1637 The Polish Maelstrom

by Eric Flint

  “What I mean is that I think Murad has ordered this line of ships to serve as blockers, holding us off or at least impeding us while the next line moves around and goes for the city. They might even be planning a bombing run. Or—what I think is more likely—Murad’s testing us to see if the tactic will work.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  Julie didn’t even think of what the Magdeburg’s captain thought they ought to do. The Dutch officers and crewmen who actually flew the ship had made clear from the beginning that they were there purely as technicians—the aerial equivalents of ship pilots. Any decisions involving military tactics were entirely the responsibility of the man who was the real commander of the Magdeburg.

  That would be one Thomas Simpson, formerly an artillery officer in the USE Army but recently promoted to colonel and put in charge of the brand spanking new “USE Army Air Corps.” That had occasioned a wrangle with the Air Force, but Gustav Adolf had come down firmly on the army’s side—mostly because he had direct control of the army and wanted tight control over the Magdeburg.

  Tom himself thought the whole thing was a little ridiculous. The “Army Air Corps” had exactly one aircraft—the Magdeburg—no other officers but himself, a handful of enlisted men—few of whom actually flew in the Magdeburg—and two military contractors, Julie Sims and Dell Beckworth, who so far did all of the combat stuff.

  Granted, the promotion was nice. Already a full colonel at the age of twenty-eight and something of an apple in his emperor’s eye, Tom had a bright career ahead of him, assuming he decided to stay in the military after the war. Also assuming the war actually ended—always a chancy proposition in the seventeenth century—and assuming he survived.

  Tom’s answer didn’t come for perhaps fifteen seconds. The man was quite intelligent, but he deliberated on things before making a decision.

  “We’ll go straight at them—but you and Dell stay away from that front gunport. They’ll all be firing at us and I don’t want to risk you getting shot.”

  Julie frowned. “Then what’s the point—”

  “They want to play football, we’ll teach them another American sport. The one called ‘chicken.’”

  Julie rolled her eyes. “Oh, swell.”

  “Are you serious, Tom?” asked Dell. Being technically a civilian, he saw no reason to waste time with long-winded military protocol. “What happens if we run into one of them?”

  “I have no idea,” was Tom’s—absurdly cheerful—answer. “So far as I know, we have no records of what happens when two airships collide. But I do understand basic physics. There’s a reason”—they could hear the clap made by a meaty hand slapping a meatier chest—“that football lineman are built like me instead of a ninety-eight pound weakling. And those ships coming at us are just a pack of ninety-eight-pound weaklings.”

  “Oh, swell,” Julie repeated.

  * * *

  When he saw the Magdeburg’s maneuver, Moshe Mizrahi hissed softly through his teeth. This was exactly what he’d been afraid of.

  But… He was considerably more afraid of the sultan’s wrath. So he turned to the signal man and said, “Order the ships to tighten the formation. As tight as possible—even if the gasbags come in contact with each other.”

  That wasn’t as risky as it sounded. At least, Moshe didn’t think it was—although this was something no one had any experience with. Still, by their very nature the envelopes would provide a cushioning effect, and they were so big that the gondolas were in no risk of colliding.

  * * *

  As the five ships closed toward each other, however, one of them was lagging behind. That was the Çıldır, commanded by Juwalji Hasan. The ship’s engineer had started having trouble with the engine a few minutes earlier and the Çıldır hadn’t been able to keep up with the other ships in the line.

  They hadn’t lagged very far behind yet—no more than a hundred feet or so—but as the line compressed they were being squeezed out of the formation. Seeing what was happening, the commander ordered the engineer to slow still further. He could be faulted for that—Sultan Murad certainly would have, had he been present—but his actions were simply the result of deeply ingrained human instincts.

  Within a short time, the Çıldır was no longer part of the formation. A five-ship line had become a four-ship line with the fifth vessel flying behind them.

  Juwalji Hasan could no longer see anything of the Magdeburg except the top swell of its enormous envelope, coming toward them like a mighty wave.

