However, while the old admiral stood in Kiel gazing out over the cold gray waters and wondering what, exactly, he had just set into motion, far beyond that quiet shore—beyond Europe, beyond Earth, beyond every map and every imagining of the men of that age—another war was already approaching its end.
Across the endless darkness between the stars there existed another world, alive beneath a merciless sun. Heat shimmered across its endless deserts, where dunes rolled between wind-carved pillars of stone and the half-buried bones of cities whose names had been forgotten thousands of years ago. Dry riverbeds cut pale scars through the land, leading toward hidden caverns and underground springs, while the ruins of some older civilization protruded from the sands like the ribs of a dead giant.
Upon those burning wastes, two armies had met.
At the center of the fighting, amid dust, screaming warriors, and the thunder of bodies colliding, two figures circled one another with murderous concentration. One was tall and furred, built like a great predatory cat walking upright, his mane and battle-cloak whipping in the hot wind as bright eyes followed every movement of his enemy. The other was leaner but no less dangerous, a scaled hunter with a long muscular tail, a bone-and-hide harness across his chest, and a jagged spear held low in both clawed hands.
They attacked almost simultaneously. Steel rang against sharpened stone. The spear scraped across the feline warrior's blade, sparks jumping between them before both fighters twisted apart and came together again. Claws, tails, teeth, spearpoints and swords flashed beneath the sun while all around them the greater battle rolled across the dunes. Feline warriors charged beneath painted hide banners, reptilian tribes answered with shrieking war cries, and the sand became a confusion of footprints, broken shields, scattered weapons, and bodies fighting over ground neither side could remember first claiming.
Then something changed.
At first it was little more than a tremor beneath their feet, so faint that either warrior might have mistaken it for the pounding of thousands of feet across the battlefield. But the vibration deepened. Sand began trembling across the ground. Loose stones danced against one another, and weapons hummed faintly in the hands that held them.
The two warriors hesitated.
Around them, the battle faltered as well. One fighter stopped, then another. War cries died unfinished. Spears lowered. Clawed hands pointed upward as warriors who had spent their entire lives fearing only one another suddenly discovered something new to fear.
The sky was changing.
Clouds twisted where there should have been no storm, drawing inward around a widening distortion of light. The blue-white heavens seemed to bend around something enormous, as though the sky itself were fabric being stretched over the shape of an approaching object. Then the distortion broke.
Something descended through it.
The vessel was so vast that, for several heartbeats, the primitive warriors below could not understand what they were seeing. It resembled no bird, no beast and no structure ever raised by their forgotten ancestors. Its hull curved in impossible, deliberate shapes, smooth in some places and brutally armored in others, dark apertures opening along its underside while pale alien lights pulsed across the metal like cold stars.
It did not fall from the heavens, it occupied them.
Slowly the enormous ship descended until its shadow spread across the battlefield and swallowed the sun. Dust rose in great walls beneath it, banners snapped violently in the displaced air, and mounts shrieked and fought against their reins. Warriors on both sides simply stared upward, their ancient hatred forgotten beneath the impossible weight of the thing hovering above them.
Then someone ran and that was enough. The armies broke almost at once. Proud formations dissolved into panicked mobs as feline warriors, reptilian hunters, beasts and riders scattered across the dunes. Roars became screams. Shields were thrown aside. Spears dropped into the sand as enemies who moments earlier had been trying to tear one another apart now fled in the same direction from a threat neither understood.
The vessel continued downward with terrible patience, as if the fear beneath it meant nothing at all.
Far, far away from that burning world, however, the Sol System remained silent.
The Moon drifted peacefully around the Earth, gray and untouched beneath the light of the distant Sun. No banners stood upon its surface. No machines crossed its plains. No ships moved between the worlds, and no war had yet carried mankind beyond the sky. The heavens above Earth remained vast, empty and apparently eternal.
The year was 1904.
And far below that silent Moon, in the German Empire, in the heart of Berlin, beneath warm electric light and polished marble, Prince Oskar of Prussia was getting drunk in an expensive hotel room.
He stood in the middle of the suite with a bottle clutched in one hand and the other cutting enthusiastically through the air as though he were personally conducting the future of German capitalism. His blond hair had become slightly disordered, his face was flushed from drink and excitement, and his words were tumbling over one another while alcohol and ambition fought over which would control his mouth.
