St. Legier

by Blaze Ward

  Jessica sat behind the desk and gestured Enej to sit as the hatch closed.

  “Enej, enough time has passed for now that I am willing to tell you a secret that must never be repeated, for reasons that will be obvious shortly,” she said gravely. “I had this same conversation with Robles before she left, but she’s Moirrey’s right hand, so we both trust her.”

  Enej gulped and nodded. There wasn’t much he hadn’t seen as her Flag Centurion over the last decade, so she had him off-balance. It had been easier with Saana Robles, since she hadn’t been there at the time.

  “In order for Yeoman Robles to know what systems to disable over there, I had to describe them in extremely precise detail,” Jessica said.

  Enej was perhaps the smartest person Jessica knew, in his ability to process a tremendous amount of raw data and boil it down into information quickly. That he was psychologically a chess player rather than a warrior just meant that his career had bloomed as her right hand, when it would have faltered long before he would have ever been put in command of a ship.

  She watched his eyes grow big. He blinked three times in rapid succession. Blew out a breath. Shuddered with his whole body, like a dog that came in from the rain.

  “But you were never aboard Alexandria Station,” he said accusingly.

  “No,” Jessica agreed. “But Moirrey wasn’t alone when she went into that escape pod, just before the Blackbird managed to kill the station.”

  “Alone,” Enej repeated slowly. “Arlo and the scientist had already evacuated. The assassin was dead. Who was left?”

  “Suvi had spent a long time planning how she could escape from the station if she ever had to face exactly that situation,” Jessica replied. “She had built for herself a human-shaped body, what she called an android, that could pass for human to anything short of a medical exam. She couldn’t physically inhabit it without assistance. The bits that made up her mind, her consciousness, were on a set of boards about this size.”

  Jessica indicated those chips with both hands, as Suvi had shown her inside the android woman’s torso in a rest room.

  “Moirrey had to pull them from the computer systems where they had resided for over a millennium, and then plug them into the new body herself, so that Suvi could escape destruction.”

  “But they rebuilt the Sentience that is going into the new Temple of Knowledge.”

  Enej was grasping at straws now, probably feeling all his logic erode. Jessica had felt the same way.

  “They did,” Jessica agreed. “And the new Librarian is a copy of the old one, done from a backup. But she is not the original woman. I met Suvi on the surface. Moirrey, Marcelle, and I had dinner with her in a burger dive. Her announced plan was to disappear from recorded history so that she could finally discover what it meant to be human. As far as I know, she has succeeded.”

  “And the Hammerhead?” Enej challenged faintly.

  “Robles needed to know how to kill the beast,” Jessica said. “Moirrey wasn’t here, so I had to explain it. The two of you are now initiated into the most dangerous secret in the galaxy. One that could result in Moirrey, Marcelle, and I being executed as traitors to the species.”

  Enej’s eyes lost focus and he muttered the sort of profanity that would have gotten either of their mouth’s washed out with soap by their respective mothers.

  “Yup,” he finally looked at her. “You’ve topped anything I imagined, Jessica.”

  “Good,” she said. “Now you understand the stakes.”

  She reached down and pressed a button to open the comm line, and then typed in the ten-digit string she and Saana had agreed to before the engineer went about the hulk.

  “Keller here,” Jessica said. “Enej is present and understands.”

  “Acknowledged,” Saana said after a moment. “As you indicated, everything fits into a knitting bag. Oz is sure that all drive and weapons systems have been disabled. Both Capriole and JumpDrives were badly damaged in the initial round, and damage control parties were just pulling panels off to effect repairs when Archer Force got to them. Navin took a lot of prisoners and has them corralled forward for now. Life support is spotty, but good enough to hold until we depart. Miss the gray lady. Would have made my job so much easier.”

  “Understood, Saana,” Jessica said, also missing her Star Controller. “I want the ship’s Sentient control systems and the data core for intelligence purposes. Any damage control team computer slabs will probably have enough of what we need if you decide that the Capriole is too damaged to cut out. I would still like a functional Power Absorber panel and battery system intact, as your first priority. We know how their beams work.”

