The Baltic War(278)

I don't want to kill those poor damned gunners over there, either, though, he thought, glaring at the batteries and remembering the wreckage his guns had left behind at Hamburg. It's not their idea, after all.



His eyes narrowed suddenly, and his spine straightened.



Wait a minute. It isn't their idea, John; it's Christian's. So why don't you just find yourself a target that can demonstrate the depth of his . . . unwisdom even to him? Something prominent, something royal . . .



His eyes lit on the tall finger of the Blue Tower rising above Copenhagen Castle on Slotsholmen Island, and he smiled thinly.





Chapter 62


Almost mesmerized, Eddie stared at the distant ironclad that was bringing itself around to bring its big ten-inch guns to bear on Copenhagen Castle. The two pivot-mounted guns had been trained around to the port broadside from their normal fore and aft positions, so he got an excellent view of three of them. And judging from their elevation, Eddie had a pretty shrewd notion that their target was the castle's single most prominent feature: the Blue Tower.



The same Blue Tower, unfortunately, that contained Eddie himself—locked into a room on one of the upper floors.



That was the USS Constitution, to make things perfect—Simpson's own flagship. Even at the distance, Eddie could recognize the admiral's flag.



No, it'd be the SSIM Constitution, now. He'd learned that from Ulrik.



He would have been positive as to the ship's identity, even if it hadn't been for the admiral's flag. It was hard to distinguish the ironclads at a distance because they'd all been built according to the same design. They were certainly too far away for him to read the lettering on the hulls. Still, each ship tended to have slight variations of its own, and as much time as he'd spent working on them those variations had become as familiar to him as the features of different people's faces.



He could see the national colors they were flying, too, which was the new flag adopted by the United States of Europe after it was formed—by which time Eddie himself was a Danish prisoner of war—not the flag he'd been familiar with. That had been the flag of the New United States, which was an adaptation of the up-time flag of the USA. A different pattern for the stars, but the same familiar red and white stripes. Since the Confederated Principalities of Europe had been a loose confederation rather than having the federal structure of the USE, the CPE's Navy had actually been the NUS Navy. Just on loan, so to speak. The CPE had never had a flag of its own.



Eddie had never seen the USE flag up close, and Ulrik's depiction of its design had been rather vague. From this distance, it looked remarkably like a Confederate battle flag from the American Civil War. At least, it clearly had the same stars and bars design, even if Eddie couldn't really make out the stars that well. But the color scheme was quite different. The USE's colors were the traditional German red, black and gold, not the red, white and blue of American custom—whether union       or Confederate. And the black crossed bars on this new flag were considerably thinner than the blue crossed bars of the Confederate flag. The end result was that, from a distance, the USE flag mostly just looked like a big red flag.



Swell, thought Eddie. Might as well just call it a bloody flag and be done with it, far as I'm concerned. Within less than a minute, he was about to get a personal introduction to the phenomenon known as "friendly fire." Most likely, a very brief introduction. Even if none of the shells struck his chamber directly, he knew that it wouldn't take that many rounds from those huge guns to bring down the whole Blue Tower in a heap of rubble. With Eddie Cantrell's poor squished skinny little carcass somewhere in the middle of it, oozing blood and—best not dwell on that—at least maybe they'd be able to identity the remains from the scraps of red hair still sticking to this or that shredded piece of—



Oh, yuck.



But, since Eddie couldn't see anywhere he could hide that would make any difference, he decided to stay at the window. What the hell. Might as well enjoy a good show, short and unfortunately truncated as it would be, on his way out.



He heard something behind him and turned. To his surprise, the door was being unlocked. A small hope flared up. Could the guards have decided to take him out?



But the person who came through the door was not one of the palace guards, it was Anne Cathrine.



"Hurry, Eddie!" she hissed, waving at him. "We don't have much time."



Eddie wasn't about to argue the point. He didn't quite race for the door—not with a pegleg—but came damn close. If he survived all this, maybe he'd look into setting up a Special Olympics. He'd probably be a cinch for the gold medal in the 100 Meter Stump.