After the meeting ended and his "war council" departed to wrestle with diapers, helmets, and cat sand, Oskar closed the door to his room and returned to the subject that had occupied his thoughts for weeks: battleships.
His desk lay buried beneath sketches and calculations. Armor schemes overlapped turret arrangements, while notes on machinery disappeared beneath drawings that had already been revised several times. Lately, his life had settled into a peculiar routine of training, spending time with Tanya, and designing increasingly alarming war machines. Now, with Christmas approaching, his most ambitious project was finally ready.
He bent over the largest sheet and added a few last annotations. Beneath his hand, a battleship stretched across the paper in precise black lines, its silhouette low, lean, and predatory. Even as a drawing, it looked as though it belonged to a different age.
The principle behind it was simple, at least in Oskar's mind. He had reduced the older battleship formula to a few essentials: roughly ten thousand tons of displacement, a handful of heavy guns, and numerous smaller weapons whose higher rate of fire compensated for the slower main battery. Then HMS Dreadnought would arrive and overturn the whole arrangement.
Forget the compromise. Big guns. More big guns. Make the important part bigger.
That was how Oskar preferred to understand the coming revolution, and his design embraced it wholeheartedly.
At first glance, the ship resembled the future Nassau class, but the resemblance did not survive a closer examination. The historical Nassau would carry twelve 280-millimeter guns in six twin turrets, arranged in a hexagon: one forward, one aft, and four along the sides. Eight guns could fire in a broadside, but the arrangement involved awkward firing arcs and a considerable amount of machinery and armor devoted to turrets that could not all engage the same target.
Oskar had taken a different approach. His design carried nine 305-millimeter guns in three triple turrets, positioned forward, amidships, and aft. There would be fewer mountings, but larger shells and a more concentrated main battery.
He knew where naval design would eventually lead. Ships such as Iowa and Yamato would demonstrate the possibilities of concentrating heavy guns in triple turrets rather than scattering smaller mountings across the hull. On paper, the arrangement promised savings in weight and space, a shorter armored citadel, and a more efficient distribution of protection. Combined with a uniform main battery, it also offered the prospect of simpler fire control.
He was not merely copying Dreadnought. He was attempting to squeeze something closer to a Second World War battleship into the technological skin of an early-twentieth-century vessel.
The machinery received similarly ambitious treatment. Coal-fired boilers and triple-expansion engines had no place in the version he wanted to build. Instead, his specifications called for oil-fired boilers supplying steam turbines: a cleaner, lighter, faster arrangement, without the same clouds of coal smoke or the clattering machinery he associated with older ships.
Whether the engineers would share his enthusiasm remained to be seen. On his desk, however, the possibilities looked magnificent.
He could already imagine the ship cutting through the North Sea faster than British captains expected, its turrets turning before a broadside of 305-millimeter shells thundered across the water. A German battleship built to define the coming era rather than struggle to catch up with it.
"I hope the old man likes this one," he murmured, studying the drawing. "If Wilhelm II says yes, then when the dreadnought race begins, we punch first."
An early advantage would not solve every problem facing Germany, but it might change the balance at sea. On land, there would still be railways, artillery, and appalling numbers of men to consider. At sea, a few years of technological superiority might make all the difference.
Now that he possessed real money, he refused to spend it fulfilling his promise with something that would be obsolete before it left the shipyard. He had not endured the humiliation of negotiating his way out of the Naval Academy merely to finance another expensive antique.
If he was going to pour a fortune into steel, it would be steel worth having.
There was also the political value to consider. Wilhelm II loved the Navy with an enthusiasm Oskar found both useful and faintly alarming. The man seemed to dream in gray hulls and heavy guns. A revolutionary warship design, presented alongside the money to begin construction, might accomplish more than a hundred carefully rehearsed conversations.
Perhaps it would even earn Oskar an impressive title and enough influence to make himself heard.
Not a demanding office, preferably. He had no desire to exchange school for an endless succession of meetings. He wanted just enough standing that, when he suggested perhaps not starting a world war, the people around him would pause before dismissing him.
It might also persuade his father to forget the unfortunate occasion on which he had described the Naval Academy as garbage.
Beneath those ambitions lay a simpler concern: if the Empire collapsed, his own comfortable existence would collapse with it. A prince in peacetime enjoyed palaces, servants, transportation, and the authority to make things happen. A prince after the fall of his dynasty was a conspicuous target with a famous name and an inconvenient collection of enemies. Wealth could make exile more comfortable, but it could not make it anything other than exile.
