Her Majesty's Western Service

by Leo Champion

  Perry raked the tank with fire, and he could see the sparking rounds bounce off. Oh, shit, he thought, but they were gaining speed, crunching over the multiple layers of razor wire.

  “Flaregun,” he said. “Gimme that flaregun for our pickup!”

  “Later,” Ahle snapped, and hard-turned the vehicle forty-five degrees right to keep from slamming into a tree. This area was almost a plain; smooth ground with a few copses of light trees here and there, a handful of bigger trees standing alone.

  Ahle jerked the vehicle to the right, and a shell blasted dirt into the ground where they had been.

  “We’re on their twelve,” said Ahle. “They can hit us, but we can outrun them. Heavy support tanks. Big boom. Great range. Not so great on accuracy.”

  She swerved and jinked the still-accelerating armored car again. Another shell exploded twenty feet to their right.

  “They have more of these little ones,” Perry pointed out, breathing hard. Turning the chaingun around one-eighty, just in time to see the double-muzzle-flash of a second heavy tank.

  One of the shells whistled overhead; the second hit not far ahead of them, and Ahle practically drove the armored car through the explosion. Dust and debris whipped Perry’s hunched-over back.

  “And they don’t have to zag to avoid gunfire.”

  “Right,” said Ahle. “You wanted that flaregun?”

  Roeder turned the flasher one way and then another, repeating the same code: First company to the right, second to the left, go around. There was something going on at the other side of Joplin base, although the fight here – his track bumped over another hooded corpse – had mostly ended.

  A purple flare shot up into the night sky. Followed by another.

  Descending fast, a couple of miles away, came a sleek escort-class airship. Unlit. Not a friendly.

  The Cheetahs’ light chainguns wouldn’t do much to affect the thing, not without tracers they didn’t have. But the Tiger IIbs had guns designed for taking down airships, with the elevation to boot.

  His own heavy tanks were miles behind. The ones belonging to the Joplin base, however, were very immediately handy.

  “There she is! Go for it!” Perry shouted.

  “I see her,” said Ahle. The two-hundred-yard-away Marlyville Zephyr had stopped descending at about thirty feet, and a rope ladder had been thrown down. Perry could see men in the open hold, ready to ditch emergency ballast and leap their ship right up again.

  Ahle changed course, aiming for the airship’s rope ladder. Another shell, then another one, exploded around them.

  A hundred yards. Seventy-five. Fifty.

  We’re going to make it, Perry thought, as the armored car decelerated.

  Then the tail assembly of the airship exploded into burning fragments.

  Suddenly without its steering, the airship began to turn on its axis.

  The men with the emergency ballast released their loads, swinging the heavy lead-and-sand-laden sacks off and cutting their ropes. They impacted the ground as the airship shot up –

  Another shell caught her high-amidships, and burning hydrogen blazed a fount into the sky.

  “She’s going down!” Perry shouted. “Avert!”

  “What did you say?” Ahle accelerated as the airship, desperately releasing sacs of flaming hydrogen, began to descend.

  Perry ducked into the turret, slammed the hatch hard behind him.

  Another tank shell blasted somewhere close by. The flaming remains of the now-devoid-of-airworthiness Zephyr crashed down on top of them.

  For a few moments, through Ahle’s plexiglas-covered vision slit, all that she could see was fire. We’re driving right into the inferno, she thought.

  Hit the steam pedal. Increased speed.

  Right through the inferno, she corrected herself.

  Something burned behind them. Something exploded above them. Then they were clear, racing through the other side of the airship that had, in a few seconds, been reduced to a blazing skeleton.

  Perry looked at her.

  “That was our ride out,” he said.

  “Was. This is our ride out now,” Ahle replied. “Tell me: Where?”

  Perry thought for a moment.

  “Hugoton. Fleming has to see those maps. We can trade copies of the shit to Lynch if he says so. Get 4-106 next.”

  “We’re on the wrong side of the Kansas state line,” Ahle said. “And Hugoton’s four hundred miles and change from there.”

