"Will the emperor be joining us, do you think?" Thorpe asked.
Torstensson smiled. "With him, who knows?"
As it happened, Gustav Adolf was coming to that decision almost the same moment Torstensson asked the whimsical question.
He didn't like the answer much, though. He even lapsed into blasphemy, something he did rarely.
"God damn it, Nils," the emperor said, "I had been looking forward to that. After six months of this miserable siege! A straight clean battle, on the open field! Do wonders for me!"
Colonel Ekstrom said nothing. It was always best, in a situation like this, to let Gustav Adolf argue with himself. However impetuous he might be on the battlefield, he was as canny a ruler as any in Europe. Certainly canny enough to recognize, once he pondered the matter, that he was indispensable in the coming negotiations with the king of Denmark-and quite dispensable meeting the French. Torstensson was perfectly capable of dealing with that matter himself.
Besides, his plaintive outcry had been more in the way of habit than anything heartfelt. Truth be told, as sieges went, this one at Luebeck had been very far from "miserable." Once the American scuba divers had destroyed several Danish ships anchored in the Trave, early in the war, the Ostender fleet had moved too far down into the bay to pose any real danger to the city. The enemy had never even been able to completely invest Luebeck. There'd always been a corridor open northeast of the city through which enough in the way of supplies had been sent to keep Luebeck's citizens and garrison from being too badly strapped.
That was due, in large part, to the USE Air Force. As few planes as the air force had, and as limited as its real fighting capabilities were, Colonel Wood's people had provided the best possible reconnaissance-and were likely to scare off whatever enemy cavalry forces were sent to cut the supply line, anyway. Even if they couldn't, there was never any possibility of the Ostenders launching a surprise attack on a supply convoy. The worst that happened was that a convoy had to return to the fortified and garrisoned supply depot at Grevesmuhlen, halfway between Luebeck and Wismar, and wait a day or two for the enemy's cavalry to leave.
So, Gustav Adolf had been able to spend the past six months in Luebeck without any great immediate cares or worries. He'd even spent them in a certain amount of luxury. If not so much in terms of his accommodations-he'd settled for a fairly spartan room in the Rathaus-then certainly in terms of his library. Among the items brought into Luebeck with the supply convoys had been a large number of books. Replicas, for the most part, of certain up-time titles the emperor was keenly interested in studying.
Gustav Adolf had read a great deal, over those months. And spent as much time thinking as he did reading. The first time he'd really been able to do so, since the Ring of Fire.
The conclusions he came up with were… often very interesting, to Colonel Nils Ekstrom. Fortunately, unlike Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, he felt under no compulsion to try to talk the emperor out of them.
"How do you propose to get to Copenhagen?" the colonel asked. "Aboard one of the ironclads?"
"No, no. Mind you, it's tempting. Ha! The pleasure I'd take, staring at that drunken bastard Christian over the barrel of a ten-inch gun! But…"
Gustav Adolf shook his head in an almost comically lugubrious manner. "No, I shall forego the pleasure. Best, I think, not to arrive in quite so martial a manner. Besides, it would be a nuisance for Simpson to have to delay things just to wait for an emperor to come aboard one of his ships. A man after my own heart, there. He'd have made a superb cavalry commander, you know."
The emperor looked out the window, which gave him a view to the east. "No, I'll take one of Admiral Gyllenhjelm's ships. That should do for the purpose."
Ekstrom nodded. "And the other matter? Regarding Stearns?"
Still looking out the window, Gustav Adolf smiled. "Ah, Nils-so diplomatic, you are. If you were Axel, you know, you'd have been haranguing me on my folly."
"I don't feel that's my place, Your Majesty." In point of fact, Ekstrom was rather dubious about the emperor's likely decision. But…
That simply wasn't his place. His job, as he saw it, was to help the emperor make whatever decision the emperor felt was best. Let the chancellor try to talk him out of it, once it was made. No easy task, that, of course.
"Yes, I've decided. The equipment needed to repair the Achates should have arrived from Magdeburg by now. Send Stearns a message instructing him to take a force from Hamburg-a good cavalry regiment should do-down to the stranded timberclad. He's to reinforce the existing guard, of course. But, most of all, I want him to take charge of the entire operation and get the Achates ready for action again."
Ekstrom simply nodded. "Yes, Your Majesty."
Now, Gustav grinned. "Amazing. Not a single word informing me that I am grossly violating protocol. What, Nils? Not one?"
Ekstrom hesitated, before deciding at the last moment that was an invitation for him to see if he could find any fallacies in the emperor's reasoning.
"They do make a fetish, Your Majesty, of the subject of separating civil from military affairs."
"So they do. But calling it a 'fetish' misses the mark, I believe. There is a logic to the whole thing, which my extensive reading has made clear to me. The problem is not simply-not even primarily-a matter of abstractions. There is a solid core of practicality that lies beneath. I will tell you what it is."
He turned away from the window. "Organization, Nils. A society so well organized-top to bottom-that clear lines of authority can be defined and delineated."
He chuckled heavily. "They have their own superstitions, you know. One of the greatest being their firm belief that they are individualists-'rugged,' no less, being their favorite qualifier-and deeply opposed to anything that smacks of what they call 'red tape.' "
Ekstrom chuckled also. "True. Quite amazing, really, given that they are the world's ultimate bureaucrats. I've been told they even put up signs in their buildings, giving precise instructions as to where anyone should go to reach whatever-precisely defined-office they might be seeking."
"Oh, yes, it's true. My daughter is quite charmed by the things. She got into some trouble once, when she took it upon herself to have soldiers move some of the signs around, in the palace at Magdeburg, just to see what would happen."
"I can imagine!" But the humor of the moment led to a far more serious issue, which Ekstrom wondered if he should raise.
Gustav Adolf raised it himself, however. "Yes, yes, I know. Sooner or later, I will have to decide if I wish to heed the advice of my daughter's attendants. Seeing as how they flood me with enough missives that I use them regularly to start fires in my fireplace."
He clasped his hands behind his back and began pacing, in that heavy cavalryman's way. "But I think not. No, I think those frantic noblewomen will simply have to learn to make the same accommodations that I've decided I must make myself. Now that we've let the genie out of the lamp, putting it back in is simply hopeless. Better to make a pact with the creature. Since he is not, actually, a devil. Not that, whatever else."
Ekstrom waited patiently. Sooner or later, the emperor would come to the point.
Smiling again, Gustav Adolf tugged at his mustache. "There's a soldier somewhere in Torstensson's army. A sergeant in the volley gun batteries, by the name of Thorsten Engler. My daughter insists-instructs me, no less-that I must make him a count, at the very least. He has become betrothed, it seems, to her favorite American attendant."