by Scott McKay
He turned the rudder to the right and brought Clyde on a heading straight over the collection of tents Hand had spotted. As they closed rapidly on the Udar, Sebastian could see that beyond that first camp the enemy were dotting the horizon with what looked like hundreds of collections of tents just like it. Smoke from campfires wafted up into the air from the hills to the coastline to the south, and all the way to Rogers Range to the west.
“By the Saints!” Mills exclaimed as the full breadth of the enemy’s number became clear. “How many is that? Millions?”
“Could be, yes,” Hand said. “Major, I’m in range. Permission to fire?”
“Let ‘em loose,” Sebastian ordered, and the two Mark 11’s began chattering as they rained death down on the enemy encampment at four hundred fifty rounds per minute apiece. To Clyde’s port side, Ann Marie was similarly engaging the enemy. The camp was reduced to shreds of tents and corpses in less than the time it took for the two airships to pass over at thirty-five miles per hour. Udar warriors ran in all directions, and the rear Mark 11’s on both airships began picking them off with short bursts of fire.
“We should just blow through this whole mass and thin ‘em out,” said Mills. “This is child’s play.”
“We certainly could,” Sebastian said, “but intel says Trenory is under the gravest threat. We’re going to strafe these savages and cut as many down as we can, but we’ve got to make our rounds.
“Engines ahead half power,” he barked to Devlin and Conliffe. “We are weapons free. Mike, be marking the enemy’s location on your map.”
“Already on it, sir,” said Mills.
And along the two airships went, chopping a swath through the Udar army as they swept west and marked the enemy location. They couldn’t see an end to the Udar camps, which stretched between the mountains of Rogers Range to the coast of Leopold Bay all the way to the fortress at Strongstead, which had fallen to the Udar a month earlier, and even beyond. Sebastian wanted to follow the coastline all the way to the end of the enemy’s force, perhaps whaling away at them with the Mark 11’s, but he had neither the fuel nor the ammunition to fulfill that mission and still complete his reconnaissance. He increased Clyde’s altitude and turned the ship north, clearing the foothills of Rogers Range and making for the plains west of Battleford along the way to Trenory.
Just twenty-five miles southwest of Battleford, tucked into the alcove of Rogers Range’s easternmost reaches, was another massive Udar encampment. Their chain guns chattered away as Sebastian brought Clyde in close, cutting a swath through the enemy. But just as it had been to the south, while they were clearly inflicting heavy casualties and the airships were certainly dominating the battlefield, the sheer numbers of the Udar gave Sebastian a helpless feeling.
With a hundred ships like what we have, we could stop these bastards cold, he thought. We have two, with a third one coming. It’s nowhere near enough and we’re out of time. They could be across the Tweade at Battleford in two days.
As they moved north and crossed the Thurgill River on the northern edge of Rogers Range, they once again encountered a huge Udar force. This one was on the move in massive columns heading north, clearly on its way to Trenory. When they swooped low to attack the Udar, though, something surprising happened.
The enemy was shooting at them, and not with arrows.
These were rifles, smoke coming from their barrels as the Clyde passed through their ranks. So far as they could tell nothing critical on the ship was hit, though they could hear a few bullets ricocheting off the metal floor of the cabin, an unnerving sound indeed. Sebastian immediately ordered a steep ascent, and from a safe distance of fifteen hundred feet they were able to lay down suppressing fire as they passed through the columns.
“If that’s not a half-million troops on the move I’d be shocked,” Mills commented as they finally neared the head of the column, about fifty miles south of Trenory. “Together with what we saw to the south, it’s got to be well more than two million. Never even heard of anything like this before.”
“I don’t know how you could supply an army like this,” said Sebastian. “That’s a feat of logistics these guys aren’t supposed to be capable of.”
“They’re gonna live off the land,” Lane said. “North of where they are is mile after mile of wheat and barley ready for the harvest. They’ll just eat what they want while the farmers evacuate.”
“Brilliant timing, I gotta say,” Mills said. “We probably underestimated these savages.”
