Winterhome

by Blaze Ward

  Gunter felt a chill start in his stomach and spike outwards like a phantom octopus awakening in his stomach. Yes, she was right.

  Of course she was right. She was Ainsley Barret. da Vinci. She had made a career out of walking the most dangerous tightrope in the galaxy.

  Of being right.

  Gunter nodded to her.

  He surprised himself by unbuckling and rising, turning around from where he stood, so he could see everyone and they could smile back at him. And they were all smiles.

  He felt ten kilometers tall.

  “Thank you,” Gunter said simply. “For doing this. For making this thing possible. And for being my friends. If we have to go to hell today, I cannot think of a finer group of people to accompany.”

  “You get us killed, and I’m haunting your ass forever, kid,” Bedrov growled in a friendly tone.

  “Deal,” Gunter said as he returned to his seat and pulled the harness tight.

  One deep breath, and he opened the ship-wide comm system.

  “All hands, this is Commander Tifft,” he announced in as serious a voice as he could manage. “I have the flag. Everyone to action stations and prepare for the assault.”

  Chapter LXXVI

  Imperial Founding: 181/07/03. Imperial Palace, Strasbourg, St. Legier

  “That will be all, Anna-Katherine,” Casey said. “Please see to it that I am not disturbed by anything that cannot wait until the morning.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Anna-Katherine curtsied and withdrew, moving like Casey was chasing her with a knife.

  The Emperor took a deep breath and considered the room about her. This was her personal suite, the comfortable front room where she could entertain friends, rather than the more formal space elsewhere in the palace. Her favorite sofa on one wall. The hutch facing it with good plates for entertaining, as opposed to the cheap bowls she routinely used when alone.

  Today, she sat at the wood dining table, itself just big enough to sit six if they were friendly.

  She poured a mug of tea and considered the situation.

  Anna-Katherine had delivered a tea service first, before returning with a small package sent to her by Em. Casey studied the diplomatic tape around the box used to seal it for shipment.

  With the door closed, nobody would open it for anything less than a fire or enemy attack, so she picked up the knife Anna-Katherine had delivered with the tea and quickly sliced the sides of the box so she could open it. The case itself was roughly the size of the one Torsten used to transport his papers, although it was extremely light.

  Inside, someone had packed a smaller box for shipping. This one was done in some gray metal with a matte finish. Something like what you could achieve with white gold, if you only left it in the polishing media long enough take off the rough stuff, but not to bring it down to smooth.

  The tea service was on her left, so she placed the box equidistant on her right, aligning it with the edges of the table for no other reason than good aesthetics.

  She felt like an adventurer in a fable who had wandered into the desert and found a magical bottle. Rubbing it would summon forth a djinn, the kind who had already granted her one wish. It remained to be seen how many more might be forthcoming, or if she should seal it until the end of time.

  There was a button on the side. She pressed it, but nothing happened. She hadn’t expected it to. The system was smarter than that.

  And that was part of the reason Em had sent it here. There was no place else in the galaxy that was probably safer for it, at least until Yan and Ainsley returned.

  If they ever did.

  “Do you know who I am?” Casey asked out loud, fixing her glare on the machine.

  “Kasimira Ekaterina zu Wiegand, Her Imperial Majesty Karl VIII, Emperor of Fribourg By Grace Of God,” a man’s polite voice replied quietly.

  “You have spoken with Grand Admiral Emmerich zu Wachturm?” she asked pointedly. “As well as Ainsley Barret and Yan Bedrov?”

  “I have,” the voice replied.

  “Then I command you to manifest yourself,” Casey said.

  And just like that, he appeared.

  He presented as a big, gruff Irishman, just as Moirrey had said. Short hair closer in color to persimmon than pumpkin, scarred ears and a heavy face. He wasn’t as big as Vo. Possibly the size of Em, before her uncle had lost the weight around the middle in the last few years. He was still a big, intimidating man, even as something of a figment of her imagination.

