Ring of Fire III

by Eric Flint

  Well. It turned out he was a splendid fellow. Who knew?

  Rita was glowering at him. “Why should I be any safer than anyone else?”

  Böcler made a face. “Mrs. Simpson—please. You must be realistic about these things.” Now he gave Tom an apologetic glance. “Meaning no disrespect, Major, but the key political factor here is that your wife is also the sister of General Stearns. Short of recapturing the two young heirs to Bavaria now in Amberg, Duke Maximilian could have no better hostage than she.”

  He was right, Tom realized immediately. He hadn’t even considered that. Rita was so unpretentious that no one who knew her thought of her as a “big cheese.” And like most up-timers, even years after the Ring of Fire, Tom didn’t really think of holding people hostage as a political tactic. Kidnapping was just a crime, dammit.

  But in the seventeenth century, as had been true for at least a millennium in Europe, holding high-ranked captives for ransom or blackmail was considered business-as-usual.

  But then, why...

  Rita had seen the same flaw in the logic. “That’s bullshit, Heinrich!” she snapped at Böcler. “You came in right after it happened, so you should know. Those guys who broke into our home weren’t trying to take me hostage. The first thing the bastards did when they came through the door was try to shoot me.”

  “That happened in the heat of the moment, when they’d just smashed through the door,” countered Böcler. “I think they expected to find you in bed, not standing right in front of them. That first shot was probably fired in reflex. Thereafter, of course, since you were shooting back with the shotgun, they had no choice but to try to kill you.”

  The secretary spread his hands. “A great deal depends on the instructions the assassins were given, which we don’t know. In particular, were they offered a share of the ransom? If they were, then they’d have had a keen incentive in keeping you alive. But Duke Maximilian is just as well-known for his penny-pinching as his ruthlessness. They probably weren’t offered any such incentive, so they had no great reason not to simply murder you.”

  It made sense. Tom had been there himself, and remembered the chaos and fury of that brief gunfight. Unless the assassins had been tightly focused on the goal of capturing Rita, their natural fighting instincts would have overridden everything else.

  And, regardless, Böcler’s general point remained valid. Rita had no business getting down on the ground where she could be captured.

  From the fact that she was now just silently glaring at the secretary, Tom knew that Rita understood it herself. She could be stubborn beyond belief, but she also had a very strong sense of duty.

  Still, he hesitated to say anything. In the foul mood she was in, she’d lash out at him if he did.

  Thankfully, Böcler stepped into the breach again. “Of course, we do need to lighten up the airship. But I can take care of that problem. I don’t weigh as much as Herr Siers, but I certainly weigh more than you do.”

  At a guess, the secretary probably weighed at least one hundred and eighty pounds. He might even be pushing two hundred. He was on the short side, but thickly-proportioned.

  “One—or all of us—could get off also,” said Maydene Utt. “There’s no use for auditors on board the Pelican.”

  She sounded a bit uncertain. Tom was more than a bit alarmed. He had no use for three auditors either, down here on the ground. He and his troops would be undertaking a forced march over the next two days. Granted that middle-aged Appalachian women were almost invariably tougher than they looked, they still weren’t accustomed to that sort of exertion.

  Bonnie Weaver stepped into the breach, this time. “That’s silly, Maydene. You and Willa and Estelle are almost fifty years old.” Fodor started to protest something but Bonnie drove right over her. “And the three of you have been on horseback for the last two years—no, it must be three, now. When was the last time you walked as much as half a mile?”

  She made a wry face. “Me, on the other hand, I’m scared of horses. So I walk everywhere. And I weigh more than any of you except Maydene. So we can lighten the airship further by putting me on the ground too. Between me and Heinrich, that more than makes up for adding the corporal and his radio equipment.”

