Ring of Fire II

by Eric Flint

Other than that . . .

  What a mess. He'd tried to get the up-timers to repack the wagon with the goods they were leaving behind, so that if someone should happen to come across it they might assume the owners had just gone off to get assistance. If so, they'd either go about their business or—better still—they'd plunder the unguarded wagon. In the latter eventuality, of course, they'd hardly bring the attention of the authorities to their own thievery.

  But, no. Careless in this as in seemingly all things, the up-timers had simply strewn the goods about. Anyone who came across it now would assume that foul play had transpired.

  Nothing for it, though. Sighing, he started to put the eyeglass away. Then, catching a glimpse of motion in the corner of his eye, looked back again.

  Two horsemen were approaching the wagon. Not locals, either, since each of them was leading a pack horse.

  He brought the glass back up. But even before he looked through it, he could see the flashing gleams coming from one of the riders. That had to be armor, reflecting the sun.

  "What the hell are you doing?" asked Noelle.

  Eddie shook his head and finished untying the cuirass from his pack horse. "You said it yourself, remember? 'That's got to be them!' Very excited, you were."

  He started putting on the cuirass. "Do us both a favor and hand me the helmet."

  When she just kept staring at him, Eddie looked up at her. "Think, Noelle. These are 'villains,' remember? Not likely to surrender simply because we yell 'stop, thief!' "

  She stared back in the direction they'd spotted the wagon. Then, put her hand on the pistol holstered to her hip. "I thought . . ."

  "Have to do everything myself," Eddie grumbled. Now that he'd gotten on the cuirass, he took the helmet from the pack. "I remind you of two things. First, you can't shoot straight. Second, while I can—"

  He finished strapping the helmet on and started clambering back onto his horse. An awkward business, that was, wearing the damn cuirass. Eddie was trained in the use of arms and armor, but only to the extent that the son of a wealthy merchant would be. He was no experienced cavalryman.

  "While I can," he continued, now drawing the rifle from its saddle holster, "you will perhaps recall that due to Carol Unruh's penny-pinching, the only up-time weapon I was allotted was this pitiful thing."

  Noelle studied the rifle. "It's a perfectly good Winchester lever action rifle." A bit righteously: "Model 94. They say it's a classic."

  "A 'classic,' indeed." Eddie chuckled. "The gun was manufactured almost half a century before the Ring of Fire. Still, I'll allow that it's a sturdy weapon. But it's only a .30-30, it has no more than six cartridges in the magazine, and while—unlike you—I can hit something at a respectable range, I'm hardly what you'd call a Wild Bill Hitchcock."

  "Hickok," she corrected. "Hitchcock was the guy who made the movies." She looked back in the direction of the wagon. There still didn't seem to be anyone moving about, over there. "You really think . . ."

  He shrugged, planting the butt of the rifle on his hip and taking up the reins. "I have no idea how they will react. What I do know is that if they see a man in armor demanding that they cease and desist all nefarious activity, they are perhaps a bit more likely to do so. I'd just as soon avoid another gunfight at the Okie Corral, if we can.

  " 'OK,' she corrected. 'Okies' are sorta like hillbillies."

  "And will you desist the language lesson?" he grumbled. "Now. Shall we about be it?"

  Noelle hesitated, for a moment. She considered riding back to Hof and trying—

  No, that was pointless. When they'd arrived in Hof early this morning, the garrison had still been asleep. Sleeping off a hangover, to be precise. All except the corporal in charge, who'd still been drinking. They'd be as useless as tits on a bull for hours, yet—and the traitors were almost into the Fichtelgebirge. Noelle was pretty sure there was no way she and Eddie would be able to get the garrison to go into the forest. That meant trying to get help from the soldiers at Saalfeld, and that was at least thirty miles away. By the time they got there, convinced the garrison commander to muster his unit, and got back, at least two days would have passed. More likely three, unless the garrison commander at Saalfeld was a lot more energetic and efficient than most such.

  Two days, maybe three. Given that much lead time, it was unlikely they'd ever find the defectors. The Fichtelgebirge and the Bohemian Forest it was part of wasn't a tall range of mountains, but it was heavily wooded. Mostly evergreens, too, so they wouldn't get any advantage from the trees having shed their leaves. Assuming the man in charge, whoever he was, knew what he was doing—and there was no evidence so far that he didn't—he'd almost certainly be able to shake off their pursuit. There was enough commercial and personal traffic back and forth across the forest between Bohemia and Franconia that there would be a network of small roads—well, more like trails, really, but well-handled wagons could make their way through them. After the passage of two or three days, especially if the weather turned bad, it was unlikely they could figure out which specific route the defectors had taken.

  "It's now or never, I guess." She started her horse into the meadow. "I'll do the talking. You just look fierce and militaristic and really mean and not too smart. The kind of guy who shoots first and lets God sort out the bodies, and doesn't much care if He gets it right or not."

  "There!" hollered Denise, pointing across Lannie's chest out of the window on his side of the plane. "It's them!"

