by Eric Flint
Rebecca turned her head to look at Laura Goss and held up a couple of fingers. Then, off she went.
* * *
“Two days or so. Got it,” Laura said to herself, smiling. As she climbed out of the cockpit, she pondered over whether the extended time meant she could party this evening.
Laura enjoyed partying. As she liked to put it: “Yeah, getting plastered and having a good time is a dirty job, but I don’t think it’s fair that men should have to do all the heavy lifting.”
Linz was a great town for partying, too. These days, anyway. Sieges had their bright side, as long as the supplies didn’t get cut off.
Three drinks, that’s it, she decided. Well…maybe four, if the guy’s cute enough.
Chapter 38
Observation platform atop the royal castle
Linz, provisional capital of Austria-Hungary
Julie had a somewhat peculiar and certainly unique relationship with Gustav Adolf. So, the next morning she was able to wheedle herself and Alex onto the best observation platform in the city, the castle that overlooked the Danube. The foundations went back into medieval times and possibly even earlier. It was said there was once a Roman fort on the same location. The castle had been rebuilt twice: once by Emperor Frederick III, who made it his residence from 1489 to 1493; the second time in 1600, by Emperor Rudolph II.
Julie had gotten interested in the castle’s history when she found out it had been successfully besieged and seized by rebellious peasants just a decade earlier in 1626. Score one for the home team, as far as she was concerned. She’d never been especially interested in politics and still wasn’t, but insofar as she thought about it her opinions leaned heavily towards a sans-culottes view of things. If that struck anyone as being inconsistent with her friendship with Gustav II Adolf, Emperor of the United States of Europe, King of Sweden, and High King of the Union of Kalmar, that was their problem. She’d never heard the quip, but if she had she’d have been in full agreement with Ralph Waldo Emerson: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Shortly after Gustav Adolf arrived in Linz to take command of the city’s defense, he’d realized that aerial combat was likely to become a significant feature of the siege. At that point he’d ordered an observation platform erected atop the castle. (More precisely, he’d requested Emperor Ferdinand’s permission to do so.) Gustav Adolf was still more likely to be found several miles to the east, in the fortifications that had been erected at the confluence of the Danube and the Traun rivers. But on any day that an air battle seemed likely, he took a position atop the castle.
He was there today, and welcomed Julie to his side. She’d been at his side at the crossing of the Lech where his opponent Tilly had been killed, more than four years earlier. Indeed, her marksmanship had played a significant role in the battle. She’d also been at his side at the Alte Veste, where Gustav Adolf had defeated Wallenstein, the second of his two great imperial opponents. Julie had come close to killing Wallenstein herself at the Alte Veste, with a shot that Gustav Adolf had witnessed personally. To this day he was convinced that shot had a miraculous aspect to it. Perhaps an angel had accompanied the bullet. The argument against that theory, of course, was that the bullet hadn’t quite killed Wallenstein. But God was known to move in mysterious ways, so who could really say? Wallenstein’s survival had eventually enabled the USE to become allied with Bohemia, after all.
So he viewed Julie as something of a lucky charm, and was quite willing to have her join him on the observation deck.
“Are the Turks coming yet?” was the first thing Julie asked when she got up the steps to the platform. She remembered to add “Your Majesty,” this time. She had a tendency to forget.
“I believe they are, yes. But here”—he handed his binoculars to her—“tell me what you think. Your eyesight is better than mine. Better than anyone’s, probably.”
Julie peered through the binoculars. After overcoming the disorientation that she always experienced when she first looked at something through binoculars, she was able to find what she was looking for quickly.
“Yes, they’re coming, Your Majesty. Looks like they’re in their usual formation: twenty ships in four lines. Well, I’m sure about the four lines. Not positive about the total number yet.” After a couple of seconds she remembered to say “Your Majesty.”
He chuckled. “Be at rest, Julie. You have fulfilled your quota of ‘Your Majesties’ at least until lunch.”
