John pushed iron counters across the table and through the scoop trough beneath the iron grille. Fingers arranged them in a pattern; they were from Zeizin Shipbuilding AG, one of the bigger firms.
recognition, Center said. Pointers dropped across the clerk’s pasty face indicating pupil dilation and temperature differentials. 97%, ±2.
That was about as definite as it got; now the question was whether this was his real contact, or whether the Fourth Bureau had penetrated the ring and was waiting for him. His palms were damp, and he swallowed sour bile, eyes flickering to the doors. He wasn’t carrying a weapon; it would have been insanely risky, here—a Protégé caught armed would be lucky to be executed on the spot. And when they found his geburtsnumero . . .
subject is contact, Center reassured him. anxiety levels are compatible. 73%, ±5.
A whole hell of a lot less certain than the first projection, but still reassuring. A little.
The clerk nodded and pressed a button on her side of the counter. A light went on with a tick over the girl closest to the stair; she stood with a mechanical smile and picked up her towel.
The upper corridor was fairly quiet, in midafternoon; a row of cubicles stood on either side, with curtains hung before them on rings and a shower at one end. John’s guide pulled aside a numbered curtain and ducked through.
He followed. Within was a single cot, a washstand and tap, and a jar of antiseptic soap . . . and crouched in a corner, the burly form of Angelo Pesalozi. He stood, bear-burly, more gray than John remembered.
“Young Master Johan,” he rumbled.
John extended his hand. “No man’s master now, Angelo,” he said, smiling.
The hand of Karl Hosten’s driver and personal factotum closed on his with controlled strength. John matched it, and Angelo grinned.
“You have not grown soft,” he said. “Come, we should do our business quickly.”
The girl put her foot on the cot and began to push on it, irregularly at first and then rhythmically; with vocal accompaniment, it was a remarkably convincing chorus of squeaks and groans.
“A minute,” John said. “My life is at risk here, too, and will be again, and I must understand. Karl Hosten is a good master, and your own daughter is one of the Chosen. Why are you ready to work against them?”
Brown eyes met his somberly. “He is a good master, but I would have no master at all, and be my own man. I have four children; because one is a lord, should the others be slaves, and my grandchildren? There are more bad masters than good.”
He jerked his head towards the girl. “She dropped a tray of insulator parts, and so she must whore here for a month—is this justice? If a man speaks against the masters when they send his wife to another plantation, or take his children for soldiers, his brother for the mines, he is hung in an iron cage at the crossroads to die—is this justice? No, the rule of the Chosen is an offense against God. It must cease, even if I die for it.”
John met his eyes for a long moment. subject is sincere; probability—He silenced the computer with a thought. I know.
And Angelo had always been kind to a boy with a crippled foot . . .
“Yes,” John said. “That is so, Angelo.”
The Protégé nodded and produced folded papers from inside his jacket; they were damp with sweat, but legible.
“These I took from the wastebasket, before the daily burning,” he said. “Here is an order, concerning five airships—”
“I worry about that boy,” Sally Farr said.
“I don’t,” Maurice Farr replied.
They were sitting on the terrace of the naval commandants quarters, overlooking Charsson and its port. This was the northernmost part of the Republic of Santander, hence the hottest; the shores of the Gut were warmer still, protected from continental breezes by mountains on both sides. The hot, dry summer had just begun; flowers gleamed about the big whitewashed house, and the tessellated brick pavement of the terrace was dappled by the shade of the royal palms and evergreen oak planted around it. The road ran down the mountainside in dramatic switchbacks; there were villas on either side, officers’ quarters and middle-class suburbs up out of the heat of the old city around the J-shaped harbor.
The roofs down there were mostly low-pitched and of reddish clay tile; it looked more like an Imperial city from the lands just north of the Gut than like the rest of Santander. Much of the population was Imperial, too—there had been a steady drift of migrant laborers in the past couple of generations, looking for better-paid work in the growing mines and factories and irrigation farms.
