The Macedonian Hazard

by Eric Flint

  “I understand, sir, but…”

  “I’m getting to it,” President Wiley interrupted. “It’s a bit complicated. The Queen of the Sea is owned by the Queen of the Sea Corporation, which is registered in New America and owned by the crew and a few of the passengers who, for whatever reason, kept their share. The Reliance is owned in part by the Queen of the Sea Corporation and in part by the government of New America, along with the part ownership by you and some of your crew.” Wiley held up his hand before Adrian could again ask what this was all about. “We want to change that. We, that is, the government of New America, want to buy the Queen of the Sea’s share of the Reliance and commission her as the New American Navy ship Reliance. Making her officially a ship of New America.”

  Adrian was shaking his head.

  Al Wiley again held up a hand. “Hear me out. I admit I don’t like the idea of this much mixing of government and private enterprise, but we are in a special circumstance. For now and for years to come, the government of New America is going to have to help in the kickstarting of the industrial revolution. It is our intent to divest ourselves of all these businesses just as soon as we can, except maybe the post office. But, for now, we need the Reliance as both a commercial presence and a New American military presence that is able to reach Europe. We have to do that to maintain the distinction between New America and the Queen of the Sea.”

  Adrian nodded. It made sense in the weird and twisted way that things had made sense since The Event. He agreed that having government mixing in business was a bad thing. He’d been a Tory before The Event. But he’d also run the Reliance up the Orinoco River to burn out the towns and villages that had been involved in the attack on Fort Plymouth. The military function of the Reliance was a reality, in spite of any desires to the contrary.

  “We want to persuade you to buy a commission as commodore in the New America Navy with your share of the Reliance.”

  Adrian looked around and went to the chair he had been offered. His knees were suddenly weak.

  As Adrian sat, Al Wiley leaned his hip against his desk. “It’s actually quite a good deal for you, Commodore Scott. As a commodore and commander of the Reliance, you will still be entitled to most of what your share would have been with the Reliance in private hands. Your share of the oil and cargo transport money will be only slightly diminished with the Reliance as the flagship of New America.”

  There was something in Wiley’s voice that made Adrian look at his face and what he saw there made it very clear that Wiley was unhappy about the whole notion of an officer of a New American warship having a share of the profits that ship might make.

  “Why?” Adrian asked. “Why ask me to buy my commission and why give me a share?”

  “Because it’s going to be hard enough to buy the Queen’s share of the Reliance. New America isn’t going to have a balanced budget this year and the Bank of New America is in truth only a branch of the Queen of the Sea bank. We need to get your shares for political reasons. The Reliance has to be wholly owned by New America, but we can’t pay you what the shares are worth. And, to be honest, if you fought us over the issue, you would almost certainly win.”

  New America had a Supreme Court. It had three justices and all of them were American lawyers from the passengers. They were also a fairly conservative bunch, with strong views on the issue of private property.

  “So what do I get to keep me from suing and what do I give up?”

  “You get the status of a commodore in the New American Navy. That puts you on a par with a Satrap of the Empire. You get a regular salary and it’s a pretty big one. And you and your crew get a share of the profits that the Reliance generates by carrying oil and cargo.”

  “And I lose?”

  “A certain amount of freedom of action,” Wiley admitted. “You will be a man under orders. And you will be operating under the UCMJ as soon as we get it written.”

  Adrian felt a grin fighting through the receding shock. The Congress of New America had been haggling over the Uniform Code of Military Justice almost from day one. The locals, both Greek and Injun, had their own views of the rights and obligations of soldiers. Those rights, by local standards, almost always included things like sacks and gleaning. The ship people, on the other hand, figured that a soldier or sailor was paid by the government. And besides, murder, rape, theft, and arson caused political problems. That was no doubt another reason for Wiley’s displeasure. Giving the crew of the Reliance a share in any profit the ship made was a precedent he clearly didn’t want to set. “How is that going to affect the crew of the Ronald Reagan?”

