In Her Majesty's Most Secret Aerial Flying Corps

I regained my composure.

Squinting my eyes against the rushing wind in my face, I regarded the rooftops passing by. From this vantage point, they formed such an orderly pattern of tranquil domesticity. The same could hardly be said for the view from the ground; from there, the building fronts jutted from the uneven cobbled streets like rows of crooked teeth, curving and winding within the slavering jaws of the city. Many a man had gotten himself lost in there, never to find his way out again.

No, it all looked very different from where I was. Peaceful. Orderly.

And no sound reached me from below. Even as I passed over the market square, where the crowds pressed against each other, where I knew very well the deafening clamor and confusion of noise, my ears were filled with nothing more than the rush of air, and the whistling of the wind.

I chanced a look back. There, beyond the last of the city streets, past the point where the buildings and houses petered out to shacks and shanties, I could still make out the camp, a stark patch of solid brown framed against the rising red hills. Tiny figures moved, and I had no doubt that the launching apparatus had already been dismantled and stowed away, for I could no longer make out the site of my departure.

It was true that the pressure of that initial ascent could be disorienting. After all, a great deal of upward force was required to propel a man into flight, and leaving the ground was not in our nature. Indeed, more than a few less seasoned men had lost consciousness on the way up, and lost more as a result.

But once you reached altitude and got your wits about you, it was really rather peaceful. As long as you held your form, the smooth surface of the flight uniform could do its job, eliminating drag and creating the cushion of air that would keep you aloft. Once you got that under control, very little else was required of you, and there was plenty of opportunity to look around.

Gazing down on it all from such a height, you could almost forget that you were a soldier, and imagine that the world was simpler, safer, altogether more docile and welcoming.

It was that sense of tranquility that struck me on my first flight. Senior veterans had tried to describe it to me, but in the end had always resorted to something very much like, "You'll just have to see it to understand," and "Once you're there, you'll know what we mean."

And I did.

Seeing the surface of the earth from that distance, becoming aware of its patterns and its softness, one could readily believe that a devoted but generally negligent creator might easily have convinced himself that all was well down there, and wandered off to amuse himself elsewhere, none the wiser to his creations' neverending stream of toil and conflict.

From above, all was harmonious.

A distant sound pulled me from my reverie, back to the situation at hand. A dull thud, far off. I scanned the landscape ahead of me.

There it was: a puff of smoke, like a wisp of wool caught on a tangle of briar. I heard the keening whistle rising, different from the steady rush already in my ears, and my muscles tensed, ready.

A small dark spot appeared, growing steadily larger. As I gauged the distance, I pivoted my shoulders, adjusting how my body took the onrush of air, and anticipating the path that the oncoming object would take.

The keening grew louder, and I continued to make subtle corrections to my course, never taking my eye off the rapidly growing dot, now nearly the size of my head. I was approaching it as quickly as it was approaching me, and in another moment it would be on me.

Then the black projectile shrieked past me, and I saw it momentarily silhouetted against the white horizon to my left. Then it was gone. Where it would land was beyond my estimation.

I wondered then if I'd been spotted, or whether the shot was part of the normal battery. As the artillery capabilities had been destroyed, the incidence of cannonballs had become inconsistent and seemingly arbitrary. A single stray shot was nothing out of the ordinary, but until I got closer, there was no reliable way of knowing whether my approach was being tracked.

Fortunately, the new launching apparatus was silent, at least compared to the loud report of cannon fire. It was an ingenious marvel of engineering, resembling a giant crossbow, and using a very simple counterweight mechanism to increase the upward thrust. Because there was no detonated charge, there would have been no audible warning of my ascent. Still, I was hardly invisible. A full-grown man is, after all, much larger than any common military projectile.

If they had seen me go up, then coming down could be much less pleasant, and my mission much more complicated. In the meantime, my only option was to keep out of the path of whatever else they decided to throw in my direction. Dodging one cannonball was simple enough. Well, no--it was actually very complicated; the smallest miscalculation in movement could send your body careening off in the wrong direction, or put you into a wild, flailing spin, hopelessly out of control and entirely at the mercy of the wind, until you plunged helplessly to the ground without the merest hope of a safe landing.

