by Eric Flint
Ed managed a chuckle, then, remembering one woodcut illustration of himself in a pamphlet put out by one of the reactionary outfits. The Knights of Barbarossa, if he remembered right. The thing had been quite charming, in its own way. The horns and the cloven hoofs and the forked tail were standard fare. Generic, really. But he'd thought the addition of a grotesquely "Jewish" hooked nose was a nice touch, given his rather puglike features. Not to mention showing him sacrificing a presumably gentile baby in some sort of religious rite, and never mind that he and his wife were lifelong Catholics and attended mass regularly.
He swiveled the chair back, to face Preston Richards and Carol Unruh, the two other people in the room. "What if Noelle's right, Press? And have we gotten any word from her since she left?"
"Nothing," said Carol Unruh, answering his second question. "Not a peep. We don't know where she is, really, except 'somewhere south of Rudolstadt.' "
The police chief grunted. "She hasn't passed through Saalfeld-or, if she did, she didn't stop for anything. We're in radio contact with the authorities there." His expression grew sour. "Not that it's likely to do any good. The garrisons in all the towns in the area are small and entirely mercenary, since-"
Ed waved that aside. "Yeah, Press, I know. Since the emperor is keeping most of the regular army units in the north because he wants them in position to attack Saxony and Brandenburg in a few months-and he's sending the ones he can spare down to reinforce the troops facing Bavaria and Bernhard. So we make do with what we can get. No point pissing and moaning about it all over again. I take it they haven't gotten off their butts and started scouring the countryside?"
" 'Scouring,' " Carol jeered. "Their idea of 'scouring the countryside' is trotting a few miles out of town to the nearest watering hole, getting plastered, and reporting that they saw no signs of suspicious activity or suspicious persons passing through. Two or three days worth of getting soused later." Her expression grew more solemn. "I'm mostly worried about Noelle, Ed. She could get hurt, or even killed. I mean, you know what she's like."
Indeed, he did, having read the detailed report of her activities the previous summer and fall in Franconia, during the Ram Rebellion. Ed's wife Annabelle had once described Noelle Murphy-now Noelle Stull-as Grantville's distaff version of Clark Kent, absent the glasses. Primly-mannered maybe-I'll-become-a-nun young woman, zips into the phone booth, out comes Super-Ingenue. She'd even blown a torturer's head half off, when he attacked her partner Eddie Junker. Since Noelle couldn't shoot straight, she'd done so by the simple method of shoving the barrel of the gun under his chin and pulling the trigger.
Timid, she was not, appearances to the contrary.
"We'll just have to hope for the best," he said. "Captain Knefler took practically the whole garrison with him up to Halle. That just leaves the police force, which is under-strength to begin with, the way Grantville keeps growing."
Richards gave Carol an apologetic glance. "I did send a couple of officers over to Rudolstadt, and they were able to get the garrison commander there to detach three of his soldiers to accompany them. No more than three men, though, and no farther south than Hof, without the count's okay. I radioed Magdeburg to see if I could reach him, but it seems Ludwig Guenther and his wife are out of the city visiting relatives at the moment."
That was too bad. The count of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt was a capable and conscientious man, and maintained good relations with Grantville. If he or his wife Emelie had been in residence at their castle in Rudolstadt, they'd have sent out the whole garrison to search for Noelle and Eddie-and the defectors, too, if Noelle was right and they were in the vicinity. It wasn't a big garrison, but it was a good one. Mercenaries, true, but a well-trained and disciplined company that had been in the service of the count for a long time, not a contractor's slapdash outfit.
The problem was that the State of Thuringia-Franconia-at least, the area around Grantville-simply didn't have much any longer in the way of military forces. In the months after the Croat raid on Grantville and its high school, more than two years earlier, the town had fairly bristled for a while with cavalry patrols, freshly built fortifications, sentinel outpost, the works. But two years was a long time in the war conditions of Europe. Soon enough, it became obvious that there was no immediate military threat to Grantville any longer. The key development had been Wallenstein switching sides in 1633. The same man who'd launched the Croat raid was now allied with the USE-and, given the number of Americans living in Prague today, some of them very closely connected to the new king, there was simply no way Wallenstein could organize and launch a secret attack even if he wanted to.
