“Did you do it yourself?”
She gave me a level look. “Daryl and Claudia were with me. They helped.” She grinned faintly. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
“Not at all.”
“Damn right,” she said.
I nodded. The lights were low, the candles flickering. The diners were well dressed. It looked so peaceful, so civilized. I smiled. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.
She smiled. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s.”
Chapter 24
Guild Master Anderson retired soon after to his estate on the mainland. I found myself a not so reluctant celebrity and I used that status for all it was worth. I was well known and at least moderately popular and Leon Sebastian pulled whatever strings he could reach. I was elected to be the next Guild Master and assumed Argent’s place on the Council. Somewhere deep inside me, Lord Damian Oliveros was pleased.
Jennifer and I married. We had three children over the next ten years and then decided to wait awhile before having any more. We had time. After all, a humble little clam that lives an unobtrusive life off the coast of Iceland possesses a lifespan that exceeds five hundred years and the simple glass sponge can live for over 20,000. There is something called the Hayflick limit, which states that cells can divide no more than fifty times before they die. A structure exists on each chromosome called a telomere, and with each cellular division a small portion of the telomere is lost. After fifty or so divisions, there is no more telomere; but an enzyme called telomerase can prevent telomeres from shortening and prevent the cell from dying. Lord Damian Oliveros possessed the genes for high levels of telomerase, and so do I. Jennifer, it turns out, does not, but that is of little concern since one of the first things that the Second Empire offered us in trade, after their re-discovery of this world, was effective life extension. Very few human beings, here or throughout the human settled worlds, those that the Second Empire has reached, at least, live fewer than three hundred years. We have plenty of time.
My brother Jimmy never joined a Guild and was content to run his pub. He opened a second across the city and then a third and within a few years found himself the owner of a thriving restaurant chain. He grumbled about it now and then. “I didn’t want to be a wage slave. I didn’t want to owe money. I wanted to work for myself. Now, I’m owned by the business.” He always said it as if he could not quite figure out how it all happened but he sounded more bemused than bothered. He liked the fact that he had succeeded on his own terms. Jennifer and I spent many happy evenings at one or another of his establishments.
Jennifer and Jolene Sebastian were already friends and though I never again felt that I could trust him completely, so were Leon and I. Our growing families spent a lot of time together. Leon and I often discussed how we might take over the world. I’m not sure if we were serious.
Edward Lane had many talents. He had run an enormous enterprise for a very long time. He knew how to prioritize and he knew how to keep his eye on the bottom line. I offered him a position as my Chief of Staff. He refused, however. A few months after the destruction of Mount Sindara, he left Meridien. “I’m going East,” he said to me. “I want to see what the Empire is doing. I might go offworld.”
I wished him luck and didn’t see him again for many years.
A few months after my return home, Jennifer and I travelled to Gath for the wedding of Celim Bakar and Janelle Madarik. We met his brother, who was almost as big as Celim and looked much like him. Nasim Bakar was now Prime Minister of Gath. Celim had the title of Foreign Minister; he was chosen for that position at least partly because of his relationship with me. Celim and Janelle had fourteen children over the next twenty years, so I guess he did take advantage of his unlimited breeding rights. We remain good friends and they visit us often.
Meridien prospered, as did Gath. Nasim Bakar opened his nation up to the outside world. He liberalized the economy and encouraged the growth of both private industry and a middle class. After he retired, his brother Celim took over and continued his reforms.
Finlandia sponsored an expedition into the ruins of Mount Sindara but the explosives had done what they were supposed to do. There was truly nothing left. A year or so later, I took one of the submarines back to the island and explored the underground escape tunnel. It ended abruptly in a fall of rock. Still, Finlandia was taking no chances. They bored into the rubble, placed tons more explosives and reduced the mountain down to sea level. A pleasant tropical lagoon now sits where Mount Sindara once rose from the sea.
The government of Finlandia, ostracized for its support of Gath and the Second Empire’s ambitions, soon fell. The new administration lost interest and I considered it poetic justice to purchase the island of Sindara once again. The first luxury resort, the first upscale beachside apartments and the largest casino in the Western hemisphere were soon welcoming tourists and my partners and I made a lot of money.
The Second Empire denied everything and maintains to this day that Miles Drayton and his colleagues were operating on their own. Nobody believes them, but they’ve behaved ever since. And who knows? Drayton had backers, somewhere in their government, but governments are large and have many factions. It is possible that these backers did indeed represent a rogue faction, or at least a minority opinion. We don’t know, and we don’t really care, just so long as they leave us alone.
