1636： The Saxon Uprising ARC - By Eric Flint Page 0,115

though. They’d been lined with wood, as had the floor. It was like a small, rather well-built closet that you entered from the top instead of the side.

Denise frowned. “What…?”

Minnie chuckled. “Whoever built this house was a pessimist, obviously. We don’t have to create a hideout, Noelle—there’s one already here.”

Noelle had reached the same conclusion herself. The safe room was superb, actually. Once the trapdoor was lowered on whoever hid inside, it could be covered with straw, some dirt—plenty of that, in a root cellar—and piled high with sacks of vegetables. Not quite enough to prevent the people inside from eventually forcing the door back open, but enough to discourage any searchers. Mercenaries looking for loot and women wouldn’t spend much time down here anyway. Especially if they were drunk, which they almost certainly would be. The biggest danger was that they’d set the whole house on fire. Arson was often a feature of a city being sacked.

Still, it was safer than anything else.

Denise peered more closely into the hideout. “I’m not sure we can all fit in there.”

Noelle had already come to that conclusion also. It didn’t really matter, though. The trapdoor wasn’t that well-concealed on its own. Minnie had spotted it easily, once she looked in this corner. Someone else could do the same. To make the hideout work, someone had to stay above and cover the trapdoor after it was closed.

“Give me your guns,” she said, extending her hands.

The two teenagers stared at her. “You’ve already got one,” said Minnie.

“And you can’t shoot anyway,” added Denise.

“I’m not going to argue about this, girls. A formality it might be, most of the time, but the fact is that you’re minors under my care. You won’t need those guns if you have to squeeze yourself down into that hole, and I need to stay up here to cover the trapdoor so it won’t be spotted.”

Noelle shrugged. “And my marksmanship is a moot point. If I have to use the guns—all three of them, and don’t think I won’t be blasting away like a maniac—it’ll be at point blank range anyway.” She looked around, squinting in the dim light. “I figure I’ll make Stull’s Last Stand down here, not upstairs. Less chance they could take me alive—and, either way, there’d be enough gore and stuff that they won’t stick around down here afterward to look for anybody else.”

Denise’s eyes were wide. So was Minnie’s one good eye.

Noelle shook her head. “I am not going to argue about this,” she repeated. “Give. Me. Your. Guns. Now.”

In the end, they settled on a compromise. Denise and Minnie would keep the guns until and unless it became clear that the walls had been breached, the city was being sacked, and all was lost. Then—only then—would the girls do as they were told.

As compromises went, Noelle figured it wasn’t a bad one. Given those two.

Then, they went back upstairs. Minnie and Denise settled down for a card game in the kitchen. Noelle went upstairs to watch the street from a window.

“She’s pretty cool,” observed Denise, as she dealt out the first hand.

“We already knew that,” said Minnie. “But it’s nice to see these things confirmed.”

Jozef Wojtowicz tried to cheer himself up. At least they wouldn’t be hauling any rocks for a while.

And there was this, too—he was learning how to use one of these fascinating volley guns in actual combat, always the best way to really become familiar with a weapon.

The design was quite interesting. Ingenious, even. Lt. Krenz had told him it was modeled on an ancient up-time weapon called the Billinghurst-Requa battery gun. “Ancient,” of course, as up-timers reckoned these things. Apparently the Americans had had a civil war of their own, back in the dawn of time, and the gun had first seen action then.

Best of all, it was a design that was well within the capability of Poland’s artisans to make. The only tricky part of the design was the percussion cap, from what Jozef could see. But you didn’t need that anyway—all of the volley guns in his bastion were being fired by simple powder trains. Percussion caps would certainly improve the rate of fire, but Jozef thought it would be possible to buy them from the French. The things weren’t bulky, so shipping wouldn’t be a big problem.

Still, it was an awkward situation. If Jozef’s history ever got exposed, how was he going to explain to Polish hussars that his only real combat experience had been fighting on