  The captain and pilot of the Magdeburg couldn’t see the Çıldır at all.

  * * *

  “Fire!” Moshe shouted. The gunner of the Chaldiran fired his rifle. The sound was the cue, and an instant later the rest of the gunners fired.

  Or rather, three of them did. Moshe wasn’t positive—the shots had been very closely spaced—but he thought he’d only heard three.

  He turned his head away from the pilot’s slit in the gondola’s forward armor. “What—”

  “The Çıldır failed to shoot,” said the signal man, who had a view out of the rear of the gondola. “They’ve fallen completely behind.”

  “Juwalji Hasan better have a good explanation,” Moshe said grimly.

  “We’re zimmis,” the signal man said, jeeringly. “What does he care what we think?”

  “Nothing—but he will care what the sultan thinks. Possibly for a very short time.” He made a gesture with his hands at his neck which simulated a garrote being applied.

  But Moshe had no time to worry about that now. As he’d expected, the gunfire seemed to have accomplished nothing—and the Magdeburg was still coming right at them.

  Mice do not play chicken with cats. That is simply a law of nature.

  “Tell the ships to divide,” he ordered the signal man. “Now. The Sokhoista with us, to the left. The Raydaniya and Marj Dabiq, to the right.”

  It seemed to take forever for the signals to be transmitted, but it wasn’t more than half a minute before the four Ottoman ships began splitting the line.

  Just in time. As the Magdeburg passed through the gap thus created, her envelope brushed against that of the Sokhoista.

  That glancing near miss was enough to jolt everybody in the Sokhoista and send its gondola into a frightening back-and-forth lurch. But the people aboard the Magdeburg barely noticed.

  They had a much bigger problem on their hands.

  * * *

  “Holy sh—Dive! Dive! Dive!” The thought went through Tom’s mind that there was something ridiculous about using terminology he’d only encountered watching submarine movies. But it was all he could think of.

  It didn’t matter, anyway, because the Magdeburg’s Dutch pilot hadn’t needed Tom to tell him that he needed to send the huge airship into as steep a descent as possible. He didn’t even think of trying to fly above the Ottoman ship that was almost upon them, because that ship had already been at least fifty feet higher in altitude than the Magdeburg when they spotted her.

  Tom braced himself as best he could. Through a slit, he could see that the enemy airship was trying to climb as rapidly as possible. Maybe—

  It was a wishful thought. The Ottoman ship simply couldn’t climb fast enough. It passed over the brow of the Magdeburg’s envelope, but couldn’t avoid the tail. Within seconds, the two airships had collided.

  * * *

  The laws of physics are what they are. Mass matters—and sometimes it really matters. This was one of those times.

  The impact stripped the Çıldır’s gondola completely off its hull. For a few seconds, the gondola teetered atop the Magdeburg before it slipped off and plunged toward the ground almost a mile below.

  For the same few seconds, Tom was hopeful that the Magdeburg hadn’t suffered any catastrophic damage. But that was only because he couldn’t see what had happened to the envelope.

  The Çıldır’s gondola had torn a great rent in the Magdeburg’s upper envelope and ruptured one of the
gas cells. Had that been the only damage, the airship would have lost considerable lifting capacity but perhaps not so much as to cause it to crash.

  And the people aboard the Magdeburg had one great piece of luck. The hydrogen spilling out of the gas bag had instantly mixed with the oxygen in the atmosphere and produced a hydrogen-oxygen mixture within the combustible range—which with hydrogen was huge: anywhere between four and seventy-five percent. All it took now was a flame—any high-heat source—to produce a conflagration. Once started, fire would have rapidly destroyed the airship.

  Such an ignition source did exist: the oil-burning engine that drove the Çıldır’s propellers. Except that seconds before the collision, the Çıldır’s engineer had shut it down temporarily. He hadn’t even been aware of the imminent collision, because he’d been completely engrossed with trying to fix the engine.