On a whim, I did buy a vineyard in Wittburg and constructed a chateau in the mountains overlooking Lake April. I made a sizable donation to the Museum of History and Antiquities, in return for which they ceded me ownership of the ancient, First Empire game console. I’ve established it in the chateau’s family room and given the little AI free run of the web, for which he is profoundly grateful. Jennifer and I travel there with the children at least once a year. They love the place and the wines really are very good.
I waited. I’ve been biding my time. I know that the Second Empire is still out there, not quite as benign and well meaning as they would have us all believe. I can see the patterns. I know what they’ve been doing. They kept an eye on me for over ten years but then there was some crisis in some far-flung region of space, something to do with an alien race and an attempted invasion of an Empire world and they seemed to lose interest in the very minor planet of Illyria.
An improved star drive, quantum teleportation, machines that can read minds and transmute matter. These marvels and many others were all lost when the First Empire fell.
But Damian Oliveros knew where to find them.
Listed on no map of First Empire cities or installations, there is a place, a very secret place, high in the desert in the middle of the continent. Nobody ever goes there, but hidden in a small, parched valley beneath a pile of rocks is a metal door, and behind the door lies a small, air cooled installation.
Deep in the jungles of the Southern Continent, hidden on an overgrown plateau there is another, and on Charon, the nearest moon, there is a third that contains the entrance to a pocket universe seeded with alien life, a universe where time flows a hundred thousand times faster than it does here. Who knows what that life has evolved into?
All still functioning, all still waiting to be discovered; and I wait as well, waiting and wondering, watching my children grow and my personal empire expand, biding my time, playing the game.
—The End—
Information about the Chronicles of the Second Interstellar Empire of Mankind
I hope you enjoyed The City of Ashes.
The series continues with The Empire of Dust, in which Michael Glover, a soldier of the First Interstellar Empire of Mankind is unexpectedly awakened after two thousand years in stasis and finds himself at the center of a plot to subvert the Second Interstellar Empire. Please read on for a preview of The Empire of Dust: Book Three of the Chronicles of the Second Interstellar Empire of Mankind.
For more information, please visit my website, http://www.robertikatz.com or my Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/Robertikatzofficial/. For contin
uing updates regarding new releases, author appearances and general information about my books and stories, sign up for my newsletter/email list at http://www.robertikatz.com/join and you will also receive two free short stories. The first is a science fiction story, entitled “Adam,” about a scientist who uses a tailored retrovirus to implant the Fox P2 gene (sometimes called the language gene) into a cage full of rats and a mouse named Adam, and the unexpected consequences that result. The second is a prequel to the Kurtz and Barent mysteries, entitled “Something in the Blood,” featuring Richard Kurtz as a young surgical resident on an elective rotation in the Arkansas mountains, solving a medical mystery that spans two tragic generations.
Preview: The Empire of Dust: Book Three of the Chronicles of the Second Interstellar Empire of Mankind
Prologue
He groaned as the cold slowly seeped into his awareness. Dimly, he felt that he might have shivered but he wasn’t certain of this. He was numb. Am I alive? He thought that he must be. I think, therefore…how did that go? Something. The thought hung there in the back of his brain, elusive. Slowly, he wriggled his fingers, then his toes. He tried to blink his eyes but the darkness was absolute. Maybe he succeeded. He couldn’t tell. Fingers and toes then. He wriggled them again then clenched his fists. If I have hands then I must have arms, and legs. That was a comforting thought. Arms and legs were good, at least a start. He tried to cry out but something liquid and harsh filled his mouth.
Wait, a voice seemed to say. Everything will be explained. Give it time. Was this his own thought or did it come from somewhere outside? Something that might have been amusement filled his mind. He had nowhere to go and nothing but time.
For a time then, he slept.
Chapter 1
The planet was dusty, almost barren, but there was life. It clustered around the oases and on the coast. People struggling to make a living. Their database listed the world as Baldur-3, the third world in the Baldur system. The local web was unshielded and easy to access. The city below them was called Norwich.
“What do you think?” Michael Glover asked.
“We need fuel,” Romulus said. “They have fuel.”
Deuterium for the fusion generators. They had jumped far and this was the first human settled world they had come across in over a month that was more than a series of ruins. “I don’t know,” Glover said. “They’re not high tech.”
“High enough. The world is clean and orderly. There are three universities on the Western continent and another five on the Eastern. They’re not barbarians. They’ll have what we need.”
