Oskar's discussion with Wilhelm II and Tirpitz lasted until two in the morning. By the time he returned to his room in the palace, he felt as though he had spent hours juggling naval doctrine, imperial politics, future history, and an unhealthy quantity of caffeine.
He collapsed onto the bed, but sleep refused to come. His head remained crowded with unfamiliar words, difficult questions, and responsibilities that had seemed considerably less intimidating when they existed only as drawings in his diary.
A few months earlier, he had barely spoken German to anyone. Now the language came more readily with each conversation, even if his grammar still sounded as though someone had beaten it with a shovel. At least he was improving. If the evening had demonstrated anything, it was that he would soon be expected to explain himself in rooms where a badly chosen sentence could do considerably more damage than embarrass him.
One decision, however, required no further discussion: he would stop drinking.
Alcohol muddled his thoughts, loosened his tongue, and encouraged him to tell admirals that he was a time traveler. Whatever pleasure other people found in it, he could no longer afford those particular consequences.
He already avoided smoking. He had seen enough ruined lungs in hospitals and trenches to have little interest in deliberately damaging his own.
Oskar raised his hands and examined them in the dim light. In his previous life, he had spent much of his youth growing soft in front of screens. This time, he had done the opposite, training until his muscles ached, hauling himself up tree branches, and turning the body he had inherited into something stronger.
He intended to keep it that way. He wanted to live long, remain healthy, and preserve whatever advantage his memories gave him.
But an advantage for what?
That question had become harder to ignore.
He had never been particularly religious. His beliefs, insofar as he had possessed anything organized enough to deserve the name, had leaned toward a loose and practical understanding of Buddhism. He had thought of the Buddha as a teacher rather than a god, and of reducing suffering as something more useful than arguing over who possessed the correct answers.
What appealed to him was the possibility of learning: accepting that his understanding might be incomplete and changing his approach when he discovered a better one. To Oskar, it had been less a rigid faith than a way of attempting to live.
Then he had died and awakened in someone else's body, in a century that should have been safely confined to history books.
Even a skeptic had to admit that this complicated matters.
Unless the entire experience was some elaborate hallucination, the universe contained possibilities for which his former life had not prepared him. Karma, fate, a higher power, or an exceptionally cruel cosmic sense of humor had placed him inside a German prince shortly before a catastrophe he already knew was coming.
It was difficult not to wonder whether he was being tested.
Why this country? Why this family? Why a body with the name, money, and position to influence events, but a mind that could scarcely explain itself to the people whose cooperation it needed?
And if he had been brought here for a purpose, how could he know that he was fulfilling it?
The drawings on his desk no longer seemed quite so reassuring.
He wanted to prevent the wars he remembered. Whatever people later claimed had been gained through them, he could not look past the oceans of blood. Yet preventing a war and ensuring that Germany won one were not necessarily the same objective. Making the Empire more powerful might discourage its enemies—or encourage its leaders to take risks they would otherwise have avoided.
He had been so occupied with giving Germany better weapons that he had scarcely allowed himself to consider where those weapons might lead.
The arithmetic was not comforting. Germany possessed perhaps sixty million people, growing toward seventy million in the years he remembered. Against that stood the potential resources of the British Empire, France, Russia, and eventually the United States. Japan and China might become involved in their own ways as well.
Taken together, he was thinking in hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions, depending on whom he counted. Behind them stood industries, raw materials, colonial resources, and manpower Germany could not simply conjure into existence through superior engineering.
Better designs and an early start would help. He was far less certain that they could sustain the country against such a combination indefinitely.
What if the war comes anyway? What if I do not save millions of people? What if I only make everyone better at killing them?
The question settled heavily in his chest.
Could he send young men into a conflict he knew would be horrific? Could he support a strategy that looked convincing on paper while turning entire regions into graveyards? Having watched wounded men bleed out among ruins, could he ever sit comfortably behind a desk and decide that a certain number of casualties was acceptable?
The thought made his skin crawl.
Oskar stared at the ceiling, then brought his hands together awkwardly. The gesture felt unfamiliar, more instinct than conviction. For the first time he could remember in either life, he attempted something he was willing to call a prayer.
If anyone is listening—Buddha, God, fate, the cosmic spaghetti monster—please tell me whether I am doing the right thing. I do not want to make this worse.
The room offered no answer.
After a while, a quiet voice came from the doorway.
"Your Highness? Are you awake?"
He did not reply, but Tanya entered anyway.
She closed the door carefully behind her, having slipped out of the servants' quarters once again. Her hair hung loose, and the cold corridor had brought color to her cheeks.
She asked nothing about the Kaiser or the Navy. Perhaps she noticed the exhaustion in his face, or perhaps she simply understood that he had spent enough of the evening trying to explain himself.
