Chapter Text
Stronghold of Yuma
September 4, CY 20, 2018 AD
Captain George Stephenson, night-ops dirigible pilot for the Southwestern Confederation Army, pedaled like mad aboard his SR-42 Blackfish stealth dirigible. In truth, the Blackfish was nothing of the sort, just that General Harris had a penchant for giving his creations bizarre-sounding names.
Together with his co-pilot, First Lieutenant Pedro Sanchez, the two of them pedaled against a shaft, which was connected to a gear box, which drove another shaft, which turned a pair of belts, which each drove a three-bladed propeller—salvaged from small pre-Change aircraft—mounted on either side of the rear of the gondola.
Considerable research and development had gone into getting the rattles and squeaks out of the propulsion system to make it quiet. The very first dirigible had literally shaken itself apart and the General had had to track down and employ a few people who'd been CNC machinists before the Change. Every moving part, both those specifically designed to move, as well as those that moved by default, were kept well-lubricated both to reduce noise and the chance of sparks, the latter of which were particularly dangerous given the extreme flammability of the hydrogen filling the internal bladders above their heads.
Stephenson turned the rudder incrementally and watched as the long nose of the craft's attenuated, tapered envelope swung eastward toward his pre-determined flight path ten miles from the river, following an SR-55 Orca medium stealth dirigible and an SR-71 Humpback heavy stealth bomber, both well ahead of him and visible as small round dots hovering above the sand and rock. He glanced westward to see two other Blackfish and another Orca heading into the setting sun on their way to engage the smaller force headed for El Centro. He checked to make sure the two Blackfish flanking him were still in formation, then let the propellers wind down a little before shifting the gearbox lever to engage Full Impulse.
“Full Impulse,” another one of General Harris' wacky ideas, was really just a fancy way of saying, “high gear.” It had little to do with actual airspeed--which was directly influenced by wind-speed and direction, as well as the payload being carried—and everything to do with the gearing combination driving the propellers.
All seven of the craft currently in the air were close to capacity. In addition to the heavy black fabric covering the envelope, each carried a six-member black-ops ninja team, their equipment, and the maximum complement of armament. Consequently, their altitude was barely over one hundred feet and they'd required assistance from ground crews just to clear the Yuma wall.
The craft lurched as the drive belts engaged the turbofan—removed from a small jet engine--at the rear of the gondola and it surged forward as it accelerated. They were unlikely to reach anywhere close to the full eighty-mile-per-hour top speed until after they'd delivered their payload. The fan would be disengaged shortly before offloading the ninjas and not re-engaged until the return trip, for it made far too much noise.
Stephenson's mission was fairly straightforward. First, he was to deposit the ninja team at the edge of an arroyo three miles inland from Golfo de Santa Clara, a small fishing village near the mouth of the Colorado River. Their job was to conduct repeated strike-and-fade raids against the enemy for the duration of their ninety-mile approach to Yuma.
After offloading the ninjas, he was to proceed to the coast and drop incendiary devices—small pottery jars filled with what everyone called poor-man's napalm—on pre-determined target types. His assigned targets were, in order or priority, still-loaded landing craft, unloaded landing craft, and siege engines.
All personnel involved in the air strikes were also to gather intelligence on the enemy. The objective of the operation was simple: continually harass the enemy from the air and return with information on anything not visible from Yuma or Confederation ground forces for the duration of the conflict. The High Warlady intended to rain down destruction upon them—her words—twenty-four-seven.
*****
Stephenson flexed his knees against the pressure of the gondola deck as the entire ship shot upward with the sudden release of weight. Six ninja Slayers and their equipment—full leather armor, desert camo for day-light raids, spare blades, blow-guns with scores of darts tipped with a mixture of venoms harvested from rattlesnakes and bark scorpions, scores of shuriken, hundreds of the large arrows flung by their four-hundred-pound bows, dozens of small incendiary devices, as well as several days' food and water—weighed over half a ton. Their first strikes were to coincide with the diversions created by the first dirigible attacks.
