1637 The Polish Maelstrom Read online

  “Not likely!” said Potocki, laughing himself. The five magnates in the room who constituted the leadership of the army that would soon be marching on Kraków didn’t share many sentiments. But on this subject, they were of one mind. By early summer, at the latest, Poland’s official capital would be in their hands.

  Theirs. Not the king’s, not the Sejm’s. Things would proceed from there accordingly.

  Near Pressburg

  Capital of Royal Hungary

  They had to detour around Pressburg on the way back, also. They hadn’t expected that, but in the few weeks since the rescue expedition had avoided the city on their way in to Vienna, Sultan Murad had apparently decided his troops were getting fat and lazy in their winter quarters and needed some exercise. So, he’d bolstered the Ottoman forces investing the city. It would be much too risky now to try to enter Pressburg or even to skirt it too closely.

  “We’d already decided to head for Kraków anyway,” said Lukasz. “We’ll take the alternate route.”

  “Which alternate route?” asked Leopold. “You’ve mentioned at least three.”

  His tone of voice was a bit sullen. The “decision” to head for Kraków had been more in the way of a declaration by Lukasz than something mutually agreed upon after long and deliberate discussion. Leopold had argued for taking a route that would enable them to return to Austrian territory as quickly as possible.

  Sadly for him, the Slovene cavalrymen who served as their escort viewed Lukasz as their commander, not an Austrian archduke who had no authority over them whatsoever. Still more sadly, and quite to his surprise, none of the people he’d expected to rally to his side did so.

  Minnie didn’t, because she wanted to stay with Denise and Denise was anxious to get back to Kraków so she could find out how her mother fared.

  Cecilia Renata didn’t, partly because she was feeling adventurous and had a pretty good idea of how cramped and tiresome her life would be in an overcrowded jury-rigged royal palace in Linz. But partly she was being influenced by Judy Wendell, who’d become the best friend she’d ever had in the course of their months-long stay in the cellars.

  For her part, Judy was inclined to continue on to Kraków because for one of the few times in her life she’d gotten attracted to a man. For whatever reason—she didn’t understand it that well herself—Jakub Zaborowsky had piqued her interest.

  * * *

  Denise found out about that from Minnie, who’d also become Judy’s friend during their months in the cellars.

  “She’s pretty uncertain—and more than a little confused—about the whole thing,” Minnie had told Denise the day before they got to the outskirts of Pressburg. “I told you she’s still a virgin. She doesn’t have our experience with the weaker sex.”

  Denise shook her head. “I still find it hard to believe about Judy. Not the part about Jakub—he’s seems okay to me—but about her maidenly state.”

  “It is strange, as good-looking as she is.”

  “Screw looks. She’s always seemed pretty levelheaded to me. Being a virgin past the age of sixteen is…” Again, she shook her head. “The only ones I know are dimwits.”

  “You hang out with a bad crowd.”

  “That would mostly be you, Minnie.”

  “No, it’s more than just me. Bad Influence Number One was—is—your mother.”

  Denise chewed her lip. “Well… Yeah. Mom lost her cherry even earlier than I did. Dad wasn’t the first bad boy ever caught her eye.”

  “She told you about it?”

  “Sure. It’s a mother’s duty to educate her daughter and raise her properly.”

  “You mom is really cool.”

  “Yeah. I just hope that Polish bad boy she’s hanging out with now hasn’t gotten her killed yet.”

  Poznań

  Poznań Voivodeship

  Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

  Not for the first time since she’d made the man’s acquaintance, Christin George had to restrain herself from laughing at the expression on Walenty Tarnowski’s face. She was even more determined to avoid giggling. Christin had learned while still a young girl that she giggled at the proverbial drop of a hat—and she detested doing so, because she thought it made her seem girlish.

  The problem was that Walenty’s expression almost seemed permanently fixed on the man’s face. The emotions displayed therein were a combination of frustration, exasperation, humiliation and disgrace.

