The little majority gave the sons and daughters of the Cartelites all the responsibilities of adulthood without any of the privileges. It was yet another thing that Jewel hated about her people and her nation.
“By our standards, women reach their majority at twenty-one and men at twenty-four,” Farl explained. “It is why we did not permit the marriage to occur earlier as your parents so earnestly desired. Marriages must be entered into with full legal consent.”
“With full legal consent?” Jewel repeated. It was such a simple phrase and it made a mockery out of everything she’d been through. “You mean even back then I had the power to choose—the power to refuse the marriage?”
All three of the Empyreals looked puzzled by her words. “Yes, of course,” the rear admiral told her. “How could you possibly think otherwise?”
The physician general spoke up, her normally impassive face contorted with outrage. “Do you mean to say that the Cartelites do not give their children a voice in their own marriages?”
Jewel felt just as astounded as the Armenites appeared to be. Marriage was the basis of every business partnership between the Hegemony and the Cartels. How could two peoples have been so intimately involved with each other for two centuries without understanding something so basic?
“Cartel marriages, at their most fundamental levels, are business partnerships,” Jewel explained to the three Armenites. “They involve transfers of shares, the combining of capital, the merging of the fortunes and long-term interests of the families of the two parties. That’s why it’s so essential that they produce offspring, although in the Cartel Worlds that can be managed artificially.”
From the expressions of disapproval on all three Empyreal faces, Jewel assumed that last point was never going to be acceptable to the Hegemony.
She continued her explanation. “Since there are fortunes at stake—often hundreds of millions or even billions of solars—Cartelite custom gives parents a free hand in arranging their children’s marriages in a way that best fosters the family fortune. It is assumed that children who have not yet reached their full majorus—that is thirty standard years of age—cannot be counted on to understand their own best interests.”
Her explanation clearly did nothing to make the Empyreals feel more comfortable with Cartelite practice, but the issue they focused in upon was the one Jewel least wanted to discuss with them. “If this is a common practice among your kind,” the rear admiral asked, “why then were you so adamantly opposed to your own union with House Delling that you risked death and sundered yourself from the family fortune to avoid it?”
Jewel took a deep breath and wondered how she had permitted the conversation to come back to this subject again. People rarely acted out of single motivations and in truth it was no longer clear to her exactly why it had been so important to her that she run away. She had been angry at her parents. She had been hurt, insulted, and she’d wanted to be free to make her own decisions for a change. In the back of her mind, she’d always known she had a couple of years to get back to Luxor if she changed her mind. She had never intended to discover a new armenium mine and spend most of a decade in cold sleep trying to escape the Armenite military. Unfortunately, confessing she was no longer clear in her own thoughts as to why she’d risked everything was not going to satisfy anyone.
“It was a complex situation,” Jewel said throwing the Armenites’ own ambiguous phrasing back at them. “Certainly, I was unhappy with the way my parents were treating me, but that was only a small part of the equation. Your people and your culture are mysterious to us despite our centuries-long partnerships. Only two women have been in my circumstances before and we know very little of what happened to them. They’re heroines among my people because they made possible the accumulation of vast fortunes by opening up the armenium trade. Millions, if not billions, of peoples’ livelihoods still depend on the relationships their marriages forged back then. Yet, almost nothing is known about what personally happened to those women after their marriages. From our perspective, after securing the fortunes of the Lisht and Nuri Cartels, those women essentially ceased to exist. They disappeared into the Hegemony and were not publicly heard from again.”
The Empyreals did not take advantage of this opportunity to dispel Jewel’s ignorance on the subject. Instead Adel asked her a follow up question. “So you were frightened?”
This conversation kept getting worse and worse. There was no way that a militarized society like the Armenites would respond well to cowardice. And yet, maybe Jewel’s fear really was the answer. “Certainly dread of the unknown was a part of what concerned me, but I believe the issue was larger than that. The Hegemony expected behavior from me far outside the norms for my people: celibacy before marriage, monogamy within marriage, a loss of all contact with my family, peers and friends.” Jewel didn’t actually feel that she had any true friends back in the Cartel Worlds, but part of the reason for that was again the fault of the Armenites. Who wants to invest in a friendship which can only return short-term dividends?
“There are a confusion of errors in your statement,” Adel told her, “that are frankly perplexing to listen to.”
“I don’t understand,” Jewel told her.
For the first time since the interview began, one of the Empyreals smiled.
“Neither do we,” Justiciar General Farl told her. “Perhaps that is the true root of this problem. May I ask where you learned that Armenites prize virginity before marriage?”
Jewel felt her jaw drop in surprise. “What do you mean? Everyone knows you despise adultery. You actually execute people for it.”
“Untrue,” Farl corrected her, “although it is a separate subject from the one we are discussing. Who led you to believe that we prize virginity in men and women of childbearing age?”
Jewel had trouble believing that the Armenites were arguing with her about this. Weren’t they one of the most conservative societies in the galaxy? “My parents have told me almost from the day I was born that the family fortune and hundreds of thousands of jobs depended on me keeping myself pure for Kole.”
