Her Majesty's Western Service

by Leo Champion

  “Come in, come out and meet me, then,” said Marko. “It'll be three minutes.”

  “Very well,” said Krushchev. Irritably.

  Marko shook hands with him. “Good night.”

  “He's late,” muttered Special Agent Mark Rosen to his partner, leaning across the table of the diner.

  “I can read my watch,” said the other Federal man, Gonaghy. “Who's the man with him?”

  “Can't see,” Rosen said. “Looks like they're parting.”

  “Nobody important. I think. One of those two-bit agitators. Low-level connection; see, he's not being invited in.”

  “Not invited in,” Rosen agreed. That meant something. They were parting half a block away, and it looked like the tall, thin one was turning around completely, had been sent away.

  He played through the procedure in his head.

  Kruschchev has sent the other man away, indicating he's willing to go this far and no further. If the other man is still in line-of-sight when Kruschchev enters the house - I'm betting he won't be – then Kruschchev will make sure he can't see which house.

  It had been a good tip, from a source Rosen wasn't cleared to know; it had been implied that one or another of the Imperial agencies had information from a mole within the Okhrana itself. All the key Russian people in New York City, and a couple of their senior continentals, were meeting at this house. Which itself had been something Federal and Imperial intelligence had been searching for: it had already been confirmed that there was a logic machine there, one whose punch-cards would have invaluable data.

  We're not going to blow it for the sake of another two-bit agit, Rosen decided. As the man on Southern Outer, that was his call to make.

  He gestured to the waiter, a young man who had been a waiter for the last week and a junior agent of the Federal Department of Internal Security for the last two years.

  “Another coffee,” he told the kid. Codewords. “Three sugars. And a scone.”

  “Yessir,” said the kid, and headed into the back of the cafe, where the telegraph was.

  Rosen's partner smiled thinly.

  “Closing it already?”

  “Limited window,” said Rosen. “My call. Yes.”

  His palms were sweating.

  The waiter came back with another cup of coffee.

  “Scone's being made,” the kid said. “It'll only be a minute.”

  That meant the trap was being closed, about to engage.

  Rosen felt the small automatic in his coat. His shoe twitched at the valise, where there was a machine-pistol. Just in case. There was a steam-car of four more men ready, but he and Gonaghy were going to be the outer line on this approach. It was entirely probable that the Russians would come out shooting.

  “I'm going to get some fresh air,” he said to Gonaghy. “Come with.”

  Gonaghy nodded.

  What the hell is wrong with Marko?, Krushchev thought, as he ambled up the street. Being stupidly resistant - well, he didn't know the man that well. Perhaps it was just his way of displaying resistance to the idea of obeying orders.

  Nominal resistance; a display like this. Marko was known as a loose cannon, but he was also one who got the job done. A token display like this would be just his style: I'll delay you five minutes just to establish that you're not actually my bosses, and then I'm going to obey your orders to the letter.

  Still. Irritating.

  And what if there was something? The man would not have lasted nearly as long as he had without damned, damned good intuition.

  You're scaring yourself.

  What if there was something there? Would it hurt to go into Angelino’s Cafe, make sure that the watch-agents were there as they should be?

  Ten feet from the door to his building, Krushchev turned around and headed across the road, toward the cafe.

  “Shit,” Rosen muttered under his breath. “He suspects something.”

  There had been a three-man Russian outer security element in the cafe, earlier. They had been very quietly and very rapidly overwhelmed about forty-five minutes ago. Now it looked like Krushchev was going in to check on them.

  We've established the pattern. Those people don't get regularly checked on. The Russians don't have the trusted manpower to; three men are supposed to be enough that taking them down would draw noise in itself.

  More to the point, the Russian chief of station was heading directly for them, and his hand would not be in his pocket like that if it weren't gripped around a weapon.

  We want him alive.

  Orders had been very specific on that.

  We want him.

  “We're taking him now,” Rosen said to Gonaghy. His own hand went around his submachinegun. The soft leather valise wouldn't slow its bullets.

  A steam-truck came down the street, and oh, shit, we're moving in already?

  It had been, yes, about a minute since he'd given the signal.

  The second element, the van, would be moving in now, but on the street corner; a hundred feet away. They would not necessarily get into action.

  Krushchev was ten feet away. Heading straight for Rosen and Gonaghy. Something had to be done. Surprise would be eviscerated the second the assault truck deployed.

  His thumb un-safetying the gun in his valise, Rosen looked at Gonaghy.

  Move.

  One of the two men who'd come to stand outside the cafe, was walking sideways, to Krushchev's left. The way professionals did.

  Shit.

  He couldn't see any of the three men, the ones who should have been in the cafe, either.

  “Mr. Krushchev–” one of them began. The smaller one who hadn't moved.

  Krushchev's gun, a .475 automatic, was already in his hand, and he shot the man through his coat pocket. Drew properly, fired again, as he stepped sideways.

  Shouts and explosions from behind.

  Shit shit shit shit, Marko was right!

  “FIS!” came shouts from behind. “Open up!”

  More shouts. Yelling.