“And rifles?” Hand growled. “How are they getting rifles? If we’ve got to deal with numbers like these and parity in weapons on top, this is going to go badly.”
They sped ahead of the enemy’s advance and made a hasty flyover of Trenory. Sebastian noted the large number of horse-drawn covered wagons, not to mention individuals on horseback and even on foot, streaming toward the city from the south. The farms across the river Aileen from the city were emptying out in a mass evacuation, and the Nineteenth Infantry, which was busy setting up a camp on the south side of the Aileen, had dispatched soldiers to aid in that evacuation. They were providing security, along with wagons to help transport those evacuees traveling on foot, to the steamboat ferries running nonstop across the river.
But having seen the size of the enemy column on its way to the action and knowing the Udar were armed with rifles, Sebastian knew the ten thousand men of the Nineteenth were barely a speed bump to the enemy force.
They hovered over the Nineteenth’s position, and Corporal Gregory Hance, Clyde’s signalman, fired off a message in military code.
“ENEMY APPROACHING FROM SOUTH,” the dots and dashes coming from the signal lantern read. “ARMED WITH RIFLES, SOME MOUNTED ON HORSEBACK. THREE COLUMNS, ESTIMATED 500,000 COMBINED HEADED YOUR WAY.”
A signal came from the ground force confirming receipt. Clyde then moved off to the southeast, headed home.
It was going to be a solemn ride back to Barley Point. Sebastian told Mills he was going to have to pilot Clyde on its second mission, and they’d be bombing and strafing that camp threatening Battleford. It was the one closest to a population center of any they’d seen. They’d have to attack the columns south of Trenory either that night or in the morning.
He had a report to make, because the military command had only suspected just how dire the threat was and they had to know the truth, immediately.
One item of priority for the ship’s crew had been to keep an eye out for the raptors, because sighting them earlier in the day had lent such a sense of urgency to this first reconnaissance mission. Somewhere along their flight path they should have run across the murder of giant birds Sebastian had seen flying northwest of Fort Stuart, and the alarm had been sent out to Battleford and Trenory that the raptors were traveling in their direction.
But they hadn’t seen the raptors. And given that Sebastian had seen hundreds or maybe thousands of them in the sky that morning, it was certain they were around somewhere. Perhaps the birds had flown beyond Clyde’s flight path to the north, which was possible, but most likely that would have involved an attack on Trenory, which they would have seen evidence of.
So, the whereabouts of the raptors was a mystery that had to be solved.
The northern tip of Rogers Range contained a labyrinth of caverns and cliffs, some of which would make a very good lair for blood raptors. If he’d had to guess, that’s where they’d find them. Sebastian wasn’t too keen on looking for the birds with only two airships, though. Nobody knew how a fight between Clyde, for example, and several dozen raptors would turn out. He figured that if they could stay above the birds, they’d have an advantage firing down on them with the ship’s four chain guns, but if they were level, or worse, below the birds, it could be a real problem. The raptors had razor-sharp two-foot-long talons, and those could rip open the canvas skin of an airship. That wasn’t fatal to its airworthiness, but if a raptor was to then enter the ship’s canopy and begin ripping at its ballonets, whe
re the hot air was, the ship would drop like a stone. Multiple raptors attacking an airship could potentially take it down very quickly.
There wasn’t a whole lot of current knowledge about the raptors, since they’d gone extinct as far as anybody in Ardenia knew until a month ago when they turned back up in the Udar attack on Strongstead. But prior experience with the deadly creatures showed that the raptors were highly intelligent, vicious predators capable of working together. The great experience of General Arthur Thorne, who had founded the city of Alvedorne after essentially wiping out the birds that had terrorized the western half of the Great Continent as far back as anyone knew, was that he was able to use chain guns and covered emplacements aboard locomotive cars in a series of ambushes. They’d wait for the birds to swoop in on the attack of railroad workers building the line to the Great Mountain Lake where Alvedorne would ultimately be founded, and when they came, the gunners would unload with devastating effect.
