Her Majesty's Western Service

by Leo Champion

  President Rockingham: Because at the time of the Crash, it was not so easy for a band of opportunists in a zeppelin to rip up five miles - and four thousand dollars to buy and lay, I'll add! - of telegraph wire for the value of its copper. Because at the time of the Crash, it was neither easy nor profitable for those same roving thieves to destroy railroad for the fuel value of the ties and the scrap value of the rails. Because the West is infested with those things, and because we as a corporation simply do not have the resources to deal with this constant, un-ending, expensive problem!

  Reporter, Boston Globe: Can't you just sell something and get the resources?

  President Rockingham: This press conference is over.

  Transcript of Q&A with David Rockingham, President of the Northern and Chicago Railroad; June 22, 1961.

  The bridge of the Red Wasp was every bit the mess that Perry had expected. A mishmash of rusted control levers, and a helm-wheel that looked like it had come off the axle of a horse-drawn chariot. Captain Nolan stood behind the helm, on the right, and a grey-haired woman in a dress - a dress! - and a multitooled rig whose function seemed primarily aesthetic, was in charge of what seemed like the type of balancing station that had been obsolete at Refoundation, in 1909. Spirit levels and long cranks, which would signal mechanically to the riggers.

  “What d'you think?” Nolan asked proudly. “My ship. Well, mine and my wife's, and the crew's got shares. Our bird.”

  “It's… very nice. It's impressive. You've had her how long?”

  “Ten years, and a bit. Won her in a poker game down Dodge way. We've been going back and forth across the country ever since.”

  “Last owner must have seen a sucker and folded,” murmured Swarovski.

  Perry gave his weapons officer a glare. We're guests on this ship, he mouthed, and don't you forget your manners.

  “Making enough to get by?”

  Nolan shrugged.

  “Just enough. Scavenging here, high-premium special there. We don't have capacity, but low operating, so… Got to admit, thirty-two Imperials, fifty bucks a head plus whatever our scraps'll bring in Chicago? Sixteen hundred, that'll keep us in coal and hydrogen for a bit!”

  “Maybe keep the creditors off our heads for a week longer,” the grey-haired woman muttered sourly.

  “That too, Elise. That too!”

  “Made quite a score off of us, didn't you?” Martindale asked.

  “Hey, you benefit, I benefit, the ship benefits. And like my bridge engineer said, the creditors benefit. Isn't free trade and mutual benefit what you Imperials are all about?”

  “Damned right it is,” Martindale grinned. “I was being congratulatory.”

  “Well, that said, looks like the man on the ground is giving us the signal to lift.”

  Nolan looked out the window.

  “Go!” he shouted, with a thumbs-up for emphasis.

  Cables slid from their hooks, and there was the sound of ground ballast being dumped. The Red Wasp lifted, shaking and swaying – damn, thought Perry, does this rattletrap sway! – into the afternoon darkness.

  “Take us north,” Nolan said, and turned the helm.

  Four or five seconds later, the dirigible began to ponderously turn.

  Nolan shouted into his speaking tube again.

  “Stop in five. Four. Three. Two. One. Stop turn!” He wrested the helm around in the other direction. The dirigible began to pick up speed.

  The grey-haired woman yanked a lever, found it stuck, put weight into it, and ponderously moved it down. Something came through one of her speaking tubes.

  “Say it again!” she yelled through her end, and pressed an ear to it.

  “I'm going to visit my crew in the hold,” Perry said.

  “Just down that passageway, Commodore. But you know that. Tell your men I say welcome aboard, if you will! And I'll show you how my baby flies!”

  The hold was a ten-by-forty-foot cage, mostly consisting of a three-inch lattice of bars. They had the silvery tint of titanium, except that in some places they'd broken loose and been replaced by iron ones, welded in. Roped here and there, mostly along a set of struts running down the center of the hold, was various junk: large boxes, pieces of titanium scrap, pieces of aluminum crap. A propeller. Most of a large electrical dynamo. A lot of hydrogen cylinders.

