Her Majesty's Western Service

by Leo Champion

  “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 about three through five thousand feet relative.

  “Turn 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.”

  “Yessir.”

  “And my compliments to Fore One. Specialist Bronson was ready for his own gun, I'd say?”

  “Very much, sir.”

  “Sir, more coming from the northeast,” Martindale snapped.

  Looking around. Yes – more shapes. A lot of them.

  This just turned serious, Perry thought. The number of confirmed bandits was pushing forty. We have a real fight on our hands.

  “General Quarters,” Airshipman Second Gilford said. “We got action! Pirates!”

  “Yeah,” Rafferty said. “Time to kick ass and chew bubblegum.” He pulled a stick from his hip pocket. “Want a piece? Strawberry, it's good.”

  The comm buzzed. Rafferty picked up his handset. “Rocket Three. Yessir. Yessir, understood.”

  “What’s he say, boss?”

  “Just got fire at will clearance. See hostiles, take `em down. So put a shrapnel rocket in there.”

  “Got it,” said Gilford, reaching for the ammo feed.

  “Pirates didn't figure on us having a ship like this,” Rafferty said. “Lot of `em aren't gonna make another mistake like that; not for a while. Maybe not ever.”

  Gilford hefted the missile into its breech. Rafferty sighted down the bore – there was one, a tiny little scout-class, probably spring-powered and held together with glue and frayed rope. Barely a hundred feet long, only semi-rigid; typical expendable piece-of-trash pirate riser.

  “Range three hundred fifty,” he said, mostly for Gilford's education. “Cut like this” – with a blade, he released the cord that held the stabilizing fins; now, when the missile came out of its tube, the fins would pop up on their springs – “set to three fifty, that's twelve and two, so the fourteenth notch here, hit the timer there – and yank the cap; missile is now live.”

  “Missile is now live,” Gilford repeated.

  Crosswind, relative speed, relative height, possible intervening objects during flight time? Rafferty did the math quickly. He'd been a missileer for twelve years, and this had become second nature to him. He understood the variables at an instinctive level, made careful adjustments to the tube in a way that looked like no more than casual fidgeting.

  “And, we point it, we sight, we see that he's moving vaguely towards us at a rate that don't count for shit, but where’s the little punk gonna be in twenty seconds? Looks about the same, maybe a little ahead. Cone clear!”

  “Cone clear!” Gilford echoed, shouting, as Rafferty fired. The nine-inch-wide, two-and-a-half-foot-long missile exploded out of its tube, its backblast flaming in a cone through the bay behind the launcher. Gilford and Rafferty were out of its way, but the shout – and a warning light outside – was for the benefit of anyone walking through the corridor.

  Trailing fir
e, the missile streaked toward Rafferty's target. He watched it with a monocular scope as it struck the pirate high-amidships and blew.

  Shrapnel ripped through the pirate's gondola, shredding sacs and releasing hydrogen that the explosion's fire set alight.

  Within seconds, the pirate ship was a floating, directionless inferno. Men were bailing from the cabin, throwing themselves loose before they or their parachutes could burn. Flaming debris fell like rain as bits of the gondola detached.

  “High explosive, the next,” Rafferty said. “Sure you don't want a bit of gum?”

  Three thousand feet above, on the lower edge of the mile-up clouds, a pirate named Karen Ahle looked down at the melee.

  “That’s it,” she said, pointing at 4-106. The line-class airship was heading through the center of the brawl, jinking every so-often, guns and rockets firing intermittently.

  “Go, cap’n?” asked her henchman, a big man in his forties named Ronalds. He chewed on a straw as he looked down.

  “Go,” Ahle said. “Stagger across – left to aft. You know the plan. Go!”

  One after the other, Ahle, Ronalds and six of their crew launched from the airship, paraglider chutes opening as they steered for the long bulk of 4-106.

  “Missileers to starboard,” Perry directed. “Helm, increase speed and take us into that cluster.”

