by Leo Champion
Past the cabins, and a small galley whose cook was presently at his rocket station, was another rocket battery. A staircase led up into the infirmary, which was inside the shell itself for better protection. Right now it would be empty, but it held ten beds. Its medic, Specialist Second-Class Rogers, was currently working his backup job in Engineering.
The third rocket battery was manned, or at least half of it was. The stations were like pods, a long nine-inch launcher on each side of the main catwalk; the two launchers were about twenty feet apart. Right now, both gunners on Rocket Three were in the red battery, port-side. On the left of the ship facing forward, to Perry’s right as he walked down its spine.
An Airshipman Second and a Specialist Third, another new man, sat in Rocket Three, the Specialist hastily concealing a pulp magazine when the captain entered.
“Astounding Adventures,” Perry observed. “Anything good in there?”
“Uh – no, sir? I was reading for the moral tone of the crew. Sir. To see if it was a good influence. On Airshipman Second Gilford here. Sir.”
“If that's the current one, you're missing a good story by Rod Serling,” said Perry. “Or rather, Airshipman Second Gilford is. Your mentoring of your junior crew is to be appreciated, Specialist Third–”
“Rafferty, sir.”
“Specialist Third George Rafferty.” Perry mentally reviewed the crewman's file, now he had a name to attach. “You saw action in Belgium, didn't you? And over South China?”
“Yessir. Nasty buggers, those Blazing Swords. No technical skill, but they made it up and then some with aggression. Fuckers would ride a blazing hydrogen wing right into you, if you didn't physically blow `em apart.”
“So it's not the first time you've handled a nine-inch rocket battery. It's Airshipman Gilford's, I believe. Gilford's been with the Thirty-First for a year now, as long as I've commanded the squadron. Used to the little six-inchers.”
“Hell no, sir,” said Rafferty. He was a lean brown-haired man with a scar on his jaw, somewhere in his mid-to-late thirties. “Told you, Gil, but I'll brag to the squadron commander any day.” He winked hard at his junior man. “Never turn down a chance to get yourself written up for a pay-raise, is what I say. Those senior officers like balls, is what I say, and to their faces.”
“I see you're the wise-guy type of barracks-room dodger,” Perry observed.
“Do what I can, sir. What I can. Insolent until the drums pound and the horns engage, also, for the record. Sir.”
“One who knows Kipling. You were going to brag to me about something? Possibly something that justifies borderline insolence to your squadron commander. Something that, for the record, had better be good.”
“Well, sir. These Vickers nine-inchers; we had the same, sir, in the 81-284, Royal Gopher. Scout-class out of Shanghai, back in `58. Secondment to the Celestials, y'know? Single tube in a three-sixty and that's it. Well, we're running air cover to a brigade of Army holding the line against a bunch of those damn rebels. We happen to be on station, mostly recon. Sub, he flashes base, attack imminent. They say, well, you hold them off until the rest of the flight can show up. We were the scout attachment to a line wing, sir. Big birds like this one. Airshipman First, I was, and I was the gunnery officer, sir.”
“Go on,” said Perry. “What did they have?”
“Crossing the line with ten or twelve steam-tanks. Gotta have been ten thousand men - Chinks, sir, don't know if you've been out that way, they're man-heavy. And about thirty little hydrogen birds. Little, rockets and springs and black-banger two-inchers, but they're still a threat. And, well, our orders were to hold the sods.”
“I imagine you did,” said Perry.
“Sir, it took twenty minutes for the first of our big boys to come on station, and by then those crazy fuckin' Luds were well and truly engaged with our Army. Sub Donaghan, sir, he's noticed the Army don’t have many punchers, so he'll go after the armor first. Air second, and damn the risk. Gave him the George and his second quill for that.”
“And what did you do, Specialist?”
“Well, sir. They gave me my four back." He touched his shoulderboard, which actually held the twin two-bladed-propeller insignia of a Specialist Third. Airshipman Second Gilford's shoulderboards had a single two-bladed propeller on each, unlike the single four-bladed on a Senior Airshipman. “Killed four of their steam-tanks, sir. We went in low to engage. Sub Donaghan, he said to only open up on their air if directly threatened, and he'd do his best to make sure we weren't. He was firing his sidearm out the bridge window, sir. To dissuade `em.”
