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wing in the process. The cockpit was disappointingly bare of anything useful; there
     was a map, but the only things marked on it were the suspected locations of
his
side’s troops. Two that he knew about were pretty accurate.
    Cole wasn’t surprised at the lack of data, since whoever was in charge of enemy glider
     doctrine would have anticipated something exactly like this. If the enemy were stupid
     they wouldn’t be winning. There wasn’t anything in the way of emergency gear, either.
     Every single ounce of weight was precious in these things.
    “Look . . .” he paused to give his name and rank.
    “Pilot Officer Alyssa Larsson, on the A-List of the Bearkiller Outfit, flying for
     the High Kingdom of Montival,” she said.
    “OK,” he said, organizing his thoughts. “Name, rank and serial number, right? You’re
     not one of the castle freaks.”
    “A PPA Associate? I should hope
not
.”
    He nodded. “We’ve got two options here. I can just let you go, in which case you’ll
     starve or get et by something or die of exposure. Unless your base is close—”
    He lifted an enquiring eyebrow, and she laughed sourly at the invitation to fall into
     an elementary trick.
    “OK, or you can surrender and I’ll take you back to
my
base.”
    “How far, and in what direction?”
    He snorted a chuckle. “I’m not an idiot either,” he said, then nodded when she just
     smiled.
    It was a wry expression, but then, it had to hurt with those injuries. He went on:
    “Right. If you come with me, I want your word you won’t try to backstab me or give
     me away to your people.”
    “I’m not going anywhere near the Cutters,” she said flatly. “I’ll take my chances
     with the wolves and bears and tigers first.”
    He kept his face neutral; his impulse was to say
well, of course, the Cutters are fucking mad weasel lunatic neobarbs
, but it wasn’t something you could say to the other side about your sort-of allies.
     For that matter most of the westerners were officially neobarbs too. Instead he thought
     hard, and went on slowly: “My CO . . . Captain Wellman . . . ah,”
Hates the Cutters like poison,
he didn’t say.
    They’d tried to put a Church Universal and Triumphant chaplain in with Battalion about
     three months ago, now that Boise didn’t have a President to keep them at bay. The
     man had just disappeared two days after he arrived, and nobody had known a thing.
     He suspected that Wellman and the sergeant-major had taken care of it personally and
     buried the body in a latrine about to be filled in.
    “. . . ah, the CO is an absolute stickler for the rules.”
    Which had the advantage of being true; scuttlebutt said it was the reason Wellman
     hadn’t switched sides, which some of the men thought he
should
do. Cole hadn’t wanted to believe the stories about Martin Thurston, but with his
     own mother and his
wife
, for God’s sake, defecting to the enemy and screaming that they were true . . . and
     he was dead now anyway, which left Fred Thurston as the old General’s only living
     son, and
he
was on Montival’s side.
    Fubar squared.
    The glider pilot looked at him searchingly for a long moment, then nodded slowly.
    “My chances right now with a busted arm and no gear aren’t much,” she said. “OK, but
     I
will
take off if I get a chance and think the odds are good. I’m not giving a general
     parole. We’re not allowed to, anyway.”
    “Fair enough, neither are we,” he said. “Now, what about something to eat?”
    She snorted and pulled out a paper-wrapped something from one of her many pockets.
     The wrapping had
Rat. Bar
stenciled on it.
    “This is the sum total of my supplies. As the label suggests, it’s made from dried
     rats.”
    Cole did a double take before he was sure she wasn’t serious. He had a couple of pounds
     of hardtack and some dried fruit in his pack, along with some salt and half a bag
     of dried chili flakes his mother had sent him. He grinned