Washington's Dirigible (The Timeline Wars, 2)

by John Barnes

  Or so we hoped they’d reason. These “assisted” timelines were disorienting—the wrong things were there at the wrong times—and that was what we were counting on. The Great George, if things were still on schedule, had already slipped off her mooring post near Bethnal Green, and was cruising through the sky toward us. If she could meet her date, Priestley assured us, the naval officers he had talked with had figured out the mechanics of the rest of the escape.

  We were betting that they wouldn’t think about the aerial route, that it would still not seem quite logical to them.

  St. James’s Park was dark as pitch, and though we knew it was popular spot for assignations, if anyone was making love out there they were doing it quietly. We were taking the swing to the south and west of the park, aiming to put ourselves between the Palace and Buckingham. The carbide lights blazed out ahead of us, making the trees throw strange shapes into the darkness, and the moon lit the more distant shrubs, bushes, and hillocks as we went on through the night, but no sound came to us over the relentless noisy pulsing of the engine and the roar of the coal-burner.

  As we rounded the corner to turn toward St. James Palace, I stretched out almost prone, with my head next to the driver. The engine tender had picked up a Pennsylvania rifle, and I heard the windows sliding open under me as Priestley, Sheridan, and the nameless officers readied themselves. We had been making plenty of noise and running with lights on; we had shot it out with Closers less than fifteen minutes before. We expected half the Royal Army at any moment.

  We turned the corner and it was just as dark and quiet as it had been before. Through the trees, which did not yet have their leaves, we could see Buckingham House and St. James Palace, and there were a bare few lights burning in each. There was no trace of the armed opposition we were expecting, and even less of the armed irregulars that were supposed to free the real King and get him to the roof for the Great George to pick up.

  There was nothing but silence and the darkness, the sputter of our lamps, the chugging of our engine, the grinding of our wheels on the pavement. We might as well be driving into a stage set.

  Then suddenly there was a single man in front of us, waving his arms frantically and shouting. The steam-carriage slowed and swung wide; I flipped the Closer weapon to infrared and scanned for any possible ambush, then shouted to the driver that there was no one else. We slowed to a stop just beyond the man, and he ran up to the coach window.

  “Dr. Priestley! Mr. Sheridan! Mr. Strang! Sirs, it’s bad news, the worst, and for the love of Christ put out them lamps if it’s not too late already!”

  Without waiting for Priestley’s barked “Do it!” the driver killed the lights; the engine tender began to stoke the now-idling engine, getting it hot and ready to run fast if we needed to.

  “Sir,” the man said, still panting, “Sir, listen, we’re betrayed, I think. Or some such. They got our main columns, sir, they got us in the street far from here—”

  “Who got you—”

  “The King’s Own Scots Machine Guns, sir, and the King’s Riot Cavalry, them new forces, they met us in the street, sir, it’s a massacre, there must be hundreds dead, and they knew right where and when to find us. We didn’t get near to St. James’s, sir, you’re here without friends, and you’ve got to turn and run—”

  He coughed violently, and it was only then we saw that his shirt was stained with blood. “Good Christ, man, are you—”

  “Dying, I think, Gov’nor. Had to warn you or we’d have—”

  The men were hauling him into the carriage; I crouched upright and began to sweep the landscape with the spotting scope set on infrared plus visible light boost.

  Below me I could hear the muffled cries of frustration as the man died despite their best efforts; he was hit in the lungs, might have made it if he hadn’t run a mile to get to us, or so Sheridan said that the small, pale man, who turned out to be a surgeon, had said.

  I swept twice more without seeing anything. If they had found some way of getting at us, they must be invisible. I turned the scope back toward St. James Palace.

  There were at least a hundred guards moving swift and silent as shadows out of St. James Palace—men who were moving in a quick, stealthy “buddy rush” that meant they had to be the First Virginian Rangers, one of the deadliest forces in the Royal Army—tough frontier riflemen who had scouted for Braddock in the War for Quebec and later raided far behind the lines in France itself.

