Her Majesty's Western Service (55 page)

No, not completely burning. Just the northern
industrial parts, although the fires were spreading.
Somebody
– and, with a glance at the bright-purple and sky-blue shapes hovering above what had been an airship park, it wasn’t hard to guess who – had done a proper job on the place. They’d laid waste to the easy targets across the northern industrial district, blowing distillation and cracking plants into red pyres that spewed thick black smoke up into the cloud-laden sky.

They’d gone over the airship park and
smashed a dozen freighters, whose captains had been too dumb, faithful or stubborn to flee, into skeletal wreckage. More black smoke roiled into the sky as those ships burned. A couple of other wrecked ships lay – not burning, must have been Federal helium birds – in the south, having crashed among what Perry knew to be a residential district. The flickering remains of another ship had fallen onto some slums abutting the Boot District.

So you killed a few Feds
, Perry thought.
Big deal
. By his understanding, none of the Federal squadron based out of Amarillo was bigger than escort-class. The two enemies were light line-classes, as opposed to 4-106’s little-above-medium size for the type.

And now I’m coming for you
, Perry thought.
Before you can do any more damage. Before you make another run over whatever might be left of the industrial district. Before you can kill any more innocent people.

His wife and children were somewhere down there, damnit! Although probably in a business district hotel, an area that didn’t look like it ha
d taken much damage. But if the wind changed and the fires spread in that direction…

There were two of the bastards.
Blue and Purple. He outweighed them, although not by very much. The Armadillos, Perry thought, were merely legendary.

I,
on the other hand, am
good.

“Wonder if we can authorize colored kill-marks,” Swarovski said.

“Two down, two more
going
down,” said Martindale.

“Engage,” said Perry.

“Says they’re Theron Marko with urgent information,” Captain Meier’s communications officer reported as the big line-class drew closer to Meier’s purple
Pith and Vinegar
. “They request permission to come within loudhailer distance.”

Meier shook her head.

“I know they told us to expect that ship, but that Marko guy’s aboard another one. This guy should have an identification code. Ask them for it.”

“Tell them ‘password’,”
Ahle suggested.

“That captain should have cou
ghed it up,” Perry growled. “He was spilling his guts once he realized who Kennedy was.”

“Maybe he didn’t know. He said the dead guy in buckskins was the boss.”

“Any other guesses?” Perry asked the bridge.

“Yo ho ho, sir?” Swarovski suggested.

“Surrender and you might live?” Martindale put in.

“I’m with ‘password’,Vice” said Nolan.

“As long as we keep them talking,” said Perry. “Actually – tell them we’ve got it, but it’s not for flasher communication. It’ll be the first thing we say by voice.”

“Nice
try,” said Meier. “Comms two, tell Rowland ‘engage wide’. That thing’s back under Imperial control.”

“Imperial?” asked her helmswoman.

Meier shrugged. “Could be Federal. Maybe another firm. Hostile anyway.”

“Tell `em anything
?” the senior comms officer asked.

“Yeah,” said Meier. “
My first response.”

“‘Nice try’,” Nolan reported. “And
it looks like they’re splitting apart.”

“To engage,” said Martindale
.

Right now the two enemy airships were about four miles away, perhaps half a mile apart
and a mile up. The wind was behind Perry at about twenty miles per hour, but smoke patterns from the burning city indicated that that might not be a constant. There was a maelstrom down there, and it’d be doing all kinds of things to the air currents.

Splitting
was 101-level tactics; maneuver to engage at right angles so that
one
of your ships would be crossing the enemy’s tail or nose.

There was a 201-level counter to that. Perry had a postgraduate degree.

Ahle was already lifting the ship. She glanced at Perry with one eyebrow raised.

She has at least a bachelor’s herself
, Perry remembered. The Sonoran Aerospace Academy was supposed to be pretty good, and she’d had legitimate combat experience before going pirate.

“The purple one,” Perry said.

“
Si, capitan
.”

As 4-106 steadily rose – you wanted to gain
height in an engagement like this, because it was easier to fire down than up – Ahle turned the wheel to starboard, in the direction of the purple
Dread Wyvern.
With considerably more speed than a 450-yard line-class was supposed to be capable of, she handled the thirty-degree turn.

“
Anything more you want said to `em?” Nolan asked.

Inappropriately –
a Signals officer wasn’t expected to initiate bridge communication unless reporting an incoming. And there was a console button for that.
Speak when you’re spoken to
, rose in Perry’s mind.

Not very hard, or harshly. Nolan as a civilian volunteer couldn’t be expected to know Imperial bridge protocols. And besides, there
was
something.

Annabelle’s somewhere down there
, Perry thought.
With the children. And Ernest knows flasher codes. Maybe they’re watching.

“Yes. Flash this slowly, understand? Tell them ‘Vice-Comm
odore Perry sends his regards’. Slowly, as I said.”

“I said to get away from the window!” Annabelle Perry
snapped at ten-year-old Ernest.

“Mother!
The big ship the pirates stole from Father, it’s definitely hostile to the Armadillos! Looks like she’s moving to fight them.”

“And what if a stray shot
lands
here
?” Annabelle demanded, getting ready to pull her son physically away from the open window he’d planted himself against.

