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carry a passenger, or cargo?"
    The question, paradoxically, made it easier to keep going. "It's true I can lift a passenger or maybe a hundred pounds of cargo, sir, but dropping stuff-anything I drop means taking a hand off the controls and changing the center of gravity, and that's just asking for trouble. I can dump a well-packaged box of paper off the passenger seat and hit a courtyard, sure, but a twohundred-pound bomb? That's a different matter. Even if I could figure out a way to rig it so I could drop it without tearing the wing off or stalling, I'd have to be high enough up that the shrapnel doesn't reach me, and fast enough to clear the blast radius, and the Saber's got a top speed of only fifty-five, so I'd have to drop it from high up, so I'd need some kind of bombsight-and they don't sell them down at Wal-Mart. Sorry. I can drop grenades or flares, and given a tool shop and some help we might even be able to bolt an M249 to the trike, but that's all. In terms of military aviation we're somewhere round about 1913, unless you've got something squirreled away somewhere that I don't know about."
    Earl Riordan stared at him for a few seconds, then shook his head. "No such luck," he grunted. "Damn their eyes." The CO wasn't swearing about him, for which Rudi was grateful.
    "So what are you good for?" demanded Vincenze, loudly.
    Rudi shrugged. The cornet had maybe had a drop too much rum in his coffee. Not terribly clever when you'd been summoned into the CO's office for a quiet chat, but then again nobody ever accused Vince of being long on brains: That wasn't much of an asset in a cavalryman.
    "Fair-weather observation. Dropping small packets, accurate to within a hundred feet or so. If you can find me somewhere to land that isn't under the usurper's guns I can carry a single passenger in and out, or up to a hundred and fifty pounds of luggage."
    "A single passenger." Hmm. The earl looked distracted. "Hold that thought. Out of curiosity, is it possible to parachute from the passenger seat?"
    "Maybe, but it'd be very dangerous." Rudi didn't need to search for words anymore: they were coming naturally. "It's a pusher prop so you couldn't use a static line. It'd have to be free fall, which would mean close to maximum altitude-I can only reach five thousand feet with a passenger-and if their primary chute didn't open they wouldn't have time to try a secondary, and I'd have fun keeping control, too."
    "So scratch that idea." Riordan raised his mug and took a mouthful of coffee. "Okay. Suppose you need to land somewhere, pick up a passenger, and fly out. What do you need?"
    "A runway." Rudi glanced into his own coffee mug: It was still empty, dammit. "With a passenger, depends on the weather, but a minimum thousand feet to be safe. I can probably get airborne in significantly less than that, but if anything goes wrong you need the extra room to slow down again. Ideally it needs to be clear-cut for the same again, past the end of the runway-most engine problems show up once you're just airborne."
    "A thousand feet?" Vincenze looked surprised. "But you took off from the courtyard!"
    "That was me, without a passenger," Rudi pointed out. "At two-thirds maximum takeoff weight you get in the air faster and you can stop a lot faster, too, if something goes wrong. If you want to take off with less than five hundred feet of runway, you really need an ultralight helicopter or preferably a gyrocopterultralight choppers are dangerous. Oh, and a pilot who knows how to fly them. It was on my to-do list."
    "Noted." Riordan jotted a note on his pad. "Assume bad people with guns are shooting at you when you take off. How vulnerable would you be?"
    Rudi shivered. He'd been shot at before, in his previous flight. "Very. The Saber-16 can only climb at about six hundred feet per minute. Takeoff is about thirty miles per hour. Handguns or musketry I could risk, but if they've got rifles? Or M60s? I'm toast. I'd be in range for minutes."
    "So we