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I hardly considered myself an expert on naval construction. I had only insisted that the Navy's chosen designs be run past me for final approval because I was a little worried that some mad scientist in the design department would come up with a massive albatross of a blueprint. Building a fleet was so expensive that one bad ship design could trouble the whole country's budget for years.

I hadn't intended to make any comments on ship construction, other than vetoing anything that looked too crazy. I just wasn't qualified. On the other hand, I was something of an expert on the subject of attacking ships from the air.

I looked from the blueprint on the table, up to Admiral Beyer, then back down at the blueprint. Visha and General Lergen sat by my side at the conference table. Finally, I gave in and voiced the question that had been bothering me since the Admiral started explaining the design for the new destroyer.

"Could it carry more guns?"

It was his turn to look at the blueprint for a moment. "Chancellor, there does need to be space on board for the men who sail the ship."

That was a fair point. Honestly, with ten 37 millimeter guns and sixteen 20 millimeter guns, the planned destroyer would already be carrying far more anti-aircraft firepower than, for example, the Empire's battleships. They wouldn't be a target that I would approach lightly, even with an experienced mage company at my back.

Even so, it could be a little bit better. A target to avoid, not just a target to be careful with.

"The main guns," I said, tapping the section of the blueprint depicting the pair of five inch guns mounted in the forward turret, "could they be mounted so as to be capable of anti-air fire?"

"Perhaps," the admiral replied, "although there are usually trade offs for such changes. I'm not sure it would be worth it."

The other option to improve aerial defenses would be to station mages on the ship. The problem with that was twofold. First, aerial mages and anti-aircraft guns were difficult to coordinate. Since charging into the fray was liable to get you shot by your own side, mages positioned on defense would have to wait to attack until after the enemy had already overcome the anti-aircraft fire. Second, aerial mages were just too useful for too many things. If spending a little extra money in ship building freed up marine mages for other uses, I thought it was worth the effort.

I looked over at Visha to get her opinion.

"I think I wouldn't like to assault the ship as it's designed," Visha said. "But if I wanted to fend off a company led by the Chancellor, I'd want the big gun too."

"I'll see what I can do," the admiral said, taking a few notes.

General Lergen didn't have anything to say other than praise for the designers. Really, they had done a good job. The ship as designed was a sort of jumbo destroyer, reasonably nimble and quick while weighing in around 3,000 long tons. It was well suited as a platform for whatever ship-to-ship weapons the research and development team developed. The ship wouldn't be anything truly special unless R&D really outdid themselves, but Germania didn't need a special navy.

With that out of the way, the next ship on the agenda was the proposed aircraft carrier. There, I didn't have anything to add. The plan was to build a scaled up version of the Akitsukushiman aircraft carrier that our team had been allowed to examine, incorporating a few changes to address problems that the Akitsukushiman sailors had shared during unguarded conversations. To hear Admiral Breyer tell it, the design department was chomping at the bit to try out some wild ideas, but he had shut them down in favor of getting the country a functioning aircraft carrier as soon as possible, if only to ensure that the fleet had a flagship.

Once the first carrier was done, though, I could expect to see some ambitious proposals for carrier number two. I honestly didn't mind too much. A navy consumed with pie-in-the-sky dreaming was a navy the Allied Kingdom would find less threatening. And, who knows, they might come up with a useful idea or two.

"That brings us to the new submarine," Admiral Breyer said, then paused. "There are two designs under consideration."

"Oh?" I asked. I was a little surprised. I had expected to be presented with simple yes and no decisions, for the most part.

"One design is an incremental improvement on the diesel electric models developed by the Empire. It should make 18 knots surfaced and 8 knots submerged, with a corresponding improvement in range and running time when submerged compared to previous models," he said, indicating one of the blueprints, before pushing the other forward. "The other design uses a new propulsion system and should be capable of traveling at over 20 knots when submerged."

A two and a half times increase in speed was more than a new propulsion system, it was a miracle. I tried to think back to anything I knew about modern submarines. Didn't most of them run on nuclear power? I was going to be very upset if the Empire had a whole nuclear program that nobody bothered to tell me about.

