1634: The Baltic War (assiti chards)

by Eric Flint

  Then, she giggled. "Too bad it's not a very long trip." She was nuzzling his ear, now. "But we'll have lots of time when we get there."

  Eddie tried to rally. His cortex did, anyway. The rest of his nervous system seemed to be on autonomous mode, with his hands moving here and there of their own volition. It didn't help that everywhere they roamed, Anne Cathrine's body came to meet them.

  "Where are we going?" he croaked.

  "Frederiksborg Palace. Ulrik and I figured out a good place to hide you. Good thing we did, too."

  Eddie croaked a little laugh. "Yeah, I'd say so. Or I'd be hamburger a la Tower."

  "Oh, yes." She kissed him. "We were pretty sure Papa would be angry. So we had to hide you from him, for a while. Or he might take it out on you."

  She kissed him again. "He certainly would now, unless your admiral surrendered so Papa could cut his head off instead."

  The third kiss was long and slow. As were all the ones that followed. They didn't speak again until the coach finally came to a stop.

  Regretfully, Anne Cathrine pulled away and opened the trunk that served as the bench across from theirs. She came out with some nondescript-looking garments.

  "Put these on, quickly. We will pretend you are a servant who came with me."

  That was a ploy so threadbare it almost seemed pointless. Mere servants did not ride in coaches with king's daughters. Certainly not male ones, with all the curtains drawn.

  But Eddie didn't argue the point. First, because his brain was still not functioning that well and, second, because its level of functioning declined still further when he realized that Anne Cathrine had every intention-unabashed, almost gleeful; did the girl have any sense of shame at all?-of watching him get undressed.

  Fortunately, since the curtains were still drawn, it was fairly dark inside the coach. But Eddie was still red-faced by the time he finished changing his clothes.

  "You are so cute!" she said, then reached with her hand to pinch his cheek, and then brought him close enough for a quick kiss. "But, come! Place the old clothes in the trunk and close the lid. We must hurry!"

  And out she went. As soon as she reached the ground, she drew herself up in a decent imitation of a haughty princess-well, imitation of a haughty one, since she was a princess-and began striding away. Completely ignoring Eddie-as, indeed, a royal scion would completely ignore a servant who was supposed to know what to do when his royal mistress hared off somewhere.

  Hurriedly, he stuffed his old clothing into the trunk and got out of the carriage. A bit awkwardly, because of the peg leg, but easily enough. With months of experience, Eddie had learned how to get about fairly well.

  Still, by the time he reached the ground, Anne Cathrine was already halfway to the nearest building. Eddie barely noticed the coach setting off again, as he peered around curiously.

  The coach had let them out in a part of the extensive palace grounds he wasn't familiar with. From what he could tell, they were on the southernmost of the three islands in the lake that made up the palace grounds, and he'd always been kept in the big royal palace on the northern island.

  Anne Cathrine was striding toward two round towers that looked much older than the part of Frederiksborg Castle he knew. Almost, if not quite, medieval construction.

  But she didn't enter them. Just before she got there, she began to head around what looked like big stables. And smelled like it, for that matter. She stopped abruptly, half-turned, and gave Eddie a very disapproving look. Not a personal look, though, just the sort of generic princess-or-noblewoman's glare at a sluggish servant who wasn't keeping up.

  Eddie could take a hint. He started hobbling toward her as fast as he could. He had to be a little careful, because a lot of the courtyard he was crossing was cobblestoned and he'd learned the hard way that peg legs with narrow tips did not do well on such paving. On the other hand, he wasn't at all tempted to go off to the side and walk through the unpaved surfaces, since those left no doubt at all that they were in horse-stable territory.

  Just before he caught up with her, Anne Cathrine started striding off again. But she'd waited long enough so that Eddie could follow her. Once she got around the corner, she headed straight for a big and very new-looking building, which had both a small entrance door and, quite a bit further down, a set of double-doors that were even bigger than you'd find in a stable. As if something very large had to be periodically taken in or out of the edifice.

