Post by Lorpius Prime on Feb 17, 2007 23:08:55 GMT -5
The “Captain’s Welcome”, as it turned out, meant quickly being handed off to a stewardess who showed Jay to his cabin. Jay decided he didn’t mind Perry ducking off, though, the captain had said he had equipment to check, and ultimately Jay would rather be alive than waited upon. He wasn’t exactly comfortable around Perry anyway.
The cabin in which Jay was to stay was near the rear of the gondola’s passenger quarters. Compared to the living standards aboard the trains Jay was used to, it was luxurious. There was a large wooden table for meals or working space, a well-upholstered sofa from which one could relax and look out the enormous windows to the ground below, and two full-sized beds against either wall, on one of which lay Jay’s suitcase.
At first, Jay couldn’t believe his boss would spend the money to get him such impressive accommodations. Then he came to his senses. The Welsh Rover was a long-distance liner, and those always had much nicer passenger conditions than the smaller airships which ferried guests much shorter distances within a limited range. Looking out into the hall, he found that his room seemed to be the average-size, only a couple at the front and very back looked considerably larger. He also reminded himself that his room was designed to be shared between two occupants, and it would probably seem less spacious with another person milling about inside.
Sighing, Jay shut the door. He figured he should probably get something useful done before his trip was finished, lest he arrive in Munich without a clue what to do next. Opening up his suitcase, he traded the prayer book his father had given him for the package of documents from John Mills. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to open it. He’d only given its contents a cursory glance after finding out their sender was dead, and now it was time to read through them more thoroughly. Jay tried not to think of them as Mills’ final message to him.
Jay was fortunate: he didn’t have to share his cabin with anyone for the first leg of the journey to the Channel Islands. The airship was delayed a couple hours when it had to wait for the winds to die down enough to allow the Rover to land at St. Helier Station in Jersey.
Another passenger was ticketed to his room for the second leg down to Paris: a graying man who spoke with such a thick accent that Jay could hardly understand him. He left some bags in the room, and then disappeared until the end of the flight. Jay thought the man said it was his first time on an airship, so he probably spent most of the time in the observation deck. Or maybe he spent his time in the dining area getting drunk and impressing women with his accent. Jay really didn’t care, he enjoyed the silence.
The papers Mills had sent him were old. Very old. Jay was thumbing through rectigraphed copies of documents from over a century ago. He hoped Mills had taken extreme care when reproducing them: paper didn’t age well. Most were stamped “WO” for War Office, and Jay thought they must be from the mountains of such files which wound up on Public Record Office shelves when the War Office became the Ministry of Defence. Jay had once seen an entire room full of such documents during his time as a new hire at the Times, all in boxes, all unsorted. It was a nightmare of disorganization, and Jay didn’t blame the PRO workers for ignoring the problem; he wouldn’t want to attempt to sort through three hundred years of bad file keeping, either.
Mills must have spent some very long nights digging this stuff up. Or some poor underling had had a bad few days doing it for him. Jay thought it was probably the former; Mills was too nice to crush a new kid’s spirit like that. Unlike Barry Godwin, whom Jay suspected took sadistic pleasure from sending junior staff members on wild goose chases.
Jay shook himself back to the present and spread out a few more pages in front of him. They were from an 1871 report to the Admiralty and the War Secretary on the Swan King Ludwig and his origins, the general gist of which was “we don’t have a clue.”
Which was the point, of course. Nobody had any idea where Ludwig had come from. He’d appeared out of absolutely nowhere, reconciled Prussia and Austria, enthralled the Germans, revived the Holy Roman Empire, took the crown for himself, and thus started the second biggest mystery in all of History.
The biggest mystery was where he went again 16 years later.
The report, assembled by an ad-hoc group of War Office “experts”, embassy officials, and various intelligence sources, admitted that it couldn’t find any information on the Swan King’s past. But it was optimistic about his intentions. The authors praised Ludwig for bringing peace to Germany and went on about how his new Germany would make an excellent counterbalance to France. They called it “a new Russia” with “an excellent position to contain any Revolutionary resurgence”.
