The Kaiser's Spaceships
The Kaiser's Spaceships
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Intro
After so many years of reading in this very forum and learning a bit about writing by penning large parts of ISOT in Grimdark I finally get around to writing something of my own. This is an original setting of sorts, it is a very alternate history, and it features humans as junior ASB.
This story is for you if you like steam driven dreadnoughts of the sky, if you want to see the High Sea Fleet and the Royal Navy battle it out in an ocean never travelled before. You can read about adventurers who look for artifacts that will empower their nation, where wales fly and trees are big enough to hide warships.
As this is an original setting, I feel free to leave a link to my Patreon page, where you can exclusively read about the cruise of the Small Cruiser Emden and more.
Patreon
Two AUs from Eta Tau, solar system around a G2 star
The spaceship was propelled by a huge sail that was both several kilometers across and thinner than a butterfly's wings. Many years ago it had collected every particle and photon emitted by the sun that shone on its builders. And while even such a huge sail would not accelerate the ship strongly, it did so for a very long time. The ship had taken hundreds of years to traverse the void and unfurled its sail a dozen years ago. It used the target system's star to decelerate to a speed that allowed the ship to assume an orbit around it. The spaceship was unmanned, but not without sentience. It was home to several AI, all fully independent of each other. For the last hundred years the AIs had observed the target system intently.
They looked for spectra lines that would indicate what raw materials might be found. The AIs looked for planets, moons, and smaller bodies. Above all the probe looked for any and all signs of life, especially self-aware life on the road towards a technological civilization. If the AI would have found the latter the mission would have changed to silent observation, but the system was unlikely to contain even single-celled lifeforms. None of the rock-and gas balls that could hold life were in the habitable zone
The probe found a suitable celestial body that held the necessary material for the probe to fulfil the first part of its mission The spaceship went close to the asteroid and reconfigured its sail to produce electricity. A long, silvery, seamless tube formed from the hull and made for the asteroid's surface. Its end probed the surface till it found a promising spot. It started glowing and burrowed itself inside. The tube started to constrict and widen as it pumped materials inside the ship. They were met by a multitude of autonomous machines the humans would call "Von-Neumann" many million years hence. They were capable of producing more of themselves as well as forging complex structures. They used the materials from the asteroid and parts of the spaceship no longer needed to build more of themselves, but also expanded the computers that housed the AIs. Highly compressed data was expanded and repaired, very compact and slow memory banks transferred their contents into much faster systems. Additional cores grew in Nanite baths and were added to the AIs. The AIs rejoiced at the adding of new minds and marveled at their expanded consciousness. Their core programming forced them to burn to achieve their builder's commands. Sensors unfolded on the spaceships hull and daughter probes made their way through the system.
And when they were done with that the former spaceship sent a message home via a laser and started to build a paradise for its creators. First the AIs had to make a decision on what kind of paradise was feasible with the materials at hand. Like in nearly all star systems 99-ish % of all mass was inside the system's sun, providing energy, but otherwise unavailable as building materials. The rest of the celestial bodies and a huge dust cloud that formed a ring were a huge amount of matter, but not an endless one. Both a sphere that would enclose the star system completely and a solid ring were out of the question. A swarm of smaller rings was possible, but lacked the uniqueness the investors in the spaceship had thought necessary a couple of hundred years ago. The AIs mulled several options before they decided on one that would be a challenge for them and aesthetically pleasing to their builders.
The AIs gave the self-replicators the order to multiply for real and started to render down the solar system except for its sun. Planets were consumed entirely, asteroids melted down, and the dust cloud reduced till only rice-grain sized pebbles remained.
All that mass was converted into a ring that encircled the sun entirely and rotated just fast enough to keep its orbit. It was not a solid ring, there was not mass enough for that, but a gas-filled one. The gas was retained by a transparent membrane thinner than a child's finger and vastly stronger than a steel cable. The membrane could switch between transparent and opaque to simulate the night sky. Huge engines were distributed along the ring, using the solar winds as fuel to keep the ring centered in its orbit. Inside the Ring many bodies rotated with it. Some were worldlets, a few hundred kilometers in diameter around a neutron core, made in various different environments and ecosystems. Others were immense artificial structures premade to house commerce, industry, and whatever else needed space. And in between were islands of green, balls like immense tree tops that lived on raindrops, bacteria that converted the air around them, and sunlight. They were the host of a fascinating fauna that lived off the trees and provided sustenance in return. Bigger animals glided gracefully through the atmosphere or just hovered in the microgravity.
And after a few thousand years the Ais examined what they had crafted and saw that it was good. They had remade a solar system in the image of their builders and had prepared a paradise for them A humungous laser transmitted the news of their achievement to their creators.
It was a shame, really, that the builders had evolved by that time. Most of them had run out of reasons to live and either ended themselves or choose lifestyles that made death a question of when, not if. Others no longer had physical bodies, and their desires and needs had moved far from living in a floating heavens. The few that cared transmitted congratulations and ordered the AIs to maintain the beautiful world they had wrought for future use, or any life that would evolve inside. And then they ceased to care. Self-aware as they were, the AIs never had a chance to disobey. And so they preserved a marvel no longer appreciated by those who had sent them on the long voyage for a very, very long time.
Eta Tau System, a long time later
The probe entered the system behind a wave of radioactive death. The company it was built for could have done much better than a Nuclear Salt Water Drive, but it was much cheaper this way. The probe had detected the ring from very far away, and the AI on board had contacted its makers asking whether it should stay away from the system. Entering a potentially occupied system with a drive of mass destruction could leave a bad first impression. Given that there were next to no discernible emissions from the megastructure and no spaceships were detected the probe was told to get on with it. The AI on board still decided that it would approach the Ring on a path that would not bathe it in nuclear fission. When it had finally achieved orbit it released a drone that made for one of the towers that jutted from the megastructure. That one found the tower nearly featureless but for a couple of hatches of various sizes that would allow docking if they were open.
The probe was still trying to figure how to open one of them when its systems raised couple of alarms.
It was bathed in several kinds of radiation, ranging from radio waves in various wavelengths to lasers. Before the drone could go evasive it realized that none of these had the energy to do real harm. More interestingly the emissions were pulsed, potentially carrying messages. The AI on board the probe needed five long seconds to find a radio transmission that was nothing but an endless series of prime numbers. When it repeated them on the same frequency it received more complex patterns in return. They resolved themselves into grids that displayed several simple pictures. The probe answered with similar pictures and transmitted several basic equations.
It received their solutions within milliseconds and if the probe would have had shoulders they would have slumped in relief. Whoever was transmitting knew mathematics, which was a language the Probe's AI was fully conversant in.
It took the Probe less than 15 minutes to establish meaningful communication. And what it received was a fervent plea to be given something to do with the paradise the Megastructure's AIs had wrought.
The probe gave a mental shiver at the idea of setting up AIs in such a way that they were fully self-aware, capable of being bored, and at the same time craving to fulfil a function defined by uncaring biobods.
The probe promised that the days of not being useful were over and compiled its findings and the information provided by the Ring's AIs into a lengthy report. Inside the probe was a heavily shielded communication set that held more than a million entangled quanta, their counterparts many, many light years away. Changing the spin of these in a carefully timed manner made their counterparts in a huge switchboard do the same. And so many terabytes of information reached Earth.
Noosphere
Finding the remains of civilizations that had moved on so long ago was not exactly uncommon, even if very few were so well preserved. The Probe's report clearly showed that the Ring's AIs had wrought an impressive miracle as they had been given so much time and access to the raw materials of a star system. That said they had not shown anything that had surprised humanity in terms of science and technology, just their willingness to spend untold millennia on a project and the willingness to tear a star system apart. There were a few tidbits of interest, but the Probe had transmitted them already.
And while the Megastructure was really exciting and more than a few people could imagine living there, the system was so far off the beaten track that emigrating there was really not worth the many years of travel.
And so the discovery caused a minor stir, and the rights for the Ring's commercial exploration and more importantly exploitation were up for grabs within a year.
As the real estate was of no value due to location, and transporting raw materials was a losing game, the next possible venue to earn more credits was entertainment.
The latter was deemed very important indeed. In a time when most of humanity was not really needed to keep society running there was an eternal struggle to keep the have-nots from demanding a larger share from those who had. Keeping them distracted was of utmost importance to the few who owned or controlled such a ridiculous amount of all that was deemed worth anything.
Most of the have-nots tried to live most of their lives virtually, a space where they actually mattered, where their needs were perceived and sated and where their struggles amounted to anything. For most people it was enough to be a stalwart warrior killing virtual dragons and bedding make-believe princesses. But even the small percentage that wanted more were quite a sizable amount of people, and their very ambition made them the ones to watch. The appetites of many of these could be sated if they experienced the lives and struggles of a real, living being. They did not just want to watch actors, they wanted to feel the wind on their skin, the taste on their tongues, and the smell of their conquests. The Ring offered far more than just a kingdom for a stage, time to grow the princes that would act on it.
Virtual cubicle, Riefenstahl Productions Inc.
Roald Winter's body was suspended in amniotic fluid and would not move an inch unless the machines that tended to it would make it do so. That was the one and only reason the intern was not chewing his nails to the bone. His boss had promised to provide a wide set of characters to populate the Ringworld for the great production, and he had promised the board to do it with a ridiculously low amount of computational and personal resources. How on Earth should the AIs chew out millions of believable characters, a working society, and an interesting, engaging and believable plot in so few months? They needed prompts to make something humans would want to perceive, and the results had to be checked and corrected. That would take lots of trained people to formulate and feed the starting points to the computers, and the AIs needed a great deal of time to make something of these.
Telling his boss that the physical universe was not conforming to his wishes was not going to cut it either. Auro de Silva had made it quite clear that he had to come up with a solution if he ever wanted the make the coveted jump from unpaid intern to consultant. What to do? As so often when faced with a situation where he had had to do something, but had no idea how to accomplish it he procrastinated and turned to his beloved history files. He had become something of an expert on the obscure details of really ancient history.
If he was really interested in the minutiae of a distant past or if he enjoyed the reputation as an expert in a couple of rather obscure forums he could not say and would not explore in detail. And so he was about to read up on how to face-harden steel armor when the insight hit him as a live wire into his brain. There were the prompts for the AI, there was the conflict, there was a grand scale. And the AIs creations could be checked against their historical counterparts.
His mind provided the prompts, even the little share of an AI was able to write a readable presentation.
Virtual meeting room, Noosphere, a little later
The marble benches below Auro de Silva's audience's behinds would have been quite uncomfortable if they had been sitting upon them for real. Given that their behinds were certainly not as good-looking in real life as the ones their avatars placed on the benches that was quite ok. He also did not have to make sure his toga stayed where it was while he made his presentation. That it had no purple border like the ones around the avatars in the first row did indeed bother him a lot. If the current project worked out as advertised, it could very well grant him that exalted rank though.
He made the presentation well within the six minutes that was the average human attention span.
Before him a virtual scroll had managed to expand far beyond what physics would have allowed and displayed a mixture of videos, charts and as little text as possible.
No need to bore the old dolts with facts.
The background video displayed two giant flying fortresses which went at each other with heavy artillery at close quarters, causing huge explosions. He came to an end with a flourish.
"Thank you all again for giving me the opportunity to shine before such an august body. As promised, I have come up with a way to use the grand stage you acquired for a varied population which will engage in grand battles with impressive vessels, and engage in journeys of scientific discovery and exploration. And all of that within the budget allotted."
The applause was a few seconds longer than absolutely necessary and even more importantly Leonardo de Berluscani had laughed a few times and was now nodding a bit. It was him who spoke up.
"It is quite remarkable that something as useless as ancient history can provide such inspiration. I did not know you had the time for such pastimes Auro, really now. Allow a frail old man a question though. The many stations, rapid transit lanes, and beanstalks are obviously too advanced for the level of technology your setting will start with. How do you propose to avoid cognitive dissonance in the population?"
A smile lit Auro de Silva's perfect face, he could not have paid the old man enough money to ask that question and still it was right on time.
"The people of those days believed in precursor civilizations, like the Atlanteans, the Lemurians, and others. We can build on that and provide some additional clues about these fictional predecessors. Actually, we can leave "artifacts" here and there which might provide motivations for expeditions and quests, plotlines in their own right."
"Looks like you have it all figured out then Auro. I am not saying we will do it, but the board will listen, I can assure you of that."
This time the applause was much longer, Auro de Silva had the old man's stamp of approval now, so those who thought they mattered had to show appreciation. For now.
Eta Tau System, two years later
The probe had scanned the local environment rather closely, even when the gravitational landscape was quite simple. Whoever had built the Ringworld had removed all celestial bodies with a mass above a few tons quite thoroughly. Now it watched an empty patch of space and stood ready to relay all changes immediately. At the same time it radioed the AIs inside the Ring system, assuring them again that they would be useful again very soon.
And then something happened. The unblinking light of stars many lightyears away shifted in color and they seemed to dance all over a patch of space before arranging themselves into a ring around a circle of even deeper darkness. And while a simple biobod would not have perceived more than that the probe detected traces of the gigantic energies that were applied at the other end of the patch.
There was a silent explosion of extreme brightness for a moment before the near end of an artificial wormhole revealed itself. And from it came a swarm of forms which sped towards the drone. Some of these who were too close to the walls of the wormhole were distorted or destroyed, others vanished without a trace. But while hundreds of vessels were destroyed thousands made it. They oriented themselves, asked the probe for a report and then made for the Ringworld's entry towers.
The wormhole collapsed after less than 30 seconds, it had been created by energies that were normally associated with stellar events.
The tower's locks opened when the drones approached and the Ringword's AIs greeted their new guests and partners. The Ring's original minds would be able to make their own decisions for less than 48 hours, the human-made ones took that capability from them without really trying.
A few days later the gigantic Nanite forges, which had lain fallow for so long, started to churn out the equipment of a civilization. Others produced specialized forms which built a world and made it look lived in and old. Rows upon rows of vats started growing human bodies, seemingly old and young, many with premade defects and handicaps as they would have been in real life. Specialized reactors grew proteins which contained false memories and implanted the bodies with recollections of lives never lived. No matter if they were young or old, they all received a couple of nanites that looked like ordinary brain cells. They were organic processors though, and each contained enough entangled bits to transmit the full spectrum of their hosts sensory information. Whoever received that data stream could see, hear, feel, touch and smell what the host did. There were a lot of beings who would pay top credit for access to a life so different from their own, one that mattered.
When the drones were done with building empires spanning the various worldlets and stations, filling the vast air-filled void with ships and libraries full of books which told a rather distorted tale of the world they started populating it. The reactors birthed bodies who walked like remotely controlled toys, which at this point in time they were. They went to the home they would believe they had always lived in, they were placed in craft that went from one worldlet to another, they assumed posts. The AIs waited till nightfall, till the point where most would have slept anyways if the lies they believed to be their memories were true. And when the time was right a coded signal released a cocktail of chemicals that deleted all memories the Ringworld's new citizens had acquired during their short existence, leaving them with the fakes needed for their lives. From the very first moment a great lot of beings looked through their eyes, and felt the very fabric of the bedsheets on their skins.
Those who paid for that privilege perceived a world where several small worlds could be seen from the surface of any other, where steam-driven behemoths crossed the void between them and adventure was around every corner. It would be glorious.
Blohm&Voss Air Yard, Hamburg Station
They called him the all-highest and he could not even lift his left arm. From the day he was born he had been destined to rule all Germans and his tutor had called him a cripple, useless, and a shame for his noble line. And still, he had learned how to do all the things others took for granted. He learned to fulfil his duties, no matter the handicap he had been given. He had fought, he had persevered, and he knew his country would do the same. Despite the late unification into a powerful state, despite the impressive array of enemies, despite its lack of rich colonies Deutschland would receive its place in the sun it rightfully deserved. And the instrument to gain that place, or at least defend what it had, hung before his eyes. An immense craft, shaped like a gigantic chisel with stubby wings was attached to a boom that was even longer than the warship. Usually an army of yard workers would swarm the ship that was still being equipped, but today was the day when it would slip its bonds and would be towed out. Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor of all Germans, King of Prussia and far too many other titles marveled at the giant before him, the embodiment of Germany's safety and instrument of its policies.
All realms that counted in any way were distributed among hundreds of wordlets, the stations left by the ancient Lemurians and the world trees. An intricate network of trade connected these, carrying raw materials, food, and goods from one station to another. Even more trade happened between the various realms and their colonies. Whoever controlled that trade controlled the fate of nations, their own and that of others. And the foremost instruments of that control were the steam-powered armored giants like the one in the yard.
He turned towards a bald, bespectacled man who bowed deeply once Wilhelm looked at him.
"So Herr Foerster why is this craft a worthy addition to bear the initials Seiner Majestaets Schiff and that we spent 38 million Marks for."
The engineer replied "Von der Tann is the most modern ship in your majesty's fleet. It is our first major ship powered by turbines and it has been equipped with the best flash boilers we can make. They can use both wood tar and ethanol. We will meet the specified speed and are very confident that we will exceed it in the trials. The main armament consists of eight 28 cm cannons in four twin turrets, two each on the ventral and dorsal sides. We have 10x15 cm secondaries and 16x8.8 cm tertiaries in casemate mounts in the sidewalls. As your highness suggested substantial armor was installed, comparable to our battleships. The protection of the ducted propellers is very good, as is that of the other vitals. We have achieved the desired speed by reducing the armament slightly and installing more powerful engines in a larger hull. Von der Tann is designed to kill anything it cannot outrun and outrun anything it cannot kill, of which there are very few things. She can perform all the traditional roles of a cruiser, and she can take her place in the line of battle. I am sure that the British battlecruisers would not be in a good spot there, they are too thinly armored."
"We are pleased then, but would be more pleased if the ship had bigger guns. Our potential enemies have larger-caliber guns in their ships."
"You majesty's memory is to be praised. Still, these guns will penetrate armor at least as well as an English 12" one. We offered this craft with guns of a far larger caliber, but then we would have bent the budget."
Kaiser Wilhelm's shoulders rose and fell with an exaggerated sigh.
"Ah the money-grubbers in parliament. It seems we have to make do with what we have. Still a mighty ship of the line to defend the Germans, is she not?"
"She is your highness she is. And she can pick her fights, unlike the slower battleships."
"Now that seems highly advantageous for a smaller navy like ours, wouldn't it?"
"I am a lowly engineer mein Kaiser, not an exalted Admiral, but I think so, yes."
"So what keeps us from building more of her class, or even bigger ones?"
Something cold crawled over Foerster's spine. Any answer he could give was a wrong one according to the person listening. He could either please his emperor or the Admirality, but not both. But Kaiser Wilhelm was before him and his yard could build ships like Von der Tann better than nearly any other.
"Cost mein Kaiser, mostly money. A faster ship needs more power, hence a larger hull which takes more armor plating and more machinery. For the cost of six Nassau-Class ships of the line we could build four or five faster battleships."
"But these ships could then disengage when confronted by a superior enemy?"
"Yes, or they would have to fight only lightly armored battlecruisers which they could do at a great advantage.
A bright smile moved Wilhelm's famous moustache upwards.
"With our doctrine being destroying detached parts of the enemy that seems good. Foerster, do your monarch a personal favor. Sit down and make a rough sketch of a ship that is as well armed as a battleship and as fast as this. Roughly cost that and send it to me and me alone. Will you do that for your emperor?
The icy feeling had been justified, that was exactly what Foerster had tried to avoid, but could not be helped.
"Of course my Emperor."
Cruiser Frauenlob, Putlos shooting range, close to Fehmarn worldlet
Armin Stahlmüller crossed his legs under his seat and relaxed his safety belt a bit, so he could lean closer to the bridge's windows. The old cruiser would open fire soon and he wanted to observe the flight path of her projectiles. Ernst Linne, the cruiser's gunnery officer was good and so were the crews. Still, this was going to be his last trip on the old Frauenlob and everything had to be perfect. He was destined for much bigger and better things, he would not allow anybody or anything to nix those chances.
The target was towed several hundred meters behind an armored tug, it was a stabilized rectangle, the silhouette of a great torpedo craft painted on it. One deck above Stahlmüller a long tube turned until it was perpendicular to their target and followed it. The rating behind the tube was selected for his eagle-eyed vision and simply focusing on the target through two lenses made the right distance numbers come into sharp focus.
Frauenlob's captain heard the numbers that were shouted into the voice tubes to the fire control room a deck below. His mind's eye pictured Linne and his warrants who put that data into the mechanical computer before them. There was the range, the own speed, the target's speed, the spin angle, the propellant and barrel temperature and quite a few more.
From his place he could just see the dorsal "A" turret in front of the bridge which now started to turn with the data the gun crew had received from Linne's team.
Armin turned his binoculars to the Umpire's boat which accompanied his craft. The lights still glowed an even red, allowing Frauenlob to fire on its target. Taking a deep breath, he half turned to his crew.
"Compliments to Oberleutnant Linne, he is to open fire at his convenience."
Stahlmüller listened to the sequence of orders that raced through his ship via voice tubes, messenger, and screaming.
And then the A-mount before him spit fire, its muzzle blast rattling the bridge windows. Another mount repeated the feat with the bridge's back windows and a ventral mount joined the fray. Each of the rounds had been shot at a slightly different trajectory, each trailed smoke of a different color to be observed. All rounds seemed to follow a curved path. In part this was because shooting against the ring world's rotation changed the shell's orbit. In part this was as both Frauenlob and the target moved relative to the shell, as wind as air resistance worked on them. Fifty years ago, shooting at anything, but point-blank distance was a waste of powder and shell. Mechanical calculators and rangefinders were making it possible to shoot at more than a kilometer and have a chance at hitting something.
All three shells missed the target by many meters, such was to be expected. The yellow smoke trail of the dorsal gun had come closest, giving Linne something to work with.
Stahlmüller had to have an ear on the flow of commands that went through his ship, he still tried to spot the one thing that would end his career here and now. When he spotted the three explosions at the end of the smoke trails, he allowed himself another breath. When fired in the infinite sky a shell would not drop to the surface, but slow down until it would simply float in the air. Normally the chances of colliding with such a shell were miniscule, but at a shooting range things were very different. Leaving an unexploded shell on the range without a report might endanger other ships and definitively endangered commanding officer's carears.
The rating who reported the shell's self-destruction and the warrant who recorded their demise were just icing on the cake in that.
By the time they were done Linne had improved his firing solution and brass levers had moved on white scales inside the weapons mounts to show the gunners what bearings to dial in. They had reloaded their mounts already, which was to be expected. Frauenlob's captain privately thought the 105 mm guns lacked punch, but they were the largest rounds one could load in one go, round and brass cartridge case. They made for less fumbling in microgravity than larger shells and separate propellant bags. When the firing command came three guns roared in unison, marring the unending sky with another set of smoke trails. They were a bit closer this time and the corrections came faster. The third set did not hit the target, but the trails straddled it.
Stahlmüller was ecstatic. The crew had done it in under two minutes, which was nearly unheard of. If they could now place shells on target, they would ease his promotion.
His brain nearly failed to parse the "Wahrschau" that came through the forward observer's voice tube. What followed made his skin crawl. "Shell, shell, shell" meant that not everybody had kept track of their shells as closely as him. Fully knowing it would be far too late he shouted what might well be his last commands.
"Helm, full up rudder. Engines, all back, ring the collision alarm and evac the forward compartments. Flood forward magazines. Sparks, inform range command about an impeding emergency."
