A Private Little War(35)
In its day, its first youth, the plane (with its puny Clerget nine-cylinder rotary and radically nose-heavy construction) was not a great climber. It was murder in a dive. Smooth and level flying was tricky. Because of its weight distribution and the torque of its engine, it wanted always to pull right, to roll over like a dog that wouldn’t stop doing its favorite trick. Taking off and landing were not its strong suits. Among the pilots who first got to know her, the Camel was known as a trainee killer, taking the lives of many before they’d completed their first flight, before they’d even gotten off the ground. And like an angry pet not quite tamed, the Camel would often maim or kill those who’d come to know her well out of pure, almost animal cussedness.
But to a careful, respectful, and conscientious pilot, there was no machine in the world so fine as the Sopwith F.1. Because of her touchy and unbalanced state, she could out-turn to the right any plane twice, outrun most, out-dive all, out-loop any but the most mad, and out-maneuver anything in the sky in a straight-up fight. In the dawning moments of the twentieth century, she could throw more weight of lead farther and faster than any predator yet devised, and like some dark, panting, and live thing, seemed to grow faster, neater, and more savagely beautiful whenever there was blood in the air. The Camel was the plane that killed the Red Baron, April 21, 1918. It was the Camel that brought down the most enemy planes during the course of that war: 1,293, not counting Richtofen. Highest scoring ace of that war: Donald MacLaren with fifty-four kills. His plane? The bloody Camel.
This was the litany. Carter knew it as well as anyone. He and the other pilots, they’d read the books. They’d committed the facts to memory. The Fokker D.VII sometimes caught fire from running too hot and exploded. The Nieuport’s wings could tear off in a dive.
Like bad gene expressions, some of these foibles and intricacies of operation had been carried forward across the centuries. Titanium framing members, modern electronics, laser-milled engine components, high-octane aviation fuel—despite all this, Roadrunner was still more Camel than not: tricky, complex, cruel. But along with her eccentricities, so, too, had she been reborn with all the predatory heat and killing want that’d once been the original Camel’s pride. So now, in the icy skies above an alien world hundreds of light-years and centuries distant from the aeries and workshops where she’d been originally conceived, Kevin Carter was left to wrestle with his Camel as she pitched and bucked, growling in frustration as he walked her back and forth and back and forth across the black stretch of night.
Hunched, half-frozen in his seat, he keyed the radio again. “Control, Roadrunner. Time to target for the rest of the wing?”
Twelve minutes, he was told. Then nine, then eight.
“Six minutes, Roadrunner. Two minutes less than when you asked me two minutes ago.”
His fingers felt frozen inside his gloves; his face ached. To stay warm, he would duck lower, sit on his hands, breathe into them, and then press them to his cheeks or cup them over his ears. None of this worked. He remembered a joke that had run through the camp for a week or two in the depths of last winter’s cold, started inadvertently by Ted. When they’d shipped out for Iaxo, hidden in among their supplies had been four dozen little lozenges of smooth stainless steel—the kind of things that looked like they’d belonged in a surgery. No one had known what they were for the longest time, until someone had figured out that they were actually catalytic hand warmers. Just pour in a drop of fuel, light an internal wick, then cap the thing, and it would give off a steady warmth for twelve hours. The pilots, of course, went nuts for them. They’d keep them in their pockets, shove them inside their gloves, drop one down the front of their knickers so that it rested under their balls, between the cloth and their armor. For two weeks, maybe three, no one complained of the cold.
Then they started to fail. The wicks burnt out. The fuel reservoirs began to leak. When they were down to two or three working units, the men who held them were like the camp’s millionaires—lucky beyond all reasonable measure. And when the last one finally gave out and someone asked Ted what they were supposed to do now that they had no way to stay warm in the air, Ted had said, “Think warm thoughts.”
Think warm thoughts.
They’d laughed and laughed until they’d realized how unfunny it really was.
There were good reasons why the company flew planes into combat on Iaxo that’d last seen action over the walls of Malaga. First, a biplane was a simple machine. Discounting its engine and guns, it had only about two dozen moving parts. Rudder, flaps, the stick, throttle linkage, interrupter gear, some simple hydraulics. Nothing more. They could be assembled in the field with the most rudimentary tools and maintained with a minimum of effort. In comparison, a modern transatmospheric fighter/bomber had twenty-two moving parts that made up its cockpit latch. Even the earliest twentieth- and twenty-first-century air superiority fighters consisted of thousands of parts, hundreds of interlinked systems, bonded construction airframes. The failure of one little piece meant the machine was grounded. Useless until the part was repaired or replaced. But one of the company’s planes on Iaxo? A man could beat on one for an hour with a lead pipe, shoot it full of holes, then light half of it on fire, and the odds would be good that it’d still fly. Sneeze on a modern vacuum fighter and it would be in the shop a week.