"I suppose we've done better than we had any right to expect to get this far without a significant engineering casualty," he said.
"I don't imagine Commander Baumgartner feels that way at the moment, Admiral," Halberstat replied, and Simpson chuckled harshly.
"No, I don't imagine he does," he agreed. Commander C.H. Baumgartner was a dour fellow even in his sunniest moments-which this certainly was not. Simpson himself was one of the few people who even knew what the initials stood for. Most of the sailors in the navy who'd dealt with the officer just used the monicker an up-timer had given him: "Clod Hopper." Not to his face, of course.
Simpson looked at Halberstat. "Any more details on his problem?"
"He did send a follow-up message, sir." Halberstat extracted another folded message slip from the breast pocket of his uniform tunic and passed it across. "According to his engineer, it's a fractured steampipe. And he's got at least three badly injured men."
"Wonderful."
Simpson unfolded the second message and scanned it quickly. Actually, it wasn't a steampipe, he saw; it was the fitting where the steampipe in question joined the boiler itself, which made the injury reports understandable enough. Indeed, they were lucky the sailors in question appeared to have escaped with relatively minor burns, given the amount of live steam that must have escaped. He didn't feel especially lucky, however, and he suppressed a sudden temptation to swear out loud and turned to the signalman who had followed him out onto the bridge wing, instead.
"Message to Achilles, copied to Achates," he said. The signalman's pencil poised itself above his message pad, and he continued. "Stand by to assist Achates. Prepare to pass a tow, if required."
"Aye, sir." The signalman read back the message, and then headed for the radio room voice pipe when Simpson nodded.
"May I ask what you intend to do, sir?" Halberstat asked.
"Unless Commander Baumgartner's initial assessment is wrong, it's going to take at least thirty-six to forty-eight hours for him to make repairs-assuming he can make them out of shipboard resources," Simpson replied. "We can't afford to wait that long. The emperor is expecting us at Luebeck and General Torstensson's already moving. What's the closest town?"
"That would be Ritsenbuttel, I believe," Halberstat said, pointing downstream and to the southern bank.
"All right." Simpson nodded. "In that case, let's get a message sent back to Hamburg. We're going to need some sort of security force down here, if it turns out Baumgartner's estimate is overly optimistic. Until they can get here, I think his own Marines should be able to provide any base security he requires."
Du Bouvard swore inventively and with feeling as the Americans' steady approach suddenly slowed. He had no idea why it had happened. One of the timberclads was turning out of line, and as he watched, a second timberclad moved towards it, as if to render assistance. There was also a lot of white smoke-or possibly steam-streaming up.
Why the devil couldn't they have had whatever problem they're having fifteen minutes earlier? he demanded.
No one answered, and he shook his head in disgust. If he'd only known this was coming, he would never have put his swimmers into the water so soon! And if the Americans were having mechanical problems, it was entirely possible they would have no choice but to anchor somewhere after all while they made repairs. An anchored warship would have been far more vulnerable.
Lieutenant Leberecht Probst, USE Marine Corps, stood beside the bass boat's wheel and shaded his eyes with one hand as he looked philosophically back upriver.
Probst was better educated than the majority of his fellow Marines. Like Hans and Gretchen Richter, he was the son of a small printer. Unlike the Richters' father, however, Anton Probst was alive and well… and an enthusiastic supporter of the Committees of Correspondence whose political tracts had brought him so much business of late. Young Leberecht had read those same tracts while helping to set type, and one thing had led to another.
Now he watched the ironclads reducing their speed to little more than a crawl while Achilles went alongside Achates.
"What do you think, Leberecht?" Ensign Kjell Halvorsen asked, and he shrugged.
"I think somebody broke down. From the looks of things, it was Achates."
"Commander Baumgartner's going to be pissed," Halvorsen said with a certain satisfaction. The tall young Swede wasn't especially fond of Commander Baumgartner, since Commander Baumgartner's attractive younger daughter was quite fond of Ensign Halvorsen and the commander did not approve. Of course, Baumgartner didn't approve of much of anything.
"I imagine he is," Probst agreed with a slight smile. Then he looked around the boat and cleared his throat.
"I don't believe I recall suggesting that it was no longer necessary to keep an eye out," he remarked to the air in general, and his detachment's attention returned magically to scanning the riverbanks and the water around them.
"It's definitely the fitting, sir," Lieutenant Hafner, Commander Baumgartner's senior engineer, said as he climbed up the internal ladder to the timberclad's bridge. He shrugged in disgust. "We've got a crack clear through the casting."
"Damn," Baumgartner said, far more mildly than he felt. Then he shook his head. "And what about those burns?"
"Ugly," Hoffner said. "Gunther's arm, especially. Lothar is doing what he can, but-"
The lieutenant shrugged again, and Baumgartner nodded. They were lucky that Admiral Simpson had insisted that each of the navy's major combatants had to have at least one trained sick bay attendant from the up-timers' training classes aboard. Even though the SBAs like Chief Lothar Tummel weren't considered full-fledged "doctors" by their up-time instructors, they were so much better than most seventeenth-century physicians that it was almost miraculous. Still, there were limits in all things.
"Repairs?" Baumgartner asked, shifting mental gears once more as he watched his deck crew making fast the towline Achilles had passed across.
"Not out of our own resources," Haffner said grimly. "A steam pipe we probably could have fixed, but this is going to have to be torched off and replaced, and we don't have the gear aboard for that. It's going to have to be sent forward to us from Magdeburg."
"The admiral isn't going to want to hear that."
"Oh, I'm well aware of that, sir. Unfortunately-"
The lieutenant shrugged yet again, and Baumgartner snorted. Haffner's apparent insouciance undoubtedly owed a great deal to who was going to actually have to tell Admiral Simpson that thirty percent of his timberclads had just become nothing more than a floating battery on a raft. On the other hand, the admiral wasn't in the habit of blaming people for things that clearly weren't their fault.
Which was quite a bit more than Baumgartner could have said for other military officers he'd served under.
"All right, Crispus," he sighed, "I'll tell him. When you go back below, ask Nikolaus to come up here. He and I are going to have to discuss port security with Rudiger."
"Yes, Sir," Hoffner said. Nikolaus Schimmel was Achates' executive officer, and Lieutenant Rudiger Kirsch was the timberclad's gunnery officer.
The engineer saluted and disappeared back down the ladder, and Baumgartner turned to his bridge signalman.
"Message for the admiral," he said.
John Simpson grunted as he read the new message slip. It was a sound of unhappy confirmation, not surprise.
"What I was afraid of from the beginning," he said, looking up at Captain Halberstat. "It looks like we don't have any choice but to send them into this Ritsenbuttel. I'm half-tempted to detach one of the other timberclads to help keep an eye on her, too."
Halberstat looked surprised, and Simpson grimaced.
"I'm worried about those intelligence reports about the scuba rigs that may have… fallen into enemy hands, let's say. I don't like the thought of leaving one of our ships all alone when we don't know where that scuba gear is. Especially when the ship in question can't move under its own power."