  She went through the small door, however, still as haughtily as she'd been walking since she got out of the carriage. She didn't glance back once to see if the menial servant was still following. Obviously, he would be, since that's what servants did.

  The door closed behind her. Muttering under his breath-very unkind words on the subject of snotty princesses-Eddie followed through.

  The moment he got inside, all unkind thoughts about snotty princesses vanished immediately. Anne Cathrine was back to the full-body press business, complete with long and lingering kiss. Eddie forgave her all her sins and any she might accumulate in at least the next five lives.

  "Come," she finally said. "Baldur dismissed all the workmen, for a week, but someone might still come in. We must hide."

  Taking him by the hand, she led him through what Eddie quickly realized was some sort of peculiar workshop. Not any sort of workshop he'd ever seen before, though, except…

  About halfway through, he finally realized what it was. Greg Ferrara had set up something like this in Grantville, right after the Ring of Fire. Call it the Early Modern Era's version of a Manhattan Project. Two and two came together soon thereafter, and Eddie knew this was the place where Baldur Norddahl-who still had no business, in a sane world, being a cross between Harald the Bloody-Handed and Herr Professor Doktor Doktor Uber-Weaponsgeek-undertook his fiendish experiments in military hardware.

  Anne Cathrine was heading toward some sort of very peculiar wooden contraption against the far wall of the workshop. Big contraption, too.

  It was the wood that threw Eddie off, until he was almost in front of it. At which point he realized he was looking at a submarine.

  A real live, no-kidding, submarine. Not completed, obviously-he could see where the holes for whatever propulsion device would drive it were still empty-but the hull seemed finished.

  A wooden submarine? The idea seemed completely outlandish, but…

  Now that he was reminded, Eddie had read somewhere-a long time ago, long before the Ring of Fire, when he'd still been in his oceanographer phase-that somebody had built a wooden submarine once, way back in the nineteenth century. A Spaniard, if he remembered right, who'd intended the thing to be used for commercial diving operations. Pearls, or maybe coral, he couldn't remember. The submarine had worked, too, although it had eventually been scrapped because the commercial enterprise hadn't worked out.

  There was a small opening on the side, low enough that only a stool was needed to pass through. Anne Cathrine was already doing so, stooping to get in. Once she was inside, her smiling face looked back. "Come in, Eddie! This is where we will hide. No one will think of it."

  In for a penny, in for a pound. As he worked his way through the opening, which was a very tight fit-probably something Baldur eventually intended for a ballast mechanism, or possibly a big observation port-Eddie realized with genuine shock that the submarine had been designed with a double hull-exactly the way submarines would wind up being designed, centuries in the future.

  "Baldur Norddahl is a freak of nature," he muttered. "A man like that has no business being this smart."

  The much bigger shock, though, came after he got inside. He'd gauged the overall size of the submarine at somewhere around forty feet long and ten feet in diameter. With the double-walled design, of course, the interior was much smaller-about twenty-five to thirty feet long, and not much over six feet in diameter in the very center. Eddie could just manage to stand up straight with a bit of clearance, although he'd have to stoop if he moved more than seven
or eight feet toward the bow or the stern.

  The hull was tapered, too, and even had a streamlined bulb-nose design that was probably a little fatter than it should be but not much. Given that Norddahl had been working from scratch with nothing more than maybe some photos to guide him and having to work with wood instead of metal, the only thing that really registered was how incredibly well designed it was. If Baldur could figure out a workable propulsion system, he'd probably be able to build a truly functional submarine. It was certainly way, way good enough, to move Norddahl to the very top of the shoot-this-mad-genius-now-before-he-goes-any-further list.

  But all that Eddie simply half-noted in passing. The real shock came from the interior furnishings, which he could see quite clearly because Anne Cathrine was lighting two lamps inside the submarine.

