The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  Charles nodded grimly. “And the Garuda?” he said; she was the closest thing they had to a technical expert, and she supposed he wanted confirmation of his own survey, to let the others know their position.

  “The bridge controls are gone. You managed to get us on a rough northeastward course when you went aft to crank the rudders before we had to shut the engines down, and the wind’s aiding us now. Six of the engines are still functional, but almost all the fuel is gone, and with the ship at this attitude using them would drive us downward.”

  He nodded again and spoke himself. “As nearly as I and Dr. King can calculate, we’re somewhere in south-central Afghanistan. Over south-central Afghanistan, that is. From there we can expect to drift northward.”

  Cassandra winced slightly; that was better than being airshipwrecked over Russia, but only just. There was one ray of hope, though . . .

  “I think the transmitter part of the wireless was working before we ran the batteries down,” Cassandra said. “We were able to keep sending—if we were sending, my repairs were by guess and by God—for many hours. The stations in Peshawar and Karachi would have been able to triangulate a location for us. A course, too.”

  Her heart went out to Charles; his face was seamed with more than the pain of a shoulder broken when the explosion pistoned him down the corridor into Narayan Singh—that had saved his life, that and the Sikh’s presence of mind. Grief for his father was there, and more, the weight of responsibility. His kingdom might be only twenty-odd souls at that moment, but it was his, and the rajadharma of guiding and protecting. She leaned closer, willing comfort to flow through the fleeting contact of their bodies.

  “Could it be intercepted?” he asked, head swiveling to take in all his advisors.

  Warburton shook his head. “Probably not. The nearest Caliphate and Dai-Nipponese stations are too far away. Possibly by the Russians—possibly by Russian agents in Afghanistan, though that’s a very long shot. What really worries me is Afghans with telescopes.”

  The others grouped around the young King-Emperor on the observation deck squatted or sat, exhaustion plain on their faces, all of them ragged and drawn, many bandaged. The air carried a scent of dry dust and powdered snow. Mountains floated to the north, white-tipped fangs glinting at heaven.

  “Hendu Kosh,” Ibrahim Khan said, pointing. “Hindu Kush—Killer-of-Hindus. We are not far from my own tribe’s lands.”

  “And not all that far from the border,” Athelstane King said.

  He was lying back on his cushion, while Yasmini changed the bandage around his head. He smiled at her while she worked, although the alcohol—a fine brandy from the pantry—must have stung like fire. Every once in a while he would work the fingers of his right hand, the sword hand, and smile a bit more broadly.

  Men! Cassandra thought, with a familiar mix of irritation and affection for her brother.

  He killed Ignatieff, and that means everything will come out right, somehow. Males are as silly as rams in rutting season about things like that.

  She was heartily glad the Russian was dead, and pleased that Athelstane had done it; but that meant absolutely nothing in their present emergency. Servants came in, bearing food—the kitchens were still working, thank the merciful Gods. Cassandra started wolfing down a fiery chicken Marsala, scooping up sauce and rice with pieces of naan; nobody was standing on ceremony now. Henri came in a second later, a rifle over his back and binoculars hanging on his chest. Everyone looked up; he was on sentry-go in the rear observation bubble.

  “Aircraft approaching, from the northwest, two.” he said. “Two kilometers—a mile and a little. Merde alors, I do not like the look of them.”

  Everyone who could got up and walked over to the portside gallery. Cassandra felt an irrational stab of hope—could it be Imperial airships out searching? That died as the vessels came into view, growing from dots against the blue mountain-fringed sky into tiny model shapes and then silently onrushing sky-sharks. They were four-tenths the length of the Garuda, but only a fraction of the breadth, and they were pure blimps, without any internal stiffening save gas pressure. A crisscross net of ropes confined their gaudily painted envelopes, the fabric bulging out between in a diamond pattern like a fat man’s flesh between his buttons. The gondolas that hung below—each with a single engine driving a propeller at the rear—were mere copies in wicker and canvas of a Persian Gulf dhow, the lateen-rigged craft used for trade—and slaving and piracy.

