Pandoric for now. While we have a general idea of how it ends (rather badly for the UPSA), there is still enough blank area for plentiful surprises. As far as the later conflict goes, we haven't heard anything about a third way between the two extremes of Global Societism and the Assembly of Sovereign Nations. Ideological disagreements within them sure, but nothing about a third horse in the rodeo.
Look to the West Volume V: To Dream Again
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Part #229: Consequences
The country’s official name is: KINGDOM OF THE FRENCH (short form FRANCE; often cited as KINGDOM OF FRANCE, technically incorrect but still in common use)
The people are known as: FRENCHMEN and -WOMEN.
Capital and largest city: Paris (3.1 million)
Flag: A single large golden fleur-de-lys on a blue disc on a white field bordered in red.
Population: 51 million.[1]
Land area: ca. 287,000 lcf.[2]
Economic ranking: Has been ranked at 1st in the world for much of the century but this position is increasingly precarious and debated, with some economists arguing for different metrics.
Form of government: Parliamentary constitutional monarchy. The legislature, the Grand-Parlement, is now entirely elected. Suffrage is property-based and (at least in theory) gender blind, with the property requirement having repeatedly been reduced over the past few decades both by deliberate policy and the action of inflation. All members of the armed forces and (more recently) the civil service also receive the right to vote automatically regardless of their wealth. The suffrage is now estimated to include approximately 75% of male and 20% of female citizens; French citizenship can be applied for by colonial subjects though the process is long-winded and expensive, and the majority of non-European descended French citizens obtained their citizenship by military or other government service. Service in the French East India Company does not automatically lead to citizenship but it is informally understood that five years’ service will result in citizenship being awarded. All citizens regardless of property have the right to vote for the Parlements-Provincial (which have also been created in Pérousie, and similar but more informal institutions exist in French India). In theory, the King of the French has the power to appoint and dismiss Prime Ministers as well as summon and dissolve the Grand-Parlement, but in practice these days these powers are rarely invoked and usually only on the advice of the party leaders. The King is also commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but in times of national peril the Constitution allows for the creation of a Dictateur who will temporarily wield extraordinary power by agreement of the King and all the major party leaders.
Foreign relations: For centuries France’s primary foreign policy goal has simply been to dominate the European continent, and despite setbacks under Louis XV and the Revolutionary governments, at the end of the nineteenth century that goal has seldom looked more plausible. Spain has a French king and she and her neighbours have been brought into the French sphere, while Great Britain has been consumed with her own problems since the Jacobin Wars, as has Austria/Danubia to a lesser extent. Only a united Germany and a modernised Ottoman Empire have posed a serious threat to French ambitions, and the former has proved much less of a rival than mid-century French politicians feared. French concerns are increasingly more about the rise of large non- or only partly-European based nations with access to vast natural resources which, combined with industrialisation, would allow them to overtake France’s ‘natural position’ of dominance: America, the UPSA, Russia, and to a lesser extent Feng China. French rhetoric therefore often focuses on the idea of France as the natural leader of the world in pushing for international policy agreements.
Military: The privileged position the French armed forces acquired after the Popular Wars , coupled to France not having been involved in many major conflicts since the Great American War, has slightly sapped the capabilities of what was once the greatest military power in the world. However, this factor is rather weaker than France’s enemies would like to believe and France continues to lead the world in many military innovations, as well as training the armed forces of several overseas powers such as Persia and the Matetwa Empire. The French Navy is probably the second largest and most capable in the world behind that of the Empire of North America, although this is subject to debate due to disagreements over how to count the French East India Company’s vessels (and similarly for Russia and the RLPC).
Current head of state: King Louis XVIII (House of Bourbon) (since 1871)
Current head of government: Prime Minister Napoleon Leclerc (National Party) (since 1895)
*
From: The World At War: From The Pages of The Discerner VOLUME I: THE GATHERING STORM (1981):
Fredericksburg, Williamsburg Province, Empire of North America
December 28th 1896
“Fine Christmas present there, President Leclerc,” muttered Lewis Faulkner MCP as he folded the newspaper under his arm. The movement meant he brushed one of his elaborate, frilly cuffs with his other hand and only worsened his mood. He had never liked the highfalutin fashions of the capital, stuck in the past with all its bowing and scraping. The Patriots might be a useless rump these days but it seemed one thing they still controlled was what was considered acceptable to wear in the House of Commons. A place for everyone and everyone in their place—the values of the Vetomund[3] splashed all over a place which made a mockery of them. America was a land of opportunity, a land in which a man could rise from humble birth to become a decorated admiral, or a great and respected artist, or a captain of industry, or a bishop of the Church…or a leader.
A man like Lewis Faulkner.
The cuffs were only part of it. Faulkner hated the Arc of Power, hated the East Coast in general, with all the strutting gentry and the quiet, subservient people. This place claimed to be the heart of American power yet it had forgotten what it was to be an American, to know the endless skies above the empty plains, a magnificent desolation yet alive with possibilities. A landscape which wanted only one individual’s human ingenuity to transform it into something the world had never seen. That was Faulkner’s America. Not resting on the laurels of past generations, content to sit in their shadows and run out the clock of the diamondball game of life.
He was one of Gualpa Province’s MCPs. Long ago that province[4] had been a part of Carolina and Faulkner vaguely thought he might have some Carolinian blood in his ancestry, but he dismissed that: he looked forward to the future, not backwards to the past. He didn’t care about Carolina, which if anything was even more dustily hidebound than the Arc of Power. He did, however, care about America. He was a Liberal, concerned with what individuals might achieve, not governments or nations—but he agreed with the old Supremacists on one thing, and that was the Self-Evident Birthright.[5] America should rule the continent that bore her name, if not both of them. Carolina had been held as a knife to her throat for too long. It was time to remove that pawn from the chessboard and make her happy, ensure she did not remain a viper in the breast. Faulkner was prepared to do anything to achieve that aim.
He hated Martin Hiedler, hated Mount Zhangqihe, hell if he didn’t hate poor old David Braithwaite too, unworthy though the thought might be. This was Christmas, dammit. Boxing Day, no less.[6] He should be at home in Pinckney[7] giving out Christmas boxes to his secretary and all his campaign staff to thank them for their hard work. Not stuck here still in the miserable capital, wet and humid even in midwinter, trapped amid crowded streets choked with steam and smoke. Dr Barton and his disciples reckoned that such environments were a breeding ground for the animalcules that caused disease: Faulkner could readily believe it. He yearned for the empty, open, clean landscape around Pinckney, the town still small and homely enough that a man could walk its streets expecting to know half his passers-by by name. He needed to get out of this Black Hole of Calcutta before he went mad.
But no such freedom for him. Sighing, he rapped smartly on the iconic black door. Unsurprisingly, it was opened almost immediately by a burly man who gave him an owlish stare before nodding reluctantly. “It’s Mr. Faulkner,” he said to an unseen personage within, in a tone which implied he’d much rather have opened the door on some hypothetical Russian nindzhya assassin.
Faulkner was allowed inside. He was hit by a blast of heat from Fourteen Culpeper Road’s newly upgraded heating system, but in other ways he felt the temperature had dropped several degrees. Both the doorman and the gatekeeper secretary at her desk kept edging looks at him which did not feel like those he was accustomed to receive from the largely docile civil servants of the capital. Faulkner shifted uncomfortably, uncertain whether to take one of the plush chairs or stand. He was halfway through belatedly going for the first option when the secretary glanced at a small device on her desk and nodded. “The President will see you now,” she told him.
If Faulkner hadn’t seen the green flag pop up on the device himself, he would have suspected her of deliberately waiting till he was in an awkward position. “Thank you,” he muttered and went to the second door, where another doorkeeper scrutinised him in turn before allowing him through. In time of war, the President’s staff were taking no chances.
The second door did not bring him directly to the Opal Office, of course, but opened onto a corridor which would eventually lead him there. Faulkner paced slowly down the hallway, noting the carefully placed portraits on the walls. They were all the former Presidents of the Empire of North America, from the days when the office had still been named Lord President. There was Lord Washington in his white wig, his wooden teeth concealed by a determined jawline, his hand artistically placed on his sword-hilt to suggest his martial origins. Then came Lord Hamilton and then the start of those who had scorned noble titles: Monroe, Seymour, Quincy (with his orange rosette), Ward, Crane, Harrison (already looking a bit peaky in the portrait), Carter (now only known through his son), the ill-fated Eveleigh, Sinclair…
Then a doorway and then they resumed: Mullenbergh, Boyd, Vanburen, Crowninshield, Martin, Bassett (Faulkner avoided that portrait’s gaze), Studebaker, then Whipple—who, Faulkner knew, was the first to actually dwell in Fourteen Culpeper Road). Then came Fletcher, Braithwaite (who bore a striking resemblance to the asimcons of his nephew that had been circulated), Chamberlain, Foxbury and Cooper. There was already an empty frame ready for the time when the man occupying the Opal Office would go from living politics to the history books, whether his mortal frame continued to walk the earth or not. There was plenty of room after that for more portraits, too. Faulkner brushed the thought aside, came to the door at the end of the hallway and once again knocked smartly.
“Enter,” a voice immediately responded. Faulkner did so, swallowing any remaining nervousness. This was only the third time he had been to the residence of the President of the Empire of North America.
That man glanced up from behind his desk, which had started out life as part of Admiral John Byng’s flagship HMS Devonshire a hundred and fifty years earlier. That was almost certainly true – what was probably added invention was the idea that it had been made out of the part of the deck where William IV had been shot dead. Faulkner had heard all sorts of lurid stories about dark stains on the wood, but looking at it now he suspected they had been made by the rather less interesting process of various Presidents spilling ink while signing documents.
He suspected however that President Stuart Jamison was not one of them. Faulkner would swear he had aged a decade in the last few weeks, but while his hair and impressive moustache might be greying, there was none of an old man’s shakes in his hands as they gripped a fountain pen in one hand and a lit cigar in the other. The crow’s-feet about his blue eyes might have deepened, but those eyes were still filled with sharp intensity.
And anger.
Faulkner might have taken a step back, were it not for the fact that something else drew his attention first. There were two chairs on the other side of Jamison’s desk, and one was already occupied.
The Opal Office was aptly named. To celebrate the Braithwaite-Araníbar treaty over Cuba two decades before, the ENA and UPSA had exchanged gifts, and among the Meridians’ gifts had been a number of fascinating fire opals from the New Spanish province of Querétaro extracted there by a Meridian company.[8] The glittering opals had been used to decorate many items in the room, from the commemorative plaque on Jamison’s desk to the frame of Emperor George IV’s official portait opposite the fireplace. But amid all those reflective shimmers, something else was reflecting the light from the gaslights hissing away on the walls. It was—
“You are, of course, familiar with Mr. Jonathan Space Oseytutu,” Jamison said in his nasal New York accent. For a moment a part of the back of Faulkner’s mind wondered madly if what some of the crank inventors were saying was true and one day a man’s voice would be propagated throughout the nation: would there be an incentive to sound more neutral to appeal to a wider range of voters?
Faulkner dismissed the thought and focused on the second man as he turned in his seat, his expression unreadable. His ebony skin, with a thin sheen of sweat from the heat of the gaslights, was responsible for that reflective shimmer Faulkner had seen out of the corner of his eye. It contrasted sharply with the cream canvas Fredericksburg suit he wore, frilly cuffs and all, almost identical to Jamison’s and Faulkner’s. It wasn’t as if he had anything against Negroes as such, Faulkner thought, but he was a bit jealous of how Oseytutu wore the suit rather better than he did.
“Mr. Faulkner,” Oseytutu said coolly, his voice deep and resonant, with barely a trace of the ‘yes massuh’ accent which a dozen Negro Burlesques had led Faulkner to expect.[9] Surely he must have heard this man, one of the MCPs for Africa Nova Province, speak in the Continental Parliament before? He searched his memory, but was interrupted: “Mr. Faulkner. His Excellency and I have been discussing the matter of the…tone of propaganda which the Empire’s agents have chosen to prepare the way for our troops.”