  The first Fed was falling, collapsed backwards into the window of the cafe. The second one was drawing something, and Krushchev fired at him as he stepped sideways. The first round missed; the second hit the Fed in the side, making him half-step back, and Krushchev's third got him through the throat.

  Rapid automatic fire, yelling and explosions from behind. Krushchev didn't want to look back, didn't have the time to. Besides he knew perfectly well about the twelve pounds of gelignite and didn't want to.

  Besides, there was another steam car turning around the street, a sedan moving at speed, and one of its rear doors was already opening.

  The cutoff element. This is a professional operation.

  How the hell could this have happened? Only three or four people – all of whom Krushchev knew, and knew to be safe and reliable – had known the location of this building until a few hours ago. It was the intelligence processing center for New York City, a secret very carefully-guarded.

  It had been blown, and the Feds – the Imperials? – had definitely had enough time to set up a serious operation.

  Very serious. A dirigible came floating across the street, low, sixty feet, barely above the rooftops. Engines whined hard as it decelerated.

  Figure it out later; run!

  Up toward the assault team would be insane. There'd be elements in the alley, too. Down the street, with their southern cutoff coming, wouldn't help. He jacked another magazine into the gun as he ran for the cafe.

  Men boiled out of the steam-car.

  Behind him, the twelve-pound dead-man charge in the safehouse blew. The front windows blew out; bits of glass, wood frame and burning curtain exploded into the street in a flaming, lethal rain.

  In the cafe, people were ducking for cover, hiding under the tables. Krushchev shoved his way through; back exit. Now.

  A mid-twenties waiter stood blocking the way to the kitchen. Dumbfounded shock, it looked. He shoved the kid out of the way and ran through, past a
cowering chef, going for the back exit.

  “Mr. Krushchev! Stop now!”

  The waiter. He'd drawn a gun.

  Fed! I should have known!

  Krushchev raised his own weapon, but the waiter's was already aimed. It stabbed flame, twice, and what felt like an iron-toed boot punched Krushchev in the chest. Followed by another.

  He staggered back, leaning against the cafe's rear door, tried to fire. His arm sagged. His right shoulder barely twitched.

  “Fuck you,” Krushchev said. There were papers on him, and he was dead anyway.

  “FIS!” the kid waiter yelled. Panicked himself, or close to it. “Drop the gun and come quietly!”

  “Fuck you,” Krushchev repeated, forcing, willing, his left hand to cooperate. It closed around the packet in his left inner-pocket, which was tied to an explosive charge in his coat’s lining. Yanked the packet loose, shoved it back. Found the dial, turned it.

  One. Two.

  He was falling, falling onto his back as the door opened. The kid was moving in.

  “Drop the gun! Medic! Medic!” the kid screamed.

  Three.

  “Fuck you to hell and gone,” Krushchev snarled.

  The three pounds of gelignite in his coat detonated.

  Marko lay flat and motionless on the rooftop, his black coat and pants indiscernible against the tar. He'd seen Kruschchev turn around, go to the cafe, shoot the Feds there–

  A Fed car, or Imperials, rolled in. Three men with rifles and submachineguns chased Krushchev into the cafe.

  An explosion. A big explosion from somewhere inside the cafe.

  The safe-house was a mess; explosive charges had gone off there, too, and the place was now burning. Obvious Federal agents were all over the place.

  Imperials? Somewhere around, yes. The Feds on their own simply aren't competent to do something like this.

  He shrugged to himself. He had the team, the mission, the goal, the equipment and the resources. If this had happened last night, if the Feds had done this then?

  Well, the meeting wouldn't have happened.

  Imperials must have gotten wind of something from higher-level. Somehow traced it to this from the top down.

  Actually not a bad thing. The Imperials close in. Two hours after everything was set up. Two hours before would have been much worse.

  From the way they were operating – he could see more outer-backup elements coming in now, moving to confer with the command post that seemed to have been set up – they clearly figured they'd gotten everyone.

  Except for him, and they didn't seem to know of his existence.

  Assume they figured me as a two-bit agitator who Krushchev sent off early.

  False confidence on the enemy's part was never a bad thing. Ever.

  He rolled over onto the fire escape and began to smoothly run down it, with an acrobat's skill and speed. A knife was poised in his hand, just in case.

  To use their own filthy technocratic vocabulary, the machine's been fueled, activated and set in motion.

  They think they've destroyed the machine, but all they've destroyed was the master governing apparatus.

  “Soon,” he giggled to himself, “we go west!”

  Chapter Two

  “The social and economic forces acting on the North American West have been essentially unchanged since the 1840s. They have ebbed and flowed, but their overall balance has remained as constant as the land itself.

  The East Coast has changed substantively, California has changed substantively, eastern Canada has changed substantively, Mexico has changed substantively. On this continent alone, in cultural and political terms, the West alone remains essentially the same as what it was a century ago.”

  Brig. Gen Louis L'Amour, introduction to Western North America: Plains, Deserts and Mountains; Republics, Technocracies and Anarchy. Littleton Press, 1959.

  Mid-March, 1963; Denver, Colorado.

  “Quite a ship, Vice.”

