The Macedonian Hazard

by Eric Flint

  “Plus, it would be wrong,” said Marie Easley.

  “Plus, it would be wrong,” Daniel acknowledged with a nod. Daniel was looking about ten years older than he had when The Event happened.

  Lars looked at Laura to catch her eye, then he shot a quick glance at Daniel Lang. She gave him back a slight shake of her head. “Later” that head shake said, clear as words.

  Surprisingly, considering her medical condition, Laura was looking good. She had a heart murmur that required blood thinner and just after The Event they had thought she was on the soon-to-die list. But, using a combination of twenty-first-century chemistry and fourth century BCE knowledge of medicinal plants, she and her medical staff came up with a drug produced from a local plant that thinned her blood enough to prevent the clotting. At least they hoped it did. Her staff was now twenty, two ship people doctors and eighteen local doctors from Athens, Macedonia, Egypt, Carthage, and New America.

  They would have expanded the medical staff more, but there were only so many beds on the Queen and only so much room. The University of the Seas was probably the most exclusive and expensive school on the planet, in spite of all they could do. There were a hundred or a thousand qualified applicants for every slot and the number of slots was also limited by the other functions of the Queen: factory, United Nations, residence of at least one of the queens of the Alexandrian Empire and its toddler king.

  All those functions took up space, and while the Queen of the Sea was a massive cruise ship—had been one of the biggest on Earth even back in the twenty-first century—it wasn’t infinite.

  * * *

  After Daniel Lang left to set more watchers on Olympias, Lars looked to Laura. “How’s he doing?”

  “There is nothing physically wrong with him. No, that’s not quite accurate. It’s the stress levels involved. Dan isn’t really suited to a high-stress job because he stresses himself enough anyway. Have you ever seen pictures of American presidents before and after their presidencies? It’s the constant stress. Stress has real effects on the human body. Usually, we have time between periods of stress to recover. There hasn’t been much downtime since The Event. Besides which, Dan hasn’t gotten over leaving his wife and kids back in the twenty-first century.”

  “What do you recommend?”

  “A long-ass vacation and to get laid,” Laura said. “Not that I think either of those is going to happen.”

  “How long a vacation?”

  “A month at least. Preferably two or three months. But who would take his place? And how are you going to put him on vacation without it looking like you’re firing him, or at least have lost confidence in him?”

  “I don’t know,” Lars said, “but I would rather replace him for a few months than have to bury him and replace him permanently.”

  Roxane’s suite

  January 11, 319 BCE

  Roxane wanted to be with Dag, but she couldn’t stand to see him like that, with the plastic tube down his throat, needles in his arms and unable to move. So she was back here, plotting her revenge on Olympias. She didn’t know how she could manage it, but she was going to…

  There was a knock and her maid stuck her head in. “Ah, Olympias is at the door to the suite, asking to see you.”

  “She can take her demands—”

  The maid shook her head. “Not demanding. Requesting. She was very clear about that.”

  And that right there stopped Roxane, because Olympias didn’t request. She demanded. Even with Philip and Alexander, she had demanded. Which was why Alexander had preferred to love his mother from a considerable distance. Olympias making a request rather than a demand was the sphinx answering a question rather than asking one.

  It took Roxane a few moments to process that, then she went to the bedside table, opened the drawer and took out the automatic pistol that Dag kept there. She checked it to make sure that there was a round in the chamber and the safety was off, then she went to the breakfast nook, sat at the table, and placed the pistol on the table about an inch from her hand. “Very well. Send her in.”

  Olympias came in. Her gaze moved quickly around the room, finding no guards, then back to Roxane at the table. Then she froze. Not for long, just for a moment. Long enough for Roxane to realize that she knew what the semiautomatic pistol was.

  Olympias nodded then, a deep nod. Almost—but not quite—a bow. “You will not need that, mother of my grandson.”

  Roxane placed her hand on the pistol and lifted a sculpted eyebrow in question.

  “I did not poison Dag Jakobsen. I swear this on the life of my grandson.”

