Ring of Fire III

by Eric Flint

  * * *

  There was only one incident along the way. As they came around a corner, they found a couple of soldiers breaking into a shop. One of them was smashing in the window with the butt of his musket while his companion watched.

  As was more often the case than not with seventeenth-century soldiers, neither of them was wearing a uniform. So Rita had no way of knowing offhand which side they were on. But she figured the act of vandalism and presumed looting was a good enough indication and she didn’t dare hesitate for long.

  Remembering the wild misses in the earlier gunfight, though, she controlled herself enough to aim carefully before she fired. The man she aimed at was the one watching, not the one smashing the window, since she figured he was the one who’d be able to react more quickly. He was standing perhaps thirty feet away and not looking anywhere near her. She took a breath, aimed, and squeezed the trigger.

  He went down as if he’d been hit by a truck. At close enough range where marksmanship wasn’t a big issue, it was hard to beat slugs fired out of a 12 gauge. They had all the stopping power of heavy caliber seventeenth-century muskets but without the slow rate of fire.

  In a hurry, but doing her best not to move frantically, Rita pumped in another round and aimed again. Luckily, the remaining soldier was either dim-witted or—quite likely—too drunk to react quickly. He wasn’t even looking at her. He was staring down at his companion, who was now sprawled against the wall of the building.

  She fired. And...almost missed, even at that range. Her shot did strike the soldier’s musket, however. The bullet not only knocked the weapon out of his hand but some sort of ricochet struck him in the face. From the minimal damage done, it was probably a small piece of the firing mechanism or possibly just a splinter from the stock.

  But the soldier was startled enough to clasp his face with his hands rather than deal with her. She jacked in another round. Not trusting her reactions—she had to be practically afloat in adrenaline—she strode forward a few steps, almost running, until she was no more than six feet away from him.

  The soldier’s hands came down from a bloody face. His mouth was wide open as he stared at her. She fired. At his chest, and this time the bullet struck where she wanted it to. The soldier was knocked off his feet and back into the window he’d been smashing, taking what was left of the glass mostly with him.

  Rita did her best to blank out the horror from her mind as she reloaded. She’d never killed anyone before tonight, and now she’d killed no fewer than four men. She’d never even been in a gunfight, for that matter, except for the escape from the Tower of London. But she hadn’t been directly involved in the fighting there.

  Maydene came up to her. “You all right?” she asked softly.

  Rita nodded. “Right enough.” She’d probably have some bad reactions later, but there was no time to worry about that now.

  The shotgun reloaded, she set off again. “Let’s go, folks.”

  Chapter 3

  Hearing another burst of gunfire, Stefano Franchetti was distracted from his work with the airship’s burners. Nervously, he glanced in the direction the gunfire was coming from. Insofar as he could determine the direction, at least, which he couldn’t with any precision. There was a three-quarter moon in the sky, but he still couldn’t see very far. A line of trees at the edge of the clearing where they’d set up the airship station impeded his view of Ingolstadt.

  The State of Thuringia-Franconia had leased one of the blimps built by Estuban Miro in order to carry out a thorough survey of Thuringia, Franconia and the Oberpfalz. They’d wanted Filippo Franchetti for a pilot, but since he was Miro’s foreman he’d declined and offered his nephew Stefano in his stead. As it was, Miro was simply breaking even on the operation. The rates he normally charged were far higher than the SoTF would have been willing to pay. He’d cut them drastically in the interests of maintaining good relations with the authorities.

  The man placed in charge of the project was Hank Siers, an independent engineer who’d been trained as a surveyor. Three young women who’d recently graduated from the geological survey program connected to the SoTF’s State Technical College in Grantville had also come along. Those were Dina Merrifield, Bonnie Weaver and Amanda Boyd.

  Stefano heard more gunfire, accompanied by the sound of at least one cannon firing.

  Where were Hank Siers and the girls?