  Vice-Commodore Marcus Perry nodded, continuing his slow walk around his new command. Around them, six other Imperial Air Service ships were being prepped; the largest of them was a hundred and eighty yards long, a little less than half the size – and a quarter the tonnage – of DN 4-106.

  “Line-class,” Perry remarked to the other man, an engineering lieutenant-commander in his late twenties. Deputy commander of the Service base here at Stapleton. “Not escort, like the others. They tell you anything about why they sent me one of the newest and best? This monster's designed for stand-up fights, not guarding convoys.”

  “Guarding convoys against stand-up fights?” the base officer suggested, shrugging. “Advanced field-testing, arguably. And it never hurts to have the firepower. First of the Denny-Neuvoldt class to be deployed west of the Atlantic.”

  Perry gestured at the vanes running along the dull-grey aluminum hull, and the center and fore steering fins. Almost all airships had huge aft fins; 4-106 had them front and center, too, and a propeller toward the front, just before the point where the gondola began to nosecone upward, that was supposed to be able to pivot two hundred and thirty degrees.

  New innovations; very much new innovations. The ship looked like something out of a rocket-fiction book.

  Perry smiled. He’d enjoyed those stories as a young man; they were a part of what had drawn him to the Air Service in the first place.

  “I'd be skeptical about flying that, sir. Bluntly.”

  “Handles like a scout-class, the delivery crew told me.” Perry said. “I'll admit it looks strange.”

  The cabin was long and sectional: front command and observation, double pressure-gun battery below. A hundred-yard catwalk led from there, through a line of rocket batteries, into a bulky engine hall. There, engines fed power to six enormous propellers that stuck from the hall on long struts, three to a side.

  “The latest,” said the base officer. “Must be a good feeling to be given one of those. A high point in your career, sir, if I may say so.”

  “You may,” Perry said. “And it is. And thank you. And now, we have a convoy to prepare.”

  Perry and the deputy base commander walked across the concrete landing pads. Around them, loading cranes turned; airshipmen scampered across steel-netted exteriors, doing maintenance. A balding, bearded Warrant Second in his forties, coveralls filthy with coal oil, approached the two officers and saluted.

  “Warrant Morton?” the base officer greeted him.

  “Fueling's complete, sir.” A nod at Perry. “All seven of the Vice-Commodore's are ready.”

  “Any issues?” the base officer asked.

  “Not a one.”

  Perry checked his watch; 7:22 am, Central Standard.

  “We're on schedule. Good job, Warrant.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  A wind gusted, rocking some of the tied-down airships. Not very hard; each was fastened to the ground by heavy steel cable. Someone shouted something anyway; a kid Airshipman Third, perhaps, who'd lost his footing on his rigging.

  As they entered the support building, Perry glanced at his reflection in the polished glass of a doorway. Five-nine, built a little stockier than average – but only a little, there were weight regulations. Coffee-colored skin, shaved head and the neat square goatee that was fashionable for Air Service officers of his rank. He wore the standard officer’s field uniform; grey shirt, sky-blue trousers and spit-polished, rubber-soled black boots.

  On each of his shoulderboards was a single silver wreath, the insignia of his rank; looking at that was cause for a slight smile, because vice-commodore at thirty-six was an accomplishment in peacetime; equivalent to Army lieutenant-colonel or Navy commander.

  The boards themselves were reason to be happy; the left one had a green border, which indicated a command, and the right-side one had a gold border, which indicated that the command was of a line unit, a fighting squadron.

  It was a beautiful morning in Colorado and Marcus Perry was assuming command of a magnificent
piece of technology on its operational shakedown run, and in his quietly-analytical way he knew he was happier than any man on government service had the right to be.

  The briefing was short and cursory. The squadron's twenty-eight officers - and seven senior noncoms - knew the procedure; with the exception of the new 4-106, this was a routine convoy run. Large convoy protected by a squadron, even if three of the seven Service ships would be splitting off for Hugoton instead of running with the main group to Chicago. Not a lot of pirates had the nerve or the strength to go after Imperial ships; mostly they preferred unescorted loners. They'd be flying over bad country, still very much the Wild West, but numbers reduced that risk.

  Perry had mixed feelings over that. On the one hand, he wanted to see how 4-106 would perform in action, and killing pirates was always a pleasure. On the other, he had a skeleton crew, barely enough to handle the ship outside of a fight, until they picked up new men in Chicago.

  Weather was about normal, but they were crossing a thousand miles. No known threats, but intelligence over that distance was minimal and it was wild country.

  “It should be about thirty-six hours to Chicago,” he closed the briefing. “Lift in sixty-two minutes.”

  “Sir,” said an enlisted yeoman to Perry outside the briefing room. “Your wife is here.”

  “Take her to logistics,” Perry said.

  “Have you run the checklists I asked for?” Perry asked the senior officer in logistics; the same base XO who'd taken him around 4-106 to begin with.

  “Yessir,” that man said. In one wall were two of the base's analytical engines, one of them with a mechanitype printer. He handed Perry seven folders of organized papers.

  Commander Ricks, who was Perry's XO and would be taking the second wing of the squadron to Hugoton, accepted them one after the other.

  “Necessary equipment, final checklist, by category. All seven ships,” Perry said.