by Blaze Ward
The woman gave Jessica another hard look, but she was speaking to Warlock anyway. “I can see that I’m not needed here. You’ll be just fine. I’ll take my leave, thank you.”
In a flash, she was gone, with Marcelle trailing in her wake.
Jessica took a breath and tried to figure out what had just happened. She looked back at Daneel. He shrugged.
“It’s complicated,” he said, by way of explanation.
“Ex–girlfriend?” Jessica hazarded a guess.
“Close,” he replied. “Ex–wife.”
Jessica raised an eyebrow at him.
“Complicated.”
“She thought I was the new one, apparently,” Jessica said.
“Teri can be a drama queen,” he said. “Besides, would that be so bad?”
“I beg your pardon?”
Jessica didn’t bother trying to keep the anger out of her voice.
Maybe she should punch him. Knock some sense into the man.
She was tired of getting marriage proposals from pirates. It was getting old, and hadn’t been funny to begin with.
He at least had the courtesy to look chagrined as she rounded on him. Both of his hands came up, although she couldn’t tell if that was a defensive response or surrender.
Better be both, mister.
“Sorry, Keller,” he said. “I spoke out of turn. It won’t happen again.”
“See that it doesn’t, Daneel,” she half–snarled back at him. “We do that sort of thing differently in Aquitaine. Perhaps you should learn that sometime.”
Jessica didn’t wait for a response. She stomped to the door, flung it open, and stomped out, surprising Marcelle and the boys guarding the room. Marcelle fell in immediately, letting her longer legs keep up with Jessica’s agitated pace.
About thirty meters down the hallway, getting back into the main parts of Arnulf’s palace, Jessica stopped so suddenly that Marcelle actually ran into her shoulder.
Had she really just told Warlock to learn Aquitaine customs if he wanted to court her? It had sounded like that coming out of her mouth, once she had time to consider her words.
Crap.
She certainly couldn’t go back and explain what she really meant.
What had she really meant?
Jessica blinked up at Marcelle, almost in embarrassment, and then continued back down the hall without a word. Silence seemed the least possible evil right now.
But strange thoughts intruded, atop all the tactical and strategic politics that had been filling her morning.
She certainly couldn’t tell Marcelle how the man smelled. There was a rightness to it that hadn’t registered on her before now.
Marcelle would give her no end of grief. Besides, she was the one that chased after men, or women, as the mood struck, not Jessica.
That was not her style. He was not her type.
Did she have a type? Had any man turned her head, ever? Well, one, but he was happily married and didn’t see her that way.
Crap.
Jessica growled under her breath and set out to locate Desianna’s apartment. Hopefully, that would go over easier than this had.
She really needed another session with the fighting robot.
Chapter XXIX
Date of the Republic November 2, 393 City of Corynthe, Petron
Desianna waited.
She did that well.
Patience.
Water was soft, and yet would grind down mountains with time.
It was patient.
Fire was hot and fast and often painful.
Wind was a burst of energy and then nothing.
Kind of like a few of the men she had known.
This sitting room was as perfect as she could get it. Cozy. Discrete. Subdued.
Nobody was allowed in here except her. Locals would have found the space disconcerting, claustrophobic.
It was, for Desianna, a shrine to her mother. To the time before Father had taken them to the frontier to find his fortune. Before poverty and piracy and Corynthe.
Not that she would ever whisper a hint of that to anyone.
She had spent four decades fitting in, making do, overcoming obstacles, going from that little girl in pigtails to the First Wife of Corynthe.
Not that she entertained Arnulf very much anymore. Mei Fan was the favored consort now, since Charlotte had died. But still, Desianna kept his attention from time to time, with passions the younger woman hadn’t learned or never discovered.
Her place in his palace was secure.
As long as it was his palace.
What did Aquitaine want? What did it mean, that they were here, now?
The riptides were building. She could feel them tug at her toes.
