by Jim Rudnick
The ambassador said once more to his guest, “I am sure that the Lady will be here directly, Professor, and my apologies—perhaps traffic has delayed their vehicle.”
He pointed to the sideboard table that held fresh coffee, tea, soft drinks, water, and the Lady’s favorite pastries and offered more to his guest.
“Not a problem, Mr. Ambassador, I was asked to attend this meeting, and in doing so, I got to skip out on lecturing a Statute Law 101 course, which is so boring that I’m happy to be here. Happy indeed and yes, I think I’ll have another of those Carnarvon muffins too,” he said as he rose, added a third muffin to his plate, and retook his seat to await the Lady St. August.
From down the hall, the striding sounds of boots on the tiled corridor could be heard, and the two men in the conference room rose to stand behind the large board table. Four EliteGuards men entered the room and spread out to picket the doorway. Behind them, the Lady entered the room and ignored the two men already there as she went to the sideboard to get a tea and take a dainty pastry—bright red icing, of course—and then took a seat down at the far end of the conference table.
Both of the men hurriedly scooped up their own cups and side plates and moved down to her end of the table. The ambassador looked directly at her, but the Lady was looking out the window at whatever lay there ignoring the two men.
As the professor leaned forward to introduce himself, a soft hand on his forearm from the ambassador quelled that introduction and they sat and waited.
“Being a Royal—at least from a non-Royal person’s point of view—seems easy, does it not?” she said, her voice soft, but it was obvious that this was a rhetorical question.
Both men sat still and waited, as they knew there would be more.
“And for someone like me, born a Royal, who is going to one day inherit the Barony with our nine—no, ten—planets with our billions of citizens, it is a lifetime of obligation and duty to the tasks of governing the Barony. Ambassador, is this the man who you have brought to me who can help me with what I seek to know about our RIM Confederacy law?” she said as she turned and leaned in to the table, picking up that red iced pastry.
“Ma’am, there is one acknowledged expert on Confederacy law, and that man is in front of you right now, Ma’am. May I present Professor Klass Boven, Ma’am?” he said, and the professor rose but was quickly waved to sit back down by the Lady.
“A quick lookup of your credentials, Professor, shows me that you are the best man I could ask for—at least that’s what Galipedia told me a few minutes ago. You are excused, Ambassador,” she said as she took a bite of the pastry she held and waited until the room was clear, still staring out the window.
Nodding to the EliteGuard who was closest to her, she ordered the room cleared, and then they were alone, the Lady and the professor. She chewed slowly, washed down the last of that pastry with some of her tea, and then looked at the professor for the first time.
“Professor, I have asked you here to ask you some questions on Confederacy law. You are to answer same with all the honesty you can find, and once that is done, you will forget we ever had this conversation. Do I make myself clear?” she said with a look on her face that asked for his compliance.
Nodding, he said, “Of course, Lady St. August, of course,” and his voice shook with the slightest of tremors.
“There may be a situation that could occur in the next few months where I may need to, well, force a RIM citizen to do something that they may not want to do. What I need to know is how to do that legally—that cannot be challenged by anyone else at least at the time that this occurs. So my question is, how can I do that legally, Professor?”
His hand shook a teensy bit as the man opposite her picked up his coffee cup to take a large gulp, and he set the cup down loudly on its saucer with a clang. He nodded and then leaned back, and as his head tilted to one side, it was as if he was searching his memory for that information.
A full minute went by and then he looked up at her and didn’t smile but looked thoughtful.
“Ma’am, do I assume that you mean a non-Barony citizen, Ma’am?” he said slowly.
The Lady nodded in response.
“Ma’am, then you’re asking if a Royal of one of the Confederacy planets can order a non-citizen—in fact a citizen of another member planet of the Confederacy to do something, Ma’am?”
Again, he received a nod in return.
“And, Ma’am, if that citizen will not comply, do you have any sanctions under current Confederacy law to force that citizen to follow your orders. Do I have that correct as well, Ma’am?”
She nodded once more to him and said simply, “Exactly!”
“Then, Ma’am, no, there is no such statute or law that can ensure compliance in this limited case,” he said and sat back slowly, not knowing how the Royal in front of him would take this kind of an opinion.
She took another bite of the pastry and licked the edge of icing off her thumb as she slowly chewed and then swallowed. Sipping her tea, she took her time and then turned back to the expert in front of her.
She spoke then as she turned back, her foot tapping on the floor quietly, yet it tapped incessantly.
“Absolutely sure, Professor?” she said, and then her look turned into a glare.
He didn’t even flinch, she noted, but his normally red complexion from the Carnarvon sun did blanch a bit and he shrugged.
“Well, wait, there is ... no, I don’t think that even ...” he said and then stammered off to silence.
Helena stared at him and pushed her chair in closer to the table as her foot stopped its tapping, and she waved him to go on.