  I whispered the news down to the men below; we had no more than half a minute till they got here, and they weren’t moving like they were looking for us—clearly we hadn’t killed those lights soon enough, or maybe a glow was showing from somewhere on the steam engine. There was no time to get ourselves turned around and in motion the other way; we would have to stand and shoot.

  And nobody at COTA had ever told me—maybe nobody had known—how you got a Closer weapon to fire on full auto.

  “This looks like business,” I whispered to the men below.

  -14-

  The carriage squeaked and shook as the door opened. One of the two nameless Royal Army officers, a tall, thin man with a beaky nose and a strange, piercing stare, got out and walked silently toward the oncoming force. He had gone about twenty paces when the first rank of the oncoming Rangers froze; then all of them did. Then he whistled a strange little tune, and one man in the middle stood up and whistled something back.

  There was another exchange of whistles. I was beginning to wonder if maybe we were going to hold choir practice here or something when our man, and theirs, ran forward and embraced each other. Silently, the Rangers stood up; just as silently, our little party got out of Dr. Priestley’s steam coach and walked over to join them.

  “I suppose this destroys my pretense that people don’t know who I am,” said the officer who had ridden out with us.

  “If I admit I don’t, will you explain what’s going on?” I asked.

  The Ranger officer laughed. “We damned near attacked and killed our commanding officer. This is Colonel Dan Morgan, and we were wondering where the hell he was when we got orders earlier tonight.”

  It rang a bell, again … Dan Morgan. In my timeline, he and Benedict Arnold (back before Arnold had changed sides) had nearly taken Quebec for the Americans.

  It didn’t take long to explain the situation, oddly enough; the Rangers would go wherever Morgan said they should, so he simply said that the guards inside St. James Palace were holding the real George prisoner, that the George in Buckingham was a pretender and an agent of a foreign power, and suddenly we were about to make the attack with the best infantry we could possibly have had.

  I got myself positioned near the front. God knows I’m no soldier—I’ve never served a day in any uniform other than a security guard’s, and “right face” means about as much to me as “keelhaul the poop deck”—but given a nice simple job like “stay out front and shoot anybody who isn’t on our side,” I could handle it.

  We relied on deception for the first step; Morgan and Major Marion walked up to the door and asked the captain, his lieutenant, and his top sergeant inside that wing of the Palace to step out and look at something. Two paces from the door, they abruptly pistol-whipped them and flung the doors open.

  The Virginians next to me were on their feet in a silent bound and running for the Palace doors. We were going in through doors in the side of the tower, not through the main part of the Palace, but this did not bring any special relief—there were lots of windows from which we could be fired on.

  It didn’t take the guards inside long to recover. There was a muzzle flash from a window. A man running beside me stumbled and fell. An instant later I heard the bang.

  I popped a shot through the window and heard the wet sock of a hypersonic round going home and turning bone, flesh, and brain into red jam. I scanned other windows, fired at the barrels.

  It was a Closer weapon, all right. Our SHAKKs, if you point them at the muzzle of a projectile weapon,
will set their projectile to home in on the open muzzle, scour its way up the barrel destroying it from the inside, and finally smash the round backward through the firing chamber to destroy the weapon. The poor bastard who’s holding it might lose a finger if he’s unlucky, and the way the weapon blows up in his hand isn’t going to be any fun, but he’s around later to complain about it.

  This was a Closer weapon. Aim it at the weapon and it finds the brain of the person who is holding it.

  I squeezed off eight shots and eight of them died. That probably meant three more Virginians, or so, got to the door alive.

  Once they were inside, there was no stopping them at all. These were men who were used to fighting with knives in the dark, unexpectedly, out in the middle of the forest. Given lights, untrained opponents, and plenty of others to watch their backs, the Virginia Rangers smashed their way through. The guards inside began to throw their weapons down, first in ones and twos, and then by the dozen, until suddenly this tower of the Palace was ours.

