Her Majesty's Western Service (15 page)

This isn't fast enough
, Perry thought.
We're still rising
– four hundred feet now, above the rippling yellow grass, and turning –
and where the
hell
is–

“Knife,”
he said to Rafferty, the nearest enlisted man. “Now.”

Rafferty yanked a stiletto from his
boot and tossed it underhand to Perry.

“Two of you with blades?”
Perry yelled, switching the pistol to his left hand. “Take a breath and follow me!”

Without waiting to see if a
nyone was, Perry leapt into the six-by-six gap that Halvorsen had opened. He fell, about five feet, before landing on the soft silk cushion of another hydrogen bag.

With the knife, he cut
open the adjacent ones, ripping wide gaps into them. Hydrogen escaped. Then he slashed the one below, and almost immediately fell; slashing, cutting, opening the bags.

Next to him was Rafferty,
slashing away with a long, heavy fighting knife. He cut his way through a hydrogen bag and into another, then lowered his face to breathe from the air between two bags. Hydrogen escaped up, not down;
all
the hydrogen from these ripped-open bags would be going up through the gaps his men were levering.

And I hope to God I don't come across anyone I have to shoot. Or that Rafferty or anyone else does
, Perry thought. Breathing deeply himself, as he moved between two layers of hydrogen sacs, past a laddered access area.
One spark and we all burn. Badly.

“
They're inside his gondola,” Martindale muttered. “Swarovski, damn you, hold your fire!”

“They got our steering,”
said Nolan. "We're fucked. They've got our damn steering, and
they're
just fine.”

“
No, captain,” said Vescard, who'd come to the bridge. “They're fighting for buoyancy. Ditching ballast!”

“
They're
inside
the gondola,” someone shouted to Mack. “And they’re
Imperials
! It’s an Imperial booby!”

“
Imperials
?” Mack shouted. Not unable to disbelieve – Pinks would never be so aggressive. Fucking Imperial
bastards!

“
Out of ballast!” Lenehan shouted. “We’re gonna drop unless we ditch cargo.”

“
Get the gang together,” Mack yelled at Weaver. “Get Biff and the crew, get up into the gondola, and fucking
kill them!
”

“
Spark in the gondola and we're dead,” said Weaver. “If they're
in
there, they're cutting away and there's loose hydrogen
all over
.”

“
Kill them with knives, moron. Knives and pressure pistols whoever’s got `em. Now
get rid of them bastards!
”

Sub-Lieutenant Kent, flat on
the surface of the gondola, trained his pistol at the hatch the submachinegunner had come from. The man - sure enough - popped his head out, gun ready; just like the last time, he began a momentary scan for where the nearest Imperials were, so he could fire his burst in that direction.

This time Kent shot him once in the head before he could do more than raise the gun.

I
want
that thing, he thought, as another plate - this one with a hydrogen sac attached - lifted free, floating up into the sky. Before the collapsing man's dead hand could pull the submachinegun back, Kent grabbed it.

It was a one-handed model, obviously; a
.400 machine-pistol with a drum magazine that looked about half-full, maybe twelve of twenty-five rounds. He made sure it was loaded and then - as another pirate came up past the corpse of the first one - fired it at that man, a three-round burst at his chest. He fell down the ladder, and there was no third.

They’
re coming up to get us
, Kent thought. He could feel the airship itself, which had climbed to a peak of about five hundred feet, rolling hard, and starting to lose more and more height.
They'll want Perry and Rafferty and those men who went down, first. Won't use guns for fear of sparking the hydrogen. I can fire down at them just fine, though.

Pointing the gun down the hatchway, he braced himself and waited.

The lower hydrogen sacs were loose and bumpy, and Perry's footing went from uncertain to practically nonexistent. He bounced between them, slashing with the knife, lowering his head to breathe where he thought he could.

The airship was falling. He could tell that. He, Rafferty and whoever the third man was, were definitely getting the work done.

Trying to move forward; he'd been about in the center of the airship when he'd gone down, but he was aiming for the bridge. Take control there...

The ship rocked, hard, and he found himself thrown against a structural vertical. And suddenly, on a ladder above him, was a pirate with a knife.

He saw the pirate first, but only by half an instant. The pirate was a wiry little red-haired man and his knife was long and jagged, and he threw himself down onto Perry with the knife aimed at Perry's throat.

Perry rolled sideways, or tried to. The smooth, unpressured silk had no particular traction, and wanted to lift anyways. What was meant to be a three-foot roll only moved him about six inches, and the pirate adjusted his knife accordingly. Desperately, Perry jerked his head and chest sideways, and the pirate's blade embedded itself in the sac they were on top of.

The pirate's teeth were half-gone, and his breath was foul, as he lay on top of Perry on the deflating hydrogen sac and pulled his knife out for another try.

Perry stabbed him in the kidney, then tried for the throat, getting
him instead in the back of his shoulder. That was the pirate's knife-arm, though, and he was already twitching from the wound in his kidney. He screamed and arched, and Perry stabbed him in the throat, again and again, blood fountaining across his chest and face. Breathing hard. Desperate.

