by Eric Flint
“Enough!” said Rebecca. “Each of you will approach the problem in the manner you prefer. As we are all agreed.”
She rose from her chair. “And now I must be off to deal with a much easier task than this one. That would be negotiating a peace settlement with the most vicious duke in the continent. Goodbye, gentlemen. I wish you both great success.”
At least the two men had the grace to look a bit guilty as she made for the door. But before she’d finished closing it behind her, they were back to squabbling again.
* * *
Eddie was waiting for her at the airfield. Before Rebecca climbed into the cockpit, she took a moment to admire the nose art. Most people who saw the Steady Girl illustration—men, especially—were struck by the pulchritude of the model. But Rebecca was more impressed with the skill of the painting itself.
That skill was not surprising, of course. The illustration had been painted on the plane by Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the few artists of the time who had still been remembered in the world Rebecca’s husband had come from.
“Munich, right?” said Eddie, after Rebecca was in her seat and he had her properly buckled down.
“Well, Freising, actually.”
Eddie waved his hand casually as he settled into his own seat. “What I meant. Same direction.”
Rebecca mused on his words for a while, as he got the plane into the air. Eventually, she decided not to worry about it. Surely, the man wouldn’t fly the aircraft as casually as he depicted its destination.
Prague, capital of Bohemia
“I wish you were coming with me,” said Noelle, trying not to sound too whiny as she said it. She brought down the lid of her small trunk and closed the latch. Then, looked around the bedroom to see if she had overlooked anything.
Janos smiled and put his arms around her. “I would not fit, anyway. The Dauntless only seats three people.”
That was true enough. The third seat in the rear of the fuselage was narrow even for one person, if they were heftily built.
“And I have to get down to Linz as soon as possible,” Drugeth continued.
Noelle nuzzled his shoulder. “We need more aircraft,” she complained. “It’s ridiculous, the way everyone has to rely on Nasi’s private plane. Why didn’t anyone else have the brains to buy a plane? It’s not as if Francisco’s the only rich man in Europe. He’s not even close to being the richest, either.”
Janos didn’t bother with a reply, since Noelle knew the answer as well as he did. Airplanes in the here and now were still being built on a one-off artisan basis. Even craft which were supposedly all of the same type—a Gustav, or a Dauntless, or a Belle—were actually quite individual in their construction. Each engine was different, salvaged and adapted from one or another up-time automobile.
He’d once seen a photograph of an up-time aircraft assembly line, taken during what the Americans called their second world war. Quite marvelous, it was—but there was nothing like that in the year 1636, and wouldn’t be for quite some time.
Francisco Nasi had gotten his airplane at just the right time, right after Bob Kelly had finished a Dauntless but before he’d begun fiddling with it as he invariably did. The man was an incorrigible perfectionist. A short time after Nasi bought the plane, the USE air force finally agreed to buy the other two that Kelly was working on. That had exhausted the man’s inventory.
Noelle wasn’t quite done with grousing. “It’s all Gustav Adolf’s fault,” she continued. “It’s absolutely idiotic the way he insists on keeping all the Air Force’s planes up in northern Poland, where they serve no purpose at all.”
There was no point saying anything in response to that, so Janos didn’t. Noelle was right, of course. But as the Americans said in one of their quips: that and fifty cents will get you a cup of coffee.
He’d inquired, once, as to the precise value of “fifty cents.” After being told, he’d been almost as astonished as he’d been at the sight of a World War II aircraft assembly line. There had really been a time—would be a time—when a luxury item like coffee could be purchased for so little? The sheer scale of the universe from which the up-timers had come was an endless source of bemusement. It wasn’t simply that their edifices and their machines had been huge; so had been the world-wide trade network that enabled them to create those structures—and ship coffee in such bulk that even the poorest man could afford to buy a cup almost on a whim.
