The Maltese Defence

by Simon Brading

  She hardened her heart to it with an effort and continued from ship to ship, sending hundreds, perhaps thousands of the Prussian soldiers to meet the Dark Scythesman.

  ‘Badger Leader, this is Trafalgar Leader, we are one minute out.’

  ‘Roger, Trafalgar Leader. Badgers, time to give that battleship something to think about.’

  Gwen banked Excalibur towards the battleship on the side of the formation nearest the Nelsons and saw both Abby and Drake do the same. The three of them converged on the huge ship from all directions, only a few yards above the sea.

  Defensive fire came from the numerous guns mounted along the length of the ship, but it was completely ineffective against the fast-moving aircraft and only served to show the Misfits where their targets were.

  ‘Incoming fire! Twelve o’clock high!’

  Trafalgar Leader’s shout contained a note of panic which startled Gwen, but she kept her mind on her job and her hand steady on the stick and completed her attack on an ack-ack gun, scattering and tossing the men serving it aside like rag dolls. Only after she had pulled up and gone over the battleship did she finally search the sky for the new threat.

  It didn’t take much effort to find it; Bertha was in the sky a couple of miles north of the convoy and raining fire down on the Nelsons.

  ‘What in Shakespeare’s name is that thing doing here?’ Gwen asked. ‘Doesn’t Gruber know they’re in range of our guns?’

  ‘I’m sure he does,’ Drake replied, ‘but unless he’s on board I’m not sure he really cares.’

  The gunners on Malta, always vigilant, reacted extremely quickly to the apparition of the giant airship and the dozens of guns positioned along the north coasts of Malta and Gozo opened fire. The range was extreme and beyond that of the lighter anti-aircraft guns, but the 4.5 inch heavy cannon had no trouble and, after a few ranging shots, began to score direct hits on the stationary target.

  Explosions began to blanket Bertha, but they were insignificant against its immensity and it seemed impossible that they would be able to bring the beast down.

  The fire from the airship, on the other hand, was far more telling. The range was a lot shorter than it had been before and in quick succession, one after the other, the Nelsons were hit.

  In desperation, the remaining bombers launched their torpedoes at long range and turned for home, but Bertha was relentless and sought them out until the last fell into the sea, tumbling over and over, spraying water and metal in all directions, before finally coming to a halt and sinking rapidly out of sight.

  As the first black clouds blossomed amongst the Nelsons, Scarlet swerved Hummingbird away from the bombers and dropped to the wave tops. She was a tiny target, hard to hit and would be safe unless the Prussians got in an extremely lucky shot.

  There was nothing Wendy could do to stop Dreadnought from being completely exposed, though. She could have turned for home, but chose not to and instead pushed her engines to their limits and raced for the convoy, thinking that the airship would have to cease fire when she was over them, for fear of hitting the ships. The ships were still a few miles off, though, and in the meantime her aircraft was struck over and over. Most hits were minor - flak bursts which did nothing more than scratch the inches-thick Duralumin - but a direct impact on her right wing put the outermost engine out of action and another on the middle of the fuselage knocked out a couple of her guns and killed the two Whizz Bangers at them.

  The huge machine kept going, absorbing the damage without much complaint, but if she took too much more, then she would just fall from the sky.

  Hölle swayed gently from side to side as an explosion rocked Bertha and Gruber looked up in alarm as the lights in the hangar flickered. He toggled his radio. ‘Admiral! We’re launching. Get the damn hangar door open, now!’

  ‘Of course, Star Leader.’

  Gruber waited impatiently as the giant slab of metal twenty metres in front of him began to swing outwards all too slowly. After the debacle in February when the mechanism controlling the door had been damaged and refused to open he had had it changed so that it rotated rather than sliding downwards. It had required enormously expensive structural modifications, but it was now almost impossible to damage and there were fail-safes in place to prevent aircraft being trapped again.

