The Macedonian Hazard

by Eric Flint

  “Menelaus, brother of Ptolemy.”

  “We have similar roles then. I am here to watch the ship people for Carthage and you are here to watch them for the satrapy of Egypt.”

  Menelaus wasn’t convinced, by any means, that a Carthaginian merchant was of the same class as a Macedonian noble and the brother of the satrap of Egypt, but Thaïs warned him that he should not try to stand on social rank with the ship people, so he nodded as politely as he could.

  It turned out to be a good choice. Capot was fairly knowledgeable about the ship and the ship people, and directed Menelaus to the carrot cake, a sweet breadlike substance that was made without yeast, yet wasn’t a flatbread, as well as offering other tidbits of knowledge and suggestions about food and drink.

  Queen of the Sea, Carthage Harbor

  November 16, 320 BCE

  Standing back from the railing, Menelaus watched as Capot waved at Carthage Harbor. It was much the same shape as the images he remembered from the Queen of the Sea’s computers, but smaller, nowhere near the thousand feet across it was supposed to be. It had the circular inner harbor, but it was smaller, only about three hundred feet across, and the long commercial harbor was both shorter and narrower than it would be a hundred years from now.

  “Well,” Capot asked, “what do you think of our harbor?”

  “It’s impressive,” Menelaus said. And it was, sort of.

  Capot laughed. “A bit of a letdown after seeing the pictures in the computer, but we may be able to speed up the new harbor this time, since we have the designs.”

  “Not if you’re going to have to dig it out to a depth of ten meters rather than two.”

  “The steam engines will help.”

  “How are you doing with those?”

  Capot grimaced. “Not well. Another boiler blew up and there is talk of a large sacrifice to persuade the gods to be more generous.”

  Menelaus looked at him and Capot shrugged. “I am not involved. I just got it over the radio.”

  The city-state of Carthage had received a radio on the Queen’s last stop here, just under two months ago. Each radio station was a small team of ship people and at least one Greek who spoke some English, often a retiring Silver Shield. The Greek was there mostly as a translator and spoke Greek, some English, and the local language, whether it was Latin, Phoenician, Egyptian, or whatever. They also dropped a computer with a translator app and the ability to manage the band hopping necessary to bounce ham radio signals off the ionosphere consistently. It meant that as long as the team members were not molested, they could keep that city in touch with the other cities on and around the Mediterranean, and they could keep the city in touch with the Queen of the Sea, no matter where she was. Even in Trinidad. The translation app, combined with someone who spoke both Greek and the local tongue, meant that they could communicate even if it took some effort.

  Alexandria had a station, as did Athens, Ashdod, Sardis, Rhodes, Tyre and more. Often the embassy was staffed by passengers from the Queen, usually older passengers. Carthage, for instance, was manned by Colonel James Godfrey, his wife Ila, and their widowed daughter, Tina Johnson. James was appointed colonel in the armed forces of New America before he and his family were seconded back to the Queen to be the radio operators for Carthage. James handled the computer, but he was hard of hearing and therefore spoke loudly. His wife and daughter handled most of the voice contact and were learning Phoenician, although their Alabama accents added some difficulty.

  Capot’s smile developed a bitter twist. “Look over there.” He pointed and Menelaus, who was still standing back from the railing, followed his pointing finger. “That is where they made their demonstration.” As part of the procedure for dropping off the radio teams, the Queen of the Sea demonstrated the ship’s guns and made it clear that if anything happened to the radio team, the guns would be turned on the city that failed to protect them.

  “I know how you feel, but be happy, my friend. I saw the Queen run over Gorgias’ fleet in Alexandria Harbor. Granted, it was a stupid thing for the general to do, to try and take this ship, but a whole fleet! And in some ways what they did at Rhodes was even worse. All that happened to you was a few grapevines got trashed and they paid for them.”

  “Yes, but they were my family’s grapevines,” Capot said. “And last I heard, the government is still holding onto the money.”