Faulkner shook his head slightly and laughed nervously. “Mr. Oseytutu,” he stumbled over the name and privately cursed the man for naming himself after some old Ashante king, “I trust you understand that my intention is only to ensure that our soldiers take over Carolina as quickly as possible, aided by discontent and divided loyalties within. Once that takeover is completed, there is no need to actually act on any of the, ah, unrealistic bait we have placed in the way of the Carolinians—”
“Of the white Carolinians,” Oseytutu said, wagging his finger in a manner that belonged in one of the Gooch Street coffee-houses whose pretentious culture Faulkner despised. “You seem to have rather ignored the impact that your grand promises to reinstate particular…institutions on those Carolinians whose skin is of other hues.”
It took Faulkner a moment to wrap his head around that: he was confused by anyone, least of all a Negro, would attempt to assert that his fellow Negroes in Carolina could or should be gathered with a sense of ownership under the same umbrella as that nation which had been created solely to perpetuate their oppression. “Sir, are you suggesting that the black folk of Carolina would do anything but welcome us with open arms, finally completing the task which should have fallen to our fathers and grandfathers but for sad accidents of history?”
“Mr. Faulkner,” Oseytutu said evenly, his voice betraying none of the anger dancing in his eyes, “I would indeed have taken that view—before you and your propagandists entered the scene. Now you have done what a dozen Meridian printing presses could not: you have muddied the waters and made my brothers and sisters south of the border doubt that their current situation under Meridian rule is open to improvement. Not when the alternative speaks of removing them from their offices and factories and returning them to the fields with iron collars on their necks.”
“Mr. Oseytutu, you must know that those words were only aimed at the white Carolinians,” Faulkner protested.
“The thing about words, Mr. Faulkner, is that they can be read by anyone with the gift of reading,” President Jamison interjected, “and, as Mr. Oseytutu was telling me, the Meridian use of the Negroes of Carolina as administrators and enforcers means that your words are more likely to be read by those Negroes than their white neighbours and would-be slavemasters.”
“Your Excellency,” Faulkner tried, “we agreed this tack together—”
“We did, and I blame myself,” Jamison said tiredly. “I should have consulted more widely. I could have been diverted from a destructive path.” He glanced at Oseytutu. “It is not merely Mr. Oseytutu that has come to see me, but Mr. Williams of Franklin Province also. Mr. Williams is the son of a Carolinian refugee who fled northward before the Thaw and maintains contacts with the community south of the border. He assures me that white Carolinian children are assured by their storytellers that the Yankees, as they name us, are all liars and tricksters. Given the tone of some of the stories they are raised on, it seems unlikely that many of the present generation will take your propaganda on trust.”
Jamison stubbed out his cigar and shuffled some papers. “Ah, here it is. Yes, this report from General Golding certainly appears to support such an idea.” He pushed it across to Faulkner, who reluctantly took it. “Our soldiers have been welcomed with open arms by the local white Carolinians, who then proceeded to give them freshly baked cakes containing ground glass, or apple pie with a little too much prussic acid beyond that which my advisors tell me is naturally found in apple pips.” Jamison abruptly snatched the report back. “You’ve made us a laughingstock!” he snarled.
Faulkner shook his head. “This shouldn’t have happened…”
“Never did you say a truer word,” Jamison said nastily.
“It was easy for you to dismiss the impact of your words as happening to a far country of which you know little,” Oseytutu said, more saddened than angry. “No matter how long this war goes on, nobody is going to be bombing Pinckney. It is my brothers and sisters who will bear the impact of your scheme.”
“Well I’m taking a different tack now, and the Ministry of War knows it,” said Jamison. “The printing presses are going full tilt. We’re reversing direction and promising to maintain the Negroes’ privileged position under the Meridians.”
“Not just maintain,” Oseytutu said mildly, though with iron beneath. “No man will fight and die just to keep treading water.”
“Improve, then,” Jamison conceded. “And that means Carolina stays as an independent kingdom for the foreseeable future. We’re just going to replace a Meridian overlord with an American one.”
Faulkner felt the future slipping through his fingers. “But…the task our forefathers failed to complete…”
“Will have to wait for another day,” Jamison said firmly. “If it ever will, if our folk have not drifted too far apart. And we will need your help.”
“My help?” Faulkner repeated, still too stunned to say more.
Jamison’s moustache bristled. “The One Carolina Movement won’t like this,” he said in the understatement of the year. “Wyatt and Babington have been campaigning for years to restore the old borders if war broke out and now they’ll be angry. That’ll be your job – silencing the OCM before they start talking about tearing away Charlotte and Africa Nova from Virginia, Franklin and Tennessee from Ohio…”
“And Arkensor, Ruddiland – and Gualpa – from Westernesse,” Oseytutu said, pulling his lips back to show startling white teeth forming what was technically a smile.
Faulkner blanched. The very idea was absurd. Gualpa, ruled by those sweaty pig-headed cotton-pickers in Ultima? “Yes,” he said softly, a broken man. “I am here to serve the people of Gualpa, the people of Westernesse…”
“I’m glad you see it that way,” Jamison said coldly, “because if you don’t do a damn good job with this, the next time you go back there, Gualpa won’t be in Westernesse…”
*
Arabian Sea, off the Concão Coast
December 31st 1896
“Happy New Year, Director,” offered Colonel Gordon Urquhart in the distorted burr of New Kent. “As you say in England.”
Director Churchill Pitt Westhough—universally known as ‘C.P.’—rolled his eyes tolerantly. “I wouldn’t know, Colonel, I’ve never visited England. Any more than you’ve ever been to Scotland.”
“Ach, you know how to hurt a man,” Urquhart said, clasping his hand to his breast in mock pain. “Just for that, I might not give you my first-foot gift.” Something clanked glassily in his knapsack as he thrust his hand in.
“Now, let’s not be too hasty,” Westhough said. “A first-foot gift, eh? Isn’t that usually whisky?”
“In the old country, aye,” Urquhart said, “but New Kent was a wee bit lacking in the right grains when me granddad arrived down under. Not so much now, but we got our own traditions, as is right and good.” He withdrew the bottle, which was the characteristic brown Cygnian glass with a black label.
Westhough squinted in the light of the gaslamp in his cabin on the Ranajit Chatterjee, trying to read it. “Auchtermuchty ’81. Not the original one, I take it…”
“No, the one named in its honour down under,” Urquhart told him. “’81 was a damn good year.”
“Was for me,” Westhough said, thinking back to his expedition all the way through the wilds of the north to the edge of the Pathan mountains, bringing back old Mughal plunder at a time when most men opined that the best pickings must be long gone. That had made his name in the Company and set him on the path to where he found himself today. “Anyway, if not whisky, what is it?”
Urquhart grinned, showing teeth that had suffered from the Company’s ready access to sugar plantations. “Red wine.”
“Truly?” Westhough asked, but as he uncorked the bottle he realised Urquhart had spoken the truth. A rich, fruity flavour filled his nostrils. “So it’s not just the French who grow the vine down in Antipodea.” He raised the bottle. “I’ll toast the new year with you then.”
“Aye, I’ll drink to that,” Urquhart agreed as Westhough found two mismatched glasses in the cupboard by his bunk. “Happy Hogmanay!”
They clinked and drank. Westhough sighed. “That’s very good. Thank you, Colonel. I’ll make it up to you when we get home—or ashore.” Urquhart nodded, looking pleased.
They made small talk until Captain Reilly called them to the bridge a few minutes later. Despite the late hour—the chronometer suggested Urquhart had only been slightly premature in ringing in the new year—the bridge was busy. Patrick Reilly turned and nodded to the Director as Westhough approached. Like many of the officers in the Honourable Anglo-American East India Company’s navy, he had been born in humble station in the Kingdom of Ireland and had cut his teeth on that nation’s small defensive navy before applying his experience in a more perilous, but also better paid, context. “Happy New Year, Director.”
With that perfunctory duty performed, Reilly inclined his head towards the scene visible through the windows. “Doesn’t look like they’re too prepared,” he said with relish. “If I was in command over there, I’d already be turfing out those shantytowns that have grown up around the fort.”
Westhough nodded, following Reilly’s gaze. Despite the dark of night, the Concão Coast stood out thanks to both the lights dotted all over Goa and the slight phosphorescenceof the sea. Westhough knew that sea was warm even now in midwinter—or what the Northern Hemisphere called midwinter. Here, only fifteen degrees north of the Equator, the very idea of winter seemed theoretical.
Yes, there was Goa, the jewel in Senhor Oliveira’s crown, the heart of Meridian influence in India. Though Westhough knew the city had existed for thousands of years, in many ways it was still synonymous with the Portuguese who had ruled it for three centuries and more before their Revolution and the Great Jihad. Though Meridian business had ruled here for decades since that time, traces of the Portuguese were still all over the place in terms of architecture, language and customs.
One of those traces now loomed up in the Ranajit Chatterjee’s windows. Fort Aguada, the Portuguese for ‘water’, so called because it sat atop a spring which meant the soldiers manning it could never be driven to surrender from thirst. A lighthouse, probably fuelled from vegetable oils rather than whale oil in this area, illuminated the beach below the fortifications. The Portuguese had built the fort long ago to protect Goa from Dutch and Marathas, two nations now both crushed and partly subordinated to the UPSA – like the Portuguese themeslves.
Well, no more. “Are we ready, Captain?” Westhough asked.
It was a perfunctory question but Reilly still looked slightly hurt at the idea he would be anything other than prepared. “The signal rocket is ready, Director. Launched from the secondary launcher aft rather than the main rocket nacelles; those we can call upon if…necessary.”
Westhough bared his teeth at Urquhart. “We might get some New Year’s fireworks yet, Colonel.”
Urquhart nodded, but his eyes were far away. Westhough knew he was thinking of the ships following them; almost all East Indiamen, some powerful armourclad warships like the Ranajit Chatterjee, othere repurposed freighters carrying soldiers, weapons and supplies from Coorg and Malabar rather than spices to Europe, China and the Novamund. Two of the ships were Imperial Navy warships from America, though sadly none of the new lionhearts. It shouldn’t matter—the Meridian force based in Goa was small. As Reilly had said, the fact that they had allowed shantytowns to grow up around their fortifications showed that they had not seriously expected war to break out.
Which was good, as it suggested the HAAEIC would be able to claim the lands of Senhor Oliveira for their own with barely a shot being fired.
“Fire the rocket,” Westhough ordered, staring at the fort. Surely even if they were so lackadaisical, they would have a lookout on duty? He hoped so, or this was a waste of time.
“Fire,” Reilly repeated. One of his crewmen pulled a lever that presumably activated an order telegraph at the other end of the ship, where the secondary rocket launcher sat.
There was a distant hissing sound as the rocket launched. The repurposed weapon rose straight and true over Sinquerim Beach, trailing smoke behind it, then exploded. Not in a mere burst of Neoxyl explosive, but one-two-three; two blinding white magnesium charges flanking a blast of yellow azelf-of-soda sparks.[10] It was a simple signal compared to an old rattling Optel shutterbox or a newer Lectel bicker-bicker-bicker, but it had been agreed ten years ago at the Convention of Bordeaux which had internationally harmonised various naval signals. It meant, simply: SURRENDER.
“There is goes,” Reilly said unnecessarily. “And now?”
Westhough nodded. “You may go to action stations, Captain. Stand by for descent. Plan Three, you think?”
“I agree, Director,” Reilly said, “seeing as it doesn’t look like we need to worry about minefields. Send the signal, Ensign.” Moments later, the electride lamps atop the ship were flashing their codes to the other members of the fleet. It gave away some information to the Meridians, but at this point it hardly seemed important.
The nearby HAAEIC warship Sylhet, a slightly older class than the Ranajit Chatterjee, lit her own electride lamps to flash back an acknowledgement. As she did, Reilly and Westhough both frowned: the bright light illuminated a ship approaching, silhouetted against Fort Aguada. Moments later, that ship lit lamps of her own, revealing…
Westhough sucked in a breath as Reilly blurted out an unwisely popish oath. “That’s a lionheart!”
It was. The new ship was not that much larger than the Ranajit Chatterjee, but her blocky hull and stubby ancillary masts could only mean she had a heart of steel, not merely a skin. None of the HAAEIC fleet had weapons capable of penetrating her hull. Westhough felt like his heart had become a dive bomb and fallen through the bottom of his chest. It didn’t matter that there was only one lionheart to their fleet…they were lost.