  The incredibly thick, armoured door was finely balanced, but incredibly heavy, and the machinery had to work hard to overcome inertia, making it a slower process than before and dangerous to do quickly. However, there was another reason why Gruber had insisted that it be changed to open up and out instead of down and, as soon as he judged that there was enough sky showing at the bottom, he threw Hölle’s throttle wide open and released the brakes.

  The aircraft was nowhere near takeoff speed by the time the runway ended but it didn’t matter; it had forty thousand feet of clear air below it and it just dropped, hurtling down towards the enemy aircraft far below.

  ‘Shut down the feed to engine five!’ Wendy shouted at Owen, her copilot for the mission, stabbing her finger at the control panel next to him.

  ‘I know which one it is, Sweety.’ Owen calmly reached out to flick the switch which cut the fuel to the stricken engine. His fingers danced over the complex panel as he sent fire suppression foam into it, making sure that the white-hot metal didn’t start a blaze, then adjusted the flow of hydrogen to the other engines, compensating for the increased pressure to them now that the pumps were only supplying two instead of three.

  Another explosion rocked Dreadnought and threw Owen forward. His straps brought him up before his head hit the panel, though, and he grimaced as the scars on his shoulder pulled painfully.

  A light started flashing and he glanced at it. ‘We’ve got a problem with the release mechanism for pod eight. The circuit’s broken.’

  Wendy swore. ‘Call Strange, tell her to leave her gun and stand by the manual release levers.’

  ‘Roger, Poochie.’

  Owen grinned as she shot him an evil look; he refused to call her “skipper” like everyone else on the aircraft and instead, every time she let him copilot for her, he came prepared with a dozen or more pet names to tease her with.

  He pressed the button to connect him with Georgina Strangeways. The woman had insisted on being on board for the mission, wanting to witness the weapons she’d helped design in use at least once. She’d been on Dreadnought for the mission against Bertha, but been frustrated when they hadn’t been able to reach their target. This time it looked like she was going to get her wish, although at the moment she was manning one of the waist guns, replacing one of the two crew members who’d been killed in the opening moments of the bombardment, instead of being strapped into the navigator’s seat in the cockpit, surrounded by armoured glass and with a good view, like she was supposed to be.

  Once the woman had acknowledged the order, Owen scanned the instrument panels around him. Seeing no new life-threatening emergencies he glanced out of the windscreen at the ships. They were still a good few miles away.

  ‘You know, I’d like you to call me skipper at least once before we die.’

  Owen glanced at his wife, seeing the intense concentration on her face and the worry lines that had sprung into being in the last few months, many of them caused by him. ‘I will,’ he said softly.

  She found a second to spare and looked at him expectantly. ‘Well?’

  He laughed. ‘We’re not going to die right now, my Rarebit!’

  Wendy frowned and opened her mouth to berate him, but right that moment the barrage stopped.

  His grin widened almost impossibly. ‘See?’

  Wendy rolled her eyes. ‘One of these days, Llewellyn...’

  Tanya watched as the fighters poured out of Bertha, magically appearing out of thin air. They dropped for several thousand feet before levelling out and forming up into their squadrons. Only then did they begin spiralling down towards their prey.

  She was fairly sure the first dozen or so that had emerge
d were red, but she couldn’t make out much detail with the awful lenses the British issued their pilots. Rudy was going to buy her a set when they got back to England, along with a proper flightsuit, although he’d said it probably wouldn’t be a Petrov; due to the war there weren’t many left outside of Muscovy. He was also going to get her an engagement ring to go with the wonderful but simple marriage bands he’d had made. Her first diamonds!

  She grinned as she marvelled once more on the fates that had put a poor Russian girl in the path of a British Lord. It was like something out of a Dostoevsky novel.

  She peered over the wing of her Spitsteam, her third, trying to spot Lion. It should have been easy with the ridiculous yellow and purple colour scheme Rudy had insisted on, but again the RAC lenses proved inadequate to the job.