"A new propulsion system?" I asked.

"By using a high concentration solution of hydrogen peroxide," he said, "vigorous combustion can take place without using up the ship's oxygen."

Well, at least it wasn't nuclear. Although, the more I thought about it, the less comfortable I was with the idea of vigorous combustion that didn't require oxygen. Wasn't that another way of saying you couldn't even smother out that kind of fire? I thought that kind of thing happened with rocket fuel, not a submarine's engine.

"That sounds dangerous," Visha said, echoing my thoughts.

"As long as the fuel is handled properly, it should be perfectly safe," the admiral replied.

He sounded surprisingly invested in the idea of a rocket-powered submarine. Well, why not? I wouldn't have to ride in the thing. From a larger perspective, it was safer for the navy to be messing around with a single dangerous prototype than to be in possession of a submarine fleet that other countries might find threatening.

"We aren't building many submarines, so we might as well make them fast," I said. "Although that kind of propulsion system seems better suited to a torpedo, to be honest."

"We've asked the inventor to contribute to our torpedo development initiative. He should be able to work on both projects at the same time," Admiral Beyer said. "Chancellor... are you sure we shouldn't also build out more of the ordinary submarines? The Allied Kingdom is dependent on merchant shipping. The only way we can threaten them is with a substantial submarine fleet."

"To put a scare into the Allied Kingdom would require more submarines than our treaty allows," I said. "Really, though, the treaty is beside the point. So is their fleet."

I needed to nip this sort of thinking in the bud. While the Empire had been qualified to call itself the Allied Kingdom's opponent, the new Germania was far from ready for a war with them, no matter how we allocated our naval budget.

"The fundamental problem is that the Allied Kingdom's economy is more powerful than ours. They are larger overall, and richer on a per person basis. Given the time to employ that economic, industrial strength, they will win any war they are involved in," I said. "Deploying an all-submarine fleet would delay the result, but it would not allow for victory any more than the Francois could have kept the Empire out of Parisee by guerilla warfare."

The cold hard fact is that the nation that adopts asymmetric warfare strategies has implicitly admitted that it was too weak to match up directly against its opponents. That sort of strategy might convince the opponent to give up if they weren't truly invested in the fight, but in a war for survival it was a sure recipe for defeat.

"Only a nation whose economy is on par with the Allied Kingdom, a nation that can build a mighty surface navy, is truly qualified to go toe to toe with the Allied Kingdom in the water," I said. "Putting your hope in some miracle of asymmetric warfare is just fooling yourself."

We might bluff and bluster a bit in order to keep their diplomats from taking flagrant advantage of us, but the bottom line was that any alternative was better for us than a war against the Allied Kingdom. The only reasonable way forward was for us to pursue peace at all costs.

I couldn't openly encourage such a defeatist attitude, but anybody who rose to the top in the military had to be pretty sharp. Admiral Beyer should be able to read between the lines and understand what I was saying.

ooOoo

The next day's military review felt a little less formal, as now-General Mattheus Weiss was going to be showing off Dr. Schugel's latest invention as well as giving us a status update. Only the presence of General Lergen in the conference room kept it from being a completely relaxing reunion of fellow 203rd veterans.

"How's staff work treating you?" I asked.

"It has been going well so far," Weiss replied. "It's still a little strange to wear a uniform every day and not get shot at."

"I could come to your next training exercise," I volunteered. It would be nice to have an excuse to get out of the office.

"I wouldn't want to impose," Weiss said, clearing his throat before shuffling through the stack of paperwork in front of him. "Anyways, the cadets are coming along according to schedule. We'll be starting them on the dual core orbs next week, which should be interesting."

The final organization of the aerial mage corps, not to mention the air force as a whole, was somewhat up in the air. At the very least, the corps would serve as a centralized training facility and equipment procurement center, ensuring that all of the Empire's aerial mages were up to snuff. The issue was what would happen to the aerial mages once they'd been trained.

