Conrad's Last Campaign

by Leo A. Frankowski

  “Normally it would take over sixty days just to decide how long a keel to lay, but the engineering has already been done. The rigidible is a favorite topic among engineering students and aeronautical dreamers everywhere. Every detail has been thought out and argued about endlessly in labs and bars and officer’s dorms around the country. Thousands of man hours have gone into the five hundred pages of technical specifications and plans that I brought with me. That model is so accurate because there are many man years of planning in it.

  “Not only do we know the length and design of the keel, the tools and fixtures to build it already exist in the Cracow Aluminum Works.

  “This chart shows the first ribs being put in place in less than a week. I know that sounds silly, but the fact is that two molds for the rib sections already exist. If Captain Feliks checks his order book, he’ll find that he approved an order for aluminum roof ribs for the new royal exhibit hall, which coincidently looks just like the top half of a rigidible. The first ones can be delivered to the navy yards in less than a week.”

  His eyes lit up and he babbled like a true believer, but he seemed to know what he was talking about. I didn’t know whether to have him arrested or give him a medal. Baron Gwidon was asking, “Why our shipyards? Shouldn’t this be an air force project?”

  “No, sir. We don’t have a facility big enough. You have four adjacent dry docks that can be roofed over with canvas to make quick and simple construction sheds for rigidibles. Two of them are empty now, one will be empty in less than a week and the fourth contains a hull that could be floated out and anchored to make room.”

  “And I suppose that I have already given orders to use the docks.”

  “Of course not. However some of your junior officers have prepared the necessary movement orders to empty the two occupied docks and possible work schedules for your signature.”

  It went on for a couple of hours. The kid had all the answers.

  “Where are we going to get that much cover material?”

  A page of the flip chart contained figures on current stores of aluminum, copper, and duralumin and estimates on production times for additional stocks. “Now that all the new planes are aluminum covered, we have thousands of square meters of unneeded airplane cloth and dope – and idle facilities that can make more.”

  “How do you plan to get that much work done in sixty days?”

  Another flip chart page contained man hour estimates and sample work schedules that covered seven days a week. “When you work around the clock seven days a week, the sixty days turns into two hundred normal work days, well over six months of normal work time.”

  “Where the hell are we going to get that many men?”

  “We just recalled them from the frontiers. We’ve got thousands of soldiers recalled from the frontiers who need some kind of garrison duty to keep them busy. It doesn’t take a lot of training to assemble this.”

  Eventually, the charts and schedules and the captain’s enthusiasm won the day. By evening, the first orders had been signed. Captain Aleksander had been put on temporary duty at the ship yards to add his aircraft expertise to the building crew, and the adventure had begun.

  My last comment to Captain Aleksander was, “We never suspected that there were such active unofficial groups among the young officers. I am still somewhat torn between giving you all medals and promotions, and having the shipyards build galleys so that we can bust you all down the rank of galley slaves. It has been an interesting day.”

  One of the most interesting things was that Lawson turned to Alexander as they left and said, “Too bad we didn’t have time to talk about the other project.”

  It was only two weeks after our momentous rigidible decision that the committee met again. The reports were encouraging. Aleksander and Quidon had identified over twenty junior officers who had engineering experience and had worked on the rigidible design over the years. They were spotted throughout the project as advisors and managers. In some cases they were given temporary rank to fit their new responsibilities. There were an additional thirty juniors familiar enough with the project to seed work crews and staff offices.

  The keel of the first ship was down and the first shipment of rib sections had arrived on site. Design modifications were being made on the fly. This was going to be a minimal build. In place of small individual cabins, the crew would have aluminum and cloth camp beds clamped to the deck and hammocks for passengers. Toilets would be holes in the floor and bathing facilities would be buckets of water. The officers would live no better. Instruments would be pirated from existing aircraft and bolted in.

  The original design called for two gross cigar shaped gas bags with complex plumbing for refilling and dumping hydrogen all controlled from the bridge. That had been simplified to ninety fatter bags manually operated by the crew.

  The engineers would have preferred highly modified engines designed for low-speed and high power, but had adapted the nacelle design to accommodate four existing bomber engines on each rigidible.

  Despite the last-minute changes, the basic design was working and, so far, Murphy was taking a vacation. We were confident enough to begin discussing what supplies should be ferried out first. We were somewhat hampered by the fact that Lord Conrad could not ask for what he wanted. The airwaves were still public and his codes were known to more than us.

  Captain Feliks took the lead for the quartermasters. “We have decided that the first requirement of an army is food. Hungry soldiers get sick and die. Of course, we can’t send our standard rations in the first few shipments. Canned food is over sixty percent water and Lord Conrad’s problem right now is that he has too much water, so we have ordered a hundred and fifty tons of rice and flour. Cooked rice is about seventy five percent water, so a hundred tons of dry rice will make four hundred tons of cooked rice, and a man can survive on as little as two pounds of cooked rice per day and live well on three pounds. Wheat does not have as good a ratio of dry-to-cooked weight, but in a gruel or porridge it comes close.