  Carthage

  November 17, 320 BCE

  Allison Gouch sat in the house of the Barca clan and sipped the wine. She looked over at Tina Johnson.

  Who shrugged indifference. “I like margaritas, with lime and salt.”

  Allison smiled. “This is actually quite good.” It was a red wine, fruity, with overtones of oak. Not quite like anything that she had tasted in the twenty-first century. Two thousand plus years had changed viniculture in a number of ways. The yeast was different, even the grapes were a little different. Most of all, the techniques were different. Mostly, from her experience in this century, worse.

  But here in Carthage, she was tasting something that she hadn’t tasted before. There was a mix of flavors that was new. She swished the wine around in her mouth, then swallowed. This was not a twenty-first-century wine tasting, where she was trying five hundred wines. She would, today, try only sixteen wines, three from the Barca wineries, and two each from the Manipua wineries and some others. Capot was here to translate for his mother and sister.

  One thing that she had learned about Carthage was that women had a distinct role from men, but it wasn’t a lesser role. The women owned virtually all of what a twenty-first-century person would call real property. At least in Carthage proper and those places under its direct control. So she sat here on an inlaid terrace, drinking some excellent wine from silver chalices, while chatting with three women in gowns that exposed their breasts. It was surreal, but not offensive. These women were not property. They were property owners.

  Then the servant brought in the next amphora, and Allison hid a grimace. This woman was property. Quite literally property, a Gallic slave from what would in a future world be Spain. She had reddish-blond hair and a very self-effacing manner.

  Again, Allison looked over at Tina and saw a carefully hidden headshake. One thing that Allison did know, because she was there when it was decided, was that Tina was the chief of station, the chief spy, for the ship people and New America here in Carthage.

  Allison made notes on the vintage on her slate. The handwritten notes were translated to text and sent to the Queen even as she wrote. She would have a record when she got back.

  Queen of the Sea, Carthage Harbor

  November 20, 320 BCE

  The supplies were loaded and the Queen left for Formentera Island, which would be the next stop on their itinerary. At Formentera Island, they stopped for several days while the owners of that island provided guided tours of the under-construction hotel complex. They also got goods from that set of tribal lands that wasn’t yet Gaul, much less France, Spain, or Germany: sturgeon and caviar, beef and barley, amber, and everything else anyone could think of that the ship people might want.

  The ship people didn’t actually want most of these items, because they had better goods that were made cheaper. Things like combs and brushes were of great value and tremendous cost to make for the locals but not for the ship people. On the other hand, the concentration of goods was in itself a draw for other traders.

  That was rapidly turning the small town on Formentera Island into a hub for international trade. It was nominally Carthaginian, but not in Carthage, so it traded with anyone that put in. That anyone probably included the occasional pirate. But then, in the fourth century BCE, almost any ship—military or civilian—would turn temporarily pirate if the opportunity arose.

  Fort Plymouth, Trinidad

  December 5, 320 BCE

  “It’s good to have you back, Captain,” President Al Wiley said, shaking Lars Floden’s hand with all the appearance of genuine friendship.

&nb
sp; Lars was not completely convinced. Not because President Wiley didn’t sound sincere. He did. Not even because they had had conflicts in the past. They had. But at the same time they had worked together well enough. No, the reason that Lars was less than confident was because Al was a twenty-first-century American politician, and such people made swindlers seem honest and straightforward in comparison.

  “I really am, Captain,” Wiley assured him as he guided Lars to a chair in a corner of his office. It was hand-carved of native wood and the cushions were native-dyed llama wool. It was no doubt bought from one of the native tribes dotting the coast of northern Venezuela. They were good at woodworking because many of their houses were built on stilts. Wiley took another at right angles to it, with a coffee table between them. The table looked more modern. In fact, Lars was pretty sure it had been made in the Queen’s carpentry shop during the months that the Queen had sat in the harbor helping build the tools that Fort Plymouth was using to build the tools to build a twenty-first-century world out of a Stone Age starter kit.

