by David Weber
None of the people left behind on Basilica had survived, and over half of those they'd managed to transfer had died during their first winter on Pontifex. The half which survived-less than sixteen percent of their original expedition-had fought desperately to cling to the technology they still had, but it had been a long, bitter struggle, and the dreadful death toll of the colony's first few years had killed too many trained technicians, too many teachers. They'd regressed to an early steam-powered level before they managed to arrest the agonizing slide downward, and there they'd stayed for generations. Now, six centuries after mankind first landed on Pontifex, and two centuries after the Nuncians had been rediscovered by the rest of humanity, the planetary population was barely three hundred and fifty million, and its technological capabilities and educational system were far inferior to the ones Grayson had attained before joining the Manticoran Alliance.
And, Terekhov mused as Hexapuma settled into her assigned orbit around Pontifex, they didn't exactly react to their difficulties the way the Graysons did. Planet names notwithstanding, according to Commander Chandler's intelligence package, these people are as aggressively atheistic as it's possible for human beings to be. Which is something I'd better remind all our people to keep in mind.
"Incoming message, Sir," Lieutenant Jefferson Kobe, the com officer of the watch reported, and Terekhov turned his chair to face the communications section. "It's from their planetary president's office, Sir," Kobe said after a moment.
"Put it on my terminal, please, Mr. Kobe," Terekhov requested, tapping the key to deploy the larger of his two com screens.
"Aye, aye, Sir," Kobe acknowledged, and a moment later, Terekhov's screen blinked to life with the hawklike face of a man who was probably in his mid-thirties, bearing in mind the primitive medical establishment of the planet.
"Greetings, Captain-?" The caller paused, and Terekhov smiled.
"Captain Aivars Terekhov, commanding Her Majesty's Starship Hexapuma , at your service, Mr.-?" It was his turn to pause interrogatively, and the hawklike face returned his smile.
"Alberto Wexler, at your service, Captain Terekhov," he said. "I'm President Adolfsson's personal assistant. He's requested me to welcome you to Nuncio and to invite you-and some of your officers, perhaps-to meet with him and Commodore Karlberg, the commander of our Space Force. He wondered if you might care to join the two of them for dinner this evening?"
"That's very kind of President Adolfsson," Terekhov replied, "and I certainly accept the invitation. With the President's permission, I'd like to bring my executive officer and one or two of my midshipmen along." He smiled again, much more broadly. "Commander FitzGerald would be there for business; the midshipmen would be along to practice being seen and not heard."
Wexler chuckled.
"I don't see any reason why the President-or Commodore Karlberg-should object, Captain. If eighteen o'clock local would be convenient for you, we'll expect you then. I'll double-check to confirm with President Adolfsson that your midshipmen will be welcome, and someone from my office will be in touch to confirm arrangements."
"Eighteen o'clock sounds fine, Mr. Wexler," Terekhov said, checking to be sure the ship's clocks had been recalibrated to the base time of the rest of the universe-and to the local planetary day-after Hexapuma dropped below relativistic velocities.
"Until dinner, then, Captain," Wexler said, and cut the circuit.
* * *
Ragnhild Pavletic decided that there were times when catching the Captain's eye had its drawbacks. Like now. No doubt it was immensely flattering to be chosen for semipermanent assignment as her CO's personal pilot. It was a great honor for a mere middy to be picked over petty officer pilots who might have as much as fifty T-years worth of experience, or even more, and she knew it. The fact that Ragnhild had stood first in her class for flight training every term for her entire time on the Island had more than a little to do with it, and she knew that, too. She'd set the new standard for virtually every record except the time/distance glider record set by Duchess Harrington over forty T-years ago. That one seemed destined to stand for quite a while longer, although Ragnhild took considerable quiet pride in the fact that she'd broken two of the Duchess' other records.