So that ended the threat from Bohemia, which was the most pressing one. Who else could launch a raid on Grantville? The Austrians would have to fight their way through Bohemia first-and Wallenstein had beaten their army at the second battle of the White Mountain. The Bavarians were in no position to do anything more than try to hold their ground. That had been obvious even before Gustav Adolf's general Baner seized their fortress of Ingolstadt, which left the Bavarians without a bridgehead north of the Danube.
The Saxons were the only real possibility, and that was negligible. John George, the elector, had a full scale invasion coming and he knew it perfectly well. He was concentrating entirely on readying Saxony's defenses, not wasting energy on raids that would simply chew up his army. Holk's mercenary forces were really the only ones he had available for something like that, anyway. Holk would have to fight his way through sizeable forces-USE regulars, too-stationed in Halle, in order to reach Grantville or any of the towns in the Thuringian basin. Nobody thought he could manage that, and if he even tried he'd leave Saxony's frontier with Bohemia open to an attack by Wallenstein. There was no way the elector of Saxony would countenance such a thing. He'd hired Holk and his army in the first place, despite their unsavory reputation, in order to help protect his southern flank.
Who else? A few hysterics shrieked about the "French menace," pointing with alarm to Turenne's daring raid on the Wietze oil fields during the Baltic war, but that was downright laughable. Given the political tensions in France after the war, there was no way Richelieu was going to send his best general haring off on a long-distance raid. Even if he did, so what? Only somebody who was geographically-challenged and completely ignorant of logistics could possibly think that a raid from France to Grantville was anything like a raid into Brunswick. That Turenne was an exceptionally gifted military commander had been proven in this universe, as well as being attested to by the historical records of another. That did not make him a magician, who could fight his way through the entire USE. It was three hundred miles from the French frontier to Grantville, even as the crow flies. At least half again that far, the way an army would have to travel.
No, aside from the mundane and everyday risks of living in a boom town, Grantville was about as safe as any place in Europe, these days. So, beginning in the fall of 1633, the military forces that had once protected it carefully had been almost completely drained away. They were needed elsewhere. The regular cavalry patrols were a thing of the past, the sentinel posts had been abandoned completely, and the outlying fortresses had no more than a handful of men detached from the small garrisons maintained in the towns of the basin-who were really there to keep order and double as a police force, more than serve as an actual military defense.
"We haven't got a pot to piss in, is what it amounts to," he said.
"Not for something like this, Mr. President," agreed the police chief.
Carol looked fierce. "If those bastards so much as hurt Noelle and Eddie, I don't care what Mike says. I'm for firing up the war against Austria. Or whoever it is."
There'd be a lot of that sentiment, Ed knew, if Noelle and Eddie came to harm. Granted, assuming Austria was behind the affair, most people would hold a grudge about the mass defection in any event. But most of the grudge would be aimed at the defectors themselves, not the Austrians. It wouldn't be the sort of thing that wou
ld set off any real war fever. Noelle and Eddie getting killed or badly injured would be a different kettle of fish altogether.
Ed contemplated the problem, for a few seconds. As a practical proposition, of course, launching any sort of immediate campaign against Austria was a non-starter. But "immediate" meant next year. The year after that…
He shook his head slightly. That was pointless speculation, right now. They still didn't even know what was really happening.
"I guess that's it then, for the moment." He straightened up in his chair. "Unless Denise Beasley-there's a real pip, for you-shows up with some more information."
