by Eric Flint
Unfortunately, after weeks of welcome slothfulness and incompetence on their part, one of Gustav Adolf’s doctors was taking a genuine interest in the case. Instead of a perfunctory few minutes breezing in and out of the king’s room every other day or so, this bastard was starting to spend time there.
A full hour, yesterday. Luckily, there had been no signs from the king that he was starting to recover from his condition. He’d been asleep most of the time and when he did wake up, immediately started shouting at the doctor in fury.
Incoherent fury, too. The annoying man had fled in five minutes.
But if he kept coming around, there was bound to be bad luck sooner or later. And once any of the doctors assigned to the king began to think the king might be recovering, he’d be sure to tell Oxenstierna.
Or if one of them didn’t, the king’s chaplain would. That was the Pomeranian Jacobus Fabricius. He’d been wounded in the battle at Lake Bledno but not badly enough that he hadn’t been able to start attending the king after a few weeks. But he’d resumed those duties too early and in his weakened state he’d fallen badly ill. A stroke of luck, that was, since the chaplain hadn’t been present during the recent period to see Gustav Adolf’s growing flashes of coherence.
Hand didn’t think any of the doctors, and certainly not the chaplain, wished any ill upon his cousin. But regardless of their motives, any of them who noticed was sure to inform Oxenstierna. Nor would it matter if the chancellor had already taken the army to Magdeburg by then. He’d be taking a radio with him. Several, in fact. Just as he’d be leaving several behind in Berlin. He’d get the news within hours.
And then…
There was no telling what would happen. But Erik now feared the worst. Three months ago—two months ago—perhaps even one month ago, he’d have sworn that Oxenstierna would do no personal harm to Gustav Adolf. Not to his own king, and a man who’d been a good friend for many years.
But Axel Oxenstierna had been changing, and the change had sped up rapidly over the past few weeks. The course of action he’d set for himself had careened out of his control, something which was now obvious to everyone except those reactionary imbeciles who guzzled the palace’s wine, gobbled food from its kitchens, and sang praises and hosannas to Oxenstierna every drunken evening.
It was certainly obvious to Oxenstierna. Most of his followers might be dull-witted but not the chancellor himself.
Nothing had gone the way he’d planned. His enemies had not reacted as he’d foreseen. There’d been none—very little, anyway—of the chaos he’d expected and had partly been depending upon. Wilhelm Wettin had dug in his heels once he stumbled across outright treachery and had had to be arrested. The princess had not knuckled under to pressure. Indeed, she and her consort-to-be had defied Oxenstierna in the most flamboyant fashion imaginable. Dresden had defied him and held out against Banér. And now Stearns had come out in open rebellion and marched his troops back into Saxony. By all reports, there would be a battle soon between his Third Division and Banér’s mercenaries. Only a new storm was delaying it.
As each setback and misadventure came, the chancellor’s mood darkened. No, not just his mood, his very soul. Always a hard man, Oxenstierna was now becoming a savage man, something he’d never been in the past.
So what would he do, if the final blow fell and he learned his king was returning?
Submit—knowing full well that Gustav II Adolf would not approve of his actions?
Maybe. And then…maybe not. The chancellor had men who were loyal to him, first and foremost. By now, he probably had entire regiments who were mainly loyal to him. He’d certainly have enough such men to overwhelm Hand and Erling Ljungberg and the king’s Scot bodyguards.
A few blows to the head—no need, even, for outright murder—and it would be done. Those who knew the truth silenced, some absurd concoction presented to the world in public—another treason plot, the details left vague—and the king condemned to everlasting madness, his brains turned to pulp.
So. Cyanide or arsenic? Those were the only viable alternatives.
Magdeburg, capital of the United States of Europe
Restlessly, Rebecca moved through the empty rooms of the town house, looking out of the windows to watch the snow fall. She had already made two complete circuits of all the rooms on the top floor except those of her children, whom she didn’t want to awaken.
She didn’t go down to the lower floors. Now that the crisis was reaching its peak, there were people there at all times. Her house had become the operating command center for the Fourth of July Party. Couriers raced back and forth from here to the Freedom Arches, where the city’s CoC had its center, every hour of the day and night. They were needed because the telephone lines were often overwhelmed.
The people in Magdeburg had good intelligence coming from Berlin. As always, servants were the weak link in the aristocracy’s armor, when it came to espionage. You’d think they’d learn not to talk in front of their servants, but some habits were just too deeply ingrained. That was especially true of the sort of cast-iron diehards who’d gathered in Berlin.
So they knew Oxenstierna was coming, and bringing his whole army with him. And while their intelligence didn’t extend so far as to know his precise intentions—Oxenstierna himself was far too shrewd to speak in front of servants—no one had any trouble guessing what they were.
Tonight, though, Rebecca wasn’t concerned about her own possible fate a few weeks or months from now. Not even that of her children. Tonight the snow was falling, and she knew what that meant.
Thought she did, at least. She’d gotten no messages from Michael. He wouldn’t have divulged his tactical plans to her anyway. But she knew her husband very well.
Mike Stearns was a charming man. Even his enemies would allow as much. Gracious, pleasant, courteous, rarely given to expressing a temper.
