1634: The Baltic War (63 page)

Gayle Mason, meanwhile, had been giving the wagon that Patrick Welch had brought out of the nearby village's stable a look that was even less admiring. "I thought Harry's coffers were the envy of Midas. He couldn't afford anything better than
this
?"

"Which is exactly why I'm riding one of the horses," Julie said. "No way I'm trusting my spine to that thing."

"Swell." Gayle gave the horses in question an equally skeptical examination. "But as I believe you know, 'Gayle Mason' and 'horseback' go together about as well as ham and—and—and—whatever. Not eggs. Maybe tofu. Or rutabagas."

Spotting the smile on Oliver Cromwell's face, Gayle asked him: "And what's so funny?" The expression on her face, however, removed the crossness of the words themselves. Now that she and Oliver had been able to spend some time together in person, the very peculiar quasi-romance that had developed over months of nothing but conversations on walkie-talkies seemed to be . . .

Coming along quite nicely, she thought. Still early days, of course.

"Actually, I think your Harry Lefferts is something of a genius at this work." Cromwell nodded toward the beat-up old wagon and the four nags that drew it. "This won't draw any attention at all. Not anywhere in the English countryside, and certainly not in the Fens."

Alex Mackay swung into the saddle of one of the other horses. Gayle thought there was something vaguely comical about the motion. He went into the saddle with all the ease and grace you'd expect from an experienced cavalry officer, of course. Much the way a champion motocross racer might climb onto a tricycle.

Those other horses weren't quite nags. Not quite. But she hoped they didn't pass any glue factories along the way, or the horses would head for it unerringly.

"All right, all right. Oliver—you too, Darryl—give me a hand loading the radio gear into this heap, will you?"

To Gayle's gratification, "give me a hand" meant that Oliver took one end of the heavy damn thing and Darryl took the other. To her was left the proper chore of giving orders.

"But careful putting it into the wagon. Be very careful."

Cromwell grunted, as he helped lift the thing up to the wagon's bed. "Fragile, is it? You wouldn't think so."

"I'm not worried about the
radio.
"

By the time the
Achates
and its little flotilla reached the estuary of the Thames, Mike was starting to recover from his seasickness. So he was able to have an actual conversation with Greg Ferrara when the radio call came in, relayed from Amsterdam, instead of simply half-listening and being unable to speak in fear the effort would just make him vomit.

"Jesse freed up one of the Belles to fly me into the airfield at Wietze, Mike. By the time I got here, some of Hesse-Kassel's cavalrymen had already arrived and secured the area. What's left of it, anyway."

"How bad's the damage?"

"Well . . . in one sense, not all that bad. The French—it was Turenne in command, by the way; he left us a note—couldn't have carried enough in the way of explosives in a purely cavalry expedition to really demolish something like an oil field. So they didn't even try. They just wrecked or carried off as much equipment as they could and torched all the buildings."

"Turenne left us a
note
? Why?"

"That's part of the bad news, Mike. Quentin Underwood is dead. Shot by French soldiers. The gist of Turenne's note was an explanation that he was killed in the course of combat, and the French had no idea who he was until afterward. Turenne gives his word of honor that it was not an assassination and says he'll provide us with a full report later if we request it."

Mike took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. "Damn it. I was afraid of that. I tried to talk him into getting out, but . . ."

"Yeah, I know. Quentin Underwood. As pigheaded a man as any who ever lived."

"That he was. Where did Turenne leave the note?"

"He left it with one of his junior officers. The man showed up under a flag of truce early this morning, just a couple of hours before I got here. What do you want me to tell him?"

"Tell him we accept Marshal Turenne's explanation. No, better write a short note to that effect. But we'd appreciate it if he'd send us the report as soon as convenient. If for no other reason, because Quentin's family will want to know what happened."

"Okay, will do. But, Mike, the worst news isn't really what happened to the oil field. We'll lose a few weeks' production, but there's no permanent damage done. What matters a lot more is that we found a French soldier who'd gotten hurt in an accident and was left behind. More than that—we found his rifle. And Jesse's guess was right. It is a breechloader. In fact, it's basically just an American Sharps rifle from back in the middle of the nineteenth century."

