Ring of Fire III (61 page)

The two company commanders came up to join him. “What do you want to do, sir?” asked Captain Conrad Fischer.

Tom had been pondering the problem. With a firefight going on, they couldn’t go directly to the barracks. Even with a moon out, the visibility wasn’t good enough for the men in the barracks to distinguish easily between friend and foe at a distance. In this dim lighting, the field-gray uniforms of the USE regulars would be hard to tell apart from the more nondescript clothing and gear worn by the Bavarians—even leaving aside the problem that, if Tom was right, a fair number of the enemy were USE defectors wearing the same uniform.

If the artillerymen saw a mass of soldiers charging toward them, they’d assume they were enemies and open fire. And that fire would be pretty devastating. By now, forted up in their barracks and the arsenal which directly adjoined it, the regiment’s artillery units would have their cannons in position and loaded with canister. The somewhat desultory gunfire Tom could hear was not the noise produced by a frontal charge. The Bavarians would have tried that once, been driven off, and were now settling down to what amounted to a siege.

It couldn’t last forever, of course. Eventually, they’d bring up their own artillery. But at least until dawn, the Bavarians were stymied.

“Nothing for it,” he muttered.

“What was that, sir?” asked Erhard Geipel, the other captain.

Tom shook his head. “Just talking to myself. We don’t have any choice. We’ll have to attack the enemy from the rear—well, more likely the flank—and drive them off. Until and unless we do that, there’s no way we can join the artillerymen.”

“They’ll just fire on us,” agreed Fischer. “But we may be outnumbered, sir.”

“We almost certainly are,” Tom said grimly. “The Bavarians would have sent at least a battalion to seize the artillery barracks.”

He was using “battalion” in a generic sense, not the precise meaning that the term had in the USE army. Like most armies of the day, the Bavarian forces were composed largely of mercenaries. A good number of them would be Italians, and not more than a third would have come from Bavaria itself. Mercenaries were organized into companies—another generic term—which were of whatever size their commanders could put together, ranging from less than a hundred to close to a thousand.

Tom was convinced that part of the reason many seventeenth-century armies liked crude formations like tercios was because the rigidity of the formation compensated to some extent for the irregularities of the units that actually made them up. But in a free-for-all melee like this sort of street fighting after a successful assault on a city, he knew the Bavarian commander, whoever he was, would have simply dispatched one of his larger “companies” to take the artillery barracks.

That meant Tom and his two understrength companies were going to be attacking a force that was at least twice as large as they were.

So be it. They didn’t have any other option, so far as he could see. Hopefully, the much-ballyhooed “advantage of surprise” would turn out to be all it was cracked up to be.

* * *

Seeing motion in the shadows of the street ahead of them, Rita pressed herself against the wall of a building and gestured with her hand to tell the people following her to stop. She could hear the slight scuffling of their feet but didn’t think anyone else could if they weren’t within ten yards. The motion she’d spotted had been at least twice that far away, just past an intersection.

She tried to figure out what to do. They were now close to the gate that led out of the city toward the airfield. That made it tempting to just charge ahead, and deal with whatever they ran across. But the shadows were very dark. There was only one street lamp in sight and that was next to a door twenty yards or so down a cross street. Rita couldn’t really see anything now. The motion she’d spotted had stopped. For all she knew, a whole squad of Bavarian soldiers was waiting in ambush.

Behind her, Mary whispered something. Rita couldn’t make out the words but she was pretty sure Mary had asked one of the other women what was holding everything up—as if any of them knew either!

For a moment, she considered firing a shot into the shadows. Just to see what happened, basically. It was quite possible that the motion she’d seen had been nothing more than a street mongrel scurrying for cover.

But that would be insane. The motion could also have been caused by a frightened child.

“Oh, fuck it,” she muttered. Rita turned and handed her shotgun to Maydene, who’d been following right behind her. “If anybody shoots me, kill him, will you?”

She turned back around and strode out into the street. In for a penny, in for a pound. She might as well make herself as visible as possible.

In the same spirit, not knowing what else to say, she shouted: “Hey, you!”

