Dane Kitt and Mark Ellis understood one another very well. They had started kindergarten together and graduated from high school together. Both of them were solid students, but not brilliant. Both came from the kind of family in which reasonably good behavior and reasonably good grades were not regarded as negotiable. Both of them had decided to live at home and commute to Fairmont State to save money. Dane had majored in mechanical engineering and Mark in civil engineering. They were both third year students when the Ring of Fire hit. They had even talked, sometimes, of starting their own firm some day—one that would specialize in projects for rural areas and small towns, the kind of things that the big boys turned up their noses at.
Neither of them wanted to be here, attached to Banér. All the more so since the Swedish commander of Gustav Adolf's military forces in the Upper Palatinate had recently decided to bring most of his army out of their billets in order to besiege the Bavarian fortified town of Ingolstadt. Boring and unpleasant garrison duty might be, but at least it was reasonably safe. This probably wouldn't be, as time went on.
No high-flying heroics for them, thank you; no dramatic romances with down-time women. The previous year, Dane had married Jailyn Wyatt, one of the WVU girls who had been at Rita Stearns' wedding. Mark was engaged to Stephanie Elias, the younger daughter of Grantville's second dentist. What they really, really, wanted was for Gustav Adolf to win this stupid war, so they could go back home and live a normal life.
For which reason they were throwing themselves heart and soul into the winning of it. Mark just had more trouble getting the down-time military types to pay attention to him. Terry Johnson, his mother, had been ingesting all sorts of things that she shouldn't while she was producing him and his twin sister Mackenzie out of wedlock. No one knew for sure if that was the reason, but in spite of everything that his Aunt Amanda and her husband Price Ellis had done after they adopted them, the twins had ended up being pretty unimpressive physically.
Dane's folks, on the other hand, had chosen his name because he looked like a Viking when he was born. He still looked like a Viking—a sort of thin and weedy one, not a Hagar the Horrible type. Dane had played basketball. So, people around the camp paid more attention to him than they did to Mark. Even if General Banér had once remarked, "Why did they have to name you fucking Dane? Why not Swede?"
Hearing some sort of ruckus outside their tent, Dane unwound himself from where he was sitting, which was a gray metal folding chair with thin yellow vinyl cushions on the seat and back and a matching card table with a yellow vinyl top. He had liberated both from his late Grandma Sadie's bridge club supplies, packed them into his baggage when he was sent to Amberg, brought them along to Ingolstadt, and insisted that he couldn't possibly fight this war without them.
Given the kind of fighting that he did most of the time, he might have been right. Back home in Grantville, his parents were working frantically on aviation and associated things, sort of but not exactly parallel to what Jesse Wood and Hal Smith were doing. He was supposed to figure out whether anything they had developed so far might give Banér just that little edge that he needed to bring this siege off successfully.
To this point, the answer was "no." By seventeenth century standards, Ingolstadt's fortifications were quite impressive. Any reasonably sized fleet of World War II era bombers could have reduced it to rubble in half an hour. For that matter, if Admiral Simpson's ironclads could somehow be brought down to the Danube, he could have done much the same in the course of a single day's bombardment, with those absurdly powerful ten-inch guns. Dane and Mark had once reduced themselves to a fit of semi-hysterical laughter conjuring up ways that might be done. The least implausible scheme had involved using giant fleets of dirigibles to hoist the ironclads out of the Elbe and drop them into the Danube. Some of the same dirigibles could then be used to keep the ironclads from running aground in the Danube.
Remembering that conversation, Dane muttered to himself. "Blue Danube, my ass." He'd never seen the Danube, back up-time—he'd never traveled anywhere outside the United States—but whatever state of pristine blue riverness it had enjoyed in the late twentieth century, it enjoyed none of it in the here and now.
It wasn't really even "a" river, to begin with. At least in this stretch of its course, the Danube was usually divided into several branches. It meandered across southern Germany like a watery braid, not a single well-defined stream. Each and every one of which braids—tributaries, branches, whatever they were called—was muddy brown.
"What was that?" asked Mark, getting up from his own folding chair. He'd brought one also, of course.
Dane was moving toward the tent entrance. "Blue Danube, my ass," he repeated. "We ought to be doing something useful, like re-inventing the Army Corps of Engineers."
Mark smiled. "Isn't that the truth? A lot of American rivers were just as messed up, originally. So much for the glories of pristine nature, huh?"
Dane had now reached the entrance and was moving the flap aside. "What's the commotion out there?" he wondered.
Mark came up to join him. The sound of General Banér's unlovely voice raised in anger was clearly audible. Clearly recognizable, too. They'd both gotten very familiar with that sound.
Outside, in the distance, they could see the walls of Ingolstadt. In the foreground, standing in front of some sort of bizarre apparatus, they could see Banér hollering at Duke Ernst and waving his arms about.