Farr’s eyes went to the dockyards. One of his armored cruisers was in the graving dock, with a cracked shaft on her central screw. The other four ships of the squadron were refitting as well; when everything was ready he’d take them up the Gut on a show-the-flag cruise.
“John,” he continued, “is on his way to becoming a very wealthy young man. And he’s doing well in the diplomatic service.
“Thank you,” he went on to the steward bringing him his afternoon gin and tonic. Sally rattled the ice in hers.
“He has no social life,” she said. “I keep introducing him to nice girls, and nothing happens. All he does is study and work. The doctors say he should be . . . umm, functional . . . but I worry.”
Maurice turned his head to hide a quick smile. From what Jeffrey told him, John had been seen occasionally with girls who weren’t particularly nice. Enough to prove that the infant vasectomy the Chosen doctors had done hadn’t caused any irreparable harm in that respect, at least.
“Do you know something I don’t?” Sally said sharply.
“Let’s put it this way, my dear: there are certain things that a young man does not generally discuss with his mother.”
“Oh.”
Smart, Maurice thought fondly. Pretty, too.
Sally was looking remarkably cool and elegant in her white and cream linen outfit and broad straw hat, the pleated skirt daringly an inch above the ankle. Only a little gray in the long brown hair, no more than in his. You’d never know she’d had four children.
“Besides,” he went on, “he’s been assigned to the embassy in Ciano. From what I know of the tailcoat squadron there, social life is about all he’ll have time for—it’s a diplomat’s main function. Count on it, he’ll meet plenty of nice girls there.”
“Oh.” Sally’s tone wavered a little at the thought. “Nice Imperial girls. Well, I suppose . . .” She shrugged.
She looked downslope in her turn. There were fortifications there, everything from the bastion-and-ravelin systems set up centuries ago to defend against roundshot to modern concrete-and-steel bunkers with heavy naval guns.
“John seems to think that there’s going to be war,” she said. “Jeffrey, too.”
Maurice nodded somberly. “I wouldn’t be surprised. War between the Chosen and the Empire, at least.”
“But surely we wouldn’t be involved!” Sally protested.
“Not at first,” Maurice said slowly. “Not for a while.”
“Thank goodness Jeffrey’s in the army, then,” she said. The Republic of Santander had no land border with either of the two contending powers. “And John’s safe in the diplomatic corps.”
“You dance divinely, Giovanni,” Pia del’Cuomo said. “It is not fair. You are tall, you are handsome, you are clever, you are rich, and you dance so well. Beware, lest God send you a misfortune.”
“I’ve already had a few from Him,” John Hosten said, keeping his tone light and whirling the girl through the waltz. The ballroom was full of graceful swirling movement, gowns and uniforms and black formal suits, jewels and flowers and fans. “But He brought me to Ciano to meet you, so he can’t be really angry with me.”
Pia was just twenty, old for an Imperial woman of noble birth to be unmarried, and four years younger than him. Also unlike most Imperials of her sex and station, she didn’t think giggles and inanities were the only way to talk to a man. She was very pretty indeed,
besides, something he was acutely conscious of with their hands linked and one arm around her narrow waist.
No, not pretty—beautiful, he thought.
Big russet-colored eyes, heart-shaped face, creamy skin showing to advantage in the glittering low-cut, long-skirted white ballgown, and glossy brown hair piled up under a diamond tiara. Best of all, she seemed to like him.
The music came to a stop, and they stood for a moment smiling at each other while the crowd applauded the orchestra.
“If jealous eyes were daggers, I would be stabbed to death,” Pia said with a trace of satisfaction. “It is entertaining, after being an old maid for years. My father has been muttering that if I wished to do nothing but read books and live single, I should have found a vocation before I left the convent school.”
John snorted. “Not likely.”
“I would have made a very poor nun, it is true,” Pia said demurely. “And then I could not have gone on to so many picnics and balls and to the opera with a handsome young officer of the Santander embassy. . . .”
“A glass of punch?” he said.
Pia put her hand on his arm as he led her to the punch table. The white-coated steward handed them glasses; it was a fruit punch with white wine, cool and tart.