  “Yes, but we’re going to run into something first. Friendly airship. Somebody. Chances are best going that way. Got any better ideas?”

  Ahle glanced at the compass, which read approximately south-southwest. She made a wheeling turn to the right. Turned back to Perry.

  “No. But we’re losing pressure. Get to the boiler.”

  Roeder was met by a seething, furious, icy-controlled Skorzeny, still coughing and slightly concussed. His rage seemed to cut through that.

  “I want you to pursue them,” he said.

  “Some of our elements already are,” Roeder said. “Stolen one of our vehicles, I saw. In the shop, I heard.”

  “Yessir,” said the base commander, a Captain Metz.

  “In the shop implies damage. What with?”

  “Nothing serious. Her suspension took a hit from a mine that didn’t completely go off. She’ll drive just fine.”

  “Damn it,” said Skorzeny. “I want that vehicle destroyed. What do we have in the air near here?”

  “Nothing closer than Columbia, last I heard, sir,” said Roeder. “Nothing we can get at.”

  “Get them. Destroy them if you have to, take the documents intact if you can. But use everything you have, Major, and stop them. Absolute top priority. Critical One. Stop them.”

  “They’re in pursuit,” Perry reported from the hatch. He could see formations of lights, miles behind them on the plains. Gaining? He couldn’t tell. “Can you drive any faster?”

  “I’m already driving faster!” Ahle shouted back.

  That was true. The bumpy earth was racing below them, and the speed needle had to be pushing fifty if not past that. The wind blew hard against him, and the armored car kicked up a thick wedge of dust as they fled, the car bucking up and down under them.

  Perry felt his ribs, where the bullet had hit. Sore, painful, bruised, but not broken. Thank God for kevlar.

  “Angle south a bit. We want to hit the railway line.”

  He knew this part of Kansas, though. It was empty. Cattle country, farms and ranches. At night, they were unlikely to encounter anything. Unlikely to be seen by anything.

  At least they had a head start.

  “By the way,” Ahle said, “just so you know, when I checked, we only have about half a load of fuel.”

  Oh.

  “We’re gaining on them, I think,” Roeder reported to Skorzeny, who was sitting in the bowels of the armored car. About half an hour into the chase, headed west-southwest. “They’re only a couple of miles ahead.”

  “Let me take a look.”

  Skorzeny, still coughing a bit – he was fucked up and his gut hurt from those punches, but damned if he’d let the major see that – took the commander’s hatch. Roeder’s sixteen armored cars, and the three remaining ones belonging to the base, and the one he was riding in, were sweeping across the plains in a line, racing each other as much as they were chasing the fleeing attackers.

  Their searchlights swept across, too, occasionally catching a the metallic glint of the now-enemy car. Too far for a lucky shot; the cars’ tires were heavy, solid rubber that a single round from the one-inch chainguns wouldn’t do much to, certainly not at this range.

  Some of the cars’ commanders had tried regardless, until Roeder had ordered them by flasher to knock it off.

  Who are these damn people, anyway?

  A black man, one had been. A black Southerner would never work with the Klan, so it had to be someone else. A Fed or an Imperial. Had the Feds gotten a clu
e? That could be very bad.

  He’d have to interrogate the fuckers and find out. He’d already ordered Captain Metz to send his infantry through the scene of the fight, see if there were any enemy wounded who could also be interrogated.

  At least he was having a smooth ride. The other vehicle had a busted suspension. The bastards would at least be uncomfortable.

  And they couldn’t run forever, and their obvious escape mechanism had been blown out of the sky. If they lasted far past dawn, Skorzeny was going to be surprised.

  “I think I’ve figured out what’s wrong with this thing,” said Ahle, as the car bumped painfully across another rock. “The suspension.”

  “Very funny,” said Perry, who was nursing a burned hand from a while earlier, when he’d been tending the boiler at exactly the wrong bump. After which he’d found the locker containing the gloves normally used by the car’s engineman. “Very, very funny, Ahle.”