“Mother – our ship’s flashing them again. Just let me see what he’s saying,
please
?”

“You have ten seconds to get away from that window,” Annabelle said.

“‘Vice – Commodore – Perry – Sends – His – Regards’, Mother!” Ernest shouted. “It’s
Father
!”

“
It’s
Marcus
?” Annabelle demanded. And ran to the window herself.

“Vice-Commodore Perry,” said Captain Rowland to her bridge. “
That a name we should know?” Vaguely she remembered an intelligence meeting, one of the senior Imperial officers. Supposed to be meticulous, careful and detail-oriented.

“
If he’s messing with us,” said the weapons control officer, “we’ll know it from the obituaries tomorrow.”

Rowland brought back her memory of the briefing. For now, she’d assume they
were
facing a careful guy. Thinking about how best to use that.

“Just some Imperial,” the weapons officer repeated.

“And Imperials don’t deserve respect,” Rowland agreed. Too much like Sonorans in their focus on technology rather than spirit, when sprit was what won fights. “So we won’t send those.”

“Aye,” said Comms.

“But we ought to say something,” Rowland went on. “Condolences, I think. Advance condolences to his family.”

“Cute,”
said Perry coldly. Because his family probably
were
down there, quite likely watching from an upper floor of some hotel when they needed to be in a fireproof basement. Maria was the sensitive kind and probably scared - viscerally he wanted to comfort her; intellectually he knew perfectly well that the appropriate reaction was to destroy the source of the threat.

But Ernest, too curious for his own good, would likely be glued to the window, and Annabelle paralyzed with trying to stop him.

He nodded firmly.

“Lined up a string of technically-not-curses befitting the Service but giving `em hell,” said Swarovski. “Say go
, sir.”

Perry shook his head.

“Exchanging trash-talk with movie-star mercenaries isn’t befitting the Service and we’ve done enough of it. I think I have better people we can talk to.”

“
E-R”, Earnest Perry read the flasher, with his nose pressed to the window. “N-E-S-T. Ernest!”

4-106 was tilted upwards, rising fast, buffeted and pushed higher by the flames it was above, heading on an intercept course for the bright-purple airship, which was also rising
, the other one closing on it like halves of a vice. A grey shape several thousand feet up, but the bright flashes were unmistakable.

Ernest whirled. “Daddy flashed me!
He flashed my name, E-R-N-E-S-T
spells Ernest!”

That
had
to be for them, thought Annabelle. Since that airship
had
to be commanded by Marcus now, who would have some idea where the Staff idiots would have put them. And of course, coming from an airship’s flasher, Ernest was taking it like literal Word of God.

“
And he hasn’t stopped, dear,” Annabelle Perry pointed out.

The airship was still flashing.

“Away,” said Ernest.

“You missed the ‘safer.’ Safer away.”

“From - that - window - end”

Marcus, I love you.

Ernest turned, a
broad
grin on his face.

“
Father flashed me personally from his command ship!”

“And you saw what he said?”

“Ernest, safer away from the window,” said Ernest, firmly turning his back on it. Heading to where Maria was sitting against the wall, hands over her eyes.

“
Father’s fine,” Ernest told his seven-year-old sister.

“How do you know he’s fine? You haven’t spoken to him.”

“He seems to have got his missing ship back and come to fight the pirates,” Annabelle said. “He gave them his regards - and then he flashed Ernest!”

“Underground,” Ernest insisted, pulling Annabelle toward the door. “Come
on
, Father said to with his flasher!”

Annabelle Perry hated the wives who wore their husbands’ rank - or the husbands who wore their wives’, rarer but not unknown - on their sleeve, tried to pull it
on the other spouses. She had not so much as earned an ensign’s commission in the Service; she had no right to wave Vice-Commodore’s rank.

And she wasn’t going to wave that rank
now, but the squadron commander’s wife also had responsibilities. To take care of the enlisted crew in the lower floors and the basement - give them some encouragement, set a careful watch on those fires and draw an evacuation plan in case they got too close…

A final glance over her shoulder saw 4-106 still rising fast, closing in at a right angle on the bright purple airship amidst smoke and flames from the burning industrial district.

God, I love you,Marcus
, Annabelle thought.
Win this one. Come back to me, please.

“They’ve been plannin
g this for a while,” said Perry as the ship rose, the gap from the sky-blue
Five Speed
closing to within a mile on their twelve, visible through wisps of boiling black smoke from the firestorn below. The
Pith and Vinegar
closed on their five, a little further away, only intermittently visible through the smoke from a furiously burning refinery.

“They’ll have gathered some idea of what kind of a man I am - that I’m going to fight carefully and logically.” Perry smiled thinly.

“A careful and logical man would run away when he’s outnumbered two to one, outclassed in firepower by about one point eight to one,” said Ahle, probably speaking for the whole ship.

“I didn’t say,” said Perry, “that I was going to
prove their intelligence right. Besides, we have a job to do.” He outlined the plan.

“You’re crazy,” said Nolan.

“You forgot the ‘sir’,” said Perry. “Now, Comms, your part in this - start talking again. Random two-letter code groups.”