  Tom was a bit dubious at the prospect of having Bonnie along on the march, but only a bit. Like every military force of the day that had been in one place for a while, the Danube Regiment had collected camp followers. Women, mostly, who were either married to one of the soldiers or pretended to be. They doubled as cooks and laundresses for the unit; and, in some cases, prostitutes. There were at least two hundred of them along on this march, including several dozen children. If they could keep up—which they surely could, with the incentive of staying out of Duke Maximilian’s clutches—then Bonnie should be able to as well. She was on the plump side, true. But that was due to genetics, not sedentary habits. She was a vigorous sort of person, as you’d expect from someone who’d chosen to become a surveyor.

  “What time do you think it is?” asked Willa Fodor. She was squinting to the east, trying to see if she could spot any signs of the dawn arriving. “My watch doesn’t work any more.”

  Neither did Tom’s. He hadn’t worn a watch in more than a year, since the battery finally died. By then, four years after the Ring of Fire, silver oxide batteries—the very few that were left—cost a small fortune. It hadn’t seemed worth the expense, especially since the new battery would eventually die also. With a handful of exceptions, the only up-time watches that were still functional were old-fashioned wind-up watches. And there weren’t all that many of those.

  Happily, there had already been a primitive watchmaking industry in Europe when the Americans arrived, which quickly began adapting the designs in up-time encyclopedias. The balance spring and balance wheel designed by Huygens in the late seventeenth century in the up-timers’ universe were well within their capabilities. Within two or three years, a fairly large number of pocket watches were available in much of Europe.

  They were expensive, of course, and up-timers tended to scorn them. The watches weren’t nearly as accurate as the timepieces Americans were used to.

  Böcler dug into his coat pocket and came out with one. He flipped open the lid and tilted the watch so he could see the face by the light of the moon. “It’s almost five o’clock in the morning,” he said.

  Seeing everyone staring at him, he smiled slightly. “No, of course I can’t afford such a device on my salary. Duke Ernst gave it to me as a gift, when he left for Saxony.”

  He put it back in its pocket. “I have tested it against American electronic timers. It is accurate within ten minutes every day. I have to keep adjusting it, naturally.”

  The sun would be rising in a couple of hours, then. They still weren’t more than four miles from Ingolstadt. Tom wanted to get five or six miles away before making camp, if at all possible. But he’d stop sooner if they found a good place to set up defensive fieldworks. It wouldn’t be long before the Bavarian cavalry found them and they had to start fighting.

  The men needed some sleep, too, even if only for two or three hours. And something to eat.

  Von Eichelberg had been reading his mind, apparently. He’d make a superb staff officer. “There is a very good place to set up camp about a mile farther down the river, Major,” he said. “Thick forest comes almost to the river, creating a bottleneck. With your guns, we could hold off five or six times our number.”

  Tom nodded. “Let’s be about it, then.” He turned to Rita. “You’re in charge up there, hon. If it looks like you’re in any danger of running out of fuel, head for Regensburg immediately. I’m hoping you’ll be able to scout for us all the way, but it’s not worth the risk. If you lose power, the winds will probably blow you into Bavaria or Austria.”

  It was tempting to send the Pelican to Regensburg right now. They could refuel and, thereafter, could provide the regiment with reconnaissance without having to worry about losing power.

 
But that presupposed that “refueling” was a simple, cut-and-dried matter, which it certainly wouldn’t be. By the time the relevant authorities could consult with each other, wrangle over everything relevant authorities could invariably find to wrangle about—you could get a headache just thinking about it—the regiment would probably have arrived in Regensburg and made it all a moot point.

  Rita gave him a quick hug. A moment later, she was headed back toward the Pelican. The three female auditors and Corporal Baier followed her.

  Tom looked at Bonnie and Johann Heinrich. “Do you two have anything you need to get off the airship? If you do, you’d better move quickly.”

  The two of them looked at each other, then simultaneously shook their heads.

  “No,” said Bonnie. “We were in such an all-fired hurry to get out of the inn when the fighting started that we didn’t take anything with us.” She nodded toward the secretary. “He’s been staying in the same inn and came with us.”

