Heinemann was laid out with the rest of his men outside the wall, nearly invisible in the deeper darkness away from the stark yard lights.
For the first time, Henry got a notion of the number of them. He started counting, but Av motioned him over to the dead captain before he’d gotten good measure. When they were both standing over the corpse, Av reached down with the barrel of the Thompson and swept the ruined tunic clear of the tattoo. “You still got that flashlight, right?” he asked.
Henry shined the light down and gasped, his hand going to the scar on his own chest. “Oh my God,” he whispered tightly. “Oh my dear God.”
In a slightly louder voice, “I thought they were gone.”
Av snorted. “Like roaches, I guess,” he said. “Never can get rid of ‘em entirely. You just gotta squash ‘em where you find ‘em — try’n’ keep ‘em from spreadin’.”
Henry glanced around the rows of bodies.
“Six others,” Av read his thoughts. “All the senior officers, the doctor, that bootsmann Dar shot to pieces, and some guy who wasn’t in uniform, but we think was the ship’s engineer. He hid aboard the ship until it was all over before he surrendered — him and about eight others."
Henry looked from the bodies to Av and back again, shining the light along the rows of dead, his face hardening. Hot new anger was burning through the grief of his fresh loss and finding the old familiar rage so long suppressed. “You think they knew?” he asked quietly, his voice steely. “You think they came here deliberately? Were they here for me, Av? Was this my fault?”
“You saw that ship,” Av snorted. “They came here because they had noplace else to go.
“Anyway,” he added. “Nobody who’d ever talk to one of these crumbs knows that you’re still alive, Henry. Far’s the Black Sun knows, you died in Hong Kong back in ‘23.”
Henry’s gaze remained on the dead captain, trying to remember if he’d ever known him — trying to imagine him as a younger man. Too many years. Too much trouble. Another lifetime on another world. A lifetime he’d gone to great pains to flush from his memory. If he’d ever known the man, the knowledge of it was long gone. And yet....
“Do you believe in fate, Avery?” he asked finally, not looking up.
“If I did,” Av told him, “I’d stop getting out of bed in the morning.”
“After all of these years....”
“You can see, though,” Av interrupted his thought, “why we don’t want RN interrogating the survivors.”
Henry jerked upright. He spun on Av abruptly. “RN! They’ll be here in the morning!”
“Yep.”
“Where are the prisoners, Av?”
“My place,” the old man replied. “Or on their way there, t’be accurate. Back up in the hills just east of the governor’s property line.”
Henry spun about again, fatigue forgotten for the moment. He looked up at the airship, eyes speculative. He scrubbed at his stubbled chin, mind racing.
“They disbanded Group, didn’t they?” he asked without turning.
“More’n ten years ago,” Av admitted. “How’d you know?”
“You’ve been here,” Henry said matter-of-factly. “If Group were still active, I’d not have seen you more than once or twice in the past twenty years.”
“Yeah,” Av acknowledged. “I guess you’re right. One o’ them veddy veddy pith helmet types from Foreign Office showed up one day and had me sign one o’ them non-disclosure ultra top secret forms letting me know I was no longer employed. Not by the British government, not by mine.”
“I see.”
“Do you?” Av wondered. “We never existed, Henry. Records expunged, personnel profiles scrubbed. Severance package and out the door without so much as a ‘by your leave’ or ‘thank you ma’am’!
“Our bases were abandoned, our equipment scrapped, our entire history wiped. There never was anything called Group. There never was anything called Black Sun. All a drunken sailor’s fantasy.”
Henry was looking at him harder now, noticing the pain in the old bandit’s voice. The sense of betrayal that had never gone away — never softened.
“But we did exist,” he said. “And they did. They do.”
“Looks like,” Av admitted.
Henry set off without a word, hobbling broadly and heading not for the stead, but for the tree line and the Oshkosh. He didn’t know if it would start, but he meant to try.
This battle wasn’t over. The shooting was done, but the battle was just beginning, and this new part promised to be much longer and every bit as harrowing. The difference was that now he was back in his own element. Or, more properly, he was in Hendrel Entigh’s element.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
The truck had butted up against a tree at the first turning of the road, screaming along at her top second gear pace of around twelve miles an hour. The tree hadn’t much cared for the encounter, but the truck had suffered no more than a bent bumper. The rifle and machine gun fire had done far more damage — perhaps even enough.
The engine coughed a couple of times, and then roared to uneven life almost of its own accord. Nothing so puny as a heavy machinegun would cow this old girl. He backed the shot up truck out of the trees and turned it around, heading for the main gates.
He was shouting orders as he cleared the wall. Ropes, chains, cables. He wanted lines run up to that airship! As many as they could find. Haul the mooring lines down if they’d reach.
To several of the men not running for cordage, he hollered to climb up and redeploy a couple of the balloons. He wanted that ship higher up off the wall, not squatting over it like some wounded chicken! He wanted it up in the wind.
Standing half out on the running board, he positioned the truck carefully and waited. But only so long as it took for him to realize that not one of those knuckleheads up there knew the first thing about the deploying or handling of balloons. He went up the scaling ladder like he was twenty-five and had two good legs.
