Part #241: Messages
The country’s official name is: KINGDOM OF BAVARIA (Standarddeutsch and High Austrogerman
KÖNIGREICH BAYERN, Neuboarisch
KINEREICH BOARN)
The people are known as: BAVARIANS.
Capital and largest city: Munich (SD/HAG
München, NB
Minga) (0.4 million)
Flag: A white-light blue horizontal bicolour with a white cross on red in the canton (a reference to the ruling House of Savoy). An unofficial version of the flag with a parallelogram ‘lozengey’ pattern is occasionally seen, but officially discouraged as it is considered too evocative of the former ruling House of Wittelsbach.
Population: 4.1 million.
Land area: 2,900 lcf.
Economic ranking: Low, although it has become host to a number of international companies taking advantage of a favourable tax regime.
Form of government: Constitutional monarchy, in which the King still holds executive power but is very aware he must take the wishes of the elected Volksdiet into account if he does not wish to lose his head.
Foreign relations: Bavaria has pursued a policy of strict neutrality since the accession of Victor I Felix, and as a consequence has taken on a role as a neutral arbiter and the site of several international agreements, such as the Treaty of Münich (1880) which guaranteed the rights of medics and journalists in a combat situation. The Knights of St John also moved to Bavaria and Prince (later King) Amadeus became their new patron, with many hospitals (including for groundbreaking medical research) founded in the kingdom. Bavarian symbols are sometimes used by those seeking to declare themselves as noncombatants (such as the Savoyard white on red cross with a light blue border) although this is not universally recognised—in the ENA, for example, violet is used to designate noncombatants. In recent years, Germany has attempted to pressure Bavaria into joining the Pressburg Pact alongside Danubia, but Bavaria has resisted this and begun diplomatically shifting towards France in response.
Military: Bavaria requires all male citizens to serve for three years in the army at the age of majority, with very occasional exceptions. Essentially this began as a means of ensuring the Kleinkriegers (who were already armed and dangerous young men) were kept where the King could keep an eye on them, but by the 1890s Bavaria has now been at peace long enough for the younger generations to resent conscription somewhat. Bavaria’s military force is naturally focused on the defensive, with the construction of several border fortresses and the fortification of mountain passes and other strategically important points.
Current head of state: Amadeus I (since 1865)
Current head of government: Karl Meier (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)
*
From: The World At War: From The Pages of The Discerner VOLUME IV: ROAD TO RUIN (1986):
Garmisch, Kingdom of Bavaria
June 4th 1898
Albrecht Kiesinger shoved on the door to the room, feeling resistance from the lock. Cursing under his breath, he fumbled in his pocket for a key. As he did, the music inside the room abruptly cut off, and by the time he had actually got the door open, his sister had got her innocent face on, with only a touch of red in her cheeks to suggest she had been exerting herself. “Hello Albrecht,” she said, slightly out of breath, “I did not expect you back so early.”
“Evidently,” Albrecht said, closing the door behind him. Though the room was not large, he was still able to theatrically glance from the violin in Maria’s hand to the open case in the opposite corner. “Aha.” He walked over to the case and withdrew the violin’s unused bow with a triumphant air. “From this, my dear Poul, I deduce that you have not been using your instrument in the manner for which it is designed.”
Maria pouted. “So what if I have? There is no law against it.” She defiantly took her violin in hand and strummed a few chords which Albrecht’s Uncle Georg would probably describe as ‘having the whiff of the jungle’.
Albrecht winced slightly. “Not here, my dear, it is true,” he conceded, “but back home—”
“Back home, you wouldn’t go around saying ‘From this, my dear Poul, I deduce...’, either,” Maria reminded him tartly. “Not too wise to announce that you are a follower of Astrid Hjelje.”
Albrecht coloured at that, then laughed. “I cannot argue with that, dear sister. Very well: I surrender.” He theatrically raised his hands. “Would that the world’s statesmen take a similar view of the predicament they find themselves in.”
“Something else you couldn’t say at home,” Maria said. She returned her violin to its case and gave Albrecht a hug. Her expression sobered as she looked into his eyes. “Despite everything, at the end of the day, we are lucky.”
Albrecht nodded tightly. “I have to remind myself of that when we struggle to make ends meet, when I think of the house at home, but—you are right.” He sat down abruptly on a battered wooden chair with a creaking sound that made Maria wince. “If we hadn’t happened to choose to visit those intriguing new ‘skiing resorts’ when we had...”
“You would be in uniform, somewhere in Poland, with Russian bullets whizzing overhead,” Maria said baldly, “and I would be in a factory making bullets for you to fire back at them.”
“A far too optimistic view, dear sister,” Albrecht sighed. “More likely that I would already be six
fußen under,[1] somewhere in Poland, and my surviving comrades wouldhave been pushed back to somewhere in Silesia.” He blinked owlishly at Maria. “Assuming, of course, I did not do the Russians’ job for them.”
Maria swatted him with her hand. “Oh, don’t speak of such loathsome things, Albrecht.”
“Taking my own life?” Albrecht said obstinately, colour blooming in his cheeks. “Tell me, dear sister, why is it that we can cheerfully discuss two groups of human beings slaying each other in a third group’s field, and call that ‘war’ and a necessary evil—if it is not called glorious—yet one man laying down his own life, the life which is his own property and his own choice to give up, is treated as—”
Maria tactfully shut him up by pushing a bottle of pilsner into his hands. Though she agreed with many of his core convictions, her brother could be dreadfully tiresome when he got on to talking about his Pacific Society beliefs. Still, it could be worse—at least he was through his Sanchezista phase.[2]
“Where did you get this from, dear sister?” Albrecht said, already having instantly dropped his ostentatious air of gloom. He turned the bottle over in his hands, examining the label. “I thought that it was rationed now until October...”
