FREE STORIES 2012(79)

“Your men?”

“Sorry, but they are for now. And you might not see them again for quite a while.”

“Well, I suppose you’re not taking them to invade some other world, are you?” And then, judging from Larry’s patient gaze, North understood. Yes, they were going to another world. The New World, to be precise. “The Americas, then?”

Quinn shook his head. “Thomas, you know I can’t say.”

“No—but you just did. Well, none of my business and not for me to repeat.” With which Thomas set about putting things in proper military order: “Finan, bring Hastings in. I want a head-count of the defenders, dead and alive. If it doesn’t match or exceed our pre-attack estimate, he’s to organize pursuit teams. As soon as you’ve got that squared away, send a mounted courier back to Biberach. Message follows . . .”





***





By the time the rider to the town was dispatched, the survivors had filled in the blanks of how the garrison had evolved into a pack of blackmailing thieves.

Their group had not started out as part of a regular formation, but as members of a mercenary regiment that had been broken, reconstituted, and broken again in the years leading up to the creeping peace that had begun to break out a year after Grantville appeared. Mostly Swabians, those that had joined from some sense of religious loyalty had, by the end of 1634, found billets with more legitimate units, or directly in Swedish regiments. And those that remained—

Well, the dregs always went somewhere, and in this case, they remained with the regiment that Horn allowed to be battered down to company size, and then a single platoon after sharp exchanges with Bernhard over various contested tracts further to the west.

With the unit exhausted and threadbare, Horn directed his staff officers to move it off the line: it was too weak, too unreliable, and too ill-equipped to be an effective fighting force. Rear-area security or garrison duty: that was its only role, now.

The unit’s senior officer, a well-respected fifteen-year veteran by the name of Grieg, was all that was keeping them together. But on the journey to replace the garrison at Biberach, he showed signs of coming down with some kind of fever. By the time they reached Biberach, he was barely able to sit his horse long enough to formally relieve the garrison’s commander. Already weak, he was one of the first victims of the plague that had been festering unknown in the unit, and which broke out even as the burgermeisters were trying to decide where to house their new garrison. Indeed, it was in dealing with them directly that Johann’s father had evidently contracted the disease himself.

In the wake of the death and misery of the plague, the only officer left was the young, charismatic, ambitious, and utterly ruthless Georg Prum. The unit’s senior remaining NCO tried to restrain his new commander, but he too was weak with fever. Although not afflicted by the plague itself, the fellow nonetheless died, possibly aided by some poison from Prum, it was hinted.

And so, without a moral compass, resentful of the town that had left them to die in a plague-house, and with no prospects of coming out of long years of warfare with any better prize than their own vermin-ridden hides, Prum’s soldiers willingly became blackmailers. And once little Gisela was in hand, it was easy to leverage each town leader to compromise the next. And so they had become wealthy at last.

Schoenfeld had, in his few short hours among them, heard enough of the story to be able to make a full report back in Biberach, but when offered the opportunity to travel there along with the courier, he shook his head. “No,” he said, “I don’t think I’ll be going back there—not if the offer to travel with you to Grantville still stands, Major Quinn.”

Larry looked a bit sheepish. “I’m surprised you’d travel anywhere with me at all, Herr Schoenfeld.”

“Johann, please. I cannot say I like the gambit you used here, but I see the wisdom of it—and I did not miss the worry in your eyes when I set out on my own.” Schoenfeld pointedly did not look at North during this exchange. “So, I take it I am welcome to accompany you, then?”

Larry smiled. “You most certainly are. We’ll start on our way at once.”

Thomas frowned. “What? No victory parade through Biberach? No basking in the ardent hero worship of a grateful town?”

Quinn’s smile broadened. “I’ll let you be the recipient of that well-deserved adulation, Thomas. I’ve got to get back to Grantville. And you’ve got an aerodrome to set up.”

“Well, yes, so I do. And the last thing I need under foot is a meddling Yank who shows up to change my mission, steal my men, and then ruin my battle plans. You made all of this most difficult, you know. Things will be much simpler now.”