Grantville Gazette Volume 24 Read online

  Grantville Gazette Volume 24

  Eric Flint

  Eric Flint

  Grantville Gazette Volume 24

  What is this? About the Grantville Gazette

  Written by Grantville Gazette Staff

  The Grantville Gazette originated as a by-product of the ongoing and very active discussions which take place concerning the 1632 universe Eric Flint created in the novels 1632, 1633 and 1634: The Galileo Affair (the latter two books co-authored by David Weber and Andrew Dennis, respectively). This discussion is centered in three of the conferences in Baen's Bar, the discussion area of Baen Books' web site. The conferences are entitled "1632 Slush," "1632 Slush Comments" and "1632 Tech Manual." They have been in operation for almost seven years now, during which time nearly two hundred thousand posts have been made by hundreds of participants.

  Soon enough, the discussion began generating so-called "fanfic," stories written in the setting by fans of the series. A number of those were good enough to be published professionally. And, indeed, a number of them were-as part of the anthology Ring of Fire, which was published by Baen Books in January, 2004. (Ring of Fire also includes stories written by established authors such as Eric Flint himself, as well as David Weber, Mercedes Lackey, Dave Freer, K.D. Wentworth and S.L. Viehl.)

  The decision to publish the Ring of Fire anthology triggered the writing of still more fanfic, even after submissions to the anthology were closed. Ring of Fire has been selling quite well since it came out, and a second anthology similar to it was published late in 2007. Another, Ring of Fire III, is forthcoming. It will also contain stories written by new writers, as well as professionals. But, in the meantime… the fanfic kept getting written, and people kept nudging Eric-well, pestering Eric-to give them feedback on their stories.

  Hence… the Grantville Gazette. Once he realized how many stories were being written-a number of them of publishable quality-he raised with Jim Baen the idea of producing an online magazine which would pay for fiction and nonfiction articles set in the 1632 universe and would be sold through Baen Books' Webscriptions service. Jim was willing to try it, to see what happened.

  As it turned out, the first issue of the electronic magazine sold well enough to make continuing the magazine a financially self-sustaining operation. Since then, even more volumes have been electronically published through the Baen Webscriptions site. As well, Grantville Gazette, Volume One was published in paperback in November of 2004. That has since been followed by hardcover editions of Grantville Gazette, Volumes Two, Three and Four.

  Then, two big steps:

  First: The magazine had been paying semi-pro rates for the electronic edition, increasing to pro rates upon transition to paper, but one of Eric's goals had long been to increase payments to the authors. Grantville Gazette, Volume Eleven is the first volume to pay the authors professional rates.

  Second: This on-line version you're reading. The site here at http://www. grantvillegazette. com is the electronic version of an ARC, an advance readers copy where you can read the issues as we assemble them. There are stories posted here which won't be coming out in the magazine for more than a year.

  How will it work out? Will we be able to continue at this rate? Well, we don't know. That's up to the readers. But we'll be here, continuing the saga, the soap opera, the drama and the comedy just as long as people are willing to read them.

  – The Grantville Gazette Staff

  Power Play

  Written by Douglas W. Jones

  I'd gotten a decent night's sleep after the hard ride back from Eisenach. Much of Grantville had stayed up late celebrating their victory over the Croats, but I'd slept through most of it. After breaking my fast, I wandered over to the police station to see how the Grantville police were dealing with the aftermath of the raid two days before.

  "Sergeant Leslie," Angela called, smiling. "Am I glad to see you!"

  Before I could reply, the phone rang and she picked it up. "Grantville Police," she said, and then paused. I listened to half a conversation while she took notes. Angela Baker is a sweet young woman, but I'd seen her handle some tough situations in the months that I'd served as Mackay's man with the Grantville police.

  She picked up her radio microphone as soon as she hung up the phone and transmitted a terse message full of the ten-codes that the American police seem to love. The message was acknowledged by what seemed more a squawk of static than words, but she seemed satisfied.

  "Where is everyone," I asked, after she finished with the radio.

  "Out," she said. "While everyone else celebrates, we work. That call was about a wounded Croat cavalryman who crawled out of the woods east of town. We've had some cases where they're still armed and dangerous, but some died before we got to them. Add to that the fact that the king is in town with his cavalry, and we're busy. What I was going to say is…"

  The phone rang again, so again I waited while she took notes. When I first began working with the Grantville police, I thought girls like Angela were menials, but I'd been wrong. Her job wasn't just to answer the phone and relay messages, it was to decide what mattered and what could wait. If something did matter, she had to know who to tell.

  "A horse wandered into someone's back yard," she said, shaking her head as she put down the phone. She looked up at me and went on in a more serious tone. "John, we're short handed, and I have a call here that needs attention now. I know you're not officially Grantville police, but could you go out and take a look at this for us?"

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "The power plant phoned just before you walked in the door. They say they think they might have been attacked."

  "They think?" I asked.

  "Weird, isn't it. The rest of Grantville is darned sure it was attacked, but out at the power plant, they just think. Could you ride out there and see what's going on? Take notes, collect evidence."

