by Eric Flint
After being defeated at Zwenkau in August, the Saxon general von Arnim had withdrawn what was left of his army into Leipzig. There, he’d prepared for a siege while he began negotiating surrender terms with the Swedes. But the negotiations had dragged on for weeks, since Gustav Adolf had been pre-occupied with driving forward his offensive into Poland. The Elector of Saxony was killed in September, and thereafter Gustav Adolf wasn’t particularly concerned with the situation in Leipzig. Von Arnim wasn’t a mercenary in the usual sense of the term and his soldiers were mostly Saxons rather than the usual mélange you found in professional armies. Still, with no patron left, von Arnim certainly wasn’t going to launch any campaigns, even after Gustav Adolf took almost all of his forces out of Saxony. He’d stay put in Leipzig until the situation got clarified.
And then the king of Sweden had been severely injured at Lake Bledno, in October, and was now out of the political picture altogether—with von Arnim and ten thousand or so of his soldiers still camped in Leipzig. So, if pressed, Stearns could always claim that he was seeing to it that in the event von Arnim resumed hostilities he could bring his Third Division back into Saxony in a hurry.
The CoC had gotten word in Dresden from their compatriots in Leipzig that the Swedes had resumed negotiations with von Arnim. But while no one in the CoCs was privy to those discussions, no one thought any longer that the Swedes were simply seeking von Arnim’s surrender. They were almost sure that Oxenstierna was trying to hire von Arnim himself—not to fight the Poles, but to serve the Swedish chancellor as another repressive force inside the USE. He couldn’t rely on the USE army still besieging Poznan to serve that purpose. In fact, everyone thought that he’d insisted on continuing the war with Poland precisely for the purpose of keeping the USE’s army out of the country. He’d use mercenaries in the pay of Sweden instead. He already had Banér and his fifteen thousand men marching into Saxony. If Oxenstierna could add von Arnim and the ten thousand men he had in Leipzig, he probably figured he could overawe or if need be crush any opposition in Saxony.
“Interesting times,” he murmured, thinking of the Chinese curse Jeff had once mentioned to him.
“Is that a ‘yes’?” Tata asked.
Eric made a face. “I guess.”
He started moving around the tower, which was built like a large turret, with Tata trailing in his wake. When he got to the other side, he leaned over the railing and began studying the walls which protected Dresden on the south. Most of the city was on the southern bank of the Elbe.
“We’re not going to be able to protect all of it,” he said. “Have to let the northern part go. Even then, it’s going to be a lot of work to build up those walls.”
“And you said you didn’t know anything about sieges,” Tata said. She wasn’t arguing the point, just doing her usual best to squash any further protests on his part.
“Just common sense,” he grumbled. “I’m still not an engineer.”
She came close and slid an arm around his waist. “You’ll do,” she said.
That statement had a very expansive flavor to it. Eric felt full of good cheer again.
Eddie Junker studied the boulevard to the south. Then, swiveled and studied it to the north.
Boulevard, he told himself firmly. That sounded so much less suicidal.
An uncharitable soul might have called the thoroughfare a “street.” A particularly surly specimen might have added “crooked” to the bargain.
In truth, the thoroughfare wasn’t really crooked. It just…jiggled around a bit.
Standing next to him, Denise Beasley stretched out her hand and made a slow, swooping motion. “You oughta be able to pull it off, Eddie. It’s a pretty straight street. Ah, avenue.”
“The lack of straightness by itself isn’t the problem.” He stretched out his arms, pointing simultaneously to the buildings on either side of the street. “What would you say the width is?”
Denise looked back and forth. Her friend Minnie Hugelmair, always given to direct methods, walked over to the building on the left side of the street. Then she paced off the distance.
“Thirty-five feet,” she announced.
Eddie nodded. “About what I figured.” He gave Denise a fish-eyed look. “And what is the wingspan of the plane?”
Denise waggled her head. “I’m not sure. Twenty-five feet?”
