1634: The Baltic War (53 page)

So, sometime in the wee hours of the morning, Captain Hamers wound up staggering back to his ship on his own. He was not overly distressed, however. There was always the next night, after all, and by now the town was very friendly indeed. The parade and the band and—most of all—the hard Thuringian currency Mike spread around lavishly had produced a complete transformation in the attitude of the townsfolk toward the situation.

And why not? Ritsenbuttel was not an independent town, and never had been. It had been under Hamburg's authority for centuries—and still was, as it turned out. A rather startlingly transformed Hamburg, to be sure. The CoC members whom Mike solemnly assured everyone were representatives of the new city council seemed to be a most unlikely set of burgomasters. They were too young; too roughly dressed; too mean-looking but not actually mean enough.

Still, it was none of the Ritsenbuttelers' concern. Certainly not compared to the sudden boom in business, ranging all the way from the taverns and the inns packed to the gills with paying guests—and wasn't that a wonder, being as they were all soldiers?—to every craftsman and artisan in town being commissioned to help with the repairs of the
Achates
and expanding the piers to handle the new business the prince of Germany assured them would soon be arriving.

Even the town's large number of fishermen were happy. Mike sent them off to catch fish to feed the regiment—and while they were at it, keep an eye out for nefarious evildoers who might be creeping up on Ritsenbuttel across the waters of the Wadden Sea or through the island channels.

Within a day, the printing press was up and running, and Mike began flooding the town with impromptu propaganda. Then he hired whatever stray lads he could find with a horse or a donkey who could spread the good word to all the farming villages in the area.

The propaganda was simple and to the point. Three points, actually.

Point One was that Hamburg and all its environs had been incorporated into the United States of Europe. Legally, legally—indeed, the Hamburg city council had been most enthusiastic, and you could always come into Ritsenbuttel to chat with the council's representatives yourself if you had any doubts.

Point Two was more or less a series of ferocious snarls aimed at The Dastardly Enemy—not too precisely defined—and boasting triumphantly of the overwhelming military might of the USE. Happily, among the printers brought from Hamburg had been an engraver who could work rapidly. By the third day, the broadsides had very nice if overlarge illustrations of the ironclads and the SRG rifle on every other page.

Point Three was an announcement that a parade, picnic and political rally would be held on Sunday, in Ritsenbuttel, following church services. With music! And, of course, the food and drink to be paid for by the new authorities.

Church services tended to be brief, that day.

So, not long after Mike arrived in Ritsenbuttel, the
Achates
was ready to go again. And it would be reasonable to say that the whole area had become a hotbed of USE sympathizers and enthusiasts for the new emperor.

Mike transmitted the gist of all that to Gustav Adolf. This time, using far more formal language.

The reply didn't particularly surprise him. For a Swede—and a king, to boot—Gustav was quite adept at American idiom himself.

Just stay put. Simpson should be arriving in Luebeck Bay any time. Expect all hell to break loose when he does. More to follow.

The Bay of Kiel

"What the devil is that imbecile shouting about?" Captain Jean-Marie Grosclaud, commanding His Most Christian Majesty's thirty-two-gun ship
Railleuse
, demanded impatiently.

He stood on
Railleuse
's tall, narrow poop deck, glaring down at the Danish fishing boat that had emerged from the morning's slightly misty visibility. The French warship had almost run down the miserable little craft, and now the boat's master (Grosclaud refused to apply the term "captain" to a Danish fisherman whose so-called vessel was scarcely larger than his own ship's second launch) was standing beside the boat's tiller shouting about
something
.

"I can't quite make it out, sir," his sailing master admitted. The master was the senior professional seaman in
Railleuse
's company. He also had the best command of their allies' language . . . which said truly appalling things about everyone
else's
Danish, Grosclaud supposed.

"Well, tell him to stand clear," the captain said, even more impatiently. "The fool is probably saying we've ruined one of his nets or something of the sort."

He snorted, eyeing the Dane with a mixture of disdain and irritation. The fishing boat master's fellow countrymen had been nothing but one enormous pain in the arse, as far as Grosclaud was concerned. In his fairer-minded moments, which he entertained no more frequently than necessary, Grosclaud was forced to admit that however ambitious their king might be, the majority of Danes weren't really particularly interested in helping Cardinal Richelieu's "League of Ostend" assail their fellow Protestants and never had been. Under the circumstances, he could scarcely blame them for that. If
he'd
been Danish, he certainly wouldn't have been madly enthusiastic over the notion, after all. Still, now that they were (supposedly, at least) committed, they could have been at least a
little
more efficient about doing it.

The sailing master was shouting down at the fishing boat. Even Grosclaud, whose comprehension of Danish was nonexistent, could tell that the sailing master was speaking slowly and awkwardly, with frequent pauses as he searched for the right word. He was only part way through the delivery of Grosclaud's order when the fisherman started shaking his head, waving both hands, and expostulating more loudly than ever.

