The Austro-Hungarian Connection: Section Six

The Mess

High Street Mansion, Seat of Government for the State of Thuringia-Franconia
President’s Office
Grantville, State of Thuringia-Franconia

    After Grantville’s police chief finished his report, Ed Piazza, President of the State of Thuringia-Franconia, half-turned his swivel chair and looked out of the window in his office. That was the first time he’d so much as glanced outside since he showed up for work this morning. His schedule had been jam-packed even before this latest crisis hit.

    The weather was still good, he saw. Clear, with not a cloud in the sky. Very crisp, of course, the way such days in November were, but not yet bitterly cold the way it would become in January and February.

    Well, not “crisis,” exactly, he mused. He and Mike Stearns had long known that there was no way to keep the USE’s enemies from getting their hands on American technical knowledge—nor from suborning some of the Americans themselves. Among the thirty-five hundred people who’d come from up-time through the Ring of Fire, there was bound to be the usual percentage who were excessively greedy and not burdened with much in the way of a conscience. That was even leaving aside the ones—there were a lot of those, now—who’d accepted legitimate offers to relocate elsewhere. You couldn’t keep people from emigrating, after all; not, at least, without building some sort of Godforsaken version of a Berlin Wall, which neither he nor Mike had wanted any part of.

    Some people were surprised, even astonished, at the number of Americans who were leaving Grantville these days. They’d assumed that long familiarity, habits, family ties—not to mention modern indoor plumbing—would keep almost everyone from straying. But that was unrealistic. West Virginians, especially northern West Virginians, had been accustomed to moving around a lot, since the area was economically depressed except when the mines were working full bore. Most families had at least one person, in the past, who’d moved to one of the industrial cities to make a living. Often they came back, when things at home picked up, but sometimes they didn’t.

    And those had been relocations just to get decent-paying but usually hard jobs in a steel mill or auto assembly plant. Today, anyone with any skills was being offered salaries that were the down-time equivalent of the kind of money top-drawer technical and business consultants made back up-time. Often enough, with lots of perks and benefits attached. And since the prospective employers were rich—many of them noblemen, sometimes royalty—even the problem of leaving modern plumbing behind wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t as if the upper classes of the seventeenth century were medieval barons living in stone piles, after all. They already had indoor plumbing, however rudimentary it might be by late twentieth-century American standards. And it would get better quickly, too, since the people offering the jobs had a keen desire themselves to get better facilities. Anyone in Grantville who had significant plumbing skills and experience practically had a carte blanche to go anywhere in Europe.

    To add pressure to pull, most up-timers after the Ring of Fire had lost what they’d had in the way of safety net back up-time. Which, for working class people like most of the town’s inhabitants, had never been all that munificent in the first place.

    Social Security was gone. Company pensions were gone, except for a few companies headquartered in Grantville who’d been able to maintain them. Medicare was gone. That might not directly affect young people, right away, but most people in Grantville were part of families, often extended families. They had parents and grandparents and other elderly relatives who were in a tight situation, sometimes a desperate one—and now, Baron Whoozit or Merchant Moneybags or City Patrician Whazzisname was waving a small fortune under their noses, if they’d just relocate to wherever and apply their skills.

    So, since the end of the Baltic war—the decision to move the SoTF’s capital to Bamberg had been a prod, too—a great migration was underway. “Great,” as least, in per capita terms if not absolute numbers. Some people were even starting to call it the “American Diaspora.” What had been a trickle, in the first three years after the Ring of Fire, was now a small flood. By the time it was over, Ed wouldn’t be surprised if half of Grantville’s residents wound up living somewhere else, at least for a time.

    Most of them were staying in the USE, true enough. But the number who were accepting positions in other countries was not inconsiderable, especially countries that had good relations with the USE like Bohemia, Venice, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian nations now united within the Union of Kalmar. Some had gone to France and Austria. A few, even farther afield, to eastern Europe, Russia, Spain and Portugal, southern Italy—even the New World.

    In fact, Ed was a little puzzled by the fact this batch of emigrants had chosen to break the law by stealing things that didn’t belong to them. Why? There was no legal barrier, as such, to moving to Austria, if that’s where they went. The Sanderlins and Sonny Fortney had moved to Vienna not long ago, perfectly openly and aboveboard. They’d even hauled two complete automobiles with them.

    Carol Unruh’s suspicion, which she’d voiced two days earlier, was that at least some of them were going to wind up implicated in the legal fall-out from the Bolender arrest. She’d probably turn out to be right. But, whatever the reason, the immediate effect—and the thing that made it a problem for Ed—was that it transformed what would have otherwise have been a simple emigration into “defection” and even “treason.”

    What a stupid mess.

    The worst thing about this episode with the Barclays and the O’Connors—assuming for the moment that they got away with it—wasn’t actually the tech transfer itself. True, among the whole group of them, they had quite a bit of technical knowledge and skills, not to mention the stuff they’d taken or stolen. But it was hardly as if there was any one “secret” that was equivalent to a magic wand. One of the USE’s enemies, probably Austria, would get a major boost to whatever modernization program they’d set underway. That was hardly enough, by itself, to transform them overnight into an industrial powerhouse—which was something of a double-edged sword in any event, for Europe’s royal houses and aristocracy.