Generally speaking, aerial mages didn't act on their own. They instead worked together with other branches of the service. For example, marine mages performed their duties of reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare in partnership with the navy, while the 203rd had frequently worked together with the army in holding the line on the Rhine front. In complicated operations like the assault on Osfjord, we had worked together with the navy, army, and friendly aircraft all at once.

I suspected that the military would eventually settle on assigning marine mages to the navy permanently, as they could be expected to work together with the same ship for extended deployments. Cooperation with the army would be more ad hoc, logically handled by keeping aerial mages as a separate organization doling out support missions on request. I didn't want to simply dictate the solution, though. For one thing, the professionals who made a career out of organizing the military bureaucracy might have a better idea than me of how to go about it. It wasn't like I could draw on any future knowledge of military deployment of magic. Also, whatever the final organization turned out to be, the military would more readily accept it if it were the result of normal bureaucratic infighting rather than a political dictate.

Of course, I would have Weiss's back if the other branches of the military got too rough with him. He hadn't asked me for any help, though, which was in line with my expectations. After all, if he came to rely too much on that kind of support then he could find himself in real trouble if I were voted out of office.

The real fight would be in the future, anyways. Right now, Weiss's only real fighting power were the 203rd veterans who would naturally prefer to report to him. They were working to bring along the first aerial mage cadet class of the Republic of Germania, one hundred volunteers strong. The flight training was a one year program, to be followed by one year of officer training for the cadets who chose that path.

Ultimately, I was hoping to have a standing mage force of three or four hundred people. A far cry from the legions of mages that the Empire had maintained, but still an ambitious goal considering our reduced population and the fact that I had ruled out conscription for the time being. I had also raised the minimum age of combat mages to match the rest of our armed forces. Really, allowing underage mages to serve was a move of desperation. It might provide a temporary boost to our numbers, but we would just be robbing from future recruiting classes.

For the moment, we had more volunteers than we could handle. The one hundred recruits in training were just about as many as we could manage at once. Time would tell if that enthusiasm would last past the initial flush of excitement over the country rebuilding its aerial mage corps.

"Are there enough dual core orbs to go around?" Visha asked.

"The cadets don't each need their own orb for training. By the time they graduate, we should have one for each of them," Weiss said. "We've been able to increase production a decent amount now that we can be open about hiring and such."

He glanced at General Lergen as he spoke. Lergen, for his part, just nodded in understanding. He had never been the type of superior who meddled with what his underlings were doing. I had always appreciated that about him. I was willing to bet that he was as happy as I was to see that Weiss had a handle on the logistical side of things.

"These orbs would be Type-97s, right?" I asked.

"Yes. Dr. Schugel is still working on the successor," Weiss said, before reaching into his pocket and laying a small device on the table. "Although he did make this."

I had come to expect a certain level of spit and polish on a finished computation orb. The device Weiss had produced didn't quite measure up. It was rectangular, made of dull steel, and roughly the size and shape of a soldier's dog tag, albeit a dog tag the thickness of my little finger.

"What is it?" I asked.

"A new computation orb. We're calling it the Elenium Model H-7," Weiss said. "It's more of a proof of concept than a real weapon system."

"That sounds like Dr. Schugel, all right," I said. "So, what does it do?"

"Automatic stealth casting," he said. "It grabs any waste mana and puts it toward body reinforcement instead of allowing the energy to dissipate."

"Impressive," I said. "What's the catch?"

Automating stealth casting would greatly expand our ability to take advantage of the technique. But I couldn't forget that this was a prototype from Dr. Schugel, a man who didn't believe in safety measures. I'd count myself lucky if the thing didn't explode from overuse.

"The efficiency is bad," Weiss said. "Maybe half the effect that a skilled user of the Junghans can get for the same mana investment. The actual body reinforcement with the waste mana is also minimal."

That wasn't too bad. An A or B-ranked mage using the low power magic that the Junghans could handle wouldn't really notice an extra fifty or even hundred percent mana cost for spells of that level.

"What about B-rank spells?" Visha asked. "Will it let you fly?"

