The Tangled Web(117)

"Well, do you expect me to tell Lane Grooms about this while I'm in Grantville? Wait a minute. Who am I supposed to tell, anyway? Damn it, Derek. With all the ad-hoccing that's been going on . . ."

"Technically, I'm in the SoTF forces, but we don't exactly have our own army and foreign policy any more. We're a state, not a country. Scott knows what I'm planning. For the USE, the closest general is Brahe in Mainz. We get along. He's just turned thirty; a couple of years younger than I am. Pretty flexible. Gustav thinks that after Torstensson, he's the best general he has. Which, I'm inclined to say, the way he conducted that swoop all the way over to the Rhine last spring after Bernhard pulled back, makes me think that the emperor is right."

Harlan nodded. "Like this harebrained project you're asking me to approve."

"More like, 'look the other way.' We'll do it—get it started, at least—while you're gone briefing Springer." Derek grinned. "I don't suppose I could talk you into not telling anybody?"

First Harlan said, "No." Then—"We?"

"I'm only going as far as Mainz, with Hoheneck. I'll take Sergeant Hartke and the men he's picked out, plus a couple of our own guys, and leave them there for a few weeks. I want someone to be in the city to take charge of the culprits when the posse brings them back, if it manages to catch them, which I hope it does. I'd rather not see them assassinated in some back alley. That's revenge, not justice. I want a trial, Harlan. I want to see them sitting there in the dock, with a lot of newspaper coverage."

"What will Mary Kat say? Will the daughter of our honorable chief justice be thrilled to have her husband out scampering through the hills and valleys looking for kidnappers?"

"I'm not planning on doing any scampering myself—not unless something really unexpected comes up. I'll talk to Brahe in Mainz and then come back to Fulda and spend Christmas in Grantville. Anyway, unless you tell her, she won't find out until after it's all over. 'Need to know' and all that."

There were times when Harlan sort of wondered about the relationship between Derek and Mary Kat. The truth of the matter was that if he were going to go out and get in peril, he'd warn Eden, whether he was supposed to or not.

"If you have to tell anybody in Grantville, tell Ed Piazza. But not unless he asks."



"Can he do that?" Andrea Hill asked. "Can he just decide to do that?"

"I really don't know. It's way above my pay grade," Jeffie Garand pointed out. "It's more to the point that he's going to do it anyway, it looks like."

"Who is Derek's boss, anyway?" Roy Copenhaver asked. "Aside from Wes, who's gone, and Mel Springer, who hasn't arrived, that is. They're his civilian superiors in any case. Who's his military commander?"

Joel Matowski rubbed his forehead. "Well, when we came out here, we were NUS military with Frank Jackson in overall military command, Mike Stearns as president, and some loose obligation to GA as Captain Gars."

"I'm with you."

"Then in the fall of 1633, it changed. There's a SoTF now instead of a NUS, and it's a state in the USE. Since last spring, Frank's gone off to be a colonel on Torstensson's staff. He's a kind of aide-de-camp and isn't really commanding anybody, any more. The Grantville guys who are with him up in Magdeburg are sure part of the USE military, but nobody has told us that we're under Torstensson. Not directly."

"My closest guess," Jeffie Garand said, "is that the Fulda Barracks Regiment didn't get transferred into the USE army. I think we're what they're calling SoTF forces, sort of a state militia."

"But it's not that simple." Joel frowned.

Harlan Stull waved a hand. "Nothing's ever simple. There are still the Swedes in Mainz, and the Swedes around Grantville. Most people don't seem to notice that the way Kagg set up the barracks, he popped his Swedes down right between the Ring of Fire and the Saxon border. At best, these guys are sort of hybrids between being the Swedish army and the USE army—they're not straight USE, even if most of the men in the regiments are Germans. Gustavus has three or four of his best Swedish commanders protecting us, really. They're protecting his interests, sure, but they're protecting us, too. That's above and beyond Torstensson and the regiments up north, not to mention Banér in the Upper Palatinate dealing with Duke Maximilian. He has Horn down in Swabia, running all round Baden and Württemberg, keeping Duke Bernhard pinned down and also dealing with Duke Maximilian."

"I hadn't really thought of it that way," Joel admitted. "So Gustavus, all this time, has had Kagg and the Yellow Regiment right outside Grantville, really making sure that while he was tied up in the north himself, John George of Saxony didn't get any silly ideas about invading Thuringia, while he took a batch of way less experienced CoC regiments to deal with the League of Ostend. I guess nobody can say that he hasn't carried out what he promised when he agreed to the 'Captain General' bit."