  “Sir!” Swarovski replied, keying a control and reaching for his mike.

  “Going in, sir,” Martindale said.

  A burning hydrogen sac floated past, just below them, attached to a large, thin section of gondola-plate. The air was full of debris, especially the hydrogen sacs. Almost all civilian dirigibles had crude fire-detachment systems; if a sac caught on fire, it could be released – with part of the nets or plating – before the fire could spread. You lost that sac, but you saved the ship.

  Of course, you then had to re-inflate a new sac, and you often had to ditch cargo to make up the weight in the meantime. The usual pirate tactic was to force a cargo ship down, land themselves, get the crew off at gunpoint – an unwritten understanding was that the downed crew wouldn't resist, and the pirates in turn wouldn't use any more force than they had to – then re-inflate the dirigible with their own compressed-hydrogen cylinders and fly it off.

  That was what most of these trash were attempting to do. Barely-airworthy ships, makeshift contraptions with just enough hydrogen - or, in a couple of cases that Perry had seen, simple hot air - to get aloft and take a stab at something with missiles or crude cannon. This was just a matter of killing them before they could; the pirate ships were easy targets, except that there were so damned many of them, and all mixed amidst the bolting, un-coordinated ships of the convoy.

  Loose fire – and it was all too easy to hit something you didn't want to, from a swaying airship in an irregular wind – was a bad risk. Airships had a lot of hit points, but nine-inch missiles were designed to inflict real damage. Stray shots into civilian freighters would be doing the pirates’ own work for them.

  4-106 sped up. The fore guns chuddered, blazing shot and tracers into a larger pirate dirigible, something actually airworthy. The pirate tried to evade, and Perry saw a pair of riggers on the tail, physically forcing it. Another rigger worked with a wrench on a stuck panel, which as Perry watched was released, a burning-from-tracers hydrogen sac lifting out. Two more had caught while that panel was stuck, and those two sacs released a moment later, navigational hazards for the next few minutes.

  Martindale turned slightly, so that the starboard missileers and the aft guns could have a chance at that dirigible. Two missiles fired, one of them missing but the second, a high explosive round, blasting the rudder – and the two men working it, unless they'd jumped clear at the last moment – into fragments, along with the aft fifth of the ship. Both of 4-106's batteries opened up on the burning wreckage, pounding three-inch rounds along the length of the gondola, down into the cabin. Men jumped, parachutes opening behind them as they fell.

  “Good kill. Excellent job, Swarovski.”

  “If we only had more men, sir.”

  “Ifs and buts, Weapons. We're doing entirely adequately for what we do have. How about that hot-air job over–”

  The aft battery opened up at the hot-air balloon Perry was pointing at, shredding its loose air sac in seconds. Three men jumped from the basket as the thing began to fall from the sky.

  “Ensign Hastings is doing quite well, don't you think?” Perry asked. “Pass that on to him, please.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  “And Helm, keep going in. Weapons, put one missileer back to a port battery, if you will.”

  “Sir.”

  Four of the Imperial line-class ship’s riggers were on the outside, maintaining the steering vanes and keeping them clear of debris. One of them was spraying foam onto a place near the nose where a burning sac had been blown into the gondola.

  Ahle steered her paraglider onto that man – no, a woman, her hair in a tight bun. She looked up in shock and found herself facing a long pistol.

  “Detach and depart. If you'd be so kind.”

  “What – who are you?”

  “Captain Karen Ahle, at your service. Now, if you'd please detach and depart? Your crew will be following you shortly, Senior Airshipwoman.”

  A quick glance back showed that Ronalds, Herrick and the others were kicking off the other riggers the same way. One of them had already jumped, his parachute opening.

  “You're pirates? Boarding us?”

  “We're not the Air Marines your ship, quite conveniently, is presently without. Now, if you would please?”

  The woman detached – her rig from the safety cable – and looked, again, uncomprehendingly at Ahle. Then she checked the bracings on her parachute, ran to the side and took a flying leap from the airship.