“You are worried, John,” she said in English. Hers was nearly as good as his Imperial, and her voice had turned serious.
“Yes,” he sighed.
“Your conversations with my father, they have not gone well?”
Even for an Imperial commander, Count Benito del’Cuomo was a blinkered, hidebound. . . . With an effort, John pushed the image of the white muttonchop whiskers out of his mind.
“No,” he said. “He doesn’t take the Chosen seriously.”
Pia sipped at her punch and nodded to her chaperone where she sat with the other matrons against one wall. The older woman—some sort of poor-relation hanger-on of the del’Cuomos—frowned when she saw that Pia was still talking with the Republic’s young chargé d’affaires. They began walking slowly towards the balcony.
“Father does not think the Land will dare to attack us,” she said thoughtfully. “We have so many more soldiers, so many more ships of war. Their island is tiny next to the Empire.”
“Pia—” He didn’t really want to talk politics, but she had reason to be concerned. “Pia, their note demanded extraterritorial rights in Corona and half a dozen other ports, control of grain exports, and exclusive investment rights in Imperial railroads.”
Pia checked half a step. She was the daughter of the Minister of War. “That . . . that is an ultimatum!” she said. “And an impossible one.”
John nodded grimly. “An excuse for war. Even if your emperor and senatorial council were to agree to it, and you’re right, they couldn’t, then the Chosen would find some new demand.”
“Why do they warn us, then? Surely they are not so scrupulous that they hesitate at a surprise attack.”
“Scarcely. I have a horrible suspicion that they want the Empire to be prepared, so you’ll have more forces in big concentrations where they can get at them,” John said.
They walked out into the cooler air and half-darkness of the great veranda. Little Adele and huge Mira were both up and full, flooding the black-and-white checkerwork marble with pale blue light, turning the giant vases filled with oleander and jessamine and bougainvillea into a pastel wonderland. The terrace ended in a fretted granite balustrade and broad steps leading down to gardens whose graveled paths glowed white amid the flowerbanks and trees. Beyond the estate wall, widely spaced lights showed where the townhouses of the nobility stood amid their walled acres, with an occasional pair of yellow kerosene-lamp headlights marking a carriage or steamcar. Westward reached a denser web of lights, mostly irregular—Ciano had a street plan originally laid out by cows, except for a few avenues driven through in recent generations. Those centered on the Imperial palace complex, a tumble of floodlit white and gilded domes.
From here they could just make out the glittering surface of the broad Pada River; the dockyards and warehouses and slums about it were jagged black shapes, no gaslights there. Above them two lights moved through the sky, with a low throbbing of propellers. An airship, making for the west and the great ocean port of Corona at the mouth of the Pada.
“Chosen-made,” John said, nodding towards it. “Pia, your soldiers are brave, but they have no conception of what they face.”
Pia leaned one hip against the balustrade, turning her fan in her fingers. “My father . . . my father is an intelligent man. But he . . . he thinks often that because things were as they were when he was young, so they must remain.”
“I’m not surprised. My own government tends to think the same way.” If not to quite the same degree, he added to himself.
They were silent for a few minutes. John felt the tension building, mostly in his stomach, it seemed. Pia was looking at him out of the corner of her eyes, the beginning of a frown of disappointment marking her brows.
“Ah . . . that is . . .” John said. “Ah, I was thinking of calling on your father again.”
Pia turned to face him. “Concerning political matters?” she asked, her face calm.
An excuse trembled on his lips. Yes. Of course. That would be all he needed, to add cowardice to his list of failings. A crippled soul to join the foot.
“No,” he said. “About something personal . . . if you would like me to.”
The smile lit up her eyes before it reached her mouth. “I would like that very much,” she said, and leaned forward slightly to brush her lips against his.
probability of sincerity is 92% ±3, with motivations breakdown as follows—Center began.
Shut the fuck up! John thought.
He could hear Raj’s amusement at the back of his mind. Damned right, lad.
Jeff’s voice: God, but that one’s a looker, isn’t she? He must be getting visual feed from Center, through John’s eyes.