“She’s not Meridian,” Urquhart said quietly.
Startled, Westhough double-taked from the New Kentish Colonel back to the ship. He was right. Spotlighted in one of the lionheart’s electride lamps, flapping from the stern of the vessel above the wake her powerful steam engines left in the warm Arabian Sea, was the war ensign of France: identical to the national French flag save that four black anchors had been added in the corners. “French,” Westhough said stupidly.
“French,” Reilly repeated, more meaningfully. “Not French East India Company. French.”
“I don’t think the FEIC even has a lionheart,” Urquhart said.
“The point is that this is a government intervention,” Westhough realised. He swallowed a curse.
“They’re flashing us, Captain,” reported another of Reilly’s ensigns. “Request parley…they want to come aboard to discuss a matter with our leader.”
Westhough felt all eyes on him. He closed his for a moment. “Signal them to send a boat.” He tried not to think of all the time they were allowing the Meridians to prepare a surprise. But it would take a braver or more foolhardy man than him to continue charging ahead in the teeth of a French lionheart…
“…is an outrage!”
Counter-Admiral Jean Ronsard raised his eyebrow mildly. “Really, Director, there is no outrage in upholding international law. If you want outrage, take a look at these two – my gift to you.” He opened an attaché case and pulled out two creased newspapers which he placed in front of Westhough.
The Director focused on them: one was the Dresdener Zeitung and the other he eventually identified as the Moscow Imperial Register, hampered by his shaky command of reading Cyrillic text. “And what relevance do these doubtlessly fine publications have to the fate of Goa?” Westhough asked sarcastically in French.
Ronsard tapped the papers, keeping his iron gaze fixed on the Director. “They show what happens if peace is allowed to slip through our fingers, Director. I have brought these directly from Kuwait, where they were brought overland through Turkey from Danubia. They came along with sealed orders from my government.” Ronsard pointed at bold, blaring headlines in Russian and Standarddeutsch, indicated imaginative sketches corrupted by being reduced to coded dots and reassembled at the papers’ presses. “The Russian Navy steamed from Koronagrad[11] to rattle their sabres in the Germans’ directions, only for two of the Tsar’s shiny new armourclads to be sent to the bottom of the Baltic. The Russians beat a hasty retreat, but fortuitously the Grand Duke of Courland has forgotten to obey his treaty obligations—likely no accident—with the result that a ‘neutral’ Couronian ship encountered the emergency surfacing of one of those ironsharks the Germans piously claim not to have.” Ronsard shook his head. “War is such a filthy thing.”
“I still don’t quite see—” Westhough began.
“Time, please, Director.” Ronsard pointed with both hands to two new sections of the newspapers. “Look here. My translators assure me that both of these articles cite the same ensuing pro-neutrality statement by the Emperor of Scandinavia, and both of them almost word for word confidently state that this is clear evidence that Valdemar II intends to join their side shortly.” Ronsard shook his head tiredly. “This is only the opening salvo in what will soon be a full-scale war between the Tsar and the Bundeskaiser, and it already provides enough material for one of your English farces.”
“I wouldn’t know, Admiral,” Westhough said coldly, unconsciously echoing his words from a hopeful conversation barely an hour before, “I have never visited England.”
Ronsard did not dignify that was a response. “It is the intention of my government to preserve what peace we can by means of the proper application of armed neutrality. To that end, I have already issued Director Castro of Senhor Oliveira’s Company with an ultimatum of my own.”
The mention of Castro raised Westhough’s hackles: he was what the Americans called a ‘Peter Martin’, someone who had risen to high office more through happening to share a name with an unrelated predecessor than for any real merit. Perhaps Westhough’s dislike of such men was because his own mother had clumsily believed she could give him a start in life with what had then been the BEIC by the names she had given him. “And what is this ultimatum? Do you seek to claim the Company’s lands for your own East India Company?”
Ronsard showed teeth. “That is hardly a recipe for peace, non? In any case I believe I have only pre-empted your own ultimatum, if I read your drafts correctly.” Westhough resisted the urge to spin theatrically and winced, remembering that several rejected drafts of the written ultimatum indeed graced the desk behind him. “You propose that if Senhor Castro does not eject all Meridian armed forces from and freeze all Meridian assets in his Company’s lands, then you shall strike with military force and annex them for your own Company.”
“Indeed,” Westhough muttered, “but when he rejects those demands—”
Ronsard raised a hand. “Do not be so hasty,” he admonished his counterpart. “In fact my Commander Hinault reported back to me one hour ago stating that the Director had reluctantly agreed to those self-same demands.”
Westhough gaped at him. “But…surely not…?”
“Senhor Oliveira’s Company is Senhor Oliveira’s Company,” Ronsard said. “We well remember the unfortunate incident a few years ago when the Meridian government decided to try to act as though it owned the place. Well, it does not; but Senhor Castro will have to learn to live without his pet Meridian army and navy and his money from PAWC shell companies.” He smiled. “The terms of the agreement is that he will trade freely and equally with any other company regardless of its country of origin.”
Westhough shook his head. “But surely he would just continue to favour the Meridian companies informally…?”
“He would,” Ronsard agreed, “if, of course, their vessels can cross the ocean without access to the coaling stations he so generously provides.”
Westhough stared at Ronsard for a long moment, and then slowly began to smile. “Damn you, damn Leclerc and damn Louie Dix-huit,” he said without rancour. “We wanted to colour some more of the map red.”
“You will have to do so without spilling blood to do it,” Ronsard said acerbically. “In the spirit of the Pitt-Rochambeau Accord our nations signed so long ago—I say this war shall not come to India. Now, you can be on board at the beginning of the new arrangement and secure a privileged position alongside our own East India Company, or…”
“Or,” Westhough repeated. He shook his head. This would make sense, long term a guaranteed slice of the Goanese pie would be better for the HAAEIC’s profits than trying to grab the whole thing and losing half of it in the process. But he didn’t know how he would explain it to His Imperial Majesty’s Government…
*
Dobryanka, Permskaya Guberniya, Russian Empire
January 20th 1897 (N.S.)
Ivan Petrovich Vasiliev saw his breath form as a white cloud before him. That was bad: that meant his scarf had slipped out of place. With gloved hands he clumsily, hastily adjusted the trappings that shielded him from the harsh winter. There. That was better. Even the briefest exposure could inflict frostbite, as he knew well from living in Perm Governorate all his life.
“That was a close one, eh, Vanya?” said a muffled voice beside him. Despite his own layers of protection, Vyacheslav Fyodorovich Mozorov managed to convey a grin.
“Too close,” Ivan agreed, although uncertain whether Slava would be able to hear him. Thankfully, at least the buildings in the centre of Dobryanka provided some protection from the bitter winds coming off the adjacent Kama River. The streets also contained a few steam-mobiles which briefly filled the air with warm murk as they passed. Ivan knew the machines’ boilers had a tendency to burst in the harshly shifting climate of the region, but he still found them greatly impressive. They were capable of travelling in cold where even the most ingenious old campaigner would pronounce it impossible to bring a horse and cart without the horse being immediately transmuted into an equestrian statue of ice. A few of the mobiles were industrial, still carrying in coal from the mines further north where Ivan’s grandfather had toiled for years, scraping and saving to build a better life for his children. That coal kept Dobryanka alive through the winter as well as powering the mobiles themselves. However, most of the mobiles were smaller, sleeker models, toys for the handful of nobles and rich mine owners who dwelt in what to Ivan was ‘the big city’. He looked out for the black Kazan 91 mobile bearing the monogramme of his ultimate boss, the self-made potash industrialist Kirill Volodin, but didn’t see it.
Of course, those rich men’s mobiles were far from the most impressive application of steam engines, and that what what he and Slava had come to see. Tarefikhov Square, a development completed when Ivan had been a boy, had been mostly cleared of the bonfires and tents which had hosted the New Year’s celebrations mere hours before. A few of the fires around the edges had been allowed to continued to burn, helping warm the crowds who had assembled to watch this new spectacle. Ivan and Vyacheslav managed to find space at one of the fires and barely restrained themselves from thrusting their icy hands, gloves and all, straight into the flames. Ivan relaxed when he began to feel pain from the heat: it was when sensation refused to return that it was time to worry.
“Good morning, my sons,” said a new voice, muffled not only by scarves and coats but by a large bushy beard beneath them. Ivan and Vyacheslav turned to find the owner of that familiar voice, the Reverend Father Dmitry, their local priest. Both of the men made an awkward gesture consisting of a half-bow coupled to touching their gloved fingers to their fur hats: it was meant to convey ‘we would of course honour you properly, Father Dmitry, were it not for the fact that removing our hats would lead to our untimely deaths’.
Father Dmitry acknowledged their gesture. “So you have come to offer yourselves?” he asked guardedly.
Ivan and Vyacheslav exchanged glances, then both began to speak at once. They were interrupted in any case by a loud, clear voice which echoed across the street. “No conscription without workers’ rights!”
Ivan rolled his eyes at that, forgetting the chances of either of his compatriots actually seeing the motion behind his scarf were minimal. “I see His Excellency is at it again.”
“I would never seek to question the Imperial Soviet’s decision not to prosecute Full State Counsellor Ulyanov for his disruptive dilettantery,” Father Dmitry said carefully, a brief glimpse of his own eyes telling a rather different story. “Much less suggest that he might do better to go back to Nizhny Novgorod where he came from and deafen the fortunate denizens of that governorate instead.”
Ivan wasn’t entirely certain that ‘dilettantery’ was a word, but knew better than to correct a priest. “Indeed, Father Dmitry, indeed,” he said soothingly. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the civil servant stood on his usual makeshift stage built of barrels, surrounded by burly coal miners carefully waving suitably patriotic flags: the civil version of the state flag, with the blue X of the St Andrew’s cross defacing the tricolour whose plain version only the government was permitted to fly. Ulyanov was a crafty one: no attempt to prosecute him for treason or Mentian activities had ever come to anything. He was merely a faithful servant of the State, expressing slightly original opinions of how to interpret the Tsar’s holy quest to purge Russia of her foreign influences and rediscover her Slavic core.
Burly though those miners might be, make no mistake—they weren’t protecting Ulyanov, he was protecting them by his status as a senior civil servant and a man who had defied all prosecution attempts. In his absence, the Governor would probably just send in the troops to beat those miners with the flats of their bayonets if not their edges; but no-one wanted to be the man who had turned Nikolai Ulyanov into a martyr.
It did seem as though some of the crowd were listening to Ulyanov, much to Father Dmitry’s displeasure. However, the Mayor or the Governor had clearly planned for this, and Ulyanov and his protestors were slowly but firmly coralled into a side street where they could be pushed away from the planned spectacle without causing any deaths. It was a far cry from the way such men would have been treated in Ivan’s grandfather’s day. Thinking of his grandfather made Ivan realise he had mixed feelings about Ulyanov’s quest. He thought that the coal miners were badly treated and abused by the mine owners who had grown rich and they indeed deserved better pay and other rights. On the other hand, his grandfather had worked his way up and fought his way out of the coal mines and it was because of his years of strife that Ivan had a middle-class desk job working for Volodin Potash. In some ways it almost felt disrespectful to the old man, to devalue his work, if it was made easier for those in his position now.
Perhaps that was silly, but it was enough of a caveat for Ivan to justify to himself not getting involved in the struggle. Father Dmitry was still muttering to himself about firing squads when a band began to play a martial tune. The crowd cheered as the street, newly gritted to prevent embarrassing ice slippage, filled with a parade.
First came the green-clad troops of the local Second Perm Rifles, an archaic title now that all infantrymen carried bolt-action rifles as standard. The troops carried their colours high, emblazoned with a double-headed eagle and with records of all their battles stitched to it. The people clapped and cheered dutifully for their local sons, but if Ivan was any judge, they shuffled impatiently, perhaps guiltily, for what came after.