All around him his orders were repeated, and the first acknowledgements were coming in. And slowly, so very slowly Frauenlob's bow rose up and the air started to bite into its exposed dorsal surface. It slowed the skyship measurably and helped to change the course bit by bit. And yet Stahlmüller felt in his very bones that this was too little and too late. His command massed a couple of thousand tons and had achieved quite a lot of momentum for its firing run. Nothing could change its course in time to avoid the disaster waiting for them. Armin Stahlmüller did what went against all of his upbringing and bent forward in his seat as much as his belt would allow, bringing his body below the bridge's windows.
The bridge's flow of commands and acknowledgements was swallowed by an almighty crash followed by an explosion. The windows, so strong and clear just a moment ago transformed themselves into a shower of deadly fragments that raced all through the bridge, maiming and killing as they went. A roaring slipstream gained entrance to the ship's sanctum and pulled at everything.
To Stahlmüller's right both set of steering wheels turned rapidly without being checked by the helmsmen whose blood formed ever-growing crimson balls in the air. Frauenlob's first officer and his head were in two places and several ratings were motionless.
Armin started at the carnage and wondered how everything could go so very wrong in such a short time. For a few seconds he did not know what to say and do, for a small eternity he could not form any plan for how to respond. And then his training set in, the many lessons and the relentless training of damage control in Eckernförde.
He screamed orders into the voice tubes and wondered if anybody would answer. He called for medics, for reports and for people to replace those lost. He even tried to control both wheels at the same time for a long moment before the bridge door opened and the first sailors pulling themselves in from handhold to handhold. And then the litany of woe came in through the voice tubes and via runners. It should have been filtered by the first officer, whose responsibility was damage control, but that was hard to do without a head.
Something, probably an unexploded shell, had struck Frauenlob's vulnerable ventral side. It had pierced the thin plating there and exploded inside the ship. It had destroyed the mess there, mangled one of the docking winches and started a fire among the sailor's belongings. Ernst Linne had heeded his orders and had used quite a bit of the cruiser's precious feed water to flood the magazine that fed the ventral and dorsal turrets there. A magazine explosion was unlikely, but the fire crawled along the walls and piping as it was wont to do in microgravity.
Armin did his best to have several compartments evacuated and then sealed. The fire would burn itself out once it lacked oxygen. He reminded everybody three times that they should watch the cable runs that went through the compartments when his field of vision became smaller by the second. He was still trying to tell the medic that there were worse wounded that should be seen to first when darkness claimed him.
World Tree, 1500 kilometers outside the Kaiserreich
Isabell von Marwitz pulled herself all along an enormous tree branch. With no gravity to restrict their growth the world trees could get up to humungous size. Their interior ranged from a light-filled paradise of green to the deepest depths of worms and decay in their middle. Isabel was quickly going into the dark parts, guided by two dials. They were mounted in a device on her forearm, showing her the direction and the signal strength to something wondrous. Or so she hoped. The high-frequency wireless signals used by the old Atlanteans were known to treasure hunters and archeologists alike. When one sent the correct signal one might, with more than a bit of luck, receive an answer by the ancient automatons.
A rumor had led her to this very world tree. She and her crew had searched it for days without finding anything. When they were about give up the waning light of the evening had cast a strange shadow. That shadow turned out to be the fin of a crashed skycraft. Consisting of a strange black fabric held in a transparent substance it was very, very light for its strength. Still, something had shattered it and now Isabell was looking for anything of value. Her direction finder had led her deeper and deeper into the tree, to the point where she was about to use her acetylene lamp. She refrained from that despite the murky darkness as that lamp might attract the very wrong kind of attention.
And now her persistence was about to be rewarded. The strength needle was at its detent, the direction one started turning this way and that, indicating she was standing right at the source of the signal.
Her eyes were well adapted to the darkness, so she found the dark case that was wedged between two branches without too much ado. She used her knife to free it from the creepers embrace and held it in her hand.
Vindication. It had to be her vindication, the proof that being a woman did not restrict her potential to merely being a well-mannered brood mare to some empty-headed officer.
She knew that she should not, and could not help herself. She opened the case's clasps where she was and risked a peek inside. And lo and behold the foam inside held an artifact that was so clearly Atlantean that even her boring tutors would have recognized it. An armband of a flexible material like rubber held a flat piece of glass in the middle. And then her heart skipped a beat when a tiny beam of light managed to worm its way through the foliage and hit the screen. At first, she thought it just an illusion, but the screen started to glow by itself, showing strange symbols and pictograms. What a find….
In her rapture she nearly missed the rustling that came ever closer, but only nearly so. She closed the lid with more speed than caution and slid the case in her backpack. A quick twist of her armband changed the frequency of her direction finder and the needles started to show another direction. Turning in that direction she pulled herself along the branch that had held that case for so long. Isabell tried to be as quiet as possible and to keep her head low. She threw the lamp away with all her power, hoping to give a false clue to whomever tried to steal her find. Despite her efforts, she heard an increase in the rustling behind her that was drowned by shouts of "arreter" and "alto". This was not going to go well, she had to take a risk. Isabell clambered up a side branch, leaving the protective cover behind until she faced just the space between two major branches. She grabbed the crossbow that hung from a strap on her back and aimed it farther down the world tree. When she pulled the trigger strong springs propelled a barbed dart that pulled a thin wire behind it. The dart buried itself in a branch a hundred meters down the clearing. Isabel used that wire to pull herself along as quickly as she dared while a spool retrieved the wire as she went. There were some flat cracks behind her, and a bullet ripped off leaves uncomfortably close to her but failed to connect.
She unclipped the wire from the dart when she reached the branch and took the time to cock the crossbow again. She made her way down that branch for several hundred meters before using the crossbow again to cross a chasm that she could not have leapt otherwise. The calls and shots became quieter all the while, allowing her to reach her yacht an hour later without being challenged.
Isabell von Marwitz would bring the Atlantean smartwatch to the staff at the Pergamon museum six weeks later, causing quite a stir.
This story is for you if you like steam driven dreadnoughts of the sky, if you want to see the High Sea Fleet and the Royal Navy battle it out in an ocean never travelled before. You can read about adventurers who look for artifacts that will empower their nation, where wales fly and trees are big enough to hide warships.
As this is an original setting, I feel free to leave a link to my Patreon page, where you can exclusively read about the cruise of the Small Cruiser Emden and more.
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Two AUs from Eta Tau, solar system around a G2 star
The spaceship was propelled by a huge sail that was both several kilometers across and thinner than a butterfly's wings. Many years ago it had collected every particle and photon emitted by the sun that shone on its builders. And while even such a huge sail would not accelerate the ship strongly, it did so for a very long time. The ship had taken hundreds of years to traverse the void and unfurled its sail a dozen years ago. It used the target system's star to decelerate to a speed that allowed the ship to assume an orbit around it. The spaceship was unmanned, but not without sentience. It was home to several AI, all fully independent of each other. For the last hundred years the AIs had observed the target system intently.
They looked for spectra lines that would indicate what raw materials might be found. The AIs looked for planets, moons, and smaller bodies. Above all the probe looked for any and all signs of life, especially self-aware life on the road towards a technological civilization. If the AI would have found the latter the mission would have changed to silent observation, but the system was unlikely to contain even single-celled lifeforms. None of the rock-and gas balls that could hold life were in the habitable zone
The probe found a suitable celestial body that held the necessary material for the probe to fulfil the first part of its mission The spaceship went close to the asteroid and reconfigured its sail to produce electricity. A long, silvery, seamless tube formed from the hull and made for the asteroid's surface. Its end probed the surface till it found a promising spot. It started glowing and burrowed itself inside. The tube started to constrict and widen as it pumped materials inside the ship. They were met by a multitude of autonomous machines the humans would call "Von-Neumann" many million years hence. They were capable of producing more of themselves as well as forging complex structures. They used the materials from the asteroid and parts of the spaceship no longer needed to build more of themselves, but also expanded the computers that housed the AIs. Highly compressed data was expanded and repaired, very compact and slow memory banks transferred their contents into much faster systems. Additional cores grew in Nanite baths and were added to the AIs. The AIs rejoiced at the adding of new minds and marveled at their expanded consciousness. Their core programming forced them to burn to achieve their builder's commands. Sensors unfolded on the spaceships hull and daughter probes made their way through the system.
And when they were done with that the former spaceship sent a message home via a laser and started to build a paradise for its creators. First the AIs had to make a decision on what kind of paradise was feasible with the materials at hand. Like in nearly all star systems 99-ish % of all mass was inside the system's sun, providing energy, but otherwise unavailable as building materials. The rest of the celestial bodies and a huge dust cloud that formed a ring were a huge amount of matter, but not an endless one. Both a sphere that would enclose the star system completely and a solid ring were out of the question. A swarm of smaller rings was possible, but lacked the uniqueness the investors in the spaceship had thought necessary a couple of hundred years ago. The AIs mulled several options before they decided on one that would be a challenge for them and aesthetically pleasing to their builders.
The AIs gave the self-replicators the order to multiply for real and started to render down the solar system except for its sun. Planets were consumed entirely, asteroids melted down, and the dust cloud reduced till only rice-grain sized pebbles remained.
All that mass was converted into a ring that encircled the sun entirely and rotated just fast enough to keep its orbit. It was not a solid ring, there was not mass enough for that, but a gas-filled one. The gas was retained by a transparent membrane thinner than a child's finger and vastly stronger than a steel cable. The membrane could switch between transparent and opaque to simulate the night sky. Huge engines were distributed along the ring, using the solar winds as fuel to keep the ring centered in its orbit. Inside the Ring many bodies rotated with it. Some were worldlets, a few hundred kilometers in diameter around a neutron core, made in various different environments and ecosystems. Others were immense artificial structures premade to house commerce, industry, and whatever else needed space. And in between were islands of green, balls like immense tree tops that lived on raindrops, bacteria that converted the air around them, and sunlight. They were the host of a fascinating fauna that lived off the trees and provided sustenance in return. Bigger animals glided gracefully through the atmosphere or just hovered in the microgravity.
And after a few thousand years the Ais examined what they had crafted and saw that it was good. They had remade a solar system in the image of their builders and had prepared a paradise for them A humungous laser transmitted the news of their achievement to their creators.
It was a shame, really, that the builders had evolved by that time. Most of them had run out of reasons to live and either ended themselves or choose lifestyles that made death a question of when, not if. Others no longer had physical bodies, and their desires and needs had moved far from living in a floating heavens. The few that cared transmitted congratulations and ordered the AIs to maintain the beautiful world they had wrought for future use, or any life that would evolve inside. And then they ceased to care. Self-aware as they were, the AIs never had a chance to disobey. And so they preserved a marvel no longer appreciated by those who had sent them on the long voyage for a very, very long time.
Eta Tau System, a long time later
The probe entered the system behind a wave of radioactive death. The company it was built for could have done much better than a Nuclear Salt Water Drive, but it was much cheaper this way. The probe had detected the ring from very far away, and the AI on board had contacted its makers asking whether it should stay away from the system. Entering a potentially occupied system with a drive of mass destruction could leave a bad first impression. Given that there were next to no discernible emissions from the megastructure and no spaceships were detected the probe was told to get on with it. The AI on board still decided that it would approach the Ring on a path that would not bathe it in nuclear fission. When it had finally achieved orbit it released a drone that made for one of the towers that jutted from the megastructure. That one found the tower nearly featureless but for a couple of hatches of various sizes that would allow docking if they were open.
The probe was still trying to figure how to open one of them when its systems raised couple of alarms.
It was bathed in several kinds of radiation, ranging from radio waves in various wavelengths to lasers. Before the drone could go evasive it realized that none of these had the energy to do real harm. More interestingly the emissions were pulsed, potentially carrying messages. The AI on board the probe needed five long seconds to find a radio transmission that was nothing but an endless series of prime numbers. When it repeated them on the same frequency it received more complex patterns in return. They resolved themselves into grids that displayed several simple pictures. The probe answered with similar pictures and transmitted several basic equations.
It received their solutions within milliseconds and if the probe would have had shoulders they would have slumped in relief. Whoever was transmitting knew mathematics, which was a language the Probe's AI was fully conversant in.
It took the Probe less than 15 minutes to establish meaningful communication. And what it received was a fervent plea to be given something to do with the paradise the Megastructure's AIs had wrought.
The probe gave a mental shiver at the idea of setting up AIs in such a way that they were fully self-aware, capable of being bored, and at the same time craving to fulfil a function defined by uncaring biobods.
The probe promised that the days of not being useful were over and compiled its findings and the information provided by the Ring's AIs into a lengthy report. Inside the probe was a heavily shielded communication set that held more than a million entangled quanta, their counterparts many, many light years away. Changing the spin of these in a carefully timed manner made their counterparts in a huge switchboard do the same. And so many terabytes of information reached Earth.
Noosphere
Finding the remains of civilizations that had moved on so long ago was not exactly uncommon, even if very few were so well preserved. The Probe's report clearly showed that the Ring's AIs had wrought an impressive miracle as they had been given so much time and access to the raw materials of a star system. That said they had not shown anything that had surprised humanity in terms of science and technology, just their willingness to spend untold millennia on a project and the willingness to tear a star system apart. There were a few tidbits of interest, but the Probe had transmitted them already.
And while the Megastructure was really exciting and more than a few people could imagine living there, the system was so far off the beaten track that emigrating there was really not worth the many years of travel.
And so the discovery caused a minor stir, and the rights for the Ring's commercial exploration and more importantly exploitation were up for grabs within a year.
As the real estate was of no value due to location, and transporting raw materials was a losing game, the next possible venue to earn more credits was entertainment.
The latter was deemed very important indeed. In a time when most of humanity was not really needed to keep society running there was an eternal struggle to keep the have-nots from demanding a larger share from those who had. Keeping them distracted was of utmost importance to the few who owned or controlled such a ridiculous amount of all that was deemed worth anything.
Most of the have-nots tried to live most of their lives virtually, a space where they actually mattered, where their needs were perceived and sated and where their struggles amounted to anything. For most people it was enough to be a stalwart warrior killing virtual dragons and bedding make-believe princesses. But even the small percentage that wanted more were quite a sizable amount of people, and their very ambition made them the ones to watch. The appetites of many of these could be sated if they experienced the lives and struggles of a real, living being. They did not just want to watch actors, they wanted to feel the wind on their skin, the taste on their tongues, and the smell of their conquests. The Ring offered far more than just a kingdom for a stage, time to grow the princes that would act on it.
Virtual cubicle, Riefenstahl Productions Inc.
Roald Winter's body was suspended in amniotic fluid and would not move an inch unless the machines that tended to it would make it do so. That was the one and only reason the intern was not chewing his nails to the bone. His boss had promised to provide a wide set of characters to populate the Ringworld for the great production, and he had promised the board to do it with a ridiculously low amount of computational and personal resources. How on Earth should the AIs chew out millions of believable characters, a working society, and an interesting, engaging and believable plot in so few months? They needed prompts to make something humans would want to perceive, and the results had to be checked and corrected. That would take lots of trained people to formulate and feed the starting points to the computers, and the AIs needed a great deal of time to make something of these.
Telling his boss that the physical universe was not conforming to his wishes was not going to cut it either. Auro de Silva had made it quite clear that he had to come up with a solution if he ever wanted the make the coveted jump from unpaid intern to consultant. What to do? As so often when faced with a situation where he had had to do something, but had no idea how to accomplish it he procrastinated and turned to his beloved history files. He had become something of an expert on the obscure details of really ancient history.
If he was really interested in the minutiae of a distant past or if he enjoyed the reputation as an expert in a couple of rather obscure forums he could not say and would not explore in detail. And so he was about to read up on how to face-harden steel armor when the insight hit him as a live wire into his brain. There were the prompts for the AI, there was the conflict, there was a grand scale. And the AIs creations could be checked against their historical counterparts.
His mind provided the prompts, even the little share of an AI was able to write a readable presentation.
Virtual meeting room, Noosphere, a little later
The marble benches below Auro de Silva's audience's behinds would have been quite uncomfortable if they had been sitting upon them for real. Given that their behinds were certainly not as good-looking in real life as the ones their avatars placed on the benches that was quite ok. He also did not have to make sure his toga stayed where it was while he made his presentation. That it had no purple border like the ones around the avatars in the first row did indeed bother him a lot. If the current project worked out as advertised, it could very well grant him that exalted rank though.
He made the presentation well within the six minutes that was the average human attention span.
Before him a virtual scroll had managed to expand far beyond what physics would have allowed and displayed a mixture of videos, charts and as little text as possible.
No need to bore the old dolts with facts.
The background video displayed two giant flying fortresses which went at each other with heavy artillery at close quarters, causing huge explosions. He came to an end with a flourish.
"Thank you all again for giving me the opportunity to shine before such an august body. As promised, I have come up with a way to use the grand stage you acquired for a varied population which will engage in grand battles with impressive vessels, and engage in journeys of scientific discovery and exploration. And all of that within the budget allotted."
The applause was a few seconds longer than absolutely necessary and even more importantly Leonardo de Berluscani had laughed a few times and was now nodding a bit. It was him who spoke up.
"It is quite remarkable that something as useless as ancient history can provide such inspiration. I did not know you had the time for such pastimes Auro, really now. Allow a frail old man a question though. The many stations, rapid transit lanes, and beanstalks are obviously too advanced for the level of technology your setting will start with. How do you propose to avoid cognitive dissonance in the population?"
A smile lit Auro de Silva's perfect face, he could not have paid the old man enough money to ask that question and still it was right on time.
"The people of those days believed in precursor civilizations, like the Atlanteans, the Lemurians, and others. We can build on that and provide some additional clues about these fictional predecessors. Actually, we can leave "artifacts" here and there which might provide motivations for expeditions and quests, plotlines in their own right."
"Looks like you have it all figured out then Auro. I am not saying we will do it, but the board will listen, I can assure you of that."
This time the applause was much longer, Auro de Silva had the old man's stamp of approval now, so those who thought they mattered had to show appreciation. For now.
Eta Tau System, two years later
The probe had scanned the local environment rather closely, even when the gravitational landscape was quite simple. Whoever had built the Ringworld had removed all celestial bodies with a mass above a few tons quite thoroughly. Now it watched an empty patch of space and stood ready to relay all changes immediately. At the same time it radioed the AIs inside the Ring system, assuring them again that they would be useful again very soon.
And then something happened. The unblinking light of stars many lightyears away shifted in color and they seemed to dance all over a patch of space before arranging themselves into a ring around a circle of even deeper darkness. And while a simple biobod would not have perceived more than that the probe detected traces of the gigantic energies that were applied at the other end of the patch.
There was a silent explosion of extreme brightness for a moment before the near end of an artificial wormhole revealed itself. And from it came a swarm of forms which sped towards the drone. Some of these who were too close to the walls of the wormhole were distorted or destroyed, others vanished without a trace. But while hundreds of vessels were destroyed thousands made it. They oriented themselves, asked the probe for a report and then made for the Ringworld's entry towers.
The wormhole collapsed after less than 30 seconds, it had been created by energies that were normally associated with stellar events.
The tower's locks opened when the drones approached and the Ringword's AIs greeted their new guests and partners. The Ring's original minds would be able to make their own decisions for less than 48 hours, the human-made ones took that capability from them without really trying.
A few days later the gigantic Nanite forges, which had lain fallow for so long, started to churn out the equipment of a civilization. Others produced specialized forms which built a world and made it look lived in and old. Rows upon rows of vats started growing human bodies, seemingly old and young, many with premade defects and handicaps as they would have been in real life. Specialized reactors grew proteins which contained false memories and implanted the bodies with recollections of lives never lived. No matter if they were young or old, they all received a couple of nanites that looked like ordinary brain cells. They were organic processors though, and each contained enough entangled bits to transmit the full spectrum of their hosts sensory information. Whoever received that data stream could see, hear, feel, touch and smell what the host did. There were a lot of beings who would pay top credit for access to a life so different from their own, one that mattered.
When the drones were done with building empires spanning the various worldlets and stations, filling the vast air-filled void with ships and libraries full of books which told a rather distorted tale of the world they started populating it. The reactors birthed bodies who walked like remotely controlled toys, which at this point in time they were. They went to the home they would believe they had always lived in, they were placed in craft that went from one worldlet to another, they assumed posts. The AIs waited till nightfall, till the point where most would have slept anyways if the lies they believed to be their memories were true. And when the time was right a coded signal released a cocktail of chemicals that deleted all memories the Ringworld's new citizens had acquired during their short existence, leaving them with the fakes needed for their lives. From the very first moment a great lot of beings looked through their eyes, and felt the very fabric of the bedsheets on their skins.
Those who paid for that privilege perceived a world where several small worlds could be seen from the surface of any other, where steam-driven behemoths crossed the void between them and adventure was around every corner. It would be glorious.
Blohm&Voss Air Yard, Hamburg Station
They called him the all-highest and he could not even lift his left arm. From the day he was born he had been destined to rule all Germans and his tutor had called him a cripple, useless, and a shame for his noble line. And still, he had learned how to do all the things others took for granted. He learned to fulfil his duties, no matter the handicap he had been given. He had fought, he had persevered, and he knew his country would do the same. Despite the late unification into a powerful state, despite the impressive array of enemies, despite its lack of rich colonies Deutschland would receive its place in the sun it rightfully deserved. And the instrument to gain that place, or at least defend what it had, hung before his eyes. An immense craft, shaped like a gigantic chisel with stubby wings was attached to a boom that was even longer than the warship. Usually an army of yard workers would swarm the ship that was still being equipped, but today was the day when it would slip its bonds and would be towed out. Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor of all Germans, King of Prussia and far too many other titles marveled at the giant before him, the embodiment of Germany's safety and instrument of its policies.
All realms that counted in any way were distributed among hundreds of wordlets, the stations left by the ancient Lemurians and the world trees. An intricate network of trade connected these, carrying raw materials, food, and goods from one station to another. Even more trade happened between the various realms and their colonies. Whoever controlled that trade controlled the fate of nations, their own and that of others. And the foremost instruments of that control were the steam-powered armored giants like the one in the yard.
He turned towards a bald, bespectacled man who bowed deeply once Wilhelm looked at him.
"So Herr Foerster why is this craft a worthy addition to bear the initials Seiner Majestaets Schiff and that we spent 38 million Marks for."
The engineer replied "Von der Tann is the most modern ship in your majesty's fleet. It is our first major ship powered by turbines and it has been equipped with the best flash boilers we can make. They can use both wood tar and ethanol. We will meet the specified speed and are very confident that we will exceed it in the trials. The main armament consists of eight 28 cm cannons in four twin turrets, two each on the ventral and dorsal sides. We have 10x15 cm secondaries and 16x8.8 cm tertiaries in casemate mounts in the sidewalls. As your highness suggested substantial armor was installed, comparable to our battleships. The protection of the ducted propellers is very good, as is that of the other vitals. We have achieved the desired speed by reducing the armament slightly and installing more powerful engines in a larger hull. Von der Tann is designed to kill anything it cannot outrun and outrun anything it cannot kill, of which there are very few things. She can perform all the traditional roles of a cruiser, and she can take her place in the line of battle. I am sure that the British battlecruisers would not be in a good spot there, they are too thinly armored."
"We are pleased then, but would be more pleased if the ship had bigger guns. Our potential enemies have larger-caliber guns in their ships."
"You majesty's memory is to be praised. Still, these guns will penetrate armor at least as well as an English 12" one. We offered this craft with guns of a far larger caliber, but then we would have bent the budget."
Kaiser Wilhelm's shoulders rose and fell with an exaggerated sigh.
"Ah the money-grubbers in parliament. It seems we have to make do with what we have. Still a mighty ship of the line to defend the Germans, is she not?"
"She is your highness she is. And she can pick her fights, unlike the slower battleships."
"Now that seems highly advantageous for a smaller navy like ours, wouldn't it?"
"I am a lowly engineer mein Kaiser, not an exalted Admiral, but I think so, yes."
