Ring of Fire III Read online

  “He was never my Herr O’Connor. I didn’t much like him even when he was working for Georg and Farrell. And after he ran off we found that a bunch of our information on resins and putties, and on composites in general, had gone missing. If Georg or Farrell ever get to Vienna, Neil O’Connor is liable to get his lights punched out.”

  “As you’ve just pointed out, the cat, as they say, is already mostly out of the bag. There was, in fact, very little for the United States of Europe to gain by trying to tie a knot in the poor kitty’s tail. On the other hand, there was a fair amount for them to gain in terms of trust and good relations by letting King Fernando have an airline. Especially in letting him have one before his brother got one on his own. The king of Spain and his advisors aren’t happy with the king in the Low Countries and they are going to be even less happy with him when he one ups them by having a working airline before Spain has its first flight.” Herr van Bradt shrugged. “His Majesty is aware of that, of course, but he really wants an air force. And this is the Netherlands. Our navy is merchant ships for the most part. It makes sense that the Netherlands Air Force should be an airline first. He wants to put off the final break with Spain as long as he can. But he is not willing to weaken the Netherlands to do it.”

  “You mean we’re not just going to be a Netherlands airline but His Majesty’s air force? These aren’t combat planes. I’d rather do aerobatics in a 747 than in a Jupiter and I’ve never flown a 747 outside one of those computer simulations.” The whole idea of trying to do a loop-the-loop in a Monster gave her the willies.

  “The Netherlands aren’t at war, Magdalena. Even if they were, His Majesty knows that the Monster isn’t designed for combat. But neither was the DC3 and it was considered one of the most valuable planes in World War II.”

  “You’ve been talking to Georg, haven’t you?” Magdalena sighed. She knew chapter and verse on the magical, mystical DC3. The way Georg talked about it, she sometimes imagined it in a miniskirt and high heels with really big engines falling half out of its blouse. Of course, other times, when she imagined flying it...Well, that was a different story.

  “Yes, I have. And confirmed it with Hal Smith. I’d order a dozen of them if I could. The point is: even in war, there are other things a plane can do than bombing or strafing runs on enemy positions. And in peace, which we all hope for, the airline becomes both a money-maker and a status symbol for the Netherlands. That’s what His Majesty wants and he is willing to pay for it.”

  Magdalena thought a minute. “Georg isn’t going to like this. Not at all.”

  * * *

  “Fat lot of good it’s going to do him,” Georg Markgraf muttered. “The aircraft are built here.”

  “Here is all of three hundred miles from Amsterdam, Georg,” Magdalena said. “Granted, that trip used to take weeks. But you know we can do it in five or six hours.”

  “I didn’t want a long-distance marriage.”

  Magdalena was stunned. While Georg had been, well, hanging around her a lot, he’d never mentioned marriage. Then she began to be a bit angry. Mostly at his assumption that she would agree to marriage. Which she wasn’t at all sure about. She liked the life of a pilot, being free to go where she willed—or rather, where the schedule allowed.

  “Oh?” Magdalena sniffed. “I wasn’t aware that you’d engaged yourself, Georg? Who is it? One of the investors’ daughters?”

  “No! I thought you and I...” His voice trailed off.

  “Nice of you to mention it to me.” Magdalena threw him a look, then flounced away.

  * * *

  Farrell Smith sighed. “Georg, I’ve never met anybody who had such a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease. Not to mention that was just romantic as all get out...not.”

  Mary, his wife, shook her head. “Panic, dear, panic. I’ve got the strangest memory of somebody at this table”—she gave him a significant look—“getting rather tongue-tied, back in the day.”

  “Georg would be better off if he did get tongue-tied,” Farrell pointed out. “Instead, he just blurts stuff out, usually stuff that’s going to get him in hot water.”

  “I don’t want Magdalena to move back to Amsterdam,” Georg said. “I’ve just been waiting for the right moment to ask her to marry me. This wasn’t the right moment.”

  “I’ll say,” Farrell said.

