Her Majesty's Western Service (58 page)

“What are they saying?”

“Don’t know - the Armadillos are using some code.”

Commodore of the Armadillos probably asking for a status report, then.

“Tell Cordova his people are dead or in custody,” Perry said. “Then flash the command group. Himmler has one chance to turn his division around and head into Texas. At this point they’re not culpable under Imperial law. If they come further, they will be.”

“Got it, sir,” said Nolan.

“They have one chance to turn around,” Perry repeated.

“
What?
” Judd asked his signalwoman. The
Ruby Red Robber
was the fourth ship, high above the SS as they made their approach toward the burning city. “You sure you got that right, Mary?”

“I been known to fuck up before?” Mary demanded. “That guy there says he’s an Imperial, he’s taken care of the other Armadillos and he’s got the balls to stand up in front of an entire armored division and tell `em he’s going to spank `em if they don’t go home like good little boys.”

“He didn’t say all of that, exactly,” put in McIlhan, grinning.

“Amounts to that.”

“That’s the airship we stole, too,” said Ferrer, putting the spyglass down. “4-106 - they must have found and retrieved it.”

“Discordia!” Marko said, and laughed. “We stole it and now Skorzeny’s jackbooters will kill it! And then we all get paid, and go home!”

Without his seeming to think about it, a knife appeared in Marko’s hand, danced  across his knuckles, flew into the air and fell before he dropped it back into whatever wrist-sheath it came from.

Ferrer could imagine it drawn across his throat. Sickness, bile, anger.

“I’m going to take a rest,” he said. “Be in my cabin.”

“Engineer’s just queasy about more blood being shed!” Marko laughed.

The laughter followed Ferrer out of the bridge.

“Himmler here,” Nolan reported. The flashes had come from the vehicle at the center of the command group. “Fuck you, Imperial. Say your prayers.”

“Sir!” reported one of the bridge lookouts. Pointing north.

Airships appearing on the horizon some miles away - rising, drawing closer.
Lots
of airships.

Perry raised his scope, saw - everything, and dozens of it. Merchantmen with their self-defense weapons, purpose-built escort-class ships and the
Vulk
-class he’d heard was the Kennedy flagship, a current-build Russian line-class warship the Kennedys had acquired somewhere.

Alongside it were - the biggest swarm attack he’d ever seen. Spring-powered blimps, big captured merchant carriers, easily a hundred real ships and probably more.

Flashes came from the
Vulk
. Five very simple words:

“Don’t,” Nolan reported. “Fuck. With. The. Kennedys.”

Ahle turned to grin at him.

“Helm, take us down. We’re going to engage their lead elements.”

From below, a sound - a rumbling sound. Smoke, kicked up.

Cattle, stampeding east, cowboys riding among them. With his scope Perry could see a few of the riders wearing dusty Imperial uniform; a small man on a big horse turned to wave up at him; that
had
to be Lieutenant Jones.

Thousands - no, tens of thousands - of head of cattle from the Dodg
e yards, charging head-on into the SS.

“Or the cowboys,” Perry remarked.

On the bridge of the
Vulk
, John Kennedy watched dispassionately as more missiles fired down into the SS. Cattle were running amuck - clever trick, that Imperial Vice was uptight but no moron - among the SS, disrupting their vehicles’ maneuvers; the eighty-ton Tiger IIs and seventy-five ton IIas and IIbs, with their rocket variant, weren’t going to plow straight through thousand-pound,fifteen-hundred pound beef.

Disrupting them and making them easier targets.

They’d rounded up everyone in the West who owed the Kennedys a favor or could be asked for one, at short notice. That meant almost everyone - there were
sheriff’s
aircraft here, and militia. One company of Nebraskan State were deploying now in a ranch hamlet to the north, some men setting up anti-tank weapons while the others dug defenses, filled sandbags.

The plan was to attack around the edges, picking away. Leave the south open, let them run south into Texas if they wanted to; the objective was
save Hugoton
, not
destroy the SS
. At a certain level of casualties the mercenaries would run away, and that was fine.

“Flasher message coming in from the south,” Nolan reported. “Imperials, the Admiral’s there personally.”

“What is it?”

4-106 was angled slightly
to port, the damaged ship firing at will on the SS vehicles below. They were reacting themselves to something their scouts had encountered south of Dodge City.

An explosion caught Perry’s eye below, as one of 4-106’s rockets hit an already-damaged tank, blew its turrets in the air.

“Another one down!” Ahle exalted from the helm, pumping one fist in the air. “
Fuck you,
Heinrich!”

“Admiral says she’s got the rest of the garrison and about two thousand locals from Dodge
. Forting up to make it harder for them to pass south. Digging and building a line of forts with makeshift anti-tank guns and rockets.”

Heinrich Himmler, in his command
tank - a monstrous Tiger IIb with its huge airship-grade rocket launcher taken out to provide some planning space - got the report at about the same time.

“Imperials and locals digging in south of the city,”
his senior comms officer reported. “Chain of little forts we’ll have a hard time busting individually. Close enough together that we can’t go between them, extending south.”

“South’s out, then. What do you think, Dietrich?”

The SS’ burly second-in-command nodded.

“We go through. We fuck these pirates, punch through and complete the job.”

Except that the pirates were on
all sides
now, slowly chewing up his personal army, and a collection of Plains locals -
that problem was supposed to have been tied off!
  - were digging in to the north, too, building a firebase that would make it impossible to pass through those suburbs.

