Her Majesty's Western Service

by Leo Champion

  “Trouble’s what we’re for,” said Marko. “But we’re going to need men. Round up your connections. We have forty-five minutes.”

  A walk, through crowds and the ever-present sticky heat, took them into the French Quarter, in the direction of Denard’s.

  “She moves, I hear,” said Ahle. “I’ve been to Denard’s before, but she also owns several other places. And there has to be at least a couple nobody knows about.”

  “You’re implying a woman with cause to worry about her own safety,” said Perry. Although a woman capable of ordering attacks on Federal contractors just to get information – with every indication she’d done stuff like this before – was, yes, going to very rapidly make some powerful enemies.

  “Damn straight. But they’ll know where to find us at Denard’s. They may even be expecting us.”

  They were. In fact, Unitas himself met them at the entrance to the place.

  “Heard you were on your way,” said the henchman. “Come in. The bosslady’s in a meeting right now, but she’ll see you in a few minutes. Care for drinks?”

  “You know what I get,” said Ahle.

  “Of course. And a whisky for the Vice?”

  “Sure.” After the last couple of days, come to think of it, he needed a drink.

  “Mr. Johnny?” A pre-teen urchin approached Unitas.

  “Yeah?”

  “Got word for you, Mr. Johnny. Urgent, sir.”

  “I’ll deal with this,” said Unitas. “You two can go in. The boss will know you’re here.”

  Seated at a booth inside Denard’s, Ahle and Perry raised their drinks.

  “To your airship,” Ahle said. “And my crew.”

  “My airship. And may your crew have learned a lesson. You’re skilled. Can’t you find mercenary work somewhere?”

  Ahle glared at him.

  “Mercenaries are who killed my family. And a lot of others.”

  “An honest living, then,” said Perry. “Don’t tell me you’re going to go right back to piracy.”

  “Honest piracy,” said Ahle. She sipped on her rum.

  “No such thing,” said Perry. “Code or not.”

  “Maybe you can at least plunder outside Imperial spheres of influence? The Romantics and the Russians are a lot sloppier about their convoy protection, you know.”

  “And not as wealthy as the Imperial client states,” said Ahle. “Bad governance has its drawbacks. They run things like the Feds run the South; brute force and corruption.”

  “At least consider it. I’d hate to see you hang after all of this.”

  “Maybe once I’ve done something about the Squadrons. Avenged my family. That was why I wanted your airship, you know. As a weapon against them. If they transferred to Texas... attack them en route. Or if they did renew the contract, sail straight into Columbia with that line-class and all those nine-inch tubes.” Ahle’s lips hardened. “Fly an Imperial flag. Hit their headquarters building. That Bavarian bastard Himmler works on the top floor.”

  “You’ve been researching this,” Perry observed. Treason? Well, these people were involved with people actively scheming against the Empire, who had overflown Hugoton with some sort of nefarious purpose. His sympathies to them were more limited than they had been a few days ago... and besides, he’d seen a taste of what the German and the Italian units did in the South. Not treason, perhaps not even a whole lot more than disapproval.

  He drained the rest of his glass to try to wash that thought from his mouth. Of course it was treason! The Hugoton maps weren’t his department; 4-106 was. This woman had stolen 4-106.

  “Oh, you think I’m bad,” said Ahle. The flicker of a challenging smile was on her face. “Tell me, would the good people of London, St. John’s, Dublin, Edinburgh, Sydney or Cape Town think I was so bad, if they knew what Himmler and his goons did to Wake Forest? The kind of thing Imperial policy is designed to avert, not turn a blind eye to?”

  “The good people of the Empire can make up their own minds and vote accordingly,” said Perry reflexively. “But – you were planning to take 4-106 not to sell its technology to the Russians, or its firepower to the Sonorans, but purely to make a one-sided attack out of personal vendetta? A one-way attack, too. You would have been blown out of the sky.”

  “A one-way attack would have been fine,” said Ahle coldly. “If it inspired others. Himmler and his men are criminals and no more. When the law is corrupted, all you have is what men like you call ‘vendetta.’ I call it justice.” Ahle drained the rum glass and put it down, a little harder than she might have, on the table.

