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WRITTEN BY
THE WIND
A Story of the Draka

Roland J. Green

I.

Roland Green is a man of letters who dwells in Chicago. He has written fantasy—Wandor's Journey—and alternate history, a continuation of the great H. Beam Piper's work in Great King's War. 

Besides writing, Roland reads a great deal, especially in history maritime and military. He really knows the details, and in his hands they're anything but dull and dry; they're the stuff of living, breathing human beings.

In this story, the rising Draka meet the Rising Sun, as two powers of the periphery of the world challenge the older states for room to live.

However bad it was, it could have been worse . . .

Sasebo Naval Airship Base, Empire of Japan 0430, August 18, 1905

 

A hundred meters aft, one of Satsuma's engines came to life. Horace Jahn felt the vibration through the big dirigible's aluminum structure before the sound reached his ears. Once it did, the diesel sounded like the purring of a cat—a distant cat, the size of an auto steamer.

Probably Engine #3, the Draka calculated. He could not have told a ground gripper how he made the calculation, but after ten years in airships, it took hardly more thought than breathing. (Say, hiding the need to sneeze at a formal banquet.) But even after he saw lights going on, he wondered why they'd started an engine.

Like the rest of the Imperial Japanese Navy's First Air Kokutai, Satsuma was snugged down to her moorings, bow locked to the mobile mast and tail just as firmly gripped by the mooring car. Her internal electrics could run off ground power, saving fuel for her five diesels until she lifted off.

Jahn strode forward, remembering to duck as he stepped off the catwalk and scrambled down the ladder to the control deck. Satsuma and her five sisters were first cousins to the Dominion's Harpy class, but when the Japanese Navy assembled them, they modified them for crews a good ten centimeters shorter than the average male Draka—and Jahn's North German genes ran him up several centimeters beyond that respectable height. The first few weeks aboard Imperial airships had left bruises and scrapes on his forehead, hips, knees, and elbows.

More lights came on. Two crewmen in blue coveralls seemed to sprout from the deck. They bowed to Jahn, then scrambled up the ladder before Jahn could return the bow or take more than two steps forward. He did not believe that the Imperial Navy was really assigning ninja adepts to spy on the gaijin advisers they were letting watch them fight the Russians, but it was undeniably hard for any of the observers to be awake and alone for long.

At least the Draka had found this easier to adapt to than some of the other nationalities, particularly the British and Germans. Omnipresent little brown men in blue or white were not too different from the household serfs that every Citizen took for granted, from the cradle to the deathbed, however un-serflike their behavior.

The brightest lights and the only noise except the distant diesel seemed to come from the radio room. Jahn looked in through the uncurtained doorway, to see Warrant Officer Chiba at the central table, while a pair of long, blue-clad legs thrust out from what seemed to be the bowels of the radio cabinet.

Jahn didn't need rude magnolia-accented mutterings floating out past the legs to know their owner. He had vivid and mostly pleasant memories of all his encounters with Tetrarch Julia Belle Pope of the Women's Auxiliary Service, and some of the most vivid were also the most pleasant.

Repairs on the radio explained the power-up; the Shalamanzar XVI airship sets ate power like a mine serf attacking his dinner. Pope was a qualified radio operator and instructor, land, sea, and air. Was she aboard for maintenance, or—?

It was less than an hour before the Kokutai was supposed to lift out on the biggest airship operation since the Draka burned Odessa. That was slicing time thinly, even with somebody who could work (or play) as fast as Pope.

"Attention!" Jahn called softly.

Scrape, rattle, thump, then:

"Shit in your rice bowel, Horrie!" in excellent Japanese. Warrant Officer Chiba tried not to grin.

Tetrarch Pope scrambled out of the radio housing, managed to combine a salute and wiping oil off her forehead, then finger-combed her dark hair as she looked Jahn up and down. He was familiar with her looks of friendly appraisal; this appraisal was hardly friendly.

"Ah had a feeling it might come tah this, when the Archangels borrowed me for Satsuma," she said in English, using the term for the Arch-Strategos and Rear Admiral who nominally ran the Draka observation mission. "But Chief Yoshiwara's gone in for surgery. Appendix, ah heard. It came down to me joining the crew or Chiba flying solo. Surely y'all wouldn't want to gladden yo' male hearts that badly, now would y'all?"

Chiba shot Jahn a look that combined mild alarm and complete resignation. Any Warrant radio operator had to understand enough English to know what was going on. The Japanese were up there with the fustiest of British cavalry generals, in preferrring women far behind the shooting line. But preferences were one thing; arguing with Julia Belle Pope was something else.

"You getting killed isn't going to gladden my heart at all," Jahn said. "Or anybody else's."

He thought he saw her shifting her feet, to be ready for a fight if things went that far. Then he raised her near hand to his lips, bowed over it, kissed it, clicked his heels in a perfect parody of Leutnant zur See Peter Strasser, and grinned.

"But I suppose you wish to know what happens to me as soon as possible. I take the liberty of assuming that you would miss me—as I would indeed miss you."

He thought his voice had been steady when he said that, as a Citizen's and a soldier's ought to be. Apparently he didn't quite succeed. Pope snatched her hand back, and Jahn could have sworn she was blushing as she dove back into the radio cabinet.

"Yo' ain't good lookin' enough to just stand around lak a prettybuck, Horrie," floated out from the shadows. "So if yo' cain't think of anythin' better to do, check the battery in the Numbah Three worklight and ah'd be evah so grateful."

"Aye aye, ma'am," Jahn said, pointed at Chiba, and switched to Japanese.

"Hard work, Chiba-san, and while we're at it, count the rest of the torch batteries."

* * *

It had been Pope who kissed Jahn first, and that on the first day they met, in the third month of the war. That had been a surprise; most of the rest he'd learned about Julia Belle Pope in the seven months since hadn't been. Frightening, delightful, or outrageous in about equal proportions—and after a while, they could laugh together about even the outrageous parts. . .

He'd been returning to the Draka Mission Compound outside Sasebo after the first airship patrol where the Japanese had allowed him to stand bridge watches alone. Since he'd commanded Fury out of Trincomalee two full years before the war broke out, they hadn't needed to take so long to admit that he was a qualified airship officer.

