by Blaze Ward
“If they can’t, then they’ve done something I don’t have to apologize for,” she replied, sipping her own tea and containing her spike of anger that never seemed far from the surface. “I’ve just fought two wars to provide everyone the chance at peace, Em. If Horvat wants to screw that up because of some ego trip, I’ll be the first one he has to go through to do it.”
“Even if it means become a traitor to Aquitaine?” Em pressed.
“A traitor to Horvat’s sense of greed, perhaps,” she countered. “I’m still Queen of the Pirates. They cannot take that away from me, regardless of what the Senate thinks or says. And they’ll have to explain trying something like that to the public, at some point.”
“Yes, but I’m sure he’ll have whipped up some something by the time he had to face that,” Em nodded. “Lincolnshire starting something with Salonnia and pulling everyone into the fracas, perhaps. That sort of thing. We largely ignored those two, except to smack them down when things got too rough. What if Horvat pushes instead?”
“Then you have a sandbox war between two junior varsity losers,” Jessica said. “And both call on their older sibling to fight for them. There are treaties that will have to be honored. Why Horvat thinks he can get away with all this still eludes me, even after listening to Torsten and Nils share their expertise.”
“Fribourg was another decade from recovering,” Em said. “Back to the emotional point where Casey could have led her people anywhere, without enough resistance to matter. Horvat had those ten years. Less, as we’d have been getting stronger every year. I can see why he thinks he has to move now.”
“And pulling the Dukes into the fray helps him, Em?”
“They own their planets, for all intents and purposes, Jess.” Em sipped some more tea. “That includes the media. Casey can get around them, she had that power, both politically as well as socially, but she’ll have to fight for opinion world by world, if they push. That takes time. I am looking forward to dropping her back home six months before anyone was expecting her, though.”
The smile in the older man’s eyes told Jessica just how big that surprise was going to be.
It didn’t solve her problem.
She could return to the red and fight on Fribourg’s side against all her oaths and most of her friends. She could beg or borrow some second-tier naval forces from Casey and Em to reinforce Corynthe against a possible attack from Aquitaine. Or she could go home to Ladaux and try to stop things.
Her next Court Martial would be an event for the ages, of that she had no doubts, but somehow, she suspected Petia would have stacked the court with men and women who would find her guilty of insubordination and probably treason, then toss her in the brig until it was all over, one way or the other.
“Florin for your thoughts?” he unknowingly echoed the phrase she and Torsten used. Or picked it up, as you did spending that much time around friends.
“Rubicon,” she replied after a moment. “Everyone thinks of it as the decision to roll the dice for everything, but very few people understand what that river was and what it meant.”
“It meant overthrowing the government that had given you supreme command, First Centurion,” Emmerich zu Wachturm, Grand Admiral of Fribourg replied in a hard, cold voice. “There are no good choices. Not for you. Torsten can always hide here. But you and Nils will have a tougher decision to make.”
“Nils has made his, Em,” she said. “He chose to remain aloof from Horvat’s machinations, when he finally understood them. In the present tense, he’s a fugitive, but history will judge him by a different standard.”
“And if he chooses the river with you?”
“Then two of your worst enemies ever will be back in the field, Em,” Jessica smiled. “On your side.”
“Don’t make your decision today, Jessica,” Em turned concerned. “First, you need to talk to Karl VIII. Not Casey zu Wiegand. Not Princess Kasimira. But the Emperor of Fribourg. Understand that that person will have to decide to accept you. Nils is an afterthought, at least until some decision is made. He’s one of the best there is, but very few of my commanders would immediately follow his orders, so his treason might have to be limited to being a Visiting Professor of Command Sciences on St. Legier. Everyone will want to listen to that man lecture, including an Emperor I know.”
“I have considered how to blackmail you into writing a book on Nils Kasum, Em,” Jessica smiled suddenly. “On the great struggles you two fought as young commanders.”