“You get any of the air?” Perry asked.
“Two, sir. Brought `em down all fiery-like. Then the squadron showed up and took all the fun away.”
“Very well,” Perry said. “High explosive, third quadrant, now!”
“You heard him!” Rafferty yelled at his junior man, who'd frozen. “High explosive, he says!” Rafferty was already opening the launcher's breech-rack, swinging the tube up to the right. “Sir, what range, sir?”
“Eleven fifty,” Perry said calmly, hands on his hips.
Gilford had finally wrested a rocket, wide and stubby, from the feed. Shoved it into the rack as Rafferty, ignoring the table on the bulkhead, calculated on his fingers.
“Dial her to six-twenty, estimating wind average – sir, we cut and fire?”
“No. And good job, Rafferty. I think you may be permitted to swear and read pulps in my gun bays for a while longer, Specialist Third.”
“Yessir, Vice-Commodore, sir,” said Rafferty.
“See,” Rafferty said to Gilford as Perry left the bay, “I told you there's not a martinet I can't handle.”
“Perhaps there is, Specialist Third Rafferty,” Perry said, looking back in. "I am not a martinet. I am merely an officer who insists that proper respect be paid to the rules. The rules are what make us effective. Our effectiveness is what stands between pan-Imperial civilization and post-Crash disarray. There is, in fact, no regulation against otherwise-unoccupied missileers entertaining themselves with personal reading material. Enjoy the Serling story, Specialist Third; I rather did myself, the other night.”
There were more - unoccupied - rocket batteries along the catwalk to the engine room, and an – empty - ventral gun battery. The engine room itself was a messy, smoky bulge. In-gondola fuel tanks gave a mixture of petroleum-jellified coal flakes to 4-106's quadruple-burner engines, where they were turned into rotating thrust for the airship's throbbing, driving, six-foot propellers.
The engine-room's crew, past the initial starboard-side control room where a Senior Airshipman in four-bladed-propeller insignia stood at a communications and monitoring station, were wearing duty coveralls and asbestos-shielded emergency parachutes. Their room was hot and smoky, and Perry was glad for his goggles as he went into the acrid gloom.
“Captain in the hall!” Lieutenant Vescard shouted above the chuffing boilers.
“At ease and back to your jobs!” Perry shouted back.
Four masked crew in coveralls, with full-arm rigs covered in asbestos-shielding, monitored boiler temperatures and fuel feeds. Vescard stood at a console next to a plexiglass-shielded computing engine that he wiped every few seconds, scrutinizing outputs. He didn't take his eyes away from it for more than a second at a time. Next to him, a bearded Warrant Second sat at a secondary console, watching buoyancy level and adjusting a lever or a wheel every couple of seconds.
It was these two and their junior enlisteds who kept 4-106 powered and stable. It was from here that buoyancy and weighting were computed, monitored and, when necessary, adjusted.
“Got a drink? Hot as hell in here.”
An Airshipman First handed Perry a bottle. He took a swig from it. It was cut with something, that much he could tell.
“This better not be above one percent vodka, Vescard!”
Regulations said one point five in the engine rooms. Perry had his own standards.
“No, sir! Ju
st enough the men think they're getting something out of it. `sides, sir, that's not the standard.”
He took a bottle from a holder that'd already been welded to the side of his own console. “Here, try this. Mackinaw handed you that one because you're the CO and all, sir.”
The Airshipman First had been a new man, one whose face Perry didn't recognize.
“I frown on that sort of thing,” Perry told him. “You keep it limited, understood?”
“Understood, sir.”
Perry gave the bottle back and drank from the one the engineering officer had given him. That was all water, with maybe a taste of lemon. Lukewarm and sooty-tasting too, though, and a single mouthful was enough.
“How're we so far?” Perry asked. He was getting used to the din.