However, Japan's industrial base was limited. Russian front-line strength was two to one against them, and the Americans were using financial influence and the threat of their Pacific and China Fleets to enforce an arms embargo that hurt the Japanese much more than it did the Russians. Modern weapons to the Japanese were like Citizens to the Draka—capital, not interest, to be expended with the same exquisite caution.

Jahn unpacked his flight gear and took a sponge bath in his quarters. He always preferred to be alone for a few minutes, after days in the echoing crampedness of an airship's quarters. Then he headed for the palestra—the dojo, he corrected himself. Half an hour of exercise or even a few minutes' sparring would unkink the rest of his muscles and make him fit for the company of Citizens, Japanese hosts, or even other nations' observer teams.

The dojo, however, was already occupied. Jahn's first proof of that came as he opened the door and saw a tanned bare foot dart toward Lieutenant Commander Goto's head. Goto saved himself from having the foot shatter his nose and cheekbone by a blurringly fast back roll, then pivoted on his thick arms and scythed down his opponent with both legs. An "Umpff!" and the sound of a body hitting the bamboo mats marked the end of the bout.

Jahn stepped forward and bowed to Goto and the unknown other. He—no, she—was already rolling to her feet, favoring one leg a trifle. She was half a meter narrower and a head taller than Goto, who resembled a pocket-sized sumo wrestler.

Goto and the woman returned the bows. "How was your flight?" Goto said, in Japanese.

The Imperial officer probably already knew more about the patrol than Jahn did. Goto was an accomplished submariner temporarily assigned to the staff job of playing herdboy to the Draka observer mission. He'd abandoned none of his old contacts, even if they hadn't got him the submarine command he transparently wanted.

Jahn looked at the woman, realized that she was not only European but Draka, and decided that the long-rumored Women's Auxiliary Corps detachment must have arrived while he was in the air. He also decided that a little courtesy might put a smile on a very agreeable face. It had vast pools of brown eyes, a wide mouth with dazzling white teeth, a frame of curling dark hair, and only one negative point—a nose so long and sharp that Jahn had a brief mental image both erotic and ludicrous.

He bowed to the woman again. "Lieutenant Commander Horace Jahn, Airship Service of the Navy of the Dominion."

She replied with a salute. "Tetrarch Julia Pope, Women's Auxiliary Corps, at your service." She spoke in fluent Japanese, with a more refined accent than Goto's, or even Jahn's. Then she grinned, and Jahn was not disappointed over what a grin did to her face.

Jahn turned to Goto. "We flew as far as the Bonins—pardon, the Ogasawaras—but sighted little. Yubari is still aground on Iwo Jima, and nothing remains of last week's cruiser battle but wreckage and a few rafts. We saw no signs of life on any of them."

"Ran has taken them to her," Pope said. Even in Japanese, she sounded as if she was praying. Jahn's eyebrows twitched. He'd heard the Norse gods invoked quite a few times since the Old Faith revival started. Usually the invocation was the gods' private parts, and he'd never heard anyone reverently name the goddess of the sea.

"May it be so," Jahn said. Goto also bowed his head and muttered a Shinto prayer too softly for the Draka to catch all of it. "On the way back, we saw an American airship—Shenandoah class, I think—who shadowed us for about eight hours until we shook her off at nightfall. They said they were off their course to the Philippines, but they didn't turn when we gave them the correct heading."

Pope's face now twisted into something that only needed a few snakes to be a perfect mask of Medusa. "Damnyankee snoops!" she snarled in English. "What do they think they're doin', messin' around in this war? Think the Japanese are Confederates in disguise?"

The accent was American—Confederate American. Obviously no relative of the Union General, later Senator, John Pope. Her family would have fought the American Civil War in gray and butternut, with Ferguson rifles that Horace's grandfather William might have run through the blockade.

"I doubt that we shall agree on the rights of the United States to be interested in this war," Goto said. "From their point of view, the total victory of either side would endanger their position in the Philippines and western Pacific, not to mention their hopes that the Tai'pings may turn China into a valuable trading partner."

"The only position ah want tah see Yankees in is on their hands and knees, beggin' the Confederacy to secede again," Pope said briskly. "But ah suppose that's too much to ask for, in anythin' but a what-if novel like that fellah Futrelle writes."

"Most likely," Goto said. "But a word to you, Tetrarch Pope, speaking as one who is for the moment acting as your sensei. You must remember not to strike except when you are completely centered. You are very fast and have a longer reach than many Japanese. . . but striking from the true center gives you the advantage over a non-centered opponent of any size."

Pope nodded, and looked Jahn up and down. He felt like a prize bull being judged at an agricultural fair. "Want tah go a few falls, sir, see if Goto's right?" she asked.

Jahn shook his head. Pope's face hardened again. Jahn almost took a step backward.

"Because I'm a woman?"

He shook his head. "Two good reasons. I've had ten hours of sleep in the last five days. Also, my school didn't teach the pankration style. I wasn't too bad at Graeco-Roman wrestling—"

"Ha!" Goto said. "Jahn-san has five heavyweight wrestling crowns, two from school and three from the Navy. Indeed, I would say that he was not too bad."

"Even mo' interestin' " Pope said. "Ah do think a friendly match might be entertainin'. But some othah time, ah agree—wouldn't do fo' me to have an unfair advantage, now would it?"

She stepped up to Jahn, gave him a not-quite-mocking peck on the cheek, then sauntered over to where her gear bag stood on a bench. The Japanese palestra garment, the white cotton gi, was loose fitting for freedom of movement, but Julia Pope would have looked good in a barley sack, either going away or coming toward you.

Obviously one of the Advanced Women, Jahn thought, and a red-hot Rebel as well. Odd combination—but interesting for more than her physical parts. Not that there's anything likely to be wrong with those . . . 

* * *

Lieutenant Commander Goto ignored the water still draining from Number 36's bridge platform, that had already soaked his legs to mid-calf. He braced himself between the railing and the periscope housing and studied the horizon with his binoculars. On the other side of the housing, Sub-Lieutenant Yamamoto did the same. Behind them, one seaman made notes as the two officers identified the Russian ships, while another stood lookout.

