by Eric Flint
He turned to Gerrit Janssen, who insisted he was only the pilot of the Magdeburg even though for all practical purposes, outside of combat, he was the captain. If this were a seagoing naval vessel, he’d have been called the ship master.
“Can we avoid that first line?” Tom asked. “Keep in mind that if we fly over them we’ll have to drop down quickly to meet the next line. Firing on those airships from above will be useless, since we’d only be poking holes in the envelope and we don’t have any incendiary rounds.”
Tom was skeptical that even incendiary rounds would do much good, fired one at a time from Dell Beckworth’s elephant gun. In theory, setting fire to an airship using hydrogen for lift should be easy, but he was sure that in the real world it would be a lot less straightforward. The ball not only had to penetrate the envelope—easier said than done, even with a .50 caliber round—it also had to let in enough oxygen to create the right mixture to ignite the hydrogen. Yes, during World War I the British had shot down a number of German zeppelins firing incendiary rounds from airplanes—but they’d been firing machine guns, not single shot rifles.
Janssen considered the problem for a few seconds. Then, shook his head. “Flying over the first line’s not a good idea, Captain Simpson.” He placed enough stress on the term captain to make it clear that they would be following proper naval protocol on board this ship, thank you very much. Janssen was just running the craft, he was not commanding it. Tom was—which made him the captain, all other rank considerations be damned.
“We’re faster than any of their airships,” Janssen continued. “I’m sure of that. I don’t know what sort of heathen Mohammedan steam engines they’re using over there”—here, his lip curled, bringing his florid mustachio to full attention—“but from what we’ve seen so far they’re pathetically weak. So—”
He pointed through the window to the enemy airships in the distance. All three of them were standing in the bow of the gondola, which gave them an excellent view forward. “We’re positioned three miles south of Linz, and about a mile southwest of the river, the way the Danube courses here.”
Now he started gesturing with both hands, using them to simulate relative movement and positions. “In order to spread smoke over Steyregg and the positions taken by the Third Division, the Ottoman tubs will have to fly past out position. As they near the confluence, we will fly across the Traun—coming down to their altitude as we do so—and then cross over behind them. If I’m gauging this correctly, we will pass behind that first line of airships and in front of the second line.”
Tom visualized the maneuver. “Crossing the T on them, in other words.”
Janssen frowned. The expression was one of puzzlement, not disapproval. It occurred to Tom that the expression he’d just used probably wasn’t in tactical usage yet. The guns on warships in this era were so inaccurate that the standard naval tactic, which the Dutch used to great effect, was simply to swarm the enemy and engage in what amounted to a seagoing melee.
He started gesturing with his own hands. “What I mean is that the Magdeburg will be passing in front of the second line of Ottoman airships. Shooting from within the hull, where we’ve set up the tripods, Julie will have a good angle at each of their ships as we near them.”
He turned to Julie. “Am I right?”
Her brow was creased with a frown also, but hers was just one of concentration. “Yeaaaahhh…” she said slowly. “I think you’re right. We’ll find out when we try it.”
Then, she shrugged. “I’m not too worried about shooting with my regular rifle—which is what I’ll start with. Almost any sort of angle will work for me, as long as the enemy’s in sight and in range. The problem’s going to be with the Beckworth .50.” Her own lip curled. “Dell can call that thing a ‘Light.50’ till the cows come home, it’s still bullshit. That thing’s a monster. It weighs a ton and it’s clumsy to handle. Can’t possibly shoot it without a tripod—and the tripod’s got to be fixed in the right place.”
She glanced at the Dutch pilot. “Meaning no offense, Mr. Janssen, but the next time you design an airship to shoot an elephant gun from, you need to set a continuous rail all along the windows so the tripod can be slid into position after the windows are taken out.”
“I’m just the pilot, Madame Mackay. I am not the engineer.”
“Whatever.” She turned away and headed for the broad-stepped ladder that led into the hull. “You get the ship into position, Mister I’m-Just-the-Pilot. I’ll take it from there.”
Linz, capital-in-exile of Austria-Hungary
Melissa Mailey planted her hands on her hips and all-but-glared at the Austrian emperor and empress. “You’re the ones who insisted I come down here. Your Majesties,” she added, remembering the protocol.
“Actually, that was General Stearns’ proposal.” Emperor Ferdinand smiled widely. “Not that Mariana and I weren’t entirely in favor of the notion. We were sure you’d be an asset.”
As bald-faced diplomatic lies went, that one was pretty impressive. Melissa was quite sure that the royals who ruled Austria had looked on the idea of having one of Europe’s most notorious revolutionaries as one of their guests with something not far from horror.
Nonetheless, they’d gone along with Mike Stearns’ idiotic suggestion—and so, here she was.
“All right, fine. But you agreed to bring me in. I gather the theory is that I’ll help bolster the morale of the lowlifes.”
“The… which?” asked Empress Mariana, frowning slightly. They’d been speaking German—the dialect prevalent in Austria, that is—but Melissa had a tendency to blur the lines between all dialects of German and the German daughter language she was most comfortable with, which was Amideutsch. So, without thinking, she’d tossed lowlifes into the last sentence. Apparently the term was unfamiliar to Austrian royal family.
