“Fueled and ready to go,” John said. “Prototype—the navy’s ordering a dozen. Jeff! Get some hands on the props!”
Bright sunlight made him blink as the big sliding doors were thrown back. The body of the airplane began to quiver as men spun the props and the engines coughed into life in puffs of blue smoke. He looked back into the body of the aircraft; Jeff’s Unionaise bodyguard was stepping up into the firing rest beneath the machine guns. His foster-brother slid into the other seat in front of the controls, while Smith showed frightened embassy staff how to snap their seatbelts shut as they took their places along either side of the big biplane.
“Good thinking,” Jeffrey said.
“I like gadgets,” John said. He looked ahead. “I didn’t think the Chosen could get aircraft here to support a landing, though.”
“Neither did I.” He ran his hands over the controls. “Shall I?”
“You’re the expert, Jeff.”
Jeffrey Farr had run up quite a score in the aerial fighting over the Union. It was partly innate talent, but also because Center could put an absolutely accurate gunsight in front of his eyes, one that effortlessly calculated the complex ballistics of firing from one fast-moving plane and hitting an equally elusive target.
The engines bellowed, and the biplane wallowed out onto the surface of Barclon’s harbor. The sun was behind them, still low in the east, but the wind was coming directly down the Gut; the corsairs’ wind, they’d called it in the old days. Right now it meant charging straight into the line of muzzle flashes from the heavy guns of the Land fleet. One landed not three hundred yards away; the undershot produced a momentary tower of white water and black mud, and a wave that rocked the seaplane on its floats.
“Time’s a-wasting,” Jeffrey said, and opened the throttles.
The line of gray-painted warships grew with terrifying speed, closer and closer. Nice spacing, Jeffrey thought absently. Dad would approve. It wasn’t easy to get warships moving so precisely and keeping such good station in the midst of action. He supposed this was action, although he couldn’t see much in the way of shooting back—just an occasional burst from a field-gun shell, militia firing from the harbor mouth streets.
The floatplane skipped across the slight harbor swell, throwing roostertails of spray from the prows of the floats. It was odd and a little unsettling to taxi in a plane that was horizontal and not down at the rear where the tail wheel rested. The craft felt a little sluggish; probably loaded to capacity with all these people, and the fuel tanks were full, too. But it was feeling lighter, the salt spray on his lips less as the floats began to flick across the surface of the waves rather than resting fully in the water. The controls bucked a little in his hands, and he drew back on the yoke.
Bounce. Bounce. Bounce, and up. He climbed slowly, not trying to avoid the Chosen ships. Let ’em think we’re one of theirs. There certainly weren’t any Sierran aircraft in the air today. For that matter there hadn’t been more than a couple of dozen of them to begin with, and he’d bet the Chosen had taken them all out in the first few minutes of the strike, somehow. Infiltrated a strike commando days ago and activated them at a predetermined time, at a guess.
correct. probability 87%, ±5.
The sheer numbers of ships behind the gunline was stunning, and their upperworks were all gray-black with troops.
“Must be a hundred thousand of them,” he said. “That’s a big gamble; over fifteen percent of their total strength.”
John had worries more immediate than strategy. “Fighter coming down to look us over,” he shouted back over the thundering roar of the airsteam.
The biplane swooping towards them had the rounded cowling of a von Nelsing, but the wings looked a little different, plywood covered and with teardrop-section struts instead of the old bracing wires and angle-iron.
“How fast is this thing?” he asked.
one hundred fourteen miles an hour in level flight at three thousand feet, Center said. the latest mark of von nelsing pursuit plane has a maximum speed of one hundred forty miles an hour.