The Russians had no operational submarines at Port Arthur, or so said the Naval Staff, but the Naval Staff was not infallible. Nor was it impossible that some of their newer undersea vessels, nearly as powerful as Number 36, could have made the voyage south from Vladivostok to support the Far East Fleet in its biggest operation of the war.

Meanwhile, less than ten thousand meters away, five hundred or more guns paraded by. The smallest of them would be able to keep the submarine from diving with a single hit. Goto focused his binoculars to get a better look at the ships now passing, Petr Veliky and two others of her class of five. Eight 30cm guns, fourteen 150cm, a score of lighter weapons, all cased in 250mm armor and driven by Germania/Danzigwerke turbines at twenty-three knots.

The Germans had an odd taste for supplying a potential enemy, Russia, with so much modern weaponry. But Britain was another potential enemy and Japan a British ally in all but name. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" was doubtless a popular saying among German shipbuilders.

Three torpedo gunboats now, one-twentieth the battleships' tonnage, seven knots faster, no armor and no guns larger than 10cm, but six torpedo tubes. Then a ship with even more freeboard than the battleships and three even taller funnels, belching a plume of smoke that must have had anyone in her wake coughing like a consumptive. Her decks were crowded with gray-clad troops whose uniforms nearly blended into the superstructure. Goto waited until the transport was out of his field of vision, but before she was gone, another (this one had two funnels and a green hull) steamed into view.

Goto and Yamamoto counted twelve troop-laden transports and nine cargo vessels before the Russian fleet vanished behind its own smoke cloud, still headed south. At least thirty-five warships, probably more, convoying at least twenty-one merchant vessels, was Goto's count. As he asked Yamamoto for his estimate, they both heard the distant rumble of guns.

"We did not see them all," the younger officer said. "They have sent a squadron against Wei-hai-wei."

"Much good may that do them," Goto said. The Japanese had not successfully attacked Port Arthur since it fell to the Russians at the beginning of the war, because of its defending gun batteries, mines, torpedo squadrons, and shore-launched torpedoes. The Japanese anchorage at Wei-hai-wei was just as well defended, with five coastal submarines in place of the shore torpedo tubes. It also now held the coastal defense ships Fuso and Haruna, which gave Goto a personal reason for wishing that the Russians were only making a diversion. His brother commanded a main-battery turret aboard Fuso, and the two old ships were the most visible targets in the anchorage if the Russians tried a serious attack.

Unlikely, though. The agents left behind when the Imperial Navy evacuated Port Arthur had taken full advantage of the Russians being unable to tell a Chinese-speaking Japanese from a native Chinese, and gained full details of the Russian plan to strike far to the south, at Hainan Island. The transports would be carrying nearly five thousand Russian soldiers to spearhead the attack on the island, and the cargo vessels thousands of tons of modern weapons and ammunition, to supply the private armies of the Chinese governors of the coastal provinces. Then either Japan's hard-won foothold on the Chinese coast would be attacked, or the Combined Fleet would have to sortie and meet a superior Russian Far East Fleet at a time and place of the Russians' choosing.

Or possibly both together.

Goto studied the horizon again, then nodded to Yamamoto.

"Trim down until only the radio mast is above water. Then we will transmit our report."

Yamamoto's round young face showed confusion. "Are we not going to pursue on the surface and attack by night?"

"After we report, if then," Goto replied. "The courage of the samurai is not in rushing to his death without purpose or gain. It is in serving the Emperor to the best of his abilities, whether by living or by dying."

"As the Emperor commands—"

"—so we are done with sitting about in plain sight," Goto finished. "Clear the bridge and rig for running awash." The soft-voiced command was enough to start the others scrambling through the hatch. Unlike the raucous diving alarm, it could reach no hostile ears.

* * *

The meeting of Jahn and Pope at the dojo was the first of many, at intervals of a few days over the next five months. Acquaintance ripened into friendship as the war settled into a stalemate both on land and at sea, a situation everyone knew that the Russians could endure longer than the Japanese.

The only unfrustrated Japanese either of the Draka knew was Goto. A month after their meeting, he received his orders—command of Number 36, one of the latest Imperial Fleet submarines. His farewell party was memorable, and his relief at getting back into the fighting undisguised.

The Japanese raided across the Yalu River into Russian-occupied Manchuria, and sent occasional airship raids against vulnerable points on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The Russians sent their long-range cruisers south from Petropavlosk, creeping out behind icebreakers during the long nights, to raid Japanese ocean commerce. The Japanese raided the strongholds of pro-Russian Chinese, while similar squadrons of Russian light craft raided the Japanese coast. Each side tried to interrupt the other's oil shipments from Borneo (Number 36 torpedoed a Russian auxiliary cruiser off Sarawak, sending it limping off to internment in Haiphong), until the Americans persuaded the British to join them in establishing a Neutrality Patrol around the oil fields. Rumor had it that they'd threatened to occupy the Sultan of Brunei's territory with a regiment of Marines if the British didn't cooperate.

That rumor moved Julia Pope to eloquent fury. "That's the closest the Yankees have come to really messin' with somebody who could mess them back, since ah was a girl. Then they'all have to go kiss and make up. Ah could spit."

Which she promptly did, startling two British officers passing by. One of them looked ready to take up the challenge of such unladylike conduct, but Jahn now knew Pope well enough to step back and let her deal with the officer on her own.

"Although if he'd said `loose Draka morals' one more time, they'd both have had a quarrel with me," Jahn said, when Pope had finished an explanation that fell somewhat short of an apology. "Would you have left enough of them for me?"

"If ah was feelin' generous, maybe," she said, slipping her arm through his. That was Improper Public Contact under the regulations, but even with the Women's Auxiliary detachment, the Draka observation mission was still less than a hundred strong. That was no more than a couple of tetrarchies or the crew of a torpedo gunboat, even if two flag officers commanded it, and all Citizens. Discipline was therefore easy enough so that Jahn and Pope could indulge themselves in the pleasure of shocking the other observers. It probably amused the Japanese, and what the Archangels didn't know wouldn't hurt anybody.

