Christopher Nuttall - Ragnarok

Volker looked up at him, sharply. “Are they mad?”

“Italy and France both have good reason to want to keep Holliston out of power,” Voss pointed out, dryly. “Fighting beside us would be better than fighting Holliston on his own, later.”

“Hah,” Volker said.

In truth, he wasn’t sure how to react. The French could fight well, he’d been told, but they’d lost so badly in 1940 that they’d never recovered. Their infantry had a great deal of experience fighting in North Africa, yet could they stand up to combat in Germany East without panzers and jet fighters of their own? And the Italians were laughable. They’d been jokes back in 1940 and they were still jokes. Their empire would have fallen apart long ago if they hadn’t been backed up by the Reich .

And they weren’t interested in crushing the life out of their territories , he acknowledged, ruefully. They might have lost their empires if their subjects hadn’t realised that they were better masters than us .

“If you can convince them to send troops, do so,” he said, finally. “But see what they want in exchange.”

He shook his head in frustration. The Reich simply didn’t have many diplomats. A year ago, the subject nations had known to obey — or else — while the North Atlantic Alliance had known better than to lower its guard, no matter what honeyed words came out of Berlin and the Reich . Now… he didn’t know quite how to talk to the French. Barking orders was no longer possible, but he didn’t want to let the French walk all over him either…

“They’ll want political freedom,” Voss predicted. “And the return of Alsace-Lorraine.”

Volker nodded. The French had made that demand before, back when Gudrun had tried to come to terms with them. And it was politically impossible. There wasn’t a single ethnic Frenchman living in Alsace-Lorraine, not now. They’d all been driven out in 1950, when the Reich had been reshaping Western Europe after the war. The French hadn’t even had the worst of it. Countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands had completely disappeared from the map. The lucky ones — the ones who couldn’t pass for German — had been shipped into French North Africa.

And the unlucky ones were exterminated , he thought, grimly.

He’d been in the SS. He knew how Untermenschen were treated. And yet it had been a shock to realise just how many Untermenschen had been slaughtered. The dispassionate remarks in school textbooks utterly failed to convey the sheer horror of what the Reich had done. Volker wouldn’t shed any tears for Untermenschen who had opposed the Reich , but how many of the Reich’s victims had been enemies? How many of the dead had been Germans who had been wounded in combat or born with defects?

“See what they say,” he said. “But we can’t give them Alsace-Lorraine.”

It was going to be a nightmare, he predicted. The Reich knew how to handle subject states — they supported the Reich and did as they were told, in exchange for what scraps the Reich offered them — but independent states? What would happen when the French started to build up their armoured divisions? Or produce their own jet fighters? Or even develop their own nuclear weapons? Would they want revenge for forty years of oppression?

“They may be satisfied merely to know that the SS beast has been slain,” Voss offered. He didn’t sound confident. “We will see.”

Volker sighed. “Begin drawing up the plans to take the offensive as soon as possible,” he said. “Even if we don’t have the French and Italians in support, we need to move anyway.”

Which will weaken us if they decide to take matters into their own hands , he thought. The French had a long way to go before they could stand up to the Reich , let alone match it, but what would happen if the German population was thoroughly sick of war? And they will know it .

He sighed as Voss saluted and left the room. If he’d known what Gudrun would unleash, when she’d started asking pointed questions, he would have gone to her father and… and done what? Konrad would still have been left in the hospital, trapped between life and death; his parents, his sister, his girlfriend utterly unaware of his condition. It wasn’t fair to blame Gudrun, he told himself sharply, for everything that had happened. The underlying weakness of the Reich , the steady collapse of the entire structure, had been underway long before she’d been born, let alone reached adulthood.

Her father might have told her not to meddle in politics, he thought. She might have been pulled out of the university and married to someone he chose, but would it have made a difference? Or would we have fallen harder because no one was prepared to stand up and point out that the Kaiser had no clothes?

He looked down at the map for a long moment. He’d approved of Gudrun as a possible wife for his son, back when the world had made sense. And then his feelings had grown mixed when she’d made it impossible for him to hide from the truth any longer. Part of him had been angry at her, even though he’d known it wasn’t her fault. And now she was a prisoner, taken by the SS. Volker knew, all too well, just what the SS would do with her, after everything she’d done to them. He’d hoped Gudrun — or her body — would turn up somewhere in Berlin, but there had been no sign of her.

She’s been taken to Germanica , he thought. And all we can do is hope they give her a quick death .

There was a tap on his door. He looked up to see his aide, looking grim.

“ Herr Chancellor ,” he said. “Minister Krueger is here to see you.”

“Show him in,” Volker ordered. “And then bring us both coffee.”

He schooled his face into impassivity as Hans Krueger was shown into his office. Krueger was a smart man, but he wasn’t a likeable man. He’d been on the former Reich Council and had switched sides, a little too quickly, after the uprising. Volker had no reason to distrust him — Holliston wouldn’t give Krueger a quick death if Krueger were captured — but there was something about Krueger that annoyed him. The man was more concerned with his figures than the real world.

And those figures can change the real world , Volker thought. There had been something oddly effeminate about the accountants in the factory, the men who could decide — seemingly on a whim — who was worth keeping and who could be fired. And Krueger had something of the same air about him. He was not a manly man. He cannot be trusted completely .

“ Herr Chancellor ,” Krueger said. He was carrying a leather folder under one arm. “Do you have a moment?”

“Too many of them,” Volker admitted. He wanted to be out there, doing something . “Is this important?”

“I’ve been running the latest set of figures,” Krueger said, quietly. He took a seat and opened the folder. “We’re looking at a total economic crash within three months.”

Volker sucked in his breath. “Are you sure?”

“That’s the best-case,” Krueger said. “Frankly, we’ve been pushing everything too hard over the last decade. We simply didn’t give our industrial base any chance to breathe.”

“I didn’t make those decisions,” Volker snarled.

“I know,” Krueger said. “But we still have to deal with the consequences.”

He looked grim. “It gets worse,” he added. “Food supplies are starting to run out.”

“Then grow more,” Volker said.