by Eric Flint
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 warplane 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 war
planes, 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.
Drugeth didn't know which type of airplane this was, but it couldn't have capabilities that were any better. In fact, if he was right in his guess about the object he could see under the craft's body, it had only had two bombs to begin with. He'd seen the bomb they'd dropped, although he hadn't spotted where it came from. But he was pretty sure it must have been the companion of the object he could see now.
As they came over the wagon again, moving as slowly as Lannie dared, they weren't going any faster than a car breaking the speed limit on an interstate highway. And Lannie had the plane not more than forty feet off the ground.
So, since he also obeyed Denise when she told him to fly on the side where she could see what was happening, she got a very good look at the second cavalryman when he looked up as they passed by. Glaring in fury and shaking his fist at them.
Except it wasn't a cavalryman and it wasn't a he.
"Jesus H. Christ!" Denise exploded. "We just bombed Noelle and Eddie!"
"Huh?" said Lannie, his mouth gaping.
"Well, shit!" screeched Keenan from the back. "Well, shit!"
"I'll kill 'em," Noelle hissed, as she went back to tending Eddie. Luckily-by now, she'd unfastened the cuirass-he didn't seem to have been wounded by the bomb itself or any of the splinters it had sent flying from the wagon when it exploded. At least, she couldn't see any blood anywhere, that she thought was any of Eddie's own. He did have some blood on one of his trouser legs, but she was pretty sure that came from his horse. One of the splinters or maybe a part of the bomb casing had torn a huge wound in the horse's belly. It had thrown Eddie when it fell to the ground. Kicked him in the head, too, in the course of thrashing about afterward, judging from the condition of his helmet.
At least, she didn't think that big a dent in a sturdy helmet could have been caused by his fall. The meadow had hardly any rocks in it.
Eddie's eyes were open, but he seemed dazed. Might have a concussion. And a broken left arm, from the looks of things.
Gingerly, she started unfastening his sleeve. Eddie moaned a little, but she got it peeled back enough to check its condition.
A broken forearm, sure enough. Noelle had broken her own forearm as a kid, falling out of a tree. She could remember insisting to her mother all the way to the hospital that the arm wasn't really broken. Just bent a little, that's all.
But it wasn't a compound fracture, and the break was obviously well below the elbow. Give it a few weeks, properly splinted, and it would heal as good as new.
The relief allowed her fury to resurge. She looked up, tracking the plane from its sound, so she could shake her fist at them again. The stupid bastards!
But when she spotted the plane, the gesture turned into a frantic wave.
"You stupid bastards! Watch out!"
The cramped interior of the cockpit seemed like bedlam to Denise.
"Jesus, Lannie, you bombed my sister! You bombed my sister!" Keenan kept screeching, in blithe disregard for the fact that he'd been the one who'd actually released the weapon.
Naturally, Lannie's response was to shift the blame himself. "She told me to do it! She told me to do it!" was his contribution.
"Shut up, both of you!" was Denise's own, trying to settle them down.
In retrospect, she'd admit to her best friend Minnie-nobody else-that she probably should have kept concentrating on the "navigating" side of the business.
Eventually, it did occur to her that she ought to see where they were going.
"Lannie!" she screeched.
"Fascinating," murmured Janos. He'd always wondered how fragile the devices were. Now, seeing one of the plane's wings partly-shredded by its impact with a mere tree limb-a large tree, granted-his longstanding guess was confirmed.
As was his determination to remain a cavalryman. Say what you would about the stupid beasts, horses were rather sturdy. Nor did they move at ridiculous speeds, nor did they keep a rider more than a few feet from the ground.
"Jesus, Lannie, you wrecked the plane! You wrecked the plane!" was Keenan's current contribution, even more useless than the last.
"Shut the fuck up!" Denise hollered. "Just concentrate, Lannie. You can do it."
Fortunately, Lannie had left off his own shouting. Now that he was in a crisis, his pilot's instincts had taken over.
"We're going in, guys," he said. "Can't do anything else."
Even to Denise, it was obvious from the damage suffered by the wing on her side that he was right. "You can do it, Lannie," she said calmly. "And we got a big wide meadow here."
Lannie's grin was as thin as a grin could get, but she was relieved to see it. "Just better hope we don't hit a gopher hole. Got no way to retract the landing gear."
