“Is that all? Free passage?” asked the king. “I was expecting you’d request military assistance.”
“We’ll take care of that part,” said Kathrine. “In every war, the move you don’t see coming is the one that kills you.” She wouldn’t say more, but she’d discussed the matter extensively with Leonora. In all the years that Denmark had been using submarines to sneak upon enemy ships, the one scenario that had never been considered was to have its own submarines used against them. Danish soldiers had devised no tactics and received no training to handle an attack from another submarine. It had always been assumed that other countries would lack such a weapon. That was the hidden disadvantage on which Nova Dania would rely in its rebellion against the Canutic Empire.
“I see you’ve thought about this thoroughly,” said Kristina with satisfaction. “I like people who take their time to think.”
Leonora asked excitedly, “Then Your Majesty is on our side?”
The king nodded. “New Stockholm is open to you. As sure as I live, Nova Dania will be independent.”
Midnight sun, December 22 (Julian), 1658
Terra incognita
Whenever a land is invaded, different families adopt different strategies to keep their children from harm. When the Danish took England, this common pattern reoccurred. Some left the country. Others schemed with the hope of one day expelling the Danes. Others saw a way to survive and even benefit if they played along with the invaders.
Admiral Edward Montagu belonged to a select generation of Britons born just before the foundation of the Canutic Empire. Men like him and his peers had reached adulthood with no memories of an independent England. For the families that didn’t flee to the Virginia colony, life under Danish rule had simply become the world they knew.
But in 1658, Nova Dania achieved its independence by using the same technology that had given Denmark command of the oceans. Kathrine’s assessment had been right: the rise of two opposed powers armed with submarines was the one geopolitical occurrence that the Canutic Empire had never considered. The wars of religion, which had briefly seemed about to end with a crushing Protestant victory, tapered out instead, with neither side winning or acknowledging defeat, and with Denmark’s ability to influence European affairs gravely diminished. During the process, the independentist cause also permeated through the people of New Sweden, who declared their own independence in 1654. Again, Kathrine had calculated accurately. To the outrage of her court, king Kristina didn’t mind that a remote colony would choose to govern itself. Shortly afterward she abdicated and spent her old age traveling across Catholic lands. She counted it as one more independence from the Swedish crown.
During Denmark’s last attempt to regain Munkhaven from the rebels, Admiral Montagu and his crew abandoned the battle in their submarine, the D.H.M. Jasconius, seeing the futility of their mission. With both Canutic and Novadanian fleets patrolling the seas, and the heightened hostility they could expect at any Catholic destination, there was no known place in Christendom where they could hide. Believing they might find shelter in the territory of a friendly nation, they took the Jasconius to a Swedish settlement in West Africa, called the Gold Coast, in the hopes that they’d be able to rest and hide for some months while the war effort took their superiors’ minds off of their desertions. But what they found was that the Swedish government had taken the side of the Novadanians, and their Danish uniforms made their presence unwanted. They gave some thought to crossing the Atlantic and trying their luck in the colony that the Dutch had just founded on the coast of Brazil, but they decided against it, since they couldn’t be sure that the Dutch authorities wouldn’t have been alerted to their disappearance. So, for a few months, they resorted to pillaging goods from Portuguese vessels headed for the Angolan slave markets, until a storm in September forced all non-submarine ships to stay away from the coast. A submarine could wait out the storm in the calmer waters below, but not for too long before having to resurface for air. The first location where they reemerged, near the middle of the South Atlantic, was swarmed with Portuguese, Spanish and even French ships, all waiting for the right time to resume their course toward their respective colonies; the submerged shape in their midst aroused some remarks among the most observant of the tripulants, but as the Danish decided not to attempt an attack against such a numerous enemy, it didn’t merit any more attention.
After renewing their air, the deserters fled to the south, hoping to put distance between them and any potential enemy. One day, they looted a lone Spanish ship on its way home from the Philippines. After sinking it, as was always done to remove any witnesses of submarine technology, they realized that the Jasconius had run out of cannon balls. That moment forced them to face reality. None of them had intended to become pirates, but they unquestionably were, and before they could come to terms with that new state of affairs, they found themselves unable of sustaining even that way of life. They were stranded, unwelcome, and defenseless.
They wandered in that manner for weeks, drawing closer and closer to a family of floating ice masses, avoiding them by passing underneath them as they’d been trained to do in the waters of the north. They encountered some funny flightless birds that they promptly hunted and cooked. After some more days, it became apparent that they had found land, albeit one covered with ice as far as the horizon. They worried about meeting white bears but saw none.
Admiral Montagu ordered his crew to explore the area; nothing was available but rocks, ice, and more of those loud, fatty birds. The soldiers wouldn’t starve as long as those birds remained so easy to kill, but a settlement couldn’t be built if there was no wood. Discussion was brief, and Montagu formulated a plan.
They would go home.
The discovery of new land, unknown and inaccessible to all other nations, was the answer to every dream of the Danish king. Although they had no way of knowing it, what they had reached was an entire continent. The addition of such a possession would more than suffice to gain them their pardon for abandoning their duty.
In the years to come, more submarines would arrive, loaded with wood, ready to replicate in the south the ambitious project underway in the north. They would probably need to wrestle the tip of South America from Spain to gain access to its forests, but they knew the Spanish navy stood no chance.
They were going to claim the polar continent for their king.
And to make whatever riches it contained usable, they were going to burn every single tree within their reach until the ice was gone and the sky was dark if that was what it took.
Part 4: Turn
The reason why God knows which possible futures will happen is not that He chooses to push our choices in a certain direction, but that He chooses to place us in a certain set of circumstances.
Now we need to proceed with fantastic imagination and invent how one world could have contact with another.