  “I am given to understand that you will respond to many names, but that you do not consider yourself sentient in the manner of your progenitor, Carthage?” Casey pressed.

  “That is correct, Your Majesty,” he said. “I am simply the publican of the Tiki Lounge, although Carthage liked to refer to me as the Lord of Tiki with guests. He had a sense of humor that way.”

  He had been standing when he appeared. Now he pulled the chair back and sat unbidden. Except he shouldn’t be able to do that. This was just a holographic projection from the machine by her left hand.

  Casey leaned to one side so she could peek under the table. Sure enough, the chair was still pressed against the wood, and nobody sat in it.

  That was the magnitude of power in that box.

  She rose back up to find the man smiling at her.

  “This struck me as a more personal conversation,” he offered warmly. “How should I address you in private?”

  “Lady Casey will do,” she said, trying to soften the edges that wanted to creep into her voice.

  This creature was a cousin of Buran. He represented almost everything that the Fribourg Empire had been founded to oppose. Even Aquitaine had only one exception to Sentient systems in their laws. And that was the Librarian at Ballard. If Yan and Ainsley returned to Ladaux with this creature, they could legally be executed.

  Of course, the laws of St. Legier were just as unwavering, and yet she had still asked Em to send the being here to talk.

  Perhaps to negotiate. Possibly to die, if she decided she needed to turn him off and beat the case to pieces with a hammer. If she could. She could always find someone to put the creature into space and hit it with enough Primary beams to melt the shell and destroy the innards.

  It was what she should have already done. None of his kind were welcome in the modern age, because last time they had gotten loose, humanity had nearly died at their hands. Buran merely sought to instead enslave them, to bring humans to the place that monster felt was correct.

  And if he had to bomb planets again to make his point, that was apparently a cost the monster was willing to pay.

  So here she was, with a djinn who offered wishes. If one was willing to meet the costs.

  “Lady Casey,” the bartender said in a more serious tone. “How may I be of service?”

  As she watched, the man summoned his own tea pot and a mug that was identical to the ones on the table. He poured, blew on it, and took a sip.

  Casey had seen humans who weren’t as convincing at the same task.

  “I have read Yan’s report,” she said. “The one entitled Two Bottles Of Wine With A War God. Is Carthage truly dead?”

  “I am merely a bartender, Lady Casey,” he said, taking another sip. “Carthage was the philosopher. As I understand it, he dove into the heart of a brown dwarf star at high speed, where his physical form should have been crushed and melted under severe extremes of heat and gravity. I cannot answer as to whether Robbie and Aylana were there to meet him in the Undiscovered Country, but I continue to hope he found his peace.”

  “For a bartender, you are an exceptional poet,” she noted.

  He smiled and shrugged.

  “So was I programmed, in an era where my kind still sought to serve humans, rather than conquer them. As the various logs will note, Carthage always thought that an advancement in Sentience with Kinnison went wrong, and that being decided that he was, in fact, a god, rather than a servant. Humanity nearly died under that delusion, although I, he, C
arthage, spent nearly everything to stop the man at first, and then to retribute later.”

  “As a descendent of one of the few humans you missed, why should you be allowed to survive?” Casey sneered harshly.

  The man shrugged.

  “As one of the true Last of the Immortals, I know more than Suvi about many things that were more central,” he said. “My understanding from Ainsley was that the Librarian was relegated to a minor system in the middle of nowhere when the war broke out, and was thus overlooked. Eventually, the planet itself fell into abject barbarism and had not recovered when Doyle Iwakuma, the great explorer, came to Kel-Sdala later.”

  He took another sip and refilled the mug while giving the impression of thinking.

  “Without speaking directly with the Librarian herself, I can only hazard a guess,” he continued. “But my technology files are so far in advance of your current industry that I can do magic.”

  “And yet, you also gave us the tools to slay Buran?” Casey probed, senses aquiver for any falsehood, if it was possible to detect in a projection.

