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Epilogue

Over the next few days, NESS got organized, consulted Chief Frost, moved from Murphyhausen to the high school refugee housing, and followed the news closely. Three events seemed significant. A big convoy left Grantville by night, carrying boats north. In Bamberg, the city council had two up-timers flogged and then was overthrown in a revolution. Neustatter and the rest of the men had a fairly good idea that that situation and the tension in Suhl and its surrounding villages were related. The implications of the third event were harder to gauge. The first airplane flight had been amazing, but what was even more shocking was that now the airplane had flown President Stearns to Magdeburg. Neustatter wanted to find some movies about airplanes, but he pointed out one thing it meant right away: President Stearns had gotten from Grantville to Magdeburg in just a few hours, faster than even the goal of the railroads.

The polizei told them that the two men who had attacked the women would be tried, and if found guilty, would be sent to prison. Schlinck had left them to fend for themselves. The polizei told Schlinck and his men to stay away from NESS. None of them expected Schlinck to obey those instructions, but he seemed to do so. Astrid concluded that Chief Frost and someone from the NUS Army were very persuasive.

The polizei also left tickets, one for each of them, for a showing of Entebbe at the movie theater in Grantville.

That Friday night, NESS arrived to find polizei, NUS soldiers, and other security contractors and mercenaries in line.

“Neustatter!”

“Sergeant Wolfe! Good to see you.”

“Do you know what this is all about? Captain Bretagne told me to find some volunteers and come. We do not even know what the title means.”

“It is not English. It was—would be a city in Africa. The movie is about . . . ” Neustatter stopped. Some people didn’t like spoilers, and in this case, the movie would be more effective without them. “ . . . about a hostage situation. A true story.”

Hans Wolfe looked dubious, which was only fair, Neustatter supposed.

“I wonder whose idea this was,” Wolfe muttered.

Neustatter pointed at Astrid. “She found out about it. I think Chief Frost took it from there.”

Astrid was eyeing the building dubiously. It had clearly seen better days. But when the line moved forward and they got inside, she saw that the interior, although nowhere near new, was neat and clean. Each of them handed their ticket to an attendant and pushed past a strange, rotating bar.

The theater itself wasn’t as nice as the Grantville High School auditorium. The fuzzy surface on the chairs was worn, and some of them squeaked. On the other hand, no down-time schloss or even palace had a theater like this, did they?

In a few minutes, once everyone was seated, the lights dimmed, and the movie began. The audience quickly grew very serious.

When the lights came back up, the theater exploded in applause, and then everyone started talking at once.

“Did that really happen up-time?” Johann asked.

Stefan shrugged. “I am not sure how much of it is real.”

“Astrid?” Neustatter asked.

She’d checked into it. “I do not know if they said exactly those words, but that is what really happened.”

“But . . . they’re Jews,” Lukas said.

“Miss Zibarth said, ‘It’s no fun when almost everyone is out to get you, and you don’t know whom you can trust.’”

“Been there.” Astrid wondered where Neustatter had picked up the English slang. “Our kind of cowboys,” he continued. “Grantville is home for them, too, now.”

“Ja,” Ditmar added. “They are all right.”

***

The men were suddenly very busy. Whether Lieutenant Kerns wanted them guarding convoys or not no longer seemed to matter. Wagons and trucks moved back and forth between Grantville, Erfurt, Suhl, and other towns seemingly all the time, and NESS escorted some of them.

Neustatter sent Astrid to the newspaper to change the address in the classified ad from the Murphyhausen address to the new office. On days that the men were in town, either Neustatter, Ditmar, or Hjalmar would be at the office. Whichever of them were not in the office were out looking for permanent quarters. Hjalmar came back one afternoon after speaking with a construction crew building something almost directly across Route 250 from the high school and not that far from the NESS office.

He’d started by exploring Freeman Street, which was the road directly across the intersection from the entrance to the high school complex. Two houses in, it took a left turn and paralleled Route 250 before stopping at a house in the woods. There was another house beyond it, but this one lay on Porter Avenue. Freeman and Porter did not connect. Or at least, they had not before the Ring of Fire. It looked to Hjalmar like they probably would within the next few weeks.

Porter Avenue started off Route 250, just west of and across the road from the building that held NESS’ office. It looked like a single-lane driveway until it got out of sight of Route 250. Then it exploded in several directions, with some branches still called Porter Avenue while other branches had different names. Most of them were little more than gravel or dirt tracks that connected twenty-odd houses that looked like they’d been randomly scattered across a large clearing—although it could be argued that half a dozen of them properly belonged to Sunkist Avenue. Sunkist was another gravel driveway, leading off Route 250 just east of the NESS office.