  “Working on that now, sir,” Saana said. “Gunner chopped us a nice line along one of the frames, so we might be able to separate the ship into sections where we can just steal one. Might be too big for the shuttle bay, though.”

  “Talk with Tamara Strnad,” Jessica said. “She can shift some of her strike bombers onto Vanguard and the cruisers to free up space. We’re going directly from here to Forward Base Omicron.”

  “Very good, sir,” Saana replied. “Probably twelve hours and we should be ready to run. Will check in.”

  And she was gone.

  Jessica keyed the comm closed, but didn’t move.

  Enej had a sheepish look on his face.

  “So now I’m guilty of a conspiracy against the human race?” he began. “That about cover it?”

  “Yes,” she replied simply. “What do you need to know at this point?”

  “Why we’re stealing parts off a Hammerhead,” he said. “I thought we understood all the basics of their engineering. I mean, physics is physics.”

  “It is, but we’ve just done something nobody else has ever managed, Enej,” she said. “Every other time someone has managed to capture a ship like this, it has self-destructed before anybody could do anything. Because the boarding teams didn’t know how to disconnect the Sentience before it did something catastrophic.”

  “Because they didn’t know what we know,” he observed neutrally. “How do we explain it, when the Grand Admiral’s people ask? What lies do I need to prepare?”

  Jessica grinned. She had been pretty sure Enej would be on her side, but there was always a risk.

  “I’m Jessica Keller,” she said with a laugh. “The infamous Fleet Centurion. The Red Admiral. The Queen of the Pirates. This is where we fall back on the magic of that legend and do a lot of hand-waving. I learned all sorts of dark secrets at Ballard. And that’s the truth. We just need to keep the timelines fuzzy, is all.”

  “Wish I’d gotten a chance to talk to Suvi more,” Enej said wistfully. “She must have been one hell of a woman.”

  “She was, Enej,” Jessica replied. “She absolutely was.”

  Chapter XXXVII

  Imperial Founding: 180/01/20. Mejico, St. Legier

  After the first week home, Casey had considered how she might steal the Arcidiacono family and turn Melina and her husband into her personal chefs. After the second week, it was obvious that the 189th just might mutiny if she tried. It was hard, though, seeing the love flow back and forth between the family that had lost nearly everything and the soldiers that they had adopted in place of the town and clan that had largely vanished. But it also gave Casey hope.

  Vo had called on the entire planet, the entire Empire, to open their homes to complete strangers and shower love on them. And they had responded. Melina and Thurman, plus Christina, Nicola, and little Celine had adopted the legionnaires instead. Kept them warm and fed. Energized them to go back out into the continuing winter and find more survivors. And to bury the dead.

  But living in Mejico, setting up her Imperial Household here, had absolutely been the right choice. And not just because Arald Rohm was assigned to Strasbourg for now. The Field Marshal was doing good work, leading a mixed force of construction engineers and marines, but the way he had always looked at her in person left her no doubts as to his designs
for the future. For her.

  Casey kept her personal revulsion to herself. She needed the man’s loyalty intact. Vo had already broken Rohm to the bit. She had watched the recordings. Better to gamble with Death, than to draw Vo zu Arlo as an enemy. Rohm had learned.

  Casey had arrived at the restaurant, reading the name Tenochtitlan in bold, flowing script on the front door, with both Torsten and Moirrey in tow. She had learned to come in mid-morning, rather than first thing, because the men were up and going before the dawn. By now, the space was mostly empty.

  Three weeks and they had settled into a rhythm.

  Vo and Alan Katche were seated when she arrived. She joined them at the table, relieved that they had gotten to the point where she didn’t have to order them to sit down at her arrival.

  Moirrey liked her coffee with all sorts of additives. Torsten, like Casey, wanted it black. Nicola delivered three prepared mugs with a smile and departed. Casey took a sip and relaxed.

