"Speedbrakes… in!"
While Jesse and Ent pushed their throttles forward and pulled hard, hard, sucking the sticks back into their laps, Emil and Dev hit the releases that allowed the metal plates to streamline along the fuselage. Jesse grunted against the force of a five "G" recovery, tightening his stomach muscles to trap the blood there. Despite that effort, his vision narrowed as blood drained from his head. The sirens stopped their racket as the noses came up and Jesse squinted to see. Noting a positive climb more by feel than anything else, he released back pressure and could see again as he held the zoom climb, rocketing skyward, trading airspeed for altitude. As he leveled off high above the city, Jesse loudly expressed the exhilaration of every pilot since the first dive recovery.
"Hot damn, that was fun!"
Grinning like a kid, Jesse looked into the small mirror at the top of the windscreen and saw Emil grinning back at him. Jesse nodded, sharing the feeling that only airmen felt, a feeling that, for the moment, erased all differences between them. Jesse glanced over at his wingman and saw two more grins. Nodding again, he was suddenly glad they had brought no weapons.
Nobody should get killed on a day this fine.
He keyed the mike. "Gustav Two, go trail."
As Ent slid out of fingertip and lined up a hundred yards behind, Jesse spoke again. "Okay, Ent, just like in training, stay on my six and don't let go."
Getting two clicks, Jesse slowly rolled to his left and began another dive back toward the rooftops of Hamburg. What followed was a thirty minute aerial tango, a whirling, diving, turning, roaring, howling dance that took the aircraft high, high above the city and down low, dashing just clear of the rooftops and steeples. As they continued, Jesse made his maneuvers more abrupt, more unexpected, testing the limits of Ent's ability. At one point, snapping down out of a vertical climb, he looked through the top of the canopy and saw Ent, still going up, looking at him through his canopy. As he tried to shake the young pilot off his tail, he almost forgot why they were there. Leveling off for a moment over the city, he saw he needn't have worried. The streets were full of people, all staring upward, waving their arms and shouting unheard cheers. Clearly enough, however recalcitrant Hamburg's authorities were being toward Gustav Adolf's proposal-demand, really-that the city join the USE, a large number of its citizens had no problem with the notion at all.
I always did like an airshow, Jesse thought. He suddenly realized he was tired, wrung out by the strain and the work of heavy aerobatics. Calling Ent back into fingertip, he was preparing for a slow pass around the city walls when Ernst called from the Belle.
"Wismar Belle is RTB to Ochsen."
"Uh, roger, Belle, RTB approved. Gustav Flight is ten minutes behind."
Jesse led his flight around the walls, absorbing the views of the ancient city. Finally, waggling farewell, he turned away, back to land, back to war.
Chapter 37
Hamburg
"All stations report closed up and ready for action, sir!"
"Very good."
Captain Halberstat acknowledged the report from the signalman manning the voice pipes, then glanced around SSIM Constitution's conning tower one more time, letting his eyes sweep across the uniformed officers and sailors of the USE Navy. The conning tower about him was very, very different from anything he had ever seen in his previous career, and not simply because of its gleaming efficiency and up-timer lighting.
The notion of providing sailors with actual uniforms had struck him as incredibly outlandish when he first volunteered for Admiral Simpson's newborn navy. Not even armies bothered with that sort of thing, and they had to worry about identifying one another in the midst of confused melees on a field of battle. But Simpson had insisted, and like so many other of his initially preposterous seeming ideas, it had repaid his efforts enormously. The navy-provided uniforms (and Simpson's draconian notions of diet and hygiene… and discipline) created a powerful sense of identity. Not to mention the healthiest ships' companies Halberstat had ever seen.
Franz Halberstat was a highly intelligent man. One who had served at sea his entire life, starting on his father's North Sea fishing boat and working his way up to the command of his own coastal lugger, with temporary diversions as a deck officer on French and Danish naval vessels. Yet he knew now that he'd been slow to recognize just how different John Simpson's navy truly was. This world had never seen anything like it, for it was the first truly professional navy in history. And that, Halberstat had come to realize, was an even more fundamental change than the marvelous ships the up-timers had been able to build.
"Ready to proceed, Admiral," Constitution's captain said, turning to his commanding officer with a crisp salute. "All hands are closed up to action stations and the ship is flooded down to fighting draft."
"Very well, Captain," John Chandler Simpson said formally. "Carry out your orders."
"Aye, aye, sir!"
Thorsten Engler looked up as the flagship's horn gave a single raucous burst of sound. Having ridden around the city, he and the other members of his battery, along with the rest of the cavalry escort, were dug in around and on a slight rise that lay just down the river from Hamburg. Now, from a distance they watched the ponderous-looking ironclads getting slowly underway in the morning light-those of them, at least, who had access to an eyeglass. Simpson's flotilla was barely visible to the naked eye. Fortunately, Lieutenant Reschly was willing to share his eyeglass with Thorsten.
They'd been supposed to begin their attack at dawn, Thorsten knew. He wasn't certain why they hadn't, but he suspected it had something to do with the heavy mist that had cloaked the river. Camp rumor said that Prime Minister Stearns had "suggested" to Admiral Simpson that he underscore the emperor's unhappiness with Hamburg's refusal to grant his navy free passage to the North Sea. Thorsten hadn't yet seen the navy's big guns in action against a real target, but like most people who'd lived in and around Magdeburg for the last six months or so, he'd heard-and seen-their crews training with them. No one in Hamburg had done that, but unless Thorsten was sadly mistaken, Admiral Simpson had decided to wait for the visibility to clear expressly so that he could give the good citizens of Hamburg the best possible opportunity to observe the consequences of that training.
This would be their last assignment, as part of Simpson's expedition. Assuming the ironclads made it through Hamburg with no significant problems, the battle group would be dissolved. Once past Hamburg, the Elbe became wide enough that there was simply no point to keeping an escort of cavalrymen and volley guns. Engler and the rest of Colonel Fey's men would be rejoining the rest of the army under General Torstensson.
Captain Rolf Hempel felt himself swallowing hard as the squat-looking American warships came slowly, steadily towards him through the morning light. Only the four iron-plated monsters were underway; apparently the wooden ships with the smoking chimneys were going to let their bigger sisters deal with Hamburg. And, Hempel thought unhappily, those bigger sisters seemed ominously confident of their ability to do just that.
They were huge, far bigger than anything anyone in Hamburg had ever seen moving up and down the Elbe, and they looked more like looming fortresses-or perhaps enormous floating barns-than ships. There was something profoundly unnatural about watching them move with no apparent regard for wind or current. There was no visible, outward sign of whatever semi-magical marvel the intruders from the Ring of Fire used to move the things. Instead, they simply glided smoothly, silently, effortlessly down the river.