“It is,” Maria said, “so don’t wave it about. Our...latest contact threw that one in as an appetiser.”
Albrecht laughed harshly. “What would we have thought two years ago, Maria, to see us now? Engaged in smuggling, forgery, organised crime...us, two prosperous middle-class Swabian burghers with interests no more adventurous than racy opera and perhaps this new pastime of skiing...”
“All right, brother, you’re not writing the synopsis for the story we’re in,” Maria said, her lip twitching. “It wouldn’t be a very interesting one, anyway.”
“Not to a reader, no,” Albrecht conceded, running his hand through his blond hair. No-one could mistake he and Maria as anything other than brother and sister; whereas another pair of siblings in their situation might have been mistaken for husband and wife, Maria not only shared his hair (she wore it girlishly in pigtails, though she had left the age of majority behind) but also his eyes and his cheekbones. He wondered if the blastic theorists’ latest witterings allowed them to be twins identical save for gender; probably not, considering Maria was a year older than him. “To a reader, how very dull that the world has gone mad and we decided to sit it out. To us, however...” he waved a hand at the window. “I would rather be alive.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Maria said, taking the Pilsner from him.
After enjoying the beer between them and carefully hiding the bottle, they went into town. If you could call Garmisch a ‘town’. It had been starting to grow from a mere village over the past few years, with Dr von Bibra’s ingenious scheme to bring Bernese-style ski resorts to Bavaria, but that had been abruptly halted by the outbreak of war. Bavaria was surrounded on both sides by the Pressburg Powers, meaning that nobody holding citizenship of a nation at war with them (such as all those Russian aristocrats and Meridian capitalists) could go there; Germans, Danubians and theoretically Britons and neutrals could, but in practice governments were leery about letting anyone go there lest they decide to disappear. Besides, even in neutral states few were willing to spend money on such a ‘frivolous’ pursuit at this time.
If Dr von Bibra’s plan had been going a few more years, Garmisch would probably have been economically devastated by the effective blockade; as it was, the town’s economy had not had sufficient chance to grow and become reliant on skiing. And, of course, it was now June, a fallow time for skiing even if the world had been at peace. As a result, people found other means of employment.
As usual, Albrecht and Maria took lunch in the optimistically-named
biergarten,
Der Skifahrer. The colourful sign depicted a man in dyed woollen garments, two skis over his shoulder and staring determinedly at the snow-capped peak of the Zugspitze. Not only was the Zugspitze looking rather less white at this time of the year, but woolly skiiers were also not in evidence anymore. The garden was only perhaps one-third full. Albrecht went to the bar to order for them, wincing when he saw it was the old
Oma taking orders. He had found that the family who owned
Der Skifahrer largely fit his general impression of the Bavarian people and their generations: the youth could be from anywhere, the middle-aged mothers and fathers were reserved and polite to outsiders but essentially normal, and the grandmothers and grandfathers gave you hard looks as though they were measuring you for a coffin. It had been sixty years and more since Bavaria had been known as
Das Blutbad, and since then Portugal had long since taken the dubious crown of the most dangerous place in Europe, but when Albrecht saw the look the old woman was giving him, he thought again of how what felt like the whole folk of this land had taken up arms as one against both Danubians and Germans.[3]
He shivered.
There was no poison in the food, though. It was simple, hearty stuff—if there was one country whose basic cuisine would not suffer from blockades and wartime shortages, it was Bavaria. This was further helped by the fact that Victor Felix and Amadeus had deliberately tried to make the country self-sufficient to avoid being pressured by its neighbours. Scratch the surface, of course, and one would nonetheless find that the
knödel potato dumplings had been padded out with less wholesome ingredients and the
Schweinshax’e pig knuckles had probably been stored a little too long out of the watchful eyes of inspectors, but overall it was quite tolerable. By contrast, rumours were rife of the awful
ersatz cooking proliferating in Germany, as the Scandinavian ironshark packs began to bite into trade.
Speaking of rumours... “I still don’t understand this,” Maria declared as she read a ten-day-old copy of the
Mingara Omdzeidung.
Albrecht snorted. “I’m not surprised you don’t understand it. These Bavarians are so keen to be different that they seem to have done their best to turn their dialect into its own inhuman tongue that could only be understood by Taillant’s Ondine.” He mentally translated the title of the paper into
Münchner Abendzeitung.
“Not that!” Maria said, swatting at his arm. “Besides, I don’t think we
Schwaben have a leg to stand on when it comes to odd dialects...”
“At least we don’t publish
newspapers in them,” Albrecht grumbled, carefully sawing a sliver of pork from his
Schweinshax’e. “But what did you mean?”
Maria proffered the paper to him, pointing at first one article, then another. “About what’s happening in England. The papers from back home I’ve seen seem to be doing their best to brush it over, but of course the Bavarians don’t care about upsetting the English’s feelings.” She shook her head, her pigtails flicking back and forth. “But just what
has happened? It sounds like a coup, maybe, by this Lee Clack, but...” she trailed off.
“But it doesn’t sound right,” Albrecht agreed. “Yes, a couple of our...contacts mentioned it to me. Lee Clack is what we would call a Mentian—maybe the English call him that too, I don’t know. And yes, he took power after they got rid of Herriott and then there was that period of chaos and they—well, it looks like they actually imprisoned their King’s brother, hard as it seems to believe. Of course, nobody knew that at the time, he just disappeared...”
