Ring of Fire III

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 Bocler. 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?”

Bocler 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.”

Well. It turned out he was a splendid fellow. Who knew?

Rita was glowering at him. “Why should I be any safer than anyone else?”

Bocler made a face. “Mrs. Simpson-please. You must be realistic about these things.” Now he gave Tom an apologetic glance. “Meaning no disrespect, Major, but the key political factor here is that your wife is also the sister of General Stearns. Short of recapturing the two young heirs to Bavaria now in Amberg, Duke Maximilian could have no better hostage than she.”

He was right, Tom realized immediately. He hadn’t even considered that. Rita was so unpretentious that no one who knew her thought of her as a “big cheese.” And like most up-timers, even years after the Ring of Fire, Tom didn’t really think of holding people hostage as a political tactic. Kidnapping was just a crime, dammit.

But in the seventeenth century, as had been true for at least a millennium in Europe, holding high-ranked captives for ransom or blackmail was considered business-as-usual.

But then, why…

Rita had seen the same flaw in the logic. “That’s bullshit, Heinrich!” she snapped at Bocler. “You came in right after it happened, so you should know. Those guys who broke into our home weren’t trying to take me hostage. The first thing the bastards did when they came through the door was try to shoot me.”

“That happened in the heat of the moment, when they’d just smashed through the door,” countered Bocler. “I think they expected to find you in bed, not standing right in front of them. That first shot was probably fired in reflex. Thereafter, of course, since you were shooting back with the shotgun, they had no choice but to try to kill you.”

The secretary spread his hands. “A great deal depends on the instructions the assassins were given, which we don’t know. In particular, were they offered a share of the ransom? If they were, then they’d have had a keen incentive in keeping you alive. But Duke Maximilian is just as well-known for his penny-pinching as his ruthlessness. They probably weren’t offered any such incentive, so they had no great reason not to simply murder you.”

It made sense. Tom had been there himself, and remembered the chaos and fury of that brief gunfight. Unless the assassins had been tightly focused on the goal of capturing Rita, their natural fighting instincts would have overridden everything else.

And, regardless, Bocler’s general point remained valid. Rita had no business getting down on the ground where she could be captured.

From the fact that she was now just silently glaring at the secretary, Tom knew that Rita understood it herself. She could be stubborn beyond belief, but she also had a very strong sense of duty.

Still, he hesitated to say anything. In the foul mood she was in, she’d lash out at him if he did.

Thankfully, Bocler stepped into the breach again. “Of course, we do need to lighten up the airship. But I can take care of that problem. I don’t weigh as much as Herr Siers, but I certainly weigh more than you do.”

At a guess, the secretary probably weighed at least one hundred and eighty pounds. He might even be pushing two hundred. He was on the short side, but thickly-proportioned.

“One-or all of us-could get off also,” said Maydene Utt. “There’s no use for auditors on board the Pelican. ”

She sounded a bit uncertain. Tom was more than a bit alarmed. He had no use for three auditors either, down here on the ground. He and his troops would be undertaking a forced march over the next two days. Granted that middle-aged Appalachian women were almost invariably tougher than they looked, they still weren’t accustomed to that sort of exertion.

Bonnie Weaver stepped into the breach, this time. “That’s silly, Maydene. You and Willa and Estelle are almost fifty years old.” Fodor started to protest something but Bonnie drove right over her. “And the three of you have been on horseback for the last two years-no, it must be three, now. When was the last time you walked as much as half a mile?”

She made a wry face. “Me, on the other hand, I’m scared of horses. So I walk everywhere. And I weigh more than any of you except Maydene. So we can lighten the airship further by putting me on the ground too. Between me and Heinrich, that more than makes up for adding the corporal and his radio equipment.”

Tom was a bit dubious at the prospect of having Bonnie along on the march, but only a bit. Like every military force of the day that had been in one place for a while, the Danube Regiment had collected camp followers. Women, mostly, who were either married to one of the soldiers or pretended to be. They doubled as cooks and laundresses for the unit; and, in some cases, prostitutes. There were at least two hundred of them along on this march, including several dozen children. If they could keep up-which they surely could, with the incentive of staying out of Duke Maximilian’s clutches-then Bonnie should be able to as well. She was on the plump side, true. But that was due to genetics, not sedentary habits. She was a vigorous sort of person, as you’d expect from someone who’d chosen to become a surveyor.