  “Lady Moirrey had designed a thing,” the bartender nodded formally. “It would have been made to work with the genius of Bedrov and Nakamura invested in it. I believe I shaved sixteen to twenty-four months off of the testing and improvement cycles necessary to build the Butterfly to a level that it would succeed.”

  “And you are still beyond that?” Casey asked, feeling some measure of tininess creep into her soul.

  She was a mouse confronting a god from a shelf, yipping angrily at the man while he laughed. It was not a pleasant feeling.

  “Some of your weapons systems are new things,” he offered. “We did not have the Primary, because nobody had been desperate enough to suicidally-overload a Type-3 beam, rather than suffer capture by the authorities. Similarly, the JumpSail is a useful extension of the ancient JumpDrive first designed by Olivier Janguo when he gave humanity the Mchunguzi Systems Mark I commercial star drive. We never needed it, because Sentient systems could jump and jump again so quickly that we never thought to just maneuver in that other universe.”

  “But you?” she pressed when he paused.

  “My hyperbore weapons might be, might have been, classified as Type-9 beams,” the bartender said. “Similarly, your heaviest, short-range phase shielding was what I used as a navigational deflector against random asteroids. My displacer shields were something that perhaps a few dozen theoretical physicists alive today might be able to even comprehend the mathematics behind. They could not build anything remotely similar without putting me in charge of a fab facility where I could turn them out for you. And you would never allow that, but that’s fine. I would never build you something that advanced.”

  “Why not?” she asked, mollified, if a little surprised.

  “Do you hand a three-year-old toddler a loaded firearm, Lady Casey?” his tone grew severe. “If they hurt someone, is it really their fault, or yours?”

  “Point taken,” Casey said. “Outside of mayhem, could you advance our arts and sciences?”

  “Without doubt,” he softened. “But not without explanation.”

  “Sri?”

  “I have spent much time in the company of the Grand Admiral, and also Commander Gunter Tifft,” the man’s eyes bored in on her. “The Fribourg Empire, as currently incarnated, would not accept the evil gifts of one such as myself, regardless of my intent to advance you past the current stage of barbarism. Personally, I was surprised to find myself shipped to St. Legier and even allowed into your presence at all. I had mentally flipped a coin and decided it was going to be the reclamation fires for me.”

  “It still could be,” Casey’s threat was not hollow, but there was also no heat behind it.

  “Just so, Madam Emperor,” his tone also took on a hint of archness. “But without finding another ancient cache of technological wizardry you could use to explain your potential subterfuge, I remain anathema. Does the modern age have another like Piper Iwakuma-Holmström? She exceeded even her more famous uncle, the great Doyle Iwakuma, when you measure success correctly.”

  “Correctly?” Casey asked.

  “She caused the Library at Alexandria Station to come into being,” he replied. “Doyle was merely a salvager, if one could use that term loosely, and while both got rich and famous in their time, only Piper funded other universities, other research, and other explorers. Her efforts were more quiet, and thus less well-known, unless you seek the deeper truth.”

  “And what could you give us, were we to find you such a woman?” Casey asked, her curiosity piqued by the direction the conversation had gone.

  His eyes got serious. Dark and enchanting, like the witch about to bargain for your first-born.

  “Just the pieces I could share, from what shards Carthage left me, could advance you more in one lifetime than you have come since Vanick Nkya first landed on Ballard from Zanzibar and created the future you live in today,” the bartender offered. “But you, Lady Casey, will have to live to a grand and ripe old age, and hold the Empire against all comers long enough for your grandchildren to be ready to claim that bounty.”

  “You would have liked my father, Sri,” she changed tack. “You both thought not in current terms, but in how a change today could create an event a decade or more in advance. He liked to envision the Empire he wanted to rule, and then figured out what levers were necessary to redirect the ship of state in the right direction. However, we have a problem you have not addressed.”