“Aerodynamics holding up, but the riggers have been busy. We have one half-shift active, another resting. The vanes don't oil themselves, and some issues with the primary steering.”
“Martindale said it was smoother than oiled silk.”
Vescard grinned.
“Said we had issues, sir. Didn't say we weren't busting them before they got problematic.”
Perry clapped him on the shoulder.
“Good job, Engineering.”
He raised his voice. “Good job the lot of you. I'll have a bag of ice sent to you from the galley. Or you can go get some yourselves.”
“This baby's got an ice machine?” asked Vescard.
Another man came up through a trapdoor from the lower level, his face, rig and coveralls blackened and filthy. Someone handed him a water bottle; he took a swig, spat on the floor – where it hissed – and took another mouthful before he noticed Perry and saluted.
“At ease, Airshipman First. Yes, Engineering, hooked to the flasher batteries.”
“Hell of a crowler this thing is!” Vescard grinned. “You must be proud as hell of her, sir! You boys hear that? We got us an ice machine in this thing!”
“Only so long as you can keep that generator running,” said Perry.
“Well, then, sir, makes it a hell of an incentive for us to! Screw Chicago, we keep these boilers at prime, boys, and we get ice!”
Past Engineering - Perry breathed relief to be out of the heat and soot, wiping off his goggles with a hand that had itself become dirty - were more unmanned rocket batteries, cabins, then the aft turret, a three-man pressure gun.
Running from a reservoir on the tertiary and quarternary boilers, the pressure-gun was a double-mounted four-inch cannon with a three-hundred-degree rotation. In the same station was 4-106's rear signalman, whose flasher battery was immediately before it.
“Captain in the gun,” reported the flasher operator, an Airshipman Second. He stood before Perry waved him down.
Four others were in the relatively spacious gun turret: the gun's crew of Senior Warrant Halversen, Airshipman First Warren Jeppesen, on-her-first-assignment young Airshipwoman Third Carmen Johnston, and battery commander Ensign Charles Hastings. Hastings had been studying the convoy's back-trail through heavy binoculars; Halversen reading some small-circulation tinker `zine, and the other two playing a card game on the auxiliary plotting table.
“Captain, sir,” said Hastings.
“Anything of interest though those scopes? Nobody tailing us, I hope?”
“Nobody, sir,” Hastings said, as though it had been a serious question. “That I saw. Sir.”
“Swarovski said you ran some diagnostics,” Perry said, as much to the experienced NCO as the newb ensign. “How's she looking so far?”
“Full traverse, we know. Pressure maxes out, good as it should be. Looks like we can ram ten rounds a minute through each of those tubes,” Halversen said. “Wouldn't be shocked if I could jigger it up to twelve. Maybe more, without losing juice.”
“You've got permission to take a stab at it, once we're fully-manned.”
“Hoped you'd say that, cap,” Halversen grinned. He was a stolid, white-haired Greenlander, in his thirty-second year of service. If there was anything about gunnery – spinners, rockets, cannon or pressure-guns – that the Senior Warrant didn't know, Perry had never heard of it.
“How's it holding up, Airshipwoman Johnston? Your first run with the Thirty-First. What do you think of our ship?”
“It's – very nice, sir,” said the young woman.
“I'm very proud of it, myself,” said Perry. Aware of how personal attention from the squadron commander would be embarrassing the pretty young twenty-year-old. “And don’t worry. If your instructors didn't think something of you, you wouldn't have been assigned to a squadron command bird. I'm starting with the assumption that you're good enough.”
“Yessir. Thank you, sir.”
“Well, I'll leave you to your card game,” Perry said. “And you, Ensign Hastings? Your dedication to our backtrail is appreciated, but entirely non-mandatory. If bandits come at us, I don't think they'll try from our six.”
About a hundred and eighty miles in, mid-afternoon, Commander Ricks and his three-ship wing - all of which had been stripped of some crew in order to provide bodies for 4-106 - turned south with seventeen of the convoy's freighters. They were bound for Hugoton, or at least Ricks was; the freighters were going to the civilian railhead at Dodge City.