Karl sat on the edge of the bed with a bottle of his own resting between his hands, somewhat unsteady but still considerably more coherent than his prince. He watched Oskar with the tired patience of a man beginning to suspect that whatever was happening in this room was either the beginning of something brilliant or the opening paragraph of a future criminal investigation.
"Hahaa, my man Karl, listen—listen," Oskar declared, pointing confidently at absolutely nothing. "This problem is not actually so difficult, you see."
Karl regarded him with the expression of someone who had just heard a man casually announce that conquering the world was mainly a matter of organization. "I am extremely curious to hear that, Your Highness. How, precisely, is any of this not difficult?"
Oskar leaned back with drunken confidence and raised the bottle slightly as though proposing a toast to his own intelligence. "Karl, our company will be called the German Welfare Lottery Company. Key word is welfare. Welfare lottery means we take part of profit and use it for good things. Social projects. Food for people with no food, diapers for babies with no diapers, medical help for poor people, money for orphanages, maybe schools. Things like that."
His grin widened as the idea pleased him more the longer he explained it. "Then we are not just gambling business. We are noble business. Charitable. Helpful. Society loves us. My father presses like. Newspapers say Prince Oskar helps poor children. Anyone who wants to attack us must think first about public reaction, my man. We become almost like saints."
As ridiculous as the delivery was, there was genuine logic beneath it. Oskar understood that prestige and public affection could serve as armor almost as effectively as rank. If the public came to see him as the prince who funded orphanages, fed the poor and paid for hospitals, then anyone trying to destroy his enterprise would have to do so very carefully. Greedy hands could still reach for him, certainly, but they would have to hide their knives behind respectable reasons.
Karl slowly lowered his bottle. For several seconds he simply stared at Oskar.
Then he nodded.
"Wow," he admitted. "That is actually a good idea, Your Highness."
Oskar's grin widened. "And lottery market is already big pie," he continued. "I am prince, yes, but I cannot eat whole pie alone. So…" He tapped himself on the chest, then pointed vaguely upward as though the entire House of Hohenzollern were floating somewhere above the ceiling. "I give share of profits to royal family. Officially. Publicly."
He spread his hands, increasingly pleased with his own logic. "If royal family makes money when we make money, then we are not just private company. We become royal welfare project. People trust that. And anyone who attacks us is attacking poor people, orphans, and Kaiser's wallet at same time. Very stupid move, my man."
Karl's eyes brightened despite the alcohol. "With the support of the Imperial Family, your social prestige, and your position as a prince…" He nodded slowly as the possibilities arranged themselves in his head. "Yes. Very few people in Germany would dare move openly against us. And if part of the eventual profit is publicly connected to strengthening the Navy, we may gain friends there as well. Unofficially, of course. That part would be wiser not to advertise."
Someone could still attempt something in private, naturally, but Oskar decided that was a problem for future Oskar. In his head, the division of profits was already beginning to take shape. Twenty percent would go toward welfare projects, twenty percent toward the royal family, and the remaining sixty percent would remain under his control. If he intended to fulfill his promise to finance a battleship—and ideally far more than one—he needed a river of money, not a respectable stream.
"Alright," Oskar said. "We do this way. Tomorrow we register company, find office, begin preparations. Three months. Lottery goes on sale in three months."
It was an absurdly short timetable, but Oskar did not feel as though he had the luxury of patience. Every historical event he remembered felt like another clock ticking somewhere beyond sight. War, alliances, industry, politics—everything was moving, even when the people around him believed history was standing still.
Karl rubbed one temple thoughtfully. "We should probably begin in northern Germany. Berlin, Hamburg, perhaps Kiel and the surrounding regions. If the format succeeds there, expansion southward will be much easier." He paused before adding, "And before we sell a single ticket, we need lawyers examining what protections are actually available for the name, branding, printed rules, and operating format. If anything can be legally protected, we protect it. Otherwise every lottery operator in Germany will copy us the moment they see money."
Oskar nodded with great seriousness. "First company. Then legal protection. We lock down name, rules, designs, everything possible. Double Color Ball is ours."
He reached into his coat and pulled out his passbook, dropping it onto the table between them. "These are all my savings. Five million marks. Startup capital. If we do not act like idiots, should be enough."
Karl looked at the book, then back at him.
"You will be legal representative," Oskar continued. "I give you twenty percent of company shares. You handle hard things—papers, lawyers, people, words. I create ideas."
Karl stared at him. "Your Highness, it is an honor to work with you, but are you seriously proposing that I do everything?"
Oskar smiled.
Karl sighed. "Yes. Of course you are."
