Perdition

by Scott McKay

  But he also didn’t know how high the raptors could fly. He was surprised they could travel at the altitude at which they were currently advancing on him, and what he saw was frightening. What if he couldn’t stop them from getting above his ship?

  The gunners were hitting their marks and they had thinned out the ranks of the raptors by a good couple of hundred, but their ammunition stores were starting to run low. Clyde was finally putting some distance between it and the raptors, though, and he could see the birds slowly begin to break off to the south.

  “That was close,” Mills said. “We are going to have to bring a lot more ammo if we’re going to come out here again.”

  “Problem there is what it’ll do to our maximum altitude,” Sebastian countered. “Those birds fly a whole lot higher than I expected.”

  Clyde, with Ann Marie following, continued east for a few more miles to put some distance between themselves and the raptors, then turned south. They’d pass over Battleford on the way home, a ninety-minute flight according to his charts.

  …

  They’d made what Sebastian expected would be a ninety-minute trip from the site of their encounter with the blood raptors back to the airship base at Barley Point in seventy-five minutes, achieving airspeeds in excess of one hundred twenty miles per hour along the way. That was a new world record for airship travel, he remarked to the crew, though none of them were in a particularly celebratory mood after having seen the colossus of the Udar army and the numbers of deadly raptors they’d had on hand during the morning’s voyage.

  Along the way Clyde had slowed to a crawl and descended over Battleford, giving Lieutenant Bart Hance, the ship’s signalman, a chance to relay a message to the Fourteenth Infantry camped outside the city.

  “ENEMY CAMP SIGHTED TWENTY-FIVE MILES SOUTHWEST. ESTIMATED STRENGTH AT LEAST TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND INFANTRY. BE ADVISED--SOME ENEMY ARMED WITH RIFLES.”

  On the ground the Fourteenth’s signal corps fired a rocket with green smoke, indicating receipt. Clyde then ascended and picked up speed for the final leg back to Barley Point.

  It was a quick turnaround when the airships landed. Sebastian debarked, headed for his makeshift command post at the military base just north of town. He’d be burning up the teletext wires. First, Sebastian needed to send warnings to the Fort Stuart defenders, then offer further detail to the troops digging in at Trenory and Battleford, and also to his makeshift base north of Trenory where the airfighters were training up ordering them into the air south of the city to protect the evacuation and slow the enemy’s advance.

  Then there would be another string of teletext messages up the chain of command in Principia to comprise a report of what he’d seen. He’d be writing a much more detailed version for General Dees’ eyes; that one would be put in a motorcar and sent to Dunnansport and delivered by train to the Office of Special Warfare headquarters in the nation’s capital.

  And he’d also be sending messages to his father, letting him know the refitted airships’ performance was exactly what it needed to be, and what he needed was more of those engines.

  Sebastian also knew he needed more crewmembers. Lots more. He also sent a teletext to the commandants of the naval bases at Dunnansport and Port William asking them to contribute whatever personnel they could spare or recruit with knowledge of ship engines, navigation or gunnery to the Special Air Force, and put them on a locomotive headed to Barley Point. They’d need to get people with the basic skills an airship crewman might need, and then train them up; Sebastian figured people familiar with steamships or naval vessels might be a good start. The logistics of training airship crews, he figured, would give him his next nightmare.

  But at least he had faith in the current crew of the two airships. They’d performed brilliantly in today’s mission, and he was exceptionally proud of a group who had been the employees of a civilian airline less than two weeks earlier. Most of these men, recruited into the Air Force from Sebastian’s former enterprise, had left families and homes behind in Principia--with virtually no notice--to follow him down to the south and mortal danger. Admittedly, it was for an increase in pay to slightly compensate them for the hazards, to crew a pair of rebuilt airships with new burners and engines, on a totally different mission with no promise of leave at any point soon. And yet the esprit de corps of these men was unblemished; most of them saw this as a grand adventure and an enviable career opportunity.