  “Miss L will see you now,” said a flunky with a submachinegun slung across his chest. “Freshen your drinks before you go up there?”

  “I’m fine,” said Perry.

  “Please,” said Ahle.

  The armed flunky produced a bottle of rum, filled Ahle’s glass until – very near the top – she gestured for him to stop.

  “Very well. This way.”

  There was an armed guard at the door to Lynch’s office, which there hadn’t been before. He saw the man leading Perry and Ahle in, recognized them and, without taking his eyes from Perry and Ahle, moved to an electrotelegraphic headset. Spoke something barely-audible into it. Received a reply. Stepped away from the door and opened it.

  Lynch was leaning back at her broad, dark wood desk, hands clasped behind her tightly-coiffed hairdo.

  “Good afternoon, Vice-Commodore, Captain,” she said. “Thank you for coming. I see you have the materials I asked for.”

  “I have a request,” said Perry, not moving to hand them over. “I’d like a copy of these.” That was the best way to not indicate he’d already made copies and sent them to Fleming, he’d reasoned a day ago.

  “Oh?” Lynch didn’t blink. “You think the information might be of interest to your boss.”

  “My boss is intelligence. I think everything is of interest to him.”

  “I think he already has copies,” said Lynch evenly. “You’ve had the time to make and send them. But I’ll indulge you, Vice-Commodore. Certainly.”

  Perry reached forward and slid the folders, and the chips, across the table to Lynch. She picked the folders – containing quite detailed maps and aerial pictures of the Hugoton area, he’d had plenty of time to confirm – up and looked at them.

  He’d had the impression of a guarded, closely-kept woman. Therefore, the way her eyebrows shot up when she saw the maps, was… relevant.

  “Oh my,” she said after a few moments. “It… appears as though the loss of the Zephyr may have been acceptable after all.”

  Perry couldn’t resist asking: “Does this fit into some kind of a picture for you?”

  “It might fit into any number of pictures,” said Lynch, recovering her composure. “You might talk to your boss Fleming about that. He and I are even now.”

  “Not quite,” said Perry. If she thought she was going to get out of a deal that had nearly killed them... “You owe me a location. And that had better be correct, unless you want trouble from MI-7.”

  “MI-7 couldn’t cause trouble to a pair of kittens right now. The information is correct as of a few days ago,” said Lynch.

  Something on her desk buzzed. As Lynch reached over for it, something outside – and not too far away – blew up.

  “For once it wasn’t a false alarm,” Lynch said, drawing a pistol from somewhere in her skirt. Her other hand swept the SS maps and chips into a small bag.

  Perry drew – the practice had paid off – his own gun. Didn’t quite point it at Lynch.

  “You owe me a location. Just to remind you.”

  “Oh, that.” She slung the bag over a shoulder and flicked a piece of paper over the desk toward him. A map! With mechanitype-printed coordinates underneath. From the contours, the X appeared to be somewhere amidst mountains…

  Gunshots. What were clearly gunshots, not far away. Unitas, followed by a flunky, pushed into Lynch’s office.

  “We�
��ve got a red alert, boss. There’s a lot of them.”

  “Let’s get moving, then.” A glance at Ahle and Perry. “You want to come with us or not?”

  Lynch’s problems were her own, thought Perry, but whatever powerful enemies were coming to get her now probably wouldn’t be too friendly to her guests either.

  He had – probably – 4-106’s location. Getting out alive was his objective now, and he couldn’t imagine Lynch going in any direction other than safety.

  “We’re with you. Of course.”

  “Get moving, then. And when I say to fire on someone, you kill them. We know our own.”

  Lynch pushed at a panel in her wall, which slide aside to reveal a chipped-brick staircase going straight down into a dripping staircase. That became a passage, moisture oozing from ancient-seeming stones. Another flunky joined them as they ran down the passage, gunshots coming from not too far away. A second explosion.

