1634: The Baltic War (42 page)

Rolf Hempel had lost count.

He had absolutely no idea how many of those demonic shells had ripped into the fortifications in his vicinity. A part of him knew the number couldn't have been as high as he thought it was, but it had been high enough.

He didn't know how long this nightmare had been going on, either. It seemed like an eternity, and he cursed his superiors for letting it continue. Surely these horrible ironclads had amply demonstrated their ability to turn the entire city into a smoking heap of wreckage! How many more of Hempel's men had to die before they were allowed to capitulate and save their lives?

He was still asking himself that question when a ten-inch shell exploded three feet away from him and the point, for Rolf Hempel, became forever moot.

"Order to all units." Simpson had to raise his voice to a half-shout to make himself heard by eardrums stunned and battered by a sixty-minute bombardment. "Cease fire."

"All units cease fire, aye, aye, sir!" the signalman replied, and started shouting down the voice pipe to the radio room.

The thunderous explosions tapered off quickly as the order was passed, and Simpson opened the armored door and stepped out onto the bridge wing. He leaned out, looking down at the side of
Constitution
's casement and saw at least a couple of dozen shallow dents. There were a few places where individual steel planks were dished in more deeply, but there was no evidence of any significant damage, and he turned to look at Hamburg.

The city, he reflected, could not say the same thing.

The Wallenlagen was torn and ripped, half-invisible under a pall of smoke and dust. The good news was that the range was so short, and the trajectory of his weapons so straight, that it looked as if none of his fire had overshot the fortifications and landed in the city proper.

And the other "good news,"
he thought harshly,
is that Stearns' demonstration of Gustav Adolf's . . . displeasure has just been made abundantly clear
.

He surveyed the wreckage one more time, then stepped back into the conning tower.

"Instruct all units to secure their guns, then raise anchor," he said. "I believe we have an appointment in Luebeck Bay."

This was the first time in the post-Ring of Fire universe that Mike Stearns had ever flown in a plane that wasn't piloted by Jesse Wood. That made him more nervous than he would have been otherwise, and he would have been nervous to begin with. Mike didn't have a fear of heights, as such, but he'd never enjoyed flying. That had been true even in up-time commercial aircraft, with their gleaming construction and much-touted safety record.

Woody must have noticed his tension, because at one point about halfway through the flight he gave Mike a grin and said, "I want you to know that we have the best safety record of anybody flying on this side of the Ring of Fire. Ain't no commercial airline comes even close."

Mike parsed the logic. "How reassuring. Of course, the Wright brothers could have made the same claim after their first flight at Kitty Hawk."

"Well, yeah. But it's still a statistical fact."

"There's no such thing as a statistical fact, Woody. What there is, is just the odds." The plane jolted around for a bit and Mike paused, stiff-faced and solemn in the manner of a man doing his level best to appear stoic in the face of mindless danger. "As I am just being reminded, thank you very much."

But the turbulence passed, soon enough. The truth was, it was a nice day for flying, with a mostly clear sky and not really very much in the way of turbulence. Blind good luck, given that Mike's mission was urgent and he would have flown in any weather short of near-suicidal.

"Damnation," he grumbled. "I'm not a gambling man."

Woody gave him a look that Mike's mother would have called "old-fashioned."

Mike couldn't help but smile a little. "All right, fine. Outside of politics."

"I was gonna say." Woody looked down, checking the Elbe to make sure he was still on course. "Way I look at it, trotting into a city in the middle of a civil war is a lot riskier than"—he patted the console of the aircraft—"flying in an old bus like this."

"I'm not going to be trotting, and it's not what I'd call a 'civil war.' "

Woody gave him another old-fashioned look. "I'll buy the trotting. The civil war part, now . . . Have the CoC guys won? What I heard just before takeoff, the situation in Hamburg was still what you'd call a free-for-all." He leaned forward a little, peering through the cockpit windscreen. "Speaking of which, there it is."

Mike leaned forward and peered also, but couldn't really see anything on the horizon beyond a splotch in what looked like a small sea of splotches.

"You can't really see the city yet," Woody said. "But it's there."

Mike was quite happy to take his word for it. He leaned back in his seat. "Oh, it's still a free-for-all. But it's more along the lines of a high-impact civil dispute than a real civil war. The CoC has a good chunk of the city under their control and Hamburg's authorities and the official militia aren't willing to launch a full-blown offensive to pry them out."

"Why not?"

