by Eric Flint
"Not as gross as the alternative," Minnie said phlegmatically.
"Well. No." She stuck out her hand. "But I keep the fuse. The two of you are too-too-too-"
The teenagers were grinning at her now.
"Too too-ish," Noelle finished lamely.
Chapter 47
The Saxon plain, near Dresden Jeff finally caught up with the volley gun company just after they fired their fourth volley. By now, so far as he could tell-which was not much-they were mostly shooting at shadows. Whatever enemy they'd been facing seemed to be on the run.
"Next time, wait," he growled at Thorsten.
Engler gave him a cold smile. "Yes, sir. It's difficult, though, as slowly as the infantry moves."
"Very witty, Captain. My better half is amused. My other half, though-that's the one in charge right now-is not. If I have to get official and make it an order, I'll do it. Next. Time. Wait. How's that?"
Engler nodded. "Not a problem, sir. Honestly, we had no intention of getting separated. By the time we realized it…"
Jeff waved his hand. "Yeah, I know. By then, you'd come upon the foe and, being volley gun maniacs, he was yours for the taking. Also for the official record, my congratulations. Whoever you were fighting, you obviously pounded them into dog food. Now let's see about moving forward. Do you have any idea where the rest of the division is, by the way?"
Not until Jeff spoke the last sentence did it occur to him that he might fairly be accused of the same fault for which he'd just criticized Engler. Just as the volley gun battery had done with its regiment, so the Hangman had gotten separated from the other regiments and…
Done what, exactly? Where the hell were they? Ahead of the division? Behind it? Off to the side? If so, which side? They couldn't very well be to the east of the division, because they'd been over by the left flank when the attack began.
He started chewing on his lip.
"If you'll permit me the indiscretion, sir…"
Jeff gave Engler a sour look. "The formality'll kill me, just from shock. Spit it out, Thorsten."
"I really don't think there's much chance we're anywhere except in front of the rest of the division, sir."
Jeff had been coming to the same conclusion.
Fine. Now what?
Mike Stearns had been doing the same thing as Jeff-except he was searching for a whole regiment, not just a volley gun battery.
Jeff's regiment, damn his irresponsible geek heart. What had possessed him, to race ahead like that?
The radios were turning out to be almost useless. Mike could get in touch with his regiments, yes. But what good did that do when nobody knew where they were to begin with?
Christopher Long rode up. "That way, I think, sir." He was pointing a bit to the right, in the directions where Mike thought Dresden probably was.
What idiot had thought launching an attack in the middle of a snowstorm was a good idea?
By now, even Johan Baner had run out of curses. He could still manage one every two minutes or so, but the pleasure had entirely vanished from the exercise.
This was turning into a nightmare. He was still quite confident he could rout the rebels-if he could find his blasted army. More than bits and pieces of it, anyway.
The problem, insofar as Baner could reconstruct what had happened, was that one or another unit of the Third Division had punched a big hole in the middle of his line. "Line," at least, if you could dignify a string of camps set up to ride out the storm by the name.
The Ostergotland Horsemen had been at the center of that hole. Somehow they'd been routed, and in their confused retreat had precipitated panic among their neighboring units. That, in turn, has led to the whole center starting to unravel.
Whatever else, Baner had to put a stop to that. If he could stabilize the center, he was sure he'd win this bastard of a battle. By now, Stearns' soldiers had to be even more disorganized than his own.
They probably were, in point of fact, on the level of the division itself. But it didn't matter because all of the regiments had stayed intact, even if none of them were really quite sure where the rest of the army was.
So, it devolved into a brawl, a pure melee in the snow, USE army regiments matched against whatever Swedish units they stumbled across. It took a while, half an hour to an hour of savage struggle with heavy casualties on both sides, before the mercenaries began to yield.
But yield they did. They simply didn't have the stomach for this sort of fight. Drifting at first, and then moving faster and faster, they headed back toward the lines around Dresden.
In the middle of all this, Mike Stearns and his staff stumbled around trying to make sense out of senselessness.
They never succeeded. They never even came close.
Somehow, though, none of them died.
Quite.
Early on, Anthony Leebrick was struck in the leg by a stray bullet, just above the ankle. Although he didn't know it, then or ever, the ball had been fired by one of his division's own infantrymen and had struck him by sheer mischance. A lot of men were killed or wounded in that battle from friendly fire. Most of them were mercenaries working for the Swedes, since they were more confused and directionless than the oncoming USE troops, but by no means all of them.
It was a nasty wound, in the way that such wounds so often were, when gun battles were fought with muskets. The balls were slow but heavy, and shattered bones if they struck them full on-as this ball did.
Stearns ordered him taken to the rear by two of the adjutants who accompanied the staff officers. Leebrick lost his foot in a surgeon's tent, but he survived. Men usually did if the amputation was of a lower extremity, so long as they didn't get infected-and the Third Division's sanitation practices were just as good among the surgeons as anywhere else.
