The Steam Mole (34 page)

In
Cuttlefish'
s timeline, the Austro-Hungarian Empire won that race and suffered a minor breakup of its territory. The Turks found
the cave-in fraught with uprisings and lost much of their empire to the French and English, or to the rise of independent states.

Germany…The British Empire was determined to see it did not threaten them again. This meant breaking it up into states again and getting rid of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The “agreement” was to say he'd had a mental breakdown, which would allow him to “retire” gracefully. However, his abdication would have made his sons rulers, and the British Empire was having no more of that. So the remaining German states were placed under the regency of Adolf Schaumburg-Lippe. This minor German prince, with his vivacious, very pro-British wife Viktoria (a granddaughter of Queen Victoria) was so adroit at reconciliation and in dealing with the German High Command that a Royalist uprising by Wilhelm II's sons was successfully put down. France, however, seized the moment to invade a small German principality. Thanks to Prince Adolf—and especially to his wife—the British Empire intervened on the side of their historic ally, Germany, in the process mending many fences. The result of this was an arranged marriage between Edward VIII of the United Kingdom (who in our timeline married Wallis Simpson in 1937 and had to abdicate to do so) and the daughter of Prince Adolf and Princess Viktoria (in our timeline their only child was stillborn), Princess Alexandria, in 1916. And thus a new Imperial line was founded, in which the German Empire and British Empire largely became one. Russia still had something of a revolution—but the Mensheviks won. France, having alienated Britain, found itself mired in colonial wars. And the world had no synthetic ammonia, and the British Empire, dominant in coal, saw to it that coal, not these newfangled oil-derived fuels, stayed dominant. The Windsor-Schaumburg-Lippe family controlled vast coalfields—and had the means to slap punitive taxes on oil and control and tax the shipping of it.

Coal ran the Empire.

But coal is a very dirty-burning fuel, and as Europe had neither World War I nor the Spanish flu, it had many people and much
energy use. Emigration, particularly to Africa and Australia, went full-steam ahead. Colonialism and racism flourished. So did the massive infrastructure of a steam-driven world.

By 1935, things began to go wrong environmentally, just as the British Empire began cracking under the strain of too many people and too little food—synthetic ammonia was the basis of much of the fertilizer used in our timeline. The coal-based society was pouring out massive amounts of soot (particulate carbon), causing substantial ice melting in the Arctic, particularly in Russia. And that led to a methane burst (where methane locked in by ice or pressure reaches a point where a lot of it is released) in the tundra. Methane is a short-lived (breaking down in the atmosphere) but very effective (around seventy-two times as effective as carbon dioxide) greenhouse gas.

This caused real environmental catastrophe: massive melting of ice, more out gassing methane, and a warmer world. Over seven years average temperatures rose seven degrees. It proved a disaster for Earth, but the saving of the British Empire.

Governments failed to cope as heat waves ruined agriculture and their coastal cities and plains were flooded. World weather conditions became erratic, causing the collapse of already-overstretched agriculture, widespread starvation, wars, and mass migrations. Elected governments in many countries failed. Government was suspended and martial law imposed in the British Empire, with authority returning to the royal family. Military intervention was largely brutal and self-serving—except that the British Empire, with more military might and infrastructure than any rival, did a generally better job of restoring order and seeing that people at least got some help. More if you were white and British, of course. In India the suffering was terrible. But Commonwealth countries who tried to go it alone—Australia, Canada, South Africa—rapidly became chaotic, soon begging the Crown to intervene and restore direct rule. Which it did, managing to stabilize things over the next few years (as the weather was resettling, though at hotter levels). The
Empire had its finest hour—along with some colossal failures—but these were less than the disaster's impact elsewhere.

Slowly (by about 1942) things began to return to a new form of normal: a normal where London is largely flooded, but not abandoned. Like Venice, her streets have become canals. The British Imperial House was not ready to hand back the power it had been given or taken. The Canadian Dominions, with vast new arable lands and new settlements in Newfoundland and Greenland, was a major engine for the British Empire. The restive factories of India provided goods. In Australia, the western settlements had suffered withering drought and had been abandoned, with forced resettlement to the east coast and Tasmania.

At home, Ireland seethed. And coal, the driver of the Empire, began becoming more difficult to source and more expensive. In the tunnels and tubes under the drowned city, anti-imperialist republicans and Irish rebels, part of the Liberty—the people who would see a return to older values and free elections—eke out a strange existence.

They are served by a fleet of Stirling-engined submarines. After the 1914–1915 War, submarines were outlawed by the Treaty of Lausanne, as the Kaiserliche Marine submarines had inflicted considerable damage on the Royal Navy and were thus hated. But the revolutionaries, the Underpeople, operate a small, clandestine fleet, smuggling illegal goods like chocolate, teak, and quinine.

The year is 1953.

This is when
Cuttlefish
is set. The
Cuttlefish
—carrying Mary Calland (Clara Immerwhar's daughter) and her daughter Clara—have escaped the Mensheviks and British Imperial forces and brought the secret of ammonia synthesis to the rebel Republic of Westralia—a country built on the land abandoned by the British Empire as uninhabitable by those who refused to leave and those who flee the Empire.

Steam Mole
takes place in the Southern Hemisphere during the spring of 1953.

Dave Freer is a former marine biologist (an ichthyologist) who now lives on an island off the coast of Australia. Besides writing books he is a diver and a rock climber and perpetually has his nose in a book when he's not doing those three things. With his wife, Barbara, two dogs, three cats, three chickens, and other transient rescued wildlife, they live a sort of “chaotic self-sufficiency and adventures” life, sort of down the lines of the Swiss Family Robinson, only with many more disasters. He also has two sons and two daughter-in-laws who will all tell you he hasn't grown up very much.

A lot of Dave's time has been spent (and still is) in small boats, or in water that no one in their right mind would get into, full of everything (sometimes entirely too close) from hippopotami (in Africa) to sharks (he was the chief scientist working on the commercial shark fishery in the Western Cape, once upon a time) and lots of interesting creatures like the blue-ringed octopus and a poison-spined gurnard perch.

He's written a slew of fantasy and science fiction novels, some with Eric Flint; being a scientist, he likes the strange creatures and machines he comes up with to work.

You can find out quite a lot more at
http://davefreer.com/