Ring of Fire II

by Eric Flint

  The distinctive clothing went by the English name of "jumpsuits" and would have been enough in themselves to identify the men. But Janos had excellent eyesight, and recognized them even at a distance. The one in the center was Ronald Sanderlin, Jr., the up-timer who'd sold the automobile to the Austrian king and had agreed to move to Vienna to maintain it for him. He'd brought his wife and two children with him, although Janos didn't know their names. Drugeth estimated his age at being somewhere in the mid-thirties, although such estimates were always tricky with Americans. You simply couldn't use the easy gauge of the condition of their teeth.

  The older man standing to Sanderlin's left was his uncle Robert, who went by the nickname of "Bob." He was unmarried, and seemed to be extremely taciturn. At least, on admittedly short acquaintance, Janos had never heard the man say a word in either German or English.

  The third man was the most interesting of the three, from Drugeth's viewpoint. His name was Andrew Jackson "Sonny" Fortney, Jr. He was also married and had also brought his wife and two children. He was supposed to be a close friend of Ron Sanderlin's—plausible enough, at first glance, since they were approximately the same age—and Sanderlin had insisted that he come along to Vienna as part of the "deal," as he called it. There was even, from the Austrian standpoint, he'd argued, the additional benefit that Fortney had experience working with train steam engines, which was not true of either Sanderlin himself or his uncle.

  Sanderlin had been quite stubborn on the matter. Istvan Janoszi, Drugeth's agent, had finally agreed to include the third man in the bargain. But he'd sent a private message to Janos warning him that Fortney might well be a spy for the United States of Europe. The man was known to have been visited on occasion by the USE's fiendishly capable spymaster, Francisco Nasi, for one thing. And, for another, despite Sanderlin's fervent insistence that Sonny Fortney was his "good buddy," Istvan had not been able to uncover any evidence that the two men had spent any time together prior to the summer of this year—which was to say, right about the time the Austrian proposal to the Sanderlins would have come to the attention of the USE's political authorities.

  The issue was of sufficient concern that Janos had even raised it with the emperor himself, the day after he arrived back in Vienna. But Ferdinand had dismissed the problem.

  "Let's be realistic, Janos. There was no possible way to keep secret the fact that three Americans with mechanical experience were moving to Vienna—not to mention the two complete automobiles they brought with them. Ha! You should have seen the huge wagons and their teams when they lumbered into the city. They could barely fit in the streets, even after I ordered all obstructions removed."

  The emperor drummed his fingers on the armrest of his chair for a moment, and then shrugged. "The enemy was bound to fit a spy into the mix, unless they were deaf, dumb and blind—and if there's any evidence that either Michael Stearns or his Jewish spymaster are incompetent, it's been impossible to find. So be it. Vienna is full of spies—but now, in exchange for allowing another, we've gotten our first significant access to American technology. I can live with that, easily enough. At least, this time, we probably know who the spy is to begin with. That'll make it easier to keep an eye on him."

  Janos had his doubts, but . . . Technically speaking, although the USE and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were political enemies, the two nations were not actually at war. Furthermore, from what he could tell, he thought the USE's Prime Minister Stearns was trying to keep an open conflict from breaking out, at least for the moment. That would be almost impossible, of course, if—as everyone suspected would happen next year—the USE's emperor Gustav Adolf launched a war of conquest on Saxony and Brandenburg. In that event, Austria would most likely join the conflict.

  For the time being, however, Stearns seemed content to let the death of Ferdinand II and the accession of his son to the Austrian throne serve as a reason to keep the peace. The new monarch's surprising decision to publicly renounce any claim to being the new Holy Roman Emperor and replace that with his new title of "Emperor of Austria-Hungary" had no doubt gone a long way toward that end. Contained within the formalities of the titles was the underlying reality, that Austria realized the days it could directly control—or try to control—all of the Germanies was at an end. Ferdinand III's public renunciation of the title of Holy Roman Emperor meant, for all practical purposes, that the Holy Roman Empire itself was now a thing of the past. Henceforth, presumably, Austria's interests and ambitions would be directed toward the east and the south, not the north and the west.

  The Turks hadn't been pleased by that announcement, to say the least. But the enmity of the Ottoman Empire was more or less a given, no matter what Austria did. The Turks had plenty of spies in Vienna too, which was the reason Ferdinand had sent Janos Drugeth on an inspection tour of the Balkan fortifications, the day after he made the announcement—even though that had required Janos to be absent from the scene during the later stages of the technology transfer from Grantville that he had largely developed. The emperor's decision to send off one of his closest confidants on such a tour of the fortifications was a none-too-subtle way of letting the Turks know that Ferdinand realized they would be furious at his decision. And they could swallow it or not, as they chose.

  The automobile was finally gliding to a stop, just in front of the three American mechanics who stood waiting. From the placid looks on their faces, it seemed they hadn't been much impressed by the ability of Austria's new emperor to move faster on land than any monarch in this history of this universe.