  Before she could speak, a sound intruded on her. A low rumbling in the distance, like one of Vo’s tanks approaching. Casey felt the first bite of panic nipping at her heels, but both Vo and Alan simply looked up, judged something unseen, and shrugged, almost in unison.

  “How can you simply ignore a ground quake?” Casey hissed, grasping at her coffee and lifting the mug before it spilled.

  It wasn’t the first since she had returned. Nor the strongest. It was still the entire room swaying slowly back and forth.

  “We have them almost constantly underneath us, Your Majesty,” Alan replied as the sound peaked and began to recede. “I would guess that one to be barely a five, reasonably deep, and almost straight down. Enough to rattle snow off rooftops, but probably not even knock over glasses.”

  “How long will this go on?” Casey asked the table.

  St. Legier was tectonically active, but there had never been anything interesting in the close vicinity of Werder.

  “The planet’s ringing like a bell,” Vo interjected. “Pulses of energy headed out in every direction, like dropping a rock in a pond. They bounce back, reflect off each other, and then pass. The bad ones were in the first week, as the compression relaxed.”

  “And now?” Torsten leaned into the conversation.

  “Fading slowly,” Vo shrugged. “One of the geologists on staff suggests another rash come spring, when the snow melts and lubricates things, and then it should settle into whatever pattern will become normal, in a year.”

  Casey sipped her coffee and glanced warily around the room.

  “Are we better off building a new palace half a world away?” she asked, meeting the eyes of all four of her cohorts. “I had been of a mind to do it here, perhaps on the shore of what will become Lake Werder in a generation. Or perhaps Strasbourg. Would Yuular be a better choice? Or perhaps Santiago?”

  “Not my call, Your Majesty,” Vo replied, pointing at Torsten. “That should be a civilian question, at the end of the day. Personally, I’d build somewhere else, because it lets you get in motion immediately, whereas we’re going to be a year just getting enough infrastructure in place to start.”

  “Torsten?” Casey turned to the quiet man.

  She liked to think of him as spending most of each day with a mighty axe of legend, chopping down electronic forests that contained all the information flowing inwards towards her. Certainly, he didn’t look the part of a lumberjack, though. In a sedate, navy blue, business suit, he looked more like a well-dressed professor, and spoke like one, as well.

  “I lean towards Strasbourg, or Lake Werder,” he agreed with her. “Perhaps along a canal we should cause to be dug between the two to regulate water flows in the immediate area of the two lakes. That will facilitate transporting heavy materials, and provide a recreational element to the new construction that will be of benefit to the entire region and its coming tourism component.”

  “And that is why I am a soldier, and not an economist,” Alan laughed heartily. “My brain wants to set back everything on the other side of a huge moat, with forty meter tall walls holding secondary shield generators and a couple of beam emplacements.”

  “Oh, those will be there, too, Alan,” Torsten reassured the man. “I’m still a sailor at heart. Even if I seem to be most of the government right now.”

  “Which brings me to my second question,” Casey said glancing cautiously around the entire room.

  When this group was having official meetings here, everyone else had made it a point to move to the far corners on her arrival. And even Celine, the youngest daughter, would happily read her books until her mother roused her to refill coffee.

  The people at the table waited for her to speak.

  “The House of Dukes has been destroyed,” Casey said. “Seating a new generation to replace them will take years unless we create an even larger emergency than we already have.”

  Everyone nodded. A few sipped their coffee.

  “The House of the People was not in session,” the Emperor continued carefully. “It could be called to sit quickly, as all the members are already credentialed. In normal circumstances, it is nothing more than a salon for intellectuals. Monarchists arguing with Chartists. Regional blocks arguing over sports teams. And it has little power, in itself, because the House of Dukes exercises an additional veto, separate from that of the Crown.”

  She left the rest of paragraph dangling. Not bait, exactly, but in the same neighborhood.

