“Indeed.” She took another sip of her wine.
“Where are the kids?” Jonathan looked around, noticing they were gone.
“I’m sure they just stepped out to be alone,” the duke said with a knowing smile. “I think the idea of waiting six months probably has them in a panic. Surely, Diane, we could help them out by pushing the date up a little sooner?”
“Well…” She hesitated.
“Remember how it was when you married my Marston?” he reminded her. “I recall the two of you were in a big hurry also.”
Jonathan sat back and raised his eyebrows. Lady Diane blushed at the revelation of her past by the duke. Jonathan stepped in smoothly.
“I know when I married Brett’s mother, Elaine…well, let’s just say we showed remarkable restraint.” He smiled and sipped his wine. “But it was miserable, the waiting.”
“But worth waiting for, no doubt,” added the duke with a gleam in his eyes. “I understand your wife died recently. I’m very sorry.”
“Yes, it’s been four years. At the time it was a shock—she’d been ill for so short a time before she died.” A profound sadness came over him briefly, and he stared at his feet as the familiar pang of grief filled him. “I always thought it would be me first. I never thought about having to live without her. If it wasn’t for Brett, I’m not sure what I would have done.”
Lady Diane spoke, “When Marston died, the only thing kept me going was Stephen.”
The duke added, “Stephen kept us both alive, my dear.”
Two sad blue gazes locked, held, and then shifted away.
“Your husband died in combat, did he not?” Jonathan asked gently.
“Yes, when Stephen was just six, in a battle against Ottoman forces.” She nodded.
“You’ve never remarried?” He tried a conversational tone of voice, to see if it sounded…conversational.
An awkward silence fell.
“Well, it wasn’t for lack of suitors.” Duke Brandon’s voice boomed. Lady Diane looked, well, a mix of shy and proud. “After her six months of mourning was over, I needed a big stick to beat off the men who hung on my doorstep waiting for a chance at her.”
“Oh, Alistair, you exaggerate.” She waved her hand at him, as if to shoo him away.
“I don’t doubt it, madam. A man would have been a fool not to stand in line.” Jonathan gave a sort of half bow to her, and their gazes met.
“I have long since given up on finding someone to replace Marston in my heart.” She looked away from him.
“And yourself, Ambassador?” Duke Brandon lifted his glass in his direction. “Do you think of marrying again?”
Jonathan scoffed. “At my age, who’d want an old broken down warhorse like me?” He shook his head and drained his glass in one gulp.
•●•
Diane thought he didn’t sound as if he were just being self-abasing, but as if he were resigned to being alone. Couldn’t he see what a catch he was, a decorated general, and an ambassador, with personal wealth? No, he doesn’t see it at all, she thought, he sees only a man and none of the trappings he is wrapped in.
She sipped her wine and watched him, slightly annoyed with him.
Just then, Brett and Stephen came back in the library holding hands. They smiled at each other and sat back on the couch.
“Did you enjoy the gardens, my dear?” the duke asked.
“Oh, yes, they were…lovely. What I could see of them in the dark.” She smiled at him as if they shared a private joke.
“I always thought they were best viewed early in the morning with the dew still on the blooms.”
“I can’t wait to see it, sir.” She grinned at him and then winked.
Well, Brett had certainly won over Stephen’s grandfather.
“Brett, would you join me for lunch next Friday?” Lady Diane asked.
“I’d love to, but I have a prior engagement.” She seemed to think, and then she added, “Lady Diane, perhaps you would like to join me? Lady Helena Stuart and I are organizing a Lady’s Guild for service work, and we are having the first meeting at lunch at her home on Friday.”
“A Lady’s Guild?” Diane tilted her head in question.
“Yes, Lady Helena found out about the service work I perform at the Military Hospital, and she thought several of her young women friends would like to participate, to give back to the soldiers.”
“You visit the soldiers at the hospital? What do you do?” Duke Brandon sat up as interest gleamed in his eyes.
“Anything that needs to be done. They are very shorthanded. Some days I help write letters from the boys to home, sometimes I read letters. I read books, or help with their personal needs. Some can’t use their arms to feed themselves, or shave, or comb their hair. The nurses don’t have time to do the little things. So I go and fill in where I am needed.”
“Diane, why have you and your friends never done this?” The duke turned to her. She shifted in her seat.
“I guess we never thought of it.” Her eyebrows lifted in surprise at the idea. She leads, indeed, Ambassador.
“Lady Helena has about twenty women coming, but if you would like to attend, too, we’d be honored. There is so much work to be done there and elsewhere.” Brett looked at her with hope.
“I would like very much to attend, my dear. I will be there on Friday.” She nodded to Brett and was rewarded with a large smile.
“It’s getting late, Brett, we need to be going.” Butler stood and put his drink glass down. Everyone stood as the party broke up.
“Sir, may I escort Brett home?” Stephen asked.
“Of course, we came in two cars. Take one, and then after you drop Brett, let the driver take you home,” Butler offered generously.
