The operations of the Princess Frederika Dock and its siblings around the Maasvlakte were as automated as technology and unions would allow. She could still remember cutting the ribbon on this thing as a teenager. One of the senior executives who’d been allowed to have lunch with her had reminisced about his former job deciding which container should be placed where on the cargo ships of his day: how to be sure that the load was balanced, and that it would remain balanced while the ship was being loaded or unloaded, while keeping in mind that the vessel might have to make several stops to discharge all its containers. He’d done it with index cards. The courtiers in attendance had tried to shut the poor man up, fearing that the princess would be bored, but she’d found it fascinating. Nowadays, of course, it was all done by software. When a big ship from China pulled into the Yangtze Canal—the deepest berth of all the Maasvlakte, the one closest to
the sea—the over-reaching cranes that plucked the boxes from it and placed them on trucks or railway cars were robots that knew exactly what was in each container and where it needed to go. And the trucks themselves, shuttling containers to and fro, were for the most part driverless. Saskia, who had at one point in her young life been subjected to a battery of tests whose purpose was to find out whether her eccentric interests were a result of being on the autism spectrum, loved to just come here and watch the machine run, somewhat as a monarch of another era might have amused himself playing with his tin soldiers.
Things were a bit different today, though, because there was some concern that some areas of the Maasvlakte might get swamped by the storm surge, and so efforts were underway to move vulnerable stuff inland. And on the water, ships were making efforts to get out of town. In the middle of the Yangtze Canal loomed Andromeda, one of a fleet of Chinese container ships that vied for the honor of being the largest in the world. She’d apparently wound up her business ashore and was now being nudged away from the quay by tugboats. In old-school ports it might have required some hours before she could get underway, but here at Maasvlakte she already had a straight shot to open, deep water and needed only push down on the gas pedal, as it were. A couple of launches were shuttling back and forth between the shore and a pilot’s door on her flank, presumably ferrying last-minute personnel and necessaries that had been left behind in the rush to get out ahead of the storm.
“I’m going to go survey the disposition of the enemy forces,” Saskia announced and hiked off in the direction of what appeared to be a long low mound of gray sand running in a straight line along one edge of the port and separating it from what looked to be absolute nothingness on the other side. Any Dutch person would immediately recognize it as a dike, although most dikes were covered with grass. Other than a couple of lonely, opportunistic shore birds, this thing was as dead and colorless as the surface of the moon. Guessing her intent, the security team scrambled out of their cars and ran to catch up.
It started as a low flat beach of fine wet sand, then suddenly got steeper and coarser, with a vaguely scalloped shape that probably showed where a grab dredger had opened its clam shell bucket to dump huge gobs of muck. This was new work that hadn’t yet settled to its natural angle of repose. Saskia helped that process along in a small way by wading and staggering up over knee-high mini-cliffs and touching off small avalanches. The levee was higher than it looked from a distance, which on a day like this was reassuring. Eventually she got to the point where she could see over the top, though. And what she could see—“The enemy forces”—was a whole lot of nothing. Visibility was cut off by mist at a distance of maybe a kilometer. The gray sea was churning and heaving, but there weren’t a lot of breakers coming in against this steep artificial shore. Those that did attack it were flicked away by the dike’s outer armor. For, soft as it was on its inner slope, the side facing the sea was another matter. The smallest and lightest objects that met the eye there were reinforced concrete cubes two and a half meters on a side. And, as had been explained to her at a level of detail that would have rendered most royals catatonic, this was only the uppermost layer of an engineered system that reached deep below the water.
But it wouldn’t stop a rogue wave. One of those could come hurtling silently out of the mist and claw the queen off the dike at any time, as her security team well knew. Looking to her right she was pleased in a way to see that, if this were to happen, Amelia would share the same fate. Willem was on her left, performatively checking his watch. But when the royal photographer finally caught up and began snapping, he melted away. She hadn’t actually come up here to have her picture taken, but she knew it was inevitable. And it would make for a fine picture.