Mike was a little amused to see the way a junior air force officer was questioning the prime minister of his nation on High Matters of State without so much as a by-your-leave—indeed, quite obviously without even having considered that he might be out of line. That wouldn't have happened in Simpson's by-the-book navy, for sure. Interservice rivalry in their new world, as such, was far milder than it had been back up-time—thankfully, as far as Mike was concerned. But what you might call the cultural differences between the various services were a lot more pronounced, to make up for it. If Mike were to make an analogy with his days as a student, the navy was the in-crowd fraternities and student government types; the army was the hairy radicals; and the air force was more or less the bikers.

But he didn't care, actually. Mike had gotten along well enough with everybody, in high school and college. He'd never heard Thorsten Engler's sarcastic opinion on the subject of up-timer security mania, but if he had he would've mostly agreed with him. Mike had concluded long before the Ring of Fire that at least ninety-five percent of all the "security necessities" he'd heard about up-time were just some bigshot's way of either covering something up or trying to make himself look like a bigger shot, or both.

"Well, I can't read their minds," Mike explained. "But, at a guess, I'd say the reason Hamburg's authorities are shying away from an all-out attack on the CoC stronghold in the city is because part of that stronghold includes one of the city's gates. Just outside of which, Torstensson's parked with eight full regiments."

"Ah." Woody frowned. "Then why doesn't the CoC just open the gate and be done with it?"

Mike clucked his tongue. "Flyboys. Trained by Colonel Jesse I-don't-need-no-steenkeeng-politics Wood, to make it worse. Let's just say that political turbulence is a lot more complicated than anything you'll run into up here—and the phrase Hamburg Committee of Correspondence has more than one noun."

Woody's frown had deepened. "To put it another way," Mike elaborated, "just because they're a CoC doesn't mean they're no longer citizens of Hamburg. They'll look at it from a different angle than the city's authorities, of course, but they're also looking to cut the best deal Hamburg can get out of this."

"Oh. All right, I can see that." Most of his attention was now focused on his flying, though, since he was getting ready to land. So all he said was, "And you're the deal-maker."

Torstensson was all business. "Till midafternoon, Michael." He glanced at his up-time watch. "Call it fifteen hundred, on the nose."

"Can we make it four o'clock? Sixteen hundred, rather."

The Swedish general shook his head, glancing at the western horizon. "No, sorry. This early in April, it will be dark by nineteen hundred. I want a minimum of four hours of daylight if I wind up fighting once we get into the city. Even going in at fifteen hundred is pushing it."

Mike accepted the inevitable. "Fine. How am I getting in?"

Torstensson waved forward another officer. "Cavalry escort." He gave Mike a sideways glance. "You
can
ride a horse?"

"Oh, yeah. Long as I'm not making any cavalry charges, anyway."

"No fear of that. You'll either be trotting in on a nice city road, or it's an ambush and you'll be dead."

"You could have maybe put that a little more delicately, Lennart," Mike groused.

An easy trot, it turned out to be, with no ambushes at all. In fact, by the time Mike got to the first CoC checkpoint, there was an official Hamburg delegation to meet him, along with the designated spokesmen for the city's CoC. Clearly enough, both sides in the dispute had seen his plane land, had their own sources of information that let them know who'd been coming in the plane—and neither one was about to let the other get the inside track on the ensuing negotiations.

Again, he found himself a little amused. Dinosaur-reactionary or wild-eyed-radical, or anywhere in between, Hamburg's citizenry had certain well-defined and long-established customs and attitudes that permeated all of them. Two stood out in particular:

They were devoted to their cussed independence, and every proper Hamburger from two-year-old toddlers on up was a natural-born businessman. Except for possibly Venetians, there were no people in Europe more addicted to mercantile deal-making and money-making schemes.

According to city legend, Emperor Barbarossa had declared Hamburg a city for free trading on May 11, 1189. It had been one of the major cities in the Hanseatic League during the Middle Ages, and had had its own navy since the fourteenth century. Although Hamburg had been occupied by the Danes twice during that time, it had managed to maintain effective independence by skillfully playing off Denmark against the Holy Roman Empire. The Wallenlagen, the massive fortifications that enhanced the city's defenses, had been constructed recently, starting in 1616, just to drive home the point to anyone who might object.

Independence was gone, now, and Mike was pretty sure even the most stubborn official on Hamburg's city council understood that. If they didn't, Mike would urge them to take a tour of their much-prized Wallenlagen. As much of the fortifications, that was to say, as Simpson's ten-inch guns had left intact as he passed through the city. Judging from what Mike had seen from the plane on his way in—he'd ordered Woody to overfly the city at low altitude twice before landing—that wasn't a whole lot. Not intact, anyway. There was plenty of rubble.