  Wiley grimaced. “As it stands now, the UCMJ makes a clear distinction between acts of war and other functions. So the Reagan, as primarily a warship, won’t be generating the sort of income the Reliance will. On the other hand, and you should know this because if you take the deal, you’re going to be the very first member of New America’s admiralty, we are probably going to have admiralty courts. And if the admiralty court condemns a seized vessel as a pirate or a ship of a belligerent power, the crew will get a share of any proceeds. I don’t like it, but we are stuck in a world where the distinction between a navy ship and a pirate is very slight.”

  Then President Alan Wiley stood up from his lean against his desk and said, formally, “Mr. Scott, will you accept the post of commodore in the Navy of New America and all the privileges and obligations of that post?”

  Adrian stood up and saluted as best he could. Adrian had come up as a merchant seaman and never before served in the military. “I will, sir.”

  Navy Office, Fort Plymouth, New America

  April 3, 319 BCE

  The Navy Office was just that. An office in the capitol building. And not a very big one. The room was ten feet by thirteen feet, had two small desks—one for the Secretary of the Navy and one for his secretary—and one file cabinet that was about half empty. It was next door to the Army Office. The offices opened into a larger room that had half a dozen desks for clerks, most of them ship people and most of them on the high side of fifty. They were the rest of the government bureaucracy. The capitol building was a grandiose name for what was actually not very different from a block of the townhouses that made up the rest of Fort Plymouth. It was two stories, wattle and daub, on a platform held four feet off the ground by wooden stilts.

  The Secretary of the Navy was Richard VanHouten, the electrical engineer and naval history buff who designed the refit of the Ronald Reagan. He was a balding man with horn-rimmed glasses and a slight stoop to his shoulders. And when he wasn’t being Secretary of the Navy, he ran a ship design firm that was going to build cargo sailing ships for the coastal trade. He reached out and shook Adrian’s hand and smiled, showing a chipped denture. The making of plastic dentures was a long way off, so dentures were irreplaceable. Or at least in regard to the quality they were used to before The Event.

  “Congratulations, Commodore. Have you met Captain Boka, late of the Carthaginian navy?”

  Captain Boka had a black beard that was both curled and perfumed, and long, curly hair. He wore a captain’s hat and a white coat with four narrow gold stripes. He saluted in the Carthaginian manner, right hand facing outward, arm bent at the elbow and raised to the shoulder. Then he gave a bow, but a shallow one.

  Adrian gave him a British navy salute, and no bow, thinking, We are going to have to come up with some form of common protocol for naval personnel. “It’s nice to meet you, Captain. The Reagan seems a fine ship and I’d like to visit her sometime.”

  “At the commodore’s pleasure,” Captain Boka said in a clearly rehearsed phrase.

  They talked some more and Adrian learned that Boka was a fairly proficient English speaker, though he had a strong Phoenician accent. He was also familiar with the political situation along the east coast of the Americas. And, surprisingly, an ardent abolitionist.

  “I spent three years as a galley slave to Sicilian pirates, Captain. I have hated the institution eve
r since. It was just that there was no other option until you people arrived.”

  “Captain Boka freed his slaves, every last one of them, three days after the arrival of the Queen on its first visit to Carthage. It effectively ruined him, and his family paid his passage on the Queen to New America just to get him out of sight,” VanHouten said.

  * * *

  The ceremony was a bit pompous, but moving in a way. Adrian swore the oath that was very close to the oath taken by everyone serving in the USA military.

  “I, Adrian Scott, having been appointed an officer in the Navy of New America, in the rank of commodore, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of New America against all enemies, foreign or domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter.”

  And that was where Chief Justice Setsuichi Watanabe stopped.

