by Eric Flint
Jozef was a very good equestrian, if not in his friend’s league. Still, most of his attention had to be devoted to the simple task of staying in the saddle. Falling off a horse which was moving close to thirty miles an hour was a sure way to break some bones, one of which might well be part of your spine.
* * *
Lukasz had a better view of what was happening and was such a superb horseman that he didn’t need to concentrate entirely on staying in the saddle. So he’d seen Gretchen get knocked down.
But what he could also see was that the men attacking her were confused themselves as to what was happening. Several of them had been killed, in a manner that many of them probably didn’t even understand. Two horses were now also down, along with the corpses of the men.
Horses are big animals and big animals are leery of stepping on treacherous terrain. In their none-too-capacious brains, corpses and carcasses qualified as treacherous terrain, so all the surviving horses were jittery.
Jittery horses make for jittery riders, and jittery riders tend not to pay close attention to what’s happening around them because they’re preoccupied with staying in the saddle. Besides, “what was happening around them” by now consisted mostly of horses jittering around.
In short, it was almost comical to see the way Gretchen was left alone for a few seconds. Deadly seconds in which she re-armed her very deadly pistol.
She came back up—not to her feet, just to her knees—assumed that peculiar two-handed firing stance, and started killing again.
Lukasz was almost there. He lifted the lance out of its holster and set his own killing stance.
* * *
Gretchen shot one of the bastards—twice, maybe three times—before another one of them took aim at her. His pistol fired and she was sent sprawling again, spinning half around from the impact of the bullet on her cuirass.
It was a hammering blow. The wind still wasn’t knocked out of her, but she was half-stunned.
So, she was in perfect position to see the final moments of Lukasz Opalinski’s charge.
Jeff had told her once of his own experience being charged by a mounted Polish hussar. He’d escaped being killed—barely—but his friend Eric Krenz had gotten wounded in the process.
“What’s it like?” he’d said to her. “It’s fucking terrifying, that’s what it’s like. Being lanced by a Polish hussar is right up there with—with—hell, I don’t know. Being charged by a really pissed-off elephant with really big tusks, maybe.”
Indeed, so. In that last split second before the lancehead speared its target, Lukasz looked enormous. She could only imagine how he looked to the man he was about to kill—who, for his part, was just staring at him with his mouth wide open and his face as pale as a sheet.
The lance took the cavalryman in the chest and drove through the buff coat as if it was a child’s jacket. Three feet of the spear came through the other side—including, incongruously, the red-and-white Polish banner he’d attached to it. Both the lancehead and the banner were coated in blood and gore.
Lukasz made no effort to hold onto the lance. To the contrary, he pitched it aside as soon as the spearhead passed through his target, which had the effect of hurling the dying man onto the ground and out of Lukasz’s way. By the time the man came out of the saddle, Lukasz had already drawn his saber.
Which also looked huge. That was hardly surprising, since by the standards of one-handed swords it was huge. You could make fun of a lot of things about Polish hussars, but their fighting skill was not one of them.
That skill didn’t run toward subtlety, though. The saber struck another cavalryman on his right thigh and cut through to the bone. The pain and shock paralyzed the man. His guard lowered, Lukasz’ next strike cut through the flange of the man’s lobster-tailed pot helmet, severed his spine and sent him flying out of the saddle.
Lukasz—she had no idea how—managed to duck a pistol shot and then came back up with the saber rising high above him.
Down it came, like an ax. That man’s helmet was split in half, the pieces falling aside, while the blade went several inches into his skull. From the sound of it, though, Gretchen thought the man was actually killed by having his neck broken from the force of the blow.
Lukasz was immensely strong. One quick twist of his wrist freed the saber from the skull it had imbedded itself in, and another quick twist tossed the man’s corpse aside.
Then Jozef arrived. Gretchen was obscurely pleased to see that he was a man with her own inclinations when it came to weaponry. To hell with that medieval crap. He had his own pistol in hand and started shooting.
