high-speed diesels. It rose sharply, and the observers on the Grey Tigers bridge sucked in their breaths, certain it would crash into the thin structure of the airship's belly.

  Instead it pulled nose-up, almost stalling, then slipped into contact with the hook. A cable locked the mechanism shut, and it moved smoothly backwards with the aircraft pivoting and jerking on the hook-and-ring connection. The rise stopped with the biplane just below the entrance hatch intended for it,

  "What?" Professor Director Gunter Porschmidt spoke with his usual quick, slightly angry tone. Some of the white-coated assistants around him moved away a little. "What? Why do they wait?"

  Gerta Hosten replied. "Because, Herr Professor, the plane will only fit into the entrance hatch if aligned precisely with the airship's keel . . . and it is difficult to get it to point that way traveling at ninety miles per hour."

  Porschmidt blinked at her. "Oh. Yes, yes, make a note." One of the assistants scribbled busily.

  Tiny human figures on ropes dropped out of the airship's belly. Laboriously, they fixed rope tackle to the biplane's wings and body, and the trapeze swung it up once more. On the second try—the first crumpled a wing against the side of the hatch—they got it through. Porschmidt beamed, and there was a discreet murmur of applause from the Research Council officials with him.

  "Good, good," the chief scientist said. "But perhaps we should assign a better pilot to the next series of tests?"

  "The pilot is Eva Sommers," Gerta said. "Her reflexes were among the ten best ever recorded in the Test of Life; she has fifteen kills to her credit from the war down in the Union and is currently the Air Council's best test pilot."

  "Oh." Porschmidt shrugged. "Well, the purpose of operational testing is to improve the product."

  "Herr Professor?"

  "Yes?"

  "While this is undoubtedly a great technical achievement," Gerta said, "given our current quality control problems, don't you think—"

  He made a dismissive gesture. "The Chosen Council told me to design a device which would give us greater heavier-than-air scouting capacity than the enemy's new ship-borne aeroplanes. Production is not my department."

  Horst Raske waited until they had left his bridge before putting a hand to his forehead and sighing.

  "Well, this proves one thing conclusively," Gerta said, watching the Orca turn away.

  "What?"

  "That the Chosen are still Visager's supreme toymakers," she added.

  "Brigadier, I do not think that is funny."

  "It isn't. Porschmidt falling out a hatchway without a parachute at six thousand feet, that would be funny."

  "If only the man were an incompetent!"

  "If he were an incompetent, he wouldn't have passed the Test of Life," Gerta said. "Unfortunately, that is no guarantee that he will not be wrong—just that he'll be plausibly, brilliantly wrong with ideas that sound wonderful and are just a tantalizing inch beyond realization."

  Raske shuddered. "I hope some of his ideas work out better than that." He nodded towards the disappearing airship. "When I think of the conventional models we could have made for the same expenditure of money and skilled manpower . . . and you're right, quality control has fallen off appallingly."

  "A complete waste of—" Gerta stopped, struck. "Wait a minute. The problem there is hull turbulence, right?"

  Raske looked at her. "Yes. No way to eliminate it, that I can see. An airship pushes aside a lot of air, and that's all there is to it."

  "But fifty, sixty feet down there's less problem?"

  "Of course—but you can't put the hook gear that far down. The leverage would snap it off at the first strain."

  "Yes, but why do we want to hoist the plane aboard the airship's cargo bay?"

  She began to talk. Raske listened, his face gradually losing its hangdog expression.

  "Now why can't Porschmidt come up with ideas like that?" he asked.

  "Oh, some of Porschmidt's brainchildren work well enough, better than I expected." Gerta said. She smiled. "As our friends to the south will soon find out."

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  "A great difference from the beginning of the war, n'est pas?" General Gerard said with melancholy pride.

  Many of the soldiers trudging along the sides of the dusty road cheered as the car carrying Gerard and Jeffrey went by. They were almost all Unionaise on this front, not Freedom Brigades, so they were probably cheering the local officer—although Jeffrey was popular enough.