"Right now, though, ah feel closer to dirty," Pope said. "Mind if we share the fee for the ofuro?"

Jahn started suspecting things when Pope reserved a private bath at a respectable inn. He stopped suspecting and started hoping when she slipped off her uniform and climbed into the tub with him. Nothing he saw disappointed him at all, and his body's reaction to her undraped splendor apparently didn't disappoint her.

"You look glad to see me." He would have sworn that she was purring.

"Well, I might call you—ah, see worthy. Very."

They went eagerly from looking to touching, and it was quite a while before they had free lips or enough breath to say anything.

That wasn't the last such encounter, either. The Japanese grew cautious about letting anybody's observers aboard their dirigibles, claiming that most of them were on patrol against the Petropavlovsk raiding cruisers, in the dangerous weather over the icy seas off Hokkaido and the Kuriles. Nothing to see, or so Goto's dour replacement told Jahn, "And we can hardly ask foreign observers to expose themselves in areas where we send even our own men reluctantly."

Since the Combined Fleet held most of its exercises as far north as possible, to escape those same foreign observers and "strengthen the spirits of the men," Jahn knew that the officer was lying and suspected that the officer knew that Jahn knew. However, implying either of these things would offend Japanese honor, probably leading to Jahn's being shipped home on a slow Portuguese tramp freighter.

Julia listened attentively, almost affectionately, that night, then gently bit the side of his neck and whispered in his ear, "Somethin' that the serf wenches do, that they say is fun for men too." Her mouth moved downward, until she heard him laugh.

"You'd bettah tell me what yo' find so funny, or ah just might bite."

Jahn tried to control his voice, and finally managed it by stroking her hair. With his eyes on the waxed cedar of the ceiling, he said, "Your nose. It's—that long, that I thought—if you ever did this—you would gut me with that—ow!"

The nip was playful, though. After a while, he groaned. "I see I was wrong."

"You cain't see anythin', Horrie. You've got your eyes shut."

"I see Paradise. That's enough."

"Ah thought the Christians say there's no lovin' in Heaven," she murmured, as well as she could with her mouth full.

"They could be wrong."

"Ah most sincerely hope so."

 

 

 

 

II

Over the Sea of Japan, 0800, August 18, 1905

 

It was three and a half hours since Jahn saw Pope's legs protruding from under the radio cabinet. It was also three hours and twenty-five minutes into a mystery.

What were the Japanese up to?

He and Pope had still been on the observation platform aft of the radio room when they saw out the windows a convoy rolling by, a long line of the little pneumatic lorries that the Japanese used on major bases. They moved at a walking pace—proof of this: more than a hundred armed sailors marched to either side of the convoy, shouldering bayoneted rifles while their officers marched with drawn swords.

Each lorry towed a bomb cart, with a canvas-shrouded bundle on it. Jahn thought that there were two sizes of bundles, both larger than conventional bombs. As he tried to lean out the window, two of Satsuma's crew came up behind him, politely urged him back, then slid the shutters closed with a fierce rattling and clinking.

A minute later, more metallic noises floated in from outside and from below. Winches and chains were lifting something heavy—something that they did not want him to see—aboard Satsuma and the rest of the airships. This went on for a good twenty minutes, interrupted once by a gonglike bwannnggg and a cacophony of screams and Japanese curses.

Jahn himself had never dropped a bomb in anger, and never seen anything larger than the standard 500-kilo incendiary clusters, direct descendants of the warloads that burned Odessa a generation ago. He knew that several nations had bombs twice that weight. The Draka and the Americans had even used them in combat, on Bushmen in the Sahara and Moro rebels in the Philippines who'd gone to earth too far from roads to allow the peacekeepers to bring up artillery. No doubt the Japanese wanted something even bigger to be a surprise to both friend and foe.

Then trumpets and whistles called Satsuma's crew to quarters for getting underway. Five officers (plus Jahn and Pope) and twenty-eight petty officers and men saluted the Emperor's portrait (or faced toward the shrine holding the portrait, if they were on duty elsewhere), then all five engines came to life. Now the purring sounded more like a pride of lions who had just feasted on fresh livestock (with perhaps a lion dog or two for dessert). . .

Engine exhaust warmed the air in the superheat cell and Satsuma lifted gently into the still morning air, along with five other airships of her lead squadron. Jahn found an unshuttered window and saw that the morning haze was also lifting, except where the ten thousand charcoal fires of any Japanese city created their own murk. Jahn reminded himself that for a country with no local oil supply, burning charcoal was prudent frugality, not primitive filth. . .

His composure didn't survive a good look at the anchorage. Instead of empty water cut only by a few boat trails, he saw at least a squadron of battleships and armored cruisers, flanked by a line of scout cruisers on one side and torpedo cruisers and gunboats on the other. At least they had steam up and the scouts had raised observation balloons, but they amounted to a good third of the already-outgunned Combined Fleet and they were still in harbor. 

Also, why the observation balloons, when they would be working with the airships?

Speculation ended then, as Satsuma glided forward, all five aluminum propellers chopping a wake of wind through the sky as the First Air Kokutai headed out to sea. Jahn's speculations only returned two hours later, as the propellers slowed while the engines worked as hard as ever, feeding the superheat so that the dirigibles went on climbing.

At three thousand meters, nearly pressure height, Satsuma broke out of one layer of clouds. Through unshuttered windows, Jahn had a good view of most of the Kokutai. Two-thirds of the Empire's airpower described slow circles between two layers of cloud, like a school of gigantic silver-gray fish in a god-sized aquarium. The flagship Akagi was so close that Jahn felt he could stick a hand out the window and touch the ten-meter square sun-rayed battle ensign flying from her upper fin.

He was raising his binoculars to get a better view of Akagi's bomb racks, when he saw a light blinking from the flagship. Something punched him in the back and someone said, "Yes!" behind him, as he finished reading the signal. Then a soft voice said:

" `The fate of the Empire depends on this day. Let every man do his utmost.' "

Jahn turned to see a grinning Julia Pope. "Ah don't suppose anybody told Admiral Kondo that there's at least one woman who's goin' to do her utmost?"