If the Swedish general's normal state of mind was choleric, that of the German administrator of the Upper Palatinate was serene. He was responding to Banér's protest with his usual expression of imperturbability.
Well... "serene" wasn't quite the right word. It just had the advantage of brevity. Dane and Mark had both gotten to know Duke Ernst rather well since they'd arrived. This particular one of the four Wettin brothers who had once been the rulers of Thuringia was almost diametrically the opposite of the youngest brother Bernhard, by all accounts they'd heard, so far as his personality and view of life were concerned. Where Bernhard was driven by personal ambition, Ernst was driven by duty. Where Bernhard's ego required constant personal gratification, Ernst's seem to require nothing beyond his sense that God approved of his actions. Where Bernhard did not suffer fools gladly and suffered personal insult not at all, Ernst seemed oblivious to such issues.
Not exactly "serene," but awfully close. And the word was a lot handier to use than calm and unruffled in the face of adversity, certain that he was doing his duty both in the eyes of Lawful Authority and the Creator.
"What the hell..." Mark was giving most of his attention to the weird contraption, not the two men quarreling. "Jesus, Dane, that's a catapult."
Dane looked. Sure enough, that very moment, the contraption went into operation. What he'd taken at first glance for an earth-moving scoop turned out to be the propulsive arm—whatever that was called—of the artillery device. A moment later, the arm whanged into a restraining crossbar and a small crate of some sort was flung over the walls of Ingolstadt.
"Damned impressive range," Mark murmured. "Hey, Mike and his guys used something like this to toss napalm onto the Wartburg. D'you think..."
Dane frowned, considering the idea. "Well... I don't know. The Wartburg was a real castle. Lots of stuff in it that could catch fire." He gestured with his chin toward Ingolstadt. "I suppose we could burn the town itself down, but I can't see where napalm would do much good against stone and earth berms. And the duke wants the town kept as intact as possible. So does Banér, for that matter. He wants to be able to station his troops in Ingolstadt, when and if he takes it. Can't do that if the place is all in cinders. Still..."
He and Mark looked back at the Swedish general. Banér was still in full protest mode. Arm-waving, red faced, voluble, the works.
Such an unlovely sight. Not to mention sound.
Dane shrugged. "Let's think about it some. Beats getting in the middle of that."
He led the way back inside the tent.
"—the king hears about this—"
"His Majesty gave me clear instructions to foster the true Lutheran doctrine here," Ernst interrupted Banér. He gestured toward Ingolstadt. "Since it will obviously take you months to reduce the will of yonder Catholics, I see no reason I shouldn't see to their souls and their moral conduct in the meantime."
"—be royal hell to pay—Vasa hell, I remind you—"
"Oh, nonsense. And what do you care if I fling some religious tracts and self-improvement pamphlets into Ingolstadt?" A bit uncharitably, Ernst added: "It's not as if either you or your soldiers have been clamoring for the items."
"—beside the fucking point! Catapults are military equipment—"
"I had them made myself, out of my purse, not yours."
"—in charge of all military affairs, not you—"
"Spiritual uplift is a military concern?" Ernst finally had something of an expression on face, with his eyebrows climbing. "In that case, General Banér, I must regretfully inform you that you and your officers have been sadly remiss—"
"—last time the Vasa temper cut loose, noble heads rolled!"
The Duke shrugged. "Send a letter to the Emperor in Luebeck, then, if you will. I will await his response quite calmly, be assured."
All the more so, he thought but did not say aloud, since I have already sent Gustav Adolf several letters myself, warning him of your plans for an independent campaign against Ingolstadt.
In one thing, if nothing else, all four of the Saxe-Weimar brothers had imbibed the same milk. They were all experienced practitioners in the art of political maneuver.
"—could probably have paved the streets of Stockholm with the skulls, if the king's grandfather had been a pagan."
"Which he certainly wasn't," concluded Ernst firmly. "Gustav Vasa was a good Lutheran. Hence—"
He gestured a command. The catapult fired again.
Two days later, in the chambers of a nearby tavern that Banér had sequestered as his headquarters for the duration of the siege, the Swedish general was in a much calmer mood. In fact, he was as close to "serene" as the man ever got.
Which was not close at all, of course. Still, Duke Ernst knew the signs. Now that the energetic and very-difficult-to-repress if not exactly irrepressible Banér was finally back in action in the field, he was a lot more content than he had been as what amounted to a garrison commander in Amberg. Furthermore, despite appearances, the Swedish general was very far from a buffoon. There was actually quite a keen military mind in there somewhere, beneath the choler and the dramatics.
