Petron

by Blaze Ward

  The Governor also carried the sort of messenger bag that the Republic of Aquitaine Navy used for couriers. It looked quite heavy with paperwork stuffed inside.

  “Your Majesty,” she bowed to Jessica as she came to the edge of the table. “Regent David. Uly. Desianna. Wald.”

  She paused when she came to two men in the corner. Inspected them for a moment.

  “Good, you’re here,” she continued. “That will make this easier.”

  Jessica doubted that, but wasn’t willing to comment. She had known Judit for a decade, since the woman took over for Horvat as Premier. Had worked extensively with the then-Premier as part of the planning that turned into Thuringwell.

  Trusted her about as much as she might a hungry, poisonous snake.

  “Sit, Judit,” Jessica instructed the woman. “We were just going over the situation and formulating an official response.”

  “What do we know?” Judit solicited politely.

  Jessica considered that the shuttle carrying Vo was probably close to the edge of the atmosphere by now.

  “Vo was injured and is being evacuated to orbit,” Jessica said, watching those hooded, cobra eyes for a reaction.

  The room around them fell to utter silence.

  “The assassin and his assistant were both captured, alive, and have been taken into custody by Imperial forces.” Jessica smiled as Judit’s eyes surged just the tiniest fraction.

  “Captured?” Judit seemed to be utterly shocked. “Alive?”

  “Indeed,” Jessica agreed. “They are currently en route to orbit with Vo, Casey, and a few others.”

  “So the Emperor is safe?”

  “She is,” Jessica said. “I have not spoken to her yet, but will later in the day, once things settle out some here. Obviously, all my forces are on high alert, as are the remaining Imperial troops that have been assisting me with security tasks on the ground. How will you get home?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Judit asked as Jessica shifted the conversation suddenly on her.

  “It is my understanding that the Aquitaine squadron departed with very little warning this morning,” Jessica said. “Will you need assistance chartering a vessel to return you to Ladaux?”

  There. That twitch. You knew they were leaving. Planned for it, didn’t you? You should be surprised and perhaps angry at being left behind by whatever catastrophe caused that squadron to run like hell for JumpSpace. But you aren’t.

  Jessica continued to smile wanly at the woman.

  “No,” Judit said. “I have some other business to conduct, that requires me to be here this morning.”

  “Do you now?” Jessica let some of her own anger color her words now, picking up the tones and intonations from Uly. “What might that be?”

  “I have a formal complaint from the government of Lincolnshire about irregularities with the Imperial passage,” Judit pulled the courier bag onto the table and withdrew a small bundle. Uly took it from her hand. “They are refusing all future passage by Imperial vessels of any kind, and have invoked the mutual defense treaty with Aquitaine to enforce those rights. Additionally, all Corynthe vessels are to be refused passage as well.”

  Jessica waited for Uly to scan the document quickly and nod to her.

  “Interesting,” Jessica said. “Why are you the person to deliver this, Judit?”

  “The message from Ramsey apparently arrived last night, Your Majesty,” Judit lied convincingly. “Their Ambassador has been withdrawn, along with most of his staff. As their long-time treaty partners, and one with a personal relationship with the Crown of Corynthe, I offered to be the messenger.”

  “Thank you, Judit,” Jessica said. “Why are my ships also embargoed?”

  “I am sure I would not know, Your Majesty,” Judit’s smile was serene, and utterly at odds with the gleam in her eyes. “But I am treaty-bound to honor it, as is the Republic.”

  “One might think,” Desianna spoke up now, “that perhaps such behavior might be tantamount to a declaration of war, Governor?”

  “It is my hope that it does not come to that, Minister,” Judit replied, shifting her attention to the person she had probably sparred the most with, at least in writing, over the last decade. First as Premier responding to Jessica’s Regent, and later as Tad’s representative.

  “However,” Judit continued. “In light of circumstances, I am compelled to order you to return to active duty with the Republic of Aquitaine Navy, Jessica. And you two as well, Jež and Kigali.”