“Jonathan,” the duke said. “Perhaps since you have a second car, you would escort Lady Diane home?”
Brett looked at her father with concern and bit her lip.
Lady Diane picked up on it and felt his hesitation. For a brief moment, a sting of hurt shot through her, but Butler turned to her and took her hand.
“Madam, I would enjoy riding with you immensely, but after the attempt on my life last year, I never ride with anyone.” His gaze burned, and his jaw set. “It is an inconvenience, but I will only chance my own life.”
She nodded her understanding. Good Lord, he was protecting her.
She smiled at him, taking in his deep green eyes set in a ruggedly handsome face. A slow flush crept over her body with the sudden awareness of him as a man.
“My driver will take you, Diane,” Duke Brandon said.
They said good night and waited as the vehicles were brought around and loaded, until only Lady Diane and the duke were left.
She offered her cheek to his kiss as he said, “Diane, thank you for coming tonight.”
“You are looking pretty pleased with yourself, Alistair. Cat and canary comes to mind.”
“Just thinking of the day this house will be filled with children again, my dear.” His eyes twinkled in the light from the covered portico, and he helped her into the car, shut the door, and then turned to go inside.
Diane leaned into the cushion of her seat. What she’d felt tonight, with the ambassador, was more than she’d experienced since…since Marston.
Certainly, she was far too old for giddiness? For the rush of excitement?
For her body to long for his touch?
Chapter Twelve
Stephen sat at his desk on the fourth floor of Military Headquarters and stared at his console. The data he poured over was puzzling, no doubt, but he couldn’t tell if he was bothered by it because it was odd, or if it was just his instincts. After years of sorting through data transmissions, he’d developed a knack for picking out the ones needing further investigation. It was one of the reasons he’d advanced so quickly within his department.
Two years ago he’d spotted the transmitted codes for an attempt to assassinate the Regent, deciphered it, and passed it on. When it'd
been rejected, he went out on a limb to push it through to the Regent’s own security, with the help of Johann. They finally took him seriously and his evidence to heart. A week later they apprehended the cabal of conspirators.
It'd been kept very quiet, of course, even their subsequent executions for treason. Brandon received a commendation, a medal, and most precious to him, a personal letter of appreciation from William, written in the Regent’s own hand.
Being promoted to senior analyst was a major move up the career ladder. It insured he got the choice sectors to watch, the really interesting stuff like the space around Euphrates Prime. You could make your career with this sort of stuff, he realized.
He really wasn’t ambitious, but wanted to stretch himself. He could do his job without much effort, it came easily, and he liked it. But he loved the thrill of finding what might be nothing, checking it, researching, deciphering, and tracking it all down, which was great stuff. It was a bit like being a detective and working out a mystery.
Now he stared at the screen, chewing on the end of his light pen, and let the wheels of his mind turn. This could be something or nothing. He needed more info, so he punched up some previous transmissions and reviewed them for matching headers. Nervously, he ran his hand through his hair. This snippet of the transmission had been left over after the buffer emptied. An unusual event, and in light of the way the satellites operated, highly unlikely. But there it was nevertheless, a small fragment of a larger message.
Brandon reviewed the communication satellite system linking the five planets of the Archipelago. They used a form of transmission known as multiplexing. All of the transmissions were broken up in pieces, encoded with a header, beamed out into space, received at the next satellite, and then, using the headers, put back together and loaded into the buffer.
If the message was due to go downside at the satellite, it was reconstructed and sent down to the planet. If it was not, the pieces were sent on, or bounced, to the next satellite, until the message reached its intended satellite. The buffers were emptied when they filled to a certain capacity, and the transmissions sent downside to the planet’s communication system to be delivered.
This was all done by the satellite’s onboard computer. On the more heavily populated worlds, the buffer emptied at a faster rate, perhaps once an hour. Some other planets were less dense and the traffic lighter, so the buffer from their satellite emptied maybe once during a day cycle.
The reason this piece of transmission was so interesting was it'd been bounced all over known space, finally coming down to rest in the satellite’s buffer near Old Earth. Its convoluted path brought it to his computer’s attention since it was the only piece left in the buffer after all the messages were rebuilt and sent downside.
A remnant of what looked like a top secret transmission.
The transmission came from someone within the government. He could see it by the encoding in the heading. He couldn’t tell who, a part was missing, and he didn’t have security clearance for higher up. His trace ended at the government firewalls, and he couldn’t go beyond it without special codes.
If asked, he would deny his job was spying, as would his superiors. Tracking and intercepting transmissions could be a seen as a form of spying. He sat back and wondered if he’d found a traitor, or at the least some type of internal government plot. This could be more dangerous than a traitor. If high-powered politicos were involved, doors could be shut on him, superiors leaned on. He could, in fact, be made to disappear if he got too close, and it was known who was digging into their plans.
His assignment was looking for transmissions concerning the Ottomans. They didn't have a satellite of their own, but they still had some type of knowledge of what the other worlds were up to, if only in self-defense. Ever since their jihad and defeat, no one really believed they would be repentant, change their ways and become peaceful. Everyone expected them to be nursing their wounds and readying themselves for the next assault. Each of the five other planets stood on constant vigil against them.
