I hope it was enough

I hope it was enough.

The view from the terrace was as beautiful as it always was, the azure waters of the Adriatic lapping against the wharfs and more distant beaches. But that wasn’t where my attention was at the moment. No, that went to the soldiers installing anti-aircraft cannons and the experimental surface-to-air missile batteries my company had just introduced to the Empire. We had known war was coming, just awaiting a spark, so much of the last few years had been spent stockpiling resources.

Ten years, we bought them ten years. I hope it was enough.

I had never been as foolish as some of my colleagues. I had never hoped that we might actually avoid the World Wars. There had been twenty of us who had volunteered to come back in time, although nobody had been able to agree on what our objective should be. In this final minutes of peace, I let my mind wander back to the beginning. Before the courts, the politics, the experiments and the compromises.

*****

The twenty finalists had huddled in the middle of a glowing chamber, the gyroscopic arms of Simon’s time travel device gradually spinning up. It was 2110, and one man’s mad vision of changing the past to change the present was about to be realized. At 35, I was the oldest one in the room except for Simon himself. We were the mad volunteers who had put up with the process and had stuck around through the challenges and setbacks the project had endured. I suppose you could say we had kept the faith, but most of the people in this room would have scoffed at any use of language that approached religion. They thought themselves enlightened past superstition and put their faith in nothing but themselves. I wondered how they would deal with our ancestors, which all books agreed were far more religious than the 22nd century.

The world was in a bad place, and it was spiraling out of control after the atomic destruction of 2082. Most of the people in this room had been born after that, and even I had only been 7 years old. Old enough to remember the loss of history. The missiles bound for my homeland had been shot down by our air defenses. But those bound for many other countries had not. The loss of capital cities was bad, the loss of cultural landmarks had unmoored entire sections of global society. Entire continents collapsed into strife and chaos. On top of that, the droughts and storms of climate change compounded with the flooding of shorelines meant that billions had been killed or displaced. By the time those who still cared tracked down the origins of the first bomb, it was obvious the climate crisis had triggered the fighting in the first place.

Which brings us back to Simon. A mad British scientist who thought that if the present was broken, we could go to the past to fix it. Like my homeland, Britain had succeeded in shooting down the missiles heading for its sites, and an elderly and beloved King George had held his people together even as the politicians tried to figure out what to do. It was a safe haven, at least a little. It was also isolationist and took full advantage of the Channel to stop most from entering. I was one of the lucky ones, my skill as a pilot meaning I was a valuable immigrant.

Almost everyone else in the room was a native of England. Simon had recruited mostly youngsters who had a dream of making a better world. I was supposed to be the dean of the group going back, but I had not been idealist enough for them, and we had formed at least three distinct cliques. We would go back as a group, because there was no other way, but from there we would scatter, each to try to do our own thing to save humanity. Perhaps there was no better illustration of what was wrong with our race. Even its saviors could not get along.

Simon’s invention hogged a lot of energy. After a successful test run had blacked out Glasgow, the British government had kicked us out of the country. An old French nuclear power plant on what had used to be the French-Belgian border was where we set up shop. The cities, for neither country still existed, it had used to supply power to were not in a position to stop us and it turns out that nuclear plants always produce energy; they don’t just shut down the way a conventional plant would. The free energy was there for those who could secure it, and there were enough mercenaries around that would agree to protect us. All it took was agreeing to take their two leaders along with us.

The test firing had demonstrated that the machine could only take us back 300 years. That would make 1910. On the bright side, that was in the middle of the industrial growth that had destroyed the planet, so there was hope. On the negative side, it was right before the first World War which meant we were entering a very tense era. The three cliques of travelers had split on how to handle it.

Leading the most idealistic had been Terry. They wanted to ignore the approach of war altogether and just focus on fixing society. They argued that if we could improve peoples’ lives fast enough, they wouldn’t need war. It was a siren song for many of the young people, many of whom had been recruited from colleges. They knew the hopelessness of the world and knew its causes. Ultimately, when we arrived, they were going to split up between a handful of countries who they believed they could shift the best. Terry himself, along with three others, were going to return to the British Empire while four were going to go to the United States. Anatoli, their last member and the only one to really speak a language other than English, was headed to the Russian Empire to try to stop its imminent collapse. I wished him luck.