“We go through,” Himmler confirmed. “Fuck them. We go through.”

He turned to the comms officer.

“And tell them I’ll
personally
execute any soldier who fails in his duty to me at this time.”

Sheriff’s Deputy Sergeant
Joe Danhauer sighted his rifle over the makeshift barricade. Since they’d dropped in, courtesy of a Kennedy-run airship, twenty minutes ago, he and the half-dozen Kearney deputies that consituted their town’s part of the Nebraska State Militia ready reserve had been alternately digging and shooting; sharp anti-tank trenches, the dirt packed hard into collapsible boxes that were a wall against incoming fire. When packed three-deep the solid two-foot cubes were supposedly able to withstand a direct hit from anything short of the tanks’ main gun, and three were packed in front of him now as he - fired!

The Tiger II’s commander, standing in his hatch and gesturing possibly to subordinates - probably not just commander of his own tank - fell forwards onto his machine-gun.

Another burst of machine-gun fire stitched the impromptu barricade. An armored car running past, fully buttoned-up except for the gunner behind a shield that bullets sparked off of.

Norris, next to him, was loading an anti-tank rocket launcher.

No time to think about how the hell Nebraska’s Adjutant-General had been in bed with the Kennedys all along, had some kind of deal. But it did explain why none of the organized pirates had ever raided towns like his, something he was thankful for - a you-don’t-try-too-hard-to-pursue-us-and-we’ll-leave-your-own-residents-alone kind of a deal that apparently translated to active support in a shooting war, now the Kennedys had called in everything to support some kind of deal they’d made with the Feds and the Imperials.

Norris fired his launcher, not being too careful where the backblast went. The rocket streaked toward an armored car.

The Feds and the Imperials approved of this; Danhauer wouldn’t have gone into combat without that solid assurance from Captain Atchison. The Feds probably approved only because the Imperials said so - nobody in Nebraska had any doubt who was in charge there - but nobody cared much, because rumor had the Imperials telling the Feds to back out of Nebraskan affairs a few times, too.

“
Got that one!”said Norris, pumping a fist in the air.

Yes. An armored car was on fire, men bailing out; riflemen and a machine-gun from Danhauer’s barricade opened fire on them, and at least one didn’t get very far after he’d hit the flat, cover-less ground.

Other SS vehicles returned fire, and Danhauer shoved his deputy back into cover as a fusiliade went over his head.

“Of course,” said Norris, breathing hard, “don’t need a rocket launcher to set something on fire;
I
can start a fire by rubbing two ice cubes together!”

“Shut the fuck up,” Danhauer said, “and fight.”

High above the fight, Ferrer watched tiny vehicles circling, minuscule explosions blooming. Pirates seemed to be mobbing the three brightly-colored airships, while the big Imperial one kept its focus against what seemed to be the SS’ main drive to pass north of Dodge.

I’m fucked. I’ve been working with a lot of asshole criminals and I’m fucked. I made a mistake, I’m not going to change the world like this or even get a comfortable retirement, and that psychopath Marko is probably going to kill me when I’m no longer useful
.

Yeah. Well, he could do something about that
now
, couldn’t he.

And perhaps he could make amends for that poor kid he’d killed, for the part he’d played in killing others.

Resolved. He got up, checked his gun. Work to do.

He’d always been comfortable with work.

Second Lieutenant ‘H’ Jones waved the cowboy hat in the air; the rancher had given it to him, saying if he was going to be doing cowboy’s work, he ought to be wearing at least some of a cowboy’s outfit.

Cattle running everywhere at this point; he and his men had the role of keeping as man
y of them pointed east - now, northeast, to interfere with the heavy armor’s movements - as possible.

In
the other hand to his hat was the stun device, which didn’t stun cattle but worked magnificently to inflict a bit of pain without actually hurting them, to keep them moving.

A couple of big bulls had gotten a bit tired, had stopped to snack on some brush. With his knees Jones steered his horse toward them, zapped one on the rump with the taser. Then on the flank, aiming them in front of a SS
Tiger II wheeling around.

The
Tiger II’s main gun fired - up at one of the circling-everywhere pirate airships. This airship was a bad excuse for a semi-dirigible blimp, a few hydrogen sacs held in place with netting, crude engine belching black steam as one of the pirates threw high-explosive grenades down.

The shell missed and one of the pirates yelled something, hurled three grenades at the tank. One hit, bouncing off the light roof armor - the tank was zipped up, most of them were by now against the sheer volume of fire coming from above and around - and doing no apparent harm except for - when the smoke cleared - trashing the coaxial gun.

And maybe doing something through the driver’s visual slit, because the tank stopped - got going again after fifteen or twenty seconds, but maybe that was the time it took to get a dead or wounded man out of the driver’s seat.

Jones slapped his cowboyhat against the horse’s flank, kneed the animal toward a couple more cattle that had slowed down, charging the taser again.

“Ride `em, cowboy!” he yelled, as one of his men passed by.

Inside Marko’s cabin, in one of the evil clown’s bags of tricks, Ferrer had found what he was looking for - two of them, in fact, with the appropriate
accessories. Guilt at invading the space was mitigated by anger, not only at Marko but at himself, for being drawn into this
murderous
scheme to hurt
how many
innocent people, people just like him, people just as fucked by the corporations as him.

“Ooooh jeez,” came a voice from behind.

Rienzi was standing in the doorway. Ferrer couldn’t keep the guilty look off his face, couldn’t pretend for a moment that he was legitimately in the cabin.