Men of War

by William R. Forstchen

  “Good luck, son.”

  Jack smiled wanly and without another word started for his machine. The group broke up, the men setting off at the run, and suddenly he was alone.

  He turned to say a final farewell to Hans, but his friend had already set off, falling in alongside Jack. Andrew felt a shudder of disappointment but knew instantly that Hans was right.

  Hans climbed up the ladder into the forward crew compartment without looking back, followed by Jack, who pulled the rope ladder up behind him and closed the door. He could see Hans climb into the seat normally occupied by the copilot but Theodor was now the backup commander of the air corps and so was flying in the second airship.

  Ground crews stepped back from their airships, crew chiefs each standing in front of his machine, right hand raised, red flag held aloft. The chief in front of Jack’s machine twirled the flag overhead in a tight circle. One after another each of the engines revved up, propellers turning to a blur, then idled back down. Stepping away to the port side of the aerosteamer, the chief waved the flag again and pointed it forward.

  All engines revved, and the machine slowly lurched forward. The bi-level wings on the port side passed within a few feet of Andrew, and as it passed the twin engines kicked up a swirl of dust around him, the air heavy with the smell of burning kerosene. The second and third aero-steamers followed, engines roaring. The column, looking like ungainly birds, taxied down to the eastern end of the grass airstrip, a line of slender hydrogen-filled ships, wings seemingly added on as an afterthought.

  The lead ship turned, facing into the gentle breeze stirring out of the west. The heads-on silhouette, illuminated from behind by the rising sun, caught Andrew as a stunningly beautiful sight, wings mere slivers of reflected light. The machine lurched forward, seconds later the sound of the engines coming to him.

  He tensed, watching as the airship lumbered down the runway, not seeming to move at first, then ever so slowly picking up speed. Gently, gracefully, it lifted off while still a hundred yards away.

  Jack expertly leveled off not a dozen feet off the ground, letting his machine build up speed before climbing. It came straight on, some of the crowd around Andrew ducking. He came to attention, saluting as the machine soared overhead, engines roaring, wind strumming the wires sounding like a harp floating in the heavens. He caught a brief glimpse of Hans, perched in the copilot’s seat, a childlike grin lighting his features. Their eyes held for a second, and in that instant it was as if all the years had stripped away and he was now the old man and Hans was the boy, embarking on some grand and glorious adventure, and then he was gone.

  Nose rising up, Flying Cloud started to climb, followed by Heaven’s Fire, and Bantag’s Curse. One after another they passed, some wagging their wings in salute, others coming straight on, their pilots too nervous to try anything other than getting off the ground.

  Jack led the way, spiraling heavenward, waiting for the last ship to form into a long, straggling column. Finally, he turned due east, rising up through a thousand feet, and sped off, catching the breeze aloft.

  Andrew watched as their shape changed from that of slender crosses to a round indistinct blur and then a mere dot of light that finally winked from view. Around him the ground crews finally began to break up, talking softly among themselves, walking back to their hangars, some looking back longingly to the east as if wishing they could go.

  “I think that was one of the hardest decisions you’ve ever made.”

  Andrew turned to see Casmir by his side.

  “Yes, Your Holiness, it was,” he whispered.

  “I remember you once saying that in order to be a good commander you must love the army with all your soul. The paradox is that there will come a time when you must then order the very destruction of the thing that you love.”

  “Yes, I said that a long time ago.”

  “Do you think it will work?”

  “Hans believes in it.”

  “But do you?”

  “I don’t know. There are too many variables. The weather turns bad. The Bantag have warning and send airships up to meet them. As it is there’s barely enough fuel, if they don’t capture additional stores, or the advance position for the second wave ..His voice trailed off. “Far too many things can go wrong.”

  “Life is a process of things going wrong. That is how Perm made the universe. It is our challenge then to find the faith to remake them into what is right and pleasing to His eye.”

  Casmir smiled and put his hand on Andrew’s shoulder. “I wish I had your faith.”