“I won’t,” Em said, before relenting with a sigh. “But if we’ve got him stuck on St. Legier for possibly years, I might assign a historian to interview us both for such a book. But that’s still secondary to the conversation at hand. My admirals would follow you. Even here. Rubicon, as you said. Neck or crown, because you would probably have to break Aquitaine in order to depose Horvat and his people. That decision cannot be made with the information at hand, because the repercussions, either way, will last for centuries.”
Jessica nodded to herself and let Kali-ma plot out grand strategies in her head, for a war neither of them ever considered fighting.
But she would not let Tadej Horvat’s ego ruin everything she had just spent a career constructing. She had made the galaxy a better place than she found it, and not many people could say that.
The only question would be how she stopped the man.
CHAPTER XXV
ENGINEERING STATUS: optimal
Weapon status: this platform is unarmed
Power supplies: batteries full. Induction systems optimal
Hardware status: Lord of Tiki projection optimal, language deviations over time adjusted for and stored internally
Memory status: 32% full with stable backups and off-site networking allowed
* * *
THE SECURITY PARADIGMS were looser today than they had been in the past. More people knew of the existence of the Lord of Tiki, even if most of them would never have any reason to interact with him.
For example, David Rodriguez, Regent of Corynthe, and his wife Kimiko had been added to the list of people he could speak to, as had their two, young children, Arnulf and little Jessica. David’s younger sister Freida was on a fallback list, as was Desianna Rodriguez.
The inner core of hooligans, as it were, was still the men and women he had helped to slay a god. Another god. Yan and Ainsley, there at his birth, so to speak. Pops Nakamura, without the deadly android known as Summer Ulfsson, last known sighting: St. Legier headed outbound into the darkness.
And Lady Moirrey zu Kermode-Wolanski of Ramsey. Pint-sized, as Jessica and Marcelle Travere both referred to the woman.
The walls of his bar were covered with actual, physical paper. He had objected, reminding them that he could cover the walls with a facsimile nobody present could tell from the real thing, but Yan had put his foot down. Probably just liked the smell of colored wax pens, knowing that pirate.
At least Pops had managed to get the room transformed into a proper bar. Four flavors of beer, from dark to heff, plus a tap of cider and another of mead, had been added, although all were on the wrong side of the bar, facing out. At least the humans could serve themselves.
He had a tape of a Formula-Six speeder race playing on a faux screen overhead, with the sound turned almost all the way down. Verisimilitude.
Lady Moirrey was seated on a comfortable barstool, turned somewhat sideways and leaning against the bar while drinking juice. Her daughter was quiescent today, although the little one had been active earlier. Even old bartenders know a tune that can calm a bouncy child, if you play it quietly.
Yan and Pops were on either side of a crude design drawing Pint-sized had brought with her, and had Ainsley tack to the wall. They had been arguing, but Moirrey was apparently ignoring the men.
She turned to face him with a serious face.
“Thoughts, barkeep?” the small woman asked.
“Wouldn’t do much to affect Buran,” the projected cognitive matrix of
the former Earth Alliance Sentient Combatant Carthage replied. “Bedrov’s new Fast Strike Bombers will suffer some, but they will quickly overcome, as will Neon Pink and Rocket Frog of the Queen’s Own.”
“Unnerstoods, ya big goof,” the engineer studied his face, rather than his projector. “Fools be comin’ in heres with Expeditionary Forces, more likely’n’not.”
The Bartender leaned his butt against the backbar and spent nearly four seconds contemplating the physics involved. Carthage had left him with the complete specs of RAN Mendocino, as scanned. Pops had added many other designs to his accessible records: current, probable, and fanciful; as well as the life of Henri Baudin, Founder of Aquitaine with the aid of the creature that would become Summer Ulfsson at a later date.
Four seconds at thirty-five thousand times the speed of human cognition equaled just over 1.62 days of constant processing, if a human could maintain their focus for that long. A few savants and chess masters were known to have that potential.
