by Eric Flint
But the flamethrower… That was a different matter. It was a fiendish weapon, more properly wielded by djinni than men. Even if the empire’s legal scholars had ruled its use legitimate, Hussein was glad that he wasn’t the one using it. Let a Christian or a Jew lose his soul instead.
* * *
To Leopold, the rocket barrage came out of the smoke wall as a complete surprise.
It shouldn’t have. The top Austrian commanders had all been briefed by Janos Drugeth’s spies. They’d been told to expect rockets—lots of them—along with a few airships and at least a thousand rifled muskets.
But Leopold had been more concerned about the rifles than anything else. The Austrian infantry still wasn’t equipped with any, except for a few in the hands of snipers. He was skeptical that they had the accuracy claimed: good up to five hundred yards, one of the spies claimed. He thought that was doubtful for anything other than an American rifle—and only an up-time made one, at that.
Rockets were notoriously temperamental weapons, and very hard to aim. So if the Ottomans did use them, Leopold had expected plenty of advance warning.
But he hadn’t foreseen the smoke. And if he’d been told that the Ottomans had the so-called “Hale” design for their rockets, he’d forgotten.
So he wasn’t expecting a big barrage of rockets fired from no more than four or five hundred yards away, which came out of the smoke with almost no warning—and many of which actually hit their target.
It was a big target, of course. Hundreds of yards of bastions and curtain walls, all of them protected by a glacis. But there were a lot of rockets, too.
Still, it was just pure blind bad luck—ridiculously bad luck—that one of the rockets sailed right over the bastion wall and exploded no more than ten yards from Leopold and his three female companions.
The only thing that kept any of them alive was that the timed fuse didn’t go off until the rocket was already past them, so most of the shrapnel kept flying forward and peppered the ground below the bastion—where, happily, no one was standing.
One piece of shrapnel removed Leopold’s hat and sent it sailing toward the moat. Two more pieces—very small ones, luckily—struck Judy Wendell. But, luckily again, they struck her on the hem of the riding jacket she favored when venturing outdoors. No damage was done except to the jacket itself, and even that wasn’t much.
The piece of shrapnel that struck Cecilia Renata, on the other hand, was quite sizeable and it struck her directly on the side of her head. The only thing that kept her alive was that she wore her thick red hair curled up in two big buns covering her ears, and today she was also wearing a broad-brimmed hat to protect her fair complexion from the sun.
She went down like a stunned steer, blood oozing into the hair on the right side of her head.
Minnie got to her within three seconds, with a kerchief in hand that she began wrapping around the archduchess’ head to stem the blood loss. No arteries had been severed, but head wounds always bleed badly. She probably had a concussion as well.
A moment later, Judy was kneeling next to her, helping to hold the dressing while Minnie finished tightening it down.
Leopold’s contribution was to stare at them. Being fair to the young man, there was nothing he could do that Minnie and Judy weren’t already doing—and he was, technically, in command of the whole garrison.
Even if that was mostly a formality, he still couldn’t abandon everything else in order to attend to his sister. For a quarter or a minute or so, his thoughts skittered around like a drop of water on a hot skillet.
Minnie got to her feet. “Nothing more we can do, right now—but we have to get her out of here. Judy, you take her left side.”
Between them, the two young woman got the unconscious archduchess’ arms slung over their shoulders and started down the ramp leading up to the bastion wall.
“Be careful!” said Leopold.
Without looking around, Minnie waved her hand. The gesture could have meant anything between will do, master! and you worry about yourself, fellow. But Leopold knew Minnie well enough by now to know which end of that range was most likely.
He turned back to face the still-invisible enemy, somewhere out there in the smoke. What would they do now?
Another hissing barrage of rockets arrived. None of them landed near Leopold, and a quick glance backward assured him that none of the rockets posed any danger to his sister and her companions. By now, the three women were off the bastion and hurrying toward the city itself—insofar as the term “hurrying” could be applied to two women carrying a third like a limp sack of grain.
A new sound came to his ears. Something… odd, but also oddly familiar.
After a few seconds, he realized what it reminded him of. That was the same sound that the “Sonny Steamer” had made, racing around the track at Race Track City.
Something was coming, driven by a steam engine. He was quite sure a day which had started badly was about to get worse.
Chapter 37
Vienna, capital of Austria-Hungary
Judy Wendell came to a stop. “This isn’t going to work,” she said, breathing heavily.
Minnie Hugelmair, who had Cecilia Renata’s other arm over her shoulder and was also supporting the archduchess with an arm around her waist, took a few deep breaths herself. She was a bit shorter than the American girl but she outweighed Judy by at least twenty pounds and was stronger. Still, she too was half-exhausted by now. Carrying a limp human body is hard work, even shared between two people.
Minnie glanced around. They were within the city itself now, no longer in sight of the fortifications, and had a large two-story building shielding them from rockets.
“Let’s set her down,” she said. A few seconds later, they had the Austrian archduchess sitting on the ground, propped up against the wall of the building.
She didn’t look good. Not only was she still unconscious, but her face was very pale and her breathing was rapid and shallow.
“I think she’s in shock,” Minnie said.