  Whatever propulsive mechanism Baldur might have intended was unknowable, because the interior had been stripped clean-if there had ever been anything to begin with-and replaced with…

  With…

  The only thing Eddie could think of was a set from a movie. The King and I, maybe. Or…

  Anne Cathrine was now lolling back on a pile of very expensive looking cushions and blankets. Lolling, as in lying on one hip and giving him a look that was at least two decades too sultry. Fifteen going on Scheherazade.

  Or the set from A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, maybe, although he wasn't sure if they'd ever made a movie of that book. He'd read it, though.

  She waved her hand, way more languidly than any girl her age ought to be able to, at a small stack of baskets toward the bow. "There is plenty of food. Breads, cheeses, delicacies. Plenty of wine, too. We may have to hide here for days, before we can be sure my father's temper will have subsided."

  Some part of Eddie's brain-a tiny little cluster of neurons somewhere in the left cortex making a valiant last stand, but even now being overwhelmed by the thalamic hordes-was trying to gibber something on the subject of fathers and their tempers in general, and royal fathers and royal tempers in particular-but they were soon slaughtered mercilessly.

  "Come here, Eddie," she said. "Now."

  "Enough," said Christian IV, finally slumping into one of the silver chairs in the Long Hall. He gave his son Ulrik a haggard look. "So, you were right. Those guns are incredible. And our own fire simply bounces from the damned things."

  Ulrik placed a hand on his father's big shoulder and gave it a squeeze. "The terms will not be bad, Father. I'm quite sure of that."

  "Union of Kalmar," the king muttered. "A Swedish union."

  Ulrik started to say something, but closed his mouth. Now was not the time to discuss with his father the opinion that Ulrik had come to develop on the subject. Partly as the simple result of being the vanquished party-but much more as a result of long months of thinking of this possibility ahead of time.

  It was odd, really, the way Christian IV loved modern gadgetry and doted on having a splendid library, given that the king himself didn't like to read. But his son did, and Ulrik had spent many hours in the Winter Room studying the up-time encyclopedia.

  It hadn't taken him long to come to a simple conclusion. The century they were in, the seventeenth century, was the heyday of Scandinavia, historically speaking. From here-well, perhaps a half century more-it would all be a downward slide. Disunited and divided, Scandinavians were simply too few in number to play a major role in world affairs. They'd only managed it in this century due to happenstance. But starting in the next, Scandinavia would be lucky if it was simply ignored by its more populous and powerful neighbors to the south.

  France and Britain would dominate Denmark in the nineteenth century, and Germany would conquer it outright in the next. Norway, too. Sweden only stayed independent by being meek and mild.

  To hell with it, as Eddie would say. A re-united Scandinavia seemed like a far better prospect to a young Danish prince, even if its initial master spoke Swedish. Languages evolve also, after all-he had only to look at the new dialect of German that was sweeping over central Europe to see the proof of it.

  "Would you take my surrender to Simpson yourself, Ulrik?" asked the king, his tone-for a wonder-mild and meek. "I think that might work best."

  "Yes, father, of course."

  Chapter 63

  The estuary of the Thames, at Sheerness

  "This is going to be closer timing than I'd like," Mike Stearns said to Captain Baumgartner. "I just talked to Harry on the radio and he says there's only so much he can do to slow down the barge. The current alone will bring them alongside Sheerness in less than an hour."

  The commander of the Achates issued a soft little grunting sound. "Should be enough, Prime Minister. We'll be in sight of whatever warships the English have stationed at the Royal Dockyard within ten or fifteen minutes. Once they see us, I doubt they'll be worrying too much about a mere barge."

  The calm words, spoken in a calm and even tone, did much to alleviate Mike's anxiety. Now that action was looming, he was getting a better understanding of Simpson's reasons for selecting Baumgartner as a warship captain. As morose as the wretched fellow might be at other times, the nearer they came to possible conflict the more the captain just seemed to get phlegmatic. It was as if his gloomy expectations were strangely lightened by the prospect of mayhem. Why not? Having predicted disaster at every moment since the crossing of the North Sea began, how could mere hostile enemy activity be any worse?

  It was an upside-down sort of psychology, to someone with Mike's temperament. But…

  "Different strokes for different folks," he muttered.