  Frustration because he really wanted to accomplish something, but couldn’t. Exasperation because he understood how to do it but didn’t have the necessary tools or equipment. Humiliation because his failure was something he took personally instead of accepting it as an inevitable concomitant of the world he’d been born into. And disgrace because he was sure that his humiliation was the source of contempt from that same world.

  Christin thought the frustration and exasperation were understandable; the humiliation was childish; and the sense of disgrace was downright idiotic. In point of fact, the people around Tarnowski were far more likely to be astonished and amazed by the man’s intelligence and talent than they were to be derisive. If Christin herself had been told before the Ring of Fire that there were people in the seventeenth century—not many, no; but there were some—who were innately brilliant mechanical engineers she would have scoffed at the notion.

  Walenty Tarnowski had proved to her otherwise, several times over. But the man himself didn’t believe it. He took every setback as a personal failure.

  The occasion for his disgruntlement this day was his inability to invent welding. Any kind of welding except forge welding, which had been around for millennia—but he didn’t consider that real welding. Oxyacetylene, arc welding, mig welding, you name it and he couldn’t do it, even though he understood how each could be done.

  His inability to use oxyacetylene was particularly annoying to him. It was so simple. Blend two gases together—oxygen and acetylene, or any number of substitutes for acetylene—set them afire, apply the heat to the two pieces of metal you wanted to join, and it was done.

  The problem was he couldn’t get pure enough oxygen. He was certain—sourly, bitterly, angrily certain—that somewhere in the dark industrial bowels of the United States of Europe some unworthy fellow was employing one or another form of fractional distillation.

  But him? In benighted and backward Poland? The best he’d be able to manage for some time was to use a throttling effect—the so-called Joule-Thomson effect, named after two scientific dilettantes in the pampered universe the up-timers came from—in order to cool air down enough to separate out the oxygen.

  Eventually he could do it, certainly. But he didn’t have eventually. He had just a few weeks before the breakout from Poznań.

  Once she was sure she had her giggling-impulse throttled, Christin tried to console Tarnowski.

  “Walenty, cheer up, will you?” She pointed to the two men atop the APC who were constructing the gun turrets. “The rivets they’re using will work just fine.”

  “Rivets,” Tarnowski muttered. The word practically dripped with contempt. “They’ve had rivets since ancient times.”

  Christin shrugged. “For this, they’ll work fine. I don’t think welding the armor plates together would be much better.”

  One of the workmen set down the bucket he’d used to haul up a heated rivet from the man working the furnace on the floor of the workshop. Then, reached in with a pair of tongs, lifted the rivet and inserted it through the drilled holes that lined up two of the iron plates. On the other side, a blacksmith pounded the tail of the rivet with a hammer until it was deformed enough to lock the two plates together.

  Tarnowski turned and began walking away. “Yes, I know it will work. But it’s not elegant.”

  Now Christin did laugh. She couldn’t help it. “My husband was a welder, Walenty. Probably the best professional welder in Grantville. If he’d heard you call what he did ‘elegant’ he’d have thought you were crazy.”
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  She stopped and turned around, looking back again at the APC. “Speaking of which, you do understand that cutting the top plates into crenellations and painting the turrets to look like medieval brick-and-mortar fortifications is purely insane.”

  Finally, that managed to elicit a smile from the man. A sour smile, true, but it was still a smile.

  “The hussars insisted on it. If there’s a distinction between ‘hussar’ and ‘lunatic,’ I have yet to discover it.”

  “They’ll come in handy during the breakout, though.”

  “That’s because it’s a lunatic enterprise to begin with.”

  “You agreed to it.”

  “Yes, I know I did. That’s because in this century there’s no clear distinction between ‘mechanical engineer’ and ‘lunatic’ either.”

  She just couldn’t help herself. She giggled.

  * * *

  Before they left the warehouse where the APC was being prepared for the breakout, Christin donned the hooded cloak she always wore when she came there. She did so partly for the warmth it provided. Poznań had a more pleasant climate than most of Poland, especially in the number of sunny days it enjoyed. This far into March, the temperature during the day was usually five or ten degrees above freezing, but at night it could drop down almost to zero degrees Fahrenheit.