Judy was already taking her pulse and had her other hand on Cecilia Renata’s forehead. “I’m almost sure you’re right,” she said. “Without a sfigmawhoozit—I can never remember how to pronounce the word for a blood pressure gadget—there’s no way to be positive. But her pulse is weak and rapid and so is her breathing. She’s cold and clammy, too.”
She removed her hands from the archduchess’ forehead and wrist. “Good enough for government work, as they say.”
Minnie snorted softly. “As Americans say. In this day and age, you’re better off doing shoddy work for a private party than trying to swindle the government.” She made a chopping motion with the edge of her hand against the side of her neck. “You up-timers just had slack and soft-hearted governments.”
Judy made a face. “You’ve got a point. I can remember a carefree and happy time before the Ring of Fire when I barely knew what ‘shock’ was, much less how to diagnose and treat it.”
She sat down and propped herself against the wall next to Cecilia Renata. “What should we do, Minnie? We’ve got to find someplace we can give her emergency care. She needs to be lying down with her feet up, and kept warm.”
Minnie was rested enough to stand up and walk to the corner. Peering around it, she first looked toward the fortified walls. But there was nothing to see in that direction because the smoke now completely obscured the view. Looking the other way, she could see the spire and the roof of the imperial palace.
She came back to where Judy and Cecilia Renata were sitting. The archduchess had slumped a bit sideways, with her head resting on Judy’s shoulder. But her eyes were now open and she seemed at least half-conscious.
Minnie knelt down next to her, on the opposite side from Judy.
“Your Grace?” she asked.
Cecilia Renata’s eyes turned toward her. The movement seemed to be coordinated and both pupils were the same size. Minnie had also been trained in first aid and she knew th
at was a good sign.
“Where are we?” the archduchess asked. Her voice was weak, but clear. “What happened?”
Then, before Minnie could answer, Cecilia Renata’s eyes bulged a little and her cheeks started to swell. Recognizing the signs, Minnie managed to scramble out of the way before the archduchess vomited.
“Well, that’s one royal outfit which is going to need a good cleaning,” said Judy. She’d sidled away herself. “And I’d say that makes it definite—she’s got a concussion, all right. We have got to get her somewhere safe.”
Minnie pointed to the north. “We can make it to the Hofburg. That’s the best place I can think of.”
Since the archduchess seemed to be done with vomiting, Minnie wiped off her face with a clean part of the hem of the same royal skirt. “Up you go, Your Grace. We need to get moving.”
Once again, she and Judy got under Cecilia Renata’s shoulders and got her onto her feet. This time, thankfully, the young archduchess was able to bear much of her own weight. They started moving toward the Hofburg.
* * *
The rocket barrage had finally ended. By the time it did, Archduke Leopold had made his way to the headquarters set up by his military commanders in a chamber beneath the southernmost bastion of the walls. They’d positioned it there because they’d thought that was the most likely place the Ottomans would attack.
They’d been wrong, but not by much. Murad had actually aligned his forces a bit further to the west. Presumably he’d done so in order to give himself a wider front across which to send his troops in an assault.
“The rockets didn’t do much damage,” said General Wolf Heinrich von Baudissin, the top commander of the garrison defending Vienna. His tone was dismissive. “A few men killed here and there, some buildings—civilian buildings—destroyed. Our fortifications were not damaged at all.”
“Then why did the Turks use the rockets in the first place?” asked Colonel Raimondo Montecuccoli. “I think we’d be foolish to underestimate them.”
Leopold was inclined to agree with him. He’d become quite impressed with Montecuccoli over the past few weeks. The Italian cavalryman was young for his rank, only twenty-seven. But Leopold would have been a lot happier if he’d been in charge of the garrison instead of Baudissin.
Baudissin was a Lusatian, now in his late fifties, the quintessential “grizzled and experienced commander”—as he never tired of depicting himself. Although a Protestant and someone whose military experience had mostly been in service to Protestant realms--with Denmark, Sweden and then Saxony—he was, like most professional officers of the time, quite willing to serve a Catholic monarch.
He had the advantage and disadvantage of not being mentioned in any of the up-time history texts. Advantage, because there was nothing bad to report about him; disadvantage, because nothing good was said, either.
It was difficult if not impossible to draw any conclusions about his absence from the historical record. He might simply have died before he became sufficiently prominent. In any event, the American texts were notoriously sketchy about the history of central Europe in this era. In the end, Emperor Ferdinand III’s decision to hire him had been driven mostly by necessity. There was something of an acute shortage of experienced generals available for service to Austria. Wallenstein had rebelled and the two generals who’d led the conspiracy against him—Piccolomini and Gallas—were no longer available either. Piccolomini had chosen to work for Bavaria and Gallas had gotten his brains shot out by the American sharpshooter Julie Sims at the Battle of the Alte Veste.
In retrospect, Leopold thought that hiring Baudissin had been an unwise decision on his brother’s part. But no one had foreseen how quickly the Ottomans under their new sultan would launch an invasion. Wallenstein’s successful rebellion had placed a premium on loyalty, when it came to the Austrian emperor’s attitude toward his generals. And, whether competent or not, no one thought that Baudissin posed the same sort of threat to the Austrian crown that Wallenstein had.