  The crew sat, mostly on their bags, along the sides of the hold, some holding onto the bars for support.

  “Everyone doing alright?” Perry asked.

  “Sir, I got a question,” said one of the riggers, a senior airshipwoman named Hayden. “When we were folding our parachutes after we came down? It was dark.”

  Perry paused for a couple of seconds, then said, “And? You have a question?”

  “No, sir. Just an observation.”

  “We're flying low, Hayden,” said Martindale. That was true; they seemed to be maintaining a height of about six or seven hundred feet. Ground was slipping past under the cage. “So don't worry. You can always jump without one.”

  Hayden tried to force a smile.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Don't worry, people,” said Perry. “Captain Nolan's been operating this bird for more than a decade without a serious incident. Should be fine.”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but nine serious incidents since `58 when the rigger I spoke with joined,” said Rafferty.

  “And he survived, so they weren't too serious,” said Perry.

  The engine hall was even more commotion, thicker smoke from the low-grade crap they used down here. The feed seemed to be – oh no, Perry thought, it is – linked to a hydrogen cylinder.

  That was dangerous. That was extremely dangerous, and none of the three engineering crew - including the woman Nolan had described as his wife - appeared to have the faintest idea just what kind of a bomb they were playing with. Hundred-times compressed hydrogen in the engine room? Linking it through a feed into your boiler?

  Slowly shaking his head, he backed out.

  Don't distract them. They've got to know what a jerry-rigged contraption, how barely airworthy a deathtrap, it is they're flying. They're used to it.

  The trouble came around five o'clock. Perry was exercising the privileges of his rank and hanging out with Nolan on the bridge, where there was at least a functional seat.

  From the west, descending out of a bank of clouds about a mile away, came a small civilian airship. Maybe half again the length of the Red Wasp, and a glance through his monocular told Perry she was probably a passenger ship.

  They also showed her flashes: ‘S-O-S. S-O-S. J-R. J-R S-O-S.’

  J-R meant Jolly Roger. Pirates.

  Oh, shit, thought Perry. And then, a moment later: Oh, good.

  “Pray there's only one of them,” Nolan said, putting his own telescope down. “They'll focus on the liner, not us. But if there's two?”

  “How are you armed?”

  “One pressure-gun. A couple of rifles. Oh, and a four-inch cannon we picked up today, no ammo.”

  “You do have a flasher. Right?”

  Nolan shook his head.

  “Just signal flags. Why?”

  “Where are they?”

  “In that box. What are you going to do?”

  “Bear with me. Signal flags. And hook that pressure-gun up.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “You want to save your ship,” Perry said. “I'm a Service veteran. Bear with me, captain.”

  Out of the clouds behind the civilian liner came the pirate. A smaller freight model, perhaps two hundred yards long. Bigger than the Red Wasp, and much better-built.

  Perry took the signal flags – hope I'm not too rusty – and lowered his goggles. Then he went into the hold.

  Some of the men were agitated. They'd seen the liner and read the signals.

  “We going to do something?” Kent asked.

  Perry gave him the signal flags.

  “I want you to get up on top, where that pirate can see. And I want y
ou to signal the freighter the following: Give Self Up. Protect Our Gold. Will Reward You For Distracting Him. Our Bank Will Reward You And Your Owners. Signal that three times to his flashermen. Clear?”

  “We gonna kill the bastards?” Swarovski asked. He stroked the barrel of his rifle.

  “We better kill the bastards,” Perry said. “Pirates took my ship. I'm going to take theirs.”

  Captain Damon Mack of the Jolly Rapist gritted his teeth, trying to make out the signal flags.

  “What the fuck is that tramp piece of shit saying, Weaver?”

  “She's talking to the liner,” said Weaver.

  “I didn't think the asshole would be hailing us. What's she fucking saying to the liner.”

  “Something about gold. Reward us for. Oh, fuck that. No way is that piece of shit carrying gold.”

  “No way?” asked Mack. "They mine that shit out west, and she's heading east. Same direction anyone from Denver would be coming.”