  “So help me God,” Adrian finished on his own. He knew the reason that Watanabe stopped. Even back in the world in the US, that “so help me God” had been tradition, not law. Here in New America it was not even that, because many of the locals swore to other gods. They had people from Athens who swore to Athena. They had Indians who swore to Quatal, a feathered dragon god that was probably an ancestor of the Aztec Quetzalcoatl. At least, it was the god of knowledge and farming. But there wasn’t a single god that was commonly worshiped in New America. Christianity—Catholic, most major Protestant varieties, Mormon—Islam and Judaism. All of them were expanding, but they were still in the minority even put together.

  Justice Watanabe reached out and shook Adrian’s hand. “Congratulations, Commodore. You can buy a good uniform at the Agape shop on Baker Street. They do good work.”

  That wasn’t a surprise either, having the chief justice touting a tailor. This was a different world. Smaller, more local. Fort Plymouth, the biggest and really the only city in New America—stretching the term “city” to the breaking point—had a population of less than five thousand. What made it seem like something of a city was more the degree of crowding into a small area than the actual size of the population. In the United States most of the ship people had come from, a typical town of five thousand people would spread out quite a bit. Here, for the sake of protection within Fort Plymouth’s palisade and because a large number of the population weren’t up to walking very far, that same five thousand people were crammed together pretty tightly. Being honest about it, much of Fort Plymouth bore a more than passing resemblance to a tenement slum.

  The new Jacquard-style loom, a device of wood and string with only a few small metal parts, lowered the cost of weaving. The spinning wheels lowered the cost of thread, and so did the small hand-powered carding machines, but sewing was still very expensive and mostly done by hand. So the uniform was going to be a month’s wages for a commodore and the sort of thing that left a lieutenant moderately deep in debt.

  “I’ll look into it, sir,” Adrian said.

  The New America Navy was not going to be very picky about uniform regulation as long as Adrian was the senior officer. On the other hand, as a commodore he had a greater obligation to lead by example. Which was probably at least part of Justice Watanabe’s point. At the moment, Adrian was dressed in his ship’s dress uniform, white with short sleeves. And, by now, it was getting quite frayed around the edges.

  * * *

  For the next several days, Adrian found himself stuck in Fort Plymouth, taking care of the parts of his new job that had to be done here in the capitol. Then he boarded the Reliance for the trip to the Med.

  Queen of the Sea, Alexandria

  April 7, 319 BCE

  Captain Lars Floden took the sheet from the steward and read the message.

  Reliance on route to Thrace.

  Then he went back to the dinner conversation with Cleopatra, Sean Newton, Roxane, Dag and Epicurus. This was still the Queen of the Sea, and this was still the captain’s table: white linen, fine china, silver flatware, the best food and wine, and people dressed in their best. “So, Sean, what do you think about the new agreement between the empire and New America?”

  “I think it’s a good thing overall, Captain Floden,” said the large, beefy man who was going a bit bald. “It will facilitate trade and increase the market for New American goods.” Sean had stayed on the Queen, but—using funds from his girlfriend Cleopatra, sister of Alexander—he had invested in several manufactories in New America and was rapidly turning into a tycoon. Cleopatra was thrilled with the situation, Lars knew. It meant that she was much less dependent on the income from her lands, which were tied to the political position she occupied and less than completely dependable. “As to the tactical and strategic situation, I don’t have a clue. Cleo says it will help Eumenes, especially coming after that mousetrapping he got in Thrace.”

  Dag Jakobsen smiled. “Don’t be too disappointed in Eumenes, Sean. From my read, it’s the sort of thing that can happen to anyone. And Eumenes didn’t let it stop him. Slow him a bit, maybe, but not stop him. He is besieging Abdera, and if Lysimachus is blocking him on the land route, he isn’t in a position to attack him. And Eumenes has a good supply situation. Apparently he’s been listening to Erica on the issues of food storage, canning, drying, and pickling.”

  “We already knew about pickling and drying, and even canning is only new by degree,” Cleopatra said.

  “Yes, dear, I know,” Sean said with such a long-suffering tone that Lars had to suppress a laugh.

