Her Majesty's Western Service

by Leo Champion

  Cornwell fell against the greasy industrial-slum wall, leaving a trail of blood with his body. His legs were limp; his chest was hurting, hurting terribly.

  He had to get to the airship park. Miles away, but he had to get there.

  They got me, he thought.

  Yes. They had. But he could walk. His legs still moved. He could walk.

  “Mister? Mister? You alright?”

  A man – not a cop, just a passer-by. A passer-by, Cornwell realized, with a vehicle. A steam-truck, a delivery driver to one of these little factories.

  A gasp, as the dismounted driver noticed the gun.

  “I’m fine,” said Cornwell, and stuck the gun in the driver’s face.

  “Nobody. Gets. Hurt. Get me to the airship park. Pay you. Don’t I’ll shoot you.”

  “Mister, you couldn’t shoot a kitten.”

  Cornwell got to his feet, forcing himself despite agonizing screams of pain from his body. He’d been shot in the gut – at least one of those pellets had gone into his gut muscles. It hurt, and he could feel strength ebbing from his body.

  He probably didn’t have long.

  Some chance was better than none.

  “Wasn’t. A. Request,” he snarled.

  “Airship park,” said the man. “Well, I was going there anyway. Don’t pretend to threaten me or it’ll be the worse for you.”

  “Pretend to bribe you,” said Cornwell, his left hand going for his wallet. There was still a few hundred, Texan currency that’d have to be converted, in there. He fumbled out a wad of money and offered it to the driver.

  “Just get me there.”

  The truck driver shrugged.

  “Ought to get you to a doctor. You been shot bad, mister.”

  “You’ll take me where I’m going.”

  The steam-car driver’s friends didn’t show up again – Cornwell had almost come to hope they wouldn’t, that he’d get a free ride to the airship park – until they were almost there.

  When they did, they came with a vengeance. Two sleek, low-slung steam-cars loaded with gunmen came screaming up behind the steam-truck without the slightest pretense of covertness.

  “What the fuck did you get me into?” demanded the truck driver.

  “Through the gates.” Which were in sight. “Drive through the fuckin’ gates!”

  “That’s illegal.”

  Cornwell leaned back in the worn leather seat of the truck and pointed the gun at the driver.

  “I can’t miss at this range. Get me in there!”

  The driver gunned the engine, pushing steam, as someone in one of the tailing cars opened up with an automatic weapon.

  “Who the fuck are you?” demanded the driver.

  Cornwell could see an Imperial-grey airship – more than one! Looked like he was finally lucky, a wing of four! – in the airship park.

  “Get me to the Imperial ships!”

  Pursued by the two cars, they smashed through the lowered boom-gates of the airship park. Mechanics and stevodores dove out of their way.

  “Next to that one! Now!”

  The airships were fueling, but Imperial airships in territory that was still arguably South never fully powered down. Was it just Cornwell’s wounded – dying? – imagination, or could he see crew moving to battle stations?

  Heavy-caliber bullets cut into the steam-truck, lancing through, smashing the boiler.

  “Fuck you,” he murmured, as something struck him.

  “I paid you. Get me there!”

  “Can’t! Lost pressure!”

  The truck was slowing. Fifty yards from the nearest of the airships, across empty pads.

  “Halt! All three of you, halt immediately or you will be shot!” came from one of the airships, an electrically-amplified loudspeaker.

  One of the black cars heard the order too late, or ignored it. Boilers hissing, it moved in to block Cornwell’s movement between his crippled truck and the nearest airship.

  A missile blasted from one of the Imperial airships. Hit the car and practically vaporized it. Burning debris flew in all directions from its shattered hulk.

  Now! Now is the only chance I’m going to get!

  Bent double, crippled, staggering, Cornwell bailed from the truck and ran through the shredded wreckage of the steam-car, praying the airship crews wouldn’t shoot him down. Instead, a door opened to him. He found himself on the ship’s bridge.

  Looking down the barrels of half a dozen pistols.

