Rolf Hempel had lost count.
He had absolutely no idea how many of those demonic shells had ripped into the fortifications in his vicinity. A part of him knew the number couldn't have been as high as he thought it was, but it had been high enough.
He didn't know how long this nightmare had been going on, either. It seemed like an eternity, and he cursed his superiors for letting it continue. Surely these horrible ironclads had amply demonstrated their ability to turn the entire city into a smoking heap of wreckage! How many more of Hempel's men had to die before they were allowed to capitulate and save their lives?
He was still asking himself that question when a ten-inch shell exploded three feet away from him and the point, for Rolf Hempel, became forever moot.
"Order to all units." Simpson had to raise his voice to a half-shout to make himself heard by eardrums stunned and battered by a sixty-minute bombardment. "Cease fire."
"All units cease fire, aye, aye, sir!" the signalman replied, and started shouting down the voice pipe to the radio room.
The thunderous explosions tapered off quickly as the order was passed, and Simpson opened the armored door and stepped out onto the bridge wing. He leaned out, looking down at the side of Constitution's casement and saw at least a couple of dozen shallow dents. There were a few places where individual steel planks were dished in more deeply, but there was no evidence of any significant damage, and he turned to look at Hamburg.
The city, he reflected, could not say the same thing.
The Wallenlagen was torn and ripped, half-invisible under a pall of smoke and dust. The good news was that the range was so short, and the trajectory of his weapons so straight, that it looked as if none of his fire had overshot the fortifications and landed in the city proper.
And the other "good news," he thought harshly, is that Stearns' demonstration of Gustav Adolf's… displeasure has just been made abundantly clear.
He surveyed the wreckage one more time, then stepped back into the conning tower.
"Instruct all units to secure their guns, then raise anchor," he said. "I believe we have an appointment in Luebeck Bay."
Chapter 39
This was the first time in the post-Ring of Fire universe that Mike Stearns had ever flown in a plane that wasn't piloted by Jesse Wood. That made him more nervous than he would have been otherwise, and he would have been nervous to begin with. Mike didn't have a fear of heights, as such, but he'd never enjoyed flying. That had been true even in up-time commercial aircraft, with their gleaming construction and much-touted safety record.
Woody must have noticed his tension, because at one point about halfway through the flight he gave Mike a grin and said, "I want you to know that we have the best safety record of anybody flying on this side of the Ring of Fire. Ain't no commercial airline comes even close."
Mike parsed the logic. "How reassuring. Of course, the Wright brothers could have made the same claim after their first flight at Kitty Hawk."
"Well, yeah. But it's still a statistical fact."
"There's no such thing as a statistical fact, Woody. What there is, is just the odds." The plane jolted around for a bit and Mike paused, stiff-faced and solemn in the manner of a man doing his level best to appear stoic in the face of mindless danger. "As I am just being reminded, thank you very much."
But the turbulence passed, soon enough. The truth was, it was a nice day for flying, with a mostly clear sky and not really very much in the way of turbulence. Blind good luck, given that Mike's mission was urgent and he would have flown in any weather short of near-suicidal.
"Damnation," he grumbled. "I'm not a gambling man."
Woody gave him a look that Mike's mother would have called "old-fashioned."
Mike couldn't help but smile a little. "All right, fine. Outside of politics."
"I was gonna say." Woody looked down, checking the Elbe to make sure he was still on course. "Way I look at it, trotting into a city in the middle of a civil war is a lot riskier than"-he patted the console of the aircraft-"flying in an old bus like this."
"I'm not going to be trotting, and it's not what I'd call a 'civil war.' "
Woody gave him another old-fashioned look. "I'll buy the trotting. The civil war part, now… Have the CoC guys won? What I heard just before takeoff, the situation in Hamburg was still what you'd call a free-for-all." He leaned forward a little, peering through the cockpit windscreen. "Speaking of which, there it is."
Mike leaned forward and peered also, but couldn't really see anything on the horizon beyond a splotch in what looked like a small sea of splotches.
"You can't really see the city yet," Woody said. "But it's there."
Mike was quite happy to take his word for it. He leaned back in his seat. "Oh, it's still a free-for-all. But it's more along the lines of a high-impact civil dispute than a real civil war. The CoC has a good chunk of the city under their control and Hamburg's authorities and the official militia aren't willing to launch a full-blown offensive to pry them out."
"Why not?"
Mike was a little amused to see the way a junior air force officer was questioning the prime minister of his nation on High Matters of State without so much as a by-your-leave-indeed, quite obviously without even having considered that he might be out of line. That wouldn't have happened in Simpson's by-the-book navy, for sure. Interservice rivalry in their new world, as such, was far milder than it had been back up-time-thankfully, as far as Mike was concerned. But what you might call the cultural differences between the various services were a lot more pronounced, to make up for it. If Mike were to make an analogy with his days as a student, the navy was the in-crowd fraternities and student government types; the army was the hairy radicals; and the air force was more or less the bikers.
But he didn't care, actually. Mike had gotten along well enough with everybody, in high school and college. He'd never heard Thorsten Engler's sarcastic opinion on the subject of up-timer security mania, but if he had he would've mostly agreed with him. Mike had concluded long before the Ring of Fire that at least ninety-five percent of all the "security necessities" he'd heard about up-time were just some bigshot's way of either covering something up or trying to make himself look like a bigger shot, or both.
"Well, I can't read their minds," Mike explained. "But, at a guess, I'd say the reason Hamburg's authorities are shying away from an all-out attack on the CoC stronghold in the city is because part of that stronghold includes one of the city's gates. Just outside of which, Torstensson's parked with eight full regiments."
"Ah." Woody frowned. "Then why doesn't the CoC just open the gate and be done with it?"
Mike clucked his tongue. "Flyboys. Trained by Colonel Jesse I-don't-need-no-steenkeeng-politics Wood, to make it worse. Let's just say that political turbulence is a lot more complicated than anything you'll run into up here-and the phrase Hamburg Committee of Correspondence has more than one noun."
Woody's frown had deepened. "To put it another way," Mike elaborated, "just because they're a CoC doesn't mean they're no longer citizens of Hamburg. They'll look at it from a different angle than the city's authorities, of course, but they're also looking to cut the best deal Hamburg can get out of this."
"Oh. All right, I can see that." Most of his attention was now focused on his flying, though, since he was getting ready to land. So all he said was, "And you're the deal-maker."
Torstensson was all business. "Till midafternoon, Michael." He glanced at his up-time watch. "Call it fifteen hundred, on the nose."
"Can we make it four o'clock? Sixteen hundred, rather."
The Swedish general shook his head, glancing at the western horizon. "No, sorry. This early in April, it will be dark by nineteen hundred. I want a minimum of four hours of daylight if I wind up fighting once we get into the city. Even going in at fifteen hundred is pushing it."