    No, insofar as the affair constituted a crisis, it was a political one, not a military or technical one. Among the still-murky set of possible outcomes, one outcome was a certainty. Wilhelm Wettin and his Crown Loyalist party would pull out the stops to make as much political hay of it as they could. Wilhelm himself would keep within the limits of using the episode to argue that it showed Americans were nothing special, so what difference did it make if Mike Stearns’ party had the support of most of them? A large number of the Crown Royalists would go a lot farther than that, though, arguing that the whole affair cast suspicion on American loyalty in general.

    And there were some elements within the CRs who’d take it to the hoop. It was well-known that reactionary elements were infiltrating that loosely-defined and none-too-disciplined party, now that nation-wide elections would be taking place within a few months. Some of them were outright extremists. They’d trot out their usual anti-Catholic diatribes, of course, given the high percentage of Catholics in the defecting group—even if most of them were lapsed Catholics. They’d probably also fire up the anti-Semitic propaganda, ignoring the fact that none of the defectors were Jewish or had any connection to Jews beyond purely casual ones. Logic was hardly the strong suit of that particular current within the politics of the Germanies.

    Ed managed a chuckle, then, remembering one woodcut illustration of himself in a pamphlet put out by one of the reactionary outfits. The Knights of Barbarossa, if he remembered right. The thing had been quite charming, in its own way. The horns and the cloven hoofs and the forked tail were standard fare. Generic, really. But he’d thought the addition of a grotesquely “Jewish” hooked nose was a nice touch, given his rather pug-like features. Not to mention showing him sacrificing a presumably gentile baby in some sort of religious rite, and never mind that he and his wife were lifelong Catholics and attended mass regularly.

    He swiveled the chair back, to face Preston Richards and Carol Unruh, the two other people in the room. “What if Noelle’s right, Press? And have we gotten any word from her since she left?”

    “Nothing,” said Carol Unruh, answering his second question. “Not a peep. We don’t know where she is, really, except ‘somewhere south of Rudolstadt.”

    The police chief grunted. “She hasn’t passed through Saalfeld—or, if she did, she didn’t stop for anything. We’re in radio contact with the authorities there.” His expression grew sour. “Not that it’s likely to do any good. The garrisons in all the towns in the area are small and entirely mercenary, since—”

    Ed waved that aside. “Yeah, Press, I know. Since the emperor is keeping most of the regular army units in the north because he wants them in position to attack Saxony and Brandenburg in a few months—and he’s sending the ones he can spare down to reinforce the troops facing Bavaria and Bernhard. So we make do with what we can get. No point pissing and moaning about it all over again. I take it they haven’t gotten off their butts and started scouring the countryside?”

    “’Scouring,’” Carol jeered. “Their idea of ‘scouring the countryside’ is trotting a few miles out of town to the nearest watering hole, getting plastered, and reporting that they saw no signs of suspicious activity or suspicious persons passing through. Two or three days worth of getting soused later.” Her expression grew more solemn. “I’m mostly worried about Noelle, Ed. She could get hurt, or even killed. I mean, you know what she’s like.”

    Indeed, he did, having read the detailed report of her activities the previous summer and fall in Franconia, during the Ram Rebellion. Ed’s wife Annabelle had once described Noelle Murphy—now Noelle Stull—as Grantville’s distaff version of Clark Kent, absent the glasses. Primly-mannered maybe-I’ll-become-a-nun young woman, zips into the phone booth, out comes Super-Ingenue. She’d even blown a torturer’s head half off, when he attacked her partner Eddie Junker. Since Noelle couldn’t shoot straight, by the simple method of shoving the barrel of the gun under his chin and pulling the trigger.

    Timid, she was not, appearances to the contrary.

    “We’ll just have to hope for the best,” he said. “Captain Knefler took practically the whole garrison with him up to Halle. That just leaves the police force, which is under-strength to begin with, the way Grantville keeps growing.”

    Richards gave Carol an apologetic glance. “I did send a couple of officers over to Rudolstadt, and they were able to get the garrison commander there to detach three of his soldiers to accompany them. No more than three men, though, and no farther south than Hof, without the count’s okay. I radioed Magdeburg to see if I could reach him, but it seems Ludwig Guenther and his wife are out of the city visiting relatives at the moment.”

    That was too bad. The count of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt was a capable and conscientious man, and maintained good relations with Grantville. If he or his wife Emelie had been in residence at their castle in Rudolstadt, they’d have sent out the whole garrison to search for Noelle and Eddie—and the defectors, too, if Noelle was right and they were in the vicinity. It wasn’t a big garrison, but it was a good one. Mercenaries, true, but a well-trained and disciplined company that had been in the service of the count for a long time, not a contractor’s slapdash outfit.

