Her Majesty's Western Service (9 page)

“Yessir.”

“And my compliments to Fore One. Specialist Bronson
was
ready for his own gun, I'd say?”

“Very much, sir.”

“Sir, more coming from the northeast,” Martindale snapped.

Looking around. Yes
– more shapes. A
lot
of them.

This just turned serious
, Perry thought. The number of confirmed bandits was pushing forty.
We have a
real
fight on our hands.

“
General Quarters,” Airshipman Second Gilford said. “We got action! Pirates!”

“
Yeah,” Rafferty said. “Time to kick ass and chew bubblegum.” He pulled a stick from his hip pocket. “Want a piece? Strawberry, it's good.”

The comm buzzed.
Rafferty picked up his handset. “Rocket Three. Yessir. Yessir, understood.”

“
What’s he say, boss?”

“
Just got fire at will clearance. See hostiles, take `em down. So put a shrapnel rocket in there.”

“
Got it,” said Gilford, reaching for the ammo feed.

“
Pirates didn't figure on us having a ship like this,” Rafferty said. “Lot of `em aren't gonna make another mistake like that; not for a while. Maybe not ever.”

Gilford
hefted the missile into its breech. Rafferty sighted down the bore –
there
was one, a tiny little scout-class, probably spring-powered and held together with glue and frayed rope. Barely a hundred feet long, only semi-rigid; typical expendable piece-of-trash pirate riser.

“
Range three hundred fifty,” he said, mostly for Gilford's education. “Cut like this” – with a blade, he released the cord that held the stabilizing fins; now, when the missile came out of its tube, the fins would pop up on their springs – “set to three fifty, that's twelve and two, so the fourteenth notch here, hit the timer there – and yank the cap; missile is now live.”

“
Missile is now live,” Gilford repeated.

Crosswind, relative speed, relative height, possible intervening objects
during flight time? Rafferty did the math quickly. He'd been a missileer for twelve years, and this had become second nature to him. He understood the variables at an instinctive level, made careful adjustments to the tube in a way that looked like no more than casual fidgeting.

“
And, we point it, we sight, we see that he's moving vaguely towards us at a rate that don't count for shit, but where’s the little punk gonna be in twenty seconds? Looks about the same, maybe a little ahead. Cone clear!”

“
Cone clear!” Gilford echoed, shouting, as Rafferty fired. The nine-inch-wide, two-and-a-half-foot-long missile exploded out of its tube, its backblast flaming in a cone through the bay behind the launcher. Gilford and Rafferty were out of its way, but the shout – and a warning light outside – was for the benefit of anyone walking through the corridor.

Trailing fire, the missile streaked toward
Rafferty's target. He watched it with a monocular scope as it struck the pirate high-amidships and blew.

Shrapnel
ripped through the pirate's gondola, shredding sacs and releasing hydrogen that the explosion's fire set alight.

Within seconds, the pirate ship was a
floating, directionless inferno. Men were bailing from the cabin, throwing themselves loose before they or their parachutes could burn. Flaming debris fell like rain as bits of the gondola detached.

“
High explosive, the next,” Rafferty said. “Sure you don't want a bit of gum?”

Three thousand feet above
, on the lower edge of the mile-up clouds, a pirate named Karen Ahle looked down at the melee.

“
That’s it,” she said, pointing at 4-106. The line-class airship was heading through the center of the brawl, jinking every so-often, guns and rockets firing intermittently.

“
Go, cap’n?” asked her henchman, a big man in his forties named Ronalds. He chewed on a straw as he looked down.

“
Go,” Ahle said. “Stagger across – left to aft. You know the plan. Go!”

One after the other,
Ahle, Ronalds and six of their crew launched from the airship, paraglider chutes opening as they steered for the long bulk of 4-106.

“
Missileers to starboard,” Perry directed. “Helm, increase speed and take us into that cluster.”

“
Sir!” Swarovski replied, keying a control and reaching for his mike.

“
Going in, sir,” Martindale said.

A burning hydrogen sac floated past, just below them, attached to a large, thin section of gondola-plate. The air was full of debris, especially the hydrogen sacs. Almost all
civilian dirigibles had crude fire-detachment systems; if a sac caught on fire, it could be released – with part of the nets or plating – before the fire could spread. You lost that sac, but you saved the ship.

Of course, you then had to re-inflate a new sac, an
d you often had to ditch cargo to make up the weight in the meantime. The usual pirate tactic was to force a cargo ship down, land themselves, get the crew off at gunpoint – an unwritten understanding was that the downed crew wouldn't resist, and the pirates in turn wouldn't use any more force than they had to – then re-inflate the dirigible with their own compressed-hydrogen cylinders and fly it off.

That was what most of these trash were attempting to do. Barely-airworthy ships, makeshift contraptions with just enough hydrogen - or, in a couple of cases that Perry had seen, simple hot air - to get alof
t and take a stab at something with missiles or crude cannon. This was just a matter of killing them before they could; the pirate ships were easy targets, except that there were so damned
many
of them, and all mixed amidst the bolting, un-coordinated ships of the convoy.

Loose fire
– and it was all too easy to hit something you didn't want to, from a swaying airship in an irregular wind – was a bad risk. Airships had a lot of hit points, but nine-inch missiles were designed to inflict real damage. Stray shots into civilian freighters would be doing the pirates’ own work for them.

