The Saxon Uprising(147)

Dresden, capital of Saxony

Aside from mail couriers and smugglers, the one other class of people who were willing to risk penetrating siege lines were news reporters. Such men had existed for at least a century, but the Ring of Fire had expanded their number considerably. With the romanticism of up-time examples to lean on, the none-too-reputable trade of news reporter gained a certain cachet. That was especially true if a man could claim the title of “war correspondent.”

(Female reporters had a certain equivalent if they could pose as “gossip columnists.” Gossip, of course, had existed for millennia. But not until the Ring of Fire did it occur to anyone that you might actually be able to make a living from the business.)By the time of the battle, there were a handful of such men residing in Dresden. They were all out of the city and moving through the trenches before the shooting even stopped. One of them was wounded, in fact, by a fragment from a grenade. Not badly, though, and in the years to come the scar he picked up on his forehead added greatly to his prestige and even probably expanded his purse a bit.

By mid-afternoon, they’d collected the essential bits of information and had all raced back into Dresden. There, they clamored for radio time.

The CoC guards protecting the radio room refused to let them in. Tempers became frayed. A nasty incident might have ensued except that Tata showed up.

“Are you mad?” she said crossly to the guards. “Let them all in. Now.”

To the reporters, she said: “Decide in what order you’ll get to the radio. Then you each get three minutes.”

This was akin to telling cats to decide the order in which they’d eat. Immediately, the reporters started quarreling. After two minutes of that, Tata threw up her hands.

“Idiots! Fine. We will have one report, written by all of you. Sign it in whatever order you choose.”

Herding cats, again. Immediately, they fell to quarreling over the order in which their names would appear.

Tata let that go on for no more than thirty seconds.

“Shut up! Fine. None of you will sign it, then. Come up with a pseudonym or something for all of you together.”

Again, quarreling.

“Shut up! Fine. Since you all have the sense of a goose, I will come up with the name.”

A stray memory came to her of something she’d run across in an up-time text.

So was born the Associated Press.

The reporters quarreled all through the process of writing the news account. But eventually they managed to get it written. They would even admit—not to each other, of course, and certainly not in public—that the end product was much better than any one of them would have come up with on their own. Their trade was at a stage of development where sensationalism came a long way ahead of substance. As a result, none of them had stayed out in the field any longer than they needed to in order to grasp the sensational essence of the event. But once all their accounts were added together, a great deal of factual content wound up being included.

There was even an unexpected bonus. By the time they were finally ready to transmit the report, a breathless CoC courier piled into the radio room.

“They killed Banér! They killed Banér!”

The reporters stared at him. “How can you be sure?” asked one, moved by an unusual impulse toward accuracy.

“I saw his head myself.” The young courier made a face. The grimace combined horror, fascination and glee. “It’d come right off his body. Ripped off by bullets, looked like. Some of the Prince’s soldiers brought it to him in a sack. They wanted to put it on a pikehead—just like that Swede shithead said he was going to do to us!—but the Prince wouldn’t let them.”

He was clearly aggrieved by that last decision; but, under the circumstances, was willing to forgive the Prince his lapse of judgment.

The reporters looked at each other.

Tata took charge again. “You’d better go make sure before you send the radio message. This is not something you want to be wrong about.”

The reporters hesitated.

“Fine. Let me put it this way. You don’t get to use the radio until you make sure. If you try”—she waggled a finger at the two CoC guards, putting them on alert—“I will have you shot.”

Off they went.

They were back in less than an hour.

“It’s Banér, all right. I did a report on him last month and got to interview him for a few minutes. Grouchy bastard.”

Another reported chimed in. “I’ve met him too. He looks a bit the worse for wear”—that got a round of chuckles—“but it’s definitely him.”

It was the work of less than a minute to modify the report. Then they started quarreling over which one of them got to read the report.