  She said a prayer for him, spared a smile for Derek, flying next to her, then returned her gaze towards what was now a swarm of more than a hundred fighters. Even though the Nelsons had all been destroyed, Dreadnought was still below, and the ugly aircraft was far too easy a target for the predators. Something had to be done to stop them.

  Derek returned the Russian woman’s smile with a quick salute, then turned his eyes skyward.

  The big airship was wreathed in smoke and boiling black clouds. One of the three fans remaining after Monty’s heroic charge seemed to have torn itself apart and there were gashes in the side of the gondola to show where pieces of the blades had ended up. That wasn’t the worst of the damage, though, as there were also multiple jagged holes all over it which demonstrated very clearly the accuracy of the Maltese gunners and he thought he detected a slight list, indicating that at least one of the gas bags had been hit. It was beating a retreat now, though, having destroyed the bombers and delivered its load of fighters, although it would undoubtedly be moving a lot slower with only two fans.

  He nodded in satisfaction. The formidable anti-aircraft batteries of Malta had done what the RAC hadn’t been able to and dealt a blow to the most effective weapon the Prussians had. It remained to see whether they would be able to complete the job before it retreated out of range.

  More than two dozen explosions had rocked the enemy ships, as the torpedoes from the Nelsons and undersea boats found targets, and over half of those were clearly sinking, but it wasn’t nearly enough. The attack wasn’t over, though, and Gwen completed her fourth run on the battleship just in time to witness the arrival of Dreadnought, raining down incandescent fire as she sped by.

  ‘Form up, Badgers, let’s give her an honour guard.’

  Gwen broke off and joined the other two fighters as they accelerated away from the huge warship, leaving the majority of the Prussian gun crews broken and battered behind them.

  Dreadnought’s heavy cannon were having a devastating effect on the merchant vessels, ripping through their unarmoured sides as if they were paper and punching large holes in their hulls close to, and occasionally just below, the water line. The damage probably wouldn’t sink many of them, if any, but Dreadnought was more than just a gun platform and meltbombs began tumbling from the oversized pods mounted on her belly. The dark objects struck one after another of the ships, sending up puffs of deceptively harmless red smoke, until eight of the ships were wreathed in it.

  ‘That’s my lot, Badger Leader. Want me to keep pounding them with my cannons?’

  ‘Negative, Firepower, I don’t want you staying around in case those fighters come down to play. Good job well done, now return to base and reload for the next sortie.’

  ‘Roger, Leader.’

  ‘Let’s pave the way, Badgers.’

  The three fighters surged ahead of Dreadnought as the big aircraft banked around towards Malta and dropped to the wave tops. The surviving gunners on the battleship saw them coming, but they had apparently had enough punishment for one day and dived away from their guns, taking cover wherever they could. The Misfits gave them a quick burst anyway, just to keep their heads down, but then they were past.

  ‘You’re on your own now, Firepower. Badgers, let’s head up and give our boys and girls a hand.’

  The meltbombs in the pod on Hummingbird’s belly were long gone but Scarlet didn’t really need a release mechanism like the other Misfits, who were locked into their flying sausages, and as she approached another of the merchant ships she just reached through her open window and grabbed a bomb from the rack bolted to the outside of her fuselage.

  ‘Whee!’ She laughed gleefully as she let go of it, then spun her agile machine through one hundred and eighty degrees and came back around to toss another.

  This was the first time she’d been in combat in ages and, with no reconnaissance or sabotage missions to relieve the boredom, she was determined to make the most of the chance to play with the enemy for once.

  Abby frowned at the battle raging overhead. At the first sign of the enemy fighters, the Harridans had climbed up to join the Spitsteams, but even with the squadrons combined, they were still vastly outnumbered. They were fighting valiantly even so, just as they had so many times before, and were shooting down more Prussians than they lost, but the enemy could afford the losses, they couldn’t, and wouldn’t be able to keep fighting for very long.

