Petron

by Blaze Ward

  Jessica nodded.

  “If I join your forces, I become a rebel,” she said succinctly. “I become the single worst Benedict Arnold figure that Aquitaine historians will ever be able to imagine, and will be crucified in the press and public as a result.”

  “Just so, Jess,” Em agreed. “Is it worth the costs? All you have to do is withdraw to Corynthe and you will seriously undermine their naval potential, especially without Nils there either. It might be a bloody mess, but we’ll win.”

  “You’ll win, but how long will it take, Em?” she asked. “Torsten and I were talking about that just before you arrived. Fribourg has more ships, but Aquitaine has generally had a better officer corps, doubly so once Nils purged the Noble Lords from the fleet and left only the Fighting Lords in command. You still have well-bred fools in positions of authority, in too many places.”

  “Yes, but you’ve just spent several years teaching my officers what it means to do their job like professionals, Jessica,” Em nodded as he sipped. “Tom Provst is a better commander now than I ever imagined he’d be, and I’m the one who shaped him, brought him along, and turned him into the man you met during the Coup. Your legend has done the same with his men, currently serving under Denis until Tom arrives to take command. We’ll win.”

  “Eventually, yes, you will, Em,” Jessica agreed. “But it will take years. Battles. Campaigns. Sieges and invasions. How many millions of people will end up dead that might have otherwise survived, without Horvat’s ego? Or Judit’s? She’s certainly just as deep in this as he is. Perhaps more so, once all the layers of lies and obfuscation are stripped away.”

  “Many,” Em nodded sadly. “That is the nature of the thing we are trying to prevent. Aquitaine would not do this thing unless they thought that A) they could get away with it, and B) they could win. Had they gotten a six or maybe twelve month head start, they might have done enough damage in enough places to sue for peace, as Bergelmir and his cronies were in a position to push.”

  “Would that have broken the Empire in two, Em?” Torsten spoke up. “I’ve been away for longer than you have, and not perhaps paying as close of attention as I could. Would Horvat’s surprise attacks in places have eventually been accepted as fait accompli, once everyone calmed down and tried to negotiate a peace? And would that internal argument have fractured us to the point that perhaps an Imperial Civil War was the next phase?”

  Jessica watched Em’s eyes grow big. The Grand Admiral had forgotten why she had fallen in love with Torsten in the first place. That mind. Able to see places and things beyond normal view.

  “He appears to be playing an even longer game than I had given the man credit for,” Em blew out a huge breath. “You will need to talk to Casey and Cameron Lara, Torsten, in great detail. Perhaps return, however briefly, to your days of rampant prognostications that always seemed so prescient.”

  Torsten nodded, understanding that his ability to predict the future from available data would probably be his role in the coming conflagration, just as Nils Kasum would teach a new generation of Imperial officers how to be better men, and possibly women, if Casey was able to move some of the older admirals off center and out of their hidebound ways.

  Who would be the first Victoria Ames to join the Imperial Fleet?

  “So now you understand why I can’t just walk away, Emmerich,” Jessica said. “That bastard wants to undo everything I’ve spent my life building. I doubt that it’s personal against me, but his ego demands that he be the man who broke the Fribourg Empire. Not even Judit Chavarría and Jessica Keller did that. All they could do was stop the bleeding. Tadej Horvat wants to win the Great War itself.”

  Em paused and studied her face closely for several seconds.

  “So you’ll step in and take command of one of my fleets?” Emmerich zu Wachturm, Grand Admiral of Fribourg, asked in a serious tone.

  “No,” Jessica felt her smile turn cold and lethal.

  “No?” he seemed surprised.

  “No, Jessica continued slowly. “I want you to lease one of your fleets to Corynthe. Those bastards declared war on me. All you have to do is defend your systems against invasions and ignore all provocations from Aquitaine.”

  “What will you do with such a fleet, Jessica?”

  “Annihilate Lincolnshire,” Kali-ma replied.