Whatever the reasons, she'd been assigned permanently to Hawk-Papa-One, Hexapuma's Pinnace Number One, which, in turn, was permanently assigned to "Hexapuma Alpha," Captain Terekhov himself. That meant she tended to stay current on what the Captain was up to and she could expect to end up attending a lot of dirt-side meetings and (possibly) soirees her fellow middies would not, which was good. But that very opportunity sometimes had its downside. Like tonight.
Of course it was flattering to be informed that she would be accompanying the Captain and the Exec to their very first meeting with the local planetary potentate. It also, unfortunately, made her highly visible, and unlike some of her fellow midshipmen, Ragnhild was of firmly yeoman ancestry. She'd had the social decorum expected of a Manticoran naval officer hammered ruthlessly into her at the Academy, but that wasn't enough to make her feel confident in rarefied social circles. She always secretly dreaded that she'd pick up the wrong fork, or drink out of the wrong glass, or commit some other unpardonable breach of -etiquette which would undoubtedly spark an interstellar incident, if not an outright war.
That was all bad enough, but the fact that Pontifex didn't possess even first-generation prolong made it far worse, because Ragnhild Pavletic was cute. It was the curse of her life. She wasn't beautiful, not pretty or handsome, but cute . She was petite, delicately built, with honey-blond hair, blue eyes, a snub nose, and even-God help her-freckles. Her hair was so naturally curly she had to keep it cut into a short-cropped mop less than five centimeters long if she was going to have any hope of managing it, and she, unfortunately, was a third -generation prolong recipient. Worse yet, she'd received the initial treatment even earlier than most, with the result that it had started slowing the physical maturation process proportionately sooner. Which meant that at a chronological age of twenty-one T-years, she looked like a pre-prolong thirteen-year-old. A flat-chested thirteen-year-old.
And the Captain was taking her down to meet the president of an entire planet full of pre-prolong people who were going to think she was exactly as old as she looked. To them.
She gritted her teeth and tried to smile pleasantly as she settled Hawk-Papa-One onto the apron of the old-fashioned airport outside Pontifex's capital city of Ollander Landing with polished precision. Paulo d'Arezzo had been selected to share her evening's ordeal, but he, unfortunately, was marginally junior to her. The Navy's protocol for boarding and disembarking from small craft was ironbound and inflexible: passengers boarded in ascending order of rank, from most junior to most senior, and disembarked in the reverse order. She'd hoped, initially, that as pilot she might be able to skip her assigned place in the queue, but Captain Terekhov seemed to possess ESP. He'd informed her that since she was to attend the dinner tonight, she could hand the pinnace over to its flight engineer as soon as they hit the ground in order to debark with the other guests.
That meant Captain Terekhov was the first person down the boarding ramp to the assembled honor guard standing beside the long, clunky-looking ground limousine and Paulo was the last. Which meant that the midshipman's preposterous good looks didn't get a chance to distract any attention from her.
The honor guard snapped to the local version of attention and presented arms crisply, but Ragnhild saw more than one or two sets of eyes widen as they caught sight of her. Damn it, she was so tired of looking like someone's kid sister, even back home where people were accustomed to prolong!
She forced her expression to remain calm and collected as she followed Captain Terekhov and Commander FitzGerald and listened to the polite, formal greetings from President Adolfsson's representative. Despite the amount of attention she was devoting to looking like she was at least old enough for high school, she was aware that it was unusual for a planetary president to send
his personal executive assistant to greet the mere captain of a visiting warship. Within his own domain of Hexapuma , Captain Terekhov was junior only to God, and even that precedence tended to get a bit blurred. But he was only the captain of a heavy cruiser, when all was said and done, and this Wexler was greeting him as if he were at least a senior flag officer.
The Captain took it all in stride, apparently effortlessly, and Ragnhild envied his composure and confidence. Of course, he was fifty-five T-years older than she was. He looked very much of an age with Wexler, and he was a senior-grade captain, to boot, but still…
"It's a pleasure to greet you in person, Captain," Wexler was saying. "It's just not the same, somehow, over a com link." His mouth twisted in a wry smile. "Of course, half of our local coms don't even have visual, so I suppose I shouldn't complain, since the President does have that capability on all of his lines."
