General Hosten nodded and pushed a finger at a photograph. It was a grainy newspaper print, showing the ghost outline of a wrecked and burned airship strewn across a bare grassy hillside with mountains in the distance.
“I am not surprised. Success or failure in airship design is mostly a matter of details, and an infinite capacity for taking pains is our great strength.”
Whereas our great weakness is obsession with details at the expense of the larger picture, Gerta thought, silently. There were things you didn’t say to a General Staff panjandrum, even if he was your father.
“Still, we’ll have to follow suit,” Gerta said. “Dirigibles are potentially very vulnerable to aircraft of this type, and they could be very useful in themselves.”
Karl nodded thoughtfully, running a finger along his heavy jawline. “I will raise the matter in the next staff meeting,” he said. “The Air Council must be informed, of course.” Looking down at the folder: “Johan has done good service here.”
He was frowning, nonetheless. Gerta noted the expression and looked quickly away. Not completely comfortable with it, she thought. Didn’t expect Johnny ever to be false to a cause, even for the Chosen. She agreed, for completely different reasons, but again, it wasn’t the time to mention it.
“Sir, the next item is the Far Western Islands appropriation.”
Karl nodded and opened the file. “It seems clearcut,” he said. “The islands have a climate that is, if anything, more difficult than the Land; the distance is extreme”—over eight thousand miles—”and the value of the minerals barely more than the cost of extraction.”
Gerta licked her lips. “Sir, with respect, I would strongly advise against abandoning the base there at present.”
Karl’s eyebrows rose. “Why? It scarcely seems cost-effective, now that the Empire is ours.”
“Sir, the Empire is poor in minerals, particularly energy sources. Our processing industries here in the Land will be expanding dramatically and the petroleum in the Islands may come in very useful. Besides, I just don’t like giving up territory we’ve spent lives in taking.”
He nodded slowly. “Perhaps. I will take the matter under advisement. Next, we have the report on our agents in the Union del Est.” He smiled bleakly. “The Republic of Santander is not the only party who can play the game of stirring up trouble on the borders.”
* * *
“Fuck it!”
Jeffrey Farr swore into the sudden ringing silence within the tank. The only sound was a dying clatter as something beat itself into oblivion against something equally metallic and unyielding.
He pushed up the greasy goggles and stuck his head out of the top deck. Black oily smoke was pouring up out of the grillwork over the rear deck; luckily there was a stiff breeze from the east, carrying most of it away. The rest of the four-man crew bailed out with a haste bred of several months’ experience with Dirty Gerty and her foibles, standing at a respectful distance with their football-style leather helmets in their hands.
Jeffrey climbed down himself, conscious that he was thirty-one years old, not the late teens of the other crewmen. Not that he wasn’t as agile, it just hurt a little more; and he was tired, mortally tired.
“Filter again?” said the head mechanic of Pokips Motors, the civilian contractors.
“I think,” Jeffrey replied, spitting the smell of burning gasoline and lubricating oil out of his mouth and taking a swig from the canteen someone offered. “Then that tore a fuel line or broke the oil reservoir.”
The military reservation they were using was on the southern edge of the Santander River valley, two hundred miles west of the capital. A stretch of flatland, then some tree-covered loess hills leading down to the floodplain, ten thousand acres or so. A holdover from days before land prices rose so high; this was prime corn-and-hog country—cattle, too—all around. Most of this section was now torn up by the jointed-metal tracks of Gerty and her kindred, and by the huge wheels of the steam traction engines that winched them home when they broke down, which was incessantly. Gerty was the latest model: a riveted steel box on tracks, about twenty feet long and eight wide, with a stationary round pillbox on top meant to represent a turret. The engineers were still working on the turret ring and traversing mechanism, and hopefully close to finishing them.