Ring of Fire III Read online

  Amberg was the safest destination. The city was garrisoned by a full regiment. The regiment was a mercenary unit, but Tom didn’t think there was much likelihood it had been suborned also. Most of the soldiers in Amberg’s garrison had been recruited in the Upper Palatinate, many of them from nearby towns. They’d been stationed in the capital long enough to develop ties with the local population, too. The chances that they’d agree to betray Amberg on behalf of the Bavarians were slight to the point of being nonexistent. Duke Maximilian had a reputation for savagery.

  Amberg was well-fortified, too. With Tom’s men added to the existing garrison, they’d be able to withstand any Bavarian siege long enough for Heinrich Schmidt to come down from the State of Thuringia-Franconia with most of the National Guard.

  Regensburg was a riskier proposition. On the positive side, there was no chance at all that the garrison at Regensburg had turned traitor. That was the Iron Regiment, a unit of the regular USE army made up entirely of volunteers, most of them also recruited in this province. It was one of the few such regiments that hadn’t been sent into Poland or Bohemia.

  Regensburg was also well-fortified, but the defenses had a weakness because the city was right on the Danube. Most of Regensburg was on the south bank of the river, with just a small and not-well-protected enclave on the north. The enclave wasn’t even legally part of Regensburg, but was a separate town. Tom couldn’t remember the name of it. That town couldn’t be held against a large and determined enemy, but losing it wouldn’t by itself threaten Regensburg. The Danube was wide enough at that point to require a great stone bridge to get across, and the bridge could be easily defended.

  Except in winter. The river froze over, enabling enemy troops to cross without using the bridge or needing the use of boats. Doing so had dangers of its own—no soldier likes to cross an iced-over river against enemy fire—and there were occasional thaws that might weaken the ice. But it made Regensburg’s bridge less of a defensive barrier than it was most of the year.

  Tom decided he had enough time to try reaching Bamberg on the radio. This was really a decision that should be made by the president of the SoTF and his top officers. They’d known for months that if hostilities broke out with Bavaria again, the brunt of the fighting would have to be borne by the province’s National Guard. Between the war with Poland and the domestic turmoil in the USE itself, the only units of the nation’s army that would be available were the troops Tom had pulled out of Ingolstadt and the Iron Regiment in Regensburg.

  But...

  Nothing. No reception at all. Small radios like this one were chancy at any distance, except during the evening and morning windows. Tom could only hope that his original message had been received.

  He’d have to make the choice himself. The road they were on, coming out of the east gate, was the road to Regensburg. If he decided to march for Amberg, he had to cross over now to the northern route. He couldn’t delay the decision. The next road they’d encounter which would enable them to head for Amberg didn’t intersect this road for another ten miles down the river. By then, they’d have covered about a fourth of the distance to Regensburg anyway. They’d do better to just keep going than try to backtrack.

  There were several small roads before then, but they wouldn’t be of any use. Five hundred men with their gear—even infantry, much less artillery—could not march down narrow country lanes without slowing down almost to a crawl. Tom couldn’t afford to dawdle. The Bavarians had cavalry; he didn’t. The enemy commander had probably lost control of his troops tonight, but he’d have them back under control by the end of the day tomorrow.

  He decided to go for Regensburg. That was a riskier decision for his own forces, but Tom was pretty sure that the Bavarians would try to seize Regensburg before they tried to penetrate further into the Oberpfalz. If they held Regensburg as well as Ingolstadt, they’d control both of the main crossings of the Danube along the border between Bavaria and the USE. They wouldn’t have to worry that a sudden attack by the USE would get large numbers of troops across the river that could threaten their own rear and cut their supply trains.

  The Iron Regiment would be hard pressed to hold Regensburg on their own against the full weight of the Bavarian army. But with the help of what was left of the Danube Regiment and its guns, they’d have a real chance. They didn’t need to hold for long, after all. Tom had been part of the staff planning for this eventuality. General Schmidt could get a full division of the National Guard down to the Danube within a week. Ten days, at the latest, if the independent little principality of Nürnberg got stubborn and refused to let the SoTF march its soldiers through their territory.

