Chapter Seven Hundred Forty-Seven
7th August 1949
Potsdam
“I can be your advisor, or I can be your hand out in the world” Kat had said, “But I cannot do both of those things, not anymore.”
That was how Katherine had concluded her briefing with Kira a week earlier. An action that had surprised the Empress. She’d thought that Kat liked doing what she did but the way she said it suggested that this wasn’t a decision that she had reached lightly. Kira understandably wanted to understand why, but Katherine had just asked Kira to respect her choices and to make a choice of her own in a timely matter. Then she had walked out.
For one of the few times in her adult life Kira was at a complete loss. Yes, she held the title of Empress, but she had little sway if Katherine just stopped answering her phone like she had. When men from the 1st Imperial Foot arrived at her front door they were told that unless Kira had an answer for her, the Gräfin wasn’t interested in having visitors. Eventually, Kira turned to someone present who knew Katherine, but it was also somebody who Kira didn’t particularly like very much.
Dame Lagertha von Wolvogle was spending more time in the Imperial Court over the previous weeks since her husband had been deployed to South Africa along with the rest of the 2nd Life Hussars. Kira found Gerta’s manner flighty, syrupy and incredibly annoying. However, she’d been Katherine’s friend since the von Richthofen family had desperately tried to find a more appropriate companion for their daughter than the train hopping street urchin that Katherine had been at the time. Things hadn’t quite gone according to plan when Katherine hadn’t gone anywhere even though the eccentric daughter of Ritter von Wolvogle had entered the picture.
Gerta tapped her toes and shuffled her feet nervously, causing the bells laced into her shoes to ring. She was wearing her usual Bohemian faux Gipsy finery, aggravating Kira to no end. “I’m not surprised that Kat is making changes” Gerta said, “Considering everything that’s been going on.”
“What’s been going on?”
Gerta shuffled nervously some more. “It’s a personal matter” She said, “If Kat didn’t tell you, it’s really not my place to…”
“You brought it up, not me” Kira said flatly. One of the saving graces when it came to her dealings with Gerta was that she frequently didn’t think before she spoke, couldn’t keep a secret to save her life and was the weak link when it came to secrets among the three furies. Kira regarded it as something of a last resort.
“Our poor little cat” Gerta said, clearly reluctant to say more.
“Yes, what about her?”
“She’ll kill me if I tell you.”
There were times when Gerta behaved like she was twelve as opposed to being an accomplished woman in her own right. Kira found it her least endearing habit.
“I need to know what’s going on so that I can make sense of what Katherine asked of me” Kira said, “I’m sure she’ll understand that, and I’m ordering you to tell me what is going on.”
Gerta stood there for a long moment, trying to figure out what to say. “In June… Kat, well… uhm” She said trying to find the right words, “She went to the Doctor’s and they found she wasn’t pregnant but had been which caused her to get depressed.” That came out in a barely understandable rush, but Kira got the gist of it.
Kira remembered Katherine during that time, reading articles in a monotone voice, distracted and withdrawn. She’d assumed that it was because she was still upset over what had happened with Jehane. There had been far more to it then that. Katherine had said nothing? Instead she’d just made a strange request months later.
8th August 1949
Knox Atoll, Marshall Islands
It was the early morning hours. The sunrise was only a gray streak on the eastern horizon. Aboard the SMS Albatros no one was sleeping. There was a feeling of excitement as the clocks counted down. The delays in this project had given researchers in Kempten time to spend the last several months perfecting the latest device, smaller, lighter and more powerful than the previous one that had been detonated three years earlier in these same islands.
Everything went according to plan, at 5am local time, the atomic bomb detonated under the island.
Washington D.C.
When Nancy returned to her desk from lunch she noticed that there was a peculiar buzzing in the background. Like a hum just below her hearing. Everyone was whispering among themselves. More than few of the other trainees had left the room to go to one of the supervisor’s office where there was said to be a radio.
“What’s going on?” Nancy asked a man as he walked past.
“You didn’t hear” He said, “Reports are coming in wherever there’s a seismograph, the Germans lit off another device just now somewhere in the Pacific.”
“Device?” Nancy asked.
“Atomic bomb” The man answered before walking away.
A couple hours later they had all been gathered in the same room where they had been given the introductory presentation weeks earlier. The difference was that this time it wasn’t some Deputy droning on in clichés. It was Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State himself and what looked like half the Washington Press Corps. The speech he gave was a prepared statement about the importance of the work they were doing. That humanity could no longer afford to go to war to solve problems and the fate of civilization itself would depend on diplomatic solutions.
Later, as she walked home Nancy thought about the sad, haunted looks that she saw on the faces of people she knew who had gone to war when they thought no one was watching. Her own father and her friends in Germany. She realized that it was something that no one should have to go through, it broke them on some level. Now this, atomic bombs, what sort of person could use one of those as a weapon? She realized that she knew who. Someone who was desperate for the war to end or had their back to the wall. When she’d been in Germany a couple years earlier, the entire nation had been coming out of that.