  President Wiley saw him looking and seemed to read his mind. “We’ve had to rejigger our notion of what ‘Stone Age’ actually means quite a bit since we landed among them. And we have the whole range from hunter gatherers to not-quite-Mayans within a few hundred miles.”

  Lars nodded. He got regular reports and the Queen visited Fort Plymouth monthly. The “not-quite-Mayans” were several tribes that failed to fully enter the archaeological record because they built their cities out of wood, not stone, and built them on stilts, often in floodplains.

  Apparently this was going to be a friendly meeting. “For all sorts of practical reasons. The factories on the Queen have a new load of cylinders and steam piping. The presence of the Queen, even more than the Reliance, acts as a warning to the locals.”

  That much was true. Even though it was the Reliance that had performed the punitive expedition against the Tupky alliance a few months ago, the Queen was larger and just more visually impressive.

  “As well as a promise,” Wiley continued, “because we have been touting the university you are establishing on the Queen all up and down the Venezuelan coast. We have a group of young people anxious to board the Queen and begin their studies. And most important of all, Captain Floden, we need to talk. And we need to do it face-to-face, not over the radio.”

  Lars felt a sudden apprehension that he was about to buy a lemon at an outlandish price. As well as a strong urge to retreat back to the Queen and never return to the port at Fort Plymouth.

  Just then a native woman came in, pushing a cart of snacks and tea. The cart was wood with simple leather bearings made in Fort Plymouth. The rubber on the wooded wheels was locally produced, one of the products of the high-end Stone Age culture that existed in central and northern South America when they landed. The woman pushing it was dressed in a calf-length skirt, sandals, and not much else. Nothing at all covering her chest. Lars lifted an eyebrow at Wiley.

  “Wasn’t my idea.” Wiley shrugged. “The locals, from hunter-gatherer types to city dwellers, don’t have much of a nudity taboo and they took offense when some of our old biddies, of both sexes, suggested that their lack of attire was immoral. It became quite a political issue in our legislature. And even if we ship people have a prominent position in the new nation we are forging here, we are outnumbered by the locals by a large margin. And that’s only going to get worse as the proto-citizens of the coastal tribes get the vote over the next couple of years. A lot of our politicians recognized the demographics and flip-flopped on public nudity as soon as the backlash developed. Looking to the next election, when a lot of those nekkid people will be voters.” Wiley didn’t sound thrilled about the situation.

  Lars had a relaxed Scandinavian view on the subject; nudity didn’t particularly bother him. He put that aside with a shake of his head. “What was it you wanted to speak to me in person about?”

  “We want to buy two of your lifeboats, Captain Floden. The big ones. They will become the basis of our navy until we can get ships built.”

  “I have a responsibility to my passengers and crew, Mr. President, and it’s not one I can or will abandon.”

  “I know that, Captain, and I would never ask you to. But with the conversion, the Queen only carries three thousand passengers, including the factory workers who work in the Queen’s shops, and six hundred crew. I would never ask you to sell us more than you can do without. Two of the three-hundred-passenger mega-lifeboats would provide us with coastal defense and the ability to reach the coast of Venezuela in force, and not endanger your passengers at all. Especially when you consider that you have all the inflatable life rafts.”

  “Those inflatables are a backup system. They have no engines and are not designed for long-term use.”

  “True. But they can be towed by your lifeboats and they are covered against weather. They represent a real capacity that means you’re safe even if you lose some of the ‘real’ lifeboats. Besides, Captain, you’ve been using the lifeboats as ship’s boats since The Event put us all here.”

  “That’s one of the problems, Mr. President. We are putting more strain on the engines than we ever intended. We are having to use the machine shops on the Queen to fabricate new parts for the engines just to keep them running. Should the worst happen, I don’t want my people stuck in the middle of the Atlantic with a busted engine and no way to get to shore.”

