Re: Steel and Gunpowder

The King’s order rippled down the marching column.

"Accelerate the cadence! We take the high ground!"

For Lukas, a loader in the Third Gatling Company, those words meant pain. His shoulders screamed under the weight of the wooden crate strapped to his back, packed with brass cartridges.

Two years ago, he had been a starving blacksmith’s apprentice. Now, he was an Ironstorm Jaeger, trained in the mathematics of trajectories and Swabian steel. He was marching toward a Hungarian fortress with an eighty-thousand-man Ottoman army behind them.

"Lukas!"

A heavy hand slapped his shoulder, nearly sending him into the mud. Lukas stumbled and turned to see Hans jogging to catch up. Hans was built like a draft horse, tasked with carrying the iron tripods for the Gatling guns.

"What is it, Hans?" Lukas wheezed, adjusting his leather straps. "I’m trying to conserve breath."

Hans grinned. "Couriers say the King wants us to pack fifty-five thousand men inside Veszprém. Us, the Austrian knights, and the levies. All in one castle!"

Lukas folded one of Hans’s fingers down. "We aren’t going inside the courtyards, idiot. The Austrians take the inner baileys. We take the walls."

"The walls?" Hans blinked. "But the walls are where the cannons hit."

"Exactly," Lukas said, eyeing the stone towers of Veszprém. "We have the Gatlings. We turn the approach into a kill-zone."

They pushed past the Austrian knights sinking into the mud and reached the gates of Veszprém.

The starving Hungarian defenders stared in disbelief as the Alemannian vanguard poured through the gates. Officers immediately shouted coordinates, directing the heavy weapons teams up the spiral staircases of the battlements.

Lukas and Hans hauled their gear to the highest watchtower. Below them, the Ottoman encampment stretched to the horizon.

Just as Lukas unlocked his ammunition crate, Lieutenant Wolff from the engineering corps stepped onto the battlement, surveying the men assembling the Gatling cart.

"Listen up," Wolff barked. "The firing angles from this elevation are steep. Does anyone know how to calculate the declination for a target at three hundred yards?"

Lukas raised his hand. "I do, sir."

Wolff pointed his brass pen at him. "Target moving at a standard jog, wind east at ten knots. Where do you set your sights?"

"I don’t set them on the target, sir," Lukas answered. "I set them two degrees left, aiming twenty yards ahead of their vanguard to account for the mechanical spread."

Wolff raised an eyebrow. "Good. You’re the lead crank-operator for this position."

Hans slapped Lukas on the back.

Wolff turned to the rest of the crew. "Let’s see if the rest of you are dead weight. Question one: The barrel begins to smoke white, not grey. What do you do?"

"The water jacket boiled dry, sir!" a recruit shouted. "Cease fire and swap the cooling cylinder, or the barrel warps!"

"Correct," Wolff snapped. "Question two: We are surrounded. The enemy breaches the lower courtyard. The Austrians run. Your priority?"

"Spike the guns, sir!" Hans chimed in. "Smash the crank mechanisms. No Swabian steel falls into enemy hands."

Wolff nodded. "Question three. Below you, a wave of Janissaries charges. They’ve forced unarmored peasants to the front to absorb our bullets. Do you fire?"

The battlement went silent.

Lukas stepped forward. "We fire, sir. Hesitation is a variable we cannot afford. We neutralize the grid, regardless of who is inside it."

Wolff stared at Lukas, then made a checkmark on his board. He turned and headed back down the stairs.

They spent the evening locking the Gatling carts into the crenellations and calibrating their sights. As night fell, they slept huddled against the freezing stone.

Day 1 of the Siege.

Lukas felt he had only closed his eyes when a kick to his boot jolted him awake.

"Up! Get up!"

Sergeant Miller, a scarred veteran, stomped down the battlement, banging an iron spoon against a tin bucket.

"Move your hides! You aren’t in Augsburg anymore!"

Lukas scrambled to his feet. Next to him, Hans yawned.

"Why is he screaming so early?" Hans grumbled. "The sun isn’t up."

Miller marched up to Hans, his nose inches from his chest.

"I am screaming because the Sultan does not sleep in!" Miller roared. "Look over the wall! Look at what is coming to slit your throats!"

Lukas stepped to the parapet and looked down.

The Ottoman camp was a hive of activity. War drums vibrated through the stones of Veszprém. Tens of thousands of men were forming into squares. The light cavalry swept the flanks, while the Janissaries marched in perfect synchronization.

At the center, massive bronze siege bombards were being wheeled forward by oxen.

"Form a line!" Miller bellowed. "Drop and give me thirty push-ups! Get the blood flowing before I throw you off this wall!"

The recruits dropped to the stone, the terror of the view below fueling their adrenaline.

"One! Two! Three!" they counted off, the sound of their exercises mixing with the war drums.

Lukas gritted his teeth. He sneaked a glance through the embrasure at the endless sea of soldiers preparing to crash against their walls.

Fifty-five thousand of us. Eighty thousand of them.

He looked at the oiled barrels of the Gatling cart, then down at Suleiman’s army.

Despite the mathematics and the Swabian steel, Lukas couldn’t help but say the thought written on the faces of every Jaeger.

What in God’s name have we gotten ourselves into?

...

Osman Pasha adjusted the collar of his ceremonial armor, his eyes scanning the horizon. As the commander of the Sultan’s elite Janissary vanguard, he had marched across half the known world, reducing proud European kingdoms to smoldering ash.

Veszprém was supposed to be just another stepping stone... Another notch on his gilded scimitar before the Ottoman war washed over Vienna.

He rode at the head of fifteen thousand battle-hardened infantrymen.

Behind them, a seemingly endless train of bronze bombards and Sipahi cavalry stretched back toward the Hungarian plains.

"They are starving in there, Pasha," his second-in-command, Kemal, muttered, riding up alongside him.

Kemal squinted at the distant walls of Veszprém. "Our scouts report that the peasants are eating their own horses. We should just wait for the Grand Vizier’s heavy artillery to arrive and flatten the gatehouse."

Osman scoffed, waving a dismissive hand. "Wait? For what? So the Vizier can claim the glory of breaking the Hungarian lines? I think not."