Too lowlife, as it were.
She waved her hand. “Never mind. What I mean is that since I’m here, let’s make the most of it. The best propaganda pitch I can think of, Your Majesties”—here she focused her attention on Mariana—“is for me and the empress to work in the hospital you’ve set up to handle the wounded when they start coming in.”
She squinted at Emperor Ferdinand. “You did set up a hospital, I trust?”
He was now frowning too, and a lot more deeply than his wife had known. “Yes, certainly—there’s a big battle coming. But—but—”
He and Mariana stared at each other.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing!” he protested. “An empress? For that matter, even a queen or a provincial princess. Attending wounded soldiers in a hospital?”
He resembled a fish out of water, gasping for breath. Ferdinand III was still a young man—two years shy of thirty—but in that moment he looked like every set-in-his-ways octogenarian in history, hearing a preposterous new idea advanced.
“I know no one expects it, Your Majesty,” said Melissa. “That’s the whole point. We’ll have Mariana and me”—here she pointed to herself with a thumb—“that is to say, the empress of Austria-Hungary and Famous Wild-Eyed Radical Number 5—hell, I might even be ranked number 4, these days—working together to tend to our valiant soldiers fighting off the Wicked Ottoman Sultan, and we’ll leave for some other time my opinion that the distinction between Wicked Sultans and Virtuous Emperors usually depends on who’s beholding whom and from what angle.”
“But—but—it could be dangerous,” protested the emperor. “Hospitals… they have diseases.”
“Well, yes. If there weren’t any danger the flamboyant propaganda coup wouldn’t be a coup at all, would it?” She wasn’t sure if the French term coup had entered the general European royal lexicon, but if it hadn’t it was about time it did, so to hell with it. “But I don’t think it’d really be all that dangerous. For one thing, my squeeze—ah, companion—is going to be running the medical show and he’ll insist that proper sanitation and antiseptic measures be taken at all times. And for another—”
She saw no reason to parse which one of them would wind up being Patient One and which would be Patient Two, should the occasion arise. Let royalty have their delusions.
“So,” she said brightly. “What do you say?”
Chapter 55
Piast castle
Brzeg, thirty miles southeast of Breslau
“You both understand what I’m about to do?” Eddie said. He was almost shouting, since he wanted to make sure Jozef could hear him in the back seat over the noise of the airplane’s engine.
“Got it,” said Christin, speaking in a normal tone of voice because she was seated next to him. From the back, Jozef called out: “Yes, I understand!”
But Eddie wasn’t satisfied with a mere acknowledgement. The critical person involved in the maneuver was Christin, since Jozef could presumably be counted on to yank the release levers when she gave the order.
“Repeat it back to me, Christin,” he ordered.
Christin George had a personality that was similar to that of her daughter, and if Denise had been sitting there her most likely response to that command would have been something along the lines of: “What, you think I’m too dumb to get it the first time?” But Christin had the advantage of an additional nineteen or twenty years of age, and the maturity that went with it.
The uncertainty of that spread—nineteen or twenty—depended on whose reckoning you use. The Ring of Fire had happened in the month of April in the year 2000, and the town of Grantville had arrived in its new universe in May of the year 1631. So, when they wanted to calculate their age, most up-timers simply transferred the same months into their new calendar. Simplifying, every May—usually May 1—they added however many years had gone by since the Ring of Fire to the age they’d been when it happened.
Christin George had been born in 1968, up-time reckoning, and it was now September of 1636, by the down-time calendar. So, she considered herself thirty-seven years old.
Not every up-timer used this simple and sturdy method, however. In particular, American teenagers approaching what they still considered the magic number eighteen (even though that age had little importance to down-timers) had a tendency to fiddle with the math involved.
As did Denise. She’d been born on December 11, 1987. So, by the standard method of calculating age, she wouldn’t be eighteen until December 11, 1636.
Screw that! The way she looked at it, years were years—no matter what month it happened to be. She’d been born in the year 1987, which meant she’d been thirteen when the Ring of Fire happened—not twelve and a half, like her mother claimed. So, since yet another May had passed in their new world, voila! She was eighteen years old. Nineteen, come December 11.
“We’re only going to do one pass at the castle,” Christin said amiably, “because you don’t want to give Holk and his men time to assemble so they can fire a volley at us. That could get hairy since you’re planning to fly very low all the way until we drop the bombs, so we have the best chance of hitting the bastards.”
“You got it,” said Eddie, nodding. “And I’m starting the descent.”
The Piast castle was located on the edge of a low cliff—more like a bluff, really—overlooking the Oder on the west bank of the river. Because of the positioning of the Tower of Lions with respect to the castle proper and the courtyard that adjoined them, they’d agreed that the best approach to drop the bombs to good effect would be to come up the river from the southeast. So, Eddie had circled far around the town of Brzeg and was now flying above the river.