  Baumgartner turned his head slightly. "What was that, Prime Minister? I'm afraid I didn't catch it."

  "Ah, never mind, Captain. Just talking to myself."

  "Okay, everybody!" Harry hollered. "Take battle stations! We'll be coming in sight of Sheerness any minute now!"

  Melissa stared at Rita.

  Rita stared at Harry.

  "Hey, Captain!" Rita hollered. "Could you puh-leese explain a little more clearly exactly what 'battle stations' consists of? Y'know-for us women and kids?"

  Harry gave her a quick grin. "Mostly, it means you keep your heads below the gunwales-or whatever you call 'em, on a barge like this-and get ready to jump overboard first, if she starts to sink."

  "Sink," said Melissa. She leaned over the rail and looked at the waters of the Thames. "How deep is it here, anyway?"

  "Got no idea, Ms. Mailey," replied Harry. "Look at it this way. There's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that this barge is probably heavy enough to absorb one or two rounds from whatever guns they've got on whatever ships they've got stationed at the dockyard. The bad news is that one or two rounds is about the limit, too. If Rita's brother ain't there in time to take out them warships, we're screwed."

  Several of the Warder women were looking worried, now. "None of us can swim very well, Lady Mailey," said Patricia Hayes. "The children, not at all." She gave the distant shore of the river an apprehensive glance. "That's a far ways."

  In point of fact, Melissa knew, if the barge sank then even very good swimmers would face a real challenge. They were now well into the estuary of the Thames, and you couldn't really call it a "river" any longer. It was more like a small bay. At a guess, although she wasn't particularly good at estimating distances, they were at least a mile from land.

  "Right," said Rita, suddenly moving purposefully. "Let's set about rigging up some sort of rafts. Or flotation devices, at least. Harry, I suppose it'd be too much to ask if you brought life vests with you, amongst all that other stuff you somehow managed to smuggle into England."

  "No, sorry." Harry's smile contained as much in the way of apology as that of a crocodile, admitting that, no, it hadn't thought to bring napkin rings to the feast. "We pretty much concentrated on stuff that goes bang and boom, y'know."

  "Don't remind me," muttered Melissa, who was also rising from her seated position, though much more awkwardly than Rita. The combination of
the adrenaline from the escape and the hours they'd spent since, crammed into a barge, had left her feeling every day of fifty-nine years old.

  On the bright side, if you chose to look at it that way, the fact that they'd made their escape from the Tower at dawn meant that it was no later than midafternoon once they reached the estuary. So at least they weren't fumbling in the dark.

  The flip side of that, of course, was that any enemy warships lying in wait at Sheerness wouldn't be fumbling in the dark, either.

  One or two rounds, and down she goes. Melissa wondered how long it took a warship to fire two rounds from whatever cannons they carried. She wasn't about to ask, however, since she was darkly certain that whatever the answer was, it would be extremely depressing.

  "And there's Sheerness," murmured Captain Baumgartner. He brought up his eyeglass. "Now let's see how many ships they've got that aren't still at anchor."

  To Rita's surprise, Thomas Wentworth came to give her some assistance. That was the first thing she'd seen him do since the barge left the Tower except stare off into whatever inner space he'd gotten lost in.

  True, he wasn't much help. Whatever skills the former chief minister of England's government possessed-a great many, of course-they clearly didn't include being a handyman. Not that it made much of a difference. Rita soon realized that the "flotation devices" she was jury-rigging out of whatever odds-and-ends she could find on the barge weren't going to be of much use beyond whatever psychological solace they brought to the Warder folks. She wouldn't have trusted these things in a swimming pool, back up-time. If they went into the water, most of them were going to drown, it was as simple as that.

  Still, she was glad to see some spirit come back to the man. Now that it was all over, and especially with the sharp contrast that Sir Francis Windebank and his mercenary goons had provided during the final period, she looked back upon Wentworth's role in those long months of captivity and remembered simply his invariant courtesy and graciousness.