by Leo Champion
“Checklist, necessary by category,” Ricks confirmed. The thirty-five year-old Ricks was tall, blond and flamboyant, with recruiting-poster good looks. As a personal eccentricity, he wore an ornately-hilted rapier that Perry had seen him practicing with at times. Born in the wrong century, was Perry's opinion of Ricks; competent, but too prone to unnecessary improvisation. The book exists for a reason.
“All seven, Ricks?”
“Oh, yes. All seven checklists are there.”
“Good. Checklists, essential items by on-ship location.”
This time Ricks did look through to make sure a list existed for each ship, and not the same list twice, before accepting.
“Checklists, essential items by on-ship location, we have. All seven.”
“Checklists, essential items by alphabetical order,” said Perry.
“Got them.”
“Have two officers and one warrant on each ship go through and confirm everything,” Perry said.
“Yessir.” This was standard procedure. Perry's reasoning was that a standard triplicate check might miss something; three different people checking by three different categories would be much less likely to.
Perry drew a notepad from his pocket.
“Very well. Briefing, all aspects, done. Logistics checks, done. I'll be back at nine for a final flight check. Nonessential crew are free as they like; have them report to squadron ready rooms at five to nine.”
All of which had been covered in the briefing, and none of which would be new to the enlisted men themselves, who were mostly in their mess, the gym or the ready rooms anyway.
Never hurt to repeat. No such thing as being too precise, too careful, too orderly. The Empire was built on – built for – order. Perry did his part.
“Annabelle.” He kissed her.
Mrs. Annabelle Perry was a year or so older than her husband, of African-Indian ancestry; her father had grown up in Sri Lanka, enlisted in the Navy, met her mother in Cape Town. After her father did his twenty-five years – rising to senior chief petty – and got out, they'd moved to London. Like hundreds of thousands of others from diverse sectors of the Empire, pursuing the dream of social mobility in the capital.
Like him, she spoke with about ninety percent of an upper-class British accent; since their teens, like most people of their background and aspirations, they'd been internalizing the tones, vocabulary and speech patterns of Eton and Oxford. She was an accountant, right now on contract as associate CFO for a minerals and ranching firm here in Denver.
“How are the kids? They were asleep when I left this morning.”
“They're fine.” She smiled. “It's nine hundred and twenty-five miles to Chicago, Ernest told me. Approximately. Is it?”
“Nine hundred and nineteen straight-line, but it varies by how you count it. It was in one of his gazetteers?”
“No, he checked a map with a ruler.”
Perry smiled.
“He's going to be unhappy when he gets older. The world's already been explored, for the most part. By the time he's grown up, all the maps will have been made.”
“By then,” Annabelle said, “they'll have a moon rocket, and they'll need explorers there. Or perhaps Venus, exploring the jungles in a pith helmet.”
“What about Maria?”
“She just wanted to know when you'd be back. When will you be back?”
“I don't know. Orders awaiting in Chicago. It might be another run straight back here; it might be Hugoton, or St. Louis. Or Edmonton.”
“Or the South,” said Annabelle. “One of the buyers just came from Missouri; he mentioned possible trouble. One of the big German mercenary companies threatening not to renew their contract.”
"One or another of the contracting firms is always threatening not to renew,” said Perry. “It's how they negotiate more money. Nothing ever comes of it.”
“Wire me when you get the orders, if they don't bring you back. And take care out there, in that new ship of yours.”
“It should be just another milk run, darling,” Perry said. “With a new piece of hardware to play with, but I'm not worried. I'll let you know when I get to Chicago. Although I might be back before you get the telegram.”
“Captain on the bridge,” reported Specialist Second-Class Vidkowski, and got to his feet.
“Captain on the bridge,” said 4-106's XO, Lieutenant-Commander Julian Martindale. The rest of the bridge crew were on their feet, saluting.
“At ease, people,” Perry said. He slid the goggles on over his eyes; a formality, but formalities were important. “I have the ship.”
“Captain has the ship,” said Martindale.
“Captain has the ship,” Vidkowski repeated into the electrical telephone.