Christopher Long was struck twice, again by stray bullets-although these were both fired by the enemy. The first ball caused a minor flesh wound on his left shoulder, which he had bound up and then ignored. The second wound, however, he couldn't ignore. That one struck him in the ribs. A glancing hit, it didn't penetrate the heavy buff coat he was wearing in lieu of armor. But it must have been a canister ball, twice the weight of a musket ball, because it broke at least two of his ribs. He tried to keep going but the pain was excruciating. Within minutes, over the young colonel's protest, Stearns had him taken to the rear as well.
That almost killed him. The two adjutants guiding him completely lost their way. The three men wandered for hours in the snowfall, with no idea where they were. None of them being sailors, none of them had thought to bring a compass. What soldier needs a compass?
Eventually, they came across a village. It had been deserted for weeks, and was not much more than ruins. But they were able to find some shelter in a house that had been only half-burned and one of the adjutants had some food on him.
There was no shortage of water. The snow drifts came as high as six feet in places.
Ulbrecht Duerr's wound came from a saber cut. A cavalryman from the unit of Courland cuirassiers came out of nowhere, shouting and swinging his blade. Duerr brought up his pistol but only had time to use it as a shield of sorts. Fortunately, it was a great heavy down-time saddle-holstered wheel-lock, not a dinky little up-time pistol. So the only damage he suffered was a broken finger that got caught in the trigger guard before the pistol was flung into the snow.
That hurt like the devil, of course, but the immediate problem was that Duerr was right-handed-and he'd just lost the use of his right hand. So, forced by necessity, he drew his own sword and fought left-handed.
And won. Blind luck, really. The cuirassier got overly rash and swung a great blow that missed and dragged him half out of the saddle. Seeing his chance, Duerr drove the point of his sword into the man's exposed throat.
Tried to, rather. His strike missed also but came much closer-and he wasn't off balance. So, at the end, he was able to turn the missed stab into a slash with the part of his blade just above the handguard.
Which
was like a razor, because although Duerr was slapdash when it came to keeping his blades sharp, that portion of a sword's edge almost never gets used. The man's carotid was severed as neatly as you could ask for. Off the saddle he went entirely, and bled to death in a snowbank.
Thereafter, Duerr withstood the pain of his broken finger rather cheerfully. At his age, besting an opponent left-handed! He'd be able to brag about that until his dying day.
Which might be today, of course. Still, bragging rights were bragging rights.
Mike Stearns got his own bragging rights that day. He had two horses shot out from under him.
Not one. Two.
Both times, by stray shots coming from nowhere. It was that sort of battle.
Neither shot struck him, and he was able to leap clear the first time a horse went down. But the second horse went down abruptly and his left leg got caught under its body. Luckily, none of the tack or weaponry came between his leg and the horse, just the horse itself. That big an animal put a hefty bruise on his leg, but nothing worse.
He might not have gotten up on the third horse an adjutant found for him, except that he found walking hurt too much.
What moron had thought fighting a battle in a snowstorm was a good idea?
Right around the time Mike was painfully dragging his leg from under that second horse, Johan Baner finally found his missing center. Not the Ostergotlanders-they were long gone. But most of John Ruthven's infantry regiment had been rallied by its commander and was getting into formation.
"Good work, John!" Baner shouted, as he rode up. "Now let's-"
Jeff finally had everything in place-and a good thing, too. Some more Swedish soldiers were looming up out of the snowfall, and these looked to be much better organized than any of the others they'd run across.
The volley gun company was where it was supposed to be-a bit in front, for a clear line of fire, but not so far that the Hangman infantry couldn't protect them.
Thorsten spotted a small knot of horsemen off to the left. Cavalry were always a volley gun unit's main target. His response was almost an automatic reflex-as was the response of his gun crews.
"Aim left!" he screeched. But most of the gun crews were already doing so.
"Fire!"
Baner's head came off. No fewer than three balls struck his neck, passing just below his chin.
His left arm came off also, which would have killed him from blood loss anyway. Three more bullets did for that. And four more struck his chest, two of which penetrated the chest wall.
John Ruthvenn's wounds were even worse. So were those of his adjutant.
One of Baner's adjutants was also mangled but the other, oddly enough, was completely untouched. Battles were freakish that way. He hadn't lagged or been off to one side, either. He'd been right in the middle of the little group, not much more than an arm's length from the general.
His horse, on the other hand, was worse hit than any human. The poor beast went down as if he'd been in a slaughterhouse. Still unhurt but trapped beneath his mount, that adjutant would surrender a few minutes later when the Hangman Regiment took the field.
He was the one who would identify Baner later that day. He had intended to keep silent, lest the enemy's morale be boosted. But then he saw that USE troops had stacked the general's body onto a mass of others, in preparation for an eventual mass grave, with his severed head tossed onto the pile afterward. They obviously had no idea who he was. So, finally, the adjutant spoke up. That so great a man should suffer such an indignity…The thought was just unbearable.
Jozef and his men reached the siege lines just as the first retreating Swedes began entering them from the other side. The two hours that followed were as savage as combat ever gets. It was all knives and grenades-and helmets used as clubs, sometimes.
Jozef was wounded twice, both flesh wounds, one on his thigh and the other a gash on his ribs. Neither was too serious once he staunched the blood loss. One or the other might get infected, of course, but he'd worry about that afterward. If he had an afterward.
