Ilse Witch - Terry Brooks [19]
“Hey, Cap!” A foot soldier with his arm tied against his body and a bandage over one side of his face hobbled into view. “Blow me a little of your luckl”
Redden Alt Mer grinned and blew him a kiss. The soldier laughed and waved with his good arm. The Rover kept walking, smelling the air, tasting it, thinking as he did that he missed the sea. Most of his time in the air had been spent west, over the Blue Divide. He was a mercenary, as most Rovers were, taking jobs where the money was best, giving allegiance to those who paid for it. Right now, the Federation offered the best pay, so he fought for them. But he was growing restless for a change, for something new. The war with the Free-born had been going on for more than ten years. It wasn’t his war to begin with, and it wasn’t a war that made much sense to him. Money could carry you only so far when your heart lay somewhere else.
Besides, no matter who you were, sooner or later your luck ran out. It was best to be somewhere else when it did.
He passed out of the sprawling clutter of tents and cooking fires onto the airfield. The warships were tethered in place by their stays, floating just off the ground, ambient-light sails tilted toward the sun off twin masts. Most were Federation built and showed it. Big, ugly, cumbersome brutes, sheathed in metal armor and painted with the insignia and colors of their regiments, in flight they lumbered about the skies like errant sloths. As troop transports and battering rams, they were a howling success. As fighting vessels that could tack smoothly and quickly, they left something to be desired. If they were ably commanded, which most weren’t, their life expectancy on the front was about the same as that of their Captains and crews.
He walked on, barely giving them a glance. The banter that had passed between himself and the foot soldiers was absent here. The officers and crews of the Federation airships despised him. Rovers were mercenaries, not career soldiers. Rovers fought only for money and left when they chose. Rovers cared nothing for the Federation cause or the lives of the men that had been expended on its behalf. But the worst of it was the knowledge that the Rover officers and crews were so much better than the Federation crews were. In the air, faith in a cause did little to keep you alive.
A few taunting remarks were tossed at him from behind the anonymity of metal-clad hulls, but he ignored them. No one would make those same remarks to his face. Not these days. Not since he had killed the last man who’d dared to do so.
The sleeker, trimmer Rover airships came into view as he neared the far end of the field. Black Moclips sat foremost, polished wood-and-metal hull gleaming in the sunlight. She was the best ship he had ever flown, a cruiser built for battle, quick and responsive to the tack of her ambient-light sails and the tightening and loosening of her radian draws. Just a shade under 110 feet long and 35 feet wide, she resembled a big black ray. Her low, flat fighting cabin sat amidships on a decking braced by cross beams and warded by twin pontoons curved into battering rams fore and aft. Twin sets of diapson crystals converted