"There aren't any gophers in Europe," she said, in as reassuring a tone as she could manage.
"Yeah, that's right," chimed in Keenan from the back. "No ground hogs, neither." Thankfully, he'd left off the screeching.
Denise saw no reason to voice aloud her firm conviction that there were probable umpteen thousand things that could produce holes in a meadow. All but two of which did exist in Europe.
They'd be coming down in a few seconds. Lannie did have the plane more or less under control. Hopefully it'd be a crash landing they could walk away from, if nothing caught fire or-
"Drop the other bomb, Keenan!"
"Huh?"
"Drop the fucking bomb!"
"Oh. Yeah."
Watching, Janos didn't wonder for more than an instant why the up-timers had committed the seemingly pointless act of bombing an empty patch of meadow. Judging from the way the first bomb had exploded, the device had been detonated by a contact fuse, probably armed by the act of releasing it. Not the sort of thing any sane man wants to be sitting atop when he tries to crash an aircraft as gently as possible.
The plane came down. And confirmed once again Janos' long-standing conviction that plans and schemes and plots are just naturally prone to crashing.
"Oh, hell," said Noelle. At first, she'd thought that the plane had come down safely. Almost as if it were landing on a proper airfield. Then-one of the wheels must have hit an unseen obstruction-she saw the still undamaged wing dip sharply and strike the ground. The plane skewed around, tipped up on its nose-please God, don't let that propeller come apart in pieces and chew anybody up-and seemed to balance precariously for a moment.
Then it looked as if the plane just more or less disintegrated into its component parts. The newly-damaged wing broke off, the fuselage tipped and rolled, and the plane flopped down on its side. Most of the other wing broke off, as did part of the tail assembly when it hit.
Still…
There was no explosion. No flames. People had walked away from car crashes worse than that.
"Just wait for me, Eddie," she said. "And don't move. Your arm's busted."
She got on her horse and headed for the crash site.
Janos pointed to the enemy cavalryman still on the ground by the remains of the wagon.
"Gardiner, see to him. Keep him under guard, that's all. Do him no harm unless he attacks you. Gage, follow me."
He set off after the other cavalryman, toward the downed plane.
"What are we going to do?" asked Gage, loud enough to be heard over the sound of the cantering horses.
"Seize them and take them with us, any who survived. What else can we do? I don't think this is a reconnaissance patrol from a larger force following them. They wouldn't have sent just two men for that purpose. I'm not certain, but I think these are operating alone. If we let any of them go-and there's at least one of them in good condition-they'll take the alarm to Hof. Two bomb explosions, a crashed warcraft, even th
e sorriest garrison in Creation will react to that."
Gage was silent for a moment. Then, as Janos expected, he raised the other obvious alternative.
"We could kill them."
"Oh, splendid," said Janos. "Just what Austria needs. Half our army is facing Wallenstein on the north, most of the rest is facing the Turks to the south-and we ignite a new war by committing a pointless massacre."
"It was a thought," said Gage mildly. "Probably not a good one, I admit."
Drugeth's irritation with the Englishman was only momentary. He'd considered that solution himself. But he still had hopes they could complete this adventure without the sort of drastic measures that would trigger off an explosive reaction from the USE.
Firmly, he ignored his own hard-gained wisdom on the subjects of plans and their likely outcomes.
Chapter 10. The Sword
By the time Denise got done hauling Lannie out of the wreck, she was exhausted. Getting Keenan out hadn't been too bad, even though he'd been in the cramped rear of the cockpit. But Keenan had just been dazed and bruised, not pinned by some of the equipment that had been broken loose and all but completely unconscious.
Denise was strong for a girl her age and build, but the fact remained that the age was almost-sixteen and while the build was great for making girls jealous and boys drool-not that she appreciated either one-it wasn't that good for frantically trying to free a normal-sized man from wreckage and haul him out by bodily force. Not for the first time in her life, she wished she'd inherited more of her dad's bulk and muscle and less of her mother's appearance.
But, finally, it was done. Probably hadn't taken more than a few minutes, actually. With the last of her strength, she lowered Lannie onto the ground and half-spilled herself out of the fuselage. Fortunately, the meadow was pretty soft ground. On her hands and knees, she saw that Keenan was sitting up and holding his head. He was groaning a little, but so far as she could tell he didn't really seem to be hurt.