That could be done with airpower, Sebastian expected. But two airships were nowhere near enough to get the job done against the numbers of raptors he’d spotted earlier in the day, and only one more, Wainwright, was due into Barley Point within the week.
There were two prospective suppliers of airships to the Air Force. The official one was a Belgarden company called Foreman Technologies, to which Sebastian had sold his airship line. That company had installed engines on Clyde and Ann Marie which were supposed to make the airships military-grade, but their work had been suspect at best. The Air Force had replaced Foreman’s engines with prototype models designed and built at a laboratory owned by his father Preston Cross VII, the prominent Morgan Valley land baron and investor. They’d also changed out the nearly-worthless standard issue Dulsey chain guns Foreman had installed for the Trunxton Mark 11 weapon, the best on the market. How many more of those engines would be available to upgrade Foreman airships was a question; there wasn’t a real production line set up for them. They’d have to be built by hand, and that meant Sebastian might have no choice at some point but to use substandard equipment in battle as his airship force grew. That was, he expected, an excellent way to get his people killed.
And Sebastian didn’t have many people. There was no supply of trained airship crews to be found. They’d be training them at Barley Point and wherever else the Air Force could train them. He had suggested to General Abraham Dees, his boss and the head of the Army-Navy Office of Special Warfare, that the Air Force lease Airbound’s Pelgreen Aerodrome in the capital city and use it as a training base, and they were doing that, but they barely had any trained people to train the trainees. This was a completely thrown-together effort.
But Wainwright, the first of the new airships, wasn’t coming from Foreman. It was built by the Sounder Company of Trentham, just west of the capital. That airship had been built, originally, to sell to the Airbound Corporation, and his partner at the time, Winford Gresham, had badly wanted to buy it. But they couldn’t make the sale, because no sooner did Gresham see a demonstration of the vehicle but one of Airbound’s three airships, Justice, had crashed on takeoff in Principia. Sixty-four people died, and the fallout from the disaster had put Airbound into a financial tailspin. Sebastian heard that Sounder had another prototype airship half-built, and he was hoping the Air Force could buy that one, too.
He also hoped politics wouldn’t get in the way, because just a few days before, the Peace Party-dominated Parliament had passed legislation restricting aircraft manufacture to specifications Foreman Technologies now had a patent on. Which meant what Sounder was doing in selling the Air Force Wainwright and, he imagined, finishing construction of that other airship at their factory, was now essentially illegal. Dees assured Sebastian those problems were going to be worked out, even if it meant rather drastic political changes were going to happen.
Sebastian thought the entire thing was absurd, but so was the fact that he was down here with Latham and Will Forling trying to set up a crash construction program to build a defense where there hadn’t been one. There should have been a hundred thousand men ready to repel the Udar, he thought, as they’d had more men than that here a generation earlier during Dunnan’s War. But instead of pacifying this territory and opening it up for settlement the Army was hustling troops straight from enlistment into defensive positions, and Dees had given Sebastian a frighteningly bleak assessment of their chances. It sure seemed like a decline in capabilities over twenty-five years.
Sebastian had a nightmare the previous evening in which Udar warriors had ridden into his family’s palatial Morgan Valley estate, lighting the manor house and outbuildings with torches and slaughtering his friends and family as they’d done to the settlers here in the Tweade Valley. He hadn’t felt right since, and his level of fear was beginning to exceed what he felt following Justice’s crash and his company’s financial tailspin.
He felt like he was being asked to stand in the way of the Udar making his nightmare an eventual reality, and he wasn’t prepared at all to do that. You go to war with the army you have, as the quote went, from somewhere Sebastian had read during his college studies of military history. And the army he had right now consisted of two airships here and nine biplanes stationed north of Trenory, which were going to be in the air this afternoon attacking those columns advancing on the city.