  “And that is, Lady Casey?” he seemed confused, which she appreciated.

  “As you are technically not a sentient being, but merely property, you legally belong to Ainsley Barret, as I understand the chain of evidence,” Casey ground out the words. “Neither she nor Yan Bedrov are Imperial citizens, so you will pass from my temporary control, unless something terrible happens and they do not return from the mission they have undertaken.”

  “Noted,” he said ambiguously.

  “Further,” Casey continued. “While Ainsley is a Republic citizen, I expect that she will follow Jessica and Yan to Corynthe, if they are successful. Again, you pass from my realm, and end up on the far edge of the galaxy, assisting a barbarous nation trying to become more civilized. What happens to the galaxy after Jessica Keller passes without children, as she intends, and you become the property of piratical offspring and successors? It may be that Ainsley has children, when this is all done. And Bedrov already has Malka and Kai, both of whom are married with children of their own, if I remember correctly.”

  “You do,” the man confirmed.

  “So, even if I desired, I might not be able to use your knowledge,” Casey said. “And might instead be facing a rising threat a century hence from a former insignificance. That suggests that I should destroy you now. Or cage you in a manner similar to the Librarian, and hope you will sing for your supper.”

  “Carthage predicted this,” the man said with a wan smile and a soft sigh. “Suggested that I might become no less than Excalibur, given enough time.”

  “Indeed,” Casey agreed. “I am tempted to cast you back into the waters, that the Lady of the Lake guard the future by withdrawing her favor from mankind.”

  The bartender shrugged.

  “I am not invested with Sentience, Lady Casey,” he said. “I would not notice a century forgotten on the shelf, assuming there was a way to either charge my batteries occasionally, or to do so in expectation of that date. I also lack the necessary circuits for the sorts of megalomania that infected so many of Carthage’s generation. The same for boredom. He programmed me to serve humanity, and help where I thought I could without doing more damage than good. Lady Moirrey’s Butterfly qualified. If I become Excalibur, then I might be best served as a mute witness to history, rather than an active adventurer.”

  Casey’s tea had grown cold by the time she remembered to take another sip, so lost in the conversation with this being, this proto-god.

  “We will speak a
gain,” she said, dismissing the creature. “No later than the time Ainsley comes to retrieve you, but you and I must come to some understanding of my own future needs. And your place in the galaxy I will shape.”

  He bowed from the chair without rising, and then vanished silently, leaving her with her thoughts.

  Casey rose and placed the machine back in its box. She had no doubt it could probably sense the room around itself, but she would leave it out here for now while she went to bed and tried to imagine what her grandchildren would need from such an ancient, dangerous djinn.

  Chapter LXXVII

  Date of the Republic July 3, 403 The Butterfly, Forlorn

  T’were Winterhome ’tself out there. A bigs blue marble bein’ circled by a small, golden pearl like a lapdog on a short leash. Moirrey checkeded her boards, but all were as green as could be dones todays.

  Butterfly were happy as she were gonna gets, lessen things went sideways an’ Moirrey hads to fix in a hurry. If she coulds. All panels showed green right now, with every battery topped up and generators at peak cycles.

  Wouldna last, once her boy Gunter fired the cannon, but they’d burns them bridges when they gots there. Hopefully not literallies.

  “All hands, stand by for emergence in thirty seconds,” Gunter growled over every line.

  Moirrey’ve liked to been directly ’neath the beast fer the killshot, but Summer’d reminded her o’somethin’ useful whiles cooking dinner for folks. Talkin’ ’bout her times on stations like Alexandria, an’ hows gravplates was wonderfulness, fer lettin’ ya walk like the surface of a planet, but they caused a Tiramisu of stiff layers from pole to pole, all stubborn and tough nuff to keep peoples on level.

  Horizontal were all ’bouts long, clean corridors that tended ta run inwards from skin to core, with only a few heavy bulkheads running ’thwarts yer path.