Ring of Fire III

by Eric Flint

  That had been three years ago. Her life had been a slow but steady slide downhill ever since.

  The colonel did not beat her. That was his one virtue. So far as Ursula could determine, his only virtue.

  Otherwise, von Troiberz was an unpleasant man in every particular. He had no sense of humor, no capacity for joy. He smiled maybe once a week. Laughed, perhaps once a month.

  He had no capacity for any sort of pleasure, for that matter, except ones deriving from spite and greed.

  Petty spite and petty greed. The man lacked style and verve even in his vices and sins.

  Mostly, von Troiberz was a sullen man, riddled with resentments and envies. He drank constantly. And then spent his few sober hours coming up with schemes that might save him from the consequences of other schemes he’d come up with while drunk. She knew perfectly well the reason he’d spent the last three days dragging her around this miserable countryside in January was because he was desperately trying to cover up one of his thefts.

  The drinking also made him incapable in bed but that was not a problem, so far as Ursula was concerned. On the now-rare occasions when the colonel did choose to engage in sexual activity, the result was brief and would have left her completely unsatisfied except that she began the coupling with no such expectations anyway. Somewhere along the way, her hopes that sex would at least be enjoyable had also died a natural death. The causes, again, being neglect and malnutrition.

  The biggest problem was that Colonel von Troiberz stank, most of the time—and Ursula had begun this life in the first place because she hated bad smells.

  He bathed once a year, at most, not counting the occasions he fell into a creek or stumbled into a pond while inebriated. But that didn’t help because such bodies of water were usually smelly in their own right, not to mention the result of the time he’d fallen into a latrine.

  He was flatulent. He had bad breath.

  No, terrible breath. Even the food he preferred was nasty-smelling. His favorite meat was pickled pork, his favorite vegetables were onions, and his favorite herb was garlic.

  His favorite drink was cheap korn made from rye taken with cheap beer. When he could afford it, he drank cheap schnapps made from apples. When he was short of money, he settled for cheap wine. All of it smelled bad to Ursula. Being fair to the colonel, all liquor smelled bad to her, even the expensive kind. She herself did not drink liquor except for an occasional glass of wine on celebratory occasions, and then only because it was expected of her.

  He had no favorite flower. What was far worse was that he disliked flowers altogether—he claimed they made him sneeze and made him itch—and so he forbade her from putting any in their rooms. Even though she loved flowers and had ever since she was a child.

  Lying in the bed staring at the ceiling, Ursula started to weep. No loud sobbing—the last thing she wanted to do was wake up von Troiberz—just tears, oozing slowly from her eyes. Eventually she would wipe them off, but not for a while. She was too tired. She was always too tired now. She could barely summon the energy to cook and do the laundry.

  The colonel didn’t want much of the first, since he usually ate in taverns, and he wanted almost none of the other. His clothing was as filthy and bad-smelling as he was, and there wasn’t much point in her washing them because within a day he’d have them covered again with spilled liquor and food; within three days, vomit; and within a week, the condition of his breeches and underclothes didn’t bear thinking about.

  Every day seemed to pass in gray colors. She was losing her hopes for simple contentment as surely as she’d lost her hopes for marriage, for children, for joy, for pleasure. She’d begun to think about suicide, from time to time. So far the residue of her Catholic upbringing kept her shying away from the idea. But she thought that eventually her faith would die also. She felt like a walking corpse, stumbling toward a grave that she simply hadn’t seen yet.

  But she would see it some day, she knew. Probably before she saw her thirtieth birthday.

  She knew her birthday, at least. Many people didn’t. February 11th, less than a month from now.

  She wouldn’t be able to celebrate it, though. Von Troiberz disliked birthdays also, even his own. She wasn’t sure why. She thought it was probably because the colonel had lost whatever capacity he’d ever had to enjoy a day just because it was a day to enjoy. And so he found it irritating to have others expecting him to celebrate. So might a man who has lost all sense of taste react when people urge him to eat a cake.

  If she wasn’t too tired, maybe she’d be able to have her own private little celebration. Just by herself. There still wouldn’t be any flowers she could pick yet, though. Even the crocus wouldn’t come up until March.

  She’d often wished her birthday had been in April or May. Maybe then her life would have turned out differently. She liked to think so, anyway. There was still some small, not-quite-dead-and-buried part of Ursula Gerisch’s soul that thought most of her life’s trajectory had been the result of misfortune and happenstance. Not all, no; she accepted that she bore some of the guilt. But on her best days she thought—well, mostly she just wondered—about someday being able to find a new course for herself.

  * * *

  A peculiar sound coming from somewhere outside finally penetrated her bleak thoughts. Ursula realized that she’d been hearing it for some time but hadn’t paid attention. It had gotten quite loud, by now.

  She found a clean portion of the bedding and wiped the tears from her face. Then she rose from the bed and went to the window.

  The sight beyond, in the glow of sunset—even in January, it seemed warm—was the most wonderful she could remember seeing in years. The one thing in the past three days that had brought some happiness to her was seeing those incredible flying machines in the sky.