"Tell him I'll drop a round shot through the bottom of his miserable boat if he doesn't stand clear!" Grosclaud snapped.

There'd never been a fisherman born, no matter what his nationality, who wouldn't claim a warship had overrun his nets and torn them to pieces. The chance of having anyone believe him might be minute, but it was worth trying. Especially when the warship belonged to someone who was playing paymaster to the fishing boat's monarch. Grosclaud, however, wasn't in the mood for it.

The sailing master waved his own hands, shouting more loudly than before as he cut off the meaningless babble of Danish. The fisherman stared up at him, shaking his head in artfully feigned disbelief, and Grosclaud snorted again.
Railleuse
was on her way home to France, and the captain had no intention of allowing a wretched fisherman's false claims of damage to delay his ship's escape.

All the fault of those damned books from the future,
he fumed silently.
All that nonsense about year-round "close blockades." Madness!

He didn't know who'd been responsible for deciding to apply that particular piece of lunatic brilliance to the present. It might even have been Richelieu himself, for all Grosclaud knew. It was the sort of convoluted, cunning notion that would have appealed to him, by all accounts. But even assuming that the books in question had told the truth (a point Grosclaud was inclined to doubt), those Englishmen of the future had never done it with ships like
Railleuse
. Nor, so far as Grosclaud had been able to discover, had they even
tried
to do it in the accursed Baltic!

He shuddered as he considered the winter just past. Ice had been a significant problem once a ship got north of Gotland, and the Gulf of Riga—as usual—had frozen over. The winter's icy winds and wet misery had turned the lot of the ships' companies assigned to the blockade into a nightmare, and the fact that Captain Admiral Overgaard had been unwilling (for reasons Jean-Marie Grosclaud found perfectly understandable, however little he liked them) to take his ships any farther up the Trave River than he absolutely had to had only made things worse. Poor diet, inadequate clothing, poor sanitation, nonexistent hygiene, miserable, wet, unheated living quarters, and treacherous conditions aloft, had killed scores and left the ships full of sick and injured crewmen . . . as anyone but an idiot must have known would happen. The attrition rate was always high aboard ships that were forced to remain at sea for extended periods; doing so in the middle of a Baltic winter had only made it worse.

Which, of course, was the reason—or
one
of the reasons, at least—why Grosclaud had no intention of letting a Danish fisherman's spurious claims of damage interfere with his departure.

The sailing master shouted one last sentence, jabbing his pointing finger sharply westward, in the direction of the mist-blurred outlines of the island of Funen. The fisherman grimaced. Then he shook his head, shrugged his shoulders eloquently, and started shouting at his motley four-man crew instead of
Railleuse
, and Grosclaud snorted a third time—this time in satisfaction.

The fishing boat's sail filled as the crew sheeted home, and the smaller craft bore away from
Railleuse
. It was considerably faster in the current light wind conditions than
Railleuse
, and Grosclaud watched it go for several moments. Then he returned to his interrupted morning's exercise, walking up and down the leeward side of the poop deck as the mist turned the fishing boat into a fading ghost.

So much for that
, he thought.
If God is good, that's the last Danish I'm going to be hearing this side of Hell! And even if He isn't, I don't see any
—

"Sail ho!" The shout came down from aloft, and Grosclaud's head snapped around as he heard the consternation in the lookout's cry. "Sail—
ships—
on the port bow!"

John Simpson had decided against any sort of finesse as he made his way from the North Sea to the Baltic. His squadron had crossed the Skaggerak, rounded the tip of the Jutland Peninsula, swung east of the island of Laeso, then south through the Kattegat straight for the Great Belt, the passage between Zealand and Funen. It was the broadest (and most easily predicted) route he could have taken, but it was also a minimum of ten miles wide—once he got south of the east and west channels on either side of the island of Sprogo, at any rate. That was the decisive factor, as far as Simpson was concerned.

He had his doubts about the probable effectiveness of mines built with seventeenth-century technology, no matter what pointers the builders might have acquired from purloined up-timer sources. On the other hand, he'd seen sufficient proof of seventeenth-century ingenuity to prevent him from investing too much confidence in those doubts of his. He'd come to the conclusion that the contempt some up-timers—Quentin Underwood came rather forcibly to mind—felt for the inherent ability of native-born denizens of this century was . . . misplaced. Given the persistent reports of King Christian's fascination with the concept of moored mines (and the fact that, for all his fondness for alcoholic beverages and his famed bouts of excessive enthusiasm, Christian was anything but stupid), John Simpson had no intention of entering the narrow waters of the Sound until he had to.

And I'm not coming in from the north
when I
do
enter it
, he thought dryly.
If there's one place where these people could make even crappy mines effective, that's it
.