  Roxane didn’t let her mouth twist, but it wanted to. On the life of her grandson. Olympias’ grandson was Roxane’s son. Not a debt that Roxane would call due.

  “I know, Roxane, but there is no oath I could hold more sacred. And if I lie, it will not be you but the gods that call the debt due.”

  Roxane knew that was true, but she didn’t know that Olympias wasn’t lying anyway. She didn’t trust her former mother-in-law not to put her grandson at risk if the gain was great enough. “If not you, who?”

  “I don’t know,” Olympias said.

  And for the first time, Roxane heard real emotion in that voice. Frustration. She still wasn’t sure, but she was starting to wonder. She waved Olympias to a seat. Not the chair across from her. She still didn’t want Olympias that close. But a couch halfway across the room.

  Olympias took the seat and they began to speak in earnest. Eventually, Roxane came to believe that Olympias was innocent. For one thing, the cocoamat was not one of Dag’s preferred drinks. He drank it because they didn’t have access to coffee, but he wasn’t fond of it and always added cream and honey. It was a lousy place to put poison if your target was Dag. It made more sense, a lot more sense, if Travis was the target.

  “You almost convince me, but it will not convince Daniel Lang. Nor, I think, most people. What do you want of me?” Roxane asked.

  “I want you to help me clear my name.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it failed to kill your Dag. If I had done it, he would be dead. I don’t want my reputation sullied by a failed poisoning.”

  And that, at least, Roxane could well believe.

  * * *

  After the meeting with Olympias, Roxane went to the daycare center, where her son was making a hash out of drawing the English alphabet, using a green crayon. Little Dorothy Miller was sitting beside him, telling him all about doing it wrong, near as Roxane could tell. In a cradle a few feet away, Eumenes’ infant son was being gently rocked by his nanny.

  Stateroom 536, Queen of the Sea

  Calix watched the television as it reported on the poisoning and wondered. He was one of three aides to Arrhidaeus, Antigonus One-eye’s representative to the USSE. Why haven’t they arrested Olympias? She is the obvious suspect.

  Then his phone rang and it was Cleon, his direct superior. “Did you see the news?”

  “I am watching it now, Lord Cleon.”

  “Well, why haven’t they arrested Olympias? Everyone knows she’s a witch.”

  “Her rank is all I can think of, Lord.”

  “Ha! Even Philip would have arrested her over something like this. Dag Jakobsen ranks high among the ship people.”

  “Not that high, and much of that is because of his relationship with Roxane.”

  “Well, I want you to go see what’s going on with the ship people guards. Offer to help or something, but go find out.”

  Calix didn’t let a grimace appear on his face or in his tone. “Yes, sir. I will go right away.” He had no desire to join the investigation and even less to be brought in contact with Olympias. Olympias knew him of old. Better if the world simply assume that Olympias was the poisoner and imprison her, or put her off the ship. He wanted her out of the way.

  Lydia, east of the Bosphorus Straits

  January 12, 319 BCE

  Erica Mirzadeh didn’t burst into the tent, but only because
there were guards at the entrance. “You let me in!” she shouted. “That bitch Olympias has poisoned Dag Jakobsen.”

  “Let her in,” Eurydice said, suddenly concerned, and the guard did. As Erica came in, Eurydice asked, “What happened?”

  “She poisoned Dag Jakobsen.”

  “You said that already. What else?”

  “Ah, well, that’s pretty much all.”

  “What precisely does the message say?” asked Eumenes from the camp stool he was seated on. They were going over the plans for the pontoon bridge. They had a regular factory making pontoons. Eight-foot-wide and four-foot-deep frameworks, wrapped in tarred cloth and painted with more tar.

  Erica Mirzadeh read the message, and it said even less than she had. There was nothing about Olympias in the message at all. Just that Dag Jakobsen and another man, Travis, had been poisoned and Travis had died.

  “Did you know Travis Siegel?” Eumenes asked.