Will you all kindly get the hell out of my love life?
“Giovanni, there are times when I think you are talking to God, or the saints, or anyone but the person you are with!”
John mumbled an apology. Pia’s eyes were still glowing. “The only question is, will he consent?”
“He’d better,” John said. Pia blinked in surprise and slight alarm at the expression his face took for a moment. He forced relaxation and smiled.
“Why shouldn’t he?” he said. “He knows I’m not a fortune hunter”—the del’Cuomos were fabulously wealthy, but he’d managed to discreetly let the Count know the size of his own portfolio—”and if he didn’t like me personally, he’d have forbidden me to see you.”
Pia nodded. “Well, I do have three younger sisters,” she said with sudden hard-headed shrewdness. “It isn’t seemly for them to marry before me—and also, my love, I think Father thinks he can beat you down on the dowry by pretending that the marriage is impossible because you are not of the Imperial Church.”
John grinned. “He’s right. He can beat me down.”
Some cold part of his mind added that Imperial properties weren’t likely to be worth much in a little while.
He took a deep breath. It was like diving off a high board: once you were committed, there was no point in thinking about the drop.
“Pia, there is something I must tell you.” She met his eyes steadily. “I am . . . I was born with a deformity.” He averted his eyes slightly. “A clubfoot.”
She let out her breath sharply. His glance snapped back to her face. She was smiling.
“Is it nothing more than that? The surgeons must have done well, then—you dance, you ride, you play the . . . what is the name? Tennis?” She flicked a hand. “It is nothing.”
Breath he hadn’t been conscious of holding sighed out of him. “It’s why my father never accepted me,” he said quietly.
She put a hand up along his face. “And if he had, you would be in the Land, preparing to attack the Empire,” she said. “Also, you wou
ld not be the man I love. I have met Chosen from their embassy here, and beneath their stiff manners they are pigs. They look at me like a piece of kebab. You are not such a man.”
He took the hand and kissed it. “There is more.” John closed his eyes. “I cannot have children.”
Pia’s fingers clenched over his. He looked up and found her eyes brimming, the unshed tears bright in the starlight—and realized, with a shock like cold water, that they were for him.
“But—”
He nodded jerkily. “Oh, I’m . . . functional. Sterile, though, and there’s nothing that can be done about it.” He turned his head aside. “It was done, ah, when I was very young.”
“Then you too have reason to hate the Chosen,” Pia said softly. “Look at me, Giovanni.”
He did. “You are the man for whom I have waited. That is all I have to say.”
Jeffrey Farr smiled.
“You find our ships amusing?” the Imperial officer asked sharply.
The steam launch chuffed rhythmically along the line of anchored battlewagons. He’d noticed the same attitude often in Imperial naval officers. Unlike the Army—or the squabbling committees in Ciano who set policy and budgets—they had to have some idea of what was going on abroad. Not that they’d admit the state their service was in, of course. It came out in a prickly defensiveness.
“Quite the contrary,” Farr said smoothly. “I smiled because I recently received news that my brother, my foster-brother, is going to be married. To a lady by the name of Pia del’Cuomo.”
And I don’t think your ships are funny. I think they’re pathetic, he added to himself.
The Imperial officer nodded, mollified and impressed. “The eldest daughter of the Minister of War? Your brother is a lucky man.” He pointed. “And there they are, the pride of the Passage Fleet.”
Ten of the battleships floated in the millpond-quiet bay of the military harbor, flanked by the great fortresses. Lighters were carrying out supplies, much of it coal that had to be laboriously shoveled into crane-borne buckets and hoisted again to the decks for transfer to the fuel bunkers. The ships were medium-sized, about eleven thousand tons burden, with long ram bows and a pronounced tumblehome that made them much narrower at the deck than the waterline. They each carried a heavy, stubby single 350mm gun in a round cheesebox-style turret fore and aft, and their secondary batteries in a string of smaller one-gun turrets that rose pulpit-style from the sides. Each had a string of four short smokestacks, and a wilderness upperworks of flying bridges, cranes, and signal masts.
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