  He turned to give the order to his immediate subordinates, who had gathered around him once he called the halt to use the radio. To his surprise, he discovered that none of them were paying any attention to him at all. They were all gawking at the moon, it seemed like.

  That was annoying. It was just a three-quarter moon, no different from the same sight that came every month. Tom was normally an even-tempered officer, but there’d been enough stress tonight to put him on edge. He was about to make a sarcastic remark when a peculiar gleam caught his eye.

  When he looked up at the sky himself, he immediately understood what had drawn his officers’ attention. They weren’t looking at the moon—in fact, they weren’t even looking close to it. They were looking at an airship flying northwest of the city.

  That was the Pelican, if Tom remembered what Rita had told him. The airship was carrying out a survey of the region and had arrived in Ingolstadt yesterday. He’d forgotten all about it. Luckily for them, they’d obviously managed to get airborne again before the Bavarians could seize their craft.

  He cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, if I could have your attention.”

  His officers immediately turned away from the sight of the airship, several of them with slightly sheepish expressions.

  “I’ve decided to make for Regensburg,” he said. “That will almost certainly be the next target for the Bavarians. We and our guns—especially the guns—would be a big help for the Iron Regiment. Does anyone have any questions? Any problems you can see that you’d like to raise?”

  Most of the officers shook their heads. Bruno von Eichelberg, though, had an intent look on his face. “Does that airship have a radio, Major? If it does, it would give us superb reconnaissance. We could use that badly, come tomorrow. The Bavarians will be able to send out cavalry patrols everywhere and all we’ve got to match them are a handful of couriers.”

  Tom shook his head. “No, unfortunately, it doesn’t. I’m not guessing, either. Rita went over to pay a visit yesterday after they landed and spent an hour or two with them. She told me Dina Merrifield and Amanda Boyd were complaining about the absence of a radio, which they thought was plain stupid. Apparently the expedition commander insisted on loading the airship with enough foodstuffs to fly to the South Pole and back, so there wasn’t...”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, struck by a sudden thought. He’d forgotten about the Pelican—but what if Rita hadn’t?

  It was a long shot, but you never knew. He looked around for the radioman and saw him standing ready just a few feet away. Tom had given him the walkie-talkie to put in his backpack.

  He held out his hand. “The walkie-talkie, please, Corporal Baier.”

  The corporal set down the pack and rummaged in it for a few seconds before coming up with the device and handing it to Tom.

  “Rita, are you on the other end?” he asked. “Rita, Rita. Repeat: are you on the other end of this thing? Rita, come in. This is Tom. Over.”

  A few seconds went by, that seemed much longer than they actually were. Then, when he’d just about given up hope, Rita’s voice came through.

  “Tom? Tom! Is that really you? Never mind, stupid question. Where are you? Uh, over.”

  “Looking right at you, babe,” he replied, almost laughing with relief. “Right up at you, I should say. Me and my so
ldiers—what’s left of us—are out of the city and on the road to Regensburg not more than a mile from Ingolstadt. We can see the Pelican clearly in the sky. Over.”

  Belatedly, it occurred to Tom that he was simply assuming Rita was on the airship. She might be transmitting from the ground herself, after all.

  But she didn’t correct him, so apparently she was. “Hold on, I’ll look.” She was off the air for a few seconds. “No, dammit, I can’t see you. The moonlight’s just not bright enough and I guess we’re up pretty high. Over.”

  “You’re not really all that close, either.” He hesitated for an instant. “Uh...what are your plans? Over.”

  “We don’t really have any. Get out of Ingolstadt was about as far as it went. We were thinking about flying to Amberg, but Stefano—he’s the pilot—thinks that’s going to be a problem. We don’t have much fuel because they weren’t able to refuel in Ingolstadt, and he says the wind is blowing the wrong way. He’s not sure we can make it before we run out of fuel. Then he says we’re at the mercy of the winds. Over.”

