Her Majesty's Western Service (5 page)

“
Guarding convoys against stand-up fights?” the base officer suggested, shrugging. “Advanced field-testing, arguably. And it never hurts to
have
the firepower. First of the Denny-Neuvoldt class to be deployed west of the Atlantic.”

Perry gestured
at the vanes running along the dull-grey aluminum hull, and the center and fore steering fins. Almost all airships had huge aft fins; 4-106 had them front and center, too, and a propeller toward the front, just before the point where the gondola began to nosecone upward, that was supposed to be able to pivot two hundred and thirty degrees.

New innovations; very much new innovation
s. The ship looked like something out of a rocket-fiction book.

Perry smiled. He’d enjo
yed those stories as a young man; they were a part of what had drawn him to the Air Service in the first place.

“I'd be skeptical about flying that, sir. Bluntly.”

“Handles like a scout-class, the delivery crew told me.” Perry said. “I'll admit it looks strange.”

The
cabin was long and sectional: front command and observation, double pressure-gun battery below. A hundred-yard catwalk led from there, through a line of rocket batteries, into a bulky engine hall. There, engines fed power to six enormous propellers that stuck from the hall on long struts, three to a side.

“
The latest,” said the base officer. “Must be a good feeling to be given one of those. A high point in your career, sir, if I may say so.”

“
You may,” Perry said. “And it is. And thank you. And now, we have a convoy to prepare.”

Perry and the
deputy base commander walked across the concrete landing pads. Around them, loading cranes turned; airshipmen scampered across steel-netted exteriors, doing maintenance. A balding, bearded Warrant Second in his forties, coveralls filthy with coal oil, approached the two officers and saluted.

“
Warrant Morton?” the base officer greeted him.

“
Fueling's complete, sir.” A nod at Perry. “All seven of the Vice-Commodore's are ready.”

“
Any issues?” the base officer asked.

“
Not a one.”

Perry checked his watch;
7:22 am, Central Standard.

“
We're on schedule. Good job, Warrant.”

“Thank you, sir.”

A wind gusted, rocking some of the tied-down airships. Not very hard; each was fastened to the ground by
heavy
steel cable. Someone shouted something anyway; a kid Airshipman Third, perhaps, who'd lost his footing on his rigging.

As they entered the support
building, Perry glanced at his reflection in the polished glass of a doorway. Five-nine, built a little stockier than average – but only a little, there were weight regulations. Coffee-colored skin, shaved head and the neat square goatee that was fashionable for Air Service officers of his rank. He wore the standard officer’s field uniform; grey shirt, sky-blue trousers and spit-polished, rubber-soled black boots.

On
each of his shoulderboards was a single silver wreath, the insignia of his rank; looking at
that
was cause for a slight smile, because vice-commodore at thirty-six was an accomplishment in peacetime; equivalent to Army lieutenant-colonel or Navy commander.

The
boards themselves were reason to be happy; the left one had a green border, which indicated a command, and the right-side one had a gold border, which indicated that the command was of a line unit, a fighting squadron.

It was a beautiful morning in Colorado and
Marcus Perry was assuming command of a magnificent piece of technology on its operational shakedown run, and in his quietly-analytical way he knew he was happier than any man on government service had the right to be.

The briefing was
short and cursory. The squadron's twenty-eight officers - and seven senior noncoms - knew the procedure; with the exception of the new 4-106, this was a routine convoy run. Large convoy protected by a squadron, even if three of the seven Service ships would be splitting off for Hugoton instead of running with the main group to Chicago. Not a lot of pirates had the nerve or the strength to go after Imperial ships; mostly they preferred unescorted loners. They'd be flying over bad country, still very much the Wild West, but numbers reduced that risk.

Perry had mixed feelings over that. On the one hand, he
wanted
to see how 4-106 would perform in action, and killing pirates was always a pleasure. On the other, he had a skeleton crew, barely enough to handle the ship outside of a fight, until they picked up new men in Chicago.

Weather was about normal
, but they were crossing a thousand miles. No known threats, but intelligence over that distance was minimal and it
was
wild country.

“
It should be about thirty-six hours to Chicago,” he closed the briefing. “Lift in sixty-two minutes.”

“
Sir,” said an enlisted yeoman to Perry outside the briefing room. “Your wife is here.”

“
Take her to logistics,” Perry said.

“
Have you run the checklists I asked for?” Perry asked the senior officer in logistics; the same base XO who'd taken him around 4-106 to begin with.

“
Yessir,” that man said. In one wall were two of the base's analytical engines, one of them with a mechanitype printer. He handed Perry seven folders of organized papers.

Commander Ricks, who was Perry's XO and would be taking the
second wing of the squadron to Hugoton, accepted them one after the other.

“
Necessary equipment, final checklist, by category. All seven ships,” Perry said.

“
Checklist, necessary by category,” Ricks confirmed. The thirty-five year-old Ricks was tall, blond and flamboyant, with recruiting-poster good looks. As a personal eccentricity, he wore an ornately-hilted rapier that Perry had seen him practicing with at times.
Born in the wrong century
, was Perry's opinion of Ricks;
competent, but too prone to unnecessary improvisation. The book exists for a reason.