“So Herr Clack locked up the
Herzog von York?” Maria said in shock. “He must be a powerful man if he feels he can get away with such audacity!”
“Yes and no,” Albrecht said, sipping his chicory faux-coffee; not everything
Ersatz had stayed north of the border, sadly. “From what they’ve told me, Clack’s a figurehead—he’s there to keep the working classes on-side. But the coup’s really being run by wealthy men.”
“Aristocrats?” Maria asked, her mind clearly on the dumpling she was cutting in two.
Albrecht raised an eyebrow. “In England? They don’t have aristocrats there.”
Maria coloured. “Yes, of course. But you know what I meant—some of their parties are dominated by men who are from what
used to be aristocratic families.”
“Ah,” Albrecht nodded, waggling his knife at her; the word OSTRUHRFABRIK engraved on the blade glinted in the sunlight for a moment. “In that case, yes, to an extent, though one of them made it sound more like they were new money, industrialists, men from international companies...”
“Like those who got us into this mess in the first place!” Maria said, viciously stabbing her
hax’e with her knife. “You want to talk about the absurdity of war, brother—how about the fact that you would be on that battlefield and I in that factory because of what some rich idiot did in building a railway in Siam!”
“A country that’s not even
in the war anymore,” Albrecht agreed ruefully. “Herr Quedling could scarcely have invented a better example for how obscenely farcical warfare can be, indeed.” He glanced at Maria’s near-indecipherable
Boarisch paper again. “And to return to these men in England, it is clear they are not motivated by any of the things our rulers tell us to hold fast to—patriotism, national pride, and so forth. They plot only to maintain their trade wealth as the war rages on, and to strip-mine their own country’s economy before hightailing it out of there, betraying their people.”[4]
Maria shuddered. “And they call
us traitors,” she said dolefully. She wiped her plate with a piece of bread and ate it, though she had clearly lost her appetite. Nonetheless, even in relatively bountiful Bavaria, one learned not to waste food in wartime.
“Well, my sister, we
are at least continuing trade like they do. On a smaller level.” Albrecht smiled and made a small gesture to someone behind Maria; his sister resisted the urge to turn around and draw attention to both herself and the newcomer. “Ah...yes, you’ve not met this one before.”
“What’s he lik—” Maria began. Before she could finish her sentence, though, the table’s third chair was being pulled up by the contact.
A rather attractive woman of her own age, with black hair and a tanned, Italian or Spanish look to her.
Albrecht hid all but a trace of his smirk as Maria shot a dirty look at him. It wasn’t
his fault that she had assumed that all the contacts he met were sweaty fat smugglers with shifty eyes. Though it would probably end up being that way when she yelled at him later. Well, so be it. “Ah, good to see you, Fräulein Rossi,” he said smoothly. “I hope you had a pleasant journey, FROM THE NORTH, THROUGH OBERAU,” he raised his voice pointedly.
Rossi sent him a death glare quite as potent as Maria’s. “Yes, Herr Kiesinger, I did,” she said coldly. “Though there is little to see in Oberau, indeed the town square still has the rotting remains of the supposedly-temporary wooden arch they erected to welcome Ryker and DeSoto a quarter-century ago. One can only assume little has happened there since the Great Race.” She folded her arms. “Well?”
“I commend you on your research,” Albrecht said, this time not hiding his grin. He lowered his voice. “I will not ask you if the Elbsee is cold this time of year, or any other matters relating to your
real itinerary.”
Rossi just sighed, and shared a glance with Maria, who to her surprise found herself sharing a moment of empathy. Well, being annoyed by her brother was certainly a universal language. “Herr Kiesinger, if you could stop trying to blow my cover for five minutes, I have a commission for you.”
Albrecht nodded, suddenly all business. “
Sehr gut. What is it this time—gold, diamonds?”
“Something a little different,” Rossi said. She opened her handbag, which was incongruously stylish; otherwise she was dressed not to stick out too much from the crowds of wartime Bavaria. Of course up here just being Latin in looks might be enough to stick out, but there would be plenty of Italians in Munich even now. She took out a packet of cigarettes and slid them across the table.
Albrecht quickly palmed the packet but raised his eyebrow at her. “While I know tobacco smuggling is a growth industry at present, Fräulein Rossi, I would have thought that economies of scale would lead to a different business model than doing it one pack at a time.”
Rossi tossed her head impatiently, Maria briefly having the urge to look enviously at her glossy black hair. “Stop being foolish on purpose, Herr Kiesinger.”
“You
have worked with him before,” Maria noted.
Rossi spared her a glance and smile, but then moved on: “The locals already know we engage in smalltime smuggling, so seeing me give you illegal tobacco merely confirms their prejudices. They would be far more intrigued if I had given you it in a plain packet.”
Maria nodded; she had spotted a couple of bystanders across the garden observing the transfer, despite the leafy shade. “Clever. So what is it really?”
“Information,” Rossi said briefly. “Don’t bother trying to open it, it’s enciphered. Just take it to Herr Resch. You recall Herr Resch?”
“One could scarcely forget his breath,” Albrecht said with a wince so theatrical that even Rossi laughed. “Very well, Fräulein Rossi. And in exchange?”
“Five hundred. Half now and half when I have confirmation it has made it,” Rossi said briefly. Maria resisted the urge to twitch in surprise as she felt Rossi’s hand against her ankle, casually transferring a wad of cash from her handbag to Maria’s. She covered the motion with a seemingly dropped fork. Again, the seasoned locals probably weren’t fooled, but better they think this was some smalltime stuff, get locked into a preconception, rather than having an open mind about it.
