For a long time—ever since Oskar began seriously playing with the idea of flight—his mind had circled one problem like a hawk.
Weight.
Wood and canvas could lift a man into the air, yes. But if he wanted aircraft that did not shred under the first hard stress of wind, engine vibration, or enemy fire… he needed something lighter than steel and stronger than dreams.
He needed aluminum.
And aluminum meant only one thing at scale:
bauxite.
The red soil.
Oskar had known about Africa's troubles long before he had the power to touch them. Back when he was still a prince with ideas and not yet a prince with industries, he could do nothing but watch reports and swallow disgust.
But now, in 1909, he had finally forced a different reality into being.
He had convinced his father—through argument, leverage, and the simple weight of money—that he would become, in practice, the architect of German Cameroon.
Not as a romantic governor. Not as a conquering hero.
As a man who intended to make the colony pay for itself—and to stop it from rotting Germany's conscience at the same time.
So, in the early days of March, he was already quickly approaching 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 it in loose formation.
Three were freighters—black-hulled and practical, their holds burdened with steel crates, sacks of grain, rails stacked like ribs, machinery wrapped in oilcloth, medical supplies, cement, tools, and prefabricated housing. Everything needed to build, to feed, to repair, to impose order on a land that had never asked for it.
Workers with their families, not "colonists," Oskar reminded himself again. That was how he forced the vocabulary to behave.
The fourth ship was something else entirely: a gray warship, low and angular, guns silent but unmistakably present, its flag snapping sharply in the wind.
Not to conquer.
To deter.
To remind everyone—from coastal traders to foreign opportunists—that Germany was still here.
On the forward deck of the lead transport stood Oskar.
Beside him, gripping the rail as if it might betray him at any moment, stood Karl—secretary, engineer, long-suffering witness to ideas that tended to arrive already half-built and fully dangerous.
Karl squinted toward the horizon for a long time.
"There," he said at last, voice tight. "Land."
Oskar had already seen it.
A dark green line rose from the sea, uneven and alive—the coast of German Cameroon emerging not as a harbor or skyline but as forest.
Dense.
Layered.
Endless.
No towers.
No smokestacks.
No reassuring geometry of Europe.
Just jungle pressing toward the water as if it meant to reclaim even the sea itself.
Karl stared.
"So that's it," he muttered. "All of it?"
"For now," Oskar 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.
None had invited Germany.
And yet, on paper, fewer than a thousand Europeans ruled millions.
A colony written by ink.
Held by rifles.
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 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.
Its costs were higher.
Its 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.
Bauxite.
And bauxite meant aluminum.
And aluminum meant aircraft: frames, engines, a future in which the sky was not empty.
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 come.
France.
Britain.
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.
Not burned.
Not destroyed.
Withdrawn.
People. Equipment. guns. stores. 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.
A port first.
A fortress second.
A city third.
The name was blunt on purpose. Not romantic. Not colonial poetry.
A label that told every ministry clerk and every foreign spy exactly what it was for:
Bauxite.
And everything that would come after 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."
He paused.
"I 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.
As shield.
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."
For the first time since leaving Europe, he felt something like awe.
In his previous life, places like this had become rare.
Here, the world still breathed freely.
Nature still ruled.
And Oskar—strangely, stubbornly—wanted to keep more of it that way, if he could.
The ships slowed as the coastline loomed large—palms and cliffs, river mouths spilling brown water into blue.
And then, at last—
Southern Bauxi Town came into view.
Not a finished city.
Not yet.
But unmistakably beginning.
A rough line of piers.
Cranes like skeletal arms.
Canvas-covered stacks.
Smoke from temporary furnaces.
A grid carved into earth where jungle had been pushed back by months of labor.
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 sure the next two did not fail.
---
Karl remained silent longer than usual.
The ships had nearly stopped now, engines idling as harbor tugs moved to meet them. The air had grown heavier, warmer. Clouds were forming out 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 laughed softly.
"Come on," he said. "We survived an assassination. We built the Industrial Group from a gamble and a miracle. We bent ministries that didn't want to bend. Surely we can manage three towns, a river, and a single mine."
Karl didn't smile.
"It's not the buildings," he said. "It's the people."
Oskar leaned back against the rail.
"We're not asking for much," he said, counting on his fingers as if the logic alone should be reassuring. "Three towns. A corridor. One mine that I'm quite certain exists. Cameroon is vast. This isn't conquest—it's coexistence. We leave them their land, their lives and don't mess with them in anyway unless they wish to trade or something like that. We just… borrow one red patch of soil."
Karl exhaled slowly.
"I hope they see it that way."
"We'll talk to them," Oskar said. "The northern leaders. The emirs. The chiefs. We explain. We negotiate. We give them guarantees. Time will smooth the rest."
Time.
Oskar had always trusted time. After all 1914 wasn't far now, so as long as they got past that safely then all would be well.
Then suddenly, the first drops of rain struck the deck—light at first, then more insistent. A fine, warm drizzle rolled in from the sea, blurring the coastline, 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 way my little man. That's why we designed proper mosquito nets. And the mosquito hats. And the medicines, and most of all we all on this boat are young and healthy as anyone can be," he said. "We planned for this, and we will make it through this, all of us."
He looked out at the rain-soaked jungle, unconcerned.
"It's just a jungle," he added. "Not a curse."
Karl watched the clouds thicken overhead.
"I hope you're right."
Oskar smiled, certain, optimistic—already thinking of rail lines and turbines and aluminum frames rising into the sky. And a funny thought of himself possibly becoming like Tarzan.
Behind them, the rain fell a little harder.