  The flame was gone by the time the ships collided and the shell of the low-powered Ottoman engine wasn’t hot enough to ignite the mixture. Given more time, it might have, but the gondola was only in the gas plume for a few seconds before its fall to earth took it away.

  So there was no fire, no explosion. But the gondola had also damaged the control structures at the tail, badly enough that the crew had no way to avert the coming disaster. The Magdeburg was out of control. The best they could do now was dump the ballast to reduce the rate of fall to something that would hopefully be survivable.

  * * *

  Tom managed to refrain from shouting any further advice to the crew. The pilot knew better than he did what the Magdeburg’s limits were, and the one thing that was blindingly obvious is that they were going down. That was now a given. What they needed was to touch down as gently as possible.

  Touch down. That was a euphemism for “controlled crash.” Probably “not all-that-controlled crash” and possibly “completely uncontrolled crash.”

  There was nothing Tom could contribute here, so he clambered up the ladder into the gun turret.

  “Is there anything you need—I mean, really need—to try to salvage?” he asked.

  Dell looked longingly at the Karabine.

  “Forget that,” Julie said. She had the Remington in hand. “Just grab the .308 ammo, Dell. If the rest makes it, fine. If it doesn’t, screw it.”

  Despite the tension of the moment, Tom almost laughed. Gun nuts! Not for the first time, he wondered if they suffered from an actual clinical disorder.

  FAD, maybe. Firearm Attachment Disorder.

  North bank of the Danube

  About a mile west of the village of Langenstein

  The sight was mesmerizing. Murad had barely noticed the gondola of one of his own airships plunging to the ground, taking the entire crew to their death. He’d given even less notice to the now unsteered envelope, which was drifting with the wind and would end up…wherever.

  The huge kâfir airship wasn’t plunging to the ground, but its descent was so steep that it reminded Murad of a stooping hawk—no, a stooping dragon. A gigantic monster, approaching the world as if it was its prey.

  What would happen when it struck, as it was so clearly bound to do?

  He didn’t know—but he did know what his army had to do. No matter what happened, the Magdeburg would be out of action for weeks, at the very least.

  He turned to the radio man. “Call the Pelekanon,” he commanded. “Tell Semsi Ahmed to order the entire fleet back to base immediately. We need to start refitting the airships for a bombing mission.”

  He went back to watching the Magdeburg’s dive. The entire army would have to be prepared as well. Murad doubted if the airships could repeat the success they’d had at Vienna. But…they might. His army needed to be ready to launch a massive assault on Linz on a moment’s notice.

  They’d have enough time. The sultan estimated that it would take a least one full day, and more likely two, to refit the airship fleet. No one including himself had expected that they’d have such a splendid victory today.

  The distant enemy airship came to ground. From his vantage point on the observation tower he could see that much, but he couldn’t see what damage it had suffered.

  Enough, hopefully, to kill the Jooli.

  A pasture two miles west of Linz

  Tom lowered Julie to the ground, then Dell, and then the two remaining Dutch crewmen. The rest of the crew including the captain, the pilot and the engineer had all jumped as soon as the gondola had touched ground—showing, to Tom’s way of thinking, a disturbing lack of martial tradition. Of course, they weren’t actually soldiers.

  So, it would fall to him to be the last man off the ship.

  Last person. If Julie heard him say “last man,” he’d never hear the end of it.

  * * *

  Once Tom was on the ground, he joined the others in moving a very respectful distance from the airship. No one expected the ship to explode, since it hadn’t already—it had never once caught fire—but…

  Who knew? He sometimes wondered if he knew anything anymore.

  “Can it be salvaged?” Julie asked.

  “Who knows?” said Tom.

  The confluence of the Danube and the Traun

  A few miles southeast of Linz

  From his own vantage point several miles to the east, Emperor Gustav Adolf hadn’t been able to see the final moments of the Magdeburg’s fall to earth. But he’d seen enough to realize that even if the great airship could be rebuilt, it wouldn’t be available for weeks. Maybe months.

  Maybe never, for that matter.