Because they destroyed their own satellite, it was difficult for them to get information. The Ottomans could try to send someone to infiltrate a planet, but the ports were heavily guarded, and entry was strictly controlled. The proper papers would be needed and would be very costly. Smuggling personnel onto a planet was close to treason, and was punished as such. So the very fear the Ottomans created about themselves was one of the things which made it so hard for them to obtain information.
They started bringing shipping freighters into docking orbit around one of the commsats and manually hacking into the communications flow, either removing messages or inserting them. It was dangerous because the satellites were so close to the planets and were patrolled, but it could be done if you were bold enough. There'd been a few suicide hackers, who killed themselves rather than be caught, their bodies wired with explosives, or with what were called suicide valves--once flipped, depressurized their space suits, killing themselves using the vacuum of space.
The small fragment he found, really only a few lines, read “our new weapon will be something big, powerful, and dangerous. It must not fall into the wrong hands.” But in the data, who “our” was, and who was supposed to be the “wrong hands” were missing. The message originated from a source off-planet, and sent to someone behind the government firewall. It seemed like it might have been part of a progress report. Stephen was only just beginning to start his trace. Finding the rest of the message was imperative.
They sent the transmission out to space and bounced off so many satellites it made him dizzy tracking it—a deliberate way of trying to lose a trace. He projected the system with the satellites on his holovid and mapped its path with a red highlight. Then it just disappeared, with only this one piece left.
Stephen ran a simulation of all the messages in the buffer at the point in time they were sent downside or on to the next satellite, and he watched as the messages, shown as bursts of blue light, speeded off on their predestined ways. For this particular hour’s dump of the buffer, only one small piece was left. Of the over seven thousand messages in the buffer, about two thirds were sent downside to Old Earth, and the rest bounced on to the next satellite at Alpha V.
It terminated on the NexSat5, a satellite orbiting Old Earth, but the full message hadn't been sent on from there, just a piece left sitting in the buffer. There was no record indicating the rest of the message had been reconstructed and sent downside.
Why was this one piece left over? It was sort of like putting together a large puzzle and finding an extra piece at the bottom of the box.
If it didn’t go downside at Old Earth, then which planet did it go to? He would need to search each satellite’s buffer and computer system for records of the other encoded pieces. He groaned. It would be a long and tedious task.
Stephen reached over, picked up his mug of coffee and took a sip, made a face, and placed it back down. Another cup gone cold. Working late nights became a habit for him, and he just about gave up any sort of social life. He’d forgotten to eat again, too. He made a mental note to go down to the mess and see if he could find something.
His mind wandered to Brett. He thought about her and closed his eyes, seeing her in his mind. She was everything he’d ever hoped for, and she loved him. At least he hoped she did. She’d agreed to marry him, hadn’t she?
He could think of nothing he’d rather do than talk to her, about his work, his dreams, their life together. He replayed their walk in his grandfather’s garden, becoming lost in her kisses, when his computer beeped, signaling the completion of the simulation program. Sitting up, he cleared his head and stared at the info on the screen.
He ran the simulation of the satellite beam. What if it had been sent on, past the point where it was needed, to throw someone, like him, off the trail? The transmission was sent a week ago and long gone, except for the lone piece, but a record of it should still remain in the onboard computer of the satellite.
He hunched forward over the keyboard and typed in his access codes to the first satellite, then sat back and waited for the data to return, his dinner forgotten again. He decided to call Brett while he waited.
When she came on, she was in her lightly lit room, sitting in front of her console. Her face was framed by her long hair, and she looked beautiful, at least to his eyes.
“Sorry, am I too late to call?” Stephen asked softly.
“No, it’s never too late to hear your voice.” Brett smiled at him, and together they touched the screen with their fingers.
“I’m still at work, slogging away. I was thinking about you and just wanted to hear your voice.”
“I’m glad you called, I was lying in bed, thinking about your kisses.”
“Mm, what else were you thinking about?”
“I was imagining how your hands would feel touching me…” Brett ran her hands down her throat, and they disappeared off the screen, dipping below her shoulders.
Stephen swallowed hard and closed his eyes, imagining his fingers stroking her.
“When can we be together?” Stephen whispered.
“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about these things, just the weather and work,” Brett suggested, a sly smile on her face. Stephen laughed and shook his head.
“Brett. I’m serious. When?”
“Soon, I promise.”
“I have a feeling I’m going to need a very long, very cold shower tonight.” She laughed, and his world lit up.
“I love you.”
“Crazy man.” She smiled and touched the screen again. “Love you.”
Stephen grinned like a fool. “Night, Brett.”
“Night, Stephen.”
The screen went dark. He sat back in his chair. Time to shut down and go home.
He needed a shower, either a very cold one, or a warm one. He shifted, giving his growing cock more room as it pressed against his trousers.
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