Perry sat down in the command chair. The bridge was semi-circular at the front of the cabin, clear plexiglass giving a hundred-and-eighty-degree view. In the center was the master pilot's control, a wheel and throttle. Perry's station was to the left of that, the XO's to the right. Both command stations held communications and auxiliary piloting controls, and cogitator-fed tactical boards of the ship. Pairs of heavy binoculars hung suspended on arms above the stations.
Around the edges of the bridge were secondary controls; signals, tactical and engineering on the left, weapons one through three on the right. A presently-closed trapdoor led down into the battery below, where two pressure-guns sat on staggered rotators so that each had a nearly-360-degree field of fire.
The whole setup was crisp aluminum, shiny chrome and black leather. Begoggled officers and bridge enlisteds sat at their stations, ready to issue orders. The pilot - presently, Martindale - stood at his, ready for lift.
A glance at the tactical control wasn't so optimistic. We're badly undermanned; a ship this size should have seventy-one crew, not thirty-two.
The weapons stations alone were proof of that. 4-106 had twelve rocket batteries; ten of them were presently unmanned. So was the ventral gun battery, a revolving four-inch cannon.
Engineering, also, was under-strength. Enough men to fly, not enough to fly and fight too effectively.
It's a milk run. And we still have more active firepower than West Coventry or the Shuffler.
Still. He was looking forward to getting those promised extra crew in Chicago. Flying on less than half your intended complement wasn't going to be easy, and if action did happen?
If I'd wanted easy, he told himself with a grin, I wouldn't have signed up for the Air Service to begin with!
He checked the chronometer. A shiny digital on his control panel; 9:07 am.
“Very well. Final checks are cleared, First?”
“Cleared, sir,” Martindale reported.
“Pilot,” he said to Martindale – the man's position on the bridge, this time, not his role – “I want lift in thirty. Signals? Order detached.”
“Ordering ground detachment,” said Sub-Lieutenant Kent. His fingers twitched on his clicker, sending electrical signals to the flashers. Then He spoke into a tube. “Ordering shipboard detachment.”
The Specialist Third next to Kent – one of the crew who'd come over with the 4-106 delivery, Perry hadn't learned her name – leaned over, from her binoculars, and said something to Kent.
“Ground detached has acknowledged, Captain.”
There came slithering noises, as the cables were pulled away.
“Shipboard detachment commencing,” Kent reported. One after the other, the ship's own anchors – running from the cabin into the landing pads’ concrete – released.
4-106 bobbled slightly. The concrete pads moved a little.
“Pilot, lift to one hundred yards in ten seconds. Hold for twenty and then and lift to five hundred. Signals, have Johnstown lift. Proceed in wing order.”
“Lift to one hundred yards,” said Martindale, “acknowledged. Ten. Nine.”
“Transmitting signals to Johnstown then remainder of squadron,” Kent reported, “yessir.”
“Acknowle
dged, Sub-Lieutenant, is the proper response. As you well know.”
“Yessir. Transmitting signals to Johnstown then remainder of squadron, acknowledged.”
A short breath. Kent's assistant said something to him.
“Johnstown confirms, sir,” Kent said. “And sorry, sir.”
“Five, Four,” Martindale was counting.
“We have a procedure book,” Perry said to the sub-lieutenant. “It exists for a good reason, as you will eventually learn. We follow the book on routine matters so that we may think to take better initiative on the less-routine.”
“Yessir,” said the sub-lieutenant.
“Consider yourself chewed-out,” Perry smiled. “And now let's see how our new ship flies!”
"One. Releasing,” Martindale said, and pulled a lever.
A hiss. Three heavy clicks. A brief rumble, as the ground weights were dumped from their clutches. And the ground began to fall away.
Around the bridge, there were murmurs.
Martindale flicked the steering wheel from side to side, slightly, and the ship wobbled.
“Responds like a beauty, sir. Crispest steering I've ever felt. And she's holding position well. Monitors are that we've got fifteen mph lateral crosswind and I'm not even noticing.”