  That was as good a way as any to distinguish up-time mechanics from down-time statesmen and soldiers—or down-time fishwives and farmers, for that matter. Anyone else who'd seen Ferdinand III racing around a track like that would know that a very different man sat on the Austrian throne from the former emperor, these days.

  Assuming they hadn't figured it out already, which most of them would have, by now. In the first two months of his reign, Ferdinand III had forcefully carried through a major realignment of his empire in ways that his stolid father would never have imagined. The old man was probably "spinning in his grave," to use an American expression.

  First, he'd pressured his father—on his deathbed, no less—to rescind the Edict of Restitution. At one stroke, at least in the legal realm, ending the major source of conflict with the Protestants of central Europe.

  Second, within a week of his father's death, he'd renounced the title of Holy Roman Emperor—that was something of a hollow formality, since he hadn't had the title anyway—and replaced it with the new imperial title.

  Third, and perhaps most important, he'd jettisoned his father's reluctance to even acknowledge the up-timers' technological superiority in favor of an aggressive policy of modernizing his realm. Ferdinand could move just as quickly on that front because, as the prince and heir, he'd set underway Drugeth's secret mission to Grantville. "Secret," not simply from the enemy, but from his own father. Had Ferdinand II learned of it, while he was still alive, he would have been even more furious than he was by his daughter Maria Anna's escapades.

  Displaying better manners than Janos had seen displayed by most Americans in Grantville, two of the up-time mechanics opened the doors for the vehicle's occupants. Ron Sanderlin, on the emperor's side, and his uncle on Drugeth's.

  "Nice recovery on that last turn, Your Majesty," said Ron, as he helped Ferdinand out of the seat.

  "It worked splendidly! Just as you said!"

  The older Sanderlin said nothing, as usual, and other than opening the door he made no effort to assist Janos out of the vehicle. Which was a bit unfortunate, since the contraption's bizarrely low construction made getting out of the seat a lot more difficult than clambering down from a carriage or dismounting from a horse. It didn't help any that Janos felt shaky and stiff at the same time.

  Hungarian cavalry officer, he reminded himself. He decided that a straightforward lunge was probably the best way to do the business.


  Somewhat to his surprise, that worked rather well. And now that he was on his feet, the properly stiff-legged stance of an officer in the presence of his monarch served nicely to keep his knees from wobbling.

  Ferdinand III, Grand Duke of Austria, King of Hungary, and now Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, planted his hands on his hips and gave the newly constructed race track a gaze of approval.

  "You were right, Ron," he announced. "We need to build up the banks of the track on the curves."

  "Yup. Even at only sixty miles an hour, which is nothing for a 240Z, you almost spun out. Of course, it'll help a lot once we can replace that packed dirt with a solid surface. Tarmac, at least, although concrete would be better."

  Ferdinand nodded. "We can manage that, I think, given a bit of time. We'll need to build spectator stands also."

  He turned to Janos, smiling widely. "We'll call it the Vienna 500, I'm thinking. You watch! One of these days, it'll draw enough tourists to flood the city's coffers."

  Janos Drugeth, Hungarian cavalry officer in the service of the Austrian emperor—a bold and daring breed, no one denied it—wondered what the "five hundred" part of that title meant.

  But he kept silent. He was afraid to ask.

  Chapter 2. The Emperor

  A few hours later, in one of the emperor's private salons, Janos felt a similar terror. A greater one than he'd felt on the racetrack, in truth, albeit not one that was immediately perilous.

  In the long run, though, what the new emperor was contemplating was likely to be far riskier than what he'd been doing a few hours earlier at the controls of an up-time vehicle.

  "Driving," Janos recalled, was the term Ferdinand III and his American mechanics used to refer to that activity. They did not use the English term, just a derivative from the stout German equivalent verb fahren. In both languages, the verb had the additional connotation of half-forcing, half-cajoling someone or some animal to go somewhere they would not otherwise go.

  In the afternoon, a young, portly, physically quite unprepossessing monarch had driven an automobile with flair. Tonight, he was proposing to drive an empire with the same flair. Indeed, in the full scope of his half-made plans, perhaps a fourth of an entire continent.

  Slowly, Janos lowered the letter the emperor had asked him to read. The letter was a long one, and had been jointly signed by Ferdinand's oldest sister Maria Anna and her new husband. Don Fernando, that was—had been, rather, since he seemed to have dropped the honorific "Don" along with his former title of cardinal-infante. He was the younger brother of the king of Spain and a member of the Spanish branch of the far-flung and powerful Habsburg family.

  Fernando I, King in the Netherlands, as he now styled himself, judging from the signature on the letter.

  "Are you seriously considering this, Your Majesty?" Drugeth asked quietly. He resisted the temptation to glance at the two other men in the room. Whatever else, Janos knew, he had to be able to react to his monarch in this situation without being influenced by the attitude of others.

