Her Majesty's Western Service (6 page)

If I'd wanted easy
, he told himself with a grin,
I wouldn't have signed up for the Air Service to begin with!

He checked th
e chronometer. A shiny digital on his control panel; 9:07 am.

“
Very well. Final checks are cleared, First?”

“
Cleared, sir,” Martindale reported.

“Pilot,”
he said to Martindale – the man's position on the bridge, this time, not his role – “I want lift in thirty. Signals? Order detached.”

“
Ordering ground detachment,” said Sub-Lieutenant Kent. His fingers twitched on his clicker, sending electrical signals to the flashers. Then He spoke into a tube. “Ordering shipboard detachment.”

The Specialist Third next to Kent
– one of the crew who'd come over with the 4-106 delivery, Perry hadn't learned her name – leaned over, from her binoculars, and said something to Kent.

“
Ground detached has acknowledged, Captain.”

There came slithering noises, as the cables were pulled away.

“Shipboard detachment commencing,” Kent reported. One after the other, the ship's own anchors – running from the cabin into the landing pads’ concrete – released.

4-106 bobbled slightly. The concrete pads moved a little.

“Pilot, lift to one hundred yards in ten seconds. Hold for twenty and then and lift to five hundred. Signals, have
Johnstown
lift. Proceed in wing order.”

“
Lift to one hundred yards,” said Martindale, “acknowledged. Ten. Nine.”

“
Transmitting signals to
Johnstown
then remainder of squadron,” Kent reported, “yessir.”

“
Acknowledged
, Sub-Lieutenant, is the proper response. As you well know.”

“
Yessir. Transmitting signals to
Johnstown
then remainder of squadron, acknowledged.”

A short breath. Kent's assistant said something to him.

“
Johnstown
confirms, sir,” Kent said. “And sorry, sir.”

“Five, Four
,” Martindale was counting.

“
We have a procedure book,” Perry said to the sub-lieutenant. “It exists for a good reason, as you will eventually learn. We follow the book on routine matters so that we may think to take better initiative on the less-routine.”

“
Yessir,” said the sub-lieutenant.

“
Consider yourself chewed-out,” Perry smiled. “And now let's see how our new ship flies!”

"
One. Releasing,” Martindale said, and pulled a lever.

A hiss.
Three heavy clicks. A brief rumble, as the ground weights were dumped from their clutches. And the ground began to fall away.

Around the bridge, there were murmurs.

Martindale flicked the steering wheel from side to side, slightly, and the ship wobbled.

“
Responds like a beauty, sir. Crispest steering I've ever felt. And she's holding position well. Monitors are that we've got fifteen mph lateral crosswind and I'm not even
noticing
.”

Below, the buildings, and the other airships, were taking a clearer shape
as they rose. Pads and warehouses of the base; the plains stretched out beyond there. A cattle-herd moved near the horizon, dark shapes almost haloed under a cloud of faint-orange dust.

The squa
dron XO’s ship, the hundred-and-fifty-five-yard long
Johnstown
, was next to lift. Then the
Plains Eagle
, Perry's personal ship until 4-106's arrival, and
Lady McMurdo
, second ship of XO Ricks' flight, and the
McPanlan
, the
West Coventry
and, smallest of the squadron, a mere hundred and ten yards long, the
Evanstown Shuffler
.

It looked like the mountains were rising, as the vast grey shells in turn lifted. Fins turned,
rudders switched; as they rose the dirigibles swayed slightly, propellers churning.

Signal panes flashed behind the bridge of each ship, directed towards
each others' bridges.

“
Sir,
Eagle
reports lift without incident.
Johnstown
reports lift without incident…” Kent reported, as his assistant spoke into his ear. Her job, her eyes fixed to binoculars, was to read the flashers, mounted behind each ship's bridge, that transmitted coded updates so fast that Perry could barely read them himself. Her own fingers pressed encoding keys, giving one acknowledgement after another.

“
Signals, order the assumption of formation.” Perry thumbed a key on his own console and spoke into one of the telephones.

“
Aft, this is Bridge. Acknowledge?”

A moment, then a
young man's voice: “Bridge, this is Aft acknowledging.”

“
Any sign of our convoy?”

“
Approaching from direct east. Big mass of them, sir.”

“
Approximate ETA?”

The officer on Aft - the commander of the gun battery there -
took a moment to confer. His name was Ensign Charles Hastings, Perry knew, with less than six months’ experience in the field. He was no doubt conferring with his warrant, a seasoned Senior Warrant named Halversen, who Perry had assigned there precisely so that young Hastings
would
have someone to learn from.

“
Bridge, this is Aft. You still there, sir?” came Hastings’ voice.

“I am, Aft. Got an ETA?”

“Six to seven minutes, sir. They're making full speed, the Warrant says.”

“
Thank you, Aft. Cutting in two, one, now.”

Aft's connection ended first, and Perry put the handset down.

“Signals, order general spread. We'll close around the convoy.”

With more time, a weapons test would have been nice. That 4-106
had relatively few weapons crewed and online… well, that was all the more reason to test-fire those that were operational. But with the convoy having formed over Denver, or around the yards closer to the inner-city than Stapleton was, and coming this quickly as a whole? No opportunity.