Albrecht nodded. “I won’t haggle; I’d rather make this a regular thing.” He almost patted his pocket, then thought better of it. “It’s safe in our hands.”
Rossi nodded. “You’ll be making the world a better place,” she said briefly. She did not rise to her feet immediately, but made small talk over the awful non-coffee for a few minutes before leaving. Albrecht paid and the two Kiesingers left soon afterwards.
“So, what is it?” Maria asked curiously when they were back in their room, her violin left neglected on her lap.
“Time to find out,” Albrecht said, opening the packet of cigarettes. Inside was, not microcon film as he had half expected, but a tightly wound roll of thin paper. Pricked in the paper were neat patterns of holes, one to six each time, in different patterns.
“I know what that is!” Maria exclaimed. “That’s an old Optel record tape!”
“You’re right,” Albrecht nodded, carefully unrolling the reel of paper. “If each pattern of dots is one character, there’s maybe a hundred-word message here. Hmm.” He took out an exercise book, sharpened his pencil and scribbled down dots, replicating the unknown message. Maria double-checked it for him, then they rewound the reel—though not before Albrecht had carefully wiped it, muttering something about fingerprints, my dear Poul. Maria rolled her eyes at that, though she supposed it was possible they might check.
“I shall go and see Herr Resch tomorrow,” Albrecht told her, frowning at the exercise book. “I suppose we have that long to try to puzzle out this message ourselves.”
“Why?” Maria asked. “Just for the intellectual challenge?” She smiled.
“Partly,” Albrecht agreed, “but if possible I would like to check Fräulein Rossi’s claim that we are making the world a better place.” His pencil traced vague rings in the air above the page.
“We’ve probably got no chance,” Maria pointed out. “This has probably been run through a proper solution engine cipher, we can’t crack that on our own. We’re hobbyists, not experts.”
“No,” Albrecht agreed. “And even if they didn’t have a solution engine, they could have used a single-use key sequence.”[5] He frowned, the dots swimming before his eyes. “Unless, of course, they were pressed for time, and had to be sloppy...”
“Wouldn’t it be in Italian anyway?” Maria protested. “Which we don’t speak.”
“Not necessarily,” Albrecht said. “Giovanna is probably Italian, but I don’t know if her masters are—”
He trailed off as Maria folded her arms. “‘Giovanna’.”
“She may have mentioned it at one point,” Albrecht muttered, his cheeks reddening. Ignoring his sister’s grin, he sank himself into looking over the code. Was that his imagination, or...
“Hah!” he said, triumphantly pointing at the book in three places. “See that?”
“It’s the same pattern of dots,” Maria said, frowning. “Oh, you don’t mean...they couldn’t have been that stupid...”
“They might have been that
desperate,” Albrecht pointed out. “And your average civilians, whose father was
not a professor of mathematics at the University of Baden, might think a mere substitution cipher was hopelessly unbreakable.” He pointed again. “Three lots of
das, I’d wager.”
“Why not
der or
die?” Maria asked.
“Because the first dot-pattern in the trio is also
here, here, here and
here,” Albrecht said, his finger stabbing out again, “and in
these trios, the second pattern
here and
here is the third one
there and
there—”
“In other words, the E in the middle of
der and at the end of
die,” Maria said, shaking her head. “You are good at this. Better than me.”
“I don’t like it when you compliment me, are you ill?” Albrecht asked with a wink. “Come on, I’m sure you’ll prove yourself wrong anyway. Help me with this.”
In the end it turned out that it wasn’t
quite a simple Caesar substitution cipher: the sender had also used a codeword book for all the nouns, which would have theoretically been unbreakable, were it not for the fact that said codebook had also been written by someone who had a poet’s mind rather than a cryptographer’s. “‘Spanish Bat’ would be
cielago, which is what the Meridians call heavier-than-air flying machines, you know, aerodromes,” Maria said.
Albrecht nodded. “And ‘Goodwine’ is...a bit trickier, but probably means
Vindobona, an old name of Vienna.”
“It would be harder if we didn’t know she’d just come from Danubia,” Maria said. “And, mm, something about coffee, but that could mean anything, it could just be a reference to shortages...”
Albrecht glanced out of the window at the blackness outside, then at his watch beneath the stuttering oil lamp: Garmisch was not yet equipped for gaslights, despite Dr von Bibra’s best efforts. “Well, sister, we’ve got a few hours to try to puzzle out the rest. And then we have to decide whether I should bring this to Herr Resch or not...”
Maria squeezed his shoulder. “We’ll do it. Boil up some of that foul coffee, we’ll stare at this thing till the sun peeps over the mountains.”
*
Fredericksburg, Williamsburg Province, Empire of North America
June 19th 1898
Lewis Faulkner MCP made a surreptitious glance up and down the great oval table in the Cabinet Room. In a tradition which had grown up from happenstance and fashion over the past few decades, the walls of the room were decorated with several fine depictions of naval battles involving the Imperial Navy and its predecessors. For example, Faulkner was sitting opposite Raymond’s chiaroscuro take on the Battle of Falkland’s Islands of 1785 (the painting itself dating from fifty years after that), with Captain Pellew leading his boarding party aboard Admiral Suffren’s flagship with Franco-Spanish shells exploding all around and lighting up the dark South Atlantic night. There were many paintings in the room’ President Chamberlain had rationalised the formerly less-organised collection with a more sensible layout, but he had also made the decision to display paintings showing battles that had been American defeats as well as victories. With typical perspicacity, the great Liberal President had argued that men making great decisions in this room on behalf of the American people should be aware of the consequences of their actions, and that disaster as well as triumph could be the result of their choices.