A second or so later, she got a response.

“Rita, is that you?”

That
had
to be Dina Merrifield. Nobody else she knew could manage to speak Amideutsch with that much of a twang. Dina was from southern West Virginia, where people’s speech had a much more Appalachian accent than they did in Grantville.

“Oh, thank God!” another woman exclaimed. Rita thought that was probably Bonnie Weaver.

A woman came into the light cast by the distant street lamp. As she’d guessed, it was Bonnie.

“Boy, are you the proverbial sight for sore eyes,” Weaver said. “We heard you coming but didn’t know who you were. We ran across a Bavarian patrol a few minutes ago, but we managed to hide from them. At least, I think they were Bavarian even though their uniforms looked like ours. I don’t know who else would be attacking Ingolstadt.”

They were probably traitors rather than Bavarians, Rita thought. But this was not the time and place to share her suspicions and guesses on that subject.

“Who else is with you?” she asked Bonnie. “And where’s the
Pelican
?”

Bonnie gestured behind her. “It’s at the airfield. Stefano should have it ready to fly by now, even working on his own. All we’ve got to do is get there—but we’ve got a problem. Hank was hurt pretty badly.”

“Can he walk?”

“Hell, Rita, he’s not even conscious. We’ve got him in a wheelbarrow we found, but we’re not making much progress any longer. We’re pretty well worn out.”

Given Siers’ size, Rita wasn’t surprised. “Well, we can spell you on that chore.”

By now, all of her people had come out into the street. So had Amanda Boyd and—sure enough—Dina Merrifield.

Böcler came forward. “I will handle the wheelbarrow. I am not doing anything else and I am not much use with firearms.”

Uncertainly, Rita stared at him. The secretary wasn’t even five and half feet tall. He had pretty wide shoulders for a man his size, but a good part of his bulk looked to be fat rather than muscle.

Bonnie had obviously been thinking along the same lines. “Ah...Hank Siers is awfully heavy.”

Böcler shrugged. “So I will be very tired by the time we reach the
Pelican
. But I will be able to rest then. I am not much use with airships either.”

The gunfire that Rita could hear had become rather desultory and all of it was now coming from the direction of the artillery barracks. She was pretty sure that her husband’s unit was the only one still putting up a fight. They were probably well-fortified and the Bavarians had stopped trying to take the barracks with a frontal assault. They’d be settling in for a siege and waiting until they could bring up some cannons.

Suddenly the sounds of intermittent gunshots was replaced by a cacophony. That was the sound of hundreds of guns being fired mixed in with the sound of men shouting. Here and there she could hear the clap of grenades, too.

She felt a surge of hope. That might be Tom, leading a charge to relieve the siege of the barracks.

The hope was short-lived, of course. Tom could easily get killed in the next few minutes.

But that thunderclap of battle also gave them their best opportunity to get out of the city. Any enemy patrols would be drawn toward the sound.

“Let’s go,” she said. Böcler left immediately, heading toward the shadows where the wheelbarrow was located. Rita turned to Weaver. “Bonnie, stay on top of Johann Heinrich, will you? I think he’s overestimating his strength and endurance. And you know what men are like in front of a bunch of women.”

Bonnie grinned. “Yeah, he’ll refuse to admit he can’t handle it until he collapses and we’ve got to carry
two
of the silly bastards. Neither one of whom would ever grace the covers of
GQ
or
Esquire.
”

Rita chuckled. “God, can you remember a world where they published magazines like that? Do you miss it much?”

“Not the magazines. I sure as hell miss the plumbing, though, any time I venture out of Grantville. Wait’ll you see what passes for toilet facilities on a seventeenth-century airship.”

“Gah.”

“You did bring your own toilet paper, I hope. No? Boy, are you in for a treat.”

“Gah.”

Chapter 5

Tom never remembered much afterward about the assault that drove off the Bavarians besieging the artillery barracks. The light thrown by a three-quarter moon only seems bright when everything is calm and peaceful. In the chaos of a battle, there were shadows everywhere and all colors were leached out. You could detect motion clearly, and that was about it.