  They kept arguing, but Lars knew that Al Wiley was correct. Besides, the Queen needed the silver and gold that Al Wiley was offering. Not everyone in Europe trusted ship money. There were gold and silver mines in Central and South America, and the locals provided the precious metals to the ship people on Trinidad on a pound-for-pound basis in exchange for good steel knives and other tools.

  The iron was mostly bought in Europe, transported to Trinidad by the Reliance, then remelted and converted to steel here in Trinidad, using oil-burning furnaces in a crucible process that was slow, tedious, and expensive, compared to back in the world, but produced good steel.

  * * *

  After lunch, they got back to it.

  “I want to convince you to change the schedule of the Queen of the Sea,” Wiley told Lars bluntly. Almost belligerently. “We are working on steam sailing ships that will run to five hundred tons of carrying capacity. They will have a sailing rig and steam engines. The sailing rig will be the main power source, with the engine as a backup for when the winds are blowing the wrong way, or not blowing at all. But it’s going to take us upwards of two years, maybe three or four years, before the first ship comes off the quays. And that’s using all the steam-powered heavy equipment that we have been able to put together.”

  “That seems a good reason for us to stay on the route we’re on now. With all respect, Mr. President, your colony here probably can’t survive if the Queen isn’t bringing goods and colonists from Europe on a regular basis,” Lars said. “We have a schedule that is quite profitable for the Queen, between the university and the paying passengers, not to mention the cargo we can manage. And it’s a capacity you desperately need if you are going to survive, much less prosper.”

  Al Wiley shook his head. “Don’t you think I know that, Captain? I have nightmares about the Roanoke colony, and wake up to worse. I watched a man die yesterday, from complications due to the improperly purified bovine insulin we are using. I held the hand of a man who had actually built a homebuilt airplane back in the world. The only person on the Queen, so the only person in the world, to have actually built an airplane is dead. All his real-world experience is lost. Because we can’t make decent insulin yet. And he’s not the only one. Half the reason that Fort Plymouth is so crowded together is because we are desperately trying to keep walking distance down for our more elderly passengers. Every time one of them dies—and we’ve lost over five hundred of the over-sixty-five crowd since The Event—we lose a treasure trove of experience.

  “Still, Captain, if we are going to spread civilizat
ion—and even more, if we are going to develop trading partners—we need to get started on it sooner rather than later. Also, to be blunt, the Queen of the Sea is the most impressive thing on the oceans of this world and will remain so for the foreseeable future. We are going to need that sense of awe and the tacit threat it represents to keep our trade ships safe.”

  Lars considered. Wiley wasn’t the first person to suggest that they run a more flexible route. Eumenes wanted them in the Persian Gulf. Any number of ship people wanted them to go find coffee plants. Others wanted them to go find real tea and other goods in China, like silk, and cotton from India, Peru, or Mexico. No one was really sure which, though Wikipedia said there was wild cotton in Peru.

  In truth, there was a very great deal that improved trade around the world would do for the world, and Lars was inclined to do it. But he wasn’t going to do it for nothing. He started negotiating.

  214–216 12th Street, Fort Plymouth, Trinidad

  December 7, 320 BCE

  Carthalo sat on the wooden bench with a cloth in his hand and a bowl of emery mud next to him. He dipped the cloth in the mud and started rubbing the lens that was locked into the wood-and-wire rack. It was slow, tedious work. The finer the finish, the better the lens. But while he had to get rid of the rough bits, he couldn’t change the shape without distorting the lens. So it was rub, rinse clean, check, rub, rinse clean, check. Over and over and over again.

  Stella Matthews was working on a machine to grind lenses, but Carthalo was doing it the way his people and the Greeks had been doing it for the last century and more. It was a slow process, but you could make a lens that would start a fire, and as he had learned since his arrival in this strange land, a lens that would project an image on a screen or, in combination with other lenses, make a telescope.