  “Are you proposing to enact the Charter of Man?” Alan Katche, of all people, asked, almost expectantly.

  Casey would have thought a career soldier like him would be the last person to be interested in the Charter, especially as his family came from the lowest ranks of the nobility, rather than the general population. His father was a Freiherr, a free holder with hereditary privilege.

  “I am not,” Casey said as Torsten began to bristle. “That sort of thing would undo everything that my father was trying to do and that I plan to accomplish. The Charter would be the thing that would cause the nobles to rise up. It would split the Empire at the very moment where all the seams and fractures are visible.”

  She smiled the smallest possible smile she could as she watched Torsten relax. Honestly, she had been expecting Torsten and Alan to give her exactly the opposite reactions. Maybe that was an even better indication. She noted how quiet both Moirrey and Vo had remained, even today feeling like outsiders in someone else’s city.

  “However,” Casey continued before everyone relaxed too far. “If we do not harry the Dukes to sit, and then follow that with the worst bureaucratic paperwork messes possible to credential each and every one of them, the House of the People will have no choice but to step up and handle the hard work of governing. They would have to go beyond matters of planetary trade and criminal law, and inject themselves into Empire itself.”

  “Wh’limitations does ya ’nvisions, Casey,” Moirrey drawled sideways.

  Nobody else was willing to address her with anything but formality, these days, but Moirrey had understood the need to have someone to talk to. And that it wasn’t going to be any of the boys. At least, not yet.

  “Something like a reverse of the ancient Magna Carta,” Emperor Karl VIII replied succinctly. “Limitations on the House of Dukes as a result of ceding certain powers to the House of the People. Not going so far as a constitution, with all those limitations, but the Crown cannot do everything.”

  “So a quieter revolution?” Torsten asked. “But not necessarily a slower one.”

  “I envision a set of emergency decrees drafted by you,” Casey focused her attention on the man. “Modified over time, but necessary to deal with the immediate situation. Nobody will be able to persuasively argue with that. Over time, they may become permanent, depending on how that House behaves itself. I will still retain the ultimate veto. And I can dissolve that House if it decides to transform itself into a parliament. Anything like this must be done over decades, not weeks. The Empire is too fragile right now t
o handle another major ground quake.”

  The lack of argument did not suggest that this group of people necessarily supported her mission. She understood that. It meant that they would give it time to process, and then probably argue with her in private. But it would take the form of questions rather than outright hostility.

  Emmerich would be the hardest one to bring over. He saw himself as one man holding back the entire sea. Men like Tom Provst and Vo Arlo were fingers stuck into the dyke as leaks appeared. She would enrage him if she were to take a hammer to the wall. But Casey would also drown with him, and she understood that, both intellectually and emotionally.

  She could, however, paint new murals on the stone, and it would be years before she could expect anything to significantly change Fribourg. Father and Ekke had calculated it would take them fifty years to accomplish it. But she would only be seventy-three at that point. And both Wiegand and Alkaev were long-lived families when they didn’t die in accidents and wars.

  Perhaps she would need to learn more about the three, ancient, English monarchs known as Elizabeth, among Moirrey’s historical favorites, to see how a crown could survive its culture attempting to come unraveled around it.

  “So now I must ask a very personal thing, Vo,” she said, letting the warm heat of the man’s presence protect her. “Is it wise to allow Victoria Ames to continue her charade?”

  It was painful, almost physically so, for Casey to ask that. To challenge another woman’s dreams and perhaps squelch them in the name of Imperial survival. She expected Vo’s gaze to grown thunderous, terrible in the ways of the ancient gods of the Homeworld’s religions.

  His wry grin wasn’t anything like she expected. Nor was Alan Katche’s. Clearly, she did not understand soldiers in the ways she had learned about sailors.

  “Not your call, Your Highness,” he said simply, eyes bright and smiling.

  “I beg your pardon?” Casey fired back, feeling her back come up as some Man had the audacity to tell her No. Worse, some man other than her father or her uncle. Even if it was Vo.