And yet…

There were more jay-gees now, and there would soon be even more as the new ships began to come into service, which was how he and Eddie had become senior-grade lieutenants after less than six months. The way things were going, they could probably count on turning into lieutenant commanders before very long, too. All of which put them in the peculiar position of finding themselves senior officers of a rapidly expanding military organization. And all of which also put Larry and Eddie in a position which was not just peculiar, but downright bizarre.

Despite everything, and however much they might fight the process kicking and screaming every inch of the way, Larry Wild and Eddie Cantrell were becoming naval officers. Which meant, in practice… John Chandler Simpson's men. There was just no way around it, no matter how much Simpson often rubbed the youngsters the wrong way. Whatever else, Simpson was building one hell of a fine little navy. And Larry, like his friend and fellow senior-grade lieutenant Eddie Cantrell, was increasingly proud to be a part of it.

Larry trotted into the harbor area mulling in his mind a remark Eddie had made the last time he saw him. Yeah, sure, Simpson's a bastard. But dammit, Larry, he's our bastard.

Now that he'd reached the harbor, Larry headed for the bustle of activity around the looming skeleton of Gustavus Adolphus' ironclad-to-be.

The ship wasn't very large by the standards of the 21 st century… but this was the 17 th century, and the partially planked hull loomed over the waterfront like a Titan.

The basic building plan had come from a book by Howard I. Chapelle, who'd once headed the maritime history section of the Smithsonian Institute. Eddie had picked it up in a used-book shop somewhere, along with a couple of Chapelle's other books, when he'd been doing the research for one of the "Four Musketeers' " war games. Once Eddie had approached Mike Stearns with the proposal for the ironclads and casually mentioned the rest of his esoteric collection of military reference works, Mike, Frank Jackson, and John Simpson had descended upon his library in force. A lot of what it contained wouldn't be very useful until the infrastructure to build it could be constructed, but Chapelle's books had been pounced upon by the Swedish shipwrights as if Eddie had been Galahad, returning to King Arthur with Holy Grail in hand. The looming skeleton of what would become the Swedish Navy's flagship was only one result.

A fairly substantial result, Larry conceded. The flush-decked U.S. Navy sloop-of-war upon which the design was based had been one hundred and forty-eight feet long between perpendiculars, with a beam of just under thirty-nine feet. That meant her hull was about thirty feet shorter than the ironclads Simpson was building in Magdeburg, but since she was going to have a bowsprit over sixty feet long, Eddie suspected no one would notice. And whereas Simpson's ships were going to be ugly, boxy vessels, with an uncompromising brutality of line and form, Gustavus' ship retained the graceful lines crafted by her original 19 th -century architect. The only real change the emperor's builders had made in the enlarged builder's draft Grantville copiers had produced from Chapelle's carefully redrawn plans had been to increase the height of the bulwarks from just under five feet to approximately seven. Once the armor plate being produced in the local rolling mill was bolted to the outside of the hull, that would provide head-high protection for her gun crews. Of course, hanging that much iron plate on the outside of the hull was going to add about two hundred tons to her weight, so even with the reduction in her broadside armament, she was going to draw close to twenty-four feet, which was a bit deep but manageable for the Baltic.

Personally, Larry suspected that the impressiveness of Gustavus' new ship was the real reason the emperor had insisted upon building her here in Luebeck. Certainly, she made a lasting impression on anyone who entered or visited the city's harbor… including the town's burghers and authorities.

The harbor itself swarmed with shipping of every description. According to Ms. Mailey, Luebeck had managed to sit out the Thirty Years War in the past of Larry's own world pretty much unscathed, maintaining its neutrality with shrewd diplomacy. This time around, it didn't look like it was going to be quite so lucky, because in this 17 th century, Gustavus Adolphus hadn't gotten himself killed in battle-so far, at least. He was very much alive, and while he was willing to use the velvet glove instead of the iron fist when he could, he also wasn't about to put up with any evasion of his requirements.

Gustav Adolf needed a solid base for his logistics, and Luebeck was one of only a few North German ports suitable for the part. Wismar, Rostock and Stralsund were already held by the Swedes and incorporated into the CPE, and it was fairly obvious to everyone that Luebeck was going to join them in the end. The only real question was how much independence the old Hanseatic League city was going to retain, and that was what Gustavus' current diplomatic dance with the city's authorities was all about.

Unlike Hamburg, which dominated the estuary of the Elbe, Luebeck was on the Baltic side of the Jutland Peninsula. That was important, because as long as Denmark was in a position to close the Kattegat to shipping and so deny Sweden access to the North Sea, Hamburg was completely unsuitable as a supply port connecting Sweden itself to the continental portions of Gustav's CPE.

Not that Luebeck was a perfect substitute for Hamburg. The Stecknitz Canal, which linked the city to the Elbe River at Lauenburg, upriver from Hamburg, had been designed only to accommodate the barges of the salt trade. Those were large enough to haul cargos that could be broken up into fairly small chunks, but not for the sort of heavy transport the CPE and the United States envisioned. That could be fixed, however, and Gustavus' engineers, assisted by American survey crews, were already busy designing the new and improved Stecknitz which would serve their needs just fine.

More immediately, however, there was the fact that any of the North German ports were close enough to Christian IV's Denmark for the Danish Navy to threaten their lines of communication with Sweden. Luebeck, in fact, was more vulnerable to Danish interference than most of them. But that was what the Swedish Navy was for. The Danes had learned the hard way that the Swedes were not to be trifled with, and the squadron of Admiral Karl Karlsson Gyllenhjelm had been stationed at Luebeck to remind Christian of that.

Luebeck itself was in two minds about Gyllenhjelm's presence. The city's burghers were far from blind to the enormous beneficial impact the sort of canal Gustavus envisioned would have on their economy. The king and his Swedish and American team of engineers were planning for a canal whose locks would admit barges as much as a hundred feet in length and thirty or forty feet across the beam-larger than many seagoing merchant ships. Coupled with the improvements on the Elbe itself which were already underway, the new and enlarged Stecknitz would turn Luebeck into the focal point for the entire Baltic's trade with Northern and Central Germany, just as Hamburg dominated the North Sea trade. Given that Luebeck was already the largest and most important of the German ports on the Baltic, its economic prospects looked bright indeed.

Unfortunately, those same burghers were only too well aware of the downside of the situation, as well. Leaving aside the loss of their cherished independence-Luebeck had been the leading city of the Hanseatic League for centuries-there was a crude and simple matter of self-preservation involved. The more important they became to Gustavus and the CPE, the more attractive their destruction would appear to Gustavus' enemies, which made his plans for the Stecknitz very much a two-edged sword. Especially since Luebeck was none too sure Gustavus was going to survive, even with his American allies and their mechanical marvels.