“You look very good. Very distinguished,” my wife said.
I felt, of course, like a complete fool—until I realized that her eyes were travelling slowly up and down my tight-fitting breeches, and after that I did not feel so bad.
“So why am I wearing these clothes?” I returned her frank stare. “Other than for your amusement.”
“Because,” Maire said with finality, “I think you’re the only one who can.” At her gesture, a door appeared, showing a corridor. The ribbed walls were faintly curved, built of some material that felt smooth as plastic but tough as steel, and which glowed softly from within, giving a pleasant illumination. Uniformed people passed to and fro, not just Nuum, I was rather surprised to see, but occasionally a Thoran. They were wearing different-colored outfits from mine, but similar in style, and they held themselves with an unmistakably military bearing. Where was I? I had expected Maire would return me to her ship, but this was not The Dark Lady. I was unsure whether we were even on a ship or in a ground installation.
As soon as we stepped into the hallway, everyone subtly altered his course to give us passage, and there was no doubt they were giving us furtive sidewise glances as they hurried past. A young Nuum in a costume much like mine, but with a powder-blue tunic, marched smartly to place himself in our path and saluted Maire.
“A pleasure to see you again, my lady councilor, I am Lieutenant Lecaudia. I have been assigned to act as the lord admiral’s aide.” He turned to me. “With your permission, my lord admiral.”
Chapter 12
A Lesson in History
Apparently, I was now the all-time record holder for greatest leap up the promotion ladder while unconscious. From retired lieutenant I had been advanced to Lord Admiral, First Minister of the Durean Defense Forces.
I emerged from my cabin with Maire and looked my aide-de-camp up and down. I recognized him now; he was the trooper who had given me his sidearm at the Institute after I gave mine to Timash. Out of his body armor, he was a fine example of Nuum manhood, with a strong chin and a full head of blond hair. Deep inside his mind, where he probably thought he had shielded, I sensed a discomfort, and an annoyance. I smiled. I knew what he was hiding.
“Jacked up from the ranks, eh, Lecaudia?”
He eyed me with surprise and a bit of suspicion. “Yes, sir. I was a sergeant when I woke up yesterday.” There was more regret than pride in his statement.
I frowned. “Weren’t you in the Crystallen navy yesterday?”
“We’ll get to that,” Maire cut in. Now there was an air of anxiety about her. She was hiding something after all.
“Well, look at it this way,” I said to Lecaudia. “Now that you are an officer, your working days are over.”
The suspicion slid away and he allowed himself a grin. “Yes, sir. I suppose you could say that, sir.”
As with so many things, the difference between the non-coms and the officers had never disappeared. I liked Lecaudia. He was practical, a rarity for officers in my experience.
My first problem, of course, would be how to get rid of him.
“I can hardly keep him, Maire. Everyone around me, everyone I count on, knows who I am. If he stays, somehow the truth will slip out, and then there will be hell to pay.” We had slipped into an unused conference room and left Lecaudia standing guard outside. “And how did he get here, anyway? I thought he was in Lobok’s command.”
“He was,” she admitted. “He still is.”
My eyebrows narrowed. I had the feeling that I was about to hear something unpleasant.
“What do you mean, ‘he still is’?”
“We’re on my flagship, the Procyon. I called it here after we picked you up with The Dark Lady. Lobok wanted to take you on his ship, but I wasn’t having any of that. I had to persuade the Council that we were working on an emergency mission, but that I didn’t have time to brief them. The way things have been…” She sighed loudly. “Oh, the hell with it. The Council still doesn’t trust you. The only way I was going to be able to take this ship out without telling them why and without having them send Lobok after us was to put Lobok on the ship.”
“Lobok’s here? On this ship?” Honestly, that did not seem so bad. I still outranked the man, commodore or not. It would be fun, actually, flaunting that to the man who had almost thrown me off of his own ship not that long ago.
“There’s more to it,” Maire went on. “He’s the captain.”
I turned to her. “Lobok is the captain? Of this ship? Of your ship?” I was beginning to feel like a parrot. Maire nodded. “What is it with the Council, anyway? I thought you were the Duchess of Dure. And this is a Durean vessel. How can they tell you what to do with it?”
Maire waved her hands in frustration. “I told you. How many times do I have to tell you? They think you’re an assassin or a spy or something. They’ve never met anyone like you, and you scare them to death. They can’t read your mind, you have no datasphere history, you make friends with breen—who wouldn’t be scared of you? They’d rather put Farren in charge of this ship than you.”
Warm shame washed across my face. I knew everything she was saying; I knew it was true. I simply had a hard time believing that anyone could care that much about me, much less fear me. I was no king, no anointed hero of a fairytale… If I had not walked through that Door in northern France, what would have made me so special?
I placed my hands on her shoulders. She was looking up at me with so much love I would have wrestled the entire breen nation for her at that moment.
“All right,” I said. “So we have Lobok. And it is because of me. End of lesson. But now, what about Lecaudia? I doubt Lobok appointed him to shadow me without expecting regular reports. Once we start looking for the time machine, he is going to start asking a lot of awkward questions.”
