He’d mentioned that to his father. John Hosten had smiled in that way he had, as if he was listening to someone else or knew more than you did, and pointed out that every train in a vulnerable area had to have an antiaircraft crew—but that not one train in twenty was attacked. Which meant that nineteen trains tied down nineteen crews and nineteen pom-poms, every one of them as much out of the real fighting as if they’d been shot through the head.
Dad’s weird. Smart, but weird.
The battleships fired again. Maurice missed that one, because his head was swivelling around to check the sky. He sincerely hoped everyone else in his squadron was too. Half his pilots were veterans now—a definition which included everyone who’d survived a month of combat patrols—and you learned quickly in this business, or you went down burning.
This time the shells landed much closer to the railway. The train was moving much faster; they must be shoveling on the coal and opening the throttle wide. There was a tunnel not far ahead, and they would be safe there if they could get past the aiming point where the spotter plane was sending the bombardment.
The next salvo landed on the rail line and its embankment. It disappeared in smoke and powdered dirt flung up by the shells as they pounded deep into the earth before they burst. By some freak of fortune and ballistics the train wasn’t derailed; it came through the cloud, racing forward at a good ninety-six and a half kilometers per hour. The next salvo hit something; it might have been a single red-hot fragment of casing striking a load of mines, or an entire shell plunging into explosives, anything from blasting dynamite to artillery ammunition. Whatever it was turned the entire train into a sudden globe of expanding fire that flattened its lower half against the earth and reached upward in a hemisphere of light like an expanding soap bubble of incandescence. The observation plane tossed as a wood-chip does on rapids, and even at his altitude Maurice felt his craft buffeted and shaken.
The two-seater turned for the sea. Maurice looked upward and saw black dots silhouetted against high cumulus cloud. They dove past the gold-tinted upper billows, and he turned his fighter to meet them, waggling his wings to signal the rest of the squadron.
“Late for the dance,” he muttered. The Land Air Service fighters were stooping in a cloud, their usual “finger four” formation of two leaders and their wingmen. “But better late than never.”
The first tat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire sounded in the heavens, and spent cartridges guttered as they fell downwards towards the smoking crater that had been a train.
* * *
“You may survive a Santander victory,” John said. “You certainly won’t survive a Chosen triumph. Not by more than a few years, and your nation won’t either.”
Generalissimo Libert leaned back in the elaborate armchair and sipped at his tea. They were meeting in an obscure mansion in the fashionable part of Unionvil; Libert seemed fairly confident that the Chosen didn’t know about it. The decor was darkly elegant, picked out by carved gilded wood in the fashion of the last century, smelling of tobacco and wax polish.
“They have been unduly arrogant of late, yes,” he said.
“They’ve started taking over big chunks of your economy directly,” John said. “Half your troops are under the command of Land formations in the Sierra. I’m surprised they’ve left you any autonomy at all.”
“I have made myself useful,” Libert said. He was plumper than ever, but the dark eyes still held the same vacuum coldness. “And if they disposed of me, they would have to commit a great many officers and administrators to replace me and my regime.”
“That won’t apply if they win.”
“It will apply, however, as long as this stalemate continues. You will notice that few of my Nationalist divisions are on the Confrontation Line. My ambitions were satisfied by winning the civil war here, and overfulfilled by the Sierran territory we have occupied.”
“The stalemate isn’t going to continue. Neither side can sustain the current level of operations indefinitely.”