  No, young women, he reminded himself. American females had odd quirks, one of them being that the older women liked to be called girls and the young ones resented it.

  As always with up-timers, there were exceptions to this rule as there seemed to be to all rules concerning them. They were the most perverse people in existence. It was worth your very life, he’d been told, to refer to the famous Melissa Mailey as a “girl” in her presence. He’d also been told—was there any coherence to American customs?—that the young up-time women who were most famous for their free-spirited ways like the equally well-known Julie Sims and the rapidly-gaining-notoriety Denise Beasley, apparently had no objection at all to being called girls.

  The four Americans had left the airship station that morning to obtain some supplies in Ingolstadt. They’d been planning to spend the night inside the city at one of the inns. They needed fuel, mostly, but they’d also wanted food. The girls—no, women—had quickly grown tired of the staples that Hank Siers had insisted on bringing. So had Stefano. Siers’ idea of suitable provender for a geological survey consisted of crackers, dried meat and vegetables which had been subjected to some sort of “preserving” process that didn’t bear close examination.

  Why? Stefano didn’t know for sure, but from idle remarks dropped by Siers it seemed the American thought that an airship survey of Franconia and the Oberpfalz was somehow similar to an expedition to the Arctic. As if Stefano couldn’t land the ship almost any time they wanted at any one of the hundreds of well-provendered towns and villages that dotted the German countryside!

  Stefano would have ascribed Siers’ eccentricities to his advanced age, except that the American engineer wasn’t more than forty years old. Bonnie Weaver had told him, a bit sarcastically—well, more than a bit—that Siers was hopelessly addicted to romantic adventure twaddle.

  “I’ve been to his house a few times,” she’d told him, “since he likes to hold seminars around his kitchen table. Says it’s quieter than the school, which is true enough. Practically every square foot of wall space is covered with bookshelves. At least a third of them hold books about exploration. It drives his girlfriend Mina David nuts.”

  The thought of Bonnie Weaver provided some distraction from his current anxieties, but only at the cost of raising new ones. It was bad enough for any young man to find himself caught between two girls—no, women—even if neither of them was an up-timer. When both of them were American, the situation was one which Hank Siers liked to call “fraught with peril.”

  The engineer was fond of such florid phrases. Bonnie said that if he wrote anything besides dry survey reports Siers would redefine the expression “purple prose.” After she’d explained the term, Stefano had had his doubts. So far as he could tell—keeping in mind that his education was fairly good but mostly informal and oriented toward practical matters—his seventeenth century was the era which had more or less defined purple prose to begin with.

  Bonnie ought to know that, too. She belonged to the Baptist church, an up-time sect that she claimed already existed in this world but which Stefano had never heard of until he encountered Americans. Apparently, in this day and age it was still confined to England.

  Somewhat against his will—it might be better to say, against his spiritual will but in accordance with his interest in things of the flesh—he had once attended a Baptist sermon with Bonnie, at her invitation.

  Purple prose, indeed. Thankfully, his own Catholic church mostly used Latin for such purposes. Latin was a language which Stefano could read, with some difficulty, but the difficulty was enough that he could i
gnore whatever the priest was saying unless he really wanted to pay attention.

  Which he usually didn’t. Had anyone questioned him on the subject, Stefano would have insisted he was a pious Catholic. But, in truth, he didn’t think much about religious matters.

  In that regard, he was closer to the Baptist woman than he was to Mary Tanner Barancek. Bonnie Weaver’s attitude toward religion seemed quite relaxed. Mary, on the other hand, while she shared Stefano’s own Catholic faith—the odd up-time version of it, anyway—was far more devout than he was. She’d told him that she’d even considered becoming a nun on several occasions.

  She hadn’t explained her decision not to take that course, but Stefano was pretty sure it was because Mary would have had difficulty adhering to the demands of chastity, and had enough sense to know it. The girl—young woman—was...attracted to men. And the reverse was certainly true.