An hour later, she was on the treadmill in the gym down on Deck Fourteen of the Sterling, and as she sweated off the furor she had been feeling since listening to the Professor, she cursed loudly. “Damn him. Damn my stepmother too. Damn them all.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Pressing her palm against the lock plate, Tibah moved through the sliding door quickly to not allow the interior lab to take in much of the warmer air from the rest of the outbuilding. She nodded to one of the lab techs but didn’t stop to chat as she had a full head of steam as she was in a rush. Knocking but not waiting to get an answer, she swept into one of her engineer’s offices and made sure the door closed behind her before she looked the man in the white lab coat in the eyes.
“Faisal,” she said and pointed a finger at him. “What in the name of Allah was that message to mean?” she said again and looked at him, her finger still skewering him.
As the Olbian who was in charge of the special seeds and their offspring, he looked up at her from his seat behind the corner desk and held up his hand with an open palm toward her.
“Wait ... wait, Tibah, this is too important to start a conversation with adversity, Ma’am. The simple truth is that the latest batch of specials—fancies you call them—is not doing well at all. We are testing, but as yet we have no idea as to why our newest batch is failing. Yet ... we have no idea yet, Ma’am,” he said and then seemed to shrink back into the seat to face what he knew was coming.
But he was surprised. Tibah did not scream, or bluster, or rant at him. Instead, she pulled back that forefinger and opened up her hand so all five fingers were spread out.
“One, Faisal, is that we know via our tests on Olbia that the methodology works, agreed?” she asked.
When Faisal nodded, she folded that little finger down onto her palm.
“Two, Faisal, we know that the seeds got here all in perfect health—they have not been irradiated, x-rayed, been subject to infrared bombardment—in fact, they are in perfect condition. Agreed?” she said.
At the nod from Faisal, she folded her ring finger down too.
“Three, we know that the seeds were properly planted, fertilized, tended, and then the sub-species insertions were done according to our best practices, do we not?” she said.
It was here that Faisal suddenly held up his own forefin
ger and she stopped.
“Ahh, Tibah, it is here that we are not sure. We think that perhaps the soil here carries some kind of unknown metabolism or gamete that we have yet to identify for us to test against. Our testing is only a few days old, so until we know—“
“Exactly, Faisal. Until we know for sure. ‘Til then, we keep this to ourselves, and we do NOT say anything to anyone about this—test results are to be held as private with my EYES ONLY if you will. Agreed, Faisal?” she said, and while they were all members of the same farm, there was no doubt about who was in charge. No doubt at all.
Faisal nodded and then took a moment to use his PDA to turn to other matters.
Tibah agreed with some but not all of the various items, and they quickly managed the various farm issues of needy items, and the only outstanding item was crop harvest date.
“Do we have any idea as to when our own D-day should be?” Faisal asked as they ended up on the final item of worry.
“At this point, not a clue. We must simply have more experience with our fancies before we consider that date; as we know, it matters only to us—no one else matters, and Nusayr only wants success. So we continue. You test while we continue to maintain the same growth trays in the hothouse and move them by turn out to the fields. Check for us and determine if all the river loams are the same—we may have just hit a bad patch out there. Agreed?” she said and waited for Faisal to nod in agreement.
“Want to see some of the latest culls?” he said as he rose and pointed to the rear set of racks.
Tibah nodded and they both moved to the shelves that held many types of vegetables. Pulling up a very large acorn squash and a large bladed knife, Faisal quickly drew the razor-honed edge across the squash and laid both halves in front of her. Tibah picked them both up and studied what she found.
One half held the normal yellow squash flesh, seeds, and stringy inside materials, yet the other half was not the same. Instead of the normal acorn squash skin, it was instead colored like a papaya and its inside area was empty except for a small stone. She stared at the two halves and nodded to him.
“Looks like these two are pretty much a good match,” she said as she picked up the stone and grinned at him.
“Souvenir, Ma’am?” he said and they both laughed loudly.
“For now, yes. Thanks, Faisal,” she said.
“We are going to do another dump tonight, as there is supposed to be a big storm,” he said.
“How many?” Tibah said, tossing the stone up in the air to catch it and repeating that over and over.
“More than thirty, I believe, Ma’am,” he said, “so we will Ansible that later today.”
She nodded and then caught the stone for the last time and tossed it to Faisal.
“Make sure to have him get any tracking info to us should that be important,” she said.
He nodded and they both smiled.
#
At the end of the Andros bridge that connected Max Island and the city lay the main east-west parkway that dived straight through the major business district and ended up stopping directly at the Farm. Everyone called it simply by that name, but the Farm was the low-security prison that held those convicts sentenced to Halberd for lesser crimes or in some cases, shorter sentences.
And yet a farm it still was, as the convicts were charged with all the duties of livestock care and the planting and harvesting of crops. Mostly, the farm was a success, but in some areas, what happened was not really any kind of farming best practices but more of “do the least you can get away with” type of farm management.
One area that this happened in with some degree of regularity was the dairy area due to the simple fact that cows must be milked twice a day. Failing to do that meant the cow would most likely suffer from udder stress, which if then coupled with infection often meant death to the cow. “Losing a cow in this manner was at best unusual, but losing a dozen a month meant something was wrong,” the Farm warden said to himself as he looked at the latest report on his monitor. He pushed the monitor back away from him to turn and stare at the large window on the sunny side of his office. He caught his reflection and smiled.
