1634: The Baltic War (38 page)

He could have added
my father and his enthusiasms,
but there was no point. By now, as closely as they had worked together for the past few months, Ulrik and Baldur had exhausted all possible variations on that theme.

The man being fitted into the diving suit had very pale skin to begin with, so it was hard to tell if his pallor was due in any part to fear. If that had been Eddie himself, he was sure he'd have been as white as a ghost.

"You look very pale," Anne Cathrine said. "Are you ill again?"

Damn the girl,
Eddie would have thought, except he was long past the point where he could bring himself to curse this particular female, even to himself. How in the name of God had a sensible—well, within reason—twenty-year-old naval officer developed a crush on a fifteen-year-old? The worst crush he'd ever had in his life, to boot, even worse than the one he'd had when he was her age for Casey Stevenson, the head cheerleader at the high school.

Maybe he just had an attraction for unobtainable women, he thought gloomily. Casey had been three years older than he, which, in the social context of a rural high school, made her no less out of his league than the princess standing next to him.

Fine. "King's daughter." What was the difference, in this day and age? Even leaving aside the fact that she was the offspring of his sworn enemy?

"Are you ill?" Anne Cathrine repeated, this time with more concern in her voice. "You are still weak, Eddie. And you are a bit frail to begin with."

Oh, swell. Frail to begin with. Any moment now, Eddie, you'll be sweeping her off her feet.

"No, I'm fine," he muttered.

Actually, he was, relatively speaking. His stump didn't ache much anymore, he'd gotten fairly accustomed to the wooden pegleg, and he'd recovered from the illness he'd come down with for a week in February, whatever it had been. Eddie just labeled it "the medieval crud" and left it at that. If
he
were the king of Denmark, he'd be throwing every spare coin he had at the plumbing industry, not wasting it on a dozen grandiose military schemes—at least half of which had no serious application to warfare anyway. Not for a decade, at least.

Like this one. Leaving aside the incredible risk to the men involved, what in God's name did Christian IV think he could do against Simpson's ironclads with a man in an old-fashioned diving suit?

Scuba equipped divers, now, that might be a different story. Eddie knew that the French had somehow managed to get their hands on some of that equipment. The king had let that slip in one of his drunken confidences—along with his bitter resentment that the French refused to let him have any of it.

Eddie and Ulrik had once teamed up to try to talk the king out of the diving suit nonsense. Eddie had felt a little guilty about that, since from a cold-blooded Agent 007 standpoint, he should probably have been encouraging Christian to continue with the foolish business. But . . .

The problem there was that, over the months of his captivity, he'd come to be almost as fond of Ulrik as he was of the prince's half-sister Anne Cathrine. And, as bold as the prince was, Eddie was worried he might test the crazy diving suit himself.

Damnation. He was reminded of a quip that he'd once read in a book, made by one of the great particle physicists up-time when they'd discovered a particle nobody had expected or predicted. He wasn't sure which one had made the wisecrack—Fermi, maybe, or Murray Gell-Mann—but he'd been charmed enough by the comment itself to remember it.

Who ordered this?

Exactly the plaint Eddie had been making silently for some time now. If Fate were to have him be captured by the enemy, what idiot ordered captors that he
liked
? Even had the hots for, in the case of one.

Eddie half-glared down at the king. Eddie and Anne Cathrine were standing by the stone ledge that served as a safety barrier for the road running alongside the Øresund a few miles north of Copenhagen. Christian IV, besotted as always with mechanical contraptions, was standing below them on the wharf right next to the pump, overseeing the whole process. Or driving the artisans nuts, take your pick.

The truth was, Eddie even liked the Danish monarch. Except when he was drunk, at least, which was half the time. Even then, Christian was a friendly and jovial souse, not at all like the nasty bastard Eddie's father had been when he was pickled. But having grown up with an alcoholic parent, Eddie didn't drink much himself and had a low tolerance for drunkards.

Anne Cathrine tugged on his sleeve. "You should be wearing a better coat, Eddie. It's still cold, in the beginning of April."

