The Macedonian Hazard

by Eric Flint

  Silas looked at him, eyes even wider, then they tightened in calculation. And, slowly, Silas gave Claudius a slight nod.

  It wasn’t nearly as deferential as Claudius would have liked, but they both knew how the world worked.

  Negotiations proceeded for a few more days, but the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Claudius got forty talents, not fifty, but he would have been satisfied with thirty.

  Eumenes’ men slipped in the north gate of Abdera an hour before dawn on the fourteenth of April. There was very little fighting.

  Abdera docks

  April 14, 319 BCE

  The captain of the single-masted merchant ship Hericlease was named Simon. He was dressed in a rag tied around his waist with a rope and a cloak that was, if anything, in worse repair. He had a short, graying beard and hadn’t bathed recently. He smelled of salt air and Simon. Rather more Simon than salt air. Erica Mirzadeh considered investing in yet another soap factory. There was one in Lydia that she had gone halves on with Eurydice, and it made pretty good soap through the good offices of a local apothecary and some modern Wikipedia articles on the making of soap that Erica translated. Unfortunately, its product was still quite expensive by the fourth-world standards of pre-Christian Greece.

  Erica Mirzadeh held her tongue and tried to breathe shallowly while Eumenes, apparently completely unaffected by the aroma, discussed shipping goods from Lydia to here. Almost from the moment that Erica had accompanied Eumenes, Eurydice, and Philip off the Queen, they had been starting businesses based on ship people knowledge. The vast majority of them were located in Lydia. They made everything from horseshoes to thread, from soap to dried soup mix.

  “But what of pirates?” Simon was complaining.

  “Come now, Captain. The straight-line distance between here and Canakkale is only eighty miles. Well, eighty of the ship people nautical miles. And I grant that you can’t go entirely straight, but we are still only talking a day or two and—” Eumenes stopped as though struck by a new idea. “I know, Captain. For your safety, I will assign a platoon of crossbowmen to you for the trip.”

  Simon didn’t look especially pleased by that, not to Erica’s eye. He looked trapped. And that, in Erica’s opinion, was all that was needed.

  From Eumenes’ expression, he was just as satisfied with the situation. He waved Erica over, and she pulled out the magnetic compass. It was the product of one of the new industries. The needles were heated, then exposed to an electromagnet. They made the needles in batches on the Queen and assembled the cases in a shop in Lydia. She also had a sextant and a set of instructions for both compass and sextant.

  “This is the compass,” she explained, holding it out and letting him take it. She pointed at the needle and had him rotate the compass around so that he could see that the needle continued to point north. She showed him the markings on the little paper sheet and how to read them to tell which way the ship was traveling.

  Then she introduced Ophion, one of Eumenes’ most trusted cavalry officers. After learning how to use both compass and sextant over the months Erica had been with the army, Ophion was actually more skilled at their use than she was. “Ophion here will command the crossbow platoon, and he will also teach you the use of the navigational devices.”

  The Queen was making clocks now, mechanical clocks that worked quite well. But the army only had three, and none of them were going to be turned over to Captain Simon and his tub, which was almost as much in need of a good scrubbing as he was.

  * * *

  Once they were off the ship, Eumenes gave her a look. “You ship people are the most fastidious people I have ever seen.”

  “Tell me that fat slob didn’t stink.”

  “Oh, he stank. But I only noticed it because Tacaran, and now Eurydice, are constantly pointing it out.”

  Eumenes had bathed the day before, with soap. It was becoming the custom in his army. But a lot of that was the medical texts that were still being translated into Greek and sent to them whenever they were stopped and had the bandwidth.

  They went on to the next ship and repeated the process with variations. Captain Iakchos, as it turned out, bathed every time he hit port and had his own stock of soap. Soap he bought in Lydia. He also had a compass that he bought in Lydia, but not a sextant, which had proved too pricey for his purse. He was happy with the sextant and the offer of ship’s credit for the trip.