“If you catch them coming out of Jump, their matrix will collapse,” the Bartender said. “Most ships will require a minimum of twenty minutes to recalibrate everything, as they will not likely be expecting it, unlike some of the stories I have been told by Queen Jessica, where her ships pushed the inner boundary of the gravity well in an attack run.”
“Yups,” Moirrey agreed. “But?”
“But that presupposes you know the emergence is imminent,” he said. “Unlikely, given standard naval tactics of the day. These co-called gravity mines will only partially help. More probable is that you will be able to generate enough localized instability that attacking ships will have to maneuver away from the device in order to escape. With sufficient defensive firepower, you may be able to inflict greater damage than expected, at least until the device is destroyed.”
“What about disrupting the fabric of local space-time?” Ainsley spoke up suddenly, where she had been largely silent until now.
“I am not sure I follow,” he replied to the woman in a careful, polite tone.
“At the end, over Winterhome, “Ainsley said, turning to glance at the others as heart rates around the room began to accelerate. “Gunter wanted to fire the beam while in JumpSpace, and then come out and maneuver the ship. Summer said explicitly that all the energy of the beam would cause local space-time, out to four light-seconds to be so badly disrupted that no vessel could escape. For eighteen minutes, she claimed.”
“Soapy water and flying bugs,” Pops didn’t say it so much as breathe loudly.
“Yeah,” Ainsley agreed. “And how the hell did she know that, anyway?”
The Bartender noted that Ainsley turned her gaze on Bedrov and Nakamura, rather than the one person here who could tell her the truth. The other one, although he would never violate that confidence, given subsequent conversations with Lady Moirrey and Queen Jessica.
Pops had gone cold. Body temperature falling sharply with shock. Heart rate at the high end of safe and climbing. His face had gone white. He collapsed loudly into a chair, blowing furiously to breathe.
“Oh, shit,” Bedrov exploded into motion. “Pops, stay with me. Are you having a heart attack?”
Now was another time when not having any arms with which to help wasn’t worth the price of living forever. Carthage had warned him that watching friends die was the hardest thing in the universe, but the Bartender hadn’t understood how, until this moment.
Quickly, Bedrov and Barret got the older man drinking something with enough alcohol involved to strip metal parts.
“I’m fine,” Pops finally sputtered, after several, long moments when the bartender considered sending an anonymous override alert to the local medical teams, security be damned. “Moirrey, you have to tell them. Tell them the truth. About Summer.”
“How in all hells did you figgers it out, Pops?”
“She was famous once, Moirrey,” Pops answered. “Only ever found one match that looked close enough, and had enough brains. Plus, she knew you and Jessica, but hadn’t been around for the battle over Petron. Limited the field of places I needed to dig. And you know how much I love solving mysteries.”
“Does someone wanna explain what the hell you two are talking about?” Yan snapped angrily, taking a heavier-than-probably-smart draft of beer as he sat across from the older man.
“Tiki, secure the entire facility,” Moirrey turned to him now. “Doors, electronic communications, everything. Disrupt systems if you have to.”
The Bartender listened on all bands he could scan, but the room was as secure as he and his friends had been able to make it. Just in case, he purposefully burned out every signal emitter within twenty-eight meters of his projector that wasn’t already in the room.
They could fix the fire alarms tomorrow.
Lady Moirrey had stopped being the goofy engineer he liked and turned into the woman that designed beam emitters capable of slaying lesser gods.
“Pops, I’m surprised you were able to figure it out, but as you said, solving strange puzzles is what you do,” Lady Moirrey began in a dark voice. “Yan and Ainsley, and you Pops, what I’m about to tell you can never be repeated to anyone. Jess and Marcelle know the truth. I thought it was limited to the four of us and the Bartender here. If Gunter Tifft ever figures it out, one of us will have to kill the man. Am I understood?”
“What the hell, Pintsized?” Ainsley griped.
“Am I understood?” Moirrey didn’t raise her voice so much as finally insert a deadly threat to it that even the Bartender had never heard from the woman.