  They were so big! Yet not frightening. Not to her, at least. Many of the soldiers were scared by them, but she wasn’t. Where they saw monsters in the air, she saw gigantic puppies.

  She liked puppies. She liked dogs, too. They smelled nice to her, even if some people didn’t think so.

  She’d have kept a dog except the colonel didn’t like dogs either.

  And now there were three of them! All at once, in a line, one behind the other. She’d only seen one at a time, up until now.

  They were coming in her direction, too—right at her, it seemed. And because they were approaching from the west, the setting sun lit up their huge, swollen bellies. She could easily see the boats that hung below them, with their noisy machines that apparently made them fly. She could even see people clearly, looking over the side of the boats.

  They were quite low, she suddenly realized, much lower than she’d ever seen one of them come down before. They couldn’t be more than six or seven hundred feet high, maybe even less.

  Suddenly, for the first time in years, Ursula was filled with excitement. She had to see them better! From outside, not through a small grimy window. It was a cheap window, too, which made everything look distorted.

  She glanced at the colonel. Von Troiberz was sprawled on the bed, snoring heavily. He’d come to bed drunk, as he usually did. Nothing would wake him up except the clap of doom.

  Splendid. If he were awake, he’d undoubtedly forbid her to go outside. Moving quickly, Ursula put on her clothes and shoes, wrapped a cloak around her, and left the room.

  * * *

  In less than a minute she was outside. But the tavern door opened into a small courtyard surrounded by buildings. She couldn’t see any of the ships from here. So, she hurried through the gate and out onto the village’s main street.

  But the street was narrow and the buildings alongside it just as tall. Frustrated, she looked around and saw a meadow in the distance, perhaps twenty yards beyond the last building. She could get there in a couple of minutes, if she hurried. The soil would probably be icy, but she had good shoes. It was the one piece of apparel she owned that the colonel had been willing to spend some money on.


  * * *

  She got there in a minute and half. Looking up, she saw that the first ship—they were huge, now, huge—had come right overhead.

  This was so marvelous! For the first time since childhood, she started jumping up and down with glee, clapping her hands.

  Then, frowned. Not worried yet, just puzzled. Why were they dropping things from the boats? They looked like jugs or some sort of pottery.

  Understanding came, and she made a small moue of disgust. Thank God she’d gotten out of the village! It was going to stink in a few seconds.

  She was a little sad, though. A little upset, too. She wouldn’t have thought that people who could do such a wondrous thing as fly through the air would be so petty and spiteful that they’d drop their chamberpots on their enemies.

  Ursula couldn’t help but giggle, though—and then realized that might be the first time she’d done that in years, too.

  Colonel Johann von Troiberz was in for a rude awakening. He was about to get shat upon by leviathans.

  Chapter 16

  Ursula was wrong. Colonel von Troiberz did not get a rude awakening.

  He didn’t wake up at all. The tavern was one of the first buildings hit by the firebombs and it was hit by no fewer than four of them—two dropped by the Albatross, and one from each of the airships that followed in the bombing run. Within less than five minutes, the building was an inferno. Von Troiberz had been so drunk when he fell asleep that he died of smoke inhalation without ever regaining consciousness.

  Most of the soldiers in that building died. Only five made it out alive, and two of them died immediately thereafter when the eaves of the tavern collapsed on them while they were still in the courtyard.

  The very worst casualties were inflicted on the soldiers two buildings over. There were eleven of them crowded into that house. It had been the “party house,” where those soldiers went who were in the mood to carouse—and they’d started carousing before noon. Only one survived and he suffered horrible burns that left him badly scarred.

  Within fifteen minutes, the entire village was on fire. Almost three dozen cavalrymen had been killed, twice that many injured—and the stables were burning too. Luckily for the horses, a sober and conscientious sergeant had raced about unlocking all the doors in time for most of the beasts to escape.

  Having made their escape, though, the horses were in no mood to stay in the vicinity of the holocaust. They scattered across the countryside, leaving all but nine cavalrymen stranded on foot.

  In January. In the Little Ice Age. As night was falling. Most of them without having had time to don heavy clothing. A number of them bootless. And with nowhere nearby to spend the night indoors that wasn’t smoldering.

  Some of the men just wandered off, but most of them gathered together near the village when the fires began dying down. Their commanding officer was nowhere to be seen, and neither were the two captains who had been with them. Of the officers who’d been in the village, only three lieutenants were left.

  After some discussion, they agreed that the best course of action was to join Colonel von Schnetter’s infantry. Insofar as they knew where that camp was located, a subject on which there was considerable dispute. The lieutenants, in particular, were quarrelsome men. In the end, three different parties went their separate ways.

  One of the parties found the camp. Another eventually stumbled across a deserted village two miles away before any of them had died, although some wound up losing toes to frostbite.

  The third party died of exposure. The last man went at three o’clock in the morning.

  * * *

  Watching this all unfold from above, Rita was aghast. She’d had no idea—never once imagined—that the bombing run would have such horrific success. She’d thought that most of the bombs would miss entirely, first of all. Some would hit the target, certainly, but few enough that by the time the fires really began spreading most of the men down there would have been able to escape.

