Bride (The Unity Book 3)

by Gilbert M. Stack

  Adel’s excitement only seemed to grow when she resumed speaking. “There’s more. As you might imagine, Empyreals undergo a number of biological tests after completing ascension. Sperm count is among them.”

  Jewel couldn’t help interrupting. “But you had questions about whether or not Kole could get an erection. If you tested him…”

  Because of the time lag, Adel didn’t know that Jewel was rudely speaking over her for several seconds. “Post ascension, his counts were still high, but were significantly lower than they are now—eight hundred thousand milliliters—”

  As Adel broke off speaking, Jewel exasperated the problem. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Oh, I’m doing it again.”

  Adel started speaking again, evidently trying to address Jewel’s earlier question. “Yes, as I’m attempting to explain, there were significant reasons to be concerned about your husband’s ability to get an erection. Like most Empyreals, his sperm count had to be calculated based on non-invasive scans as he was unable to produce an erection at the time of testing.”

  Jewel’s eyes flashed to her husband’s apparently stoic face. This had to be embarrassing to him, didn’t it? She decided to make a gesture toward fortifying his reputation and his self-esteem. “I don’t think getting erect will be a problem if you decide it’s necessary to test him again.”

  She waited the several seconds to hear Adel’s response all the while worrying that humor really didn’t transmit well over distances greater than one or two light seconds.

  Adel laughed anyway. “I agree. This latest testing suggests that contrary to his post-ascension results, Major Delling is now one of the most virile Empyreals alive today. This is why I am so excited. Jewel, you also appear to be a fertile young woman. The chances of the two of you being able to conceive a child are astronomically greater than I would have predicted. Congratulations.”

  The physician general sounded almost giddy with the news, but before Jewel could say something polite accepting her praise, Kole deflated the atmosphere in their room. “Will these unexpected results affect my operational orders?”

  The merriment in Adel’s voice disappeared. “One of the pleasures of working with other Empyreals is that so little needs to be spelled out for you. As you have guessed, your uncle, Rear Admiral Delling, has made a formal motion to suspend your current orders and bring you back to the Hegemony to determine whether or not this marriage will be fruitful.”

  Kole did not look pleased by these words.

  Jewel didn’t like the sound of them either.

  “Why would this affect Kole’s orders?” Jewel asked.

  Kole answered without waiting for the physician general to hear the question. “There are many reasons, but all of them are cover for my uncle’s faction wishing to hide me away and drive me to commit suicide. Since they do not value the relationship with the Khaba Cartel, it is quite likely that they would attempt to drive you to commit suicide as well. With both of us dead, the contract will have been honorably fulfilled and honorably terminated.”

  If Jewel felt that Adel’s revelations regarding Kole’s fertility had been shocking, this latest insight into the agenda of Kole’s enemies absolutely staggered her. In her world, assassination was not unheard of, although it was considered a crass sign of economic weakness, but to drive someone to suicide? That sounded pathological to Jewel.

  “Empyreal Farl and I have blocked the Rear Admiral’s move to suspend your orders but there is a serious possibility that our decision will be overturned on review,” Adel informed them. “The reality is that the possibility before us is uncharted territory—”

  Jewel’s head snapped around to stare at the com panel.

  “Uncharted how? Are you saying now that Empyreals have never had children?”

  Adel continued speaking while Jewel’s interruption crossed the depths of space to her starship. “A reasonable argument could be made that given the medical peculiarities and security concerns involved, Jewel should be under Armenite medical care in the event of—oh, this time lag in our communications is becoming most annoying.”

  She paused for a moment gathering her thoughts. “Jewel, I’m not going to go into all of the particulars at this time—”

  “Why not?” Jewel demanded, but of course Adel could not hear her interruption yet.

  “But suffice it to say that children between an Empyreal and an Armenite are exceedingly rare. You Cartelites are more fertile than the typical Armenite woman so the chances of conception are correspondingly higher in your case.”

  It still didn’t feel like Adel was telling Jewel everything she needed to know. “And will there be a problem in the Hegemony about the mixed race of any child of Kole and mine?”

  This time the seconds between her response and Adel’s answer seemed to stretch out three times as long. “I think we must expect some bias against the child,” Adel finally admitted, “but your marriage contract grants you full Armenite citizenship and when we consider all the special circumstances, I think it is safe to say that any child you and Major Delling produce will be greeted with joy across the Hegemony.”

  There the woman went again making vague allusions she did not intend to clarify. It was absolutely infuriating. “What special circumstances?”

  Adel, however, was already speaking again. “Major Delling, as we speak, Justiciar General Farl is updating the instructions of Captain Krell. The Righteous Lightning is now instructed to bring you and your wife to Arch where you are to obtain passage to Luxor in the Cartel Worlds and embark upon your mission.”

  “I wish you both well,” she continued, “and assure you that the justiciar general and I will both continue to argue on your behalf for the greater strength of the Unity.”

  The call terminated before Jewel could get any further answers to her questions.

  Chapter Seven

  It’s a Question of Tactics

  “What in the void is going on here, Kole?” Jewel demanded.