I had been more pragmatic: war was unavoidable. The best we could do was delay it so that we could alter the script. I also thought that the best thing we could do for the future was shore up the countries which were bound for collapse in the World Wars. If we brought them proof of their failure, they might be more open to listening and engaging in serious change. That change could bring along the rest. I was from Austria, so I would go there. Two others, Stephen and Ashley, were coming with me. Those who agreed with me were also heading to Germany, Greece, Persia and Japan. We had an Arab man named Sayid as well who we tried to convince to go to the Ottoman Empire. He agreed to go to the Arab lands of the Ottomans, but he didn’t have much fondness for the Turks who had ruled that land in 1910.

For the third group, it turned out that, for some, saving the world was not an entirely altruistic motivation. After all, a mind from 2110 in 1910 could do a lot for itself with proper application. The two French mercenaries planned to stay in France and seek their own fortune while Yonas was headed for Ethiopia.

Our arrival in 1910 had been met with a lot of shock by those we called down-timers. Twenty people appeared in the middle of a wheat field in northern France with a flash of energy that actually started a fire. We were laden down with whatever books and manuals we had thought would be helpful. It drew attention, really more of a circus. But that had served our purposes very well. Terry and his crowd had trumpeted their intention to save the world and raced off to their destinations. My crowd had offered promises of making lives better and had been offered train tickets to our destinations by the appropriate governments.

*****

My mind slipped over the thirteen years since our arrival. Unabashedly, I knew I had done the best job at influencing my target country. Stephen and Ashley were the leads at the scientific division of my semi-private company, Istrian Illuminations. Originally, it had just been Illuminations, but when the Emperor appointed me the Duke of Istria, it had seen a natural addition. Imperial law was flexible enough about distinguishing private and public that I moved seamlessly between the two arenas.

Telling Franz Joseph that his Empire would outlive him by only two years was an incredible incentive to the man. His court had been aware of the fading star of Austria-Hungary, but hadn’t known how to turn it around. Now, they had a new vision. Industrial innovation spurred economic growth. Legal and constitutional reforms meant that the new Emperor, Franz Ferdinand, led a much more cohesive and proud nation than his uncle. He was also alive in this timeline, so he was especially happy with me, hence the appointment as Duke of Istria.

It hadn’t all been sunshine and roses across the world, but my place in Austria was solid. Not all of my companions could say the same. Sayid had been arrested by the Ottoman authorities in 1913. Sebastian had been killed by the KKK in America for lobbying for racial justice. Thierry didn’t pay attention to safety, caught syphilis, and died. He’d been quick too, we had worked to start producing antibiotics almost immediately, and penicillin had been released in 1915. At least two others had just disappeared off anybody’s radar and we had no idea what had happened to them. Their loss had at least spurred on the others, and Sebastian’s death had prompted a crackdown on the KKK and had actually led to some preliminary civil rights reforms in America. Good for them.

We had avoided major international showdowns for a decade, but minor ones had still happened. The Italian seizure of Ottoman territories in 1911 launched almost immediately after we arrived. The two Baltic wars of 1912 & 1913 had still happened, although their outcome had been different. The Ottomans had been pushed entirely out of Europe by a stronger Greece, which also took the Anatolian Aegean coastline. Serbia and Bulgaria had not gained as much, and the Greeks were definitely the dominant power in the Balkans now. I owned several factories in their country, including in reconquered Constantinople. Sayid had actually been arrested during the fallout of that war, when he tried to launch an Arab rebellion in Syria.

Things had been fairly peaceful for about five years after that, as the Great Powers and time travelers alike had all held our collective breaths during the timespan of the actual Great War. The great alliance structures that had broken the world in the original timeline: the Triple Entente & Alliance, strained under the burden of avoiding war. Fractures started to appear in them in the winter of 1914/5. My friend, Abdul, had succeeded in his push to modernize Persia but our friendship meant that the now renamed Iran was breaking free of the restrictions Russia and Britain had placed on it and was starting to align with Austria. This threatened the 1907 accords that had drawn Russia into its friendship with Western Europe. Anatoli, meanwhile, had the Russian court so tied up in internal reforms that it had retreated to isolationism.

