Petron

by Blaze Ward

  Not that he would have ordered such a brazen thing, but it had been an option for Judit, on the scene. Make the galaxy a better place by killing Kasimira off now, and then bullying the old men next in line to surrender a century’s worth of conquests, if they wanted a real peace.

  Still, Lincolnshire had been pissed, to have to politely host a war fleet passing through, when everyone had expected at most a squadron, however poorly such a term had been defined in the agreements. Wachturm had brought more mass with him than Lincolnshire’s Naval Ministry could field.

  So they had, by now, refused further transit. And, more importantly, no more victualling calls to keep the Imperial larder topped up for that many men. And had even been willing to settle for a grant of credit from Aquitaine far less than they might have made in profit from letting Karl VIII return home the direct way.

  Tad had kept a larger reserve in the budget for that. But if they didn’t want it now, he could use it to pry something more out of them later.

  The Emperor would have had to circle all the way around to Salonnia to get home, following the long spine of that skinny nation back to Imperial space before they could cut across. More time lost.

  A knock at the door caused him to close his report and place it in his lap, face down and anonymous.

  “Enter,” Tad called.

  His aide Stacia had been with him since she had graduated university. She entered now with a stern look on her face, as if disapproving of things. Briefly, he wondered if the woman was being hampered by developing a bad case of morals that might get in the way of her enduring much longer on his staff.

  “Your next meeting, Premier,” she said simply, sliding out of the way of the woman following.

  Tad nodded and Stacia closed the door firmly and quietly. Tad studied the woman remaining behind, standing there in a Senior Centurion uniform with the ubiquitous messenger bag strapped across her chest.

  Average might be too much to describe her. She seemed to have the ability to not be there, even when you were staring at her.

  Nothing about the woman caught the eye. Perhaps mid-thirties, with a decade of error either way. Brown hair the deep color of teak that was so common across the Republic, along with the reddish-brown skin that made up such a bulk of the populace. Dark eyes with a hint of cunning stared out of a bland face that was just irregular enough not to be beautiful, while not letting the unconscious eye understand why.

  Nils had always referred to them as midnight pixies, the folks from the Office of Naval Intelligence who knew things they weren’t at liberty to explain. Simply handed you a report before they stepped around a corner in a hallway and vanished.

  “Sit,” he ordered. “What news?”

  “A rumor from St. Legier,” she replied in a melodious voice that suggested the woman had been vocally trained at some point, before disappearing into the shadows.

  Tadej didn’t inquire as to the source of such Rumors. Within the limits of statistical analysis, they were always as true as could be communicated across such a vast distance of time and space to arrive at his desk.

  “Go on,” Tad said.

  “Unrest, or the lack thereof, has caused Admiral Provst to meet with the civilian authorities on a more formal basis,” she said simply, without explaining who she might have in which place to be able to tell them even that much. “They are beginning to look more closely at some of the political liabilities that might benefit from future unrest.”

  “I did warn everyone that Wachturm would not leave St. Legier undefended,” Tad noted. “And that the men in charge would be people like Provst, even as we expected the man himself to accompany the Grand Admiral.”

  “You did,” she agreed. “And contingencies were placed. No threat to the Imperial Capital could succeed, at present. Even the fleet Buran sent against the planet probably would have been annihilated by the current defending force. However, our sources are not a military threat.”

  “My dear, everything is a military threat,” Tad actually smiled at her. “You just have to step up to the civilians who control budgets to understand that. Without repair funds or food, your fleet stops working, and I’m positive some of the men you are talking to have taken steps to exercise some control there. A smart politician is always looking for the edge he can exploit.”

  She nodded rather than reply, which indicated just how canny she probably was. He hadn’t asked a question.

  “How soon will our demands for more trade and demilitarization of the border arrive?” Tadej asked.

  Never attack your foe head on. Always come at them from an oblique angle, where they can think they have successfully forced you to one side, right into the original outcome you sought.

  Trade didn’t matter. Most Imperial worlds were wholly owned fiefs, and didn’t generate the economic surpluses that had made the Republic so much wealthier and able to resist Imperial aggression. Closer ones could be enticed with the hints of the riches they could get. Or threatened with withdrawal, once they had a taste and didn’t want to give it up.

  Tad didn’t believe for a minute that Wiegand was ignoring the Buran border and letting those planets sort themselves out. He would have been sending war fleets with invading legions to capture such worlds and bring them into the Empire by force.

  So, demanding that they disarm the near border would allow those Admirals to perhaps move forces from in closer to Aquitaine and redeploy them elsewhere.

  If Buran had a generation to recover, Fribourg would never conquer them. And Tad knew it. God or no god.

  “The House of Dukes will have introduced your messages, about two weeks ago,” the woman spy nodded. “Roughly at the same time as the wedding. Various contacts will be arguing over it, both in favor and opposed. We will deliver details as soon as a courier can route the messages out.”

  “Very well,” Tadej said. “I look forward to reading your report.”

  She took that properly as a dismissal and pulled out a thick sheaf of papers that she handed to him. They could have just left the report on his desk in the dead of night, but Tad always wanted to be able to ask specific questions.

