The Baltic War(282)

The door closed behind her. Muttering under his breath—very unkind words on the subject of snotty princesses—Eddie followed through.



The moment he got inside, all unkind thoughts about snotty princesses vanished immediately. Anne Cathrine was back to the full-body press business, complete with long and lingering kiss. Eddie forgave her all her sins and any she might accumulate in at least the next five lives.



"Come," she finally said. "Baldur dismissed all the workmen, for a week, but someone might still come in. We must hide."



Taking him by the hand, she led him through what Eddie quickly realized was some sort of peculiar workshop. Not any sort of workshop he'd ever seen before, though, except . . .



About halfway through, he finally realized what it was. Greg Ferrara had set up something like this in Grantville, right after the Ring of Fire. Call it the Early Modern Era's version of a Manhattan Project. Two and two came together soon thereafter, and Eddie knew this was the place where Baldur Norddahl—who still had no business, in a sane world, being a cross between Harald the Bloody-Handed and Herr Professor Doktor Doktor Über-Weaponsgeek—undertook his fiendish experiments in military hardware.



Anne Cathrine was heading toward some sort of very peculiar wooden contraption against the far wall of the workshop. Big contraption, too.



It was the wood that threw Eddie off, until he was almost in front of it. At which point he realized he was looking at a submarine.



A real live, no-kidding, submarine. Not completed, obviously—he could see where the holes for whatever propulsion device would drive it were still empty—but the hull seemed finished.



A wooden submarine? The idea seemed completely outlandish, but . . .



Now that he was reminded, Eddie had read somewhere—a long time ago, long before the Ring of Fire, when he'd still been in his oceanographer phase—that somebody had built a wooden submarine once, way back in the nineteenth century. A Spaniard, if he remembered right, who'd intended the thing to be used for commercial diving operations. Pearls, or maybe coral, he couldn't remember. The submarine had worked, too, although it had eventually been scrapped because the commercial enterprise hadn't worked out.



There was a small opening on the side, low enough that only a step stool was needed to pass through. Anne Cathrine was already doing so, stooping to get in. Once she was inside, her smiling face looked back. "Come in, Eddie! This is where we will hide. No one will think of it."



In for a penny, in for a pound. As he worked his way through the opening, which was a very tight fit—probably something Baldur eventually intended for a ballast mechanism, or possibly a big observation port—Eddie realized with genuine shock that the submarine had been designed with a double hull—exactly the way submarines would wind up being designed, centuries in the future.



"Baldur Norddahl is a freak of nature," he muttered. "A man like that has no business being this smart."



The much bigger shock, though, came after he got inside. He'd gauged the overall size of the submarine at somewhere around forty feet long and ten feet in diameter. With the double-walled design, of course, the interior was much smaller—about twenty-five to thirty feet long, and not much over six feet in diameter in the very center. Eddie could just manage to stand up straight with a bit of clearance, although he'd have to stoop if he moved more than seven or eight feet toward the bow or the stern.



The hull was tapered, too, and even had a streamlined bulb-nose design that was probably a little fatter than it should be but not much. Given that Norddahl had been working from scratch with nothing more than maybe some photos to guide him and having to work with wood instead of metal, the only thing that really registered was how incredibly well designed it was. If Baldur could figure out a workable propulsion system, he'd probably be able to build a truly functional submarine. It was certainly way, way good enough, to move Norddahl to the very top of the shoot-this-mad-genius-now-before-he-goes-any-further list.



But all that Eddie simply half-noted in passing. The real shock came from the interior furnishings, which he could see quite clearly because Anne Cathrine was lighting two lamps inside the submarine.



Whatever propulsive mechanism Baldur might have intended was unknowable, because the interior had been stripped clean—if there had ever been anything to begin with—and replaced with . . .



With . . .



The only thing Eddie could think of was a set from a movie. The King and I, maybe. Or . . .



Anne Cathrine was now lolling back on a pile of very expensive looking cushions and blankets. Lolling, as in lying on one hip and giving him a look that was at least two decades too sultry. Fifteen going on Scheherazade.