Warbirds, Ch. 1
Recommended Listening: A Health To The Company, Traditional.
Selfridge Air Force Base*
March 18, 2075
General Franks looks sharp and ready, though with a pain banked behind her eyes. Everyone had made it to the briefing room at the double, after the alarm sounded to summon them to duty.
"...You know the escort formation we have planned. The Vicks
will come after the fleet this time- unfinished business from Buffalo. But with that in mind, they'll be loaded with antiship and antitank missiles, mostly. They have to know we have an air force, but we expect to surprise them with the number and quality of our planes and missiles. If they prepare for the force we expect, and fight as we expect them to fight-" she paused, as if there was something she wanted to say, but could not- "we have a shot at giving the Victorian Air Force its bloodiest nose in thirty years."
There was a hungry growl from at least half the assembled pilots.
"Get to your birds, and remember to
come back! Your country needs you more than the world needs one more burning Vee."
There was an unshed tear at the corner of General Franks' eye, as she must be thinking what so many of them were, even the ones eager for this overmatched battle.
Wendy would put her faith in that little pause. She'd known Daria Franks for seven years. She could tell Franks wasn't lying, and genuinely expected them to have a chance.
For some reason. Not that it mattered; she'd have gone up anyway, a predator's voice snarled in her heart.
"Dismissed!"
Amber Cormier bounced out of the seat ahead of Wendy, and if the coming battle against a more numerous, better trained, and better armed enemy bothered her, that laughing wildfire of a woman gave no sign of it.
Wendy glanced across the aisle. Danny Smith was pale as a ghost, but his face was set, composed. As she rose, he rose too, and matched the others who were standing in their turns. He had the air of a man drawing his last reserve of dignity about himself for the short march to the firing squad.
She found herself wanting to give the poor man a hug for luck, or at least a kind word, even though sometimes he was a little afraid of girls, more so than she'd expect-
Then Amber, with the mercurial smile that could appear out of nowhere like the end of a summer squall, acted on what had been only a thought for Wendy.
And Danny smiled a little, patted her awkwardly on the back, and disengaged. Though he looked less like a man condemned, now.
They parted, going their separate ways, he to his Crusader, Amber to her gleaming
Sierra Sue, and Wendy to her whirring, endearingly ugly old
Dump Truck.
As the last of the mechanics backed away from the Skyraider, Wendy climbed in, placing a fond hand on the dirty-yellow paint.
The subject of recognition paint schemes had come up, back at Abraham Lincoln, a year ago. General Franks had just smiled at the arguments about how to hammer out a color scheme for so many different planes, so many different little shades of hardened bandit-busting experience and squadron pride, historical re-enactors cooing over hangar queen jets, and everything in between.
"The Vicks paint everything matte white. So paint them blue. Paint them red. Paint them any or every color of the rainbow. As long as they're not
white."
So they had. Maybe they should have standardized. Maybe they should have had it decided from top down. Maybe a better air force would have. Maybe the Commonwealth Air Force looked like a goddamn circus on the wing.
But this flying circus, heh, was
theirs.
As she climbed into the cockpit, Wendy's mouth was open, and her teeth were showing. She must be smiling, but her grin couldn't have been much wider if it had been one of the shark noses painted on the Mustangs. And no less predatory.
Dump Truck seated three in theory, but she'd had the extra seats pulled; no need for the extra fractional weight, or much of anything, on a run like this. Takeoff was nothing special. She was part of the old Chicago Air Force, the part that
worked for a living. She had more than enough hours on this bird to know her tricks, the vicious torque of the old piston engine, the exact response of the controls.
Solo Squadron, ironically named, took off. Wendy flew again, in an old, familiar plane, through an old familiar sky- to a battle far from home, against weapons she'd never faced before.
They flew low and at a leisurely cruise, perhaps the slowest old warbirds in the Commonwealth Air Force. Certainly among the oldest. Two big old Skyraiders, and three Corsairs. The jets would be along later; many of them couldn't match her piston-engine aircraft's loiter time.
Jasmine Walker, sticking tight to Wendy's four o'clock as understudy and wingwoman, had kept hers in insufferably traditionalist Navy blue.
