The Baltic War(35)

Catching sight of Colonel Ekstrom's slight wince, the emperor barked a laugh. "You too! Another skeptic!"



He went back to his mustache-tugging. "Well. I should have said, the three northern provinces. None of them have any great allegiance to the United Provinces, being mostly Catholics. I agree it would be unwise to try to push further, into the Dutch heartland."



Mike took a deep breath. They had now entered very perilous territory. For all that he basically liked and admired Gustav Adolf, he never let himself forget that at bottom the king of Sweden was not that much different from any monarch of the time. He was an imperialist, at heart. For seventeenth-century rulers, grabbing as much land as possible was second nature. The nationalist sentiments that would dominate Europe before too long were still nascent in most places, although you could easily see them emerging if you looked and knew what to look for.



But no monarch did, not even Gustav Adolf. They thought in dynastic terms, not national terms—even those of them who, like Richelieu or Gustav himself, had carefully studied the histories brought back in time through the Ring of Fire. There was simply that deep-seated part of them that didn't quite believe that any ramshackle dynastic territory they built up would surely come to pieces, sooner or later, if it didn't have firm roots in popular sentiment.



Again, however, Mike decided to let it slide. He was pretty sure that Gustav's desire to add three small Dutch provinces to his dynasty wasn't really important to him. Assuming Gustav won the war, Mike intended to keep just enough to allow the USE Navy to dominate the Zuider Zee, if need be. His own motives were mostly as a way of throttling the life out of the slave trade while it was still in its infancy. But he was fairly certain that Gustav would settle for that, over time, simply as a token of his triumph.



The emperor's real territorial ambitions were toward the east. First, once the war with the Ostenders was over, Mike knew that Gustav was determined to punish the electors of Brandenburg and Saxony for their treacherous behavior by expropriating their territories outright. He'd do what he'd already done with Mecklenburg and Pomerania, simply add them to the USE as provinces.



So much, Mike had no quarrel with. In fact, he was for it. Saxony—even Brandenburg in this day and age, which hadn't yet undergone its metamorphosis into Prussia—were both German lands. But the problem was that any war with Saxony and Brandenburg was almost sure to bring in the Poles, and Gustav would then use that as a pretext to try to conquer Poland. Or a good chunk of it, at least. From his point of view, why not? Poland and Sweden had been fighting for decades, and it wasn't as if the king of Poland didn't claim that he should rightfully be the king of Sweden. Serve the bastard right.



Except, if that happened, Mike knew full well that the USE would simply be tying an albatross to its neck. Giving itself the same grief with Poland that, in a different universe, the Russians had done—more than once, and it had never worked.



But . . .



Let it slide, just let it slide. That was going to be quite literally a battle royal, when it happened. But it was a problem that wouldn't arise for about a year—and Mike had the situation in the Low Countries on his plate right now.



It was better, for the moment, to deal with Gustav's other objection. Mike was pretty sure he knew what it was going to be—and, if so, he thought he could persuade the emperor to follow his advice.



"And your second reservation, Your Majesty?"



Gustav dropped his hand from the mustache and spread both arms wide. "Oh, come, Michael! Surely it's obvious. The inevitable result of your plotting and scheming—your wife's, too! even worse than yours!—will be a powerful realm in the Low Countries. More than that. A united Netherlands is bound to sweep into it any number of the surrounding small principalities. What you propose is nothing less than the recreation of old Burgundy. And is that—"



Gustav went right back to his mustache-pulling. A bit enviously, Mike reflected that there were some advantages to being a king. To hell with advisers nattering you about perfectly comfortable habits. L'État, c'est moi—and that includes the damn mustache.



"Is that really in the interests of the United States of Europe?" Gustav concluded. "Or Sweden, for that matter, especially since—I will brook no arguments on this, Michael—you know I have every intention of recreating the union       of Kalmar. Once I've finished pounding that drunken Danish bastard Christian into a pulp."



There was no way Mike was going to stick his thumb into that issue. Not now, anyway. Personally, he had reservations concerning the emperor's plan to forge the first united Scandinavian realm since the Middle Ages. Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn't—but, either way, it was not an issue that directly confronted the USE.