He almost grit his teeth. The princess—fine, "king's daughter"—was wearing nothing more than her usual apparel. The same sort of garments she wore in the castle.

She
wasn't frail, of course. Oh, hell no. A cross between a Valkyrie and a Danish dairy maid. With the looks of the former and the constitution of the latter. All she needed was breast plates.

Best not to think about that, though. They'd probably have to be whatever the Valkyrie equivalent of D-cups were—C-cups, for sure—and Eddie was
trying
to maintain his sanity and not do anything incredibly stupid and suicidal like—

Really best not to think about that.

Fortunately, he had a distraction. The diver was finally entering the water, carefully lowering himself into the Øresund with the help of two other men holding ropes. Even leaving aside the risk, Eddie didn't envy the poor man. That suit had to weigh a ton, and the water would be frigid. Hopefully, the first misery would offset the latter, at least to a degree.

The man wasn't supposed to spend all that long underwater, at least. Even the king had allowed that it wouldn't make much of a test if the testee froze to death halfway through.

"He's a brave man," Eddie said, shaking his head.

Anne Cathrine shrugged. "Not so brave as all that. He was supposed to be executed next week. Tortured first, too, I think. Killed a man and his wife in a robbery. Our father promised him a pardon if he survived the test."

The matter-of-fact way she said that reminded Eddie forcefully—it was easy to forget, often, around her and her half-brother—that he was not only a captive, but a captive in the miserable benighted seventeenth century, to boot. "The Early Modern Era," historians called it.

What a laugh.
Ripe Medieval
would have been Eddie's pick. Complete with dungeons and heated tongs and outdoor sewage.

Hearing a commotion behind him on the road, he turned his head. A carriage was pulling up and coming to stop. Prince Ulrik and his tame Norwegian half-tech-whiz and half-cutthroat had finally arrived.

"About time!" boomed the king, once his son emerged from the vehicle. "You almost missed it!" He pointed at the water, where the diver's helmet was disappearing beneath the surface.

Ulrik gave his father an half-apologetic wave of the hand and came to stand next to Eddie and Anne Cathrine. His Norwegian sidekick, on the other hand, climbed down the ladder to the wharf and went over to the pump. Baldur was almost as bad as the king, when it came to being obsessed with gadgetry, even gadgetry that he didn't approve of. Eddie knew that Norddahl was no more in favor of working on diving suits than Ulrik was.

But the king had decreed, and so it would be—and Baldur wasn't about to miss the chance to fiddle with his gear.

Hopefully, he wouldn't be fiddling much, if at all. Ever since Ulrik and Baldur had raised this project with Eddie, he'd been trying to remember what he'd read about it years earlier. There'd been a brief stretch there, back when he was fourteen, where Eddie had developed the ambition to become an oceanographer. He'd dropped the idea, soon enough, once he got a better sense of how much tedium the apparently glamorous profession actually had in practice. In that respect, it was much like being an archaeologist or an astronomer. They were all professions that looked really cool in the movies, but in the real world mostly involved tedious and repetitive work recording data. The intellectual equivalent of being a ditch-digger, it seemed to him. By then, he'd veered off into his
I'll-be-a-NASCAR-race-driver
phase, anyway.

The problem was that Eddie couldn't remember much about whatever he'd read concerning this sort of diving. Or scuba diving, for that matter. Like any proper fourteen-year-old enthusiast, Eddie had been interested in
deep
sea diving. The sort of enterprise that you couldn't possibly do in any kind of personal diving gear. For that you needed the really nifty stuff like bathyspheres or bathyscapes—and if something went wrong at those depths, there wasn't anything to worry about.

Poof—
or maybe
crunch
—and it was all over.

The only thing he did recall was that something he'd read had made him solemnly vow he'd never get into this sort of diving suit. But he couldn't for the life of him remember what it was. Just . . . something, that went beyond the usual perils of drowning or the bends. Something really grisly.