Nevertheless, the offer clearly affected him. Twenty percent of a potentially enormous enterprise was no small gift. After a moment, however, Karl's expression became more thoughtful. "I cannot simply accept that much without contributing anything. My conscience would trouble me."
He reached into his jacket and withdrew a folded document. "So this will be my investment."
Oskar unfolded the paper.
It was a cheque from Deutsche Bank.
One million marks.
For several seconds, Oskar simply stared at it. "Karl," he said slowly, "where did you get so much money?"
Karl's expression became equal parts proud and guilty. "Some of it came from my father. His Excellency Essen gave me a respectable amount of capital when I came of age. He has always believed I should have something of my own." Karl hesitated. "The rest came from investments. Your investments, technically."
Oskar looked up.
Karl cleared his throat. "You were not using most of your allowance or savings, so I began placing portions of it in various ventures rather than allowing everything to sit idle. I made rather good returns." His eyes shifted slightly. "And I may have retained a very small portion of those profits as a management fee without explicitly asking you."
Oskar burst out laughing.
"Hahaha! My man! Herr Essen is wise man after all. And you are wise too! You saved money instead of wasting it on stupid things."
Karl blinked. Apparently Oskar had missed the confession entirely. He decided not to repeat it.
Oskar took another swallow from his bottle, hiccupped, and continued. "But Karl, even if you own twenty percent of company, you receive ten percent total profit. Other forty percent goes welfare and royal family. Remaining sixty split according to shares after commitments."
"Of course, Your Highness. I understand perfectly." Karl shook his head faintly. "Frankly, if your projections are even remotely accurate, ten percent would already be an absurd amount of money."
Three drawings every week, enormous participation, and hundreds of millions of marks annually if everything somehow worked as Oskar imagined. Even a fraction of that could make Karl wealthier than most nobles could reasonably dream of becoming.
That night, both men drank far more than either intended. Oskar eventually passed out without changing his clothes, dragging Karl against his chest in his sleep as though the dwarf were an unusually argumentative stuffed toy. Karl, equally intoxicated, snored into Oskar's sweat-soaked uniform while one hand remained stubbornly wrapped around the red diary.
The following morning, Oskar woke with a pounding skull and no clear memory of why he was hugging his personal assistant.
Karl woke with no clear memory of why he had agreed to reorganize his entire life around a prince who wanted to buy battleships with lottery money.
Then both of them remembered the battleship. That provided motivation.
They dragged themselves out of bed, splashed water over their faces, attempted to make themselves presentable, and went to begin the process of creating the company. Oskar still failed to wash properly, but imperial privilege proved considerably more powerful than body odor.
Where an ordinary businessman might have spent weeks navigating offices, waiting for signatures, finding the correct officials, and learning which documents were missing, doors opened quickly when a Hohenzollern prince appeared. Clerks became attentive. Meetings were suddenly available. Papers that might otherwise have sat untouched for days acquired urgency.
Within a week, the German Welfare Lottery Company existed as a legal enterprise.
At the same time, Karl's lawyers began examining every method available to protect the company's intellectual property: its name, printed designs, promotional material, ticket structure, trademarks, operating system, and any game mechanics that could reasonably be shielded under existing law. Oskar, thinking far ahead, also began recording other lottery formats he remembered from his previous life—different number pools, prize structures, combinations, and variations—anything he could describe clearly enough to preserve as another potential product.
If this world intended to gamble with numbered balls, Oskar wanted as much of that world passing through his hands as possible.
Then came hiring.
Karl took the lead, because Oskar's contribution to a professional interview still tended to involve phrases like my man, questions unrelated to the position, and long explanations of future military technology nobody had asked about. Clerks were recruited to manage tickets and accounts. Lawyers handled regulation and contracts. Regional managers were brought in to oversee distribution, while advertising men were hired from the rare breed who understood that selling something required more than politely listing its characteristics.
Security became another priority. Oskar insisted that the tickets look respectable and be difficult to counterfeit, although Karl and the lawyers were responsible for translating that desire into something practical. They contracted a reputable printing company and developed serial numbering, distinctive markings, watermarks, and other anti-forgery measures. Each ticket would have a recorded counterpart retained by the company, allowing winning claims to be checked against archived records rather than accepted on trust.
Ticket sales would close several hours before each drawing, after which records from the different selling regions would be secured and brought into the central accounting system under guard. The entire process was designed around one principle Oskar understood instinctively from his previous life.