And since he'd already demonstrated that seventeenth-century artillery wasn't going to do much more than scuff the paint on his ironclads, he'd been perfectly willing to take his chances on whatever he might happen to meet as he sailed calmly through the Great Belt from the Kattegat and from there to the Bay of Kiel.

The wind was from the southeast, ideally placed for shipping headed for the North Sea
from
the Baltic, even if it wasn't very strong. He was sure the timberclads preferred the current conditions to the awkward, corkscrew roll that had afflicted them in the Skaggerak, and although visibility was patchy (not uncommon for these waters, especially in the spring), they'd already encountered several outbound ships and fishing vessels. That was one reason he'd reduced speed to little more than three or four knots; it had turned particularly patchy over the last fifteen minutes or so, and he didn't want to run anyone down.

Of course, he thought as he watched the warship—French, from the look of her—solidifying out of the mist at a range of less than two miles, worse things could happen to a ship than a simple collision.

Grosclaud gaped in disbelief. For a second or two, he couldn't imagine what he was seeing. It was too alien, too unlike anything he'd ever seen before. It was more like some sort of slab-sided building floating toward him than any proper sort of vessel.

But it was only for a second or two. Then he knew what it had to be, and his blood ran cold as a second dark silhouette started blending out of the mist behind it.

"Clear for action!
Clear for action!
"

Even as he heard his own voice shouting the order, a part of his mind wondered what point there was to it. It had been far easier to decide the rumors about the newest American deviltry had to be grossly exaggerated when the ships those rumors swirled about were still sitting in the Elbe River at Magdeburg. It was quite a different thing, he discovered, when one saw them altering course directly toward one's ship.

Shouts, the rousing tattoo of the drum, bellowed orders, and pattering feet sounded all about him as
Railleuse
's startled crew responded to his orders, and he stared up at the set of the sails.

There was no wind, not really. The Kattegat this morning might almost have been a millpond, and
Railleuse
's canvas was scarcely even drawing. She couldn't have been making more than one or two knots, with barely a ripple around her cutwater, which meant there was no point trying to evade the oncoming monsters, and he looked at the suddenly white-faced sailing master.

"At least we know now what the fellow was trying to tell us," Grosclaud said with a smile that held no humor at all. Then he shrugged. "Come four points to starboard. We'll try to engage with the port broadside."

Simpson watched the other ship swinging to starboard, turning away from the squadron's line of advance and opening its port broadside. The range fell steadily as
Constitution
and her consorts foamed ahead, working up towards a speed of ten knots in obedience to his last maneuvering orders, and he wondered what the idiot in command of that ship thought he was doing.

"Bullhorn!" he snapped.

"Aye, aye, sir!" one of the bridge signalmen acknowledged sharply, and disappeared briefly into the conning tower. He reappeared on the bridge wing almost instantly, carrying the bullhorn that had once belonged to the Grantville Fire Department and now bore the crossed anchors of the Navy.

"Ahoy!"

Grosclaud had no idea what the single word booming impossibly across the narrowing gap of water between him and the Americans might mean. No doubt it was yet another of those "up-timer" words that were working their way into the world's proper languages.

"This is Admiral John Simpson, United States Navy," the hugely amplified voice continued, this time in recognizable German. "Lower your sails and surrender, or I will be forced to fire into you!"

"Captain?" a merely mortal voice asked closer to hand. Grosclaud turned his head and saw Leon Jouette, his second in command. Jouette's face looked like curiously mottled porridge, and Grosclaud wondered if his looked the same.

"What do you expect me to do, Leon?" he demanded harshly.

"But if the reports are accurate, what
can
we—"

"Even if they are accurate, I can't simply haul down my flag the first time someone threatens me!"

Jouette looked as if he wanted to continue to argue, but he closed his mouth with a click as Grosclaud glared at him. Then he nodded spastically and turned and hurried away, shouting orders of his own as he went.

"I repeat," the voice thundered again. "Strike your sails and surrender, or I will destroy your vessel!"

"—destroy your vessel," Simpson said the into the microphone, then lowered it and watched the other vessel.

It continued to swing to starboard, slowly under the current wind conditions, and his mouth tightened.

"Clear the bridge," he said as gun ports began to open here and there along the other ship's side. The bridge wing lookouts moved smartly past him into the conning tower's protection, and he lifted his binoculars, looking across the water at the Frenchman—now less than eight hundred yards away.

Eighteen-pounders, at best, he decided.

He looked astern to where
President
foamed along in
Constitution
's wake. Captain Lustgarten's carronades were run out on either broadside, as were
Constitution
's. Despite their stubby barrels, both ships' carronades would have the range to engage the French ship within the next few minutes, whatever the other captain did. When that happened, there could be only one outcome. He knew that—which didn't mean he had to
like
it.

"Captain," he said through the bullhorn, "I have no desire to destroy your ship and kill your crew, but if you do not surrender, I will have no other option. This is your final warning."