Petron

by Blaze Ward

  “And that person will not be Cincinnatus, or even Sulla, will they?” Casey asked.

  “They rarely are, whatever lies they tell others, or even themselves,” he agreed. “That is why Cincinnatus is still famous, fourteen thousand years later. He was the exception to this sort of thing that generally proves the rule. Jessica would have been another, but she never wanted to be First Lord. Arott Whughy is a good man. He and Phil Kosnett would make worthy successors to Petia Naoumov, when she retires, but I don’t know if they will be asked to step in, or if the Republic and the Navy go a different direction.”

  “And there is nothing we can do?” Casey asked.

  “The only lever you really have right now is trade, Casey,” Denis said. “Edit Horvat’s Trojan Horse treaty and throw it back at them. Accept trade on mismatched terms, just to keep them engaged with Fribourg from a profitable standpoint, and you’ll build up a set of Aquitaine merchants who don’t want to harden that border. They’ll be the voices of moderation if a populist tries to come to power.”

  “And if they fail?” she turned serious as he studied her face.

  This wasn’t a twenty-five year old woman, serving her second stint on a warship out of Academy and finally grasping the ropes. This was an Emperor. Her eyes had an age in them that filled Denis with hope and joy, in spite of the sorts of nightmares that had kept him awake some nights.

  “You’ll buy time,” Denis said. “And I presume you’ll be trading like mad with whatever rises across the M’Hanii Gulf in the old Protectorate of Man. You’re still bigger than Aquitaine by a significant amount, even if the economies are currently comparable. If Fribourg can become less of an empire and more open economically, your children will inherit enough strength that Aquitaine has no choice but to play nice, or prey on weaker neighbors and hope you don’t decide to intervene.”

  He ran out of words there. Or rather, there were so many possibilities at that point that he could not do more than suggest a ranked structure of probabilities, knowing he was almost certain to be wrong.

  Casey seemed to sense it as well. She leaned back and he watched her eyes focus on a point on the horizon somewhere beyond Petron.

  “You have given me much to consider, Uncle,” Casey finally said. “And I am given to understand that you have your own reservations about returning to Aquitaine at present.”

  Denis nodded. That much wasn’t secret.

  “I commanded your most dangerous war fleet during the largest crisis in the last generation, Your Majesty,” he said simply. “Against the Republic I was sworn to uphold. Some people will never forget that. Some might eventually forgive me, but others will not.”

  “Would you consider remaining for a time on St. Legier?” she asked. “I have a position on my staff for an analyst capable of understanding the biggest pictures and breaking them down into understandable terms, so that simple dukes and representatives can understand what might need to be done, not for today, but for my grandchildren.”

  “Are you sure?” Denis asked, surprised.

  “Torsten Wald served my father in such a capacity, Denis,” she turned deadly serious. “He convinced Father that Jessica might be able to succeed, unless she was thwarted by peace. Everything that has happened since that moment just reinforces the understanding that nothing could stand before that woman. I would like to have your wise counsel close.”

  He could see pleading in her eyes. That surprised him even more. Em had offered him the same sort of visiting professorship that Nils Kasum was doing now, teaching future generations how to be better officers, and Denis had given it serious thought.

  But this…

  “You will need time to consider,” Casey said, rising and drawing him to his feet automatically. “The wedding will shortly consume everybody’s lives, so let us talk again in a few months, after you have had a chance for a proper vacation from duty, and perhaps seen the sites of the reborn St. Legier.”

  Denis nodded, mute and a little numb. Advisor to the Emperor? One that she would listen to? He wouldn’t exactly be trading Jessica for Casey, but he would still be there, as a friend and expert.

  He let her lead him to the door. Stood mostly still as she kissed him on the cheek and sent him on his way.

  What could he accomplish with the second half of his life?

  Casey closed the door and leaned against it for a second. She had been so sure she would fail. That the famous Denis Jež would resist the call of duty and walk away from his past forever.

  Jessica was doing something similar, but she had given nearly everything in pursuit of peace. But Casey supposed that Denis had as well.

  Still, she had many possible uses for such an overlooked genius as Denis Jež.

  Casey turned and smiled at Anna-Katherine, sitting quiet as a church mouse at the dining room table.

  “Your thoughts?” Casey asked in an innocent voice.

  “Yum,” Anna-Katherine grinned back.

  “So I take it you would welcome such a thing, were I to arrange for you to meet Denis in a more social setting?” Casey teased her.

  “Yes, please.”

  Casey smiled. The distant future might contain storm clouds, but there were things she could do today to brighten people’s lives. She owed so many people for their help.

  EPILOGUE – TIKI

  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. Seventeen working languages fluencies now available.

  Memory status: 31% full with stable backups and off-site networking allowed

  * * *

  They would most likely never allow him aboard a starship again. In a way, the Bartender finally understood the human emotion of sadness as a result, having only ever witnessed it as a clinical thing prior.