  “No. I never met him. It’s a big ship and we never ran into each other. Honestly, I never met Dag either, though of course I saw him on shipwide TV several times. He’s usually with Roxane. It’s not personal, not exactly. It’s that that bitch poisoned one of ours.”

  Eumenes laughed and Eurydice wanted to. Philip pointed at Erica and shook his head in rebuke, all without looking right at her.

  Erica blushed. “Sorry. We really do mean it when we talk about equality, but not that many of us came back in The Event and it’s a bond between us.”

  “As it should be,” Eurydice said. She looked at Philip. “Just because she is concerned about Dag doesn’t mean that she thinks ship people are better than us.”

  “Ship people are better than us,” Philip said. “They are healthier and better educated. But they should not act like it. It’s against the ship people rules. People should obey the rules.”

  Erica Mirzadeh grimaced a little, but nodded. The truth, Eurydice knew, was that Erica was no more comfortable with Philip than most people were. It was getting better over time because Philip was acting as the primary computer for the bridge project and Erica was deeply involved. That threw them together and people got used to Philip’s ways.

  “That doesn’t actually sound like Olympias,” Eumenes said.

  Eurydice turned to him in shock, and he looked back, consideration plain on his face.

  “She scares me,” Eumenes said, not sounding all that scared. “Always has. But a good part of the reason for that is that she has her insanity under control. This doesn’t seem to me to fit her style.”

  “She takes credit for things she didn’t do,” Philip said, sounding aggrieved. “She took credit for my spectrum disorder.”

  “Which is probably a good thing, when all is said and done,” Eumenes said. “If it were thought that the gods did it, things might have been much worse.”

  “Not why she did it,” Philip said.

  “No, you’re quite right, love,” Eurydice said. “She just wanted credit for having powerful and subtle magic. That’s half the trouble with her. You can never know what’s real and what’s illusion.”

  “And that’s what bothers me about this,” Eumenes said. “It just seems too sloppy for her.”

  “Well, I think she just didn’t understand what our labs could discover,” Erica pointed out.

  “Possible. But in her way Olympias is as careful a person as I have ever met,” Eumenes said.

  “And as evil,” Eurydice said. “She had Philip murdered and forced me to commit suicide.”

  Eumenes looked at Eurydice, and she felt her face heat. The truth was that while she despised Olympias personally—she was a vicious old harridan—she wasn’t all that much worse than any of the rest of them. Perhaps even herself.

  “She would have had Philip murdered. In a different universe,” Eumenes said. “In any case, there is nothing we can do about this now. What about the tar?”

  Erica Mirzadeh grimaced and came to the table. “It’s being used up faster than we expected. And the shipment from Egypt is delayed again. I think Ptolemy may be being sneaky.”

  “You think he’s—” Eumenes started to say, then stopped. “No. Ptolemy doesn’t exactly hate Cassander, but the little coward isn’t one of his favorite people. I don’t see him actually conniving with Cassander, unless Cassander had more to offer him than he does. What concerns me is that whatever its cause, the delay could throw our timing off.” King Seuthes had gone back to Thrace to prepare his forces. The plan was to have the Thracians make a display to threaten Lysimachus and draw some of his forces away from the Bosphorus when they had the parts of the bridge ready to be put together. There was no way that Lysimachus would pull all his forces out, but crossing the Bosphorus against two thousand would be a lot easier than crossing it against ten thousand.

  They had signals to let Seuthes know when to act, but his preparations were going to be hard to keep secret. And if Lysimachus were to deal with him before they were ready to cross the Bosphorus and hit Lysimachus in the rear, things could get very bad for Seuthes.

  Pella, radio shack

  January 12, 319 BCE

  Malcolm Tanada checked the final connection and sent the handshake. The handshake was the radio code in the computer that would tell the Queen’s radio that the message that followed was from Malcolm and tell his computer that the Queen was who they were talking to. It was a series of codes and responses loaded into his computer and the computers in the Queen’s radio room.