Banér laid down the report he'd just summarized for Ernst and leaned back in his chair at the table. "So. Duke Bernhard did not send his regiments north to join de Valois at Luebeck. In my assessment"—he waved a contemptuous hand at the report—"unlike that of this over-intellectual spy, this only signifies that the man isn't stupid."
Duke Ernst nodded. "Over time, people have called my youngest brother Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar a lot of things. Arrogant. Inconsiderate. Ambitious. Rude. 'Stupid' was never one of them."
Banér grunted. "Nobody ever called him 'incompetent' either."
Ernst leaned back in his chair also, and contemplated the situation. To the best intelligence that Sweden and the USE had been able to collect, Bernhard had responded to Richelieu's repeated prodding by sending part of his troops sort of halfway toward the north. He had left most of his infantry in the Franche-Comté and taken himself, Friedrich von Kanoffski, and their picked companies north through the Breisgau, settling for the past couple of weeks into the monastery buildings at Schwarzach on the Rhine—not that he wouldn't be heading back to Besançon pretty soon, most likely. He'd set up his administrative headquarters there. Bernhard had sent Caldenbach, Ohm, and Rosen, with the rest of his cavalry, toward Mainz, apparently to provide a screen against any moves that Gustav might be contemplating there. Or, possibly, to make the USE nervous about the possibility that he might launch raids in the direction of Thuringia.
He spoke that last aloud. "It certainly isn't impossible that Bernhard's men could get as far as Fulda, or do a razzia against the towns in the Werra valley on the south face of the Thüringerwald."
Banér scowled. Not in displeasure; that was simply his usual expression when he was thinking. "I've worked with those captains of his, Duke. All three of Bernhard's cavalry units facing Mainz have something in common. They can move very fast when they need to. Maybe Bernhard does intend to send at least a token force to support the French regiments outside Luebeck. But then again—maybe that isn't what he intends. Fast is fast, no matter what direction it might be headed."
The general was tactful, for a wonder. He did not add the obvious coda. Since your brother has proven himself to be a traitor, who's to say he's not planning to betray Richelieu as well?
Ernst was thankful for Banér's courtesy in leaving all that unsaid. Not because he really cared about the issue of family honor, though. He and Wilhelm and Albrecht, by their own unswerving loyalty to Gustav Adolf since he landed his Swedish army in the Germanies in 1630, had done more than enough to still any suspicious that the Saxe-Weimars as a whole were untrustworthy.
He simply didn't want to get into another argument with Banér. The Swedish general didn't really understand Ernst's youngest brother. True, Bernhard was almost satanically ambitious. But he was not actually that quick to treason, nor was he the conscienceless and amoral man that most people took him to be. From Bernhard's viewpoint, he had not betrayed Gustav Adolf in the first place. Rather, the Swedish king had betrayed him.
Ernst did not agree with that viewpoint, but he had no trouble understanding its logic. There were times, now and then, in the darker places of his soul, when the same resentment surfaced. Between them, the Swedish king and the American up-timers had dealt roughly with the Saxe-Weimar dukes. With their status and prestige, at least, if not their personal selves.
Yes, Bernhard could be ruthless. And, yes, he had the sort of arrogance that made it very easy for him to interpret events in a way that satisfied his personal code of honor and ethics. But that was not the same thing as the absence of honor and ethics altogether. Once satisfied that his course of action was acceptable—to himself, at any rate—Bernhard would proceed according to that same code. The youngest of the four Saxe-Weimar dukes was not only competent and capable, he was no more prone to pointless cruelty or gratuitous misconduct than any of his older brothers were. He was quite a devout Lutheran, actually, in his own way.
All that said...
Ernst looked out of the second-story window of the tavern onto the landscape below. Already, Banér's engineers and soldiers had turned the once-fertile fields surrounding Ingolstadt into a nightmarish landscape of trenches and fieldworks.
There was no report, anywhere, that Bernhard had ever sworn an oath of loyalty to the French. Not, at least, the sort of personal oath he had once sworn to Gustav Adolf. He had simply agreed to accept employment from them as the commanding general of a mercenary army.
Ernst was reminded of an American witticism of sorts he'd once heard, from one of the UMWA men who still provided Mike Stearns with the backbone of his regime. One coal miner explaining to another the words he'd spoken to an employer who had angered him. Fuck you, buddy. I was looking for work when I walked in this door, so it's not as if I'm any worse off on my way out.
Yes. It was quite possible that his brother was planning to betray Richelieu. He wouldn't think of it that way, of course.
Hearing movement, Ernst looked back into the room. Banér had sat back upright and was leafing through some of the other reports on the table.
"But Bernhard's not my problem," he said. "He's Horn's problem, and the problem of Nils Abrahamsson Brahe in Mainz. So let's get back to the siege here at Ingolstadt. I've got a report that just came in from one of my cavalry units. It seems that some of Maximilian's troops are—"