As the two ships passed the confluence of the Thurgill and the Tweade, Sebastian saw a now-familiar sight he was not looking forward to. Ahead to starboard some fifteen miles away was a flight of raptors heading east. It had to be six or eight dozen of them. He wasn’t really interested in an air battle with those birds today, but they were headed straight for Battleford and they had to be dealt with.
“Contact!” he barked. “Raptors at two o’clock!”
“Contact, aye,” said Mills. “Do we engage?”
“Affirmative,” Sebastian said. “Increase altitude. Let’s get above these bastards before the fight. Make your height five thousand feet. Engines ahead at half power.”
The raptors would pass right in front of the airships, and, he hoped, below. That way they’d be able to pour fire down on them.
“Loaders, report ammunition stores. We have enough bullets to take out these birds?”
“Looks like we have maybe two hundred rounds left,” reported Corporal Adam Vale, the loader for the forward port gun.
“We have three hundred here,” Hand’s loader, Private Walter Jacks, said.
The loaders from the two rearward guns estimated six hundred fifty and seven hundred rounds, respectively.
“All right. Share up. We need more on the front side. You guys on the rear guns, leave two hundred rounds and pass the rest forward.” Each crate of .50 caliber rounds held two hundred rounds.
The order was carried out and in no time flat, Clyde and Ann Marie were within gunnery range of the enemy avians as they cruised across downrange at about three thousand feet of altitude. “Fire at will,” came Sebastian’s order. “Engines, full stop.”
They were going to hold still and attempt some target practice.
The raptors passed right below the ships, apparently incurious as to the threat bearing down on them. When the forward chain guns of the two airships began firing, there was an immediate effect on the raptors. Bird after bird was hit and nose-dived onto the flat plain of the river valley in the initial fusillade from the chain guns. Half their number were hurtling to the earth; they wouldn’t be feasting on any Ardenians today, or any other day.
But the raptors they didn’t get immediately turned back to the west as they dived low. Sebastian then had a choice to make. Should he pursue the forty or so raptors he hadn’t killed, having taken them out as a threat to Battleford, or should he race back to Barley Point to reload those guns and refuel his ships?
The decision became easy when Hand piped up. “Major,” he said, “we’ve got incoming raptors at our one o’clock. Lots of them.”
He trained his binoculars to that angle. “Where?” he said. “I
don’t see them.”
“Up,” Hand said. He elevated his view.
And there they were, cruising at ten thousand feet but descending. He estimated at least four or five hundred, five miles away and closing fast.
“Time to go,” he said. “Increase altitude to ten thousand. Engines full ahead. I need all the speed I can get. Let’s see if we can outrun ‘em.”
He spun the rudder wheel and pointed Clyde to the east-northeast. Best not to lead the raptors over Battleford in case they decided they’d like to dine on ground-based Ardenians today, though if he went too far off course, they might have a fuel problem making it back to Barley Point.
The engines purred loudly, and Clyde completed its turn, motoring quickly away from the scene while climbing just as rapidly. Ann Marie followed suit. Sebastian couldn’t believe how maneuverable the ship was compared to what it had been as a passenger vehicle just a couple of weeks earlier.
But as he could see, the raptors were still closing. Sebastian had the loaders of the forward guns transfer all their ammunition to the rear guns and gave his rear gunners orders to fire at will. Very soon he could hear the chatter of the Mark 11’s and ventured a glance out of the cabin’s rear windows.
He could see a cloud of raptors advancing, though they were rapidly being thinned out by the gunners. The birds were flying at impressive speed, but as Clyde gained velocity the rate of their closing was diminishing. They might well outrun the birds, he realized.
But he needed more altitude. His altimeter read eighty-five hundred feet, and climbing, but the birds were still advancing above the airship, and that he couldn’t have.
He didn’t know what the ceiling of his ships was. That hadn’t been tested with the new engines. As passenger airliners, Clyde and Ann Marie generally cruised at five thousand feet and hadn’t gone above eight thousand, but they’d been re-rigged with superior burners to generate better lift and he figured they’d be able to fly at twelve thousand if need be.