  I raced up the stairs to where Colonel Morgan and the rest were talking excitedly to the King, who looked thin and ill but functional. “I am so glad to see all of you,” he said. “Now we need only get my family and we can—”

  There was a loud crash from downstairs, and the thunder of gunshots. I darted out and was halfway down the stairs when I saw that a counterattack was under way; grenadiers were trying to force their way in down a long hallway, and were being held back by Virginians crouched behind overturned tables. I popped two of the grenadiers with rounds from the Closer weapon, and that seemed to make them retreat.

  A Ranger strode up to me, his soft leather boots thudding strangely on the hard marble surface below him. “Sir,” he said, “we have a major problem. It looks like there are troops coming out of Buckingham, and some of the forces that went out to suppress the mob in the streets are returning as well. We’re going to be cut off and surrounded very quickly if we don’t get moving soon.”

  He probably wasn’t supposed to salute a civilian advisor like me, but what did I know about that? Besides, he was standing there looking like I should know what to do. “I’ll let the Colonel know,” I said. “Meanwhile make sure everyone is ready to move.”

  He nodded, so it must have been the right answer.

  I raced back up the stairs—this was four flights of marble steps, past a dozen paintings that really ought to have had some attention and more fine furniture than you can imagine; there’s plenty of exercise in my job, but, though you travel, there’s no chance to sightsee.

  When I burst back into the room, I discovered several people—Morgan, Priestley, and Sheridan among them—looking very carefully at the floor or off into space, clearly trying to appear to be listening to the King and actually trying to come up with some overwhelming argument.

  “It’s quite impossible,” George was saying. “I can’t leave my family to the mercy of these scoundrels, and most especially I can’t leave my eldest son—and heir!—to their attentions. So we must cross over to Buckingham House and rescue them.”

  “Your Majesty,” Morgan responded slowly, “I am sorry to repeat myself, but we just don’t have the forces. We’ll be lucky to hold the roof till the Great George gets here, if it gets here, and after that it’s anyone’s guess. I would go after the Queen and your children myself if I possibly could, but we can’t risk doing it.”

  “It’s no longer a risk,” I said. “It’s impossible.” Quickly I told them about the troops pouring out of Buckingham and the returning forces from the city.

  The King turned and looked out the window, across the low middle of the Palace on the opposite side of the inner court, toward the city itself. Flames were showing in places, and in others there was the unmistakable distant twinkle of muzzle flashes. There was fighting raging across the city tonight.

  Major Marion said, “I do believe those troops were sent with orders to hang any Whigs they could take, without trial.”

  “Oh, God,” George groaned. “These bastards have my subjects killing each other.”

  “Exactly, Your Majesty,” Sheridan said, very smoothly—maybe too smoothly, I thought. “This is why we need to get up to the roof, so that when the Great George comes we can whisk you away to—”

  “Nonsense,” George said, just as firmly. He was thirty-seven and looked younger, despite his years of captivity; there was something about the set of his pouty lips over his cleft chin that made you think of a stubborn small boy and feel like spanking him, and yet at the same time his clear, slightly outsize eyes seemed to be looking at and weighing everything, constantly searching for the right thing to do. That was just the way he was; once he locked onto an idea, there wasn’t much use in trying to talk him out of it. I was to realize later how hard he worked to make sure he locked onto good ideas.

  Unfortunately, hard work has never guaranteed success. “The Queen must be frantic with worry, especially since she has had cause enough in the past to fear for my sanity, and it’s impossible not to reassure her on this point just as quickly as I can. And then, too, has it not occurred to any of you that they have the Prince of Wales? If I die, they will have a perfectly legitimate Regency that they control. In that case all the effort you have made will be wasted.”