  It will be, he thought, if we don’t all get killed.

  As he entered his command hut, he was greeted by his adjutant, a local woman named Rose Turner. Until a few days earlier Rose was a secretary to a Barley Point solicitor, but the legal eagle took the news of the Udar raids on the other side of the Tweade as an impetus to evacuate his family and legal practice to parts east. With Rose’s job evacuating along with it, and her husband a cavalry sergeant stationed at the base, she’d shown up three days earlier asking about a job and found one with Sebastian on the spot.

  “Hi honey, how was your trip?” she joked. Sebastian noticed that Rose, a thickly built brunette of about thirty, had a rather unorthodox, quite entertaining and, he reasoned, thoroughly inappropriate manner about her, especially given she’d been enlisted into the Special Air Force as a sergeant. He gave her a glance indicating she was on thin ice.

  “Let’s just say it’s not good out there,” he said. “I hope you’re ready to do some typing, because we’re going to be firing off communications in every direction the rest of the day.”

  FOUR

  Fort Stuart, Tenthmonth Thirteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal

  He stopped for a while, watching Clyde and Ann Marie lift off and speed rapidly to the south, their engines purring smoothly as they rapidly gained altitude and velocity. And Hank Latham noticed out of the corners of his eyes that he wasn’t alone; several hundred men also gawked at the dirigible airships motoring off to find and engage the enemy somewhere south of their position. He wondered how many of them, like him, were seeing an airship for the first time.

  In different circumstances this would have been a wondrous bit of entertainment. But the current situation hardly allowed for diversions.

  Latham had the near-impossible assignment of constructing a fortress on the site of the former Hilltop Farm in what he expected were mere hours before the Udar were to arrive for a bloody, and potentially disastrous, battle. He gave thanks to the Lord of All for those two airships and the fact that his new friend Sebastian Cross was commanding them. He’d met Cross just three days before. The national hero aviator had suddenly showed up at a house in Dunnansport where Latham had straggled to after participating in the rescue expedition to save the survivors of the Udar raids on Dunnan’s Claim, with the surprising news that Cross was now in charge of the Ardenian Special Air Force and would be basing much of it just seventy miles up the Tweade at or near Barley Point.

  And Cross had then asked Latham, an engineer by trade who less than a week ago was in private practice as an architect, to design and build a base for his airships and more weaponry he’d be bringing into the theater. That came on top of Latham’s current responsibility, which was to build Fort Stuart here on this site.

  In forty-eight hours or less.

  But while that seemed impossible, Latham didn’t think it was that daunting a task. In fact, he had everything he needed to get the job done. Within a couple of minutes of the two airships’ arrival at the site, the convoy of three dozen lorries he’d been counting on had begun arriving, and with them came enough lumber and metal braces to stand up a wooden palisade about two hundred ten yards on each side.

  That was the most important bit.

  Once he was done with the palisade square, he could then start his second phase, which was to build the cannon and chain gun emplacements that the walls of the fort would be littered with, and then a fortified command position which he would construct out of some remnants of the manor house at Hilltop Farm the Udar had destroyed in their raid on the property eight d
ays prior.

  Latham was amazed at how quickly events had progressed. Eight days ago he’d been here on horseback to deliver plans to George Stuart, the landholder at Hilltop Farm, for an expansion of the manor house, only to find the farm ablaze, the Stuart parents dead and only the youngest children alive on the premises and hiding in the cellar after the Udar attack. His plans for the manor expansion were, thankfully, adaptable to repurposing them as a military presidio, and he was able to sell them to Lieutenant General Alfred Terhune, an old friend who had commanded Latham in the Ardenian cavalry a decade ago, as the design for the new Fort Stuart.

  But Latham couldn’t build a stone presidio in forty-eight hours. The palisade was all he had time for right now. He knew the Udar would attack it with fire, assuming they could get close enough to do so, and if they were able to ignite the wooden barrier, it could conceivably lead to disaster.

