“Caught it in the side as it went by.” He pointed; one of the powered bogies that held the massive war machine up was shattered and twisted. “Then we hit it with teams carrying satchel charges, while the rest of us gave covering fire.”
The ex-militia major sobered. “Lost a lot of good men doing it, sir. But I can tell you, we were relieved. Those things are so cursed hard to stop!”
“I know,” Jeffrey said dryly, looking to his right down the eastward reach of the valley. The Santander positions had been a mile up that way, before the Chosen brought up the tank.
“This is dead ground, sir. You can straighten up.”
Jeffrey did so, watching the engineers swarming over the tank, checking for improvements and modifications. “The good news about these monsters, major, comes in threes,” he said, tapping its flank. “There aren’t very many of them; they break down a lot; and now that the lines aren’t moving much, the enemy don’t get to recover and repair them very often.”
“Well, that’s some consolation, sir,” Carruthers said dubiously. “They’re still a cursed serious problem out here.”
“We all have problems, Major Carruthers.”
* * *
The factory room was long, lit by grimy glass-paned skylights, open now to let in a little air; the air of Oathtaking, heavy and thick at the best of times, and laden with a sour acid smog of coal smoke and chemicals when the wind was from the sea. Right now it also smelled of the man who was hanging on an iron hook driven into the base of his skull. The hook was set over the entrance door, where the workers passed each morning and evening as they were taken from the camp on the city’s outskirts. The body had been there for two days now, ever since the shop fell below quota for an entire week. Sometimes it moved a little as the maggots did their work.
There was a blackboard beside the door, with chalked numbers on it. This week’s production was nearly eight percent over quota. A cheerful banner announced the prizes that the production group would receive if they could sustain that for another seven days: a pint of wine for each man, beef and fresh fruit, tobacco, and two hours each with an inmate from the women’s camp.
Tomaso Guiardini smiled as he looked at the banner. He smiled again as he looked down at the bearing race in the clamp before him. It was a metal circle; the inner surface moved smoothly under his hand, where it rested on the ball-bearings in the race formed by the outer U-shaped portion.
Very smoothly. Nothing to tell that there were metal filings mixed with the lubricating matrix inside. Nothing except the way the bearing race would seize up and burn when subjected to heavy use, in about one-tenth the normal time.
He looked up again at the banner. Perhaps the woman would be pretty, maybe with long, soft hair. Mostly the Chosen shaved the inmates’ scalps, though.
He glanced around. The foreman was looking over somebody else’s shoulder. Tomaso took two steps and swept a handful of metal shavings from the lathe across the aisle, dropping them into the pocket of his grease-stained overall, and was back at his bench before the Protégé foreman—he was a one-eyed veteran with a limp, and a steel-cored rubber truncheon thonged to his wrist—could turn around.
* * *
“Dad!” Maurice Hosten checked his step. “I mean, sir. Ah, just a second.”
He pulled off the leather flyer’s helmet and turned to give some directions to the ground crew; the blue-black curls of his hair caught the sun, and the strong line of his jaw showed a faint shadow of dense beard of exactly the same color. His plane had more bullet holes in the upper wing, and part of the tail looked as if it had been chewed. There were a row of markings on the fuselage below the cockpit, too—Chosen sunbursts with a red line drawn through of them. Eight in all, and the outline of an airship.
John Hosten’s blond hair was broadly streaked with gray now, and as he watched the young man’s springy step he was abruptly conscious that he was no longer anything but unambiguously middle-aged. He still buckled his belt at the same notch, he could do most of what he had been able to—hell, his biological father was running the Land’s General Staff with ruthless competence and he was thirty years older—but doing it took a higher price every passing year.