She grinned and made to hand back the binoculars, but he shook his head. “No, you keep them. Even with these”—he tapped the sports glasses he was wearing—“my vision is not good at a distance. You can tell me what’s happening better than I could see it for myself.”
“Okay,” she said. She was tempted to add: You are the coolest emperor since Nebuchadnezzar, but didn’t. First, because she was pretty sure that would fall into the category of lèse-majesté, which was French for “way too cheeky.” Second, because she couldn’t remember if Nebuchadnezzar had been one of the good guys in the Bible. She thought so, but…
Sunday school had not been her best academic subject. In fact, it had been all the way at the bottom except for biology, and the only reason biology ranked last was because they’d partnered her with Dustin Acton when it came time to dissect a frog and that’s when the asshole had pinched her butt. She’d held a grudge against the whole science ever since. She didn’t like frogs, either.
As the minutes passed, the Ottoman air fleet drew near. Julie looked through the binoculars again and announced: “Yeah, I was right. Twenty airships again. They must have found a replacement for the one that went down with the Magdeburg. Hey, what happened to that ship, anyway? I lost track of it after they hit us because…well, when you’re going down and hoping against hope that the envelope doesn’t catch fire, you tend to concentrate on what’s right in front of you.”
One of the emperor’s adjutants provided the answer: “Nobody knows, actually. The ship—the envelope, yes?—was last seen heading toward the Alps.”
“Hoo, boy,” Julie muttered. “If it gets there…talk about no contest.”
An unmistakable buzzing sound crossed her hearing threshold. She turned her head in that direction.
Sure enough. “It’s coming. The Vasa.”
* * *
When Ent had told her what the new plane was called, she’d burst into laughter. “Hal Smith! Talk about a guy who never fails to play the political card! First, the Gustav; now, the Vasa. What’s next, d’you think?”
“I’d say that was obvious,” had been Ent’s reply. “The Kristina.”
Julie had shaken her head. “No, Gustav Adolf would put his foot down. You name a plane after Kristina and you won’t believe the ruckus she’ll make until her father lets her fly it. Ten years old be damned.”
“You got a point there. I dunno. You probably couldn’t name it after the queen because she’s dead now and by all accounts I’ve heard the emperor wasn’t that taken with her to begin with. Maybe after his father, Charles?”
Alex shook his head, then. “No, Hal’s a lot cannier than that. He’ll name it the Ulrik. You watch. That’ll irritate Ulrik, because he dislikes being flattered. But on the other hand, he’ll understand the political advantage and there’s no prince in Europe who’s cannier than he is. The emperor will understand it also. Kristina won’t, but she’ll be pleased anyway because she really likes her future husband so she’ll forgive Hal for not naming it after her.”
Julie had gotten a little dizzy trying to follow the political logic. After her head finally settled down, though, she spotted the hole in her husband’s theory.
Ent had spotted it also. “But if Hal names the next one after Prince Ulrik, he’ll have to name the one after it for Kristina. If he doesn’t”—he’d whistled softly—“boy, you wanna talk about a princess raising hell.”
“Yes, you’re right,” said Alex. “But he’s being guided by the same reasoning followed by the thief i
n that ancient tale where he’s sentenced to death but gets his execution postponed for a year if he can teach the king’s horse to sing.”
“I know that story!” Julie exclaimed. “I always thought it was clever. One of the other prisoners makes fun of him and the thief replies”—her voice got a little sing-songy—“a year is a long time and many things might happen. I might die. The king might die. The horse might die. And maybe the horse will sing after all.”
“Exactly,” said Alex. “It will take Hal Smith a year—well, half a year, at least—to design and build another plane. In that time, someone important might die in a way that makes them a martyr, like Hans Richter.”
“Like who?” Ent asked, skeptically. “Aren’t too many people lying around who are more important than Kristina. Not in her eyes, anyway—and she’d be the one making the fuss.”