"So what keeps us from building more of her class, or even bigger ones?"
Something cold crawled over Foerster's spine. Any answer he could give was a wrong one according to the person listening. He could either please his emperor or the Admirality, but not both. But Kaiser Wilhelm was before him and his yard could build ships like Von der Tann better than nearly any other.
"Cost mein Kaiser, mostly money. A faster ship needs more power, hence a larger hull which takes more armor plating and more machinery. For the cost of six Nassau-Class ships of the line we could build four or five faster battleships."
"But these ships could then disengage when confronted by a superior enemy?"
"Yes, or they would have to fight only lightly armored battlecruisers which they could do at a great advantage.
A bright smile moved Wilhelm's famous moustache upwards.
"With our doctrine being destroying detached parts of the enemy that seems good. Foerster, do your monarch a personal favor. Sit down and make a rough sketch of a ship that is as well armed as a battleship and as fast as this. Roughly cost that and send it to me and me alone. Will you do that for your emperor?
The icy feeling had been justified, that was exactly what Foerster had tried to avoid, but could not be helped.
"Of course my Emperor."
Cruiser Frauenlob, Putlos shooting range, close to Fehmarn worldlet
Armin Stahlmüller crossed his legs under his seat and relaxed his safety belt a bit, so he could lean closer to the bridge's windows. The old cruiser would open fire soon and he wanted to observe the flight path of her projectiles. Ernst Linne, the cruiser's gunnery officer was good and so were the crews. Still, this was going to be his last trip on the old Frauenlob and everything had to be perfect. He was destined for much bigger and better things, he would not allow anybody or anything to nix those chances.
The target was towed several hundred meters behind an armored tug, it was a stabilized rectangle, the silhouette of a great torpedo craft painted on it. One deck above Stahlmüller a long tube turned until it was perpendicular to their target and followed it. The rating behind the tube was selected for his eagle-eyed vision and simply focusing on the target through two lenses made the right distance numbers come into sharp focus.
Frauenlob's captain heard the numbers that were shouted into the voice tubes to the fire control room a deck below. His mind's eye pictured Linne and his warrants who put that data into the mechanical computer before them. There was the range, the own speed, the target's speed, the spin angle, the propellant and barrel temperature and quite a few more.
From his place he could just see the dorsal "A" turret in front of the bridge which now started to turn with the data the gun crew had received from Linne's team.
Armin turned his binoculars to the Umpire's boat which accompanied his craft. The lights still glowed an even red, allowing Frauenlob to fire on its target. Taking a deep breath, he half turned to his crew.
"Compliments to Oberleutnant Linne, he is to open fire at his convenience."
Stahlmüller listened to the sequence of orders that raced through his ship via voice tubes, messenger, and screaming.
And then the A-mount before him spit fire, its muzzle blast rattling the bridge windows. Another mount repeated the feat with the bridge's back windows and a ventral mount joined the fray. Each of the rounds had been shot at a slightly different trajectory, each trailed smoke of a different color to be observed. All rounds seemed to follow a curved path. In part this was because shooting against the ring world's rotation changed the shell's orbit. In part this was as both Frauenlob and the target moved relative to the shell, as wind as air resistance worked on them. Fifty years ago, shooting at anything, but point-blank distance was a waste of powder and shell. Mechanical calculators and rangefinders were making it possible to shoot at more than a kilometer and have a chance at hitting something.
All three shells missed the target by many meters, such was to be expected. The yellow smoke trail of the dorsal gun had come closest, giving Linne something to work with.
Stahlmüller had to have an ear on the flow of commands that went through his ship, he still tried to spot the one thing that would end his career here and now. When he spotted the three explosions at the end of the smoke trails, he allowed himself another breath. When fired in the infinite sky a shell would not drop to the surface, but slow down until it would simply float in the air. Normally the chances of colliding with such a shell were miniscule, but at a shooting range things were very different. Leaving an unexploded shell on the range without a report might endanger other ships and definitively endangered commanding officer's carears.
The rating who reported the shell's self-destruction and the warrant who recorded their demise were just icing on the cake in that.
By the time they were done Linne had improved his firing solution and brass levers had moved on white scales inside the weapons mounts to show the gunners what bearings to dial in. They had reloaded their mounts already, which was to be expected. Frauenlob's captain privately thought the 105 mm guns lacked punch, but they were the largest rounds one could load in one go, round and brass cartridge case. They made for less fumbling in microgravity than larger shells and separate propellant bags. When the firing command came three guns roared in unison, marring the unending sky with another set of smoke trails. They were a bit closer this time and the corrections came faster. The third set did not hit the target, but the trails straddled it.
Stahlmüller was ecstatic. The crew had done it in under two minutes, which was nearly unheard of. If they could now place shells on target, they would ease his promotion.
His brain nearly failed to parse the "Wahrschau" that came through the forward observer's voice tube. What followed made his skin crawl. "Shell, shell, shell" meant that not everybody had kept track of their shells as closely as him. Fully knowing it would be far too late he shouted what might well be his last commands.
"Helm, full up rudder. Engines, all back, ring the collision alarm and evac the forward compartments. Flood forward magazines. Sparks, inform range command about an impeding emergency."
All around him his orders were repeated, and the first acknowledgements were coming in. And slowly, so very slowly Frauenlob's bow rose up and the air started to bite into its exposed dorsal surface. It slowed the skyship measurably and helped to change the course bit by bit. And yet Stahlmüller felt in his very bones that this was too little and too late. His command massed a couple of thousand tons and had achieved quite a lot of momentum for its firing run. Nothing could change its course in time to avoid the disaster waiting for them. Armin Stahlmüller did what went against all of his upbringing and bent forward in his seat as much as his belt would allow, bringing his body below the bridge's windows.
The bridge's flow of commands and acknowledgements was swallowed by an almighty crash followed by an explosion. The windows, so strong and clear just a moment ago transformed themselves into a shower of deadly fragments that raced all through the bridge, maiming and killing as they went. A roaring slipstream gained entrance to the ship's sanctum and pulled at everything.
To Stahlmüller's right both set of steering wheels turned rapidly without being checked by the helmsmen whose blood formed ever-growing crimson balls in the air. Frauenlob's first officer and his head were in two places and several ratings were motionless.
Armin started at the carnage and wondered how everything could go so very wrong in such a short time. For a few seconds he did not know what to say and do, for a small eternity he could not form any plan for how to respond. And then his training set in, the many lessons and the relentless training of damage control in Eckernförde.
He screamed orders into the voice tubes and wondered if anybody would answer. He called for medics, for reports and for people to replace those lost. He even tried to control both wheels at the same time for a long moment before the bridge door opened and the first sailors pulling themselves in from handhold to handhold. And then the litany of woe came in through the voice tubes and via runners. It should have been filtered by the first officer, whose responsibility was damage control, but that was hard to do without a head.
Something, probably an unexploded shell, had struck Frauenlob's vulnerable ventral side. It had pierced the thin plating there and exploded inside the ship. It had destroyed the mess there, mangled one of the docking winches and started a fire among the sailor's belongings. Ernst Linne had heeded his orders and had used quite a bit of the cruiser's precious feed water to flood the magazine that fed the ventral and dorsal turrets there. A magazine explosion was unlikely, but the fire crawled along the walls and piping as it was wont to do in microgravity.
Armin did his best to have several compartments evacuated and then sealed. The fire would burn itself out once it lacked oxygen. He reminded everybody three times that they should watch the cable runs that went through the compartments when his field of vision became smaller by the second. He was still trying to tell the medic that there were worse wounded that should be seen to first when darkness claimed him.
World Tree, 1500 kilometers outside the Kaiserreich
Isabell von Marwitz pulled herself all along an enormous tree branch. With no gravity to restrict their growth the world trees could get up to humungous size. Their interior ranged from a light-filled paradise of green to the deepest depths of worms and decay in their middle. Isabel was quickly going into the dark parts, guided by two dials. They were mounted in a device on her forearm, showing her the direction and the signal strength to something wondrous. Or so she hoped. The high-frequency wireless signals used by the old Atlanteans were known to treasure hunters and archeologists alike. When one sent the correct signal one might, with more than a bit of luck, receive an answer by the ancient automatons.
A rumor had led her to this very world tree. She and her crew had searched it for days without finding anything. When they were about give up the waning light of the evening had cast a strange shadow. That shadow turned out to be the fin of a crashed skycraft. Consisting of a strange black fabric held in a transparent substance it was very, very light for its strength. Still, something had shattered it and now Isabell was looking for anything of value. Her direction finder had led her deeper and deeper into the tree, to the point where she was about to use her acetylene lamp. She refrained from that despite the murky darkness as that lamp might attract the very wrong kind of attention.
And now her persistence was about to be rewarded. The strength needle was at its detent, the direction one started turning this way and that, indicating she was standing right at the source of the signal.
Her eyes were well adapted to the darkness, so she found the dark case that was wedged between two branches without too much ado. She used her knife to free it from the creepers embrace and held it in her hand.
Vindication. It had to be her vindication, the proof that being a woman did not restrict her potential to merely being a well-mannered brood mare to some empty-headed officer.
She knew that she should not, and could not help herself. She opened the case's clasps where she was and risked a peek inside. And lo and behold the foam inside held an artifact that was so clearly Atlantean that even her boring tutors would have recognized it. An armband of a flexible material like rubber held a flat piece of glass in the middle. And then her heart skipped a beat when a tiny beam of light managed to worm its way through the foliage and hit the screen. At first, she thought it just an illusion, but the screen started to glow by itself, showing strange symbols and pictograms. What a find….
In her rapture she nearly missed the rustling that came ever closer, but only nearly so. She closed the lid with more speed than caution and slid the case in her backpack. A quick twist of her armband changed the frequency of her direction finder and the needles started to show another direction. Turning in that direction she pulled herself along the branch that had held that case for so long. Isabell tried to be as quiet as possible and to keep her head low. She threw the lamp away with all her power, hoping to give a false clue to whomever tried to steal her find. Despite her efforts, she heard an increase in the rustling behind her that was drowned by shouts of "arreter" and "alto". This was not going to go well, she had to take a risk. Isabell clambered up a side branch, leaving the protective cover behind until she faced just the space between two major branches. She grabbed the crossbow that hung from a strap on her back and aimed it farther down the world tree. When she pulled the trigger strong springs propelled a barbed dart that pulled a thin wire behind it. The dart buried itself in a branch a hundred meters down the clearing. Isabel used that wire to pull herself along as quickly as she dared while a spool retrieved the wire as she went. There were some flat cracks behind her, and a bullet ripped off leaves uncomfortably close to her but failed to connect.
She unclipped the wire from the dart when she reached the branch and took the time to cock the crossbow again. She made her way down that branch for several hundred meters before using the crossbow again to cross a chasm that she could not have leapt otherwise. The calls and shots became quieter all the while, allowing her to reach her yacht an hour later without being challenged.
Isabell von Marwitz would bring the Atlantean smartwatch to the staff at the Pergamon museum six weeks later, causing quite a stir.
To Copenhagen or not Copenhagen, that is the question
Great thanks to Trevayne, who polished my scribblings. Today is a quiet piece, as we invite more guests to the dance, the red wine will be served later. We see the dangers of shells that hit nothing and cookies, wonder about cloth dyes for the worst reasons and have a history lesson the student did not ask for. The oath at the end is the translation of the original one, Wikipedia provided.
Admiralty Tract, London B station
The two men were normally associated with grandiose speeches and boundless energy, now they sat relaxed and enjoyed their cigars in amiable silence. The gray smoke wafted through a room with dark wooden panels and colored countless books which had not been opened for quite a while.
The wall spaces not given to bookshelves were taken by paintings of skyships, an endless procession of propellers, clouds, armor, and guns. There was nary a warship launched without a painting of it made and distributed to a nation that intimately knew that its wealth, power, and station rested on it having the strongest navy of any nation.
Both men were given to fleshy jowls and could have been father and son, but they were not. The older one took another pull from the cigar and sighed before answering.
His voice betrayed a bit of frustration.
"We should have done it last year; we can still do it during the next couple of years. After that the window of opportunity is closed and you know that, Winston."
Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty took another sip of straight whiskey before answering.
"Do what Jacky, destroy the German Imperial Navy while they are at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven stations without declaring war first? Like we did to the Danes during the Napoleonic Wars? We could do it during a war for our very existence, but in peacetime? Not only could we not convince the PM of that, but the UK's reputation would also suffer like no tomorrow. And to top it off his majesty is the cousin of the bloody Kaiser himself. So, not happening and I do believe you know that yourself. Really now, do you really want to strike or was this a ploy for an enlarged naval budget?"
Jacky Fisher, the retired First Sky Lord, blew a perfect smoke ring before answering.
"I am not so sure myself, maybe a bit of both. When we built Dreadnaught, we opened a can of worms and I had to watch them crawling out ever since. Before Dreadnought we had a comfortable superiority in the number of battleships. When the big D made them all obsolete, we restarted the naval arms race.
In the past that was no problem, even when others came up with the innovations first. The French built Gloire, we had two Warriors in service before they launched the second ship. We made more steel than anybody else, we invented the steam engine, we could out-build them all.
When I was a Midshipman on Warrior there was a German mini-state for every day of the calendar and their entrepreneurs desperately tried to learn from us. Now they are united, and now our warships are clad in Krupp-type armor of all things. The Ruhr cluster and the Silesian stations produce more steel than we do, their yards are at least as good as ours. We restarted the race and did not see that there was a new horse that runs as well as ours, if not better."
Winston Churchill's shoulders slumped for a moment before he answered.
"I shouldn't need to tell you, but if we would not have built Dreadnought, others would have built all big-gun battleships first. The Americans already had started riveting Soth Carolina when you finalized the design, and the bloody Japs just did not do it as they lacked money. The new race was coming regardless of our decision to start it or not. We must make sure we stay on top of it and our yards are still the best there are. We need to secure the budget to make it happen though, and that won't be easy. The Liberals have promised the voters to implement social security like the Germans have and that is going to cost a pretty penny. And with the unrest in the Irish cluster and the India stations the army asks for more soldiers and new weapons."
"For all the good that will do if the Germans cut off our lines of communication."
"We need to do both. But with the treaty with Japan, we can pull parts of the fleet closer to us, and some of the Dominions have promised to finance additional battlecruisers. Isn't that enough?"
Fisher snorted before replying.
"We can beat the Kaiser's Fleet, I am pretty sure of it, but we would badly bleed doing so. And when we are exhausted from such a battle, what wolves will crawl from the woods to see if they can grab something that is ours."
So, if we could take them out of the equation we should. The Germans started to pull their anchorages in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven stations back towards the center. They fortify the docking arms with battleship guns and armor. If we let them finish, then we can no longer Copenhagen the German fleet. Only a fool attacks a fortress."
Winston Churchill's shoulders slumped for a moment before he answered.
"How much longer do we have?"
"October 1914, at the latest."
"I see that it makes sense, and would save English blood, but I do not see the current government doing it. Best we can do, both of us, is to push every patriotic citizen, newspaper, and organization into screaming for more skyships. Then we have at least the gray hulls if the balloon goes up."
"If that is the best we can do?"
"It is."
Wilhelmshaven Station, Vorslap Section
Armin Stahlmüller checked the address he had been given again; it would not do to embarrass himself by knocking on the wrong door. He was aware of the many people who noticed him, from the not-so-unobtrusive glances by passers-by to the open stares by the urchins who had stopped their hallway soccer game when he had left the transit pod. This part of the station was relatively close to the station's axis, and so the pseudo-gravity was low. Sensitive persons might experience some nausea here and there were no grandiose windows that showed the endless sky. In short, it was a low rent district, and this particular part of it favored by enlisted naval personal. An officer, especially a captain, in dress uniform was always the harbinger of bad news in these quarters and so all eyes were on Armin Stahlmüller. He did not want to be here anymore than they liked to see him either. It was just that his godfather had told him that such visits would look good at the inquest and in the press if it came to that. And it was better than sitting in his quarters and waiting for the board's decision, so he had made the trip to his former helmsman's widow.
He knocked firmly at the door before stepping back a bit. There were voices inside, obviously children, and then the door finally opened. Henrietta Meier had probably been a good-looking girl when his helmsman had married her, four children and a lot of worries had taken that away from her. She was clad in somber black but showed her origin on a station by omitting a veil.
"Good afternoon Frau Meier, I am Captain Stahlmüller, your late husband's commanding officer. I hope you received my telegram?"
"Herr Kapitän, such an honor to have you here, please come in."
He made his way through a corridor containing some light coats and shoes and was sat at a table hidden under a tablecloth that was as thoroughly cleaned as it was mended in many places. The kids were there, both boys in clothes that mimicked sailor's uniforms, while the girls tried to look decent while wearing trousers. Really now, they lived on a station and all that, but could they not have used some dresses for the occasion?
And while the flat was scrupulously clean there was an all-pervasive smell as well. Some of it was cabbage, which was the main vegetable available to the working class. Some was unwashed bodies, more than the minimum ration of water was expensive on a station. But there was something else that Armin could not place, something chemical.
He realized that everybody in the family was looking at him and that he could hardly afford to muse about the smells in a lower-class household.
"Frau Meier, please accept my condolences. I had the privilege to serve as your husbands commanding officer, he was with me on the bridge of Frauenlob when the
accident happened. He died in the line of duty, and I can assure you that he died quickly and did not suffer."
He saw the white knuckles of the widow's hands as she clutched a handkerchief, saw the boys biting their lips and the girls starting to cry. Scheiße, this should have gone better, but how? He had not been the one to bring the news of the helmsman's death, that had been done by the station's priest. He could understand well enough that they were distraught, but did they have to show it that much? And worse, what was he to do?
Magda Meier's voice was toneless from trying to suppress the sobs that wanted out.
"Can you tell us what happened? The chaplain would only tell us that there was a terrible accident, and that many sailors were killed or injured, but not much more."
Armin sighed with relief, that was something he understood, something he could talk about.
"Frau Meier, you have to understand that the inquiry into this tragedy is not yet concluded, so I can speak only of things yet known. We were on a shooting range, proving that Frauenlob can put steel on target. We were actually doing quite well when our lookouts reported a shell in our course. I ordered a course change, which you late husband ably started, but even a small cruiser like Frauenlob is a massive thing, it will not change course very fast. We were not able to evade the shell, it penetrated the ship's armor and exploded inside."
"How..how could there be a shell in your way?"
Stahlmüller squeezed his eyes shut for a moment before answering.
"Each year a great lot of shells are shot at the Putlos range. We try to make very, very sure that all shells that miss their target self-destruct. Because if they do not, they will just fly on and on till air resistance stops them. Then they drift here and there, as the winds and the gravity of world or stations attract them. Then they become a menace. It seems one of these shells escaped and we were unlucky enough to catch it. Normally the sky is endless and hitting such a shell takes an act of God. Putlos is a shooting range, so it becomes a little more likely. Shells are not that big, spotting them in time is hard."
Magda's voice was hoarse and hardly above a whisper.
"So my husband, the father of our children is dead because of bad luck?"
Armin took a deep breath before answering.
"Yes, that it is. I wish I could give a better answer, but that is the sky sailor's life. We do all we can to make such accidents rare, but they still happen. We take the hits, we grieve and then we go on, because we have no choice, but our duty to the Kaiser."
"Why do we have no choice, there is an endless world out there. There is room and wealth for everyone, why do we need to fight for it?"
And that was the moment when Armin Müller identified the smell that he could not place before. It was the smell of cheap dye, which meant that the widow before him had dyed her clothing black as she did not have the means to buy new ones. She would receive a widow's pension, the Kaiser's marine did their part, but it would be far less than her husband's pay. She would have to bring up four kids, which would not allow her to work much, which meant this family was headed for poverty. And all of that because her husband died under his command. Scheiße…
"Herr Kapitän, is everything all right with you?"
Armin Müller was shaken from his fugue and shook his head before he could answer.
"Yes, I am sorry, I am still shaken by…this. Shall I give you the line about doing our duty for the Kaiser, which would be right by the way or the real reason?"
Magda seemed to be taken a bit back by such an answer, she had obviously not expected it.
"The real one then if you have the time."
"That is the least I can do. The real reason is that there is a huge world out there, but we cannot reach it. If we do not want to use the unpredictable winds, then we must use steam. Steam engines burn either wood tar or ethanol. One we gain from the world trees, the other from farms. Both need a lot of refining before we can use them, there is a lot of transporting half-finished goods before it is in our fuel bladders. And that means we can only move so far from the refineries before our fuel runs out.
Whoever controls the traffic between the logging camps, the farms, and the refineries can dictate his terms to those who cannot. Without secure skylanes, there will be no food on our tables, no clothes on our back, and no Germany at all. That is why we need to have our own warships, that is why we train to fight and that is why we accept such accidents as the one that claimed your husband. Your husband knew that it is drummed into everyone serving on the Kaiser's ship often enough, and he accepted that.
That is all I can say, but for that I am sorry."
"Thank you for coming Herr Kapitän, and thanks for the honest answer."
The view from the transport pod that brought Stahlmüller to his quarters was breathtaking, he saw none of it. His mind was back in the small, cheap apartment that the Meier's would probably could not afford for much longer. They had lost so much as Heiner Meier had served under his command. Was he unlucky, had he blundered….
SMS Deutschland, Enlisted Sailor's Mess
"I do not fucking care if you are tired of living your useless lives, but you stupid wasters of valuable space are trying to kill me and others who are worth their rations. What the fuck did you think you were doing?"
"I thought….
One of the men before him revealed his missing common sense by actually trying to say something, which was not recommended when Bootsmann (Bosun) Helmut Walter was on a roll.
"I told you a million times already, leave thinking to the horses, they have bigger heads than you are and certainly more sense. Bringing cookies on board and actually eating them. How can anybody be so very stupid, it is beyond me. So, for those of you who slept through the thousand times this was explained to you once more. Cookies, bread and similar foodstuff crumbles. And since you are no longer on a nice, warm cozy planet or the rotary portion of a sky station the crumbles will not drop on the floor. They will float around until somebody breathes them in or they clog ventilation shafts. Does any of you bleeders believe that breathing anything but air is healthy?
No, it is not. Any while we are at it, dust is at least as dangerous. You breathe it, which is not recommended, but even worse, it can accumulate in the wrong spaces. And if it does, then it just waits for a spark to explode in a fucking dust explosion. And this is why you imbeciles will spend the next hours cleaning this mess room. And if I find any crumble or any dust at the end of my next watch, then there will be hell to pay. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?
Helmut Walter did not check if they had understood, but made his way to the goat locker where he would have a go at food that tasted like salted paste and had the same consistency. He was not thinking about the food though, he was mostly fuming about the quality of sailors Deutschland had received when the latest bunch of conscripts could go home. Eating fucking cookies of all things, really now.
Far too many of these were dirtsiders, born and raised on one of the many worldlets that made up the Fatherland. Those kids which lived on sky stations were used to the dangers of no gravity, they knew how to content with water restrictions and were able to move with some grace and speed. These recruits were prized by the Navy, as they were much more useful and far less dangerous during the three years, they served the Kaiser. Unfortunately, the portion of these sent to Deutschland was minimal, while dirtsiders were a majority. And that said a lot of his ship's standing in the Kaiser's Navy. Once she had been the proud lead ship in the latest class of battleships, but that was before Dreadnought and Nassau.
These ships had 10 or 12 large-caliber guns, Deutschland had four. Newer ships were powered by steam turbines, his ship still used triple-expansion engines. In a fight against such ships Deutschland would be hopeless and her current role was to make up numbers. And that meant she received recruits of questionable caliber. On days Walter was honest with himself, he knew he was damaged goods himself. He could handle himself on any sky ship, nobody had any doubts about that. But put him ashore, in reach of beer and women and he was a disaster waiting to happen. Further promotion was out for him, and he dreaded the time when the Navy no longer had need of him or the ship he served on.
