Her Majesty's Western Service (12 page)

“
Nice little town,” Martindale said. “What do you figure the population is?”

“
Given the industrial bit on the river? Probably at least a thousand. More houses to the south of us, a lot more,” said Perry.

“
Local center of commerce. Wonder how soon we can get us a ride out?”

“If there's not one by tomorrow,”
said Perry, “we walk.”

Rafferty,
Gilford and a half-dozen other enlisteds, after being shown to a bunkhouse where they dumped their bags, found their way into the cowboy equivalent of an enlisted bar, a rough, dim place with cheap cast-iron spittoons on the floor.

“
Whisky,” said Gilford.

“
I'll have a beer,” Rafferty said. “And he'll have a beer, too. Not a whisky.”

“
Learning to behave yourself, Rafferty?” asked Vidkowski. The two had served together out of Bermuda as young Airshipmen Third then Second, and then met again in South China some years back.

“
Boss can't behave himself if he tries,” said Gilford proudly. “You hear what he did to that pirate with the rocket launcher? Would've fried him, too, if he hadn't been all jacketed up.”

“
I've seen him do worse,” Vidkowski said, drinking his own beer. “Only man in the crew to hurt the scabs, though. They remember us by anything, it's by what Raff did.”

“What Raff did, and what the cap’n’
s going to do,” said Warrant Second O'Leary, coming in with Senior Warrant Halversen.

Gilford gulped his beer nervously, a bit
uneasy in the presence of the squadron's top enlisted man and another warrant, besides. Halversen ranked equal to a battalion sergeant-major. Under normal circumstances even a warrant second wouldn't drink with an airshipman second.

“
Double whiskeys for us both,” Halversen told the bartender. He and O'Leary, who was a lean red-haired woman in her early forties, took the glasses.

“
I was under Perry in `56,” O'Leary said. “Specialist First on the
Galway Hawk
. FitzMorrison's division, punching out pirates in the Mediterranean and running guns to our rebels in Italy and Greece. Perry was a lieutenant-commander then, just been promoted.”

“
Wasn't that when the Frogs made their play for the Suez?” asked Vidkowski.

“
That was what made it
fun
. Well, we're clashing with a pair of Frog privateers over Cyprus; a nest of the bastards were somewhere in the mountains, and our wing was hunting it. Take some hits, and four of the rig crew go down. Three of `em women. We're moving too fast to rescue, but you know how the riggers are equipped for that shit.”

“
Wouldn't do rigging for the world,” Rafferty muttered. “That bonus they get ain’t enough.”

“
You did it for two years,” Halversen pointed out.

“
Two years too long. Sorry, Warrant.”

“
They go down. We meet up with some Marines a while later, pick them up for a ride back to Malta. Turns out they know what happened to those four riggers. Raped and killed by those Frog motherfuckers.”

“
Privateers,” said Halversen. “Which is to say, government ships and government contract but they can be denied. The Romantics are
assholes
like that.”

“
Honorable airmen go under their own flag and no other,” Vidkowski agreed. “I'm not ashamed of the Jack, and I'll clobber the man who says I should be.”

“
Anyway
,” O'Leary said, “Perry gets mad. You should have seen him. Demands permission to hunt them down. Squadron commander – that was Vice Rittenhouse, and a bitch on wheels
she
was – says, well, we got a crisis exploding in the Canal Zone, a rebellion to stop and an Army division to support. But I can live without one escort-class for two weeks, I suppose. You've got that much and no longer to chase down the killers.”

“
Did you get them?” asked Gilford.

“
We didn't sleep,” said O'Leary. “Captain Perry wanted to get the scum, and we were operating constantly. Sweeping the hills, landing our Marines to interrogate locals and prisoners. Don't think he was getting more than two or three hours a night of Z.”

“
You get them, Warrant?” Gilford asked again.

“
We got them. Second-last day, and only because Perry was riding the ship so hard. Caught them where they were trying to hide on the ground – we'd learned who it was, a little fuck named Scagnetti and his gang who'd done the raping, in either an escort-class or a scout-class, depending how you measure `em – and the cap says, just open up. No warning, no quarter, no terms. Blow their tanks, blow their ship, blow their buildings, blow them to fucking hell. We have a whole lot of ordnance on this ship, he says, and I don't want to come home with one grain.”

“He do it
?” asked Rafferty.

“
Nothing left of their base but ash and skeletals, and not much of that. Trashed it back and forth, then landed and shot a couple of woundeds we found playing possum in the wreckage. Perry says, you do
not
rape my crew.”

“
And you know,” said Rafferty, “I am
not
planning to!”

“
Vice isn't going to be happy about this, was my point,” Leary said. “Could've happened to anyone, but I'll bet you ten-two he's seeing it as a personal humiliation.”

“
Didn't seem very upset, Warrant,” said Gilford.

“
Of course he's gonna keep his mouth shut about it in front of enlisted types. He'll keep it shut around the junior officers, too. But you better believe he's gonna be seething inside, if I know him right. He'll have taken it personally. Last he took something personally that
I
saw? That wop bastard Scagnetti was dead two weeks later, with every last one of his crew.”

“
Excuse me?” It was the young deputy, Norris. He looked up and down the bar – about half of 4-106's enlisted crew was there, in knots and individuals, some of them talking to the local cowboys and a couple of off-shift workers. “Sergeant Danhauer says your captain wants to speak with Airshipman Gilford and Specialist Rafferty?”