The squadron's seven airships began to spread out, moving
sideways and forwards in order to encircle the jumbled mass of civilian ships. Unlike the Service vessels, which were a uniform silvery-grey, with darker-black cabins bristling with chromed weapons, the eighty-two civilian airships were a wide range of colors; some plain silvery aluminium, others bright primary colors. Banners hung from a few of them, and – instead of the service identification codes of the Imperial ships – they all had big, colorfully-written names.

Almost all
of the ships were bigger than the escort-class vessels of Perry's squadron, and the majority were bigger than 4-106's 350-yard nose-to-tail length. Their cabins resembled small warehouses, mostly not even enclosed; Perry could make out wooden boxes and crates inside the metal grates that mostly covered their cargo holds. Cables dangled loosely, and their flashers transmitted – slowly and clumsily, by Perry's standards - signals that were no more than meaningless social chatter between the various ships.

Well, they were civilians. Their job was to run goods back and forth and make a profit for their owners. Perry expected discipline for its own sake
– because you never wanted to get into bad habits, and because the Empire had been built upon organized, disciplined application of force – from his crews and from his fellow Service officers. It wasn't a reasonable expectation for civilians, and he had nothing against them being social or disorganized.

We
exist to serve
them
, after all
, he thought.
There wouldn't be an Empire worth protecting if it weren't for civilian industry and commerce.

“
Signals, flash the nearest and then next-closest of them,” Perry ordered, as 4-106 took station behind the vast, colored circus of private ships. “Tell them that Vice-Commodore Perry and Squadron Thirty-One are happy to meet them, and look forward to a comfortable journey to Chicago. Tell them to repeat the signal onwards.”

Kent acknowledged.

Perry pulled down the binoculars, found the other ships around his squadron; the closest,
West Coventry
, was almost two miles to his south.

“
Signals Two” – oh. No Signals Two, yet; that was something else they were short. "Signals One, then flash the
West Coventry
and tell them to commence circuit position check.”

“
Acknowledged, sir.”

Ahead of them, eighty-two merchant freighters
– well, seventy-five merchant freighters and seven smaller passenger ships - bobbled and maneuvered, steering east for Chicago.

“Helm
, accelerate to thirty miles per hour,” Perry told Martindale. Specs said the ship could do almost twice that, but they were escorting civilians here, and moving at the pace of the slowest of
those
.

“
Accelerating to thirty, confirmed,” said Martindale. The ship's engines seemed to thrum harder, and the ground moved faster underneath them.

“
Evanstown Shuffler
reports circuit complete,” Kent said. “Squadron XO reports everyone maintaining adequate position.”

“
Very good,” Perry said. “Sub-Lieutenant Kent; what do
you
think of our new ship?”

Kent smiled.
“First brand-new I've ever flown, sir. We'll see, I suppose, but right now it feels like Newfoundland outdid themselves.”

“
Specialist First – Assistant Signals, I'm sorry, Specialist, I don’t know your name.”

“
Singh, sir,” she said. “Jaleen Singh.”

“
You came over on this. How did she perform on the trip?”

“
Admirably, sir. The taxi commander didn't want to hand her over.”

“
After four thousand miles, that's a compliment. Lieutenant-Commander Martindale, how's she feel to handle?”

“
I could run her to Chicago, sir. Most responsive bird I've ever flown.”

“
You could, but I'm not going to let you; your squadron commander didn't push to make his rank just so he could give lieutenant-commanders all the fun. Lieutenant Swarovski, I know we haven't had the chance to test weapons, but I heard you running diagnostics earlier. What's the word?”

“
Undermanned, sir,” said the messily-blond-haired Hanoverian, “but she seems good otherwise. Rotates smooth, and the gunners are fine. Hope we do run into something. Killing shit's going to be a pleasure with what we've got.”

“
I hope it is, Lieutenant Swarovski, but we are Imperial officers on the bridge of an Imperial ship. Please remember to moderate your language to the
Queen's
English in future.”

Swarovski smiled sheepishly. As far as rebukes from Perry were concerned, that was a pretty light one.

“Sorry, sir. Will do in future, sir.”

“
You have the need to curse, go aft to the engine room.”

“
Engineers will be engineers, huh?” asked Martindale.

Perry grimaced.
“I'm a realistic man, First. Speaking of engineers, I'm going to go pay them a visit; take a look at the rest of the ship. Vidkowski, ask Engineering to make sure they don't have any problems? Don't want to distract them if they've got a crisis.”

A moment later, the response came back.

“Engineering says everything's good. Engines running just fine. Light on riggers, and they're sweating – this multi-finned design doesn't
completely
operate itself, he says.”

“
Tell him Lieutenant Swarovski has even fewer gunners than he has riggers, not least because Engineering's
got
half of his department on temp-assign.”

“
Acknowledged, sir.”

Perry stood up. The bridge was rocking slightly, but considerably less than the old
Plains Eagle
would have. Slick and smooth.

“
First has the bridge,” Perry stated.

“First has the bridge,”
Martindale acknowledged, without looking up.

Mine
, Perry thought.
My
beautiful new ship.

He'd served on new ships before, but he'd never commanded one. Things seemed to practically gleam; there were no tarnished fixes, no oil
yet trodden into the stamped-aluminum floors. Past the bridge was an empty rocket-battery, then a line of cabins. He looked into his own, briefly; a hammock and his kitbag; a folding desk and chair. Nobody had had the time to fully set up their own cabins yet; they'd all be much like this, if smaller.