  “You do, it’s just hidden at the moment. Best we head back to the city. Who knows, by the time we get back there might not even be a government.”

  He said it so casually but Andrew felt all the worry of that other problem returning.

  Varinna, who had launched this entire effort, stood wistfully, crippled hand cupped over her brow to shade the sunlight as she continued to gaze eastward, tears streaming down her face. She sensed him looking at her, and, turning, she faced Andrew, and he knew he had to resume his strength. He forced a smile.

  “Chuck dreamed it, you made it possible. It will work.”

  “You think so?”

  “I wouldn’t have ordered it,” Andrew said. He looked around at those gathered around him, Casmir, Varinna, Gates, the technicians and ground crews, all of them wanting to believe, and he knew that he had lost his own faith ever since the moment he had been cut down by the mortar shell. It was needed now, needed for all of them.

  He smiled.

  “I have faith,” he whispered. “It will work.”

  * * *

  “My Qarth.”

  Jurak stirred, looking up at the entry to his yurt. Zartak stood in the open doorway, silhouetted by the dawning light.

  “The time?” Jurak asked, embarrassed that he had slept past sunrise.

  “No matter, you were up half the night. I ordered the guards not to disturb you. but this cannot wait.”

  “The Yankees, they’re moving,” Jurak said even as he stretched and came to his feet.

  “How did you know?” Zartak asked cautiously.

  Jurak shook his head. “Don’t go running off proclaiming I have the ability of far seeing. It’s just that I had a dream. I saw Yankee airships. My back was turned, and they fell upon me by surprise.”

  Zartak stared at him intently until Jurak nodded toward what he was holding. The old warrior stirred and handed him two telegrams, and Jurak scanned the contents.

  “Three Yankee ships carrying land ironclads spotted late yesterday by a flyer out of Tyre patrolling the Inland Sea between Tyre and Roum. First light this morning ships seen in harbor at Tyre. New airships at Tyre already behind our lines and attacking.”

  “When did this come in?”

  “The second report just minutes ago. The first report the middle of the night.”

  “Why the delay?” he asked angrily.

  “Apparently a problem with a relay station. Then when it arrived here the Chin who transcribed it simply put it in with the other reports on train movements and supply shipments.”

  “Damn all.”

  “Should I have an example made of him?” Zartak asked.

  Jurak thought on it for a moment, then shook his head.

  “If I killed every telegrapher who made a mistake, the line would be down in a day.”

  “He might have done it deliberately,” Zartak pressed.

  “Tell him another such mistake and it won’t be the moon feast, it will be slow impaling,” Jurak replied.

  Zartak gave a noncommittal grunt in reply.

  Jurak looked around the yurt. Though it was the yurt of a Qar Qarth, piled with gold and every luxury known to this world, he still would have traded it all for running hot water, privacy when relieving himself, and music, music that could be heard at the touch of a button rather than the wailings of the chant singers and the nerve-tearing screeches of the single-string basha.

  Zartak of
fered to help him dress, but he waved the old warrior aside as he slipped into leather trousers that felt cold and clammy, riding boots, a leather jacket, and a lightweight shirt of chain mail, nothing that would be much good in a battle but here in the rear lines was worn as a matter of course to protect against an assassin’s blade in the back.

  As he did so he continued to think about the two telegrams.

  “Moving their ironclads down to Tyre,” he said. “I wonder if they stripped everything off this front.”

  “We could send up our airships to look behind their lines here.”

  He nodded in agreement.

  Why Tyre though? He walked over to a map drawn on the tanned hide of one of the great woolly giants that wandered the steppes. The map was stretched out on a wooden frame, showing the entire world from Nippon to Suzdal.

  The mapmaking of the Bantag had intrigued him as soon as he had come to this world. With the endless circlings they had drawn out every step of their march, every watering hole, river ford, cattle settlement, place of good grazing, and places where the land was barren. The great scroll, when stretched end to end, measured well over two hundred paces. What hung before him was but one small part of the great fabric of this strange world that was now his home.