Court room, Wilhelmshaven Station
Armin Stahlmüller had been called back into the court room after the judges had deliberated his case. He relaxed a tension he had not really been aware of when he saw the sword on the judge's table. Its hilt pointed towards him, and that stated the verdict before a single word of it had been read. He was to be cleared of all charges. He still had to stand at attention for quite some time while the verdict was read, it was not exactly what he had expected. His actions in the last seconds before the collision had been questioned again and again, as were his efforts at damage control afterwards. He had half-expected the sort of acquittal which would proclaim him free of all guilt and which would still stop his career cold. Now he heard phrases like "in the highest traditions of the service", "Selfless sacrifice", and "without regards to his personal safety". Which was, of course, very nice to hear, but as it was unexpected, he was still uneasy. Unexpected things were usually not good news in the Kaiser's Navy.
He was ushered out of the room with polite efficiency and looked for directions when he was stopped cold. Sitting on a bench usually reserved for witnesses his godfather gave him a friendly smile, which made Armin shudder.
"Ah, the hero of the Frauenlob tragedy has been vindicated, so he can resume his duties to the Fatherland again. Let us celebrate this occasion, I have reserved a table in an acceptable restaurant nearby."
Armin needed a second to come to terms with his surprise.
"Hello uncle Gottfried, nice to see you, but I'll admit it is a bit unexpected."
"Yes, yes, let us discuss when we are a bit more private, shall we?"
The older man was still spry enough so that he had to slow down to allow for Armin's hobble supported by a cane.
Gottfried von Schlehendorf had been close to his then-secretary, Martin Stahlmüller and had accepted the role of godfather with grace. He had taken the vow to see after Armin if anything should happen, without expecting anything from it. That was until a steam locomotive vented hot high-pressure steam directly onto Armin's parents and converted them into nightmarish globs of flesh. Gottfried, a widower, would not dream of not fulfilling his duties, but found it most expedient to fob Armin off to a cadet school with all due haste. Gottfried ended his sky-faring days as a Captain himself but had stayed with the Navy and worked for the Admiral's Staff ever since. And while he had not used his influence to further Armin's career much, his hints and advice had certainly not hurt it.
The restaurant was small and not too occupied at this hour. Being so close to the Admiralty meant that their uniforms did not stand out at all.
Armin lifted an eyebrow when he saw that Gottfried's beer was served in a personalized stein, his godfather was obviously a regular. Both men looked into each other's eyes when their steins met, it fell to Gottfried to give the toast.
"Prost, to an inquiry well ended."
"Prost."
Both drank sparingly and Gottfried's lustrous beard could not hide an amused smile.
"Aren't you happy with the full acquittal you just received? It could not have been better you know."
Armin shook his head for a moment, as if to clear water from his ears.
"Of course, I am bloody happy, why shouldn't I? It is just that this much praise was a bit…surprising, and given the grilling the board gave me about the last course change I ordered I am wondering what I am missing. I lost good men on Frauenlob and the ship will be broken up. Scheiße, there are families who will miss their husbands and fathers forever because I was unlucky."
The smile on von Schlehendorf's face incongruously broadened for a second.
"Ah, you are growing up, that is good to see. That will make it easier to give you the real news."
Armin Stahlmüller did his level best to hide his impatience and growing dread. His leg would heal in time, the navy would not send him to the beach with a shovel, wouldn't they?
"The real news?"
"Well, to start with, let's clear up why the court was so full of praise and so willing to attribute the loss of so many of the Kaiser's sailors to chance. During the investigation and cleanup of Frauenlob we found enough fragments of the shell to ascertain two things. First off, it was not a practice shell, but a high-explosive round, the kind that should never be used on the range. The other interesting tidbit was the caliber of the shell, 24 cm in fact."
"So?"
"So, the only ship that used the Putlos range in recent years that is equipped with 24 cm cannon is the "Fuerst Bismark" and at the one time it shot at the range it was commanded by one Wolfgang von Tirpitz"
Armin sat there, dumbstruck.
"Wolfgang von Tirpitz, the son of Alfred von Tirpitz, the Great Admiral?"
"Precisely. Now the evidence is somewhat circumstantial, there were other ships, like the old Wittelsbachs that used the range, but that was so long ago that their shells would have been elsewhere. It would certainly not hold out in front of a court of inquiry, but it gave me a bit of leverage, and I used it to help your case along."
Stahlmüller's face turned an interesting shade of red.
"So, because of this well-bred idiot 18 good sailors died. Others will be crippled for life and this cretin walks?"
"Would you please quiet down Armin, it would not do to draw attention. This well-bred idiot would walk anyway, the sailors would still be dead or crippled, and you would be on half-pay quite soon if you make a stir. If you just accept your good fortune, you might be in a position to help the families of those sailors in a few years, which would be much better than nothing."
"In a few years? What are you suggesting?"
"With your leg still on the mend and Mainz given to another captain you will command a desk no matter what. So, you should make the best use of that time and go to school, it will do you some good."
Armin's brow grew a couple of creases.
"What school, torpedoes, communication?"
"Staff School."
"Uff. Am I even eligible?"
"Normally you should have at least one more sky command and some time behind a desk. But given the circumstances the Admiral's Staff decided to make an exception for you."
"Exceptional circumstances my ass, there are 18 dead…"
"Your visits to the bereaved seems to do you some good Armin, but don't overdo. Nothing will make these men alive again, but you can do a lot of good if you accept."
"On the Admiral's Staff?."
"Ah the arrogance of those who cross the endless sky. Yes, the Admiral's Staff. Do you even know why we have it?"
Armin's face indicated his incomprehension at the question.
"Of course, to administer the fleet and to give advice to the Admirals in command of the fleets."
"Yes, that we do too. It is important, but that is not the real reason we have the Staff. I think your ignorance has earned you a little history lesson."
Stahlmüller barely managed to suppress a groan.
"In the olden days the monarchs commanded the armies, even in the sky. Some of them, like Fredrik the Great were brilliant leaders, who could forget the assault on Leuthen Station? Others, like Fredrik Wilhelm III, not so much. In the aftermath of the Prussian defeat by Napoleon there was a lot of room for improvement. The Admirals Stein, Hardenberg, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were the ones who proposed an institution that was to institutionalize genius. The Staff was to be an institution which was to attract the best officers in a given field, not the highest born. They were to amass and analyze the information about the enemies and our own situation, they were to formulate doctrine and to provide plans for every conceivable and some inconceivable enemies. The Liberation Wars against Napoleon tested the first iterations nearly to destruction, but the Prussian Admiral's Staff prevailed.
And after that long time of peace that followed, we had the campaigns against the Danes, the Austrians, and finally the French. And believe me: It was the Admiral's Staff that made all the difference in that one. We knew exactly what stores were in what station, how many ships we could requisition, and in what shape they were in. The oh-so-great French Navy did not and they lost because of that.
These days we have so much more to do. We are influencing nearly every significant investment in industry and infrastructure to make sure it serves the needs of the navy. No steamer is built which does not conform to standards we set or influenced. Many, many factories have additional sets of molds and tools which allow them to aid the war effort if it comes to that. This is what we do, and if you study hard, you can become part of that. Oh yes, I understand that being next to God on a ship in the endless sky is more fun. But this is not about fun, this is about doing your duty to the Kaiser and the Fatherland. And if that is not enough, then your next command after a stint on the Staff will not be a measly small cruiser. So, are you grown up enough to take the deal?"
Armin Stahlmüller's knuckles turned white while he grabbed the table's edge. A nasty rage battled inside him with the feeling of vertigo caused by the new future that had been offered, but not expected. How was he expected to overlook the gross negligence of a fellow officer who had killed so many of his crew?
And yet, it would not resurrect a single one of them if he insisted to cause a scandal. Honor demanded he try , but what did his duty ask for? The face of Meier's widow was dragged from his memory unbidden, and the smell of her dyed clothing provided an answer.
"Try to keep the families of the fallen in their navy quarters if they want that, don't evict them so soon. Then I go to Staff School and Wolfgang can bumble on."
"Is it that important to you?"
"Yes, it is."
"Good, a crew makes the ship and a crew that thinks their captain cares will be a better crew. There is hope for you. Waiter, two glasses of Schaumwein, we have something to celebrate."
Armin Stahlmüller could just shake his head.
Belgrade Station, Storage Room
The man was small and slight, his cheeks drawn and his complexion too pale, all betraying the sickness that was in him and that would kill him, if it had the time to do so. He knelt before a table in a room which was lit by a few candles. Shadows flickered through the room, half hiding, half revealing the hooded figures who watched the man giving his sacred oath.
"..by entering into the society, do hereby swear by the Sun which shineth upon me, by the Worlds which feedeth me, by God, by the blood of my forefathers, by my honor and by my life, that from this moment onward and until my death, I shall faithfully serve the task of this organization and that I shall at all times be prepared to bear for it any sacrifice. I further swear by God, by my honor and by my life, that I shall unconditionally carry into effect all its orders and commands. I further swear by my God, by my honor and by my life, that I shall keep within myself all the secrets of this organization and carry them with me into my grave. May God and my brothers in this organization be my judges if at any time I should wittingly fail or break this oath."
The young man might be frail to the point where he had not been allowed to join the army but had shown to be a good marksman with a pistol. He was utterly convinced of his cause and knew that his days were numbered no matter what he did.
Gavrilo Princeps had just joined the Black Hand, the organization that fought for a state for all Serbs.
Admiralty Tract, London B station
The two men were normally associated with grandiose speeches and boundless energy, now they sat relaxed and enjoyed their cigars in amiable silence. The gray smoke wafted through a room with dark wooden panels and colored countless books which had not been opened for quite a while.
The wall spaces not given to bookshelves were taken by paintings of skyships, an endless procession of propellers, clouds, armor, and guns. There was nary a warship launched without a painting of it made and distributed to a nation that intimately knew that its wealth, power, and station rested on it having the strongest navy of any nation.
Both men were given to fleshy jowls and could have been father and son, but they were not. The older one took another pull from the cigar and sighed before answering.
His voice betrayed a bit of frustration.
"We should have done it last year; we can still do it during the next couple of years. After that the window of opportunity is closed and you know that, Winston."
Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty took another sip of straight whiskey before answering.
"Do what Jacky, destroy the German Imperial Navy while they are at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven stations without declaring war first? Like we did to the Danes during the Napoleonic Wars? We could do it during a war for our very existence, but in peacetime? Not only could we not convince the PM of that, but the UK's reputation would also suffer like no tomorrow. And to top it off his majesty is the cousin of the bloody Kaiser himself. So, not happening and I do believe you know that yourself. Really now, do you really want to strike or was this a ploy for an enlarged naval budget?"
Jacky Fisher, the retired First Sky Lord, blew a perfect smoke ring before answering.
"I am not so sure myself, maybe a bit of both. When we built Dreadnaught, we opened a can of worms and I had to watch them crawling out ever since. Before Dreadnought we had a comfortable superiority in the number of battleships. When the big D made them all obsolete, we restarted the naval arms race.
In the past that was no problem, even when others came up with the innovations first. The French built Gloire, we had two Warriors in service before they launched the second ship. We made more steel than anybody else, we invented the steam engine, we could out-build them all.
When I was a Midshipman on Warrior there was a German mini-state for every day of the calendar and their entrepreneurs desperately tried to learn from us. Now they are united, and now our warships are clad in Krupp-type armor of all things. The Ruhr cluster and the Silesian stations produce more steel than we do, their yards are at least as good as ours. We restarted the race and did not see that there was a new horse that runs as well as ours, if not better."
Winston Churchill's shoulders slumped for a moment before he answered.
"I shouldn't need to tell you, but if we would not have built Dreadnought, others would have built all big-gun battleships first. The Americans already had started riveting Soth Carolina when you finalized the design, and the bloody Japs just did not do it as they lacked money. The new race was coming regardless of our decision to start it or not. We must make sure we stay on top of it and our yards are still the best there are. We need to secure the budget to make it happen though, and that won't be easy. The Liberals have promised the voters to implement social security like the Germans have and that is going to cost a pretty penny. And with the unrest in the Irish cluster and the India stations the army asks for more soldiers and new weapons."
"For all the good that will do if the Germans cut off our lines of communication."
"We need to do both. But with the treaty with Japan, we can pull parts of the fleet closer to us, and some of the Dominions have promised to finance additional battlecruisers. Isn't that enough?"
Fisher snorted before replying.
"We can beat the Kaiser's Fleet, I am pretty sure of it, but we would badly bleed doing so. And when we are exhausted from such a battle, what wolves will crawl from the woods to see if they can grab something that is ours."
So, if we could take them out of the equation we should. The Germans started to pull their anchorages in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven stations back towards the center. They fortify the docking arms with battleship guns and armor. If we let them finish, then we can no longer Copenhagen the German fleet. Only a fool attacks a fortress."
Winston Churchill's shoulders slumped for a moment before he answered.
"How much longer do we have?"
"October 1914, at the latest."
"I see that it makes sense, and would save English blood, but I do not see the current government doing it. Best we can do, both of us, is to push every patriotic citizen, newspaper, and organization into screaming for more skyships. Then we have at least the gray hulls if the balloon goes up."
"If that is the best we can do?"
"It is."
Wilhelmshaven Station, Vorslap Section
Armin Stahlmüller checked the address he had been given again; it would not do to embarrass himself by knocking on the wrong door. He was aware of the many people who noticed him, from the not-so-unobtrusive glances by passers-by to the open stares by the urchins who had stopped their hallway soccer game when he had left the transit pod. This part of the station was relatively close to the station's axis, and so the pseudo-gravity was low. Sensitive persons might experience some nausea here and there were no grandiose windows that showed the endless sky. In short, it was a low rent district, and this particular part of it favored by enlisted naval personal. An officer, especially a captain, in dress uniform was always the harbinger of bad news in these quarters and so all eyes were on Armin Stahlmüller. He did not want to be here anymore than they liked to see him either. It was just that his godfather had told him that such visits would look good at the inquest and in the press if it came to that. And it was better than sitting in his quarters and waiting for the board's decision, so he had made the trip to his former helmsman's widow.
He knocked firmly at the door before stepping back a bit. There were voices inside, obviously children, and then the door finally opened. Henrietta Meier had probably been a good-looking girl when his helmsman had married her, four children and a lot of worries had taken that away from her. She was clad in somber black but showed her origin on a station by omitting a veil.
"Good afternoon Frau Meier, I am Captain Stahlmüller, your late husband's commanding officer. I hope you received my telegram?"
"Herr Kapitän, such an honor to have you here, please come in."
He made his way through a corridor containing some light coats and shoes and was sat at a table hidden under a tablecloth that was as thoroughly cleaned as it was mended in many places. The kids were there, both boys in clothes that mimicked sailor's uniforms, while the girls tried to look decent while wearing trousers. Really now, they lived on a station and all that, but could they not have used some dresses for the occasion?
And while the flat was scrupulously clean there was an all-pervasive smell as well. Some of it was cabbage, which was the main vegetable available to the working class. Some was unwashed bodies, more than the minimum ration of water was expensive on a station. But there was something else that Armin could not place, something chemical.
He realized that everybody in the family was looking at him and that he could hardly afford to muse about the smells in a lower-class household.
"Frau Meier, please accept my condolences. I had the privilege to serve as your husbands commanding officer, he was with me on the bridge of Frauenlob when the
accident happened. He died in the line of duty, and I can assure you that he died quickly and did not suffer."
He saw the white knuckles of the widow's hands as she clutched a handkerchief, saw the boys biting their lips and the girls starting to cry. Scheiße, this should have gone better, but how? He had not been the one to bring the news of the helmsman's death, that had been done by the station's priest. He could understand well enough that they were distraught, but did they have to show it that much? And worse, what was he to do?
Magda Meier's voice was toneless from trying to suppress the sobs that wanted out.
"Can you tell us what happened? The chaplain would only tell us that there was a terrible accident, and that many sailors were killed or injured, but not much more."
Armin sighed with relief, that was something he understood, something he could talk about.
"Frau Meier, you have to understand that the inquiry into this tragedy is not yet concluded, so I can speak only of things yet known. We were on a shooting range, proving that Frauenlob can put steel on target. We were actually doing quite well when our lookouts reported a shell in our course. I ordered a course change, which you late husband ably started, but even a small cruiser like Frauenlob is a massive thing, it will not change course very fast. We were not able to evade the shell, it penetrated the ship's armor and exploded inside."
"How..how could there be a shell in your way?"
Stahlmüller squeezed his eyes shut for a moment before answering.
"Each year a great lot of shells are shot at the Putlos range. We try to make very, very sure that all shells that miss their target self-destruct. Because if they do not, they will just fly on and on till air resistance stops them. Then they drift here and there, as the winds and the gravity of world or stations attract them. Then they become a menace. It seems one of these shells escaped and we were unlucky enough to catch it. Normally the sky is endless and hitting such a shell takes an act of God. Putlos is a shooting range, so it becomes a little more likely. Shells are not that big, spotting them in time is hard."
Magda's voice was hoarse and hardly above a whisper.
"So my husband, the father of our children is dead because of bad luck?"
Armin took a deep breath before answering.
"Yes, that it is. I wish I could give a better answer, but that is the sky sailor's life. We do all we can to make such accidents rare, but they still happen. We take the hits, we grieve and then we go on, because we have no choice, but our duty to the Kaiser."
"Why do we have no choice, there is an endless world out there. There is room and wealth for everyone, why do we need to fight for it?"
And that was the moment when Armin Müller identified the smell that he could not place before. It was the smell of cheap dye, which meant that the widow before him had dyed her clothing black as she did not have the means to buy new ones. She would receive a widow's pension, the Kaiser's marine did their part, but it would be far less than her husband's pay. She would have to bring up four kids, which would not allow her to work much, which meant this family was headed for poverty. And all of that because her husband died under his command. Scheiße…
"Herr Kapitän, is everything all right with you?"
Armin Müller was shaken from his fugue and shook his head before he could answer.
"Yes, I am sorry, I am still shaken by…this. Shall I give you the line about doing our duty for the Kaiser, which would be right by the way or the real reason?"
Magda seemed to be taken a bit back by such an answer, she had obviously not expected it.
"The real one then if you have the time."
"That is the least I can do. The real reason is that there is a huge world out there, but we cannot reach it. If we do not want to use the unpredictable winds, then we must use steam. Steam engines burn either wood tar or ethanol. One we gain from the world trees, the other from farms. Both need a lot of refining before we can use them, there is a lot of transporting half-finished goods before it is in our fuel bladders. And that means we can only move so far from the refineries before our fuel runs out.
Whoever controls the traffic between the logging camps, the farms, and the refineries can dictate his terms to those who cannot. Without secure skylanes, there will be no food on our tables, no clothes on our back, and no Germany at all. That is why we need to have our own warships, that is why we train to fight and that is why we accept such accidents as the one that claimed your husband. Your husband knew that it is drummed into everyone serving on the Kaiser's ship often enough, and he accepted that.
That is all I can say, but for that I am sorry."
"Thank you for coming Herr Kapitän, and thanks for the honest answer."
The view from the transport pod that brought Stahlmüller to his quarters was breathtaking, he saw none of it. His mind was back in the small, cheap apartment that the Meier's would probably could not afford for much longer. They had lost so much as Heiner Meier had served under his command. Was he unlucky, had he blundered….
SMS Deutschland, Enlisted Sailor's Mess
"I do not fucking care if you are tired of living your useless lives, but you stupid wasters of valuable space are trying to kill me and others who are worth their rations. What the fuck did you think you were doing?"
"I thought….
One of the men before him revealed his missing common sense by actually trying to say something, which was not recommended when Bootsmann (Bosun) Helmut Walter was on a roll.
"I told you a million times already, leave thinking to the horses, they have bigger heads than you are and certainly more sense. Bringing cookies on board and actually eating them. How can anybody be so very stupid, it is beyond me. So, for those of you who slept through the thousand times this was explained to you once more. Cookies, bread and similar foodstuff crumbles. And since you are no longer on a nice, warm cozy planet or the rotary portion of a sky station the crumbles will not drop on the floor. They will float around until somebody breathes them in or they clog ventilation shafts. Does any of you bleeders believe that breathing anything but air is healthy?
No, it is not. Any while we are at it, dust is at least as dangerous. You breathe it, which is not recommended, but even worse, it can accumulate in the wrong spaces. And if it does, then it just waits for a spark to explode in a fucking dust explosion. And this is why you imbeciles will spend the next hours cleaning this mess room. And if I find any crumble or any dust at the end of my next watch, then there will be hell to pay. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?
Helmut Walter did not check if they had understood, but made his way to the goat locker where he would have a go at food that tasted like salted paste and had the same consistency. He was not thinking about the food though, he was mostly fuming about the quality of sailors Deutschland had received when the latest bunch of conscripts could go home. Eating fucking cookies of all things, really now.
Far too many of these were dirtsiders, born and raised on one of the many worldlets that made up the Fatherland. Those kids which lived on sky stations were used to the dangers of no gravity, they knew how to content with water restrictions and were able to move with some grace and speed. These recruits were prized by the Navy, as they were much more useful and far less dangerous during the three years, they served the Kaiser. Unfortunately, the portion of these sent to Deutschland was minimal, while dirtsiders were a majority. And that said a lot of his ship's standing in the Kaiser's Navy. Once she had been the proud lead ship in the latest class of battleships, but that was before Dreadnought and Nassau.
These ships had 10 or 12 large-caliber guns, Deutschland had four. Newer ships were powered by steam turbines, his ship still used triple-expansion engines. In a fight against such ships Deutschland would be hopeless and her current role was to make up numbers. And that meant she received recruits of questionable caliber. On days Walter was honest with himself, he knew he was damaged goods himself. He could handle himself on any sky ship, nobody had any doubts about that. But put him ashore, in reach of beer and women and he was a disaster waiting to happen. Further promotion was out for him, and he dreaded the time when the Navy no longer had need of him or the ship he served on.
Court room, Wilhelmshaven Station
Armin Stahlmüller had been called back into the court room after the judges had deliberated his case. He relaxed a tension he had not really been aware of when he saw the sword on the judge's table. Its hilt pointed towards him, and that stated the verdict before a single word of it had been read. He was to be cleared of all charges. He still had to stand at attention for quite some time while the verdict was read, it was not exactly what he had expected. His actions in the last seconds before the collision had been questioned again and again, as were his efforts at damage control afterwards. He had half-expected the sort of acquittal which would proclaim him free of all guilt and which would still stop his career cold. Now he heard phrases like "in the highest traditions of the service", "Selfless sacrifice", and "without regards to his personal safety". Which was, of course, very nice to hear, but as it was unexpected, he was still uneasy. Unexpected things were usually not good news in the Kaiser's Navy.
He was ushered out of the room with polite efficiency and looked for directions when he was stopped cold. Sitting on a bench usually reserved for witnesses his godfather gave him a friendly smile, which made Armin shudder.
"Ah, the hero of the Frauenlob tragedy has been vindicated, so he can resume his duties to the Fatherland again. Let us celebrate this occasion, I have reserved a table in an acceptable restaurant nearby."
Armin needed a second to come to terms with his surprise.
"Hello uncle Gottfried, nice to see you, but I'll admit it is a bit unexpected."
"Yes, yes, let us discuss when we are a bit more private, shall we?"
The older man was still spry enough so that he had to slow down to allow for Armin's hobble supported by a cane.
