Her Majesty's Western Service (30 page)

“Even when they had money?”

Ahle shrugged. The steamer was moving slowly, enormous rear paddle wheel churning spray. They seemed to have reached full speed, and by Perry’s eye that full speed wasn’t much more than ten or twelve miles an hour. No wonder it was going to take them almost three days to reach New Orleans!

“If you have money, you can afford insurance,” said
Ahle. “We’re just skimming a little bit off the top.” She paused. “You know, I never killed anyone as a pirate. Ever.”

“I find that hard to believe.
You stole enough.”

Ahle
’s lip curled in a slight snarl. “You know, I have to work with you to keep Ronalds, Hollis and the others alive. I don’t have to
like
you, Imperial, and I don’t. I’m going to the common room for a drink. Alone.”

Ahle
stormed off.

Loyal to her people?

Well, pirate scum. Loyal to her people meant loyal to scum, even if it meant denying they
were
scum. For a moment he’d almost felt sorry for her, with her officers’ lives held to ransom over a mission she wasn’t guaranteed to succeed at.

Bastards deserved to hang, of course.

Worry about yourself, Marcus. Worry about Annabelle and what the children will think if you don’t succeed at this and you’re a fugitive, not a respectable Imperial airshipman, for the rest of your life.

Which won’t be long.

Eventually night fell. A couple of hours after sunset, they stopped by a rickety pier at Cape Girardeau to offload a few passengers and onload a few more. Ahle cooled down, possibly after a few drinks, and got Perry to buy her one – “and one for yourself, we may as well spend Ian’s money” – in the common room.

The steward with the slicked-back hair was joined by the other steward, a tubby blond kid who couldn’t have been older than seventeen, and who’d given them their tickets at the St. Louis pier. Now the older steward had a microphone, fritzing faintly through a speaker in one end of the common r
oom, and the kid had a sax. The thirty or so traveling workers aboard the steamer gathered in an appreciative crowd in front of them.

“And this evening we have the Albinos; Slick Willy over here out of Little Rock on the sax
ophone and E.A. Presley – that’s me, ladies and gentlemen – on vocals as always. You all got your drinks, because we got a new song for you this trip! The Southern boys’ blues, and I think you’ll know what we’re talking about.”

Despite himself, Perry found himself smiling and raising his beer. This was where jazz
came
from, although a couple of stewards on a Mississippi rustbucket couldn’t be very good.

He took a sip from his beer and nodded as the kid named Slick Willy opened with a
blare on his sax. The other man began to sing:

Dark night, falls over Memphis

Feds they’re on the prowl

We’re not the Klan, there’s not a man

But the Feds, they’re on the prowl.

The Feds, they have the khaki

Their Germans wear light grey

Like my great-granddaddy wore

Before he went away

Me, I’m wearing blues

Got the Southern blues

Real bad

The Feds they got the cuffs on you

The mercs they’ll simply shoot

All the work my parents did

It
goes northeast as loot

I got the Southern blues, man

- Sing it, brother –

Got the below-the-Mason-Dixon blues, real bad.

It went on for a while in that vein – Southern blues singers, it seemed, got a whole lot of material from the Federals’ behavior.
And they
are
jerks
, Perry thought; heavyhanded and abusive, while the Imperials looked the other way in total defiance of the Curzon Doctrine.

Then, the Doctrine didn’t say anything about Imperial allies, just that the Empire
itself
would respect the absolute right of nations and regions to self-determination. Pieces of the old Empire – most of the Russian Empire now, and the Franco-Spanish Romantics did some pretty atrocious things in Africa and south Asia – had been held in place by force.

Pieces of the
post-1909 Refoundation Empire could leave any time they saw fit; they stayed for the benefits and had a voice in its governance. But the United States was an Imperial ally, and treated its South the absolute opposite way; not even trying to win hearts and minds, holding down the territory through brute force. And the Imperials looked the other way, sometimes actively assisted...

They’d argued this sort of thing as cadets at the Academy, and
as junior officers. As he’d gotten older and been promoted, abstract philosophical bullshitting became less important; you discussed practicals, not hypotheticals.

But the workers here, the bullied smallholders and dispossessed landholders of the South, the blacks who were abused from both sides,
the traveling migrants with him on this boat as it slowly made its way down the black Mississippi – these weren’t abstractions or hypotheticals. The people who’d created an entire musical genre were right here, right around him, and he was
working
with someone whose family had been wiped out by mercenaries who completely ignored the Geneva Conventions but had been paid, when you came down to the real source, with Imperial money.

We’re supposed to be the good guys, the Empire. But we look the other way at some pretty damn shady and disgusting behavior.

It was confusing and disconcerting to think that people like Ahle might have a point, might have valid grievances.

As the two stewards segued into a new song, about a w
oman who’d left, as the engines of the heavy steamer thrummed resonantly through the boat, as the
Memphis Darling
pushed her barges slowly down the wide, dark river, Perry headed over to the bar again.

“Scotch,” Perry told the off-duty crewman in filthy coveralls, who was filling in as the stewards played. He pushed over a dollar. “And make it a triple.”

Chapter Twelve

…also present at the 1875 signing of the Hanoverian Alliance, as part of the British and German entourages respectively, were two officers who, it is known, met. Then-Commander Jackie Fisher, and then-Colonel Ferdinand von Zeppelin.