  “It's a fifth-rate piece of shit,” said Lenehan.

  “Nobody asked your opinion.”

  The Jolly Rapist was a crew of real men, twenty-nine strong out of the Black Hills. They were tough killers, not the pussy let-them-live Code adherents, and the ship's name was not ironic. Real men – not like Kennedy and his bunch – had only one use for women, and some of them had the same use for men they captured.

  “You think it's a bluff. Shitty wreck that nobody like us is gonna waste his time bothering with, so they can sneak gold past,” Weaver said.

  “Yeah. I think it is.”

  “So why they fucking scream it out?”

  “Panic? Maybe they thought there might be two of us?”

  “Bullshit a piece of garbage is gonna have gold,” Weaver said, but he sounded less sure. “They going to give their gold courier to someone stupid? It's a bluff. They're trying to let the liner get free. Figure a reward from someone who can operate a real ship is going to make up the loss of their garbage.”

  Mack shrugged.

  “Turns out to be a bluff, we'll kill every last one of them.”

  “I thought we were gonna do that anyway," said Lenehan.

  “Even their bitches.”

  That drew a couple of angry noises from others on the bridge.

  “Once we're done with `em ourselves, morons.”

  Decisively, he turned the helm into an intercept course with the flying jalopy, which looked to be doing about forty-five.

  “We'll get `em in a couple minutes. Hail `em down and tell the fuckers they'll live if they do as we say. May as well take their bird – gonna be some asshole who'll pay ten grand for it.”

  “You told them what the fucking hell?” Nolan demanded.

  “That we're carrying gold. And, as you can see by how they'll have intercepted us in about three and a half minutes, they believe it.”

  “You bastard! I know she's not much of a ship, you Imperial son of a bitch, but the Red Wasp is mine! I've put my life into this bird!"

  “Prize law,” Perry said calmly.

  “What?”

  “Prize law. Considering my men and myself to be Marines - we are, after all, only passengers – then six eighths, or three quarters, of the pirate's value will go to the ship crew, yourselves as represented by you. The Service is paying you thirteen hundred for our fare. That airship is going to sell, at absolute minimum, for thirty times that, and that's not counting any cargo aboard. There may also be rewards on the individual men. Do you hear what I am saying?”

  “You're saying we can make a locker’s payload of money if your men can take out this pirate,” said Nolan. “I'd like that more if I knew how.”

  Perry had been thinking fast about that himself for the last couple of minutes. The problem was that the pirate outgunned them badly, whatever she had. She also had better resilience, more power, better steering and probably less inclination to take them intact - after all, a fall wouldn’t damage gold and you could always retrieve it from wreckage.

  He had two advantages: One, surprise. The pirates would not be expecting thirty-two Imperials. Two, discipline. His men were almost certainly better at what they did, on average, than pirate rabble were going to be.

  Remember. No plan ever survives contact with the enemy, he thought. He needed flexibility and backups, and he needed them now.

  Martindale was looking at him as well.

  “They're going to tell us to go down,” said Perry to Nolan. “Comply, but keep them to the lee. What do you estimate the wind as?”

  “Ten, twelve?” Martindale said.

  “Keep them as close as possible to our lee. When I give the signal, dump ballast. Kent, I want you to gather all seven riggers and six other volunteers. Not Swarovski. Make sure they're all armed.”

  “We dump ballast, they're going to open fire on us right away," said Nolan. "You can retrieve gold from wreckage. They don't need an intact ship.”

  “But they'll want one, and it'll take them a couple of seconds to respond. My boarding team hits them from above.” Inspired by the way the pirates had come onto 4-106. Two could play at that, and it'd be easier with a stationary ship.

  “We rip out their lift. Engage their safeties, rip open the bags. They can dump their own ballast to an extent, but it'll slow them."

  “Immobilize them, you're saying. Then what?”

  “Board and attack.”

  “And what about the rest of us?” Martindale asked.