  She started to reach for that courier bag again when Jessica put her hand out and laid it flat on the table.

  “You do not have that authority, Judit,” Jessica let the angry growl into her voice now. “Such orders do not originate with the Senate, nor the Premier. They can only be issued by the First or Fourth Lord of the Fleet.”

  Judit froze, like a rabbit spying a hawk overhead. Jessica could see some of the internal dialogue, as the woman realized that she might have stepped into a trap.

  “Nevertheless…” she started to say.

  “Nevertheless,” Jessica overrode her like a rock slide. “If you did happen to have such orders in that messenger bag, they would have had to have been signed by the correct authorities months ago, in order to be legal today. If they weren’t legal, that would most likely set you outside your ambassadorial protections, what you are suggesting. And if they were legal, then someone might draw the obviously-incorrect conclusion that this was part of a larger conspiracy that had also been planned months ago, given the other circumstances today, such as Vo’s attempted assassination and your squadrons insulting the Crown of Corynthe by departing suddenly and without any message. I would think very carefully, Judit, about whatever it was you thought you might introduce into this conversation right now. It might require me to return to Ladaux with you, yes, where I might then have to file an official, formal, and public complaint about Aquitaine attempting to publicly assassinate an Imperial General Officer, and the fiancé of the Emperor, as well as a man who is an Aquitaine citizen that has been awarded the Order of Baudin and the Republic Cross with Bar.”

  Jessica leaned back and drew a breath to stop herself from snarling at the woman. Or ordering other things be done to her. This was still a pirate kingdom. Not all the laws on the books were as friendly and civilized as Aquitaine, if Jessica chose to invoke some of them. She let Judit see that in the back of her eyes.

  Judit, to her credit, had frozen, like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar. She withdrew it from the bag empty, but Jessica could see the utter rage the woman was suppressing.

  “I’m sure this is all a miscommunication, Your Majesty,” she tried to deflect things.

  “And I, as well, Governor,” Jessica did growl back, just a little. “However, in light of the circumstances, I have lost faith in your ambassadorial credentials, and you are hereby declared persona non grata. You and your staff have until noon tomorrow to be off-planet and headed away in JumpSpace. All government officials with your embassy above the rank of Assistant Deputy Chief of Station will depart with you, until a formal apology is delivered from Lincolnshire. A single Republic of Aquitaine Navy courier vessel will subsequently be allowed into Corynthe’s space, as, you have noted, they could be delivering legitimate, legal orders for myself and other such retired Aquitaine officers as reside on Petron to return to Active Duty. That will be the only Aquitaine vessel allowed to cross the border until such apology is delivered. Given the best turnaround speed possible, I would not expect such a person bearing orders to arrive here before June. Do you have any questions before you leave?”

  Dead silence.

  Jessica considered that all those lessons and classes in diplomacy had managed to teach her something, after all. Girisha was sitting more or less in Judit’s blind spot, so he allowed Jessica to see the terrible, vengeful glee playing on his face. Jessica supposed the others had to maintain stoicism right now.

  It wasn’t that Jessica couldn’t be an effe
ctive politician. She had just never desired to be one, beyond the elements necessary to command a naval force. The Crown of Corynthe was only hers because letting Ian Zhao keep it had been a bridge too far for her to accept. It would have rewarded evil, for her to just walk away and let Corynthe sink back down into the barbaric morass Arnulf had spent his entire life fighting.

  She wasn’t about to let Aquitaine start a war that never should have even been considered, without doing something about it. Talking to journalists on Ladaux would have probably gotten her Court Martialed again, but then Tad would have had to explain to the Senate why. And the people of Aquitaine.

  That just might bring down his government again. Without the reputations of people like Nils or Jessica protecting him.

  “I have no questions.” Judit closed the messenger bag carefully and rose.

  She bowed properly to David, and then Jessica, and departed in utter silence.

  Marcelle stuck her head in the door and looked expectantly.

  “I’ll handle it,” Uly rose and slid by Marcelle.