  Böcler shrugged. “I regret not taking some additional clothing, but other than that, there really wasn’t anything in my room worth bringing. Administrator Christian sent me here to compile records on a number of routine matters. The Bavarians are welcome to plunder the lot—the very great lot—and take it back to Munich. Perhaps they’ll die of boredom as they study the files. I came very close to doing so myself.”

  So Böcler had a sense of humor, too. Who knew?

  Certainly not Bonnie Weaver. The expression on her face, looking at him, was positively startled.

  Chapter 10

  The next morning, Captain Johann Heinrich von Haslang wasn’t any happier than he’d been the night before. If anything, his misgivings about the campaign were growing.

  There were a number of things troubling him. To begin with, as he’d foreseen, there would be no serious effort made to track down the culprits who had caused the failure of the expedition to capture the airship. When he’d reported his findings to von Lintelo, the general had shrugged irritably and said, “These things happen when a city is taken. Assign a reliable sergeant to see what he can find out. I have more important work for you.”

  Assign a reliable sergeant was a meaningless phrase, applied to this task. What was one sergeant supposed to do? If he wasn’t from the same mercenary company as the perpetrators, he would have no idea where to start his investigation. If he was from that company, acting essentially on his own, he’d be too wary of stirring up animosity toward himself to do anything but a perfunctory investigation.

  So, not only would a vicious crime go unpunished, but the discipline of the troops would degenerate still further. But there was nothing Captain von Haslang could do about it, so he put the matter aside and concentrated on the new orders he was getting from the general.

  Those were...also not to his liking.

  The one pleasant note was that he would be working under the command of Colonel von Schnetter again. He and Caspar were old friends, and got along well professionally as well as personally. So far as von Haslang was concerned, Colonel von Schnetter was the best field grade officer in General von Lintelo’s whole army.

  The assignment itself was straightforward, too—always a blessing in military campaigns led by generals like von Lintelo, who thought of themselves as superb military strategists. In Johann Heinrich’s experience, the phrase superb military strategist meant a general whose plans were invariably too complex and intricate and made too little allowance for the predictably unpredictable mishaps that all military campaigns were subject to. There might be some exceptions to that rule, but the Bavarian commander was not one of them.

  On this occasion, however, the mission was clear and simple: Pursue the USE forces that had escaped the city, presumably under the command of Major Tom Simpson, and either capture or destroy them.

  So far, so good. But thereafter, everything turned sour.

  The first problem was that von Lintelo was not giving them a large enough force to do the job properly. All told, they’d have fifteen hundred men to overcome an enemy force that was probably no more than a third that size—but consisted mostly of artillery. Well-equipped artillery, at that. Two of Colonel von Schnetter’s adjutants had investigated the barracks and reported that Simpson’s artillery unit had taken all of their six-pounders and four-pounders with them, along with plenty of powder and shot. They’d spiked the heavier ordinance and done a surprisingly good job of damaging the rest of their supplies before they left.

  They’d have done a still better job if they’d simply blown up the barracks, of course. Presumably, they hadn’t done so because Simpson was reluctant to inflict casualties on the nearby civilian population. Many officers might—no, certainly would—interpret that as weakness on Simpson’s part. They’d think he was either a pewling neophyte or just too tenderhearted to make war his business.

  But Captain von Haslang suspected otherwise. That act of merciful restraint was also what you’d expect from an opponent who was coldly determined to recapture the city someday—and quite confident that he would. The American major’s ability to rally his troops so quickly and effectively and lead a successful retreat—one of the most difficult maneuvers of all in war—certainly did not indicate a fumbling, uncertain novice.

  Such a commander wouldn’t panic, when pursuit caught up with him. He’d position his men behind good fieldworks and take a stand. With the guns he had, he’d inflict a lot of damage on his enemy before he was driven under.

  To make things still worse, most of the companies von Lintelo had assigned to them were infantry companies!