  And I doubt they can do more than forty miles an hour at most, Cassandra thought. Or travel more than a few hundred miles. Which is forty miles an hour and several hundred miles more than we can do right now.

  Some watchman on a mountaintop had seen them, and flashed signals from height to height with mirrors to the nest of the chief who commanded those blimps. He’d come to see if the wreck was as helpless as reported . . . which, unfortunately, it was. Without fuel or controls or ballast to spare, Garuda was a free balloon—and that only as long as it took the remaining leaking gas cells to empty. They had thrown out everything they could, and hacked away bits of the hull, but the inexorable descent continued; or perhaps it was the hills of Afghanistan rising to meet them like a fanged mouth.

  Ibrahim Khan spat out into space, studied the heraldry on the blimps, and turned his face to Athelstane King: “Hazaras,” he said. “And Durranni Pathans. Jackals—even the Emir has no use for them.”

  The ship-shaped gondolas of the Afghan craft were packed with men, a hundred or more of them together. As they closed she could hear them hooting and yelling, waving weapons; one near the wheel of the forward blimp was looking at the wreck of the Garuda through a long brass telescope.

  “See them off,” Charles said sharply.

  Warburton spoke, reluctantly: “Ransom, Your Majesty. For the good of the realm—”

  “No.”

  The word was not loud, but the Political Service Officer fell silent and bowed his head slightly.

  Cassandra felt herself heave a tiny, guilty sigh of relief. Capture by Afghans was a grisly enough fate for a man. For a woman . . .

  The Gurkhas snatched up their rifles; so did the other fit men. They lined the rails and knelt; aiming at one moving target from another was no easy task. A slow crackle of shots began; Cassandra could see men yell on the Afghan blimps, and one or two fall. Both drew back, dwindling with a startling speed, and then came alongside each other, obviously making plans via speaking trumpet and hand signals.

  “They could try to fire us,” Henri said. “We’re leaking badly.”

  “No,” Warburton said. “They want to capture the ship intact. The six undamaged engines are booty beyond price—with those, they could get some real range out of those blimps, and go pirating on a grand scale, as long as they lasted.”

  “Merde,” Henri said, looking at Sita.

  She had a rifle, too; she glanced up at him and gave a cheerful thumbs-up, looking a little puzzled when he didn’t return her gesture.

  The Afghans had obviously come to a decision. One kept station with them while the other curved around behind, coming up on their starboard side, just beyond rifle range. Then both turned toward the wrecked Imperial vessel and dropped sandbags full of ballast, bobbing up out of sight.

  “That’s torn it,” Athelstane said grimly, picking up his rifle. “Better get topside.”

  “No!” Cassandra said sharply.

  He looked at her in surprise. “The gasbags are leaking,” she said; the tracing-smell was present, faint but unmistakable. “Hydrogen leaks up. The upper part of the hull is full of an air-hydrogen mixture, and so is the air right above it. If you start shooting off guns up there, it won’t just burn, it’ll explode.”

  He gave an exasperated snarl, and nodded. “Sir?” he asked the King-Emperor.

  “You’re in tactical command,” Charles said.

  “All right, Your Majesty. You handle things here; they can’t get close to the gondola, because of the overhang of the hull, and
you can shoot down here. Henri, you take the rear half of the upper hull. I’ll take the forward; cold steel only—they may try to board.” He raised his voice slightly. “Half with the vicomte, half with me. Unwounded men only. You, you, you—” His finger flicked from man to man.

  “Not the Afghan,” Charles said quietly. “I have another mission for him, and Sir Manfred. There will be search parties beating the ground all along the Border; someone has to make contact with them.”

  Athelstane nodded curtly. “Be careful, sir—some boarders may get past us through the hull.”

  The two parties dashed off, feet pounding on the incongruously festive delicacy of the spiral staircase, shouts tailing off as the two commanders organized them even as they clambered up into the hull.