  “Marcelle, in and close the door,” Jessica said.

  She waited until her oldest friend in the world came to rest and looked around at everyone.

  Denis smiled at Jessica like a twelve-year-old who had just pulled the perfect prank on a teacher.

  “Thank you,” Jessica said to him. “Without knowing about Alber’, I wouldn’t have pushed back as hard as I did. At the very best, this goes deeper than anybody over there is willing to admit.”

  “Yes, but now you have a second problem,” Denis replied. “In roughly three months, there will be a courier. He will have legal orders from Petia. We will be returned to harness or declared outlaws, most likely.”

  “Only if they can find us,” Kigali spoke up.

  Jessica turned to Marcelle.

  “Find me Em,” she said.

  “Just talked to him while you were in here with her,” Marcelle replied. “He’s headed this way now. ETA five minutes or so.”

  “So you’ll be gone,” David spoke up. “What do I tell those rat bastards when they come?”

  “Not a damned thing,” Torsten joined in with a half-snarl of his own. “He or she will be carrying a stack of order papers for a set of Republic citizens. If none of them are here, all he can do is deliver them to your government, where the current treaty requires you to attempt to locate the named party and deliver the mail. You do not have to tell them where their prey has gone. You do not have to expend extraordinary means to deliver the mail. Just drop it into the Crown Post and wait.”

  Trust Torsten to have memorized the relevant bits of all the treaties she had signed with all her neighbors. Jessica suspected that all of them would be coming under much closer scrutiny shortly.

  Uly returned with Em before anything else required her attention.

  “We should depart,” David said to his mother as he rose. “As I will be no doubt representing her Government in three months when all this plays out, I would like to be able to tell them things without having to lie about what I know. Not that it would stop me, but I’d like to make their lives as tedious as I could with a straight face.”

  Desianna smiled the way she did when things got twisted.

  “I agree,” she rose. “We should probably consider postal reforms as well…”

  Jessica could only imagine what those might do, with three months to set up an elaborate prank on a Republic Courier. But those sorts of people would have had it coming.

  Especially if they had handed Judit a stack of signed orders three months ago, just so the woman could recalel the very allies that Casey might need in a crisis.

  Many of the other aides departed with David, leaving Jessica just Marcelle and her bodyguard, Willow Dolan, the latter hovering close and ready for violence, as always.

  Em counted noses as he sat in the same chair Judit had vacated. Jessica. Torsten. Uly. Denis. Kigali. He smiled grimly.

  She would have liked Robbie and Alber’ here. And Arott and Phil Kosnett. But they were all currently aboard ship, racing towards the galactic interior, possibly preparing for a new war with Fribourg. Not that they would look forward to it, but they would follow orders.

  Assuming said orders were found to be legal. Tad Horvat would probably have manufactured a provocation by then. Especially if he had already goaded Lincolnshire into something just a shade short of a declaration of war on Fribourg and Corynthe. Somewhere, soon, Jessica had no doubt that a Corynthe–flagged MotherShip would cross a frontier they didn’t respect and hit a Lincolnshire freighter.

  Didn’t matter that similar things already happened regularly enough because she couldn’t keep all the former pirates on her side of the border behaving. Tad seemed willing to escalate this frontier, which suggested he was going to do something stupid on the Fribourg side.

  Nils had warned her.

  Nils.

  “Marcelle, find Nils and get him and his family secured right now, just in case,” Jessica looked over Em’s shoulder.

  Em just raised an eyebrow, but Jessica waited until the door was closed again.

  “I might have had a premonition of trouble,” Jessica said carefully. “Not when, nor what, but that the implications might be much larger than they appeared on the surface.”

  Em nodded knowingly. The man had tangled with Nils Kasum many times, when the two were active officers, twenty and thirty years ago. She knew both respected one another, if they might never come to be friends.

  Jessica considered how that might change, if Nils became an outlaw as well. His commission as First Centurion could be reactivated just as easily as hers, if Tad really wanted to push.