  He adjusted the boiler again to feed a bit more of the airship-grade petroleum-coal distillate into the engine, then moved back a bit through the car’s narrow quarters, going for the aft hatch. That had a ring-mount that looked like it could hold a flasher or a detachable machine-gun; at present it held neither, but it was a closer viewpoint than the fore gun-tub.

  He stuck his head through, getting used to feeling the wind lashing his back. They seemed to be gaining; the sweeping searchlights definitely seemed a fraction brighter. It was a little after five, and they’d been running for a very tense hour or so now.

  “Gaining on us, I think,” he reported. “Looks like

  “I’m serious about the suspension. These things are supposed to normally have a much smoother ride.”

  “If we don’t run into help soon, we’re going to have a much deader ride,” said Perry.

  “Do you know exactly where we are?”

  “Does ‘somewhere in Kansas’ help? Or maybe northern Oklahoma?”

  “No,” said Ahle. “Not really, no.”

  “Then just drive and hope this thing doesn’t break down on us.”

  “Definitely gaining,” Roeder said another half-hour after that. “Definitely. We’re going to be approaching effective shooting distance soon. We’ll shoot them to fragments and have them.”

  “You flashed my orders,” Skorzeny replied. Not a question, or even really much of a confirmation.

  “Yes. Destroy them. Take the stuff intact if you can, but don’t under any circumstances let them escape. And kill the bastards.”

  “Right. It won’t be much longer, sir.”

  “It better not be.”

  Roeder smiled. The thieves had the exact same model of APCs he and his men were using, of course, but his cars had full four-man crews, for one; driver, gunner, engineer and secondary gunner/flash operator. That helped a little.

  What helped more was that the crews customized their vehicles a bit, and they knew the customizations and the invariable individual quirks of their particular vehicle. That added up to a little more efficiency from the boilers, and a little more speed from the engines.

  Only a few percent more, perhaps another mile and change per hour, but at a couple of miles’ range over the hour and a half it had been so far, it was going to be decisive.

  The sun was beginning to rise in the east, backlighting the twenty pursuing armored cars. They’d drawn close enough, within a half-mile, that they were firing intermittent bursts; they were a line spread across the near distance, now, not just flashing lights that might have been on the horizon.

  We’re gone, thought Perry, as the marks on the hopper showed that the fuel was close to zero. There was what was in the engine now, plus about two percent more, and when that was in and burned...

  They’d lose pressure, slow, and die. He’d tried a dozen stories in his head, but none of them fit. He didn’t have Federal identification. He was officially a rogue Imperial, and Ahle was definitely a known pirate. And they’d killed at least one Special Squadrons man during the escape, not to mention sprayed several others and beaten the crap out of one of their ranking officers.

  There was no conceivable excuse they could use, and no conceivable way the SS would see fit not to simply execute them out of hand.

  A week and a half ago, it crossed his mind, he would have absolutely agreed that they should. A pirate and a renegade with stolen documents and blood on their hands?

  It felt different now. She may be a pirate, but I’m not really a renegade!

  No time for excuses. If we’re going to die, the Service officer’s part of his mind said, take as many of those bastards with us as we can.

  Very simple, when you came down to it.

  Within a few hundred yards, and fire was striking home on the Cheetah regularly – not inflicting damage, but sparking off and making the hull ring. Making it dangerous for Perry to stick his head up without the shield of the front gun tub.

  It didn’t matter. There was no need for a man at the boiler; the last of the fuel was gone and Ahle’s gauge was already showing a loss in pressure. Within a few minutes – ten, at best, if they put up an effective fight against twenty times their number – it would all be over.

  Perry fired another burst at what he thought would be the command car, shooting through their dust trail and the rising sun, now visible across the endless plains.

  A sudden noise to his left. Engines. Propellers.

  An airship. Flying low, at a couple of hundred yards and getting lower.

  Perry waved frantically.

