Her Majesty's Western Service (8 page)

“
Swarovski said you ran some diagnostics,” Perry said, as much to the experienced NCO as the newb ensign. “How's she looking so far?”

“
Full traverse, we know. Pressure maxes out, good as it should be. Looks like we can ram ten rounds a minute through each of those tubes,” Halversen said. “Wouldn't be shocked if I could jigger it up to twelve. Maybe more, without losing juice.”

“
You've got permission to take a stab at it, once we're fully-manned.”

“
Hoped you'd say that, cap,” Halversen grinned. He was a stolid, white-haired Greenlander, in his thirty-second year of service. If there was anything about gunnery – spinners, rockets, cannon or pressure-guns – that the Senior Warrant didn't know, Perry had never heard of it.

“
How's it holding up, Airshipwoman Johnston? Your first run with the Thirty-First. What do you think of our ship?”

“
It's – very nice, sir,” said the young woman.

“
I'm very proud of it, myself,” said Perry. Aware of how personal attention from the squadron commander would be embarrassing the pretty young twenty-year-old. “And don’t worry. If your instructors didn't think something of you, you wouldn't have been assigned to a squadron command bird. I'm starting with the assumption that you're good enough.”

“
Yessir. Thank you, sir.”

“
Well, I'll leave you to your card game,” Perry said. “And you, Ensign Hastings? Your dedication to our backtrail is appreciated, but entirely non-mandatory. If bandits come at us, I don't think they'll try from our six.”

Ab
out a hundred and eighty miles in, mid-afternoon, Commander Ricks and his three-ship wing - all of which had been stripped of some crew in order to provide bodies for 4-106 - turned south with seventeen of the convoy's freighters. They were bound for Hugoton, or at least Ricks was; the freighters were going to the civilian railhead at Dodge City.

The main body of the convoy,
sixty-five ships protected by Thirty-First Squadron's Primus Wing, arrayed in a loose diamond around the miles-wide bobbing mass, turned slightly north onto a direct course toward Chicago.

“
Ricks to 4-106, sir,” reported Sub-Lieutenant Kent. “I've acknowledged him. See you in Chicago with full crews for us all, he says.”

“
Tell him I'll buy him a drink,” Perry said from the controls. “No – belay that, Signals.”

“
Yessir.”

“
Tell him I look forward to seeing him too. Wishes for a safe trip.”

“Yessir. Sending now.”

“Ricks acknowledges, same to you, he says.”

“
Thank you, Signals. Off the record, drinks
are
on me, and another round when Secundus Wing shows.”

“
Haven't seen how Lieutenant Vescard drinks, have you, sir?” asked Martindale.

“
I make
Vice-Commodore
's pay, Lieutenant-Commander.”

“
Not referring to the hit on your wallet.” 4-106's XO tapped his head. “Went drinking with him in Dodge, last month. He and some of the other engineers. I was hurting a week later.”

“
Vice-Commodore's tolerance, too,” said Perry. “How are we doing for schedule?”

“
About an hour ahead of where we should be.”

Ahead of them, the bobbling mass of
the convoy moved, sixty-five joggling airships. Below them, the plains rolled on endlessly, eastern Colorado becoming Kansas. A herd of cattle, perhaps a thousand head, moved past in the distance, kicking up a thick plume of yellow-white dust. On their fringes moved the taller figures of mounted cowboys, protecting and herding the cattle.

The way we are, these freighters
, Perry smiled.

“
Time to Chicago, First?”

“
Eight pm, Central, sir. Like I said, about an hour ahead of schedule. Unless something goes wrong. You expect it to?”

Perry shrugged.
“Why would it? You want the controls back?”

“
Sir?" asked Lieutenant Swarovski, the weapons officer.

“
Yes, Weapons?”

“
Mind if I have a turn? Being acting Second? I need the practice. If something happens to you, sir, and Lieutenant-Commander Martindale's asleep.”

You want a turn because handling this wizard looks as fun as it really is
, Perry thought, but suppressed an unprofessional smile.

“
Quite correct, Weapons, and good reasoning. She's yours.”

Near the tail of the dirigible
Karlsbad Streamer
, a six-hundred-yard bulk transport painted in broad, dust-faded red candy-stripes and loaded to capacity with iceboxed beef, two riggers hung on the outside, near the top rudder. They were contract employees and their job was to push the rudder one way or the other when the old dirigible's unreliable control systems failed.

Their
work
involved the aft flasher.

One of them put down his monocular.

“That's it. Butler Lake,” he said to his partner. Gesturing at a narrowly V-shaped lake three or four miles away to the south. In the neck of the V was a stockaded cluster of buildings, one of the little fortified ranch-villages that dotted the plains. Big enough to sit on a water source and protect itself from casual raiders.

“
You got it encoded? We get one shot at this,” said the partner, a stringy red-haired man whose friends called him Red. Sometimes he wished he had brighter friends; he wasn't fond of the nickname.

“
I got it encoded,” said the man with the monocular, who went by Thick Mick. His name was no variation of Mick, he was of about average build and in fact was one of Red's brighter friends.

“
OK. Put the battery in.”

Red unslung his backpack. Quickly he pulled leads from the flasher, yanking them free of their connections, and connected them to bolts on the battery in the pack.