Ragnhild stood behind the Captain, listening unobtrusively to the conversation, and wondered if Wexler was deliberately drawing attention to Pontifex's primitive technology. It happened, sometimes. Or that was what her instructors at the Academy had told her, anyway. Sometimes the inhabitants of planets whose societies or technology bases had been hammered especially hard took a sort of aggressive, in-your-face reverse pride in their neobarbarian status.
"It's actually fairly amazing what a broad spectrum of technological capabilities societies can adjust themselves to," Captain Terekhov observed. "The capabilities change, but the interactions and the basic human motivations seem to remain surprisingly intact."
"Really?" Wexler said. "I often wish I'd had the opportunity to travel, myself, a chance to see how other planets have adapted themselves. I suppose that's probably the one thing I most envy about someone like you, Captain. A professional naval officer who spends his time visiting one world after another."
"Actually, Mr. Wexler," Terekhov said with a smile, "naval officers spend most of their time looking at displays and repeater plots-when they're not doing paperwork or looking at the bulkheads of their cabins. We do get to see quite a few different worlds, in peacetime, at least. But we spend a lot of time basically sitting around between planetfalls. In fact, I sometimes envy people who have the opportunity to sit in one place long enough to really understand a planet and its societies."
"Another case of the other man's grass always being greener, I suppose," Wexler murmured, then gave himself a little shake and gestured at the waiting ground car.
* * *
Planetary President George Adolfsson looked quite a bit like Alberto Wexler. He was older, possibly within ten T-years of Terekhov's own age, and the hawklike profile was leaner, more angular. But the dark hair (liberally laced with gray in his case) and dark eyes, with their odd little flecks of amber scattered around the iris, were the same, and so was the easy sense of humor.
"Thank you for joining us for dinner, Captain."
"Thank you for the invitation, Mr. President," Terekhov replied, shaking the offered hand firmly. "May I present Commander FitzGerald, my executive officer, Midshipwoman Pavletic, and Midshipman d'Arezzo?"
"Indeed you may, Sir." Adolfsson shook each of the Manticorans' hands in turn. "And this," he indicated the tall, rawboned, sandy-haired man standing respectfully at his right shoulder, "is Commodore Emil Karlberg, the senior officer of the Nuncio Space Force."
"In all its magnificent glory," Karlberg said dryly, extending his own hand to Terekhov. All of the Nuncians' Standard English had a peculiar accent, with swallowed last syllables, flattened vowels, and a staccato rythym pronounced enough to make their speech actually a bit difficult to follow. Planetary variations from the norm were far from uncommon, but this one was much more noticeable than most. No doubt the planet's long isolation from the galactic mainstream, coupled with the loss of most of its recorded sound technology during the interval, helped account for it. But there were obviously purely local variations, as well, for Karlberg had a markedly different accent from Adolfsson or Wexler. It was sharper, more nasal.
"I've viewed the download you were kind enough to make available to us on your ship's capabilities," the commodore continued. He shook his head. "I realize Hexapuma is 'only' a heavy cruiser, but she seems like a superdreadnought to us, Captain. My 'Space Force' consists of exactly eleven light attack craft, and the biggest of them masses all of eighteen thousand tons. So the entire Nuncio fleet masses about a third as much as your single ship."
Ragnhild instructed her expression to remain one of simple polite interest, but Karlberg's statement stunned her. Intellectually, she'd known from the outset that none of the poverty-stricken governments in the Cluster had the economic and industrial capacity to build anything like an effective naval force. But that was pathetic. Less than a single LAC squadron to defend-or even effectively patrol-an entire star system? She wanted to glance at Paulo, to see how he'd reacted to it, but she knew better than to allow her attention to wander.
"Emil, don't get started talking shop so quickly!" President Adolfsson scolded with what was obviously a fond smile. "Captain Terekhov's been in-system for less than twelve hours. I think you might give him, oh, another thirty or forty minutes of amiable social chitchat before you dive headlong into all that important stuff."