Fools would fall. Fortunes would be made.
And an Aquitaine fleet hovered overhead.
Desianna remembered to breathe.
She felt almost dowdy today, dressed in simple slate–gray pants and a maroon tunic, Arnulf’s favorite colors. The ensemble made her hair glow softly and her eyes glow like fire.
Only the barest minimum of jewelry today, all gold: a ring from Arnulf, all those years ago; earrings from her son; a bracelet that had been her mother’s.
She felt almost naked without half a pound of gold in bangles and chains and fripperies, to say nothing of pearls and gems and the sorts of jewelry an important, beautiful woman can acquire for a favor or a smile.
And the room was too subtle for someone from Petron, even a native of the capital city. The walls were done with a fabric dyed a very dark green, highlighted with gold and white.
Before Keller had arrived, very few people would have seen those colors and realized they were the colors of the Republic.
The space was a proper sitting room such as one might find on Ladaux or Anameleck Prime, comfortable for two, cozy for four. Small enough for tea. Or conspiracies.
A knock startled Desianna from her reveries.
The door opened partway and a woman peeked in.
“Yes, Intan?” Desianna asked, suddenly breathless with nerves.
“Your guest has arrived,” the woman replied quietly.
“Please, show her in.”
Desianna rose to her feet.
She wiped her suddenly damp hands on the backs of her pants and centered herself.
Calmness. Courtesy. Perfection.
Aquitaine was here.
Ξ
Jessica entered the inner chamber with a touch of trepidation. The rooms she had passed through had had a very homey feel to them, but in a completely feminine way she found almost alien.
At that last door, as the maid knocked, Jessica flashed back to First Lord Kasum’s door at Fleet HQ. Room 2304.
The Dragon’s Den.
This was almost as far as you could get from that place, socially or politically.
And yet…
Inside, the surprises multiplied.
Her mother would have had a tea room like this, had she ever stopped crafting long enough to dedicate a whole room to formally entertaining visitors. Indira Chastain–Keller, however, would have never parted with the sort of money required to purchase the intricately crafted tea set on the table, nor the little statue of Ganesh, or the Kali–ma, the jade carved rose, or the matched set of antique measuring cups. Even after she could have afforded it.
Not even on a wild splurge. She was just too moderate and careful with her money.
Jessica had been in salons like this, though. When visiting Fleet Lords who represented the Fifty Families of the Republic. Money. Power.
Desianna, as far as she knew, wasn’t one of them. But this room had not been assembled overnight. And it could have graced any number of mansions, back home.
Jessica took the offered chair and sat with all the care she would have, had she just discovered she had navigated into a minefield. A real one, and not just a social construct far beyond her experiences.
Hopefully, not beyond her preparations.
The maid left. The door closed with a heft similar to the primary airlock hatch to Engineering.
Solid.
They were alone. She could trust Desianna. She could trust the food.
She hoped.
The tea was amazing. The little cucumber and dill sandwiches could have been served by her mother, or one of her aunts. And they took those sorts of things extremely serious.
The small talk was carefully vague and obtuse. The weather, the room, the ball.
Idle chatter.
Jessica would have been willing to bet anyone good money that there was not another room like this in the palace, let alone on the planet. Meeting here was a message she hoped she could work with, from someone telling her, in her own way, that she understood Aquitaine.
Jessica set down her mostly empty tea mug. She dared hope.
Desianna eyed her warily.
“I don’t know where to begin, Desianna,” Jessica said carefully. Social maneuvering was an alien thing. She was still working on it.
Desianna’s stress levels went down. It was there in the relaxation around the eyes, invisible if Jessica hadn’t already been looking so closely at the woman to see it.
“What brings you to Corynthe, Jessica?”
Jessica considered herself again.
At the end of the day, nothing so much as raw Gunboat Diplomacy.