  Eumenes reached into his breast pocket—an affectation at least in part, as to add a pocket to a tunic required hand-sewing the pocket onto the tunic, and in spite of the very low cost of labor, it was still not something poor people could afford. It was a way of demonstrating wealth without exactly flaunting it. From his pocket, he pulled a booklet. The booklet was a checkbook. It had a picture of the Queen of the Sea in the upper right corner on every check, something that would be very difficult to forge. Using a barrel as a table, he wrote out “Iakchos” on the PAY TO line and the amount, then signed it.

  “When we get back to the station,” Erica said, “I can radio the Queen, set you up an account, and send them the information that is recorded there, so the Queen will have it. You do need to be aware, though, that only you can cash the check. You can’t sell it to someone else.”

  That was, by now, a standard spiel. Checks and Queen of the Sea bank money were sometimes accepted, and sometimes not. The wealthier and more educated the person was, the more likely they were to accept the Queen’s bank money. On the other hand, the Queen’s coinage was absolutely the best money anyone had ever seen. The coins were stamped consistently and the edges were reeded. That is, they had little grooves all around the edges to prevent clipping. The coins were also of a constant purity, and that purity was marked on the reverse of each coin. The front had a stamped image of the Queen of the Sea herself.

  That was proving to be one of the biggest advantages of the royalists in the civil war. The money that Roxane and Eurydice spent through their agents was better and more trusted than the money of Antigonus, Cassander, or the other rebellious satraps. It was even better than Ptolemy’s money, though Ptolemy was now in negotiations to have the Queen of the Sea mint Egyptian coinage for the bank of Egypt.

  Alexandria, Egypt

  April 14, 319 BCE

  TinTin Wai adjusted her glasses, then looked through the microscope. It was impressive in its way, even if its magnification was only a little over a hundred power. It had taken the efforts of three glassmakers, a jeweler, two carpenters, and a brass smith three months to make. TinTin was in new territory. She was using the microscope to try and identify the bacteriological infection that was making Abaka sick. Abaka was the twelve-year-old daughter of a family of wealthy Egyptian merchants. She had the symptoms of tuberculosis, but TinTin wanted to be sure because the sulfa drugs that she, along with the help of the local apothecaries and the Queen of the Sea’s database—

  There! There is one of the tubular little suckers. She was pleased at the confirmation that the microscope was working and useful in identifying the disease. Happy that it worked. Still, the prognosis wasn’t good. There were surgeries that could be tried to relieve the symptomatology, and the sulfa drugs would at least impede the disease. But those drugs were poison. They would destroy the liver with regular use.

  She sat up and stretched, then waved Kadmos over. Kadmos was a doctor in the mold of Hippocrates, both an experimenter and good with patients. He was, in fact, second chair of medicine in the newly formed University of Alexandria. TinTin gave him her stool and he looked. It took a minute. Then he said, “Yes, yes. I see it. It is much like the image I saw on the computer, but different as well. Harder to see.” He spoke in English with a Greek accent that TinTin thought was even worse than her Cantonese accent. Whatever Bruce said.

  The door opened without a knock. “Sorry to interrupt, Doc,” Bruce said, “but I need TinTin.”

  “What? Oh, fine,” Kadmos said in Greek with a pronounced Spartan accent. The difference between Athenian Greek and Spart
an Greek was about as great as the difference between Southern and Bronx, with the Macedonians off somewhere in Cockney Land.

  “What do you need?” TinTin asked.

  “Word just came in. Eumenes took Abdera yesterday.”

  “And?”

  “And Ptolemy has a message to send to Antigonus.”

  TinTin lifted an eyebrow as she moved to the door.

  Bruce shrugged. “It’s in code,” he said as he stepped back out of the room.

  TinTin waited until the door was closed to ask, “What code?”

  “A variant on the military code that they were using with the signal fires.”

  “Cracked?” TinTin asked. She was careful even here in their offices.

