Ring of Fire III

Chapter 2

Tom found his commanding officer dead in his quarters, just a block away. The door to the apartment had been blown in by the same sort of explosion that had destroyed Tom’s own. Colonel Friedrich Engels’ body was sprawled across the floor of his living room, half-dressed, with at least two gunshot wounds that Tom could see at a glance. The floor was covered with drying blood. A pistol was lying near the colonel’s body that Tom recognized as belonging to Engels. It was a wheel lock and the mechanism hadn’t been engaged. Obviously, the attack had come so quickly that Engels had been roused from sleep but hadn’t had time to arm the weapon.

Reluctantly, partly because he didn’t much like the idea of getting his boots soaked in his commander’s blood but mostly because he was pretty sure what he was going to find, Tom stepped over Engels’ body and went into the bedroom. As he’d expected, Engels’ wife Hilde was dead too. Her body was sprawled across the bed. Her neck had a deep gash in it and the bedding was blood-soaked.

Their year-old daughter, who slept in a cradle against the wall, had also been murdered. Also with a sword, at a guess.

Doing his best to control his fury, Tom hurried out of the apartment. He was now certain that the enemy-whoever it was, but it almost had to be the Bavarians-had launched a well-planned and coordinated assault on the city. There was no way they could have managed something like this without the aid of traitors, including traitors in the military.

Tom and Engels had worried about that, but there hadn’t seemed to be much they could do about it at the moment. Tom’s artillery unit was the only one made up entirely of volunteers, mostly recruited by the CoCs in Magdeburg and the State of Thuringia-Franconia. The rest of the soldiers in the regiment were the men left behind by the Swedish general Baner when he left for Saxony with most of his army. Those soldiers were all mercenaries except for the Jaegers and boatmen-the River Rats, as they were called-recruited by Ernst Wettin while he’d been the administrator of the Oberpfalz. Clearly enough, a number of them had been persuaded to switch their allegiance to Duke Maximilian.

Once he was back out on the street, he could hear the sounds of fighting all over the city. He was sorely tempted to return to his quarters and help Rita make her escape, but he had duties of his own. With Engels dead, Tom was now the commanding officer of the regiment-or whatever portions of it, at least, had not defected to the Bavarians.

The one unit he was sure of were his own artillerymen. He’d have to start there. He set off at a run toward their barracks against Ingolstadt’s eastern wall.

“What do we do now?” asked Estelle McIntire, once she’d finished sewing up Rita’s wound and had sterilized it once again. “Sit tight here? Go somewhere? If so, where?”

“And if we do decide to go somewhere,” added Maydene Utt, “everybody better be really well-dressed. We’re in January, not June. January in the Little Ice Age, mind you. Right now, at a guess, the temperature isn’t any higher than fifteen degrees out there-Fahrenheit, I don’t hold with that Centigrade crap.”

Everyone looked at each other, gauging their mutual willingness and ability to brave the conditions of a January night in the middle of Germany. In the Little Ice Age, as Maydene had so kindly pointed out.

They’d almost certainly have to venture out into the countryside, too. Rita had no idea what the military situation looked like, but she was pretty sure it was dire. Tom had told her of his and Friedrich’s worries over the loyalty of many of the garrison troops. It looked as if the worst of those fears had come true, and if so she didn’t think there was much chance Colonel Engels and her husband could hold the city.

She said as much, ending with, “I don’t think we have a lot of choice. I think if we try to hole up here we’ll just wind up getting captured. After that…well, it’s likely to get awfully ugly.”

She didn’t see any reason to dwell on the details. She and Mary Tanner Barancek were young women. Both of them were good-looking, too, to make things worse-but that probably didn’t make much difference if Ingolstadt was sacked. Troops running amok were anything but discriminate. All five of the women were likely to be assaulted. The one man among them, Johann Heinrich Bocler, would get slaughtered out of hand.

Their one chance was the fact that all of them were up-timers except Bocler. Most down-time rulers and military commanders were leery of infuriating Americans for no good purpose, which the brutalization of five American women would certainly do. All the more so since one of them was Mike Stearns’ sister.