As a Quaran, he had been here since the big Fiftieth Anniversary year, but being very long lived, he still was in the prime of his lizard-like life. Green hide with large diamond-shaped cells covered his whole body, and as all Quarans who were cold-blooded, he wore only a minimum of clothing. His head had those same diamonds, but they were smaller and more raised up, as they should be since he had been one of the first in his clutch to break his egg to crawl to the top of the pile of eggs. His red irises shone with an inner light that was similar to neon gas, and they were still almost as bright when he flicked his transparent eyelids up and down just to check. His tongue flicked out to skim his cheeks and the cooling evaporation made him feel at home. Cold-blooded lizard finds a temperate world to be comfortable would be his epitaph, and the tongue flicked once more as he preened himself by the usual means. He slid out his tongue and gently licked his lips and sloping cheeks and enjoyed the cooling effect of the evaporation on his scales. Still a leader and still climbing up the clutch, he thought, sighed, and turned back to the monitor and the reports.
He knew, of course, what was going to happen—as usual from humans far too late to allow for superior planning and facilities management—and as usual it would fall to him to save the day. Anniversary events should have a certain degree of pomp and ceremony, but more than that, it should also showcase the various leaders who had led to the success here on Halberd.
He nodded and turned back to the spreadsheet that laid out the latest dairy section losses and thought of how to ensure the damn farm convicts showed up to milk their herds. His tongue snaked out of his thin lips, and again, he licked his cheeks and enjoyed the cooling. Once the cows were handled, he’d have to get started on the planning that eventually would fall to him. He’d put together a small team of trustees and such to get started on the changes to the stadium.
That made him think of the Avengers, and he called out to his aide to get him the team’s game schedule for the rest of the season. He wondered how that would play with the upcoming Anniversary date, his tongue flicking his cheeks again.
#
“Eyes on the surface for bobbers, right, gentlemen,” Nusayr said to his crew as they sat on the small sandy beach on the north side of Max Island. Between the Pod Plant to their left and the cone to their right that held the Power Plant a mile away or so, the beach stretched about half the distance in between. The waters from the Rasp River, fresh waters that held some sediment, emptied into the bay that held Max Island, and the currents of the river eventually sloughed off the northern edge of the island and right past the beach. And it was this current flow that the Olbian Council of Nine, now all convicts here on Max Island, sat and watched and studied the flow of the waters at their feet.
“Tibah said they’d free the next batch at the same time as the Pod Plant whistle at change of shift, so ... about fifteen minutes or so ago,” Hamzah, now the ex-professor of chemical crop engineering at the University, said.
“We watch and wait,” Nusayr said and rose to get a bit more height on the waves around the beach shore. All eyes were staring at the flow of waters, the Rasp River waters only slightly less blue than the colors of the bay waters.
They watched and they waited.
“Bingo,” Razin said, and he marched into the surf to seize a floating acorn squash that was only twenty feet in. “And thanks to the relatively shallow waters, I’m not that wet.”
“Tamir, Wajih,” he said, pointing at the waters behind him, “more there.”
They were quick to jump in and get the others too. Still others now bobbed in the waves deeper, and that required some of them to swim out, but eventually more than a dozen of the squash gourds were in a pile on the beach.
“So,” Nusayr said, “let’s see what ... oh, some are papayas. Nice,” he added as he bashed one open with a sharp
stone they kept at hand on this section of the beach. He pounded one edge out of the way, tasted the sweet papaya fruit, and then looked back into the cavity. Nodding to his group that was all busy opening up their own gourds, he smiled.
“Cavity is fine, though these acorns are not really allowing us the size of same, but that’s for the real ones later. Anyone else got anything different in this flight?” he said.
Razin nodded and held up a shard of a pineapple.
“Part pineapple and part pumpkin ... big enough, Majesty,” he said as he sucked on the bright yellow pineapple flesh. “And the pineapple is so, so tart!” he added with a smile.
“Got a cucumber—big one too that is also part coconut it looks like as I can’t get the dang stone to cut same. Big though, very big, and I think the coconut is of a green variety,” he added. He held the cucumber-coconut in his hands and grinned at Nusayr, who looked at the length of the cucumber too.
“Green coconut would be correct, which gave the buoyancy to the fancy, but yeah, the length is just too, too long and thin. We need something more compact, and Tibah has to know that,” he added.
Only the sounds of the group of them chomping and sucking on the fruit parts of the fancies were heard for a few minutes more.
“Right,” Nusayr said, “finish up, gentlemen, and then bury them.”
The group walked back toward the Max Island maximum-security prison, only a mile away. They chatted and generally enjoyed the early spring day. Halberd’s sun in the sky was warmer today than it had been in days, and the seasons were about to change.
At the gate into the prison, the guards who manned the gate met them, and they were checked in as a matter of course. Having a Max Island pass allowed them—or anyone who had such a pass on their account—to wander around the island when they were not scheduled to work in the Pod Plant. All the convicts of the prison received that pass to begin with, but of course, it could be lost due to infractions or behavior issues, which meant that if you weren’t at work on the pods, you were in your quarters.