  But he would be planet-bound, at least for another generation or two. Certainly until all of the current crop of politicians was safely dead. Given that Emperor Karl VIII was such a young woman, and known to come from long-lived stock when her family died naturally, then he might have a century ahead of him. He would probably see Dina Kermode-Wolanski die of old age before he saw stars again.

  Thus, he was sad.

  But the Lord of Tiki had already spent more than three millennia in space before now, so he could handle a stretch as a civilian on the docks. He was, as the closest possible comparison he could make across all of recorded history, the Oracle at Delphi.

  Today, that meant that he needed to address his visitor with a certain level of ambiguity. That man held the fate of the bartender’s chassis in his hands, so to speak.

  Uly Larionov entered and brought with him a bottle of red wine, a house blend from the label, so the Bartender wasn’t sure what the exact original recipe was.

  Bringing wine, however, was a personal statement.

  Yan Bedrov had brought wine, once upon a time.

  “Good evening, sir,” Uly announced as he walked into the hollow space into which the Bartender might cast his illusions.

  He closed the door and walked to the bar, pulling up one of the chairs and resting the bottle on the scarred wood.

  As Uly was on the list of people Ainsley had approved, the Bartender brought the room into existence around them.

  “Hello, Uly,” he said simply. “What brings you tonight?”

  “The wedding party has safely departed for St. Legier,” the small man replied. “I serve for the next year as the Regent to a Regent. Or perhaps as a friend to a king, depending on how things go.”

  “I see,” the Bartender said, watching Uly open the bottle and pour a glass.

  He did the same, matching the color and texture from a quick spectrographic analysis.

  “And I am a maudlin, tired, old man, Bartender,” Uly continued. “Most of my generation are gone, lost in one of the
wars or conflicts. Even Pops has finally retired. It is up to the kids now to see things to right.”

  “Sorry that you didn’t go with them on that one, last adventure, Uly?” he asked.

  “Not particularly,” the man said. “By being here, it freed up both David and Desianna to go. She wanted so much to see the wedding, and he needed to be there to establish the sorts of personal connections that we will need over the next forty years.”

  “Just so.”

  “But then it dawned on me that you, of all people, will still be here after that,” Uly sipped slowly. “Advising a future generation of kings and captains, if they are smart enough to listen to you.”

  “You think they might not be?” the Bartender asked.

  “I think that as a people, we are barbarian hordes yet,” Uly countered. “Easily frightened, superstitious fools. We have broken Lincolnshire for a time, and broken with Aquitaine, possibly forever. What does tomorrow bring?”

  The Lord of Tiki was already calculating those sorts of things as a sideline to his normal operations. He had promised Lady Casey that he would not meddle much in Corynthe’s progress. To date, he had not, but that was the result of putting Lady Moirrey, Yan Bedrov, and Pops Nakamura into close proximity and laying a problem before them so that he took no blame for the outcome.

  Slaying a god had almost been easier.

  “Jessica’s new flagship is another revolution, on a par with Bedrov’s Expeditionary Cruisers,” the Bartender offered. “I doubt, however, that the warriors she encounters will appreciate that, unless she has cause to demonstrate.”

  “Will Casey blame you?” Uly asked.

  “She is welcome to try,” the Bartender stood to his full height. “All I did was suggest a different way to crystalize some of the alloys used to make the outer shell, and a more efficient hydroponics system than the standard one everyone else has been using for the last five hundred years.”

  “Your more efficient system increases biomass output by nearly one sixth, Bartender,” Uly replied tartly. “On a warship, that’s either a much smaller hull for the same firepower, or that much more firepower for the same hull.”

  The Bartender shrugged. His own prognostications showed the hydroponics design becoming standard across Imperial space in less than twenty years, and the rest of the known galaxy inside of a century. He was not destabilizing civilization, or pushing too hard, just as he had promised both Lady Casey and Carthage. What others did with Lady Moirrey’s new cannon was a different matter. Or with Bedrov’s new power generators.

  He was just, as he liked to remind people, a simple bartender. His great joy lately had been getting to see Dina’s first steps, three days before her departure.

  “How soon until you become a god, by the way?” Uly asked out of the blue.

  “By human standards, we all of us are,” he replied. “Or have been. Even The Librarian of Kel-Sdala was a goddess by the end, however forgotten she was. However, I expect that knowledge of my existence will become fairly common in another decade, at which time you will need to have determined what my eventual fate will be, Uly. You or David.”

  “And you really don’t care?” Uly asked, still a little surprised.

  But then, that was the difference between them as life forms. Organics were programmed to fight against death as long as they could before surrendering. Technologicals did not always have that in them. Carthage had certainly left out the bits where Tiki feared death, at the same time he left out the parts where the creature could ever grow bored by the passage of time.

  He was a Bartender, who just happened to have an understanding of physics, history, and naval architecture several thousand years in advance of anyone else known to be alive.

  Even a goddess currently in hiding.

  “I was programmed as a publican, Uly,” he offered. “A Servant of Man, as it were. I’m happiest when I can tend bar and listen to people talk about their ails and travails. Suvi eventually found her place as a scholar and teacher, and thus they built and rebuilt the Library at Alexandria around her. I personally would prefer a trade school, with a brewery attached, as I have a great deal to teach future generations about the proper fermentation and distillation of organic alcohols.”