But…

First of all, the commanders of this attack probably wouldn’t even learn what was happening to the women until it was too late to stop it. Troops sacking a city were no more discriminate about getting official permission to commit atrocities than they were to commit them in the first place.

And secondly, Maximilian of Bavaria was one of the exceptions. The duke had made quite clear in times past that he held up-timers in no high regard, to put it mildly.

“I really don’t think there’s any choice,” she repeated. “We’ve got to get out of the city.”

Estelle and Willa grimaced. Maydene, stoic as ever, shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t disagree. But we’ll need some horses, or at least a wagon. There’s no way we can manage for very long on foot once we get into the countryside. We’re still hours from dawn. At that, we’re lucky there’s a moon out.”

“What about the Pelican? ” said Mary.

Everyone turned to look at her.

“Is it still here?” asked Willa uncertainly.

“And even if it is,” added Estelle, “would it carry all of us?”

Mary nodded vigorously. “It’d carry all of us-easy. And, uh, yeah. It’s still here.” She paused, seeming to avoid her aunt Willa’s gaze. “Well. At least, it was this morning.”

Fodor glared at her. “I told you to stay away from him!”

Even under the circumstances, as dire as they were, Rita couldn’t help but choke out a laugh. Fodor shifted the glare onto her.

“Give it up, Willa,” Rita said, shaking her head. “Trying to keep nineteen-year-old girls from chasing after boys has been a lost cause since the Stone Age.”

“He’s not a boy! He’s at least ten years older than she is.”

“He is not!” countered Mary hotly. “Stefano’s only twenty-six.”

“Seven years is still too much! Especially when he’s Latin.”

Maydene looked exasperated. “Is that ‘Latin’ as in Eye-talian, Willa? Like a lot of the population of Grantville? In fact, if I recall correctly, wasn’t your high school boyfriend Matt Difabri?”

“He was Italian-American,” Fodor said, defensively. “That Franchetti guy is Italian-Italian. It’s not the same thing.”

“Can we please concentrate on what’s important?” said Estelle. “Worry about Mary’s love life later. If that contraption can get us all out of here, I’m for using it.”

“Me too,” said Rita forcefully. “And there’s no time to lose. By now, Stefano is bound to be trying to get up in the air. We’ve got to catch him before he does.”

She gave the apartment a quick survey, to see if there was anything she wanted to take with her. The walkie-talkie radio, of course, which was also perched on the mantelpiece. Hopefully that would enable her to get in touch with Tom, since his unit had a radio also. Beyond that…

There was a fair number of personal items she’d hate to lose, but she sternly suppressed the urge to snatch them up. Besides the radio, there was really only one thing important.

“Mary, give me a hand,” she said, hurrying into the bedroom. Once there, she began emptying the chest of drawers against one of the walls. Her clothes got piled onto the bed, Tom’s got pitched unceremoniously onto the floor. No one, not even Maydene, was big enough to fit into her husband’s clothes.

As she did so, she pointed to a corner. There was an old suitcase there, that Tom had had with him when the Ring of Fire came and had held onto ever since. “Use the suitcase. Skip the underclothes but cram it full of whatever will help keep us warm.”

Maydene wouldn’t fit into Rita’s clothes, and she didn’t think Bocler probably would either. But there was no help for it.

Well…

Maydene stuck her head in. “Can I help?”

“Yes. Grab the blankets off the bed and roll them up. We’ll need them, I figure.”

Less than a minute later, the suitcase was packed and Utt had the blankets over her shoulder. Rita headed for the front door, stopped, and raced back into the bedroom. Tom kept a box of shotgun shells in the drawer of the little table next to the bed. She shoved it into the capacious pockets of the heavy jacket she’d put on and went back into the living room. After stuffing the walkie-talkie into one of her pockets and picking up the shotgun that she’d left leaning against the wall, she went into the corridor. As the rest of the party followed, she took the time to reload the weapon.

“Is anyone else armed?” she asked.

“Me,” said Estelle. Looking back, Rita saw that McIntire had pulled a revolver out from somewhere. The gun looked like a small cannon. Rita thought it was probably one of her husband Crawford’s guns. He had a big collection of them and was partial to heavy calibers, as she recalled.