So no, it wasn't simple, necessarily, but it was certainly less challenging than trying to avoid several of them at once.

Looking down again, I saw the last row of rooftops pass beneath me, and then I was out over the river. Dark shapes moved beneath the shining surface of the water, and I was glad to be far above it, well out of range of the leaping, hungry mouths.

I checked my distance; still holding steady on course. The cannon shot had given me a better sense of how far away I was, though I couldn't yet make out my target.

Though still a good distance to go, I began to mentally prepare myself for my descent, and ultimately for impact. The principle was simple enough, albeit counterintuitive. Every ounce of your self-preservation wanted to glide softly to the ground, but that wasn't the intention at all.

When the flying program had been in its formative days, there had been two camps: Lord Hawksworthy, a senior engineer of impeccable lineage and reputation, said that the safest maneuver was to spread the arms and legs out as wide as possible, in order to evenly distribute and absorb the impact throughout the entire body, thereby reducing the amount of force exerted on any one part.

The opposing claim came from Lionel Chatham, the young Baronet whose father had first envisioned the Flying Corps. He posited that the only safe means of landing was to make the body as small as possible, giving a forward direction to all the building force from the acceleration of descent, and providing a final burst of kinetic energy that would actually drive ahead of the landing. As a result, the force of the human projectile would exceed the inert mass of nearly anything in its path, and would actually slow the body down as it continued through impact. A controversial claim, to say the least.

And so the two men put their ideas to the test.

The results had been irrefutable. As it turned out, Hawksworthy's whole-body approach had proven quite definitively that the spreading out of the human body simply made it into a rather poor parachute, and the even distribution of force meant that the first unfortunate bastard to try it broke every single bone in his body, equally.

So Chatham's theory won the day, and a reliable system of descent was devised in earnest.

But just like dodging cannonballs, the actual execution is far from simple. Even with practice, the slightest misalignment of your body can quite easily turn you from a highly trained aerial assassin into little more than an oversized water balloon. Concentration is the key.

The camp was coming into view. There was the row of artillery; thankfully our earlier barrages had cleared most of their guns, though there were still enough to bring me down if they happened to fire them all at once.

Which is exactly what they did.

There was no flurry of activity on the ground to suggest that they were actually firing at me, but even as the four wisps of smoke appeared, followed by the four corresponding reports, I cursed myself silently for even imagining it.

Three of the remaining cannons were divided on opposite ends of the line, while one more sat near the center. Their gunners had fired all four almost simultaneously, and unless I was very lucky, outmaneuvering them would require every ounce of skill and concentration I had.

I watched the black dots approach, and almost immediately saw that one was high, another wide. But the remaining two were going to be very close, if they didn't both hit me at the same time.

I banked slightly to the left, then corrected right.

Still closer. Closer. Now they were almost on me.

At the last moment I took a chance and rolled right. I felt them whistle by, one only inches from me, and then they were gone.

I quickly corrected left again, before I lost control and went into a spin, and managed to get back on course.

There it was: a row of tents, the largest with two tall center poles flying brightly colored banners that snapped in the breeze. Inside, the Comandante would be dining with the Prince Regent and his closest advisors; the serpent's entire head, all in one place, all at one time. The final stroke to end this bloody war.

I tucked my hands along my ribs, just within reach of my pistols. If they failed me, there were two long knives strapped to my thighs, another in my right boot. The confusion caused by my landing would buy me time to press my advantage.

I readied myself, prepared to pull my knees up and bury my head; this would send me into a roll, amplifying the force of my descent. Even so much as a thumb out of place could be fatal, but I'd never gotten this part wrong.

My heart began to race, adrenaline coursing through my veins. I took one last deep breath and set my teeth.

The canvas approached. I tucked, and prepared for impact.