Noelle drew back and pushed him away gently. “Okay, enough pissing and moaning. Seeing as how you’re the bold and daring cavalry commander, you get to haul the trunk down the stairs.”
“I’ll stumble and break my neck,” he whined.
“Suck it up, buddy.”
* * *
Eddie arrived in Prague the next day, after having delivered Rebecca to Freising.
“I’m starting to feel like a damn bus driver,” he complained to Noelle, as he helped her into the cockpit. He’d been the one who had to muscle her valise into the cargo compartment at the rear of the fuselage, of course. Noelle had insisted she was much too weak for such an enterprise and Janos Drugeth—no fool, he—had decamped as soon as the place landed on Prague’s airstrip.
Her betrothed had urgent business, Noelle had said—a claim that Eddie didn’t believe for a minute, since he’d be back to fly Drugeth down to Linz as soon as the Austrians there got the new airstrip finished. That shouldn’t take more than a few days, which would give him the time he needed to shuttle Albrecht, his two sons and their tutor down to Freising and then bring Noelle back to Prague where Nasi would give her whatever new assignment he had in mind.
Which would almost certainly be going to Linz to rejoin Drugeth so Nasi could keep his finger in that pie as well as all the others he was meddling with.
Some people got all the luck. Eddie was just the damn bus driver. At least he got into Prague fairly often so he could spend time with Denise.
Chapter 44
Ed Piazza gazed at his image in the full-length mirror positioned in the hallway entrance to his apartment. He and his wife Annabelle lived on the second floor of a three-story residential building located in the southwest area of Magdeburg’s Neustadt. (The “New City,” in English parlance). Their apartment building had been recommended to them by Mary Simpson, who lived just three doors away on the same street. For Ed and Annabelle, both avid opera fans, the clincher had been that the apartment was within easy walking distance of the city’s Opera House.
The image in the mirror gazed back at him—at least, insofar as he could see anything of the face beneath the broad-brimmed hat sporting an ostrich plume.
“Christ, I feel stupid,” he said. “I sure don’t envy Morris Roth, having to wear a ridiculous get-up like this every day.”
“Better get used to it,” said Annabelle, standing just behind him and a bit to his left. Her tone of voice was noticeably lacking in sympathy. “For what it’s worth, I agree with Judith Roth. Middle-aged men with expanding bellies and thinning hair look a hell of a lot better in fancy seventeenth century outfits than they ever did in up-time suits.”
“Hey!” Ed protested. “My hair’s as thick as ever even if it’s mostly gray now.”
Annabelle plucked the hat off his head, exposing the skull beneath. “That forehead’s at least an inch higher than it was when we met,” she pointed out.
“Well, almost as thick,” Ed qualified. His eyes moved down to the image’s midriff. “I won’t argue about the belly. Which is not my fault, anyway! Back in the day, when I was an honest high school principal, I was on my feet a lot. Now that I’m a no-good rotten politician, I spend most of my day sitting on my butt.”
“You should start loitering in back alleys with your hand outstretched for bribes. That’d give you a little exercise, at least.”
Ed sniffed. “Not how it’s done in the here and now. Corruption’s an entirely sedentary affair. No exercise required at all, except throttling your conscience—and even that’s just pro forma.�
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He tugged at the bright blue sash that crossed his chest from his left shoulder. “I admit I don’t miss having to wear a damn tie.”
“Enough preening,” said Annabelle. She seized her husband by the shoulders and began steering him toward the door. “The emperor awaits, and you don’t want to be late.”
“And that’s another thing,” Ed complained. “Why do we have to have the only monarch in Europe—hell, probably the whole world—who thinks punctuality is a virtue?”
* * *
Once down in the street, they found a carriage waiting for them. The vehicle belonged to the Marine Corps, and had a Navy captain standing by the open door waiting to help them in.
Ed frowned at him. “Is this part of the protocol, now? And when did you get here from Luebeck?”