  “Land, spread out, and attack from all sides while they're distracted.”

  “What if they don't comply with your plan? What if they move faster than expected? What if they shoot this thing down?”

  “Then everyone bails and we engage them from the ground.”

  “I want to board,” Swarovski said as they descended. The pirate was about two hundred yards from them, close enough that through the gaps in the cargo cage they could see individual men. The ship had one rocket launcher that they could see – probably another one to starboard – and what looked like a very crude pressure gun.

  “No. You're of more value with that rifle. Shoot anyone, starting with their riggers, then bridge crew and gunners,” said Perry.

  “But sir–”

  “That's an order, Weapons. We obey orders in the Service, remember?”

  “Sir. Yessir,” said Swarovski. Then muttered “I want the next boarding, though.”

  “One hundred!” Nolan called out.

  The ground below was grass, two or three feet high. It rippled in waves under the wind. Nolan was doing an adequate, if jerky, job at keeping them squarely to the freighter's lee.

  Just two riggers aboard the pirate ship, although there was going to be a rig station with possibly another one or two in reserve.

  “Fifty,” Nolan called.

  “You will dump four hydrogen sacs on landing and come out with your hands up,” came a voice over the pirate's loudhailer.

  “Charming name, sir,” Halvorsen muttered to Perry. “The Jolly Rapist. Ten to one they're not the Code type.”

  “Don't tell me you think there's a jot of substance to that Code noise, Warrant,” Perry murmured back. “If they respected laws, they wouldn't be pirates.”

  “I got a bad feeling,” Lenehan muttered to Captain Mack, on the bridge of the ship. “Gonna be hard men aboard.”

  “Nobody fuckin' asked your opinion, I told you. Fag asshole.”

  “The balance geek's got a point,” said Weaver. “Might be a tramp, but you think they're gonna let gold fly without half a dozen Pinks riding along with it?”

  “Thirty of us,” Mack said. “I've killed two Pinks singlehandedly. They come out with their hands up, or we blow them to slag.”

  “Ten grand for the ship,” Lenehan said.

  “And there might be a hundred in gold. Fuck the ship. She makes a false move, we blow the shithead to hell. Second, remind the guns of that. She twitches and we blow her to wreckage.”

  “I got it,” said Weaver.

&nb
sp; “Do we dump the hydrogen sacs?” Nolan asked Martindale. He was uneasy about this, very uneasy. This crazy colored Imperial was out for revenge against pirates, but it wasn't his, the colored Imperial captain's, stake they were playing with. It was Nolan's, and this was insane beyond the standards of what the Red Wasp did normally.

  On the other hand, the size of this potential score...

  Martindale, who had thrown a blanket poncho over his uniform tunic so that the pirates wouldn't suspect anything, thought for a moment.

  “Yeah. We dump them. Your crew ready to dump equivalent ballast and then some? We put them at ease. But we've got to dump that ballast on the spot. All at once.”

  “What's wind, Vidkowski?”

  “Ten or eleven.”

  The ship bumped to the ground, the pirate about a hundred and fifty yards away, just off the ground. Ropes were thrown down, and a couple of men with rifles dropped into the waist-high grass.

  Nolan suddenly became very aware of the pirate's weapons. A rocket launcher at a hundred and fifty yards, with fairly low crosswind? And the pressure-gun just aft of the bridge, aimed right at them?

  How had he allowed the Imperials to talk him into this insanity? Oh. Right. They'd just gone ahead with it.

  Well, run!

  “Charlie!” Nolan shouted. The code-signal.

  “They're not dumping!” came a voice, half-heard through the pirates' loudhailer.

  The sounds of ballast, dirt sacks pre-clumped together, moving along the deck. And then suddenly lift, and Nolan shouted into the speaking tubes: “Keep us steady over them!”

  The wind was pushing them up, fast, hard, as more ballast was dumped and they gained ground.

  A rocket fired. Nolan flinched and then screamed as it impacted somewhere aft. Oh God this thing's going to hell they're better than the Imperials had planned on...