Within a few seconds, it was all over.
* * *
After dismounting, Lukasz moved through the bodies littering the ground to see if there were any survivors. The horses had all run off by now except the two Gretchen had killed.
One of men who’d been shot was still alive. But he wouldn’t be for much longer so Lukasz severed his carotid artery with a thrust of the saber. Under the circumstances, it was a mercy killing.
Another cavalryman was almost entirely unhurt, except for having the wind knocked out of him. His left forearm might be broken too, from the way he was cradling it. Lukasz checked to make sure the man was unarmed, and then told him: “If you move more than three inches in any direction, I’ll cut your head off.”
That would hold the fellow, he judged. He checked the rest of the corpses while Jozef tended to Gretchen. The woman had obviously been battered about, but none of her injuries were life-threatening.
Served her right, anyway, being as reckless as she had taking off her helmet.
But…
Lukasz Opalinski was a very experienced soldier, given his still-young age. Gretchen Richter had been attacked by a dozen men, only one of whom had survived.
He’d killed three of them and he thought Jozef had killed two more. The rest—six, all told—had been killed by Richter herself.
He knew very few hussars who would have survived, in her position, even with the help of that fearsome up-time pistol. That had taken the sort of cool nerve and concentration in battle that not many men could manage.
He wasn’t sure he could have done it himself.
* * *
Gretchen waited, more or less patiently, until Wojtowicz and Opalinski finished berating her. She figured she owed them that much.
Eventually, they finished. By then she was back on her feet, aching all over but apparently with no permanent injuries.
She would admit that the armor had kept her from having ribs broken by a horse trampling on her, and had kept a bullet from passing through her torso. But if she’d been wearing the stupid helmet she’d have been unable to shoot accurately.
More to the point, she’d been going about this whole business wrong from the very beginning. That was what came of listening to men whose shaky grasp on practical reality had been shaken still further by their faith in military superstitions.
“Fine, I shouldn’t have taken off the helmet. But I never should have been wearing it in the first place. We’re doing this all wrong. Chasing all over trying to find Holk and fight him. It’s stupid.”
The two Poles frowned at her.
“How else can we find the bastard?” asked Lukasz.
“Make him come to us. I will show you.”
She pointed at the one surviving mercenary. By now, he was sitting upright. Still cradling his forearm, which was almost certainly broken, not that Gretchen or her two companions had any sympathy for the swine.
“Bring him. He might know something.”
Neither she nor Lukas nor Jozef bothered to speculate on whether or not the man would talk. First, because he was a mercenary. Of course he’d talk.
Secondly…
Opalinski went over to their captive.
“Be afraid,” he told the fellow cheerfully. “Be very afraid.”
Chapter 43
Freising, Bavaria
“You’re sure?�
� Mike Stearns asked, his tone of voice insistent.
His brother-in-law got an exasperated expression on his face and lapsed out of military protocol. “For Christ’s sake, Mike, will you please stop fretting about it? We’ll be fine. The last thing Piccolomini’s going to do is order a sortie. Right now—bet you dollars for donuts—the only thing he’s pondering is where to find his next job. Seeing as how this one is clearly coming to an end.”
Mike looked away from Tom and spent a few seconds studying the distant walls of Munich. They were starting to look pretty ragged. The relentless pounding of the two ten-inch naval rifles, for weeks on end, had turned large stretches of the Bavarian capital’s fortifications into not much more than rubble. They were at the point where launching a mass frontal assault would be on the agenda very soon—except that Mike was on the verge pulling the Third Division out of the siege and beginning the march into Austria.
Beginning the ride into Austria, it would be better to say. By now, he had close to a hundred barges assembled in Freising. The vessels were anything but uniform, either in size or carrying capacity. But he figured he had enough to carry the whole 1st Brigade as well as the Hangman regiment down the Isar to the confluence with the Danube near Deggendorf. From there, the troops would transship onto larger craft which would take them down the Danube to their final destination at Linz, which had become the new capital of Austria.