  Cleopatra gave him a look, then she did laugh. “I know, I know. The improvements are significant in reducing spoilage. And in making storage and transport easier. But it’s not like we were still figuring out how to make fire.”

  “How is he getting supplies?” Epicurus asked. “I mean, with Abdera in enemy hands and Lysimachus controlling most of the land between them and the Bosphorus.”

  “Mostly they aren’t.” Roxane waved a wineglass. “That’s why food preservation has become such an issue. Eumenes was already quite a good quartermaster by local standards. Almost certainly the best in Alexander’s army. Alexander used to talk about it quite a lot. As long as Eumenes was handling it, he never had to worry about supplies. Except for that trek back from India, and that wasn’t Eumenes’ fault. It was Alexander’s. Anyway, after he met you ship people, he set up a bunch of local kitchen canneries in his territory, and he has wagon loads and wagon loads of preserved meats and beans, as well as other stuff. It allows him to keep his army fed with much fewer depredations on the Thracians. Meanwhile, Lysimachus is raping the land and Eumenes’ army grows every day because of it.”

  “It grows.” Dag frowned. “But it doesn’t grow stronger. Just bigger. Most of the new recruits aren’t veterans. They are farm boys who are escaping from burned out villages. And they are bringing their wives and mothers with them. That’s why the alliance is such a boon. If the Reliance ever leaves Fort Plymouth, that is.”

  “You will be pleased to know, then, that the Reliance has left Fort Plymouth and should raise Abdera in eighteen or nineteen days.”

  “Does Eurydice know that?” Roxane asked.

  “If not, she will soon,” Lars said.

  CHAPTER 13

  Over My Dead Body

  Abdera, Thrace

  April 8, 319 BCE

  Claudius Kokaliáris—in spite of the moniker Kokaliáris, which meant skinny—was in his middle forties, a stocky man. He had the famous Greek nose and a thick, luxurious beard that was going gray in spite of the fact that his hair was still black. He sat on a couch and read the message again. He looked around the room at his officers lounging here and there, working or drinking. More drinking than working.

  The siege of Abdera was two weeks old, just long enough for it to be clear that Eumenes wasn’t going to waste his army in an attempt to storm the walls. Now this. The message was sent
by a herald, from Philip and Eumenes as his strategos, but Claudius knew what that meant. It was actually from Eumenes and Eurydice. And all it said was: Reliance has left New America. Will arrive at Abdera Harbor April 27.

  He knew what that meant too, at least to him as commander of the city.

  Claudius was one of Lysimachus’ lieutenants. He was appointed to this post because of his proven loyalty to Lysimachus and because he was quite unpopular in Thrace, having spent much of the last three years as one of Lysimachus’ top tax collectors. But Claudius was also, at his core, a very practical man. He knew for a fact that he couldn’t hold the city if the Reliance got here. Even if it never fired a cannon or shot a rocket, just its presence would cause the city to rise up.

  Claudius stood up and went to a table. Then he called over Silas, a slave. Silas was an Athenian and a student of Aristotle before falling on hard times. “Write what I tell you,” Claudius said quietly. He could read, though not very well, and he wrote even more poorly.

  “Eumenes, I will turn the city over to you, but not for free. I will need to leave Thrace and I will need money to live. What I can do for you is to open the north gate and stand down the troops just before dawn on a day to be agreed. But you must guarantee my safety and provide me transport to New America. And I want an account in the bank of the Queen of the Sea in the amount of fifty talents.”

  Silas looked at Claudius, eyes wide, and started to open his mouth.

  “Quietly, Silas. Quietly, or I will have the skin of your back off.”

  Silas’ mouth snapped shut. And Claudius considered. Silas was silent now, but he would need to stay silent or Claudius would find himself deposed before he could act. He wasn’t Lysimachus’ only man in Abdera and Nikomedes was stupid enough to think he could hold Abdera in spite of the Reliance. Sighing with real regret, he spoke again. “Also, my slave Silas, who I manumit the moment we are both on the Reliance.”