  He stared at the map.

  “From Tyre, two days of hard marching could bring them up to the head of the rail line we are running from this small port here.” He pointed at the map. Zartak nodded.

  “Camagan the cattle call it,” Zartak replied.

  “Our warriors at Tyre, except for a few regiments, have yet to be armed with rifles. If he flings his ironclads into them, there will be no stopping such an advance. Take our rail line, push to the Great Sea, and establish there a base to harry our supply shipments.”

  “Audacious. Typical of Keane.”

  Keane. Did Keane dream of this he wondered. If so, it was a desperate bid. Most likely he had stripped all his ironclads and his surviving airships for this attack. He just couldn’t send the ironclads. It would have to have infantry support, at least a umen of their troops as well.

  He traced the route out on the map. Send an order to Xi’an, have them divert the next shipment of ironclads, rush the machines to Camagan. Though the distance was long, move up some airships as well, and also some airships from Capua. There were eight umens surrounding Tyre. Even with just bows that should be enough once the ironclads and airships were moved into place.

  “We let them get their heads well into the trap,” Jurak announced, “make sure we don’t attack too soon. Then snap it shut and annihilate what is left of his advanced weapons.”

  “Suppose that isn’t the true goal?”

  “What?”

  “Suppose it is something else.”

  Jurak turned back to the map. The ironclads were too far south even to think of attempting a march to the northeast. From there it was nearly 150 leagues to his main supply depot at what the Yankees once called Fort Hancock.

  Xi’an? Two hundred leagues southward and then east to the narrows of the Great Sea, and even there it was a mile-wide channel to cross to the eastern shore and then another hundred leagues back up to the northeast.

  No. Not Xi’an.

  “You dreamed of airships, my Qarth,” Zartak said, his voice barely a whisper, “not ironclads.”

  “I know.”

  He continued to stare at the map.

  “Well, it was only a dream, my friend.”

  Chapter Seven

  “There’s the coast,” Jack shouted, trying to be heard above the roar of the engines. “That looks like Tigranus Point, means we’re about twenty miles north of Tyre.”

  Jack lowered his field glasses and passed them to Hans, but at the moment Hans really didn’t care. For the last hour he had been far to busy suffering from an acute bout of airsickness.

  “I can still see the Hornets, though.” He pointed down and to the right. Hans vaguely looked in the direction Jack was pointing and nodded bleakly, though he saw nothing.

  “We’ll have to wait out here another ten minutes or so, give them a little more time to cut up the Bantag telegraph lines just to make sure.” Even as he spoke he turned the wheel hard over to the right.

  Hans grasped the edge of the forward panel, sparing a quick glance to his right as the aerosteamer went into a sharp banking turn. A mile or more below the ocean sparkled, catching the light of the late-afternoon sun. He tried not to contemplate just how far down it was, how long the fall would take.

  Jack grabbed the speaking tube to his topside gunner and blew through it.

  “You still with me up there? Tell me if everyone turns on me, and I want a count off.”

  Hans uncorked his own speaking tube to listen in as the Roum gunner counted off the ships, still holding at eleven Eagles, and all were turning.

  As Jack had predicted the one with the leaking hydrogen bag had turned back after only an hour. After leaving the coast of Rus behind and crossing out over the Inland Sea for the run to Tyre the topside gunner had excitedly reported that one of the ships had burst into flames and gone down. Two more just seemed to have wandered off.

  The ship bumped through another bubble of air, and Hans was again leaning out the side window, gagging.

  They spiraled through half a dozen banking turns. Hans looked around bleakly. He guessed it should be a beautiful sight. Puffy clouds seemed to dance and bob around them, the aerosteamers pirouetting in circles like butterflies in a field of white flowers. They slipped through the edge of a cloud, the world going white, the air colder, the ship bobbing up and down. Suddenly the world exploded back into blue, the turquoise blue of the ocean below, the crystal blue of the horizon, the darker sky above.