All of it was even true. But what the qualities disguised from those who didn’t know him as well as she did, was that he was also utterly pugnacious. Not belligerent, as such. He did not go looking for fights. But when a fight did come he would throw himself into it with a pure fury. Rebecca had never seen him fight with his fists, but she knew from Melissa Mailey what his record had been. All but one of his professional fights he’d won by knockout before the end of the fourth round.
So how would such a man fight as a general?
Snow was falling. Not only here but all across the Germanies. She’d checked the weather reports.
It would be falling in Saxony too. White, cold—and gentle, as snowfalls were. But tomorrow it would be bathed in blood. She could only hope Michael’s blood would not be part of that gruesome, incongruous mix.
Or not too much of it, at least. She was a Jewess. Her people had learned long ago that you had to be practical about these things.
Chapter 46
The Saxon plain, near Dresden
Johan Banér was awakened by the sound of gunfire. He came awake instantly.
“Fucking bastards! I warned them!”
He began pulling on his pants, calling for his orderly and his adjutant. The orderly arrived first, piling into the little room on the upper floor of the house. He’d have been sleeping just outside, in the hallway. The hallway was small and narrow, too, as you’d expect from a village home that wasn’t quite a hovel but came close.
Without speaking, the orderly helped the general put on the rest of his clothes. The adjutant arrived seconds later.
“I warned them, Sinclair! I warned the fucks! Which one of them started it?”
The Scot officer’s face was pale. “Sir, I’m not—”
“If you don’t know, find out! I intend have whoever started this brawl shot dead! No, I’ll—”
“Sir, I really don’t—”
“—have them hanged! Hanged, you hear me? If need be, a whole fucking company!”
“Sir, I think it’s the enemy!” Sinclair shouted desperately.
Banér stared at him, as i
f he’d gone mad.
Sinclair pointed to the window. “Listen, sir! That’s too much gunfire to be coming from a brawl between companies.”
Still wide-eyed with disbelief, Banér stared at the window. An instant later, he rushed over, fumbled at the latch, and threw the window open.
The sky was lightening with the sunrise but he still couldn’t see very far because of the snowfall. The sound of gunfire was growing, though, and Sinclair was right. That wasn’t a brawl between drunken soldiers.
But—
“No sane man launches an attack in the middle of a snowstorm!”
He and Sinclair looked at each other. Sinclair shrugged. “He’s a rank amateur, sir. You know the old saying.”
Banér had always thought that saying was inane, actually. The opponent a great swordsman fears the most is the worst swordsman. Blithering nonsense. Still…
Stearns might be mad, but this could get dangerous. He had to get out there. His soldiers would be muzzy with sleep and confused. They’d no more been expecting this than he had, and the snowfall would make it difficult for his officers to get the men into proper formations. Everyone would be half-blind.
So would the enemy, though—and, just as Sinclair had said, they were rank amateurs.
Choose to fight real soldiers in a snowstorm, would they? He’d show them where children’s games left off and real war began.
You couldn’t see a thing beyond thirty yards or so and volley gun batteries didn’t blast away at nothing. Not batteries under Thorsten Engler’s command, anyway. And he wasn’t nervous, either. They’d trained with the sled arrangements, and had actually come to prefer them over wheels, in some ways. They were easier to bring to bear, for one thing. Their biggest drawback was the recoil, which could be a little unpredictable, but that wasn’t a factor in the first round. And it was usually the first round fired by volley guns that was the decisive one.
Finally, he could see shapes ahead. Those were the shapes of men, too, he was sure of it.
But they weren’t coming forward, they seemed to be just milling around. And now he spotted horses among them.
They’d caught a cavalry unit off guard then. Still trying to mount up.
Splendid. Ten more yards and they’d fire.
The sleds moved fast, too. It was just a matter of a few seconds before the entire battery started coming around.
By now they were only fifteen yards from their nearest enemy soldiers and they’d been spotted themselves. One of the Swedes who’d managed to get up onto his horse fired a wheel-lock pistol at them. In their direction, rather. Thorsten was pretty sure the shot had sailed at least ten feet over their heads. Confusion, surprise and a snowstorm do not combine to make for good marksmanship.
Happily, good marksmanship didn’t matter that much to a volley gun battery.
He glanced back and forth. All the guns he could see had been brought to bear. Good enough.
“Fire!” he screeched, in that high-pitched tone he’d learned to use on a battlefield. Not even the heavy snow coming down could blanket it.
Only two guns in one of the batteries hadn’t been brought in line yet, but their fire came not more than three seconds later. Twenty-five barrels to a volley gun, six guns to a battery, six batteries to a company. Subtracting a few misfires, almost nine hundred musket balls struck the enemy just a few yards away.
That was equivalent to the fire from an entire regiment—except an entire regiment couldn’t fire its muskets all at once. Not on that narrow a front.
Thorsten couldn’t see most of them, but the clustered units his volley gun battery had just fired upon were two of the four companies of the Östergötland Horsemen. That first murderous volley killed and wounded dozens of them, including the commanding officer Colonel Claus Dietrich Sperreuter. The rest were sent reeling backward—where they collided into the other two companies and cast them into further confusion.
