1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [0]
The Ring of Fire series:
1632 by Eric Flint
1633 by Eric Flint & David Weber
1634: The Baltic War by Eric Flint & David Weber
Ring of Fire ed. by Eric Flint
Ring of Fire II ed. by Eric Flint
1634: The Galileo Affair by Eric Flint & Andrew Dennis
Grantville Gazette ed. by Eric Flint
Grantville Gazette II ed. by Eric Flint
1634: The Ram Rebellion by Eric Flint with Virginia DeMarce et al.
1634: The Bavarian Crisis by Eric Flint & Virginia DeMarce
1635: The Cannon Law by Eric Flint & Andrew Dennis
Grantville Gazette III ed. by Eric Flint
Grantville Gazette IV ed. by Eric Flint
1635: The Dreeson Incident by Eric Flint & Virginia DeMarce
1635: The Eastern Front by Eric Flint
Time Spike by Eric Flint & Marilyn Kosmatka
For a complete list of
Baen Books by Eric Flint,
please go to www.baen.com.
1635: The Eastern Front
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Eric Flint
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-4391-3389-7
Cover art by Tom Kidd
Maps by Gorg Huff
First printing, October 2010
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)
Printed in the United States of America
Prologue
The Upper Vogtland
June 1635
"They've passed on, Georg," said Wilhelm Kuefer, as soon as he came down the ladder. "I think those soldiers are just deserters, on their way out of Saxony altogether. Probably see no reason to get ground under the Swede's boot."
Georg Kresse nodded. "Probably. If they're some of Holk's men, almost certainly. All those thugs were ever good for was savaging unarmed civilians. The last thing they want is to get caught in a real war."
Neither Kresse nor Kuefer bothered to whisper. This far into the abandoned tin mine that Georg Kresse and his people had taken over as a base of operations, there was no chance that anyone outside the mine could hear him. Kuefer could have shouted and not been noticed by anyone in the open.
That was one of the advantages of using the mine. It offset the many disadvantages, among which darkness and dampness ranked high on Kuefer's list.
Wilhelm had had no trouble seeing Kresse nodding, though. The problem wasn't darkness in itself. They had plenty of lamps, donated to them by their supporters and sympathizers in the Vogtland. The problem was that the oil lamps emitted fumes, which, given the poor air circulation in the mine, added to the problems caused by cooking fires. Whenever they could, Kresse's people did their cooking outside, but that option wasn't always possible.
They did have one "flashlight," as the smokeless American lamp was called, but it was no longer operating. The device required "batteries" to operate, and by the time they made that discovery—by exhausting the energies of said batteries—it was too late to do anything about it. Kresse's agents had made inquiries, to see if the batteries could be replaced. But by now, four years after the Ring of Fire, such batteries had become scarce and extremely expensive. New batteries were being manufactured, they'd learned, using a combination of up-time knowledge and available down-time techniques. They even worked, by all accounts. But they were reportedly much too large and cumbersome to be fit into the slender flashlight.
So, the once-delightful gadget was now useless. It wouldn't even make a very good club. But they kept it anyway, less as a memento than something in the way of a symbol for the future.
That more or less summarized their general attitude toward Americans. For Georg Kresse and his followers in the Vogtland, as for rebels throughout the Germanies—throughout all of Europe, for that matter—the real importance of the