Glover shrugged. “Better than nothing.”
The ship’s sensors had revealed a landing field on a large island off the coast of the Eastern continent. He instructed the AI to approach. They were hailed when still fifty kilometers up. “Unknown ship. State your business and world of origin.”
“This is the starship London,” Michael said. “Out of Beta Ionis-4.” It was nonsense, of course. Beta Ionis was a rocky, frozen system with a population of sentient, low temperature aliens that had never developed interstellar travel. Humanity had been trading with them for thousands of years.
The voice seemed to hesitate. “We have no record of human habitation in the Beta Ionis system.”
“We maintain a habitat in the asteroid belt.” This was true, or it was true in the days of the Empire. Regardless, it was not a statement that could be disproven from half a galaxy away.
“Please state your business.”
“I wish to purchase deuterium.”
“The names of your crew?”
“There is only myself. My name is Michael Glover.”
After a moment, the voice said. “You may land. Please follow the beacon to slip number eight.”
Twenty minutes later, the London settled into the designated location. Up close, the port was busier than Michael had expected. Cargo carriers rolled across the dusty tarmac. Three other slips were occupied, all with ships somewhat smaller than their own. “I think you should stay aboard,” Michael said. “Actually, you should stay hidden.”
Romulus looked nothing like Homo Sapiens. His matte black composite structure possessed arms, legs and a head only as a concession to human sensibilities. Romulus nodded. Without a word, he pressed a panel in the wall of the main cabin. The panel slid open. The robot entered and the panel slid seamlessly closed.
Five minutes later, the port inspectors, one small, young and female, the other male, of indeterminate age, with a harried expression arrived. Michael pressed a button. A metal ramp unfolded and the main airlock opened. The inspectors entered, glancing curiously around the cabin. “Captain Glover?” The male inspector held out a hand. Michael took it. “I’m Chief Inspector Mark Conway. This is Assistant Inspector Natalie Levin. Welcome to Baldur.”
Natalie Levin frowned. “You’re really the only one aboard? I’ve heard of fully automated ships. I’ve never seen one.”
Michael smiled. “We’re proud of it. It’s a copy of an ancient First Empire design.”
“Well, we’ll need to inspect your cargo.”
“Feel free.”
The cargo had been carefully chosen. Little of it was high tech, mainly inexpensive but long since out-of-date pre-fab matrices and solid state transistors that could be adapted to a variety of computer platforms, spices from five different worlds that had been stored in liquid nitrogen for over two thousand years, a lockbox of uncut jewels, most of them unique to their own worlds of origin, another lockbox containing small ingots of gold and another of platinum, and palettes of spider silk from the jungles of Rigel.
Natalie Levin pursed her lips when she saw the manifest and frowned at Michael. “You can’t trade the spices here unless you get authorization from the medical authorities declaring them safe for human consumption. Also, the matrices might contain viruses that our own computers aren’t equipped to handle. You’re not allowed to sell them or let them connect to the local web. The rest of it is approved.” She tore a sheet of paper off a clipboard. “Post this in your cargo bay where prospective buyers can see it. Good luck.”
“An interesting cargo,” Conway said. “You’ve travelled widely.”
“It’s what I do,” Michael said. “Buy low and sell high.” It was a plausible statement but not exactly the truth. It could easily become the truth, however. He had to do something to occupy his time and whatever that ultimately turned out to be, an itinerant merchant captain made an excellent cover.
“Your papers are in order,” Conway said. “I suggest that you head over to the merchant’s guild. They’ll put you in touch with potential buyers.” He glanced at a comp on his wrist. “Too late tonight, though. They open first thing in the morning.”
“Thank you,” Michael said. “I’ll do that. Meanwhile, what is there to do at night in your fair city?” Calling it a city was definitely a stretch but it never hurt to be polite.
Natalie snorted. “Not much,” she said.
Conway smiled at her. “We have some excellent restaurants, a zoo and a museum. There are a number of local sports teams but none of them are playing this evening. Two small theaters offer live entertainment. One of them is playing Twelfth Night, the 5714 translation. Also, the local web carries numerous channels. If you want to get off your ship, there are three reasonable hotels in the center of town.” He shrugged. “Good luck.”
They shook hands again, Michael thanked them both and waited until they had gone and the airlock closed behind them before saying, “What do you think?”
Romulus’ voice issued from a speaker grid near the ceiling. “Everything seems in order. I’m not expecting trouble.”
“No,” Michael said. “It all seems very civilized.”
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