by Scott McKay
“Why the hell would you do that, boy?”
“Sir, the attack on the fort happened when the three of us and our corporal, Corporal Blue, were on patrol to the south. We saw a large force of Udar advancing this way. The fort was all but destroyed and there were only twenty-eight of us left, so it was decided we’d split up and evac to warn you and Fort Bountiful.”
“Where’s the rest of your group?” asked Captain James.
“West of here, sir,” Butch said. “They’re on their way, but they’re moving a lot slower. Some of them are injured and some have dehydration. They probably need a rescue.”
James considered Butch’s report, then nodded. “All right,” he said.
The captain then crooked a finger at one of his sergeants, and the man came running. James spoke softly in the man’s ear, and he hustled off to a door in the cliffside wall of the fort. It opened wide, and Butch could see a pair of horse-drawn wagons being brought out toward the front gate.
“You,” James said, pointing at Butch. “You go with these fellas and you find your people. Load ‘em up and get ‘em in here. And know that if this is some kind of funny-business, your two friends here are gonna wish they’d been bird-food yesterday. You get me?”
“Yes sir,” Butch said. “Thank you, sir.”
Grubbs, the scout, remounted his horse and led Butch, Francis and three other men on the two wagons while six other cavalrymen joined the rescue party on horseback. They headed west into the hot noonday sun, searching for Milton and the other ten unfortunates.
It took about an hour, every minute of which Butch dreaded would be his last as his mental picture of an Udar war party riding up on them grew more vivid the longer the rescue mission took. But finally, Grubbs became irritated at their lack of progress and fired a shot into the air. They heard the report of a return shot not far away and stumbled upon the bedraggled troopers shortly thereafter.
Water was offered from a barrel on one of the wagons, and the men were hoisted aboard. Most weren’t in any advanced state of distress, though one of the supply clerks, a youngster named Gilvern who didn’t look his claimed age of seventeen, looked half-dead from heatstroke.
“We need to get back to the fort, Lieutenant,” Butch said to Francis when the troop was loaded aboard. “The Udar are going to be here any minute.”
“All right, son,” the lieutenant answered. “Hold on.”
They made a hasty retreat in the direction of Fort Harrow, and about thirty minutes later they could hear the loud booming of cannon fire.
Shit, Butch thought. Oh, shit. We aren’t going to make it back to the fort and we’re going to die out here.
Francis caught the look of terror on his face. “Don’t you worry, young fella,” he said. “Those are six-pounder cannon. They have a range of almost two miles fired at that elevation.”
“Thirty minutes away?” Butch asked, shaking his head. “We’re a lot more than two miles out. How are we gonna make it?”
“By goin’ faster!” Francis said. “Hold on ya ass!”
He flicked the reins to the team of horses, and shouted “Haw!”, and the jostling and bouncing accelerated with their speed. The rescue party made a beeline over the rough desert plain for the fort, which Butch could see in the distance.
Smoke wafted up from its walls as the cannon fire continued. He noted that the chain guns hadn’t yet let loose, which meant the enemy was still outside immediate range.
They were still a half-mile away, and Butch could now see a line of Udar horsemen to their south, advancing toward them.
“Still think we’re gonna make it?” he asked Francis.
“Hell yeah, boy!” the lieutenant roared. He looked like he was enjoying himself.
Butch looked in the wagon and saw five petrified kids staring off to the south as it bounced along.
They reached the bottom of the mountain path just as the chain guns started firing, and Francis was whipping the horses as hard as he could to get them up toward the front gate. The six cavalrymen were hanging back, now firing at the Udar horsemen who were quickly advancing on them. Butch took out his Benchford and started firing as well, knowing he had no chance of hitting anything on purpose. The kids in the wagon did the same. They made little other than noise, but with a few of the chain gunners beginning to strike their targets the Udar were dissuaded from continuing their advance. The wagons made it up the path and through the gate, with the cavalrymen riding hard just behind. The soldiers swung it shut and dropped the giant wooden barrier behind the huge log doors.