All three Empyreals looked so perplexed by this statement that it actually made Jewel angry.
She rose to her feet and pounded the table with her fist. “But you execute adulterers.”
“No, we don’t.” Farl said again.
“Really?” Jewel asked. She knew she was still shouting but she didn’t seem able to stop herself. When she thought of the living hell that her parents had subjected her to in their never-ending efforts to make certain that she remained a virgin, she wanted to pick up the table and flip it over. “You tolerate adultery? You approve of it?”
“No, of course not.” Farl said. “Adultery is a criminal violation of personal and household honor. In those rare cases where it becomes necessary, we shame and ostracize the criminals and they are ejected from their Houses.”
That was a lot to take in and Jewel didn’t have time now to think through all the ramifications, but even without the death penalty it seemed to be at odds with the Empyreals assurance that virginity was not important. “So why do you say you don’t prize virginity?” she asked.
The doctor interjected herself back into the conversation. “We Armenites come from a relatively small genetic pool and we are not the most fertile of people. It is desired, even expected, that young men and women will have children before their marriage both as proof of their fertility and as a service to our species.”
“You want out of wedlock children?” Jewel asked unable to contain her incredulity. Then the natural implication of what the woman had said sank in. This information was completely out of character with the Armenite reputation for conservative morality. Then the second thing the woman had said registered on her brain. “And what do you mean your species? Are you suggesting you’re not human?”
From the look in their eyes Jewel realized she had it absolutely backward. They were suggesting that she wasn’t human. But that was n
ot the way that the physician general explained her thoughts.
“While we can breed with you, we are a higher life form. We thought this would be obvious to you. The word Armenite means the ascended one.”
Jewel sank back into her seat. Those simple words explained so much about the way the Armenites interacted with the rest of the galaxy, but…
“Why are you telling me this?” Jewel asked.
Physician General Adel leaned forward, reached out and touched Jewel’s arm with her heavily tattooed hand causing Jewel’s flesh to tingle. “Because it is possible, Ms. Sapphira, that if you complete this marriage into the House of Delling, you yourself will ascend to our level. Impossible as it sounds—for the first time in our history, there is reason to hope that there is a non-Armenite who is also fully human.”
Jewel stared back at her, trying to read her dark eyes but the orbs became lost in the spiraling pattern of the woman’s tattoos. She didn’t understand these people. What could they possibly see in Jewel that made her stand out from the rest of her people?
She forced herself to become diplomatic again. It wasn’t easy. Her heart was racing and her lungs were heaving but she had to slow things down and figure out what was actually happening in this conversation. “I really appreciate that you are trying to help me become better than myself, but I am obviously not at your level yet. I do not understand what you’re trying to tell me. I don’t even understand what it means to ascend.”
“It’s not so much you as your children that I’m interested in,” Justiciar General Farl explained. “I personally would like to see if you and Lieutenant Delling are capable of producing offspring.”
“That’s ridiculous,” the rear admiral spat. “It won’t happen. Kole probably can’t even—”
“Hoyt!” Farl interrupted him. His voice was sharp-edged with anger.
The rear admiral broke off his sentence and stared hard at the justiciar general.
“If they can have children,” Farl reiterated, “it would be truly remarkable.”
“Yes,” the rear admiral reluctantly agreed, “I suppose it would at that.”
“But why?” Jewel asked. “And why do you think Kole might not be able to have any?”
The Empyreals ignored her again, embarking on another conversation amongst themselves. “I agree that a child of this union would be remarkably important,” the doctor said, “but I am also interested in observing the development of this young woman. I can’t get past the apparent coincidence that this woman out of all the trillions in the galaxy is on the verge of ascending and that she is bound to Lieutenant Delling in the moment of his crisis.”
“And how is this a help?” the rear admiral asked. “Do you think she’s supposed to guide him?” His tattoos were good at concealing subtle emotions, but they magnified the appearance of his anger.
“I do not know,” the doctor admitted. “But I see purpose in this, Hoyt. I know it is difficult, but sometime you must have faith. Perhaps we should reconsider our plans for them after the wedding.”
“No,” Delling insisted. “No, no, no!”
“What purpose?” Jewel asked. Her frustration was making her angry and that made it more likely she would say something stupid. “What are you talking about? And what’s this plan the admiral’s so opposed to changing?”
She feared that they were slipping into the bounds of religion now which added to her discomfort. Her people worshipped God but their theology carefully excluded him from a particularly active presence in the universe. They believed that God revealed Himself through the Stars—the fountains of all life—but that He rarely involved Himself in miraculous interventions. The Armenites clearly had a much more traditional—a much more primitive her snobbish parents would argue—view of the role of the divine in the universe. Few details of their religious thought were understood by the outside world, but it was believed to include a dose of ancestor worship somehow wrapped up in their concept of the Unity.
