The new United States in central Germany launches a one-plane Doolittle Raid on Paris, France. The target: their arch-enemy, Cardinal Richelieu. Meanwhile, an ambassador from the Mughal Empire of northern India is being held captive in Austria by the Habsburg dynasty. Mike Stearns decides to send a mercenary company to rescue him, led by two seventeenth-century mercenary officers: an Englishman and a Irishman, who seem to spend as much time fighting each other as they do the enemy. Mike Spehar&rsquo;s &ldquo;Collateral Damage&rdquo; and Chris Weber&rsquo;s &ldquo;The Company Men&rdquo; are just two of the stories contained in this second volume of the Grantville Gazette. In other stories:<P>*A prominent Italian musician decides to travel to Grantville to investigate the music of the future. * An American archer and a Finnish cavalryman become friends in the middle of a battlefield. * A Lutheran pastor begins a theological challenge to the establishment based on his interpretation of the Ring of Fire. * American and German detectives become partners to investigate a murder. * And, in a complete novel by new alternate history star Danita Ewing, <I>An Invisible War</i>, the new United States founds a medical school in Jena despite resistance from up-timers and down-timers alike.<P>The second volume of <I>Grantville Gazette</i> also contains factual articles which explain some of the technical background for the 1632 series, including articles on practical geology, telecommunications, and seventeenth-century swordsmanship.