A reminder that Aquitaine was an ally of Lincolnshire, and Corynthe should mind its manners and abide by its treaties. A hope that maybe she could prevent a war that would draw Aquitaine in, at the very time when the Fribourg Empire was already feeling the weight of the fighting after all the damage she had done a year ago at places like 2218 Svati Prime or C’Xindo.
Desianna waved a hand to forestall whatever words she thought Jessica was going to say.
“You destroyed the base at Sarmarsh IV, Jessica,” she continued. “You could have easily killed them all. Why didn’t you?”
Jessica took a breath, and a leap.
“Aquitaine doesn’t want a war, Desianna,” she said. “I have a reputation back home as a fighting commander. The hope was that Corynthe would recognize what I could do if turned loose. Instead, I’m trying to play nice. Will they?”
“I don’t know, Jessica,” the woman murmured back. “Arnulf has enemies. They would overthrow him in a heartbeat if they could. Every day is a challenge to keep the monsters at bay.”
Jessica eyed her carefully.
“Desianna, I’m Aquitaine,” Jessica said bluntly. The conversation suddenly seemed to demand it. “I’m not sure we aren’t better off fostering that sort of civil strife here. A weak Corynthe is less trouble for the neighbors.”
Her reward was a look of pain that quickly turned hard.
“Without Arnulf,” Desianna replied, “the wolves will run wild. Study your history. What was it like fifty years ago? A hundred? He’s trying to make Petron a place, and not just a bar and a brothel and a skid row.”
Inside, Jessica shrugged. Should she tell this woman that all of Corynthe barely rated more that Here there be dragons in most history books of the galactic fringes, or the Fleet’s Gazette? Lincolnshire might have been able to tell her more, but it had seemed more important to strike the pirates hard and fast, before they could prepare. At Sarmarsh, she had even caught an Imperial Admiral with his hand in the cookie jar.
Jessica’s blood went cold. Several pieces of a puzzle clicked, all at once, into an entirely new configuration from what she had been seeing before.
Admiral Wachturm really had had his hand in the cookie jar. Doing just exactly the opposite of what she was trying to do, as was entirely appropriate from where he stood.
She had envisioned an Imperial plot to help Corynthe invade Lincolnshire. And that might still be the case.
But what if the plot was against Arnulf? Bring back the wolves, let them run wild over Lincolnshire, blooding Ramsey and other places. Draw Aquitaine farther out onto the frontier, since the Fribourg Empire ran closer to the fringes than Aquitaine, bordered directly by Lincolnshire, and then Corynthe beyond it. The Republic would have to respond.
“You begin to see?” Desianna said quietly, apparently noting the change in Jessica’s eyes.
“At Sarmarsh, when Ian Zhao fled, we captured an Imperial Admiral, Emmerich Wachturm. He claimed diplomatic immunity, so I can’t just throw him in the brig, but he was most certainly meeting with Zhao and Daneel Ishikura.”
“The Red Admiral?”
Jessica was impressed, but the man’s reputation was spectacular. It was possible he was known this far out.
“Zhao is Jing Du’s man,” Desianna breathed, leaning forward.
“And Daneel?”
Desianna was silent for a moment. “He was always loyal to Arnulf. After he killed Willem Agano, Arnulf sent him to Sarmarsh, partly as a punishment, and partly to keep him away from Rory and the rest of the clan.”
“Did he know that?”
Desianna shrugged.
“Better, was he mad enough about it to listen to promises from Jing Du?” Jessica could see a thread binding all the bits together, like popcorn on a thread.
She blinked. This room really did remind her of home. She hadn’t done something silly like make a popcorn necklace since she was a little girl.
“That I could believe,” Desianna said. “But why assassinate him now?”
Jessica was far enough ahead in her logic to guess. It was not a pretty sight.
“They wanted him isolated out there, Desianna,” she said. “Him here, with my fleet, suggests that he might have turned loyal again. Or it might be to keep him from revealing their plans to Arnulf in order to buy his life.”