Now cruising at two hundred feet—still within arrow range—Stephenson cranked the propellers to one-quarter impulse and guided his craft toward the coast, pitching it slightly upward to gain a little more altitude. It was nearly pitch-black, the waxing moon barely a sliver above the eastern hills, and none of the other stealth dirigibles were visible. There was little chance of a mid-air collision, as they were all spaced out at least a mile apart along the vast swath of the enemy's unbelievably broad landing site. He and every other night-ops airman had drilled blindfolded to simulate working in total darkness, even before field training under new-moon conditions. That night's job would be exactly like that.
He grinned to himself as the enemy campfires drew closer. Like most military men who'd spent untold hours training, he was eager to kick some actual ass. He knew the risks, although it helped that their source was all-but-invisible in the darkness that glided by below.
A blaze of light closer to the river-mouth caught his attention and he grinned some more. One of the other airships had drawn first blood! More fires erupted up and down the shore as his fellows-in-arms began delivering their payloads. It was his turn. They stopped pedaling as he got up and took his place at the bow of the gondola, letting momentum carry them forward. He pulled on the special pre-Change Nomex fireproof gloves and picked up the first gallon-sized jar of napalm. Sanchez came up behind him, opened a small canister holding a fully-enclosed tallow candle and used a pair of forceps to hold the kerosene-soaked fiber wick into the flame. When it had caught fire, Stephenson turned, selected his target—of which there were frighteningly many—and dropped.
He smiled as fire blossomed from the deck of a ship. He only had a moment to admire his handiwork before reaching for another jar. He and his teammate repeated the procedure over and over, leaving a trail of flaming ships in their wake. With each bomb dropped, the airship rose incrementally higher.
When their complement of gallon jars had been depleted, they turned back toward shore in search of siege weapons that would be the targets of quart-sized jars. They would be difficult to spot in the dark. Fortunately, the daylight strikes would have little trouble with visibility and targets of opportunity were always well within their purview.
They dropped jar after flaming jar, each erupting into fiery death below. It was unclear if the enemy was trying to shoot them down and whether he would know it if they were.
When their payload had been fully deployed, Stephenson gazed westward and watched more fires blaze into existence, each appearing tiny in the distance. He exchanged a high-five with his co-pilot, turned north and brought the ship up to Full Impulse, quickly leaving the enemy behind still suffering under the barrage from the Orca and the Humpback, both of which carried far more ammunition than did a Blackfish.
The two of them broke into an impromptu chorus of “The March of Cambreath,” which had become the Confederation's unofficial national anthem. Making unnecessary noise was technically a breach of black-ops protocol, but their mission was accomplished, they were well out of bow-shot--and probably ear-shot, too—and there was little doubt in the enemy's mind who'd been dropping fiery death upon them from out of the black of the night. He wished he could say they were leaving flaming ruins in their wake, but he knew they'd barely put a dent into the enemy. It was just the beginning.
He'd be doing it again the next night, the night after...hells, every night for the duration of the conflict. The daylight operation would commence at dawn and they'd be more effective. The enemy now knew about the Confederation air force, so they'd expended that aspect of the element of surprise. Hopefully they'd come to dread what would be nightly attacks. It was widely whispered and hoped that the enemy might just drop dead from sheer sleep deprivation, although that was probably wishful thinking. Even the High Warlady insisted that any foe that had gone through that much effort to mount an offense was not going to just turn around and give up without having been well and truly beaten.
He turned his thoughts to the next couple of hours. He could see the entire area in his mind's eye: far to the northwest, the ruins of Mexicali and Calexico, most of which had burned in the Change; to the south of Yuma, the meager traces of San Luis Rio Colorado, slowly being swallowed by the desert. That city had also burned in the Change and then most of its remains had been wiped off the desert floor by the Colorado River when Hoover Dam collapsed in the third Change Year, also obliterating the northwestern half of Yuma itself and carving an entirely new course.
They'd approach Yuma from the northeast before bringing the ship into a shallow dive—a steep one was ill-advised with an envelope as long as those designed for night-ops airships. Once the ship had been properly grounded, they'd file their reports, then debrief with General Harris at dawn, who would in turn brief the commanders of the daylight strike crews. Then he'd get some shut-eye before doing it all over again.