Fisher was already
well-regarded in the Royal Navy for his work on torpedo development, and it is understandable that he at first saw Zeppelin’s dirigibles as a means to deliver those. His own diaries, however, show that he was quickly saw other military possibilities in airships, and was determined to add them to his Navy.

In
March 1877, four years before the outbreak of the Great War, Fisher was promoted to captain and put in charge of the newly-established Royal Navy Aerial Arm, precursor to the Imperial Air Service that the great military innovator would go on to father…

From
The Air Service: An Abbreviated History
, Chatham Press, 1941.

Karen
Ahle loved New Orleans. The Free City, they called it, because it sat on the border of Texas and the United States, looking onto the Gulf of Mexico and its coastlines with Mexico, Yucatan and Spanish Cuba, itself a gateway to vibrant Central America and the teeming Caribbean. There was room for a trade town – trade in goods proper, illicit and stolen – at that intesection, and teeming New Orleans with its thousand fences fit that space as though it had been built for the purpose.

Lake Pontchartrain, as they slowly
exited the canal leading to it, was filled with hundreds of airship support barges, more of them loaded than empty. Water taxis and motorboats ferried people around between the barges, or back and forth to the city whose flood-barrier walls rose on their right. The channel was thick with shipping and a breeze blew in their faces, light soot mixed with thick salt, as Perry stood with Ahle and a dozen of the other traveling workers.

“How are we going to
find
this woman once we land?” Perry asked. He seemed to have warmed since their clash, possibly due to seeing first-hand on the ground what the Feds were doing. The boat had been brutally searched in dock at Memphis by a platoon of yellow-uniformed mercenaries, jabbering at each other in fast Italian while occasionally barking an order in broken English at one or another of the stewards.

They hadn’t paid much attention to
Ahle or the heavily-sweating Perry, but they’d roughed up a couple of the other workers and shaken down a ten-dollar bribe from Perry, who’d simply handed it over without trying to negotiate down. They’d gotten smaller bribes from others of the better-dressed passengers – six fifty from Ahle, after first trying to extort ten – and something from the boat’s captain, probably after indicating they’d keep the boat in Memphis indefinitely without it.

That kind of shit could and did happen; for that matter, some of the units – such as
the damned murdering Special Squadrons – were known to simply confiscate boats, airships or whatever they could get their hands on.

But they’d made it out, and the experience seemed to have maybe given the Imperial some context. Or perhaps the blues the stewards had been playing; it might have been artistically lacking, but it was genuine, more genuine than the
smoothed-up performers at upscale clubs in Dodge and Denver played. Those performers were just making a buck; these guys
felt
it, and maybe some of that had come across.

She looked back at Perry.

“We’re not going to find her.”

Perry seemed bemused.

“What’s the point of this trip, then?”

“You’ve n
ever heard of Miss Lynch, have you? She knows
everything
. We won’t find her; she’ll find us. We’ll check in at the nearest hotel, get a drink, and wait. It shouldn’t take long.”

It didn’t even take
that
long. They were met at the dock by a well-built, crew-cut man of about thirty who introduced himself as Johnny Unitas. There was a twinge of northerner to his accent, but that didn’t surprise Ahle; people of all kinds found their way into New Orleans. Looked unarmed to a casual observer, but Ahle could see the tell-tale bulge of a pistol under his silver-trimmed brown leather jacket, and would have bet he had at least one hideout gun plus a few knives.

“If you’ll come this way, Captain; Vice-Commodore?”

He led them off the docks and to a waiting car.

“I trust you have the chip?”

Perry reached into his jacket and handed over the obsidian chip. Unitas inspected it closely, then put it into his own jacket and nodded.

“
Take a seat,” he said. “The boss will see you after lunch.”

New Orleans, at the heig
ht of noon in late March, was busy and crowded. The open back of the steam-car made a walking pace through the dock district, past loaded freight trucks and colorfully dressed pedestrians, toward and into the dense, crowded French Quarter. Ahle was aware – Perry probably wasn’t – that they were being led and tailed by narrow two-man electro-quadripedes that weaved in and out of the traffic but always kept about the same fifty-foot distance.

Unitas, riding shotgun, was maintaining a
degree of alertness himself. They passed a bronze statue, thirty feet high, of Governor Huey Long, at the center of a rotary, and then the streets became a lot denser and the buildings a lot older. The traffic only increased, though, and even Ahle – a Southerner, used to it normally – was feeling the heat and the humidity as the car inched through crowded traffic.

Even
tually they stopped outside a discreetly upscale cafe with a couple of loitering men smoking cigarettes around it. As Perry watched, one of them ambled off, only for another passer-by – in an expensively fake airshipman’s rig, thigh-high leather boots and a begoggled top-hat; urban trash with money – to take up station a few feet from where the first man had been.

He wasn’t as familiar with this business as
Ahle clearly was, but his few days of accelerated training with Agent Connery had taught him a few things. One of them was that these men were obviously guards, and another was that if a professional like this Miss L apparently was, had two guards visible, there were going to be at least four in the windows and rooftops. A lot of security for a brothel.

“Welcome to Denard’s Cafe,” said their guide, the man called Unitas. “Why don’t you come in and have a couple of drinks? Miss L will make herself available to you presently.”

This is a lot of rigamarole to deal with a two-bit information broker
, he thought.