  "Quite seriously, Janos. Be assured of that. Not that I feel bound by any of my sister and new brother-in-law's specific suggestions. They face a very different situation than I do, over there in the Low Countries. And while my sister is an exceptionally well-educated and intelligent woman, and was raised here, in the nature of things her knowledge of the Austrian empire was limited in many respects. Quite limited, in some. She has no close knowledge of military affairs, for instance." The new emperor chuckled, a bit heavily. "Of course, the same cannot be said of her new husband, who could legitimately lay claim to being the most accomplished military leader produced by the family in generations."

  All that was true enough. Janos had encountered Maria Anna, and had been quite impressed by her forceful personality, as much the product of an acute mind as the self-confidence of a princess. What was even more true was that the situation in Austria and its possessions was quite different—radically different—from the one she now dealt with in her new domain.

  There were but two or three languages in her new kingdom, for instance, and not too distantly related at that. Whereas in the Austrian empire, how many languages were spoken? And not by a handful of foreign émigrés or small groups in isolated pockets, either, but by entire regions and by powerful persons?

  Janos didn't actually know, for sure. German and Italian, of course. Hungarian. A veritable host of Slavic dialects. Three very different groups of languages, with little similarities at all.

  Maria Anna and her new husband only had to deal with a few religious strains, to name another difference. Catholicism and two brands of Calvinism. Some Jews. Almost no Lutherans. Whereas in the Austrian empire, although they'd been largely driven underground by the harsh policies of Ferdinand's rigidly Catholic father, there still lurked every variety of Protestantism, Christians who adhered to the Greek church, as many if not more Jews as there were in Holland—and, should the full scope of the successor's plans come to fruition, a great number of Muslims as well.

  "All of the Balkans?" he asked, managing to keep any trace of quaver from his voice.

  "Constantinople, too," said the emperor flatly. "The Turks have had it long enough."

  Privately, Janos made a note to himself to try to limit the emperor's ambitions in that regard. He could see no real advantage to seizing the southern Balkans, beyond seizing territory for the sake of it. Especially given that the rest of the proposal was already so ambitious.

  "Insanely" ambitious, one could almost say. Ferdinand proposed to overturn centuries of Austrian custom, social institutions and policies at the same time as he expanded Austrian power.

  The older one of the other two men in the room cleared his throat. "I have read many of those same up-time history books, Your Majesty. I feel constrained to point out that, in essence, what you propose to do here in Austria is what another monarch in Russia would try to do at the end of this century."

  "Yes. Peter the Great."

  The man—Johann Jakob Khiesel, Count von Gottschee, who had served the Austrian dynasty as its principal spymaster for decades—cleared his throat again. "He failed, you know. In the long run, if not in his own time. His Romanov dynasty would be destroyed in two centuries—and, in great part, by the same forces he set loose."

  The emperor nodded. "I'm aware of that. But simply because he failed does not mean that we shall. We have many advantages he did not possess. And please show me any alternative, Jakob? Given that those same histories make quite clear the fate of our own Habsburg dynasty. We were also destroyed, in that same conflagration they call the First World War."

  Somewhere in Janos Drugeth's mind—perhaps his soul—he could feel the decision tipping. Pulled toward the emperor by Ferdinand's unthinking use of the pronoun "we," in a manner that made quite clear he was using it in the common form of a collective pronoun, rather than the royal We.

  Although he'd only read some of the up-time accounts of the future history of Russia—which were fairly sparse, in any event—Janos was quite sure that Peter the Great had never done any such thing. The Russian Tsar had tried to transform his realm without ever once contemplating the need to transform himself and his dynasty.

  That . . . might be enough.

  Even if it weren't, Janos could not gainsay the emperor's other point. Drugeth had studied exhaustively every American account he could find—Austria had many spies in Grantville, and good ones, so he was sure they'd found most of them—and the accounts of the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and its likely causes, were clear enough. Insofar as anything was ever clear when it came to history.

  If they continued as they had been, they were surely doomed. Not in their own lifetimes, probably, but so what? If a man had no greater ambition than to go through his life satisfying his personal wants and desires, ignoring what might happen to his descendants, Janos thought him to be a sorry sort of man. Not to mention a Catholic in name only.

  The fourth man in the room put the
thought to words. "I think we have no choice, Father. Like you, I can see all of the pitfalls and perils in the Netherlanders' proposal. But what choice do we have? And I will point out that if we have advantages that our counterparts in another universe did not have, we also have disadvantages." A thin smile came to the face of Georg Bartholomaeus Zwickl, the count's stepson and official heir. "They did not have to face Michael Stearns."

  Stearns. Mentally, Janos rolled the harsh-sounding English name on his tongue. A former coal miner, now grown into a force that had struck Europe like Attila and the Huns a thousand years earlier. In his impact, at least, if not in his methods.

  Janos had seen him, once, although only at a distance on the streets of Grantville. The man had been laughing at some remark made by his companion, the president of the USE's State of Thuringia-Franconia. That was Ed Piazza, whom Janos had met briefly and in person in the course of a casual social affair.