She sounded excited at the idea of stealthy flight. I couldn't blame her.

"The efficiency loss scales up rapidly with the complexity of the spell," Weiss said. "It might be possible to fly with this thing, but you'd burn it out pretty quick."

"Still, it's quite the achievement," I said.

From a technical perspective, it was obviously a major advance. I couldn't begin to imagine how he had done it. It was also a major practical leap in utility. Using stealth casting on the battlefield could be quite useful, but battlefield conditions weren't really conducive to calm and technically perfect spell formation.

Weiss nodded. "Dr. Schugel intends to incorporate the ability as an option in his next-generation orb."

Dr. Schugel had promised a lot of features for his next magnum opus. The project had started as a simple upgrade of the Type 97. Once he got his hands on the captured Francois orbs his aspirations for the new orb had shot through the roof. Now he was adding automated stealth casting as well. I could only hope that he wasn't biting off more than he could chew.

"How's that going?" I asked.

"It's been two weeks since the last explosion," Weiss said. "Dr. Schugel says you can't rush genius."

That did sound like Dr. Schugel. On the other hand, just because the next dual core orb was a long way away didn't mean we should just ignore the possibility this new development presented.

I reached across the table and picked up the H-7. It really didn't look like a computation orb. Turning it over in my hand, it didn't feel like a computation orb either.

"Do you have time for a little side project?"

"Ah, well-" Weiss said, before I interrupted him.

"Good, good," I said. I knew from long experience supervising Mattheus Weiss that anything but an immediate and unequivocal no meant that I could browbeat him into taking on a task. "I want you to recruit a small cadre of C-ranked mages and train them up on this thing."

I held the H-7 up on display. He looked at it for a long moment, lost in thought.

"Basic training would only take a few weeks," he said. "but they wouldn't be close to real combat mages. Even just keeping up a minor reflex enhancement... you'd be talking about minutes per day."

"Not combat mages... but I bet General Lergen could find something to do with soldiers who can use little bursts of magic," I said. "Whether as infantry, pilots, or gunners."

Aerial mages were able to use magical enhancement to cause absurd levels of damage relative to their numbers. But, really, the ability to fly and use constant physical and mental enhancements and keep up shields, taken together it was a little excessive. Giving an average soldier a few seconds of enhanced reflexes on command should be useful on its own.

"It would open up some interesting possibilities," General Lergen said.

"I see," Weiss said. "Well, there's enough C-ranked mages running around that I should be able to find some, even limiting it to military age volunteers."

That was good to hear. While things had been going well for the last little while, our country was still in a precarious position. We couldn't afford to ignore any opportunity to procure a new ace in the hole.

ooOoo

There was one other aerial mage project that was not operating under Weiss's supervision. Koenig had been given command of a group of twelve men and sent out to cause problems for the Russite forces in the far east. He had succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. Just the intelligence he gathered alone made the trip worthwhile.

The most surprising piece of information was that the Russite army operated entirely without aerial mages. I had read Secretary Jughashvili's speeches denouncing combat mages as tools of international capitalist repression, of course, but I also knew that communists habitually lied about their internal governance. I didn't expect that they would follow through and weaken their own military so badly. Of course, the real reason was likely the party's fear of decentralized power rather than ideological purity, but it was still a surprise.

Since they couldn't meet mage with mage, the Russite doctrine focused on early detection and massed firepower. Against Koenig and his highly mobile, stealth-capable company of mages, they might as well have been trying to swat a fly with a sledgehammer. While Koenig couldn't face down their main force directly, he was able to wreak havoc around the edges.

The second bit of intelligence was less heartening. The Russy Federation was moving out in force for this war. The sheer volume of men, planes, tanks, and artillery that they were shipping east was almost certain to push the Akitsukushiman army out of the territory they had gained in the Russo-Akitsukushiman war. If they wanted, they could likely drive Akitsukushima off the mainland entirely.

