“And what else?”
“They do in fact have an air force, as I told you they might.”
“It needed only this,” Janos muttered. “And the nature of it is…?”
“Apparently they have no airplanes like those of the USE’s air force. What they have instead are lighter-than-air craft.”
“Ah, yes. ‘Zeppelins,’ I think they’re called.”
“Not quite, Baron. I investigated the matter and discovered that zeppelins are difficult to make. They’re the best such craft, but there are many obstacles to overcome. On the simplest side is what are called ‘blimps.’ Those have roughly the same elongated shape but the big envelope that lifts them is like that of a balloon—without any internal structure. Just a big bag, basically, filled either with hot air or some kind of light gas.”
“So these are blimps, you’re saying?”
The doctor held up his hand in a staying gesture. “Give me a moment, please. Somewhere in the middle is a hybrid design. They are only partly rigid, with a much simpler structure than that of a zeppelin properly so-named. They have what amounts to a sort of keel, but most of the bag is left to its own shape. That is apparently what the Ottomans have.”
He opened a pouch hanging from his shoulder and dug out some papers. “I have some diagrams here, which I got by bribing a Turk cavalryman. I wouldn’t count too much on its precision, because it’s just something the man drew from memory. Still, it gives you an idea of what they look like.”
Janos spent a couple of minutes studying the diagrams. There was no point spending more time than that, since it was obvious from the drawings themselves that they were only approximations based on memory.
“There is no sense of scale. How big are they?”
Grassi shrugged. “Hard to say. The cavalryman claimed they were enormous, but I imagine a device like that would inevitably seem enormous to someone who’d never seen one before. When I pressed him on the weapons they carried, though, he claimed they only occasionally dropped explosive devices and those were not large ones. Mostly, it seems, the Turk used the things as flying scouts.”
Which was quite bad enough. Janos had spent a lot of time over the past few years studying the campaigns and battles fought by the USE—and before it came into existence, by the little nation created by the up-timers in Thuringia, when they first arrived. The New United States, as they’d called it. One of the things that had quickly become obvious to him was how difficult it would be to fight an enemy who always knew where your own forces were because of their aircraft. Except in bad weather, at least. The Poles under Koniecpolski had been successful because they’d been able to take advantage of storms, when the airplanes were grounded.
Possessing aircraft of any type gave an army an enormous advantage, whether or not those aircraft could carry weapons. The real danger the things posed was their extraordinary expansion of an army’s reconnaissance capabilities.
He leaned back in his own chair. He was now feeling weary himself, in mind if not in body.
“I’m still puzzled, though.” He gestured with a thumb toward one of the windows. That window looked out over the town’s main thoroughfare. The window was closed because of the cold, but the sounds of the heavy traffic outside could easily be heard.
“What produced all these refugees?”
Grassi frowned. Then, rose and went to the window. After studying the scene below for a few seconds, he chuckled softly.
“Those aren’t precisely ‘refugees,’ Baron. They’re not people fleeing their homes ahead of an invading army. They’re mostly merchants racing ahead of an invading army to make sure their business concerns aren’t jeopardized when the army arrives. That’s why they’ve come so soon, even though they don’t expect anything to happen for some time yet. Arranging such business can be time-consuming.”
“Ah.” That made sense, now that it was explained. There was a fixed season for campaigning, if you were the Turk seeking to march a huge army through the Balkans. That sort of mobilization presupposed enormous numbers of livestock. You couldn’t start the march, therefore, until the spring grass was coming up or your horses and oxen would starve.
In the Balkans, once an army got past Belgrade, that meant waiting until early May. So the merchants crowded in the streets out there and packed into the taverns had three months or so to do their preparations.
“I take it they don’t have any doubts that the Ottomans plan to attack Vienna next year.”
Grassi chuckled again. “Not any, Baron. Neither do I. After such a great victory, the Turk is flushed with pride and ambition. That new young sultan intends to become as famous as Suleiman the Magnificent. More famous, even. And to do that…”