  But geography favored the good guys here. Latham’s plans worked with the land to set up the wall, particularly on the south side, on what amounted to a natural motte given a steep ridge of about twenty feet. He’d set the southern wall of his palisade hard against that ridge, and then constructed the west side against the road from Barley Point. The northern and eastern walls of the palisade would be built based on what he had available, but he expected the whole thing to be at least twelve feet high, which would be more than enough to keep the Udar from quickly scaling it. With the elevation, the Ardenians would be able to pour fire down on the enemy as they approached from the south, assuming that’s where they came from.

  Now the lorries were on site, as was Latham’s crane, a fifty-foot high monstrosity which had come down via locomotive from Port William to Dunnansport, and then by boat to the landing across the Tweade from Barley Point, and then to Fort Stuart pulled on a trailer by a lorry. That crane would rapidly improve the rate at which the wooden stakes of the palisade would be constructed. His men were setting up the crane, which was set on a movable base to be pulled by teams of horses, to lift the timbers for the palisade from the beds of the lorries into the post-holes he’d had his men digging all morning.

  Latham circulated quickly among the men, making sure their work was done with maximum efficiency. This was easy, he noted, as everyone here knew the enemy was close and any delay in getting that fortress built could mean the garrison would be overrun. And the reports from the intelligence the Office of Special Warfare had generated indicated the enemy would arrive not just with thousands, but perhaps hundreds of thousands, of troops.

  Which meant this was more an anthill than a construction site, Latham noted. His men were jogging from place to place, rather than walking, and there was nobody standing around on the site of what would shortly be Fort Stuart.

  There were currently some four hundred armed men to defend the site, plus the two airships set to operate from the airbase Latham was charged with building once his fortress was complete, assuming there wasn’t an active battle long before he had the chance to begin construction. He’d drawn up plans for an extended defense to the east and west in the event the Ardenians had the resources to man that defense, building a line which would essentially amount to a bubble extending south of the Tweade and protecting the town of Barley Point twelve miles away across the river. Fort Stuart would be the central focus of that defense, if Latham had the men, material, and most of all time to put his plans in motion. If not, it would at least be a fire base from which to thin the enemy out a great deal on his way to the Tweade.

  The morning and afternoon were occupied with heavy construction on a nearly impossible schedule, but Latham thought progress was satisfactory. By mid-afternoon he had almost the entire south wall built, with the foundation dug for the east and west walls and a bit of the palisade beginning to extend in both directions. And by sundown Latham’s outer wall was more than half complete, with the south wall finished along with his gun emplacements largely in their final state, and the west wall almost entirely built with its large double doors operable. The east wall and north foundations were about halfway completed.

  By then the horse-drawn wagons had begun arriving with more equipment and materials, and Latham had what he needed to begin constructing the outbuildings within and behind the fort on its north end. He’d sent the lorries back to the Barley Point ferry; they were expected to return the following day with more lumber, as well as an arsenal of guns and ammunition.

  Major Will Forling, the commander of Fort Stuart, at least for the day (Forling’s official designation was that of Executive Officer for the Lower Tweade Military District under Terhune), came to see Latham in his command tent just before dusk.

  “Hank, this has been an amazing performance by your men,” Forling said to his new friend; the previous week both had served in the hastily assembled contingent which had rescued more than three hundred Ardenian captives from an Udar raiding party. “I wouldn’t have thought it possible to finish this fort in two days, and you’re likely to finish it in one.”

  “We might just,” Latham responded. “I need a bit of luck in keeping the Udar away, and then I can turn over to you a workable defense for your men. But it’s going to take a lot more to keep the enemy from encircling us and starting a siege.”

  “That, hopefully, is what airpower and artillery are for,” Forling said. “I’m told we’ll have Clyde and Ann Marie back here in the morning to make another run to the south and whittle away at the bad guys. They found them stretched out along the coast south of here. They’re at least thirty miles away, which gives us two days before we would face the bulk of ‘em.”