Press Richards grinned. "Don't think that's too likely. I got no idea what she's up to now. The last I saw of her she was racing off on her bike, giving me and Knefler the finger. Most of her spleen wasn't really aimed at me, since Denise knows I haven't got the resources to do what she wanted. But she probably has me lumped in with 'the fathead' for the time being."
Carol's mouth made a little O. "Did she really call Captain Knefler a 'fathead'? I mean, to his face?"
"Oh, yeah." Solemnly, Press shook his head. "Wasn't all she called him, I'm deeply sorry to report. Girl's got a real potty mouth, when she cuts it loose. She also called him a fuckwad and an asshole and a motherfucking moron."
"She's not even sixteen!"
"She's Buster's kid," Ed grunted. "That's got to add a decade or so, at least in the lack-of-respect-for-your-betters department. Thank God I'm no longer the high school principal. She's not my headache, these days."
Richards and Unruh both looked at him.
"Well, she isn't," Ed insisted. Hoping it was true.
Chapter 7. The Wild Blue Yonder
Kelly Aviation Facility
Near Grantville, State of Thuringia-Franconia
Denise stared at the object that was the center of the proposal Lannie had just advanced.
"No fucking way," she pronounced.
Yost shook his head lugubriously. "You really oughta watch your-"
"Don't fucking start on me, Lannie. Just don't." She pointed an accusing finger at the aircraft. "There is no fucking-or flibbertyjerking, if that makes you happier-way in hell I'm getting into that thing."
Lannie frowned. "What does 'flibbertyjerking' mean? And what's the matter, anyway? It flies. It flies just fine. I've taken it up plenty of times." After a two-second pause he added, "Well, maybe three times."
Denise scowled at him. "You said yourself. It's a prototype, remember?"
"Well, sure, but…"
He let that trail off into nothing. The truth was, except for being a boozer, Lannie wasn't a bad guy. And he did have the virtue of being a very loyal sort of person, even if Denise thought he had to be half-nuts to give his loyalty to Bob and Kay Kelly.
Kay was a harridan, and Bob was… Well. Impractical. Not hard to get along with, but the kind of guy who simply couldn't control his enthusiasms and seemed to have the attention span of a six-year-old.
She looked around the big hangar. There were no fewer than four planes in evidence, all of them in various stages of construction-or deconstruction, in the case of two-and every one of them bore the label "prototype." It seemed like every time Bob Kelly got close to finishing a plane he decided there was something not quite right about it and he needed to redesign it. Again. The slogan of his company might as well be The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good Enough-and We Can Prove it to You.
The only reason he hadn't gone bankrupt three times over, since the Ring of Fire, was because of his wife. For reasons Denise couldn't begin to fathom, Kay Kelly seemed to have a veritable genius for drumming up investors and squeezing money out of the government.
"I'm not getting into it," she repeated.
Alas, some trace of uncertainty must have been in her voice. The third party present detected it and pounced immediately. That was Keenan Murphy, the mechanic who was the only other person in the facility that day. The Kellys had gone up to Magdeburg to lobby the government for more funds, and apparently the office manager had decided to take the day off.
"C'mon, Denise," said Keenan. "We gotta help Noelle. I mean, she's my sister."
Denise almost snapped back, "half-sister," but she restrained herself. First, because Keenan was giving her such a sad-eyed, woebegone look; second, because he was a sad-sack, woebegone kind of guy; but, mostly, because whether or not Keenan Murphy was a loser he was another one who had an exaggerated, irrational sense of loyalty.
As did Denise herself, and she knew it. In her own personal scale of things, the way she judged people, that counted for a lot.
She stared at the plane again, trying to imagine herself in it up there-what? maybe a mile high?-with a souse for a pilot and a low-achiever for a…
"Hey, wait a minute." She glared at the two of them. "I thought you said Keenan didn't know how to fly."
"He don't," said Lannie. "He's the bombardier. He'll ride in the back." He pointed toward the rear of the cockpit. Now that she looked more closely, Denise could see that there was a third seat there, behind the two side-by-side seats in front.