"Oops." Karlberg shook his head again, this time with an expression strongly reminiscent of a small boy who'd just been told he was too bouncy for polite manners.
"Don't worry," the President assured him. "I won't have you beheaded just yet. It would delay dinner, and getting the gore out of the carpet is always such a pain."
Karlberg chuckled, and Terekhov and FitzGerald both smiled broadly. The midshipmen didn't, and Wexler surprised Ragnhild by smiling sympathetically at both of them. It wasn't the smile that surprised her; it was the fact that it was the sort of smile subordinate officers shared in the presence of their joint betters, and not the smile of a patronizing adult for a mere child. She was entirely too familiar with the difference between them.
Perhaps, she thought, as the President ushered his guests down a glass-sided hallway filled with the rich, golden sunset of -Nuncio-B towards a spacious, woodpaneled dining room, this dinner wasn't going to be quite the ordeal she had dreaded.
* * *
"So that's about the size of it, Captain Terekhov," George Adolfsson said two hours later. He leaned back comfortably in his chair, nursing a glass of Pontifex's traditional plum brandy while he gazed across the table at his Manticoran visitors. "As far as everyone on Pontifex is concerned, the chance to join your Star Kingdom is the greatest opportunity to come along since the Founding Idiots landed their incompetent, superstitious posteriors on Basilica."
His tone was so dryly, bitingly humorous Ragnhild had to raise one hand to conceal her smile. The meal had been delicious, although she personally found the brandy far too rough edged for her taste. And President Adolfsson had been a charming host. It turned out Wexler was the President's nephew, as well as his assistant, and she suspected that uncle and nephew had gone out of their way to charm their visitors. And done so very effectively, because, when it came right down to it, they were simply naturally charming.
But the President also had a dead serious side, and it showed as he met Terekhov's eyes very steadily.
"We've got considerably less than a half billion people in the entire Nuncio System, Captain," he said quietly, all traces of banter vanishing from his voice. "We don't have prolong, we don't have any sort of decent medical establishment, our educational system is a joke by modern standards, and our cutting-edge technology is probably at least two hundred T-years behind yours. But we do know all about the benefits Frontier Security brings. That's why over ninety-five percent of the voters here on Pontifex favored annexation by your kingdom, instead. And it's also the reason our delegation to the Constitutional Convention is working so closely with Joachim Alquezar."
"With all due respect, Mr. President," Karlberg said, "I'm still not comfortable about tying ourselves so closely to the
Rembrandters."
"Emil," Adolfsson said patiently, "what happened to us here wasn't Bernardus Van Dort's fault. It wasn't even the Rembrandt Trade Union's fault. Damnation, man! There's only been a Trade Union for the last fifty T-years! Rembrandt and San Miguel certainly never 'looted' Pontifex's economy. It's past time we stopped being envious and started emulating them! Although," he added in the tone of someone making a grudging concession, "I suppose we won't have to be quite so… assertive in our business negotiations with our neighbors."
" Assertive! " Karlberg snorted. Ragnhild was still surprised by the comfortable, casual way the commodore addressed his President. She tried-and failed-to imagine anyone talking that way to Queen Elizabeth. Yet despite the comfort level, there was nothing disrespectful about Karlberg. It was almost as if his familiarity was an indication of the true depth of his respect for the President.
"I realize my ship and I are new to the Cluster, Commodore," Terekhov said. "But I've spent quite a few hours reading over the intelligence briefings Admiral Khumalo and Governor Medusa have made available. From what I can see, Mr. Van Dort must be a remarkable individual, and I understand he and Mr. Alquezar are close personal friends, as well as business and political associates."
"You understand correctly, Captain," Adolfsson replied. "Oh, he didn't organize the Trade Union solely out of selfless humanitarianism. But I've never subscribed to the theory that the entire RTU was conceived of simply as a means to fleece the other star systems in the area. And whatever else may be true, I'm convinced Van Dort-and Alquezar-are deeply committed to driving through this annexation."