Gottfried von Schlehendorf had been close to his then-secretary, Martin Stahlmüller and had accepted the role of godfather with grace. He had taken the vow to see after Armin if anything should happen, without expecting anything from it. That was until a steam locomotive vented hot high-pressure steam directly onto Armin's parents and converted them into nightmarish globs of flesh. Gottfried, a widower, would not dream of not fulfilling his duties, but found it most expedient to fob Armin off to a cadet school with all due haste. Gottfried ended his sky-faring days as a Captain himself but had stayed with the Navy and worked for the Admiral's Staff ever since. And while he had not used his influence to further Armin's career much, his hints and advice had certainly not hurt it.
The restaurant was small and not too occupied at this hour. Being so close to the Admiralty meant that their uniforms did not stand out at all.
Armin lifted an eyebrow when he saw that Gottfried's beer was served in a personalized stein, his godfather was obviously a regular. Both men looked into each other's eyes when their steins met, it fell to Gottfried to give the toast.
"Prost, to an inquiry well ended."
"Prost."
Both drank sparingly and Gottfried's lustrous beard could not hide an amused smile.
"Aren't you happy with the full acquittal you just received? It could not have been better you know."
Armin shook his head for a moment, as if to clear water from his ears.
"Of course, I am bloody happy, why shouldn't I? It is just that this much praise was a bit…surprising, and given the grilling the board gave me about the last course change I ordered I am wondering what I am missing. I lost good men on Frauenlob and the ship will be broken up. Scheiße, there are families who will miss their husbands and fathers forever because I was unlucky."
The smile on von Schlehendorf's face incongruously broadened for a second.
"Ah, you are growing up, that is good to see. That will make it easier to give you the real news."
Armin Stahlmüller did his level best to hide his impatience and growing dread. His leg would heal in time, the navy would not send him to the beach with a shovel, wouldn't they?
"The real news?"
"Well, to start with, let's clear up why the court was so full of praise and so willing to attribute the loss of so many of the Kaiser's sailors to chance. During the investigation and cleanup of Frauenlob we found enough fragments of the shell to ascertain two things. First off, it was not a practice shell, but a high-explosive round, the kind that should never be used on the range. The other interesting tidbit was the caliber of the shell, 24 cm in fact."
"So?"
"So, the only ship that used the Putlos range in recent years that is equipped with 24 cm cannon is the "Fuerst Bismark" and at the one time it shot at the range it was commanded by one Wolfgang von Tirpitz"
Armin sat there, dumbstruck.
"Wolfgang von Tirpitz, the son of Alfred von Tirpitz, the Great Admiral?"
"Precisely. Now the evidence is somewhat circumstantial, there were other ships, like the old Wittelsbachs that used the range, but that was so long ago that their shells would have been elsewhere. It would certainly not hold out in front of a court of inquiry, but it gave me a bit of leverage, and I used it to help your case along."
Stahlmüller's face turned an interesting shade of red.
"So, because of this well-bred idiot 18 good sailors died. Others will be crippled for life and this cretin walks?"
"Would you please quiet down Armin, it would not do to draw attention. This well-bred idiot would walk anyway, the sailors would still be dead or crippled, and you would be on half-pay quite soon if you make a stir. If you just accept your good fortune, you might be in a position to help the families of those sailors in a few years, which would be much better than nothing."
"In a few years? What are you suggesting?"
"With your leg still on the mend and Mainz given to another captain you will command a desk no matter what. So, you should make the best use of that time and go to school, it will do you some good."
Armin's brow grew a couple of creases.
"What school, torpedoes, communication?"
"Staff School."
"Uff. Am I even eligible?"
"Normally you should have at least one more sky command and some time behind a desk. But given the circumstances the Admiral's Staff decided to make an exception for you."
"Exceptional circumstances my ass, there are 18 dead…"
"Your visits to the bereaved seems to do you some good Armin, but don't overdo. Nothing will make these men alive again, but you can do a lot of good if you accept."
"On the Admiral's Staff?."
"Ah the arrogance of those who cross the endless sky. Yes, the Admiral's Staff. Do you even know why we have it?"
Armin's face indicated his incomprehension at the question.
"Of course, to administer the fleet and to give advice to the Admirals in command of the fleets."
"Yes, that we do too. It is important, but that is not the real reason we have the Staff. I think your ignorance has earned you a little history lesson."
Stahlmüller barely managed to suppress a groan.
"In the olden days the monarchs commanded the armies, even in the sky. Some of them, like Fredrik the Great were brilliant leaders, who could forget the assault on Leuthen Station? Others, like Fredrik Wilhelm III, not so much. In the aftermath of the Prussian defeat by Napoleon there was a lot of room for improvement. The Admirals Stein, Hardenberg, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were the ones who proposed an institution that was to institutionalize genius. The Staff was to be an institution which was to attract the best officers in a given field, not the highest born. They were to amass and analyze the information about the enemies and our own situation, they were to formulate doctrine and to provide plans for every conceivable and some inconceivable enemies. The Liberation Wars against Napoleon tested the first iterations nearly to destruction, but the Prussian Admiral's Staff prevailed.
And after that long time of peace that followed, we had the campaigns against the Danes, the Austrians, and finally the French. And believe me: It was the Admiral's Staff that made all the difference in that one. We knew exactly what stores were in what station, how many ships we could requisition, and in what shape they were in. The oh-so-great French Navy did not and they lost because of that.
These days we have so much more to do. We are influencing nearly every significant investment in industry and infrastructure to make sure it serves the needs of the navy. No steamer is built which does not conform to standards we set or influenced. Many, many factories have additional sets of molds and tools which allow them to aid the war effort if it comes to that. This is what we do, and if you study hard, you can become part of that. Oh yes, I understand that being next to God on a ship in the endless sky is more fun. But this is not about fun, this is about doing your duty to the Kaiser and the Fatherland. And if that is not enough, then your next command after a stint on the Staff will not be a measly small cruiser. So, are you grown up enough to take the deal?"
Armin Stahlmüller's knuckles turned white while he grabbed the table's edge. A nasty rage battled inside him with the feeling of vertigo caused by the new future that had been offered, but not expected. How was he expected to overlook the gross negligence of a fellow officer who had killed so many of his crew?
And yet, it would not resurrect a single one of them if he insisted to cause a scandal. Honor demanded he try , but what did his duty ask for? The face of Meier's widow was dragged from his memory unbidden, and the smell of her dyed clothing provided an answer.
"Try to keep the families of the fallen in their navy quarters if they want that, don't evict them so soon. Then I go to Staff School and Wolfgang can bumble on."
"Is it that important to you?"
"Yes, it is."
"Good, a crew makes the ship and a crew that thinks their captain cares will be a better crew. There is hope for you. Waiter, two glasses of Schaumwein, we have something to celebrate."
Armin Stahlmüller could just shake his head.
Belgrade Station, Storage Room
The man was small and slight, his cheeks drawn and his complexion too pale, all betraying the sickness that was in him and that would kill him, if it had the time to do so. He knelt before a table in a room which was lit by a few candles. Shadows flickered through the room, half hiding, half revealing the hooded figures who watched the man giving his sacred oath.
"..by entering into the society, do hereby swear by the Sun which shineth upon me, by the Worlds which feedeth me, by God, by the blood of my forefathers, by my honor and by my life, that from this moment onward and until my death, I shall faithfully serve the task of this organization and that I shall at all times be prepared to bear for it any sacrifice. I further swear by God, by my honor and by my life, that I shall unconditionally carry into effect all its orders and commands. I further swear by my God, by my honor and by my life, that I shall keep within myself all the secrets of this organization and carry them with me into my grave. May God and my brothers in this organization be my judges if at any time I should wittingly fail or break this oath."
The young man might be frail to the point where he had not been allowed to join the army but had shown to be a good marksman with a pistol. He was utterly convinced of his cause and knew that his days were numbered no matter what he did.
Gavrilo Princeps had just joined the Black Hand, the organization that fought for a state for all Serbs.
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Flour marks the honorable dead
1910/Take 2
Auditorium, Karl-Ruprechts-University, Heidelberg Station
The rising ranks of seats were completely full. The students all wore suits and ties, the latter often denoting their allegiance with a Burschenschaft, the scars in their young faces demonstrating their willingness to fight with the sword. The very few patches of colors denoted female students, there might be completely full five of them in each block of a hundred. That was quite a lot already, with history being a subject considered acceptable for a woman from a good family while she waited for a suitable husband.
Isabel von der Marwitz managed to suppress a snort and straightened her back. She did not believe that her splendid reputation as an orator, the sum of her academic credentials or the subject of today's lecture would draw such a crowd. It was the novelty of a woman lecturing, and for many men there was an undertone of watching a horse speak: fascinating for sure, but not for the message to be heard.
Isabel was sure that many in the crowd suspected her of knowing that, which combined itself with this being her first lecture as a research associate. This had the potential to make or break her academic career. Von der Marwitz reminded herself that more than a few of her superiors were busy researching the artifacts she had brought them. Her hand landed flat on the table before her with a crack when the clock's hand reached the appointed hour. The silence that followed was broken by a voice trained to overcome the scream of the slipstream and the roar of engines, she was easily heard in the very corners of the auditorium.
"Ladies and gentlemen, you honor me with your numerous attendance. "Today's lecture is about something that everybody thinks he knows about, nearly everybody is wrong about that, and that has an importance that can hardly be understated.
Today's lecture is about those who came before, about the root races who lived before us and who made the world we live in. Let us lay down the basics first, so that we are all starting the same page, before we come to the details that are oh-so-important.
The first race to populate this world, the one that made the Ring itself, and the one we know the least about, were the Polarians. From all we know they had no physical body as we know them, but were ethereal, made up from a form of matter as yet unknown to us. They left no bodies, and if they left notes or literature it no longer exists in any shape or form that we could recognize, let alone decipher. Nothing is known about what motivated them, we have no idea why or how they built the Ring and the worldlets inside. If there was a race before them, how they came to be and what caused them to move on or die out is a mystery. What we know about them comes from a couple of sources provided by their successors, mainly Atlantean copies of Lemurian texts and their translation of the Howardian Scrolls, which may or may not be translations of Hyperborean texts. To call them nebulous is likely not just our state of knowledge about them, but is probably also a good description of their bodies.
The Hyperboreans were the first race that left physical evidence for us to find. Many worldlets hold their graves, some ruins tell us about their passing. We have very few texts from them, as they preferred knotted ropes to keep their messages. They did not age well. What we know, both from Lemurian descriptions and their mortal remains is that they were a golden-skinned race with humanoid bodies. Their social life must have been interesting given that they procreated by budding. We know the latter as the Lemurians were fascinated by that and noted it several times, but we also have remains that are quite conclusive. The current theory about their disappearance is that budding is not conductive to healthy reproduction. Sooner or later defects accumulated and their numbers dwindled. I have seen skeletons which would support that theory, but never in enough numbers to be sure.
The Lemurians who followed them left some texts that we can access and impressive artifacts, including this station's very core. Indeed the cores of most stations we know of are their work, as are the beanstalks that connect transit stations to them. They were the first progenitor race that that reproduced sexually, with very tall, slender bodies adapted to low-gravity environments. They seem to stem from a group of low-gravity worldlets in the Madagascar sector. Most of these worldlets have been destroyed in a cataclysm when their orbits around each other decayed and they collided. They could live on their stations, but they could not farm there and they could certainly not live on the higher-gravity worldlets we are used to. Either as a separate evolution, or more likely through adaption of a small group they gave way to the Atlanteans.
These are the people we know most about, they left many texts and artifacts. These are more accessible to us for three reasons: They are much younger and therefore better preserved. They were the race which was closest to our own physiology and judging from their texts, our psychology. We can relate much better to a race that formed bonds and procreated than to one that probably rested for six months to bud. And in some ways their technology was less developed than that of the ones that went before. We can simply understand it better than some Lemurian marvel.
We need to study those who went before, for many reasons besides scientific curiosity. They show the way forward, they show what is possible if we apply scientific thought and engineering effort, they point the way towards miracles. But they are also no more, or in the case of the Atlanteans their civilization is no more, they might well be our forbearers in more ways than one.
We need to study the reasons for their demise, we need to understand why they vanished for otherwise we might very well join them. Does any of you know why they are no longer around?
There was a silence that lasted uncomfortably long until a student raised his hand after looking around for somebody else to take the burden.
"They became decadent, only interested in their own pleasures, no longer wanting to contribute to their society?"
Isabel sighed.
"That is the answer your priest gave you, not your history teacher, at least I very much hope so. Yes, we have evidence that hints that the Atlanteans practiced many things we consider to be perversions of the highest order. What we do not have is any evidence that these practices increased in depravity or number by the end of their time. What we do have is evidence, lots and lots of it, of increasingly violent wars. It is a bit hard to tell, but to me and some other researchers it looks like they fought their last war with pathogens, spreading diseases and plagues far and wide. There is a hypothesis that they managed to wipe a class of plants from existence they needed for their survival, others think they managed to curtail their own procreation. Whatever they did they managed to reduce their numbers below the point where they could keep their own civilization up, losing large parts of their technological and scientific know-how.
They lost all that, reduced themselves to small groups isolated on worldlets and stations. For many millennia they lost the capability to travel to other worlds, to communicate with each other. They became isolated from each other, their languages developed dialects that became more disparate with each passing century. Even their very bodies started to change, conforming themselves to the worldlets they were living on, the food, and their sexual preferences."
That was when a ripple went through the students. A woman using the term "sexual preferences" in public, oh my.
Isabel von der Marwitz continued as if nothing had happened.
"And after all these years, they became us. No matter if British industrialist, Chinese coolie or Prussian Junker: we are all descendents of the Atlanteans.
We need to study them in great detail, for many reasons. Many think the most important one is the bits of new technologies that allow us to proceed. Those nations who fail in that, like the Chinese Empire, fall behind and need to confirm to the whims of those who did better.
But I posit that we need to study them to avoid their fate, otherwise there will be a lecture in a few thousand years where some wise being muses what became of the humans."
Assault Boat S-37, close to Kummersdorf beanstalk
The station loomed large before the approaching fleet of assault boats, its myriad lights providing a beacon in the darkness. Compared to the ancient edifice the wooden assault craft were less than flies, seemingly too small to affect it at all. But like flies the assault boats came in an innumerable swarm. Small red lights shone to the rear of each boat, trying to mark their position to its mates without giving them away to the enemy. So far that seemed to have worked more or less well. At least in Schuster's limited field of view there had been no collisions. In a few moments the sun would be allowed to pierce the veil the Lemurians had put up on the ring's inner wall, the first traces of light were already appearing on the noncom's left. Schuster was not sure if he should dread or hail the coming dawn. On the one hand it would allow the assault boats to assume a much tighter formation, avoid collisions, and communicate. On the other hand it would expose them, and these assault boats were flimsy. Most parts would keep small fragments or a rifle caliber bullet out, but that was it.
If a destroyer would take this craft in his sights, it would be blood and splinters in under a minute. What a cruiser or battleship could do to a swarm was indescribable. There were assault boats lacking the capacity for marines, being armed with revolver cannon and other small artillery pieces, they might buy the assault boats some time if such a thing came to pass. Maybe.
As long as they could pull the darkness of the night around them like a cloak, a swarm of assault boats like this had a decent chance to arrive at their targets unmolested. A trip that would take several days was unthinkable, they would be spotted and attacked by heavier units. It would need just a single destroyer or cruiser to break through whatever escort they had for a nearly guaranteed massacre.
Lieutenant Paul Schuster wanted the boatswain to push the throttle to all-ahead, but every time he did so the thought "twenty tons of potatoes equal one ton of ethanol" appeared unbidden.
The six-cylinder inline engine in the middle of the boat might look big in the confines of an assault boat, but was pretty dainty otherwise. And its carburetor and small pistons would certainly not run on such a gooey semiliquid like wood tar, that stuff would only burn in much bigger steam engines. He had to watch as mirrors and lights signaled the enemy's approach. Two destroyers and a light cruiser were still many kilometers out, but closing quickly. A group of gunboats detached themselves from the swarm, heading towards the ships like minnows attacking a shark. Others placed themselves between the station and the assault boats, preparing to lay down the smoke to obscure the boats from whatever shore batteries were on the station before him.
And it did not take long for the gunboats to lay down a thick, black smoke that burned in everyone's eyes and smelled of the oil used to make it. Schuster did his best to spot the boat on the port side, trying to make sure that they would not collide even in this muck. He had to shout corrections to helmsman twice during the next minutes and his hands clamped hard on the railing before him all the time.
And then the smoke was gone as quickly as it had appeared, with the station being so much closer. Schuster could make out the enemy's batteries without the help of his binocular's by now, even the comically small muzzle flashes from the top of the barrels. At the same time the gunboats steered to port and starboard with all their might, they had no role to play in the actual landings. Before they changed course they dropped small cylinders with fins at their ends, speeding towards the station's surface by their inertia alone. Some burst shortly before hitting the station, other vented on impact, leaving clouds of white powder behind.
And that was when the helmsman pulled the levers all backwards, changing the propeller's pitch, pushing the throttle lever all the way forward, and deploying huge wooden brake flaps on both sides of the hull.
The Lieutenant shouted "Brace yourselves" to his men, even when they should know by now. Everybody was pushed forward by an invisible force and the assault boat reduced speed with every second. Still, the approaching surface of the station took his breath away, as his treacherous head insisted they were far too fast and would crash into the steel surface that now filled his field of view. The impact when it came was quite tame compared to his expectations, it was still enough to jar everybody.
A quick look around showed that most boats around him had made the landing, only a few flew the flags that either marked them destroyed by artillery or crashed upon landing.
The assault boat moved back up a bit until the electromagnets at its bottom connected and the chains grew taut. Now he could loosen the harness that kept him anchored to his position, now he could pull himself from handhold to handhold and look at his men. Seemed that they had learned to brace themselves by now, there seemed to be nothing worse than a bloody nose this time. The ramp was pushed down by two burly deck hands who waved at him.
He had needed years to train his voice to the point where it would carry like that.
"Go, go, go, you do not want to be a better target. And keep your feet on the bloody ground."
Schuster watched his platoon exit the loading ramp and all Marines charged while screaming at the top of their lungs. It did not make much sense, but impressed the umpires to no end, so Schuster encouraged it. Instead of screaming he watched that his men ran well. One foot had to remain on the ground at all times, the magnetic heel pressed to the station's surface, the other lifted up, sliding the toes forward till the leg was extended and that heel became the new anchor point. Especially the station-rats would be tempted to slide forward on their toes like an ice skater. Inside the station that could lead to an embarrassing collision with a wall, outside it might leave them hanging helplessly in the air, a target for ridicule at best and a bullet at worst. There was a magnet and a string in a pouch on Schuster's belt, that would give him a chance at self-recovery if that went wrong and he had the time.
For a wonder nobody tried to be cute and so everybody gained the 50 meters from the assault craft the orders asked for. The sergeant had to shout to overcome the scream of many engines, men and the clamor of guns firing blanks.
"First team down, second advance."
That made half of his men drop on their bellies aiming their Lugers downrange while the others made their way forward. Schuster winced when he saw at least two marines haplessly charging right through their comrades field of fire. That would not look good, and the Umpires promptly designated both of them dead. They obediently stood still where they were. The rest of his men advanced by teams, firing blank cartridges that were caught by ugly bags mounted to the side of the elegant carbines. Three more of them were declared wounded or dead before they reached the barricade before them. Schuster made sure he was in front by now, the next bit needed a bit of a deft hand. Counting the seams between the hull plates he guesstimated the range to the barricade and saw that it was good. He dropped to his knee while the first troop kept up a fusillade that would have kept the defenders heads down if there would have been bullets in it.
His voice managed to carry through the din of the mock battle.
"Grenadiers, two seconds".
Four more marines took a knee, and like him frantically twisted the handle of their potato mashers till the indicator reached the "2" cut into it. They seemed to have it in hand a few seconds later.
"Grenadiers, throw."
That made all of them throw their weapons as hard as they could. One went far too high, reasonably straight lines. He had estimated correctly, the grenades reached the end of their timed fuses when they were past the barricade. The explosions that followed were quite subdued, the flour they released would indicate which soldiers were designated "killed" without the need for an umpire to make a ruling about it.
No matter how many of them were "taken out", now was the time.
"Charge" brought his platoon forward as fast as they could shove their magnetic boots forward. Judging from the impressive amount of fire they laid down, most of them seemed to have loaded a fresh drum magazine. That allowed them to put 32 rounds downrange without reloading and allowed them to reach the barricade. Four of them were declared "killed" then, the rest mimicked shooting the defenders.
Schuster took a deep breath, counted his remaining marines and decided he could go forward. Pointing at a piece of inoffensive wall besides a hatch he raised his voice again.
"To the wall to the left of the lock, go go go What are you waiting for, a written invitation?"
Another assault shuffle forward brought his platoon to the wall where they could catch their breath. Schuster saw two sappers hug the wall till they were besides the door and place a box on it that was held by magnets. One of the sappers pulled a cord from it and a red light started to glow evilly on its top. An umpire declared the attack successful, but also declared a sapper dead. The sergeant tried to be heard over the clamor.
"Grenadiers, two each. First troop, advance"
The soldiers closest to the open hatch did the same as Schuster himself, and pulled more grenades from their belts. No need for a closely timed fuses, the room behind the hatch itself would make sure the grenades would explode where they were supposed to. Schuster managed to throw his grenade without exposing his arm for more than a second, one soldiers was not that good and managed to float off. One of his comrades managed to pull him in in time and for a wonder none were declared casualties. The first grenades were followed by a second set moments later, meant to catch any defenders who would come up from cover after the first ones. For a change first troop managed to enter the hatch closely after the muffled bangs had distributed more flour over everything.
They mostly managed to follow their training, checking the corners, trying to keep their sector observed and firing a blank at anything that resembled a soldier, whether moving or not. One was declared dead when a surprisingly clean enemy fired off a single round, apart from that all "survived". They occupied the barricade the blue team had erected, and covered the hatch beyond. Schuster and the second troop arranged themselves on the sides of that and a soldier turned the wheel that opened the inner hatch. The big steel door had opened by half a meter when a grenade sailed through it. Schuster froze in place when one of his soldiers kicked it back through the opening where it exploded a second later. The sergeant tried to memorize that this had been Lafontaine, who should receive an evening off while he pushed two more mock-explosives through the hatch. When he emerged through the opening he only found soldiers covered in white dust, coughing and trying to pat at least some of the flour from their uniforms.
Schuster barely managed to suppress a smile.
"Well done lads. Take position behind those planters over there and the benches on the left. Runner, inform Captain Voss that we have taken hatch 2B."
The sergeant found himself a spot that offered cover and allowed him to observe his platoon. He saw that it was good and stole a glance over the railing that kept him from the inner core of the station. It was a sight that never failed to amaze, the ancients had left an open shaft with dozens of galleries around it. They allowed the loading and unloading of the electric cable cars that brought passengers and freight from and to the worldlet below them. Windows below showed the huge cable that led to the landscape hundreds of kilometers below them, it was a sight to frighten anyone not used to it, and would never fail to awe. And it would be the one and only chance to stage an invasion if it came to that.
1911/take 2
Madame Rosa's saloon
The Obsler in Armin Stahlmüller hand was good, not sublime as its price tag suggested, but good enough not to rise any ire. Given how Armin had spent the last two hours getting any rise out of him would have been an undertaking of heroic proportions. Understanding and expecting exactly that his file de jour had left with a peek on his cheek and a wink a while ago. Stahlmüller relaxed as much as he dared, he had to make the trip to his quarters soon enough. Sleep was something that the students of the Kriegsakademie, the academy of war, had very little of
He was feeling very mellow, a bit melancholic after the romp he had anticipated for a week at least, consummated well enough, but now over. Besides him were two others from his Kriegsakademie class, and they looked to be in the same state as him.
