Many Words

Sparrow drew near, and the bombers split into two groups of three, breaking left and right to bracket the British airship. Joe joined the right-side group as it turned onto its attack vector. Without heavy and fragile aerial torpedoes hanging off the wings, the bombers were free to jink as flack began to burst around them. Joe weaved around the black puffs, then gunned his engine to pull ahead of the bombers. He settled his sights on a defensive machine gun position atop the forwardmost engine pod and squeezed his triggers. Tracers impacted all around the turret, but Joe had no time to inspect his handiwork. Sparrow went by overhead, and he pulled into a steep climb.

“Nice shooting,” Emma’s voice said in his headphones. Beneath them, lines of thick white smoke filled the sky, linking planes to fireballs against the zeppelin’s left flank. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the same picture playing out on the right side. Already he could see Sparrow losing speed.

“That’s that,” he said. “Flight leads, report in and head to home plate.”

“Robber flight here. Everything’s a-ok.”

“Charline One, nothing to report.”

“Ace One,” someone said—Marcel Lecocq, leading the bomber flight. “Two Vultures with light damage from flak. Otherwise we are fine.”

“X-Ray lead,” Takahashi crackled. “X-Ray Three took a long burst. She is holding together for now.”

Six fighters sped into it. Five parachutes twitched, then turned nearly horizontal as fighters struck the steel cables hanging beneath them. Three of the fighters shook violently as their propellers and the cables tore each other to pieces. The other two parachutes fluttered in the wind a few seconds more, before explosions bloomed on two more fighters as the charges at the ends of the cables went off. In several pieces, the two stricken fighters fell past the three who had taken less critical damage.

The remaining British fighter passed through the minefield unharmed, rolling inverted and diving away, headed back toward its zeppelin. The way was clear for Inconstant‘s bombers.

Joe ordered them in, climbing above Inconstant as they lumbered by, all carrying loads of high-explosive rockets. They skirted the slowly-descending minefield, and Joe followed them, circling overhead. A mile south, Charlie flight herded the British bombers away from Inconstant, making quick slashing attacks and breaking off before the defensive gunners could draw a bead. As Joe watched, one bomber’s left engine belched black smoke, its propeller seizing. It turned out of formation, barely able to keep altitude as it followed one of its fellows toward HMS Sparrow. One of Charlie’s pilots must have winged it earlier.

Joe watched Inconstant‘s Vultures launch. The British captain knew his game, to have tracked the Long Nines for a week. He had to know he wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance of keeping pace with Inconstant if he lost even one engine, and now that the pirate pilots had an edge in numbers—Joe saw a third British plane fall away from the fight with Takahashi’s flight, and a pair of Long Nines break off to help Robber flight finish off its opponents—he couldn’t plan on winning the dogfight before dealing with Inconstant‘s bombers. Sending his pilots around the pirate zep at any real distance would expose them to her flak guns, and to repeated attacks from the pirate fighters. That left him with one good option—gun for Inconstant‘s bombers as quickly as he could.

Almost in unison, the remaining British fighters broke from the dogfights, careful to do so when their opposite numbers were off-balance, gaining a few thousand yards before the pirates could turn after them.

Joe keyed his microphone. “Chase them, but leave room.”

The British fighters bore down on Inconstant, aiming to run close along her flanks, so that she couldn’t bring her guns to bear before they were past. A respectable play, against most zeps. Unlike most, Inconstant could answer it. Panels opened all along her stern to reveal hundreds of stubby tubes. Smoke erupted from them, rippling down the rows of launchers. Joe could just see dark blurs as projectiles flew up and behind Inconstant. Puffs of smoke dotted the darkening sky, and a cloud of parachutes descended all around the British planes.

The radio clicked, and Emma’s Falcon slotted back into formation. Joe looked up and over his shoulders. One British pilot hung from his parachute straps below and behind the bombers, watching as his plane spiralled into the desert, fifteen thousand feet away. The other plane Emma had fired on descended past him, out of control, in a steep turn. Far below, the first crashed into the dunes, throwing up a cloud of dust and debris. Charlie flight split into two elements, one threatening the remaining two escorts, and one moving in on the bombers.

“Good shooting, Two,” said Joe. “Let’s go help Robber out.” He pulled his throttle back to maximum continuous power. The din of his engine dropped a note. It would take a minute or two to climb back into the fight.

“Two more Limeys down,” Burr reported. Reflexively, Cannon looked down at the plotting table, though nothing had changed. Sparrow lagged them by twenty miles, and in between, all the counters representing fighter groups clustered together, engaged too closely to track them separately. “Burr, get the bombers in the air. Mr. Churchill, have the stern gunners shoot as soon as the Brits come into range. Let Joe know what they’re up to.”

Cannon hobbled aft through the radio room to peer through the vision slits. Vultures,stubby, single-engined things, with a turret atop the tail and a downward-pointing vertical stabilizer, dropped from the hangar, overtaking Inconstant and zipping past the gondola’s windows to form up ahead of her. A minute later, one Gorcrow, a conventionally-arranged twin-engine medium bomber, fell from the main skyhook, clawing its way back to the zep’s altitude under the burden of a pair of heavy rocket racks. The other followed a moment later.