  He dropped his own gun. Collapsed face-down, coughing blood on the airship’s pristine stamped-aluminum deck.

  “Who,” an officer demanded, “the fuck are you?”

  “MI-7,” Cornwell coughed, barely audible.

  “Who the fuck?” The officer leaned closer

  “MI-7,” Cornwell repeated. “Lift. And get me to Hugoton. I have urgent news.”

  “You been shot bad, agent,” said the officer. “And we’ve got a convoy to protect coming out of here.”

  “Get here. And” – as Cornwell realized he’d made it, but he might not live long enough to reach safety proper – “get me a pencil and pad. I have a report to make.”

  “You heard the man,” the fading Cornwell heard the officer shout. “Lift! And now!”

  “He might live,” the airship medic reported at Hugoton later that evening. “If he gets treatment, and gets lucky. But he was most insistent.”

  “On what grounds?” asked the base officer. “Get him to intensive care, of course.”

  “MI-7 agent,” said the ship’s XO. “Flasher command from Vice Begley said to go straight here because of this. Wounded, dying MI-7 agent.”

  “And your point?” demanded the irritated lieutenant.

  “My point is this,” said the XO, brandishing a blood-stained envelope. “This has what he knows. He said it’s to get to Deputy Director Fleming immediately.”

  “You flashed ahead,” said a civilian on crutches, coming up. “I want that.”

  The man showed a card. Neither the ship XO nor the base officer had the time to look closely.

  “Run it through the cogitator or take my word, lieutenant,” said the civilian. “My name’s Senior Agent Connery, MI-7, and I’m to get Cornwell’s information to the Deputy. Immediately, as requested.”

  Ian Fleming put down his drink and re-read the last few lines of Cornwell’s note. None of it was in the man’s handwriting; it had been dictated by him to an Air Service ensign who was now in security isolation.

  It was terrifying. It filled the last dots of a picture that, in hindsight, was all too clear.

  “Shit,” he murmured, as much to Connery as himself. “I was right.”

  “Sir, you wanted something?” asked Connery.

  “Yes. I want a meeting with Flight Admiral Richardson, Brigadier Henry and the Governor. Right now.”

  “Sir?” That was a substantial request, at 1 am. The governor had a reputation for going to bed early.

  “Right now, Connery. You have half an hour to put me in a briefing room with those people. We don’t have a lot of time. A day or two. At most.”

  “Sir, the governor will be asleep at this hour.”

  “Wake him. And scramble the garrison while you’re about it. Unless you want to see Texas undo what’s left of the Louisiana Purchase, wake him!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Despite its neutrality in the Great War, the United States was drawn into the Collapse regardless, due to its government having made massive loans to the Alliance and its banks having made massive loans to both sides.

  When the Collapse began and the governments to which those loans had been made, disintegrated, it became increasingly apparent that those loans would become default through borrower existence failure. The economic crash that followed began amongst the Gilded Age plutocrats but was not limited to them.

  Social, regional and ethnic tensions compounded the Collapse, as the South took its opportunity to restart the Civil War - only to disintegrate w
ithin months under its own internal tensions. Indian groups re-surged to reclaim their land, while the cities became as violent as London, Berlin and Paris as the unwashed masses rose.

  And unlike the educated professional classes of the United Kingdom, a meaningful number of whom were able to escape to isolated Newfoundland where they and their children would form the core of the Restored Empire, their American counterparts could only run west…

  …where the Indian tribes were rising. The sensible tribal leaders, however, readily accepted the influx of once-American engineers and professionals, since they had ambitions of their own freedom…

  From A Young Person’s History of the World, Volume IX.

  Perry’s first sight of Red Cloud, at one thirty in the morning, was a shrouded nightscape, occasional street lights, fewer than there would have been in a legitimate city of the same size. Rumor had it that Red Cloud – which had for a few years, before the Crash had hit and the Lakota had come back to their ancestral lands, been named Custer – had a population of fifteen thousand. It didn’t look half that size to Perry.

