S. Stirling - Conquistador

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….”