They were safe, for now
…
THREE
Fort Stuart, Tenthmonth Thirteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
There was little time to lose, and Major Sebastian Cross, who had only become a military man five days prior but was nevertheless the head of the nascent Ardenian Special Air Force, knew he was completely in over his head.
He mused about that for a split second, seeing as though what was currently over his head was a sizable murder of Blood Raptors, the species of avian predator once thought extinct on the Great Continent. Somehow, the Udar had resuscitated the species and trained them as weapons of war, and seventeen hundred years of on-again, off-again military hostilities were now on.
The Udar armies were advancing, Sebastian expected, straight to his position.
He was here at a place called Fort Stuart, helping to facilitate a crash construction program on what had less than ten days ago been a quite prosperous agricultural holding. Hilltop Farm was the home of the prominent Stuart family until an Udar incursion had all but wiped out the settlers in Dunnan’s Claim, this part of the country so close to the border between Ardenia and Uris Udar. The landowner, George Stuart, and his wife Judith had been murdered along with their middle daughter Tabitha, while the oldest daughter Sarah had been taken captive. A hastily formed rescue force had chased down the Udar invaders to the south and saved sixteen-year-old Sarah, along with three hundred sixty-six other women the Udar had captured in a campaign of raids like the one on Hilltop Farm.
The rescue party had been taken by boat to the port city of Dunnansport at the mouth of the river Tweade, about eighty miles east of their current position.
It was at Dunnansport where Rob Stuart, Sarah’s seventeen-year-old brother, who had come from the military academy at Aldingham to take part in the rescue force and was thought to be the oldest surviving member of George Stuart’s family, had agreed to lease the Hilltop Farm property to the military on the condition that it be named Fort Stuart. The military installation was to become the field headquarters for the Ardenian Special Air Force that Sebastian, who less than a week earlier was the proprietor of the country’s and world’s only airship line, had been drafted into his nation’s service to lead.
Sebastian knew almost nothing about war, but he did know about logistics and business and especially about aviation. Those skills were paramount for building an organization like this one from thin air. Fort Stuart, which sat on a high hill a bit more than fifteen miles south of the town of Barley Point, overlooked a large swath of the Dunnan’s Claim territory and therefore was a good post for forward observation, and the two hundred acres of what used to be Hilltop Farm were crisscrossed with streams and lush farmland. It was a prize catch, and one that Sebastian and his boss, Gen. Abraham Dees, the head of the Army-Navy Office of Special Warfare, had moved quickly to secure for the war effort.
Now, it was up to Sebastian and his partners at the Lower Tweade Military District to get the fortifications built and to stand up an air base which could be used to house the two, and soon to be three, airships he’d be operating out of the installation. Originally intended as vehicles for passenger transportation, the airships Clyde and Ann Marie, and within a few days Wainwright, were now repurposed to bring death to the Udar expected to surge into Dunnan’s Claim any day now. They had been refitted with the most powerful engines Ardenian technology could supply, engines which in fact were comme
rcially illegal thanks to what Sebastian now recognized was unspeakably bad public policy coming out of Parliament in Principia, the capital. They each carried four of the devastatingly-effective-but-not-standard-military-issue Trunxton Mark 11 chain guns.
But the airships weren’t due into Fort Stuart for another couple of hours, having undergone last-minute mechanical preparations before being sent into duty as reconnaissance assets. The Ardenians knew there was a sizable Udar force massing to the south, but how sizable, how far away it was and where it could be expected to advance, they didn’t have a firm grip on yet. The airships, which were now capable of speeds over a hundred miles per hour with those new engines, would soon have the battlefield mapped out completely, not to mention have the firepower to whittle down the Udar cavalry and infantry they found.
What Sebastian was truly concerned about were the raptors. Airship travel was a relatively new phenomenon, as he’d been the first man to circumnavigate the globe in one eight years ago, as a precursor to launching his airline. And until a month ago the raptors had been thought extinct; thus, there had never been contact between airships and the giant birds. The raptors could pose a real problem for the airships, as the outer skins of the flying machines’ canopies were made of a canvas material susceptible of being torn by the raptors’ razor-sharp two-foot long talons. But whether the birds would fight the airships or flee from them wasn’t known.