There was a pause, on Ferrara's part, then,
"Mike, I feel terrible about this. I really dropped the ball."

"Hey, look, Greg—"

"No, I mean I really dropped it big time. It's a percussion-cap design, Mike. The French somehow managed to mass produce production caps after I convinced everybody on our side it couldn't be done quickly enough for this war. On account of all the problems you have trying to work with fulminate of mercury."

"Yeah, I remember. So I guess the French were more willing to absorb a lot of casualties in their production force than—"

"Goddamit, Mike—I don't think they're
using
fulminate of mercury. I won't be sure until I get it into the lab, but I'm willing to bet they're using potassium chlorate."

Mike frowned. "I thought—"

"Yeah, yeah, I
did
think of it myself, back when. What I told you was that the production process would be way too complicated. But now that I'm looking at this . . . Oh, shit. I half-remember, now—now that it's too late—that I think you can probably make the stuff just by—"

From the way his voice was rising, it was obvious to Mike that Ferrara was on the edge of tears. "Greg! Stop it! For Christ's sake, man, you're a high school chemistry teacher who got the world dropped on your shoulders. We asked you to become a one-man military research and development team that would have employed thousands of people up-time and had a budget in the umpteen God-knows-how-many billions of dollars. You've worked miracles as it is. So, fine, maybe you dropped a stitch here. I'm just amazed you haven't dropped a hundred by now."

Mike broke off, giving Greg time to compose himself. A few seconds later, he continued. "It isn't the end of the world. So stop beating on yourself, will you? The way I look at it, the whole thing's just a salutary reminder to us not to drop the biggest stitch of all. And you want to know what that one is? It's the arrogant presumption that our side is the only one with any brains. We'll survive this one, well enough. We ever get in the habit of dropping the big stitch, our ass is grass. We
are
talking about the French, right? Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't they the same people who produced Pasteur, the Curies, ah—hell, I can't remember—"

Ferrara's chuckle was quite audible.
"Oh, jeez, there's a whole slew of 'em, Mike. Cuvier, Berthelot, Becquerel—four generations of great physicists, in that family—Ampère, Foucault, Poincaré, the list goes on and on. If you include mathematicians and philosophers, you can start with René Descartes and Blaise Pascal—and let me tell you it feels really weird knowing they're both alive right now."

"I rest my case. Just take a deep breath or three and relax, Greg. If they can make a Sharps, we ought to be able to catch up before too long. And they didn't make enough of them to make a qualitative difference in
this
war, so we've got the time. Right?"

When Ferrara spoke next, his tone was firm and resolute.
"Yes, we can. Damn right we can, in time for the next war."

"That's assuming there's a 'next war' in the first place. Who knows? Maybe there will be and maybe there won't. Don't forget they're also the same nation that produced the Marquis de Lafayette and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Not all that far down the road from now, either, if you put it all in perspective. We're not trying to destroy France, Greg. We never were. We just want to hurry those folks along a bit, that's all."

"Yeah, you're right. Easy to forget sometimes, though, isn't it?"

Mike hesitated, not wanting to add another bruise to Ferrara's already battered spirit. But some things just had to be said, and damn the bruises.

"I've never forgotten it once, Greg," he said bluntly. "That's what it's all about in the first place. The world doesn't need another fucking empire. They always come out of the mint looking bright and shiny, but the truth is they're a dime a dozen. The human race has been littering the landscape with them for thousands of years. The Mesopotamians alone must have produced a dozen, and nobody except specialists even remembers the names of more than a couple any longer. For every one that did some good, there were at least ten that were just pretentious garbage."

There was silence on the other end, for a moment. Then, quietly, Ferrara said,
"Okay, I'll sign off now. I've got things to do and you've got some of our people to rescue. But . . . ah, Mike . . ."

"Yeah?"

"In case the chance never comes around again, I'd just like to tell you that I've been really glad, ever since it happened, that you came through the Ring of Fire with us. Most of us just floundered, but you were the one person who seemed made for this time and place."

Mike smiled. "Well, thanks. But you're forgetting Tom Stone, aren't you? Not to mention—talk about predestination—a certain gent by the name of Harry Lefferts."