Not all of his Poles were so lucky. Szklenski and Bogumil were both killed in the fighting. He'd miss Ted, for all the man's occasional annoying traits. Bogumil, he wouldn't miss at all. He didn't like the man any more the day he died than he had the day he met him.
Kazimierz would lose a leg by late afternoon, and lose his life by noon of the following day. Waclaw lost an arm, but survived.
Eric Krenz survived also, but his peculiar friend Friedrich Nagel did not. The same grenade that left a rather dashing little scar on Krenz's cheek tore his fellow lieutenant's throat apart.
Within two hours, most of the fighting was over. The battle in the trenches had become a stalemate, with the men from Dresden holding the inner lines and the Swedes holding the outer ones. Trying to push further, in either direction, was now tantamount to suicide.
Then the Hangman Regiment showed up, in superbly good order. How they managed that in a snowstorm was anyone's guess.
The colonel in command of the regiment had his volley guns brought into position where they could fire right down the line of trenches. "Enfilade," the French called it, if Jozef remembered correctly.
Two volleys of that and the Swedish mercenaries began surrendering wholesale. Especially once other regiments from the Third Division started appearing out of the snowfall.
By early afternoon, it was all over. Toward the end, a big man appeared on a horse and the troops started cheering him wildly. He seemed more puzzled by the applause than anything else.
Eventually, Jozef realized he was looking at Mike Stearns.
Gretchen Richter came out of Dresden shortly thereafter, over-riding the protests of her assistants.
They were worried about her safety. She was worried about her husband.
She walked right by him, as Jeff stood talking to his officers about handling the huge numbers of captured enemy soldiers. Didn't give him more than a glance.
Some big, confident, obviously martial sort of fellow. No one she knew.
It was only when she heard his startled exclamation of her own name that she turned around. And even then, took a second or two to recognize him.
Thereafter, things went splendidly. The two of them, in their embrace, got a round of applause from the troops that matched the one Stearns had gotten.
"Okay," said Denise. "I'm bored stiff. And my leg's getting cramped."
"The shooting seems to have stopped," Minnie ventured.
Noelle was still inclined toward caution. "I think we should wait another hour."
Chapter 48
Dresden, capital of Saxony Aside from mail couriers and smugglers, the one other class of people who were willing to risk penetrating siege lines were news reporters. Such men had existed for at least a century, but the Ring of Fire had expanded their number considerably. With the romanticism of up-time examples to lean on, the none-too-reputable trade of news reporter gained a certain cachet. That was especially true if a man could claim the title of "war correspondent."
(Female reporters had a certain equivalent if they could pose as "gossip columnists." Gossip, of course, had existed for millennia. But not until the Ring of Fire did it occur to anyone that you might actually be able to make a living from the business.)By the time of the battle, there were a handful of such men residing in Dresden. They were all out of the city and moving through the trenches before the shooting even stopped. One of them was wounded, in fact, by a fragment from a grenade. Not badly, though, and in the years to come the scar he picked up on his forehead added greatly to his prestige and even probably expanded his purse a bit.
By mid-afternoon, they'd collected the essential bits of information and had all raced back into Dresden. There, they clamored for radio time.
The CoC guards protecting the radio room refused to let them in. Tempers became frayed. A nasty incident might have ensued except that Tata showed up.
"Are you mad?" she said crossly to the guards. "Let them
all in. Now."
To the reporters, she said: "Decide in what order you'll get to the radio. Then you each get three minutes."
This was akin to telling cats to decide the order in which they'd eat. Immediately, the reporters started quarreling. After two minutes of that, Tata threw up her hands.
"Idiots! Fine. We will have one report, written by all of you. Sign it in whatever order you choose."
Herding cats, again. Immediately, they fell to quarreling over the order in which their names would appear.
Tata let that go on for no more than thirty seconds.
"Shut up! Fine. None of you will sign it, then. Come up with a pseudonym or something for all of you together."
Again, quarreling.
"Shut up! Fine. Since you all have the sense of a goose, I will come up with the name."
A stray memory came to her of something she'd run across in an up-time text.
So was born the Associated Press.
The reporters quarreled all through the process of writing the news account. But eventually they managed to get it written. They would even admit-not to each other, of course, and certainly not in public-that the end product was much better than any one of them would have come up with on their own. Their trade was at a stage of development where sensationalism came a long way ahead of substance. As a result, none of them had stayed out in the field any longer than they needed to in order to grasp the sensational essence of the event. But once all their accounts were added together, a great deal of factual content wound up being included.
There was even an unexpected bonus. By the time they were finally ready to transmit the report, a breathless CoC courier piled into the radio room.
"They killed Baner! They killed Baner!"
The reporters stared at him. "How can you be sure?" asked one, moved by an unusual impulse toward accuracy.
"I saw his head myself." The young courier made a face. The grimace combined horror, fascination and glee. "It'd come right off his body. Ripped off by bullets, looked like. Some of the Prince's soldiers brought it to him in a sack. They wanted to put it on a pikehead-just like that Swede shithead said he was going to do to us!-but the Prince wouldn't let them."