  The top of the gondola was corrugated aluminum, broken up by the big steering vanes. Ahle ran hunched along them, her rubber-soled boots gripping the surface well, despite the thirty-mile-an-hour backwind and a crosswind. You learned, after a while.

  Ronalds and Klefton had already found a hatch; Klefton, a lean man with an assault rifle and a number of ropes, watched as Ronalds jimmied it open.

  “Drink, boss?” he asked, pulling a silver hip flask.

  “Don't mind if I do,” Ahle said, and took a swig of the rum. She passed it to Ronalds, who took a swig and returned the flask to Klefton.

  “Time, boss?” Ronalds asked.

  Ahle checked the chronometer on her left arm. The clock was ticking up to the minute. “At the sixty.”

  “Hooked in,” Ronalds said. “I'll go first?”

  “I'll go first, Ronalds,” said Ahle, and connected the rope.

  Below, a pair of missiles streaked out at a ship a couple of hundred yards away, less than 4-106's own length. One missed, and the other exploded near its aft.

  “Sixty. Go!” Ahle said, and leapt down into the gondola.

  Inside were structural braces and vast helium sacs. The thing was seventy-five yards in diameter; seventy-five yards down, the height of a twenty-storey building to the cabin area. She rappelled in short bursts, dropping three or four yards at a time. Fore of her was a huge structural brace, a double-triangle shaped like a Jewish star, with big brown helium sacs on either side. A ladder ran through the center of it. Behind, secured in place with narrow girders, were more helium sacs.

  Drop, pull, drop. The rope swayed hard, kicking her around as the dirigible accelerated, slowed, turned. Every so-often she caught hold of the ladder to steady herself; every so-often her swinging rope slammed her into the ladder, or into one of the sacs.

  After one of the ladder's rungs collided hard with the small of her back, she decided that she preferred the sacs.

  A curse came from Klefton, as something like that happened to him. Well within the minute, their footing was stable. A passageway; a door marked ‘Medic Bay.’

  Ahle un-hooked herself and drew her pistols. One long revolver, in
her – dominant – left hand; in her right hand was a pressure-pistol with special ammunition.

  “We go in. Klefton, you come with me to the bridge. Ronalds, go through the gondola and link up with Mackinaw at the stern. Boyle's team will be in the engine room. Kick out anyone you see along here. Understood?”

  “Got it, boss,” said Klefton. Ronalds touched two fingers to his temple.

  “This is a beautiful ship,” said Ahle, as she kicked open the door to the medical bay. Her guns covered the place, but – as she'd expected – there was nobody inside. She turned back to Ronalds. “Let's make her ours, shall we?”

  “See that one over there? The one firing pressure-guns into that Allied Freighting bird? Helm, take us closer. Weapons, missileers to port and we'll show the gentleman what real gunnery looks like. That should put fear of the law into the last of his friends, too.”

  “Sir,” said Martindale and Swarovski.

  “Belay that order, please, Vice-Commodore,” came a female voice. The accent reminded Perry of upper-class Southern, although terser and less-twangy than the usual drawl.

  He turned. As did Swarovski and Martindale, and the others on the bridge.

  A woman in brown, with a complex rig, was standing at the entrance, a pistol in each hand. Brown hair tied in a ponytail, a face that was a little too square to be beautiful, green eyes with a pair of lifted goggles above them. Behind her stood a yellow-haired man with an eyepatch and a submachinegun.

  “What the hell?”

  “Vice-Commodore, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you and your bridge officers to abandon ship. Klefton, clear out that fore gun.”

  “You're pirates?” Perry asked. Complete, absurd, disbelief. A pirate was pointing a gun at him here, on the bridge of 4-106? Was this a–

  “Tell Ricks that this is not an appropriate joke to pull in the middle of a battle. Ma’am, please find an unoccupied cabin; I don't think you realize how serious this is.”