Note: this chapter used the vaguely mentioned Weimar-esque Britain (leftist government backsliding into right-wing fanaticism) progression of events we're considering for Kaiser Lane, as previously touched on in Strange Bedfellows.

Besides, it is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness

before seeing what manner of man you may become

by developing your bodily strength

and beauty to their highest limit.

Valiant was tactically aware enough to be grateful for blimps, but that didn't mean she had to like them aesthetically. They had their moments – especially when they were doing the world a favor by taking submarines out of it – but they were just… ugh. Clumsy, formless sacks of gas that they occasionally dragged behind them on missions, like a fat slug on a string, the gondola hanging off it like some tick. (The gondola wasn't even a new design! It was a plane fuselage!)

That could be tolerated, but Valiant still found them distasteful. Where a warship was unshakeable, unrelenting steel, a blimp was linen, dope, and hot air. And yes, she knew blimps didn't actually use hot air, thank you!

Valiant disliked their bonier Germanic cousins, the Zeppelins, for rather obvious reasons. Baby-killers. Having them shot down was a good thing… even if some part of Valiant couldn't help but feel sick when she imagined an incendiary bullet hitting the gas bags. A simple bullet and a shell were incomparable when it came to size, but either could annihilate a ship if they struck true. The problem, of course, was that the Zeppelin's weak spot was several thousand cubic meters of oh-so-fragile balloon instead of a magazine buried behind armor.

There were a number of reasons why rigids were a bit of a dead end when it came to military use. Germany and Britain competed against each other to send their aircraft higher, Zeppelins and interceptors scrambling to reach the heights… which grew increasingly dangerous for the crew. Which sounded better: a brief plane flight up to the cold and thin air, or a Zeppelin flight? Add to that the obvious trade-off of bombs for height and the piss-poor performance of the Zeppelins when it came to actually hitting things…

(The German Gotha planes had the Zeppelins beat for damage in no time at all.)

Planes were becoming increasingly relevant in modern warfare; Valiant would know, considering that she played host to a few, but their lighter-than-air counterparts had been left high and dry. No pun intended. She would admit to feeling a bit of vindictive pleasure regarding that particular point; she was a proper piece of military hardware, not some strut-filled gasbag.

Still, Valiant wasn't so blind as to miss what airships meant to people, in the grander sense. Do you know what happened when the Count Zeppelin's LZ 4 crashed and burned? He made six million marks. Not due to some insurance scheme or anything like that, but because people were so enamored with the idea of the airship they were willing to foot the bill.

When an airship plowed through the air like some silvery fish in a boundless sea… it was unbelievable. Something Valiant's size moving through the skies, propelled by your engineers, designed by your nation's genius, made you feel like you were part of something tremendous, so great as to overthrow gravity itself.

In some sense, those early pencil-shaped balloons trundling through the air were Valiant's cousins, national pride made manifest in a marvel of engineering. They'd be show ponies instead of warhorses, but Valiant was content to let them strut their stuff in the air.

What she wasn't content with was wasting a perfectly good cube on one.

R101 was certainly an airship's shipgirl. She was a bit taller than Valiant, but it looked like she had been stretched horribly just to get to that point. The girl was thin as a wire and the remarkable volume of her clothes did absolutely nothing to hide it. Her hair was cut short – boyishly, aggressively short – as if that was another mass-saving measure the engineers were compelled to make.

"I'm pleased to meet you, Miss Valiant." A soft, delicate voice to go with soft, delicate hands.

"Charmed," Valiant smiled back. R101's ship was behind her; its tremendous silver bulk a perfect match for the hair. "I've heard excellent things about the promenade."

"London is spectacular from the air," R101 confirmed, "but I fear you'll have to settle for Cardington."

Cardington, home to something like half of Britain's airship industry. R101's sister, R100, was a Vickers girl at the other airship hub, Howden. Well, she wasn't a girl at all. R101 was the government's darling, so she got the cube.

Valiant wasn't sure what she'd see from the promenade that she couldn't see from a one-hundred-and-seventy-foot mooring tower, but she took R101's hand and let herself be hefted up into the entrance hatch. She felt the curve of the airship under her feet as they walked down a long hallway in white and gold. Valiant wondered if the wind was already starting to drag the airship some other way - she could rotate around the mooring as much as she… or rather, the weather pleased.

Eventually, they reached the belly of the ship, where the passengers would be spending most of their time. (Along with the lucky members of the crew who didn't have to work on the external engines.) A Titanic's worth of volume was all spent on keeping this segment floating in air.

She was… what, one hundred and fifty feet above ground now? A little less than before, but that was on a tower. Good, solid, trustworthy. Valiant gulped.

"We've quite the selection of foodstuffs," R101 said. "If you're not feeling well, perhaps the chef can…?"

"I'm fine, thank you." Valiant cut her off. "When is the photographer supposed to show up?"

"The end of lunch."

At the very least, they respected Valiant enough not to lodge a camera in her face as she ate. Still, she'd have to pay the piper eventually. (If only she was paying her share in sunny Australia right now… oh, or maybe India? If she could smooth talk her way into the viceregal palace…)

"There's the smoking room – you don't smoke though, I presume? – all lined with asbestos, and over here is the saloon."