Jay shook his head, reading the analysis of these long-dead men only confirmed his opinions of how stupid people were back then. They were still worrying about Napoleon sixty years after his defeat, and tripping over themselves to praise a strong Germany. No one predicted the problems which might arise when the Duke of Cumberland died and Victoria tried to recover his lost throne in Hanover.
He pushed those pages aside and considered a similar document. This one was from 1879 and done in a much more professional—and less enthusiastic—manner. By then the Empire was already at war with Ludwig, and the War Office had a much more urgent need for accurate information about the enemy monarch. Victoria’s armies were being beaten all along the Frisian front and in the Rhine Valley, and the government was desperate for anything that might offer them an advantage over the Germans.
Unfortunately, this second report was no more able than the first to divine anything about Ludwig’s past. It seemed they had been able to buy off some member of his court to pass information on him, but he was either not willing to share, or not privy to any material on the Swan King’s background. Most of the knowledge gleaned was about his apparently rather extravagant taste in art and architecture that he put into constructing his palace on the Bavarian Sea.
The final conclusion of this second attempt was that Ludwig’s strength came not from any kind of military or strategic genius—indeed, it concluded that he was probably only a mediocre thinker at best—but from his ability to inspire his people and armies to fight with an enthusiasm that the British Army was hard pressed to replicate. Their recommendation was to immediately begin exploring methods of demoralizing the German soldiers or undermining their unity.
If the War Office had followed that advice, nothing came of it. The obliteration of Britain’s Grand Army by von Moltke’s allied forces at Hamburg convinced a fuming Empress Victoria to seek peace with Ludwig and sack the entire Admiralty and Army leadership.
Jay flipped through a few more pages. After the Hanoverian disaster, it seemed the War Office had made a more determined investigation of Ludwig’s government. Jay skimmed detailed reports about the design of the Herreninsel palace from spies impersonating tourists and about the structure of his government which was teased out of disgruntled former monarchs and nobility.
A third wartime report was much briefer than the last. It was from just a few months after the start of the Great War in 1885, by which time it seemed the War Office no longer depended on single omnibus reports to gather intelligence on the Swan King. This report, again collected with the assistance of a source inside Ludwig’s court, was interested in the Swan King’s periodic disappearances. Apparently, the German monarch would simply vanish on occasion, sometimes for days at a time, before making a sweeping return to reassure his officers and officials. Attempts to follow the Swan King were hampered by London’s inability to get a truly loyal spy inside the palace, and it simply proved impossible to ever reliably track Ludwig’s movements.
The War Office official who reviewed the report ordered a follow-up and approved expanded resources for the mission. Jay flipped through the packet of documents; if the subsequent operation had produced anything useful, he didn’t have it.
Well, that was interesting at least. Jay set the report aside to review again later.
He sipped at a cup of cold coffee he’d ordered from a stewardess shortly after departing Jersey and dove into a post-war study of German mythology and symbols utilized during Ludwig’s reign.
Jay hardly noticed when his cabin-mate returned to retrieve his luggage. He was dozing when the man’s incomprehensible babbling roused him. Jay thought the accent had to be something derived from French, it would explain why he was disembarking in Paris, anyway. He made a series of gestures at Jay that seemed friendly before walking out the cabin door. Jay smiled and nodded back, utterly clueless.
He started nodding off again, and this time was woken by a gunshot. That was unusual enough to bring Jay fully alert and to his feet. The sharp noise had come from outside the airship, and Jay looked down through his cabin window.
Standing on the tarmac of the Parisian Air Station, just beyond the ticket taker was a man who was either incredibly brave or completely insane. What made this man either very brave or very insane was not that he had apparently just fired a pistol into the air while surrounded by several hundred enormous hydrogen-filled bombs. That was merely stupid. What made this man either very brave or very insane was that he was waving that same pistol around while approximately fifty French gendarmes pointed rifles at him. As Jay watched, he could see several more squads of armed men running towards the scene.
To his credit, the man might not have been aware of most of the rifles threatening to blast him into tiny messy pieces. Only one of the Frenchmen was in front of him, the rest stood behind, apparently having come to their comrade's assistance. The insane man—Jay had decided this was the more likely explanation—was shouting at the one in front him. The gendarme blocking his path was shouting back.