  “Holy shit. This is me in the Black Hills,” Rafferty was saying, a broad, excited grin on his face. “Joined the Service for adventure, never thought I’d get to see a place like this.”

  “Never wanted to,” Perry muttered.

  “Oh, you’ll like Red Cloud,” said Ahle. “It’s not the shithole Deadwood is.”

  The airship park was large, much bigger than a town of fifteen thousand would normally have had, and lit well enough. A flasher instructed them to take any available slot; Nolan guided them into one that he said would be only a short walk from Port Control.

  “Do we just walk in, or what?” asked Perry as they touched down.

  Ahle shook her head.

  “Not unless you want to get shot. Like I said, this isn’t Deadwood. We wait for Port Control.”

  Three mounted braves appeared, wearing modern military fatigues and carrying sleek modern guns – two automatic rifles, one rocket rifle – over their shoulders. The man with the rocket rifle had three feathers in his headband; the others had one each. They dismounted outside the Red Wasp’s bridge.

  “Welcome to Lakota country,” said the three-feathered man. He raised an eyebrow when he saw Ahle. “Captain Ahle.”

  “Lieutenant,” said Ahle.

  “We heard about you. The black man must be Vice-Commodore Perry, of the Imperial Air Service.”

  “I am. Lieutenant, is it?”

  “It’s not often we get Imperials here in any form. And it looks like” – a glance at Rafferty’s uniform – “we have two. Another deserter?”

  “My bodyguard,” said Perry.

  “It’s not often we get a full-grown lieutenant running our customs check,” said Ahle. “Do you want to get on with it? We have business with the Kennedys.”

  “Very well. Anything to declare?”

  “No cargo,” said Nolan. “Not as though we’d object to picking one up.”

  “Twenty dollars, then.”

  Nolan raised an eyebrow. Steep fee.

  “I’ll cover it,” said Perry, and paid the lieutenant. After a cursory check of the cabins and hold, the three braves rode off.

  “So where do we go from here?” Perry asked.

  “I have an apartment,” said Ahle. “For that matter, Hollis lives next door. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you crashed there. Given the hospitality you Imperials are providing him.”

  “We didn’t come to Red Cloud to sleep,” said Perry. “We came to hire men and get resources so that we can take 4-106 back.”

  “And that might take a little while. Get some rest and we’ll work on it in the morning.”

  Perry had expected a raucous, drunken parkside district – Dodge City’s Boot District only more so, since Red Cloud was known for pirates. That element probably existed somewhere, but the street Ahle took them down was quiet, clean and orderly; two- and three-storey office buildings, houses above the mostly-closed storefronts. The three taverns they passed were quiet and subdued – conversation, not roistering.

  “Not the town I expected,” said Rafferty. “Where’s the fun part?”

  “A few blocks over,” said Ahle, gesturing in the direction Nolan’s mercenaries had headed. “This is officer country. And businessmen.”

  “Red Cloud has businessmen?” asked Perry.

  “Sure. One in four of these offices we’re passing belong to insurance companies,” said Ahle. “What do you think happens to ships that get taken?”

  “The insurance companies have offices right here for buying `em back?” Perry asked incredulously.

  “Of course. It’s easier for all concerned. And there are independent brokers for the un-insured ships. Banks, too. You know, it’s not totally uncommon for an owner-operator to lose his ship, come here looking for a cheap replacement, and buy his old ship back – with the loan money coming from a deposit made by the pirate who took his ship in the first place, stashing the money he got for its sale.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I’m speaking from personal experience. Pirates have to invest their money somewhere, those who make it. The local economy is the easiest place to. In here.”

  A little to Perry’s surprise, Ahle didn’t take him up into the two-storey building. Rather, she took him in and down two flights of stairs, to a foyer where a doorman in a brown-and-grey uniform waited behind a desk.

  “Captain Ahle, ma’am,” he said. Another Lakota, from his complexion.