"And there it is," said George Sutherland cheerfully. "The Tilbury fort. How d'you want it, Captain Lefferts? Scrambled or fried?"

Harry stood in the bow of the barge, his hands on his hips, gazing benignly upon the ramshackle old fort that had just come into view. "Aw, hell, those guys were friendly and polite when me and Don dropped by for a visit. I'd feel downright unneighborly if we went and ruined their day. As long as they don't mess with us, I figure we won't mess with them. Besides, we're getting low on munitions."

Melissa Mailey had seemed to be dozing off, but her eyes popped wide open. "Oh, certainly. You need to save the stuff for more important work. Destroying Stonehenge. The Roman works at Bath. Better yet! I think we should sail back to London. You forgot to blow up Parliament. And as long as we're headed that way, we could hunt around and find the field at Runnymede. Plow it up and sow it with salt."

"Jeez, Ms. Mailey. How long are you gonna hold this grudge, anyway?"

Melissa's expression was dark, dark, dark. "They signed the Magna Carta a little over four hundred years ago. That seems about right."

Harry grinned. "I hate to be the one to break the news, but you aren't likely to live that long."

"You watch, young man. I'm starting an exercise regimen as soon as I get back. Eat nothing but healthy foods, too."

"Fine.
I
won't live that long."

"Won't do you any good. Might have, back up-time, but not here. Paracelsus and Nostradamus didn't die all that long ago, not to mention John Dee. I'll track down their disciples, find out how to raise the dead. If Dante were still alive, of course, I wouldn't bother. I'm sure I could talk him into adding a tenth level to the Inferno and immortalizing you for posterity."

Sitting on the deck next to her, Rita Simpson rolled her eyes. "Melissa, don't you think you're overreacting just a tad?"

"I most certainly am not.
He burned down the Globe theater!"

A field in Germany,
just south of the village of Ahrensbök

The most peculiar thing, thought Thorsten Engler, was how magnificent a battle looked before it began. It was a gigantic theatrical spectacle, with a cast numbering all told something like fifty thousand men, complete with precision marching, musical accompaniment, pennants and banners flying, and horsemen galloping all over carrying messages from commanders to subordinates. Not even the wealthiest and most powerful emperor of ancient Persia could have afforded to put on such a spectacle for any purpose save the deadly one that confronted them today.

Standing on the ground next to him—keeping a certain distance from the horse—Eric Krenz planted his hands on his hips and whistled softly.

"And will you
look
at that? Too bad we're not artists, eh, fellows? We could stay back here the whole time and just paint the performance. Match deadly brushes against fearsome canvas."

The crew of the nearest volley gun smiled. "Not for the likes of us, Krenz," said the gunner, Olav Gjervan.

The volley gun battery had been positioned on a very slight rise on the southern side of the field, so they had a better view of the unfolding drama than most of the soldiers in either army. Gjervan pointed toward the center of the French army and said, "We'll be down there, soon enough, you watch. About all we'll be seeing are clouds of gunsmoke. What sort of stupid painting would that make?"

One of his mates grunted. That was Raymond Meincke, the crew's loader. "On the other hand, we'll have a better view of the real business. Guts spilled all over, rivers of blood, brains served up for the beetles."

Krenz made a face, but the two other crew members just responded with a little laugh. Meincke had a certain reputation. One of the up-time noncommissioned officers, Floyd Little, called him the regiment's "designated pessimist." His friend and fellow American sergeant John Dexter Ennis favored
Mr. Doom and Gloom
.

"Better make sure your ears are covered, Eric," said Gjervan, "seeing as how the helmets don't do it. Every crow in miles will have its eye on them."

The brought a much bigger laugh, even from Krenz himself. Eric had very big ears, it was just a fact. They were the frequent butt of rough humor, although usually along the lines of people wondering how a man with such big ears could somehow manage to not hear any order he found inconvenient.

Eric started to make a quip in response, but was cut off by the sound of a bugle. The USE's army had adopted that up-time version of a trumpet because it made a distinctive sound of its own, and one that couldn't be confused with the various horns being used by the enemy. For simpler commands, of course, they continued to use the fifes and drums that were common to most armies.