Nor could he simply return to Asia and disappear into the life he had once known. Whatever remained of Zhang-Ge existed inside the body of an enormous German prince. His fate and Germany's were now welded together.
The throne, however, was another matter entirely.
Oskar gave a quiet snort as he considered it. With the Crown Prince ahead of him and several other brothers between himself and the succession, he was comfortably placed near the back of the family queue. That suited him perfectly. Being Emperor sounded like the worst job in the world.
He would have made Karl Crown Prince instead, given the opportunity. Unfortunately, the laws of blood—and, he suspected, height—were against them.
Over the following days, Oskar continued his routine. He trained, worked on his drawings, and practiced German with Tanya's patient assistance, all while attempting to keep the less educational aspects of their relationship from becoming common knowledge.
Beyond his room, the German Welfare Lottery Company continued to grow. Double Color Ball had become the lottery everyone with a little spare money seemed eager to try, and its first-prize winners supplied the company with advertisements no ordinary publicity campaign could have purchased.
There was Hans, of course, but also a merchant's widow, a teacher, and, most astonishingly, a six-year-old orphan.
Oskar had nearly choked when that report arrived. The child was now technically a millionaire, despite being young enough to require assistance with considerably smaller numbers.
His name was Gustav Schwarzenegger.
Oskar had read it twice.
After hurried negotiations, charitable arrangements, and an eruption of newspaper interest, the boy had been given a home in the palace's stable complex. His days were divided between lessons with tutors and helping feed the horses, while his winnings were held in trust until he reached adulthood.
"Future strongman," Oskar had declared upon hearing the arrangements. "We make him Austrian steel number one, my man."
The newspapers adored the story.
Between the lottery's expanding profits and the first modest returns from safety equipment, hygiene products, and his other fledgling ventures, Oskar's fortune continued to grow like a bodybuilder enjoying an exceptionally successful bulk. The Imperial Family's explicit protection made the businesses difficult to threaten openly, giving him and Karl room to consider what might come next.
They had already begun discussing expansion beyond Germany in the coming year. Austria-Hungary seemed an obvious prospect, followed by the Balkans, overseas colonies, and whatever neutral markets might prove receptive. The lottery would not travel alone; useful products could cross borders just as readily as numbered tickets.
Oskar liked the idea of foreign money flowing into German industry. In his own blunt arithmetic, every mark earned abroad and converted into machinery, factories, or warships was another mark strengthening the country to which he now belonged.
Enough wealth, properly used, might buy more than military power. Perhaps it could make Germany sufficiently formidable that anyone contemplating an attack would examine the situation, soil himself, and decide that peace had always been an excellent idea.
That was the plan, anyway.
Meanwhile, Christmas drew steadily closer.
In Oskar's previous life, the holiday had mostly meant sales, electric lights, cold weather, and women on the internet charging money to appear in abbreviated Santa outfits. Here, in 1904, it seemed considerably more serious. There was no OnlyFans and no procession of strippers in elf hats to distract from the occasion. Instead, there were candles, hymns, family obligations, and politics wearing its most respectable clothes.
For the Imperial Family, Christmas offered an opportunity to display public piety, reinforce personal loyalties, and conduct quiet negotiations beneath the appearance of a family celebration. Wilhelm II's Christmas Eve banquet at Potsdam would bring together representatives of the royal houses of Saxony, Bavaria, and Württemberg, along with grand dukes, princes, senior ministers, generals, admirals, industrialists, and ambassadors from across Europe.
Oskar had initially intended to become conveniently ill.
His father had resolved the matter by visiting him personally with a leather belt in hand.
"If you miss Christmas again," Wilhelm II had informed him, "I shall flog you myself and give your lottery company to your eldest brother."
After considering the available medical evidence, Oskar had concluded that attending the banquet would be better for his health.
There was one small mercy. Karl had quietly informed him that the Kaiser had agreed not to insist upon his participation in the dancing. Oskar, who had briefly imagined being ordered to perform a waltz before half the Empire's nobility with nothing but internet dance memes available to guide his feet, received this news with profound relief.
On Christmas Eve, he stood in his Berlin hotel room while Tanya made the final adjustments to his parade uniform. The buttons were fastened, the boots polished, and the medals properly aligned. His hair was neat, his cuffs clean, and he smelled faintly of soap rather than fear and onions.
He looked like someone's excessively ambitious interpretation of a Prussian prince.