Despite this attitude of humility, with depictions of defeats like the Battle of Bermuda in the Second Platinean War or Vernon’s disastrous descent on Cartagena-des-Indes in the 1730s—technically before the ENA existed—there was still one small painting that seemed shoved into a corner. Paradoxically, though, it was positioned so that no man could enter or exit the Cabinet Room without seeing it. This was Vandeleur’s controversial depiction of the assassination of William IV in 1749. American artists could not ignore the incident that had played such a crucial role in the story of the birth of their nation, of course, but they had traditionally chosen to represent it from the King’s point of view, falling dramatically and tragically to the
Devonshire’s deck with a suitably family-friendly genteel interpretation of his wound, observed by a shocked but helpless Admiral Byng. From most American versions of the incident, one might be forgiven for thinking that King William had sadly but conveniently dropped dead of a heart attack as his fleet sailed into Lewisborough harbour. Vandeleur, though, no friend to American romanticism, had shown the incident from the perspective of some of Emperor Frederick’s riflemen in their fishing boat, coldly aiming at the man who many might regard as their rightful King. Vandeleur had meant to criticise, but President Foxbury had taken a different lesson from the painting: that a nation born from a ruthless act could never afford to fool itself into thinking it could shy away from the same choice when its survival was on the line.
Thoughts which seemed all too apt right now.
“I would like to thank His Imperial Majesty the Emperor-King for joining us once again,” President Burwell said, his Virginian drawl almost masking the note of quiet concern in his voice. It was one thing for the monarch to attend the occasional Cabinet meeting, but Emperor George seemed to be making too much of a habit of it even for many moderate constitutionalists’ liking, never mind the extremist Mentians in the Continental Parliament who had refused to join the National Government. Of course, Faulkner wondered, was George really more of an activist monarch than his predecessors, or was it just that he had simply spent more time in America and saw it more as his home, so interfered here more than he did with Great Britain?
Indeed, some might say, it might be time for him to interfere a little
more with the old motherland...
“Thank you, Your Excellency,” George IV said. His face was looking a little more reddish these days: the port, perhaps? Specialised port vineyards had proliferated across the world’s suitable climates in the decades since Portugal went to hell and exiles fled, and the Emperor would be far from the first to develop a little too much of a taste for the sweet fortified wine. “What is the latest news?”
Burwell coughed and began the agenda as if the Emperor had not spoken, seeking to regain control of the meeting. He had been politically capable enough to stab Jamison in the back in his moment of triumph, Faulkner thought (not without a certain note of vindictive triumph) but he seemed out of his depth when trying to manage an Emperor crossing constitutional boundaries. Though, to be fair, that might be true of many American politicians if put to the test. “And that brings us to the latest news,” Burwell finally said in a pointed tone, which George IV ignored. “Firstly, Carolina. Lewis?”
Faulkner was shaken out of his reverie. “Garrison rollout phase three is now complete,” he said, glancing at his notes. “There are continuing sporadic Kleinkrieger attacks, but these are growing smaller and more desperate since the blockade was sealed. There is now precious little way for Meridian arms to enter the...” he almost said ‘country’, ‘region’ or another more specific word, but hastily corrected himself, “...to enter Carolina, that is, and it will grow even harder for the smugglers now our troops have taken control of all the remaining hostile islands in the West Indies.”
Burwell nodded. Faulkner had hoped that his last words would provide a natural segue point to switch to the matter of the war in the islands, someone else’s remit, but the President was unwilling to let him go quite yet. “What about the Wyatt Plan?”
Faulkner winced. “Good as far as it goes, Your Excellency. We have not seen many Kleinkrieger attacks on our crews helping rebuild Carolina’s industrial base: the Meridians were not too popular towards the end, and the fact that Carolinian workers will be making bullets that we will shoot at them is not seen as much of a reason for sabotage. Mr Wyatt and our...ally Mr Cyrus Wragg have managed to recruit most of the remaining Wragg and other pseudopuissant corporation structures for our purposes, which has accelerated redevelopment.”
“Then why does the Minister for Carolina sound like he’s just swallowed a lemon?” the Emperor interrupted.
Carefully, but pointedly, Faulkner glanced at Burwell, who nodded in annoyance. Then, and only then, Faulkner turned to his monarch, who affected not to have noticed the interplay. “The problem, Your Imperial Majesty, is that the Wyatt Plan was half intended as a way to distract Mr Wyatt from his role in the One Carolina Movement by giving him a task that, frankly, we expected to be more problematic. His success is good for the war effort, but by making him a prominent and successful figure, we have stored up troubles for the peace.”
“Any considerations about the peace can wait until the war is won,” George said dismissively. “It certainly sounds as though Carolina is falling into line faster than we had dared to hope. In your opinion, Minister, would it be feasible to recruit soldiers from there?”
Faulkner’s eyes widened at that, but then narrowed again as his brow wrinkled. “On reflection, Your Imperial Majesty, that is a suggestion that would have sounded absurd mere months ago, but now I wonder.”
“It would still be risky to put them into a battle against Meridians,” argued Thomas Gedney, the Minister for War, his short New England vowels a contrast to Burwell’s drawl and Faulkner’s clean, anodyne Westernesse speech. “And alongside soldiers who were shooting at them not long ago. But perhaps reserve troops...or another front...”