Michael von Alvensleben seemed to study the murky swirls inside his glass before downing it in one go.
"You know the world is going down the drain Armin, we might as well enjoy what time is left?"
Armin squinted and shook his head. He had not expected that from the young captain on the opposite ottoman.
"What is it Michael, that the SPD gained more seats in the Reichstag or that women will probably be allowed to vote some time in the next 50 years?"
There was a subdued belch from von Alvensleben before he got his answer. The fact that his fellow student did not catch Armin's sarcasm indicated how far he was gone.
"That…that. And the fact that nobody respects the old families anymore, as if somebody who can hardly name his grandfather is the same as someone from a family who can look back at noble ancestors for a dozen generations. Or that income from trade and lending is as honorable as nobly growing food on honest soil.
Fuck this, we know that a new cycle starts every hundred years or so, that nations have their time in the sun and then fade. Look at the Spaniards, the world was their oyster 300 years ago and now they can't pay their sailors and are beaten like a drum by the Americans of all people. The Swedes called the Baltics their personal pool, now they even lost the Norwegian sector and most of their raw materials. The French still think they matter after the drubbing they received from us, but boy did our ancestors shake in their boots when they thought of Grand Admiral Napoleon.
Good times end sooner or later Armin, and it might be our time now, I don't know. But we lose our connection to what made us grand in the past, and what I see in the future scares me. Socialism, women who vote and work, undisciplined children and youth who want anything except learning and.
You know that so many say we will not have another great war, that we are all too well connected by trade and too clever to have another one. I say let us have one, see who is the top dog and shake everything up so that people see what really matters…"
"Let's go to our quarters Michael, tomorrow will start early enough."
Auditorium, Karl-Ruprechts-University, Heidelberg Station
The rising ranks of seats were completely full. The students all wore suits and ties, the latter often denoting their allegiance with a Burschenschaft, the scars in their young faces demonstrating their willingness to fight with the sword. The very few patches of colors denoted female students, there might be completely full five of them in each block of a hundred. That was quite a lot already, with history being a subject considered acceptable for a woman from a good family while she waited for a suitable husband.
Isabel von der Marwitz managed to suppress a snort and straightened her back. She did not believe that her splendid reputation as an orator, the sum of her academic credentials or the subject of today's lecture would draw such a crowd. It was the novelty of a woman lecturing, and for many men there was an undertone of watching a horse speak: fascinating for sure, but not for the message to be heard.
Isabel was sure that many in the crowd suspected her of knowing that, which combined itself with this being her first lecture as a research associate. This had the potential to make or break her academic career. Von der Marwitz reminded herself that more than a few of her superiors were busy researching the artifacts she had brought them. Her hand landed flat on the table before her with a crack when the clock's hand reached the appointed hour. The silence that followed was broken by a voice trained to overcome the scream of the slipstream and the roar of engines, she was easily heard in the very corners of the auditorium.
"Ladies and gentlemen, you honor me with your numerous attendance. "Today's lecture is about something that everybody thinks he knows about, nearly everybody is wrong about that, and that has an importance that can hardly be understated.
Today's lecture is about those who came before, about the root races who lived before us and who made the world we live in. Let us lay down the basics first, so that we are all starting the same page, before we come to the details that are oh-so-important.
The first race to populate this world, the one that made the Ring itself, and the one we know the least about, were the Polarians. From all we know they had no physical body as we know them, but were ethereal, made up from a form of matter as yet unknown to us. They left no bodies, and if they left notes or literature it no longer exists in any shape or form that we could recognize, let alone decipher. Nothing is known about what motivated them, we have no idea why or how they built the Ring and the worldlets inside. If there was a race before them, how they came to be and what caused them to move on or die out is a mystery. What we know about them comes from a couple of sources provided by their successors, mainly Atlantean copies of Lemurian texts and their translation of the Howardian Scrolls, which may or may not be translations of Hyperborean texts. To call them nebulous is likely not just our state of knowledge about them, but is probably also a good description of their bodies.
The Hyperboreans were the first race that left physical evidence for us to find. Many worldlets hold their graves, some ruins tell us about their passing. We have very few texts from them, as they preferred knotted ropes to keep their messages. They did not age well. What we know, both from Lemurian descriptions and their mortal remains is that they were a golden-skinned race with humanoid bodies. Their social life must have been interesting given that they procreated by budding. We know the latter as the Lemurians were fascinated by that and noted it several times, but we also have remains that are quite conclusive. The current theory about their disappearance is that budding is not conductive to healthy reproduction. Sooner or later defects accumulated and their numbers dwindled. I have seen skeletons which would support that theory, but never in enough numbers to be sure.
The Lemurians who followed them left some texts that we can access and impressive artifacts, including this station's very core. Indeed the cores of most stations we know of are their work, as are the beanstalks that connect transit stations to them. They were the first progenitor race that that reproduced sexually, with very tall, slender bodies adapted to low-gravity environments. They seem to stem from a group of low-gravity worldlets in the Madagascar sector. Most of these worldlets have been destroyed in a cataclysm when their orbits around each other decayed and they collided. They could live on their stations, but they could not farm there and they could certainly not live on the higher-gravity worldlets we are used to. Either as a separate evolution, or more likely through adaption of a small group they gave way to the Atlanteans.
These are the people we know most about, they left many texts and artifacts. These are more accessible to us for three reasons: They are much younger and therefore better preserved. They were the race which was closest to our own physiology and judging from their texts, our psychology. We can relate much better to a race that formed bonds and procreated than to one that probably rested for six months to bud. And in some ways their technology was less developed than that of the ones that went before. We can simply understand it better than some Lemurian marvel.
We need to study those who went before, for many reasons besides scientific curiosity. They show the way forward, they show what is possible if we apply scientific thought and engineering effort, they point the way towards miracles. But they are also no more, or in the case of the Atlanteans their civilization is no more, they might well be our forbearers in more ways than one.
We need to study the reasons for their demise, we need to understand why they vanished for otherwise we might very well join them. Does any of you know why they are no longer around?
There was a silence that lasted uncomfortably long until a student raised his hand after looking around for somebody else to take the burden.
"They became decadent, only interested in their own pleasures, no longer wanting to contribute to their society?"
Isabel sighed.
"That is the answer your priest gave you, not your history teacher, at least I very much hope so. Yes, we have evidence that hints that the Atlanteans practiced many things we consider to be perversions of the highest order. What we do not have is any evidence that these practices increased in depravity or number by the end of their time. What we do have is evidence, lots and lots of it, of increasingly violent wars. It is a bit hard to tell, but to me and some other researchers it looks like they fought their last war with pathogens, spreading diseases and plagues far and wide. There is a hypothesis that they managed to wipe a class of plants from existence they needed for their survival, others think they managed to curtail their own procreation. Whatever they did they managed to reduce their numbers below the point where they could keep their own civilization up, losing large parts of their technological and scientific know-how.
They lost all that, reduced themselves to small groups isolated on worldlets and stations. For many millennia they lost the capability to travel to other worlds, to communicate with each other. They became isolated from each other, their languages developed dialects that became more disparate with each passing century. Even their very bodies started to change, conforming themselves to the worldlets they were living on, the food, and their sexual preferences."
That was when a ripple went through the students. A woman using the term "sexual preferences" in public, oh my.
Isabel von der Marwitz continued as if nothing had happened.
"And after all these years, they became us. No matter if British industrialist, Chinese coolie or Prussian Junker: we are all descendents of the Atlanteans.
We need to study them in great detail, for many reasons. Many think the most important one is the bits of new technologies that allow us to proceed. Those nations who fail in that, like the Chinese Empire, fall behind and need to confirm to the whims of those who did better.
But I posit that we need to study them to avoid their fate, otherwise there will be a lecture in a few thousand years where some wise being muses what became of the humans."
Assault Boat S-37, close to Kummersdorf beanstalk
The station loomed large before the approaching fleet of assault boats, its myriad lights providing a beacon in the darkness. Compared to the ancient edifice the wooden assault craft were less than flies, seemingly too small to affect it at all. But like flies the assault boats came in an innumerable swarm. Small red lights shone to the rear of each boat, trying to mark their position to its mates without giving them away to the enemy. So far that seemed to have worked more or less well. At least in Schuster's limited field of view there had been no collisions. In a few moments the sun would be allowed to pierce the veil the Lemurians had put up on the ring's inner wall, the first traces of light were already appearing on the noncom's left. Schuster was not sure if he should dread or hail the coming dawn. On the one hand it would allow the assault boats to assume a much tighter formation, avoid collisions, and communicate. On the other hand it would expose them, and these assault boats were flimsy. Most parts would keep small fragments or a rifle caliber bullet out, but that was it.
If a destroyer would take this craft in his sights, it would be blood and splinters in under a minute. What a cruiser or battleship could do to a swarm was indescribable. There were assault boats lacking the capacity for marines, being armed with revolver cannon and other small artillery pieces, they might buy the assault boats some time if such a thing came to pass. Maybe.
As long as they could pull the darkness of the night around them like a cloak, a swarm of assault boats like this had a decent chance to arrive at their targets unmolested. A trip that would take several days was unthinkable, they would be spotted and attacked by heavier units. It would need just a single destroyer or cruiser to break through whatever escort they had for a nearly guaranteed massacre.
Lieutenant Paul Schuster wanted the boatswain to push the throttle to all-ahead, but every time he did so the thought "twenty tons of potatoes equal one ton of ethanol" appeared unbidden.
The six-cylinder inline engine in the middle of the boat might look big in the confines of an assault boat, but was pretty dainty otherwise. And its carburetor and small pistons would certainly not run on such a gooey semiliquid like wood tar, that stuff would only burn in much bigger steam engines. He had to watch as mirrors and lights signaled the enemy's approach. Two destroyers and a light cruiser were still many kilometers out, but closing quickly. A group of gunboats detached themselves from the swarm, heading towards the ships like minnows attacking a shark. Others placed themselves between the station and the assault boats, preparing to lay down the smoke to obscure the boats from whatever shore batteries were on the station before him.
And it did not take long for the gunboats to lay down a thick, black smoke that burned in everyone's eyes and smelled of the oil used to make it. Schuster did his best to spot the boat on the port side, trying to make sure that they would not collide even in this muck. He had to shout corrections to helmsman twice during the next minutes and his hands clamped hard on the railing before him all the time.
And then the smoke was gone as quickly as it had appeared, with the station being so much closer. Schuster could make out the enemy's batteries without the help of his binocular's by now, even the comically small muzzle flashes from the top of the barrels. At the same time the gunboats steered to port and starboard with all their might, they had no role to play in the actual landings. Before they changed course they dropped small cylinders with fins at their ends, speeding towards the station's surface by their inertia alone. Some burst shortly before hitting the station, other vented on impact, leaving clouds of white powder behind.
And that was when the helmsman pulled the levers all backwards, changing the propeller's pitch, pushing the throttle lever all the way forward, and deploying huge wooden brake flaps on both sides of the hull.
The Lieutenant shouted "Brace yourselves" to his men, even when they should know by now. Everybody was pushed forward by an invisible force and the assault boat reduced speed with every second. Still, the approaching surface of the station took his breath away, as his treacherous head insisted they were far too fast and would crash into the steel surface that now filled his field of view. The impact when it came was quite tame compared to his expectations, it was still enough to jar everybody.
A quick look around showed that most boats around him had made the landing, only a few flew the flags that either marked them destroyed by artillery or crashed upon landing.
The assault boat moved back up a bit until the electromagnets at its bottom connected and the chains grew taut. Now he could loosen the harness that kept him anchored to his position, now he could pull himself from handhold to handhold and look at his men. Seemed that they had learned to brace themselves by now, there seemed to be nothing worse than a bloody nose this time. The ramp was pushed down by two burly deck hands who waved at him.
He had needed years to train his voice to the point where it would carry like that.
"Go, go, go, you do not want to be a better target. And keep your feet on the bloody ground."
Schuster watched his platoon exit the loading ramp and all Marines charged while screaming at the top of their lungs. It did not make much sense, but impressed the umpires to no end, so Schuster encouraged it. Instead of screaming he watched that his men ran well. One foot had to remain on the ground at all times, the magnetic heel pressed to the station's surface, the other lifted up, sliding the toes forward till the leg was extended and that heel became the new anchor point. Especially the station-rats would be tempted to slide forward on their toes like an ice skater. Inside the station that could lead to an embarrassing collision with a wall, outside it might leave them hanging helplessly in the air, a target for ridicule at best and a bullet at worst. There was a magnet and a string in a pouch on Schuster's belt, that would give him a chance at self-recovery if that went wrong and he had the time.
For a wonder nobody tried to be cute and so everybody gained the 50 meters from the assault craft the orders asked for. The sergeant had to shout to overcome the scream of many engines, men and the clamor of guns firing blanks.
"First team down, second advance."
That made half of his men drop on their bellies aiming their Lugers downrange while the others made their way forward. Schuster winced when he saw at least two marines haplessly charging right through their comrades field of fire. That would not look good, and the Umpires promptly designated both of them dead. They obediently stood still where they were. The rest of his men advanced by teams, firing blank cartridges that were caught by ugly bags mounted to the side of the elegant carbines. Three more of them were declared wounded or dead before they reached the barricade before them. Schuster made sure he was in front by now, the next bit needed a bit of a deft hand. Counting the seams between the hull plates he guesstimated the range to the barricade and saw that it was good. He dropped to his knee while the first troop kept up a fusillade that would have kept the defenders heads down if there would have been bullets in it.
His voice managed to carry through the din of the mock battle.
"Grenadiers, two seconds".
Four more marines took a knee, and like him frantically twisted the handle of their potato mashers till the indicator reached the "2" cut into it. They seemed to have it in hand a few seconds later.
"Grenadiers, throw."
That made all of them throw their weapons as hard as they could. One went far too high, reasonably straight lines. He had estimated correctly, the grenades reached the end of their timed fuses when they were past the barricade. The explosions that followed were quite subdued, the flour they released would indicate which soldiers were designated "killed" without the need for an umpire to make a ruling about it.
No matter how many of them were "taken out", now was the time.
"Charge" brought his platoon forward as fast as they could shove their magnetic boots forward. Judging from the impressive amount of fire they laid down, most of them seemed to have loaded a fresh drum magazine. That allowed them to put 32 rounds downrange without reloading and allowed them to reach the barricade. Four of them were declared "killed" then, the rest mimicked shooting the defenders.
Schuster took a deep breath, counted his remaining marines and decided he could go forward. Pointing at a piece of inoffensive wall besides a hatch he raised his voice again.
"To the wall to the left of the lock, go go go What are you waiting for, a written invitation?"
Another assault shuffle forward brought his platoon to the wall where they could catch their breath. Schuster saw two sappers hug the wall till they were besides the door and place a box on it that was held by magnets. One of the sappers pulled a cord from it and a red light started to glow evilly on its top. An umpire declared the attack successful, but also declared a sapper dead. The sergeant tried to be heard over the clamor.
"Grenadiers, two each. First troop, advance"
The soldiers closest to the open hatch did the same as Schuster himself, and pulled more grenades from their belts. No need for a closely timed fuses, the room behind the hatch itself would make sure the grenades would explode where they were supposed to. Schuster managed to throw his grenade without exposing his arm for more than a second, one soldiers was not that good and managed to float off. One of his comrades managed to pull him in in time and for a wonder none were declared casualties. The first grenades were followed by a second set moments later, meant to catch any defenders who would come up from cover after the first ones. For a change first troop managed to enter the hatch closely after the muffled bangs had distributed more flour over everything.
They mostly managed to follow their training, checking the corners, trying to keep their sector observed and firing a blank at anything that resembled a soldier, whether moving or not. One was declared dead when a surprisingly clean enemy fired off a single round, apart from that all "survived". They occupied the barricade the blue team had erected, and covered the hatch beyond. Schuster and the second troop arranged themselves on the sides of that and a soldier turned the wheel that opened the inner hatch. The big steel door had opened by half a meter when a grenade sailed through it. Schuster froze in place when one of his soldiers kicked it back through the opening where it exploded a second later. The sergeant tried to memorize that this had been Lafontaine, who should receive an evening off while he pushed two more mock-explosives through the hatch. When he emerged through the opening he only found soldiers covered in white dust, coughing and trying to pat at least some of the flour from their uniforms.
Schuster barely managed to suppress a smile.
"Well done lads. Take position behind those planters over there and the benches on the left. Runner, inform Captain Voss that we have taken hatch 2B."
The sergeant found himself a spot that offered cover and allowed him to observe his platoon. He saw that it was good and stole a glance over the railing that kept him from the inner core of the station. It was a sight that never failed to amaze, the ancients had left an open shaft with dozens of galleries around it. They allowed the loading and unloading of the electric cable cars that brought passengers and freight from and to the worldlet below them. Windows below showed the huge cable that led to the landscape hundreds of kilometers below them, it was a sight to frighten anyone not used to it, and would never fail to awe. And it would be the one and only chance to stage an invasion if it came to that.
1911/take 2
Madame Rosa's saloon
The Obsler in Armin Stahlmüller hand was good, not sublime as its price tag suggested, but good enough not to rise any ire. Given how Armin had spent the last two hours getting any rise out of him would have been an undertaking of heroic proportions. Understanding and expecting exactly that his file de jour had left with a peek on his cheek and a wink a while ago. Stahlmüller relaxed as much as he dared, he had to make the trip to his quarters soon enough. Sleep was something that the students of the Kriegsakademie, the academy of war, had very little of
He was feeling very mellow, a bit melancholic after the romp he had anticipated for a week at least, consummated well enough, but now over. Besides him were two others from his Kriegsakademie class, and they looked to be in the same state as him.
Michael von Alvensleben seemed to study the murky swirls inside his glass before downing it in one go.
"You know the world is going down the drain Armin, we might as well enjoy what time is left?"
Armin squinted and shook his head. He had not expected that from the young captain on the opposite ottoman.
"What is it Michael, that the SPD gained more seats in the Reichstag or that women will probably be allowed to vote some time in the next 50 years?"
There was a subdued belch from von Alvensleben before he got his answer. The fact that his fellow student did not catch Armin's sarcasm indicated how far he was gone.
"That…that. And the fact that nobody respects the old families anymore, as if somebody who can hardly name his grandfather is the same as someone from a family who can look back at noble ancestors for a dozen generations. Or that income from trade and lending is as honorable as nobly growing food on honest soil.
Fuck this, we know that a new cycle starts every hundred years or so, that nations have their time in the sun and then fade. Look at the Spaniards, the world was their oyster 300 years ago and now they can't pay their sailors and are beaten like a drum by the Americans of all people. The Swedes called the Baltics their personal pool, now they even lost the Norwegian sector and most of their raw materials. The French still think they matter after the drubbing they received from us, but boy did our ancestors shake in their boots when they thought of Grand Admiral Napoleon.
Good times end sooner or later Armin, and it might be our time now, I don't know. But we lose our connection to what made us grand in the past, and what I see in the future scares me. Socialism, women who vote and work, undisciplined children and youth who want anything except learning and.
You know that so many say we will not have another great war, that we are all too well connected by trade and too clever to have another one. I say let us have one, see who is the top dog and shake everything up so that people see what really matters…"
"Let's go to our quarters Michael, tomorrow will start early enough."
Smoke, not on the water
As so many times before: Great thanks to Trevayne, who proofread this update and provided inspirations, so it might be more enjoyable to all. Today it is about massacres, planned and real, of birds and humans.
SMS Kaiserin Elisabeth, close to Arnstetten Worldlet
The shotgun hammered against a bruised shoulder; the sharp report irritated ears despite their ear protection. The pellets met a thing of beauty, a quad-winged skymew that had tried to snatch a piece of bait that had been distributed alongside the cruiser.
Bloody feathers dissipated in a last dance and the bird's muscles were mushed into uselessness. They might be eaten by scavengers later on; the shooter did not care. A servant dutifully counted the animals thus killed; he had taken up these duties from another an hour ago as their liege was on a killing spree.
If the pages before him did not lie, then Archduke Franz-Ferdinand had killed more than 2,000 birds today. The servant would never talk about it, but like others he thought this an awful excess, something only permissible in these days which many thought to be the last ones and by those who thought themselves above mortal men.
The massacre continued unabated for another hour before the darkening sky indicated the approaching night and the hunter retreated to his quarters.
He met with a few allies and confidantes in the cruiser's centrifuge, which allowed him to sip his brandy from a snifter instead of sucking it through a straw like a common skyman.
The alcohol added to the deep relaxation that the hunt brought him and thus he was willing to talk about subjects he would normally leave alone.
His aide-de-camp was trying his best to look like he was not waiting for an answer when he so clearly was. Yes, he was to aid his liege in all respects, but he was also to report to the court. A lot of people were highly interested in what the heir presumptive had in mind, most of those even had a legitimate reason for receiving the information, and others were or might be useful in future.
"Yes, uniting the Bosnian, Croatian, and Dalmatian sectors into South Slavia will produce a counterweight to the Hungarians, but I am not aiming for Trialism instead of the Dualism for the Empire. With three equally strong regions inside the realm the crown can favor one party over the others as needed. And we will need to do so, as I intend to build a federation, giving each ethnicity its own sector to govern internally as they see fit. But the crown will have the external policy, the armed forces, and the mint, so it will be the ultimate arbiter."
Von Bardolff took a sip from the tumbler in his hands to gain time for an answer.
"That will bring the Hungarians to a boil and the Serbs will call for your blood highness. A South Slavia will block any chances of them expanding in that direction and that is their goal."
"The Hungarians might bitch and moan, but in the end, they are loyal to the crown. They need to be, they are too weak to stand up to the Great Powers on their own. And the Serbs can try to pick off another piece of the corpse that is the Ottoman Empire, but not ours."
The young noble tried to look supportive. "In that case the Serbs will run afoul of the Germans, they prop the Turks up."
"That they do, and wouldn't it be nice if somebody else would take care of those thieving bastards?"
Von Bardloff thought about when he could politely retire so he might get some notes down while his prince looked through the window. The centrifuge's rotation brought a school of skywhales up, marvelous creatures more than a hundred meters long. They were moving in graceful, slow-seeming motions, the kings of their realm. Franz-Ferdinand thought about harpooning one or two tomorrow, that might sate his unrest for a while.
Imperial Palace, Greater Berlin Worldlet
The model was beautifully detailed, nearly two meters long and showed a warship the likes of which this world had not seen before. When it had been sent to the Imperial Palace it had been accompanied by a huge folder of sketches and specifications, all of which conveyed much more information than the model ever could.
The recipient had taken one look at them and had disregarded them ever since, he only had eyes for the toy before him.
The famous beard's points moved upwards and inwards the longer he looked at it, framing a slightly childish grin on Kaiser Wilhelm's face. Ernst Foerster was not sure whether he should be glad about this or not. This assignment could seriously damage Blohm&Voss' connections to the Admiralty.
"So, this is what we asked you to draw up for us Foerster? It looks….interesting. Please explain your design to us."
Bowing slightly the Chief Constructor pointed at the ship.
"Your highness directed me to propose a ship that would combine the firepower and armor of a ship of the line with the speed of a Great Cruiser. To do so, we had to double the power of the engines and lengthen the ship compared to a Nassau-Class ship of the line.
In order to keep the armor and the number of guns we went to four triple turrets with 12" guns. This allows us to use two barbettes through the entire ship at both ends of the citadel, closing the the vitals off from forward and aft. We kept the 300 mm belt armor but increased the angle for more protection. In order to keep the belt intact we placed the 5.9" secondaries in turrets above and below the main armor. The engines will produce more than a hundred thousand horsepower, allowing for a top speed of better than 300 kph."