“What time do you think it is?” asked Willa Fodor. She was squinting to the east, trying to see if she could spot any signs of the dawn arriving. “My watch doesn’t work any more.”

Neither did Tom’s. He hadn’t worn a watch in more than a year, since the battery finally died. By then, four years after the Ring of Fire, silver oxide batteries-the very few that were left-cost a small fortune. It hadn’t seemed worth the expense, especially since the new battery would eventually die also. With a handful of exceptions, the only up-time watches that were still functional were old-fashioned wind-up watches. And there weren’t all that many of those.

Happily, there had already been a primitive watchmaking industry in Europe when the Americans arrived, which quickly began adapting the designs in up-time encyclopedias. The balance spring and balance wheel designed by Huygens in the late seventeenth century in the up-timers’ universe were well within their capabilities. Within two or three years, a fairly large number of pocket watches were available in much of Europe.

They were expensive, of course, and up-timers tended to scorn them. The watches weren’t nearly as accurate as the timepieces Americans were used to.

Bocler dug into his coat pocket and came out with one. He flipped open the lid and tilted the watch so he could see the face by the light of the moon. “It’s almost five o’clock in the morning,” he said.

Seeing everyone staring at him, he smiled slightly. “No, of course I can’t afford such a device on my salary. Duke Ernst gave it to me as a gift, when he left for Saxony.”

He put it back in its pocket. “I have tested it against American electronic timers. It is accurate within ten minutes every day. I have to keep adjusting it, naturally.”

The sun would be rising in a couple of hours, then. They still weren’t more than four miles from Ingolstadt. Tom wanted to get five or six miles away before making camp, if at all possible. But he’d stop sooner if they found a good place to set up defensive fieldworks. It wouldn’t be long before the Bavarian cavalry found them and they had to start fighting.

The men needed some sleep, too, even if only for two or three hours. And something to eat.

Von Eichelberg had been reading his mind, apparently. He’d make a superb staff officer. “There is a very good place to set up camp about a mile farther down the river, Major,” he said. “Thick forest comes almost to the river, creating a bottleneck. With your guns, we could hold off five or six times our number.”

Tom nodded. “Let’s be about it, then.” He turned to Rita. “You’re in charge up there, hon. If it looks like you’re in any danger of running out of fuel, head for Regensburg immediately. I’m hoping you’ll be able to scout for us all the way, but it’s not worth the risk. If you lose power, the winds will probably blow you into Bavaria or Austria.”

It was tempting to send the Pelican to Regensburg right now. They could refuel and, thereafter, could provide the regiment with reconnaissance without having to worry about losing power.

But that presupposed that “refueling” was a simple, cut-and-dried matter, which it certainly wouldn’t be. By the time the relevant authorities could consult with each other, wrangle over everything relevant authorities could invariably find to wrangle about-you could get a headache just thinking about it-the regiment would probably have arrived in Regensburg and made it all a moot point.

Rita gave him a quick hug. A moment later, she was headed back toward the Pelican. The three female auditors and Corporal Baier followed her.

Tom looked at Bonnie and Johann Heinrich. “Do you two have anything you need to get off the airship? If you do, you’d better move quickly.”

The two of them looked at each other, then simultaneously shook their heads.

“No,” said Bonnie. “We were in such an all-fired hurry to get out of the inn when the fighting started that we didn’t take anything with us.” She nodded toward the secretary. “He’s been staying in the same inn and came with us.”

Bocler shrugged. “I regret not taking some additional clothing, but other than that, there really wasn’t anything in my room worth bringing. Administrator Christian sent me here to compile records on a number of routine matters. The Bavarians are welcome to plunder the lot-the very great lot-and take it back to Munich. Perhaps they’ll die of boredom as they study the files. I came very close to doing so myself.”

So Bocler had a sense of humor, too. Who knew?

Certainly not Bonnie Weaver. The expression on her face, looking at him, was positively startled.