Tanya had come especially to help him prepare and was now examining his collar with the concentration of an officer inspecting a fortification. She smoothed a crease, adjusted his belt, and stepped back before immediately moving forward to correct something else.
Oskar endured the process with reasonable patience until the door opened and Karl entered.
His attendant wore a white suit, his hair slicked neatly back and his face freshly shaved. The overall effect reminded Oskar of a diminutive crime lord whose accountant had just delivered excellent news. Karl's eyes shone with an excitement he was making very little effort to conceal.
"Your Highness, I am ready," he announced. "When shall we depart?"
For all his professional composure, Karl was still a young man preparing to enter a hall full of noblewomen. Oskar suspected that his friend hoped to find a wife with much the same determination a fisherman brought to a river rumored to contain exceptionally large trout.
His own feelings were more complicated.
A year earlier, he had been a counterfeit prince hiding behind his bedroom door, terrified that every conversation might expose him. He still spoke imperfect German and understood far less about court life than anyone expected, but he was no longer merely the family embarrassment. He had built something. His company employed people, his ideas were beginning to take physical form, and his name now carried weight in Berlin's business circles.
He was also extremely rich.
The thought remained difficult to absorb. In his old life, he had watched people casually send money to streamers simply to hear a woman thank them. The word millionaire had appeared so often, attached to so many different currencies and displays of wealth, that it had lost much of its force in his mind.
Here, a million marks was not merely an impressive number. It could change the way people looked at a man.
Oskar dismissed the thought before it could make him any more self-conscious. Tanya finished with his collar, and he thanked her with a gentle pat on the head, apparently unaware that this was not the most dignified expression of affection available to him.
"Okay, my man," he told Karl. "I am ready. Let us go slay demons."
Tanya's cheeks puffed slightly. She watched them prepare to leave with an expression caught between pride and disappointment, then turned toward the room in search of something that urgently required cleaning.
Oskar picked up a small suitcase before following Karl to the door. His attendant assumed it contained business papers, perhaps another collection of drawings that would eventually become his responsibility.
In fact, Oskar had packed gifts for his parents and siblings. There were no explosives and no practical jokes, only presents he had chosen with genuine care. Now that he possessed a fortune, arriving empty-handed at Christmas seemed difficult to justify.
Outside the hotel, a Mercedes-Benz waited with a driver.
Apparently, Wilhelm II had decided that his fifth son should no longer wander through the streets like a particularly well-connected vagabond. A car had therefore been placed at Oskar's disposal, complete with someone who knew how to operate it.
Karl settled into the back seat without difficulty. Oskar followed, struck his head against the frame, and spent several undignified seconds discovering how little of the vehicle had been designed with his shoulders in mind. Eventually, he managed to fold himself inside.
The suspension gave a faint, disapproving groan.
As they pulled away from the hotel and began the journey toward Potsdam, Oskar studied the interior. Whatever prestige the car might possess in this era, to him it remained a rattling box with an ugly steering wheel, inadequate cushioning, and none of the conveniences he instinctively expected. There was no radio, no convenient control for the temperature, no screen, and certainly nothing resembling an autopilot.
"So primitive," he muttered in Mandarin.
Karl glanced at him but wisely refrained from asking for a translation.
Oskar shifted in his seat, failed to become more comfortable, and looked out at the horse-drawn carts and trams passing through the streets. Another idea had already begun taking shape.
"The Welfare Lottery earns money every day," he said thoughtfully in German. "Leaving too much of it in banks is wasteful. We should consider another investment. Cars, perhaps."
Karl's shoulders tightened.
"Another investment, Your Highness?"
"Yes, my man. Better cars. Smooth shapes, comfortable seats, good speed. Something people enjoy riding in."
He could see them already: elegant bodies, sensible interiors, machines that looked less like carriages someone had persuaded to move without horses. Give people a car that was beautiful, comfortable, and fast, and it would sell like cheap cheeseburgers in his old world.
Karl's expression suggested that he was mentally adding an automobile company to a list already crowded with lottery offices, helmets, diapers, exercise machines, and bags of cat sand.
Oskar noticed and raised a reassuring hand.
"Step by step, my man. First, banquet. Then, battleship. After that, cars."
Karl released a slow breath and leaned back against the seat. As the vehicle rattled onward toward Potsdam, he found himself considering the evening ahead with unexpected optimism.
A banquet full of princes, ministers, and generals might turn out to be the least demanding part of his month.