But Hjalmar could hear the noise of construction, and most of it was coming from further back in the woods. He backtracked to Route 250 and headed west toward Grantville. Just past the entrance to the high school complex, more or less opposite the corner of the tech center, was a single-lane paved road called Kimberly Heights. It curved around the back of the veterinary clinic that was on Route 250. One of the livery stables was on the outside of that arc. Further on, trailers lined both sides of the road, eight on one side and nine on the other. As soon as Kimberly Heights straightened out behind Freeman Street, it ended.

But now it was being extended, apparently all the way to another of those extensions of Porter Avenue. It looked to Hjalmar as though it would form a neighborhood two blocks deep in this area. Those weren’t houses going up, either. The frames were three stories tall.

Hjalmar quickly reported to Neustatter.

Hjalmar and Neustatter found out who owned the land and whom he had put in charge of what looked like yet another growing village. That man was not quite the same thing as a lehenholder, but close enough that Neustatter knew how to approach him. He found the man supervising the construction operation.

The man wearing the white hardhat immediately shook hands with them. “Joel Carstairs. Sommersburg and Carstairs Construction. Although that Carstairs in the firm name is really my brother.”

“Edgar Neustatter.”

“Hjalmar Schaub.”

“What are you building here?” Neustatter asked.

“Apartments,” Carstairs answered. “We need more housing in the Ring of Fire, wherever we can put it.”

“We are looking for housing ourselves,” Neustatter told him. “Twelve of us. Two couples, one with a child. Hjalmar here has a sister and a cousin. I am one of four single men.”

“Where are you living now?”

“In the refugee housing by the high school.”

Carstairs pointed at the framework of a building. “That is going to be four apartments across and three stories tall. We will put another one next to it, and then we are going to build townhouses beyond that.”

“Who do we see about renting an apartment?” Neustatter asked. “Who owns the land, and who is his lehenholder?”

“It doesn’t work quite like that,” Carstairs told him. He flipped pages on the clipboard he was carrying. “I’ve got the list right here, and all twelve apartments in Building One are spoken for. But I’ve got a couple third-floor apartments available in Building Two. With twelve people, you’ll need both, right?”

“Twelve of us fit in one of the rowhouses in Murphyhausen.”

“I know those rowhouses,” Carstairs told Neustatter. “These apartments are not as big. You need both. Six adults is just about as many people as I would want to put in one of them.”

“Astrid is going to have to rework the budget,” Hjalmar warned.

“Still . . . Herr Carstairs is right,” Neustatter said. “Will we be able to cook inside?”

“Absolutely!” Joel Carstairs nodded vigorously enough that his hardhat bounced up and down. “We’ve already upgraded the connections along Kimberly Heights and Porter Avenue, so the apartments and the townhouses will have water, sewer, and electricity. I don’t know if there are enough telephones available to make it worth running phone lines or not.”

Neustatter nodded. “How do we sign up?”

***

On Wednesday, September 28, NESS’ first civilian client appeared. Some goods needed to be shipped to Magdeburg. They could be transferred to a boat at Halle, but would have to reach Halle overland. In light of the news and the value of the goods, guards were required. The shipment was in two days. Neustatter accepted the mission at once.

The men left that Friday. It was four days each way. The trip was entirely uneventful. They did not even see the villagers south of Kösen. But when they returned on Friday, October 7, they had no more than hugged their wives (and sister) than Neustatter directed everyone to the popular tavern, the Thuringen Gardens.

“We need to hear the news,” he stated. “We heard bits and pieces, but I want to know everything.”

The Thuringen Gardens was in an uproar. It had been loud on the few occasions they had eaten there before, but this was different. It was standing room only.

NUS forces had fought a battle against the Danes in Wismar Bay. Someone shouted the crowd down periodically and gave updates.

Hans Richter was dead. His airplane had been shot down. Larry Wild and Eddie Cantrell were dead, too. Their boat had blown up. But they had destroyed much of the Danish fleet.

NESS mostly listened. Everyone in Grantville was heartbroken, proud of the boys, and angry, all at once. And determined.

“This is a new war,” Neustatter stated.

“Do you think you men will be called up?” Ursula asked.

“It is too soon to say,” Neustatter answered. “But there is no sense in trying to outthink President Stearns and Captain-General Gars. This League of Ostend will learn that soon enough. We have a new home, and until we hear otherwise, a lot of convoys to protect.”


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Framed