  “Sir Manfred,” Charles said quietly. “We must assume that a relief force is on its way.” A slight, wry twist of the lips. “Because otherwise we are doomed. Many relief forces, by land and air; but even the Empire’s resources are not unlimited. You . . . and Ibrahim Khan here . . . will parachute out now. Make your way eastward; the Border can’t be far. Promise whatever is necessary in the way of subsidies and gifts to any natives you encounter; find the nearest relief column, and guide it.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Warburton said, eyeing Ibrahim Khan and obviously calculating if the Pathan would cut his throat the minute they touched ground. “And you, Your Majesty?”

  “We will”—a real smile this time—“find the best possible place to crash, and attempt to hold out until relieved.”

  He shook both men’s hands as they left; Ibrahim Khan seemed a little surprised. Then the King-Emperor turned to his ragged followers:

  “Everyone who can shoot to the gallery rails. The rest of you, follow me. We’re going to put together bundles of what we’ll need. Ammunition, food, water, medical supplies—everything in portable bundles. And stretchers for the wounded—”

  Cassandra’s heart beat a little harder with pride as she rose to obey. Perhaps they would die soon, but at least they wouldn’t do it sitting and weeping over their fate. Not with Charles leading them.

  Daffadar Narayan Singh grinned as he lay crouched in the stuffy, bad-smelling dimness, clutching at the silken rope netting that confined the gas cell. It arched away from him on either side, like a temple dome for size, with the four men of the section under his command at half-seen intervals. From outside came shouts, muffled by the fabric of the hull; those of his folk, and then the wolfish yelping of the Afghans, a sound he knew of old. For an instant he wondered what Ibrahim Khan was doing, and then there came a massive thunktwuuung sound. Fifty feet away from him light flashed as the barbs of a harpoon sliced through the hull and plunged into one of the spiral girders that stretched from stern to prow of the Garuda, or had before the explosion.

  He was closest. The Sikh scrambled across the billowy, resilient surface of the cell, his bare feet seeking out the knotted rests on the outside of the netting that were supposed to help riggers crawling about patching holes. Sweat soaked his beard despite the chill of altitude; if he misstepped, his body would probably plunge right through the hull fabric a hundred fifty feet down, and then all the way down below that. He made himself move with careful speed, hands clamping and releasing like mechanical grabs. The harpoon shaft was five feet long, and proved to be deeply embedded in a laminate girder. No time to hack it free, and no use going for the shaft or the line anchored to it; both were wound with iron wire to prevent exactly that.

  Instead he waited, out of sight through the hole the harpoon gun had made, drawing the saber he wore slung across his back. The cable running back to the Afghan gondola was taut. Soon . . .

  Yes. A yell, and a whirring, rasping sound. Two dirty bare feet landed on the hull on either side of the rent in the fabric.

  “Rung ho!” the Sikh shouted, and lunged from his crouch.

  He felt the point go home in meat, grate on bone—with luck, he thought vindictively, in the Afghan’s diseased private parts.

  Rotten with a pox caught from his sister, Narayan thought, and wrenched it free while the man twisted and thrashed about, shrieking like a woman in childbirth.

  The wounded man’s body would give him cover. He slit open more of the hull covering and leaned out. From here he could see the Afghan dangling from some sort of harness arrangement on the line, and more of them at intervals up the long slanting curve of the cable, back to the jagged black and scarlet of the dhow-shaped car of their airship. They screamed curses, thin through the high air, and waved weapons.

  Narayan made a broad mocking salute, then edged out with one hand clamped strongly to the cable. As he hacked at the tough hemp, he could see two parachutes gliding in to a landing on the rough ground far below.

  “Good luck, Warburton sahib,” he grunted, hacking at the tough hemp. “And even to you, child of misbelief—provided you keep faith.”

  The Afghan yells turned to fear and frustrated fury as the cable parted; the Sikh laughed as he watched it whipcrack away. The reaver airship bobbed upward, and two figures—the man he’d wounded and the one above him—detached from the line to windmill downward to the hard rocky soil. One blossomed out in a parachute of its own, and he cursed as he clambered back into the hull of the Garuda.