  “Better timetable than I’ve been expecting,” Latham said. “Under the circumstances you can count me grateful.”

  “That’s the good news,” Forling cautioned. “The bad news is the size of the enemy’s force. We might have a stout defense, but to call us outnumbered would be a gross understatement if Major Cross’ recon reports are right.”

  “Well, you’ll have a fort with a twelve-foot high palisade and chain gun or cannon emplacements every ten yards or so,” Latham said. “That should allow you to lay a pretty lethal amount of fire on Mr. Udar when he shows up, and that twenty-foot rise along the south wall means if he wants to make a frontal assault he’s going to suffer for it.

  “The problem is, I don’t think he’s that stupid. The intelligent strategy would be to bypass us and try to cross the Tweade either east or west of here.”

  “You might be right,” said Forling. “We do have enough of a vantage that we should be able to spot him as he comes and make our defense as we need. But, those numbers. Wow!”

  “The raptors are what worry me,” Latham said. “We dodged a bullet not having them hit us today. I can’t say I have a proper defense for them should they come.”

  “It isn’t feasible to build a roof on this place, is it?” asked Forling.

  “No, but I have been thinking about that. What we need is to get hold of as much wire mesh as possible and string it along the top of the walls. If it’s strong enough, it might keep the raptors from attacking. But I would think the closest place where that might be obtainable would be Port William or Aldingham, if not Trenory. I don’t know we could get it here in time.”

  “That’s a hell of an idea, Hank,” Forling said. “Let me see what I can do.”

  He scratched out a note and had his adjutant, a young corporal named Richman whose family were dirt farmers northwest of Barley Point, deliver it to the fort’s teletext operator. “We’ll see whether the quartermaster at the base is able to scrounge us up something. Copper wire isn’t all that hard to find.”

  “I’ve got doors on the southeast, northeast, northwest and southwest corners wide enough for men to come through single-file,” Latham said, “and then there are the double doors at the fort’s front gate on the west side along the road. That’s enough to get people in and out of here as needed without compromising the fort, and with a two hundred ten-yard square on all four sides, you can easily fit a
couple of thousand troops in to defend this place. It should make for a pretty fearsome fire base. I just don’t know that they won’t bypass it.”

  “When are you heading back to Barley Point?” Will asked, changing the subject.

  “Not until this project is done,” he answered. “If I can get started on Sebastian’s airbase before the battle starts I’ll be here to work that out, and I’m starting to work on the drawings for it in hopes he’ll quit asking for some sort of masterpiece I have neither the time nor the resources for.”

  “You’re going to need some rest and relaxation soon, you know.”

  Latham looked at Forling with a suspicious eye. “What’s that mean, young Will?” he asked.

  “Only that I imagine Helen’s missing you already.”

  Latham had struck up a friendship with Helen Irving, the sister of the commander of the Marine detachment in Barley Point, just a few days earlier, and the two had quickly become an item. As Latham was well-liked by all the men owing to his honorable service in the rescue force which had saved the Udar captives in Dunnan’s Claim the previous week, the budding relationship between the two was a subject of approval among the builders and defenders of Fort Stuart.

  “Helen’s a grownup, Will,” Latham said. “She knows this is a fight for our lives. Your Sarah knows the same.”

  “You’re right about that,” Forling said.

  Will had a letter from his fiancée just this morning, written two days earlier after he’d left Dunnansport to rejoin the command here. She was a bit emotional in describing her concern for Will’s well-being on the front lines and including some details of her own ordeal with them that had boiled Will’s blood. The two had known each other since childhood, but Will’s heroism in killing the Udar raider headman in single combat, which freed the captives and prevented what could have been an utter bloodbath, had sparked a quick romance from a childhood friendship. The reunion ended with a proposal of marriage before Will had to deploy here as part of his new post as a cavalry officer.