  Things were finally starting to get interesting.

  Next stop: Lincolnshire’s insulted honor.

  CHAPTER XIX

  IN THE TWELFTH YEAR OF JESSICA KELLER, QUEEN OF THE PIRATES: APRIL THE TENTH IN JUMPSPACE

  SHE KEPT TELLING herself that she would slow down, one of these days. Become Dowager Queen and stop taking responsibility for the galaxy. Maybe even sleep eight hours at a stretch.

  Jessica knew better. Fortunately, Torsten only teased her a little bit.

  The last month had been almost the honeymoon that the two of them had contemplated. Or the elopement part.

  After all, fleets were in motion chasing them. And just as unlikely to catch up anytime soon.

  Jessica was sitting in a lotus position on the bed while Torsten read something on a tablet in the cabin’s only chair. She must have made a noise, or he was only pretending to read while waiting for her to speak.

  They had gotten to that point in life, where each could almost hear the thoughts of the other.

  “Drachma for your thoughts,” Torsten said suddenly.

  “Drachma?”

  She felt the confusion derail her enough that she unfolded her legs rather than fall over.

  “Unit of currency for the Concord,” Torsten explained. “Before the fall. Reading up on some of history of the Great War. It was so bloody and destructive for everyone else involved that it saw the Concord accidentally achieve hegemony of the galaxy for several thousand years as a result.”

  The man was an econometricist. Far be it for him to find something like romantic comedies entertaining. Not that she read much, beyond studying the lives and strategies of history’s greatest commanders. Many of them went on to be bad rulers, but that was the failure to transition out of a world of immediate obedience to orders, and into the sorts of political maneuverings necessary to mak
e a government run. Only nations with a solid bureaucracy running in the background ever turned into successful empires and dynasties.

  “I suppose I could be vaguely accused of contemplating the near future,” Jessica said as she struggled to get her thoughts back on track.

  Not that there had been much. They had gone over everything several times.

  There was no news in JumpSpace, just as there was no company. You were alone in your own, personal sub-universe until you dropped back into RealSpace.

  And Kigali’s ship was taking them on another record-setting voyage, presumably the fastest transit ever between Petron and St. Legier. Or, the poles of her heart, if she had to express it in poetical terms.

  “Concerned that Horvat has already done something?” Torsten set the reader on the side table. If he had ever been reading, rather than waiting for her. He was like that.

  “Tad will leave no fingerprints that could ever be traced to him,” Jessica replied.

  Just because, she climbed off the bed and slid into Torsten’s now-vacant lap, where she could curl up like a cat.

  “Who stands to gain the most from turmoil in Fribourg?” Torsten asked academically.

  “The Dukes, although most of them don’t know it yet,” she nodded to her favorite professor. “Without that turmoil, Casey slowly slides the rug out from under them, until the entire Empire perhaps changes track into something more like Aquitaine prided itself on being.”

  “Past tense, my love?” He looked down at her and kissed her on the forehead.

  “We had the chance to change the future,” Jessica felt her emotions well up. “End all the wars for a generation or more. Break the old boundaries down and let trade bind everything together instead. I’m not sure they aren’t about to flush that away.”

  “Pendulums,” Torsten nodded. “Every motion eventually generates its own counter-motion.”

  “Then what is all this a response to?” she asked.

  This man had reinvented himself for a second career as an academic, after losing his leg in service. The one that was cold under her bottom right now. Torsten Wald’s reports and analyses had gone a long ways towards convincing Karl VII to seek peace, as a lesser cost to trying to fight on.

  Her love would have a radically different take on things than the average professor who had never served, or the average line officer who had never crunched numbers.

  “In some ways, I think Karl IV through VII,” Torsten said. “I know that it’s not always taught that way in Republic schools, but the last century or so was an unmitigated disaster for Aquitaine, at least militarily. Right up until Kasum came along to slow the bleeding, and then you. Fribourg used to be much smaller. A big chunk of that real estate came at Aquitaine’s expense. I suspect Horvat sees a chance to do something about that. There are Imperial citizens alive today on some worlds who can still remember being part of the Republic. If enough of them make noise, the local Duke would be wise to listen. The other option is to drop divisions of troops on restive worlds and that just drives things underground, which always makes people more desperate.”

  “So Tad’s trying to get all that back?” she asked.

  “I expect a man like Horvat sees the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something massive,” Torsten shrugged. “The War is over, and Aquitaine either has to learn to live in this smaller state, or maybe push back and try to carve out at least a demilitarized zone as a buffer.”

  “Are we in the wrong, then, helping Casey?” Jessica asked.

  She could phrase it that way, here in the privacy of their cabin. Casey, Nils, and Em were just a few rooms away, but everyone understood the need for alone-time, so frequently remained in their cabins.

  Torsten tensed a little as he thought, but she suspected that was from his recent past as Casey’s Chief of Deputies. The head of her government. His automatic reaction that he had been doing the right thing.

  But what was right? She was racing madly across the galaxy to get Casey home, on the expectation that the nation Jessica had once sworn to overthrow, to literally bomb from orbit, needed to be prepared to fight back if the nation Jessica had sworn to uphold and defend actually tried something so stupid.