  Murad wasn’t going to give him more than a few days.

  He turned to one of his couriers. He’d briefly considered trying to use one of the radios, but he was unsure if any of the radios he had on hand could reach the Baltic.

  “Go immediately—quickly as you can—to the main radio station. Send a message in my name to Colonel Wood. Order him to bring the entire Air Force to Linz. Every plane that’s available.”

  He paused for a moment. “Well, no. He can keep one of the Belles to provide reconnaissance for General Torstensson. But I need the rest of the airplanes down here. As soon as possible. Make sure that’s clear.”

  After the courier left, Gustav Adolf looked to the east instead of the west. He could see the nearest fieldworks of the huge Ottoman army that had resumed its siege of Linz.

  Could airplanes that had never been designed to fight other aircraft be of any use against the Ottoman fleet that would soon be coming at them?

  He had no idea. Just the surety that he’d find out before too long. He could remember feeling the same way on the eve of his first battle. He’d still been a teenager, then.

  What he couldn’t remember was what it had felt like to be a teenage king, on the eve of his first battle. Such were the blessings of age.

  Part Seven

  April 1637

  She sees, coming up a second time,

  Earth from the ocean, eternally green

  “The Seeress’s Prophecy,” The Poetic Edda

  Chapter 36

  Kraków, official capital of Poland

  Actual capital of Lesser Poland

  “About time,” Jeff muttered, looking down from his bedroom window in an upper floor of the Cloth Hall. “I was starting to wonder if they’d get here before the heat death of the universe.”

  Below him, the troops from the Galician Democratic Assembly were filing into the city’s huge market square.

  “Filing in,” Jeff muttered. “What a laugh. Piling in with neither rhyme nor reason, what it is.”

  Next to him, his wife smiled. Jeff had the trained habits, by now, of a military officer. Disorder and confusion offended his tidy soul. She, on the other hand, had the trained habits of a political organizer. A state of disorder and confusion was her natural habitat. She moved through it like a fish through water.

  Admittedly, the soldiers pouring into the square seemed distinctly short of training and discipline. Of orderly formations, there were essentially none. The closest
she could see was what looked like a battalion-sized unit in the southwestern corner of the square that was making some attempt to come to order. Given that “making some attempt” seemed mostly to consist of officers on horseback yelling furiously at each other, she didn’t think Jeff would find much comfort there.

  But what was also evident to her was that the morale and fighting spirit of the Galician Assembly’s forces seemed every bit as high as their decorum was low. They were all in for savage struggle when the army of the magnates that was nearing Kraków arrived. Savage struggles were won with fighting spirit and morale, not decorum.

  “Relax, husband,” she said. “You and Prince Ulrik will bring order to this chaos soon enough. My military expert tells me that it will be at least a week before the magnates are ready to launch an assault.”

  “Which military expert?” His tone was still peevish. “We got so many of those—in their own minds, anyway—that they’re tripping over each other.”

  “I was thinking of the one I sleep with every night. Who murmured into my ear just a few hours ago that we still had plenty of time to engage in carnal relations—you put it less delicately—before we had to break off to crush the wicked magnates. You put that less delicately also.”

  “Did I say that? I don’t remember.”

  She glanced up at him. “That’s a truly sinful expression on your face. Smug self-satisfaction is the most charitable term I can think of. If you were a believer, you’d be on your knees praying for forgiveness.”

  Jeff’s expression got smugger and more self-satisfied. And why not? He wasn’t a believer. Not in a kind and benevolent deity, at any rate. He did believe in the woman standing next to him, on the other hand. Which, the way he looked at the universe, was plenty good enough.

  Is “smugger” a word? he wondered.

  * * *

  In the square below, Lukasz Opalinski was wondering if he should add his voice to the shouting multitude.

  He was tempted. Since he and the mission to rescue the people in the cellars had arrived in Kraków two days earlier, he’d gotten a good estimate—what the up-timers called “feel”—for the army assembled to confront the oncoming magnates.