  She glanced back down at Dreadnought, willing Wendy to get a move on. The big aircraft was well clear of the ships but still a good couple of minutes from the safety of Malta. Once she made it there, the remaining Harridans and Spitsteams would be able to disengage. If they lasted that long.

  It was just as well help was at hand.

  The fight had naturally descended as height was substituted for speed, meaning the Misfits didn’t have far to climb to reach it and they fell on the enemy fighters, spreading destruction wherever they turned.

  The last of the enemy fighters, the three Misfit aircraft, were finally engaged. It was time.

  ‘Star Squadron, follow me.’

  Gruber rolled Hölle onto its wing and let gravity take it. Fifteen bright red Blutsaugers followed him down, but they were unable to keep up as he pushed his aircraft to the limit. The airframe began to creak and protest, but he trusted in Blume’s engineering and kept going, not wanting to lose the element of surprise, not wanting anyone to warn his target before he’d had a chance to shoot it from the sky.

  He laughed, exhilarated, as the sea seemed to rush towards him, but he resisted the temptation to pull back on the stick and kept the nose down, pointed directly at the giant cruciform of the Misfits’ heavy bomber, Dreadnought.

  Georgina Strangeways fumbled the lenses on her borrowed flight helmet into place then bent down to peer through the armoured glass over the shoulder of Dreadnought’s rear gunner. She grinned at the sight of the enemy fleet surrounded by red smoke - it looked like every single one of the merchant vessels had been hit at least a couple of times and most six or seven. She could imagine the panic aboard them as the men tried to wash away the acid and not only failed to stop its inexorable march but spread it further and caused more damage. She wished that she could stay around to watch the ships sink and make notes on which were the most effective placements for the bombs in which of the different classes of enemy vessels, but Dreadnought was an easy target for the Prussian fighters and had to race for safety.

  Nervously, she leaned forward and squinted up through the glass at the fight taking place only a mile above. She could clearly make out each individual aircraft as they swooped and tumbled around each other like feeding swallows.

  Dreadnought was far too vulnerable and they were far too close; the enemy could cover that kind of distance in a heartbeat.

  She took one last look at the ships, intending to go back to her temporary post at the waist gun, but a flash in the sky over them caught her eye and she paused.

  Her eyes widened and she fumbled with the wire of her headphones. She followed it to the jack and stabbed it at one of the sockets spread throughout the machine. On the third try it slipped in and she pressed the button. ‘Incoming fighters! Six o’clock high!’<
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  Gwen gave a 190 a quick squirt of her machine guns as it crossed in front of her nose. She missed by a couple of feet but the fright was enough to put the pilot off and he swerved away from the Harridan he’d been pursuing, allowing it to escape. Her own target couldn’t get away from her, though, and she used a couple of her dwindling supply of cannon rounds to blast a big hole in its wing next to the fuselage and send it spinning away.

  ‘This is Firepower, I have incoming fighters!’

  Gwen didn’t hesitate or even look, she just abandoned her search for a target, put Excalibur on her back and pulled the stick into her lap.

  Gruber swore as his shots went wide - the guns of the immense aircraft had opened fire right before he had and he had flinched. It didn’t matter; he would still say he hit it first and when the rest of his squadron shot it down the kill credit would still be his.

  Hölle was out of her reach, but the rest of the Barons in their Blutsaugers were lagging behind him for some reason, apparently so focussed on trying to catch up with their wayward leader that they hadn’t noticed her approach.

  She slotted in behind a straggler and throttled back slightly so as not to overshoot, then opened fire, raking it with machine gun fire. The aircraft fell away and she put it out of her mind.

  ‘Only fifteen to go...’ A quick glance at her ammunition counter showed that there was no way she was going to be able to destroy all of the Barons, even if they lined up nicely for her.

  A flash of purple off her wing told her that she didn’t have to, though, and another of the Barons disintegrated in mid-air, the pieces scattering to the winds.