  CHAPTER XLIII

  IMPERIAL FOUNDING: 183/06/10. HALL OF GOVERNMENT, STRASBOURG, ST. LEGIER

  REINHARD HAD ENTERED the building through an obscure side door he hadn’t even known the Hall of Government had. It had deposited him quickly behind the glossy façade of the government itself, down in the machinery, the bowels of the bureaucracy.

  Guards still checked his credentials at every barrier, but they in turn passed him quickly on to the next layer with a sharp professionalism rather at odds with the looser methods of the House of the People. Reinhard wondered what that said about the relative bodies.

  Finally, a door with a number and nothing else by which to identify it. He checked his mechanical chronometer and was close enough to on time that he turned the handle and pushed the door in.

  He was in another of what appeared to be an endless stream of medium-sized conference rooms, such as made up his life these days. Four meters wide. Eight long. Dominated by a wooden table that had seen better days and chairs that were three-quarters from the same, matched set.

  Guards around the outer wall, as was becoming more and more common as well, as he had stopped being among irrelevant fish sometime in the last few weeks. Aides in the left-hand corners, farthest away from the head of the table, where Chief of Deputies Lara waited with a relaxed smile on his face. Only one other person at the table, so this would be a small meeting.

  Those were usually the most dangerous, as Reinhard had come to discover that the size of the group in the meeting tended to be inversely proportional to importance of the topic.

  The other person seated at the table registered and Reinhard felt his stomach fall out of his body.

  “Your Majesty?” he gasped, unsure what the correct protocol was for a situation like this.

  He had never before met the woman, nor her father. Was he supposed to bow? What?

  “Sit, Reinhard,” Cameron said with a calming motion and a smile. “Close the door behind you and then see if you can pick your jaw up off the floor.”

  Reinhard staggered to the second chair on this side, rather than the one directly across from the woman, and collapsed into it.

  Karl VIII seemed to be pleased with something, from the light smile on her face.

  “I had no idea…” he stammered.

  “Yes,” Cameron said. “That was intentional on my part. Security, but also the need to keep certain things secret as long as possible.”

  “Sir?” Reinhard managed.

  Rather than speak, the Chief of Deputies turned to the Emperor.

  She studied him for several seconds as he felt every crime and sin he had ever even considered come to the fore of his mind. Then he managed to crush those thoughts, if not the embarrassment. She was just a person, like him. A woman who had happened to be born the youngest child of someone important, and had inherited his authority when he passed.

  Reinhard managed to take a deep enough breath that his heart started to slow down some.

  “Reinhard Hjördís,” she said in a warm, alto voice.

  He nodded, unwilling to betray the inevitable crack in his voice by speaking.

  “The reason I asked Cameron to surprise you like this was mostly to protect you from political and social reprisals,” she continued. “The next few months will be difficult for you.”

  “Your Majesty?” Reinhard asked.

  “Cameron has explained to me that he tasked you with thwarting the will of the Dukes, but doing so in such a way that no trail could be traced back to my government,” she explained. “For that, I wanted to personally thank you, and ask an even greater favor of you.”

  “Your Majesty?” he ask
ed again, feeling like a broken recording stuck to just playing the same two words over and over again, at least until his brain managed to jump itself out of the rut it had fallen into.

  Her smile indicated that she had noticed the same verbal tic.

  “I want you to continue your tilting at windmills, Hjördís,” the Emperor commanded him in a light voice. “Neither Cameron nor I will be able to publicly acknowledge your chore, perhaps for a long time, but what you are doing will make the Empire a stronger, better place for our children.”

  “I don’t understand,” Reinhard managed to bite back the words Your Majesty this time. Hopefully she would not be offended.

  “It is my will, my goal, that the Dukes eventually be neutered,” Karl VIII said. “My hope is that my children inherit a galaxy where Fribourg is more like the place that Aquitaine likes to describe itself, however short of reality they might have fallen in recent times. That the House of the People becomes the dominant legislative body, responsible for the well-being of the Empire itself.”

