Ring of Fire III(10)

Tom shook his head. “Just talking to myself. We don’t have any choice. We’ll have to attack the enemy from the rear—well, more likely the flank—and drive them off. Until and unless we do that, there’s no way we can join the artillerymen.”

“They’ll just fire on us,” agreed Fischer. “But we may be outnumbered, sir.”

“We almost certainly are,” Tom said grimly. “The Bavarians would have sent at least a battalion to seize the artillery barracks.”

He was using “battalion” in a generic sense, not the precise meaning that the term had in the USE army. Like most armies of the day, the Bavarian forces were composed largely of mercenaries. A good number of them would be Italians, and not more than a third would have come from Bavaria itself. Mercenaries were organized into companies—another generic term—which were of whatever size their commanders could put together, ranging from less than a hundred to close to a thousand.

Tom was convinced that part of the reason many seventeenth-century armies liked crude formations like tercios was because the rigidity of the formation compensated to some extent for the irregularities of the units that actually made them up. But in a free-for-all melee like this sort of street fighting after a successful assault on a city, he knew the Bavarian commander, whoever he was, would have simply dispatched one of his larger “companies” to take the artillery barracks.

That meant Tom and his two understrength companies were going to be attacking a force that was at least twice as large as they were.

So be it. They didn’t have any other option, so far as he could see. Hopefully, the much-ballyhooed “advantage of surprise” would turn out to be all it was cracked up to be.

* * *

Seeing motion in the shadows of the street ahead of them, Rita pressed herself against the wall of a building and gestured with her hand to tell the people following her to stop. She could hear the slight scuffling of their feet but didn’t think anyone else could if they weren’t within ten yards. The motion she’d spotted had been at least twice that far away, just past an intersection.

She tried to figure out what to do. They were now close to the gate that led out of the city toward the airfield. That made it tempting to just charge ahead, and deal with whatever they ran across. But the shadows were very dark. There was only one street lamp in sight and that was next to a door twenty yards or so down a cross street. Rita couldn’t really see anything now. The motion she’d spotted had stopped. For all she knew, a whole squad of Bavarian soldiers was waiting in ambush.

Behind her, Mary whispered something. Rita couldn’t make out the words but she was pretty sure Mary had asked one of the other women what was holding everything up—as if any of them knew either!

For a moment, she considered firing a shot into the shadows. Just to see what happened, basically. It was quite possible that the motion she’d seen had been nothing more than a street mongrel scurrying for cover.

But that would be insane. The motion could also have been caused by a frightened child.

“Oh, fuck it,” she muttered. Rita turned and handed her shotgun to Maydene, who’d been following right behind her. “If anybody shoots me, kill him, will you?”

She turned back around and strode out into the street. In for a penny, in for a pound. She might as well make herself as visible as possible.

In the same spirit, not knowing what else to say, she shouted: “Hey, you!”

A second or so later, she got a response.

“Rita, is that you?”

That had to be Dina Merrifield. Nobody else she knew could manage to speak Amideutsch with that much of a twang. Dina was from southern West Virginia, where people’s speech had a much more Appalachian accent than they did in Grantville.

“Oh, thank God!” another woman exclaimed. Rita thought that was probably Bonnie Weaver.

A woman came into the light cast by the distant street lamp. As she’d guessed, it was Bonnie.

“Boy, are you the proverbial sight for sore eyes,” Weaver said. “We heard you coming but didn’t know who you were. We ran across a Bavarian patrol a few minutes ago, but we managed to hide from them. At least, I think they were Bavarian even though their uniforms looked like ours. I don’t know who else would be attacking Ingolstadt.”

They were probably traitors rather than Bavarians, Rita thought. But this was not the time and place to share her suspicions and guesses on that subject.

“Who else is with you?” she asked Bonnie. “And where’s the Pelican?”

Bonnie gestured behind her. “It’s at the airfield. Stefano should have it ready to fly by now, even working on his own. All we’ve got to do is get there—but we’ve got a problem. Hank was hurt pretty badly.”