Jay couldn’t hear anything they were saying through the glass window, but he imagined the conversation went something like this:
“Stop, madman! I’m not going to let you onto this airship because you’re mad.”
“Get out of my way. I’m mad, see? I’m threatening an entire company of soldiers with my gun because I’m barking bloody mad!”
“I can see that you are mad, and that is why I am not going to let you on this airship. We have a strict no-madmen policy.”
“I don’t care because I've gone completely 'round the bend! Let me on!”
“Absolutely not. If we let one madman on, then we’d have to let every madman on, and then we wouldn’t make any money because all our normal customers would leave and madmen don’t pay bills.”
Jay knew they were probably speaking French as well, but he figured he could give his imagination license enough to work in English.
At this point, the insane man seemed to discover some memory of past sanity, for he put his gun away, and instead pulled out a piece of paper. Unfortunately, Jay thought it unlikely that the paper would help him much because he immediately began waving it around as wildly as he’d been waving the gun. The Frenchman didn’t move.
Finally, one of the soldiers crowding in behind the insane man stepped forward and snatched the paper from its owner. Jay supposed he was an officer. When the insane man spun and started shouting, the officer ignored him, letting the other gendarmes contain him with their bayonets.
After a few moments, the officer beckoned over the soldier who’d been steadfastly blocking the gun-slinging lunatic. The guard glared at his subject for a moment, then shouldered his rifle and walked over. He and the officer argued for a minute before the officer finally shrugged and pointed to the paper. Eventually it was handed back to the insane man, who was no longer shouting. The gendarmes were dispersed by the officer, and the posted guard jerked an angry thumb at the man he’d been blocking, who walked past and made an obscene gesture when he thought the soldier wasn’t looking.
Jay got quite a laugh out of the whole episode, until the madman walked into his cabin.
<<7<<_>>9>>
Book One, Chapter:
-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20-21-
-22-23-24-25-26-27-28-29-30-31-32-33-34-35-36-37-38-39-40-41-42-
-43-44-45-46-47-48-49-50-51-52-53-54-55-56-57-58-59-60-61-62-
Appendix: -A-B-C-
The cabin in which Jay was to stay was near the rear of the gondola’s passenger quarters. Compared to the living standards aboard the trains Jay was used to, it was luxurious. There was a large wooden table for meals or working space, a well-upholstered sofa from which one could relax and look out the enormous windows to the ground below, and two full-sized beds against either wall, on one of which lay Jay’s suitcase.
At first, Jay couldn’t believe his boss would spend the money to get him such impressive accommodations. Then he came to his senses. The Welsh Rover was a long-distance liner, and those always had much nicer passenger conditions than the smaller airships which ferried guests much shorter distances within a limited range. Looking out into the hall, he found that his room seemed to be the average-size, only a couple at the front and very back looked considerably larger. He also reminded himself that his room was designed to be shared between two occupants, and it would probably seem less spacious with another person milling about inside.
Sighing, Jay shut the door. He figured he should probably get something useful done before his trip was finished, lest he arrive in Munich without a clue what to do next. Opening up his suitcase, he traded the prayer book his father had given him for the package of documents from John Mills. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to open it. He’d only given its contents a cursory glance after finding out their sender was dead, and now it was time to read through them more thoroughly. Jay tried not to think of them as Mills’ final message to him.
* * *
Jay was fortunate: he didn’t have to share his cabin with anyone for the first leg of the journey to the Channel Islands. The airship was delayed a couple hours when it had to wait for the winds to die down enough to allow the Rover to land at St. Helier Station in Jersey.
Another passenger was ticketed to his room for the second leg down to Paris: a graying man who spoke with such a thick accent that Jay could hardly understand him. He left some bags in the room, and then disappeared until the end of the flight. Jay thought the man said it was his first time on an airship, so he probably spent most of the time in the observation deck. Or maybe he spent his time in the dining area getting drunk and impressing women with his accent. Jay really didn’t care, he enjoyed the silence.