Ivan’s father Pyotr had been too young to serve in the Euxine War, but he had served in the army during the brief Baku War against the Persians in 1876-7. That war had only been the climax of a series of more minor and debatable skirmishes as Tsar and Shah-Advocate sought to carve up the lands of Independent Tartary and rob them of their independence. Russia had failed to duplicate Peter the Great’s brief triumph of a hundred and fifty years before in practically rendering the Caspian Sea a Russian lake by taking Gorgan; but Baku and the Azeri lands were firmly in St Petersburg’s grip these days, even if Khiva remained in the Persians’ sphere of influence. Pyotr had come back from that war with no more damage than a scar on his forearm and a slight limp, and always spoke of what great fighters the French-trained Persians had been and how he was glad Russia had not tangled with them since.
During that war, Pyotr had graduated by dead men’s shoes from being an infantryman to a crewman of one of Russia’s first proper armarts.[12] Ivan’s father still spoke fondly of his experience driving that Kaluga Dazhbog I armart, with its thick varnished wooden armour supplemented by an iron frame, its single huge rifled cannon barrel protruding from a vertical slot that permitted elevation, its high cart-like wheels with their iron rims.
In the Seventies, Ivan was sure that had been impressive. But those old armarts might be the huts of primitive native tribes against the glory of St Basil’s Cathedral when he saw what now filled the street. Grit crunched and cobblestones sparked beneath the serrated wheels of the finest fruits of Russian industry.
Vyacheslav suddenly clutched him like a schoolgirl who had caught sight of her crush (a metaphor that would not have occurred to Ivan’s grandfather, in whose day few local girls would have ever seen the inside of a school). “Vanya! It’s a Perun! They’ve brought a Perun!”
“I can see that, Slava,” Ivan said, trying to sound calm and unimpressed and utterly failing. Gouts of steam from the vast war machine’s twin engines hid it like the fog of war, but were then left behind as the armart-captain ordered more steam to be raised and its wheels spun ever faster. Two additional wheels at the front were raised above the ground and did not spin: Ivan realised they were there to allow the mighty armart to gain purchase on sloping ground—or a German trench—and the driver could engage them by gears when required. The great hull of the Perun rose above even those wheels, though, wrought iron shaped to loosely suggest the shape of a ship. That was not merely the affectation of those who compared armarts to warships on land, but intended to help survive the swampy state of many Russian roads when spring or autumn beckoned. For now, though, the frozen hard ground took even the vast weight of the Astrakhan Perun III. Atop the hull, the big two-dyuim[13] main gun might not be the largest Russia’s arsenals could wield, but it was mounted not on a fixed traverse but a turret that might have come from a modern lionheart lineship. Supplementing the great turret were two sponsons, each bearing a cingular gun.
Ivan realised his mouth was hanging open and thanked God for his scarf, or by now his saliva would have frozen on his tongue. “Bozhemoi – sorry, Father Dmitry – she’s impressive.”
“Pagan names,” Father Dmitry muttered to himself in disapproving tones, but he seemed as fascinated by the vehicles as his two parishioners.
“Not only can she blast Fritz to the devil’s uncle, she can protect herself, too,” Vyacheslav said in satisfaction, pointing at the two cingular guns as they swept the crowd. It was easy to imagine an endless stream of bullets blasting from those weapons, cutting men and women down as bloody rags… Ivan shuddered at the thought. “Why, she barely needs those Kresniks!”[14]
Ivan nodded as he watched the smaller, lighter escort armarts which each mounted two cingular guns in a single turret. Those were not their only weapons, either. The people cheered enthusiastically as one of the Kresniks fired a rocket—a variant of the usual war type, thankfully—which exploded into stars and briefly bathed the street in red light.
Red like blood. Ivan pushed the thought aside. The Perun had shuddered to a halt—intentionally, for the other armarts and the troops halted alongside it. A figure emerged from a hatch in the hull. His officer’s uniform had probably once been clean and neat but had clearly suffered from the conditions within. He was actually sweating! Two of the infantrymen hastily offered him a greatcoat, hat and scarf before that sweat froze on his skin. The Major—as his insignia identified him—survived.
“Let us bid a fine welcome to Major Kurakin and his men!” roared a new voice. The crowd collectively genuflected to Governor Fanbranglov as he rose to stand beside the Major. Two ensigns behind them held both a regimental colour and the unblemished tricolour that usually flew from the Governor’s residence.
Fanbranglov surveyed the crowd. His unusual name, Ivan knew, was a consequence of attempting to Slavicise the very un-Slavic-sounding ‘von Wrangel’ at some point a couple of decades back. Germans in Russia had managed to survive Slavicism for a long time, for Emperor Paul had won back his throne with the help of men like Kautzman, and Slavicism had been directed against more helpless targets such as the Jews. But that could only last so long, as so many Jews had fled to the Crimea and elsewhere. Other minorities like the Old Believers had moved eastwards where the RLPC, always ready for more workers, allowed the Tsar’s test acts to be de facto relaxed. That meant that sooner or later it was only the Germans, often occupying privileged and noble positions which made them a target of resentment, had been left.
Slavicism continued.
“These are just some of the fine young men who will uphold the honour of His Imperial Majesty Emperor Peter V and the truth of the Holy Mother Church!” Fanbranglov said, going slightly off-piste in his terminology and making Father Dmitry wince. He made up for any inexactness with enthusiasm which easily penetrated the yellow scarf that mummified him. “Bundeskaiser Johann Georg thinks he can order a greater nation about when he cannot even keep his own house in order!” Some boos and laughs.
Fanbranglov turned more serious. “And he strikes at us by the only way he can—by cowardice and hypocrisy!” More boos. “Young men have been drowned thanks to the weapons the oh so high-and-mighty Germans always claimed not to have. They will be avenged! By our brave men at sea, yes, but also…” the Governor gestured dramatically at the troops and armarts. “On land!”
More cheers. “When your children asked you where you were in the war,” Franbranglov continued, “some of you will be able to say ‘the Tsar needed me to continue my work, to supply our soldiers with what they needed to win victory’. And there shall be no shame in that.” He scanned the horizon as though looking every member of the crowd in the eye at once. “But what of the rest of you? Is there no man who will step forward and declare he will fight to uphold Russia’s honour?”
This was what Ivan and Vyacheslav had been waiting for. “I will!” they both cried, stepping forward, but their voices were lost amid dozens, hundreds of others.
“You are a great people!” Fanbranglov said, taking on an excessively theatrical pose that made the more educated members of the crowd think of Yapontsi Nogaku theatre. “I do not deserve to be your Governor! You have lived up to the example his Imperial Majesty has set. And now…” he gestured to Major Kurakin, who was trying not to hop from foot to foot either out of impatience or just chill. “Come and sign your names or make your marks in the book of the chosen!”
Ivan and Vyacheslav gave a quick farewell to Father Dmitry, who promised he would pass their farewells on to their families. Neither young man had the heart to tell the priest that they had already discussed it with their parents. They both knew how the game was played, how it had been played for years. The Emperor would send his recruitment parties around the cities once and call for volunteers, and those volunteers would get good prospects and be well trained and supplied, at the start of a conflict when there were time and resources for such things.
Later, the parties would be sent around again, and this time there would be no choice involved: any family that had not yielded up a son would be forced to contribute one. And those conscripts would more than likely be sent straight to the front as cannon fodder.
Pyotr, like Slava’s father, knew the game. They knew they could be sending their sons to their deaths. But they had other sons who could feed the family, sons in vital industries who would not be pressed into the army. Volunteering now was the best option.
As Ivan signed his name, he wondered where he would be sent. West to fight the Germans, assuming Danubia and Poland finally leapt the way it was looking they would? Fanbranglov had certainly implied as much, having not even mentioned the reason why the Tsar had taken Russia to war in the first place. But then it was a lot easier to get people angry at the Germans, even when in a supreme irony the man riling them up was himself of German blood, than it was to get them angry at the Americans.
And so Vyacheslav was surprised, but Ivan wasn’t, two weeks later when the train pulled out of Perm station and headed eastwards, through the Urals.
To Alyeska.
[1] This figure includes all of metropolitan France and French Antipodea (Pérousie) but not the French colonies in India, Africa and South America. Pérousie makes up 6.5 million of this figure; France has benefited from the annexation of parts of OTL Belgium but does not include Nice, Savoy or Corisca like OTL. The larger population than OTL has much more to do with the fact that the TTL equivalent of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were a full decade shorter than OTL’s.
[2] As above, this includes Pérousie as an integral part of France but not the French colonial possessions. Note that the vast size of Pérousie means that metropolitan France has less than a fifth of the total land area of ‘France’ cited here.
[3] I.e. the Old World. Not as commonly used a term as ‘Novamund’.
[4] OTL, approximately: parts of the Texas Panhandle plus the northern half of Oklahoma.
[5] Ironically, the Self-Evident Birthright was coined by Thomas Whipple, a Liberal, but like most people this author has misattributed it to the Supremacists who embraced the term. The real Faulkner rather than this fictionalised one would probably know better.
[6] Although Boxing Day usually falls on December 26th, strictly it is the first non-weekend day after Christmas and in 1896, as Christmas fell on a Friday, Boxing Day took place on December 28th.
[7] Formerly Fort Pinckney, OTL Oklahoma City.
[8] This is another anachronism on the part of the author: the province of Querétaro was not split off from the province of México until the 1880s.
[9] Negro Burlesques can be thought of as similar to minstrel shows from OTL but there are some differences – there is more focus on narrative and less on music, and the situation of Carolina means that white Carolinians are caricatured alongside their black counterparts and if anything often more viciously. However, they are still very racist pieces of work and with the Negro characters almost invariably portrayed by white American actors in blackface.
[10] Azelf-of-soda = sodium nitrate.
[11] OTL Kronstadt – an example of the Slavicisation of place names in post-Civil War Russia in TTL.
[12] ARMoured ARTillery – an example of an English-derived abbreviation entering Russian, even though the term actually used in English is ‘protgun’.
[13] A Russian unit of measurement equal to an English inch.
[14] A footnote in the original manuscript notes that the author made an error here – a Tula Kresnik I is a flamethrower variant of the type of cingular gun carrying armart listed here and was not produced until the latter stages of the war. The correct name for the cingular gun version as of 1897 appears to be Tula Radegest IV.
The country’s official name is: KINGDOM OF THE FRENCH (short form FRANCE; often cited as KINGDOM OF FRANCE, technically incorrect but still in common use)
The people are known as: FRENCHMEN and -WOMEN.
Capital and largest city: Paris (3.1 million)
Flag: A single large golden fleur-de-lys on a blue disc on a white field bordered in red.
Population: 51 million.[1]
Land area: ca. 287,000 lcf.[2]
Economic ranking: Has been ranked at 1st in the world for much of the century but this position is increasingly precarious and debated, with some economists arguing for different metrics.
Form of government: Parliamentary constitutional monarchy. The legislature, the Grand-Parlement, is now entirely elected. Suffrage is property-based and (at least in theory) gender blind, with the property requirement having repeatedly been reduced over the past few decades both by deliberate policy and the action of inflation. All members of the armed forces and (more recently) the civil service also receive the right to vote automatically regardless of their wealth. The suffrage is now estimated to include approximately 75% of male and 20% of female citizens; French citizenship can be applied for by colonial subjects though the process is long-winded and expensive, and the majority of non-European descended French citizens obtained their citizenship by military or other government service. Service in the French East India Company does not automatically lead to citizenship but it is informally understood that five years’ service will result in citizenship being awarded. All citizens regardless of property have the right to vote for the Parlements-Provincial (which have also been created in Pérousie, and similar but more informal institutions exist in French India). In theory, the King of the French has the power to appoint and dismiss Prime Ministers as well as summon and dissolve the Grand-Parlement, but in practice these days these powers are rarely invoked and usually only on the advice of the party leaders. The King is also commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but in times of national peril the Constitution allows for the creation of a Dictateur who will temporarily wield extraordinary power by agreement of the King and all the major party leaders.
Foreign relations: For centuries France’s primary foreign policy goal has simply been to dominate the European continent, and despite setbacks under Louis XV and the Revolutionary governments, at the end of the nineteenth century that goal has seldom looked more plausible. Spain has a French king and she and her neighbours have been brought into the French sphere, while Great Britain has been consumed with her own problems since the Jacobin Wars, as has Austria/Danubia to a lesser extent. Only a united Germany and a modernised Ottoman Empire have posed a serious threat to French ambitions, and the former has proved much less of a rival than mid-century French politicians feared. French concerns are increasingly more about the rise of large non- or only partly-European based nations with access to vast natural resources which, combined with industrialisation, would allow them to overtake France’s ‘natural position’ of dominance: America, the UPSA, Russia, and to a lesser extent Feng China. French rhetoric therefore often focuses on the idea of France as the natural leader of the world in pushing for international policy agreements.
