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 amp;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.