Vienna, Schönbrunn Palace.
Franz knew exactly what was about to happen. Over the years, the palace guard had grown from eight hundred men to two thousand, and now to eight thousand—ten times the defensive strength it had possessed in history.
Vienna's old city walls had been torn down and replaced by Franz's shops and factories.
This had the advantage of preventing rebels from using the walls to build barricades. If necessary, the buildings near the palace and the aristocratic district could also be blown up, creating a buffer zone as a final line of defense.
The city garrison had not grown much compared with its historical numbers, but after the old, the weak, and the young had been weeded out, Albrecht's training had turned it into a proper fighting force.
It was an army of twenty thousand nobles, equipped with the most expensive gear in the Austrian Empire. Their fighting spirit had risen considerably, especially after the Winster incident and the anti-drug campaign.
In addition, the Austrian army had stationed a hundred thousand troops near Vienna—a force far larger than anything there had been at the same point in history.
Most importantly, despite the broader economic crisis, the Austrian Empire's economy was still doing well. The farmers had enjoyed good harvests, and there had been no mass exodus from the countryside.
Vienna had no great influx of refugees, nor were there many unemployed workers. On the whole, the people were getting by reasonably well. At least, no one had been driven to the point of having nothing left to live on.
The economic downturn had indeed bankrupted a small number of factories and merchants, but the scale was limited. Britain and France, by comparison, saw over a thousand companies go bankrupt in a year—more than a hundred each month, on