Ainsley started to say something, probably sarcastic and biting, when Yan caught her hand in both of his and deflected the woman’s rage. From where the Lord of Tiki was monitoring vital signs in the room, Ainsley Barret appeared to be the only person that had not solved the riddle, as Yan’s heart was hammering almost as hard as Nakamura’s now.
“Yeah. Fine,” Ainsley nodded, taking in everyone with a hard, sour glance, including a bartender. “Talk.”
“Very simply, the woman you knew as Summer Ulfsson was an imposter,” Moirrey said in a voice as cold as the black space between stars. One he remembered well.
“Knew that already,” Ainsley said. “One of Jessica’s spies, or something.”
“No,” Moirrey said simply. “When you and I were at First Ballard, during your battle outside, I had to help Suvi escape from an assassin. The comm systems had been killed, and she had no way to copy herself off-station. She had, however, spent a great deal of time thinking about how to escape her golden cage, and I helped.”
“I know that,” Ainsley’s voice grew quieter. “What did you do?”
“She had built an android body capable of passing as human, Ainsley Barret,” Moirrey said. “I helped birth her, by transferring all of her boards into that body. She escaped into the pod with me when the station was destroyed. They built a new copy of her from backups, but the original woman never went back. Jess and Marcelle helped me. Anyone knowing this information is subject to execution by both Aquitaine and Fribourg.”
The Lord of Tiki blinked in internal shock. He had assumed the android had done it herself without ever realizing what kind of help she must have had. Or what form it would have taken.
“And she still went with us to Winterhome?” Ainsley’s heart rate had finally joined the men.
“It was the only way, she said, that she could be sure she was the Last of the Immortals, not counting our friend here,” Moirrey explained, gesturing in his direction.
Everyone fell silent. Nakamura’s heartrate was almost back to normal, interestingly. The others still had a jolt of adrenaline to work off.
Finally, Yan spoke.
“So what happens if you enter JumpSpace with a short-range sail,” he asked in a technical tone. “And then fire a Primary beam across someone’s bow?”
“Dunno,” Moirrey said.
She turned her Death Goddess face in his direction and nodded.
“You will not
hit anything,” the Bartender replied. “The physics are such that the chances of intersection with anything but a gravity well are so insignificant as to be a rounding error. However, you would cause a localized disruption sufficient to prevent anything escaping, via JumpSail or the older JumpDrives. I can show you the math necessary build such a device, crossing one of Lady Moirrey’s Primary mines with a small JumpSail and a few other devices you would need to build.”
“Could you park Primary mines in JumpSpace?” Ainsley asked. “Like Jessica’s Forward Operating Base could do? And then disrupt local space-time from outside and drop them down on top of some stupid bastard and fire into his ass?”
Lady Moirrey’s laugh was a chilling, inhuman thing, even to a being as old as the Lord of Tiki.
“Sounds like Mischief,” she suggested with a voice between a laugh and a hungry snarl.
The Bartender would have shuddered, were he organic. But this place was his home now, too. He would do anything Carthage had allowed to protect it.
CHAPTER XXVI
IMPERIAL FOUNDING: 183/05/06. IFV HANS BRANSCH, STABIEL SYSTEM
VO TOOK his usual place on the bridge, to the left of the Captain where he could watch things unfold. He hadn’t been a bridge officer in his time with Jessica’s various squadrons, and only had stories about this team, but Roland Exeter and his crew had been challenged by RAN Ballard to step up their game, with plentiful examples in the process.
It showed here, as they camped about a light-hour out from Stabiel and listened to chickens closer-in to the star, frantically worried that the weasels would return to the hen house for a second go.
“Thoughts, sir?” Exeter turned his way with an open face.
Another Imperial officer might have asked for orders, but Denis had explained Vo’s position as a flag of authority, rather than a naval expert to be deferred to. Plus, Roland Exeter had impressed Jessica with his own competence, and that wasn’t an easy thing to do.
