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  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 b
ow 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.