Aboard the Jupiter, en route to Vienna
Judy looked at Susan, three seats up and across the aisle. They were all in the Jupiter. It was surprisingly quiet, but not silent, and she could hear the engines faintly.
Susan Logsden needs to get laid, thought Judy with seventeen-year-old certainty. She thought this in spite of the fact that she herself was still technically a virgin and intended to remain one till someone developed a trustworthy means of contraception or she got married. Neither of which looked to be happening anytime soon. But Judy wasn’t Susan, or perhaps more to the point, Susan wasn’t Judy. Judy looked at the prospect of eventual intercourse with pleasant anticipation, but suffered very little frustration over its present lack. There were, after all, other things you could do.
Perhaps something could be worked out in Vienna. The pilot had just told them that they would be landing in a few minutes.
Vienna
Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, Bishop of Passau and brother to Emperor Ferdinand III, went over the papers and tried to forget that he was at least nominally a bishop. Leo had never thought of himself as overly religious. The church just was. But now the church wasn’t. Urban had retreated from Rome. Borja was butchering cardinals, whether to conquer the church or to save it no one seemed to know. True churchmen, the monks and the real bishops, couldn’t decide which side to be on. Order fighting order, priest condemning priest. He tried to retreat into the facts and figures that Gundaker von Liechtenstein and Moses Abrabanel had provided to ready him to meet Karl Eusebius and his bride.
“It’s here, Your Grace,” Marco said.
Leo, looked up from the report. Just as well. There was little good news in it anyway. The treasury was essentially empty. The people who were supposed to be putting money into the treasury wanted things in return. Mostly they wanted products from the United States of Europe kept out of Austria-Hungary. The soldiers wanted to be paid, as did the bureaucracy. “Calm yourself, Marco. Calm yourself,” Leo said, trying to sound like a bishop was supposed to. The title was political, a way of keeping lands that were nominally the church’s in the family. Not that his father would have ever admitted such a thing, even to himself. To his father, Leo had been something of a human sacrifice, a child given to the church to ensure salvation.
Leo could hear a buzzing from the sky. He kept a straight face as he rose and moved to the window. Keeping a straight face when he was really just as excited as Marco was second nature. Habsburg training. By natural inclination, Leo’s preference was for leading armies rather than prayers, but it didn’t do to show that to the people surrounding him, any more than it would do to show excitement about the plane.
“But look at it, Your Grace!” Marco was still excited and a bit irrepressible. Leo hid a smile.
The plane had indeed arrived. It was turning, slowly it seemed, making a circle around Vienna before it landed on the hastily-built new airstrip near Race Track City.
“Karl is certainly making an impressive entrance,” Leo murmured. When word came that Prince Karl Eusebius von Liechtenstein would be arriving on one of the Jupiter aircraft, Neil O’Connor had provided the information on its needs. Provided it with much bragging. To hear Herr O’Connor tell it, the Air Cushion Landing Gear had been wholly his innovation and much of the rest of the plane as well. It didn’t need an airfield prepared, just a flat piece of ground or, even better, water. Then a place to park. Markers had been placed on the south bank of the Danube where it was to pull out of the river.
Then, unfortunately, the news had arrived had arrived that one of its sister ships had crashed in Italy. It seemed the peculiar landing gear had failed. Apparently there had been many maintenance problems with the landing gear even before the crash. As a result, the Royal Dutch Airlines, which owned the Jupiters, had refitted all of them-more precisely, the only one still in service at the moment-with more conventional landing gear.
So, a landing strip needed to be constructed. Happily, the land around Race Track City had many flat areas and there were now a number of Fresno scrapers on the site. Happier still, from the instructions sent ahead by the airline company, the Jupiter’s new landing gear, like the plane itself, was quite sturdy. The strip didn’t need to be macadamized, although that would certainly be an advantage in the future. They just needed to make sure the strip was smooth, level, and cleared of any rocks or stones.
Neil O’Connor offered his advice on that subject as well. Maintaining all the while that he’d never trusted that weird ACLG landing gear, nohow.
* * *
“Come, Marco,” Leo said. “We’re the greeting party.” Leo headed to Race Track City.
Landing Strip, near Race Track City
“Back, there. Back, back. You want to get run over!” Neil O’Connor had reached the landing strip ahead of them and was shouting in poorly accented German. With the help of half a company of the city garrison, he seemed to be shooing most of Vienna out of the parking place of the aircraft. The guardsmen were having difficulty keeping the crowd back.
“Move,” Marco shouted. The crowd parted, mostly because of the guards who surrounded Archduke Leopold. As the path appeared, Leo moved forward. “Would you look at that?” another guard whispered when they got to the front.
The Jupiter was sitting at the far end of the landing strip and slowly turning around in the wide area that had been leveled for that purpose. Then, it began moving slowly back to the strip’s beginning where it had first set down and where the crowd was gathered.
“They call that ‘taxi-ing,’” said the same guard. “I don’t know why. Thurn and Taxis has nothing to do with airplanes.”
The approaching airplane looked enough like a monster that the guards had no great difficulty getting the crowd to move back off the landing strip and onto the grounds beyond. Once they’d done so, the aircraft moved the final distance and came to a halt. There was a peculiar noise of some kind and the blurry things on the wings-they were called “propellors,” Leo knew-began to slow down. Eventually they stopped spinning, and Leo could now see that they looked like long and twisted oar-blades.
The door on the side of the airplane opened and Prince Karl stepped out onto the lower wing, followed by a pretty young woman. “Leo, ah, Your Grace!” Karl waved, then bowed, and nearly stumbled as the young woman pulled him aside to clear the door. Leo held back a snort of laughter, and moved forward a bit. Others had exited the plane to stand on the wing, including a young man carrying a ladder, which he attached to the rear of the wing.
“Your Grace,” Karl said, coming down the stepladder. Leo had known Karl Eusebius von Liechtenstein most of his life, but Karl had been away for several years now.
“Prince von Liechtenstein.” Leo nodded, then glanced at the young woman who had followed him down.
Karl took the hint. “Your Grace, may I introduce my fiancee? Assistant Secretary of Economic Forecasting for the Federal Reserve Bank of the USE, Miss Sarah Wendell von Up-time. Sarah, His Grace, Bishop and Archduke Leopold Wilhelm von Hapsburg.” The girl, Sarah, performed a small dip of her knees, not a bow, not a curtsy. Just a dip, of sorts. She was much, much different than the young woman who had come to Austria with the defectors. No tattoos he could see, and not a single facial piercing. That was a relief. Leo had begun to wonder about these up-time women after seeing Suzi Barclay.
More young women joined them. “And the rest of our visitors, Your Grace. This is Sarah’s sister.”
Leo took his eyes off Sarah. He turned his head and suddenly felt like he’d been struck by lightning.
Karl was still talking. “Judith Wendell von Up-time.”