“All seven, Ricks?”

“Oh, yes. All seven checklists are there.”

“
Good. Checklists, essential items by on-ship location.”

This time Ricks did look through to make sure a list existed for each ship, and not the same list twice, before accepting.

“Checklists, essential items by on-ship location, we have. All seven.”

“
Checklists, essential items by alphabetical order,” said Perry.

“Got them.”

“Have two officers and one warrant on each ship go through and confirm everything,” Perry said.

“
Yessir.” This was standard procedure. Perry's reasoning was that a standard triplicate check might miss something; three different people checking by three different categories would be much less likely to.

Perry drew a notepad from his pocket.

“Very well. Briefing, all aspects, done. Logistics checks, done. I'll be back at nine for a final flight check. Nonessential crew are free as they like; have them report to squadron ready rooms at five to nine.”

All of which had been covered in the briefing, and none of which would be new to the enlisted men themselves, who were mostly in their mess, the gym or the ready rooms anyway.

Never hurt to repeat. No such thing as being too precise, too careful, too orderly. The Empire was built on – built
for
– order. Perry did his part.

“
Annabelle.” He kissed her.

Mrs. Annabelle Perry was a year or so older th
an her husband, of African-Indian ancestry; her father had grown up in Sri Lanka, enlisted in the Navy, met her mother in Cape Town. After her father did his twenty-five years – rising to senior chief petty – and got out, they'd moved to London. Like hundreds of thousands of others from diverse sectors of the Empire, pursuing the dream of social mobility in the capital.

Like
him, she spoke with about ninety percent of an upper-class British accent; since their teens, like most people of their background and aspirations, they'd been internalizing the tones, vocabulary and speech patterns of Eton and Oxford. She was an accountant, right now on contract as associate CFO for a minerals and ranching firm here in Denver.

“
How are the kids? They were asleep when I left this morning.”

“
They're fine.” She smiled. “It's nine hundred and twenty-five miles to Chicago, Ernest told me. Approximately. Is it?”

“
Nine hundred and nineteen straight-line, but it varies by how you count it. It was in one of his gazetteers?”

“
No, he checked a map with a ruler.”

Perry smiled.

“He's going to be unhappy when he gets older. The world's already been explored, for the most part. By the time he's grown up, all the maps will have been made.”

“
By then,” Annabelle said, “they'll have a moon rocket, and they'll need explorers there. Or perhaps Venus, exploring the jungles in a pith helmet.”

“
What about Maria?”

“
She just wanted to know when you'd be back. When
will
you be back?”

“
I don't know. Orders awaiting in Chicago. It might be another run straight back here; it might be Hugoton, or St. Louis. Or Edmonton.”

“
Or the South,” said Annabelle. “One of the buyers just came from Missouri; he mentioned possible trouble. One of the big German mercenary companies threatening not to renew their contract.”

"
One or another of the contracting firms is
always
threatening not to renew,” said Perry. “It's how they negotiate more money. Nothing ever comes of it.”

“
Wire me when you get the orders, if they don't bring you back. And take care out there, in that new ship of yours.”

“
It should be just another milk run, darling,” Perry said. “With a new piece of hardware to play with, but I'm not worried. I'll let you know when I get to Chicago. Although I might be back before you get the telegram.”

“Captain on the bridge,”
reported Specialist Second-Class Vidkowski, and got to his feet.

“
Captain on the bridge,” said 4-106's XO, Lieutenant-Commander Julian Martindale. The rest of the bridge crew were on their feet, saluting.

“
At ease, people,” Perry said. He slid the goggles on over his eyes; a formality, but formalities were important. “I have the ship.”

“
Captain has the ship,” said Martindale.

“
Captain has the ship,” Vidkowski repeated into the electrical telephone.

Perry sat down in the command chair. The bridge was semi-circular at the front of the
cabin, clear plexiglass giving a hundred-and-eighty-degree view. In the center was the master pilot's control, a wheel and throttle. Perry's station was to the left of that, the XO's to the right. Both command stations held communications and auxiliary piloting controls, and cogitator-fed tactical boards of the ship. Pairs of heavy binoculars hung suspended on arms above the stations.

Around the edges of the bridge were se
condary controls; signals, tactical and engineering on the left, weapons one through three on the right. A presently-closed trapdoor led down into the battery below, where two pressure-guns sat on staggered rotators so that each had a nearly-360-degree field of fire.

The whole setup was crisp aluminum
, shiny chrome and black leather. Begoggled officers and bridge enlisteds sat at their stations, ready to issue orders. The pilot - presently, Martindale - stood at his, ready for lift.

A glance at the tactical control wasn't so optimistic.
We're badly undermanned; a ship this size should have seventy-one crew, not thirty-two.

The weapons stations alone were proof of that. 4-106 had twelve rocket batteries; ten of them were presently unmanned.
So was the ventral gun battery, a revolving four-inch cannon.

Engine
ering, also, was under-strength. Enough men to fly, not enough to fly and fight
too
effectively.

It's a milk run. And we still have more active firepower than
West Coventry
or the
Shuffler.

Still. He was looking forward to getting those promised extra
crew in Chicago. Flying on less than half your intended complement wasn't going to be easy, and if action
did
happen?