Military: The privileged position the French armed forces acquired after the Popular Wars , coupled to France not having been involved in many major conflicts since the Great American War, has slightly sapped the capabilities of what was once the greatest military power in the world. However, this factor is rather weaker than France’s enemies would like to believe and France continues to lead the world in many military innovations, as well as training the armed forces of several overseas powers such as Persia and the Matetwa Empire. The French Navy is probably the second largest and most capable in the world behind that of the Empire of North America, although this is subject to debate due to disagreements over how to count the French East India Company’s vessels (and similarly for Russia and the RLPC).
Current head of state: King Louis XVIII (House of Bourbon) (since 1871)
Current head of government: Prime Minister Napoleon Leclerc (National Party) (since 1895)
– Taken from APPENDIX: GUIDE TO THE WORLD’S NATIONS AT THE EVE OF THE PANDORIC WAR, OCTOBER 1896, from
The World At War: From The Pages of The Discerner VOLUME I: THE GATHERING STORM (1981)
The World At War: From The Pages of The Discerner VOLUME I: THE GATHERING STORM (1981)
*
From: The World At War: From The Pages of The Discerner VOLUME I: THE GATHERING STORM (1981):
Fredericksburg, Williamsburg Province, Empire of North America
December 28th 1896
“Fine Christmas present there, President Leclerc,” muttered Lewis Faulkner MCP as he folded the newspaper under his arm. The movement meant he brushed one of his elaborate, frilly cuffs with his other hand and only worsened his mood. He had never liked the highfalutin fashions of the capital, stuck in the past with all its bowing and scraping. The Patriots might be a useless rump these days but it seemed one thing they still controlled was what was considered acceptable to wear in the House of Commons. A place for everyone and everyone in their place—the values of the Vetomund[3] splashed all over a place which made a mockery of them. America was a land of opportunity, a land in which a man could rise from humble birth to become a decorated admiral, or a great and respected artist, or a captain of industry, or a bishop of the Church…or a leader.
A man like Lewis Faulkner.
The cuffs were only part of it. Faulkner hated the Arc of Power, hated the East Coast in general, with all the strutting gentry and the quiet, subservient people. This place claimed to be the heart of American power yet it had forgotten what it was to be an American, to know the endless skies above the empty plains, a magnificent desolation yet alive with possibilities. A landscape which wanted only one individual’s human ingenuity to transform it into something the world had never seen. That was Faulkner’s America. Not resting on the laurels of past generations, content to sit in their shadows and run out the clock of the diamondball game of life.
He was one of Gualpa Province’s MCPs. Long ago that province[4] had been a part of Carolina and Faulkner vaguely thought he might have some Carolinian blood in his ancestry, but he dismissed that: he looked forward to the future, not backwards to the past. He didn’t care about Carolina, which if anything was even more dustily hidebound than the Arc of Power. He did, however, care about America. He was a Liberal, concerned with what individuals might achieve, not governments or nations—but he agreed with the old Supremacists on one thing, and that was the Self-Evident Birthright.[5] America should rule the continent that bore her name, if not both of them. Carolina had been held as a knife to her throat for too long. It was time to remove that pawn from the chessboard and make her happy, ensure she did not remain a viper in the breast. Faulkner was prepared to do anything to achieve that aim.
He hated Martin Hiedler, hated Mount Zhangqihe, hell if he didn’t hate poor old David Braithwaite too, unworthy though the thought might be. This was Christmas, dammit. Boxing Day, no less.[6] He should be at home in Pinckney[7] giving out Christmas boxes to his secretary and all his campaign staff to thank them for their hard work. Not stuck here still in the miserable capital, wet and humid even in midwinter, trapped amid crowded streets choked with steam and smoke. Dr Barton and his disciples reckoned that such environments were a breeding ground for the animalcules that caused disease: Faulkner could readily believe it. He yearned for the empty, open, clean landscape around Pinckney, the town still small and homely enough that a man could walk its streets expecting to know half his passers-by by name. He needed to get out of this Black Hole of Calcutta before he went mad.
But no such freedom for him. Sighing, he rapped smartly on the iconic black door. Unsurprisingly, it was opened almost immediately by a burly man who gave him an owlish stare before nodding reluctantly. “It’s Mr. Faulkner,” he said to an unseen personage within, in a tone which implied he’d much rather have opened the door on some hypothetical Russian nindzhya assassin.
Faulkner was allowed inside. He was hit by a blast of heat from Fourteen Culpeper Road’s newly upgraded heating system, but in other ways he felt the temperature had dropped several degrees. Both the doorman and the gatekeeper secretary at her desk kept edging looks at him which did not feel like those he was accustomed to receive from the largely docile civil servants of the capital. Faulkner shifted uncomfortably, uncertain whether to take one of the plush chairs or stand. He was halfway through belatedly going for the first option when the secretary glanced at a small device on her desk and nodded. “The President will see you now,” she told him.
If Faulkner hadn’t seen the green flag pop up on the device himself, he would have suspected her of deliberately waiting till he was in an awkward position. “Thank you,” he muttered and went to the second door, where another doorkeeper scrutinised him in turn before allowing him through. In time of war, the President’s staff were taking no chances.
The second door did not bring him directly to the Opal Office, of course, but opened onto a corridor which would eventually lead him there. Faulkner paced slowly down the hallway, noting the carefully placed portraits on the walls. They were all the former Presidents of the Empire of North America, from the days when the office had still been named Lord President. There was Lord Washington in his white wig, his wooden teeth concealed by a determined jawline, his hand artistically placed on his sword-hilt to suggest his martial origins. Then came Lord Hamilton and then the start of those who had scorned noble titles: Monroe, Seymour, Quincy (with his orange rosette), Ward, Crane, Harrison (already looking a bit peaky in the portrait), Carter (now only known through his son), the ill-fated Eveleigh, Sinclair…
Then a doorway and then they resumed: Mullenbergh, Boyd, Vanburen, Crowninshield, Martin, Bassett (Faulkner avoided that portrait’s gaze), Studebaker, then Whipple—who, Faulkner knew, was the first to actually dwell in Fourteen Culpeper Road). Then came Fletcher, Braithwaite (who bore a striking resemblance to the asimcons of his nephew that had been circulated), Chamberlain, Foxbury and Cooper. There was already an empty frame ready for the time when the man occupying the Opal Office would go from living politics to the history books, whether his mortal frame continued to walk the earth or not. There was plenty of room after that for more portraits, too. Faulkner brushed the thought aside, came to the door at the end of the hallway and once again knocked smartly.
“Enter,” a voice immediately responded. Faulkner did so, swallowing any remaining nervousness. This was only the third time he had been to the residence of the President of the Empire of North America.
That man glanced up from behind his desk, which had started out life as part of Admiral John Byng’s flagship HMS Devonshire a hundred and fifty years earlier. That was almost certainly true – what was probably added invention was the idea that it had been made out of the part of the deck where William IV had been shot dead. Faulkner had heard all sorts of lurid stories about dark stains on the wood, but looking at it now he suspected they had been made by the rather less interesting process of various Presidents spilling ink while signing documents.
He suspected however that President Stuart Jamison was not one of them. Faulkner would swear he had aged a decade in the last few weeks, but while his hair and impressive moustache might be greying, there was none of an old man’s shakes in his hands as they gripped a fountain pen in one hand and a lit cigar in the other. The crow’s-feet about his blue eyes might have deepened, but those eyes were still filled with sharp intensity.
And anger.
Faulkner might have taken a step back, were it not for the fact that something else drew his attention first. There were two chairs on the other side of Jamison’s desk, and one was already occupied.
The Opal Office was aptly named. To celebrate the Braithwaite-Araníbar treaty over Cuba two decades before, the ENA and UPSA had exchanged gifts, and among the Meridians’ gifts had been a number of fascinating fire opals from the New Spanish province of Querétaro extracted there by a Meridian company.[8] The glittering opals had been used to decorate many items in the room, from the commemorative plaque on Jamison’s desk to the frame of Emperor George IV’s official portait opposite the fireplace. But amid all those reflective shimmers, something else was reflecting the light from the gaslights hissing away on the walls. It was—
“You are, of course, familiar with Mr. Jonathan Space Oseytutu,” Jamison said in his nasal New York accent. For a moment a part of the back of Faulkner’s mind wondered madly if what some of the crank inventors were saying was true and one day a man’s voice would be propagated throughout the nation: would there be an incentive to sound more neutral to appeal to a wider range of voters?
Faulkner dismissed the thought and focused on the second man as he turned in his seat, his expression unreadable. His ebony skin, with a thin sheen of sweat from the heat of the gaslights, was responsible for that reflective shimmer Faulkner had seen out of the corner of his eye. It contrasted sharply with the cream canvas Fredericksburg suit he wore, frilly cuffs and all, almost identical to Jamison’s and Faulkner’s. It wasn’t as if he had anything against Negroes as such, Faulkner thought, but he was a bit jealous of how Oseytutu wore the suit rather better than he did.
“Mr. Faulkner,” Oseytutu said coolly, his voice deep and resonant, with barely a trace of the ‘yes massuh’ accent which a dozen Negro Burlesques had led Faulkner to expect.[9] Surely he must have heard this man, one of the MCPs for Africa Nova Province, speak in the Continental Parliament before? He searched his memory, but was interrupted: “Mr. Faulkner. His Excellency and I have been discussing the matter of the…tone of propaganda which the Empire’s agents have chosen to prepare the way for our troops.”
Faulkner shook his head slightly and laughed nervously. “Mr. Oseytutu,” he stumbled over the name and privately cursed the man for naming himself after some old Ashante king, “I trust you understand that my intention is only to ensure that our soldiers take over Carolina as quickly as possible, aided by discontent and divided loyalties within. Once that takeover is completed, there is no need to actually act on any of the, ah, unrealistic bait we have placed in the way of the Carolinians—”
“Of the white Carolinians,” Oseytutu said, wagging his finger in a manner that belonged in one of the Gooch Street coffee-houses whose pretentious culture Faulkner despised. “You seem to have rather ignored the impact that your grand promises to reinstate particular…institutions on those Carolinians whose skin is of other hues.”
It took Faulkner a moment to wrap his head around that: he was confused by anyone, least of all a Negro, would attempt to assert that his fellow Negroes in Carolina could or should be gathered with a sense of ownership under the same umbrella as that nation which had been created solely to perpetuate their oppression. “Sir, are you suggesting that the black folk of Carolina would do anything but welcome us with open arms, finally completing the task which should have fallen to our fathers and grandfathers but for sad accidents of history?”
“Mr. Faulkner,” Oseytutu said evenly, his voice betraying none of the anger dancing in his eyes, “I would indeed have taken that view—before you and your propagandists entered the scene. Now you have done what a dozen Meridian printing presses could not: you have muddied the waters and made my brothers and sisters south of the border doubt that their current situation under Meridian rule is open to improvement. Not when the alternative speaks of removing them from their offices and factories and returning them to the fields with iron collars on their necks.”
“Mr. Oseytutu, you must know that those words were only aimed at the white Carolinians,” Faulkner protested.
“The thing about words, Mr. Faulkner, is that they can be read by anyone with the gift of reading,” President Jamison interjected, “and, as Mr. Oseytutu was telling me, the Meridian use of the Negroes of Carolina as administrators and enforcers means that your words are more likely to be read by those Negroes than their white neighbours and would-be slavemasters.”
“Your Excellency,” Faulkner tried, “we agreed this tack together—”
“We did, and I blame myself,” Jamison said tiredly. “I should have consulted more widely. I could have been diverted from a destructive path.” He glanced at Oseytutu. “It is not merely Mr. Oseytutu that has come to see me, but Mr. Williams of Franklin Province also. Mr. Williams is the son of a Carolinian refugee who fled northward before the Thaw and maintains contacts with the community south of the border. He assures me that white Carolinian children are assured by their storytellers that the Yankees, as they name us, are all liars and tricksters. Given the tone of some of the stories they are raised on, it seems unlikely that many of the present generation will take your propaganda on trust.”