Meanwhile, the Triple Alliance was publicly abandoned. Italy had been a traitor to it anyway, which the Austrian government took note of and heavily fortified the borders and coastlines facing Italy. The relationship between the two governments had always been rocky, and now it was just poisoned. Neither had wanted to start a war then, but it was always clear one was coming. Franz Ferdinand was also skeptical of the German Empire’s influence in his country. The border too long, and culture too close, for us to truly separate from them, but the new Emperor was very aware that Germany’s star had originally waxed as Austria’s had waned (and had played no small part in that waning).

I was proud of what my clique of the time travelers had done here. Once he was embedded in the Ethiopian government, Yonas had sought me out and proposed a novel solution. Austria, Ethiopia, Persia & Greece were all ancient powers (Austria was actually the youngest by several millennia!) who were seen by others as remnants of the past. But they were all also countries where time travelers were given their best chance to transform and rejuvenate the populations. So we worked together. Our name in German was Vier Vereinte Volker, the alliteration of Four United Peoples pleasing the Austrian court. The VVV flew under the Great Power radar since Austria was the only nominal member of that club and largely discounted anyway. Our economies and politics grew closer and closer over the decade. My company had large manufacturing presences in all four, and we worked to introduce new technologies and systems across all four. Japan had refused to join the alliance explicitly, but I kept in touch with Evan, the traveler there. He was Deputy Prime Minister now and while they refused direct foreign investment, we were able to work pretty well indirectly and through import agreements. It helped that none of the VVV had colonial empires of our own.

Istrian Illuminations had many different divisions, based on a combination of what the down-timers were asking for and what the up-timers wanted to change. The first thing we had done was work on cleaner power, since coal-fired power plants and factories were detrimental to both air quality and the future of the planet. None of the four countries of the VVV were heavily developed in that sphere, so I was able to be very successful in them compared with the American, British, French or German travelers. Down-timers, meanwhile, wanted innovative weapons systems to help them overcome the more powerful empires. Those were probably our two largest sources of income.

I was the best at managing the court and explaining our work. That’s why Illuminations wound up being my company. Stephen and Ashley, meanwhile, got to drive innovation. Ashley worked on medicines and a few other chemicals that she had been studying as a medical student before we came back. Stephen had an eclectic range of interests and had his finger in so many different projects it was a wonder he'd remembered to marry Ashley. Meanwhile, aside from the politics, my past as a pilot meant I had designed airplanes, which then led me to other vehicle projects, especially in the navy. That was why the Emperor had eventually granted me Istria as a nominal duchy (real political power was mostly held by appointees, not by aristocrats). Its capital, Pula, was the major naval base for the Empire and was tied with Vienna for where most of my commercial facilities were.

The uneasy peace around the world had ended in 1917, when the Chinese Civil War began, the restoration of the Qing finding more support than it had in the original timeline and winning some of the early confrontations. That may have been my fault: the Chinese rebels had purchased substantial numbers of small arms from my company. The Great Powers raced to secure their investments by supporting proxy warlords resisting what was feared as a Chinese restoration that would have swept out foreign influence. The Chinese Republican government, which had originally swatted aside Puyi and his supporters, instead collapsed. Russia, France, Britain, Germany and Japan were all heavily invested in the unequal treaties, which had carved China up into spheres of influence. They moved to defend their interests. Britain was the first to deploy its own troops to secure Hong Kong & Shanghai, while France mostly supported a faction of Chinese Republicans in southern China. By 1923, it had solidified into a three-way contest in China. France and Britain dominated the south. They weren’t quite directly fighting, but instead had rival warlords. But they both had lost possessions in the north they wanted to recover. Germany was heavily engaged in the north while the Chinese had bargained for Japanese support in removing non-Asian powers entirely. Russia had initially sent some soldiers into the north, but Chinese and German forces had worked together to defeat them before turning on each other. It was a mess, but Austria had no immediate stakes. We were free to continue to innovate and expand our economy.

Austrian peace had lasted for six more years, until a new crisis had emerged. Thanks to Terry, who had somehow managed to not lose his idealism in the last 13 years. He’d never managed to make it to rich and powerful, but was supported by English universities and just authored studies and gave lectures about the future. Most were ignored, some were mocked, but a few managed to gain traction. Their economy and military were both modernizing, but nothing compared to what I had accomplished in Austria. England, France and Germany were all preoccupied with each other, nobody paid much attention to the VVV.