Koenig did what he could around the edges. While he didn't have enough men to materially affect the course of the war, the Akitsukushimans seemed pleased with his efforts. I had also agreed to give them one of our two remaining captured Francois computation orbs. Dr. Schugel had already taken it apart and documented everything of value before putting it back together, so it didn't cost us much to hand it over. In return, we were allowed a much closer look at carrier operations than we otherwise would have gotten, as well as given a demonstration of their new air-dropped torpedoes.

The Akitsukushimans also worked with us to make sure that when our naval analysts came back to Germania, they brought a present along with them: a nearly intact Russite tank, one of several disabled by Keunig and his team on the battlefield. Analyzing the tank pushed back our own rearmament a bit. Naturally, our new anti-tank guns had to be able to take out the mainstay of the Russite forces, and our new tank at least had to be capable of being fitted out with a gun that could threaten their opposing number.

Such merely technical problems couldn't keep the Germanian military down for long, though. Soon enough we were producing all the accouterments of a modern military. Tanks, planes, and guns big and small were all rolling off the assembly lines. The demonstration of the final model of the assault rifle, in particular, was endearingly thorough.

All of this production was taking place at a measured pace. We were only aiming to match the combat power of the Francois army, after all. For their part, the Francois army was frozen at the size it had been during the Duisbusch incident. This wasn't the result of any particular military policy but more the result of a lack of military policy. Francois politics were in even more turmoil than the early days of the Germanian Republic. They were unanimous in their dislike of Germania and their hatred of me, of course, but there were severe differences in opinion as to what to do about it. As a result, they had stopped the previously ongoing reduction in size of their army, but had not yet committed to any kind of rearmament program.

All in all, things were going well. This level of military spending was reasonably sustainable. Also, spending on domestic military production, unlike reparations payments, at least kept the money in the local economy. Not that any nation could sustain itself solely on the back of the military-industrial complex, but it was some comfort to think that our military spending wasn't just a dead weight on the economy.

I was feeling pretty content about the state of the country. My largest day to day worry was whether I had done enough to break apart my political coalition so as to ensure my own loss and a reasonable successor, but I knew that I should pace myself on that front. With over two years to go until the next elections, I needed to keep my powder dry. While I wasn't yet enjoying the quiet retirement that I wanted, everything seemed to be moving in the right direction.

Then Mr. Klohse, during a routine briefing on the workings of the Ministry of Finance, mentioned that the stock market in the Unified States had lost twenty-five percent of its value in less than a week.

The Great Depression! Unfortunately, Being X had not been kind enough to send along my college textbooks when he forcibly reincarnated me, so I couldn't recite chapter and verse of what was about to happen. But I remembered the basics. A stock market crash, followed by bank closures, deflation, tariffs, and grinding poverty. Most importantly, this was my free ticket out of the Chancellor's office!

It was a basic principle of democracy that the party in power got the blame when something went wrong. Anybody in office when the Great Depression hit would be turned out by the voters at the first opportunity. I did find it a little annoying that all of my work to break up my party had been rendered superfluous. Still, as long as I got to my destination in the end, I didn't mind taking a detour along the way.

Although, if the impact on the Germanian economy were too much, that could be a problem. I knew better than anybody what sort of craziness people would vote for in times of economic trouble.

I seemed to be the only person in the government who was alarmed about the situation. The consensus among my cabinet seemed to be that the Americans had, at worst, gone from being obscenely rich to being remarkably rich. While some American newspapers had taken to calling June 21, 1938 a "Black Tuesday," the American press was known for its sensationalism.

Thanks to the benefit of hindsight, I was less sanguine. Especially after I reached out to our ambassador and discovered that the lower house of Congress had already passed a far ranging tariff increase earlier in the year. It seemed I might not have as much time as I had thought if I wanted to get out in front of the coming tariffs.

Fortunately, as Chancellor I could meet with foreign diplomats without the approval of my cabinet. They might get restless if they felt like I was being too high handed with my foreign policy, but for me that was all to the good. Even so, it took a week before I could arrange a convenient time to meet with Mr. Johnson, the American ambassador.

I welcomed him into my conference room with a glass of water and a smile. As usual, we didn't waste much time on pleasantries.