Jamison stubbed out his cigar and shuffled some papers. “Ah, here it is. Yes, this report from General Golding certainly appears to support such an idea.” He pushed it across to Faulkner, who reluctantly took it. “Our soldiers have been welcomed with open arms by the local white Carolinians, who then proceeded to give them freshly baked cakes containing ground glass, or apple pie with a little too much prussic acid beyond that which my advisors tell me is naturally found in apple pips.” Jamison abruptly snatched the report back. “You’ve made us a laughingstock!” he snarled.
Faulkner shook his head. “This shouldn’t have happened…”
“Never did you say a truer word,” Jamison said nastily.
“It was easy for you to dismiss the impact of your words as happening to a far country of which you know little,” Oseytutu said, more saddened than angry. “No matter how long this war goes on, nobody is going to be bombing Pinckney. It is my brothers and sisters who will bear the impact of your scheme.”
“Well I’m taking a different tack now, and the Ministry of War knows it,” said Jamison. “The printing presses are going full tilt. We’re reversing direction and promising to maintain the Negroes’ privileged position under the Meridians.”
“Not just maintain,” Oseytutu said mildly, though with iron beneath. “No man will fight and die just to keep treading water.”
“Improve, then,” Jamison conceded. “And that means Carolina stays as an independent kingdom for the foreseeable future. We’re just going to replace a Meridian overlord with an American one.”
Faulkner felt the future slipping through his fingers. “But…the task our forefathers failed to complete…”
“Will have to wait for another day,” Jamison said firmly. “If it ever will, if our folk have not drifted too far apart. And we will need your help.”
“My help?” Faulkner repeated, still too stunned to say more.
Jamison’s moustache bristled. “The One Carolina Movement won’t like this,” he said in the understatement of the year. “Wyatt and Babington have been campaigning for years to restore the old borders if war broke out and now they’ll be angry. That’ll be your job – silencing the OCM before they start talking about tearing away Charlotte and Africa Nova from Virginia, Franklin and Tennessee from Ohio…”
“And Arkensor, Ruddiland – and Gualpa – from Westernesse,” Oseytutu said, pulling his lips back to show startling white teeth forming what was technically a smile.
Faulkner blanched. The very idea was absurd. Gualpa, ruled by those sweaty pig-headed cotton-pickers in Ultima? “Yes,” he said softly, a broken man. “I am here to serve the people of Gualpa, the people of Westernesse…”
“I’m glad you see it that way,” Jamison said coldly, “because if you don’t do a damn good job with this, the next time you go back there, Gualpa won’t be in Westernesse…”
*
Arabian Sea, off the Concão Coast
December 31st 1896
“Happy New Year, Director,” offered Colonel Gordon Urquhart in the distorted burr of New Kent. “As you say in England.”
Director Churchill Pitt Westhough—universally known as ‘C.P.’—rolled his eyes tolerantly. “I wouldn’t know, Colonel, I’ve never visited England. Any more than you’ve ever been to Scotland.”
“Ach, you know how to hurt a man,” Urquhart said, clasping his hand to his breast in mock pain. “Just for that, I might not give you my first-foot gift.” Something clanked glassily in his knapsack as he thrust his hand in.
“Now, let’s not be too hasty,” Westhough said. “A first-foot gift, eh? Isn’t that usually whisky?”
“In the old country, aye,” Urquhart said, “but New Kent was a wee bit lacking in the right grains when me granddad arrived down under. Not so much now, but we got our own traditions, as is right and good.” He withdrew the bottle, which was the characteristic brown Cygnian glass with a black label.
Westhough squinted in the light of the gaslamp in his cabin on the Ranajit Chatterjee, trying to read it. “Auchtermuchty ’81. Not the original one, I take it…”
“No, the one named in its honour down under,” Urquhart told him. “’81 was a damn good year.”
“Was for me,” Westhough said, thinking back to his expedition all the way through the wilds of the north to the edge of the Pathan mountains, bringing back old Mughal plunder at a time when most men opined that the best pickings must be long gone. That had made his name in the Company and set him on the path to where he found himself today. “Anyway, if not whisky, what is it?”
Urquhart grinned, showing teeth that had suffered from the Company’s ready access to sugar plantations. “Red wine.”
“Truly?” Westhough asked, but as he uncorked the bottle he realised Urquhart had spoken the truth. A rich, fruity flavour filled his nostrils. “So it’s not just the French who grow the vine down in Antipodea.” He raised the bottle. “I’ll toast the new year with you then.”
“Aye, I’ll drink to that,” Urquhart agreed as Westhough found two mismatched glasses in the cupboard by his bunk. “Happy Hogmanay!”
They clinked and drank. Westhough sighed. “That’s very good. Thank you, Colonel. I’ll make it up to you when we get home—or ashore.” Urquhart nodded, looking pleased.
They made small talk until Captain Reilly called them to the bridge a few minutes later. Despite the late hour—the chronometer suggested Urquhart had only been slightly premature in ringing in the new year—the bridge was busy. Patrick Reilly turned and nodded to the Director as Westhough approached. Like many of the officers in the Honourable Anglo-American East India Company’s navy, he had been born in humble station in the Kingdom of Ireland and had cut his teeth on that nation’s small defensive navy before applying his experience in a more perilous, but also better paid, context. “Happy New Year, Director.”
With that perfunctory duty performed, Reilly inclined his head towards the scene visible through the windows. “Doesn’t look like they’re too prepared,” he said with relish. “If I was in command over there, I’d already be turfing out those shantytowns that have grown up around the fort.”
Westhough nodded, following Reilly’s gaze. Despite the dark of night, the Concão Coast stood out thanks to both the lights dotted all over Goa and the slight phosphorescenceof the sea. Westhough knew that sea was warm even now in midwinter—or what the Northern Hemisphere called midwinter. Here, only fifteen degrees north of the Equator, the very idea of winter seemed theoretical.
Yes, there was Goa, the jewel in Senhor Oliveira’s crown, the heart of Meridian influence in India. Though Westhough knew the city had existed for thousands of years, in many ways it was still synonymous with the Portuguese who had ruled it for three centuries and more before their Revolution and the Great Jihad. Though Meridian business had ruled here for decades since that time, traces of the Portuguese were still all over the place in terms of architecture, language and customs.
One of those traces now loomed up in the Ranajit Chatterjee’s windows. Fort Aguada, the Portuguese for ‘water’, so called because it sat atop a spring which meant the soldiers manning it could never be driven to surrender from thirst. A lighthouse, probably fuelled from vegetable oils rather than whale oil in this area, illuminated the beach below the fortifications. The Portuguese had built the fort long ago to protect Goa from Dutch and Marathas, two nations now both crushed and partly subordinated to the UPSA – like the Portuguese themeslves.
Well, no more. “Are we ready, Captain?” Westhough asked.
It was a perfunctory question but Reilly still looked slightly hurt at the idea he would be anything other than prepared. “The signal rocket is ready, Director. Launched from the secondary launcher aft rather than the main rocket nacelles; those we can call upon if…necessary.”
Westhough bared his teeth at Urquhart. “We might get some New Year’s fireworks yet, Colonel.”
Urquhart nodded, but his eyes were far away. Westhough knew he was thinking of the ships following them; almost all East Indiamen, some powerful armourclad warships like the Ranajit Chatterjee, othere repurposed freighters carrying soldiers, weapons and supplies from Coorg and Malabar rather than spices to Europe, China and the Novamund. Two of the ships were Imperial Navy warships from America, though sadly none of the new lionhearts. It shouldn’t matter—the Meridian force based in Goa was small. As Reilly had said, the fact that they had allowed shantytowns to grow up around their fortifications showed that they had not seriously expected war to break out.
Which was good, as it suggested the HAAEIC would be able to claim the lands of Senhor Oliveira for their own with barely a shot being fired.
“Fire the rocket,” Westhough ordered, staring at the fort. Surely even if they were so lackadaisical, they would have a lookout on duty? He hoped so, or this was a waste of time.
“Fire,” Reilly repeated. One of his crewmen pulled a lever that presumably activated an order telegraph at the other end of the ship, where the secondary rocket launcher sat.
There was a distant hissing sound as the rocket launched. The repurposed weapon rose straight and true over Sinquerim Beach, trailing smoke behind it, then exploded. Not in a mere burst of Neoxyl explosive, but one-two-three; two blinding white magnesium charges flanking a blast of yellow azelf-of-soda sparks.[10] It was a simple signal compared to an old rattling Optel shutterbox or a newer Lectel bicker-bicker-bicker, but it had been agreed ten years ago at the Convention of Bordeaux which had internationally harmonised various naval signals. It meant, simply: SURRENDER.
“There is goes,” Reilly said unnecessarily. “And now?”
Westhough nodded. “You may go to action stations, Captain. Stand by for descent. Plan Three, you think?”
“I agree, Director,” Reilly said, “seeing as it doesn’t look like we need to worry about minefields. Send the signal, Ensign.” Moments later, the electride lamps atop the ship were flashing their codes to the other members of the fleet. It gave away some information to the Meridians, but at this point it hardly seemed important.
The nearby HAAEIC warship Sylhet, a slightly older class than the Ranajit Chatterjee, lit her own electride lamps to flash back an acknowledgement. As she did, Reilly and Westhough both frowned: the bright light illuminated a ship approaching, silhouetted against Fort Aguada. Moments later, that ship lit lamps of her own, revealing…
Westhough sucked in a breath as Reilly blurted out an unwisely popish oath. “That’s a lionheart!”
It was. The new ship was not that much larger than the Ranajit Chatterjee, but her blocky hull and stubby ancillary masts could only mean she had a heart of steel, not merely a skin. None of the HAAEIC fleet had weapons capable of penetrating her hull. Westhough felt like his heart had become a dive bomb and fallen through the bottom of his chest. It didn’t matter that there was only one lionheart to their fleet…they were lost.
“She’s not Meridian,” Urquhart said quietly.
Startled, Westhough double-taked from the New Kentish Colonel back to the ship. He was right. Spotlighted in one of the lionheart’s electride lamps, flapping from the stern of the vessel above the wake her powerful steam engines left in the warm Arabian Sea, was the war ensign of France: identical to the national French flag save that four black anchors had been added in the corners. “French,” Westhough said stupidly.
“French,” Reilly repeated, more meaningfully. “Not French East India Company. French.”
“I don’t think the FEIC even has a lionheart,” Urquhart said.
“The point is that this is a government intervention,” Westhough realised. He swallowed a curse.
“They’re flashing us, Captain,” reported another of Reilly’s ensigns. “Request parley…they want to come aboard to discuss a matter with our leader.”
Westhough felt all eyes on him. He closed his for a moment. “Signal them to send a boat.” He tried not to think of all the time they were allowing the Meridians to prepare a surprise. But it would take a braver or more foolhardy man than him to continue charging ahead in the teeth of a French lionheart…
“…is an outrage!”
Counter-Admiral Jean Ronsard raised his eyebrow mildly. “Really, Director, there is no outrage in upholding international law. If you want outrage, take a look at these two – my gift to you.” He opened an attaché case and pulled out two creased newspapers which he placed in front of Westhough.
The Director focused on them: one was the Dresdener Zeitung and the other he eventually identified as the Moscow Imperial Register, hampered by his shaky command of reading Cyrillic text. “And what relevance do these doubtlessly fine publications have to the fate of Goa?” Westhough asked sarcastically in French.
Ronsard tapped the papers, keeping his iron gaze fixed on the Director. “They show what happens if peace is allowed to slip through our fingers, Director. I have brought these directly from Kuwait, where they were brought overland through Turkey from Danubia. They came along with sealed orders from my government.” Ronsard pointed at bold, blaring headlines in Russian and Standarddeutsch, indicated imaginative sketches corrupted by being reduced to coded dots and reassembled at the papers’ presses. “The Russian Navy steamed from Koronagrad[11] to rattle their sabres in the Germans’ directions, only for two of the Tsar’s shiny new armourclads to be sent to the bottom of the Baltic. The Russians beat a hasty retreat, but fortuitously the Grand Duke of Courland has forgotten to obey his treaty obligations—likely no accident—with the result that a ‘neutral’ Couronian ship encountered the emergency surfacing of one of those ironsharks the Germans piously claim not to have.” Ronsard shook his head. “War is such a filthy thing.”