  The ship people enclave was a large four-story building near the Temple of Serapis. The temple was new, built since Ptolemy had become Satrap of Egypt. In it there stood a newly made statue of the god Serapis. Fifteen feet tall, made of painted terracotta, and dressed in robes. Serapis had aspects of Osiris, but also a Greek look about him. The temple, reminiscent of the Acropolis in Athens if smaller, was made of marble columns. TinTin could see it every time she looked out the window of her suite in the four-story apartment building that was now the ship people enclave.

  On top of the ship people enclave was the radio tower, and the radio room was on the top floor, but protected from weather and accident. On the bottom floor was a ten-room hospital for the wealthy. On the second floor, where they were now, were the labs and shops, mostly occupied by Greek and Egyptian scholars and master craftsmen loaned to them by the University of Alexandria. On the third floor were rooms that they rented to visiting ship people, of which there were several at any given time. Either from the ship directly or from Judea, where there was a small colony. And on the fourth floor, along with the radio room, were the apartments of Bruce Lofdahl and TinTin Wai. Bruce was leading her to the stairs. An elevator was being added as a demonstration project, but it wasn’t finished yet and TinTin had no intention of using the thing even after it was finished.

  “Did you carbon copy Her Nibs?” TinTin asked. The ship people enclave had more locals than ship people by an order of magnitude, at least. And some of them were spies. So TinTin and Bruce had taken to speaking obscurely, if not exactly in code.

  “Yep. And I would bet Strom Borman has cracked their code, even if it is a book code.” Bruce was grinning like he knew a secret.

  “Maybe.” TinTin conceded the probability, though she was less confident. A book code was, by its nature, the hardest of all codes to crack. Even with the software and computing power of the Queen, you had to have something for the formula to work on. And that meant you had to have the book the sender used. Or you had to make your own by making guesses. Besides, TinTin had never met Strom Borman and didn’t know much about him, except that he was supposed to be some sort of mathematical genius.

  “I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet, TinTin,” Bruce said. “Not so much because of Doctor Borman, but because I would bet that Eumenes or Roxane had a copy of the main book. Or at least can make a good guess about which book it might be.”

  By now they were on the third-floor landing and Bruce motioned her to his rooms. Again, TinTin lifted an eyebrow, but she went with him. As soon as they went through the door, TinTin faced Ahura, whose smile at seeing Bruce disappeared as soon as she saw TinTin.

  “It’s just business, sweetie,” Bruce said.

  Ahura was eighteen or nineteen. They weren’t sure which. She was an orphan and a slave whom the enclave bought and manumitted. She started as part of the cleaning staff and set her cap at Bruce the moment she first saw him.

  TinTin didn’t see it, at least not physically. Bruce was on the wrong side of fifty and chunky, with horn-rimmed glasses and a hairline that was in full rout. But he was a nice guy who hadn’t tried to use his position to importune any of the staff, so Ahura had gone after him. And got him. Which was fine with TinTin, whose tastes went to the Arnold Schwarzenegger type.

  Ahura tried to smile at TinTin but didn’t make a great job of it. Bruce led TinTin into the office. Then, waving her to a chair, he went to the locally made wheeled office chair. “Ptolemy is trying to buy oil from Antigonus.”

  “How do you know?”

  Bruce pointed at a bookshelf. TinTin went to look. It was a bound book, Government by Aristotle. It was clearly not one of the scrolls that the locals used as books. She pulled it out and looked. It was a printout that used their dot matrix printer and it had the text in Greek and English.

  “There is a copy on my keyring flash drive. Plug it in, and ta da.”

  “So you knew all along,” TinTin said.

  Bruce grinned even wider. “Best way to keep a secret, don’t tell anyone.”

  TinTin shook her head in disgust. “So tell me about the oil?”

  “Ptolemy is building steamships at Suez.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Queen can’t be everywhere, and she is neutral besides. And while the Queen isn’t there, a steam gunboat will control the Red Sea, and a few of them could control the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf as well. I think that Ptolemy is getting ready to make a try for most of eastern North Africa and maybe India.”

