Termination Shock

To judge from the sounds of laughter and happy exclamations ricocheting like musket balls up the punishingly hard flat surfaces of the palace’s grand staircase, everyone else was having a good time. But today was all about Queen Frederika. It was a truism that, at your own wedding, you never actually got to have a real conversation with all the dear friends and family who had gathered to celebrate it. Likewise, her job this morning would be to descend that staircase on cue, air-kiss a lot of cousins, climb into the golden carriage without falling off her heels, jump out at the Ridderzaal, and read the damned speech. Unlike a lot of those family members, who were dressed as if for the Academy Awards, she was in a pretty sensible outfit. Not that she didn’t like dressing up. But the point of the exercise, at the end of the day, was to open Parliament so they could get cracking on budget negotiations. To amaze the world with a fashion-forward frock was a goal that could maybe be postponed for some other occasion. So she was in a long dress, deep blue, with bits of orange that flashed out of darts and pleats and linings as she moved around. The designer had insisted that it was inspired by military uniforms. Saskia didn’t see the resemblance at all, but she wasn’t a fashion designer.

She had been getting prepped in one of the vast echoing rooms at the top of the stairs. Fenna, and the fashion designer responsible for the dress, had established their respective base camps at one end of this space. At the other, Saskia was having an unexpected last-minute check-in with Ruud.

Ruud was the prime minister. Technically speaking, he was her prime minister. He’d popped in through the back door with an emended copy of the speech.

“We did not expect,” Ruud said, “that this thing was actually going to go into operation.”

He did not even need to specify that “this thing” was the Biggest Gun in the World.

Saskia sighed. “We didn’t expect a lot of things.” She was referring to the pigs. This had been much on her mind of late. Everyone who knew about the plane crash was still waiting for the other shoe to drop. But apparently in Texas you could just crash jet airplanes, shoot it out with giant predators on the tarmac, set fire to the wreckage, and flee, and no one would get particularly excited about it. The story had simply disappeared. No one cared. The government of the Netherlands, eight thousand kilometers away, was the closest thing to adult supervision in the matter. They had taken the action of grounding Saskia pending the completion of what was promised to be a discreet, yet thorough, investigation.

They had the power to do this. To ground Saskia, that is. She couldn’t blame them really. The deal was that the monarch was personally above reproach, but the PM was responsible. She could go out and murder someone and the prime minister would take the heat. Oh, he wouldn’t go to jail, but he’d have to resign and the government would fall along with him. So her very inviolability created a peculiar co-dependency with the PM. Whenever they felt like it, the Dutch government could cut the budget and curtail the powers—what was left of them, anyway—of the royals. Saskia—the whole monarchy, really—served at their pleasure. If she behaved in a way that created serious inconvenience for them—forcing PMs to fall on their swords and governments to collapse—consequences would follow. She and Ruud had daggers at each other’s throats. Not because they were dagger-to-the-throat kinds of people—Ruud was the very definition of a Euro-technocrat—but because that’s how the Grondwet had been written.

Ruud was a few years older than her, but other than a few lines in his face, seemed to have stopped aging at thirty-nine. If his hair was graying, he hid it by shaving his head. His rimless glasses were nearly invisible and didn’t seem to actually do anything—what sort of prescription was that, anyway? A strict one-beer-a-day policy combined with intermittent fasting and lots of bicycling made things very easy for whatever tailor was putting together his wardrobe of black, navy blue, and charcoal suits.

“Are you talking about the plane?” he said. “Last I heard, the insurance company—”

“They are no longer claiming that feral swine are an act of God. They will pay for the plane. If they don’t, I will just liquidate some of my Shell stock and pay for it out of pocket, just to make this go away. They won’t have to sue Waco for not properly maintaining the fence.”

“Fence?”

Saskia tried to suppress a sigh. Usually, Ruud was better prepared. “The fence that the pigs went under. To get on the runway and crash the plane.”