If for no other reason, because he wasn’t bright enough. Leopold’s brother had even said that to him, once.
Leopold cleared his throat. He was normally hesitant to speak up at these command meetings. Regardless of his position as an archduke in line of succession and his formal status as the overall commander of Vienna’s defense, Leopold was very well aware of his age—twenty-two—as well as his vocation—bishop—and his military experience—none.
“The rockets have still had an effect on our troops,” he said. “That was quite obvious to me on my way over here. Between the smoke and the rockets—that bizarre noise coming from the Turkish ranks isn’t helping either—they’re pretty badly shaken. I think we need to shore up morale.”
Baudissin didn’t curl his lip, or make any other visibly derisive sign. But it was quite clear that he was paying no attention to the archduke’s cautions.
Leopold caught the eye of Montecuccoli. The Italian officer made a slight face, accompanied by a little shrug, as if to say: I agree with you, but I’m not in charge.
Technically, Leopold was in charge and—technically—he could relieve Baudissin of his command right here and now.
But… He shrank from that course of action. If for no other reason, the impact on a garrison that was already wobbly of having its commander summarily relieved in the middle of a battle—and replaced by who? Leopold? A not-that-well-known and very young officer like Montecuccoli?—was likely to make things still worse.
“Murad just did it to bolster the morale of his own troops,” Baudissin went on, his tone firm and confident. “The Turks will now go back to proper siege techniques.”
His finger came down on a portion of the map spread out across the table in the center of the room. “They’ll start extending their trenches here, while”—his finger moved over a bit—“their sappers concentrate here, closer to the canal.”
He certainly sounded as if he knew what he was talking about.
* * *
On the way back to their base, Abraham Zarfati made sure that his airship was at least three hundred kulaçs above the ground. If they followed the plan, the oncoming airships which would be dropping bombs on the fortifications would be flying very low—not more than one hundred kulaçs.
Supposedly. But Abraham was an airship commander himself and he knew that the natural inclination of an airship pilot was to avoid flying too low. That was true even without the added incentives of smoke that obscured visibility and the possibility of enemy gun fire.
The smoke would be worrying the bomb ship pilots. Supposedly—that treacherous word, again—the smoke should have cleared away by the time the bombing airships arrived over the fortifications. But that depended largely on the wind, and Abraham was pretty sure the wind had died down quite a bit. There could still be a lot of smoke in the area when the new wave of airships arrived.
That would not be his problem. But he didn’t want to run any risk of colliding with an incoming airship whose pilot was hedging his bets.
No one had any idea what would happen if two airships collided—which was exactly where Zarfati wanted to leave that particular bit of knowledge: “Result unknown.” Eventually someone would probably find out. Let it not be him.
Hearing his engineer muttering something, Abraham turned to see what the problem was.
“Trouble?”
“Not as such,” replied Joseph Culi. He was scowling at the steam engine in the center of the gondola. “I just wish the sultan would let us adapt one of the American designs.”
Out of reflex habit, Abraham glanced around quickly. That was silly, of course. Some of the airships had Muslim commanders, but everyone on board this one was a Jew. Still, you needed to be careful on the subject of the Americans. Or “up-timers,” as they were also called. Sultan Murad IV was willing—no, eager—to modernize his army, and to do so he had no choice but to look to the American texts for ideas and inspiration. Nonetheless, he had still not rescinded the official
proscription against any reference to Americans.
“This stupid thing is slow,” Joseph growled.
“Reliable, though,” countered Abraham.
“So is a mule. And I bet I could hang a mule over the side and let its farts drive us along—probably as fast as this thing does.”
Abraham chuckled. The steam engines the sultan had ordered put in use for his fleet of airship were based on a design that was almost a century old and of entirely Muslim origin. The great astronomer Taqi ad-Din Muhammad ibn Ma'ruf ash-Shami al-Asadi had devised the plans for such an engine, although he’d never actually tried to build one, so far as anyone was aware. But the design had still existed in his book, The Sublime Methods of Spiritual Machines, and Murad had seized on it as the basis for his engineers to develop a suitable airship engine. Abraham suspected the sultan had chafed at the necessity to rely on machines developed by infidels and saw this as a way to at least partially counter that taint.
Taqi ad-Din’s machine had been a steam turbine designed to rotate a spit for cooking meat. He’d also designed a steam-operated six-cylinder water pump. To serve the purpose for which Murad had commanded them, the Ottoman engineers had combined and transformed those designs into an engine that could turn the propellers which drove the airships.
The Ottoman-designed engine did have some good points. It was reliable, it didn’t break down often, and the thrust could be easily reversed with a simple gear shift. The boiler was run at lower pressures than on American designs of the same size and wall thickness and thus operated with a greater safety margin.
But it was also quite a weak engine. So weak, in fact, that the airships couldn’t operate in any sort of strong wind. As far as Abraham was concerned, though, that was a disguised advantage. Fine for the sultan—down there on the ground—to order his airships to fly in the face of strong winds. Better for Zarfati and his crew to be able to refuse such an order on the simple grounds that it couldn’t be carried out due to mechanical realities.