  Von Eichelberg had that intent look on his face again. “Isn’t there gasoline in Regensburg?”

  Tom held up a hand to interrupt him, nodding and talking into the walkie-talkie at the same time.

  “There’s plenty of gas in Regensburg, Rita. They’re storing it up for the spring, when they hope to get that ironclad working again.”

  Working for the first time, would probably be a better way to put it. The small ironclad in question had been designed entirely by down-timers, whose enthusiasm had outrun their experience. The thing was so top-heavy it almost capsized the one and only time it had been put in the river, and was so awkward that the oars which were supposed to drive it through the water couldn’t compete with the current. It was lying up in drydock to be fitted with an up-time engine as soon as a suitable one became available. But, hope springing eternal, the enthusiasts had somehow managed to sweet-talk the powers-that-be into providing them with several barrels of gasoline.

  “And we could sure use your help while we’re trying to get there ourselves,” he added. “We’ve got no scouting capabilities worth talking about and within a day the Bavarian cavalry will be all over the place. Over.”

  “Hold on a minute, hon. I’ve got to talk it over. Uh. Over.”

  She was off the air for about a minute before she came back on. Tom was surprised, actually. He’d figured Hank Siers would make a fuss and it would take Rita at least five minutes to bully him into it.

  That she’d succeed, he didn’t doubt at all. When his wife wanted to be, she was pretty ferocious.

  “Okay, Tom. We’re on. Stefano thinks it’s a good idea and so does everybody else. What do you want us to do? Exactly, I mean. Over.”

  She made no mention at all of Siers. Tom wondered what had happened to him. Had the surveyor been killed?

  But that wasn’t something he needed to worry about tonight. Tom studied the distant airship for a few seconds, wishing he knew more about the devices than he did. How easy were they to land and take off? And what did they need in the way of space and facilities?

  For sure, they’d need plenty of space. The Pelican was as long as half a football field, and at least fifteen yards wide. There was no way it could land in a small meadow.

  Von Eichelberg and his men had been stationed in Ingolstadt longer than Tom himself. So Tom turned back to him.

  “Is there any large open area in the next few miles?” He pointed up at the Pelican. “It needs to be big enough for the airship to land. Say, a minimum of a hundred yards.”

  The young mercenary captain pursed his lips thoughtfully. After a moment, he said: “Two, that I can think of. Luckily, the nearest one is the largest.”

  He turned and pointed toward the Danube. “It’s a big clearing alongside the river, perhaps two miles downstream from here. We could be there in an hour.”

  That was pushing it, Tom thought. In an hour, a man could walk two miles quite easily. Five hundred men, with six-pounders and supply wagons? In the middle of the night, to boot, with just moonlight to guide them? He thought they’d be doing well if they made it within two hours.

  Still, that would get them to the clearing before dawn, which was what mattered. The Bavarians wouldn’t be sending out any large cavalry force until morning.

  He got back on the walkie-talkie. “How much room do you have in that thing? Can you carry another man, with—”

  He looked at Corporal Baier, quickly gauging the weight of the radioman himself as well as that of the equipment he carried.

  “Say, two hundred and twenty-five pounds, all told. Over.”

  Rita’s answer came immediately. “You’re not talking about yourself, obviously. Yeah, I’m pretty sure, especially because we can subtract my weight from the equation. Your guy gets on, I get off. That brings it down to a net gain of less than a hundred pounds. Hold on, I’ll check with Stefano.”

  Tom winced. He’d been afraid she’d come up with that alternative. With thousands of Bavarians running wild, he wanted his wife to stay right where she was—way, way, way too high for the bastards to get to her.

  Rita came back on the air. “No problem, as long as we make the switch. Stefano says the Pelican could handle at least two more people—if we weren’t low on fuel. But he says we’ve got enough to land and take off with an additional hundred pounds or so. Where do you want us to set down? Over. No, wait—don’t tell me, tell Dina. She’s the copilot and she’ll double as the navigator. I’ll put her on.” A couple a seconds later: “Oops. Forgot. Over.”