  Ten minutes later, I was on my horse on the road up Buffalo Creek. I'd hoped to spend the day helping celebrate Colonel Mackay's wedding, but I knew how much Grantville depended on electric power. In the past few months, Grantville's electric powered machine shops had become the key to supplying the king's new artillery.

  It's a three mile ride to the power plant, but even before I got to the fairground on the west side of town, the whole atmosphere changed. Where the center of town was bustling with work cleaning up after the Croats, the west side was calm. I saw no broken windows and no bullet scars on buildings. If any Croats had made it west of town, they'd left scant evidence.

  Not long after I crossed the railroad tracks at Murphy's run, the valley turned, giving me a view of the great cliffs south of Schwarzburg that mark the border of Grantville's land. A bit over a year before, Grantville and a round chunk of America from almost 400 years in the future had been plunged through a ring of fire into the center of Germany. The ring of cliffs around Grantville mark the mismatch between the German mountains outside and the American mountains inside. I've been in and around Grantville for most of a year now, and it's still terrifying to think about what God or the Devil did in that instant.

  As the valley straightened out, the castle at Schwarzburg and the power plant below it came into view. A year ago, there was just a small cluster of houses by the power plant. Some people called it Spring Branch, after the stream that used to flow into Buffalo Creek there. Now, the Schwarza River flows into Buffalo Creek at Spring Branch, and the village has more than tripled in size. The power plant workers put up some of the new houses, a cluster of what the Americans call mobile homes, but the biggest growth started as a prisoner of war camp just west of the plant. By fall, the camp had become a refugee camp, and now that was fast becoming a permanent village,
housing for workers at the power plant and at the new businesses growing up around it.

  "Someone here called the police?" I asked, at the power plant's guard house.

  "You not police," the guard said, looking at me through the woven steel wires of the fence around the place.

  " Nein," I said, switching to German. The old man didn't look like he could guard much of anything, but he controlled the gate in the eight-foot high fence around the plant. "I'm John Leslie, cavalier with the Green Regiment. The police are a bit short handed, so they asked me to come out."

  "I'll phone," he said, suspiciously, walking back into the guard house.

  While I waited, I looked. I'd seen the power plant from the road many times, but I'd never been inside the fence. The place is immense and strange. Tall stacks on the east end of the building give off faint brown trails of smoke. The walls of the plant are iron in some places and brick in other places, and they must be fifty or a hundred feet high. It's not a fortress, but if it weren't for the huge windows, it would be easy to mistake it for one.

  "Come in," the guard said, walking out to the gate. He pulled it just wide enough for my horse. "Tie up your horse this side of the railroad track, the grass is good there. Someone will come for you."

  A man came around the corner of the plant as I took care of my horse. "Mr. Leslie?" he said, in American style. "I'm Tom McAndrew. You're here instead of the police?"

  "I've been the Green Regiment's man with the Grantville police for most of a year now," I said, taking out the pad of paper Angela had made me take and writing down Tom's name. "They're a bit short handed what with the raid and the king's visit and all, so I said I'd help. What happened here?"

  "Someone's been shooting at the plant," he said, leading me around the corner.

  "It looks like it'd take a cannon to hurt this place," I said, looking up at the thick brick walls. "Of course, those big windows are a weak point."

  The west wall of the place wasn't as high as most of the walls facing the road. Perhaps only 30 or 60 feet high, and parts looked newer. The windows began halfway up and ran almost to the top. If they'd had colored glass, they'd have belonged in a cathedral.

  "They're not aiming at the windows, they've been shooting at our switchyard."

  "Your what?"

  Tom paused, and then pointed. "That's the switchyard," he said, pointing to the place where all the different electric wires converged on the plant. A line of tall towers carried six great wires off to the south while wooden poles carried three great wires off to the north. Smaller lines also came together at the place. There was a ring of high wire fence around the yard, and inside, a maze of strange stuff, all made of gray metal except for some parts that must have been green glass or brown glazed fine china. A faint hum seemed to fill the air as we came near.

  "I'm afraid I don't get it," I said, dismayed. "I'm just a poor Scot, they should've sent an American."

  Tom smiled wryly. "Don't worry, most of the folks in Grantville don't understand this stuff either, but I suppose they do their best to sound like they do around downtimers. The switchyard is where the power from the plant gets switched onto one line or the other. Those boxes with two connections each are circuit breakers to cut off power to the power line if there's a problem."

  "Connections?" I asked, puzzled. "You mean those pillars of crockery coming out the top?"

  "Right," he said, grinning. "Now, the big boxes with six connections each are the transformers, they change the voltage."

  "Voltage?" I asked, feeling lost.

  "That's a measure of how strong the electric power is," he said. "Forty volts is enough to kill a careless man, less if his skin is damp. When people turn on an electric light, that's just one hundred and fifteen volts. The bus bars are those three pipes that go across the top of everything. They run at thirty-five kilovolts, that's thirty-five thousand volts, three hundred times stronger than the power for an electric light. The three main circuits going out of the plant are one hundred and thirty five kilovolts. Of course, there's only one that still works, the one that goes over the hill to the mine."

