A bit skeptically, Ulrik eyed the gadget. "Are you sure . . ."
"Oh, yes, Your Highness. I've tested this myself, many times, on boats I've taken out onto the Castle Lake. So long as you have the fuel for it—and that's not really so hard to buy on the black market in the Germanies, certainly not the little we'd need—this thing is just about as reliable as oars. That's because it's what the Americans—have I told you how much I enjoy their little saws and turns of phrase?—call 'store-bought.' This isn't something they cobbled together here themselves, from whatever bits and pieces of their old world they brought with them. This is something that was made—in great huge lots of thousands, they say, like a shop making nails—in one of those giant factories they had up-time."
The dizzy feeling returned, for a moment. Ulrik tried to imagine a world whose cities housed millions and whose landscapes—he'd seen many of the pictures himself, when he'd visited Grantville—were dotted by giant manufactories as if they were dairy farms.
He shook it off. Thankfully, the kingdom of Denmark in the coming year would not have to fend off such an incredibly powerful world. Simply a fragment of it. Insofar as the term "simply" could be applied to a task that even such a fellow as the Norwegian with him viewed grimly.
Ulrik was quite fond of up-time expressions, himself, as it happened. He'd picked up quite a few while he'd visited the Germanies where the Americans had spread their influence.
"Hard-boiled," the Americans would have labeled Baldur Norddahl. Very hard-boiled, indeed.
"You said there was a problem with it, though."
Baldur ran fingers through his hair. "Yes, there is. Once I finally got my hands on the contraption and tested it, I discovered that with a boat that has any weight at all—and we need something fairly sturdy to support a heavy bomb on the end of a long pole—the outboard motor isn't really any faster than just using oars. The big advantage it has is that it doesn't wear out the crew the way pulling oars does. But any attack we launch on those American ironclads will have to be quick, anyway, so the advantage disappears. And the engine makes an incredible racket. A very distinctive sound that the Americans will certainly recognize."
Ulrik thought about it. "Perhaps we should plan on using the thing as a decoy, then. Draw their attention with the outboard motor, but plan the real strike with oared boats."
Baldur looked surprised. Then, quite respectful. "That's an intriguing idea, Your Highness. I hadn't thought of it. Be awfully rough on the men on the decoy ship, though."
"Yes, it would. Unless we can figure out another way of confusing the enemy at the same time. But let's leave that be, for moment. What was the other project you thought had promise?"
"That's even better—or would be," he said, half-sighing, "had I been able to interest His Majesty in it. That's over there."
Five minutes later, Prince Ulrik was struggling not to curse his own father.
"This would have been sensible!"
Norddahl shook his head, his expression unnaturally lugubrious. "It certainly would have. Almost no risk involved at all. And the up-time texts say that it's the most effective anti-ship device ever designed by the hand of man. Beautiful in its simplicity, isn't it? It's not even very different from things we down-timers have done before, although never on such a scale."
Ulrik looked first at the device itself—Baldur called it the "prototype," using yet another American term—and then spent some seconds admiring the clever way the Norwegian had shown how it would work in practice. He called that the "scale model."
As simple as you could ask for. Just litter the narrow confines of the Danish straits with mines. Straightforward bombs, whose design posed no insurmountable problem, each big enough to sink even an ironclad. Devices that could be set in place by boats such as the Danes already had in profusion, rather than one or two intricate and exotic ships to be designed and built in a hurry—with who could say what result in practice?
With enough of them, they could possibly do more than close the Straits. If they closed the Kattegat, they could keep the ironclads from even getting near to Copenhagen. Granted, that would take an enormous number of mines and was probably impractical.
"We could still . . ."
But Norddahl was shaking his head, his expression more lugubrious still. "I'm afraid not, Your Highness. There simply isn't enough time left. I did my best to persuade the king—right from the beginning—that we should abandon everything else in favor of this alone. But . . ."