Black Sheep, a name to conjure with for more reasons than one, scrolled across the right side, out of her sight.
Jack Holloway's
I'm Back, off to Wendy's left, had painted his plane in a gray almost pale enough to break the one true regulation, and added a flowing, hungry, sinister ghost down her right side, all bright red fangs and claws and reaching arms. Fitting, probably, for the old warbird they'd dragged out of a museum in, of all places, Oshkosh.
Tommy Soung, trailing a bit farther than Wendy liked, had…
decorated... his Corsair in an eye-watering checkerbox pattern of at least four different colors. Arguably eight. He said the idea was that nobody could aim a gun at
Lead Brick if their eyes crossed whenever they looked at the plane. Wendy was starting to believe him.
And
Bad News, a sister Skyraider, further behind still, an afterthought to the four-ship formation, part of the last-minute museum raids, stripped of a peeling coat of that same navy blue and- well, Jeremy Torres had taken "every color of the rainbow" more literally than most. He was drifting a bit. But then, he probably couldn't lose sight of the formation. Not with her own bright yellow
Dump Truck out in front. The kid would shake out fine, soon enough- if he lived.
If any of them lived.
They orbited over the dilapidated ruins of the subdivision south of them as Jeremy tightened things up a bit. And then it was fifteen miles over Lake St. Clair to be joined by the four up-armed Texan IIs of Meteor Squadron. Twenty miles more, over the farms and forests of Essex County. All past, in the space of ten minutes. And
there they were, to orbit the plucky little gunboats and their clouds of coal smoke as they steamed out the mouth of the Detroit River.
"Solo, Meteor, this is Lancer squadron. Joining the stack. We'll be passing you to the left and about… a thousand feet above. Watch and weep!"
And soon, there they were, waggling their wings. There'd been a
lot of flyable P-51 Mustangs in private collections before the Collapse. Maybe a hundred, maybe more. Seven had made their way to Chicago, at one time or another. Four were still in flying condition.
Worry Bird and
Cottonmouth,
Sierra Sue and Gentleman Jim, in a tight diamond, casually buzzed past her own looser, slower-going formation, engines barely ticking over, a few glints of sunlight on bare aluminum when the angle was right.
The Mustangs were faster than Solo's Corsairs, even as the smaller Corsairs could outrun her Skyraider- by a little, at cruise. A lot more at redline, but none of them had redlined their engines any time this decade. Maybe they would today. Or maybe they'd all be blown out of the sky by radar-guided rockets before they ever sighted the Viks. Who knew?
But if only they could get close...
Well, even the prop planes had a few teeth of their own. The Skyraider could carry four tons of bombs, rockets, and gun pods; the Corsair could handle around two. The flying characteristics weren't quite the same, but close enough to work together.
For this, the ground crews had already loaded each plane in her flight up with a brace of homebrewed Sidewinder knock-offs. They might not be the Air Force's best, but, in all fairness, her plane had no fire control, no jet afterburner, and not much avionics of any kind. Nothing like the Wolverines that Governor Jameson had somehow gotten for them, two years back. Certainly nothing like the jets.
She'd just have to hope the Wolverines- and the jet jockies- made the
best shots count. Because her Solos carried only two missiles each, ones that just might work if launched right up a Vee's tailpipe. Well, that and gun pods.
Lots of gun pods.
It was a chance, she supposed. If General Franks, or General Burns, knew something she didn't.
Better hope for that, too.
And for all that, she wouldn't miss this for the world. Not after what she'd seen, of these scarred lands.
Not many people flew these days. But she'd seen more than her share of America from the air, one way or another. There were some stretches of countryside where, from ten thousand feet, you could almost pretend the nation was whole and healthy.
But you had to pretend
hard, and she knew who was to blame.
If there was anyone who'd come up, like her, through the Chicago Air Patrol who
wouldn't die happy as long as they died fighting Vicks, well... Wendy would have a hard time getting inside their heads, and that was all.
*(Formerly a Michigan Air National Guard base. Redesignated by a Commonwealth-Detroit joint committee January 26, 2075)