A beaming monarch regarded the model before him before answering.
"That is all well and good, except maybe for the caliber of the guns. And yet we have this feeling that we are yet to hear the bad news Herr Foerster."
"The new 12" gun has great armor piercing capabilities your excellency, but they are also needed as Krupp will not commit to any larger gun before 1913 at the earliest. But if they come through the triple-gun-turret design allows to change the weapons for 15" doubles with acceptable effort. As for other bad news, this would simply be a very big and somewhat expensive sky ship. We keep costs reasonable with fewer turrets and a very short citadel, ordinary steel is cheap, and air is free. But we need more boilers and bigger turbines to power the ship.
If our calculations are correct, then for the price of three Moltke-Class Great Cruisers and three Koenig-Class Battleships your highness would purchase five of these or better two of these and three half-sisters with eight 15" guns."
"That is the kind of bad news that we are willing to hear. But why are you as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs around this? Why does Grand Admiral Tirpitz dislike anything like this so much?"
Ernst Foerster sighed before straightening his back and looking his Emperor in the eye.
"Technically speaking the Admiralty does not like triple turrets as they claim they have a lower rate of fire, and the barbettes weaken the deck structure due to their larger diameter. The latter is simply not correct as the ratio of the cutouts to the ship's beam is similar to older, smaller ships with twin-gun turrets. Given that there are two more barrels than a Koenig-Class is going to have, the rate of fire will be better, not worse. At the end of the day these ships are so much faster than the ships of the line that they need to be in a separate division or the older ships we spent so much money on are obsolete. Last, but not least, fewer ships means fewer posts for officers, something the Admiralty will also not like very much."
Kaiser Wilhelm's left arm might be useless, but his right one was strong enough that the hand that hit the engineer's shoulder made him sway for a moment.
"Looks like there is an honest man in there if we dig deep enough, thanks for being so frank with us. What you do not know and what the good Admiral just suspects is that the British government sent out another feeler about limiting capital ship build numbers. You have just given us the opportunity to give them a positive answer, look good in front of everybody and still do good for the navy. We will build less ships, but they will be better ones. Herr Foerster, go back to your yard and prepare to build your creation, you have done us proud."
ACR Giuseppe Garibaldi Close to Beirut Station
The skyship that tried to intercept the Italian cruiser squadron betrayed her age by her blocky, non-aerodynamic structure, the mass of black smoke that trailed from her funnels and the lack of proper turrets.
Admiral di Revel watched the huge 10" gun turret before his bridge rotate towards the enemy. He knew that the ventral turret would do the same, offering the muzzles of two 8" guns towards the Ottoman ironclad.
The old Turkish warship was so much smaller than the ships in his squadron, its armor outdated and could only open fire if it offered broadside. It was so slow he could easily dictate the engagement range.
A more cautious officer would have kept the range long and bombarded the old warhorse into submission, but he wanted to use the remaining daylight to finish the fight quickly.
"Admiral, enemy is at 6000 meters."
Garibaldi's captain was such a cautious officer, but it was his ship and his men in harm's way, so his discrete hint of a long-range battle was excusable.
"Very well captain, you may open fire at your convenience. Signal the squadron to do likewise."
"At once Admiral"
Orders were shouted into the voice tubes and the gun before him changed elevation minutely. Lesser officers might cover their ears, di Revel would do no such thing when the gun roared in accordance to his orders.
Multicolored smoke traced the rounds fired from both turrets and the forward casemate. The skyship strained against its gyros and the helmsmen did their best to correct the yaw forced on the ship by the off-center recoil and differing calibers of her mighty guns. All rounds managed to miss their target by quite a margin, that was to be expected and so the admiral tried to keep his disappointment from his face. More salvos ran out at different intervals. The crew on the 10" gun before him would do very well if they got off a second round within a minute, the 8" ones below him were good for three rounds in the same time and the 6" casemate guns would be ashamed of anything less than five. It made for a colorful and noisy spectacle which for the first minute achieved exactly nothing, but to put holes into innocent air. That Garibaldi's artillerists had to calculate the corrections for guns with three different calibers was not helping matters, but it made for quite the spectacle.
The Ottoman casemate warship could only bring a single 6" gun to bear, and di Revel was sure he could see the shell in flight as it was so slow. The smoke made by the ironclad was thickening by the minute and the Italian admiral expected her propellers to stop turning every minute.
It was one of the 6" guns which caused the first hit. It left a glowing scar on the inclined armor, no other damage could be seen from the Italian fleet. There were several hits that followed and di Revel was sure he spotted at least one glowing crater that indicated penetration.
When all was said and done, Garibaldi's shooting was not that important for its direct effects, spectacular as it looked. It forced Avn-I-Illah to orient its armored belt, such as it was, towards di Revel's flagship and exposed its vulnerable ventral and dorsal sides to Varese and Ferrucio, Garibaldi's sister ships kept formation a kilometer above and below di Revel. From these positions they would soon shoot into parts of the old ironclad that had next to no armor. They could forego armor-piercing projectiles and shoot the old ship with HC shells filled to the brim with high explosives.
For now the three ship formation put round after round around the Ottoman skyship or into its side. Many rounds off it, but di Revel imagined the hell inside. Its cramped, dark interior would be filled with men who fought through smoke and fire, doing their best to extinguish the flames that crept along the walls with the smallest amount of water possible. The engine room would be an even worse level of hell, filled with humid heat, vaporized oil, and the ever-present danger of a ruptured steam line. The latter could easily emit a thin, invisible stream of superheated steam that would kill its victims in seconds if they were very lucky.
Something must have broken in the old warhorse already as its funnels emitted even greater amounts of thick smoke, half hiding the ironclad, its wake and the far side. The colorful tracers came closer and closer to Avn-I-Illah now that the ships got ever closer to each other, and the gunners were finding their range. Numerous hit ripped into the skyship, causing short-lived flowers of bright flame often followed by the sinister glow of fires in ever more places. Di Revel could not help but to admire the Ottoman's courage. They might be lacking in equipment and maybe a bit in the skill's department, but by God nothing was wrong with their guts. They would make for a great victory over a worthy foe.
Something shook Garibaldi for a second and an explosion hammered into the Italian admiral's ears. The first Turkish shell had found its mark on the armor belt, exploding with the smoky cloud of a black-powder filled shell. Di Revel was a passenger on Garibaldi as much as directly running the ship was concerned, and he would not undermine her captain's position by directly asking for a damage report. The captain was clever enough to repeat the report loudly enough that his admiral could overhear as it came through the voice pipe. It seemed that the hit had not penetrated the armor.
By now explosions blossomed on Avn-I-Illah regularly and the evil flickering of fire could be seen in the rents de Revel's flotilla had ripped into the old skyship. The smoke from the funnels had increased, if such a thing were even possible, and changed in color, indicating that copious amounts of steam were leaking into the funnels. It might be the admiral's imagination, but the skyship seemed to lose speed. He would have to adjust accordingly, but for now the ironclad still tried to close the distance. And by now di Revel could see how armor plates were shorn off his opponent, how shells from the other ships in his flotilla scored hits above and below the belt of Avn-I-Illah. Smoke emerged from many holes and rents, lit by flickering fires inside. The ship was slowing down by now and started to tumble when parts of its great rudder went missing. Either her captain would strike her color soon or…
The Italian admiral saw a rating listen to something that came from a voice tube. He then went to his officer who blanched and went to Garibaldi's captain immediately. What could possibly be that important in his moment of triumph? And while a huge explosion wracked the old ironclad and cheers ran through the cruiser the captain finally addressed di Revel.
"Sir, message from Ferrucio, there is another ship hiding in the ironclad's smoke."
The Admiral immediately turned back to the vision slit and tried to make out something from the thinning smoke that showed Avn-I-Illah`s final course. For a second he was not able to see anything, but something stirred the gray mass, ripping it aside like a veil and trailing it behind for a second. It was shaped like an arrowhead, painted a flat black to better hide at night and streaked with the grime of the old Ironclad's passing. It accelerated like a scolded cat, seemingly making a beeline for di Revel. Its course was a complicated spiral and its ever-changing velocity made the rocket boat a hard target to hit.
Colorful tracers went all around it, mostly missing to the aft as it accelerated faster than the gunners could calculate a new solution. A heavy shell passed right through it without doing visible damage, as there was nothing substantial in its way to trigger the fuse. More and smaller tracers originated from Garibaldi's revolver cannons. While going wildly awry at first the crews walked the tracers towards the target and managed to get bursts of 37mm shells into the rocket boat. Something must have given as the rocket boat started to yaw, presenting more of her sides to the slipstream.
He was about to hope that Avn-I-Illah`s avenging angel would start its final somersault when the rocket boat stabilized itself, pointing its ravaged prow directly at the Italian admiral. It approached a bit slower than di Revel anticipated and the smoke from its stacks was the off-color of incomplete combustion. She certainly had not much longer before she would end in some way, but would that ship be destroyed soon enough?
The rocket boat's slowdown threw Garibaldi's gunner off for a critical moment, allowing the craft to stabilize into its attack run. Di Revel saw her prow aim away from him, towards the point where his ship would be in a few moments. Maybe he could challenge fate now.
"Captain, course change four points to starboard, one point up, make it snappy. Signal our intent to the flotilla while you are about it."
"Four points starboard, one point up, immediately."
Di Revel saw the captain turn towards the helmsmen with what seemed like glacial slowness and repeat his orders word for word. And the helmsmen repeated the same again, at least while they turned their respective wheels.
The great rudders at Garibaldi's stern started to move, biting into the slipstream and turning the armored cruiser around. But the ship massed many thousands tons, and so it was reluctant to change the course on which it roared ahead at better than 200 kph. And even when Garibaldi's gunners started to get the range and speed again the rocket boat refused to die. Di Revel was amazed that anybody could still be alive in that boat that trailed smoke and flames, losing parts and corpses in its wake. But somebody still had to be as the boat was approaching like some undead monster from a cheap horror novel.
And then his breath stopped as his binoculars revealed four hatches rising in the boat's prow, soon obscured by fire and smoke. Belching copious amounts of smoke the huge rockets accelerated on sooty flames towards his command. He saw the rockets yaw this way or that before their fins unfolded and bit into slipstream. That and the sputtering of their black powder propellant were Garibaldi's last hope for survival. One of the rockets started a massive yaw shortly after it left its tube, a yaw so massive that it started to turn around itself in a violent motion that ripped it apart.
Two were subjected to a withering fire from the cruiser's machine guns and revolver cannon. The chances of a single hit were insignificant, but be it simple chance or di Revel's hand that clutched the cross under his tunic, a machine gun round found one of the rockets, exploding it in an ugly black cloud of smoke lit from within.
The last remaining pair refused to stop, evaded every bullet fired at them and their primitive boosters did not fail. One managed to pass Garibaldi's flank by a scant few meters, roaring off into the endless sky. The other hit the cruiser's angled belt at an acute angle and was thrown upwards. Its fuse needed a second to work, exploding the warhead a dozen meters above Garibaldi's thinly armored ventral side. Even this thin armor was easily enough to withstand its shockwave, but the explosion managed to travel down the ship's funnels. The shockwave went directly into the cruiser's boilers, sending flaming fuel and scalding steam into its machinery rooms. The flash boilers had next to no pressure reserve, failing to provide steam to the cruiser's turbines in mere moments. Not only did that stop the rotation of the shafts that turned the ACR's propellers, but it also stopped the steering engines that helped push its rudders into the slipstream.
The great armored cruiser coasted along its course, unable to change, to evade or to fight. Admiral di Revel could only watch the flaming wreck of the rocket boat approach. As in a nightmare he could not run, could not evade, and could only watch his doom approach. The rocket boat was just a flaming mass now, wreathed in fire. No one could possibly be alive on board, no vengeful crewman could try to correct its course. And still, an unkind fate guided the burning remains directly against Garibaldi's armored side. This crushed the rocket boat's fuel tanks, coating the Italian cruiser with a flaming inferno.
When the rescue crews from the other Italian ships could finally enter the burned wreck that had been Garibaldi they found the Admiral's corpse. They had to identify him by the remains of his medals as the body was blacker than the night and smaller than a child.
And while the Italian Navy Cielo Militare mourned the death of so many skymen, Auro da Silva could not hide his glee at the bonus he received from an immense spike in views.
SMS Deutschland, forward boiler room
Helmut Walter closed the hatch behind him and waited for his ears to pop before opening the second one before him. Currently Deutschland was cruising, so the positive pressure in the boiler room was minimal. If the captain called for full bells for the old lady there would be considerable added pressure inside the boiler rooms to force more air into her boilers.
The temperatures inside the lock had been warm already, the boiler room was a steam bath. The many pipes and joints in the boiler room had developed small leaks here and there, often in hard-to-reach spaces. And each of the flash boilers in the room contained a roaring inferno, burning many tons of wood tar every day to propel the aging juggernaut through the endless sky. He glanced at the oil- and water-operators, a small group of experienced noncoms and officers. They watched the instruments before them as closely as priests the relics of their faith. No father would guard the virginity of their daughters more closely, no accountant would balance their books better than these men who regulated how much fuel and water was introduced into each boiler at any given minute.
If there was too much water the fragile mass of tubes inside the drums would melt into uselessness before long. Too much water, and the heat would not be sufficient to evaporate it right at the injectors where it was introduced into the boiler. Having liquid water inside a boiler in zero gravity would lead to all kinds of problems, many of them potentially quite destructive. All the steam they produced was further heated and thus put under ever-increasing pressure. There was only one way out for the steam, a well-insulated tube that ran into the next room. That one contained one of Deutschland's four steam engines. The steam would work itself through three cylinders at ever-decreasing pressure before entering condensers that tried to convert all that steam back into water. A part of that energy released by the phase change would be used to preheat the feed water that was to enter the boilers, the rest entered huge radiators that dumped the heat into the sky around the aging battleship. The whole ship, especially the engine room vibrated under the hammer blows of the huge pistons even when the ship just needed a third of the power it was capable of. If full power was called for the juggernaut would tremble under its own power and the machinery would pound itself into something catastrophic within hours. Running at full power for days at an end was the privilege of turbine-driven ships, not such old warhorses as Deutschland.
Walter saw a group of lowly skymen doing their level best to clean the deck of the ever-present oily sludge that tried to trip everybody and that was dangerous if allowed to accumulate. Another had the rather nasty job of winding an asbestos banding around a leaking pipe, something dangerous and nasty at the same time. He saw the pasty-faced, somewhat pudgy recruit try to avoid getting burned and still apply the band-aid where it was needed. His task was made more difficult by the glasses that kept steaming up in the sauna that masqueraded as an engine room.
The recruit stiffened up under Walter's gaze and the boatswain made a get-on-with-it gesture that worked better in the clamor of the boiler room.
He stood his own watch at the port fuel pump while something kept nagging him.
Walter was back at the airlock when he realized what it was. Not only had the recruit moved the wrong way, he had not looked at Walter, he had glanced at the group of recruits besides him. Something needed checking before it blew up, and it was not the boiler in the room.
Cafeteria, Will-to-Stream asteroid, Riefenstahl Productions headquarters
Auro de Silva watched the fork piercing a piece of steak nearly miss the mouth that it was supposed to go into. He brought it off to look like he was looking in another direction, giving the impression he would consciously and generously ignore the mishap while amusing himself at the same time. Even more amusing to see the realization when the taste of real meat hit Roald Winter's brain, knowing that the former Intern would now disdain the simulation of the same food when he went back to his fluid-filled VR-pod. What a marvelous way to celebrate the promotions of the newly minted consultants, making them depend on the jobs he could dole out and showing his superior standing.
And all it took to achieve this was to celebrate in the real, taking the former interns out of the VR pods they spent so much of their lives in and make them perform in the flesh. Especially those whose avatars were muscle-filled ninjas and were now relearning that their real bodies reacted quite differently. Winter seemed to have it in hand by now, time to unbalance him a bit further.
"That Ringworld production is putting up quite the show at the moment, your contribution to the team is noted. How long do you think that novelty will last and how do we keep the audience's attention?"
Oh how Auro relished the onset of panic in Winter's features and what conscious effort the newly-minted assistant writer applied to keep that from freezing him.
"I do believe that this world has so much to offer, the vistas alone are breathtaking. And there is so much to explore, both of the world for the Ringworlders as well as their society for our viewers. The Moulin Rouge alone has a couple of million viewers each time it performs. And then there is of course the violence of the conflicts."
Auro da Silva weighed Winter in his mind. That useful nerd was not totally innocent it seemed. Others might shy away from seeing death and destruction as an important source of entertainment, Winter did not seem to object. Did he not see the Ringworlders as real humans or was he indeed sufficiently ruthless? He would learn in time.
"Yes, this little fracas at Bayreuth station certainly did catch everybody's attention, didn't it? But you know how things are, people want more of it, more and bigger and bloodier. Otherwise, they might look elsewhere. You promised that didn't you?"
"Sorry Sir, it is Beirut station, Bayreuth is a worldlet in the German sector. The history we used as a template for this Ringworld setting certainly had that. But if the humans there go exactly down the same path is yet to be seen. We cannot control them directly of course; we could just set the stage. But that something big will happen, that is for sure."
Auro did not like anything he could not manipulate or control, that might have crept into his tone as Winter was flinching.
"How so?"
"Well Sir on the one hand this is a radically different environment than Earth, so many small things differ which might lead to larger consequences. For example, the Battle of Beirut Station was a one-sided massacre on Earth, not that intense battle that our viewers still like so much.
I can practically guarantee that the Great War we expect, and need will not start on 28.07.1914, things are already too different from our ancient history. But something is bound to happen, the question is when and maybe even who starts it."
That was not what da Silva wanted to hear.
"We need something like this, our teaser trailers have made that clear and the polls could not be more clear, especially after that Bay..something battle."
"And something will happen, this setting is a powder keg, and several players are compulsive match lighters.
The French are still seething as they believe the Germans stole Alsace-Lorraine from them, their memories we implanted that they conquered it themselves 200 years ago did not seem to stick so well. They want to be the dominant power in that region, not the Germans whom they consider upstarts.
The German Kaiser has fired Bismark, the chancellor who declared the Germans "saturated" and not interested in acquiring new territories. Wilhelm wants a nice colonial empire like his English cousins and keeps saying that Germany would fight for its place in the sun, whatever that means in this world. Talking about saying, that guy has a mouth on him and manages to p.o. nearly everybody around.
The Austrians are sitting on the last old-style empire in the European Sector, ruling a very diverse population who on average no longer believe in an emperor who rules because god said so. They are sharing power with the Hungarians who help in keeping all the other minorities down, but this is an uneasy arrangement that is subject to change. They believe themselves in a really long struggle with the Serbs, mostly about acquiring territories that the weak Ottoman Empire can no longer hold.
The Russians really need to make foreign hay as the lid on their population is really rising in a state that is badly governed in a style that would be appropriate a hundred years ago. The Czar has declared himself protector of all Slavs, and that brings him into conflict with the Austrians, as the Serbs are Slavs, as well as some of Austria's subjects. On top of that the Russian industrialization is financed by the French, who also have a beef with the Germans. They have an influence on him, as has some sort of mystic quack.
The Italians are allied to the Germans and Austrians, for now. But if they switch sides, they might gain the Venice and Tyrol sub-sectors from Austria-Hungary they so dearly desire to round out their nation state.
And the English see the carefully maintained balance of power in the European Sector crashing down, they fear a new power rising that could threaten them like they remember Napoleon did before. That the German industry is becoming more powerful than theirs is just icing on the cake.
Oh something is going to blow, big time. And when it does all of them will realize that they have not fought a major war for quite some time, that their doctrines are outdated, and they will have to learn on the fly. I cannot promise you when or how exactly. But I promise you that it is going to be big, bloody, and epic."
Auro da Silva noted how animated and self-assured the former intern became when he was talking about something he knew about, highly interesting.
"I'll hold you to that, you know?"
SMS Deutschland, passageway, at night
Helmut Walter pulled himself through the passageway with practised ease. He had not bothered to don his magnetic shoes. He needed a trip to the head, not stand watch for four hours. This being the dog watch not many people were about and the cacophony that every skyship under power made hid whatever sound they made. For a brief, precious moment the boatswain felt alone, a private moment to himself. He did his business with sucky hose and was about to head back when he heard things he would have normally ignored.
There was the sound of belt leather meeting flesh, there were whimpers and cries for mercy. The voices that accompanied that were vindictive and full of glee.
That was probably "Selbsterziehung" self-education, something his Imperial Navy quietly encouraged. If a lowly skyman stole from his comrades or did not pull his weight it was much better if said comrades took care of it themselves instead of bothering the officers.
Helmut was not so sure about it, having experienced it from both sides a long time ago. It gave the little shits ideas, gave too much power to bullies and pushed useful men from the navy. Still, he was just one boatswain and rocking the boat was not a good idea if he wanted to stay in the navy as long as possible.
On the other hand, this went on for longer than it had to and the sounds of despair became too quiet. Something was about to go off the rails, better to keep things manageable.
Pulling himself further along the corridor he went to the hatch leading to a storage room. The dogs opened easily enough and the boatswain pushed the hatch open with both legs, swinging him into the room. It was dimly lit, but what light there was was more than enough to reveal madness. Several skymen stood around a few who held the recruit he had spotted in the boiler room down and had obviously beaten him bloody. Helmut tried to see it all and take the situation in, but the big, round eyes of the recruit kept him. He had seen such eyes before.
Fuck, another suicide in his watch would see him thrown from the navy in a heartbeat. What was he to do?
SMS Kaiserin Elisabeth, close to Arnstetten Worldlet
The shotgun hammered against a bruised shoulder; the sharp report irritated ears despite their ear protection. The pellets met a thing of beauty, a quad-winged skymew that had tried to snatch a piece of bait that had been distributed alongside the cruiser.
Bloody feathers dissipated in a last dance and the bird's muscles were mushed into uselessness. They might be eaten by scavengers later on; the shooter did not care. A servant dutifully counted the animals thus killed; he had taken up these duties from another an hour ago as their liege was on a killing spree.
If the pages before him did not lie, then Archduke Franz-Ferdinand had killed more than 2,000 birds today. The servant would never talk about it, but like others he thought this an awful excess, something only permissible in these days which many thought to be the last ones and by those who thought themselves above mortal men.
The massacre continued unabated for another hour before the darkening sky indicated the approaching night and the hunter retreated to his quarters.
He met with a few allies and confidantes in the cruiser's centrifuge, which allowed him to sip his brandy from a snifter instead of sucking it through a straw like a common skyman.
The alcohol added to the deep relaxation that the hunt brought him and thus he was willing to talk about subjects he would normally leave alone.
His aide-de-camp was trying his best to look like he was not waiting for an answer when he so clearly was. Yes, he was to aid his liege in all respects, but he was also to report to the court. A lot of people were highly interested in what the heir presumptive had in mind, most of those even had a legitimate reason for receiving the information, and others were or might be useful in future.
"Yes, uniting the Bosnian, Croatian, and Dalmatian sectors into South Slavia will produce a counterweight to the Hungarians, but I am not aiming for Trialism instead of the Dualism for the Empire. With three equally strong regions inside the realm the crown can favor one party over the others as needed. And we will need to do so, as I intend to build a federation, giving each ethnicity its own sector to govern internally as they see fit. But the crown will have the external policy, the armed forces, and the mint, so it will be the ultimate arbiter."
Von Bardolff took a sip from the tumbler in his hands to gain time for an answer.
"That will bring the Hungarians to a boil and the Serbs will call for your blood highness. A South Slavia will block any chances of them expanding in that direction and that is their goal."