"Well, shit," said Krenz. "Looks like General Torstensson decided we'd make lousy artists. Here we go, boys."

That had been the order to advance. Thorsten turned his horse and began trotting down the line of the batteries' guns, making sure that every crew was following the signal. About halfway down he encountered Lieutenant Mark Reschly trotting his horse the other way, doing the same.

Since all the crews were going about their business properly, the two men took a moment to exchange a few words.

"I'm a little surprised the general's ordering an advance," said Thorsten. "I thought he'd have us keep this position." He made a little back-and-forth jerking motion with his head, indicating the surrounding terrain. "Here we've got the headwaters of the Trave anchoring our line on the right and the woods outside Ahrensbök on our left."

Mark smiled. "You'd make a good officer, Thorsten, as I've told you before. Sure you don't want a commission? I'm certain I can get you one. Ever since that mess crossing the Alster, Colonel Straley has had a very good opinion of you."

That
had
been a mess, when a hastily and poorly made bridge had collapsed. Thorsten had been able to get the men organized to deal with it quickly, though, and they'd only suffered two dead horses and one man crippled. But he didn't really consider the episode an indication of any special martial virtues on his part. It was just a job that needed to be done, and in truth he was a very good foreman. There was nothing more to it than that.

Personally, Engler thought the real reason their regiment's commander Len Straley had a good opinion of him had far more to do with a personal situation than anything involving the army. Stan Musial Wilson, an up-time army sergeant who was the son of one of Straley's close friends, had gotten very interested in a German woman he'd encountered during their stay in Hamburg. At Straley's diffident suggestion, Thorsten had wound becoming young Wilson's principal adviser in the matter, which seemed to be developing to everyone's satisfaction. He'd had a certain perspective on the situation, given that he'd faced it himself from the other way around.

"No, thank you, Lieutenant. It's as I've told you before. I'm only in the army for three years. After that, I plan to become a psychologist. Germany's first one, I think."

"As you wish," said Reschly. He pointed to the field ahead of them. It widened out dramatically less than thirty yards beyond, where the Trave—which was more of a creek, here, not the river it was down at Luebeck—made a sharp bend to the south. Once the USE army moved past that point, it would be entering a wide field instead of the narrow stretch of clear land where Torstensson had first had it take up position.

"Mind you, I'm just a lieutenant and not privy to the general's plans. But I'm quite certain he's gotten orders from the emperor to defeat the French here, not simply stand on the defensive. And to do that, he's got to get us some maneuvering room. Be nice, of course, if we could just stand where we are and let the French grind themselves up against us. But they're not that stupid, not even the duke of Angoulême."

Thorsten thought about it, for a moment, and then decided to play devil's advocate. Not out of any spirit of contrariness, but simply because he always found it very difficult not
to ponder all sides of a problem once he got it into his head.

"Why not, Lieutenant? What I mean is, it doesn't matter whether the French are stupid or not.
They're
the ones—not us—who have to get somewhere. So why doesn't General Torstensson just stay on the defensive? If they try to move around us, we just move to block them. Sooner or later, they'd have to attack."

Reschly scratched his jaw. "Good point, in fact. I think the answer—though I'm not sure—is that the emperor wants this all done quickly. The sort of maneuvers and countermaneuvers you're talking about could take days, even as much as a week or two. And that brings up another problem, which is that we're getting low on supplies and the French have no supply lines at all. That means their army will have to start foraging almost immediately, and we'd probably have to follow suit soon enough, if the maneuvering took us very far from Luebeck. It'll still be some time before the TacRail units can catch up with us, even as fast as they work."

He cocked his head slightly, peering at Engler. "You're from a farm family, Sergeant Engler. You know better than most what 'foraging' really means."

Thorsten's jaws tightened a little. What it meant—at best—from a farmer's standpoint, was seeing his livestock and crops seized. Often enough, it also meant being killed and his womenfolk ravished. If they were lucky, the women would then be carried off as camp followers. If they weren't, their corpses would join those of their fathers and husbands and sons.