“I don’t know if you’ve realized it, my love, but once we find the time machine we’re going have to answer a lot of awkward questions.”
The Procyon had rendezvoused with The Dark Lady while I was asleep, and the captain had pushed her limits to get her there—only to be relieved of his command. Boasting a crew of nearly three hundred, it was the pride of the Durean navy.
Unfortunately, it pretty much was the Durean navy. To explain the current situation, Maire had to give me the kind of history lesson that she had never had time for, and with which the Library, for all his knowledge, had not been programmed. As Maire unfolded the story, I began to read between the lines and realized that the information had not been omitted from the Library for any practical reason—it had been suppressed.
“When the Nuum landed on Earth, we found the natives decadent, listless, uninterested in anything outside of their own sphere. Space travel had dwindled to almost nothing, and most of what did occur was in the form of arrivals, not departures. Visitors who wanted to stay were welcome, but most left within a short time. Since trade was sparse, so were traders, and the cycle fed upon itself.
“Our arrival changed things, but not as much as one would have expected. It was as if there were something in the atmosphere; the Nuum gradually seemed to be infected by the same lassitude the natives exhibited. After several decades, we were satisfied just to stay put; no one went back to the home world, and no one new arrived. We had established ourselves as the master race, and nothing offered a significant threat to that dominion, so nothing changed. It’s kind of ironic; after waiting 3,000 years to regain their place on the surface, the klurath missed their best opportunity by a mere three centuries.
“We had dismantled our spaceships after the first wave of consolidation, and after a while no one had the resources or the incentive to replace them. They could have asked the Library, but nobody bothered. We were divided into city-states that became more suspicious of each other with every passing generation. Many of the city-states like Dure and Crystalle had navies, but impressive as their airships might be, they were only good in atmosphere, and there weren’t many of them. There were lots of skybarg
es like The Dark Lady, but they geared more toward pleasure than work.
“Then, twenty years ago, our complacency took a hard right to the chin.
“The day you faced down the Council of Nobles at the head of a small army of breen that you smuggled into the capital without even a hint of their existence was like an electric shock to our collective spine. For all that the Council attempted to keep a lid on the story, rumors leaked out, and in many ways the rumors were worse than the truth.” Maire’s eyes held a faraway look, as though she were still trying to come to grips with what she had seen with her own eyes. “I told you what happened after you disappeared, how Farren managed to worm his way back into power, and how I barely held onto my own. But that was what happened to me.
“We’d always suspected that the Thorans had ways of tapping into the datasphere, and stealing news feeds and communications at the very least. It didn’t take long after you left to be sure. There were no Thorans in that chamber except our crew, and they knew the truth. But within a week there were rumors flying everywhere that the Council had been murdered in a Thoran uprising, and that the Nuum were in complete panic. Mini-revolts were popping up all over the planet. And for a while we were in a panic. We had no idea there were that many insurgent groups, or that they were so well-armed. It was like the entire Thoran population had been waiting for its chance for the last hundred years.”
I closed my eyes, not wanting to think about what I knew was coming. I had seen how the Nuum dealt with dissent. But I had to know. This was my fault.
“What happened?” I asked quietly.
Maire sighed. “Just what you think happened. The Thorans took us by surprise, but it didn’t last. They were cut down by the hundreds—the thousands, maybe. Make no mistake, a lot of Nuum lost their lives, too, but that only made it worse.
“I chased the Council out of Dure by convincing them they were needed at home, threatened to slit Farren’s throat if he interfered, and appealed to my Thorans, the ones in Dure, personally, asking them to keep calm. I needed them to keep calm, because I’d already sent out almost every ship we had looking for you. I was lucky; not only had my father always had a soft spot for Thorans because of my mother, but I was also able to send the crew of The Dark Lady out to mix in and talk people down. I don’t know how many flare-ups they stopped. All I know is I didn’t see Skull or anybody for days.
“And then it stopped. Dure went back to the way it had been, and if you hadn’t been there you wouldn’t have known there’d been a problem. But there was; you could feel it if you looked. So I offered Farren a deal; he could handle all of Dure’s relations with the other Nuum as long as he let me deal with my Thorans my own way.”
“What did he say?” I thought about the man, about how he had tried to kill Maire, and me, right in front of the Council, and how he had gotten away with it. That time. “It sounds like exactly the kind of deal he would jump at; the Thorans could go hang for all he cares.”
“He did. And they can. The first thing he wanted to do was build up our navy; he said everyone else was bound to in the wake of the riots, and so we had to, too. Why we would need protection from our own people, he didn’t say. I knew it was so he could crush the Thorans the next time, but I’d already played pretty much every card I had. I had to give him something. Besides, we already had enough firepower to put down a revolt if it came to that, so he wasn’t really getting anything he didn’t already have.”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “You actually gave Farren permission build his own navy?”
“What? Of course not! How stupid do you think I am? I didn’t trust him any further than I could throw Timash. The problem was how to give him what he wanted without losing everything I had. And speaking of Timash, that’s where I got my answer.”
I nodded. “You said he had been a lot of help after I disappeared.”
