1636： The Saxon Uprising ARC - By Eric Flint Page 0,97

south.

“We need this entire street widened. For at least fifty yards, maybe a hundred. Remove enough of the buildings to make the street”—she cocked an inquisitive gaze on Junker.

“I want at least sixty feet. That’d give me twice the wingspan of the plane. Anything less gets too risky.”

She nodded. “That means widening it about thirty feet. If we’re lucky, we can do that by just removing the first row of buildings on one side of the street. But if we need to, we’ll level them on both sides.”

Removing the first row of buildings—

Level them on both sides, maybe—

“I’m assigning you and all your Poles to the project,” Richter went on. “I’ll give you as many more people as I can free up. This project takes priority over everything else except defending the walls against a direct assault.”

Back to hauling rocks. Did God have a grudge against Poles in general? Jozef wondered. Or was the Almighty specifically enraged at him for some reason?

Chapter 27

Magdeburg, capital of the United States of Europe

Rebecca Abrabanel tried to think of any other possibility she hadn’t explored, when it came to available aircraft. The exercise was more in the way of a formality, though—the sort of final double-check a careful person will do just to remind themselves to be careful—than anything she expected to produce results. There simply weren’t all that many aircraft in existence in January of 1636. Most of those were military, furthermore—and Jesse Wood had made clear that he wasn’t lending any of the air force’s planes to this purpose.

He’d told Rebecca that himself, when he came to pass along the message from Luebeck.

“Sorry, Becky, but I talked it over with the admiral and John’s adamant on the subject. I think he’s probably right, and it’s not something I’m going to buck him on. We’ve kept the navy and the air force out of this ain’t-quite-a-civil-war. Formally, anyway. It’s true we’ve bent the rules into a pretzel, but we haven’t broken any. But if we did this…”

She hadn’t argued the point. She thought Admiral Simpson was right herself.

Of the civilian aircraft, the possibilities were very limited. She didn’t trust most of them—not with the lives of these two people. Of the ones that had demonstrated they were reliable, almost all were ruled out either by mechanical, operational or political concerns. January was not a good time to be flying in the Germanies, so most of the planes were undergoing major maintenance.

The ones based in the Netherlands would need to have at least the tacit approval of the king—for something like this, anyway—and that was a can of worms Rebecca didn’t want to open. At a minimum, Fernando would insist on concessions, and he was already being a pain in the neck. He’d been careful not to cross a line when it came to taking advantage of the internal turmoil in the USE, the line being anything that might provide a clear and obvious casus belli at a future date when his larger neighbor was stable again. But he’d come right up to that line, every time and place he could.

Besides, in order to get his approval, she’d have no choice but to explain the purpose of using one of the Netherlands’ aircraft. And that she wanted to avoid. If this secret got out…

She shook her head. As it was, she was more than a little amazed that it hadn’t. She’d only found out herself a few days ago, when Simpson finally confided in her using the intermediary of Jesse Wood. From what Jesse had told her, it was obvious that Simpson had known for some time that Luebeck was simply a staging point for Kristina and Ulrik. Not, as Rebecca and just about everyone else had assumed, merely a safe area that the prince and princess had settled on because they didn’t want to be a pawn for anybody in the conflict.

Oxenstierna had certainly made that assumption. Rebecca had been in fairly regular touch with John Chandler Simpson, either through Jesse or through the admiral’s wife Mary. She knew that the Swedish chancellor had initially bombarded Kristina with messages demanding that the headstrong girl obey her Uncle Axel; bombarded Ulrik with threats of dire consequences for Denmark if he didn’t stop aiding and abetting the child’s monstrous willfulness; and Simpson himself for not doing what was clearly his duty and expelling the two from Luebeck. From the naval base, at least. Simpson didn’t actually have any formal control over what the city’s officials