James Philip - Empire Day

In the near distance 0.8 and 1.7-inch ammunition lit off like fireworks and smoke billowed downwind to the south east from the superstructure of the Princess Royal.

Tom Packenham did not wait for a yeoman to call out Cassandra’s signal.

He chuckled to himself.

“WELL DONE EVERYBODY STOP THERE WILL BE HELL TO PAY WHEN WE FIND OUT WHO IS BEHIND IT STOP QUEEN AND I STILL IN ONE PIECE STOP I WILL REMAIN ON CASSANDRA UNTIL SITUATION CLEAR STOP GEORGE V MESSAGE ENDS”

The Squadron Commander was about to swap jocular small talk with the Lion’s captain when both men heard HMS Ajax’s quadruple 1.7-inch mounts angrily clatter back into life.

That was when they heard the sound of the two aircraft approaching.

Upper Bay, New York

Alex Fielding had flown over Bedford Island and on into New Jersey and circled south over Elizabethtown at about three thousand feet. He would have searched for somewhere to land but after what he had just witnessed in the bay an unfamiliar aircraft was liable to be shot at. Fortunately, he had plenty of fuel left in the tank so he could afford to stooge around and wait for things to settle down.

All the other times he had been in the air in the middle of a battle he had had the comfort of knowing he had a couple of machine guns mounted either on his kite’s nose or top wing; so, in the last few minutes he had felt positively naked.

He had no real sense of time passing; he was too busy scanning the skies around him and trying to piece together the insanity of the last few minutes.

That Bristol VI which hit the last battleship in line had looked an awful lot like one of the ones Magnus McIntyre and Paul Hopkins had been flying. And by the size of the fireball it must have been carrying spare cans of 87-octane or some kind of explosive charge onboard when it hit…

Oh shit!

That would explain why those comedians had taken such long take-off runs…

This just got worse!

Guess who signed their temporary Long Island Flying Certificates?

No, no, no he was letting is imagination get the better of his brain.

Every amateur flier in New England was snapping up Bristol Vs and VIs for a song as the CAF re-quipped with modern types; hardly any of the idiots who bought those kites knew how to fly the things. The lunatics crashing their rides into those ships did not even need to know how to land the damned things!

Although, the question of exactly what sort of a man would deliberately crash his kite, let alone deliberately crash it onto the deck of a battleship defied all reason.

You would have to be insane?

Wouldn’t you?

The big ships were alone in the Bay; all the small craft had scuttled for cover with their crews waving anything they could find that was remotely white as they got out of the firing line. From the amount of debris and fuel oil fouling the Upper Bay a lot of innocent people must have been caught in the cross fire. He noticed for the first time that the third battleship in the line had started leaking a new, thin slick of black bunker oil into the dirty grey waters downstream towards Hell’s Gate.

A pillar of black, grey-streaked smoke was billowing from the second battleship in line from somewhere amidships. The pall of smoke was drifting east across Red Hook. Periodically there were flashes, pinpricks of light through the increasing murk of the fog of war. That would be ammunition exploding, small stuff, nothing that was going to sink a ship like that.

Alex was about to point his aircraft south over Staten Island and begin a long, circular return to Jamaica Bay when he saw the other aircraft.

A Bristol VI.

Well, he did not so much see it as collide with it!

It almost flew straight into him!

He threw the stick to the right and for a moment looked the man at the controls of the other machine in the eye.

Rufus McIntyre…

Brooklyn Heights, Long Island

Colonel Matthew Harrison had had his driver take him up to a vantage point on Brooklyn Heights to join the crowds gawking at the big ships anchored in the main channel less than a couple of miles away. Even at that distance the four Lions looked damned big, utterly indestructible, the very foundations of the Empire.

The Governor of the Commonwealth of New England was going to give him a hard time about John Watson. It was not going to be enough to rely on the line that he was shot resisting arrest, those nincompoops had filled him so full of lead, front and back, that he was going to have to throw them all to the wolves.

Heck, that was the sort of thing criminals did to each other, not honest to God patriotic CSS Agents!

What was it they said about no plan surviving contact with the enemy?

Inevitably, when you designed an operation with as many moving parts as Empire Day it was to be expected that not everything would work out the way it was supposed to and that somewhere along the line somebody was going to have to be thrown under the train.

Nonetheless, he was still a little disappointed that Sarah had not been able to tie down the Sons of Liberty angle; even though that had always been a speculative exercise, just another level of insurance in case something went badly wrong elsewhere. A lot of people were going to want somebody to take the rap – and probably swing from a gibbet – in the coming months and it was going to be as hard as Hell to pin it on the real bad guys.

The real bad guys!

What was going on out there in the Upper Bay was effect not cause. The men in those speedboats and aircraft crashing into the symbols of Imperial dominion honestly believed that they were martyrs doing God’s sacred work.

Were they the bad guys?

What about the men whose negligence and complacency had brought the First Thirteen to their knees?

In any event, most of the men the papers and those smart-arsed college boys on TV would call the evildoers would soon be – if they were not already – dead out there in the fires and smoke blanketing much of the Upper Bay. They had fulfilled their role in the tragedy of the age; now it was for others to pick up the flag.

It was frustrating being able to see so little. The folks up on the top, road deck, of the Brooklyn-Manhattan bridge would have had the best view looking down to the south from two hundred feet above the East River. The head of the CSS had contemplated joining them up there, decided against it. He instinctively mistrusted hubris even when a plan had come together so perfectly.

Perfection, of course, was a relative thing.

He would have a better feel for the post-outrage situation when he learned who had lived and who had died. In the confusion fall guys as well as actors would have died or been taken prisoner and as with any conspiracy the key thing was for everybody to get their story straight at the outset.

That, and to make damned sure one had a cast of scapegoats and hapless victims who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Harrison hated loose ends; like for example, where in the name of Hades was the youngest Fielding boy? He had been promised he would be in the air over the bay today but the latest he had heard was that the kid had gone off up country with his little squaw!

That just was not natural!

There were good reasons why that sort of thing was illegal in the northern colonies!

It was bad enough the whole population along the South West border gradually turning a dusky shade of white. In a way that was understandable; the Border War had turned that whole region into a racial melting pot but nobody gave a damn about that because West Texas, the disputed Coahuila, Nuevo Mexico and Alta California borderlands were so far from anywhere remotely civilised that decent folk back in the First Thirteen colonies were not about to get offended. Up here in the North East people had standards. People had a right to expect dedicated public servants like him to defend their God-given beliefs and prerogatives, and when necessary to try his Christian conscience to its limit to ensure that God’s work continued to be done on the Commonwealth of New England. The rest of the Empire could go to Hell in a handcart if it wanted to depart from the path of the Lord; here in the heartland of the First Thirteen there would be no compromise, no surrender to the godless, libertarian excesses so common elsewhere in what ought to be for all time the White Empire.