  Her new husband crossed his tattooed arms over his muscular chest and stared at her with one of the inscrutable Empyreal expressions that Jewel had come to find so infuriating. He was still naked, as she was, but right now his body wasn’t the thing elevating her blood pressure.

  “I believe,” Kole told her in a voice that fitted his new rank of Empyreal Major, “that Empyreal Physician General Adel was quite clear in her briefing. Our unexpectedly high fertility levels have changed the calculation behind our orders, making it more likely that internal Hegemonic politics will continue to overtly influence our mission.”

  He said the word politics as if he found it particularly distasteful—as if he believed that most of the orders that came down the chain of command were somehow isolated from crass political considerations.

  That seemed amazingly naïve to Jewel and this added to the fury welling up inside of her. “I am not going to travel to the Hegemony so that some backwoods idiots in your family who are too stupid or inbred to understand how a modern galactic economy works can attempt to torment me into committing suicide.”

  She’d been trying to get a rise out of Kole, but her efforts failed. If anything, his voice softened a shade as he tried to better explain what was happening. “No, of course not, and I wouldn’t permit it even if you were willing. But I don’t believe this is a long-term concern for us. There are a lot of special circumstances involved in your case which would frustrate any attempt to treat you so poorly.”

  “But you said—” Jewel protested.

  “Your backwoods analogy isn’t actually that far from the truth,” Kole told her. “The Isolationists in the Hegemony still have a strong block of support within the Council of Elders but they are mostly a reactionary force these days, destined to weaken over time.” He stepped forward apparently unconscious of his nudity, slipped his arm around Jewel’s shoulder and encouraged her to sit with him on the edge of the bed.

  Jewel did so, much more conscious of her own nakedness than Kole appe
ared to be of his. Once they were firmly seated, Kole started talking again. “Remember it’s only been eight years since we actually found the Valkyrie system.”

  That eight years was more like eight days for Jewel, but she didn’t comment on this since Kole was still talking.

  “That’s twenty-two long years of the Isolationists questioning the decisions of those who argued in favor of the initial expansion into Ymir. The conquest there was not easy. Truth to tell, there are still terrorist movements on the planet and their influence has caused political, economic, and social disruptions through much of the rest of the Hegemony. Twenty-two years in which the costs of the deal between the Hegemony and your father were felt year after year, while the promised armenium increasingly looked like an elaborate Cartelite fraud.”

  Jewel had to interrupt. “What your saying is very misleading. Even before you found the armenium in the Valkyrie system, your trade with Khaba was generating fortunes.”

  Kole grinned. Apparently he was genuinely amused by her observation. “Is it just you?” he asked, “or are all Cartelites so attractively frivolous.”

  “I’m not frivolous!” Jewel protested.

  “Of course, you are, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that your Cartelite concerns appear very frivolous to we Armenites. You trade with us to earn money, but that is not why we trade with you.”

  His statement stopped Jewel. “It isn’t, is it?” She thought back to her conversations with the justiciar general and his comments on the origins of the armenium trade. “You trade with us for security, or at least, that’s why you started doing it, isn’t it?”

  Kole was still smiling as he nodded. “That’s exactly right. You Cartelites see everything in terms of solars. You’re obsessed with how many you have.”

  Jewel frowned. “That’s not quite right. We earn solars so we can buy things.”

  Kole did not concede his point. “Which you then value in terms of how many solars they cost or how many you could sell them for. We Armenites don’t view things that way. Money is a tool, nothing more. We don’t sell armenium to make money, we trade it for things that money can’t buy like strength and security. When your father approached the Hegemony with proof that armenium had been discovered elsewhere in the galaxy it sent a cataclysmic shock through the Council of Elders. It divided the indivisible—split the Unity. Many Armenites, and the Isolationists were chief among them, believed that armenium could exist nowhere but on Armen. The mere suggestion that it could develop elsewhere was heretical to these people. They wanted your father kidnapped so they could torture the truth out of him. But others among the Council were more cautious. They believed that acting as the Isolationists suggested was not only dishonorable but that it made it less likely that the next discovery of armenium would be brought to the attention of the Hegemony if they mistreated your father.”

  Jewel understood exactly what Kole was talking about. It was the same basic argument she had made to Justiciar General Farl when she’d argued that rather than punishing her crewmates for their salvage and mining activities in Valkyrie, the Armenites should reward them for their discovery, setting a precedent that encouraged other prospectors to come to Armen first if they discovered further armenium deposits.

  “The Expansionist camp won the debate and a deal was struck. Your father, and through him the Khaba Cartel, was given a contract to process raw armenium ore for the Hegemony. In return he gave us information that permitted us to identify the individuals who had profaned the sacred armenium deposits. And for the next twenty-two years the Hegemony invested its resources in conquering Ymir and tracking down the lost system of Valkyrie. All of that time the Isolationists argued that we were chasing a myth—that there was no new source of armenium—while the expansionists counter argued that all they needed was a little more time to identify the source of the armenium ore your father had showed to them.”