  For a pursuit? In Captain von Haslang’s professional opinion, that practically constituted criminal negligence.

  Initially, in fact, von Lintelo had assigned them nothing but infantry units. After Colonel von Schnetter protested vigorously, the general had at least given them an explanation—which was unusual for him.

  “I need all the cavalry I can muster to send to Amberg,” von Lintelo said. “Above all else, we must rescue the heirs to the duchy!”

  Rescue the heirs to the duchy. There was another phrase that begged for a coherent translation.

  Duke Maximilian was childless himself, so the heir to the throne was—had been—his younger brother Albrecht. But the uproar that resulted when the duke’s betrothed, the Austrian archduchess Maria Anna, fled before the wedding, caused a rupture between Maximilian and his brother. Who, with his wife and three sons, had also fled Bavaria.

  Or tried to. Duke Maximilian and his soldiers caught up with them and in the fracas that followed, Albrecht’s wife Mechthilde and his oldest son Karl Johann Franz had both been killed—Mechthilde at the duke’s own hand.

  Albrecht had become separated from his two other sons. He eventually managed to escape and had been given exile in Prague by Wallenstein. The tutor for his two younger sons, the Jesuit priest Johannes Vervaux, had managed to smuggle the boys out of Bavaria by a different route. They’d found exile in the United States of Europe; in Amberg, specifically, the capital of the province of the Oberpfalz. There was still a Jesuit school there, where the boys could continue their Catholic education.

  Thankfully, the USE’s formal stance of religious toleration and freedom was actually practiced in the Upper Palatinate. The province adjoined and was heavily dependent upon the State of Thuringia-Franconia, the province of the USE which, along with Magdeburg, took the principles very seriously. So there was no immediate danger of a forced conversion of the two boys—who, since their father had been outlawed, were now Maximilian’s only heirs.

  In short, rescue the heirs to the duchy meant bringing back to the custody of their uncle two boys who’d seen him slay their own mother and had placed their father under a death penalty. So that one of them could eventually succeed him as the duke of Bavaria.

  Such were the established principles of aristocratic and royal inheritance, as ridiculous as the results might sometimes seem.

  But what made the project itself ridiculous was that i
t had no chance at all of succeeding, anyway. So why waste the time and efforts of good cavalry units, who could be put to much better use bringing down Simpson and his men?

  Even before the Ring of Fire, von Haslang was skeptical that such a mission would have succeeded. In essence, a large force of cavalry was being tasked with racing to a city at least fifty miles away, measuring as men and horses travel. In midwinter. They could not possibly arrive in less than a day and a half, and more likely two or three.

  Then, upon arriving, they were to assault a well-fortified city garrisoned by a full regiment—with no artillery at their own disposal—in order to reach and capture two boys being held in a school within.

  Not...impossible, in the old days. But very close to it.

  Today? Almost five years after the Ring of Fire? Did Duke Maximilian and General von Lintelo think there had been no radio in Ingolstadt? Or, even if the attempt to reach Amberg had failed initially, that the retreating artillery unit didn’t have a portable radio with them with which they could try again?

  And even if by some near-magic luck the cavalry did manage to reach Amberg before a warning arrived, what then? They couldn’t possibly break into the city in time to prevent the boys from being spirited away again. Von Lintelo was sending no more than five thousand cavalrymen to Amberg. The capital of the Oberpfalz was not a small town, and the surrounding terrain was hilly and wooded. There was no chance they could encircle the city and invest it tightly before any number of people could escape.

  That would be true even if the means of escape were restricted to horse and foot. But they weren’t. For the love of God, von Lintelo had seen the airship in the sky over Ingolstadt last night with his own eyes.

  Nor was that the only airship at the enemy’s disposal. Leaving aside any airplanes which could only land at the airfield outside of Amberg’s city walls, the State of Thuringia-Franconia was home to a fleet of no fewer than four dirigibles. They could only hope that all of those airships were out of the province at the moment, having flown somewhere to the north.