  He looked over and spotted the wagon immediately. "Yup. Gotta be. Keenan, you get ready to unload when I tell you."

  "Both bombs?"

  "Better save one in case we miss the first time."

  Denise wondered if they actually had the legal right to bomb somebody, without even giving them a warning. No way to shout "stop, thief!" of course, from an airplane doing better than a hundred miles an hour.

  "Why don't we just call in their position on the radio?" she asked. "That way . . . you know. We could ask somebody up top how they want us to handle it."

  "Well," said Lannie.

  Behind her, Keenan cleared his throat. "The radio don't exactly work. Bob took some of the parts out of it so's we could—"

  "Never mind," she said, exasperated more with herself than anyone else. She should have known better than to get into the plane without double-checking that all the details were up to snuff.

  She'd once hitched a ride with Keenan Murphy into Fairmont, just a few weeks before the Ring of Fire. First, the tire had gone flat. Then, after borrowing a jack from a helpful driver passing by, which Keenan needed to borrow because he'd somehow or other lost his own jack, he discovered the spare was flat. Then, after the still-helpful passerby drove him to a nearby gas station where he could get the tire fixed, they'd continued the drive to Fairmont until he ran out of gas. Turned out the fuel gauge didn't work and Keenan had lost track of the last time he'd filled up the tank. She'd wound up walking the last three miles into town.

  As for Lannie—

  But there was no point in sour ruminations. Besides, what the hell. She had expansive opinions on the subject of "citizen's arrest." Why should the lousy cops get special privileges? If she'd heard her dad say it once, she'd heard him say it a million times.

  "Now," commanded Janos. While Gage and Gardiner got off the wagons and untied their horses, he looked down from the saddle at the up-timers gawking up at him.

  "Wait here," he said curtly.

  "I got a gun!" protested Jay Barlow. As if that needed to be proven, he drew it from the holster at his hip. "Way better than that ancient piece of shit you're carrying, too."

  Janos looked at the weapon Barlow was brandishing. It was what the up-timers referred to as a "six-shooter," a type of revolver, which the man had drawn from one of those holsters Janos had seen in the so-called "western movies." The ones slung low, for the "quick draw," tied down to the thigh.

  Naturally, it was pearl-handled.

  With his soldier's interest in
weaponry, Janos had made inquiries during his weeks in Grantville. The man named Paul Santee had been particularly helpful on the subject of up-time firearms. On one occasion, when Janos had asked about "six-shooters," Santee had explained the careful distinctions to be made between serious revolvers and the sort of "Wild West bullshit pieces" that some of the town's more histrionic characters favored.

  As for the wheellock Janos carried—he had two of them, actually, one in each saddle holster—the weapons were quite good and he was quite good with them.

  "Wait here," he repeated firmly. The last thing he wanted was someone like Barlow involved. Janos still hoped the problem could be handled without violence. Barlow was the sort of man who would lose control in a confrontation—and then miss what he shot at.

  Gage and Gardiner were ready. Both of them, from their long stay in Grantville, with up-time firearms. The weapons called "pump-action shotguns," which were much favored by soldiers. They'd be loaded with solid slugs, not pellets.

  "Let's go," he said.

  "Abandoned," Eddie pronounced. Given the broken axle and the goods strewn around the wagon, Noelle thought that as redundant a statement as she'd ever heard.

  She didn't tease Eddie about it, though. She knew he'd really said it just to steel himself for the inevitable. They'd have to continue the pursuit into the forest.

  Feeling more than a little nervous, she studied the terrain ahead of them. The Fichtelgebirge was not only a low range of mountains, it was an old one. Erosion had worn its peaks down to round forms, with not much rock showing. As a barrier to travel it wasn't remotely comparable to the Rocky Mountains, much less the Sierra Nevadas. It was more like the sort of terrain in most of Appalachia that Indians and early white settlers had never had too much trouble passing through.

  But as ambush country, it did just fine, thank you.

  Hearing a familiar and quite unexpected sound, she twisted in her saddle and looked up behind her.

  Eddie had already spotted it. "Look!" he shouted, pointing toward the oncoming aircraft. "The Air Force has arrived!"

  Her sense of relief was brief. She couldn't really see what good a warplane would be in the situation. There couldn't be more than one plane available. In fact, she'd thought the air force had all of their few craft stationed in Magdeburg or points north. Jesse Wood must have detached one of them to Grantville when he got news of the defection.

  One plane would be almost useless trying to spot a small party in the forest, and even if it did spot the defectors it couldn't maintain the patrol for very long before it had to go back to refuel. By the time it returned, they'd have vanished again.

  As the plane got closer, what little sense of relief remained went away altogether.

  "That's not a warplane," she said. "It's got to be one of the Kelly's."

  Eddie squinted at the oncoming aircraft. "You are sure? I didn't think any of theirs were operational yet."

  Noelle shook her head. "Define 'operational.' Nobody ever said Bob Kelly didn't know how to build airplanes. The problem is he doesn't know when to quit. At any given time, he's got at least one plane able to fly—until he starts tinkering with it again."