Her eyes widened. "You have got to be kidding. You want me to be the copilot? I don't know fuck-all about flying!"
Keenan Murphy shook his head. "Naw, not that. We need you to be the navigator. I can't see well enough, back there, and Lannie… well…"
Yost gave him a pained look. Keenan shrugged. "Sorry, Lannie, but it's just a fact. You get lost easy."
"Oh, swell," said Denise. She ran fingers through her dark hair, starting to wind it up into a bun. No, hell with that. She'd just put it in a pony tail, like she did riding the bike.
"Gimme a rubber band," she commanded. With a sneer: "I'm sure you got plenty around here, for engine parts."
"Hey, there's no call for-"
"Leave it, Lannie," said Keenan, chuckling. "I'll find you one, Denise. It might not be real clean, though."
She looked around the hangar again. Bob Kelly followed the Big Bang theory of design and manufacture. Out of chaos, creation-and, clearly enough, they were still a lot closer to chaos. The area was completely unlike her dad's weld shop, which was as neat and well kept as he wasn't.
"Never mind," she said, heading for the hangar door. "My bike's right outside. I got some in the saddlebags."
The Saale river, south of Halle
"I ought to have you arrested!" shouted Captain Knefler.
"For what?" demanded the burly boatman. Clearly, he was not a man easily intimidated by a mere show of official outrage. Not here, at least, while he was still within Thuringia-Franconia. In some provinces of the USE, not to mention the districts under direct imperial administration, he might have been more circumspect. But the laws concerning personal liberties were strict in the SoTF-and, perhaps more importantly, were strictly enforced by the authorities.
The real authorities, which did not include any cavalry captain who thought he could throw his weight around.
"You are part of a treasonous plot!" screeched Knefler.
Watching the scene, standing behind the captain where Knefler couldn't see him, Sergeant Reimers flashed a grin at the two soldiers with him. None of them had any use for their commanding officer. This was entertaining.
"Oh, what a pile of horseshit," jeered the boatman. He waved a thick hand at the three rafts now drawn up to the river bank. "Your evidence, please?"
No evidence there, since the rafts were quite empty, except for some parcels of food and a few personal belongings. Unless something had been dumped overboard, the crude vessels obviously hadn't carried anything down from Jena except the boatmen themselves and their travel necessities.
Reimers' amusement faded a bit. To be sure, there was no chance the boatmen had jettisoned anything, since they couldn't have spotted the cavalry troop coming up from Grantville until it was almost upon them. Whereupon, Knefler had ordered them-with the threat of his soldiers' leveled carbines, no less-to bring the rafts immediately ashore.
St
ill, the captain was furious enough-he was certainly thick-witted enough-to order his men to start dredging the river for miles upstream. As useless as such a task might be, given their small numbers and lack of equipment.
The problem was that while Knefler was thick-witted, he was not a complete dimwit. He knew perfectly well that he now faced a major embarrassment. Probably not something that would get him cashiered, more was the pity. But certainly something that would not enhance his prospects for promotion.
The young American girl had told him the culprits had fled to the south, in language that was still a delight to recall. But Knefler had dismissed her arguments and insisted on following his own reasoning.
Knefler was now wasting time glaring at the empty rafts. "I need no material evidence," he insisted. "There is the evidence of your actions. Why, if it were not part of a treasonous plot, did you leave Jena before dawn?"
He tried a sneer himself. "Of course, I am no boatman. But I doubt such is standard practice."
"Because our employer paid us to do so," said the boatmen. "A bonus, he said, to make sure we got to Halle in time to pick up-"
"Nonsense! Nonsense! You did it so there would be no witnesses! Nobody who could tell me that the rafts were empty!"
The boatman planted his hands on his hips and squinted up at the tall, almost-skeletal officer. "In other words, you were outsmarted. Not by me and my boys-we are innocent parties only accidentally involved-but by the man you're chasing. Not so?"