For a long time—ever since Oskar had first begun taking flight seriously—his mind had circled one problem above all others.
Weight.
Wood and canvas could lift a man into the air, yes. They could carry engines, wings, and hope for a little while. But if he wanted aircraft that would not tear themselves apart under hard wind, engine vibration, rough landings, or enemy fire, then he needed something better than timber and prayer.
He needed something lighter than steel and stronger than dreams.
He needed aluminum.
And aluminum, at scale, meant only one thing: bauxite. The red earth.
Oskar had known about Africa's troubles long before he possessed the power to touch them. Back when he had still been only a prince with ideas, not yet a prince with industries, he could do little except read reports, listen to officials dress cruelty in polished language, and swallow his disgust.
But now, in 1909, he had finally forced a different reality into being.
Through argument, leverage, and the simple crushing weight of money, he had convinced his father to give him practical control over the future of German Cameroon. Not as some romantic colonial governor. Not as a conquering hero riding into the tropics beneath banners, but as an architect, a builder, as a man who intended to make the colony pay for itself—and, if possible, stop it from rotting Germany's conscience in the process.
So, in the early days of March, Oskar was approaching the coast of German Cameroon.
The sea was calm.
The Atlantic stretched flat and dull beneath a pale sky, as if even the ocean were holding its breath. Four steamships cut through the water in loose formation. Three were freighters: black-hulled, practical, and heavy with purpose. Their holds carried steel crates, sacks of grain, stacked rails, machinery wrapped in oilcloth, medical supplies, cement, tools, prefabricated housing, and all the hard, ugly necessities of construction.
Everything needed to build, feed, repair, and impose order upon a land that had never asked for it.
Workers and their families, Oskar reminded himself again. Not colonists, these were workers.
That was how he forced the vocabulary to behave, even if reality remained stubbornly less clean.
The fourth ship was different. A gray warship moved alongside them, low and angular, its guns silent but impossible to ignore. Its flag snapped sharply in the wind. It was not there to conquer. Not today. It was there to deter pirates, opportunists, corrupt traders, and anyone else who mistook German patience for weakness.
It was also there as a reminder, Germany was still here.
On the forward deck of the lead transport stood Oskar, broad and silent beneath the sea wind.
Beside him, gripping the rail with both hands as if the ship might betray him at any moment, stood Karl—secretary, engineer, and long-suffering witness to ideas that tended to arrive in Oskar's mind already half-built and fully dangerous.
Karl squinted toward the horizon for a long time.
Then his fingers tightened on the rail.
"There," he said at last, voice tense. "Land."
Oskar had already seen it.
A dark green line rose from the sea, uneven and alive: the coast of German Cameroon. It did not appear as a European harbor, with stone quays, church towers, factory chimneys, cranes, or neat rows of warehouses announcing civilization's arrival.
It appeared first as forest.
Dense, layered jungle pressed toward the water in thick green walls, as if nature had not merely claimed the land but intended, given time, to reclaim the sea as well. No grand avenues. No steel towers. No proud industrial skyline. No familiar signs of Europe's arrogance carved into stone and smoke.
Here, nature ruled.
Karl stared at the coast.
"So that's it," he muttered. "All of it?"
Oskar looked at the endless green and allowed himself the faintest smile.
"For now," he replied.
Cameroon in 1909 was not a country in any sense Europeans liked to define.
It was a mosaic.
Hundreds of peoples lived here—kingdoms, villages, clans—each with their own languages, customs, histories older than the Reich itself. In the north, where the land opened into broad plains with wet and dry seasons, power concentrated around Islamic emirates and old cavalry authority—faith, trade routes, and rules set long before Berlin ever cared.
In the south, closer to the coast, the world fractured into forests and rivers, animist traditions, ancestor worship, spirits that lived in trees, stones, water, and memory.
Some had converted to Christianity. Most had not, and none had invited Germany. And yet, on paper, fewer than a thousand Europeans ruled millions.
It was a colony written by ink, held by a few rifles, and managed by men who too often treated human beings as numbers on a ledger.
Oskar knew the reputation—how forced labor and taxes had turned resentment into a quiet, stubborn fire. How "administration" had become extraction. How African troops from elsewhere had been hired to police people who were told they belonged to Germany without ever being asked.
He had read the reports. He had also argued about them under chandeliers in Berlin while ministers spoke of "civilizing missions" and deficits.
Cameroon cost lives. It cost money. It produced coffee, cocoa, rubber—commodities Germany could obtain elsewhere, cheaper, with fewer headaches.