  Reinhard let the words worm their way into his skin and settle, trying desperately to find something useful to say. Something that didn’t make him look like a greater fool.

  “But the People would have eventually passed the treaty, Your Majesty,” he offered weakly.

  She nodded and continued to study him like a hawk watching a mouse.

  “At the time, it was a good document, Hjördís,” she replied. “And the Throne is still not bound by such decisions, if we choose not to be. At least not yet.”

  “Not yet?” he gasped, staggered at the implications.

  That suggested a future where the Emperor of Fribourg might be bound by limitations. What might that kind of a place look like?

  “Not yet,” she agreed. “The People must first learn to govern well and effectively. That will be measured in decades, most likely, perhaps generations from my own studies of history, but it is a goal to which I want you to strive, and draw your House with you.”

  “Me?”

  “You, Hjördís,” she nodded, more serious now. “You want to make this a better place, and believe me, I have many men following up on such things, especially in light of some of the things I have recently discovered, You are not blinded by ego or greed, and that is far too uncommon a trait.”

  “So you want me to thwart your government?” he asked, aghast, but at the same time intrigued.

  As a man who sold books, he had also read his fair share of them over the years. Especially histories and biographies; the various sub-genre of romance just not working to keep his mind engaged.

  “In a way, yes,” she agreed. “The foundations of the Empire have cracked and rotted. All that we have seen recently simply revealed that. The rest of my life will be dedicated to repairing and rebuilding it. Physically, in the form of St. Legier and Lake Werder, but also metaphorically as we want to give our children and grandchildren a better world in which to live. I might never be able to publicly thank you for your work, especially as you may become such an enemy of my Dukes that I am required to step in and adjudicate from time to time. But I also hope that this will not be the last time you and I meet to plot a brighter future.”

  Reinhard had no words. None. Emptiness. Blank pages in new notebooks, but nothing that would take form.

  Emperor Karl VIII smiled at him and rose from her seat.

  “With that, I will leave you to talk business with Cameron,” she said, smiling. “He will be able to answer other questions, and facilitate communications between us in the future.”

  And then she was gone, in a breeze that smelled faintly of spring roses.

  Reinhard stared at Cameron for several seconds, still unable to speak.

  “What just happened?” he finally managed in a weak voice.

  “One of us just became an unindicted co-conspirator,” the Chief of Deputies laughed warmly. “Probably both, depending on which conspiracy you’re looking at.”

  Yes, Reinhard suspected as much.

  And Emperor Karl VIII saw it as a good thing that he was going to tilt at windmills with the Dukes.

  What kind of a galaxy could he help birth?

  PART FIVE

  THE GREAT WAR

  CHAPTER XLIV

  DATE OF THE REPUBLIC JUNE 20, 405 CA CYRUS, HEMERA

  PHIL HAD SPENT the last two days trapped in the most bizarre snare any rabbit had ever lost a foot into. So he had mostly hidden in his office and considered.

  His squadron had acted with sure professionalism as the Imperial fleet leapt away to JumpSpace. In the back of his mind had been the outside possibility that Vo zu Arlo, Imperial General and possibly rogue Centurion, had either made the leap to drop an anvil on the eggshells Phil commanded, or to make the sort of demonstration against Hemera’s orbital defenses as Cyrus and her consorts had done to Stabiel. Considering that a tentative state of war might exist right now between Aquitaine and Fribourg, Arlo could have annihilated him.

  Instead, the man had moved backwards into the cold part of the outer system, almost exactly one light-hour out from where he had been before.

  And then sat there, like gargoyles. Or wolves at the very edge of the firelight. Same thing.

  Nothing Phil could have done against that many modern warships might have even registered.

  So he had waited. Held the line as best such an outgunned force could have.

  But nothing had happened. Just an Imperial fleet, watching him.

