Where were they?
Hank Siers was lying next to a pile of rubble, from which his companions had just pulled him out. The building he’d taken shelter behind had been collapsed by an exploding cannon shell. His leg was broken and he was unconscious, but he was still alive and otherwise unhurt, so far as Bonnie Weaver could tell.
Of course, that assessment was based on nothing more substantial than a two-week class in first aid that Bonnie had taken a couple of years earlier. For all she knew, Hank was bleeding internally, had all sorts of internal damage, and was even now exhibiting plain and unmistakable symptoms of said injuries that she was too ignorant to recognize.
“How is he?” asked Dina Merrifield. She and Bonnie were the same age, had grown up together, and had been in the same classes in school. In short, they knew each other as well as people in a small town do who are acquaintances rather than friends-but very closely acquainted. Closely enough that Bonnie didn’t see any point in pretending to know more than she did.
“I don’t really know, Dina, to be honest. I’m sure his leg’s broken, although-thank God-it’s not a compound fracture. He probably has a concussion, too.”
Amanda Boyd came around the corner of the building-what was left of it, rather. She’d gone to see if there were any signs that enemy soldiers were moving around in the area.
“I can’t see anybody, except a couple of women hurrying to get into a building. So far as I can tell, the fighting is still at least a quarter of a mile away.”
That wasn’t really much comfort. A man could walk a quarter of a mile in five minutes. But soldiers in combat wouldn’t move that quickly, Bonnie told herself, unless they had specific reasons to know that a target was nearby.
Still, she didn’t think they had more than half an hour of safety. That gave them barely enough time to get out of the town and reach the airship, with a wounded and unconscious man to carry.
Hank was no lightweight, either. It would take all three of them to carry him, even if they could jury-rig some sort of stretcher.
The thought of a stretcher concentrated her mind and helped her to control the incipient panic. One thing at a time. We need something to make a stretcher from.
As it turned out, Dina had been thinking along the same lines. “There was a wheelbarrow back there, where they were doing construction. And some wood we could make a splint from.”
“Fitting a man as big as Siers into a wheelbarrow isn’t going to be easy,” Bonnie said dubiously.
Amanda shrugged. “I saw a picture once of something like twelve guys who crammed themselves into a VW. And I don’t see where we’ve got an alternative, Bonnie, unless we just leave him here. Ain’t no way we’re gonna carry this fat asshole.”
Amanda didn’t get along well with Siers. Partly that was because of her age-she was two years younger than Bonnie and Dina, just shy of twenty-and partly it was because Amanda was edgy and didn’t get along with a lot of people. Being fair, although Bonnie herself wouldn’t go so far as to call Hank an asshole, he certainly wasn’t one of her favorite people, either. He was a fussy and overbearing boss, just for starters.
Dina straightened up. “She’s right. I’ll go get it.”
She was back in less than five minutes. It took them at least that long to fit a splint onto the surveyor’s leg. Bonnie, who did the work of setting the broken bone, could only hope she’d done it right. If she hadn’t, Hank would probably walk with a limp for the rest of his life. But she was beginning to fear that might be the least of his problems. Hank was still unconscious. Not even the pain of having a broken bone reset had aroused him. She didn’t think that was normal, even for a man who’d been knocked out and almost certainly had a concussion.
Then, it took another two or three minutes to get Hank into the wheelbarrow and positioned in such a way that he wouldn’t fall out-entirely, anyway; at least a third of him wasn’t actually in the wheelbarrow-and enough of his weight was distributed properly so that they could pick up the handles.
At that, it would take two of them, one on each handle, to move him. The third woman would rotate so they’d each get some rest.
They’d need it, too. Bonnie didn’t know exactly how much Hank weighed. She’d have said two hundred pounds or so. Now, straining at one of the handles as they trundled toward the gate that led out of the town in the direction of the airfield, she revised her estimate upward.
“Like. I. Said.” Amanda was on the other handle while Dina led the way ahead of them. “Fat. Asshole.”
Chapter 4
As he got close to the barracks, Tom was relieved to find that his artillery unit was apparently still intact and, judging from the noise, fighting back with considerable spirit. The unit was officially a company-a “battery,” in the artillery’s parlance-but it was way oversized because the men assigned to Ingolstadt’s defensive guns had been incorporated into it. Instead of two hundred men, Tom had almost four hundred under his command. That was more than a third of the total strength of the Danube Regiment.
Not all of them would have been at the barracks when the fighting broke out. But he probably still had close to three hundred soldiers available in his artillery unit, and he’d picked up a couple of infantry companies on his way to the barracks. The companies belonged to the 2nd Battalion, whose commanding officer had been murdered in his sleep also. The two captains in charge of them had no idea where the rest of the battalion was, nor what had happened to the 1st Battalion.
Tom didn’t know the answer to that question either. But he was pretty sure the 1st Battalion had defected to the Bavarians. That would explain how the enemy had managed to pour into Ingolstadt the way they had. Units from that battalion had been in charge of several of the city’s gates. They would have let in assassination teams first, to target the regiment’s still-loyal officers, and then opened the gates for the Bavarian forces who were camped nearby.
Tom and Colonel Engels had both been worried about the reliability of the soldiers in that battalion, but there hadn’t been much they could do about it given the political situation. Reliable units in the regular army-meaning volunteers, in this context, not mercenaries-were now mostly in Poland or Bohemia. And with a new prime minister, the few such units which were still stationed in the USE itself were not likely to be assigned to the Danube Regiment.
The officers and enlisted men in the 1st Battalion were Italian mercenaries, almost to a man. Italy provided a large percentage of Europe’s professional soldiers. They were valued for their courage and skills-nobody made wisecracks about Italian armies in the seventeenth century-but were notoriously prone to switching sides if presented with the right inducement.
Tom stopped while still just out of sight of the barracks. Behind him, he could hear the sounds of a hundred and fifty men coming to a ragged halt. More ragged than usual. The companies were missing at least a fourth of their men and officers.
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