Just above it—there probably wasn’t more than twenty feet between the plane’s fuselage and the water. From Christin’s vantage point in the cockpit, it looked as if they were flying even lower than that. It was both scary and exhilarating.
Luckily or unluckily for him, depending on your disposition, Jozef couldn’t really see the river. The single-person back seat of a Dauntless wasn’t simply cramped and narrow, it didn’t provide a good view of the countryside below because the windows on either side were small and placed rather high.
Now that he’d become a little accustomed to flying, Jozef envied Christin her much better vantage point in the front seat. He thought he would have enjoyed the sight she was able to look at.
But this was, after all, a combat mission, not a sightseeing tour. So, Jozef put all envy aside and concentrated on the task at hand. Which, in his case, was about as simple as it got: yank up on two levers, in whatever order and at whatever instant Christin gave the command.
“I’m ready!” he called out.
The top speed of a Dauntless wasn’t much more than one hundred miles an hour, and they were flying slower than that. That was partly because of the weight of the bomb load. If you assigned Denise Beasley to make bombs for you, it was pretty much a given that the girl would build them right to the upper limit of size and weight. No wallflower, she, when it came to making things go boom!
Leaving that aside, Eddie was flying as slowly as he could anyway, without risking a stall. They weren’t facing soldiers accustomed to the speed of airplanes, they were coming against men whose traditional gauge of speed had been riding a horse. Whether they flew at eighty miles per hour, or seventy or even sixty—the plane’s stall speed was just below that—they’d be moving faster than the trained reflexes of seventeenth century shooters.
Eddie figured he was doing about seventy miles per hour, in the last mile of his approach. The speed gauge he had was a bit crude, so he didn’t want to drop below that lest he risk stalling.
To Christin, as low as they were, it seemed as if they were flying at least twice that fast. She had to force herself to stop looking down at the river racing past them and look up toward the castle they were approaching.
She could see the tower now. It rose perhaps forty feet above the courtyard and was one story taller than the main building of the castle.
“Get ready, Jozef!” she called out. “It won’t be long now. It’ll be the left lever first, like we planned—and I’ll give you a one-two-three countdown.”
As best I can, but she left that unspoken. She didn’t want to shake Jozef’s confidence in her—or her own, for that matter. Christin had very steady nerves, as you’d expect from a woman who’d spent many hours riding motorcycles since she was a teenager. But this was new to her.
“Get ready,” Eddie said, almost muttering. “I’m about to—okay, now.”
He brought the plane up out of the river bed and over the cliff, flying just above the trees lining the Oder. The castle was right ahead of them. They’d reach it in seconds.
Christin could see men milling around in the courtyard—a dozen of them maybe—with more coming out of the castle. Some of them had guns in their hands, some didn’t—and from what she could see, the guns themselves were a mismatch. At least half of them looked like big pistols. Those would be wheel-locks, favored by cavalrymen.
Two of the men in the courtyard fired at them with pistols. Given the distance, the speed of their approach and the inherent inaccuracy of smoothbore pistols, they might as well have been throwing stones.
“Almost…” Eddie said.
Christin started the countdown. “Three! Two!”
Eddie veered the plane just a bit, now aiming it toward the Tower of Lions rather than the main castle.
“One! Left—now!”
The plane lurched up as the bomb was released. Christin hadn’t foreseen that and it threw off her timing just a bit. But she recovered quickly.
“Right—now!”
The plane lurched again, and then they were passing right over the tower. Christin was afraid they might even scrape against it, but they actually had fifteen feet to spare. Eddie had a lot of con
fidence by now in his ability to handle a plane. From his point of view, this had been nowhere nearly as scary as the experience of flying the Dauntless out of Dresden during the siege.
* * *
They happened in every war. One term for them was golden BB, which first came into common use by American combat pilots during the Vietnam War. But the concept and the haphazard reality behind it went back as far as warfare itself.
The fluke shot, the unpredictable twist, the weird killing.
The two most famous such incidents in American history dated back a century before the Vietnam conflict, both of them taking place during the civil war.
The more ironic of the two happened on May 9, 1864, at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House. The Union general John Sedgwick was killed by a Confederate sharpshooter right after saying: “They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance.”
But the more important incident had happened a year earlier. On the evening of May 2, 1863, returning from a scouting expedition of the Union lines after the first day of the Battle of Chancellorsville, General Stonewall Jackson was mistaken for the enemy by Confederate pickets and shot three times in the confusion that followed. He died of his wounds eight days later. After being told of Jackson’s death, General Robert E. Lee commented, “I have lost my right arm.”
A golden BB had been responsible for the death of Larry Wild during the Battle of Wismar, when he was struck by a cannonball. Given the speed at which his Outlaw motorboat had been racing and the impromptu haste with which the Danes had fired the cannon, it was just blind bad luck that the ball even came near him.
Not long afterward, in the same battle, Captain Hans Richter died in what became the single most famous incident in the entire war against the League of Ostend. Enraged by the destruction of the Outlaw—he assumed, wrongly, that both his friends aboard the craft had been killed—Richter flew his plane directly at another Danish warship in order to be sure of hitting it with his rockets.