Re: Steel and Gunpowder

It had been exactly fourteen days since General Voss had marched the Third Jaeger Battalion into the southern mountain pass, establishing an unyielding choke point against the encroaching forces of the Holy Roman Empire.

Down in the valley, the Vanguard of the Spanish Tercios had ground to a miserable halt.

Lukas huddled inside a sandbagged watchpost, rubbing his gloved hands together over a small, enclosed kerosene heater.

Beside him, Hans was meticulously sharpening his socket bayonet with a whetstone.

"The Spanish are freezing to death down there,"

Lukas muttered, peering through the narrow firing slit.

He could see the distant campfires of the Imperial army flickering weakly in the sleet.

"They wanted to starve us out. Blockade the pass. But they didn’t account for the rail line."

Hans grunted, testing the edge of his bayonet with his thumb. "King Konrad’s supply trains drop off fresh bread, hot stew, and dry socks every forty-eight hours. The only thing I’m starving for is a decent pint of Augsburg lager. When do you think they’ll actually charge the walls?"

"They won’t try a daytime assault," a voice interrupted.

General Voss stepped into the cramped watchpost. He stepped up to the firing slit. "The Duke of Alba knows a frontal charge against our Gatling emplacements is suicide. So, he sends the Pope’s zealots into the meat grinder every night."

For the past two weeks, the Knights of the Cleansing Flame had attempted to infiltrate the Swabian perimeter under the cover of darkness.

They wore white cloaks over blackened armor, scaling the rocky inclines with grappling hooks. But King Konrad had anticipated the archaic tactic.

He had ordered the engineering corps to bury hundreds of pressure-fused fragmentation mines along the approaches.

Every night, the mountains echoed with the sudden detonations of Swabian artillery shells buried just beneath the mud, followed by the roar of the Jaegers cleaning up the survivors.

"They’ve lost over two hundred infiltrators," Lukas noted, adjusting his collar. "We’ve only lost two men. And that was just a lucky shot by a Spanish heavy arbalest three days ago."

Voss remained perfectly still, the brass spyglass locked onto a specific patch of frozen mud about three hundred yards beyond the trench line.

That was where the two Jaegers had fallen during a forward reconnaissance patrol.

The volume of suppressing fire from the Spanish lines had made retrieving the bodies impossible.

Suddenly, Voss exhaled a sharp breath. The spyglass lowered slightly.

"By the Maker," Voss whispered, his voice quiet.

Lukas frowned, stepping up to the slit. "General? What is it? Are they moving the bombards forward?"

"No," Voss replied, his knuckles turning white around the brass cylinder. "Look at Private Steiner’s body. Look at his webbing."

Lukas grabbed his own issued binoculars, pressing them to his eyes.

He scanned the muddy expanse until he found the two fallen Jaegers.

They were lying face down in the frost. But something was horribly wrong...

The leather straps of their uniform webbing had been slashed open with a blade.

"Their holsters are empty," Lukas gasped. "General, their rifles are gone. And the brass cartridge pouches... they’ve been completely stripped."

Hans stopped sharpening his bayonet. He stood up so quickly his helmet scraped the roof of the watchpost.

"They stole the breech-loaders?" Hans growled, his face flushing red with sudden anger. "Those archaic bastards crawled out there in the dark and stripped our dead? General, give me fifty men! I’ll lead a trench raid right now! We’ll carve through their picket lines and take our steel back before Alba even knows what hit him!"

"Stand down, Hans," Voss commanded, his voice cracking like a whip. "You will not abandon the high ground to fight Spanish pikemen in the mud."

"But General!" Lukas protested. "If the Duke of Alba sends those rifles back to Toledo, Emperor Charles will have the schematics for a breech-loading mechanism!If they discover how to mass-produce brass cartridges, King Konrad will cut us to pieces! They have a hundred and forty thousand men! If even half of them are armed with our rifles—"

"Lukas, take a breath and use that polytechnic education the King paid for," Voss interrupted calmly. He collapsed his spyglass with a sharp clack.