  Jewel couldn’t believe the things Kole was sharing with her. Not only had he just nonchalantly informed her of the greatest secret in the galaxy, that prior to Valkyrie all the armenium in the universe had come from just one star system, but he was admitting to deep philosophical divisions within the government of the Hegemony.

  Kole continued his explanation. “The discovery of armenium in Valkyrie should have ended the schism within the Unity, but while the Isolationists recoiled in the short term and admitted their obvious mistake, they did not reunite with their Expansionist opponents and accept their proven leadership. Oh, some of them did, to be sure, but the hardcore extremists remain committed to taking power within the Hegemony and overturning the fundamental principles of Expansionist doctrine. It is beginning to appear that you and I are a direct threat to Isolationist aspirations.”

  That last sentence seemed a mighty big leap to Jewel. “Because the Isolationists are opposed to the relationship with the Cartel Worlds? They want to pull back completely into the Hegemony and cut off the rest of the galaxy?”

  “Not precisely,” Kole corrected her. “The Isolationists were not impervious to the implications of the discovery of armenium in the Valkyrie System. Like all other Armenites they fundamentally believe that all armenium is already morally ours. Neither do they disagree with the Council of Elder’s determination to use our military might to control any new source of armenium which might be discovered in the future.”

  “Then what is the problem?” Jewel asked.

  “It’s a question of tactics,” Kole explained. “The Expansionist faction of the Council of Elders does not believe that the Hegemony is strong enough to conquer all of human space. It believes that the aims of the Unity can best be achieved through partnerships with outsiders—partnerships backed up by the threat of overwhelming military force.”

  “Partnerships like the one between Khaba and Delling?” Jewel asked.

  “Precisely,” Kole explained. “While the Expansionists believe that direct rule is unnecessary and may even be counterproductive in the quest to secure the Hegemony, the Isolationist faction believes that our current armenium monopoly is sufficient leverage to force the galaxy to its knees.”

  The very idea horrified Jewel and she wondered if Kole fully understood the implications of the Isolationist position. These radicals were courting a full-scale galactic war. “That is a very dangerous supposition. Even if the Isolationists proved correct in the short term, they would provoke every government in the galaxy to invest massively in finding additional sources of armenium. If it’s in two systems, it has to be in more.”

  Kole nodded. “I agree. So do the Expansionists.”

  “I see,” Jewel said and she thought she was telling the truth. “And your House got the right to develop the armenium mines in Valkyrie because you’re Expansionists, right? Except for your crazy Uncle Delling.”

  Kole shook his head. “No, we got the mining rights because we’re Isolationists, but the Council of Elders gambled that they could co-opt the leadership of the House and gain its resources and those of our allies for the Expansionist cause. They believed that if they forced us into a relationship with Khaba, they could use our sense of honor to compel us to support their vision of the Unity.”

  This was getting more and more complicated. “And were they right?”

  Kole nodded. “For the most part they were. There are still holdouts like my uncle, but for the most part Delling is now an unhappy bridge between Expansionist and Isolationist factions in the Hegemony.”

  Jewel was going to have to think about this at greater length, but she had at least one more question she wanted answered first. “And how does our marriage work into this?”

  Kole grimaced. “Marriage is rare but of great symbolic importance in the Hegemony. By marrying Delling to the Khaba Cartel it shackled our family to this new path. So long as an honorable relationship exists between House and Cartel we are bound to the Expansionist strategy.”

  He looked as if he wanted to say something more, but then chose not to.

  “
What is it?” Jewel asked him. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “There are a lot of things I’m not telling you yet. Everything has been complicated by my failure after my ascension and by your experiences in Valkyrie. I agree that you are going to have to know this information soon, but I’ve already given you a lot to mull over, and now that we’ve found out that the Righteous Lightning is going to take us to Arch, I think our time would be better spent preparing for our mission to the Cartel Worlds. I need to meet my new thetes and—”

  Jewel cut him off. “Kole, I want to know what you’re keeping from me. And I want to know it now.”

  He looked as if he might object for a moment, but then the tension seemed to leave his body. “You’re right. I should have told you already. It’s a deeply personal, deeply spiritual thing and I’d hoped to have the opportunity to introduce it to you properly, but it’s already happening and you’ll notice it soon even without—”

  A voice erupted from the communication panel on the wall, interrupting him. “Empyreal Major Delling, please report to the brig. There has been an incident involving your thetes. Medical personnel are on the way.”

  “Your thetes?” Jewel said. “Does he mean my crewmates?”

  Kole jumped to his feet and slapped the switch on the communication console. “This is Empyreal Major Delling. Acknowledged and on my way.”

  He was pulling on his uniform trousers before he finished responding to the com message.

  Jewel grabbed her own gray coverall and hurried to get dressed.

  Chapter Eight

  This Thete Is Your Lover?

  “What happened?” Kole demanded as he and Jewel swept past the security station into the brig.

  Ahead of them, Jewel could see a cluster of uniformed personnel standing outside of one of the cells staring into it.

  A lieutenant stepped forward, saluted and offered a report. “One of the thetes—the Ymirian native, Gunnarson—attacked Captain Delling and—”