Not yet, at least, and he expected that was about to change.
When Sebastian spied the murder of raptors, hundreds of them, flying to the northwest of their position earlier that morning, he directed his signalman, Lt. Simon Chase, to send up three rockets--the first exploding in blue smoke, signifying enemy contact, the second red smoke, signifying raptors, and the third black, signifying an attack to the west. The rockets would be seen by the signal corps at the military base at Barley Point, which would then send teletext messages to the forces deployed to protect the cities of Battleford, to the northwest, and Trenory, to the north of Battleford, upriver along the Tweade.
“And Simon,” Sebastian said, “get a teletext message to Barley Point that I need those two airships here five minutes ago.”
“Yes sir, Major Cross,” Chase said.
Cross’ two principal partners, Major Will Forling, who was executive officer of the Lower Tweade Military District and the hero of the rescue mission just completed a couple of days prior, and Captain Hank Latham, who was the Military District’s chief engineer and thus in charge of the construction project to put up Fort Stuart, had scrambled into action alongside Sebastian when he reported seeing the raptors through his binoculars. Forling, in command of a detachment of four hundred men to secure the site in advance of the arrival of construction equipment, had raced to the bivouac his soldiers had set up in order to raise the alarm. Latham had two dozen men busily working to demolish the burned-out manor house and salvage the stone and other materials that could be reused to build the fort. But instead, they would be pulled off that job and put to work with shovels digging post holes for the wooden palisade Fort Stuart would comprise in its initial construction phase.
Latham had advertised to Forling and Cross that he thought he could have the palisade completed in forty-eight hours. But with the sighting of the raptors and the significant possibility that a second murder might be headed their way, or that the contingent of the birds Cross had spotted might make their way back over to Fort Stuart at any time, his time frame had just shortened significantly. He muttered that he’d have to find a way to quicken the fort’s completion and give the men a modicum of protection in advance of the enemy human (or avian) wave on its way to them.
The fort’s seven chain guns were trained upward, lookouts were scouring the skies and horizon to the south, east and west, and the builders of Fort Stuart were doing all they could to prepare for the race that was to come. In less than an hour, Latham expected a convoy of lorries containing men, equipment and materials to erect his palisade, and Sebastian was counting down the seconds before the airships would make their way in. He was taking command of Clyde as soon as it landed.
The airships arrived just minutes ahead of the lorries, as the site of Fort Stuart suddenly became a symphony of activity. Clyde put down on the west side of the Barley Point road just opposite the stone fence from where the ruined manor house had been, while Ann Marie landed north and east of the manor house in the middle of a wheat field that needed harvesting.
“Second Lieutenant Michael Mills, reporting for duty,” said the pilot of Clyde, debarking from the airship as Sebastian approached. Mills had, until a few days ago, piloted the airship in its civilian capacity, making a daily run back and forth from Principia to Port Excelsior, Ardenia’s second largest city along the coast of the Great Sea to the southeast of the capital. Sebastian thought it was lousy that Mills had been commissioned into the Air Force at the bottom of the officer class seeing as though he was an airship pilot and would regularly command Clyde, but Dees had told him there would be battlefield promotions to be had in bushels once the war got started.
“Don’t sweat the small things,” he’d urged.
“Good to see you, Mike,” Sebastian said, ignoring Mills’ salute and shaking his hand instead. He hadn’t yet become instinctive in adopting the military customs and wasn’t sure whether they absolutely had to become part and parcel of how his Air Force would do business. “How’s she run with the new engines?”
“Oh, you won’t believe it, sir,” Mills said, with the enthusiasm of a kid with a new toy. “She’s fast. From the time we took off from Barley Point to landing here, nine minutes.”