Below, the buildings, and the other airships, were taking a clearer shape as they rose. Pads and warehouses of the base; the plains stretched out beyond there. A cattle-herd moved near the horizon, dark shapes almost haloed under a cloud of faint-orange dust.
The squadron XO’s ship, the hundred-and-fifty-five-yard long Johnstown, was next to lift. Then the Plains Eagle, Perry's personal ship until 4-106's arrival, and Lady McMurdo, second ship of XO Ricks' flight, and the McPanlan, the West Coventry and, smallest of the squadron, a mere hundred and ten yards long, the Evanstown Shuffler.
It looked like the mountains were rising, as the vast grey shells in turn lifted. Fins turned, rudders switched; as they rose the dirigibles swayed slightly, propellers churning.
Signal panes flashed behind the bridge of each ship, directed towards each others' bridges.
“Sir, Eagle reports lift without incident. Johnstown reports lift without incident…” Kent reported, as his assistant spoke into his ear. Her job, her eyes fixed to binoculars, was to read the flashers, mounted behind each ship's bridge, that transmitted coded updates so fast that Perry could barely read them himself. Her own fingers pressed encoding keys, giving one acknowledgement after another.
“Signals, order the assumption of formation.” Perry thumbed a key on his own console and spoke into one of the telephones.
“Aft, this is Bridge. Acknowledge?”
A moment, then a young man's voice: “Bridge, this is Aft acknowledging.”
“Any sign of our convoy?”
“Approaching from direct east. Big mass of them, sir.”
“Approximate ETA?”
The officer on Aft - the commander of the gun battery there - took a moment to confer. His name was Ensign Charles Hastings, Perry knew, with less than six months’ experience in the field. He was no doubt conferring with his warrant, a seasoned Senior Warrant named Halversen, who Perry had assigned there precisely so that young Hastings would have someone to learn from.
“Bridge, this is Aft. You still there, sir?” came Hastings’ voice.
“I am, Aft. Got an ETA?”
“Six to seven minutes, sir. They're making full speed, the Warrant says.”
“Thank you, Aft. Cutting in two, one, now.”
Aft's connection ended first, and Perry put the handset down.
“Signals, order general spread. We'll close around the convoy.”
With more time, a weapons test would have been nice. That 4-106 had relatively few weapons crewed and online… well, that was all the more reason to test-fire those that were operational. But with the convoy having formed over Denver, or around the yards closer to the inner-city than Stapleton was, and coming this quickly as a whole? No opportunity.
The squadron's seven airships began to spread out, moving sideways and forwards in order to encircle the jumbled mass of civilian ships. Unlike the Service vessels, which were a uniform silvery-grey, with darker-black cabins bristling with chromed weapons, the eighty-two civilian airships were a wide range of colors; some plain silvery aluminium, others bright primary colors. Banners hung from a few of them, and – instead of the service identification codes of the Imperial ships – they all had big, colorfully-written names.
Almost all of the ships were bigger than the escort-class vessels of Perry's squadron, and the majority were bigger than 4-106's 350-yard nose-to-tail length. Their cabins resembled small warehouses, mostly not even enclosed; Perry could make out wooden boxes and crates inside the metal grates that mostly covered their cargo holds. Cables dangled loosely, and their flashers transmitted – slowly and clumsily, by Perry's standards - signals that were no more than meaningless social chatter between the various ships.
Well, they were civilians. Their job was to run goods back and forth and make a profit for their owners. Perry expected discipline for its own sake – because you never wanted to get into bad habits, and because the Empire had been built upon organized, disciplined application of force – from his crews and from his fellow Service officers. It wasn't a reasonable expectation for civilians, and he had nothing against them being social or disorganized.
We exist to serve them, after all, he thought. There wouldn't be an Empire worth protecting if it weren't for civilian industry and commerce.
“Signals, flash the nearest and then next-closest of them,” Perry ordered, as 4-106 took station behind the vast, colored circus of private ships. “Tell them that Vice-Commodore Perry and Squadron Thirty-One are happy to meet them, and look forward to a comfortable journey to Chicago. Tell them to repeat the signal onwards.”
Kent acknowledged.