  Who is it attacking her?, Perry thought. It seemed entirely too coincidental. Right now, they were under attack?

  “Along here.” Unitas gestured to a sharp left turn in the damp underground passage. “This’ll get us out of the area.”

  Ferrer had been briefed, fully briefed. He was in charge of a squad of these lowlife thugs – he had no other way to think of them, bottom-feeding trash – with the objective of cutting off one of this Lynch’s escape routes.

  The preliminary operation had been swift and sure, and Ferrer didn’t know all the details of it. Marko had swept up a handful of Lynch’s own goons, interrogated them, gotten one of her officers and put her to brutal torture. He’d heard the screaming, but it hadn’t lasted long.

  He supposed a man like Marko would know his way around torture devices. There’d been a time, before the knifework and the killings, that he’d have found that idea casually acceptable. Now he was seeing it – well, the state did still have to burn, right?

  The state was evil, he reminded himself as he waited in the alley, looking at a brick wall that somewhere was apparently false. The state fucked you over. The state has to go.

  “Look up, damn you!” he told the thugs. Ordered them. Raised his own submachinegun, and can I really believe I’m holding one of those and supposedly ready to shoot?, in emphasis. “They could come from anywhere, not just ground level.”

  Marko had briefed him, him and his trigger-happy assistant and McIlhan, well. The others didn’t need to know so much, and Ferrer had been led to understand it would have been bad for their life expectancies if they did. The important thing was to keep this operation under control, Marko had said. Keep her from escaping with the information.

  Well, he’d do his job at that, at least.

  Another sharp turn, and in this underground labyrinth Perry couldn’t tell how many there’d been at this point. Four, five, seven? Let alone the directions. Miss L had planned for survival, that was for sure.

  Or her predecessors had.

  That wasn’t a particularly comforting thought.

  Suddenly, in the cramped passages, they halted.

  “We’re about to come out,” Unitas hissed. Over his shoulder was a heavy-looking backpack of his own. Containing information of what kind, Perry didn’t want to know. “We’re on the edge of the French Quarter. Docks district area. Follow me to the warehouse.”

  “And then what?” Ahle demanded.

  “There’ll be an airship,” Lynch said flatly, as gunshots echoed through the tunnels. “You don’t think I haven’t planned for this?”

  “Where does it go?”

  “Out of here.”

  “That’s not very specific,” said Perry.

  “Does it have to be?”

  Before Perry could reply, Unitas pulled the lever that opened the door.

  They were in an alley, was all Perry could tell, and there were goons there. Then the gunfighting began.

  Ferrer had had orders. He’d had orders to keep the mooks between him and the enemy, if such enemy were to show up. But he was in charge, and didn’t a leader have duties as well as responsibilities to go with the job? He wasn’t going to let any human flesh stop a bullet for him, no matter how wasted and irrelevant that flesh was.

  If the bullet was meant for him, it was meant for him. And he opened fire on the group, cocking his submachinegun as he’d been trained, methodically pointing it at the one with the heaviest weaponry – a liveried flunky with a light machine gun – and firing. All according to training.

  Throwing himself to the side of the alley, according to training. Marko had drilled him hard.

  The grenade hadn’t been part of the training. A deafening overpressure that blasted his ears and his brain, hurting.

  No.

  Focus. Focus damnit!

  Through the waves and the smoke – they must have let off smoke grenades, too! – firing. Focused on that liveried enemy with the machine gun, thirty feet away, shoot him down before the heavy weapon could deploy!

  Around him, men were going down. It seemed to be happening in slow motion. They were falling, firing their pistols and their sawn-offs but falling regardless.

  Ferrer fired another burst into the man with the machine gun. That was his focus, as the others around him broke and bolted. Follow training. Rules and discipline. The others didn’t have machine guns. That one had a machine gun. Kill – no, shoot down was a much more comfortable thought – that man.

  Explosions. Something tore Ferrer’s head, and suddenly he was down on his face, kissing warm tarmac. The gun was out of his hands, he knew, because he couldn’t fire it any more.