The colony's income was measured in mere millions. While it's costs were higher, and it's administration lived in debt. Which, ironically, had made it easy for Oskar to get his hands on it.
And beneath all of it—the true reason he had come—was the red soil.
The problem was distance.
The bauxite deposits lay inland—far to the north, beyond the easy control of coastal posts. The existing colonial structure hugged the sea like a frightened animal. It could not reach deep country without becoming a war machine.
Oskar refused to simply unleash that war machine. But he also could not abandon the colony. Not even if doing so would soothe his conscience. Because if Germany left, the land would not become free.
Someone else would simply come and take it. And Oskar—born of the future—knew exactly how that story tended to end.
"Are you certain about this?" Karl asked quietly as the coast drew closer. "About… all of it?"
Oskar didn't answer immediately.
Because the truth was that the decision had already been made months ago—made with signatures, steamship schedules, and furious telegrams from men who believed colonies existed to be squeezed until nothing remained.
At the beginning of the year, Oskar had issued orders that turned half the colonial administration furious and the other half terrified.
The scattered coastal posts—thin, vulnerable, badly supplied—were to be withdrawn. People, equipment, guns, tools, everything that could be moved, would be moved.
The old pattern—small German fingers hooked into dozens of places they could not truly hold—was over.
In its place, Oskar had chosen one anchor.
A single new port, farther south, where the Sanaga River reached the sea and split—two mouths, two currents, and between them a long, low island that no one had bothered to claim. Empty ground. Strategic ground. A place where bridges could be built to the mainland like clasped hands.
There, he had ordered the construction of Southern Bauxi Town. Which was a port first, a fortress second, a city third. The name was blunt on purpose. A label that told every ministry clerk and every foreign spy exactly what it was for: Bauxite.
Southern Bauxi Town was to be the first of three.
The southern city by the sea—shipyards, warehouses, docks, coastal gun batteries and walls thick enough to make opportunists rethink their ambitions.
Then the corridor inland.
A central fortress-city on the river—administrative, industrial, the place where supplies and decisions would gather.
And in the far north, near the deposits themselves, a final settlement—secure, heavily guarded—built not for comfort, but for permanence.
Three towns, one corridor, rail lines binding them, roads following. Bridges spanning rivers that had never known steel.
Hydroelectric plants rising along the Sanaga, turning water into power for the three cities, and whatever military checkpoints or villages were built in between.
And, in Oskar's mind, the most convenient detail of all: the Sanaga's reputation.
Treacherous water, aggressive wildlife, sickly marsh zones that kept permanent settlements sparse in certain stretches. This wasn't farmland being stolen from villages. It was a harsh corridor being forced into usefulness—proof, to everyone watching, that the land could be made livable without driving anyone out.
Karl had run the numbers until his eyes hurt.
"Each settlement," he said reflexively, as if his mind couldn't stop calculating, "will cost no less than sixty million marks."
He swallowed.
"Likely more, if we intend them to be truly self-sufficient. If we intend tens of thousands to live there."
"Yes," Oskar said calmly. "I know."
Karl stared at him.
"Sixty million," Karl repeated, as if saying it twice might make it less insane.
"And you intend to finance this," he added, carefully, "with your own money, and my money as well?"
Oskar's mouth curved faintly.
"Yes."
Karl's voice dropped. "Lottery income. Books. The rest."
"Exactly, we will do it as we have done everything else so far. Together as a team," Oskar said.
He didn't say it with pride. He said it as if it were simply the logical outcome of everything they had built.
Karl exhaled.
"And you want this… not only for Germany's security," he said, "but for theirs."
Oskar didn't look away from the coastline.
"Yes," he said. "If we do this correctly, they keep their lives. Their villages. Their customs. We take only what we must. I just hope it will be enough."
Karl didn't answer.
Because Karl had seen what "enough" looked like in Europe.
And he had read enough reports to know what Cameroon already thought of Germans.
Oskar rested his hands on the rail, breathing in air that smelled different—wet, green, alive.
"The people here hate us already," he said quietly. "That damage can't be undone."
Karl's jaw tightened.
"So I won't try to rule them," Oskar continued. "Not their villages. Not their faiths. Not their lives."
He had chosen something radical—something that would make Berlin bureaucrats foam at the mouth.
Every people would govern themselves. No taxes. No forced labor. No conscription. No interference.
Germany would claim only the corridor: the Sanaga River and its immediate surroundings, the three fortress towns, the mine.
In return, Germany would stay, not as master, but as shield.
There would be no French patrols slipping across borders. No British "protectorates" appearing overnight. No foreign armies carving up land while tribes were blamed for resisting. Internal conflicts would remain internal.