  Mostly, though, she always wore the garment because it made her very hard to recognize. By now, the fact that Jozef Wojtowicz had brought with him a German woman he planned to marry—said he did, at any rate—was fairly common knowledge. But her visits to the warehouse would draw attention, if people realized how often she made them. And the explanation…

  She’s actually an American and she knows way more about machinery than any proper woman should. She’s probably a witch.

  Would be awkward.

  “It’s too bad Lukasz insisted you ride a horse and wear that silly armor,” Walenty said, as they made their way toward their lodgings. “I’d be happier if you were driving the APC than Mark was.”

  She smiled. “Not too many up-timers would agree with you. Men, at any rate. They used to make fun of women drivers, you know.”

  “It’s outrageous. Odious.”

  “The term you’re looking for is ‘male chauvinist.’”

  Tarnowski waved his hand dismissively. “Not that. What’s odious is that men so unthinking should have had such splendid technology. It’s like—like—”

  “The phrase you’re looking for is ‘putting lipstick on a pig.’”

  “Precisely.” After a moment, he asked: “How do you make lipstick?”

  Chapter 33

  Linz, provisional capital of Austria-Hungary

  The summons came as a knock on the door, just as the sun was coming up.

  Julie answered it, yawning. A young man was standing at the front door of the apartment that she and Alex and daughter Alexi lived in, which was on the building’s ground floor. There was enough light for her to discern that he was wearing Austrian colors. That consisted simply of an ocher sash running diagonally from his right shoulder that featured the newly adopted coat of arms of the recently proclaimed Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

  Emperor Ferdinand—the new one, the Third—had gotten the idea from one of Grantville’s history books. He’d simplified the double-headed eagle he’d seen in the book, because the up-time version was the so-called “medium common coat of arms” adopted in 1867. Unfortunately, that particular coat of arms included the armorials of Galicia, Salzburg, Tyrol, Silesia, Transylvania, Illyria and Bohemia in addition to the undisputedly Austrian provinces of Styria, Carinthia and Carniola. Given that Ferdinand III would have to wage war against every single one of his neighbors in order to enforce his claim to those territories, it seemed more prudent to just modify the coat of arms.

  She recognized him as one of Gustav Adolf’s couriers and knew immediately what his presence at her door this early in the morning had to mean.

  “They’re coming,” she said.

  “Yes, My La—ah…”

  Julie was amused by the youngster’s fumbling attempts to come up with the proper cognomen for a Swedish baroness who’d begun life as an American commoner and was married to a Scot nobleman who’d need to display the bar sinister if he made so bold as to adopt a coat of arms of his own.

  “Mrs. Mackay will do just fine,” she said. “But whatever you do, don’t call me ‘Ma’am.’” Julie was firmly of the opinion that “Ma’am” was a title reserved for women in their dotage.

  She looked past him and saw that he’d brought an extra horse for her use.

  Fat chance of that happening. Julie had been exceedingly disgruntled that she wouldn’t be able to scramble properly, as she’d seen done in movies about the RAF during World War II. The approach of enemy airships just didn’t require any such measures. So she’d insisted that she had to be provided with a motorcycle, which, after a few weeks, was delivered from Grantville.

  She loved that motorcycle, although she had to be careful with it on some of the city’s streets. It was a dirt bike, of course. She’d been adamant on that point. Riding a motorcycle through a seventeenth-century city wasn’t too different from motocross racing.

  “Forget the horse,” she said. “I’ll get to the airfield long before you do.”

  She closed the door. By then, Alex had come out of their bedroom. He understood what was happening just as well as she did, and had a strained expression on his face.

  “I’m coming with you,” he pronounced.

  “Okay—but you ride in back.”

  “Yes, certainly. I don’t know how to operate that infernal machine. I’m a cavalryman.”

  She went into the bedroom and started dressing. “Take Alexi over to Grizelda. I’ll pick you up there after I get something to eat.”