  “No,” Torsten finally decided after nearly a minute of silence that would probably have been worth a mint to the right politicians and spies, could they but read his mental analysis. “For all their other faults, Fribourg is in the right here. They signed a treaty with Chavarría’s government setting the new border. They have gone over and above that to be polite, and Aquitaine has reciprocated by helping them defeat Buran.”

  “But?” she felt the word lingering on his tongue.

  “It sets Aquitaine up for failure, long term,” he noted. “Fribourg can expand into the interior, assimilating systems that once belonged to the Protectorate of Man. Down one flank they have an ally in Salonnia that limits Aquitaine’s expansion. Across the Dark Reaches, you have that huge gap between arms of the galaxy where both sides face the unknown, but neither had previously been in a position to really explore or colonize as far apart and isolated as those stars will be.”

  “Could Aquitaine be pushed that way anyway?” she set her mind to the topic.

  Exploration rather than war, as a competition?

  “They could,” he acknowledged. “If they wanted something other than combat. Nils Kasum may be facing his own backlash now.”

  “How so?”

  “He removed all of the men and women he considered the Noble Lords from positions of authority, he and Horvat,” Torsten said. “Who did that leave behind?”

  “The Fighting Lords,” Jessica saw the problem. “Those people most likely to want to use force to make Fribourg give way. The ones with the least in common, socially, with those aristocrats across the border, with whom they might once have made common cause.”

  “Were we wrong?” Jessica asked the ten thousand Lev question.

  “Absolutely not,” he kissed her again. “We’d have won if Nils still had idiots like Bogdan Loncar in positions to make big, expensive mistakes. Third Iger would have been a middle school brawl by comparison.”

  “And now?”

  “Now, we must find a way to win the Peace, Jess,” he said with a small shrug.

  “I had wondered, in a moment of either lucidity or insanity, if it would be necessary to bring down Horvat and Chavarría,” Jessica mused aloud. “Is that too small? Should we perhaps consider bringing down the entire edifice? Overthrow Aquitaine itself?”

  “That, my love, is literally treason,” his face grew serious. “Over and above what they’re likely to charge you with for helping Casey stop them.”

  “Only if they can catch me,” Jessica felt her soul harden as she kissed the man.

  Somewhere, Kali-ma stirred in her uneasy slumber.

  CHAPTER XX

  DATE OF THE REPUBLIC APRIL 11, 405 CA CYRUS, GRANTHAM

  PHIL KOSNETT LAUGHED to himself as he considered the current situation.

  Once upon a time, he had been promised a cruiser command by First Lord, but that had been just before Keller’s Peace with Fribourg had put a freeze on budgets. After serving as First Officer on the Light Cruiser Kamakura, he might have been dead-ended and had to go find a real job.

  Fortunately, Buran came along at the right moment for Phil, and the Lords of the Fleet commanded a new squadron be built, for service on the only war frontier left. Petia had asked what Phil wanted to do, given the relatively few slots that would open. He had taken the gamble.

  Promotion to Command Centurion had put him in charge of CS-405, the least-armed warship currently in Republic service. But at least he had been able to serve.

  And then shine, when a badly-designed JumpSail failed at Severnaya Zemlya and left him and his crew stranded and alone. His Court Martial had been a formality, once he brought his whole crew home, plus four other captured ships and rescued a mob of previously-captured Imperial officers.

  But again, peace had th
reatened to break out and tank his chances of service, just as Petia made him a Fleet Centurion.

  At least he had gotten this far.

  Phil’s new office was just off the bridge of the Founder-class Heavy Cruiser Cyrus. The ship was an older model, laid down long before that pirate Bedrov had put his design aesthetic on everything. Everyone in the next room still faced forward towards a big wall screen, with Command Centurion Bohumil Križ at the back of the bridge. When he needed to be out there issuing orders, Fleet Centurion Kosnett sat off to one side in a workstation converted to handle flag command.

  The ship wasn’t really designed to command a squadron, but he’d rather be up here than taking over one of the auxiliary control spaces below. Like on CS-405, he had asked Križ to make a point to rotate her officers through various stations, so everyone got to know everyone, and Phil could spend time with each.

  Technically, he supposed that meant that he should spend time on the other cruisers as well, but that might be too much.

  He’d had a year to work with this crew, and this squadron: two light cruisers, including his old friends on Kamakura, plus the missile cruiser Ishfahan that had served with Keller during the last battle of the old war, at Thuringwell. Two escort corvettes and an assault corvette of the new design rounded out the team.

  Phil Kosnett had proven what he could do with a minimally-armed raiding squadron, so Petia had given him a heavy one. Not as modern as the Expeditionary Cruisers he had escorted on CS-405, but more than enough to handle anything less.

  The door chime to his office sounded and Phil opened the hatch.

  “Fleet signals, sir,” Phil’s Flag Centurion stepped into the room.

  Paskal Maisuradze, another of Petia’s protégés. She had made it clear to Phil that he would only have the man for another year or so, depending, as she intended to make him First Officer on a corvette after this, on his way to higher ranks.