When the food was brought out, Valiant was almost certain that it was a joke. Or rather, she thought it was a sign that R101 had heard some news of her nickname.

Her expression was innocent and there was no reason to think she'd be in the know, but… dressed crab from the Crab? Really?

"Is there anything objectionable about the food?" R101 asked.

"It's fine–" workable, at the very least, but Valiant struggled to find any food that satisfied her palate, "– but the window is disarming."

"It's a bit much at first, but you can build up a tolerance to it."

Valiant wouldn't be getting back on this thing if she could help it. Any sort of tolerance was lunacy. She remembered the first time she saw R101. You didn't notice anything wrong at first, a smear of silver in the distance, but as it grew… she realized it wasn't coming head-on.

R101 swept over Valiant and the rest of the shipgirls present for the display crabwise, facing the wind nearly head-on and just barely winning that fight. She puttered along overhead, fat and clumsy and sideways. It was just… with the cube request and the money burned for her and the mix of worry about being superseded and shock that anyone could think that airborne cow a match for a proper ship…

R101 was, to shipgirls, the Crab, the Gasbag, One-Oh-Spun, the Big Dope, Thomson's Hot Air, the Baron's Bi– ahem. Supposedly, she was the empire's future. She'd turn months of travel for imperial conferences into days, so the various governors could be harangued by the British government more frequently. (Maybe they'd even be bullied about the budgetary concerns the airship sisters and their terribly expensive moorings had caused. It was an imperial project, after all.)

She could, in theory, make the India trip a mere five days, hopping over the Mediterranean with a quick stop in Ismailia on the Suez. In practice, the route would almost certainly be longer, considering France and Italy. No one wanted the Syndicalists getting cheeky with an airship filled with government men.

Speaking of… "I heard you played host to the MPs. How was that?" Of course she got opportunities like that tossed into her lap.

R101 sighed. "Mortifying."

"Politicians are very simple animals," Valiant said, "you just need to know how to play them."

"My concern was that they'd all end up dead." R101 intoned.

"Pardon?"

"I was three and half tons short of lift for the flight. We dumped fuel and ballast, threw out emergency rations, dumped the chutes."

Good God. How… how?

"If the wind wasn't fifty miles per hour, we might have had to fly them. Can you imagine?" R101 shook her head. "At least Guy Fawkes was trying to do it on purpose."

"But… what about DELAG?" They were running a tight ship.

"What about DELAG?" R101 asked. "The Germans won't hand over their experts if we ask nicely."

R101 was the fruit of British ingenuity… and lessons learned from those few German airships that crashed in Britain or France without being immolated in the process. The Graf Zeppelin (airship) was doing milk runs to Saigon with the best airship team in the world while R101 sputtered.

(And even Valiant's press visit was just copying from the German book. Württemburg had been photographed with Eckener, the new head of the Zeppelin company, and she was on the famed Riga-Rhine flight that inaugurated the Zeppelin's peacetime use. Maybe that was some inspiration for the imperial airship scheme…)

"You mean to tell me this whole thing is a pipe dream?"

"Just about." R101 shrugged. "They're going to cut right through me and stick another gasbag in too. I don't have the lift for India."

"You don't– but that was the whole point!" How could you tie the empire together if you couldn't even reach her crown jewel?

"It was."

Valiant let her head rest in her hands. "I need a drink." Technically, the Admiralty didn't want her drinking, but that hadn't stopped her after Texel.

She heard R101 riffling about for a second. "Here." Valiant looked up to find a flask held in front of her face.

"... What the hell do you think you're doing?" Valiant snapped. "Are you crazy? You could be their last chance at survival, you – you sot!"

"I'm not the sot. Scott is."

"Your… captain?"

"I wish it was that simple," R101 groused. "He's not my captain, Irwin is. Scott is something like… an admiral in his flagship. A sozzled, busybody admiral the captain can technically disobey."

Valiant sighed. "And how does more booze help?"

"Scott likes taking over our moorings. If he was drunk enough to fall unconscious, we'd probably save an hour every time." R101 leaned back in her – perilously light, like everything in this damned ship – seat and smiled. "And there's the press."

They took several photographs, including a few in front of the promenade windows. (Cellon, not glass. It was all about weight-saving.) Valiant managed to plaster on a fake smile as they carefully refrained from leaning against paper-thin sheets of cut wood and doped fabric. Gold inlay and paint did something to hide the terrible flimsiness of it all…

Maybe they picked Valiant for appearance reasons. She was one of the few ships shorter than R101 and they needed to do everything they possibly could to give her the appearance of substance. Valiant would be having words if some idiot was trying to aggrandize his project by making her look small… but it seemed like he had already measured out a portion of rope to hang himself with.

The political consequences played themselves out in her head. A project to unify the empire falling apart and costing all parties involved a pretty penny, including the Dominions… In attempting to tighten the reins, would they only snap? No, it was only an airship. (Only a nationalist dream, ill-advised and expensive and more trouble than it was worth.)

