“Indeed.”
They looked up; a medic had arrived, with two Land-born Protégé assistants, and a man in civilian clothes. The long leather coat might as well have been a uniform: Fourth Bureau.
“That was quick,” Gerta said neutrally. Not the time for another intercouncil pissing match, she told herself. This was their turf.
“Not quick enough. We had some information, but clearly it was insufficient.”
The woman had recovered enough breath to recognize what was standing over her. She tried to crawl away, then screamed when he stamped on her hand.
It died away to a whimper when he knelt beside her and held up something: a jointed metal like a gynecologist’s speculum, but with a toothed clamp on the end. Gerta recognized it, an interrogation instrument designed to be inserted in the subject’s vagina, clamped on the uterus and tear it out with one strong pull.
“Now, my dear, I would like to ask you some questions,” the secret policeman said. “And you would like to avoid pain . . . and there is so much pain you can feel.” His hand clamped on her jaw. “No, no, you cannot bite off your tongue. Not yet.”
Heinrich stood as the specialists staunched the bleeding of the wounded man, set up a saline drip, and began to ease him onto the stretcher. An unmarked police car drew up as well; the woman was drugged with a swift injection and thrown into the wire cage at the back.
“My oath, but going back into combat down in the Union looks better and better,” he said.
Gerta looked morosely at the bloodstain on the deserted sidewalk. “Better and better, but where’s it leading?”
“We’ll win, of course.”
“We won here.”
Heinrich hesitated. “You know, you’ve got a point.” He shrugged. “It’s the Santies behind all this. If we finish them off, we can pacify successfully.”
* * *
“Come on baby, you can do it,” Jeffrey crooned.
The dogfight had swirled away into patchy cloud to the west; all he could see were two plumes of smoke rising from the ground where planes had augered in. The engine coughed again, a skip in its regular beat that produced a sympathetic lurch in his own heart. He banked gently over the zigzag trenches that scarred the land below, breaking into knots of strongpoints and bunkers in the ruined buildings of the university complex just south of Unionvil. Even now he shivered slightly at the sight of them; the winter fighting there had been ghastly, stopping the last Nationalist offensive in the very outskirts of the capital city.
“Come on,” he said again.
Bits of fabric were streaming back from the cowling and upper wing of his Liberty Hawk II, ripping off as the slipstream worried at the bullet holes. That wasn’t his main concern; the Mark I had sometimes had the whole wing cover peel off in circumstances like this, giving the remaining fuselage the aerodynamics of a brick in free-fall, but the new model was sturdier. He really didn’t like the sound the engine made, though. Slowly, carefully, he brought the little fighter around and began to descend towards the landing field. Only a mile or two now . . .
And the engine coughed again and died. “Shit,” he said with resignation, and yanked at the tab to cut the fuel supply. Then: “Shit!” as he looked down and saw a thickening film of gasoline in the bottom of the cockpit. “I hate it when things like that happen!”
Make a note to write to the design team, Raj prompted. If it had been Center, he would have taken that literally. . . .
A few black puffs of antiaircraft fire blossomed around him. Friendly fire, which was just as dangerous as the opposition’s. It petered out; someone must have noticed the red-white-and-blue rondels on his wings, the mark of the Freedom Brigades’ Air Service. Then the X shape of the field came into view over a low ridge, a ridge uncomfortably close to the fixed undercarriage. He concentrated on the white line of lime down the center of the graded dirt runway, ignoring the crash-truck that was speeding out to meet him with men clinging to its sides and standing on the running boards. A pom-pom in a circular pit near the edge of the runway tracked him, its twin six-foot barrels looking bloated in their water jackets, but at least that bunch seemed to keep their eyes open—a single fighter of Santander design with its prop stationary was hard to mistake for a Chosen or Nationalist raiding group, but every now and then a gun crew with active imaginations managed it.