  She hadn’t even thought about the horses. Americans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have understood how deadly it could be for a man to be stranded in winter without a horse. But she’d come from the end of the twentieth. “Being stranded” meant running out of gas and hitching a ride with the next car to come by. In a rural area like Grantville, people would usually stop for you. Especially in winter.

  What had thrown her off, again, had been watching too many newsreels. She’d seen documentary footage that depicted bombing runs from World War II and the Korean War and the Vietnam War and Operation Desert Storm. Planes moving hundreds of miles an hour when they dropped their bombs; the trajectory of those bombs themselves covering a great distance before they finally hit the ground.

  It was amazing any of them hit anything they were aimed at. And those bombs had been military-grade high explosives or incendiaries, vastly more powerful than the ones Bonnie Weaver had jury-rigged. By the time of the Iraq-Kuwait war, some of them had been guided munitions. But even as far back as World War II, she knew, the bombers had some kind of superb bombsights.

  Her bombsights had been her eyes, looking down over the lip of the gondola, while two of Franchetti’s crewmen held a bomb on the same lip, waiting for her signal.

  What she hadn’t considered, until the bombs started hitting, was that her bombing platform was almost stationary. She’d told Franchetti to maintain just enough power to keep the airship from drifting. Both of the airships that followed her after the Albatross unloaded all its bombs had done the same.

  And none of it had taken very long. Once Rita saw that the bombs really didn’t need to be “aimed” at all, she’d told the crewmen to just start pitching them over the side as fast as they could.

  Another deadly factor had been her decision to make the run at a much lower altitude that the airships normally flew over enemy troops. At her husband’s insistence, the airships had stayed at least two thousand feet high most of the time. They never dropped below a thousand feet.

  But Rita had decided, just this once and to hell with what Tom said about it afterward, that they’d come in not more than the length of two footfall fields over the target. That was still within range of seventeenth-century musket fire, technically speaking. But at two hundred yards the fire would be wildly inaccurate. Besides, although Rita didn’t know the exact formulas, she knew from things her husband had said that smoothbore round shot lost its muzzle velocity much faster than rifled bullets did. She figured that even if a bullet fired from a musket six hundred feet down did manage to hit the envelope or even the gondola, it probably wouldn’t be moving fast enough to do a lot of damage. Barring a really lucky shot, anyway.

  In the event, only two cavalrymen shot at them, and both of them used wheel-lock pistols. She had no idea where those bullets wound up going. Nowhere close, for sure.

  This was just a massacre. She felt sick to her stomach.

  * * *

  Once she stopped screaming and brought her panic under control, Ursula got up and looked around. She had to get up because in her frenzied race away from the inferno the village had become, she’d eventually tripped on something and sprawled flat on the ground.

  She’d come a long way from the village, she realized. At least a quarter of a mile. She wasn’t sure. She hadn’t been thinking about anything except get away! get away!

  She looked up. Now, the things in the sky did look like monsters to her. You could still see all of them very clearly, since the sun hadn’t fully gone down yet. Its red hemisphere glowed above the western skyline.

  She stood there for a while, gasping to regain her breath and trying to figure out what to do. Going back to the village was...unthinkable.

  But where else? She looked around, more slowly this time, and realized she was the only person in sight.

  She was cold, she suddenly realized. Very cold. The temperature was already below freezing. Within a few hours no one would be able to survive out here without some way to stay warm better
than a coat and a pair of shoes. Even a good pair of shoes.

  Noise drew her attention back to the sky. The first of the airships had turned and was now coming...

  Right at her.

  She screamed and started running again.

  * * *

  “What do you think is happening, sir?” von Haslang asked the colonel. Von Schnetter lowered the eyeglass and shook his head. “It’s too far away to see much. Something is burning, though. A whole village, I think, as bright as it is even from here.”

  Both of them now looked above the glow in the distance. The airships in the sky were quite visible, even this far away.

  “Do you think...?”

  Von Schnetter sighed. “I don’t know, Heinrich. But...it could be, yes.”

  He looked around at their own camp. “Better make preparations, Captain. Just in case we have to move suddenly.”

  * * *

  Tom Simpson was even farther away. But because of the radio, he didn’t have to wonder what had happened.

  What he was starting to wonder about, though, was how much more his wife could take. There’d been a ragged edge to her voice that he’d never heard before.

  There were a lot of ways in which Rita resembled her older brother Mike, but other ways in which they were not alike at all. One big difference was that Mike Stearns—as nice a guy as he was, and Tom would vouch for that—also had a ruthless side to him. As wide and deep as the Mississippi, sometimes.

  Rita just plain didn’t. She was the sort of person for whom healing and nurturing came easily and killing did not.

  At all.

  Tom was starting to worry that she was going to come out of all this with a lot more scars—and a lot worse ones—than the one left on her arm by a splinter from an exploding door.

  She hadn’t fired the first bullet. But she’d fired some of the ones that came after, including a gigantic bullet that had just taken out dozens of men and the whole village they’d been in.