Farmers hated soldiers. It really didn't matter whose army they belonged to, even their own. Supposedly their own, rather—since from the standpoint of most farmers, as a rule, it hardly mattered. Let an army be badly beaten on a battlefield, and the survivors of the defeated side were likely to find themselves hunted if they couldn't reform their units. For a few miles, they'd be hunted down by the cavalry of the victors. Thereafter, by any farm villagers they ran across, who'd pursue them and murder them pitilessly.

"You see what I mean?" said Reschly. "The emperor plans to incorporate all of this area into the United States, even if he's never quite come out and said it in so many words. But you know it and I know it and probably even the local village idiots know it. So he'll not want the populace ravaged, and a quick decisive victory is the best way to make sure it doesn't happen."

Put that way, Thorsten could not only see the logic but he approved of it. The bugles blew again at the point, however, followed by the fifes and drums. He and Reschly fell silent for a while as they watched over the batteries' evolutions.

That went smoothly enough. The volunteer regiments of the new USE Army still didn't have much in the way of combat experience. But they'd been well trained, and trained for months—far more so than most armies of the day. So there were no major problems in simply carrying out a maneuver. How well they'd do once the fighting started, remained to be seen. But their morale was high and they were quite confident they'd do well. Thorsten thought so, himself.

A few minutes later, he asked Reschly another question. "They're putting us farther out on the flank than we usually go. Any idea why?"

In fact, the way Torstensson was ordering the formations, the three volley gun companies by now were almost at the very edge of his army's right flank. There were only a few units of skirmishers and a thin cavalry screen beyond them

Reschly sucked in a breath. His jaws weren't exactly clenched; but he had his teeth pressed together and his lips spread. It was an expression that was half-apprehensive and half-thoughtful.

"I'm guessing, Sergeant. But the way you break a big army on a battlefield is by tearing at their flanks with cavalry—and, unfortunately, we don't have enough cavalry for the purpose. We've got more than the French, but not enough. You really need to be able to hammer at them to manage it."

He closed his lips and blew the breath back out. "One of the problems, you know, with the way this army was created. We simply don't have enough mercenaries"—here he smiled almost gaily—"and we sure as hell don't have enough noblemen."

That was true enough too, once Thorsten thought about it. The regiments mainly drew their volunteers from the CoC strongholds. With some exceptions here and there, those were in the cities and big towns. Such recruits might have splendid morale and determination to fight, but it was just a fact that not too many of them were good horsemen. Not even most farmers were, really. Almost any man of the time had some familiarity with horses, including riding them. But there was a world of difference between being able to guide a stodgy cart-horse and being able to ride the sort of horses a cavalrymen needed, in the way they needed to be ridden, and using weapons at the same time.

Thorsten was rather unusual, that way. For whatever reason, he'd always had the knack with horses. Eric Krenz's attitude was on the opposite extreme, but the truth was that most soldiers in the regiments were a lot more like Krenz than they were like Engler.

Which meant—

He sucked in a breath of his own. "You think the general's going to use us up close, in a charge."

"Yes, I do," said Reschly. "And, yes, I know that's a real switch. We're mostly supposed to fend off cavalry, not substitute for them. But I'm pretty sure that's what Torstensson has in mind."

The French army had come to a halt, its commanders having apparently decided to stand on the defensive. Now, they seemed to be trying to get the big tercio-style formations on their left flank to wheel around and face the cavalry and volley gun regiments that Torstensson had kept moving farther and farther to the right.

It was still an incredible spectacle, but the sheer glory was fading from it rapidly. The tusked demon beneath was rising to the surface.

"They're not going to make it in time!" said Reschly, suddenly sounding excited and eager. He pointed at the French forces that were now less than half a mile away. "Look, they're too slow!"

He was right, Thorsten decided. Those bulky infantry formations were very hard to maneuver quickly. That was true even in a simple forward assault, much less the more difficult maneuver of trying to get them to square off to the flank. "Refuse the line," it was called. Gustav Adolf's Swedish army had managed to carry off the maneuver at Breitenfeld, thereby enabling them to fend off Tilly's assault long enough for the king of Sweden to bring his artillery to bear. But they'd been facing Tilly's slow-moving tercios, whereas a very large part of the training of the USE's new regiments had been designed to enable them to move quickly. As quickly, at least, as tightly formed infantry could.