by Scott McKay
Just then, they could hear whoops coming from outside, and the three exited the tent to see Clyde and Ann Marie flying low overhead on their way south. The men cheered as the two airships went by.
“How are those missions going?” Hank asked. “It’s been, what, a day and a half since you got started?”
“Great,” Sebastian said. “But our bombs don’t do enough damage and two airships carry eight chain guns between them, which is nice but not game-changing. It takes mission after mission to get anything done, and we’re spread from here all the way to Trenory. Ask me again when I have two dozen airships in theater.”
Will and Hank looked at each other, sharing a dissatisfied grimace.
“What do you mean, the bombs don’t do enough damage?” Hank asked.
“Not a big enough boom,” Sebastian said. “We’ll drop two dozen bombs per airship in a run, and they’re pinpricks against an enemy camp that has fifty or a hundred thousand Udar. They scatter, and we blow up empty tents.”
“It’s a shame my brother John isn’t around,” Will muttered.
“Why is that?” Sebastian asked.
“He was a captain of artillery,” Will said. “Stationed at Fort Walder back when they were first building the place, and then at the garrison at Azuria. They moved him out when the Peacies took over and closed the Azuria Army garrison, and then he got into the mining business. Made a fortune in the hills east of there.”
“Sounds like a hell of a guy,” Sebastian said.
“He’s an explosives expert,” said Will. “Maybe the best in the country. I bet he could build you a bomb that would work.”
“Where is he now?” Sebastian asked.
“Azuria, or at the mine,” Will said. “Why?”
“Because I’ll go get him. He doesn’t want to be in Azuria anyway. We’re going to evacuate that city; we don’t have anything to defend it with.”
“This is pigshit,” Will said. “How do we not have a damn army to fight these people with? You don’t have airships, I don’t have men, whole cities with no defense and the Udar are bringin’ half their country, and everybody here’s already lost their family. Lord dammit!”
He stormed off, barking orders to the cavalrymen as they readied artillery and chain gun emplacements along the south wall.
“Common sentiments,” Hank said.
“Yeah.”
“Anything from Dees, Sebastian?”
“He sent me a guy this morning who had a very interesting mission,” came the response, “but I can’t talk about it other than to say it’s promising. Hang on for a week here, and the result could matter.”
“I’m intrigued,” Hank said, “but I won’t ask.”
“Well, I’m taking up enough time down here,” Sebastian said. “You’ve got teletext to the base, just keep me updated. And look me up when you get back to town. I’ll stop by Helen’s place and drop off your letter.”
“Thanks, buddy,” Hank said, as Sebastian hustled off to his motorcar.
…
THIRTEEN
Dunnan’s Claim, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
Reese had traveled on an airship before, but only once. Coincidentally, it was this airship he’d traveled on when he’d taken that trip to Port Excelsior the previous year.
Ann Marie did not look the same as it did then.
Gone were the plush upholstered chairs arranged in box seating in the middle of the cabin. Gone was the railing along the sides with stools for viewing the scenery on the ground. This was a lot more bare-bones seating arrangement; Reese had a wooden chair bolted into the cabin floor to sit on, and the bulk of the cabin was taken up with pallets and boxes containing ammunition and explosives.
And a medium-sized cage, into which were stuffed a pair of half-naked Udar warriors.
Reese had been shepherding these two savage southmen since taking control of them in Dunnansport. They’d been in the brig of the naval wharf in that town, and the locals had been quite adamant in wanting to dispose of them their own way; namely, to hang them from a shipping crane at the town port.
Reese was emotionally and philosophically on board with that, but strategically he differed with the sentiment of the Dunnansport locals. That’s because he knew a little bit more about the plan, which involved their being saved from an ugly public fate courtesy of the noose.
Where these two were going, they were unlikely to return from. And thanks to what he was about to do to them, neither were a whole lot of their friends.
As Ann Marie zoomed over the top of the lightning-fast construction project at Fort Stuart and absorbed the cheering and hat-waving of the soldiers and workmen at that budding stronghold, Reese addressed the two men, defiance tinged with fear in their eyes.
His Udar wasn’t perfect, but it was fluent enough for them to understand, something he’d made sure of during the lorry ride from Dunnansport to the military base at Barley Point, and further as the prisoners had been loaded onto the Ann Marie.
“You’re headed back to your people,” he told them, “as part of an agreement Ardenia has made with your sa’halet. We are returning you to the Udar as part of a peace treaty we have conducted with you. You are to be congratulated for your courage, and we owe homage to the valor of your warriors. Drink this as a toast to peace between our people.”
And then he poured a vial of greenish-yellow Blue Pox serum, mixed with a powerful sedative with the complementary effect of weakening the immune system, into the mouths of each. In less than twelve hours they would both be contagious with the world’s most infectious viral plague, and as Reese knew, they’d likely be up all night engaged in sexual congress of an indiscriminate sort and spreading the disease to the entire Udar force moving slowly through Dunnan’s Claim on the way to Fort Stuart and Barley Point.
“No peace will hold between the followers of Ur’akeen and the Profaner scum,” said one of them. “We will return in due time to kill and enslave all of you.”