Germany would not play kingmaker.
"We protect against outsiders," Oskar had told his father. "Nothing more."
It wasn't full freedom. Oskar knew that. It wasn't what the people truly wanted.
But in a world where the strong wrote the rules, it was the least monstrous offer he could make while still securing what Germany needed.
Karl's eyes remained on the coastline.
"You realize," he said finally, "there are millions of them. And barely a thousand of us."
Oskar smiled faintly.
"Yes," he said. "And yet they live as they always have. No factories. No cities. No machines. Just land and sky."
Looking at the vast wilderness before him, Oskar felt something he had not truly felt since leaving Europe.
Awe.
In his old life, places like this had become rare. Here, the world still breathed freely. Nature still ruled without apology. Forest, river, heat, rain, insects, birds, unseen animals, and endless green pressed together in a living wall older than any empire.
And Oskar—strangely, stubbornly—wanted to keep as much of it that way as he could.
The ships slowed as the coastline grew clearer. Palms leaned over the shore. Low cliffs rose in dark, wet layers. River mouths spilled brown water into the blue Atlantic, spreading like stains from the land into the sea.
Then, at last, Southern Bauxi Town came into view.
It was not a finished city. Not even close. But it was unmistakably a beginning.
A rough line of piers jutted into the water. Cranes stood like skeletal arms against the sky. Canvas-covered stacks waited near the shore. Smoke rose from temporary furnaces. Beyond them, a grid had been cut into the earth where the jungle had been forced back by months of labor.
Not civilization yet, but a foothold, a foundation. An anchor thrown into the coast.
Oskar stared at it, and the weight in his chest shifted. The southern town had started without him. Now he had arrived to make certain the next two did not fail.
Karl remained silent longer than usual.
The ships had nearly stopped now, engines idling as harbor tugs moved out to meet them. The air had grown heavier and warmer. Clouds gathered over the sea, low and wide, their undersides darkening with the promise of rain.
"Oskar," Karl said at last.
"Yes?"
"I admire you," Karl said quietly. "You know that."
Oskar glanced at him, surprised enough to smile.
"But," Karl continued, "I have a bad feeling about this."
Oskar let out a soft laugh.
"Come on, my little man. We survived an assassination. We built the Industrial Group from a gamble and a miracle. We bent ministries that had spent decades refusing to bend. Surely we can manage three towns, a river, and one mine."
Karl did not smile.
"It's not the buildings I'm worried about," he said. "It's the people."
Oskar leaned back against the rail.
"We're not asking for much," he replied, counting on his fingers as if reason alone could make the matter simple. "Three towns. A corridor. One mine that I am quite certain exists. Cameroon is vast. This is not conquest. It is coexistence. We leave them their land and their lives. We do not interfere unless they want to trade, work, or deal with us."
He looked back toward the green coast.
"We just borrow one red patch of soil."
Karl exhaled slowly.
"I hope they see it that way."
"We'll speak with them," Oskar said. "The northern leaders, the emirs, the chiefs, whoever matters on the ground. We explain. We negotiate. We give guarantees. Time will smooth the rest."
Time.
Oskar had always trusted time. After all, 1914 was not far away now. If they could pass through that year without disaster, then perhaps everything after it could be managed. Perhaps the world could be forced onto a better road one decision at a time.
Then the first drops of rain struck the deck. Light at first. Then steadier.
A warm drizzle rolled in from the sea, soft but insistent, blurring the coast and darkening the wood beneath their boots.
Karl grimaced.
"If this keeps up, I'm going to die of malaria before we finish the harbor."
Oskar waved a hand dismissively.
"No, you won't. That's why we designed proper mosquito nets, mosquito hats, sealed sleeping rooms, drainage rules, and medical stores. Quinine, hygiene, boiled water, screened windows—the whole list. We planned for this."
He looked down at Karl with firm confidence.
"And besides, everyone on these ships is young, healthy, and as prepared as I can make them. We will get through this. All of us."
Karl gave him a look that said youth was not armor and optimism was not medicine.
Oskar ignored it.
He turned back toward the rain-soaked jungle, eyes already filling with rail lines, turbines, sawmills, clinics, schools, roads, aluminum frames, and aircraft rising one day from red earth into open sky.
"It's just a jungle," he said, unconcerned. "Not a curse."
Karl watched the clouds thicken overhead.
"I hope you're right."
Oskar smiled, certain and optimistic, and for one ridiculous moment imagined himself swinging through the trees like some kind of Prussian Tarzan, terrifying monkeys and colonial officials alike.
Behind them, the rain fell harder.