Crossing the room, she climbed onto the bed and settled beside him, resting against his side with the ease of someone who no longer felt the need to ask whether she was welcome.
Oskar lowered his hands.
He could not tell her what troubled him, not without beginning an explanation he had no idea how to finish. For the moment, however, she did not seem to require one. Her presence offered something simpler than advice: he was here, he was trying, and he did not have to endure every difficult hour alone.
He wanted to believe that was enough.
For tonight, he allowed himself to.
His thoughts gradually slowed. The warmth beside him, the quiet rhythm of Tanya's breathing, and the familiar scent of soap and clean linen gave him something immediate to hold onto. The future receded far enough for exhaustion to take its place.
Sleep came, but it brought little peace.
He dreamed of muddy trenches and roads broken by shell craters, of burned vehicles abandoned beside frozen tracks. Men lay in ditches, some groaning, others already still. Artillery rolled in the distance, while the thin, familiar buzzing overhead belonged to weapons the world around him had not yet invented.
There were bodies with limbs blown away, torsos torn apart, and neglected wounds alive with maggots. Men called for their mothers in voices that scarcely sounded human anymore. Others tried to speak and choked on blood instead.
His own memories tangled with the documentaries he had watched in another life. Different uniforms, different landscapes, different explanations for why the killing had been necessary; beneath them, the same screaming and the same terrible silence afterward.
He remembered eyes that had been bright only moments before, left staring at nothing.
But other memories came with them. Soldiers running into fire to drag a wounded comrade back. Men accepting risks they might otherwise have refused because somebody else would die if they did nothing. Accounts of brutal decisions made not out of pleasure in cruelty, but in the desperate belief that one terrible act might prevent something worse.
He remembered a saying whose source he could no longer place: sometimes, to build a better world, a man first had to walk through hell.
He did not know whether he believed it. He was not certain he wanted to.
Yet the possibility haunted him. Changing history might not permit him to remain innocent of its consequences. Sooner or later, he might face a choice in which every available course caused suffering, and refusing to choose would merely leave the decision to someone else.
Oskar shifted restlessly, his brow tightening as he muttered into the darkness. Tanya stirred, moved closer, and laid an arm across him without fully waking.
Beyond the windows, the palace lay quiet beneath the winter stars.
Elsewhere, Wilhelm II and Tirpitz remained in the study, examining the battleship drawings long after their creator had departed.
Both approved of the concept. Neither mistook that approval for proof that the ship could be built as drawn.
A battleship required years of work, enormous expenditure, and the coordination of industries that could not be hurried simply because the Kaiser was enthusiastic. Even Britain, with its greater shipbuilding capacity, needed substantial time to turn a design into a completed warship. Launching the hull was only one stage; machinery and armament had to be installed, systems tested, crews trained, and faults corrected before a vessel was ready for service.
Oskar was asking them to undertake several unfamiliar developments at once. If the design succeeded, it might establish a new direction for the fleet. If it failed, the result would be an expensive reminder that confidence and technical judgment were not the same thing.
They needed the Naval Technical Committee to examine it.
That would not be an easy conversation.
The men on the committee had devoted their careers to designing ships, guns, and machinery. Some had been doing so since before Oskar was born. They were unlikely to welcome the suggestion that their work had become outdated, particularly when the suggestion came from a prince still capable of confusing man and woman in ordinary conversation.
Nevertheless, the matter would not wait.
An emergency evaluation would convene at two o'clock on Christmas afternoon. Oskar would be required to present his proposal and defend it before men whose objections could not be answered with a promise to buy them soap.
The prospect was precisely the sort of trouble he had hoped success might allow him to avoid.
Somewhere between sleep and waking, his assessment emerged in a weary murmur.
"Committee meeting… old fogies… big trouble, my man…"
By the following afternoon, that trouble had acquired an address.
The meeting room at Naval Technical Committee headquarters smelled of ink, cigar smoke, and wounded pride. Every seat around the long table was occupied, and several of its occupants appeared to regard the interruption of Christmas Day as a personal affront.
At the head sat Count von Warren, the committee's chairman, an elderly aristocrat with steel-wire eyebrows and an expression that suggested new ideas ought to be kept outside until properly inspected.
Beside him, Sir Dietrich, Director-General of Naval Shipbuilding, sat with his mustache bristling above tightly compressed lips. Commodore Gussard, the naval weapons specialist, was thin and upright enough to resemble a bayonet. Chief Engineer Bruckner presented a rounder figure, although his permanent scowl made him no more approachable.