“OK. Do as I say. I got this thoroughly encoded. Wait.
Dumbass
. Turn it toward the lake town first, idiot!”

“
I was
turning it
, clown.”

“
Long-off-short-long-off. Long-off-short-on-off...”

Confirmed Service line-class present. Tail of convoy.

“Long-off-long-off-long-off-short-long-off-long-short.”

Barely crewed. About half strength
. Four escorts total.

“
Short-off-short-short-short. Long-long-long-short-short.”

90
ships total convoy. Chicago ETA 8 Wed.

“
Just one go,” Red said, as Mick began to repeat the directions again. “They'll pick it up or not. No need to confirm.”

“
What the
hell
does anyone in the Black Hills need to know about an Imperial battleship, anyway?” Mick muttered. He eyed 4-106; even from two miles away, its size was scary for a purpose-built fighting craft. Those jutting little nuts along the cabin?
Nine-inch rocket launchers all of them.
Only reason you'd want to know about a killer like that would be so as to
stay the fuck away from it
. 

“
Jack Kennedy paid us
personally
to transmit that signal. Ride on and transmit it, he said,” Red reminded him. "You care
why
the Kennedys want something? Something we're getting a hundred apiece for?”

Mick looked at 4-106 again.

“Not gonna ask why.” He imagined that signal being received, being passed on by a chain of temporary heliograph stations, from here to – well, somewhere in the east, he supposed.

On the bridge of 4-106, Lieutenant
-Commander Martindale noticed a series of flashes from the village by the little lake to the southeast. Butler Lake, said the map.

“
Sir, take a look over here.”

Lieutenant Swarovski was still at the
helm.

“
What is it?”

“
Looks like a heliograph to me. Think it relates to us?”

Later, Perry would curse himself
for his not-even-a-decision, forgetting the hundreds of times he'd seen wholly innocuous heliograph flashings that he'd dismissed without a thought. He dismissed this one the same way.

“
I wouldn't worry about it, First. You just want an excuse to take that wheel back from Swarovski, don't you?”

Chapter Three

“
Like James Curley, Joseph Kennedy and his sons came out of Boston, and in a more peaceful world they might have been only bootleggers - maybe to legitimize in high finance, perhaps even to follow Curley, with his acknowledged early-career mob ties, into politics. Instead of becoming the most notorious raiders to originate in Boston since the time of John-Paul Jones.”

From
The Last Hurrah: President Curley's Third Term
. Edwin O'Connor; Little, Brown, 1956.

They came at a quarter past five, out of nowhere and from an abandoned township on the Nebraska side of the old Kansas state line.

“
Sir! We have four – no, five, six, eight, nine,
shit, a whole lot
of blacks rising in front of us!” Swarovski cried out.

Late afternoon, dark lines of clouds in the west. Clouds above them, too, at abou
t three through five thousand feet relative.

“T
urn to engage,” Perry said calmly. He'd have been more shocked if this weren't the optimal time for pirates to attack: it'd be dark in half an hour. For the last half-hour he'd been expecting something. And he'd known, from the more-alert bearings of Swarovski and Martindale – and Halversen, when he'd visited aft again a few minutes ago - that the others did, too.

If it was going to come, it was most likely
going to come during the last hour of daylight; time to engage, and much more time in which to run.

“
Signals, hit squadron general quarters. Now, please.”

“
Aye, sir.”

“
Sir. We have more coming from the north. Little hills, they're rising out,” Specialist Second Vidkowski reported. “Sir! We have ten, fifteen, twenty, and sir, I strongly suspect there's some up above.”

Ahead of them, the convoy was reacting. Increasing steam, turning to bolt.

In these situations, the captains tended to react like sheep: every man for himself, and the hell with formation or safety. Irrational - he'd audited a hundred lectures where civilian captains had been told not to outrun their escorts, to stay where they could be protected or, if need be, recovered - but a universally-human panic reaction anyhow.

I have to remember that my
weapons are stripped for airworthiness
, Perry told himself, looking at the ship plot. There was a fully-functional pressure-gun right below him, a fully-functional one aft. There were a nominal twelve missile batteries, of which only two were actually manned.

The missile batteries are not
to be considered applicable in this engagement.

“
They're ignoring flashes, sir. Definitely hostile,” Kent reported.

For the first time, Perry actually looked up to
see
the enemy - or rather, looked away from his consoles and through the window. Little birds, tiny ones, that had been hidden in the township. From the north, to the left, they were powering in on an intercept course to the convoy.

“
Signals. Rockets and guns may feel free to engage. Repeat: Free fire is authorized.”

“
Fire at will is authorized, confirm, sir?”

“
Fire at will is authorized, confirmed,” Perry said.

The instinctive response, as it always did, calmed him. This was combat; people were going to die. But it was also known and familiar;
the protocol, the confirms, the etiquette. Every man on 4-106 had a job to do; every man was doing it. It reduced the visceral, random chaos of combat down to something known and manageable.

Pfung! Pfung
! came from down below, the fore pressure-gun battery. Then, irregularly:
Pfung! Pfung!... Pfung!

“
Sir! Fore One reports confirmed hit, one of the fucking bastards is going down in flames!” Swarovski exalted.

“
Very good,” said Perry. “But Weapons, I did remind you about your language earlier. Please
do
remember that we are officers on one of Her Majesty's ships, not pirate trash.”