“He was. We had dinner a few nights after Farren made his demand. I told Timash I was running out of time; Farren was insisting that I sign off on the idea. And Timash looked at me and said: ‘He’s going to need a lot of manpower to build all those ships. You’re in charge of Thoran relations. Why don’t you start a training program for them to help? The Nuum will still be in charge, but they wouldn’t have to get their hands so dirty. It works on The Dark Lady…’ I tell you, I could’ve kissed him.”
“And Farren went for this?”
Maire spread her hands. “What can I say? He wanted his ships. I pointed out to him that the Thorans obviously had access to a lot more technology than they were supposed to have already. This was a good way to channel that know-how into constructive uses—uses that would help the Nuum. Farren may be evil, but he’s not stupid. We don’t have the heavy construction equipment we need any more, and like Timash said, the Nuum don’t like getting their hands dirty.”
I sat back, needing time to absorb what I had heard. Farren had tried to maneuver Maire into letting him build a new navy, one that he would have assured was loyal to him. What he planned to do with it was problematic, but Timash’s idea allowed Maire to neatly insert Thorans into the mix, and there was not a Thoran in Dure who would willingly give Farren the time of day. On the other hand, it was the first step toward Maire’s (and my) dream of elevating the Thoran population to equality with the Nuum. I felt almost jealous that they had been able to accomplish all of that without me.
Chapter 13
The Phantom of the Procyon
“All right,” I said, “I admit I am very impressed. You handled Farren and you raised the Thorans’ standard of living. Two questions: First, what happed to all the ships? You told me this was pretty much it.”
Maire grimaced. “I told you I cut a deal with Farren. I never said he stuck by it. He pointed out that while we were free to run Dure as we pleased, we were both under the Council’s microscope, and while giving Thorans some freedom was one thing, putting them on warships—or even near warships—was another thing entirely. Possessing any sort of higher technology has been a capital crime for Thorans for almost three hundred years, and although some of them are allowed to use it in their jobs, this…was different. If we went ahead, and the Council found out what we were doing, they’d come down on us with an army. Don’t forget that my even being co-regent didn’t sit well with them. There were Council members who would gladly have had me shot.”
“And Farren would have let them.”
“Yes, he would. But it would have complicated matters. Anyway, we had to take the idea to the Council, and if we both hadn’t pushed it, it never would have gotten anywhere. As it was, it took two years before they gave us permission, two years during which I had to watch Farren every minute so he didn’t cut some kind of deal behind my back.” She sighed, a faraway look in her eyes. “I had to do some things I’m not proud of, like shut down some projects that came from Thorans—projects that I would have supported if I could, but I couldn’t. I had to think of the greater good. And other things, too, things I couldn’t even tell Timash about. That’s when he left; he thought I didn’t trust him. I didn’t see him again until he told me you were back.”
“I know you had your reasons.”
“Yes, I did. But I need to tell you. You need to know what I’ve done.”
“First things first,” I said. We had been apart so long, and had had so little time simply to spend together, I was far from sure I was ready to hear her dark secrets. Some day, when all of these crises were over and gone, she could tell me everything. “You have yet to explain why you only have one large ship in your navy.”
“We had two,” she said flatly. “The Celestial. Two hundred and fifty crew. Hand-picked. There was an accident. It was the only bad thing in the last twenty years that I couldn’t blame on Farren.” Maire was silent for a few moments. I could understand. I had lost men, too.
“And I have The Dark Lady, of course. She’s still sitting in one of the hangar bays. Skull and the crew are going stir-crazy, but I didn’t think Thorans out of uni
form wandering around the ship was the wisest course. What was the second question?”
I lifted my hands in a gesture of bewilderment. “What does all this have to do with my becoming the commander of your fleet?”
My incomprehension seemed to amuse her; at least, it brought a smile to her face, which I was happy to see. Her earlier anxiety about deals with Farren and the dams she had been forced to erect to progress seemed to have faded.
“That, my love, was an easy decision. After I watched Lobok’s disaster at the Chronologic Institute, I realized that we don’t have any really experienced military leaders. A man like Lobok can run a ship, but he can’t run a navy. It was just like what we saw in Jhal with the klurath; they’d been in charge so long they didn’t have anyone who could take charge. Even Gaz Bronn didn’t have a clue how to fight a war the way you did. And if we’re going to integrate Thorans into the Navy, I need a commander who doesn’t have a prejudice against them. You.”
“You realize that I was never ranked higher than lieutenant, and I retired from the service twenty—well, I had retired from the service—twenty years ago. Not to mention I was in the Army, not the Navy.”
“Yes, and you’re still the most qualified man for the job.”
I shrugged. “All right, if you say so, my lady. What are your orders?”
Maire stood up. “First things first. You have to meet the captain.”
We collected my new aide and headed for the bridge. Before I could meet the captain, however, I had a lot to learn about my own fleet. It appeared that I had three kinds of personnel under my command: Thorans, who often as not nearly hurt themselves saluting me; Nuum who saluted Maire smartly and me with courteous precision; and Nuum who saluted us both with courteous precision.
“Can you guess which crew members are Lobok’s men and which are mine?” Maire asked after yet another demonstration of exact courtesy. I merely offered a wry look in favor of an answer, and then I frowned.
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