“If you ascend,” Farl told her, “provision will have to be made for your complete education, but at this time it is enough for you to know that this tribunal believes that this union is intended and that we have the authority to make it happen. When your parents arrive tomorrow—”
“My parents are coming tomorrow?” Jewel interrupted him. Suddenly all the other things they were talking about appeared much less important.
The justiciar general looked to Delling for elucidation.
“Their starship translated into this system fourteen hours ago. It will match velocity and vectors with us in another twenty-two.”
Farl picked up his explanation again. “You will be given an opportunity to seek their advice before we ask you for a formal response as to whether or not you agree to the union they negotiated thirty years ago.”
“And if I decline?” Jewel asked. She had to ask. She knew that tremendous pressure was about to be brought to bear on her, but in Jewel’s heart of hearts she still wanted to be with Erik. She didn’t know Kole; she didn’t love him; and she certainly didn’t want to spend her life with him. There would be consequences to that decision, but she wanted to spend her life with Erik.
The justiciar general shrugged. “Then I will recommend that the House of Delling permanently disentangle its affairs from that of the Sapphiras and the Khaba Cartel as expeditiously as possible.”
“Which is what I think we should do now,” Rear Admiral Delling reminded them.
Jewel felt a cold wave of fear well up within her alongside her despair. She didn’t want to believe it. Erik really was lost to her. The Armenites were actually willing to break the cartel. Many, many, times she had overheard her parents discussing what would happen if Jewel had died or if for some other reason the marriage could not be completed. In each of those scenarios, they had convinced themselves that the Armenite economy could not handle the dislocation that would accompany shutting down the Khaba refineries and distribution networks. But Jewel now knew definitively that those speculations were completely off base. Looking at these three Empyreals, Jewel had absolutely no doubt that the fate of the entire cartel rested on her shoulders. The livelihood of hundreds of thousands of loyal employees depended on her while billions of other people’s fortunes were indirectly tied to the fate of her cartel. The economies of hundreds of worlds would collapse as armenium production plummeted and the price of the fuel soared and who knew how long it would take for those star systems to recover even after fuel supplies rose again. The Armenites were calmly contemplating years of galactic recession because Jewel longed to marry the wrong man.
“What if I had died?” she asked. Her voice came out little girl small, swallowed in disbelief and incredulity that these people could be so callous. “Would Delling have broken the relationship then?”
The justiciar general shook his head. “Under those circumstances a secondary union would have been negotiated.”
“But not if I say no now,” Jewel clarified.
“Not if you decline,” the man agreed. If he had any idea what was troubling Jewel, she could not tell by looking at him.
“So this whole notion of needing my consent is a fiction,” Jewel accused. “You’re blackmailing me—do as we want or we’ll take the armenium away and crash the galactic economy.”
The Empyreal was not impressed with her accusation. “There are consequences to all actions. Those in this case are simply more severe than the ones you are used to dealing with, but the choice is real and remains yours to make.”
He looked to the physician general who nodded and stood up. “We will leave you to consider the path of honor and the weight of your responsibilities,” she said.
Jewel was not quite ready for the interview to end. “I have a request, please?”
“And that would be?” Adel asked.
“I would like to know what is going to happen to my crewmates.”
The justiciar general fielded the question. “I have not made a formal determination of their f
ate, but at the very least I believe they will spend the rest of their lives in prison.”
Jewel closed her eyes. Was there no good news to be had today? She wanted to help them, and not just because of Erik, but realistically, what could she possibly do? All the cards were in Armenite hands.
She opened her eyes and met the justiciar general’s stare. “Would it be possible for me to see them?”
Chapter Five
I Know She’ll Do the Right Thing
Jewel met with her former crewmates in a recreational lounge which was normally dedicated to the use of the crew of the Righteous Lightning. This surprised her greatly. She had expected to have to speak with them in the brig, but the Armenites proved to be more compassionate than she had anticipated. There were seven of them in all—seven survivors of the Euripides dressed in bright orange jump suits, with bands around their wrists that could be used both to monitor their movements and to sedate them should they prove to be recalcitrant.
At least one of the seven was very happy to see her.
“Jewel,” Erik Gunnarson shouted. Before the echo of his voice could fade he was out of his seat and around the end of the table reaching for Jewel before she had finished stepping into the room. The Armenite guards immediately lifted their control wands as if they thought Erik was going to run or even to try to harm her. Jewel preempted them by stepping around her enlisted man escort and opening her arms to the only lover she had ever known.
“Erik.”
He scooped her up and hugged her tight against him and she hugged him back as if her very life depended on it. His arms were strong, his chest firm and hard, and it just felt good to be holding him again.
“I thought you were dead,” he whispered. “There was all that blood and so much damage to your face and you’d gone so long without oxygen. We made Brüning freeze you, but I didn’t really think it would help.”
Jewel didn’t answer him. She just squeezed Erik even tighter, realizing suddenly that this might well be the last time she’d be permitted this pleasure. One way or the other, the Armenites and her parents were going to take this man away from her. Even if she didn’t end up marrying Kole, Erik and she would never end up together.
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