Eventually, Jozef realized he was looking at Mike Stearns.
Gretchen Richter came out of Dresden shortly thereafter, over-riding the protests of her assistants.
They were worried about her safety. She was worried about her husband.
She walked right by him, as Jeff stood talking to his officers about handling the huge numbers of captured enemy soldiers. Didn't give him more than a glance.
Some big, confident, obviously martial sort of fellow. No one she knew.
It was only when she heard his startled exclamation of her own name that she turned around. And even then, took a second or two to recognize him.
Thereafter, things went splendidly. The two of them, in their embrace, got a round of applause from the troops that matched the one Stearns had gotten.
'Okay,' said Denise. 'I'm bored stiff. And my leg's getting cramped.'
'The shooting seems to have stopped,' Minnie ventured.
Noelle was still inclined toward caution. 'I think we should wait another hour.'
Chapter 48
Dresden, capital of Saxony Aside from mail couriers and smugglers, the one other class of people who were willing to risk penetrating siege lines were news reporters. Such men had existed for at least a century, but the Ring of Fire had expanded their number considerably. With the romanticism of up-time examples to lean on, the none-too-reputable trade of news reporter gained a certain cachet. That was especially true if a man could claim the title of 'war correspondent.'
(Female reporters had a certain equivalent if they could pose as 'gossip columnists.' Gossip, of course, had existed for millennia. But not until the Ring of Fire did it occur to anyone that you might actually be able to make a living from the business.)By the time of the battle, there were a handful of such men residing in Dresden. They were all out of the city and moving through the trenches before the shooting even stopped. One of them was wounded, in fact, by a fragment from a grenade. Not badly, though, and in the years to come the scar he picked up on his forehead added greatly to his prestige and even probably expanded his purse a bit.
By mid-afternoon, they'd collected the essential bits of information and had all raced back into Dresden. There, they clamored for radio time.
The CoC guards protecting the radio room refused to let them in. Tempers became frayed. A nasty incident might have ensued except that Tata showed up.
'Are you mad?' she said crossly to the guards. 'Let them all in. Now.'
To the reporters, she said: 'Decide in what order you'll get to the radio. Then you each get three minutes.'
This was akin to telling cats to decide the order in which they'd eat. Immediately, the reporters started quarreling. After two minutes of that, Tata threw up her hands.
'Idiots! Fine. We will have one report, written by all of you. Sign it in whatever order you choose.'
Herding cats, again. Immediately, they fell to quarreling over the order in which their names would appear.
Tata let that go on for no more than thirty seconds.
'Shut up! Fine. None of you will sign it, then. Come up with a pseudonym or something for all of you together.'
Again, quarreling.
'Shut up! Fine. Since you all have the sense of a goose, I will come up with the name.'
A stray memory came to her of something she'd run across in an up-time text.
So was born the Associated Press.
The reporters quarreled all through the process of writing the news account. But eventually they managed to get it written. They would even admit-not to each other, of course, and certainly not in public-that the end product was much better than any one of them would have come up with on their own. Their trade was at a stage of development where sensationalism came a long way ahead of substance. As a result, none of them had stayed out in the field any longer than they needed to in order to grasp the sensational essence of the event. But once all their accounts were added together, a great deal of factual content wound up being included.
There was even an unexpected bonus. By the time they were finally ready to transmit the report, a breathless CoC courier piled into the radio room.
'They killed Baner! They killed Baner!'
The reporters stared at him. 'How can you be sure?' asked one, moved by an unusual impulse toward accuracy.
'I saw his head myself.' The young courier made a face. The grimace combined horror, fascination and glee. 'It'd come right off his body. Ripped off by bullets, looked like. Some of the Prince's soldiers brought it to him in a sack. They wanted to put it on a pikehead-just like that Swede shithead said he was going to do to us!-but the Prince wouldn't let them.'
He was clearly aggrieved by that last decision; but, under the circumstances, was willing to forgive the Prince his lapse of judgment.
The reporters looked at each other.
Tata took charge again. 'You'd better go make sure before you send the radio message. This is not something you want to be wrong about.'
The reporters hesitated.
'Fine. Let me put it this way. You don't get to use the radio until you make sure. If you try'-she waggled a finger at the two CoC guards, putting them on alert-'I will have you shot.'
Off they went.
They were back in less than an hour.
'It's Baner, all right. I did a report on him last month and got to interview him for a few minutes. Grouchy bastard.'
Another reported chimed in. 'I've met him too. He looks a bit the worse for wear'-that got a round of chuckles-'but it's definitely him.'
It was the work of less than a minute to modify the report. Then they started quarreling over which one of them got to read the report.
'Shut up!' said Tata. 'Fine. Give it to me. I'll read the blasted thing.'
By then, though, it was already late afternoon and Tata decided to wait until the evening window. She'd had some time to think the matter through and realized that she wanted to make sure the transmission reached as far as possible and as many people as possible.
The reporters put up an argument, naturally, but not much of one and not for very long. Tata was a ferocious bully and had a short way with annoying men.
Finally, the time came and the report went out.
Chapter 49
Magdeburg, capital of the United States of Europe After Rebecca got the report, she took her children and sat with them by a window, looking out into the night. The snow had finally stopped falling and there was enough of a moon to see the city. For once, its industrial filth covered in white, Magdeburg was not ugly.
Kathleen was in her lap. Sepharad sat to her left, Baruch to her right.
'Daddy will be home soon,' she said, smiling.
'Is he all right?' asked Baruch anxiously.
'Oh, yes.' She imagined he must have some bruises, assuming the report that he'd had two horses shot out from under him was accurate and not just a reporter's fabrication. But he was definitely alive and in fairly good