  The aircraft was heading straight for them, no longer more than a hundred yards off the ground. By now it was quite close enough to recognize the details of its construction. The USE's air force had a grand total of two—count 'em, two—models of aircraft. The Belles and the Gustavs. Even someone like Noelle, who'd never been able to distinguish one model of automobile from another unless she could see the logo or it was something obvious like a VW bug, could tell the difference between either one of them and the oncoming plane.

  "No, it's one of the Kelly's. Couldn't tell you which model, except it'll have a name like 'Fearless' or 'Invincible' or something equally bombastic, but it's one of theirs."

  Eddie was still squinting at it. "You're positive?"

  "Yes, I'm posi—"

  "The reason I ask," he interrupted, pointing his finger at the plane, "is because it's carrying bombs."

  "Huh?" Noelle squinted herself. Her eyesight wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as Eddie's. Still, now that she looked for it—the plane was close, and coming pretty fast—she could see two objects suspended underneath the fuselage.

  Those did look like bombs, sure enough.

  And now that she thought about it, the oncoming plane's trajectory . . .

  "Let's get out of here!" she yelled. "They're going to bomb us!"

  Chapter 9. The Bomb

  "Bombs away!" shouted Lannie. Way too soon, in Denise's judgment.

  Fortunately, Keenan objected. "Hey, make up your mind! You said only one—"

  "Drop it!" Denise hollered, when she gauged the time was right. Lannie might have buck fever, but she didn't. Not with Buster for a dad, teaching her to hunt.

  "It's off!" said Keenan.

  By now, the plane had swept by, over the wagon and the two enemy cavalrymen guarding it.

  Well, one cavalryman, anyway. The other one might have been a civilian. They'd been moving too fast for Denise to get a good look at them.

  Lannie brought the plane around. As soon as they could see the effect of the bomb, he shouted gleefully. "Yeeee-haaaaa! Dead nuts, guys!"

  Sure enough, the wagon had been hit by the bomb. If not directly, close enough. Denise wasn't sure, from the quick glimpse she'd gotten as they went over it, but she thought the wagon had already been busted. It had seemed to be tilted over to one side, as if a wheel or an axle had broken, and she thought some of its cargo was on the ground.

  Now, though, it was in pieces. And something was burning.

  One of the cavalrymen was down, too. His horse was thrashing on the ground, and the rider was lying nearby. Dead, wounded, unconscious, it was impossible to tell. The other cavalryman—well, maybe cavalryman—was dismounting to tend to his partner.

  Denise frowned. There was something about the way that second cavalryman moved. . . .

  "Fly back around," she commanded.

  Keenan, even from his poor vantage point in the cramped bombadier's seat in the back, with its little windows, had been able to see the results too. "Jeez, Denise. I don't know as we gotta be bloodthirsty about this."

  "Fly back around!" she snapped. "I just want to get a better look. And slow down, Lannie."

  "Don't want to stall it out," he warned.

  "Yeah, fine. So don't stall it out. Slow down and get lower."

  "Backseat driver," he muttered. But he did as commanded.

  "Wait," said Janos, holding out a hand. They were now sheltered beneath a large tree, not more than two hundred yards from what was left of the wagon. As soon as Janos had spotted the plane, he'd led them under the branches. Hopefully, they'd be out of sight.

  "What a piece of luck," said Gage. "They bombed their own people."

  Janos wasn't surprised, really. He knew from experience how easy it was for soldiers to kill and wound their own, in combat. In some battles, in bad weather or rough terrain, as many as a third of the casualties were caused by the soldiers' own comrades.

  He'd never thought about it before, but he could see where that danger would be even worse with aircraft involved. At the speed and height it had maintained when it carried out the attack, the plane's operators couldn't have seen any details of their "enemy."

  "What should we do?" asked Gardiner.

  "Wait," Janos repeated. "The plane is coming back around. It we move out from under the tree, they might spot us."

  That was the obvious reason not to move, and he left it at that. Still more, he wanted to see what would happen next.

  Gardiner put up a mild objection. "That bomb was loud, when it went off. The garrison might come to investigate."

  His tone was doubtful, though. Janos thought there was hardly any chance the explosion would alert the soldiers at Hof. Hof was miles away and while the sound might have carried the distance, it would have been indistinct. Thunder, perhaps. Of course, if the USE warp
lane kept dropping bombs, the situation would probably change. People would investigate an ongoing disturbance, where they would usually shrug off a single instance.

  But Janos knew the plane couldn't be carrying very many bombs. By now, months after the Baltic War, Austria had very good intelligence on the capabilities of the up-time aircraft, and Janos had read all of the reports. Even the best of the enemy's warplanes, the one they called the "Gustav," was severely limited in its ordnance.

  And this was no Gustav. Janos had seen one of them, on the ground at the Grantville airfield. Nor was it one of the other type of warplane, the one they called the "Belle." He'd seen those on several occasions, both on the ground and in the air.