“I still don’t quite see—” Westhough began.
“Time, please, Director.” Ronsard pointed with both hands to two new sections of the newspapers. “Look here. My translators assure me that both of these articles cite the same ensuing pro-neutrality statement by the Emperor of Scandinavia, and both of them almost word for word confidently state that this is clear evidence that Valdemar II intends to join their side shortly.” Ronsard shook his head tiredly. “This is only the opening salvo in what will soon be a full-scale war between the Tsar and the Bundeskaiser, and it already provides enough material for one of your English farces.”
“I wouldn’t know, Admiral,” Westhough said coldly, unconsciously echoing his words from a hopeful conversation barely an hour before, “I have never visited England.”
Ronsard did not dignify that was a response. “It is the intention of my government to preserve what peace we can by means of the proper application of armed neutrality. To that end, I have already issued Director Castro of Senhor Oliveira’s Company with an ultimatum of my own.”
The mention of Castro raised Westhough’s hackles: he was what the Americans called a ‘Peter Martin’, someone who had risen to high office more through happening to share a name with an unrelated predecessor than for any real merit. Perhaps Westhough’s dislike of such men was because his own mother had clumsily believed she could give him a start in life with what had then been the BEIC by the names she had given him. “And what is this ultimatum? Do you seek to claim the Company’s lands for your own East India Company?”
Ronsard showed teeth. “That is hardly a recipe for peace, non? In any case I believe I have only pre-empted your own ultimatum, if I read your drafts correctly.” Westhough resisted the urge to spin theatrically and winced, remembering that several rejected drafts of the written ultimatum indeed graced the desk behind him. “You propose that if Senhor Castro does not eject all Meridian armed forces from and freeze all Meridian assets in his Company’s lands, then you shall strike with military force and annex them for your own Company.”
“Indeed,” Westhough muttered, “but when he rejects those demands—”
Ronsard raised a hand. “Do not be so hasty,” he admonished his counterpart. “In fact my Commander Hinault reported back to me one hour ago stating that the Director had reluctantly agreed to those self-same demands.”
Westhough gaped at him. “But…surely not…?”
“Senhor Oliveira’s Company is Senhor Oliveira’s Company,” Ronsard said. “We well remember the unfortunate incident a few years ago when the Meridian government decided to try to act as though it owned the place. Well, it does not; but Senhor Castro will have to learn to live without his pet Meridian army and navy and his money from PAWC shell companies.” He smiled. “The terms of the agreement is that he will trade freely and equally with any other company regardless of its country of origin.”
Westhough shook his head. “But surely he would just continue to favour the Meridian companies informally…?”
“He would,” Ronsard agreed, “if, of course, their vessels can cross the ocean without access to the coaling stations he so generously provides.”
Westhough stared at Ronsard for a long moment, and then slowly began to smile. “Damn you, damn Leclerc and damn Louie Dix-huit,” he said without rancour. “We wanted to colour some more of the map red.”
“You will have to do so without spilling blood to do it,” Ronsard said acerbically. “In the spirit of the Pitt-Rochambeau Accord our nations signed so long ago—I say this war shall not come to India. Now, you can be on board at the beginning of the new arrangement and secure a privileged position alongside our own East India Company, or…”
“Or,” Westhough repeated. He shook his head. This would make sense, long term a guaranteed slice of the Goanese pie would be better for the HAAEIC’s profits than trying to grab the whole thing and losing half of it in the process. But he didn’t know how he would explain it to His Imperial Majesty’s Government…
*
Dobryanka, Permskaya Guberniya, Russian Empire
January 20th 1897 (N.S.)
Ivan Petrovich Vasiliev saw his breath form as a white cloud before him. That was bad: that meant his scarf had slipped out of place. With gloved hands he clumsily, hastily adjusted the trappings that shielded him from the harsh winter. There. That was better. Even the briefest exposure could inflict frostbite, as he knew well from living in Perm Governorate all his life.
“That was a close one, eh, Vanya?” said a muffled voice beside him. Despite his own layers of protection, Vyacheslav Fyodorovich Mozorov managed to convey a grin.
“Too close,” Ivan agreed, although uncertain whether Slava would be able to hear him. Thankfully, at least the buildings in the centre of Dobryanka provided some protection from the bitter winds coming off the adjacent Kama River. The streets also contained a few steam-mobiles which briefly filled the air with warm murk as they passed. Ivan knew the machines’ boilers had a tendency to burst in the harshly shifting climate of the region, but he still found them greatly impressive. They were capable of travelling in cold where even the most ingenious old campaigner would pronounce it impossible to bring a horse and cart without the horse being immediately transmuted into an equestrian statue of ice. A few of the mobiles were industrial, still carrying in coal from the mines further north where Ivan’s grandfather had toiled for years, scraping and saving to build a better life for his children. That coal kept Dobryanka alive through the winter as well as powering the mobiles themselves. However, most of the mobiles were smaller, sleeker models, toys for the handful of nobles and rich mine owners who dwelt in what to Ivan was ‘the big city’. He looked out for the black Kazan 91 mobile bearing the monogramme of his ultimate boss, the self-made potash industrialist Kirill Volodin, but didn’t see it.
Of course, those rich men’s mobiles were far from the most impressive application of steam engines, and that what what he and Slava had come to see. Tarefikhov Square, a development completed when Ivan had been a boy, had been mostly cleared of the bonfires and tents which had hosted the New Year’s celebrations mere hours before. A few of the fires around the edges had been allowed to continued to burn, helping warm the crowds who had assembled to watch this new spectacle. Ivan and Vyacheslav managed to find space at one of the fires and barely restrained themselves from thrusting their icy hands, gloves and all, straight into the flames. Ivan relaxed when he began to feel pain from the heat: it was when sensation refused to return that it was time to worry.
“Good morning, my sons,” said a new voice, muffled not only by scarves and coats but by a large bushy beard beneath them. Ivan and Vyacheslav turned to find the owner of that familiar voice, the Reverend Father Dmitry, their local priest. Both of the men made an awkward gesture consisting of a half-bow coupled to touching their gloved fingers to their fur hats: it was meant to convey ‘we would of course honour you properly, Father Dmitry, were it not for the fact that removing our hats would lead to our untimely deaths’.
Father Dmitry acknowledged their gesture. “So you have come to offer yourselves?” he asked guardedly.
Ivan and Vyacheslav exchanged glances, then both began to speak at once. They were interrupted in any case by a loud, clear voice which echoed across the street. “No conscription without workers’ rights!”
Ivan rolled his eyes at that, forgetting the chances of either of his compatriots actually seeing the motion behind his scarf were minimal. “I see His Excellency is at it again.”
“I would never seek to question the Imperial Soviet’s decision not to prosecute Full State Counsellor Ulyanov for his disruptive dilettantery,” Father Dmitry said carefully, a brief glimpse of his own eyes telling a rather different story. “Much less suggest that he might do better to go back to Nizhny Novgorod where he came from and deafen the fortunate denizens of that governorate instead.”
Ivan wasn’t entirely certain that ‘dilettantery’ was a word, but knew better than to correct a priest. “Indeed, Father Dmitry, indeed,” he said soothingly. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the civil servant stood on his usual makeshift stage built of barrels, surrounded by burly coal miners carefully waving suitably patriotic flags: the civil version of the state flag, with the blue X of the St Andrew’s cross defacing the tricolour whose plain version only the government was permitted to fly. Ulyanov was a crafty one: no attempt to prosecute him for treason or Mentian activities had ever come to anything. He was merely a faithful servant of the State, expressing slightly original opinions of how to interpret the Tsar’s holy quest to purge Russia of her foreign influences and rediscover her Slavic core.
Burly though those miners might be, make no mistake—they weren’t protecting Ulyanov, he was protecting them by his status as a senior civil servant and a man who had defied all prosecution attempts. In his absence, the Governor would probably just send in the troops to beat those miners with the flats of their bayonets if not their edges; but no-one wanted to be the man who had turned Nikolai Ulyanov into a martyr.
It did seem as though some of the crowd were listening to Ulyanov, much to Father Dmitry’s displeasure. However, the Mayor or the Governor had clearly planned for this, and Ulyanov and his protestors were slowly but firmly coralled into a side street where they could be pushed away from the planned spectacle without causing any deaths. It was a far cry from the way such men would have been treated in Ivan’s grandfather’s day. Thinking of his grandfather made Ivan realise he had mixed feelings about Ulyanov’s quest. He thought that the coal miners were badly treated and abused by the mine owners who had grown rich and they indeed deserved better pay and other rights. On the other hand, his grandfather had worked his way up and fought his way out of the coal mines and it was because of his years of strife that Ivan had a middle-class desk job working for Volodin Potash. In some ways it almost felt disrespectful to the old man, to devalue his work, if it was made easier for those in his position now.
Perhaps that was silly, but it was enough of a caveat for Ivan to justify to himself not getting involved in the struggle. Father Dmitry was still muttering to himself about firing squads when a band began to play a martial tune. The crowd cheered as the street, newly gritted to prevent embarrassing ice slippage, filled with a parade.
First came the green-clad troops of the local Second Perm Rifles, an archaic title now that all infantrymen carried bolt-action rifles as standard. The troops carried their colours high, emblazoned with a double-headed eagle and with records of all their battles stitched to it. The people clapped and cheered dutifully for their local sons, but if Ivan was any judge, they shuffled impatiently, perhaps guiltily, for what came after.
Ivan’s father Pyotr had been too young to serve in the Euxine War, but he had served in the army during the brief Baku War against the Persians in 1876-7. That war had only been the climax of a series of more minor and debatable skirmishes as Tsar and Shah-Advocate sought to carve up the lands of Independent Tartary and rob them of their independence. Russia had failed to duplicate Peter the Great’s brief triumph of a hundred and fifty years before in practically rendering the Caspian Sea a Russian lake by taking Gorgan; but Baku and the Azeri lands were firmly in St Petersburg’s grip these days, even if Khiva remained in the Persians’ sphere of influence. Pyotr had come back from that war with no more damage than a scar on his forearm and a slight limp, and always spoke of what great fighters the French-trained Persians had been and how he was glad Russia had not tangled with them since.
During that war, Pyotr had graduated by dead men’s shoes from being an infantryman to a crewman of one of Russia’s first proper armarts.[12] Ivan’s father still spoke fondly of his experience driving that Kaluga Dazhbog I armart, with its thick varnished wooden armour supplemented by an iron frame, its single huge rifled cannon barrel protruding from a vertical slot that permitted elevation, its high cart-like wheels with their iron rims.
In the Seventies, Ivan was sure that had been impressive. But those old armarts might be the huts of primitive native tribes against the glory of St Basil’s Cathedral when he saw what now filled the street. Grit crunched and cobblestones sparked beneath the serrated wheels of the finest fruits of Russian industry.
Vyacheslav suddenly clutched him like a schoolgirl who had caught sight of her crush (a metaphor that would not have occurred to Ivan’s grandfather, in whose day few local girls would have ever seen the inside of a school). “Vanya! It’s a Perun! They’ve brought a Perun!”
“I can see that, Slava,” Ivan said, trying to sound calm and unimpressed and utterly failing. Gouts of steam from the vast war machine’s twin engines hid it like the fog of war, but were then left behind as the armart-captain ordered more steam to be raised and its wheels spun ever faster. Two additional wheels at the front were raised above the ground and did not spin: Ivan realised they were there to allow the mighty armart to gain purchase on sloping ground—or a German trench—and the driver could engage them by gears when required. The great hull of the Perun rose above even those wheels, though, wrought iron shaped to loosely suggest the shape of a ship. That was not merely the affectation of those who compared armarts to warships on land, but intended to help survive the swampy state of many Russian roads when spring or autumn beckoned. For now, though, the frozen hard ground took even the vast weight of the Astrakhan Perun III. Atop the hull, the big two-dyuim[13] main gun might not be the largest Russia’s arsenals could wield, but it was mounted not on a fixed traverse but a turret that might have come from a modern lionheart lineship. Supplementing the great turret were two sponsons, each bearing a cingular gun.