The main body of the convoy, sixty-five ships protected by Thirty-First Squadron's Primus Wing, arrayed in a loose diamond around the miles-wide bobbing mass, turned slightly north onto a direct course toward Chicago.
“Ricks to 4-106, sir,” reported Sub-Lieutenant Kent. “I've acknowledged him. See you in Chicago with full crews for us all, he says.”
“Tell him I'll buy him a drink,” Perry said from the controls. “No – belay that, Signals.”
“Yessir.”
“Tell him I look forward to seeing him too. Wishes for a safe trip.”
“Yessir. Sending now.”
“Ricks acknowledges, same to you, he says.”
“Thank you, Signals. Off the record, drinks are on me, and another round when Secundus Wing shows.”
“Haven't seen how Lieutenant Vescard drinks, have you, sir?” asked Martindale.
“I make Vice-Commodore's pay, Lieutenant-Commander.”
“Not referring to the hit on your wallet.” 4-106's XO tapped his head. “Went drinking with him in Dodge, last month. He and some of the other engineers. I was hurting a week later.”
“Vice-Commodore's tolerance, too,” said Perry. “How are we doing for schedule?”
“About an hour ahead of where we should be.”
Ahead of them, the bobbling mass of the convoy moved, sixty-five joggling airships. Below them, the plains rolled on endlessly, eastern Colorado becoming Kansas. A herd of cattle, perhaps a thousand head, moved past in the distance, kicking up a thick plume of yellow-white dust. On their fringes moved the taller figures of mounted cowboys, protecting and herding the cattle.
The way we are, these freighters, Perry smiled.
“Time to Chicago, First?”
“Eight pm, Central, sir. Like I said, about an hour ahead of schedule. Unless something goes wrong. You expect it to?”
Perry shrugged. “Why would it? You want the controls back?”
“Sir?" asked Lieutenant Swarovski, the weapons officer.
“Yes, Weapons?”
“Mind if I have a turn? Being acting Second? I need the practice. If something happens to you, sir, and Lieutenant-Commander Martindale's asleep.”
You want a turn because handling this wizard looks as fun as it really is, Perry thought, but suppressed an unprofessional smile.
“Quite correct, Weapons, and good reasoning. She's yours.”
Near the tail of the dirigible Karlsbad Streamer, a six-hundred-yard bulk transport painted in broad, dust-faded red candy-stripes and loaded to capacity with iceboxed beef, two riggers hung on the outside, near the top rudder. They were contract employees and their job was to push the rudder one way or the other when the old dirigible's unreliable control
systems failed.
Their work involved the aft flasher.
One of them put down his monocular.
“That's it. Butler Lake,” he said to his partner. Gesturing at a narrowly V-shaped lake three or four miles away to the south. In the neck of the V was a stockaded cluster of buildings, one of the little fortified ranch-villages that dotted the plains. Big enough to sit on a water source and protect itself from casual raiders.
“You got it encoded? We get one shot at this,” said the partner, a stringy red-haired man whose friends called him Red. Sometimes he wished he had brighter friends; he wasn't fond of the nickname.
“I got it encoded,” said the man with the monocular, who went by Thick Mick. His name was no variation of Mick, he was of about average build and in fact was one of Red's brighter friends.
“OK. Put the battery in.”
Red unslung his backpack. Quickly he pulled leads from the flasher, yanking them free of their connections, and connected them to bolts on the battery in the pack.
“OK. Do as I say. I got this thoroughly encoded. Wait. Dumbass. Turn it toward the lake town first, idiot!”
“I was turning it, clown.”
“Long-off-short-long-off. Long-off-short-on-off...”
Confirmed Service line-class present. Tail of convoy.
“Long-off-long-off-long-off-short-long-off-long-short.”
Barely crewed. About half strength. Four escorts total.
“Short-off-short-short-short. Long-long-long-short-short.”
90 ships total convoy. Chicago ETA 8 Wed.
“Just one go,” Red said, as Mick began to repeat the directions again. “They'll pick it up or not. No need to confirm.”