“
That'll be us,” said Rafferty.

“
Come with me. Sarge says you fired a missile at one of the pirates.”

“
More than one, kid,” Rafferty said.

“
Fired one backwards when they were in your ship,” said Norris. “Fried him to a crisp, he said.”

“
Almost did," Gilford said. "Then Rafferty jumped on him and practically bashed his head in. One tough guy, my gun lead.”

“
Yeah, well,
I
shave with a broadsword,” said Norris, running a hand across the stubble on his jaw. “And, I'll tell you what? When the boogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for
me
.”

“
Uh-huh,” said Rafferty.

“
Gonna be a Ranger someday," Norris went on, leading them up the boardwalk. "This is just training. They say you've got to have four years doing law-enforcement as well as a military hitch. Three and a half more years, and I'm there.”

“
You were military?”

“
Air Force. Just ground crew,” he added, as though he expected the two airshipmen to make a fight of it.

“
Hey. Our ground crews are worth more than a damn,” said Rafferty. “And your lot aren't too bad either. Sweat themselves as good as any man under the Jack, they do, what I've seen of `em.”

“
I was with a hard bunch then, I'll grant. Stationed down near my hometown, in Oklahoma near the Tex border. At first. Hey, I got another one. That Charles Darwin guy got it wrong. No theory of evolution, just the animals I choose not to kill!”

The
common-room of the Grand Junction was an upscale place; low electric lighting, polished floorboards, leather chairs. The ship's officers were sitting around, a couple of them talking to civilians; a well-dressed cowboy in his fifties, a pair of men in suits who looked like drummers or cattle-buyers.

Captain Perry was in a booth with XO Martindale, on the same side. Both men had pads and pens in front of them.

“Thank you, deputy,” said Perry. “Specialist, Airshipman. Sit down, please. I want you to debrief me on exactly what happened in your missile bay.”

“
Buy us a drink, sir?” said Rafferty as he sat down. “Tongue moves better after a little oil, y'know, sir.”

“
You've had an hour in which to oil your tongues already,” said Perry. “And I don't want exaggerations here. You put up the only effective fight of anyone on the ship; I heard that much. I want to hear how it happened. Airshipman Gilford, you first.”

The XO's pen scribbled as Gilford began to tell his story, Perry asking questions every so-often. When he'd finished, Perr
y asked Rafferty.

“
Very well. You two, tell the bartender you're to have a drink apiece on my tab.
One
drink. Deputy Norris? Would you please find Senior Warrant Halversen and Airshipman First Jeppesen, bring them here?”

“
Thought this man might be of interest to you,” Danhauer said about half an hour later.

The guy
with him was short and sandy-haired, his square face smeared with grease. About forty, he wore a dirty white shirt under a frayed brown coat, and on his forehead were the goggles of an airshipman.

“
Vice-Commodore Perry,” said Perry. “Imperial Air Service. What can I do for you?”

“
Nolan's the name. Nate Nolan –
Captain Nathaniel
Nolan, at your service. Just winged in half an hour ago, sir.”

“
A captain of what?”

“
Red Wasp
,” Nolan said. “Captain and owner, with my wife. We heard there was a bit of a fight around here, might be some pickings.”

Another woman in goggles had come in,
her engineer's rig covered in sooty black and a clipboard in her hands. She was talking with the cowboys and businesspeople down the other end of the bar.

“
There might be,” said Perry. “You might also be looking to take passengers? Can you carry thirty-two people to Chicago?”

“
In the hold we could, sir. We might well could. It wouldn't be comfortable, but I can give you a lower rate than any passenger line. You want to give us a few hours to look over where the battle was, see what we can pick up?”

“
I'd rather get moving now,” said Perry.

“
One or two hours, is all I’m asking. You're flying to Chicago. That'll be sixty bucks a head, but I'll cut that down to fifty if you give us until four o'clock.”

“
That's
five
hours,” said Perry. “And you're charging second-class passenger rates for what isn't even steerage. How about four hours, and you get forty dollars a head. Paid on delivery.”

“
Now, if you don't have the cash down, it might be a little more. How about we say fifty, because a promise ain’t the same as a pound.”

“
Forty-five bucks a head, and you've got until three o'clock to take whatever you can scavenge from the battlefield. And if we're not in Chicago by sunrise tomorrow, you're getting thirty dollars a head. I don't care when we leave; I care when we
arrive
.”

“
How about fifty a head, and if we don't get to Chicago by sunrise, it's free?"

“
That sounds fair,” said Perry. “Good luck finding scraps. And be careful, a bunch of pirates also went down. Some might still be out there.”

That thing flies?
was Perry's first thought when he saw the
Red Wasp
, anchored at a stockyard near the town's little scout-class. It was a little over a hundred and fifty yards long, small as airships went, and every bit of it looked to have been a battered-apart piece of some other ship, crudely welded onto a frame that itself had started existence as at least three pieces. The aluminum gondola was a multicolored patchwork; pieces had clearly been taken from dozens of other craft, with blobs of color or pieces of lettering joined together in a messy quilt.

The cabin wasn't much better. The
re was the usual configuration of bridge/cabins then hold then engines; the engines emitted thick smoke just at idle, and the hold wasn't much more than a grilled box. Lines of reddish corrosion streaked the short pathway from the engine room to the hold, and there were frayed streaks of it where the engine room met the gondola. Rusting iron bolts ran along its length, and the entire ship was covered in a film of brownish dust.