"He's probably too carried away by being the first admiral to lead an airship fleet into action."

"You think we're goin' after the Russian fleet?"

"Our hosts have to be secretive and ruthless. They can't afford to be crazy."

* * *

Commander Goto had thought of manning the deck gun as Number 36 ploughed south, green water swallowing her bow torpedo tubes as she worked up to her full surface speed of fourteen knots. However, the stubby 80mm gun was hardly effective against anything bigger than a junk, and shooting up one of those would merely make noise that might alert the Russians to who was on their trail. The gun's crew would also be more men to get below, if the Russians became suspicious on their own and sent a torpedo squadron racing north to clear their wakes.

Goto would yield to no one aboard in his pride in Number 36. But right now he would have considered trading her for one of the French croiseur-sousmarins de haute mer or even one of those Swedish submarines that were supposed to have a folding air pipe that let them run their diesels submerged. The Russians could hardly do more to Number 36 and her comrades than force them to dive, but a submarine's fourteen knots on the surface dwindled to five or six submerged, and a single torpedo gunboat could keep Number 36 down until nightfall. By then, the Russians would have an unbeatable lead.

Yamamoto scrambled up the hatch and saluted. "Message from Fleet Headquarters, sir."

Goto read the yellow flimsy and nodded. "Let us pray that our best will be good enough."

"I have calculated, sir. If the Russians maintain their present speed and course, it will be."

Yamamoto was too young to have fought the Chinese at sea. He had not faced the surprises that even the unreformed and largely foreign-officered Tai'ping Northern Fleet had been able to spring. In twenty-four hours, if he was still alive, he would be less ready to expect the enemy's cooperation.

* * *

The purr of Satsuma's diesels faded to a distant mutter. Jahn felt the deck tilting under his feet, as Satsuma turned. Pope tilted against him, sliding her arms around his torso.

"Ah won't pretend that was an accident."

He tightened his grip on her shoulders. "Want to try the Shalimar Gardens, when we make it home? They've got mazes with little nooks where nobody can see you. Some of them even have spring-heated pools."

"Where yo' can wear nothin' and do anythin'?"

"That's the idea."

"Mmmm."

"After the Gardens, I'll have to do it."

"What's `it'? when it's got clothes on?"

"Visit Alexandria."

"Your mother might not approve."

Jahn stepped back, careful of his footing on the oily deck. It was level now, but vibrating more strongly as the engines accelerated Satsuma on a new course. Looking out the window, Jahn thought that they were still heading south.

A set of repeater gauges confirmed the suspicion, also that they were using a good twenty-five knot tailwind to save fuel. The engines were at one-third speed, just enough to generate dynamic lift and keep up the superheat. A heavy warload and a long flight meant that dropping ballast was a last resort, even if the water condensed from the engine exhausts might replenish it eventually.

"Eventually," Jahn knew, was a dirty word in airship navigation, because it often translated as "too late." His hands again rested lightly on Pope's shoulders, feeling solid muscle and bone (not to mention enticing animal warmth) under the cloth. "I know. I thought I'd have to fight one war at home, before I went off to this one."

They both smiled, remembering the story of his sister walking in on him when he was happily tumbling a kitchen wench, to break the news of the Japanese declaration of war on Russia. His mother had accused him of gross indecency that would corrupt his sisters.

"It can't have been easy on my mother, trying to raise five children in Alexandria, without asking for family charity," Jahn said judiciously. "Seeing me married off will ease her mind a lot."

"Getting out of Alexandria might help some, too. Half that there place is still vacant lots and mean-eyed serfs."

Then Akagi was signaling again. " `Russian fleet maintaining present speed. All hands to Battle Stations at 1430.' "

Pope stepped back. "See you at lunch?"

"If we get any, maybe. Save a rice ball for luck, anyway."

"Make that a pickled plum, and ah promise. Ah nevah met a rice ball ah didn't like."

 

 

 

 

III

The China Sea, 1400, August 18, 1905

 

The trumpet blowing Battle Stations caught Jahn by surprise. He looked at his Swiss watch. Cursed if it wasn't half an hour early! But on the scale of random variables in war, a half-hour change was barely worth noticing.

Unless the Russians had detected the First Air Kokutai . . .

Jahn needed only a few steps to reach his battle station, at the Auxiliary Control Room just forward of the radio room. He saw Pope sprinting to her post, a pair of chopsticks thrust hastily into the breast pocket of her coveralls. She blew Jahn a kiss, then bobbed gracefully so that not even her hair touched the top of the radio-room door as she vanished inside and pulled the curtain.

Jahn gripped a stanchion as new vibration told him of increased speed. Only slightly, though—this wasn't the crisis that losing surprise would be, then.

Auxiliary Control straddled Satsuma's keel, with machine-gun positions on either side, firing from ball-and-socket mountings through plex-glass blisters that gave them a a 270-degree arc of fire. The blisters also gave anyone in them a first-class view. Jahn insinuated himself between the gunner and loader for the port gun and peered out.

He counted five airships rapidly pulling ahead of the rest of the Kokutai, Akagi in the lead. He thought he saw the nearest one—Musashi, with her white-painted after engine gondola—starting to drop her warload. Then he saw what she was dropping fluttering by, like dirty laundry caught in the artificial whirlwind of the airship squadron's passage. Canvas or treated-silk covers, was Jahn's guess—but Shokaku and the rest of the vanguard pulled away into the haze before he could see what the discarded covers had hidden.

Abruptly, the distant rumble of the superheat died. At the same time, the engines speeded up, and Jahn saw the indicators on the control panel to his right go hard over to Full Descent. For a moment, the deck seemed to fall out from under him—or was that just his stomach, reacting to the thought of diving an airship at this speed? Satsuma was sliding down out of the sky faster than any airborne vehicle Jahn had ever seen, except once when he saw a glider caught in a downdraft at the Alexandria Games plummet into the Nile. Only a water landing had saved the pilot, then he had to be practically snatched from the jaws of the crocodiles.