“Yes,” Burwell said. “And speaking of which, sir, what of the Northwest Front?”
Gedney blinked and glanced at his own notes. Faulkner felt a note of relief. “There are no Russians east of Lake Winnipeg anymore,” he reported.
“It was absurd there ever were,” the Emperor grunted. “How far from their colonies had they got? Did you see the report that it may have just been a few raiders in Les Grandes Fourches?”
Gedney, too, gave the increasingly annoyed Burwell a tiny glance before continuing: “Yes, it does appear that the early reports were exaggerated, Your Imperial Majesty. Though even a few raiders that deep into the North American continent was a concern, of course. Not to mention their apparent allies among the Superians.”
“Allies which are now defeated by our troops, I take it?” the Emperor asked keenly.
A glance, a frustrated nod. “Defeated or pushed out, sir. The remaining Russian allies among the Superians appear to have fallen back to a combination of Quappelle in the south and St. Denis on Lake Athabasca in the north. We are in occupation of the majority of the Superior Republic, and I believe President Burwell has received an angry letter from President Wambleeska about it...”
“Ah, yes,” Burwell said. “We will have to consider this carefully.”
“Simply annexing the Superian lands would be popular with many voters,” Faulkner pointed out.
“But it would not look good on the world stage,” warned Michael Briars, the Foreign Secretary. “We have to tread carefully at every stage. Even now, with the enemy on the back foot, the French and their damned alliance could still turn the tide against us if they joined the other side.”
“I don’t see why they would at this stage,” the Emperor said, “but you’re right, we can’t take the risk.” He frowned. “Although judging by that last briefing note, they do not seem to have the same attitude towards failing to antagonise
us. What is this matter in Antipodea?”
Burwell’s hand scrabbled for a moment on the agenda as though crumpling it up. It was clear that sticking to it was too much to ask for; partly because of the Emperor’s interruptions, partly just because of their own fatigue and strain, the meeting was jumping all around the world. “Please summarise, Foreign Secretary.”
Briars ran a hand through his thinning brown hair. “Now that the Beiqing Chinese have entered the war, the Feng government has felt it can lend us more direct support, and as a result we have access to one of their secret trans-Pacific submarine cables, allowing us to re-establish short-term contact with our forces across the seas. This has clarified a number of matters that were previously greatly confusing to us, as we were working on outdated information.”
He coughed and reshuffled his notes. “Now this specific matter is a similar situation to the matter in the International Settlement not long after the war began; Nieuw Holland, the Antipodean-mainland portion of the Batavian Republic, could still technically be considered a pseudopuissant corporate entity, a subsidiary of the old Dutch East India Company. With our victories in the north-west of the continent, the board of directors in Tasmanstad appear to have decided that the game is up and they cannot hold on—but they have declared a separation from the Batavian Republic and the Hermandad, and have applied to join Pérousie as a province!”
“Absurd,” Gedney muttered to himself. “What have the French said?”
“They have not said
oui, but they have not said
non,” the Emperor said dryly. “That much I know, as it has been passed on from Great Britain by my brother.”
A note of silence, a silence beyond mere lack of sound, like a night darker than the mere absence of light, seemed to descend over the room. The faintly hissing gaslights only seemed to intensify it. “You have...discussed this with the Duke of York, Your Imperial Majesty?” Burwell asked carefully.
George IV nodded. “We still have agents in France, and my brother has particularly privileged access—I am afraid that the new head of the Zero Desk is a little leery about President Clack’s politics so prefers to go straight to the crown, or at least the nearest thing on that side of the Atlantic.” He smirked a little at that. “There is also information that the French Government is increasingly concerned about that never-ending revolt on the Isle of Dufresne, at the other end of Antipodea. I had thought they would have plenty of military force with which to crush it with, but apparently their ‘armed neutrality’ elsewhere means they have to keep most of their regiments and fleets in European waters for their threat to be effective.” He glanced around the table, saw worried expressions. “Do not worry, my brother does cypher his Lectel messages. A cypher only we two know.”
“Ye-es,” Burwell said carefully, “of course, these days even the most complex cyphers are proving vulnerable to solution engines. But regardless, Your Imperial Majesty—I, ah, I take it that there is no doubt that it
is your brother who is communicating with you?”
The Emperor’s expression darkened. “Do not bring this absurd matter up again,” he bit out. “I am shocked and appalled by the number of otherwise intelligent men who seem to be giving any credence to that self-evidently ridiculous rumour. That my brother could be overthrown and imprisoned by some fictitious coup—then
escape and flee to Belgium, of all places—I communicate with him most days! The torchies are really scraping the bottom of the barrel with this latest attempt at propaganda!”
“Of course, sir,” Burwell said hastily. “I am sure that you would immediately spot if a Lectel message came from someone else pretending to be your brother.”
“They say Professor Fitzgerald’s new invention can let one communicate by voice as well as text,” Faulkner mused.
“I have heard it sounds like someone shouting into a tin bath,” George IV said dismissively. “Oh, his Ventriloquist Machine will be an interesting toy for the peace, but—as I said before—we cannot afford to consider the peace now.” He frowned.[6] “Could we supply arms to the rebels on Dufresne to put pressure on the French on the other matter?”
“Not openly,” Briars said briefly, but Faulkner caught the slip—the Emperor’s idea had intrigued him enough that he was failing to make pointed gestures towards constitutional appropriateness. “We would have to work through intermediaries, ensure that the French can never trace it back to us...”