Still, if R101 went down in flames – bad metaphor, bad metaphor – then the blowback would hit the Labor government. Not necessarily a bad thing, Valiant thought, but it would came with a catastrophic loss of face for Britain as a whole, another piece of evidence that their star was fading and their grip on the colonies loosening. Already, R101 had been mocked in parliament as a waste of money.

And where would that leave her? R101, pale and meager, almost ghostly? Maybe the next stiff breeze would pick her up and blow her away. Press-ganging into the navy was a pretty obvious choice for a shipgirl, but maybe she could find some other way (or some other person) to support her.

A seven hundred thousand pound trophy wife, not counting the cost of research, mooring masts, or the monster sheds she had been built in.

Speaking of, they dipped outside quickly to take photographs on the mooring mast, journalists jostling to catch R101's nose, the sheds, and the little town that had sprung to life around her. They'd certainly want her to succeed, wouldn't they?

Valiant would have been content with being aboard R101 just the one time, but R101 managed to talk (read: flatter) her inside, so they could have a bit of a heart-to-heart.

That heart-to-heart took place underneath the real heart of the ship, on the other side of the crew cabins hidden away under the passenger's. A hatch led to a proper gangway, something a bit more familiar to Valiant than the carefully presented entrance pathway she had walked earlier. No carpet in Cambridge blue, no trickery to give paper-thin walls the illusion of depth; there was simply canvas and metal beneath her and the bulging bags above.

Ten stories of gasbag. Ten stories. That was half the length of a destroyer, end to end, but it was something like ten meters more than Valiant's own beam. It was tremendous, and they came in numbers, stacked in a row like cheese wheels fit for a giant. All that bulk and they'd need six of her, fully loaded, to equal little Zubian. She was less than half a percent of Valiant's displacement.

"It's… certainly a sight," Valiant said, trying to prevent something that felt suspiciously like awe from showing. "What are they made of?"

"Goldbeater's skin," R101 murmured.

"Goldbeater's…?"

"Cow intestine," R101 said. "From what I heard, the Germans banned the use of cow ceca for wrapping sausage during the war. It was too useful to end up in stomachs."

Coming back on board didn't feel like such a good idea now. Her life was dependent on acres of sausage casing? Get the matter over with quickly, at least: "What did you want to speak about?"

R101 sighed. "You can tell when something's wrong with your ship, right?"

"I can, but my crew usually handle it." She or the officers made them handle it.

"How do you feel it?"

"Like an ache or a pain, I suppose. Nothing intolerable–" her mind swam like a fish during Texel, any respite from the physical agony letting her plunge into indescribable emotional pain, something the gasbag would never understand, "–but unpleasant. Still, your crew should fix it even if you're not in pain."

"What if it isn't tolerable?"

"You order someone to fix it… and then you bite your lip and wait." You made sure things were in working order, and then you did you duty. That was how it had to be. Valiant couldn't afford to be anything less than composed.

"And what if they won't fix it?"

"Tell them they're fools. You're worth too much to neglect." The cost of a handful of destroyers was nothing to sneeze at, even in Britain. Especially not in modern Britain.

"I'm worth far too much, I figure. Every fix is red ink, every study a setback before I'm useful. Who even knows if I'll ever reach profitable."

Profitable. Was that the highest point she could ever reach? Well, Valiant supposed she could, possibly, become a Graf Zeppelin. A globe trotter, a visitor to places strange and foreign, a great piece of Britain floating in the sky. The crowds could cheer, there could be ticker tape parades in New York.

"I wish I could be like you, Valiant," R101 said.

… At the end of the day, would Valiant still say that R101 was a waste of a cube? Yes. The cube would have done better if it was used on a warship, plain and simple. But it was also easy to find the poor girl's position pitiable.

Valiant pitied the poor girls who lost their ships and became bulins, but at least they could latch onto someone else useful. But being attached to dead weight? A catastrophe of a ship? Trying to make something out of a shambles?

But for the grace of God, huh? (Wasn't that a terrifying thought.)

The book that inspired this chapter, "His Majesty's Airship", is a lot shorter than Dreadnought lol. (Starting Castles of Steel next.) Still, the story of R101 is riveting and horrifying in a sort of rubbernecking way.

This may be S.C. Gwynne taking it a bit far with the dramatization but the idea of this stupid project coming about because Baron Thomson wanted to impress a Romanian baddie is just hysterical in a tragic way. He was apparently rather buddy-buddy with Prime Minister MacDonald

R101: "Valiant, I was born with glass bones and paper skin…"

I suppose the theme here is Valiant's gladness about being useful, in some sense, contrasted with an increasing sense of vanity. Germany's just better with airships, the scheme can't really tie the empire together, in all likelihood it'll just blow up in their faces. I was considering inserting more explicit comparisons about the holes Valiant and R101 were burning in the government's pockets, but eh. Valiant has the advantage of being part of the defense budget, so she'd probably be super pissed if a government with military budget cutting in mind turned its gaze to her.

Cubing R101 is explicitly supposed to be a somewhat stupid, largely politically motivated move to further buff up the reputation of the imperial airship scheme, itself a somewhat vain attempt to tie the empire together that will only get more absurd as Britain swings right and begins to alienate her Dominions.