They needed to get there quickly. No one doubted that as soon as he felt he had Vienna under control, Sultan Murad would leave a garrison to hold the city while he marched most of his huge army up the Danube to crush the final pocket of Austrian resistance. If he could manage that, he would win the war, not simply Vienna.
Murad had to be stopped at Linz. That was the best that could be done for the moment, but Mike thought it would prove to be good enough in the end. So long as the Austrians held Linz and Emperor Ferdinand was kept from being killed or captured, the fight could continue without the morale of the allies being too badly hammered. But if they lost Linz—and with it all of Austria—Mike wasn’t so sure of that. Everyone was astonished at the speed and ferocity of the Ottoman onslaught. Even Mike himself, being honest about it, for all that he’d warned people of the danger of underestimating the Turks.
He looked back at Tom Simpson. “All right. You’ll still have the 2nd and 3rd Brigades for a few more days. By then General Schmidt should have arrived with the SoTF National Guard. Between them and the two regiments I’ll leave behind—”
“—we’ll be fine. Like I said, quit worrying.” He made the same sort of two-handed shooing motion that Gustav Adolf had used with Rebecca. “Go, will you? Sir.”
The last word came with a smile as well as an emphasis. Mike couldn’t help but smile back.
“Fine. I’m off.”
On their way down to the docks, his adjutant Christopher Long asked him a question.
“Dollars I understand, as part of a wager. But what is a donut?”
Mike explained. Then, added: “My wife claims we stole the idea from Jewish bagels and just made it unhealthy. She might be right.”
As he had many times in the past, Long got a long-suffering look on his face. “What is a bagel?”
Munich, capital of Bavaria
Ottavio Piccolomini had been worried himself that Duke Maximilian might order a sortie, once he realized that Stearns was starting to withdraw some of his forces from the siege. There would be no useful purpose to such a sortie, though. Even if the Bavarians managed to dislodge the remaining USE forces, they couldn’t possibly destroy that army. The approaching forces of the State of Thuringia-Franconia would intervene before they could do more than inflict some casualties—and they’d suffer plenty themselves while they were about it.
No, by this point, Piccolomini’s main concern was to keep his army as intact as possible. The war was lost, no matter what he did. From his point of view, the best outcome would be a negotiated settlement where Maximilian went into exile and was replaced by his brother Albrecht. There was really no longer any reason for the duke to reject that outcome, since his only heirs were Albrecht’s two sons unless he remarried and sired more offspring.
But, first, Maximilian didn’t have enough time left for that alternative. And, second, he lacked the desire anyway. The ruling duke of Bavaria was now sixty-three years old, heartsick at the loss of his wife Elisabeth of Lorraine, and still further disheartened by the treachery of his betrothed, Maria Anna of Austria. He spent most of his time in prayer, these days, paying little attention to the affairs of his duchy.
Piccolomini was fairly sure—he certainly hoped—that Maximilian would accept a political settlement if one was offered to him. The fact that Stearns was now withdrawing some of his forces would seem to indicate that Gustav Adolf was finally opting for that solution also, probably because of the unexpected Ottoman victory at Vienna.
Assuming that to be the case…
Piccolomini needed to plan for his own future. Any political settlement which the USE would accept with Bavaria would certainly result in a sharply reduced independence of the duchy, even if it wasn’t simply absorbed entirely. That meant a much-reduced Bavarian army as well, and the likelihood that the USE would allow Piccolomini to remain as its commander was essentially nil.
The best outcome for him would be to negotiate his withdrawal, along with that of most of his men, as part of the settlement. He could extract as many as ten thousand soldiers, possibly, which he could take with him wherever he went. A mercenary general with an army at his disposal could always get a much better deal with a new employer than a general on his own.
So. Where to go?