Perry pulled down the binoculars, found the other ships around his squadron; the closest, West Coventry, was almost two miles to his south.
“Signals Two” – oh. No Signals Two, yet; that was something else they were short. "Signals One, then flash the West Coventry and tell them to commence circuit position check.”
“Acknowledged, sir.”
Ahead of them, eighty-two merchant freighters – well, seventy-five merchant freighters and seven smaller passenger ships - bobbled and maneuvered, steering east for Chicago.
“Helm, accelerate to thirty miles per hour,” Perry told Martindale. Specs said the ship could do almost twice that, but they were escorting civilians here, and moving at the pace of the slowest of those.
“Accelerating to thirty, confirmed,” said Martindale. The ship's engines seemed to thrum harder, and the ground moved faster underneath them.
“Evanstown Shuffler reports circuit complete,” Kent said. “Squadron XO reports everyone maintaining adequate position.”
“Very good,” Perry said. “Sub-Lieutenant Kent; what do you think of our new ship?”
Kent smiled. “First brand-new I've ever flown, sir. We'll see, I suppose, but right now it feels like Newfoundland outdid themselves.”
“Specialist First – Assistant Signals, I'm sorry, Specialist, I don’t know your name.”
“Singh, sir,” she said. “Jaleen Singh.”
“You came over on this. How did she perform on the trip?”
“Admirably, sir. The taxi commander didn't want to hand her over.”
“After four thousand miles, that's a compliment. Lieutenant-Commander Martindale, how's she feel to handle?”
“I could run her to Chicago, sir. Most responsive bird I've ever flown.”
“You could, but I'm not going to let you; your squadron commander didn't push to make his rank just so he could give lieutenant-commanders all the fun. Lieutenant Swarovski, I know we haven't had the chance to test weapons, but I heard you running diagnostics earlier. What's the word?”
“Undermanned, sir,” said the messily-blond-haired H
anoverian, “but she seems good otherwise. Rotates smooth, and the gunners are fine. Hope we do run into something. Killing shit's going to be a pleasure with what we've got.”
“I hope it is, Lieutenant Swarovski, but we are Imperial officers on the bridge of an Imperial ship. Please remember to moderate your language to the Queen's English in future.”
Swarovski smiled sheepishly. As far as rebukes from Perry were concerned, that was a pretty light one.
“Sorry, sir. Will do in future, sir.”
“You have the need to curse, go aft to the engine room.”
“Engineers will be engineers, huh?” asked Martindale.
Perry grimaced. “I'm a realistic man, First. Speaking of engineers, I'm going to go pay them a visit; take a look at the rest of the ship. Vidkowski, ask Engineering to make sure they don't have any problems? Don't want to distract them if they've got a crisis.”
A moment later, the response came back.
“Engineering says everything's good. Engines running just fine. Light on riggers, and they're sweating – this multi-finned design doesn't completely operate itself, he says.”
“Tell him Lieutenant Swarovski has even fewer gunners than he has riggers, not least because Engineering's got half of his department on temp-assign.”
“Acknowledged, sir.”
Perry stood up. The bridge was rocking slightly, but considerably less than the old Plains Eagle would have. Slick and smooth.
“First has the bridge,” Perry stated.
“First has the bridge,” Martindale acknowledged, without looking up.
Mine, Perry thought. My beautiful new ship.
He'd served on new ships before, but he'd never commanded one. Things seemed to practically gleam; there were no tarnished fixes, no oil yet trodden into the stamped-aluminum floors. Past the bridge was an empty rocket-battery, then a line of cabins. He looked into his own, briefly; a hammock and his kitbag; a folding desk and chair. Nobody had had the time to fully set up their own cabins yet; they'd all be much like this, if smaller.
He checked out a few of them anyway, on the basis that if nobody had set them up, he wouldn't be disturbing anyone's privacy. Privacy was something you learned quickly to respect, as an airshipman operating in close quarters for, sometimes, months at a time. Single cabins for officers above ensign; two-man ones for ensigns and warrant-grade enlisteds, slightly smaller two-man ones for specialist-grade enlisteds, three- and four-man ones for the airshipman-grades.