Captain Franz-Leo Chomse smiled. “The admiral’s wife suggested to the admiral that I might be helpful. There being no pressing need for my services at the moment in Luebeck, Admiral Simpson sent me down here. As for the issue of protocol, so far as I know there isn’t anything established yet.”
After they climbed into the carriage, Chomse came in and closed the door behind him. “If I might make a suggestion, though,” he said, “now that the awkwardness of having a Crown Loyalist prime minister is behind us, I would recommend that you establish the Marine Corps as the official guards of the prime minister’s person and residence.”
He nodded politely at Annabelle. “And family as well, of course.”
Ed sighed. “Let me guess. Simpson put you up to this. Or Mary did.”
“The admiral himself, with regard to the position of the Marines. Mrs. Simpson did suggest, however, that it was perhaps time to establish an official residence for the prime minister. The down-time equivalent of Number 10 Downing Street, was the way she put it. She said she saw no need for the more flamboyant alternative of erecting a White House.”
“Oh, wonderful,” said Ed. “An official residence which will no doubt be within walking distance of Government House and the Royal Palace instead of the Opera House.”
“I would imagine so,” said Chomse blandly.
There was a serious issue beneath the badinage, though. A whole set of issues, in fact. Ed Piazza was about to become the third prime minister of the USE, but in a number of ways he would be the first one who was fully legitimate. Mike Stearns had simply been appointed to the post by Gustav Adolf when the USE was formed in late 1633. And while the second prime minister, Wilhelm Wettin, had been elected to the position, his administration had very quickly become embroiled in the plot hatched by the Swedish chancellor Oxenstierna to overthrow the USE’s regime after the emperor sustained his incapacitating head injury at the battle at Lake Bledno.
The administrations of both Stearns and Wettin would always have an asterisk attached to them—in the minds of the populace, at least, if not the official histories. Piazza would be the first prime minister of the USE chosen in a fair and reasonably untainted election whom no one suspected of having any schemes in mind beyond governing the nation—or having any attachments to anyone else who might have such schemes.
True, he was known to be close to Mike Stearns, the man now often called “the Prince of Germany.” But if Stearns had wanted to seize power, he would have done it at the height of the Dresden Crisis, after his defeat of Báner at Ostra. The fact that he had voluntarily resumed his position as the commander of the Third Division once the emperor had regained his senses amounted to his assurance to the nation that he had no such designs.
In the universe the Americans had come from, it was said by historians that perhaps the greatest boon George Washington had given the nation he’d help create was the way he left office. In a different way, Mike Stearns had done much the same thing after the Dresden Crisis.
But legitimacy is always aided by props and buttresses. One of those, however small it might seem, was to have the chief executives of a nation reside in an official dwelling, instead of anywhere they might choose to waft about.
“Cheer up, dear,” said Annabelle. “Look at it this way. Princess Kristina adores musical performances so it’s just a matter of time before she insists on having operas—musicals, oratorios, you name it—performed regularly at the Royal Palace. Which we can walk to.”
“With a pack of Marines surrounding us any time we go outside,” muttered Ed. “Great.”
“As opposed to the pack of CoC toughs that Gunther Achterhof makes sure we have surrounding us any time we go outside where we live now. What’s the difference?”
Ed couldn’t help but smile. The solicitude of the city’s Committee of Correspondence for his and Annabelle’s health and well-being had a slightly comical edge to it. Since Piazza hadn’t had any official status in Magdeburg—technically, he was still the President of the State of Thuringia-Franconia and technically he still lived in Bamberg, the SoTF’s capital—he’d felt it would be inappropriate to ask the national government to provide him with any official assistance.
So, Gunther Achterhof had made good the lack. And if having a bunch of CoC activists as bodyguards and assistants was a bit like having a pack of bikers doing the job…
Well, what the hell. He’d certainly never worried about being assaulted by irate reactionaries, had he?
The carriage drew up before the Royal Palace.