Italy, he thought. The Spanish recklessness in overthrowing Pope Urban VIII was producing tremendous unrest in the peninsula. Cardinal Borja, the new self-proclaimed pope, could use Piccolomini’s services. And since the Spanish crown had thrown its support to Borja, they’d presumably be willing to foot the bill. Whatever weaknesses and failings the Spanish kings might have, they always had the silver fleets from the New World to rely on.
All things considered, his situation was actually quite good. True, he’d lost the war. But he could claim a tactical victory at Zolling, which would make him the only general in Europe who’d ever defeated Stearns on a battlefield. Given how much of Europe’s royalty and aristocracy detested the American upstart, Piccolomini thought he was eminently employable.
Grantville, State of Thuringia-Franconia
Rebecca gave the two aircraft designers an exasperated look of her own. “Can the two of you stop squabbling for a moment? I cannot spend much more time on this. I need to get down to Freising so I can begin negotiations with Duke Maximilian.”
Hal Smith and Bob Kelly both had the grace to look embarrassed. After a moment, Hal cleared his throat and said: “Rebecca, trying to keep Bob and me from disagreeing is just hopeless. Maybe if he weren’t such a stub—”
“Hal!” exclaimed Rebecca, almost barking the name. “I said: stop squabbling.”
“He’s right, though,” said Bob Kelly. He placed his hands on his thighs and pushed himself back in his chair. Then, smiled a bit. “We can’t even agree on which of us is the stubborn one. I admit, that’s probably like trying to pick which mule is the most ornery.”
He shrugged, without moving his hands from his legs. “Look, let’s do it this way. Hal goes ahead with his pusher design and I’ll concentrate on building the two-engine Mosquito-style plane I think would be best for our purpose. The government can buy either one it wants, once the prototype is ready.”
Hal grunted. “Or both, like you guys wound up doing with the Dauntless.” There was a note of grievance in his voice. Rebecca knew that Hal was still annoyed that the USE government had decided to expand its little air force by buying two of Kelly Aviation’s new Dauntless planes instead of putting in another order for his tried-and-tested Gustavs.
But there was no point in stirring up that issue. She had enough to deal with, as it was
.
She looked from one of them to the other. “Just to be sure, in case the emperor asks me to explain. You are both convinced that it would be a mistake to try to develop a single-engine tractor plane whose gun would either fire through the propeller by using a—I forgot what you called it—?”
“Synchronization gear,” Hal and Bob said, simultaneously.
“Yes, that. Or to mount guns on the wings, where there would not be any risk that the bullets would strike the propeller.”
Again, simultaneously, both men shook their heads.
“Synchronization gears are tricky to get right,” Bob said, “and if you mess it up you’ve got a real problem on your hands. In the universe we came from, they didn’t get them working smoothly until the Second World War. But we don’t have anything like the kind of industrial base they had.”
“The problem isn’t just the synchronization,” added Hal. “Putting guns on the wings won’t work either. The machine guns we can build right now are pretty damn crude and they malfunction a lot. The truth is, we need a two-man crew to operate a real fighter. One to fly the plane and one to fire the gun—and get it working again when it messes up. Trying to pile a synchronization gear on top of that is like putting lipstick on a pig.”
Rebecca chuckled. She’d heard that American expression before but still found the image amusing.
“I see,” she said. Again, she looked back and forth between them. “So the way you will each handle it is that Hal Smith’s aircraft will have the gunner positioned forward of the pilot—”
“Forward and below,” qualified Bob. “That way the pilot’s forward line of sight isn’t obstructed.”
“Christ, that thing’s going to be a tub,” muttered Kelley. “Slower’n molasses.”
“It won’t be slower than an airship!” snapped Smith in reply. “Which, you might recall, is the specific mission involved. And at least I’ll get it built in time to do some good—which is more than you’ll be able to say after your fancy damn sorta-Mosquito runs into the design problems it’s bound to have because you’re too ambitious like you always are. I’m telling you, Bob—”