“Ha. Thirty-two feet. Leaving me three feet of clearance in the street—the very-not-straight street—if I have to come down into it.”
“But you’re not planning to,” protested Denise. “Exactly.”
“ ‘Exactly,’ ” Eddie mimicked. “No, I would simply be following it toward the square while—not quite—coming below the surface of the roofs. That would—hopefully—allow me to come into the landing area with a lower altitude than if I had to hop over the big buildings surrounding it. But if anything goes wrong…”
He looked down and scuffed his boot across the surface of the road. “Then there’s this little problem. You did notice these are cobblestones?”
She looked down. “Um. Yeah.”
“And exactly how many cobblestoned airstrips have you ever seen?”
“Um. None.”
“There’s a reason for that.” He lifted his own, much thicker hand, and shook it up and down sharply. “Cobblestones are contraindicated for landing gear.”
The two CoC craftsmen standing next to them looked at each other. Their expressions were dubious.
“Hard to pull up all these cobblestones and lay new ones,” said the taller of the two.
“And then they wouldn’t be as solidly set,” added his companion.
Eddie had already figured that much out for himself. “How about paving it?”
The two craftsmen looked at each other again.
“We don’t have enough asphalt,” said the one on the left. His name was Wilbart Voss.
“Not nearly enough,” said his partner, Dolph Knebel.
Eddie shook his head. “I don’t really need a regular landing strip. The cobblestones would made a solid foundation if we could just fill it in with gravel to even out the surface. Then, level it with a roller.”
The craftsmen exchanged glances again. That seemed to be a necessary ritual before their brains engaged.
“How wide?” asked Voss.
Eddie started walking slowly toward the big square to the north. “I’d want a minimum of forty feet. I’d be a lot happier with sixty.”
Knebel made a face. “That’s…about three hundred tons of gravel.”
His partner was more sanguine, however. “Not so bad,” said Wilbart. “There’s plenty of gravel in the area and with everyone coming into the city for shelter from Banér we’ve got a lot of wagons and manpower. A strong wind might blow some of it away, though.”
Eddie had already considered that problem. “If need be, I figured we can coat it with pine tar. But I don’t think it’ll be necessary. Between building the strip and repairing the plane, there’s no chance we’d be able to use it until January or February. By then, there’ll be snow holding the gravel in place. Just have to pack down the snow. Really well.”
Denise chimed in. “Hey, I just thought of something, Eddie. You could land and take off on skis instead of wheels.”
Junker’s jaws tightened a little. His girlfriend had a great deal of confidence in his ability to do most anything. As a rule, this was a pleasant state of affairs. There were times when it was awkward, however.
“There is no way I am using skis. I have been flying for only a few months, and I have no experience—none at all—with skis. On a plane, I mean. I know how to ski myself, of course.”
“You don’t have any skis for the plane anyway, do you?” asked Minnie.
“No.”
“Can’t be hard to make,” said Denise, reluctant as always to give up one of her pet schemes.
“I am not using skis. If we can’t do it the usual way, then we simply won’t do it at all.” Eddie shrugged. “Whic
h we probably won’t, anyway, if we lose the airstrip outside the city. This whole idea of flying in and out of the city’s square is crazy to begin with.”
Denise didn’t argue the point. It’d be pretty hard for her to do so, given that her first reaction upon hearing that the CoC was thinking of building an airstrip inside the city walls was pungent, explosive, and consisted mostly of the Amideutsch variant of every four-letter Anglo-Saxon term known to man and girl.
“It might all be a moot point,” said Minnie. “They probably can’t fix the plane anyway.”
Eddie had crashed the plane when he landed it on the jury-rigged strip outside the city a few weeks earlier. He’d blamed the condition of the soil. More precisely, he’d blamed the girls for having assured him the soil was suitable. They had their own opinion, of course.
The most serious damage had been to the propeller, which had been completely destroyed. There was no way to replace it with the tools and equipment available in Dresden, so Eddie’s employer Francisco Nasi was having a new propeller shipped in from Grantville.