Ivan realised his mouth was hanging open and thanked God for his scarf, or by now his saliva would have frozen on his tongue. “Bozhemoi – sorry, Father Dmitry – she’s impressive.”
“Pagan names,” Father Dmitry muttered to himself in disapproving tones, but he seemed as fascinated by the vehicles as his two parishioners.
“Not only can she blast Fritz to the devil’s uncle, she can protect herself, too,” Vyacheslav said in satisfaction, pointing at the two cingular guns as they swept the crowd. It was easy to imagine an endless stream of bullets blasting from those weapons, cutting men and women down as bloody rags… Ivan shuddered at the thought. “Why, she barely needs those Kresniks!”[14]
Ivan nodded as he watched the smaller, lighter escort armarts which each mounted two cingular guns in a single turret. Those were not their only weapons, either. The people cheered enthusiastically as one of the Kresniks fired a rocket—a variant of the usual war type, thankfully—which exploded into stars and briefly bathed the street in red light.
Red like blood. Ivan pushed the thought aside. The Perun had shuddered to a halt—intentionally, for the other armarts and the troops halted alongside it. A figure emerged from a hatch in the hull. His officer’s uniform had probably once been clean and neat but had clearly suffered from the conditions within. He was actually sweating! Two of the infantrymen hastily offered him a greatcoat, hat and scarf before that sweat froze on his skin. The Major—as his insignia identified him—survived.
“Let us bid a fine welcome to Major Kurakin and his men!” roared a new voice. The crowd collectively genuflected to Governor Fanbranglov as he rose to stand beside the Major. Two ensigns behind them held both a regimental colour and the unblemished tricolour that usually flew from the Governor’s residence.
Fanbranglov surveyed the crowd. His unusual name, Ivan knew, was a consequence of attempting to Slavicise the very un-Slavic-sounding ‘von Wrangel’ at some point a couple of decades back. Germans in Russia had managed to survive Slavicism for a long time, for Emperor Paul had won back his throne with the help of men like Kautzman, and Slavicism had been directed against more helpless targets such as the Jews. But that could only last so long, as so many Jews had fled to the Crimea and elsewhere. Other minorities like the Old Believers had moved eastwards where the RLPC, always ready for more workers, allowed the Tsar’s test acts to be de facto relaxed. That meant that sooner or later it was only the Germans, often occupying privileged and noble positions which made them a target of resentment, had been left.
Slavicism continued.
“These are just some of the fine young men who will uphold the honour of His Imperial Majesty Emperor Peter V and the truth of the Holy Mother Church!” Fanbranglov said, going slightly off-piste in his terminology and making Father Dmitry wince. He made up for any inexactness with enthusiasm which easily penetrated the yellow scarf that mummified him. “Bundeskaiser Johann Georg thinks he can order a greater nation about when he cannot even keep his own house in order!” Some boos and laughs.
Fanbranglov turned more serious. “And he strikes at us by the only way he can—by cowardice and hypocrisy!” More boos. “Young men have been drowned thanks to the weapons the oh so high-and-mighty Germans always claimed not to have. They will be avenged! By our brave men at sea, yes, but also…” the Governor gestured dramatically at the troops and armarts. “On land!”
More cheers. “When your children asked you where you were in the war,” Franbranglov continued, “some of you will be able to say ‘the Tsar needed me to continue my work, to supply our soldiers with what they needed to win victory’. And there shall be no shame in that.” He scanned the horizon as though looking every member of the crowd in the eye at once. “But what of the rest of you? Is there no man who will step forward and declare he will fight to uphold Russia’s honour?”
This was what Ivan and Vyacheslav had been waiting for. “I will!” they both cried, stepping forward, but their voices were lost amid dozens, hundreds of others.
“You are a great people!” Fanbranglov said, taking on an excessively theatrical pose that made the more educated members of the crowd think of Yapontsi Nogaku theatre. “I do not deserve to be your Governor! You have lived up to the example his Imperial Majesty has set. And now…” he gestured to Major Kurakin, who was trying not to hop from foot to foot either out of impatience or just chill. “Come and sign your names or make your marks in the book of the chosen!”
Ivan and Vyacheslav gave a quick farewell to Father Dmitry, who promised he would pass their farewells on to their families. Neither young man had the heart to tell the priest that they had already discussed it with their parents. They both knew how the game was played, how it had been played for years. The Emperor would send his recruitment parties around the cities once and call for volunteers, and those volunteers would get good prospects and be well trained and supplied, at the start of a conflict when there were time and resources for such things.
Later, the parties would be sent around again, and this time there would be no choice involved: any family that had not yielded up a son would be forced to contribute one. And those conscripts would more than likely be sent straight to the front as cannon fodder.
Pyotr, like Slava’s father, knew the game. They knew they could be sending their sons to their deaths. But they had other sons who could feed the family, sons in vital industries who would not be pressed into the army. Volunteering now was the best option.
As Ivan signed his name, he wondered where he would be sent. West to fight the Germans, assuming Danubia and Poland finally leapt the way it was looking they would? Fanbranglov had certainly implied as much, having not even mentioned the reason why the Tsar had taken Russia to war in the first place. But then it was a lot easier to get people angry at the Germans, even when in a supreme irony the man riling them up was himself of German blood, than it was to get them angry at the Americans.
And so Vyacheslav was surprised, but Ivan wasn’t, two weeks later when the train pulled out of Perm station and headed eastwards, through the Urals.
To Alyeska.
[1] This figure includes all of metropolitan France and French Antipodea (Pérousie) but not the French colonies in India, Africa and South America. Pérousie makes up 6.5 million of this figure; France has benefited from the annexation of parts of OTL Belgium but does not include Nice, Savoy or Corisca like OTL. The larger population than OTL has much more to do with the fact that the TTL equivalent of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were a full decade shorter than OTL’s.
[2] As above, this includes Pérousie as an integral part of France but not the French colonial possessions. Note that the vast size of Pérousie means that metropolitan France has less than a fifth of the total land area of ‘France’ cited here.
[3] I.e. the Old World. Not as commonly used a term as ‘Novamund’.
[4] OTL, approximately: parts of the Texas Panhandle plus the northern half of Oklahoma.
[5] Ironically, the Self-Evident Birthright was coined by Thomas Whipple, a Liberal, but like most people this author has misattributed it to the Supremacists who embraced the term. The real Faulkner rather than this fictionalised one would probably know better.
[6] Although Boxing Day usually falls on December 26th, strictly it is the first non-weekend day after Christmas and in 1896, as Christmas fell on a Friday, Boxing Day took place on December 28th.
[7] Formerly Fort Pinckney, OTL Oklahoma City.
[8] This is another anachronism on the part of the author: the province of Querétaro was not split off from the province of México until the 1880s.
[9] Negro Burlesques can be thought of as similar to minstrel shows from OTL but there are some differences – there is more focus on narrative and less on music, and the situation of Carolina means that white Carolinians are caricatured alongside their black counterparts and if anything often more viciously. However, they are still very racist pieces of work and with the Negro characters almost invariably portrayed by white American actors in blackface.
[10] Azelf-of-soda = sodium nitrate.
[11] OTL Kronstadt – an example of the Slavicisation of place names in post-Civil War Russia in TTL.
[12] ARMoured ARTillery – an example of an English-derived abbreviation entering Russian, even though the term actually used in English is ‘protgun’.
[13] A Russian unit of measurement equal to an English inch.
[14] A footnote in the original manuscript notes that the author made an error here – a Tula Kresnik I is a flamethrower variant of the type of cingular gun carrying armart listed here and was not produced until the latter stages of the war. The correct name for the cingular gun version as of 1897 appears to be Tula Radegest IV.
I guess you can say this war will cause the world order to fall like...a House of Cards.
And nice touch with Lenin.
Alex Richards
Donor
This continues to be excellent- Russia has a strong prospect of ending up in a two-front war by the looks of it, and the ghostly echoes of OTL continue to make their impression- Lenin's ATL-cousin being simply a minor firebrand for example.
I wonder how much of India might end up effectively falling into the French sphere of influence in the short term?
I wonder how much of India might end up effectively falling into the French sphere of influence in the short term?
*The writer of the atl fiction book is rather overstating the cold.
It's a get out of free card for any mistakes thande could ever make.
Thande
Donor
Remember this is January. Of course, I am British so me describing minus ten Centigrade may sound more like I'm talking about minus twenty...
Otherwise, Youngmarshall has provided the ultimate excuse
What was that book you mentioned a while back that it took you a while to realise was supposed to have a weird climate as a plot point because it just seemed like ours?Remember this is January. Of course, I am British so me describing minus ten Centigrade may sound more like I'm talking about minus twenty...
Otherwise, Youngmarshall has provided the ultimate excuse
More seriously: good to see the (Lord no more - when did that happen?) President realise the error of his ways and Faulkner get his comeuppance. The horrified realisation he doesn't want the old Carolina Confederation restored is particularly brilliant.
It seems to be with Monroe, which according to the list on the wiki seems to have been in 1799.
I was taking that into account. The average low in the city of Perm (which isn't that far away) is like 2C colder than the average low in Ottawa (and significantly warmer than Thunder Bay). I'll accept that winter coats are probably a lot better today, but I've run to take the garbage out in similar weather without bothering for a coat many times. It is cold and you do need to stay warm, but it's not quite as super lethal as all that.
(Also western Europe just can't handle weather. Spain of all places seems to break down at summer temperatures not uncommon in Torono or Ottawa, let alone any of you dealing with cold.
)Yep, that works.Otherwise, Youngmarshall has provided the ultimate excuse
Thande
Donor
It became convention that a Lord President should be an MCP not a peer from Hamilton's 2nd term onwards, but that's different from actually dropping the word 'Lord' from Lord President which as said above came in with the Supremacist Reforms.
(You don't have to be a Lord to be a Lord President - the OTL British office is currently held by a bloke called David Lidington).
Ja. I walked to school when it was -40. Taking off your toque didn't give you instant frostbite, let alone death. OK, so you didn't want to leave off for LONG!!!
Oh, and as @Beedok says, a quick run to take the garbage out, say, who puts on a coat? Few teenagers, anyway.
Oh, and as @Beedok says, a quick run to take the garbage out, say, who puts on a coat? Few teenagers, anyway.
I spy an alt-Lenin in there.
Also, sneaky, sneaky Frenchies.
So, is Russia de facto on the Meridian side, whilst the Germans de facto on the ENA side?
Also, sneaky, sneaky Frenchies.
So, is Russia de facto on the Meridian side, whilst the Germans de facto on the ENA side?
Yay for an update! It's 1:26 am though, I hate you...
So, the French remain smart. That's... smart of them. Doubt it'll last the war.
Unless you retconned it, France should be in possession of Savoy. They won it from Habsburg Italy, along with Lorraine, after the Nightmare War.
Smooth, Thande, smooth.
Good to know he's doing relatively well. How's Father Jughashvili though?
Yeah, I was wondering the same. And aren't the Ottomans supposed to be on the same side as the Danubians? It'd be strange to have Russia and the Ottoman Empire on the same side. If not... well, let's just say that Polan can't into space even in an ATL.
So, the French remain smart. That's... smart of them. Doubt it'll last the war.
Unless you retconned it, France should be in possession of Savoy. They won it from Habsburg Italy, along with Lorraine, after the Nightmare War.
Smooth, Thande, smooth.
Good to know he's doing relatively well. How's Father Jughashvili though?
Yeah, I was wondering the same. And aren't the Ottomans supposed to be on the same side as the Danubians? It'd be strange to have Russia and the Ottoman Empire on the same side. If not... well, let's just say that Polan can't into space even in an ATL.
-40 is soft compared to how bad it can get out on the prairies, no obstacles to break up the north wind. And it passes through as easily as a knife through perfectly cooked veal.
But a question for Thande. Will the Koreans make an appearance at all in this current conflict? And will the French dominance of India, in the name of armed neutrality of course, handicap the establishment of the Joseon controlled section of the sub-continent that earlier updates teased?
But a question for Thande. Will the Koreans make an appearance at all in this current conflict? And will the French dominance of India, in the name of armed neutrality of course, handicap the establishment of the Joseon controlled section of the sub-continent that earlier updates teased?