Around here, it will be sharks.

Skang! The machine gunner had cocked his weapon, with a metallic clashing that would have been ominous under other circumstances. The loader snapped the lid off a second crate of belts and stroked the dull-gleaming rounds as if they might bring him good luck.

Or at least bad luck to the Russians.

Jahn decided that the loader's gesture counted as a prayer, and touched the pocket where the little crucifix rested, that Peter Jahn had worn across the North Sea. The crucifix had helped his great-great-grandfather sail his boat and his family from the Frisian Islands, through Napoleon's patrols and North Sea storms, then kept him alive for six years on the lower deck of a British seventy-four.

What had worked on the sea might now work in the sky.

* * *

Commander Goto looked at the oily swell through which Number 36 was trailing a broad white wake, and prayed—to gods bearing different names than the White Christ or the Norse pantheon, but addressed with equal fervor.

The First Air Kokutai had gone to radio silence hours ago—the Russians were backward at interception, but not completely incompetent. At sea level, the wind was barely a—a capful, Goto thought, savoring the English phrase. Aloft, the heavily-loaded airships would need a good tailwind out of the north to overtake the Russians without burning too much fuel.

Goto raised his binoculars and looked aloft. Visibility was poor enough to hide Number 36 from anything except a very keen-sighted or very lucky Russian lookout. It was also poor enough to hide the fleet on the sea and the fleet in the sky from one another.

Signaling to the airships meant revealing himself and then having to dive, if he was lucky enough to last that long, then probably missing the battle—another sort of bad luck. Goto lifted the conning tower hatch and called below.

"Battle stations—gun. Load with starshell."

Young Yamamoto at least was going to have something to do besides stare at the sky and try to find the wind—the wind that today might write the fate of two empires.

* * *

They'd broken out of the clouds at a thousand meters, Satsuma and seven other airships that Jahn could count in the improved visibility below the clouds. They were still descending faster than Jahn liked, but none of the crew seemed to be worried. Of course, the Japanese were rather casual about suicide, individual or mass, but he could not see the whole Kokutai committing mass seppuku

"I'll be damned."

"I hope not," Pope said from behind him.

"Dump the theology," Jahn said. He was proud that his pointing hand didn't shake. Maybe having the other around Pope's shoulders helped.

Pope's eyes followed Jahn's hand, out past the barrel of the machine gun and the glass, to study their sistership Shokaku, barely two hundred meters away.

"Well, ah'll be—never mind. Am ah seein' things, or are those torpedoes under Shokaku?"

"Either that, or leeches the size of crocodiles."

"Mah money's on torpedoes."

Satsuma lurched. Pope fell against Jahn, so that he could now grip her with both hands.

"What are you doing out here?"

"Chiba threw me out. 'Fraid ah might have learned Fleet code, ah suppose."

If Pope had to take over the radio, she would use Draka Commercial Two for code, a merchant-marine creation that anybody could buy for a not too outrageous number of aurics. This doubtless included the Russians—but Jahn suspected that the Russians wouldn't be listening in on the First Kokutai's radio messages until it was too late to do them any good.

He started calculating. Four torpedoes, assuming the standard 45-cm model, plus what looked like glider wings to let them down into the sea easily. Call it a ton each, times four—plenty of weight to make a big difference in the airships' performance.

Now if only the altimeter isn't jammed and the elevator man doesn't have his thumb up his arse. . . .

Then he saw the starshell bursts ahead, and moments later, blazing through the mist, the bomb explosions.

* * *

Commander Goto fired off a curse right after the deck guns fired its third starshell. The vanguard of the Kokutai had found the Russians without any help from Number 36. Now the five airships were keeping station over the Russian battle line, raining incendiary bombs on them.

A modern dirigible with good men at the controls could keep station over a battleship and practically shovel the incendiaries out of the bomb bay. The light bombs wouldn't penetrate, but they didn't need to. They would start fires—had started them, on at least three Russian ships that Goto could count. Fighting fires distracted crews. So did exploding ammunition, and the Russians' understandable fondness for anti-dirigible batteries meant extra ready-use lockers on deck, so that the high-angle guns could go into action at a moment's notice.

Except that the dirigible bombers had swung around to either flank of the Russians and hadn't given them even that much warning.

Ready-use ammunition must already be exploding aboard one armored cruiser—Goto saw a funnel fly overboard, a mast sag, and the whole ship swing out of line. The cruiser narrowly missed running down a scout, and two battleships had to almost spin around on their sterns to avoid ramming the cruiser. Bogatyr class, Goto thought, although with a second funnel now gone and her decks a mass of flame it was hard to tell.

The Russian fleet formation seemed to be disintegrating before Goto's eyes. Panic-stricken or dying helmsmen flinging helms over wildly, lookouts unable to see through the smoke or beating out the flames on their uniforms—the incendiaries had to be those phosphorous charges that rumor had mentioned—

The sea grew waterspouts, four of them, twenty meters high and no more than a hundred meters behind Number 36. This time Goto's curses were a salvo. As he had feared, the starshells had done no more than reveal his boat's presence.

Meanwhile, the Russians were not disintegrating in a panic, as he had thought. The warships were turning to port, forming into two lines, the battleships in the rear and the lighter craft closer to the submarine. Smoke from funnels, fires, and anti-dirigible guns made the next thing to a fogbank, but Goto thought he saw the bulky merchant vessels holding their course.

Yamamoto wasn't cursing. He was shouting for the ammunition passers to bring up the smoke shells. Goto wondered what for, then noticed a rising chop to either side—just as a second salvo of Russian shells hit the water. Three this time, and if anything a few meters closer. A fragment hit the conning tower hard enough to go ting.

Young Yamamoto had a clear head. The rest of the airships would be attacking soon, and the drift of the smoke from Number 36's shells would give them a wind-direction indicator that wasn't lost in the murk over the Russian fleet. They could steer precisely to attack the Russian fleet broadside-on.

The first smoke shell went on its way at the same moment as the third Russian salvo—or was that just one heavy shell? It seemed that hectares of sea reared up, and spray and fragments rained down on Number 36 even though the shellburst was farther than the first two.

