The Baltic War(20)

And if all of them were risky, so what? In the world they'd left behind, the early pioneers of flying had been willing to accept ghastly casualties. Why would anyone in their right mind think that seventeenth-century aviation pioneers would be any less bold? These were the same people who didn't think twice about undertaking voyages around the globe on ships that were practically rowboats, by late twentieth-century standards. Something like thirty percent—nobody knew the exact figure—of the commercial seamen in the seventeenth century wound up dying at one point or another, just in the course of doing what was considered a routine job. Probably an equal percentage wound up maimed or crippled or at least seriously injured in the course of their working lives. So far as Jesse was concerned, anybody who thought down-timers would shy away from still higher casualty rates for the sake of mastering aviation or underwater demolitions was just a plain and simple idiot.



Unfortunately, whatever his many virtues, Gustav Adolf shared in full what was perhaps the most common vice of seventeenth-century monarchs and princes. He liked to boast. So, boast he had, to his enemies, and damn the price his people would wind up paying for it downstream.



But Jesse tore his mind away from those gloomy thoughts. Mike was coming back to the subject.



"So it's doable, then?" he asked.



"Yes."



"How soon?"



Jesse shrugged. "The weather's fine. We could leave this afternoon, if you're ready to go. Well . . . at least once we hear back from Luebeck that that field is clear. But the radio connection is good enough now that we shouldn't have to wait for the evening window to get word back."



Mike shook his head. "There's not that much of a rush. And I need to spend this afternoon"—he made a little sweeping gesture with his head toward the other officers in the room—"dealing with some other matters. Let's figure on tomorrow morning; how's that?"



Jessed nodded. "Fine. Do you need me to stay for that discussion?"



Mike looked at Jackson and then Simpson. "Gentlemen?"



Jackson grinned again. "Not unless Colonel Wood's changed his mind about fitting machine guns onto his planes."



Jesse grimaced. There were times he felt like a man under siege himself, the way enthusiasts—down-timers worse than up-timers—would deluge him with eager questions on the subject of when the USE's warplanes would be able to start riddling the enemy with machine-gun fire. "When," measured in terms of this week or next week. Alas, among the many American terms that had made its way into the down-time German lexicon, some damn fool had included the verb "to strafe."



"No," Jesse growled. "I haven't. We're still at least two generations of aircraft away from mounting machine guns. Any that are worth mounting, anyway—which those antique contraptions you're talking about aren't."



"Okay, then," said Stearns. "In that case, there's no reason you need to stick around for the wrangle. Unless you want to, of course."



Jesse shook his head. "No, I've got plenty of other things to attend to. And participating in another argument over machine guns ranks somewhere below getting a colonoscopy, in my book."



Torstensson perked right up. "What is a colonoscopy?" he asked. "And how soon could we have one deployed against the Ostenders?"





After Jesse left—and Frank clarified the nature of a colonoscopy—Mike decided to cut right to the chase. He had a faint hope that Simpson wouldn't argue the matter for more than an hour, if Mike made clear from the outset that he'd made up his mind.



"Gentlemen. After long and careful consideration, I've decided that the army's claim to the volley guns has to take first priority."



"Blast it, Mike!" exploded Simpson, jettisoning his beloved protocol. "We need volley guns for the timberclads, if we're to have any hope at all of suppressing cavalry raids on our river shipping."



A faint hope got fainter.



"And who cares about that if we can't win the battles?" demanded Jackson. "The best way to suppress cavalry raids is to smash up enemy cavalry before they can go out on raids in the first place."



"Yes, I agree completely," said Torstensson. "With all due respect, Admiral—"



Fainter and fainter.





It took closer to two hours, but in the end Simpson gave up the fight. Looked at from one angle, it was absurd for him to persist so stubbornly in the matter. With both his prime minister and the top commander of the USE's military arrayed against him, he was bound to lose the dispute and was perfectly smart enough to have been aware of that five minutes from the outset.