  “You’re being awful hard on him, Dad,” Merton said. “Getting a girl is pretty hard when you’re a nerd.” Then he laughed. “Don’t worry about it, Georg. Maggie’s a nerd, too. She’ll come around.”

  Farrell held his peace. Barely. He positively hated it when Merton said nerd. Merton had dropped out of high school, not exactly the best endorsement of a teacher. Farrell hadn’t handled it well and Merton had moved out. Then he had that accident after the Ring of Fire and lost both legs above the knee. Merton had always been more of a physical kid than a mental one. The loss of his legs had been especially hard on him, and the Ring of Fire had had made it harder still, because it had turned back the clock in the field of prosthetics. It had never occurred to Farrell before Merton’s accident that the switch from “disabled” to “physically-challenged” had been anything but political correctness. The difference between a peg leg and an up-time prosthetic limb was the difference between a disability and a challenge. At least in Merton’s case. It was, for all practical purposes, impossible to walk on a couple of peg legs that started above the knee. That was not true with up-time prosthetics.

  Farrell didn’t peek under the table to see the fiberglass and resin prosthetics that his son now wore. But the knowledge that they were there and Georg had been instrumental in putting them there made it really hard for him to hold his tongue.

  Georg snorted at Merton. “What would you recommend, O Great He-man?”

  “Flowers, oh Nerdly Genius.” Merton said, “Flowers and chocolates with a note telling her you’re a jerk. The great truth of the universe is all men are jerks. The problem with nerds is they don’t realize it.”

  “And the problem with jocks,” his mother told Merton, “is you revel in it.”

  “And it’s about time for me to get to my reveling,” Merton agreed, pulling his walker to the kitchen table. He used the walker to lever himself up out of the chair, then reached down and adjusted the tension on the knee springs of his artificial legs, using the walker for balance. They weren’t truly up-time artificial legs, but they were a great deal closer to what they had up-time than Europe had had before the Ring of Fire. With them and the walker, Merton wasn’t limited to a wheelchair.

  Wooden legs have the problem that they are heavy. And when you lose most of your legs, you lose that muscle mass as well. Aside from the limited ability to flex at the heel and knee, the fiberglass prosthetics were lighter than wood would have been. Merton still needed buns of steel to make them work, but physical labor had never been his trouble.

  * * *

  “Come on, Maggie. You knew he was going to ask you as soon as he got up the nerve,” Merton said a couple of hours later. Merton was a pilot for TEA—RDA, he guessed it would be soon. It took some extra gear and the truth was that he probably wouldn’t have been allowed to fly professionally up-time. The rudder controls were foot pedals after all. But while not a pilot before the Ring of Fire, Merton did have flight time. He had gone up with friends of his grandfather and even considered it as a career. But he hadn’t liked school.

  “I know that. It was his blithe assumption that I’d say yes.”

  “From what I’ve seen, you’ve been going out of your way to give him that impression.” Merton gave her a look. “Were you just leading him on?”

  “Okay. I would have said yes but...”

  “But he failed to suffer enough?”

  “No. It’s not that. But, why didn’t he ask me?”

  “Dowry.”

  “What?” Maggie looked up. “He wasn’t satisfied with my dowry?”

  “No. The other one, the one that the guy gives.”

 
; “He owns a big chunk of M and S Aviation!”

  “Yep and you own a big chunk of TEA or at least you did. How’s that going to work out, by the way? Is His Nibs buying you out?”

  “Not entirely. He wants me to have an interest to make sure I don’t jump ship. Actually, that was one of the things that a lot of the negotiations were about. TEA has two planes and a contract for eight more. But even more than the planes, TEA is the people. By switching off pilots we’ve been able to train more. We have eight pilots and twice that many maintenance people. We’ll have more by the time we have planes for them to fly. All our pilots have experience on four-engine aircraft and most of them are cross-trained as maintenance people.”

  Merton nodded. He was one of those pilots; he got maybe three flights a month. And several hours stick time on each flight. And on every flight he was either training someone or being trained. While his legs limited what he could do in the way of aircraft maintenance, he spent time supervising that, too. Like most of the others, he was waiting impatiently for more planes to come off the line at M&S Aviation so that he could get more time in the air.