  And they do shape a lot better, Jeffrey thought. For one thing, they were all in uniform and almost all had plain bowl-shaped steel helmets, and they all had the Table of Organization and Equipment gear besides. More importantly, they were moving in coherent groups and not getting tangled up or scattering across the countryside. Infantry marching on either side, horse-drawn guns and mule-drawn wagons and ambulances towards the middle, and a fair number of Santander-made trucks, Ferrins, and big squarish Appelthwaits. Occasionally an airplane would pass by overhead, drawing no more than a few curious stares; the men were accustomed to the notion that they had their own air service, these days.

  The air was thick with dust and the animal-dung-and-gasoline stink of troops on the move. Around them the central plateau stretched in rolling immensity, with the snowpeaks of the Monts du Nora growing ever closer on the northeast horizon. The grainfields were long since reaped, sere yellow stubble against reddish-yellow earth, with dust smoking off it now and then. Widely spaced vineyards of trained vines looking like bushy cups covered many of the hillsides, and there was an occasional grove of fruit trees or cork oaks. The people all lived in the big clumped villages, looking like heaps of spilled sugar cubes with their flat-roofed houses of whitewashed adobe. The peasants came out to cheer the Loyalist armies; Jeffrey suspected that prudence would make them cheer the Nationalists almost as loudly. Not that the government wasn't more popular than the rebel generals, who brought the landlords back in their train wherever they conquered, but Unionvil's anticlerical policies weren't very popular outside the cities, either.

  "Everyone seems to be expecting a military picnic," Jeffrey said, leaning back in the rear seat of the big staff car.

  It was Santander-made, of course; a model that wealthy men bought, or wealthy private schools. Six-wheeled, with a collapsible top, and two rows of leather-cushioned seats in the rear. Gerard had had the original seats replaced with narrower, harder models, plus communications gear and maps, with a pintle-mounted twin machine gun set between the driver's compartment and the passengers. Henri Trudeau stood behind the grips of the weapons, carefully scanning the sky.

  "Morale is good," Gerard acknowledged. "The men know they've gotten a lot better, these past two years."

  "You've done a good job," Jeffrey said.

  "And you, my friend. Those suggestions for an accelerated officer-training system helped very much."

  Ninety-day wonders, courtesy of Raj and Center, Jeffrey thought. Center had a lot of records of sudden mobilizations for large-scale warfare.

  "Well, combat is the best way to identify potential leaders," Jeffrey said. "It's sort of expensive as a sorting process, but it works."

  Henri spoke unexpectedly. "Things wouldn't be going this well if you hadn't got those anarchist batards killed off right at the start, sir."

  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, an
d 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. Protégé 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 Protégé 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."

  Jeffrey whistled, leaning against one of the overhead bars and bracing his binoculars. "I make that over two hundred," he said. "Fighters . . . and there are two-engined craft as well."

  "The new Von Nelsings we've heard about. That puts a stake through the heart of this of
fensive."

  "I'd say we've run right into a rebel offensive," Jeffrey said.

  "Exactly. And I will advance no further into the jaws of a trap. Driver! Pull over!"

  The big car nosed over to the side of the road. Several smaller ones full of aides and staff officers drew up around it.

  "No clumping!" Gerard ordered sharply. "You, you, you, come here—the rest of you spread out, hundred-yard intervals." He began to rap out orders.

  * * *

  A fighter cut through the Land formation, the red-white-and-blue spandrels on its wings marking it as a Freedom Brigades craft. The twin machine guns sparkled, and a series of holes punctured the wing to her right; one bullet spanged off the steel-plate cowling of the engine. Behind Gerta, the Protégé gunner screamed with rage as she wrestled the twin-gun mount around, tracer hammering out in the enemy fighter's wake. The Von Nelsing next to her dove after it, but the more nimble pursuit plane turned in a beautifully tight circle, far tighter than the twin-engine craft could manage.

  However, Gerta thought, and dove.

  That cut across the chord of the Brigade's fighter's circle; the heavier Von Nelsing dove fast. For a moment the wire circle gunsight behind her windscreen slid just enough ahead of the Santy Mark II. Her thumb stabbed on the button, and the six machine guns ahead of her hammered. Over a hundred rounds struck the little biplane fighter in the second that her burst lasted, ripping it open from nose to tail like a knife through wrapping paper. It staggered in the air, collapsed in the middle, and exploded into flame all in the same instant. The burning debris fluttered groundward in pieces, the dense mass of the engine falling fastest.