"We sell hope," he told Karl. "If people think cheating happens, hope dies. Then business dies."
Karl nodded gravely. "And if the government believes we are cheating, we die."
Oskar considered that and nodded. "Also true."
Advertising, however, was where his old streamer instincts truly awakened.
Oskar spammed.
Advertisements began appearing in every large newspaper the company could afford, and unlike the restrained commercial notices common to the era, Oskar wanted enormous lettering, impossible-to-ignore prize numbers, and slogans that practically shouted from the page.
WANT TO BECOME RICH AND HELP FILL AN EMPTY BOWL?
PLAY DOUBLE COLOR BALL!
FIRST PRIZE: FIVE MILLION MARKS!
A NEW LIFE FOR THE PRICE OF ONE TICKET!
There were other slogans too.
CHANGE YOUR DESTINY.
FORTUNE FAVORS THE BRAVE.
And one line Oskar insisted was profound despite nobody understanding where it came from:
DO OR DO NOT. THERE IS NO TRY.
By the advertising standards of 1904, it was loud, aggressive, and almost embarrassingly direct.
It was also difficult to ignore.
The cost was brutal.
Every full-page advertisement felt to Oskar like tearing another strip out of his five-million-mark heart. Money poured into printing contracts, office rents, salaries, lawyers, distribution arrangements, security, promotional work, and advance payments to vendors. Within only a few weeks, an alarming portion of their available capital had vanished.
Karl watched the account books with growing horror.
"Your Highness," he said one evening, "our cash reserves are shrinking at a terrifying speed."
Oskar remained remarkably calm. "Yes, my man. But our name grows at terrifying speed also. Good exchange. Soon everyone wants our balls."
Karl stared at him.
Oskar nodded confidently. "Colored balls. People like balls."
"That," Karl said slowly, "is an extremely unfortunate way to advertise the product."
Nevertheless, Oskar was not wrong about the growing attention.
By the time the company was ready to launch, Double Color Ball had become a subject of conversation across much of Germany. The enormous advertised jackpot was difficult for ordinary people even to comprehend.
Oskar loved explaining it to anyone willing to listen. "Normal worker maybe earns eight hundred marks each year," he would say in his broken German. "Five million marks means more than six thousand years wages. Or enough money to buy ridiculous mountain of bread. You win once, your great-great-great-great-grandchildren can become lazy."
The mathematics were crude, but the psychological effect was not.
In Hamburg beer halls, dockworkers joked that they would buy one of those ridiculous welfare tickets "just once." In Berlin cafés, students began inventing number-picking systems and arguing about them with the seriousness normally reserved for politics and philosophy. In quiet towns, old men, housewives, clerks, laborers, veterans, and shopkeepers who had rarely considered lotteries at all began whispering about the five-million-mark prize.
For people who might never personally possess even a few thousand marks at one time, five million belonged to the realm of fantasy.
That was precisely why it worked.
Oskar and Karl had originally intended to launch only in northern Germany, learn from the first few months, and then expand south if the system proved successful.
Their own advertising ruined that cautious plan.
Vendor requests began arriving from farther and farther away. Munich. Stuttgart. Freiburg. Towns neither man had expected to consider until much later were already asking how they could obtain tickets. The idea had moved faster than the company itself.
So the launch expanded.
On 18 November 1904, tickets for the German Welfare Lottery Company's first Double Color Ball drawing went on sale across Germany.
From the moment the authorized selling points opened, queues began forming.
In Berlin, lines stretched outside kiosks and shops displaying the new red-and-blue Welfare Lottery signs. In Kiel, sailors and dockworkers bought tickets between shifts, joking about which one of them would soon become richer than his captain. In provincial towns, people arrived wearing their Sunday clothes to purchase small slips of paper that represented a chance—however tiny—of becoming unimaginably wealthy.
The first sales reports exceeded even Oskar's most drunken projections.
The Double Color Ball was not merely successful.
It had become a phenomenon.
Back in Berlin, an exhausted and still somewhat sweaty Prince Oskar stared at the first reports spread across a table while Karl practically vibrated with excitement beside him.
There were columns of figures, regional breakdowns, sales totals, distribution numbers, and handwritten notes explaining performance.
Oskar stared at all of it for a long time. Then he scratched his head.
Damn. I really need to learn German. I have no idea what half of this says.
His eyes dropped toward the numbers again. Numbers, fortunately, required considerably less translation.
A grin slowly spread across his face. They were one step closer to a battleship, maybe.