  Best to leave it at that, he thought. Stefano was already on perilous ground without adding to the risks by thinking about it.

  Another burst of gunfire came from Ingolstadt. Where were the Americans? Stefano’s concern was for himself as well as for them. He couldn’t get the airship ready to fly on his own. They’d deflated the balloon after they arrived in Ingolstadt, as they normally did when they were stopping somewhere for any significant stretch of time. The sheer mass involved in getting the balloon reinflated was just too much for one person to handle in any reasonable amount of time.

  For that matter, even if he could get the blimp aloft on his own he couldn’t really handle it safely. The airship was designed to be flown by a minimum of two people, and a crew of three was better.

  Where were they?

  * * *

  Hank Siers was lying next to a pile of rubble, from which his companions had just pulled him out. The building he’d taken shelter behind had been collapsed by an exploding cannon shell. His leg was broken and he was unconscious, but he was still alive and otherwise unhurt, so far as Bonnie Weaver could tell.

  Of course, that assessment was based on nothing more substantial than a two-week class in first aid that Bonnie had taken a couple of years earlier. For all she knew, Hank was bleeding internally, had all sorts of internal damage, and was even now exhibiting plain and unmistakable symptoms of said injuries that she was too ignorant to recognize.

  “How is he?” asked Dina Merrifield. She and Bonnie were the same age, had grown up together, and had been in the same classes in school. In short, they knew each other as well as people in a small town do who are acquaintances rather than friends—but very closely acquainted. Closely enough that Bonnie didn’t see any point in pretending to know more than she did.

  “I don’t really know, Dina, to be honest. I’m sure his leg’s broken, although—thank God—it’s not a compound fracture. He probably has a concussion, too.”

  Amanda Boyd came around the corner of the building—what was left of it, rather. She’d gone to see if there were any signs that enemy soldiers were moving around in the area.

  “I can’t see anybody, except a couple of women hurrying to get into a building. So far as I can tell, the fighting is still at least a quarter of a mile away.”

  That wasn’t really much comfort. A man could walk a quarter of a mile in five minutes. But soldiers in combat wouldn’t move that quickly, Bonnie told herself, unless they had specific reasons to know that a target was nearby.

  Still, she didn’t think they had more than half an hour of safety. That gave them barely enough time to get out of the town and reach the airship, with a wounded and unconscious man to carry.

  Hank was no lightweight, either. It would take all three of them to carry him, even if they could jury-rig some sort of stretcher.

  The thought of a stretcher concentrated her mind and helped her to control the incipient panic. One thing at a time. We need something to make a stretcher from.

  As it turned out, Dina had been thinking along the same lines. “There was a wheelbarrow back there, where they were doing construction. And some wood we could make a splint from.”

  “Fitting a man as big as Siers into a wheelbarrow isn’t going to be easy,” Bonnie said dubiously.

  Amanda shrugged. “I saw a picture once of something like twelve guys who crammed themselves into a VW. And I don’t see where we’ve got an alternative, Bonnie, unless we just leave him here. Ain’t no way we’re gonna carry this fat asshole.”

  Amanda didn’t get along well with Siers. Partly that was because of her age—she was two years younger than Bonnie and Dina, just shy of twenty—and partly it was because Amanda was edgy and didn’t get along with a lot of people. Being fair, although Bonnie herself wouldn’t go so far as to call Hank an asshole, he certainly wasn’t one of her favorite people, either. He was a fussy and overbearing boss, just for starters.

  Dina straightened up. “She’s right. I’ll go get it.”

  * * *

  She was back in less than five minutes. It took them at least that long to fit a splint onto the surveyor’s leg. Bonnie, who did the work of setting the broken bone, could only hope she’d done it right. If she hadn’t, Hank would probably walk with a limp for the rest of his life. But she was beginning to fear that might be the least of his problems. Hank was still unconscious. Not even the pain of having a broken bone reset had aroused him. She didn’t think that was normal, even for a man who’d been knocked out and almost certainly had a concussion.