Now Yamamoto was cursing as loudly as his captain. Goto saw why. One fragment had jammed the breech block of the deck gun, another killed the gunlayer, and a third taken the last two fingers off Yamamoto's left hand. He was examining the ruined gun as he wrapped the bloody stumps in a handkerchief.

"Secure the gun and get below!" Goto shouted. He had to repeat the order three times before Yamamoto seemed to hear, and only then did Goto dare to order "Rig for diving."

He hoped he didn't sound too relieved. If the next stage of the battle went as he had begun to suspect, the safest place for Number 36 would be on the bottom of the China Sea, fifty meters below the sharp prows and hundred-kilo warheads that would soon be filling this area of water.

* * *

The port gunner was desperately craning his neck, trying to find a target, with white knuckles on the grips of his machine gun twisting the weapon almost as wildly. The loader, junior but older, finally gripped his arm and said something that stopped the frantic search for targets that still had to be far out of machine-gun range. The gunner sat down in lotus position beside his weapon, while the loader went back to work laying out spare belts. Jahn noticed that the deck had sets of clips on either side of the guns, to keep the ready belts from tangling if the deck tilted.

Typical Japanese attention to detail. I wonder if we could create the concept of an "honorary Draka" to encourage them to join forces with the Dominion. Sooner or later, we will have to start picking and choosing our enemies, instead of just civilizing everybody we meet with a Ferguson.

Then Satsuma's deck not only tilted, it seemed that the airship was trying to stand on her tail—which has to be less than a hundred meters above the water even in level flight

Instead of the impact with the water, Jahn felt the whole ship shudder and heave. He didn't need shouts of "Torpedoes away!" to know that the airship's weapons had launched. From the violence of the sudden upward surge, he wondered if Satsuma had been carrying only four torpedoes. Then he heard the superheat feed roaring like something vast and hungry, increasing the ship's lift by a good part of a ton every few seconds.

I wouldn't fly low over a fleet of Russians in a bad mood either.

Since all he could see out the gun blister was sky, smoke, and something torpedo-craft sized leaving a curving wake, Jahn tried to calculate the hammer blow that was descending on the Russian fleet. Fourteen torpedo-carrying dirigibles. A minimum of four torpedoes apiece. At least fifty-six torpedoes in the water, the largest spread ever launched. Unless some of the airships had maneuvered out to the flanks, to hammerhead the Russians when they turned to comb the torpedoes from the first launch? With surface ships, that tactic went back as far as the Anglo-Russian War. The Japanese had used it too effectively against the Chinese not to think of using it with faster launch vehicles against a more formidable opponent.

Suddenly the torpedo craft wasn't there. Its wake ended in a rising column of smoke. Jahn saw plating, funnels, guns flying out of the smoke, and thought he saw the bow ploughing itself under. He hoped the Russians didn't maneuver too many of their light craft into the path of the torpedoes, and with that very Japanese tactic somehow save their battle line.

Unbelievably, Satsuma's upward lunge stopped at five hundred meters. The captain probably vented superheat. Very shrewd airship handlers, these people. Jahn still had to tap the altimeter twice, before he could believe its reading.

He couldn't see how the Russians were maneuvering, but he could see that they were fighting back. Akagi was limping off, down by the bow—then some shrewd Russian put a flare or a starshell into the air-hydrogen mixture fed by the damage forward. A fireball grew out of Akagi's bow, then swallowed the bow. Her stern would have risen until it was vertical, but the glowing remnants of her bow struck the water first. The flames still swept aft, the cells erupting one by one, until nothing remained of Kondo's flagship except a cloud of smoke fed by patches of burning diesel fuel on the water.

Akagi's killer wasn't the only Russian with sense. A battleship was firing her main battery into the water, raising tree-tall clusters of shell splashes in the path of the Japanese airships. Some of them were still below two hundred meters, and the glowing foam seemed like the fingers of a sea giant, reaching up to pluck them out of the sky.

Jahn saw Shokaku fly directly over one such cluster—and fly away. But one engine trailed smoke, another had stopped, and from two kilometers away Jahn could see rents and wrinkles in her aluminum skin. She wasn't going to make it back to Japan; the Draka could only hope that she could reach a Japanese-controlled portion of the nearest coast.

Then the rest of the torpedoes started hitting. Jahn couldn't watch everything at once, so he focused his attention on a single Russian battleship—Suvorov, he thought, the Petr Veliki with the second and third funnels trunked together into something that looked like a diseased tree stump or a heating system assembled by drunken serf-mechanics.

One torpedo hit Suvorov right forward. She started to slow, which reduced her rate of turn, but with her forward compartments flooding no doubt the bridge officers had decided to reduce the water pressure somehow. That left the ship in the path of two more torpedoes, one striking under the first funnel, the other under the after turret.

Smoke trickled, then gushed, out of the after turret, and the deck and hull around it. Then the smoke turned to flame, steel plates bulged and erupted outward, and the after magazine went up in a single cataclysmic blast of a hundred or more tons of ammunition.

Suvorov's stern was gone—blown into the air or toward the bottom. Her bow continued for a moment, already listing, like some great maimed animal too stupid to understand that it was dead. Then boilers and a magazine for one of the midships turrets both exploded, and Suvorov and her eight hundred men were gone.

Jahn looked across Auxiliary Control, to see that the starboard gun blister was gone and so was the gunner. The loader was firing the gun sharply downward—with gravity to help the bullets, he might hit something—but his left leg was a mangled ruin and he would bleed to death if nobody—

The junior elevator man started across the deck to help the loader. Then a giant claw seemed to rip open the deck of Auxiliary Control. Somebody down there still had an anti-dirigible gun in action, and it had just punched a shell into Satsuma.

Fortunately the first hit was a dud. It bounced off the overhead and tumbled, sweeping the starboard loader overboard like an old-fashioned solid shot. The hole it left in the deck was large enough to swallow the junior elevator man.

Then a second shell hit, farther aft, and this one exploded. Bulkheads bulged and vomited smoke and fragments. One fragment scored Jahn's thigh. Between that and the dying senior elevator man reeling against him, Jahn fell to the deck.