  “And bad luck to you, misbelieving, sister-fucking son of a whore!”

  “Here, Daffadar!” came a shout; faint from the other side of the gas cell. “They come!”

  In Nepali-accented Hindi, followed with a cry of Ayo Gorkhali!

  Narayan Singh sheathed the saber and began to leopard-crawl rapidly upward, over the curve of the gasbag. He was still grinning.

  If he lived through this, he’d have a tale to tell the pitaji indeed. And as his father had taught him, while a warrior Sikh was always glad to fulfill his karman as a soldier, doing it where your superiors could see your faith and skill was doubly fruitful. Under the eye of a padishah, he supposed, would be the most fruitful of all.

  “Mort de ma vie!” Henri de Vascogne wheezed.

  Another Afghan whirled down the cable just behind the sternward observation post. The Frenchman pushed open the door of the bubble, leapt out, and skidded forward; his own feet were bare, too, but the fabric was slick at the best of times, and there were patches of blood already. The tribesman seemed unconcerned, balanced easily with a curved dagger in one hand and the ugly cleaverlike chora in the other, the points moving in unpleasant counterpoint, ready to hold the base of the cable and harpoon while more of his friends slid down it.

  “Allahu Akhbar!” he shouted—a war cry Henri was only too familiar with.

  “Chingada tu mère!” Henri replied; not the first time he’d used that reply either.

  He lunged, aiming for the face. The Afghan parried with crossed blades, ready to trap the long saber and then free one weapon for close-in work. The Frenchman knew a better trick than that one; his left foot punched out, toes rolled up, and took the tribesman in the stomach—no chance for a groin kick, with the knee-length robe the other man wore.

  “La savate,” Henri snarled, as the bearded Muslim doubled over in uncontrollable reflex and dropped his chora.

  Then he yelled again wordlessly as his feet shot out from under him, unbalanced by the kick, and he began to slip downward. A frantic grab took hold of an edge of the pirate’s robe, and Henri hung for a moment with his feet scrabbling on a curve above nothing. Then the Afghan fell, too; Henri used the moment to drop his useless sword, climbing up the prostrate form of the other man. He seemed to be made all out of gutta-percha and gristle and stale-sweat stink, recovering far too fast and slashing at Henri with the curved dagger as he rolled on top.

  The Frenchman caught the wrist with a smack and they strained against each other, the Afghan trying to grind a knee into his opponent’s stomach, Henri working to get a decent grip. The hooked point came closer to his eyes, inch by inch.

  Something flashed over his head and thunked into the Afghan’s skull. His eyes ro
lled up into his head for a moment, and Henri could feel him weaken. He grabbed his own short blade from its sheath and punched it up into the Afghan’s body half a dozen times, then rolled him off. The body slid sideways and away, turning and fluttering in the thin cold air.

  Henri turned his head. Sita was lying three-quarters of the way out of the open door of the observation bubble, rifle still gripped by the barrel, eyes wide.

  There was no time for questions. “Ax!” Henri screamed, then remembered to do it in English. “Ax! By your foot!”

  She snapped out of her daze and bent back for it. Henri grabbed it and turned, pivoting on his backside and hacking at the cable just as another Afghan came down it. It parted on the third stroke and whipped away under the strain of the pirate blimp’s weight. He could see the Afghan aircraft turning away and climbing; a quick glance showed the other doing the same.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked Sita.

  The kunwari looked older; certainly more smudge-faced and drawn than he’d seen her before.

  “Saving your life—again,” she said.

  A Gurkha’s head popped up into the observation bubble behind her, and he called something in his own uncouth tongue.

  “Come on—we’re getting too low, Charles says.”

  Henri looked down; the ground was a good deal closer. Up, and the Afghan blimps had shrunk to figures no bigger than a man’s thumb.

  “I don’t suppose they’re going away?” Sita said, hopefully but with a tone that said she knew better.

  Henri shook his head. “Just waiting for us to come down,” he said. “Then they can land and come after us on foot.”