  As soon as he finished dressing, he left. Julie was done a minute later and went into the kitchen. She already had a lunch ready—she’d made sure she did for the past week—and took it with her to the shed in the alley where she kept the motorcycle.

  Once she removed the padlock from the shed, she stuffed her lunch into the bike’s saddlebag. It was just a cloth sack with a small loaf of bread and some cheese. She would have liked to include an apple as well, but one of the bitter realities of life in the seventeenth century was that the season for apples was autumn, not supermarket aisle.

  She started up the bike and raced off. Still a little peeved that she wasn’t able to scramble properly, she made up for it by doing a wheelie—which was probably a really stupid thing to do, but war was hell.

  After a minute or so of enjoying her improvised scrambling, Julie turned around and went back to her apartment building. By the time she arrived, Alex was waiting for her. He climbed onto the bike, and off they went. She was driving fast, but she refrained from doing another wheelie. It wasn’t that she didn’t think she could, it was that she knew if she did Alex would retaliate by boasting about his horsemanship.

  * * *

  Linz was not a big city, geographically speaking, even though it now had a population density that would have rivaled any equivalent-sized portion of Tokyo. But this early in the morning the streets were not packed yet, and the bike made enough noise that by the time she passed by all the pedestrians and most of the horse-drawn vehicles had moved aside.

  Not all, though, which kept the ride from getting boring. A couple of flustered pedestrians who had to jump aside yelled at her, but they were instantly shouted down by the others nearby. Most people in Linz understood perfectly well why Julie was racing through the streets. A fair number of them cried out her name in praise.

  So, in five minutes she had passed through the city’s western gates—which had already been opened for her—and was coming out onto the field where the Magdeburg was moored. She left the bike in the care of a courier, gave Alex a fierce but quick kiss, and raced up the wooden staircase that had been erected to provide access to the huge airship’s gondola.

  “Wher
e’s Dell, Konrad?” she asked the young officer who helped her clamber into the gondola.

  “Here’s not here yet,” replied Lieutenant Neydell.

  “How much time do we have?” She started climbing into the gun turret, which was located in the upper portion of the gondola.

  Captain van Buskirk turned away from his inspection of the instrument panel and said, “At least ten minutes before we have to lift off.”

  Julie stopped on the ladder. “That long?” In practice runs, she’d never gotten to the airship with more time to spare than five minutes—and sometimes by the proverbial skin of her teeth.

  The captain smiled. “Once again, we discover the discrepancy between simulation and reality.” He pointed at the narrow slit in the armor through which he’d have to guide the airship. “The Ottoman fleet is still several miles away, and they seemed to have stopped all forward progress.”

  Frowning, Julie finished climbing into the gun turret. Her Remington Model 700 was resting in its case, and the Karabine was positioned against the left wall. If they decided to use it, Dell would help her get it into position. If need be, she could do it herself, but it helped to have an assistant. The Karabine was heavy and awkward to handle.

  She was hoping she’d be able to stick with the Remington, though. Julie was extremely confident in her marksmanship—with good reason—and was fairly sure that at any range the Ottomans needed to get within in order to have a chance at hitting her, she’d be able to strike them before they got there. They’d have their own gun turrets, of course, but they couldn’t make the firing slits too narrow or they’d simply be useless.

  Once she was settled in, she went back to pondering the problem.

  Why had the Turks stopped coming?

  * * *

  It was perhaps as well for her peace of mind that she didn’t know the answer, which was quite simple. The one and only purpose of the current Ottoman airship attack was to kill Julie. And since the Magdeburg hadn’t detached from its mooring mast yet, what was the point of coming any closer? If the airships got over the city itself, there was the risk that they could be struck by groundfire. Over the winter, the Turks had observed the rockets test-fired by the Austrians on several occasions. The missiles were not at all accurate, but they could reach altitudes of between one and two thousand yards. Unless the Ottoman fleet stayed well clear of the rocket batteries, nothing would prevent the Magdeburg from staying at low altitudes. If the Ottomans wanted to kill the American woman, they’d have to come down and get her.