But that left the matter of Hamburg's commercial and trading rights and privileges still to be determined. The Hamburgers—both sides—were clearly hoping Mike had plenty of leeway for negotiation on that subject.

Which he did, in point of fact. In his radio exchanges with Gustav Adolf, the emperor had made it clear that while Hamburg's independence was to be eliminated—and no wiggling—he didn't care much about anything else. Neither did Mike, for that matter. His principal concern—which the emperor had expressed no opinion on, one way or the other—was to see to it that the power of the city's council was either broken altogether or so severely compromised and undermined that it could never regain its former control over the city.

Naturally—Mike almost felt like breaking into a rendition of "Tradition" from
Fiddler on the Roof
—the quarrels began over the shape of the table.

Figuratively speaking, anyway. The CoC delegates were adamant that the negotiations had to take place right there on the street just beyond the open gate—and Torstensson's eight regiments. They even had CoC members hauling chairs and a few tables from nearby taverns, for the purpose. The city council's delegates were just as adamant that the negotiations should take place in the Grossneumarkt, a large square on the city's western side which, just coincidentally, happened to be the location where the city's official militia assembled and practiced.

Mike let it go on for a few minutes, simply to establish the facade that he was a thoughtful fellow who considered all matters judiciously and ponderously. He might have even broken into "Tradition," except he really couldn't carry a tune that well.

Façade, though, is what it was. He'd already decided where he'd hold court—to call "negotiations" by their right name—before he'd passed through the gate. Torstensson had recommended the place to him.

"Enough," he said eventually. "We'll continue this in St. Jakobi church."

The city councilmen and CoC members squinted at him. Despite the age difference—the former, all middle-aged; the latter, mostly in their twenties—their expressions were almost identical. A painter might have called it "Owls, Suspicious."

"I'm not going to argue about this, people," Mike said mildly. "St. Jakobi's, it is." He turned toward his horse, giving loud orders to his cavalry escort. Soon thereafter, he set off, with the city's various negotiators trotting on foot in his wake.

He figured the church would make a suitable compromise for a meeting location. On the one hand—the key, critical hand—it was located within striking distance of Torstensson's regiments. On the other hand, it
was
a church. For all the incredible bloodshed that had engulfed Europe since the great war began in 1618, churches were still, more often than not, respected as sanctuaries. Even in the war's worst massacre, the sack of Magdeburg, those residents who had managed to find refuge in the city's
Dom
had had their lives spared.

So, he kept the substance of power while giving the city councilmen some reason to assume he wasn't actually out for their blood.

Once they reached the church, it took a bit of time for the wherewithal for a negotiation to be assembled. But, eventually, it was done. And by then it was two o'clock in the afternoon.

Right about when Mike had planned.

He looked at his watch, ignoring the keen-eyed interest of all the negotiators. Copies of up-time books were practically flooding Europe by now, but few people had ever actually seen in person one of the fabled up-time watches.

"Ah, blast it. We're running out of time. General Torstensson told me in no uncertain terms that if I didn't have a settlement by three o'clock—that's just one hour, and twenty of minutes of it will be needed to send him word—he'd storm the city."

Mike lowered the watch. "Generals, you know—and he's a stubborn Swede, to make it worse. Refused to give me any leeway at all."

Five minutes were wasted with indignant protests. Most of them, but by no means all, coming from the city councilmen. Mike waited patiently enough, since from his standpoint the more time they wasted, the stronger his bargaining position became. This was just another of life's many illustrations of Dr. Johnson's remark on the subject of a short time span concentrating the mind wonderfully.

Eventually, that thought seemed to occur to the city councilmen also. Silence fell over the ramshackle collection of tables around which everyone was sitting in the church's nave.

"Here's where we start," Mike said. "Hamburg's days as an independent city are over. Done. Finished. Don't even bother raising that issue, because the answer is 'absolutely not.' Emperor Gustav Adolf's patience was used up by you folks over the past few months, and there's nothing left. Perhaps more to the point, I can assure you that Torstensson's regiments outside the walls have no patience at all. I either go out there in a little over half an hour and tell them that they can march into the city as its legal protectors—they'll maintain discipline; you can rest assured of that—or they'll come in and sack it."

Silence. Mike waited a minute or so.

"Splendid. Now, let's move on to other matters. First, the emperor wishes me to assure Hamburg's representatives that he has no intention of abrogating or limiting their traditional and well-established rights as merchants. In fact, he plans to encourage Hamburg's prosperity by establishing it as the chief port for the United States of Europe."