Voss turned to face the two soldiers. "Let us assume the Duke of Alba holds a Pattern-3 Jaeger rifle in his hands today," Voss lectured, pacing the small confines of the bunker. "What does he actually possess? A tube of crucible steel and a box of brass cylinders. He does not have the steam-powered lathes required to carve the internal rifling grooves. If his Toledo blacksmiths try to hammer the barrel by hand, they will leave micro-fissures in the iron."

Hans blinked, his anger slowly giving way to confusion. "But what about the bullets?"

"Ah, the brass cartridges," Voss smiled. "...how does the cartridge fire, Lukas?"

Lukas hesitated. "The firing pin strikes the primer cap at the base of the casing. The cap contains... mercury fulminate."

"Exactly," Voss nodded. "Mercury fulminate requires an advanced, sterile laboratory and an exact understanding of molecular chemistry to synthesize. The Emperor’s alchemists are still trying to turn lead into gold. If they try to pack our breech-blocks with raw, unrefined black powder and ignite it with a match-cord, the back-blast will sheer the locking pins."

Voss stepped back to the firing slit, looking down at the Spanish camp with genuine pity. "If they try to reverse-engineer it, the weapon will simply detonate in their faces. Let them have the rifles. It will only accelerate their despair."

Three miles down the valley, the command tent of the Spanish Vanguard.

Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, the Duke of Alba, sat rigidly on a wooden stool. Despite the bitter cold, he wore his full suit of blackened plate armor. A single brazier provided the only warmth in the sprawling silk pavilion.

The flap of the tent was pushed aside, and a shivering Spanish captain stepped inside. The man was covered in freezing mud, his eyes wide with a mixture of terror and awe. Clutched against his chest was a bundle wrapped in a soiled woolen blanket.

"My Lord Duke," the captain rasped, bowing stiffly. "The Jinetes returned from the midnight crawl. They secured the weapons from the fallen Swabian guards."

Alba stood up. He stepped around the campaign table. "Show me."

The captain laid the bundle on the table and reverently peeled back the wool.

Resting on the rough timber was a Swabian Pattern-3 Grooved Rifle.

Alba stared at it in absolute silence. It was a weapon of alien beauty. The blued steel absorbed the dim light of the brazier. The varnished walnut stock was perfectly contoured. But what immediately unsettled the veteran commander was what the weapon lacked.

There was no serpentine lever to hold a burning match-cord. There was no flintlock mechanism. There was no pan to pour priming powder into.

Alba reached out with a gauntleted hand and picked the rifle up.

"How does the heretic fire it?" Alba whispered, turning the weapon over.

He ran a finger over the smooth, enclosed steel of the breech-block. "Where does the spark go?"

"We... we do not know, My Lord," the captain admitted, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a handful of gleaming brass cylinders.

He placed them on the table. "They carried these in their pouches. They are completely sealed. There is no opening to pour the powder down the barrel."

Alba picked up one of the brass cartridges. He squeezed it. It was solid metal, topped with a deadly, conical lead projectile.

The Duke’s mind, honed by decades of traditional warfare, slammed into a brick wall of impossibility...

A solid brass tube could not be shoved down a muzzle. A sealed metal casing could not catch a spark.

It was magic... It was the dark sorcery of a King who had sold his soul to the devil.

"They are mocking us," Alba hissed, his grip tightening on the rifle until his leather gloves creaked.

"My Lord?"

"Look at the perfection of this steel!" Alba shouted, suddenly slamming the rifle back down onto the table. "Look at the geometry of these brass casings! The Swabian King engineered a puzzle designed to make us feel like children playing with mud!"

Alba paced the length of the tent, his breath pluming in the freezing air.

The arrogance of the Alemannian kingdom was suffocating...

They sat in their heated fortresses, dropping explosive shells and wielding weapons that required no fire to ignite, while the finest Catholic army in history froze in the snow!

"Captain," Alba commanded, stopping and pointing a finger at the table. "Wrap that demonic device back up. You will ride south tonight. You will not stop until you reach the Alcázar in Toledo. Present this to the Emperor."

The captain bowed deeply, hastily wrapping the rifle back in the wool. "And what message shall I deliver to His Majesty?"

Alba stared at the brazier. "Tell the Emperor," Alba murmured, his voice exhausted, "that if the Toledo Guildmasters cannot unlock the secrets of this sorcery within the month... the Holy Roman Empire will not survive the spring."

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