“But give them the right sort of knowing winks when they complain,” Burwell noted, also ignoring the Emperor’s breach of protocol this time. “Perhaps we could work through the Mauré? I understand some of them have already become involved with the rebels for a long time.”
“That sounds like an idea,” George agreed. He counted on his fingers. “So—Carolina secured, the Russians pushed back in the North-West, and an implicit
quid pro quo for the French to make a deal with us about Nieuw Holland. What about the Caribbean Sea strategy?”
“Cuba is fully on side, we have secured Jamaica and conquered the Hermandad possessions in the Leeward and Windward Islands,” Gedney summarised. “In other words, Puerto Rico, Lijzijden, and now Trinidad have all been taken. We have been careful to avoid the French naval forces in Guadeloupe and Martinique. That places us in a position to potentially attack the Guayanese Republic or attempt to retake Venezuela.”
George snorted. “If the French Vulture doesn’t dive in and take them from us after our men have bled and died to take
those, too. What is your recommendation for our further strategy, Your Excellency?”
Burwell bristled at that ‘recommendation’, but answered regardless: “We cannot afford to overextend ourselves, Your Imperial Majesty. We have won so far, but the last thing we need is some of the grand designs made by excitable young men in the papers, which would see us sail the Imperial Navy straight up the River Plate and bombard Buenos Aires, as though this were the eighteenth century instead of almost the twentieth. We need to continue to strike heavy blows against the enemy, blows which will help our country directly when the dust has settled, blows in which we remain on short supply lines and have the advantage.”
“Specifically?” George asked.
Burwell nodded to Gedney, who spread a map over the table. “We cannot truly dominate the Caribbean and eject Hermandad power until we knock Mexico out of the war. Thus far, the southwestern front has been a low priority; in almost two years of war, our men have taken Tejas y Luisiana province and some strategically important parts of Nuevo México, but our advance bogged down on the Nueces River six months ago, and frankly there have been political reasons not to push it.”
“Ah,” George noted, quirking an eyebrow. “The ‘Fighting Irish’.”
“If too many images of our boys fighting their second cousins got out,” said Duncan Coyle, the Ohioan who had replaced Burwell as Continental Secretary, “then the boys in the Auld Sod wouldn’t need to hear it on Professor Fitzgerald’s machine to kick up a fuss, to say the least.”
“A knotty problem, indeed,” the Emperor admitted, “but I presume your plan circumvents it?”
Gedney noded. “Though we will have to concentrate considerable naval forces to do it.”
“I could ask my brother to send more of the Royal Navy,” George said carelessly.
Gedney exchanged a glance with Burwell. “What of the Scandinavians having entered the war in Europe?” Burwell asked carefully.
“I should think they have enough on their plates with our German cobelligerents,” George said.
“But there are rumours,” Briars said, also with caution, “that the Pressburg Pact’s...difficulties in Silesia may encourage a certain other power with a beef against Germany to enter the war on the enemy’s side.”
George laughed. “If we do not have to worry about them kidnapping my brother, then we have to worry about the Belgians joining the foe! But rest assured, gentlemen: this is a war that will be fought and won in the Novamund, and I am sure that any reversals in the Old World can easily be eliminated once victory is ours...”
*
Gulf of Mexico
August 2nd, 1898
“Up periscope,” Captain Llewelyn T. Cooke ordered. His first officer, Will Legge, helped him raise the bulky device; not for the first time, Cooke wished for a powered mechanism, then reminded himself that the ensuing steam leak would scarcely be stealthy. Though if they were starting to hide their main engine exhaust by redirecting it...
He brushed the thought aside and focused his lenses. There! It was a clear, sunny day—good for targeting, less good for the ‘staying alive’ second phase of a submariner’s attack plan. But such were the fortunes of war.
His Majesty’s Ship
Narwhal knifed through the pleasant warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico in summer. She was too far east of the Mexican coast for Cooke to see the ultimate target of Operation Craveheart. (The Admiralty used the names of randomly selected towns as code names for such things; the oddly-named capital of Linneway Province, Michigan had its turn this time). He knew, though, that over that horizon lay Tuxpan, headquarters of the Mexican Armada and one of the biggest naval bases in the Novamund. More than a hundred miles farther south down the coast was Veracruz,
de jure capital of the Kingdom of Mexico and the target of the simultaneous Operation Ottawa.[7] By hitting both of them together, the Empire stood a good chance of knocking Mexico out of the war in one fell swoop.
In theory.
“There she is,” Cooke murmured, refocusing again. At this range one could hardly miss her. The
Santísima Trinidad was a huge lineship, technically a lionheart though the briefings suggested she was a bit undergunned by modern standards—standards which changed with bewildering rapidity, especially with the war on. She was escorted by three dentists armed with visible rocket pods, and an older armourclad lineship took up the rear of the small flotilla. All the ships sported the flag of Mexico as ensigns, the white diamond surrounded by triangles of yellow and red which was common to several countries in the region, but uniquely defaced by the eagle eating a snake atop a cactus. Some people claimed that was some old native symbol, but many Yankees were convinced it was a deliberate insult aimed at the rattlesnake of America.
Tellingly, though the ships also flew the jack of the Empire of New Spain, it had been demoted to second place beneath the star-and-connected-circles symbol of the Hermandad. The old Empire, once talked up as a potential equal and rival to the ENA, was now nothing more than a historical footnote. Few other than the Mexicans themselves seemed to take much notice of Emperor Carlos V in the City of Mexico, and whereas New Granada had been assimilated deeply into the Hermandad and declared war alongside the UPSA as lockstep as the Former Dutch Republics, Mexico and Guatemala had tried desperately to chart a middle course and preserve their trading relationships with the ENA before finally being forced to pick a side.