The diver had now apparently reached the bottom. Eddie didn't know what sort of surface he was walking on. Nothing too rocky, he hoped. But he did know that the depth here was almost sixty feet, because the king had remarked that he'd picked this spot because it was the deepest place his workmen had been able to find in the Øresund that wouldn't require doing the test from the back of a boat. At least Christian had had enough sense not to add that complication on top of everything else—although it was typical of the man to have chosen the deepest possible place for a first test. God forbid anything should be done by halves in Denmark, the way they were in more sensible lands ruled by dullard but thankfully unimaginative kings.

There being nothing to see beyond a hose entering the water and moving slowly about, Eddie dredged up his memory and did some calculations. Water pressure increased by one atmosphere every thirty-three feet, with sea level pressure being 14.7 pounds per square inch. Call it thirty pounds per square inch at a depth of thirty-five feet, and forty-five pounds at a depth of sixty-five feet. That meant the diver, at a depth of approximately sixty feet, had about forty pounds per square inch pressing on every square inch of his body surface.

The suit's surface, rather. How many square inches did that suit have?

Eddie had no idea. The only answer he could come up with was
lots.
He lifted his forearm and looked down on it, trying to estimate how many square inches there were just on that small part of his body alone. The coat sleeve wasn't as thick and bulky as a diving suit, of course, but . . .

Close enough. He figured there were somewhere between sixteen and twenty-four square inches of surface just on the upper side of his forearm. Call it twenty square inches. Then multiply by . . . he figured three times would give a reasonable estimate of the total surface area of his entire forearm. Sixty square inches, then.

Each and every one of which, for that diver down there, had an extra twenty-five pounds squeezing down on them. That was three-quarters of a ton's worth of pressure just on one forearm alone. For his whole body, who knew? Ten tons, at least. Maybe fifteen.

To be sure, he wouldn't be feeling it, since the pump was maintaining a higher air pressure in the suit to compensate. But if anything went wrong . . .

Eddie suddenly remembered what he'd forgotten.

No wonder he'd forgotten it!

"Eddie, you should go inside," Anne Cathrine said forcefully. "You're looking more pale than ever."

He ignored her, turning to Ulrik. "Do you have a—a—? Ah! I can't remember what they're called. A safety valve. On the hose, near the pump."

He made vague, groping gestures with his hands, trying to delineate something he could only vaguely describe. "It's like a check-valve. What it does, if the pump suddenly fails, is automatically lock—so the higher air pressure in the suit can't escape."

Ulrik frowned. "I don't know. I don't believe so. But I'd have to ask Baldur."

As always, they'd been speaking the German which served the royal Danes and Eddie alike as a common tongue. The prince raised his voice and started jabbering some Danish at the Norwegian standing next to the king below. Eddie could now understand some of the language, but these quickly shouted words he could only guess at.

Baldur looked up. After a moment, he shook his head and jabbered something back. It was clear enough to Eddie from the expression on Baldur's face that the answer wasn't even
no, we don't.
It was more along the lines of
what are you talking about?

"Get him out of there, Ulrik," Eddie hissed. "The diver, I mean. Pull him out.
Now.
"

Ulrik frowned. That would require overriding—trying to, anyway—his father. Which was no small chore, to put it mildly, whenever Christian IV had his heart set on something.

He shrugged. "I'll try."

But before he could even speak a word, there was a sudden hubbub among the men working the pump.

One of them jabbered something at the king. Eddie had gotten familiar enough with Danish to grasp that the gist of what he was saying was that something seemed to be wrong.

Eddie looked at the hose. Sure enough. There were
so
many ways to get killed doing this. The hose was now thrashing about, in a sluggish sort of way. Eddie was sure it had ruptured somewhere along the line.

"Pull him out! Now!" Ulrik shouted. Those simple Danish terms, at least, Eddie understood.

The king didn't seem inclined to argue the matter. The diver had two ropes attached to him as well as the hose. The workmen standing by started hauling on them. Meanwhile, the men at the pump continued their useless labor.

Baldur took off his boots and his coat and jumped into the water, disappearing below the surface.

"What's wrong, Eddie?" asked Anne Cathrine. "And you look really sick, now. You should go inside."

He grasped at that straw. He knew what was coming up out of the water—he remembered it all, now, too late for it to do any good—and he had no desire to let the king's daughter see it. She was only fifteen years old.