  Or got desperate when Jessica and her Merry Men slipped through his fingers.

  “You’ve heard about Lincolnshire?” Em began.

  “Judit Chavarría just left,” Jessica replied. “Having come as close to war as she dared, and then having to back down, when I refused to play nice and threatened to go public on Ladaux.”

  “Interesting,” Em nodded and leaned some of his weight back. “I look forward to that story. However, I have a more pressing problem right now. Even going straight home, through Lincolnshire and Aquitaine, it would take me probably eight months to get Casey to St. Legier. Having to detour through Salonnia to pick up supplies means ten or maybe eleven months, with the number of mouths I have to feed.”

  “Seriously, zu Wachturm?” Kigali leaned forward and put his elbows on the table so he could rest his chin on his hands. “You dream too small.”

  “I beg your pardon, Tomas?” Em turned that way.

  “The fastest possible single transit between Petron and St. Legier is calculated at seventy-four days, if you don’t stop anywhere,” Kigali sneered at the Grand Admiral. “Nobody has ever attempted it. I could probably do in in seventy-eight at most. That’s you, Jessica, Torsten, Centurion zu Wiegand, and Anna-Katherine Kallenberger. We’d need to take on extra foodstuffs here, especially if you require more staff than that, but I sure as hell can put you in St. Legier orbit in early June.”

  Jessica turned to the man still famous across several star nations as The Navigator.

  “How?” Em’s mind slowly caught up to the younger man.

  “I started with something similar to your courier design,” Kigali smiled, obviously answering a different question than the one Em had intended to ask. “Had Bedrov improve it for long sailing. It’s not as comfortable as your battleship, but my crew and I can spend eight months at sea. Show me another vessel anywhere that can do that.”

  “What about the rest of the fleet?” Em’s voice got sharp. “Just abandon them and hope they can make it home in a reasonable manner?”

  “I don’t know, Emmerich,” Kigali asked airily and then turned his entire torso to stare at Denis. “Wherever could you find a spare Imperial Admiral you trusted to maneuver a major fleet in potentially hostile territory?”

  Jessica nearly laughed out loud.

 
; Denis blushed as everyone chuckled, but she was expecting that. He had been the last of her inner circle promoted to Command Centurion, but the first to make Fleet Centurion. Even then, he had become an Imperial Admiral first.

  “Denis?” Em asked.

  “I was already considering traveling to St. Legier,” Denis said, almost evasively, if Jessica heard the tones correctly.

  “How would you feel about having your Imperial Commission reactivated?” Em asked.

  Which was a world of difference from Judit waltzing in here and demanding. Ordering.

  Had she spent so much time around Fribourg that she had forgotten what the Republic was like?

  No. Nils had reminded her. Had showed her how far astray he thought that Horvat and Chavarría had gone on their own.

  She wondered, though, how different her home might be now, with people like that running things and imprinting their personalities on the government.

  Should they be allowed to remain in power?

  Once upon a time, a hot-shot, young Command Centurion would have never even entertained such thoughts. Jessica would have followed orders as best she could interpret them.

  Had.

  It had taken her to Ramsey, and then Petron. Thuringwell. St. Legier. The Expedition.

  Victory.

  “If that’s what it takes,” Denis replied, drawing Jessica back out of herself before she wandered astray herself.

  “I will talk to the Emperor,” Em said. “But I presume that her being home now is more important than the fleet escorting her. Denis, you’ll need to be in Red, just so all the White Admirals I brought with me will shut up and listen to you. Kigali, how soon could you move?”

  “I’ll need names, genders, and weights,” Kigali said. “Dietary preferences would be nice, as well, but not necessary. I could lift in six hours.”

  Jessica turned to the man with a raised eyebrow. Six?

  “Bedrov likes challenges,” Kigali said. “A third of the original cargo space got transformed into the hydroponics and greenhouses. I considered some dwarf cattle, just for the fresh milk, but didn’t feel like hiring a cowboy for my crew.”