by Jim Rudnick
It was being out there on the RIM, exploring, getting called to do this and that, and running into chances that come with that kind of possibility, which was the way to find those opportunities.
So … guess I need someone to sit beside me, listen, counsel and then hey—come up with the same ideas.
Wonder who that should be? She went through the list of her aides, secretaries, and second-tier help—and there was none. In fact, she trusted her dresser, who laid out her outfits each day more than any of the others.
She nodded to her aide who’d been standing there for more than half an hour, and soon, standing in front of her once again was Captain Tanner Scott.
She nodded.
She pushed away her Throthian cat—if in fact it was a cat—and it moved off with its odd angular gait, and she brushed off the hairs on her lap.
She looked at him, smiled, and said “Tea, Captain?” and he nodded back.
Once the aide had delivered same, and she was careful to note that her captain got his full double-double, she thought that maybe this aide could move up in her adviser list—then she remembered that she’d had to berate this young woman just a few days ago about wearing lavender and magenta in the same outfit. She shuddered and turned to her guest.
“Captain, can I ask what this highly sought EYES ONLY personal meeting is about? While I appreciate that you are a busy Barony Navy captain—Sir, I run the realm. Asking for this is paramount to asking for me to quit all else—to deal with you, Sir,” she said, and the tea in her mouth went right down, and she almost choked but saved it at the last moment. No sense in letting the captain know that I’m upset. She had learned that what felt like a thousand years ago when she had been a pleasure girl inward.
The captain nodded, and then out of the pouch on his hip, he tendered a small set of documents, less than a dozen pages, in real live hard copy, directly to his Baroness.
She looked at him and accepted the stapled documents, but then she turned them over on the short coffee table between them. She smiled at him and said, “And these docs say …”
It took almost a full hour for him to explain what the document report supposedly said.
It took her almost another half hour for her to ask her questions, reconsider, then re-ask, and reconsider again what was at least to her something astounding. For the RIM Confederacy. For the galaxy—and it was hers—or rather, she corrected herself, the Barony’s!
She thought on this for quite a bit before she tore a big strip off him.
“You, Sir—work for the Barony Navy. You, Sir, as before, should be not only able to find these kinds of opportunities but simply to turn them over to the Barony. You, Sir, should not be looking at the kind of modification that the anti-grav devices could offer—and then just go off on a tangent. That is up to me—the Baroness—to handle,” she said.
“Ma’am, with all due respect—and I mean this in all honesty, Baroness—the Barony does not at this point have the degree of follow-ups when it comes to technical and biological sciences. Actually, we on the Atlas only do as we have a chief warrant officer, Astrin Hartford—a Tarvos alien, who without a doubt should be promoted now, Ma’am. It was his idea to test the gravity well. While the thought did sort of occur to me, the difference between the Atlas gravity well of about fifty thousand tons compared, say, to the Juno sun of two to the thirtieth power—a gravity well that is so much bigger that it is odd that we ever even thought of the simple anti-grav basics. Such a huge difference—at least to his way of thinking—made him test the plates in outer space. Hence, we have—with your verification, Ma’am, instant travel. Anyone who has their ships outfitted with our app and equipment will be able to travel the RIM in an instant.
“No more one light per day or more—instead, the full length of the RIM—all ninety lights in less than a few seconds. Ma’am, we seem to have conquered the ability to move from one star to another. And, might I note, Ma’am, that as this is a process that appears, at least, to be a diminishing ability—each time one ship uses the gel as the igniter of the process, it dissipates. So there will be needs for all to purchase new gel for every trip. Or not. Nothing can stop any RIM Confederacy member from not taking part in the Barony Drive—they can simply turn on their Perseus engines and start up their own TachyonDrive. Not a thing can prevent that—except that once we think instant travel makes its mark—it cannot be withstood, Ma’am” he said.
And he sounded right, she thought. Once anyone can be there in a second, why would you then instead take twenty days to do to the same thing. That was the crux of the matter.