As he scrabbled for a handhold on the blood-slick aluminum, he heard the port machine gun firing. Next was the sound of metal twisted agonizingly far beyond its limits, and finally a human scream.

Jahn told himself three times that it was not a woman's scream.

He did not bother telling himself that Satsuma wasn't going down. Somehow the loudspeaker connection to the bridge was still alive, and someone was shrieking "All hands to crash landing stations! Long live the Emperor!" over and over again.

Jahn thought that he was already at his station—if the Auxiliary elevator controls still worked, at least; Satsuma was far beyond help by damage control. And while he wished the Emperor Meiji no harm at all, he could not see what prolonging the Emperor Meiji's life could do for his loyal subjects who were rapidly approaching Yasukuni Shrine.

Are worshippers of Christ or the Old Norse gods allowed in there? 

Smoke billowed from aft, then Julia Pope staggered out of it. She was covered with blood, and staggered in a way that sent Jahn's bowels twisting like a disturbed nest of mambas.

They do have a point, saying men will panic over a wounded woman.

Except that Julia was where she'd wanted to be, with battle comrades and even a lover close by. If you had to die, that was always one of the better places.

She gripped a stanchion, then shifted her grip as a jagged end scored her palm. "Radio's—dead. Chiba—gone too."

Jahn realized that his own shallow cut had almost stopped bleeding, and decided that Julia needed his battle dressing worse than he did. He started to unwrap it.

"Never mind," she said. "Most of the blood—it's Chiba's. He'd do to ride the river with, as mah father will say when—ah tell him."

Jahn felt even worse gut twistings. Julia's father was dead.

Then Satsuma gave her most violent lurch yet. The port gunner fired off a last burst and shouted, "We've hit a Russian ship!"

Jahn wondered at the idea of Russian ships flying, then realized that Satsuma must have lost considerable altitude from her damage. No fire, so far, but they would be down in the sea in minutes. Thank God both Julia and I are in shape to swim.

"Last message, before they hit us," Pope said, sitting down abruptly. "The torpedo squadrons are coming in to finish off the Russians—even towing the coastal boats. The rest of the battle line's going north to surprise Vlad—Vlad—"

She coughed, and rested her head against the metal, as if it cooled a fever. Jahn's fingers flew through the rest of opening the dressing. He looked up, to see blood trickling from the corner of her mouth. In one hand she held out her Thorshammer.

"Take it—take it to a shrine. Or—or Ran's."

Then she twisted the fingers of her free hand, and only let go when he took the amulet. Or when life left her, which was about at the same time.

Jahn didn't have time even to close Pope's staring eyes, before Satsuma started breaking in two fifty meters aft. The port gunner and loader were peering out past their empty gun and must have seen something they didn't like, because they both flung themselves through a hole in their blister.

Then Jahn saw it too—an orange glow from aft, where the collision must have ignited escaping hydrogen.

He thought of staying with Julia for only a moment, but that was almost too long. A blast of superheated air flung him out the port blister, and for a moment he thought he was going to come down on the Russian's deck.

But he missed, dove deep, and came up just in time to see Satsuma's—and Julia's—hydrogen-fed pyre cremate everything above decks aboard the Russian ship—a freighter, he thought.

But the Russian must have been carrying fuel or ammunition, and the hydrogen flames had reached it. Explosions sprayed the sea with flames and wreckage, as well as all the Russian crew who hadn't already been reduced to ashes on their own deck.

Bodies and parts of bodies rained down around Horace Jahn. One landed almost on top of him, and he was obscurely relieved to see that it was a man. The explosions continued, as he swam away from the burning Russian ship. . . .

 

 

 

 

IV

China Sea, 1950, August 18, 1905

 

Commander Goto had double lookouts posted and a machine gun mounted on the bridge, as Number 36 cruised through the graveyard of the Russian Pacific Fleet. The Combined Fleet's torpedo squadrons were still patrolling the area, to sink or capture any surviving enemy ships that hadn't beached themselves on the Chinese coast, and they would have quick hands on the gun lanyards.

So, for that matter, would Sub-Lieutenant Yamamoto, even he would be firing the machine gun with his right hand only. Morphine controlled his pain, and he was determined to end the most glorious day in the history of the Imperial Japanese Navy on his feet, at his post, ready to deal with any Russians not yet out of the fight.

None of the living Russians they'd found so far had any fight left in them. In fact, several had begged to be rescued. Number 36 had no space for prisoners, so the radio operator had just given the torpedo-gunboat Furutsuki the position of the latest boatload, when a lookout called out a lone swimmer dead ahead.

One man we can take, and perhaps his gratitude will make him talkative.

In the fading light, the man was certainly a European, and fair-haired like so many of the Russians. But he was wearing Imperial Navy airship coveralls, and Goto remembered that seven of the nineteen airships who had delivered the first and deadliest stroke were lost or missing.

As Number 36 slowed, the man released his grip on half of a wooden deck grating and swam over to the submarine. Gripping the port bow plane, he hauled himself aboard even before the deck party could reach him. It was only when he stood up that Goto recognized Lieutenant Commander Jahn, last heard of aboard the missing Satsuma.

"We may have other survivors in the area," he said. He seemed afraid to let out more than a few words at a time, and Goto did not bother asking about the fate of Lieutenant Pope. The big Draka seemed smaller than before, as though his body had shrunk to fold itself protectively around his wounded spirit. Goto thanked the gods for his brother's survival and asked them to give peace to Julia Pope along with all the other warriors who had died for the Emperor this day.

He was about to urge Jahn below, when the man held out something in his hand. It was a sea-tarnished, smoke-blackened silver amulet in the shape of a hammer. Goto recalled seeing Julia Pope wearing it at his farewell party—a religious emblem, like the Christian cross.

Jahn looked at the amulet for a long moment. Then he thrust it into a hip pocket and saluted Goto.

"Lieutenant Commander Horace Jahn, Navy of the Dominion of the Draka, reporting aboard. Do you know if there is a shrine to Thor or Ran in the Empire?"

 

 

 

 

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