The papers Mills had sent him were old. Very old. Jay was thumbing through rectigraphed copies of documents from over a century ago. He hoped Mills had taken extreme care when reproducing them: paper didn’t age well. Most were stamped “WO” for War Office, and Jay thought they must be from the mountains of such files which wound up on Public Record Office shelves when the War Office became the Ministry of Defence. Jay had once seen an entire room full of such documents during his time as a new hire at the Times, all in boxes, all unsorted. It was a nightmare of disorganization, and Jay didn’t blame the PRO workers for ignoring the problem; he wouldn’t want to attempt to sort through three hundred years of bad file keeping, either.
Mills must have spent some very long nights digging this stuff up. Or some poor underling had had a bad few days doing it for him. Jay thought it was probably the former; Mills was too nice to crush a new kid’s spirit like that. Unlike Barry Godwin, whom Jay suspected took sadistic pleasure from sending junior staff members on wild goose chases.
Jay shook himself back to the present and spread out a few more pages in front of him. They were from an 1871 report to the Admiralty and the War Secretary on the Swan King Ludwig and his origins, the general gist of which was “we don’t have a clue.”
Which was the point, of course. Nobody had any idea where Ludwig had come from. He’d appeared out of absolutely nowhere, reconciled Prussia and Austria, enthralled the Germans, revived the Holy Roman Empire, took the crown for himself, and thus started the second biggest mystery in all of History.
The biggest mystery was where he went again 16 years later.
The report, assembled by an ad-hoc group of War Office “experts”, embassy officials, and various intelligence sources, admitted that it couldn’t find any information on the Swan King’s past. But it was optimistic about his intentions. The authors praised Ludwig for bringing peace to Germany and went on about how his new Germany would make an excellent counterbalance to France. They called it “a new Russia” with “an excellent position to contain any Revolutionary resurgence”.
Jay shook his head, reading the analysis of these long-dead men only confirmed his opinions of how stupid people were back then. They were still worrying about Napoleon sixty years after his defeat, and tripping over themselves to praise a strong Germany. No one predicted the problems which might arise when the Duke of Cumberland died and Victoria tried to recover his lost throne in Hanover.
He pushed those pages aside and considered a similar document. This one was from 1879 and done in a much more professional—and less enthusiastic—manner. By then the Empire was already at war with Ludwig, and the War Office had a much more urgent need for accurate information about the enemy monarch. Victoria’s armies were being beaten all along the Frisian front and in the Rhine Valley, and the government was desperate for anything that might offer them an advantage over the Germans.
Unfortunately, this second report was no more able than the first to divine anything about Ludwig’s past. It seemed they had been able to buy off some member of his court to pass information on him, but he was either not willing to share, or not privy to any material on the Swan King’s background. Most of the knowledge gleaned was about his apparently rather extravagant taste in art and architecture that he put into constructing his palace on the Bavarian Sea.
The final conclusion of this second attempt was that Ludwig’s strength came not from any kind of military or strategic genius—indeed, it concluded that he was probably only a mediocre thinker at best—but from his ability to inspire his people and armies to fight with an enthusiasm that the British Army was hard pressed to replicate. Their recommendation was to immediately begin exploring methods of demoralizing the German soldiers or undermining their unity.
If the War Office had followed that advice, nothing came of it. The obliteration of Britain’s Grand Army by von Moltke’s allied forces at Hamburg convinced a fuming Empress Victoria to seek peace with Ludwig and sack the entire Admiralty and Army leadership.
Jay flipped through a few more pages. After the Hanoverian disaster, it seemed the War Office had made a more determined investigation of Ludwig’s government. Jay skimmed detailed reports about the design of the Herreninsel palace from spies impersonating tourists and about the structure of his government which was teased out of disgruntled former monarchs and nobility.
A third wartime report was much briefer than the last. It was from just a few months after the start of the Great War in 1885, by which time it seemed the War Office no longer depended on single omnibus reports to gather intelligence on the Swan King. This report, again collected with the assistance of a source inside Ludwig’s court, was interested in the Swan King’s periodic disappearances. Apparently, the German monarch would simply vanish on occasion, sometimes for days at a time, before making a sweeping return to reassure his officers and officials. Attempts to follow the Swan King were hampered by London’s inability to get a truly loyal spy inside the palace, and it simply proved impossible to ever reliably track Ludwig’s movements.