  Then, it took another two or three minutes to get Hank into the wheelbarrow and positioned in such a way that he wouldn’t fall out—entirely, anyway; at least a third of him wasn’t actually in the wheelbarrow—and enough of his weight was distributed properly so that they could pick up the handles.

  At that, it would take two of them, one on each handle, to move him. The third woman would rotate so they’d each get some rest.

  They’d need it, too. Bonnie didn’t know exactly how much Hank weighed. She’d have said two hundred pounds or so. Now, straining at one of the handles as they trundled toward the gate that led out of the town in the direction of the airfield, she revised her estimate upward.

  “Like. I. Said.” Amanda was on the other handle while Dina led the way ahead of them. “Fat. Asshole.”

  Chapter 4

  As he got close to the barracks, Tom was relieved to find that his artillery unit was apparently still intact and, judging from the noise, fighting back with considerable spirit. The unit was officially a company—a “battery,” in the artillery’s parlance—but it was way oversized because the men assigned to Ingolstadt’s defensive guns had been incorporated into it. Instead of two hundred men, Tom had almost four hundred under his command. That was more than a third of the total strength of the Danube Regiment.

  Not all of them would have been at the barracks when the fighting broke out. But he probably still had close to three hundred soldiers available in his artillery unit, and he’d picked up a couple of infantry companies on his way to the barracks. The companies belonged to the 2nd Battalion, whose commanding officer had been murdered in his sleep also. The two captains in charge of them had no idea where the rest of the battalion was, nor what had happened to the 1st Battalion.

  Tom didn’t know the answer to that question either. But he was pretty sure the 1st Battalion had defected to the Bavarians. That would explain how the enemy had managed to pour into Ingolstadt the way they had. Units from that battalion had been in charge of several of the city’s gates. They would have let in assassination teams first, to target the regiment’s still-loyal officers, and then opened the gates for the Bavarian forces who were camped nearby.

  Tom and Colonel Engels had both been worried about the reliability of the soldiers in that battalion, but there hadn’t been much they could do about it given the political situation. Reliable units in the regular army—meaning volunteers, in this context, not mercenaries—were now mostly in Poland or Bohemia. And with a new prime minister, the few such units which were still stationed in the USE itse
lf were not likely to be assigned to the Danube Regiment.

  The officers and enlisted men in the 1st Battalion were Italian mercenaries, almost to a man. Italy provided a large percentage of Europe’s professional soldiers. They were valued for their courage and skills—nobody made wisecracks about Italian armies in the seventeenth century—but were notoriously prone to switching sides if presented with the right inducement.

  Tom stopped while still just out of sight of the barracks. Behind him, he could hear the sounds of a hundred and fifty men coming to a ragged halt. More ragged than usual. The companies were missing at least a fourth of their men and officers.

  The two company commanders came up to join him. “What do you want to do, sir?” asked Captain Conrad Fischer.

  Tom had been pondering the problem. With a firefight going on, they couldn’t go directly to the barracks. Even with a moon out, the visibility wasn’t good enough for the men in the barracks to distinguish easily between friend and foe at a distance. In this dim lighting, the field-gray uniforms of the USE regulars would be hard to tell apart from the more nondescript clothing and gear worn by the Bavarians—even leaving aside the problem that, if Tom was right, a fair number of the enemy were USE defectors wearing the same uniform.

  If the artillerymen saw a mass of soldiers charging toward them, they’d assume they were enemies and open fire. And that fire would be pretty devastating. By now, forted up in their barracks and the arsenal which directly adjoined it, the regiment’s artillery units would have their cannons in position and loaded with canister. The somewhat desultory gunfire Tom could hear was not the noise produced by a frontal charge. The Bavarians would have tried that once, been driven off, and were now settling down to what amounted to a siege.