  “As we get closer to launch, we hope to identify other lightweight, high calorie foods to ship. It’s taking some time because the priorities are somewhat different from normal expedition planning. On the ground, space is primary and weight secondary, so we look for dense products to ship. In the air ship our primary concern is weight, so we need to reevaluate potential foods.”

  All throughout the meeting, we had been wondering about the six-foot long crate that they brought. The last crate launched massive program and I wondered, no, dreaded, what this one would do.

  Then the rest of the meeting was concluded, it was Lawson and Alexander’s turn. Lawson was now a regular member of the committee, but he still tended to talk hurriedly as if no one would listen.

  This time they uncrated a six-foot long wing. It was a white wing with two tiny motors, one on each side, and a spindly looking elevator sticking out the front. I was about to ask what the hell it was, but Captain Lawson never needed any encouragement to talk.

  “This is a project that we didn’t have time to talk about at the last meeting. Unlike the rigidible that we’re building, this one carries less cargo and is therefore less pertinent to our current situation. It’s about the same gross weight as the other ships, but it has other strengths.

  “This is a fast courier ship with unlimited range and high speed. This ship could fly from Cracow to Cracow, around the world, without refueling and averaging well over gross miles an hour.

  “We didn’t press it in the last meeting, because we weren’t certain what role it could play in the very near future. During the last two weeks, we figured out how it might save Lord Conrad’s butt, I’m mean, how it might have a significant effect on an effort to rescue and supply a possible future distant force, and we figured our how to make one with the material and manpower the air force has on hand.”

  Baron Quidon was our savior, or tried to be. “The last time we let you talk, you got us into a multimillion pence projec
t, used up all the aluminum in Europe, got a commitment for two thousand workers, and possibly got us all charged with treason.

  “I don’t think you can do that again.”

  I don’t know if Lawson was supremely confident, or just unaware of reality. “You forgot that we didn’t use up all the cloth, hydrogen, or wood, and a lot of air force workers are still available, and this is a great machine. As a soldier, you’ll love it, and we don’t need any more money.”

  Quidon shook his head, “I know I’m going to regret this, but why will I love it?”

  “Well, you notice it’s a different shape. The regular rigidible is a cigar shape and this is a flying wing.” I guess the kid liked repeating the obvious. “But the real difference is inside. You’ll notice that the center third of the wing is a slightly different color than the outer thirds. That’s because only the outer thirds contain hydrogen, and they hold only enough to almost, but not quite float the ship.

  “We decided to call this a compound airship because part of the lift is provided by gas burners in the center section. The center section is, in effect, a hot air balloon very much like the toys we demonstrated at the last meeting.

  “Remember that the ultimate range limitation on the pure hydrogen rigidible was the need to frequently valve off and then replenish the hydrogen. In this one, you never need to valve off hydrogen. If you want to go down, you turn the burners down and light the fires to go up. Since the ship is near neutral buoyancy anyway, it doesn’t take much fuel to lift it and the liquid fuel is a lot easier to carry than spare hydrogen is. N

  “It’s not immortal, but its range is several times that of a hydrogen only ship.”

  Komander Evan jumped in. “So, you can stay up a long time. So what? You still have to carry fuel to drive this thing. What’s the advantage?”

  Lawson was almost gleeful. “That’s the other thing. You don’t need fuel to drive it. The lift does it. Those two little engines on the wing are just for maneuvering. Some of you have flown gliders or read about them or had friends that flew them. One of the tricks of getting speed out of your glider is catch a thermal and get up high. Then you nose down, glide forward, and trade your height for speed.

  “That’s what this does, but it makes its own thermals going up or going down. On the way up, the wing shape lets you angle the ship forward to move horizontally. When you reach the top, you cut the heat and do the same glider trick on the way down. It might make you seasick, but it’ll move you farther and faster than anything else on earth.”

  I still wasn’t convinced. “As usual, you’ve done a great job and made fantasy almost believable, but I still fail to see any urgency to build this. Perhaps when we have more time…”

  But he wasn’t done. “Please, just another thirty seconds. Let’s all imagine that somewhere out there forty thousand brave Christian Army warriors are facing, let’s say, a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand Chinese infantrymen and mounted Mongol warriors.

  “Now picture yourself being one of those infantrymen or Mongols and you look up in the sky. Something is dropping out of the sky. It’s big, but so high that you really can’t tell how big. It’s the biggest and fastest thing you’ve ever seen. You shoot at it, but it’s way out of range. Then as it levels out ahead of you, twenty pairs of machine guns open up and start mowing a path through your army, gross feet wide, killing everything. You’re dead, and everyone and everything near you is dead.

  “That’s what this machine does. That rigidible keeps you alive and this kills your enemies. Anywhere in the world. We’ll call it Equalizer.”

  There was less discussion this time. If Lawson said that they had the manpower and materials, we were inclined to believe him. If he said that he would deliver it on Saturday, I might have believed him.

  We built it.

  Wisdom from Conrad

  Have you ever noticed that we thank God for good things, but we curse “the gods” when things go wrong. Catholic or not, I was tempted to start the cursing.

  It rained for seven days and seven nights, and then just kept on raining. Not the buckets and barrels of the first seven days, just enough mist and drizzle and showers to keep everything damp, cold, and miserable. This was the second time that rain had brought disaster to this mission. One more time, and I would change my name to Noah Stargard.

