1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [65]
Krenz wouldn't make fun of him, of course, since he was riding a gelding himself.
"For another . . ." Eric prompted him.
"It's a little hard to explain. Even leaving Gretchen aside, I feel . . . I don't know. More alive, I guess. Like what I do here makes a real difference where in the world I left behind it probably never would have."
Krenz chewed his lower lip for a while, thinking about it. "I suppose I understand. But I have to say the thought of being insignificant but alive and healthy seems quite a bit superior than the state of being oh-so-very-important and oh-so-very-dead. If you ask me, Achilles was an idiot."
Jeff chuckled. "Oh, if that's what's bothering you! No, no, you've got it all backwards. You think the world I came from was safe?"
He clucked his tongue. "I guess you never heard of thermo-nuclear weapons. There were tens of thousands of those lovely things floating around. Any one of them could have turned the biggest city in the world—that world, forget this one—into a pile of slag."
Ghastly details followed.
"—also had biological and chemical weapons. Take sarin gas, for instance—"
Eric listened intently.
"—course, there probably wasn't any designed weapon as nasty as the Ebola virus. That came out of Central Africa, but I always figured it'd get loose some day. After that . . ." He made a face. "It's a viral hemorrhagic fever. That means—"
Graphic and gruesome details followed. Jeff moved on to other ills of the twentieth century.
"—overpopulation. Oh, yeah, I figured someday even Fairmont would have skyscrapers and you'd be lucky to get five hundred square feet to—
"—additives in everything. I mean, you had no idea what you were really eating. And it was even worse in the fast food joints where—"
He reserved particular venom for what had been his own bête noire, automated phone systems.
"—always changed their menus. Call the next day and the lying bastards would insist the menu had changed again. There were stories of people dying of thirst and ruptured bladders trying to figure how to actually talk to anybody. And the one phrase you never heard those fucking computer voices say was ‘call volumes are unusually low so we'll connect you to your party immediately.' Oh, hell no. Call volumes were always high. It was like grading on a bell curve where everybody flunks."
By the time he was done, Krenz was looking downright chipper.
From atop the closest thing his scouts could find to a hill—it was really just a hillock, a slight rise in the landscape—Hans Georg von Arnim studied the surroundings. And, just as Eric Krenz had done, mused on the fact that in another universe the king of Sweden had died in battle not far from this very place.
Exactly where, no one knew. The up-time accounts referred to "the battle of Lützen," but provided few details. The battle hadn't taken place in the town itself but in some field nearby. There was supposed to have been a monument erected where Gustav Adolf died, but of course that did not exist in the world on this side of the Ring of Fire.
Von Arnim himself had once been in Swedish service, for several years. That had been two decades back, not long after Gustav Adolf ascended the throne. The new Swedish king had been seventeen years old at the time. He was only nineteen when Arnim came into his employ.
That had been a long time ago. Two decades. Two decades during which von Arnim, like most professional soldiers of the time, had served many employers. Having been born in Brandenburger Land, naturally enough he'd begun his military career as a soldier for the duchy of Prussia. That had been before Prussia was absorbed by Brandenburg. He'd had to leave hastily due to a