“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.