Instant travel—or the more perfectly named Barony Drive—was the answer. One that, she thought, with the right press and PR campaigns could make her again the savior of the RIM and at the same time bury the leadership of this issue by her captain—yet that was unrewarded—at least as yet. Wonder what he wants—let’s speak plainly, she thought.
“Captain—this is all due to your own efforts—and yes, we will speak later about your CWO too … but now let’s speak to you and how I can offer you some help for your own efforts—no, no, please—do not negate this,” she said as he half-rose and tried to get his Baroness to stop.
“Captain—you know of our Captains Council—and here in the Barony Navy, we do not have an admiral top position—is that something I can tempt you with. I will make you the admiral of the whole Barony Navy—your own recommendations as to who should replace you on the Atlas too will be both okayed and certified.”
She sipped more tea. “Or, if that is not what you are after—then let me say this. I know—as do very few others here on the RIM—that you and the Lady St. August are having an intimate relationship, which will perhaps lead to your marriage. Yes, I know—this is something that you and she are hiding. Yes, I know. But still have you at least looked into what that might mean? I have no idea as to what you think you feel with my stepdaughter—but I can tell you this—that the life of a Royal compared to a non-Royal can be such a change that most cannot handle same. You, of course, may be different—but I offer this as a change of your position here too.”
She smiled at him then. “Or, Captain, we will just put all this on hold—and find you a place to sit and wait and see what comes of all of this. Oh, we—the Barony Drive, that is— will go ahead on its own, but ‘till then I will try to place the Barony Drive as where it should be … in other words, thank you for this opportunity, Captain—but you may, as of right now, forget it even exists.
She sipped her tea and smiled at him, and in a few seconds more, he realized it appeared to her that he knew he’d been dismissed.
#####
Sitting in his quarters at his console and awaiting the large conference call from the admiral of the RIM Navy was an easy task—least it had been easy. Before, he’d have added a large dollop of Scotch to his morning coffee, but now he sat sipping his tea.
It made him think though of what the rest of his life would be like now that he was forty years old. On many planets, that was old—an elder even. On others, it wasn’t much past being a youngster—but on his own home world, Branton, one of the realm worlds of the Earldom of Kinross, it was just coming into full maturity. Not that living and growing up on a tidally locked planet was easy, mind you, but still it was the doorway to full adulthood.
He no longer drank alcohol—its liveliness replaced by a single vaccine shot on the Barony Hospital Ship. Only nineteen percent of human stock had the right gene to be able to react with the vaccine so that any imbibed alcohol was immediately diverted to the bladder—no absorption, no effects, no fun at all. He had thought about that—just because the vaccine worked did not mean that the ability to have a good time and the need to have that good time was anything but over.
Yes, he still went out with friends like Alver and Bram, and yes, he’d even had beers too with them—but while such imbibing allowed them to use the beer like a social lubricant, he didn’t find that at all. Instead, he watched carefully as t
hey all got more funny and loud and joked and enjoyed themselves, but he didn’t. He missed that.
What he didn’t miss, he thought as he sipped his oolong tea, was the PTSD. That had come as a result of his attention to duty and the subsequent need to put down a criminal rebellion over on Halberd, the RIM Confederacy prison planet. And a large part of that quelling had meant he had to use his Colt to kill a couple of the traitors, one of whom he was sad to say had had the beginnings of a personal relationship with him. He had lain in bed for some pretty sleepless nights, wondering if that had been her plan all along, to foment a relationship with him so that if he ever had to choose between duty and love—that she might get the decision made in her favor.
“Wrong,” he said to himself, “there wasn’t a navy man anywhere who would have picked those violet eyes over the fact that she had a Merkel in her hands and was aiming at the head of her state. Not anywhere.” He sipped the dregs within the plas-cup and thought about those violet eyes one more time.