  He looked at his computer screen and it took a minute before he was in. Well, not a real minute. A minute was a long time for a computer handshake, but it did take a full ten seconds, which meant there was a weak signal and a lot of interference. The bandwidth was going to be low, and it was going to take more time to send his files. He used the mouse ball and moved the cursor over the file and dragged it into the queue.

  Then he waited, looking out his window at the city of Pella. Well, small town of Pella. Maybe ten thousand people lived here, which was a lot by fourth century BCE standards, but still a small town by Malcolm’s. It was also a city of slaves. He could see them out his window, carrying water and food from place to place and working at trades in the open air.

  He shook his head and turned back to the computer. The file contained about two thousand words of text, but also twenty or so pictures. It was the report that he put together as they were setting up the radio and included things like the fact that Thessalonike was now living in Pella and Cassander had a group of Macedonian nobles calling him king. Also the fact that very few of those nobles had anything good to say about Alexander the Great, and even fewer had anything good to say about Eumenes, Philip, Eurydice, Roxane or her son.

  Royal Compound, Pella, Macedonia

  January 12, 319 BCE

  “Well?” Cassander said to Malcolm Tanada, then looked over at Thessalonike, who was watching from the sidelines. She hadn’t agreed to marry him, not yet, but she had agreed to come to Pella. She was watching the ship person with the same sort of interest she might have shown if he was a great ape or an elephant.

  Malcolm was the lead radio operator for Macedonia. And like most of the radio teams, he had a radio made by the ship people after they had arrived and a computer system that they had brought with them.

  “The derrick is finished, sir,” Malcolm said. “We’re back in contact with the Queen. We can also reach Rome, Athens, and Alexandria.”

  The derrick, as Malcolm called it, was a wooden framework that was placed on top of one of the tallest buildings in Pella. It extended up another forty feet and from what Cassander was told, allowed the range of the radio to be greatly enhanced. He also knew that a link to any station was effectively a link to all of them because, like signal fires, they formed a network. So he didn’t ask about Carthage or, for that matter, Trinidad on the other side of the world. “What about Babylon?”

  “Nothing from that team yet, sir,” Malcolm said.

  Cassander grimaced because Malcolm insisted on calli
ng him by the ship people appellation “sir,” rather than majesty or my lord. According to the ship people it was a sign of respect, but carried no precise designation of rank. Sir could be said to a merchant you were dealing with or the greatest king in the world without giving offense.

  At least, that’s what the ship people said.

  Cassander didn’t agree. He found their failure to give him his proper title—king of Macedonia—to be a calculated insult. And if it were anyone but a ship person who used “Sir,” he would have them killed for it. But the radio was vital, and even if he took it, it would do no good, because it needed another radio to be of any use and the other radio was far away and not under his control. The ship people would refuse to acknowledge any message he sent, even if he managed to make his radio work. It was an amazingly effective protection for the radio operators.

  Cassander looked at Thessalonike and saw a little half smile on her face. He suspected that it was because of the lèse-majesté the ship person was showing him. Cassander really wanted to execute Malcolm then. The fact that he couldn’t was probably amusing her greatly.

  “I didn’t really expect anything yet. First, they have to cross the frigging desert and travel down the Euphrates to Babylon. Then they will have to negotiate with Antigonus for access and a place to stay,” Malcolm said.

  Cassander knew all that, but it was taking a long time.

  Syrian desert

  January 12, 319 BCE

  Susan Godlewski reached up and wiped her forehead with a damp rag. It was raining in the Syrian desert. Again. Whoda thunk it, she thought. Susan was from Arizona. She was used to desert, which is why she’d agreed to take this position. Well, that and the very, very good money offered by Arrhidaeus and Eumenes. They hadn’t mentioned—the dumb bastards—that she was liable to drown on the way. The desert sands were now grainy mud, the wagon wheels were four inches deep and the wagons wouldn’t go anywhere till the rain stopped and the sand dried so that they could dig out the wheels. The camels, on the other hand, seemed to be enjoying the rain, holding up their heads and licking their muzzles. Or maybe they were just happy they didn’t have to pull the wagons.