Her Majesty's Western Service (35 page)

Hit the steam pedal. Increased speed.

Right
through
the inferno, she corrected herself.

Something burned behind them. Something exploded above them. Then they were clear,
racing through the other side of the airship that had, in a few seconds, been reduced to a blazing skeleton.

Perry looked at her.

“That was our ride out,” he said.

“Was.
This
is our ride out now,” Ahle replied. “Tell me: Where?”

Perry thought for a moment.

“Hugoton. Fleming has to see those maps. We can trade copies of the shit to Lynch if he says so. Get 4-106
next
.”

“We’re on the wrong side of the Kansas state line,”
Ahle said. “And Hugoton’s four hundred miles and change from
there
.”

“Yes, but we’re going to run into something first.
Friendly airship.
Somebody.
Chances are best going that way. Got any better ideas?”

Ahle
glanced at the compass, which read approximately south-southwest. She made a wheeling turn to the right. Turned back to Perry.

“No.
But we’re losing pressure. Get to the boiler.”

Roeder was met by a
seething, furious, icy-controlled Skorzeny, still coughing and slightly concussed. His rage seemed to cut through that.

“I want you to pursue them,” he said.

“Some of our elements already are,” Roeder said. “Stolen one of our vehicles, I saw. In the shop, I heard.”

“Yessir,” said the base commander, a Captain Metz.

“In the shop implies damage. What with?”

“Nothing serious. Her suspension took a hit from
a mine that didn’t completely go off. She’ll drive just fine.”

“
Damn it,
” said Skorzeny. “I want that vehicle destroyed. What do we have in the air near here?”

“Nothing closer than
Columbia, last I heard, sir,” said Roeder. “Nothing we can get at.”

“Get them. Destroy them if you have to, take the documents intact if you can. But use everything you have, Major, and
stop them
. Absolute top priority. Critical One.
Stop them.
”

“They’re in pursuit,” Perry reported from the hatch. He could see formations of lights, miles behind them on the plains. Gaining? He couldn’t tell.
“Can you drive any faster?”

“I’m
already
driving faster!” Ahle shouted back.

That was true. The bumpy earth was racing below them, and the speed needle had to be pushing
fifty if not past that. The wind blew hard against him, and the armored car kicked up a thick wedge of dust as they fled, the car bucking up and down under them.

Perry felt his ribs, where the bullet had hit. Sore, painful, bruised, but not broken. Thank God for kevlar.

“Angle south a bit. We want to hit the railway line.”

He knew this part of Kansas, though. It was
empty
. Cattle country, farms and ranches. At night, they were unlikely to encounter anything. Unlikely to be seen by anything.

At least they had a head start.

“By the way,” Ahle said, “just so you know, when I checked, we only have about half a load of fuel.”

Oh.

“We’re gaining on them, I think,” Roeder reported to Skorzeny, who was sitting in the bowels of the armored car. About half an hour into the chase, headed west-southwest. “They’re only a couple of miles ahead.”

“Let me take a look.”

Skorzeny, still coughing a bit – he was fucked up and his gut
hurt
from those punches, but damned if he’d let the major see that – took the commander’s hatch. Roeder’s sixteen armored cars, and the three remaining ones belonging to the base, and the one he was riding in, were sweeping across the plains in a line, racing each other as much as they were chasing the fleeing attackers.

Their searchlights swept across, too,
occasionally catching a the metallic glint of the now-enemy car. Too far for a lucky shot; the cars’ tires were heavy, solid rubber that a single round from the one-inch chainguns wouldn’t do much to, certainly not at this range.

Some of the cars’ commanders had
tried regardless, until Roeder had ordered them by flasher to knock it off.

Who are these damn people, anyway?

A black man, one had been. A black Southerner would never work with the Klan, so it had to be someone else. A Fed or an Imperial. Had the Feds gotten a clue? That could be
very
bad.

He’d have to interrogate the fuckers and find out. He’d already ordered Captain Metz to send his infantry through the scene of the fight, see if there were any enemy wounded who could also be interrogated.

At least he was having a smooth ride. The other vehicle had a busted suspension. The bastards would at least be uncomfortable.

And they couldn’t run forever, and their obvious escape mechanism had been blown out of the sky. If they lasted far past dawn, Skorzeny was going to be surprised.

“I think I’ve figured out what’s wrong with this thing,” said Ahle, as the car bumped painfully across another rock. “The suspension.”

“Very funny,” said Perry, who was nursing a burned hand from a while earlier, when he’d been tending the boiler at exactly the wrong bump.
After
which he’d found the locker containing the gloves normally used by the car’s engineman. “Very, very funny, Ahle.”

He adju
sted the boiler again to feed a bit more of the airship-grade petroleum-coal distillate into the engine, then moved back a bit through the car’s narrow quarters, going for the aft hatch. That had a ring-mount that looked like it could hold a flasher or a detachable machine-gun; at present it held neither, but it was a closer viewpoint than the fore gun-tub.

He stuck his head through, getting used to feeling the
wind lashing his back. They seemed to be gaining; the sweeping searchlights
definitely
seemed a fraction brighter. It was a little after five, and they’d been running for a very tense hour or so now.