Smuggled in would be a better way to put it. The Swedish general Johan Banér had already announced a blockade on any goods coming into Dresden. His army was still too far away to enforce the blockade systematically, but he had a number of cavalry patrols searching for contraband. Given their relatively few numbers, the cavalrymen weren’t trying to interdict all goods, just those that had military uses. Presumably, Nasi had had the propeller hidden some way or another. Still, it was taking time to get it into Dresden.
In the meantime, a number of the city’s artisans had started working on repairing the damage to the plane’s structure. That was slow-going, partly from lack of the right tools and supplies, but mostly because none of them had any good idea what they were doing.
Neither did Eddie, really. He was on the radio almost every night talking to Bob Kelly, the plane’s designer. At the rate they were going, he didn’t expect to have the plane ready to fly again until mid-winter.
By then, the way things were looking, Banér would have Dresden under siege and the airfield outside the city’s walls might as well be on the moon.
So, this project had been launched to jury-rig an airstrip in the central square. It was a project that Eddie considered just barely this side of insane. The only reason he’d agreed to it—a reason he kept entirely to himself—was that if worse came to worst and Banér’s army breached the walls and began sacking the city, Eddie would try to fly himself, Denise, Minnie and Noelle Murphy out of Dresden. If they crashed and died, as they most likely would, the women would still be better off than they would in the hands of the Swedish general’s mercenaries in the midst of a rampage. At least it’d be quick.
“You’re looking awfully solemn,” Denise said, in a teasing tone of voice.
“He thinks we’re probably all going to die,” piped up Minnie, “but it’s sort of okay because this way it’ll be over fast. He’s a pretty stoic guy.”
Denise curled her lip. “I don’t hold with philosophy.”
“Which is itself a philosophical proposition,” said Eddie mildly.
Chapter 8
Stockholm, capital of Sweden
“It’s a tub,” pronounced Kristina. The Swedish princess made the statement with a royal assurance that sat oddly on her slender eight-year-old shoulders.
Nine-year-old shoulders, she would have insisted herself, and never mind that her birthday was still a month away. Kristina tended to view facts with disdain, if they conflicted with her axioms.
Being fair, Prince Ulrik was pretty sure he’d had the same attitude toward facts when he’d been eight years old. Or nine, for that matter.
“I know the Union of Kalmar is unpleasant to travel on,” he said patiently. “But it’s the only ship that can get us across the Baltic without fear of being intercepted.”
“If it gets across the Baltic at all,” she countered. Triumphantly: “You said yourself the thing was not really suited for the open sea! I heard you! And that wasn’t more than four months ago!”
So, he had. Not for the first time, Ulrik reminded himself to be careful what he said in front of Kristina. The girl had a phenomenal memory to go with her ferocious intelligence. He could only hope that she would not prove to be a grudge-holder as she aged, or their marriage would be a tense one.
But that possible problem was still a considerable number of years in the future. Right now, he had to squelch the girl’s developing tantrum over the issue at hand.
“Risks are relative,” he said. “No, the Union of Kalmar is not the best vessel in which to venture on the open sea. It’s a shallow draft ironclad, designed for bombarding shoreside fortifications and destroying ships in sheltered waters. On the other hand, it is—by far—the best vessel to be in should we encounter a Swedish warship on our way across the Baltic. By now, Chancellor Oxenstierna may well have drawn the right conclusions from your silence, and have sent vessels to prevent our passage across the Baltic.”
“I’m mad at him, anyway!” Kristina had a furious expression on her face, most of which Ulrik thought was play-acting. “He was rude in the last two letters!”
The pretense of fury vanished, replaced by another triumphant look. “So that’s the reason I haven’t answered his letters. Well, it’s not really the reason, of course. We had already agreed that it would be smarter to say nothing. But he might think that. So he wouldn’t send ships out.”