  He could hear a moaning curse echoing through the speaking tube connected to the compartment holding their passengers. A small hole had been left in the floor for the men to relieve themselves but from the shouts and curses only minutes after they had taken off he could figure easily enough that it didn’t work thanks to the forty-mile-an-hour breeze whistling through the compartment. Someone apparently had missed the target yet again. Jack chuckled at their distress.

  “We should have papered over the compartment at least. Those boys must be freezing back there.”

  Jack pushed his ship through one more slow banking turn, gaze fixed on the eastern horizon.

  “They must have cut the telegraph lines by now; we gotta head in if we want all these ships down by dark.”

  Hans sighed with relief as they leveled out, again picking up a southeasterly heading.

  After several minutes he could finally distinguish the eastern shore of the Inland Sea, recognizing the point north of Tyre and the gentle curving coast of shallows and mud flats that finally led down to the rise of ground and narrow harbor. Jack edged the elevator stick forward, easing back slightly on the four throttles. They thumped through another small cloud, which was beginning to glow with a pale yellow-pink light. The summits of the Green Mountains, fifty miles to the north and east, were cloaked in the clouds and what appeared to be a dark thunderhead.

  Jack pointed out the storm.

  “Get caught in one of those, and you’re dead,” he shouted.

  Hans nodded, breathing deeply, struggling against the urge to get sick yet again.

  Scanning eastward, he wondered if his eyes were playing tricks or could he actually see the distant shore of the Great Sea nearly a hundred miles farther east. The two oceans, back on the old world they’d more likely be called great lakes, were closest together at this point. Long before the wars there was even a trade route going overland from Tyre eastward to the small fishing village of Camagan.

  Back in the old days of the Great Ride, the eternal circling of the world by the hordes, this region between the two seas was usually disputed by the Tugars to the north and the Merki, making their long ride farther south through Tyre and from there around the southern end of the Great Sea and then up into Nippon and the edge of the vast
populous lands of the Chin.

  He took the field glasses, which rested in a box between his seat and Jack’s, checked the map, then raised the glasses to scan the coast. After months in the siege lines of Tyre he knew it all by heart, the outer circle of the Bantag lines, half a dozen miles from the city, the inner line of his own works, the ancient whitewashed walls of the town clustered around the harbor. He caught a glint of sunlight reflecting off the wings of a Hornet out beyond the enemy line, held it for a second, then lost it, wondering how Jack could so easily spot such things from ten, even twenty miles away. He again looked eastward with the glasses, but they were lower now. It was hard to tell just how far he could see out across the open brown-green prairie.

  He studied the harbor again, bracing his elbows on the forward panel containing the pressure and temperature gauges for the four engines. The machine was bobbing up and down too much, though, for him to keep a steady lock, and another wave of nausea started to take hold. Taking a deep breath, he settled back in his chair.

  The air was getting warmer, humid.

  “I see transports in the harbor. Hope they’re the right ones, or we’re finished.”

  Hans nodded, closing his eyes for a moment, breathing deeply, wishing they were higher up again, where the air was cooler. The minutes slowly passed. He finally got his stomach back under control. He opened his eyes again. They were just a couple of miles out from the harbor, flying parallel to the coast.

  He spotted the aerosteamer landing field, south of town, right on the coast. There was already one airship down.

  “We got more ships to the north.” It was the top gunner.

  Hans looked over anxiously at Jack. Several seconds passed.

  ’“Four engines, must be the ones from Roum.” Both breathed a sigh of relief. The Bantag had committed only a couple of ships to that front, and both had been aggressively hunted down over the last week and destroyed, but there was always the prospect that Jurak had moved reinforcements down there.

  From due east he could see two Hornets coming in as well, one of them trailing a thin wisp of smoke. They passed directly west of the harbor, and Hans saw half a dozen ships tied off at the docks. Several land ironclads were on the dock, puffs of smoke rising as they slowly chugged along, joining a long column of machines weaving up through the narrow streets of the town. At least that phase of this mad plan seems to have gone off, he thought.