Her Majesty's Western Service (44 page)

“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 civil
ian 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 within 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 ma
n 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,” sa
id 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 apa
rtment 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 – unless 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 kno
w, 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.