The weapon looked too big for Estelle, but Rita knew there’d be no point in saying anything on the subject. Besides, even if the woman lost the revolver after firing it, her first shot would hit the target. McIntire was the sort of person who’d handle killing the same way she’d handled sewing up a wound. If it needs to be done, just do it.

Once they were out in the street, the sounds of fighting were much louder. They seemed to be concentrated toward the eastern side of the city. That was where Tom’s artillery unit had its barracks. The unit quartered next to them was a mercenary force, but it was under the command of Bruno von Eichelberg, a young man from a modest noble family in Brunswick whom Tom and Friedrich Engels had been on good terms with. Rita thought it was unlikely that Eichelberg’s unit had participated in whatever treachery was underway.

She was tempted for a moment to head that way, but stifled the impulse. She and her party would just get in the way and be a distraction for Tom. The best way she could help her husband under these circumstances was simply to get herself out of the city.

The Pelican was hangared just outside the city walls near the northwest gate. She set off in that direction, with her shotgun held at the ready. Estelle came right behind her with the revolver, followed by the three other women. Johann Heinrich Bocler brought up the rear.

The scholar and clerk seemed to be holding up well, a bit to Rita’s surprise and certainly to her relief. He was a studious young man, straightlaced to the point of being something of a prig. But he hadn’t gotten badly rattled at any point, and had even had the presence of mind to pick up one of the assailants’ pistols and the ammunition pouch he’d had on his belt. Rita had no idea if Bocler knew how to use the weapon, but the fact that he’d thought to take it was a good sign in itself.

There was only one incident along the way. As they came around a corner, they found a couple of soldiers breaking into a shop. One of them was smashing in the window with the butt of his musket while his companion watched.

As was more often the case than not with seventeenth-century soldiers, neither of them was wearing a uniform. So Rita had no way of knowing offhand which side they were on. But she figured the act of vandalism and presumed looting was a good enough indication and she didn’t dare hesitate for long.

Remembering the wild misses in the earlier gunfight, though, she controlled herself enough to aim carefully before she fired. The man she aimed at was the one watching, not the one smashing the window, since she figured he was the one who’d be able to react more quickly. He was standing perhaps thirty feet away and not looking anywhere near her. She took a breath, aimed, and squeezed the trigger.

He went down as if he’d been hit by a truck. At close enough range where marksmanship wasn’t a big issue, it was hard to beat slugs fired out of a 12 gauge. They had all the stopping power of heavy caliber seventeenth-century muskets but without the slow rate of fire.

In a hurry, but doing her best not to move frantically, Rita pumped in another round and aimed again. Luckily, the remaining soldier was either dim-witted or-quite likely-too drunk to react quickly. He wasn’t even looking at her. He was staring down at his companion, who was now sprawled against the wall of the building.

She fired. And…almost missed, even at that range. Her shot did strike the soldier’s musket, however. The bullet not only knocked the weapon out of his hand but some sort of ricochet struck him in the face. From the minimal damage done, it was probably a small piece of the firing mechanism or possibly just a splinter from the stock.

But the soldier was startled enough to clasp his face with his hands rather than deal with her. She jacked in another round. Not trusting her reactions-she had to be practically afloat in adrenaline-she strode forward a few steps, almost running, until she was no more than six feet away from him.

The soldier’s hands came down from a bloody face. His mouth was wide open as he stared at her. She fired. At his chest, and this time the bullet struck where she wanted it to. The soldier was knocked off his feet and back into the window he’d been smashing, taking what was left of the glass mostly with him.

Rita did her best to blank out the horror from her mind as she reloaded. She’d never killed anyone before tonight, and now she’d killed no fewer than four men. She’d never even been in a gunfight, for that matter, except for the escape from the Tower of London. But she hadn’t been directly involved in the fighting there.

Maydene came up to her. “You all right?” she asked softly.

Rita nodded. “Right enough.” She’d probably have some bad reactions later, but there was no time to worry about that now.

The shotgun reloaded, she set off again. “Let’s go, folks.”