Ring of Fire III

Chapter 16

Ursula was wrong. Colonel von Troiberz did not get a rude awakening.

He didn’t wake up at all. The tavern was one of the first buildings hit by the firebombs and it was hit by no fewer than four of them-two dropped by the Albatross, and one from each of the airships that followed in the bombing run. Within less than five minutes, the building was an inferno. Von Troiberz had been so drunk when he fell asleep that he died of smoke inhalation without ever regaining consciousness.

Most of the soldiers in that building died. Only five made it out alive, and two of them died immediately thereafter when the eaves of the tavern collapsed on them while they were still in the courtyard.

The very worst casualties were inflicted on the soldiers two buildings over. There were eleven of them crowded into that house. It had been the “party house,” where those soldiers went who were in the mood to carouse-and they’d started carousing before noon. Only one survived and he suffered horrible burns that left him badly scarred.

Within fifteen minutes, the entire village was on fire. Almost three dozen cavalrymen had been killed, twice that many injured-and the stables were burning too. Luckily for the horses, a sober and conscientious sergeant had raced about unlocking all the doors in time for most of the beasts to escape.

Having made their escape, though, the horses were in no mood to stay in the vicinity of the holocaust. They scattered across the countryside, leaving all but nine cavalrymen stranded on foot.

In January. In the Little Ice Age. As night was falling. Most of them without having had time to don heavy clothing. A number of them bootless. And with nowhere nearby to spend the night indoors that wasn’t smoldering.

Some of the men just wandered off, but most of them gathered together near the village when the fires began dying down. Their commanding officer was nowhere to be seen, and neither were the two captains who had been with them. Of the officers who’d been in the village, only three lieutenants were left.

After some discussion, they agreed that the best course of action was to join Colonel von Schnetter’s infantry. Insofar as they knew where that camp was located, a subject on which there was considerable dispute. The lieutenants, in particular, were quarrelsome men. In the end, three different parties went their separate ways.

One of the parties found the camp. Another eventually stumbled across a deserted village two miles away before any of them had died, although some wound up losing toes to frostbite.

The third party died of exposure. The last man went at three o’clock in the morning.

Watching this all unfold from above, Rita was aghast. She’d had no idea-never once imagined-that the bombing run would have such horrific success. She’d thought that most of the bombs would miss entirely, first of all. Some would hit the target, certainly, but few enough that by the time the fires really began spreading most of the men down there would have been able to escape.

She hadn’t even thought about the horses. Americans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have understood how deadly it could be for a man to be stranded in winter without a horse. But she’d come from the end of the twentieth. “Being stranded” meant running out of gas and hitching a ride with the next car to come by. In a rural area like Grantville, people would usually stop for you. Especially in winter.

What had thrown her off, again, had been watching too many newsreels. She’d seen documentary footage that depicted bombing runs from World War II and the Korean War and the Vietnam War and Operation Desert Storm. Planes moving hundreds of miles an hour when they dropped their bombs; the trajectory of those bombs themselves covering a great distance before they finally hit the ground.

It was amazing any of them hit anything they were aimed at. And those bombs had been military-grade high explosives or incendiaries, vastly more powerful than the ones Bonnie Weaver had jury-rigged. By the time of the Iraq-Kuwait war, some of them had been guided munitions. But even as far back as World War II, she knew, the bombers had some kind of superb bombsights.

Her bombsights had been her eyes, looking down over the lip of the gondola, while two of Franchetti’s crewmen held a bomb on the same lip, waiting for her signal.

What she hadn’t considered, until the bombs started hitting, was that her bombing platform was almost stationary. She’d told Franchetti to maintain just enough power to keep the airship from drifting. Both of the airships that followed her after the Albatross unloaded all its bombs had done the same.

And none of it had taken very long. Once Rita saw that the bombs really didn’t need to be “aimed” at all, she’d told the crewmen to just start pitching them over the side as fast as they could.

Another deadly factor had been her decision to make the run at a much lower altitude that the airships normally flew over enemy troops. At her husband’s insistence, the airships had stayed at least two thousand feet high most of the time. They never dropped below a thousand feet.

But Rita had decided, just this once and to hell with what Tom said about it afterward, that they’d come in not more than the length of two footfall fields over the target. That was still within range of seventeenth-century musket fire, technically speaking. But at two hundred yards the fire would be wildly inaccurate. Besides, although Rita didn’t know the exact formulas, she knew from things her husband had said that smoothbore round shot lost its muzzle velocity much faster than rifled bullets did. She figured that even if a bullet fired from a musket six hundred feet down did manage to hit the envelope or even the gondola, it probably wouldn’t be moving fast enough to do a lot of damage. Barring a really lucky shot, anyway.

In the event, only two cavalrymen shot at them, and both of them used wheel-lock pistols. She had no idea where those bullets wound up going. Nowhere close, for sure.

This was just a massacre. She felt sick to her stomach.

Once she stopped screaming and brought her panic under control, Ursula got up and looked around. She had to get up because in her frenzied race away from the inferno the village had become, she’d eventually tripped on something and sprawled flat on the ground.

