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give an order you know won’t be obeyed. That had given
him what his mentors would have called a ‘command challenge’ with this crew
more than once.
    Like most airships at night, Wind Dancer had put on
her running lights, climbing high enough to not run into anything in the dark.
Rogers was pleased with the ship’s progress. They had picked up a good tail
wind. They were speeding along at nearly fifty miles an hour, which was very
fast indeed. They might even make Calcutta within the Captain’s desired time at
this rate.
    Staring into the darkness outside, Rogers mused that being
second in command of a mercenary airship was hardly where he expected to be in
his fifties. But then so much had changed since he was a young man. He had only
just obtained his commission in the wet navy, as they now called it, as a very
junior officer aboard HMS Reliant when the Invaders had attacked.
    He doubted that anyone who had lived through those dark years
would ever forget them. The incredible devastation, the hordes of refugees
fleeing a living nightmare, as nothing seemed to stand in the way of the
monsters slaughtering the whole human race. That is, until Tesla and the other
science boffins had developed the huge city-covering Shields that were proof
against the aliens’ attacks. Her Majesty’s Government had disseminated the
knowledge of making them around the world to anyone still fighting. With that
breathing room, an Alliance of the great nations had formed, building airships
and weapons to take the fight to the enemy. Rogers had joined the Alliance air
service on the first call for volunteers.
    The following years had seen him fighting all around the
world, serving with men and women from every race and nation, so desperate were
the times that anyone who could fight was welcomed into the service. The higher
ups had taken note of his ease with different people, so he became a liaison
officer helping to integrate the airships built by other nations into the
Alliance Expeditionary Force. He still had nightmares of those swarms of hastily
built airships mobbing one of the great spider-like war machines, stinging it
to death. Many people had died in those battles, but so had the Invaders, all
of them in the end.
    After the War, now Commander Lawrence Rogers left the AEF to
join the newly forming British Air Navy where he received a commission of his
own and an air command. He had chosen well. As the years passed with no further
invasion, the AEF had dwindled while the various nations built up their own
forces, each eying the other like cats at a single mouse hole. It seemed that
humanity knew no end of stupidity, he thought sourly. Rogers had never climbed
higher than Captain in the BAN. He had no stomach for politics and was content
commanding the deck of his own ship. He had figured to stay on until death or
retirement which ever came first. Perhaps by then, he would have saved the capital
needed to reclaim his family’s farm in Yorkshire from the Smoke Blight. His
parents would have liked that, he always thought. But it was not to be.
    His last command, HMS Defender, had been patrolling
the air lanes off the Siam coast. It had been the middle of the night, much as
now, when he’d been called to the bridge.
    A distress wave had come in from a British merchant ship.
They claimed to be under attack by coil−cannon firing raiders. They
pleaded for aid from any ship that could reach them. Then the connection had
broken off. If they were under attack Rogers knew, a coil cannon strike had
likely destroyed their electronics as well as their engines. Merchantmen tended
not to shield their systems as fighting ships did. A single coil strike would
not significantly damage an ungrounded airship. It would however make a melted
slag out of anything electrical on board that was not shielded, not to mention
the very real danger of starting fires. It was a miracle that they had gotten a
wave off at all. Rogers had to act fast, if they were to