“Or,” Desianna said, “they don’t need him anymore, since you destroyed the base that was his reason for being involved in the first place. Du is a cut–throat son of a bitch.”
Jessica considered the angles. They were all bad.
“Could we turn him loyal again?” Desianna asked.
Jessica felt her face harden. Her shoulders came up all by themselves. And she had suggested he learn how to court her? “Why would we care?”
Desianna blinked at her and leaned back. She started to speak, stopped herself, and looked closely at Jessica.
Jessica felt like grinding her teeth, but managed not to. Barely.
“He can be a very charismatic man,” Desianna said obliquely, a vague smile painting her lips.
Jessica let both of her eyebrows rise, although she kept her sarcastic, caustic comment to herself.
“He owes you his life twice now,” Desianna continued. “Contrary to what you might think, he can be an honorable man.”
“He’s a pirate,” Jessica growled back.
“We’re all pirates, Jessica. These are poor worlds on the fringe. And only eleven are loyal enough to Arnulf as king to pay their taxes regularly. There are dozens of others determined to go their own way.”
“And what does Daneel have to do with that?”
Desianna smiled a private smile. “Let me talk to him, Jessica. He might confide in me. We have been friends for a long time.”
“Lovers?” The world came out before Jessica could stop it. She clamped her jaws tight. Not grinding. Crushing, perhaps.
Desianna shook her head. “Never with Daneel. Contrary to palace rumor, I am not a wanton slut bedding every virile young man I see.” She shrugged. “If I have occasional needs, Arnulf knows of those affairs. Many have been political, tools of statecraft.”
Jessica found herself silently mouthing the words. “Tools of statecraft.” They didn’t make any more sense the second time she heard them.
“But I have never taken Daneel into my bed, Jessica. He is a dear friend, and nothing more.”
That seemed to help her relax.
Where did all this anger come from? Especially over a man? One she barely knew? A pirate?
Grrrrr.
Jessica drew in a breath, held it, let it escape. Some of the energy went
with it. Fleet maneuvers in three dimensional gravity fields made more sense. And made her less angry.
“So Lincolnshire’s security relies on Arnulf’s staying in power?” Jessica said.
Who knew interstellar politics would provide welcome conversational respite?
“I believe so,” Desianna said, relief creeping into her voice as she relaxed as well.
“How do we convince him to bother other people?” Jessica said. The King of the Pirates wasn’t about to just lie down with the lamb.
Desianna thought for a second, eyes darting back and forth, staring at an invisible horizon. For a moment, it was just like watching Moirrey at work. That made Jessica smile.
“Isolate the main players,” Desianna said abruptly.
“Huh?” Jessica felt like she was back in Introductory Fleet Tactics class on the first day, trying to learn the vocabulary, the ships, and the vectors in real time, all while being graded.
That actually made it feel better.
She could learn this. Future First Lord Nils Kasum had been her instructor then. Perhaps she could learn what she needed from Desianna. The woman was obviously just as serious an expert in her chosen field.
“We need to get Arnulf, the chancellor, Ian Zhao, and Daneel Ishikura away from Petron. If the plot centers on them, we derail it by being elsewhere. Certainly, we can’t leave the others here without adult supervision.”
Jessica could follow that line of logic.
Just like maneuvering fleets.
She laughed to herself.
“What?” Desianna said.
“My aide, Marcelle, uses the phrase adult supervision occasionally, usually to describe my pilots on Auberon.”
“Pilots are pilots.” Desianna laughed back.
“So what would you suggest, Desianna? How do we isolate the key people and work on them?”
“A Promenade.”
“A what?” Jessica felt the ground shift under her again.
“Would you be willing to take a tour of several Corynthian worlds, Jessica? Take your squadron and several Motherships and be seen by the locals?”
“Would that help solidify Arnulf’s hold on power, by showing them that he has a new ally in Aquitaine?”