  I shook my head, lost in all this detail. "So how do you know someone was shooting at it."

  Tom pointed. "Look at the insulators."

  "Insulators?"

  "You called them towers of crockery. They're glass or porcelain, crockery if you wish. Their job is to support the bus bars and the wires without letting the electricity leak out. Electricity only goes through metal, it can't go through insulators. The bigger insulators are for higher voltages. Anyway, take a look at the insulators holding up the bus bars."

  I looked, and indeed, two of the insulators holding up one of the bus bars were shattered. Looking at the gravel below, I could see fragments of broken crockery.

  "I see," I said. "Nobody seems to be in a panic, though. Why is this important."

  "Because it could have shut down the plant. It should have. I wouldn't have expected the bar to hang in the air like that. The two insulators at the other end of the bus bar must be holding most of its weight, and the rest is being taken by the rigid feeders that drop down to the two newest transformers below. If the bar had sagged down just a bit more, we'd have had an electrical explosion and the power plant would probably have been dead for at least a week while we fixed the damage. As it is, we've got a problem because we only have one spare of that insulator. We've taken it to a potter so she can try to make a duplicate."

  "You think it was done with a gun?" I asked, looking around. The closest the outer fence came to the switchyard was about ten rods, either from the south across the creek or from the edge of the refugee camp to the west. "It can't have been done with a common matchlock, it's too far. Whether it was German or American, it was a long rifle. If we could find a bullet, that would help."

  "I have the key," Tom said, "but it's dangerous in there. Keep down, don't get tempted to climb up on anything."

  "I heard you talking about thousands of volts, when what, forty are enough to kill a man."

  "Right," he said, as he unlocked the gate in the switchyard fence.

  I wasn't happy in that switchyard with the humming of the electricity all around me, but I did my best to ignore it. It was the broken insulator on the ground that I wanted, not anything up high. I didn't move anything, but just looked at the pieces where they'd fallen. "Do you see," I said, pointing to the shattered pieces of one insulator, and then pointing up at where they'd come from.

  "What," he said.

  "The pieces are scattered, but they're mostly east o' where they came from. I'd bet the shooter was over there somewhere," I said, waving at the refugee camp to the west.

  The pieces of the other insulator were scattered in the same way. I wanted a bullet, so my eyes were on the gravel. Lead doesn't bounce very well. If a bullet hit an insulator head on, it would likely drop to the ground right under it.

  "Look there," Tom said, pointing at the wall of the power plant.

  "What?" I asked, straightening up to look where he pointed. There were fresh bullet scars on the brick wall of the power plant. It was obvious that a shooter trying to hit an insulator at 50 yards was bound to miss a few times.

  "That's good," I said. "But help me find a bullet before we leave here."

  We looked for another few minutes before I found a smashed bullet. "Take a look," I said, holding it in my hand.

  "It was a round ball, wasn't it."

  "Right," I said. Not with a flat bottom, like your rifles shoot, but it was shot from a rifle, you can see the grooves. We're looking for a downtime marksman, I think, perhaps a jager."

  "Yayger?" he asked, while I pocketed the ball and a few pieces of shattered insulator.

  "Professional hunter," I said. "They usually use good rifled guns."

  The area under the scars on the side of the powerplant was weedy, there was no hope of finding a bullet there, but standing under the scars on the side of the building and sighting back through the switchyard tow
ard the refugee camp, it was obvious where the shots had come from.

  "Want me to go with you?" Tom asked, as we stared at the building the shooter must have used.

  "That would be nice. Back through the main gate?"

  "Faster through the west gate," he said. "The railroad used to go out that way, before they pulled the track last summer. I have the key here."

  When I'd first seen it, the refugee camp had been nothing but a few parallel rows of light sheds. Just about every time I'd visited, there'd been changes. What had been sheds had been closed in by winter, and with the coming of spring, the pace of construction had increased. The shooter's building had a new second story, and as we came up to it, a roofing crew was at work adding a good slate roof on top.

  "Hey, who you," a German carpenter asked, as we stepped inside.

  "I'm from the power plant," Tom said. "John is with the Grantville police. Who are you?"

  "Johann Schneider."

  While I tried to figure out what question to ask, I wrote down his name. "What happened here during the Croat raid?" was the best I could do.

  "Well," the carpenter said, answering in German, "the news of the Croats came before we got to work. We decided to lock the old prison camp gates and move the women and children into the inner houses. I think we could have held off a cavalry attack for a long time."

  I nodded, looking around. "You're probably right. Horses are no match for a woven wire fence with barbed wire on top. You had guns?"

  "A few," he said. "Mostly matchlocks, but enough to keep an attacker from trying to cut his way through the fence, and three of us had American pistols."

  "No rifles?"

  "No," Schneider said. "Everyone who had a gun had it out. I didn't see any rifles."

  "So what happened afterwards. When did you get back to work here?"

  "When news came of the victory, we had a bit of a celebration. It was time for the noon meal, so it was afternoon when we got to work."