  The other obnoxious feature of the King, I realized, was that every so often he would hit on something he was right about, and those ideas would be a thousand times harder to shake him off of. I had just had the sinking realization that this was shaping up to be one of those operations they pick through at COTA (“Now how could this blunder have been avoided? Given that the situation was already a disaster, what could they have done?”), when three panes of glass blew in at us. The other side had gotten riflemen onto the roof of the wing we were facing.

  Everyone took cover, and Morgan dragged George to a fairly safe corner. I took a look outside, saw a few of them, and popped them with the hypersonic weapon. Sickeningly, I realized that “popped” was more than just COTA slang—these guys went to messy pieces like squeezed pimples.

  There was firing now from windows on all sides of the tower, but there were muzzle flashes all around as well. We were surrounded and cut off.

  I heard Morgan pointing this out to George, who made an impatient, hissing grunt, and said, “Then do the best you can. I’m at your disposal, sir, if anyone has a good idea.”

  By now I was running from window to window, trying to get riflemen whenever they fired. I had probably killed twenty men, besides the ones killed in the first rush on the building, and every one of them had doubtless been quite certain that he was dying for his country—that is, he would have been if he’d had time before he was torn to bloody rags. In the whole city there were probably not actually twenty people consciously on the wrong side of all this—it was all over a deception and a misunderstanding.

  Damn, but my counterpart and his cronies were talented. I was going to have to find them and reward them. …

  Morgan gave a low whistle, and I crawled to his side. He’d been using one of the new bolt-action Pennsylvanias, with a sniper scope, and I’m not sure he hadn’t killed more men than I had with homing ammunition. When a frontier marksman like Morgan pointed a gun, something died.

  “Strang, the news just got worse,” he said.

  I could hear the crashes, booms, and screams far below as the Virginia Rangers held the ground floor—for now.

  I peeped out the window and saw. The Palace was beginning to burn.

  “They’re lighting it,” he said, answering my question. “It’s probably worth it to them just to get rid of us, get rid of the real King—and with any luck this way there will be plenty of bodies to hide his among—”

  “Yeah, and I’ll be burned beyond recognition,” George said, crawling over to join us. “I don’t suppose there’s anything useful I can do except not die, just now.”

  “That will be useful, and it may be quite an accomplishment,” I said. I looked up and managed to bag a man with a
torch before he could apply it to the house; it made the others hesitate. Dan Morgan’s rifle barked, and another of them fell. The rest broke and ran, but after all, there were fires already burning that we could not fight, and the air was fast getting thick with smoke. The way gunfire was echoing in the stairwell suggested that we weren’t going to hold the ground floor much longer, or the floor above it—too many doorways, too many windows, this was a palace, not a castle or a fort, and it had not been designed to take a siege.

  “We’re going to have to retreat to the roof in any case,” Morgan said. “I hope the damned Navy turns up with that airship, or we’ve really lost.”

  It’s hard to describe how well the Virginia Rangers handled the retreat—I was too busy to see much of it, it was so confusing that no one could have managed an accurate picture, and besides, it breaks my heart to talk about it. But they managed to bring along their wounded and even most of their dead, and they made the enemy—who should never have been set up to be the enemy!—pay dearly for every step, room, and hallway.

  It took the better part of half an hour, while St. James Palace blazed around us. I guessed that in this timeline Buckingham would become the important one much faster and sooner.

  Whenever I could get a glimpse out the window, I did, and I hated what I heard and saw—it looked like much of modern London was going to burn down before this was over. How much of that was obstruction of fire companies by the struggling factions, and how much of it just the fact that the cities of the time were flammable and fire-fighting techniques were crude? I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.

  The lower floors of the tower itself were on fire by the time that those of us around the King were getting him onto the rooftop, and the strong updraft was going to turn the place into an inferno at any moment; as soon as a draft broke through with enough force, the whole tower would become one big chimney, and we’d all be cremated. The only positive thing you could say about it was that the fire was now so hot that the enemy couldn’t close with us.