Terry’s latest problem study had, in the words of the future, gone viral. It was about Congo. Turns out the Belgian government was still pretty nasty, even after they’d done away with the worst of Leopold’s abuses in the reforms of 1908. He called for Britain to leverage its protection of Belgium from Germany (one of the causes of the original First World War) to force Belgium to give up its Congolese colony. Naturally, he advocated for independence, but the colonial empires were skeptical. The Chinese war was mostly by proxy by now, so the French & British people were not being hurt by the war there. They managed to force their governments to take action. Democracies were a lot more vulnerable to public pressure than were the monarchs of Central Europe. The tensions in China, though, had poisoned the French and British governments against each other. Meanwhile, neither was about to give Germany another inch of Africa. There had been a conference about it in Belgium, and it had actually ended with the German representative punching the French one!

I had gone to represent Austria. Technically, it was now the Imperial Federation of Crowns, three interlinked royal territories that were largely autonomous but united by common imperial, military and constitutional structures. The constitution we had worked out was a masterpiece of compromise and structure that still ultimately all rested on Imperial decree, so the Emperor could do what he needed to improve his country but they could also work by themselves. Austria was but one of the Crowns, but it was the one everybody called the union by.

I was the only time traveler present. I had risen the highest of all of us. Well, technically Anatoli had married the Princess Olga of Russia (eldest child of the Tsar), but Russia didn’t send a special envoy to the conference, as they cared little for Africa. I couldn’t recall if their ambassador had even said a word aside from his own name. Even before the fight broke out, it had been a lively conference. At least twice, the topic of China had come up and I had to wrestle it back to Africa.

I was pleased with how I did at the conference. My new background as a businessman meant I was always the most focused on finding a deal. I had learned to work in secret though, and spoke only occasionally at the public meetings. Behind the scenes though, it was a busy week for me. I managed to get the British and French to agree to one set of terms, and the Germans to agree to another. I was trying to move the entire conference together when it ended over the fistfight. By then, the last public statements of the conference’s intent were that the only two acceptable options for someone to take Congo were Italy or Austria. Britain and France agreed to back us if we helped them defeat Germany in a war, along with the rest of German Africa. Germany, meanwhile, agreed to back us in Congo if we helped them fight against Britain & France along with passing us British East Africa.

*****

My reflections were cut short by a knock on the door to my terrace in Pula, Istria. My butler, Stavros, entered. “Your Grace, the Palace is on the line.”

Thank God that we managed to get telephones common. We were still working on computers and the internet. It was actually Georgios, the time traveler in Greece, that was heading up that part of our work. I’d brought him into the company after VVV had been formalized. I was glad that his main facility was in the northern Aegean, where it would likely be safe from military action during the war.

I headed inside and picked up the receiver Stavros had placed on the table for me. Oh, how I longed for us to get cordless telephones. “Istria speaking.”

Telephone conversations between important people were always annoying. Now I had to wait for the attendant who had actually called to go and fetch the Emperor. Finally, he was on the line. “Kurt, we just received word. The Italians have fired the first shots at Isonzo. I hope the defenses are in place down there, we’re expecting their first attacks all along the front today.”

“We’ll see, in the original Great War, they were overly focused on the land border. We know our air force is superior to theirs. They won’t make any progress in the Adriatic.” I wasn’t too worried. No time travelers had ever gone to Italy, a major source of irritation to that country, so they could only figure out what we were willing to export or what they could steal. Which wasn’t much. Nobody trusted Italy after reading the histories of the original early-20th century. Austria’s forces were now using equipment analogous to the 1960s, and in some cases had leaped ahead to the 21st century, at least in systems that didn’t require computers. Our spies, meanwhile, reported that Italy might have caught up with the original 1930s.

The Emperor and I spent a few more minutes reviewing what we both already knew about the war and orders that had been issued to the various military detachments before the conversation turned to the broader war that was breaking out in Europe. Germany and France had gone to war over their altercation. Britain was promising that if Germany went through with its old plans and invaded Belgium, the controversy over Congo was not about to stop them from following their treaty and coming to the defense. The United States and Russia were both being silent on the issue. The VVV had all declared their backing for Austria’s claim to Congo while Italy naturally stood against it.

“We haven’t heard anything from our ambassador in Gaziantep.” The Emperor talked about the new Ottoman capital, installed after Constantinople had been lost to the Greeks. “I know the VVV is expecting them to come after us if the Greeks get into the war.”