  “This way,” Lynch snarled. “They’re onto us now!”

  “I thought we’d fought our way past them!” Perry yelled back.

  “Bullshit. That was a tripwire as much as anything else. They know where we came out, now, and they’re going to be vectoring onto us everything that they have.”

  “Very well,” said Ahle. “We have an airship. Want a ride? We’re getting out our own way.”

  “I have my own airship.”

  Blazing gunfire came out of a side-street, no warning. Another of Lynch’s flunkies was shot down. Unitas turned, hurled the sack of – documents? Not quite – an improbable distance into that street.

  Blazing explosion.

  “I’m getting the bosslady outta here,” Unitas growled at Perry. “We’ve done your business. Come along or not.”

  “Safest not to,” Ahle yelled at Perry. She gestured in a direction that appeared random, down an alley. “That way.”

  “That way,” Perry agreed. He had the coordinates of 4-106, if the information fence knew them. He owed her nothing. Without a look back, he ran.

  More shooting exploded behind them.

  “Up!” Ahle gestured at a ladder. A fire-escape. They clambered up, up, to the roof of a cheap-looking warehouse.

  “I don’t think they noticed us,” Ahle hissed. “These people, they stay on target.”

  “Who are these people?”

  “Professionals.”

  “Holy shit,” Rienzi was saying. “You nailed a whole ball of them.”

  Ferrer slowly found himself getting to his feet.

  “You mean I’m not dead?” he muttered.

  “Just a few cuts, boss. You killed a whole stack.”

  “One with a machine-gun?” He’d been shooting at that man. The best-armed man had been his priority, as per the general directions he’d been given.

  You followed directions.

  “You blew his guts out!” Rienzi exalted. Kicking a corpse. A machine-gun lay in the dust nearby.

  Staggering, still disoriented, Ferrer went over. The dead man – gut-shot, he noticed, although riddled in the legs and shot in the face as well – had an elaborate jacket. He found a wallet in one pocket of that.

  “What you doing?” Rienzi asked.

  “I killed him,” said Ferrer. “Ought to know who he is.”

  He’d taken a life. Him personally. Himself. There was bile in his th
roat, but you didn’t hide from facts.

  “Eh, just some fuckup. Your first notch, man.”

  “Philip Riordan,” said Ferrer, reading off the state ID in the wallet. “Birthdate 10/22/1940.”

  “Don’t get all sentimental, boss,” said Rienzi, kicking the corpse again.

  “Occupation, construction laborer. Funny. Should have said machine-gunner.”

  “You killed the fucker, that’s all. And” – an explosion, a big explosion – “it looks like we just got the rest of them.”

  “It looks like we just got the rest of them,” Marko said to McIlhan as the cabin of the formerly-ascending scout-class exploded.

  “You sure that’s her, boss?” asked McIlhan.

  “Always the skeptical, logical Imperial bitch, aren’t we?”

  “Not afraid of you, crazy man. I want to fuck shit up just like you, and you know it. So, how you so sure we just killed this L bitch?”

  Marko giggled.

  “She’s going to want to fly out, once she reaches the limits of her tunnels. Only so many places you can put even a scout-class. So we put the rockets in range – and when someone lifts under the shooting, we know it’s got to be her. Everyone else in the warehouses and docks are keeping their noses down, not running, right?”

  “So we got her?”

  “You wanna stick around and sniff the corpses?” asked Marko. “Who else would be on that late, unlamented dirigible? We got her firm and good. Now, we just rocketed a dirigible out of existence over New Orleans dockside. You want to sniff, or you want to scram?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Trotsky, Leon – Russian statesman

  Born – 7 November 1879; Bereslavka, Ukraine (aged 84)

  Present Position – Special Minister of State, Russian Empire

  File Summary:

  Despite coming from relatively low (kulak; upper-peasant) origins, Trotsky (original name – Lev Davidovich Bronstein) is one of the key figures in the Russian Empire’s upper administration. Instrumental (as an organizer and field commander) in the Russian Restoration of 1917, he has gone on to be a close associate of three Tsars.