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The Viennese Waltz(66)

By:Paula Goodlett


Leo could hear a buzzing from the sky. He kept a straight face as he rose and moved to the window. Keeping a straight face when he was really just as excited as Marco was second nature. Habsburg training. By natural inclination, Leo’s preference was for leading armies rather than prayers, but it didn’t do to show that to the people surrounding him, any more than it would do to show excitement about the plane.

“But look at it, Your Grace!” Marco was still excited and a bit irrepressible. Leo hid a smile.

The plane had indeed arrived. It was turning, slowly it seemed, making a circle around Vienna before it landed on the hastily-built new airstrip near Race Track City.

“Karl is certainly making an impressive entrance,” Leo murmured. When word came that Prince Karl Eusebius von Liechtenstein would be arriving in one of the Jupiter aircraft, Neil O’Connor had provided the information on its needs. Provided it with much bragging. To hear Herr O’Connor tell it, the Air Cushion Landing Gear had been wholly his innovation and much of the rest of the plane as well. It didn’t need an airfield prepared, just a flat piece of ground or, even better, water. Then a place to park. Markers had been placed on the south bank of the Danube where it was to pull out of the river.

Then, unfortunately, the news had arrived that one of its sister ships had crashed in Italy. It seemed the peculiar landing gear had failed. Apparently there had been many maintenance problems with the landing gear even before the crash. As a result, the Royal Dutch Airlines, which owned the Jupiters, had refitted all of them—more precisely, the only one still in service at the moment—with more conventional landing gear.

So, a landing strip needed to be constructed. Happily, the land around Race Track City had many flat areas and there were now a number of Fresno scrapers on the site. Happier still, from the instructions sent ahead by the airline company, the Jupiter’s new landing gear, like the plane itself, was quite sturdy. The strip didn’t need to be macadamized, although that would certainly be an advantage in the future. They just needed to make sure the strip was smooth, level, and cleared of any rocks or stones.

Neil O’Connor offered his advice on that subject as well. Maintaining all the while that he’d never trusted that weird ACLG landing gear, nohow.

* * *

“Come, Marco,” Leo said. “We’re the greeting party.” Leo headed to Race Track City.

Landing Strip, near Race Track City

“Back, there. Back, back. You want to get run over!” Neil O’Connor had reached the landing strip ahead of them and was shouting in poorly accented German. With the help of half a company of the city garrison, he seemed to be shooing most of Vienna out of the parking place of the aircraft. The guardsmen were having difficulty keeping the crowd back.

“Move,” Marco shouted. The crowd parted, mostly because of the guards who surrounded Archduke Leopold. As the path appeared, Leo moved forward. “Would you look at that?” another guard whispered when they got to the front.

The Jupiter was sitting at the far end of the landing strip and slowly turning around in the wide area that had been leveled for that purpose. Then, it began moving slowly back to the strip’s beginning where it had first set down and where the crowd was gathered.

“They call that ‘taxi-ing,’” said the same guard. “I don’t know why. Thurn and Taxis has nothing to do with airplanes.”

The approaching airplane looked enough like a monster that the guards had no great difficulty getting the crowd to move back off the landing strip and onto the grounds beyond. Once they’d done so, the aircraft moved the final distance and came to a halt. There was a peculiar noise of some kind and the blurry things on the wings—they were called “propellors,” Leo knew—began to slow down. Eventually they stopped spinning, and Leo could now see that they looked like long and twisted oar-blades.

The door on the side of the airplane opened and Prince Karl stepped out onto the lower wing, followed by a pretty young woman. “Leo, ah, Your Grace!” Karl waved, then bowed, and nearly stumbled as the young woman pulled him aside to clear the door. Leo held back a snort of laughter, and moved forward a bit. Others had exited the plane to stand on the wing, including a young man carrying a ladder, which he attached to the rear of the wing.

“Your Grace,” Karl said, coming down the stepladder. Leo had known Karl Eusebius von Liechtenstein most of his life, but Karl had been away for several years now.

“Prince von Liechtenstein.” Leo nodded, then glanced at the young woman who had followed him down.

Karl took the hint. “Your Grace, may I introduce my fiancée? Assistant Secretary of Economic Forecasting for the Federal Reserve Bank of the USE, Miss Sarah Wendell von Up-time. Sarah, His Grace, Bishop and Archduke Leopold Wilhelm von Hapsburg.” The girl, Sarah, performed a small dip of her knees, not a bow, not a curtsy. Just a dip, of sorts. She was much, much different from the young woman who had come to Austria with the defectors. No tattoos he could see, and not a single facial piercing. That was a relief. Leo had begun to wonder about these up-time women after seeing Suzi Barclay.