"The Hungarians might bitch and moan, but in the end, they are loyal to the crown. They need to be, they are too weak to stand up to the Great Powers on their own. And the Serbs can try to pick off another piece of the corpse that is the Ottoman Empire, but not ours."
The young noble tried to look supportive. "In that case the Serbs will run afoul of the Germans, they prop the Turks up."
"That they do, and wouldn't it be nice if somebody else would take care of those thieving bastards?"
Von Bardloff thought about when he could politely retire so he might get some notes down while his prince looked through the window. The centrifuge's rotation brought a school of skywhales up, marvelous creatures more than a hundred meters long. They were moving in graceful, slow-seeming motions, the kings of their realm. Franz-Ferdinand thought about harpooning one or two tomorrow, that might sate his unrest for a while.
Imperial Palace, Greater Berlin Worldlet
The model was beautifully detailed, nearly two meters long and showed a warship the likes of which this world had not seen before. When it had been sent to the Imperial Palace it had been accompanied by a huge folder of sketches and specifications, all of which conveyed much more information than the model ever could.
The recipient had taken one look at them and had disregarded them ever since, he only had eyes for the toy before him.
The famous beard's points moved upwards and inwards the longer he looked at it, framing a slightly childish grin on Kaiser Wilhelm's face. Ernst Foerster was not sure whether he should be glad about this or not. This assignment could seriously damage Blohm&Voss' connections to the Admiralty.
"So, this is what we asked you to draw up for us Foerster? It looks….interesting. Please explain your design to us."
Bowing slightly the Chief Constructor pointed at the ship.
"Your highness directed me to propose a ship that would combine the firepower and armor of a ship of the line with the speed of a Great Cruiser. To do so, we had to double the power of the engines and lengthen the ship compared to a Nassau-Class ship of the line.
In order to keep the armor and the number of guns we went to four triple turrets with 12" guns. This allows us to use two barbettes through the entire ship at both ends of the citadel, closing the the vitals off from forward and aft. We kept the 300 mm belt armor but increased the angle for more protection. In order to keep the belt intact we placed the 5.9" secondaries in turrets above and below the main armor. The engines will produce more than a hundred thousand horsepower, allowing for a top speed of better than 300 kph."
A beaming monarch regarded the model before him before answering.
"That is all well and good, except maybe for the caliber of the guns. And yet we have this feeling that we are yet to hear the bad news Herr Foerster."
"The new 12" gun has great armor piercing capabilities your excellency, but they are also needed as Krupp will not commit to any larger gun before 1913 at the earliest. But if they come through the triple-gun-turret design allows to change the weapons for 15" doubles with acceptable effort. As for other bad news, this would simply be a very big and somewhat expensive sky ship. We keep costs reasonable with fewer turrets and a very short citadel, ordinary steel is cheap, and air is free. But we need more boilers and bigger turbines to power the ship.
If our calculations are correct, then for the price of three Moltke-Class Great Cruisers and three Koenig-Class Battleships your highness would purchase five of these or better two of these and three half-sisters with eight 15" guns."
"That is the kind of bad news that we are willing to hear. But why are you as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs around this? Why does Grand Admiral Tirpitz dislike anything like this so much?"
Ernst Foerster sighed before straightening his back and looking his Emperor in the eye.
"Technically speaking the Admiralty does not like triple turrets as they claim they have a lower rate of fire, and the barbettes weaken the deck structure due to their larger diameter. The latter is simply not correct as the ratio of the cutouts to the ship's beam is similar to older, smaller ships with twin-gun turrets. Given that there are two more barrels than a Koenig-Class is going to have, the rate of fire will be better, not worse. At the end of the day these ships are so much faster than the ships of the line that they need to be in a separate division or the older ships we spent so much money on are obsolete. Last, but not least, fewer ships means fewer posts for officers, something the Admiralty will also not like very much."
Kaiser Wilhelm's left arm might be useless, but his right one was strong enough that the hand that hit the engineer's shoulder made him sway for a moment.
"Looks like there is an honest man in there if we dig deep enough, thanks for being so frank with us. What you do not know and what the good Admiral just suspects is that the British government sent out another feeler about limiting capital ship build numbers. You have just given us the opportunity to give them a positive answer, look good in front of everybody and still do good for the navy. We will build less ships, but they will be better ones. Herr Foerster, go back to your yard and prepare to build your creation, you have done us proud."
ACR Giuseppe Garibaldi Close to Beirut Station
The skyship that tried to intercept the Italian cruiser squadron betrayed her age by her blocky, non-aerodynamic structure, the mass of black smoke that trailed from her funnels and the lack of proper turrets.
Admiral di Revel watched the huge 10" gun turret before his bridge rotate towards the enemy. He knew that the ventral turret would do the same, offering the muzzles of two 8" guns towards the Ottoman ironclad.
The old Turkish warship was so much smaller than the ships in his squadron, its armor outdated and could only open fire if it offered broadside. It was so slow he could easily dictate the engagement range.
A more cautious officer would have kept the range long and bombarded the old warhorse into submission, but he wanted to use the remaining daylight to finish the fight quickly.
"Admiral, enemy is at 6000 meters."
Garibaldi's captain was such a cautious officer, but it was his ship and his men in harm's way, so his discrete hint of a long-range battle was excusable.
"Very well captain, you may open fire at your convenience. Signal the squadron to do likewise."
"At once Admiral"
Orders were shouted into the voice tubes and the gun before him changed elevation minutely. Lesser officers might cover their ears, di Revel would do no such thing when the gun roared in accordance to his orders.
Multicolored smoke traced the rounds fired from both turrets and the forward casemate. The skyship strained against its gyros and the helmsmen did their best to correct the yaw forced on the ship by the off-center recoil and differing calibers of her mighty guns. All rounds managed to miss their target by quite a margin, that was to be expected and so the admiral tried to keep his disappointment from his face. More salvos ran out at different intervals. The crew on the 10" gun before him would do very well if they got off a second round within a minute, the 8" ones below him were good for three rounds in the same time and the 6" casemate guns would be ashamed of anything less than five. It made for a colorful and noisy spectacle which for the first minute achieved exactly nothing, but to put holes into innocent air. That Garibaldi's artillerists had to calculate the corrections for guns with three different calibers was not helping matters, but it made for quite the spectacle.
The Ottoman casemate warship could only bring a single 6" gun to bear, and di Revel was sure he could see the shell in flight as it was so slow. The smoke made by the ironclad was thickening by the minute and the Italian admiral expected her propellers to stop turning every minute.
It was one of the 6" guns which caused the first hit. It left a glowing scar on the inclined armor, no other damage could be seen from the Italian fleet. There were several hits that followed and di Revel was sure he spotted at least one glowing crater that indicated penetration.
When all was said and done, Garibaldi's shooting was not that important for its direct effects, spectacular as it looked. It forced Avn-I-Illah to orient its armored belt, such as it was, towards di Revel's flagship and exposed its vulnerable ventral and dorsal sides to Varese and Ferrucio, Garibaldi's sister ships kept formation a kilometer above and below di Revel. From these positions they would soon shoot into parts of the old ironclad that had next to no armor. They could forego armor-piercing projectiles and shoot the old ship with HC shells filled to the brim with high explosives.
For now the three ship formation put round after round around the Ottoman skyship or into its side. Many rounds off it, but di Revel imagined the hell inside. Its cramped, dark interior would be filled with men who fought through smoke and fire, doing their best to extinguish the flames that crept along the walls with the smallest amount of water possible. The engine room would be an even worse level of hell, filled with humid heat, vaporized oil, and the ever-present danger of a ruptured steam line. The latter could easily emit a thin, invisible stream of superheated steam that would kill its victims in seconds if they were very lucky.
Something must have broken in the old warhorse already as its funnels emitted even greater amounts of thick smoke, half hiding the ironclad, its wake and the far side. The colorful tracers came closer and closer to Avn-I-Illah now that the ships got ever closer to each other, and the gunners were finding their range. Numerous hit ripped into the skyship, causing short-lived flowers of bright flame often followed by the sinister glow of fires in ever more places. Di Revel could not help but to admire the Ottoman's courage. They might be lacking in equipment and maybe a bit in the skill's department, but by God nothing was wrong with their guts. They would make for a great victory over a worthy foe.
Something shook Garibaldi for a second and an explosion hammered into the Italian admiral's ears. The first Turkish shell had found its mark on the armor belt, exploding with the smoky cloud of a black-powder filled shell. Di Revel was a passenger on Garibaldi as much as directly running the ship was concerned, and he would not undermine her captain's position by directly asking for a damage report. The captain was clever enough to repeat the report loudly enough that his admiral could overhear as it came through the voice pipe. It seemed that the hit had not penetrated the armor.
By now explosions blossomed on Avn-I-Illah regularly and the evil flickering of fire could be seen in the rents de Revel's flotilla had ripped into the old skyship. The smoke from the funnels had increased, if such a thing were even possible, and changed in color, indicating that copious amounts of steam were leaking into the funnels. It might be the admiral's imagination, but the skyship seemed to lose speed. He would have to adjust accordingly, but for now the ironclad still tried to close the distance. And by now di Revel could see how armor plates were shorn off his opponent, how shells from the other ships in his flotilla scored hits above and below the belt of Avn-I-Illah. Smoke emerged from many holes and rents, lit by flickering fires inside. The ship was slowing down by now and started to tumble when parts of its great rudder went missing. Either her captain would strike her color soon or…
The Italian admiral saw a rating listen to something that came from a voice tube. He then went to his officer who blanched and went to Garibaldi's captain immediately. What could possibly be that important in his moment of triumph? And while a huge explosion wracked the old ironclad and cheers ran through the cruiser the captain finally addressed di Revel.
"Sir, message from Ferrucio, there is another ship hiding in the ironclad's smoke."
The Admiral immediately turned back to the vision slit and tried to make out something from the thinning smoke that showed Avn-I-Illah`s final course. For a second he was not able to see anything, but something stirred the gray mass, ripping it aside like a veil and trailing it behind for a second. It was shaped like an arrowhead, painted a flat black to better hide at night and streaked with the grime of the old Ironclad's passing. It accelerated like a scolded cat, seemingly making a beeline for di Revel. Its course was a complicated spiral and its ever-changing velocity made the rocket boat a hard target to hit.
Colorful tracers went all around it, mostly missing to the aft as it accelerated faster than the gunners could calculate a new solution. A heavy shell passed right through it without doing visible damage, as there was nothing substantial in its way to trigger the fuse. More and smaller tracers originated from Garibaldi's revolver cannons. While going wildly awry at first the crews walked the tracers towards the target and managed to get bursts of 37mm shells into the rocket boat. Something must have given as the rocket boat started to yaw, presenting more of her sides to the slipstream.
He was about to hope that Avn-I-Illah`s avenging angel would start its final somersault when the rocket boat stabilized itself, pointing its ravaged prow directly at the Italian admiral. It approached a bit slower than di Revel anticipated and the smoke from its stacks was the off-color of incomplete combustion. She certainly had not much longer before she would end in some way, but would that ship be destroyed soon enough?
The rocket boat's slowdown threw Garibaldi's gunner off for a critical moment, allowing the craft to stabilize into its attack run. Di Revel saw her prow aim away from him, towards the point where his ship would be in a few moments. Maybe he could challenge fate now.
"Captain, course change four points to starboard, one point up, make it snappy. Signal our intent to the flotilla while you are about it."
"Four points starboard, one point up, immediately."
Di Revel saw the captain turn towards the helmsmen with what seemed like glacial slowness and repeat his orders word for word. And the helmsmen repeated the same again, at least while they turned their respective wheels.
The great rudders at Garibaldi's stern started to move, biting into the slipstream and turning the armored cruiser around. But the ship massed many thousands tons, and so it was reluctant to change the course on which it roared ahead at better than 200 kph. And even when Garibaldi's gunners started to get the range and speed again the rocket boat refused to die. Di Revel was amazed that anybody could still be alive in that boat that trailed smoke and flames, losing parts and corpses in its wake. But somebody still had to be as the boat was approaching like some undead monster from a cheap horror novel.
And then his breath stopped as his binoculars revealed four hatches rising in the boat's prow, soon obscured by fire and smoke. Belching copious amounts of smoke the huge rockets accelerated on sooty flames towards his command. He saw the rockets yaw this way or that before their fins unfolded and bit into slipstream. That and the sputtering of their black powder propellant were Garibaldi's last hope for survival. One of the rockets started a massive yaw shortly after it left its tube, a yaw so massive that it started to turn around itself in a violent motion that ripped it apart.
Two were subjected to a withering fire from the cruiser's machine guns and revolver cannon. The chances of a single hit were insignificant, but be it simple chance or di Revel's hand that clutched the cross under his tunic, a machine gun round found one of the rockets, exploding it in an ugly black cloud of smoke lit from within.
The last remaining pair refused to stop, evaded every bullet fired at them and their primitive boosters did not fail. One managed to pass Garibaldi's flank by a scant few meters, roaring off into the endless sky. The other hit the cruiser's angled belt at an acute angle and was thrown upwards. Its fuse needed a second to work, exploding the warhead a dozen meters above Garibaldi's thinly armored ventral side. Even this thin armor was easily enough to withstand its shockwave, but the explosion managed to travel down the ship's funnels. The shockwave went directly into the cruiser's boilers, sending flaming fuel and scalding steam into its machinery rooms. The flash boilers had next to no pressure reserve, failing to provide steam to the cruiser's turbines in mere moments. Not only did that stop the rotation of the shafts that turned the ACR's propellers, but it also stopped the steering engines that helped push its rudders into the slipstream.
The great armored cruiser coasted along its course, unable to change, to evade or to fight. Admiral di Revel could only watch the flaming wreck of the rocket boat approach. As in a nightmare he could not run, could not evade, and could only watch his doom approach. The rocket boat was just a flaming mass now, wreathed in fire. No one could possibly be alive on board, no vengeful crewman could try to correct its course. And still, an unkind fate guided the burning remains directly against Garibaldi's armored side. This crushed the rocket boat's fuel tanks, coating the Italian cruiser with a flaming inferno.
When the rescue crews from the other Italian ships could finally enter the burned wreck that had been Garibaldi they found the Admiral's corpse. They had to identify him by the remains of his medals as the body was blacker than the night and smaller than a child.
And while the Italian Navy Cielo Militare mourned the death of so many skymen, Auro da Silva could not hide his glee at the bonus he received from an immense spike in views.
SMS Deutschland, forward boiler room
Helmut Walter closed the hatch behind him and waited for his ears to pop before opening the second one before him. Currently Deutschland was cruising, so the positive pressure in the boiler room was minimal. If the captain called for full bells for the old lady there would be considerable added pressure inside the boiler rooms to force more air into her boilers.
The temperatures inside the lock had been warm already, the boiler room was a steam bath. The many pipes and joints in the boiler room had developed small leaks here and there, often in hard-to-reach spaces. And each of the flash boilers in the room contained a roaring inferno, burning many tons of wood tar every day to propel the aging juggernaut through the endless sky. He glanced at the oil- and water-operators, a small group of experienced noncoms and officers. They watched the instruments before them as closely as priests the relics of their faith. No father would guard the virginity of their daughters more closely, no accountant would balance their books better than these men who regulated how much fuel and water was introduced into each boiler at any given minute.
If there was too much water the fragile mass of tubes inside the drums would melt into uselessness before long. Too much water, and the heat would not be sufficient to evaporate it right at the injectors where it was introduced into the boiler. Having liquid water inside a boiler in zero gravity would lead to all kinds of problems, many of them potentially quite destructive. All the steam they produced was further heated and thus put under ever-increasing pressure. There was only one way out for the steam, a well-insulated tube that ran into the next room. That one contained one of Deutschland's four steam engines. The steam would work itself through three cylinders at ever-decreasing pressure before entering condensers that tried to convert all that steam back into water. A part of that energy released by the phase change would be used to preheat the feed water that was to enter the boilers, the rest entered huge radiators that dumped the heat into the sky around the aging battleship. The whole ship, especially the engine room vibrated under the hammer blows of the huge pistons even when the ship just needed a third of the power it was capable of. If full power was called for the juggernaut would tremble under its own power and the machinery would pound itself into something catastrophic within hours. Running at full power for days at an end was the privilege of turbine-driven ships, not such old warhorses as Deutschland.
Walter saw a group of lowly skymen doing their level best to clean the deck of the ever-present oily sludge that tried to trip everybody and that was dangerous if allowed to accumulate. Another had the rather nasty job of winding an asbestos banding around a leaking pipe, something dangerous and nasty at the same time. He saw the pasty-faced, somewhat pudgy recruit try to avoid getting burned and still apply the band-aid where it was needed. His task was made more difficult by the glasses that kept steaming up in the sauna that masqueraded as an engine room.
The recruit stiffened up under Walter's gaze and the boatswain made a get-on-with-it gesture that worked better in the clamor of the boiler room.
He stood his own watch at the port fuel pump while something kept nagging him.
Walter was back at the airlock when he realized what it was. Not only had the recruit moved the wrong way, he had not looked at Walter, he had glanced at the group of recruits besides him. Something needed checking before it blew up, and it was not the boiler in the room.
Cafeteria, Will-to-Stream asteroid, Riefenstahl Productions headquarters
Auro de Silva watched the fork piercing a piece of steak nearly miss the mouth that it was supposed to go into. He brought it off to look like he was looking in another direction, giving the impression he would consciously and generously ignore the mishap while amusing himself at the same time. Even more amusing to see the realization when the taste of real meat hit Roald Winter's brain, knowing that the former Intern would now disdain the simulation of the same food when he went back to his fluid-filled VR-pod. What a marvelous way to celebrate the promotions of the newly minted consultants, making them depend on the jobs he could dole out and showing his superior standing.
And all it took to achieve this was to celebrate in the real, taking the former interns out of the VR pods they spent so much of their lives in and make them perform in the flesh. Especially those whose avatars were muscle-filled ninjas and were now relearning that their real bodies reacted quite differently. Winter seemed to have it in hand by now, time to unbalance him a bit further.
"That Ringworld production is putting up quite the show at the moment, your contribution to the team is noted. How long do you think that novelty will last and how do we keep the audience's attention?"
Oh how Auro relished the onset of panic in Winter's features and what conscious effort the newly-minted assistant writer applied to keep that from freezing him.
"I do believe that this world has so much to offer, the vistas alone are breathtaking. And there is so much to explore, both of the world for the Ringworlders as well as their society for our viewers. The Moulin Rouge alone has a couple of million viewers each time it performs. And then there is of course the violence of the conflicts."
Auro da Silva weighed Winter in his mind. That useful nerd was not totally innocent it seemed. Others might shy away from seeing death and destruction as an important source of entertainment, Winter did not seem to object. Did he not see the Ringworlders as real humans or was he indeed sufficiently ruthless? He would learn in time.
"Yes, this little fracas at Bayreuth station certainly did catch everybody's attention, didn't it? But you know how things are, people want more of it, more and bigger and bloodier. Otherwise, they might look elsewhere. You promised that didn't you?"
"Sorry Sir, it is Beirut station, Bayreuth is a worldlet in the German sector. The history we used as a template for this Ringworld setting certainly had that. But if the humans there go exactly down the same path is yet to be seen. We cannot control them directly of course; we could just set the stage. But that something big will happen, that is for sure."
Auro did not like anything he could not manipulate or control, that might have crept into his tone as Winter was flinching.
"How so?"
"Well Sir on the one hand this is a radically different environment than Earth, so many small things differ which might lead to larger consequences. For example, the Battle of Beirut Station was a one-sided massacre on Earth, not that intense battle that our viewers still like so much.
I can practically guarantee that the Great War we expect, and need will not start on 28.07.1914, things are already too different from our ancient history. But something is bound to happen, the question is when and maybe even who starts it."
That was not what da Silva wanted to hear.
"We need something like this, our teaser trailers have made that clear and the polls could not be more clear, especially after that Bay..something battle."
"And something will happen, this setting is a powder keg, and several players are compulsive match lighters.
The French are still seething as they believe the Germans stole Alsace-Lorraine from them, their memories we implanted that they conquered it themselves 200 years ago did not seem to stick so well. They want to be the dominant power in that region, not the Germans whom they consider upstarts.
The German Kaiser has fired Bismark, the chancellor who declared the Germans "saturated" and not interested in acquiring new territories. Wilhelm wants a nice colonial empire like his English cousins and keeps saying that Germany would fight for its place in the sun, whatever that means in this world. Talking about saying, that guy has a mouth on him and manages to p.o. nearly everybody around.
The Austrians are sitting on the last old-style empire in the European Sector, ruling a very diverse population who on average no longer believe in an emperor who rules because god said so. They are sharing power with the Hungarians who help in keeping all the other minorities down, but this is an uneasy arrangement that is subject to change. They believe themselves in a really long struggle with the Serbs, mostly about acquiring territories that the weak Ottoman Empire can no longer hold.
The Russians really need to make foreign hay as the lid on their population is really rising in a state that is badly governed in a style that would be appropriate a hundred years ago. The Czar has declared himself protector of all Slavs, and that brings him into conflict with the Austrians, as the Serbs are Slavs, as well as some of Austria's subjects. On top of that the Russian industrialization is financed by the French, who also have a beef with the Germans. They have an influence on him, as has some sort of mystic quack.
The Italians are allied to the Germans and Austrians, for now. But if they switch sides, they might gain the Venice and Tyrol sub-sectors from Austria-Hungary they so dearly desire to round out their nation state.
And the English see the carefully maintained balance of power in the European Sector crashing down, they fear a new power rising that could threaten them like they remember Napoleon did before. That the German industry is becoming more powerful than theirs is just icing on the cake.
Oh something is going to blow, big time. And when it does all of them will realize that they have not fought a major war for quite some time, that their doctrines are outdated, and they will have to learn on the fly. I cannot promise you when or how exactly. But I promise you that it is going to be big, bloody, and epic."
Auro da Silva noted how animated and self-assured the former intern became when he was talking about something he knew about, highly interesting.
"I'll hold you to that, you know?"
SMS Deutschland, passageway, at night
Helmut Walter pulled himself through the passageway with practised ease. He had not bothered to don his magnetic shoes. He needed a trip to the head, not stand watch for four hours. This being the dog watch not many people were about and the cacophony that every skyship under power made hid whatever sound they made. For a brief, precious moment the boatswain felt alone, a private moment to himself. He did his business with sucky hose and was about to head back when he heard things he would have normally ignored.
There was the sound of belt leather meeting flesh, there were whimpers and cries for mercy. The voices that accompanied that were vindictive and full of glee.
That was probably "Selbsterziehung" self-education, something his Imperial Navy quietly encouraged. If a lowly skyman stole from his comrades or did not pull his weight it was much better if said comrades took care of it themselves instead of bothering the officers.
Helmut was not so sure about it, having experienced it from both sides a long time ago. It gave the little shits ideas, gave too much power to bullies and pushed useful men from the navy. Still, he was just one boatswain and rocking the boat was not a good idea if he wanted to stay in the navy as long as possible.
On the other hand, this went on for longer than it had to and the sounds of despair became too quiet. Something was about to go off the rails, better to keep things manageable.
Pulling himself further along the corridor he went to the hatch leading to a storage room. The dogs opened easily enough and the boatswain pushed the hatch open with both legs, swinging him into the room. It was dimly lit, but what light there was was more than enough to reveal madness. Several skymen stood around a few who held the recruit he had spotted in the boiler room down and had obviously beaten him bloody. Helmut tried to see it all and take the situation in, but the big, round eyes of the recruit kept him. He had seen such eyes before.
Fuck, another suicide in his watch would see him thrown from the navy in a heartbeat. What was he to do?