"You have my sympathy for the recent stock market collapse," I said.

"Markets go up, markets go down," he said, shrugging. "It'll be back to normal soon enough."

It seemed my cabinet was not alone in its blase assessment of the situation.

"Perhaps," I said. "Just in case, though, I think it prudent to discuss our trade relationship."

"What about it?"

"I imagine you'd be interested in selling more wheat to Germania," I said.

The Unified States grew an enormous amount of wheat. Too much for their domestic market, so they were always interested in new opportunities for foreign sales. Germania had a tariff in place in order to protect domestic farmers, but even so the Unified States still exported a decent amount of wheat to us. After all, while Germania was technically capable of producing enough food to feed itself, the actual process of doing so involved eating a lot of K-brot. Much better to pay for foreign food, if possible.

"You're talking about lowering the tariff," Mr. Johnson said. "Can you do that on your own?"

"The law would have to be changed," I said, "but it's hardly worth the effort if you aren't interested."

Changing the law would also make for a handy wedge issue. The wealthy conservative coalition was a roughly even split between old money aristocrats, who dearly loved the wheat tariff, and wealthy industrialists, who hardly cared about it.

"Sure, I'm interested," he said. "But what would you want in return?"

"We export a fair amount of manufactured goods to the Unified States," I said. "I'd like to see that continue."

"The law doesn't give the President a lot of leeway to knock down tariffs," Mr. Johnson said.

"That's fine. While I'd appreciate anything he could do to help," I said, "my primary goal is to preserve the status quo. Preserve the current rates and the current freely tradeable items."

The tariff regime the Unified States had in place was relatively expensive but also relatively narrow. It also mostly applied to raw materials and industrial chemicals, as opposed to finished consumer products. Automobiles, for example, weren't subject to a tariff at all.

Germania, of course, was a world leader in the production of fancy, overpriced consumer products. The Unified States was a world leader in the production of rich people who wanted to buy fancy gewgaws. I hoped to get a treaty in place to preserve that natural relationship before the new tariffs came into force.

"You're worried about the tariff bill that just passed the House?" Johnson asked. "You know that won't take effect unless the Senate passes it, which they won't, and the President signs it, which he won't."

"I know what it's like when a country goes through hard times. People do things they never thought they would do," I said. "All I want to do is to secure a safe haven before the winds of change start to blow."

I did have an ulterior motive, of course. Even setting aside my hindsight-driven hunch that tariffs were coming, I was expecting to be driven from office soon. I had no guarantee that I would be replaced by somebody as clear eyed and rational as myself, so it was entirely possible that my successor wouldn't realize the futility of war with the Allied Kingdom or Unified States. Having a trade treaty in place with the Unified States, however tenuous its value, would help cement the friendly relations between our countries. It was no guarantee of peace, of course, but every little bit helped.

Besides, even if my future knowledge proved to be misleading, the worst case scenario was a flood of cheap American grain heading to Germania. Not the worst thing in the world. Honestly, if our farmers couldn't out compete Americans who had to pay their labor in dollars and then ship their food across an ocean, they only had themselves to blame.

Mr. Johnson gave me a long look. "I can't agree to something like this on my own. But I can run it up the chain. I expect they'll be interested."

As it turned out, they were interested. As well they should be, as they were very nearly getting something for nothing. Reaching a final agreement still took a while.

Getting the legislation authorizing me to negotiate away the tariffs through the Diet was a bit of an adventure. We had some defecting voters among the old money representatives. It wasn't enough to drop us below a majority, and it was more than made up for by the miscellaneous votes we picked up from the minority parties, but it was an encouraging sign of my coalition fraying around the edges.

With that done, it was up to me to hammer out a deal. There was the usual hemming and hawing, but we reached an agreement on the broad strokes a couple months after I had made the initial proposal, largely along the lines of my initial proposal. The only thing left to do was for me to make an official visit to the Unified States to hash out the last few details and hold a public signing ceremony.

With any luck, it should double as my farewell tour.