I nodded in agreement, even though these old-fashioned phones couldn’t convey it. “And the Greeks will. They want the Italian Aegean possessions. I’m surprised the Turks would help the Italians though, I know there’s a faction that blames them for beginning of the Ottoman collapse with the war in 1911.”

I could hear the shrug in the Emperor’s words. “Hard to compete with the Greeks for the hatred of Gaziantep. I’ve told Constantine to focus his forces on defending Anatolia. I agree that our forces won’t need the help with Italy. I know Zewditu is planning on crossing over to Arabia after her forces finish with the Italians in the Horn. Reza Khan is counting on the Ottomans to give him an outlet for his army, which is itching to prove itself.”

“I know, I just can’t believe the Ottomans would be so foolish. They have to know that they’d lose a three front war against the VVV.”

The Emperor laughed. “There is a reason God teaches us that Pride is the deadliest sin.”

“Have the Great Powers accepted our demurring?” I brought up the most important topic. After all, I had been the one to deliver to Franz Ferdinand offers of support in Congo if we sided with both sides of the war that was breaking out in Northern Europe this week. As the Emperor, it was his responsibility to choose which to honor. Attacking Germany would give us a much more dangerous war, fighting on two fronts against both them and Italy, but Germany was definitely weaker than the alliance of France and Britain, which despite their tensions was still holding. That was probably why Germany’s offer of all of British East Africa, including Egypt and the Suez Canal, had been much more generous. It would catapult us fully into the front ranks of the Great Powers. If we could win. Despite our modernization, I knew there was hesitation in Vienna over such a bold move.

It had been the Prime Minister of Hungary, one of the other constituent Crowns of the Empire, that had proposed a novel solution: waiting. We were not allied officially to any of the countries involved. We had agreements of politicians, no treaties signed by monarchs. We had our own war to fight, with Italy and likely the Ottoman Empire. Plus, nobody knew which way Russia and America were going to jump, if they did at all. This Great War was going to be very different from the original. The history books we had brought back had shown that America had tilted both World Wars by waiting out the initial strikes and then coming in fresh. Minister Andrassy had come up with the idea of pitching Austria performing a similar role to the powers of Northern Europe. We would deal with Italy first and then enter the war to support our (new) allies. Of course, we would be able to choose which side we were on at that point and could be opportunistic about it.

“The British just said talk to the French. They’re still pretending like they aren’t going to get involved. The French aren’t happy, but I think they’ll accept it if we do eventually come in. The Germans were happier with us staying out of it for now. They worry that publishing the deal would get the British involved prematurely. They have plans, apparently, and think our involvement would jeopardize those plans. I think there’s still some superstition that Russia will go to war if the alliances start to look too much like the original war’s.”

I could hear the warning klaxons of the missile batteries near Pula start to sound. They were launching warnings, meaning that the systems were about to fire. We had missiles that could easily reach Italian naval bases on the Adriatic, and a barrage of those was planned to soften the targets before our navy and air force truly moved to engage. “The longer it stays Germany and France alone, the better for Germany. But, Your Majesty, I think I need to go. The missiles will be launching soon, and I expect there will be need for me here.”

“Yes, of course Kurt. God be with you.” I said farewell and then the line disconnected.

I heard the roar and hiss of missiles launching as I stepped back out into the sun. Shouts rang out from the vessels launching out of Pola harbor to join, some already out in the water contributing their own cruise missiles to the land-based ones launching from the countryside. To inspire the citizens, a group of fighter planes did flyover of the city, low enough that their jet engines rattled your bones. All that in only one city on the coast. From my mansion on the hill, I could see trails from missiles launched to our south arcing towards Italian shores. There were more every minute.

All of these efforts were focused on Italian naval, air and army bases up and down the Adriatic coast. The Austrian admirals were talking about amphibious landings if we could soften the coastline. I was glad I had gotten them to agree to restrict themselves to military targets. I had talked to them about the concept of strategic bombing. The aristocrats had been horrified at how ungallant it was, the military appalled at the conclusion of most military historians that it had relatively little tactical benefit. The suffering of civilians rarely hastened the end of a military conflict, you had to actually defeat the military. In fact, it was frequently counter-productive, as the military fought harder to avenge the suffering of civilians. Austria had agreed to not engage in it, although we had defenses in place in case the Italians were less chivalrous.

I hope it was enough.