  Maggie was still talking. “Herr van Bradt spent a certain amount of time explaining that to His Majesty. If the employees didn’t like the deal, Royal Dutch Airlines would end up owning two cargo planes, two mail planes and having nobody to fly them, load them, or maintain them. He’d also probably have a new airline starting up here in competition with him. When you get right down to it, an airline is mostly its people.”

  “So what’s he offering?”

  “A ten percent raise across the board. Plus a bonus if you’re willing to join the Dutch Royal Air Force Reserve. And he’s going to want us to train Dutch pilots.”

  Merton nodded. It made sense if you looked at it from King Fernando’s point of view, but he would have to think about it. Not that they were going to let him into the USE Air Force.

  * * *

  Moving the airline to Amsterdam wasn’t that difficult. It was only some three hundred miles. But scheduling the move wasn’t a picnic. TEA, now renamed Royal Dutch Airlines, had schedules to meet. One of which was with Claudia de Medici in Bolzano.

  Claudia lifted an eyebrow when she saw the new logo on the side of the Neptune. “Royal Dutch?”

  Magdalena shrugged. “A person has to do what a person has to do.”

  “And you have to move to Amsterdam. And delay what part of my cargo, pray tell?”

  “None of it,” Magdalena said. “We’ve been flying the wings off both planes to get caught up. Jupiter number three is ready for test flights. Once we’ve got it on the schedule, we’ll open up a new route. The Brussels-Amsterdam-Grantville route will be a triangle, which will mean that you will be able to fly from Venice to Grantville, spend the night there, then catch a plane to Brussels, refuel there, then fly on to Amsterdam the same day. Just a day after you left Venice. Jupiter Four, when we get the engines for it, we’re going to try and keep in reserve for when one of the other three is on its semiannual tear down and for the occasional charter. But it won’t always be the Jupiter Four that is the reserve; they will rotate. The Brussels-Amsterdam-Grantville plane will reach Grantville, then fly the Grantville-Venice route while the Grantville-Venice plane is flying to Brussels. Then the reserve plane will get the Grantville-Venice route as the Brussels-Amsterdam-Grantville plane goes into reserve. All subject to change as one or another blows a cylinder or throws a rod. Which is happening a lot more than we’d like with the new engines in the testing phase. As we add more planes, we’ll add more routes and more and more of those routes will be centered on Brussels.”

  “Why Brussels?”

  “Mostly politics. Brussels is the capital, after all. But also, from Brussels, London, Paris and Luxemburg are all short hops. Mostly short enough that the Jupiter Threes will be able to get there and back without refueling. Not that we plan on doing that. His Majesty is on relatively good terms with everyone just at the moment, so he’s going to try to arrange for airports with fueling stations. Anyway, from Luxemburg it’s a hop to Zurich then another here to Bolzano without a stop in the USE. We considered Basel, but with the city council’s propensity for taking hostages...well, some of our passengers are fairly high profile.”

  Besides, Queen Maria Anna was still a bit annoyed with Basel and moving some of the highest-value trade to a competing city was just one of the ways she was demonstrating her displeasure. Maggie completely agreed with Her Majesty. Actually, almost all their passengers were pretty high profile, not all of them politically. Some were just rich. Some were princes of the church. The cardinal protector of the USE had flown on the Monster more than once, as had a couple of the great artists and scientists of the seventeenth century. Most of their passengers would make pretty good hostages for someone. And Maggy, like the queen in the Low Countries, felt that taking hostages was the sort of hobby that should be discouraged.

  “What about Magdeburg?” Claudia de Medici asked.

  “Not soon.”

  “Why not?”

  “Again it’s mostly politics and just a little bit of economics. You know as well as I that the planes rarely fly much under their max load. We have more passengers and cargo than we can carry and would on just about any route between major cities. There are hundreds of rich people in every major city in Europe. And thousands of tons of cargo that someone can make a fortune on, if only they can get it to their partner in days instead of weeks.”

  Claudia laughed. “When it absolutely positively has to be there on time. Yes, letters of transfer, bids ten pounds of gold coins because the person they are dealing with doesn’t trust paper.”