  “Philip. Good to see you again. These two are Imperial Vice-Commodore Perry and Specialist Third Rafferty.”

  “Sir. Sir,” the doorman nodded.

  “I’m coming home, for now. These two will be borrowing Hollis’ apartment. Anyone comes to see them, send them to me. Understood?”

  The doorman nodded. Perry, from his read of the directory, was noting that this seemed actually quite a respectably-sized apartment building; two storeys up but four down, twenty-four apartments in total. Two thirds of them underground.

  “Thank you, Philip,” said Ahle. “Vice, shall we go downstairs? Here’s a key.”

  Lieutenant-General (retired) Sir Charles Lloyd, Governor of the Hugoton Lease, was a big man of about seventy, with a thick, well-groomed white moustache and a few thin wisps of white hair remaining. He wore the insignia-less remains of a red and gold regimental dress uniform, and he did not look happy.

  “This had better be good, Fleming,” he growled. “By which I mean critical. It’s two in the morning. This could not have waited five hours?”

  Fleming met the Governor’s glare directly.

  “This can’t wait another thirty minutes, sir. We have at best seventy-two hours in which to prevent not merely the loss of this territory but—”

  “Hold on,” the Governor interrupted him. “Merely the loss of Hugoton?”

  The others in the sparsely-appointed conference room had similar skeptical looks. Those were Flight Admiral Richardson and Brigadier Henry, Richardson’s ground-forces counterpart. Their personal aides and the Governor’s private secretary, a handsome twenty-five-ish lord named Warren Buff, who wore a monocle and an immaculate, elegant black suit. Fleming’s own aide, Connery, stood in the background, leaning on his crutches but ready to present the supporting materials that had been hastily run off.

  “Yessir. The loss of Hugoton may in fact be unavoidable. Gentlemen, Flight Admiral, we are facing perhaps the biggest power play the Russians have attempted in a generation. Their intent is not merely to destroy Hugoton; it is to undo what remains of the Louisiana Purchase.”

  The Governor looked at him.

  “You’re insane, Fleming. The Russians would never dare. How would they?”

  “Hold on, sir,” said Richardson. “Deputy Director, you wouldn’t have called us into this conference at this hour – nor exceeded your authority by waking every soldier, Marine and airshipman on this garrison and bringing the place to orange alert – unle
ss you were prepared to justify that statement. If the Governor will permit you to, please do.”

  Fleming looked at the Governor.

  “Go on,” he muttered.

  “As you all know, my organization has been systematically destroyed over the last month. We’ve taken out the Okhrana presence on this continent in return, but that wasn’t a coincidence.

  “This spy war now appears to have been staged deliberately. The leak that triggered it may have come directly from St. Petersburg with the specific purpose of initiating this mutual destruction. Because the Russians could afford to sacrifice the Okhrana presence on this continent for enough gain. Through a stroke of luck and some sacrifice, sir, we’ve determined that the Russians also have a Third Department presence in North America.

  “The Russians could afford to ultimately lose their Okhrana network here. They have other eyes. Not as plentiful nor as effective, but they exist. While we’re blind.

  “Why would the Russians make this sacrifice to blind us now? Because I have also confirmed that a sizable Russian force has either landed in Houston or will do so very shortly. Multiple divisions of fighting troops. Logistical and support structure. Meanwhile, Texas has fully mobilized.”

  “You’re drunk,” said the Governor flatly. “The Russians are never going to directly invade the United States. That would mean open war with us.”

  “No, sir. They’re not. But they can provide logistics and support inside Texas, thus freeing up Texan troops and resources for the invasion. They can go to the Sonoran border, thus freeing up a number of Texan divisions from security there. Lyndon Johnson has made repeated threats against the United States; the Russians have given the capability to act on them.

  “The Russians have already shipped arms to the South; there’s going to be another rising, set to begin at any time. West of the Mississippi, Texans are going to sweep north up the plains, possibly as far as Canada – their entire army, with what the Russian logistics will have freed up, will make mincemeat of the Department of the West.”