Av kept clear. Henry was all of a sudden a man with a mission, and he was content to watch for now, trying to figure out what the man was up to. Surely he wasn’t planning to—? But what else could he be about?
Smiling, he levered himself away from the wall and started giving orders of his own. He didn’t understand yet why Henry wanted to do what he wanted to do, but there were more ways to skin a cat than one, and Dar had told him that some of the stead hands had survived the attack.
Henry felt the deck shift beneath his feet and smiled grimly. “Okay!” he called down to the men below. “Release those mooring lines down there — all but the five at the bow! Quick now!”
He turned to the men inside the balloon rigging compartments. “Just keep feeding those burners gas,” he told them. “I’ll sound the horn when I want you to stop.”
He hadn’t even spun ‘round to put foot to the ladder before he spotted Av over by the barns, leading the surviving ranch hands and two eight-up yoke of allox out into the yard. His smile widened. This might just work at that! “Back there!” he hollered down, waving towards the stern boom.
“Alright,” he called out through the bullet shattered rear window of the Oshkosh a quick climb later. “On three!”
At the count of three, he gunned the engine. At the same time the hands cracked whips behind the ears of the startled allox. Both truck and beasts surged forward, bringing up short as the slack was taken up and the mass of the airship stopped them like a wall.
He gunned the engine again, feeling the front tires dig and the rears lift. The tires broke loose and sent roostertails of crud up into the air behind him in long arcs. He let up, feeling the truck flop down before gunning it again to repeat the process. He took it like that in turns, trying to coax the great craft into motion while the allox teams to either side maintained a steady pull.
He didn’t need much — just enough for the witnesses to say it was moving. Just enough to get it completely inside the walls.
Av was gathering militia and attaching them to dangling ropes to add their puny mass to the struggle. Meanwhile, other militia were busily rigging horizontal cables between the heavy, pointed dragon stakes that dotted the yard every twenty or thirty feet in a grid. They were the stoutest things in the yard, and anchored the deepest, for the great beasts they were proof against were strong, vicious, and voracious.
The ship rose slowly beneath the four emergency balloons, swinging slowly free of the wind break of the trees. The crowns of the balloons cleared the canopy and the breeze caught them, arcing them to leeward.
A cheer went up when the screaming Oshkosh gained a few inches of ground and the teams of allox managed a forward step. Henry sounded his horn.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the airship swayed in the direction of the struggling mass of laborers, pivoting about on the bowlines. A foot. Two. Five. Fifteen, and the hull of the airship was completely within the stead walls her stern drifting slowly to the northeast. He stopped the truck and climbed back out onto the running board.
“Vent it!” he called up. “Like I showed you! Not too much, now!”
Beside him, the teamsters had halted their allox and were hurriedly turning them about amidst a cloud of invective. Militia were hauling the mooring lines over to the heavy dragon stakes and looping them around before tying them off to the stretched cables already there.
“You’re letting out too much, you fools!” Henry called up. “Give it some gas! You’ll plant it on the stakes if you don’t watch out!”
The militia on the ground, their task done, bolted for the safety of the far side of the bunkhouse, not wanting to be anywhere near the lines they’d just rigged when the mass of the airship hit them.
The yard was suddenly filled by the screeching of terrified allox as the ship hit the ends of the tow lines and started dragging them backwards, the rearmost pairs rising into the air for the first time in their adult lives.
Loud reports echoed through the yard as dragon stakes fought the mass of the moving ship and lost, snapping short in rows and slinging across the yard as the steel cables took up the strain of the moving ship. Two of the yard lights winked out, smashed by flying debris.
Eventually the network of lines and cables did their work, slowing the vessel enough that the remaining stakes held. The great ship dipped, and stopped, swaying back until it lay steadily at the ends of the forest of mooring lines. The ranch yard looked like the aftermath of a cyclone.
Leaving the men aboard the airship to maintain its altitude with the balloons, Henry gathered up the rest of the assemblage, checking for injuries and leading them toward the farm house’s saloon. There were papers to be written up and signed, statements to be sworn to, radio transmissions to be sent.
They were almost to the side door when a roar filled the clearing that drowned all else, beating into those present with an almost physical force. A pair of silvery streaks passed low overhead, almost too quickly to see, trailing a faint cloud of bluish smoke. RN had arrived a bit early, it seemed.
Slowing, the Royal Navy SkyFuries, banked hard and circled the stead a couple of times, orbiting the tethered airship at a respectable distance as their pilots sized up the situation. A second pair streaked overhead a hundred feet or so higher.
RN was pulling out all the stops. These were not trapeze fighters launched from within the hulls of smaller craft — these were the big dogs. Somebody was bringing a carrier to the party.
A third pair of SkyFuries rocketed in from over the ridge to the northeast, making a show of it. A whole flight. Very serious indeed. A shame they were more than twenty hours late. A shame for them, anyway.
A head popped out of the farmhouse door, its owner struggling in vain to project his voice beyond the close in roar of the fighters’ screaming Bristol engines. Henry just nodded and headed for the house. The militiaman was no doubt trying to tell him RN was on the radio requesting a word with someone in charge.