“Gaining on us, I think,” he reported. “Looks like

“I’m serious about the suspension. These things are supposed to normally have a
much
smoother ride.”

“If we don’t run into help soon, we’re going to have a much
deader
ride,” said Perry.

“Do you know exactly where we are?”

“Does ‘somewhere in Kansas’ help? Or maybe northern Oklahoma?”

“No,” said
Ahle. “Not really, no.”

“Then just drive and hope this thing doesn’t break down on us.”

“Definitely gaining,” Roeder said another half-hour after that. “Definitely. We’re going to be approaching effective shooting distance soon. We’ll shoot them to fragments and have them.”

“You flashed my orders,” Skorzeny replied. Not a question, or even really much of a confirmation.

“Yes. Destroy them. Take the stuff intact if you can, but don’t under any circumstances let them escape. And kill the bastards.”

“Right. It won’t be much longer, sir.”

“It better not be.”

Roeder smiled. The thieves had the exact same model of APCs he and his men were using, of course, but
his
cars had full four-man crews, for one; driver, gunner, engineer and secondary gunner/flash operator. That helped a little.

What helped more was that the crews customized their vehicles a bit, and they
knew
the customizations and the invariable individual quirks of their particular vehicle. That added up to a little more efficiency from the boilers, and a little more speed from the engines.

Only a few percent more, perhaps a
nother mile and change per hour, but at a couple of miles’ range over the hour and a half it had been so far, it was going to be decisive.

The sun was beginning to rise in the east, backlighting the twenty pursuing armored cars. They’d drawn close enough, within a half-mile, that they were firing intermittent bursts; they were a line spread across the near distance, now, not just flashing lights that might have been on the horizon.

We’re gone
, thought Perry, as the marks on the hopper showed that the fuel was close to zero. There was what was in the engine now, plus about two percent more, and when that was in and burned...

They’d lose pressure, slow, and die. He’d tried a dozen stories in his head, but none of them fit. He didn’t have Federal identification. He was officially a rogue Imperial, and
Ahle was definitely a known pirate. And they’d killed at least one Special Squadrons man during the escape, not to mention sprayed several others and beaten the crap out of one of their ranking officers.

There was no conceivable excuse they could use, and no conceivable way the SS would see fit
not
to simply execute them out of hand.

A week and a half ago, it crossed his mind, he would have absolutely agreed that they
should
. A pirate and a renegade with stolen documents and blood on their hands?

It felt
different now.
She may be a pirate, but I’m not
really
a renegade!

No time for excuses.
If we’re going to die
, the Service officer’s part of his mind said,
take as many of those bastards with us as we can.

Very simple, when you came down to it.

Within a few hundred yards, and fire was striking home on the Cheetah regularly – not inflicting damage, but sparking off and making the hull ring. Making it dangerous for Perry to stick his head up without the shield of the front gun tub.

It didn’t matter. There was no need for a man at the boiler; the last of the fuel was gone and
Ahle’s gauge was already showing a loss in pressure. Within a few minutes – ten, at best, if they put up an effective fight against twenty times their number – it would all be over.

Perry fired another burst at what he thought would be the command car, shooting through their dust trail and the rising sun, now visible across the endless plains.

A sudden noise to his left. Engines. Propellers.

An airship. Flying low,
at a couple of hundred yards and getting lower.

Perry waved frantically.

“Pirates!” he shouted in the hope he might be heard, might be believed.

Was it just his imagination, or w
as the car starting to lose speed?

The airship continued to drop, on a clear intercept course for where they were headed. A rope ladder fell from it,
swaying as it dangled.

Oh, thank God!

“Jam the pedal down and maintain speed somehow while we can,” Perry ordered.

“I
see him just as well as you,” said Ahle, and proved it by adjusting course.

So could the pursuers. They switched their chainguns’ fire from
Ahle and Perry to the two-hundred-yard long airship’s bulk. Even at extreme range, five or six hundred yards, they couldn’t miss, and lines of sparks and dings clashed across the ship’s colorfully-painted, dust-faded aluminum hull.

Pe
rry laughed. They could fire all they wanted; at best they’d puncture a few hydrogen sacs. Without tracers, the armored cars’ fire would be irrelevant to this airship.

Regardless, the ship fired back. A missile burst from amidships,
trailing fire as it lanced out at the center of the line of armored cars. Two of them broke formation to avoid it. It hit the ground and exploded, sent a wild brown dust fountain into the sky against the sunrise.

Intercept! The ladder banged against the slowing armored car – they were down to three quarters or less of what their speed had been, now, and the Squadrons’ cars were gaining
fast
– and Perry, bag over his shoulder, grabbed it, climbed. Ahle was immediately behind him.

“You two hold on tight!” someone yelled from the hatch above.

Perry hooked his arms around the sides of the rope ladder, planted his feet and held on for dear life. Chaingun fire continued to spark the gondola.

“Ballast
now
!” that same voice yelled. A voice Perry had heard before, although he couldn’t place when.

Something rolled off the hatch, boxes and then barrels tumbling to the ground. The airship
jumped
with a sharp jerk, and suddenly they were fifty feet off the ground – no, sixty, seventy, and rising fast.