Reese gave him a subservient bow. “As you say, my lord,” he said in a level tone.
“If we are victorious, why are we bound and caged?” asked the other man.
“This is done because the crew of this vessel are terrified of the martial prowess of the Udar warrior,” Reese answered, “and should you be allowed free hand among them, they are incapable of conducting their duties aboard ship.”
Both men smiled at one another.
“Take us to our camp,” the first man said.
“As you wish, lord,” Reese said, bowing again.
“What the hell was that?” asked Second Lieutenant Bradley Kyle, the captain of the airship, when Reese sauntered to the front of the cabin. “You seemed awfully friendly to those two primitives.”
“All part of the act,” he said. “They need to be in a celebratory mood when they get back to their people, because we want these two waterheads to be ready to copulate with the whole Udar army.”
“Do I get to know why?” Kyle asked.
“You don’t. But be assured that if this works out, the Udar will cancel themselves before we have to do it for them.”
“Well, however that works out I approve,” said Kyle. “This war isn’t convenient for me. I’m ready to get back to the private sector.”
“Thoroughly and completely understood,” Reese said. “But I think you’re going to need to be a little patient. This is going to take a while.”
Kyle grunted, as the airship passed over Sutton Hill and the Ardenian cavalry detachment of twelve men manning that high promontory. From here, the consequential portion of the mission would commence.
They’d had orders to drop the two Udar a mile out before reaching the enemy camp, as before long both would be out cold and hopefully found by Udar scouts. The sedative was fast-acting but supposedly lasted no more than four hours, which Reese was hoping would play into the lie he’d told them about the cease-fire. All they needed was a few hours of confusion as to that question while the usual
night-time Udar recreational activities took place, and the Blue Pox would be circulating apace through their camp.
Reese looked back over his two prisoners and noticed that they were both becoming drowsy. He nodded at his two compatriots from the Office of Special Warfare, a pair of ex-Marines named Roy Harris and Alex Trent, who had been with him since Dreadwick, and both nodded back. When the time came, they’d be handling the prisoners.
About five minutes later, on the lee of a hill just north of where the front edge of the Udar army was camped, Clyde zoomed overhead and started its chain gun attacks on the enemy position. Ann Marie dipped down and landed on the hillside, and Harris and Trent opened the cage, cutting the bonds of the two Udar and dragging them out of the open door in the back of the cabin.
Ann Marie then lifted off, joining Clyde in bombing and strafing the enemy with the usual positive, though hardly dispositive, results. Reese gave a quiet prayer that his mission would be worth a thousand, or a million, bombs and bullets.
After about twenty minutes of nonstop violence, the two airships made a turn to the north.
The second stage of his mission was to drop the two Udar in Clyde’s cage, giving them the same treatment Reese had given his two charges before dumping them at Dunnan’s Claim. An hour and a half later they’d done just that, Reese’s second-in-command Alfred Lyles having recited the same spiel in front of a pair of Udar before knocking them out with the deadly viral concoction. Ann Marie led the attack on the enemy while Clyde dropped off the pair near the enemy camp southwest of Battleford.
Reese noted that the Udar were far, far too close to Battleford for anything they were doing to be effective in saving that city. Battleford was doomed. They had no more than fifteen thousand troops in defense along the Tweade, and the enemy numbered well more than one hundred thousand.
Soon Ann Marie had caught up to Clyde, and both airships were fully engaged in slaughtering the Udar with alacrity. But as Kyle emphatically told him while the bombs fell and the guns blazed, it was nowhere near enough. Soon, the stores of ammunition were nearly empty, and it was time to go; not only that, but a diminutive dark cloud was apparent in the western sky as Reese peered out of the front of Ann Marie’s cabin.
“What is that?” he asked Kyle, pointing ahead.
“Trouble,” came the answer, as Kyle spun the wheel and hollered, “All ahead full!”
Ann Marie departed from the scene in a blistering hurry, with Clyde following hard behind. Reese suspected the other airship had seen whatever it was in that dark cloud, just as he had.
“What are we running from?” he said.
“Raptors,” Kyle answered, as Reese noticed that Ann Marie was rapidly gaining altitude. “We could fight it out with them, but we’re on the wrong side of two rules we’ve figured out so far.”
“What are those?”
“First, you’ve got to be above them, and not below. The guns can’t reach above.”
“Makes sense. What’s the second?”
“You’d better have a full store of bullets. We don’t, so we’re going home. Fast.”
As the airships passed over Battleford before turning back south to Barley Point, Kyle had his signalman drop a rocket emitting black smoke over the Fourteenth Infantry’s positions in the town. That let the soldiers know a raptor attack was coming.
Reese gave another prayer for the folks left in that town. He knew that Battleford, other than the infantry and cavalry divisions embedded there hoping to save it, was being evacuated. But from what he’d seen, those soldiers and cavalrymen were as good as dead.
…
FOURTEEN
Principia, Tenthmonth Fifteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
The locomotive carrying General Dees pulled into Belgrave Station, the central rail hub in the capital city and the largest train station in the world, at the ungodly hour of three in the morning. But Dees was rested and alert, having slept en route in his VIP car after handling all items of business and concluding his preparation for the meeting of the High Military Commission.