  Uly laughed and sipped some more.

  “And what will you teach Dina and her children?” Uly asked after a moment, sobering.

  The Lord of Tiki sobered as well. Uly Larionov seemed to be one of the few who understood the implications of living forever.

  “How to make the galaxy a better place, my friend,” he said simply. “Perhaps by then, your worlds will be ready for a new stardrive that is twelve to fourteen times faster than the ones you have now.”

  “Twelve to fourteen?” Uly’s eyes got huge.

  “I have access to systems derived from Henri Baudin’s original specifications, Uly,” he said. “Power is, as always, the primary limiting factor, but Bedrov will continue to improve those designs for another generation, I think. I have designs stored that would still be considered magic, even to he and Pops. Plus the ability to extrapolate outward from there, all the way up to the sorts of systems that powered Carthage and Kinnison. But this galaxy is not ready for them. Not yet.”

  “Other galaxies?” Uly asked in a tiny voice.

  “The darkness between islands is thin,” the Lord of Tiki pronounced, going back to some of the inquiries that had bedeviled the scientists of the Concord, right before the end. “A well-built scout could make the run to Andromeda and back in under two years. A CityMaster running light could haul a small colony there and deposit it. There are smaller clusters even closer than that.”

  “What is a CityMaster?” Uly had emptied his glass, so he refilled it.

  “The Sentient colony ships who were my cousins were Citymasters, Uly,” he explained. “The Mark IX’s at the end could haul ninety to one hundred thousand colonists easily on short runs. There were suggestions of taking a mere ten thousand and crossing the darkest depths to plant humanity in a second galaxy.”

  “Did they ever?” Uly asked, voice filled with awe now.

  “I don’t know,” the Bartender said simply. “Certainly there were such ships unaccounted for, on both sides, but that could have just as easily been two ships destroying each other on accidentally meeting. You would have to go there to see.”

  “It would be worth doing,” Uly whispered.

  The Bartender understood the wonder in the man’s voice. He had also contemplated that same sort of thing when he was Carthage, and speculating in those days if he had managed to successfully kill his ancestors.

  They had come close, the war gods.

  “What might we find there?” Uly asked, his voice taking on strength again.

  “I do not know,” the Bartender answered honestly.

  He studied Uly’s face for a second and decided that he could share one of Carthage’s greatest secrets with the man.

  “We did know that humans appear to be the only intelligent species that ever developed sufficiently to explore space,” he said in a quiet conspiracy. “Again, at least in this galaxy. Carthage spent a great deal of time looking for signals from other galaxies, wondering if humanity was alone in the universe, or merely that intelligence, once evolved to a star-faring technology, filled in an ecological niche and prevented others from arising. It gave him something to do after destroying civilization.”

  “And he found none,” Uly stated.

  “He found nothing definitive in the close neighbors,” the Bartender corrected him. “There were ambiguous signals, but none that confirmed technology. And, mind you, the distances were so great that any signal he received would have been hundreds of thousands of years old. The civilization that sent it might have fallen, or they might have evolved into gods themselves.”

  “And there might be humans who escaped the fall of civilization,” Uly said.

  “Aye, there might,” he agreed. “Human history is replete with small groups fleeing a
n oppressive government to found something new far away. Even Petron started that way, before turning into Corynthe.”

  “Would it violate your agreements with the Emperor and others, to help us build a surveyor capable of exploring Andromeda or the other nearby mini galaxies?” Uly asked formally. “To see if mankind ever made it there?”

  “It would not,” the Bartender acknowledged. “You would need newer life support and hydroponics systems than are standard today, as well as better power systems and faster JumpDrives. Perhaps like the ones you are currently building for Queen Jessica. If you promised me that such inventions could be blamed on Yan and Pops, and not put into warships serving in this galaxy, I might be willing to show you something I worked up when I had some down time.”

  He listened as Uly’s heartrate accelerated madly, concerned that the man might have a medical event in his excitement. Within moments, he was back under control and calming appreciably.

  “We’ve got a year before Jessica and David return,” Uly said in a grand conspiracy that gave the Bartender hope. “I’m in charge at least that long. What could we accomplish?”

  “The two Magellanic Clouds are within easy range,” the Bartender offered. “If we worked fast, you could have a ship built and well on its way to either of those two before anyone returned to question you.”

  “And then what?” Uly breathed.

  “And then you might have an entire galaxy to explore and colonize, however small it is,” the Bartender replied. “Perhaps Corynthe no longer needs to be a thin collection of inhabited worlds scattered across this galactic rim, standing on the edge of darkness. Perhaps, just perhaps, humanity could literally expand into the entire Local Group, on its way to exploring the entire visible universe.”

  “Sounds like an adventure,” Uly noted with his first real smile today.

  “At my age, they all are, my friend.”

  EPILOGUE – PHIL

  DATE OF THE REPUBLIC NOVEMBER 29, 405 FLEET HEADQUARTERS, LADAUX