  “Pirates!” he shouted in the hope he might be heard, might be believed.

  Was it just his imagination, or was the car starting to lose speed?

  The airship continued to drop, on a clear intercept course for where they were headed. A rope ladder fell from it, swaying as it dangled.

  Oh, thank God!

  “Jam the pedal down and maintain speed somehow while we can,” Perry ordered.

  “I see him just as well as you,” said Ahle, and proved it by adjusting course.

  So could the pursuers. They switched their chainguns’ fire from Ahle and Perry to the two-hundred-yard long airship’s bulk. Even at extreme range, five or six hundred yards, they couldn’t miss, and lines of sparks and dings clashed across the ship’s colorfully-painted, dust-faded aluminum hull.

  Perry laughed. They could fire all they wanted; at best they’d puncture a few hydrogen sacs. Without tracers, the armored cars’ fire would be irrelevant to this airship.

  Regardless, the ship fired back. A missile burst from amidships, trailing fire as it lanced out at the center of the line of armored cars. Two of them broke formation to avoid it. It hit the ground and exploded, sent a wild brown dust fountain into the sky against the sunrise.

  Intercept! The ladder banged against the slowing armored car – they were down to three quarters or less of what their speed had been, now, and the Squadrons’ cars were gaining fast – and Perry, bag over his shoulder, grabbed it, climbed. Ahle was immediately behind him.

  “You two hold on tight!” someone yelled from the hatch above.

  Perry hooked his arms around the sides of the rope ladder, planted his feet and held on for dear life. Chaingun fire continued to spark the gondola.

  “Ballast now!” that same voice yelled. A voice Perry had heard before, although he couldn’t place when.

  Something rolled off the hatch, boxes and then barrels tumbling to the ground. The airship jumped with a sharp jerk, and suddenly they were fifty feet off the ground – no, sixty, seventy, and rising fast.

  “Winch!” the man shouted, and the rope ladder, twisting and turning, began to be hauled up.

  Below, the armored cars were frantically reversing, trying to get enough elevation to fire effectively. One of the commanders drew an automatic rifle and opened up wildly at the swaying, jerking, rising rope ladder. Lots of muzzle-flash, but none of the rounds came close.

  The winch was drawing the ladder toward an open trapdoor, up and into the airship
’s bridge.

  A smiling man in a long brown coat was waiting there, pistols in his rig.

  “Cap’n Perry,” the man said. “Don’t know if you remember me, being a high-level Imperial Vice-Commodore and all. But when Cap’n Nate Nolan tells you he’s at your service, he means it. Your little operation bought us a new ship.”

  The balance woman in the dress and the spectacularly useless rig stood smiling next to him. This ship’s bridge was – well, still a civilian mess, but neater and equipped with proper communications. Not up to Imperial standards, but an order of magnitude more advanced than the last bridge he’d seen this man on.

  “Welcome aboard the Red Wasp II, Cap’n Perry. Heard you might have been in the area. Where did you say you wanted to go, again?”

  “Hugoton,” said Perry immediately. “This is a priority. They’ll allow civilian transport as far as Dodge.”

  Nolan shook his head.

  “In case you hadn’t forgotten, Mr. Vice-Commodore, aren’t you still a wanted man with bucks on your head? Not going to be seen to sell a friend out, I’m sorry.”

  “Just take me to Dodge and I can turn myself in. Report to Fleming.”

  “If you really insist,” said Nolan. “But you’re sure there’s nowhere else you’d rather go?”

  “We were sent to get that material,” Ahle pointed out.

  4-106, Perry thought. I said I’d come back with my ship or not at all.

  And Lynch knew where 4-106 was. Or said she did. He could copy the material before giving it to her. Mail it to Hugoton, to Fleming; he had a couple of codewords that would reach him.

  “Very well. Take us to the nearest place I can wire Hugoton,” Perry said. “Any small town along the Dodge line should do, but keep us out of SS jurisdiction. And then take us back to New Orleans.”