“For Pete’s sake, Ent, we’re in the middle of a war. I can think of lots of candidates. Mike Stearns could get killed in a battle. What’s even more likely is that Gretchen Richter gets knocked off. She came within a hair of it less than a year ago.”
“Why in the world would Gustav Adolf want—”
“I grant you, it’d seem a little weird. But ever since she took Silesia, Gretchen’s been in the emperor’s good graces. And if she gets killed, he’d win lots of brownie points with the CoCs if he told Hal to name a new plane after her. And there’s no downside for him because, what the hell, the witch is dead.”
“Okay, okay. But what happens when you run out of martyrs?”
She shrugged. “By then, Kristina might be old enough to fly the plane. I figure—given Kristina—that wouldn’t take more than another couple of years.”
Ent’s eyes seemed to bulge. “At the age of twelve? Are you nuts?”
“What part of ‘given Kristina’ are you having the most trouble with?”
* * *
It didn’t take long before the new airplane was visible to everyone on the observation deck, including the myopic emperor. And no more than a minute further before it was clear that the Vasa was headed directly for the approaching Ottoman fleet of airships. Whatever his flaws might be, clearly Dustin Acton didn’t suffer from cowardice. It was like watching a very small knight in armor charging a pack of very large dragons.
Or…
Don Quixote charging a windmill. Julie had never read the book, but she’d heard about that episode in it by the time she was eight years old.
The closer the Vasa got, the more anxious she got.
“What the hell is he doing?” she said. “Climb, you—you—not smart person. Get above them where they can’t see you and then attack from the rear.”
Gustav Adolf was frowning at her. “You seem very concerned. Why?”
She pointed her finger at the plane, which was now close to the first line of airships. They’d started closing their formation as soon as the Vasa appeared. By now they were quite near each other, at least by airship values of “near.” They reminded Julie of a line of musketeers getting ready to fire a volley.
Which, she realized, was exactly what they intended to do.
“He’s going straight at them! Uh, Your Majesty.” Protocol then got completely shredded. “Does the fucking idiot think Turks can’t shoot? They’ve got to have their best marksmen in the entire Janissary Corps up there! And he’s giving them a perfect target! Does that man always have to be a jackass?”
* * *
In point of fact, Dustin Acton did assume that Turks couldn’t shoot. That wasn’t a conscious assessment on his part. It was simply racial prejudice so deeply ingrained he wasn’t even aware of it.
Acton had even less interest in politics than Julie did. But his parents had been vehement supporters of John Chandler Simpson’s campaign against Mike Stearns back in 1632. Because they were teetotalers, neither had ever entered the Club 250, notorious during the campaign for being the lair of Grantville’s most vociferous bigots. But they would have been quite comfortable there otherwise.
Dustin had absorbed that view of people since he was a toddler, and because he was a self-satisfied, unreflective man, he had never once in his life thought to question his family’s attitudes.
To him, Turks were just targets.
Being fair to Acton, he’d been rushed through flight school because they needed someone to be ready to fly the new Vasa as soon as the first one became operational. Jesse Wood had been short of pilots because several had been injured or gotten sick, and even at the best of times there were never all that many pilots available. What was the point of training a lot of pilots when there were so few planes available for them? The USE in 1636 and its jury-rigged airplanes were a far cry from the USA in 1944, with fighters and bombers pouring out of the rapidly expanding aviation industry.
Plus, Jesse had been preoccupied with the problems the Air Force had encountered due to the winter conditions in northern Poland, which was where Gustav Adolf had insisted on deploying most of its aircraft.
And the truth was that Jesse was not really temperamentally suited to his job. The only reason he’d been made the head of the Air Force was because he was the only person in Grantville after the Ring of Fire who’d been an officer in the up-time Air Force.
He tended to think like a pilot, instead of a commander—and trainer—of pilots. And he tended to focus on the problem in front of him rather than thinking about next year’s problems. As a result, he’d overlooked what you’d expect would have been one of the main things emphasized in military flight school.