Farther along the table sat Erich Dawson, one of the Navy's senior battleship designers, sharp-eyed and visibly skeptical. Admiral Müller, Chief Cabinet Officer of the Navy, consulted his pocket watch with the weary patience of a man who expected the discussion to become difficult long before anything useful was accomplished.
The complaints had begun before the formal proceedings.
"Why are we spending Christmas Day examining a child's drawing?" Dietrich demanded, striking the table with his palm. "Since when has naval engineering become a pastime for schoolboys? If a teenager is now to design our battleships, what purpose do the rest of us serve?"
Bruckner grunted in agreement.
"Prince Oskar should be attending the Naval Academy, not avoiding his lessons and playing draftsman. I understand that he attempted every possible means of escaping his education. Are we seriously expected to believe that he has somehow acquired the knowledge to design a capital ship?"
"He may possess a talent for lotteries," Dawson observed, "but success in gambling does not qualify a man to arrange a battleship's armor and machinery. The future of the Navy cannot depend upon a prince who reportedly struggles to construct a coherent German sentence."
Dietrich leaned back and folded his arms.
"What will he offer next? Torpedoes? Submarines? A hull made of gingerbread?"
Count von Warren cleared his throat.
"Gentlemen, the Kaiser and Admiral Tirpitz have requested a professional evaluation. That is what we shall provide."
His voice remained calm, but the edge beneath it quieted the nearest conversations.
"If the proposal is unsound, we will identify its faults. If it possesses merit, we will acknowledge that as well. Our pride does not relieve us of our duty."
The room subsided into reluctant silence.
Müller returned his watch to his pocket.
"The proceedings begin in five minutes. I suggest we reserve our conclusions until we have examined the drawings." His gaze moved toward Dietrich. "And I remind you that speculation about members of the Imperial Family is best conducted with considerable discretion."
Dietrich muttered something about drunken princelings but offered no further objection.
A few minutes later, footsteps sounded in the marble corridor outside. The committee members turned toward the double doors, preparing to receive a nervous boy with a title, a collection of ambitious sketches, and very little understanding of the work he was proposing.
The first man through the doorway was Crown Prince Wilhelm.
His expression was cold, and he made little attempt to conceal his hostility. His presence also reminded everyone that this was not an ordinary technical discussion. Whatever happened in the room would find its way back to the Emperor.
Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz followed, his beard immaculate and his gaze moving across the assembled specialists. Beside him came Prince Heinrich, Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet, composed and stern.
Chairs shifted as the engineers straightened. These were men whose opinions could determine the fate of entire construction programs.
Then Oskar entered, and several of the committee members looked at him again.
He was taller than Tirpitz and broader through the shoulders than Heinrich, his dark Prussian uniform fitted across a frame more suggestive of a woodcutter than a sheltered prince. His hair was neatly combed, his jaw clean-shaven, and there was nothing in his appearance to support the more unpleasant stories about his hygiene.
He carried a long blueprint tube beneath one arm and walked toward the presentation table without hesitation.
The committee's skepticism did not disappear, but some of its easy contempt faltered. They had expected someone fragile, flustered, or visibly foolish. The young man before them looked imposing and controlled.
None of them knew what was written in the small leather-bound notebook he held in his other hand.
Tanya's handwriting filled much of it: carefully arranged German sentences, technical vocabulary spelled out phonetically, and reminders inserted wherever she thought he might need them.
Breathe. Speak slowly. No "my man." Do not call the Naval Academy garbage again.
Oskar repeated the opening lines of his presentation to himself as he crossed the room.
Calm. Slowly. Read if you need to.
His eyes were slightly puffy from a night of broken sleep, and exhaustion lay beneath the composure he had worked so hard to assemble. Yet even that seemed to make him appear more serious, as though the proposal had cost him enough effort to deserve a hearing.
There was no Viktoria Luise beside him to keep him steady and no Karl waiting to rescue a sentence before it collapsed. He had Tanya's notebook and his drawings. Everything else would have to come from him.
He reached the table, set down the tube, and carefully withdrew the blueprint. The paper whispered across the polished wood as he unrolled it.
For a moment, the room remained silent.
Prince Heinrich raised an eyebrow. Tirpitz allowed himself the faintest approving expression, while the Crown Prince watched with an unease that sharpened his already severe features.
Oskar took a slow breath and opened the notebook, resting a finger beneath the first line Tanya had helped him prepare.
"Gentlemen, thank you for coming," he began. "I am Prince Oskar von Hohenzollern. Today, I will present a new class of battleship—one designed not merely to anticipate the future, but to shape it."
The words emerged clearly, without a stutter or a single misplaced "my man."
Several men exchanged brief glances. This was not quite the presentation they had expected.
Oskar raised his eyes from the page and looked along the table.
Time to impress these old men, he thought, or destroy them with competence.