  “Marijuana seeds so that the crop can be gotten in this year not next year. Dye because the ladies at court have to have the new colors for the party next week,” Magdalena added.

  “Fresh Italian oranges for Duchess Maria who is Frau Higgins’ guest for the season and absolutely must have her freshly-squeezed orange juice or she’ll die. Even though she has spent the last twenty years of her life without it.”

  And on they went listing some of the things that had been shipped on the Jupiter 1 and the Neptune since the Venice-Grantville route had opened. After they wound down Magdalena continued, “The same thing will be true in a route from Brussels to Paris or London, and almost as true on a route from Grantville to Magdeburg.”

  “Almost?”

  “They have the train between Magdeburg and Grantville. Those oranges would have been just as fresh after a train ride as after a plane ride.”

  “The plane would be full anyway. You know there is a waiting list,” Claudia insisted. “So why not Magdeburg?”

  “His Majesty, so I am told, does intend to have scheduled flights to Magdeburg just as soon as we have enough planes for it. It’s on the list right after Paris. But putting it at the front of the list would imply that the USE is more important than France or Spain. The point, as it was made to me, was that economically it’s pretty much a wash whether the fifth plane we get goes from Brussels to London or Grantville to Magdeburg. But politically putting Magdeburg ahead of London makes the king in the Low Countries look like he’s a vassal of the Emperor of the USE or at the very least like he’s siding with Gustavus Adolphus against the League.”

  Claudia was nodding by the time Magdalena was finished. “If the Netherlands are to be effective as a buffer state they must, absolutely must, maintain an evenhandedness in their dealings with the nations that surround them. They already have scheduled flights to one city in the USE and Royal Dutch Airlines is owned by the crown.”

  * * *

  “Please forgive me. Please, please, please?”

  Magdalena looked toward the door. The voice had certainly been Georg’s, but what was at the door didn’t look much like him. Well, if you didn’t count the feet. He’d apparently forgotten to put on the clown shoes. Or hadn’t been able to walk in them, knowing Georg.

  “Emmett Kelley was a silent clown,” she pointed ou
t.

  Georg pulled three long-stemmed roses out of his sleeve. But he’d obviously forgotten to trim off the thorns, since he said “Ouch” rather loudly.

  Magdalena couldn’t help it. She began laughing. Georg’s sad face didn’t look so sad now. “What are you doing in that outfit, Georg?”

  “Apologizing for being a jerk. Even if I didn’t really know I was,” Georg said. “I’m sorry. I just assumed...well, I’m not a very romantic type, I know. But I do love you. And I do hope you’ll marry me. Even if you do go off to Brussels, I hope you’ll marry me. Eventually. I’ll move to Brussels, too. Anything.”

  “Hold off on that, Georg. Farrell needs you here.” Magdalena thought for a moment. “You do realize I’ll be back in Grantville at least twice a week, don’t you?”

  Georg looked hopeful. “We could maybe work something out, yes?”

  “Yes. I imagine we could.”

  * * *

  Merton looked at the maintenance checklist and flipped a switch to check the battery power. It was well into the green. That’s done. It’s time to get some shuteye. It was Merton’s night in Brussels this week. He had spent one night a week here for the last month and never seen Brussels. Walking tours weren’t his favorite type of entertainment. In fact, he wasn’t looking forward to the walk to the Airport Inn. He turned in his chair and grabbed his walker.

  Merton was hobbling back to the door of the Jupiter 3 when the guests arrived. There was Herr Quackenboss, a member of the new board of Directors of RDA and several other people, craftsmen of various sorts by their dress. “What can I do for you, sir?” Merton had met Herr Quackenboss just once. Several of the German board members had sold out and resigned when King Fernando bought the company. They had been replaced by members of Fernando’s court and wealthy merchants from Brussels and Amsterdam. Herr Quackenboss was both a member of the court and a wealthy merchant from Brussels. But that didn’t explain what he was doing bringing a bunch of people here in—well, not quite the middle of the night, but the sun had set.