1636： The Saxon Uprising ARC - By Eric Flint Page 0,133

we give the crown.

There followed a laundry list of praises heaped upon just about everybody who’d had the good sense to stay on the sidelines—not just the parliament members in Magdeburg but the regional heads of state, the mayors and councils of the imperial cities, town militias, etc., etc., etc. This list was even longer than the denunciations of Oxenstierna.

When he was done, Jimmy flexed his fingers for a few seconds. He was sending the transmissions in Morse code as well as vocally. Most of the USE’s radios were still limited to Morse code.

“Okay, sir. What’s next?”

“We’re almost done. This is the final one. It’s a transmission to General Banér.”

To Johan Banér, general in command of the Swedish army besieging Dresden

From Michael Stearns, major general in command of the USE Army Third Division

Your assault on Dresden is illegal, immoral, treasonous, and ungodly.

Mike thought the “ungodly” part was a nice touch. Being an agnostic himself, he had no idea how you’d parse the theology involved. But the Germanies were crawling with theologians. Within twenty-four hours of the transmission there’d probably be at least two competing and hostile schools of doctrine. Within forty-eight hours, charges of heresy were sure to be thrown about.

You have forty-eight hours to remove your troops from the siege lines around Dresden. Seventy-two hours after that, your troops must have departed Saxony and returned to the Oberpfalz, where you can employ them to fight Bavarian invaders instead of murdering German civilians.

I will expect an answer within twenty-four hours indicating your agreement to these conditions. Failing such an answer, I propose to move immediately upon your works.

The last clause was swiped from Ulysses Grant’s terms at Fort Donelson, if he remembered his history properly. Mike thought the words had a nice ring to them.

The entire message was designed to make Banér blow his stack. There was no chance the Swedish general would agree to end the siege of Dresden, no matter how Mike put the matter. So he figured he might as well see if he could so enrage the man—Banér’s temper was notorious—that he’d make some mistakes.

There was probably some term derived from Latin to describe the tactic in military parlance. Street kids playing a pick-up basketball game would call it “trash talk.” Mike had used the same term in his boxing days.

You never knew. Sometimes it worked.

“Anything else, sir?” Jimmy asked.

“No,” he said. “I think that will do.”

Chapter 39

Swedish army siege lines, outside Dresden

“I’ll kill him!” Johan Banér roared. “I’ll kill him!”

The Swedish general had already torn the message to shreds. Now he picked up the stool he’d been sitting on when he was handed the message and smashed it down on the writing desk. If his adjutant hadn’t been sensible enough to retreat as soon as he’d handed over the radio slip, his own skull would probably have been the stool’s target.

Banér was not a particularly large man, but he was quite powerful. That blow and the ones that followed with the leg of the shattered stool that remained in his fist were enough to reduce the desk to firewood.

“I’ll fucking kill him!”

Chapter 40

Dresden, capital of Saxony

Eric and Tata found Gretchen Richter standing in the tallest tower of the Residenzschloss, looking out over the city walls toward the Swedish camp fires. They’d gone in search of her to discover what preparations she wanted made, now that they knew the Third Division was coming.

Night had fallen and it was quite dark in the tower, with only one small lamp to provide light. So it took them a while before they realized that Gretchen had been crying. No longer—but the tear-tracks were still quite visible.

Krenz was dumbfounded. He’d never once imagined Richter with tears in her eyes.

Tata went to her side. Gretchen was gripping the rail with both hands. Tata placed a hand over hers and gave it a little squeeze. “It’s nice when people don’t disappoint you.”

“I wondered,” Eric heard Gretchen whisper. “For years, I wondered.”

It took Krenz perhaps a minute before he figured it out. At which point he was even more dumbfounded.

She’d wondered about the general?

Dear God in Heaven.

One of the letters Eric had gotten from Thorsten Engler after he was wounded at Zwenkau described the execution of twenty soldiers who’d been caught committing atrocities after the Third Division took the Polish town of Świebodzin. Thorsten’s volley gun battery had been given that assignment.

Till the day I die, I’ll never forget seeing those men tied to a fence being torn apart by a hail of