The screen lit up in front of him with the RIM Confederacy logo—the dagger over the star on a blue diamond—and moments later after the encryption Ansible software chimed, he was a part of the conference call.
“Captains,” the admiral said, “good to have you all connected and able to take part in this conference. As you all know, I have been in direct touch with your own heads of state, and if you’re on this call, you and your ship have been assigned to this mission.” He nodded to them all.
While the admiral’s face took up the top three-fourths of the screen, the bottom held two rows of five captains each, and the list was surely the cream of the crop when it came to experienced navy ship’s captains.
Captain Siegel of the RN Nugent represented the RIM Navy, and from the Barony, it was himself and Captain Vennamo of the BN Gibraltar. There was a captain he didn’t know from the DN Nelson of the Duchy d’Avigdor. Then a captain from the CN Roc, a destroyer from the Caliphate, and a captain from an unnamed sphere ship from the Alex’n hegemony were there too. There was also a captain from an Eran cruiser, the EN Orc, a captain from a Tillion destroyer the TN Fendi, and a captain from a Randi cruiser the RN Fallster.
He realized he’d need to at least try to get to know these other captains—or would he, he suddenly wondered, as he really had no idea what this conference call was all about.
The admiral, however, wasted no time at all and got right to the point.
“You all know—or have been sent the EYES ONLY reports of the recent past developments on Memories—of our destruction of more than one hundred of these terraforming foundries and the huge concerns that in doing so—at least from the Roma refugees’ mouths, has led us to this. Captains—as of right now—verified by your own heads of state—each of you and your ships has just been seconded into a specialized group—what we’re calling Team Memories.”
That did get some heads leaning back he could see on his screen and even an objection was launched by the Eran captain, but it was ignored by the admiral.
“What that means is—that you just go about your business like you always do for your own realm. But one day—perhaps never—but should you ever get an emergency EYES ONLY from me with the subject Team Memories, you are to stop whatever the hell it is you’re doing and read same. There will undoubtedly be orders to go somewhere and help repel what we think will be alien resource invaders. They could show up over any planet, they could in fact not ever show up. But if they do, you’ll receive orders to move, and I mean move at top speed to a rendezvous point for us to either talk to these aliens—or simply destroy them. There are no exceptions to these orders, no more important matters that can or will exist. If I call you, Captains—you respond. Do I have your agreements?” he said, and he looked at each of them.
Try as he may to have pushed the AYE button first, Tanner noted that the duchy captain had beaten him, but soon all the smaller live photos of each of the ten captains had a nice bright green checkmark in their top right-hand corner.
“Acknowledged, Captains. I will be the fleet admiral on this Team Memories mission and will use the RN Nugent as my fleet vessel—Captain Siegel will be my 2IC for this mission too, you all should know that.”
He half-smiled at them. “We really have no idea on this—these aliens could show up in two hundred years or in two weeks—we don’t know. But we are ready. I will need each of you captains to stock up your ships with full ordnance and all personnel needed to launch your ship into action. I need all of your ships up and live and running well—in fact, it’s not me that needs this—it’s the RIM Confederacy itself that asks for this kind of insurance against these resource invaders. We have had some experience with their type of action and sorties before, so this is not a blind-side engagement, we believe. Be ready and be prepared is all I order. Thank you, Captains, for your time,” he finished off, and the console monitor screen faded to black.
Tanner stood and walked over to his bed and sat on the edge. He ordered his room AI to take down the view currently of the Neres City skyline and instead to show him the layout of the RIM Confederacy itself.
The Confederacy was about one hundred and a few lights by about forty lights, with the Barony of Neres being at the center of the whole realm. Juno lay about forty or so lights to the east, and Memories lay in a southerly direction at about half that distance. Depending on where these aliens came from—he’d be willing to bet that it would surely be Memories itself where the bombed foundries were located that would be first—or maybe as their satellites had been knocked out, maybe it would be the RIM Confederacy capital itself.