He was ready. He’d need to be, because this was the most important presentation of a life relatively full of them. Later that day Dees would be addressing the Commission on the state of the war with the Udar, making recommendations for its prosecution and then advocating for the inclusion of the Office of Special Warfare, and more definitively, of himself as the chief of that office, into the High Military Commission. It was well recognized that a spot on HiMiCom was tantamount to OSW becoming an equal branch of the Ardenian military, the budgetary consequences of which would be momentous.
But there were still nine hours until that meeting, and Dees had a lot to do in that time now that he was back in the capital.
Specifically, there was the matter of the Udar Club, the secret brothel in Principia that had been abruptly broken up a little over three years ago in what had been an even-more-secret OSW operation. The proprietor of that establishment, a man named Howard Sneads, had given up quite a bit of information, though most of it cryptic, before choosing to stay in his club as its gas oven was rigged to explode. Sneads preferred a fiery death to facing charges from the city prosecutor for kidnapping, slavery and child prostitution. He knew what awaited him in prison.
Sneads’ disclosures had led OSW investigators on a lengthy exercise in unraveling what had been described to Dees as a sizable conspiracy. Their Udar Club raid would prove awfully inconvenient for some high-placed people in politics and commerce not just in Principia, but elsewhere in Ardenia as well. It seemed that the club’s clientele was far more exclusive than it should have been in a decent society. Dees had slow-walked the investigation, choosing to bank the political chips it had supplied him. Members of the club who’d been questioned all told investigators they had no knowledge of the staff of the place not voluntarily working there. Legally there would be a valid defense to such claims, seeing as though the presence of the drug marwai, illegal in Ardenia for just this reason, would have made individuals there against their will unable to give evidence of that fact to customers of the club.
But public identification of the Udar Club’s members would be far more scandalous than most of them could stand, and when a couple of them who had nothing to offer by way of information about its activities and membership were given over to the Principia city prosecutor’s office and issued Bills of Suspicion on slavery and child prostitution charges, both had opted for suicide rather than the disgrace of a trial.
Those adult females among the “staff” the OSW had rescued from cages in the basement when they’d made their raid on the facility, after being given luxurious conditions in the northeastern resort town of Guthram with which to decompress after their ordeal, had been very cooperative in identifying club members and, most importantly, Udar Club management. After a two-year investigation, that cooperation had led to a major break in the case two months prior. A man living quietly under the alias of Brook Ingram in Winterstead was apprehended by OSW operatives and then positively identified as Francis Hall, the club’s manager.
Francis Hall, upon examination, was Udar. He bore the telltale burn mark in the center of his back.
Under rather intense examination, Hall had broken. He had named several very prominent delegates of Parliament and some key government bureaucrats who were members of the club, not to mention some prominent business figures and three scions of very prominent Principia families. It seemed that Ardenia’s elite were not flawless in exemplifying the nation’s values, opting instead in their private carousings to sample the sinful delights of the savages to the south.
Worse, Hall had confirmed something which had been suspected: there were Udar Clubs operating in Belgarden and Port Excelsior, and he identified their locations. OSW surveillance of those establishments had produced a photographic cornucopia of damaging information on the politically connected and commercial elite of the second and fourth largest cities in the country. Raids on both establishments were to take place in
the next two days, and unlike the initial raid in Principia, these would not take place when the club was closed to customers. With a war on, there would be no such discretion, and those snared in those raids would bear the full price of their scandalous recreation.
Dees decided to sit on the information Hall had provided, owing to intelligence reports indicating the Udar were preparing for war. But he was building a file he knew could have both politically explosive effects and immense use in gaining agreement for his vision of how the upcoming war would be prosecuted.
Just in the last week, there was a colossal development on that score. Dees’ people had cracked open a safety-deposit box at the Ackerton Bank in East Principia which contained a ledger detailing the entire Udar Club membership in all three locations. Dees’ assistant director of counterintelligence, Major Alexander Curtis, met him at the station at this unseemly hour to brief him on the matter.
“Alex,” Dees greeted him, “let’s do this in the car. I’ve got procurement and politics waiting for me at the office.”
“Yes, sir,” Curtis said, and climbed into the motor sedan waiting at the platform of Track Fourteen as Dees descended from the VIP train car. Lieutenant Mason, Dees’ adjutant, stowed a set of bags in the sedan’s boot, and then climbed into the back seat with the two of them and rapped on the divider to let the driver know it was time to head off.
The sedan inched off the platform and through a tunnel to an outlet onto Bixton Street, where it made a left and then a right, north on Manleigh Boulevard, a straight shot to the Office of Special Warfare’s headquarters in the Evan Taylor Building on the southwest side of the Capitol District.
There was little traffic, which wasn’t unusual given the hour. Dees noticed the prosperity of the Elkstrand entertainment district they were passing through as they neared his headquarters. The Elkstrand was the world’s biggest playground, full of nightclubs, restaurants, high-end shopping destinations and luxury playpen condominiums for the rich and famous. He’d considered making his home here; as he was currently unmarried, the Elkstrand would be a perfect neighborhood to hang his hat in.