Baldur Norddahl chuckled. “The key word is ‘might,’ girl.” The burly Norwegian sat up straighter in his chair, glanced at the salon’s window, and looked back at her. “But he might not think that, either. In which case there we are, in the middle of the Baltic, in our comfortable staterooms on a proper seagoing vessel—and fat lot of good it does us, with our plump merchantman under the guns of a Swedish warship. The captain wouldn’t even think of putting up a fight. Certainly not against a Swedish ship going about the chancellor’s business.”
“Whereas the captain of the Union of Kalmar is a Dane,” Ulrik added quickly, “and will certainly do whatever we tell him. Especially since his ship can destroy any warship in the Baltic—”
“Except one of the other ironclads!”
“Yes, that’s true. But the other two ironclads are under the command of Admiral Simpson in Luebeck. Who is an American, not a Swede.”
Kristina started to say something but Ulrik drove over her. “Yes, I know that he’s formally under the authority of Prime Minister Wettin, who is doing Oxenstierna’s bidding nowadays and might well order us intercepted as well. But whether Simpson would actually obey such a command is doubtful, in my opinion.”
“Why? You told me yourself once he was given to formalities. So why wouldn’t he do what his lawful superior ordered him to do?”
Keep—his—mouth—shut. Speak only of recipes in front of the girl.
He made that vow, knowing full well he wouldn’t be able to keep it. The problem was that Kristina was both too smart and too important to his developing plans. There was no way he could manage this situation without her cooperation, and she was quite capable of withholding that cooperation if he didn’t involve her fully in the project.
“Yes, I know I said that, Kristina. But…”
How to explain?
“Most people are complicated,” he said. “Simpson certainly is. Under most circumstances, I am sure he would be the very Platonic ideal of a politically neutral military officer obeying lawful orders. But the thing is…”
“He’s also very intelligent,” said Baldur. “And politically sophisticated. Simpson will know full well that if he’s ordered by Wettin to take into custody the lawful heir of three crowns—only one of which answers to Oxenstierna and only one of which answers to Wettin—”
“Might answer to Wettin,” interjected Ulrik. “It’s actually not at all clear if the prime minister has the right to act as regent for the crown in the event the monarch is incapacitated and his successor is not of age.” H
e waved his hand. “The whole area is completely gray, in legal terms.”
Thankfully, that piqued Kristina’s interest. “Really? I thought…”
Ulrik shook his head. “The prime minister of the USE isn’t equivalent to the Swedish chancellor. Perhaps more to the point, when it comes to dynastic issues the USE’s parliament is not equivalent to Oxenstierna’s council. Swedish law is fairly clear that the council has the right to appoint a regent for the crown under these circumstances. There is no such clarity in the USE’s constitution.”
Baldur chuckled. “And Stearns, bless the man’s crafty soul, insisted on a formal constitution. So the lawyers can’t just do a quick shuffle of the rules. They’ll need to get an official legal ruling by the supreme court. Which is not known for the celerity of its deliberations.”
Ulrik spoke. “That means, in effect, that the whole issue will be Simpson’s to decide, at least for two months or so. And that’s probably all the time we need.”
Kristina made a last, valiant stand. “You don’t know that!”
Ulrik nodded. “No, I don’t. But we can find out by tomorrow, with the radio.”
The princess chewed on her lower lip for a few seconds. “Okay,” she finally said. “I guess if Simpson agrees, we’ll take the stupid ironclad across the sea. And hope we don’t sink.”
USE naval base
Luebeck
Colonel Jesse Wood hung his flight jacket on a peg near the door and then took a seat in a chair against the wall in Admiral Simpson’s office.
“So what’s up, John? Why did you insist I fly out here at the crack of dawn?”
With the passage of time and some shared heartaches, relations between Jesse Wood and John Chandler Simpson had gotten a lot more relaxed than they’d been in earlier days. The two men still weren’t what you’d call friends, but there was a lot of mutual respect between them.
A lot of trust, too, which is what the admiral thought was most critical at the moment. He half-rose, leaned over his desk and handed Jesse a radio message. “This came in yesterday evening.”