Aerial combat techniques and methods.
Why bother? Until the Vasa came into being, aerial combat had been nonexistent. The best anyone could have managed was to carry a pistol in their cockpit and shoot at nearby planes with it—a technique that could be rivaled in futility only with hunting geese by throwing rocks at them.
So, as he headed into his first combat with other aircraft, Dustin Acton didn’t know his ass from his elbow—and was not the sort of man who’d have contemplated the problem beforehand. Why should he? His ass was spectacular and his elbow was the finest the world had seen in decades.
* * *
Had Ent Martin been the pilot, he would have avoided the head-on approach Acton was taking. But as the gunner, he was so concentrated on his approaching target that he didn’t think of the danger he might be in.
Not, at least, until they were close enough that he could see the firing slit in the gondola of the airship they were facing directly. But by then he had already started to fire, and all other thoughts were swept aside.
He couldn’t have done anything, anyway. Another man was flying the plane.
* * *
Acton wasn’t actually stupid. He had planned to approach the Ottoman airships from above, since that would give his gunner the best field of fire and the Vasa would be shielded from enemy fire by the envelopes of the enemy ships.
Alas, he hadn’t considered the fact that the enemy airships were approaching from the east.
He hadn’t considered that it was still early in the morning with the sun not all that far above the horizon.
And he’d forgotten to bring sunglasses.
The sun was blinding. For a short while, he tried shielding his eyes with one upheld hand, but that wasn’t very practical. The Vasa was a somewhat awkward plane to fly and really needed both hands to do the job.
The solution was simple and obvious. He dropped down in altitude until the big envelopes of the Ottoman airships were blocking the sun.
* * *
The other four riflemen in the first line of airships fired before Tufenkci Gülhan did, although his ship, the Mohacs, was the one directly in line with the kâfir aircraft. But they were forced to fire because the closer the enemy airplane got, the worse their firing angle became. He intended to wait until the last possible moment.
He couldn’t believe his good fortune. The enemy was clear in his sights.
Then the kâfirs started firing and he was so startled h
e lost his aim for moment. He’d been expecting cannon fire—small, by the standards of cannons, but still cannons. Powerful, but not quick. Instead, what seemed like a storm of bullets slammed into the gondola above him. He heard the screams of wounded crewmen.
But he paid no attention. He had his aim back. He fired.
* * *
It was a powerful rifle. The Turk’s bullet punched through the Vasa’s fuselage as if it wasn’t there, struck Ent’s left forearm and sprayed the interior of his cockpit with blood. Then, smashing into the frame of his seat and ricocheting upward, the bullet punched into the cockpit above and still had enough force to pass through the pilot’s seat and penetrate the back of Dustin Acton’s right thigh. It came to rest against his femur.
There was no spray, but Acton’s seat was instantly soaked with blood. He cried out in pain and shock and lost control of the plane. It swerved down and to the side.
That swerve killed Tufenkci Gülhan. Ent still had the machine gun’s aiming mechanism in his right hand, along with the trigger. By instinctive reflex, he clutched it in response to the sudden swerve. The bullets shifted their trajectory and shredded the lower portion of the gondola where the rifleman had been positioned.
He would have died soon, in any event. Enough of the incendiary rounds had struck the airship to start one fire, then two, then three. Even if half of the crew hadn’t already been killed by that first murderous volley, they still couldn’t have put out the fires and brought the vessel down safely.
In less than a minute, the entire envelope was sheathed in flames and the Mohacs was plunging toward the Danube.
* * *
It took Julie a while to realize that the Vasa heading back to the airfield was in trouble. But when it got close enough that she could see it more clearly, it became obvious that it was barely under control. The pilot had to have been injured—which would explain why it was coming back so soon. She’d been surprised by that, but perhaps it had already run out of ammunition. She hadn’t thought to ask Ent the day before how long the gun could be operated before the ammunition was gone.
