He watched their paling faces. “Privately, and completely off the record, the War Cabinet has decided that in the event of Germany producing a nuclear weapon, Germany will be blown off the face of the Earth. Understand; the hatred of nuclear weapons in Britain is so strong that using even one will cause my Government to fall, but if its them or us…”
He smiled at them. “I’ll see some of you individually over the next week,” he said. “Others will discover that they have friends here who will be more than willing to suggest… new courses of action. If you want privacy, just ask the guards; if not… good day gentlemen.”
“One question,” Nehru said, as they rose to leave. “How long will it be before Germany completes an atomic bomb?”
“I wish I knew,” Hanover admitted. “The worst-case scenario is that it will take them something between one year to two years to design and build a reactor – particularly concealing it from us – and then around six months to build the weapon itself. Even so, it will take them time to build one small enough – or a delivery system large enough – to transport the weapon over here. The Oversight Committee believes that they will reserve use of the weapon for a landing on the mainland from us. Hitler, of course, is not that rational.
“Another possibility is Stalin or Japan getting their hands on a weapon,” he continued. “The Japanese might well be tempted to engage in nuclear blackmail; no one is quite certain how far they actually managed to get with a weapon in the original time line. Stalin, of course, got his in 1949.”
“So, what did you think?” Hanover asked afterwards. He sat neatly on the couch, sipping Scotch from a glass. “How do you think they reacted?”
“I think they were a little stunned,” McLachlan said. “They just don’t move with as much speed as the modern world did, before we left it. I don’t suppose the physics team came up with anything?”
Hanover shook his head. “They’re still arguing about possible causes,” he said. “Of course, the religious fraternity has gotten the idea that it’s a holy sign from God to begin changing the world for the better. Every Imam in the country is preaching about the JRHC and how it is going to recover the Holy Cities and give Islam back to itself. Speaking of which, how is the planning going?”
McLachlan sighed. “They have organised ten thousand of their original fighters, with some training from us – covertly, of course – and are preparing the plan for the occupation. They’ve not done too badly; they’ve purchased several solar-powered desalination plants and they’re planning to build a major airport to link in with the chain we’re planning to build.
“Of course, everything depends on us providing the transport, which is being prepared now,” he continued. “I think that they should be ready to go in a couple of weeks or thereabouts; even with the weapons they do have they’ll outgun the barbarians. Frankly, I give the invasion itself a ninety-percent chance of success, with nation-building a sixty-percent chance. Sean, to be fair, is very committed to the democratic ideal of Islam and they will extend voting rights to anyone who speaks English and Arabic, as well as accepting their rules.”
Hanover smiled. “Well, we’ll see,” he said. “So, back to our new-old friends…?”
“I think that Australia and New Zealand will sign up at once,” McLachlan said, sipping his tea. “Canada might; South Africa might, provided we don’t interfere with the race issue. Of course, with a dose of AS-01, the problem might just… go away.”
“I think we’ll… suggest that they absorb the Italian prisoners from Libya,” Hanover said. “That and their families should give the white population a boost.” He scowled. “We might also want to suggest that they accept the Contemporaries; I don’t know if they’ll fit in here.”
McLachlan nodded grimly. There’d been several more race riots, some sexual incidents, and one nasty riot over the family silver. It had given the BBC quite a lot to talk about on the nightly news. “You don’t think that they’ll fit in here?”
“Too different,” Hanover said. “We can try to take a handful, but I don’t know if we can take them all.”
McLachlan laughed. “You want to hear about another problem?” He asked. Hanover shook his head, but McLachlan pressed ahead anyway. “You know all those children who were sent to America and Canada? All their families have disappeared; except in many cases…”
“Don’t tell me,” Hanover said. “Themselves.”
“Exactly,” McLachlan said. “Their legal guardians, for all intents and purposes, are older versions of themselves, who are in their eighties, at the very least.”
“Dear God,” Hanover said. “How the hell do we solve this one?”
“Legally, we have the precedent that a person from the original time line is not the same as the person from the new time line,” McLachlan said. “The Law Lords are still arguing, but I think we may have a lot of kids going up for adoption soon.”
“Bugger,” Hanover said. “You know; we have minor problems. It’s Hitler and his goons who have the worse problems.”
“Funny you should mention goons,” McLachlan said. The legal arguments over Spike Milligan’s right to Spike Milligan’s work were still raging.
“Oh, shut up,” Hanover said.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Reflections on Evil
Undisclosed Location
Berlin
29th August 1940
Berlin was different, these days. SS men were on every street corner, looking around with fierce eyes. The citizens, those handful that remained after the mass call-ups and brutal purges, walked the streets with their heads lowered; dozens of those who would serve in the future government of West and East Germany had been simply… disappeared. Not all of it was Night and Fog; the corpse of Admiral Canaris had hung from the roof of a public centre before a British missile reduced it to its component atoms and the centre to rubble.
The purge and the call-ups had affected everywhere. All over the Reich, the menfolk had almost disappeared, forced into the army or the air force, even the navy. In their place, Speer had ordered the unmarried and single women into the factories, already producing vast improvements in all fields. Idly, Roth wondered what the future would hold, with the women working to support the men in the armed forces. What would happen when the Reich won the wars and the men came back to discover that they had been supplemented?
“Papers,” an Unterscharfuehrer demanded. Roth bit down all the comments that came to mind and passed over his identification. His SS identity card, his special permission card signed by Himmler himself, his access to Hitler’s headquarters, and several that the mere Unterscharfuehrer would never have seen in his life. What he did see was enough; he paled remarkably fast for someone of his bulk.
“Herr Standartenfuehrer,” he said, with a salute that was almost perfect. Roth glared at him and he pulled himself up into tight attention. “I’m sorry for interfering…”
“Never mind, Unterscharfuehrer,” Roth said in exasperation. The SS guards on the street were supposed to be watching for draft-dodgers. “You may go.”
“Heil Hitler,” the Unterscharfuehrer snapped, and left without waiting for Roth’s reply. Roth let him go, watching him as he marched on, and then headed for the current centre of the SS; the original headquarters having met a British missile. It still spooked Roth, to understand very suddenly that they were an open book to their enemies and their targeting systems. The British didn’t seem to have as many of the super-weapons as their allies of 2015, the United States, had, but they were just as good at careful targeting. The first surge of cruise missiles, so precise when compared to the primitive V1, had seriously damaged the Reich.