She’d come a long way from the village, she realized. At least a quarter of a mile. She wasn’t sure. She hadn’t been thinking about anything except get away! get away!

She looked up. Now, the things in the sky did look like monsters to her. You could still see all of them very clearly, since the sun hadn’t fully gone down yet. Its red hemisphere glowed above the western skyline.

She stood there for a while, gasping to regain her breath and trying to figure out what to do. Going back to the village was…unthinkable.

But where else? She looked around, more slowly this time, and realized she was the only person in sight.

She was cold, she suddenly realized. Very cold. The temperature was already below freezing. Within a few hours no one would be able to survive out here without some way to stay warm better than a coat and a pair of shoes. Even a good pair of shoes.

Noise drew her attention back to the sky. The first of the airships had turned and was now coming…

Right at her.

She screamed and started running again.

“What do you think is happening, sir?” von Haslang asked the colonel. Von Schnetter lowered the eyeglass and shook his head. “It’s too far away to see much. Something is burning, though. A whole village, I think, as bright as it is even from here.”

Both of them now looked above the glow in the distance. The airships in the sky were quite visible, even this far away.

“Do you think…?”

Von Schnetter sighed. “I don’t know, Heinrich. But…it could be, yes.”

He looked around at their own camp. “Better make preparations, Captain. Just in case we have to move suddenly.”

Tom Simpson was even farther away. But because of the radio, he didn’t have to wonder what had happened.

What he was starting to wonder about, though, was how much more his wife could take. There’d been a ragged edge to her voice that he’d never heard before.

There were a lot of ways in which Rita resembled her older brother Mike, but other ways in which they were not alike at all. One big difference was that Mike Stearns-as nice a guy as he was, and Tom would vouch for that-also had a ruthless side to him. As wide and deep as the Mississippi, sometimes.

Rita just plain didn’t. She was the sort of person for whom healing and nurturing came easily and killing did not.

At all.

Tom was starting to worry that she was going to come out of all this with a lot more scars-and a lot worse ones-than the one left on her arm by a splinter from an exploding door.

She hadn’t fired the first bullet. But she’d fired some of the ones that came after, including a gigantic bullet that had just taken out dozens of men and the whole village they’d been in.

“Look there!” said one of the Albatross ’s crewmen. His first name was Luca, but Rita couldn’t remember his last name. It wasn’t Franchetti but she thought he was somehow related to the Franchettis. Like most up-time businesses had been in a small town like Grantville, seventeenth-century companies were usually family affairs. The families got pretty big, too.

Luca was leaving over the rail of the gondola, pointing at something on the ground ahead of them. Rita went over and looked herself.

At first she didn’t see anything. It was now getting dark down on the ground, if not up here where the last of the sun was still visible.

After a few seconds she spotted a flash of movement that drew her eyes. It took her a few seconds to realize what she was seeing.

“It’s a woman, I think,” said Luca. “Hard to tell from here.”

Rita thought the figure on the ground was a woman herself. She didn’t know why, exactly. You really couldn’t distinguish body shapes from this far up, much less facial features. It was winter, too, when people wore bulky clothing.

But something, whatever subtlety of movement or posture, led her to think Luca was right.

He shook his head. “She might make it through the night, if she can find one of the abandoned villages and get inside. Probably not, though.”

Rita stared at him. Then, down at the woman below.

That was a woman, she was almost sure now. But even if it wasn’t, that person certainly wasn’t a Bavarian cavalryman.

“Fuck that,” she muttered. She turned to Franchetti. “Take the Albatross down, Filippo. All the way to the ground.” She pointed to the figure herself. “We’ll pick her up. We’ve got room and plenty of weight allowance, now that the bombs have all been dropped.”

“But…signora…”

“Oh, stop worrying! There’s nobody else down there. Not within half a mile, at the very least. We’ve got plenty of time to get down, pick her up, and get back in the air before anyone’ll be able to come at us.”

“But… signora…”

“ Just fucking do it!”

She took a deep, ragged breath. “Please, Filippo.” She had tears in her eyes. “I am so sick of killing people.”

In the end, what saved Ursula’s life was her own despair.

She ran from the monster. Ran and ran for a while. But it kept pursuing her, coming closer and closer to the ground.

Eventually, partly from exhaustion but mostly from too many years of seeing her hopes all scraped away, she just stopped. Then, sat on the ground, holding her knees. Ignoring the cold seeping into her buttocks. Just waited for her death, the way prey run to the ground waits for the predator.

If she’d kept running, she could have escaped the Albatross. It was dark now and she could have slipped away into the shadows any number of times, if she’d been thinking clearly.

Rita had almost given up hope herself.

The monster had the face of a young woman. Ursula hadn’t expected that.

Quite a pretty one. Black hair, blue eyes. The color was very clear, even in twilight. A slender build, she thought, although it was hard to be sure. She was wearing a peculiar, puffy sort of jacket.

The monster extended her hand. “Come on, girl,” she said. “It’s time to go.”

Some time later, looking out at the moon from the gondola, Ursula finally spoke.

“I’m flying,” she said, wonderingly. “I’m really flying.”

A while later, she added, “Away.”