“Sixteen miles in nine minutes? That’s what, a hundred six miles an hour?” Sebastian calculated, as he came aboard the airship. “And that’s with starting and stopping? Whoa.”
“Yes sir,” said Mills, in his East Principia brogue. He’d been a river pilot on the Morgan before hiring on as an airshipman for Sebastian’s Airbound Corporation line in civilian life. “Those engines, they purr like lions. Yer gonna love drivin’ her.”
“Well, good, Mike,” he said, “because we are going into battle right damn now, and we’re going to need every advantage we can get. Are you ready for war?”
“I am, sir,” said Mills, and the thirteen other members of Clyde’s crew nodded their assent.
“All right then, guys. Battle stations for all of you, and let’s get going.”
Sebastian then took the rudder wheel, and barked to Sergeant Christopher Lane, who manned the elevator wheels, “Lift off.” Lane turned the wheels and the ship’s foreward and aft ballast tanks began to empty.
“Ahead, quarter power,” Sebastian ordered to the ship’s engine operators, Sgts. Peter Devlin and Richard Conliffe, and he could feel the twin engines on the port and starboard side hum into action. Clyde leapt forward as Sebastian turned the rudder to the south, while Mills, serving as copilot, began delivering him readings from the ship’s instrument panel.
“Altitude sixty feet and climbing, airspeed 25 knots, heading 190 degrees,” he said.
“Aye,” answered Sebastian. “Increase engine power, ahead half power.”
He took a minute to survey the ship’s cabin, noting that Clyde, which had a crew of six when it was a civilian airship, was now possessed of more than twice that number. That was mostly due to the four massive Trunxton Mark 11 chain guns mounted on two-dimensional swivels to the four corners of the ship, now pointing down at the ground. Each gun required a crew of two, one to aim and fire the gun and one to load its ammunition through the firing chain and to ensure the bucket from which it drew its water coolant stayed full.
Sebastian figured those Mark 11’s would be chattering away shortly; Clyde was headed due south to the coast of Watkins Gulf, where the ship would attempt to locate the Udar invasion force and deal as many casualties as possible as it passed them by. From there they would turn to the west, following the coast to the mouth of Leopold Bay, and then north, skirting the f
oothills of the Rogers Range while keeping an eye out for Udar invaders who might be following on to Battleford and Trenory; marking their position and strafing them with gunfire, they would go as far as the River Aileen west of Trenory before making the return trip to Barley Point to refuel and reload. Depending on the enemy’s proximity to Ardenian forces, their second mission of the day would be an attack with not just the chain guns but phosphorous incendiary bombs they’d pick up at the airfield in Barley Point.
One hell of a first day in the air as a military man, Sebastian thought.
“Altitude five hundred feet and climbing, airspeed fifty knots, heading one-eight-five degrees,” called out Mills.
“Aye, said Sebastian. “Full ahead. Let’s open this up and see what she’s made of.”
“Chris,” he turned to Lane, manning the ballast wheel, “level us off. I want to be high enough that they can’t reach us with spears or arrows, but low enough to see what they have.”
“Aye aye, Major,” said Lane, as he eased back on the ballast wheel.
The hum of the engines increased, and Sebastian expected it to be deafening. But it wasn’t, and that amazed him, accustomed as he was to the rattle and clatter of the steam engines the ship had run on when it was a civilian airliner. Clyde surged forward to the coast, and in just a few seconds he could see the waters of Watkins Gulf on the horizon.
“Enemy camp, one o’clock!” boomed Sergeant Arlen Hand, literally a hired gun manning the forward starboard chain gun. Hand was an ex-infantryman brought on as a security officer by the Air Force who had talked his way on board as a gunnery expert. “Range three miles. Looks like company strength, probably an advance guard.”
Sebastian understood the effective range of the Trunxton Mark 11 to be right at twenty-two hundred yards. He didn’t want to waste ammunition on firing wildly. “Adjusting heading,” he said. “I’ll get you over them.” And then to Devlin and Conliffe, he called, “Reduce engines, ahead quarter.”