4-106 sped up. The fore guns chuddered, blazing shot and tracers into a larger pirate dirigible, something actually airworthy. The pirate tried to evade, and Perry saw a pair of riggers on the tail, physically forcing it. Another rigger worked with a wrench on a stuck panel, which as Perry watched was released, a burning-from-tracers hydrogen sac lifting out. Two more had caught while that panel was
stuck, and those two sacs released a moment later, navigational hazards for the next few minutes.

Martindale turned slightly, so that the starboard missileers and the aft guns could have a chance at that dirigible.
Two missiles fired, one of them missing but the second, a high explosive round, blasting the rudder – and the two men working it, unless they'd jumped clear at the last moment – into fragments, along with the aft fifth of the ship. Both of 4-106's batteries opened up on the burning wreckage, pounding three-inch rounds along the length of the gondola, down into the cabin. Men jumped, parachutes opening behind them as they fell.

“
Good kill. Excellent job, Swarovski.”

“
If we only had more
men
, sir.”

“
Ifs and buts, Weapons. We're doing entirely adequately for what we do have. How about that hot-air job over–”

The aft battery opened up at the hot-air balloon Perry was pointing at, shredding its loose air sac in seconds. Three men jumped from the
basket as the thing began to fall from the sky.

“
Ensign Hastings is doing quite well, don't you think?” Perry asked. “Pass that on to him, please.”

“Will do, sir.”

“And Helm, keep going in. Weapons, put one missileer back to a port battery, if you will.”

“Sir.”

Four of the Imperial line-class ship’s riggers were on the outside, maintaining the steering vanes and keeping them clear of debris. One of them was spraying foam onto a place near the nose where a burning sac had been blown into the gondola.

Ahle
steered her paraglider onto that man – no, a woman, her hair in a tight bun. She looked up in shock and found herself facing a long pistol.

“
Detach and depart. If you'd be so kind.”

“What –
who are you?”

“
Captain Karen Ahle, at your service. Now, if you'd please detach and depart? Your crew will be following you shortly, Senior Airshipwoman.”

A quick glance back showed that
Ronalds, Herrick and the others were kicking off the other riggers the same way. One of them had already jumped, his parachute opening.

“
You're pirates? Boarding
us
?”

“
We're not the Air Marines your ship, quite conveniently, is presently without. Now, if you
would
please?”

The woman detached
– her rig from the safety cable – and looked, again, uncomprehendingly at Ahle. Then she checked the bracings on her parachute, ran to the side and took a flying leap from the airship.

The top of the gondola was corrugated aluminum, broken up by the big steering vanes.
Ahle ran hunched along them, her rubber-soled boots gripping the surface well, despite the thirty-mile-an-hour backwind and a crosswind. You learned, after a while.

Ronalds and Klefton had already found a hatch; Klefton, a lean man with an assault rifle and a
number of ropes, watched as Ronalds jimmied it open.

“
Drink, boss?” he asked, pulling a silver hip flask.

“
Don't mind if I do,” Ahle said, and took a swig of the rum. She passed it to Ronalds, who took a swig and returned the flask to Klefton.

“
Time, boss?” Ronalds asked.

Ahle
checked the chronometer on her left arm. The clock was ticking up to the minute. “At the sixty.”

“
Hooked in,” Ronalds said. “I'll go first?”

“
I'll
go first, Ronalds,” said Ahle, and connected the rope.

Below, a pair of missiles streaked out at a ship a couple of hundred yards away, less than 4-106's own length. One missed, and the other exploded near its aft.

“Sixty. Go!” Ahle said, and leapt down into the gondola.

Inside were structural braces and vast helium sacs.
The thing was seventy-five yards in diameter; seventy-five yards down, the height of a twenty-storey building to the cabin area. She rappelled in short bursts, dropping three or four yards at a time. Fore of her was a huge structural brace, a double-triangle shaped like a Jewish star, with big brown helium sacs on either side. A ladder ran through the center of it. Behind, secured in place with narrow girders, were more helium sacs.

Drop, pull, drop. The rope swayed hard, kicking her around as the dirigible accelerated, slowed, turned. Every so-often she caught hold of the ladder to steady herself; every so-often her swinging rope slammed her into the ladder, or into one of the sacs.

After one of the ladder's rungs collided hard with the small of her back, she decided that she preferred the sacs.

A curse came from Klefton, as something like that happened to him. Well within the minute, their footing was stab
le. A passageway; a door marked ‘Medic Bay.’

Ahle
un-hooked herself and drew her pistols. One long revolver, in her – dominant – left hand; in her right hand was a pressure-pistol with special ammunition.

“
We go in. Klefton, you come with me to the bridge. Ronalds, go through the gondola and link up with Mackinaw at the stern. Boyle's team will be in the engine room. Kick out anyone you see along here. Understood?”

“
Got it, boss,” said Klefton. Ronalds touched two fingers to his temple.

“
This is a beautiful ship,” said Ahle, as she kicked open the door to the medical bay. Her guns covered the place, but – as she'd expected – there was nobody inside. She turned back to Ronalds. “Let's make her ours, shall we?”

“
See that one over there? The one firing pressure-guns into that Allied Freighting bird? Helm, take us closer. Weapons, missileers to port and we'll show the gentleman what
real
gunnery looks like. That should put fear of the law into the last of his friends, too.”

“
Sir,” said Martindale and Swarovski.

“
Belay that order, please, Vice-Commodore,” came a female voice. The accent reminded Perry of upper-class Southern, although terser and less-twangy than the usual drawl.