  Tom would have handed his walkie-talkie to von Eichelberg, since he was the one who’d actually be providing the directions. But he didn’t think the Brunswick captain was familiar with the device. He’d show him how to use it after they were done here, but for now he’d keep serving as the intermediary.

  While he waited for Dina Merrifield to come on the air, he contemplated some of his wife’s personal characteristics. There’d been a good reason he’d thought she could bully Hank Siers within five minutes.

  He foresaw some difficult times ahead. In about...two hours.

  Chapter 9

  By the time the rendezvous was made, Tom had figured out what to do. He and Rita—and von Eichelberg, whenever further directions were needed—had stayed in regular contact throughout those two hours. Once she told him about Hank Siers’ condition, the solution to his problem was obvious.

  The key was getting enough weight removed from the Pelican to be able to add Corporal Baier and his radio to the gondola without endangering the airship because of its fuel shortage.

  And...voila! The surveyor weighed almost twice as much as his wife did. And was useless aboard the Pelican because he was still unconscious. And—could it get any better?—badly needed medical attention, which Tom could provide since they’d brought the regiment’s ambulance along with its doctor.

  True, the doctor wasn’t exactly a medical titan. Dr. James Nichols, he was not. In fact, the soldiers usually referred to him as “the surgeon”—which was not a prestigious title in the here and now—because what he mostly did was amputate limbs and extract teeth. He also served as the regiment’s dentist, a trade whose principal tool in the here and now was a pair of pliers.

  But he knew and followed the principles of sanitation and sterilization, and however meager his skills they were better than anything they had aboard the Pelican.

  Well... That was pushing it, so he’d better leave that argument aside. Rita was a very good practical nurse in her own right, and had quite a bit of experience at it. During their long captivity in the Tower of London, she’d wound up being the prison’s de facto medical expert. The Yeoman Warders had credited her with keeping several of their children alive when disease struck, and they were probably right.

  Still, she didn’t need to deal with Siers. There wasn’t much anyone could do for him now.

  * * *

  “You want to put Hank in a wagon
?”

  “Hey, hon, it’s an ambulance,” Tom protested.

  “It’s a fucking wagon with a red cross painted on it—except you never even got around to painting on the cross. Don’t bullshit me, Tom. This is just a scheme to keep me on the Pelican.” Rita turned and pointed at the airship, which was tethered to a tree not far away in the clearing. A number of soldiers were helping to keep it down and steady with ropes.

  “You see that?” she demanded. “It’s not a wagon.” Her hand made a gliding motion. “Flies right through the air, as gentle as you please. And you want to take a man with a bad concussion—maybe worse!—off that best-ride-you-could-ask-for and put him in a fucking wagon? On seventeenth-century roads? Are you fucking nuts?”

  When his wife got agitated, she tended to lapse into the Appalachian patois of her not-so-far-back youth. This ran heavily toward short Anglo-Saxon terms, which perhaps lent support to the theory that Appalachian speech was closer to Elizabethan English than any other dialect had been in the twentieth century.

  Or maybe hillbillies just liked to cuss a lot. The habit had been a source of trouble when Rita first met Tom’s very blueblood parents.

  Rita crossed her arms. Tom was familiar with that gesture. Alas.

  “No,” she said. “N. O. Absolutely not. Siers stays on the Pelican.”

  A third party intervened. “If I might interrupt...”

  Turning, Tom saw that the speaker was the province administrator’s secretary, Johann Heinrich Böcler. Tom hadn’t even been aware the man was standing nearby. The three middle-aged auditors were with him, along with Bonnie Weaver.

  Tom didn’t know the man very well, but any interruption was welcome. “Sure, what is it?”

  Böcler gave Rita an apologetic glance. “I agree with your wife that Herr Siers should remain on the Pelican. Truthfully, it would be much safer for him. But I also think, for the same reason, that it would be foolish for her to leave that safety. She should also remain aboard the airship.”