  TinTin considered. She was rather cynical. Not paranoid, just mostly convinced that a lot of people had a large helping of self interest and rather smaller helpings of loyalty and honor. Especially among the locals. “I don’t know, Bruce. How is he going to control the captains of those ships once he builds them?”

  “I don’t know, but Ptolemy is pretty good at this sort of thing.”

  “No. He’s pretty good at controlling an army on land. A ship at sea is a whole different kettle of fish. The idea of loyalty to the state or government, even loyalty to kings…it’s not really there yet.”

  “Alexander.”

  “Which is why they called him ‘the great.’ Remember that Persian guy whose soldiers killed him and brought Alexander his head? For them to get in trouble for doing that, they had to do it. Can you imagine someone chopping off the queen of England’s head, or even the President’s, and giving it to the enemy just because their side lost?”

  “TinTin, you’re a cynic.”

  “I’m a realist. I know you’re fond of the locals. Hell, I’m fond of them. But don’t you start believing that they are civilized. Anyway, what’s the word on the Reliance?”

  “I think we are going to have to wait till they get to Abdera before we find out.”

  Abdera, Thrace

  April 27, 319 BCE

  Commodore Adrian Scott looked around the airy room with the parquet floor, and the incredibly expensive wall hangings. It was a very nice place and they were digging out the paths for sewage pipes to install toilets. He’d seen them as he came in, proudly pointed out by one of Eumenes’ aides. “I’ll forward your request, Strategos Eumenes,” Adrian said. “But I honestly doubt it will be granted.” The request was to have the Reliance ship a load of troops from here in Abdera to Amphipolis. Not a long trip or a dangerous one, at least not for the moment. But it would drag the Reliance right into the middle of the war.

  “Is there nothing you can do, Commodore Scott?” Queen Regent Eurydice asked. “Can’t you persuade your President Wiley?”

  “I suspect that President Wiley would like to help you, Your Majesty, but he doesn’t operate in a vacuum. We have a constitution and an elected government. And the government must be respected even if it doesn’t do the wisest thing.” Adrian was fudging here more than a bit. As much as the notion of agreeing with anything Anna Comfort said galled him, in this case he thought she might be right. The Reliance had once been boarded and taken by locals, and acting in support of Eumenes was just asking for it to happen again. Keeping New America out of “foreign entanglements” made a lot of sense.

  It wasn’t like the USA back in the world. New America was still a very small nation with a very small population, and technology would only take you so far agai
nst numbers.

  Meanwhile, Eumenes was looking at Adrian like he didn’t quite buy it. Not surprisingly. Adrian was a ship’s captain, not a frigging politician.

  “Let us set that issue aside for now,” Eumenes said. “At least until you get word back from your President. In the meantime, what can you tell me about the situation in the rest of the world?”

  Adrian looked at him. “That I can do. Cassander is using the time to try and consolidate his control over Macedonia and using printing presses to print proclamations and broadsheets describing Eurydice here as a usurper. And you as a peasant clerk with delusions of grandeur. He is making much of how you got mousetrapped in the pass.”

  “What does mousetrapped mean?” Eumenes asked. “I can make a guess. But I don’t want to misunderstand.”

  For the next few minutes Adrian found himself describing mousetraps and how they worked. And as he talked, he realized that the introduction of mousetraps might save a million people from death due to malnutrition or disease in the next decade or so. Mousetraps, for the Lord’s sake. It happened now and then. The simplest thing, the most seemingly inconsequential, unimportant thing, and it was the difference between life and death for people he would never know. “I’ll get designs for them, Strategos, and give them to you.” Then it was back to the political discussion and the situation in Babylon and Alexandria. Babylon was still a stalemate and Ptolemy was building steamships in Suez.

  “He’s going to be trouble,” Eurydice said hotly.

  “Perhaps, Majesty, but Ptolemy is a careful commander. He is not a McClellan, but neither is he Lee or Grant.”

  Adrian blinked. He wasn’t entirely sure who McClellan was, though he recognized Lee and Grant from movies about the American Civil War.