  Even the Big People weren’t able to move more than ten miles an hour in this muck, and wagons sank in axle deep when they were moved. It was far less fluid than pure mud would have been, but you still couldn’t put any real pressure on it.

  The cold was getting worse. By the calendar, we were now in November and even though the medieval calendar was flawed, it was obviously close to winter. We had made another eight hundred miles before the rain started so we were now almost two thousand miles from Cracow, and well beyond the range of rescue or arrest.

  The scouts were still reporting an almost eerie emptiness on the Steppe. There were a few Mongol yurts but no herds of animals, no moving bands of men. We had drifted away from the Silk Road, but a reconnaissance showed that traffic was stopped there too.

  Of course, we weren’t running parallel to the real Silk Road. The traditional route ran far south of us. It started near modern Beijing, skirted the northern edge of the Gobi Desert, crossed the Middle East south of the Caspian Sea and ended in Constantinople or Alexandria, but for about a hundred years the Mongols insisted that the caravans follow a route from Sarai through Karakorum, so we were a lot of miles north of cities, supplies, and good roads.

  The men played cards, polished weapons and armor, dreamed about, bragged about, and lied about women, but mostly they tried to find a dry place to stretch out. We were camped on the highest spot in sight but there just wasn’t enough high ground for a city of forty thousand men. We had done our best to ditch around the camps, but the damned sod was three feet thick. You couldn’t get a shovel through it.

  Someone got the bright idea of cutting the sod and using it to build low walls around the tents to deflect the water. Of course, we didn’t carry sod cutters with us, so they used what shovels we had and the two thousand saws the quartermaster had insisted in bringing from Sarai.

  A few of the men used their swords to cut sod. My first reaction was absolute rage that someone would defile a sword that way, but then I realized that the sword was just a tool to keep you alive and if keeping you dry kept you healthy, cut with my blessing. We’ll sharpen them again before we go.

  Me, I sat in my tent and planned. I’m not the worrying type. I plan ahead and in fact plan a lot for every contingency that I can see, but I don’t “worry”. This time there had been little time for planning. I knew when I heard the Mongols were coming that they had to be delayed so I reacted the most rational way possible. I got all the men and weapons together that I could lay my hands on and went to harass the enemy.

  It’s possible that plan was accomplished when I sent the Big People out to kill the Mongol horses. My reasoning was that a Mongol without a horse was just a nasty little man who needed a bath. We hadn’t heard back from the Big People, but we hadn’t seen any herds of horses in weeks. I might have been able to turn back then, but I was convinced that there was a Mongol invasion force forming somewhere and we needed to bloody it before it got to Poland.

  It felt good to wipe out the garrison at Sarai, but forty thousand Mongols was a damned small outfit for an invasion, and I was convinced that there was another force forming in Mongolia or already on the trail.

  My plan was to find that Mongol army, hit them hard before winter set in, and high tail it back to Poland before the worst of winter stopped us. It was more than the horse raid plan I started out with, but if it succeeded the Mongol threat would be gone for many years.

  Unfortunately, we were having problems finding any sign of a Mongol army or even any sign of living Mongol horse herds, and I did get fired.

  As a result of being recalled, I had promised the men with me untold riches and glory. If
we couldn’t find a Mongol army, the only way to fulfill that promise was to empty the treasuries at the Mongolian capital at Karakorum, and we were rather short of artillery, ammo, mines, men and everything else needed to storm a fortress city with high stone walls.

  I needed a plan. I couldn’t very well assemble the army and announce, “We’ve had a nice little walk our here, but now it’s time to amble back home.” Neither would I ever return to Poland. I had spent a lifetime making the Christian Army and Poland the most powerful force in Europe, made a county preacher into a pope, cherished a wife for many years, and made a minor king into one of the most powerful monarchs in Christendom and my reward was betrayal by virtually everyone I had helped.

  I was recalled to explain myself. If I returned, the only possible explanations would require a lot of blood be spilled, some of it royal and some of it holy. My anger was only dampened because I was bored with my life anyway and had enough gold with me to form an empire anywhere I went. The army and the Mongols were my real problems.

  So, I sat cross-legged on the carpet and thought and drank liberated wine and stared out at the rain for three days. Occasionally one of my bodyguards would offer a back rub or sex or bring me a meal. I accepted the back rubs and meals, but passed on the sex.

  I still hadn’t decided what to do when the answer dropped out of the sky, literally. We were buzzed by an airplane. Almost two thousand miles into a barren steppe, an airplane buzzed us. I ran outside and looked up to see twin-engine aircraft about the size of a DC3 circling overhead. The brilliant and beautiful crest of Poland gleamed on its bright aluminum tail. Obviously Sir Piotr had once again gone against my orders and this time built the twin-engine cargo plane I didn’t want. When he wasn’t busy betraying me, he was a handy man to have around.

  After several passes, the pilots apparently identified my tent and circled tightly over it. One of the pilots leaned out of his window and dropped a canister with a long green ribbon streaming behind it. I was still putting on my armor when a trooper brought it to me.