“Reload!” Thorsten screeched.
As orders went, that one was superfluous to the point of being asinine. His men had already started reloading before he finished taking in his breath. What else would they be doing on a battlefield? Picking their teeth?
But it was tradition. Elite units took traditions seriously, as pointless as they might be.
The term “elite” was no empty boast, either. The company was ready to fire again in ten seconds—a better rate of fire than even musketmen could manage.
“Fire!” he screeched.
This time, all the guns went off together. There were misfires, here and there, but not many.
Again, almost nine hundred balls hammered the milling cavalrymen. Thorsten’s men still hadn’t taken more than a couple of dozen shots fired in return and so far as Thorsten could tell, all of them had gone wild.
Dozens more were killed and wounded. The one company that had started to form up was shredded again, its captain thrown out of the saddle by a ball that struck him in the head. He survived the shot—just a crease, he wasn’t even stunned—but after he landed on the ground his horse stepped on his head and crushed it into the hard soil beneath the snow. He survived that, too, although he was no longer really conscious. Then his horse and another trampled his ribs before they stumbled off, away from the guns.
He survived that as well. But three ribs were broken, he was now bleeding internally, and everyone who looked at his body assumed he was dead. Engler’s soldiers did too, when they passed by.
So, a while later, he died from hypothermia. He’d never managed to get his boots on. He died in his socks—and both of them had holes. His had not been a wealthy family and the Swedes had been late with the pay.
Again.
Thorsten gauged the enemy, as much of them as he could see. Then, decided to take the risk. Instead of ordering another volley, he ordered the guns moved forward.
“Ten yards up!” he screeched.
Jeff Higgins heard the screech, although he couldn’t make out the exact words. In the half-blindness of the snowfall, his volley gun company had gotten separated from the regiment and charged ahead. He’d been groping his way forward with the infantry battalions, trying to find them before it was too late. The volley guns were murderous but they were a lot more fragile than the gunners themselves liked to admit. If they got caught between volleys by cavalry—even well-led infantry that could move quickly—they were dead meat.
Engler was particularly oblivious to that reality, damn him. How could a man who planned to become a psychologist behave like a blasted lunatic on a battlefield? If Jeff didn’t find him and reunite the volley gun company with the regiment’s infantry, things were likely to get very hairy. The Hangman was light, when it came to regular artillery, so they relied a lot on the volley guns.
He heard another screech. Again, he couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded closer.
The words had been: “Come into position!”
Thirty-six volley guns swiveled on the snow, gliding easily on their Bartley rigs.
“Come on!” Jeff shouted, raising his sword and waving it. He detested the thing almost as much as he detested horses, but it was just a fact that an officer leading a charge had to wave a stupid sword around. Waving a pistol just didn’t do the trick, not even a big down-time wheel-lock.
Yes, it was asinine. Nothing but a pointless tradition left over from the days when illiterate men went into battled armed with nothing but oversized swords and blue paint. But the Hangman was an elite unit and elite units take tradition seriously.
Thankfully, Jeff was a big man and had big hands even for a man his size. So he probably wouldn’t lose his grip on the sword more than twice before the battle was over.
Somehow, it never occurred to him that he might be dead or maimed before the battle was over. He never thought of that, in the middle of a battle. He’d only think of it as he tried to sleep afterward, when sometimes he’d get the shakes.
He heard another screech. He might finally have been close enough to make out th
e words but the screech was immediately drowned by a thunderclap. Nine hundred volley gun barrels going off at once made the term “noisy” seem inadequate if you were anywhere nearby.
That third volley—again, at point blank range—destroyed the Östergötland Horsemen. Most of them survived, as men somehow do on a battlefield. Most of them weren’t even injured. But as a fighting formation, they were done. On this battlefield today, at least. The survivors raced to the rear, insofar as men could race through heavy snow and insofar as they could tell where “the rear” was in the middle of a heavy snowfall.
The sun was still invisible. It would remain invisible through that day and most of the next. But there was now enough light that a man could distinguish, approximately, between east and west. And, that done, determine which way was north—which is where they wanted to go. Back into the siege lines.
Miserable they might be, those trenches, but they weren’t as miserable as being savaged by musket balls fired by an unseen enemy.
Not more than one soldier in five of the Östergötland Horsemen had caught so much as a glimpse of the men who’d been killing them. Not more than a dozen had gotten a good look at them. Of those dozen, only two were still alive.
One of them was now hiding under the carcass of his horse, trying not to scream because of a broken leg. He was playing dead in the hopes that none of the enemy soldiers passing by would spot him. They were likely to cut his throat if he couldn’t offer ransom, which he couldn’t. His had not been a wealthy family, either, and the Swedes had been late with the pay.
Again.
Dresden, capital of Saxony
“Where? Where?” Jozef demanded, as soon as he came onto the platform around the tower.
Eric Krenz pointed to the south. “Over there. Somewhere. It’s hard to be sure, exactly.”
Wojtowicz peered into the snowfall. You really couldn’t see anything worth looking at. From this high up in the Residenzschloss, you couldn’t even see the city’s own walls.