Somehow he became aware that they were no longer on
hydrogen sacs; they were on hard ground, a walkway at the bottom of the gondola.

The airship wa
s bucking hard, seemed to be tilted at about a thirty-degree angle, although in the confusion Perry had lost his sense of direction.
Definitely
falling, and he had no
clue
as to how far.

I'll get to the bridge
, he decided. He had ten rounds in his gun, and that ought to be enough. The further down he was, the safer it was to use the gun.

Thankfully, along the walkway was a mark, in faded white stencil six inches high: "30."

Thirty yards from the nose? He went in that direction, cutting open more hydrogen bags above him and to the sides. 25. An access way, and a hatch.

From somewhere he could hear shouting,
then a gargling scream that abruptly ended.

On the hatch was marked, in the same faded white stencil,
Bridge
.

I open it. I shoot. I jump in. I shoot, and I reload, and I kill everyone there
, he decided, and braced himself to yank it open.

“
Where
is
that fucker?” Mack yelled. They were falling hard and fast, gods only knew how much lift they were down.

Gods only knew how many
men
they were down. There was fighting going on through the gondola, and for all Mack knew the ship was burning. If the man who would have reported a fire was dead, how could he know?

“
Fifty feet and brace yourselves!” Weaver shouted from the balance console. Lenehan had gone to join the fight.

“
Turn, damnit!” Mack shouted. Panicked. This was an Imperial trap, and he'd fallen into it, and if there were Imperials aboard his ship and there was that other ship, then they had to have come from somewhere.

There was an Imperial warship about, lying covered somewhere, or just out of sight. There must have been a signal.

Clear those ones off. Kill them. Reinflate, and go
.

Reinflation took time, when you'd been hacked to pieces as solidly as the
Roger
seemed to have been from their descent. It would take at least half an hour, and the Imperials would be on them in less than that. Unless he could get a crew together to fight them, six or seven expendable men to delay them on the ground. They'd hang, but Mack and the good ones would –
might
– have enough time to get away.

“
Land!” yelled Weaver, panicked, as the ground slammed them.

Knocking Mack off his feet, and Weaver against a bulkhead.

The
Red Wasp
touched down about three quarters of a mile from where the pirate ship was about to land, Nolan desperately releasing four hydrogen sacs in order to lose height before they got
too
far away.

“
We can't fight from here,” said Martindale. “Weapons, you ready?”

“
And finally!” said Swarovski.

“Then offload and assemble!”
the XO called.

Within hal
f a minute, the rest of the crew was on the ground, standing with pistols and knives.

“
We go join the captain,” Martindale declared. “We shoot to kill, but be the hell careful not to get any of ours. We’re going to secure that thing. Do you people understand?”

“
Let's kill the fuckers,” said Specialist First Singh.

The dozen
or so unwounded crew started running through the waist-high grass, weapons raised.

“
Get your shit together and fight them!” Mack screamed, fighting to get up from the impact of landing.

Lenehan came staggering back, blood streaming from wounds in his side and thigh.

“Got the engine room. They got the engine room. Jags tried to take control – they shot him in the face – we’re fucked! We’re fucked!”

The balance-man’
s panic was infectuous, and Mack was
already
on the edge of it.

“
I don't
need
this shit!” he snarled, and shot Lenehan through the head. Wounded man. No good to anyone anyhow. Fag asshole anyway.

“
Captain?” another man cried from the entrance way, then screamed when he saw Lenehan. “What do we
do
?”

The upper hatch opened. Not
more
people demanding orders he didn’t have the information to give them?

No. The man was in Imperial officer's uniform, covered in blood and holding a pistol. He shot Weaver, somehow didn't see Mack, and jumped down.

Mack finally got to his feet. The man from the bridge entrance turned and ran. The Imperial officer, a black man, already had his gun pointed at Mack.

“
Imperial Air Service,” the man snarled, in one of those effete upper-class Imperial accents.
A nigger posing as a fag aristocrat. How cute.
“You’re under arrest for piracy. Maybe you'll live if you answer a few questions.”

Mack
extended his left hand placatingly.

“Whatever you want. I didn’
t never kill nobody. Rape nobody, too. Code and all that shit and” – he flicked his left wrist and fired the derringer – “
die,
you fucker!”

The derringer's bullet hit Perry in the chest, but the chest of his uniform was kevlar and it was a low-caliber round. The shock of the impact
made him stagger a half-step back, but he was already firing, emptying his gun into the pirate captain.

“
I hoped you'd do that,” he said, breathing hard. Taking his spare magazine, shoving it into the automatic. Covering the door against more pirates. The captain was well and truly dead, as were the other two on the bridge. “I very sincerely much hoped you'd try something like that, you pirate
bastard
.”

“
Sir,” Martindale reported about half an hour later. “I have the list.”

Perry grimaced. Acutely aware that he'd suffered
no
serious casualties during the loss of 4-106.

You didn't join the Service without being ready to put your life down. That didn't make it any easier when your men
did
.