He really had no idea where they’d appear—but he knew that this Team Memories group had some real firepower—and if the admiral was at the helm of the mission, they had a great chance to overcome these invaders.
“At least on paper,” he said to himself as he used his PDA to make appointments with all department heads to explain this new mission and what they’d need to prepare the Atlas and get her up to full power and speed.
#####
Tanner poured himself another glass of wine and slid away from Helena as he did so—pretending to almost drop the mostly empty bottle just to get a few inches away from her. She had an arm entwined with his right arm, and as he quickly moved to his left to the night table, trying to steady the rocking wine glass, she had to let go.
“What, Captain … the ability to pour wine is now beyond you? Come back closer,” she said, her nails scraping his lower back muscles as she tried to get him to return.
“Ma’am—Helena, wait a sec,” he said, and the wine glass was righted, the bottle returned to the chiller, and he sat on the edge of the bed in her quarters on the Sterling.
Now or never, he thought and spun to face the bed’s headboard, made from some kind of other world stone with small shards of opals throughout it. It sparkled in the candles that she—or rather one of her servants—had lit all around the bed area, and he squinted for a second until he moved his head slightly to the left and then all the way to look at her.
She was beautiful. Her long blonde hair hung down on her right side almost but not quite covering a breast that was to die for—full and round and yet as firm as he’d ever touched. She tucked the satin sheet between her legs and then lay on her side, her hips barely covered yet as seductive as he’d ever seen her look. She arched an eyebrow as he still stared at her and she waited for him to speak.
And speak he must.
“Ma’am—Helena, we need to talk, and I’m sorry that I feel that it must be now, Ma’am. Yet I can’t—rather I am simply unable to—lie here and go on like there is nothing bothering me—because there is, Ma’am. And you must know it too, right?” he asked, but she shook her head negatively to him in answer.
“Tanner, what on earth are you talking about?” she said, her voice kind, yet he could still hear the Royal steel within her words.
“Ma’am,” he said as he took a quick gulp of the Quaran Chardonnay and almost smiled it
was that delicious.
“Ma’am, this … this relationship is what is worrying me, Ma’am. Not the love—as it’s there. Not the feelings as they’re there too … but it is the fact that you are a Royal and I am not, Ma’am. That I see as something that—well at least to me is something that we will not be able to bridge, Ma’am. Well, not unless you—what is the word—abdicate, Ma’am? Give up your Barony Royalty and become a simple captain’s wife?”
She looked at him and stared.
She said not a word for over three minutes.
She slowly shook her head at him a single time.
“I must ask, Tanner—what has prompted this kind of … well, this kind of stupidity on your part? What could ever make you think that I would ever give up more than, what, two thousand years of my heritage and Royalty? Is it not so much simpler and easier that you just ‘become’ a Royal, Captain?” she said, her tone like that of a frustrated teacher to an eight-year-old student.
He nodded back to her and held up a hand, palm up, as if he was giving her something. “But Ma’am, all you’ve talked about over the past few months has been what you will do, where you will go, where you will live, what ship you will take over after the Sterling here is returned to the Barony Navy. Not a single question about what I might want to do, where I might like to go—whether or not I’d want to remain in the Navy too. You—as a Royal, I take it—look at life from a selfish point of view, and the addition of a husband does not change that POV, Ma’am. I’d just be an extra, to have around when you need a state dinner partner or the like. Not a real husband at all—at least that’s how I see it.”
She exploded. “Selfish—you can call me selfish, Captain? When I have given every single year of my public life to the duties of being a Barony Lady? When I expect to one day sit where my stepmother does now in the full control of the Barony itself—running, what, almost a dozen planets with hundreds of billions of subjects all of whom need some time with their head of state? Is that what you think being a Royal is—a selfish role?” she said as she tucked the whole sheet around her and got up and out of her bed. She walked over to the setting of chairs, quickly picked up a robe, put it on, and then went back to the bed, but she came around the foot of it to face him directly.