“And here we go,” he said. “O brave new world, that hath such rituals and protocols in it.”
“Stop grousing,” said Annabelle. “And make sure you don’t knock off your ostrich plume getting out of the carriage.”
* * *
The ceremony itself went flawlessly. Gustav II Adolf, Emperor of the United States of Europe, King of Sweden, etc., etc., etc., appeared in the audience chamber moments after Ed arrived. He was dressed in a costume that was an order of magnitude fancier than Piazza’s—and wore it with an ease that was at least two orders of magnitude greater.
Long and ornate sentences issued from the monarch’s mouth, the gist of which was:
I need a new government. Are you willing to organize it?
Not quite as long or quite as ornate sentences issued from Ed’s mouth, the gist of which was:
Yup.
To which Gustav II Adolf replied, stripping away the dense verbiage:
Have at it, then. You can leave now.
* * *
“See?” said Annabelle, after they emerged from the audience chamber. “That wasn’t so bad.”
“Where would you like to go now, Prime Minister?” asked Chomse.
Ed didn’t have to think about it. “To the Government House. The radio room. I need to send Rebecca a message.”
That was just a short walk across Hans Richter Square, followed by climbing four flights of stairs once they were in Government House. For obvious reasons, the radio room had been placed on the top floor.
Ed paused to take a brief rest on the third floor. At the age of fifty-five, climbing a bunch of stairs wasn’t as easy as it used to be. His wife, who was eleven years younger than he was, waited patiently. Unlike her husband, she wasn’t breathing any more heavily than usual.
“How long are you going to be my factotum?” he asked Chomse.
The navy officer shrugged. “As long as you need me. I assume you’ll have your own staff put together shortly.”
“Take me about a week, I figure. Okay, then. Make a note. See about getting an elevator installed.”
“Sissy,” said Annabelle.
“I’m just thinking about the convenience of elderly guests we might have.”
“Liar,” said Annabelle. “I can remember when you were an honest straight-talking school principal instead of a sleazeball politician. It’s kind of sad, really, the way some people lose their moral rectitude along with their hair.”
Ed gave Captain Chomse an appealing look. “Isn’t there some sort of protocol governing how sarcastic wives are allowed to be once their husbands reach a certain social elevation?”
“Judging
from the way Mrs. Simpson speaks to the admiral, no. I believe what she’d say in this situation is: ‘suck it up’.”
Annabelle burst out laughing.
* * *
The message Piazza sent to the Third Division’s radio station in Freising was short and sweet:
You’re it, Becky. It’s official. Secty of State. Get that bum out of there ASAP.
Munich, capital of Bavaria
“I’m afraid the duke is indisposed,” said Ottavio Piccolomini. “He asked me to begin the negotiations with you on his behalf.” He motioned toward a nearby chair. “Please, won’t you sit down?”
As Rebecca took her seat, she considered the implications of the general’s short statements.
The duke is indisposed. Translation: He doesn’t want to deal with it himself, which means he’s not going to resist whatever settlement is reached. Not very hard, at any rate.
He asked me…
Why would he ask a military figure to negotiate a political question?
Translation: All of Bavaria’s top officials are either fleeing Munich—which would be quite easy, since Michael had made no effort to surround the city—or they’ve gone into hiding and trying to stay out of sight in case the settlement winds up being a savage and punitive one.
Which meant that, for all practical purposes, Bavaria’s government had disintegrated under the combined pressure of the siege and the expectation that Maximilian’s resistance was at an end.
To begin the negotiations…
The key word was “negotiations.” The use of it meant that Piccolomini—as well as Maximilian himself, presumably—was not going to quibble over what was transpiring. If they wanted to stall, Piccolomini would have use a term like “discussion” instead.
So.
Since Piccolomini was the key figure in all this, on the other side, Rebecca decided that a diplomatic opening statement was called for. Michael would have put it more crudely: Start by buttering up the son-of-a-bitch.