That might have been a blessing. Tom still had vivid memories of his first real battle, when he and Heinrich Schmidt had driven off an assault on Suhl by Wallenstein’s mercenaries almost four years earlier. The horror hadn’t stemmed from the fighting itself. There hadn’t been much of that, since they’d been firing at an enemy in the open from behind good fieldworks. The end result had been a lot closer to a massacre than what you could really call a battle. Afterward, the field had been carpeted with bodies. And blood; and intestines; and brains; and some things whose identity Tom had never been sure about and didn’t want to be.

There wasn’t so much of that tonight. Not because it wasn’t there but because you couldn’t see it very well. Fighting in the darkness, by the light of a moon and the flashes of gunfire and grenades, all a man had time for was motion. Once an enemy went down, you ignored him. The blood spreading out from his body blended into the cobblestones. Everything was a shade of gray, and blood was no different.

There were drawbacks to that, of course. Twice he slipped and fell, when his foot skidded on something wet—and, in one case, horridly squishy. But who could say? In that sort of melee, the falls might even have saved his life, when bullets passed through space he no longer occupied.

His one clear memory was that of an enemy soldier rising from the street, as he neared the last corner before the barracks. The man had probably slipped and fallen himself. He must have fired his gun and hadn’t had time to reload—or he simply panicked. He came up screeching, thrusting his arquebus forward as if it were a spear and catching Tom in the stomach. If the weapon had been a spear, the blade would have sunk into him at least six inches. As it was, the gun barrel just knocked some of the wind out of him and left a nasty bruise.

Not all of his wind, though; not even most of it. Tom’s torso was massive, and most of the mass was hard muscle. He didn’t feel any pain and didn’t even realized he’d been bruised until afterward. He just grunted—a very pronounced sort of “oof!”—and struck back in reflex.

That instinctive reaction was not the best response, all things considered, since he held his pistol in his hand and the blow was mostly delivered by his knuckles. Against a lobsterstail helmet, too, not a mere skull.

That
did
hurt. But as strong as Tom was, the blow knocked his opponent back down onto the street. He was dazed, and his weapon slid out of his hands.

Before Tom could decide what to do, a pikehead came from behind him, thrusting forward just past his elbow. He was almost deafened by the screech of the soldier wielding it, who was now standing right next to him as he skewered the man lying on the cobblestones.

Night battles aren’t much suited for taking prisoners. Tom would probably have decided to kill the man himself, in another second or two.

He took a moment to look around, the first time he’d had a chance to do so since he ordered the charge. And was relieved to see that the much-vaunted virtues of surprise had real substance. Everywhere he looked, the enemy was running away.

At least, he assumed they were the enemy. Some of them were wearing the same USE uniform that his own men were wearing. Traitors from the 1st Battalion, he figured. The rest, the ones in more nondescript clothing, would be the Bavarian mercenaries.

He fought down the temptation to order a pursuit. If there were any chance of winning a real victory here, he would have given the order. But even before he launched the charge, he’d come to realize that Ingolstadt was lost.

Tom wasn’t the only commander who’d used the factor of surprise tonight. Duke Maximilian of Bavaria had done so also, and done so to much greater effect. Tom had taken a barracks; the duke had taken a city. There was simply no way Tom would be able to drive the Bavarians back out of Ingolstadt with the forces that remained to him. All he could do now was try to lead an organized retreat out of the city and salvage as much of the regiment as he could.

Captain Geipel came up to him, pointing over his shoulder with a thumb. “One of my sergeants says he’s established contact with the artillerymen in the barracks. But they’re distrustful since they don’t know him and—just as you guessed—a number of the regiment’s units have turned traitor.”

“I’ll talk to them.” Tom started toward the corner Geipel had been pointing out, with the captain walking alongside him. “You and Fischer get your companies back into order. We’re heading out as soon as we can get the artillerymen moving.”

“Where to, sir?” Geipel’s question sounded a bit apprehensive.

“Don’t worry, Captain. I don’t propose to attack the Bavarians with what little we’ve got. We’re leaving the city altogether.”