The wrong side, Cooke thought.
He glanced at the three clocks carefully mounted in wooden holders positioned in three nooks of the ironshark’s cramped bridge. This was the latest wheeze by the boys with the high foreheads at the Admiralty: knowing that even the best-made clocks still lost or gained time, especially when subjected to all the impacts and strains of shipboard life, the idea was to take the average and standard deviation of the three and then for the Captain to make a judgement. This was the best arrangement they had come up with so far for scattered ships to keep to a common timetable. It was still far from perfect. If only there was a way to communicate between distant ships, like an invisible Lectel network throughout the air, Cooke thought, then dismissed it as an absurd fancy.[8]
“Ten minutes to H-hour,” he said. “Firing solutions, Mr McIntyre.”
“Ach, we’ve got a wee bit of leeway,” said McIntyre from behind the rattling solution engine. “If she holds her course, Boggs can set the timers tae 02:34 and 01:89—that’s tubes wan and twa, respectively, ye ken—and we can hit her fore an’ aft at the same time.”
“Good,” Cooke nodded. He had suspicions about McIntyre’s politics, but no man could doubt the man’s competence at his job. And besides, everyone’s politics was suspect these days, if you could believe some of the rumours that had circulated the last time they had pulled into Lowestoft before crossing the Atlantic—
He brushed the thought aside. He had a job to do.
The minutes and seconds ticked past. He half expected the Mexicans to obey the usual rules that even the simplest military plan was inevitably obsoleted by the enemy doing something inexplicable, but in the end the
Santisíma Trinidad steamed on without a care in the world, her ensign continuing to flap in the lovely Gulf sun. Cooke wondered how well her sailors were trained. The Yankees talked disdainfully of Mexican and other non-Meridian Hermandad sailors as being slapdash and corrupt, as likely to sell their xylofortex for tobacco as fire it at the enemy—but the Yankees said a lot of things.
Finally, almost as an anticlimax, the clocks ticked down to H-hour. Cooke had already decided to reject clock number 3, which was a full three minutes ahead of the other two, which still agreed to within thirty seconds of each other. He therefore averaged 1 and 2 and, at the appointed second, cried “FIRE ONE! FIRE TWO!”
Steelteeth streaked away towards the
Santisíma Trinidad. Whether the Americans’ tall tales were accurate or the Mexicans were just unlucky, they did not appear to spot the wakes before the torpedoes struck the big lineship’s starboard flank in rapid succession. “COURSE B-2, FULL SPEED AHEAD!” Cooke ordered as he spotted the explosions bloom. The course had been plotted before they had fired: a simple run eastwards. Out in the ocean, he would have ordered a dive instead, but this part of the Gulf of Mexico was too shallow for it to be much good: a steerable or cielago flying out of Tuxpan might still be able to spot them and flash a heliograph to the Mexican ships.
The Mexicans were clearly not as incompetent as the Yankees had claimed: Cooke and the
Narwhal spent most of the next two hours dodging dive bombs from one of the dentists, while the other two helped recover survivors from the listing
Santisíma Trinidad before it sank. All the time, in the back of his mind, even as they went through some close scrapes with the enemy dentist, Cooke was thinking about what was going on elsewhere. Had the other ironsharks kept their timing? Had the plan worked, the plan to deliver knockout blows to Mexican ships and coastal defences simultaneously to overwhelm the enemy chain of command, paralyse them into indecision?
He would not find out until he made it to the temporary base at Galvesville. Requiring British and American ships to be based solely out of captured enemy bases—there had been no Imperial bases west of Florida since Braithwaite and Araníbar had withdrawn from Cuba—had been another complication that would tip the scales against Craveheart and Ottawa being a success. But if the synchronicity had really been pulled off...?
[1] The
fuß is a pre-metric German unit of measurement equivalent to the foot in English. Its length varied across the German states, but conveniently the Badenese
fuß (which Albrecht is referring to) is almost exactly the same length as the English imperial foot.
[2]
(Sgt Mumby’s note) Probably an editorial edition, although these stories seem to have been treated with a lighter touch than many of the books previously digitised.
[3] Either the author or Albrecht is being anachronistic, of course—there was no ‘Danubia’ and no united Germany at the time Saxony and Austria were grappling over Bavaria and both being attacked by its Kleinkriegers.
[4] The author is probably letting Albrecht know more than he reasonably could here, for the sake of a soapbox rant.
[5] AKA a ‘one-time pad’ in OTL, a completely unbreakable cryptogramme (providing the code key is truly random and used, as the name implies, only once), but one which requires both sender and receiver to already have the code key. It consists of a pad or book’s worth of random data which is combined with the plaintext (e.g. by adding a sequence of numbers to numerically encoded text) by the sender and then separated by the receiver. In OTL they were proposed in the 1880s but did not make a big impact until they were reinvented in the 1910s. In TTL, with solution engines making it easier to break other codes, they have seen wider deployment earlier on.
[6] This is probably the author of this segment doing a slightly unsubtle ‘if only’ by noting that a good quist (telephone) connection would have made it much harder for someone to impersonate the Duke of York than the text-only limitations of Lectel telegraphy.
[7] Not the OTL city of Ottawa, but a town named for the tribe in Chersonesus Province, New York, on the site of OTL’s Grand Rapids, Michigan.
[8] Another not-very-subtle authorial musing, this time about the coming invention of Photel (radio).
