Eric Flint - 1636:The Saxon Uprising

There was only one officer present, as usual. Wismar was a military backwater, these days. The main purpose of the air base was monitoring the weather in the Baltic and the North Sea. In Europe, as in North America, the weather basically moved from west to east. Getting a day or two's warning of a coming storm front was useful, for the military in time of war even more than civilians.

Lt. Gottfried Riemann levered himself out of the arm chair where he'd been reading a training manual. He was an ambitious young man, and had no intention of remaining a ground crew officer consigned to a wretched post like Wismar. He took the radio message slip from the operator, read it quickly, and then handed it back.

"Well, what are you waiting for? You know the Colonel's orders. Get this off right away."

On his way back up to the radio in the control tower, Corporal Grauman pondered the same problem he'd been pondering for weeks.

Was there any way to poison a man and remain undetected?

The lieutenant was the sort of obnoxious officer who insisted that nothing be done without his approval-and then criticized his subordinates for lack of initiative. Not too uncommon a type, of course, but Riemann was an extreme version of it. So extreme that it had only taken him a month to become thoroughly detested by every airman assigned to the base.

Naturally, he was also good at brown-nosing, so his superiors were oblivious to his true nature.

The problem with using arsenic or cyanide was that they were too well known. There was some deadly poison the up-timers knew about called "strychnine." If you could get your hands on some of the stuff…

He wasn't even thinking about the message when he sent it. That was old habit by now, something he could almost do in his sleep. He certainly gave no thought to the message's potential ramifications.

Maybe an accident of some kind. The problem was that the lieutenant almost never got out of that damned arm chair. "Studying," he called it. The shithead was lazy, too. The only time he exerted himself was to criticize a subordinate for not working hard enough.

The corporal's thoughts circled back to poisons. Maybe…

Dresden, capital of Saxony Blessedly, Denise and Minnie had found a new enthusiasm. If they'd kept hammering away in the basement, expanding and improving the hidey-hole, Noelle would have had to start thinking seriously about poisons instead of just idly fancying them. Had she been as full of boundless enthusiasm and inexhaustible energy at that age? Surely not.

However, all bad things come to an end. The day after Eddie left, they got a radio message from their employer in Prague.

Stay put. (As if they had any choice.) Interesting developments coming. Make preparations to restore air strip as soon as possible.

Denise immediately interpreted that as an assurance that Eddie would be back within days. How he would manage that was unclear, given that the airstrip in question-the former airstrip-was now the site of a corral where Baner's Finnish light cavalry kept their mounts. But Denise was not given to fretting over uncertainties.

Not even she and Minnie were so insouciant that they planned to start repairing the airfield with the Finns still in the area, however. They just wanted to be ready to race out there as soon as the first opportunity arose, with the "relief expedition" ready to go.

That was their term, which Noelle thought was absurd. Relieve who? Relieve what? Did they think a field that had been cleared of rocks and obstructions was groaning with pain and despair now that it was covered with horse crap?

Had she been as careless with language at that age? Surely not.

All they were planning to do was scrape off the manure and whatever other garbage the Finns had left with a modified plow. Then they'd level off the snow with a different modification to the plow, and finish by compressing the snow with rollers of some sort.

So far, they'd gotten the plow modifications ready. They were still working on the rollers.

Noelle had been taking advantage of the peace and quiet in the townhouse to write the report Nasi had asked for. What she'd found most interesting about his radio message was that he'd stressed he wanted a full and detailed report. Not something to be sent as a radio message then, but something written on paper that would have to be carried by a courier.

There hadn't been a courier in two weeks. Even the Thurn and Taxis people had stopped coming after Baner, in one of his fits of fury, had ordered that a detained courier be executed.

Of course, now that the Swedes had pulled out of the trenches and gone after Mike Stearns, couriers might start taking the risk again. Perhaps that was what Nasi was counting on.

"More," said Jozef. "Many more."

The gunmaker was looking at him almost cross-eyed. "How many grenades can a man carry?"

"You might be surprised, when he figures his life will depend on them. And we won't be carrying them on our bodies anyway, not most of them. We're having sleds made up."

The gunmaker had been a soldier once himself. His eyes now seemed on the very verge of crossing. "You're going to carry grenades on sleds? Nobody does that!"

Jozef gave him a cool smile. "To the contrary, Herr Teuber. It's a standard Polish tactic."

In point of fact, hussars rarely used grenades. Even the Polish infantry didn't use them much. But he was getting annoyed with the gunmaker and wanted to cut this short. Never had he met a man who quarreled so much when people offered to pay him for his work. Granted, the money was in the form of a promissory note, but he ought to know by now that if Dresden held off the Swedes, the CoC would be good for it. Sooner or later.

Unfortunately, while any gunmaker and most apothecaries knew how to make gunpowder-so did lots of other people, for that matter-this Teuber jackass was the only one in the city whose shop was set up to make it in quantity.

Thankfully, he was not making the grenades themselves. That work was being handled by a little consortium of two gunmakers and two blacksmiths. The weapons they produced were a bit crude, heavier than Jozef would have preferred, and he wasn't entirely happy with the fuses. But they'd work well enough and he hadn't expected anything better under the circumstances. Making grenades was normally specialized work.

Eric Krenz and Friedrich Nagel weren't any happier with the sled-maker.

"More," said Eric.

"Many more," qualified Friedrich.

The sled-maker's way of expressing disbelief was spitting. The more spittle, the greater the skepticism, as nearly as Krenz could figure.

"Why don't you just have me make you a few big sleds?" he demanded crossly. "All these little ones…"

He threw up his hands. "Child's toys! You are expecting to find hordes of children somewhere?"

Eric set his teeth. "Herr Meissner, as I told you before-"

"Twice, already," Nagel interjected.

"Yes, twice already. We want these sleds to carry grenades. We need to be able to move quickly and we don't know in which direction we will need to go or how many of us will be together at any one time. It will be snowing, as I already mentioned."

"Twice," said Nagel.

"Yes, twice. So perhaps you can see why a few big sleds will not-"

The most irritating part of it was that Meissner had not been a soldier and had spent some time making that clear. So why was he arguing the point? Based on what self-professed lack of expertise?

Gretchen Richter came into the shop. "I was told there is a problem," she said, as soon as she came in. "What is it?"

Eric sketched the problem. Very briefly. We want a lot of small sleds not a few big ones and this assho-Herr Meissner here-seems unhappy with the order.