  It would be utter folly to attack. Suicide.

  And Arlo had threatened to come down from the darkness and destroy Hemera if Phil left, regardless of what movement orders arrived with one of the couriers that had been coming and going deeper in the system.

  Finally, there were the contents of the packet the man had given to him.

  Disturbing.

  Someone had organized the material according to Aquitaine standards. Someone who knew exactly how such a report should be written. Accusations. Conclusions. And a transcript of an attached video interview, where someone never identified had interviewed a pair of men: Garth Andresson and Naruhito Yamagura; walking them slowly and deliberately through a criminal conspiracy to assassinate a foreign dignitary on Corynthe soil.

  Worse than being taken alive, the men were apparently still among the living and had decided to cooperate, presumably to reduce an obvious death penalty down to something lesser. The last note indicated that they could be made available to answer questions posed by an RAN officer, a member of the Judge Advocate General Corps. But only on an Imperial deck.

  Phil had consumed it all. Twice. Slept on it. Cogitated. Considered his own Oath as an Officer and a Gentleman.

  Yes, someone had known what buttons to push, whoever they might have run into at Hemera. It had just been Phil’s luck to draw that straw.

  He had no idea if it was good fortune or bad.

  He pressed a button to open a line to Paskal.

  “Sir?” his Flag Centurion appeared immediately.

  “You, Command Centurion Križ, and Centurion Velazquez of the JAG need to come to my office,” Phil said. “Immediately. And let the rest of the team know to prepare for squadron maneuvers as soon as we’re done in here.”

  The man gulped, nodded, and cut the line.

  Phil ran his hand down his face, as if he could wipe the last two days away and return to the simpler, semi-idyllic life he had known as recently as fifty-five hours ago.

  Command Centurion Križ appeared first. Probably had been sitting on the bridge right now, so the rest of her team had a chance to sleep and eat. Phil had secured everyone from alert, but they really hadn’t stood things down. There was still a Mongol army parked at the edge of the field.

  “Phil,” she nodded as she entered.

  “Bohumil,” he tried to smile up at her. “You sit on the end, turned sideways. Given what’s coming, you might be a witness, and you might be called upon to make command decisions.”

  She looked at him sharply
. Phrased that way, he was telling her in subtle terms that she might need to consider relieving Phil of command.

  In the middle of a battle.

  At least one of them would probably be cashiered in disgrace if she did that. Maybe both.

  Paskal was next, bringing along a spare chair that he shifted to the opposite end from the Command Centurion and clicked to the deck.

  Andrea Velazquez knocked and entered, obviously bewildered by being summoned to the Fleet Centurion’s office without any warning.

  “Sit, Velazquez,” Phil ordered. “You aren’t in any trouble. I need a legal opinion, and I’m afraid too many lives probably hang in the balance.”

  She nodded, her reddish skin turning a little whiter as her eyes opened a bit and then focused hard on Phil. He was known as The Professor in the squadron, a nickname he had earned serving with Jessica Keller. Intellectual and meticulous.

  Andrea Velazquez was a close match in temperament. Trained as a naval officer, and then as a lawyer, where she might eventually become a Naval Judge, or return to civilian practice with a leg up on others.

  Phil pressed a button on his console and took a deep breath.

  “This is Fleet Centurion Phil Kosnett, Task Force commander aboard RAN Cyrus,” he began in a tone that got the other three immediately sitting at attention. “With me are Command Centurion Bohumil Križ, Commander of Cyrus; Centurion Andrea Velazquez, JAG; and Paskal Maisuradze, Task Force Flag Centurion. They are not currently aware of the contents of the package delivered to this force by Aquitaine Centurion Vo zu Arlo, on detached duty and currently aboard the enemy flagship, parked in the Hemera system and offering overwhelming threat to this force, but only at such time as we depart from Hemera.”

  Phil paused and popped his neck one way and then the other before he continued.