    The problem was that the State of Thuringia-Franconia—at least, the area around Grantville—simply didn’t have much any longer, in the way of military forces. In the months after the Croat raid on Grantville and its high school, more than two years earlier, the town had fairly bristled for a while with cavalry patrols, freshly-built fortifications, sentinel outpost, the works. But two years was a long time in the war conditions of Europe. Soon enough, it became obvious that there was no immediate military threat to Grantville any longer. The key development had been Wallenstein switching sides in 1633. The same man who’d launched the Croat raid was now allied with the USE—and, given the number of Americans living in Prague today, some of them very closely connected to the new king, there was simply no way Wallenstein could organize and launch a secret attack even if he wanted to.

    So that ended the threat from Bohemia, which was the most pressing one. Who else could launch a raid on Grantville? The Austrians would have to fight their way through Bohemia first—and Wallenstein had beaten their army at the second battle of the White Mountain. The Bavarians were in no position to do anything more than try to hold their ground. That had been obvious even before Gustav Adolf’s general Banér seized their fortress of Ingolstadt, which left the Bavarians without a bridgehead north of the Danube.

    The Saxons were the only real possibility, and that was negligible. John George, the Elector, had a full scale invasion coming and he knew it perfectly well. He was concentrating entirely on readying Saxony’s defenses, not wasting energy on raids which would simply chew up his army. Holk’s mercenary forces were really the only ones he had available for something like that, anyway. Holk would have to fight his way through sizeable forces—USE regulars, too—stationed in Halle, in order to reach Grantville or any of the towns in the Thuringian basin. Nobody thought he could manage that, and if he even tried he’d leave Saxony’s frontier with Bohemia open to an attack by Wallenstein. There was no way the Elector of Saxony would countenance such a thing. He’d hired Holk and his army in the first place, despite their unsavory reputation, in order to help protect his southern flank.

    Who else? A few hysterics shrieked about the “French menace,” pointing with alarm to Turenne’s daring raid on the Wietze oil fields during the Baltic war, but that was downright laughable. Given the political tensions in France after the war, there was no way Richelieu was going to send his best general haring off on a long-distance raid. Even if he did, so what? Only somebody who was geographically-challenged and completely ignorant of logistics could possibly think that a raid from France to Grantville was anything like a raid into Brunswick. That Turenne was an exceptionally gifted military commander had been proven in this universe, as well as being attested to by the historical records of another. That did not make him a magician, who could fight his way through the entire USE. It was three hundred miles from the French frontier to Grantville, even as the crow flies. At least half again that far, the way an army would have to travel.

    No, aside from the mundane and everyday risks of living in a boom town, Grantville was about as safe as any place in Europe, these days. So, beginning in the fall of 1633, the military forces which had once protected it carefully had been almost completely drained away. They were needed elsewhere. The regular cavalry patrols were a thing of the past, the sentinel posts had been abandoned completely, and the outlying fortresses had no more than a handful of men detached from the small garrisons maintained in the towns of the basin—who were really there to keep order and double as a police force, more than serve as an actual military defense.

    “We haven’t got a pot to piss in, is what it amounts to,” he said.

    “Not for something like this, Mr. President,” agreed the police chief.

    Carol looked fierce. “If those bastards so much as hurt Noelle and Eddie, I don’t care what Mike says. I’m for firing up the war against Austria. Or whoever it is.”

    There’d be a lot of that sentiment, Ed knew, if Noelle and Eddie came to harm. Granted, assuming Austria was behind the affair, most people would hold a grudge about the mass defection in any event. But most of the grudge would be aimed at the defectors themselves, not the Austrians. It wouldn’t be the sort of thing that would set off any real war fever. Noelle and Eddie getting killed or badly injured would be a different kettle of fish altogether.

    Ed contemplated the problem, for a few seconds. As a practical proposition, of course, launching any sort of immediate campaign against Austria was a non-starter. But “immediate” meant next year. The year after that…

    He shook his head slightly. That was pointless speculation, right now. They still didn’t even know what was really happening.

    “I guess that’s it then, for the moment.” He straightened up in his chair. “Unless Denise Beasley—there’s a real pip, for you—shows up with some more information.”

    Press Richards grinned. “Don’t think that’s too likely. I got no idea what she’s up to now. The last I saw of her she was racing off on her bike, giving me and Knefler the finger. Most of her spleen wasn’t really aimed at me, since Denise knows I haven’t got the resources to do what she wanted. But she probably has me lumped in with ‘the fathead’ for the time being.”

    Carol’s mouth made a little O. “Did she really call Captain Knefler a ‘fathead’? I mean, to his face?”

    “Oh, yeah.” Solemnly, Press shook his head. “Wasn’t all she called him, I’m deeply sorry to report. Girl’s got a real potty mouth, when she cuts it loose. She also called him a fuckwad and an asshole and a motherfucking moron.”

     “She’s not even sixteen!”

    “She’s Buster’s kid,” Ed grunted. “That’s got to add a decade or so, at least in the lack-of-respect-for-your-betters department. Thank God I’m no longer the high school principal. She’s not my headache, these days.”

    Richards and Unruh both looked at him.

    “Well, she isn’t,” Ed insisted. Hoping it was true.