The War Office official who reviewed the report ordered a follow-up and approved expanded resources for the mission. Jay flipped through the packet of documents; if the subsequent operation had produced anything useful, he didn’t have it.
Well, that was interesting at least. Jay set the report aside to review again later.
He sipped at a cup of cold coffee he’d ordered from a stewardess shortly after departing Jersey and dove into a post-war study of German mythology and symbols utilized during Ludwig’s reign.
* * *
Jay hardly noticed when his cabin-mate returned to retrieve his luggage. He was dozing when the man’s incomprehensible babbling roused him. Jay thought the accent had to be something derived from French, it would explain why he was disembarking in Paris, anyway. He made a series of gestures at Jay that seemed friendly before walking out the cabin door. Jay smiled and nodded back, utterly clueless.
He started nodding off again, and this time was woken by a gunshot. That was unusual enough to bring Jay fully alert and to his feet. The sharp noise had come from outside the airship, and Jay looked down through his cabin window.
Standing on the tarmac of the Parisian Air Station, just beyond the ticket taker was a man who was either incredibly brave or completely insane. What made this man either very brave or very insane was not that he had apparently just fired a pistol into the air while surrounded by several hundred enormous hydrogen-filled bombs. That was merely stupid. What made this man either very brave or very insane was that he was waving that same pistol around while approximately fifty French gendarmes pointed rifles at him. As Jay watched, he could see several more squads of armed men running towards the scene.
To his credit, the man might not have been aware of most of the rifles threatening to blast him into tiny messy pieces. Only one of the Frenchmen was in front of him, the rest stood behind, apparently having come to their comrade's assistance. The insane man—Jay had decided this was the more likely explanation—was shouting at the one in front him. The gendarme blocking his path was shouting back.
Jay couldn’t hear anything they were saying through the glass window, but he imagined the conversation went something like this:
“Stop, madman! I’m not going to let you onto this airship because you’re mad.”
“Get out of my way. I’m mad, see? I’m threatening an entire company of soldiers with my gun because I’m barking bloody mad!”
“I can see that you are mad, and that is why I am not going to let you on this airship. We have a strict no-madmen policy.”
“I don’t care because I've gone completely 'round the bend! Let me on!”
“Absolutely not. If we let one madman on, then we’d have to let every madman on, and then we wouldn’t make any money because all our normal customers would leave and madmen don’t pay bills.”
Jay knew they were probably speaking French as well, but he figured he could give his imagination license enough to work in English.
At this point, the insane man seemed to discover some memory of past sanity, for he put his gun away, and instead pulled out a piece of paper. Unfortunately, Jay thought it unlikely that the paper would help him much because he immediately began waving it around as wildly as he’d been waving the gun. The Frenchman didn’t move.
Finally, one of the soldiers crowding in behind the insane man stepped forward and snatched the paper from its owner. Jay supposed he was an officer. When the insane man spun and started shouting, the officer ignored him, letting the other gendarmes contain him with their bayonets.
After a few moments, the officer beckoned over the soldier who’d been steadfastly blocking the gun-slinging lunatic. The guard glared at his subject for a moment, then shouldered his rifle and walked over. He and the officer argued for a minute before the officer finally shrugged and pointed to the paper. Eventually it was handed back to the insane man, who was no longer shouting. The gendarmes were dispersed by the officer, and the posted guard jerked an angry thumb at the man he’d been blocking, who walked past and made an obscene gesture when he thought the soldier wasn’t looking.
Jay got quite a laugh out of the whole episode, until the madman walked into his cabin.
<<7<<_>>9>>
Book One, Chapter:
-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20-21-
-22-23-24-25-26-27-28-29-30-31-32-33-34-35-36-37-38-39-40-41-42-
-43-44-45-46-47-48-49-50-51-52-53-54-55-56-57-58-59-60-61-62-
Appendix: -A-B-C-