Jude’s jaw dropped as he stared at Celline. “Who are you?”
Pytr made a little bow to Celline. “If I may, Miss?” Then he turned to Jude. “You have the honor of addressing Her Grace the Duchess Celline, daughter of the late Edmund, fifty-sixth Duke of Northern Iridia and Marshall of the Grand Army of the Realm.”
I said, “Oh.”
Jude frowned at Celline. “You lied to us.”
She lifted her chin. “I did not! Arrogance assumes.”
“Arrogant? Me?”
She waved her hand like she was swatting flies. “The title doesn’t matter. It is manure now, anyway.”
Pytr sucked in a breath. “Miss! Your father would be-”
She pointed at the old man, and her finger quivered. “My father would be alive but for the RS. The only thing that matters now is to gut them all.”
Jude said, “The house where we met you. You knew where the fish hid-”
“That was our family’s home for six hundred years.”
“Your father-”
“Your RS shipped him north as an enemy of the state when they stole our house.”
Pytr made another of those little six-inch bows to Celline. “Shall I see to the chancellor, Miss?”
Celline nodded, like she had been giving servants their leave all her life, which apparently she had.
I nodded after Pytr. “How long has he taken care of you?”
Celline smiled. “All my life. But you say it wrong. Pytr is like my family. Now he’s old. I take care of him, and I will until one of us dies.”
“The rest of your family-”
“There is no rest. Since the war, my old soldier is the nearest to family I have left.”
I stared at Jude, and he at me. Wherever or whenever, war is an orphanage, and now there were three of us.
We three talked for another hour. She told us about the hierarchy of Iridia, and about the pitiful Iridian resistance, which she nominally led. I told her about Jude, about his family, which were as close to royalty as America ’s peculiar meritocracy came. Jude told her stories about me that made me sound better than I was.
At noon, Jude accompanied me on a rehabilitative limp, with a cane Pytr provided, inshore from the ducal fishing lodge. Pytr assured us the route was rhiz-free. Jude carried a pistol anyway.
“Jason, all these people can’t be lying. What I’ve seen since I’ve been back on Tressel is no illusion. I’ve been criminally stupid.”
I shook my head as we picked along the rocks. “You’re not the first soldier who was too busy to look over his shoulder. Honest men believe other men are honest.”
“I think Aud made the same mistake.”
“I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“Do you think Celline would give me the benefit of the doubt?”
“You could ask her.”
“No. After what she’s seen of the RS, I need to show her who I am.”
“You like her a lot.”
“No.”
I swiveled my head toward my godson and raised my eyebrows.
“Jason, I love her.”
“Don’t you think that’s a big word? You’ve barely met her.”
“How long after Dad met Mom, did he know?”
My eyes moistened, and I swallowed, then smiled. “About the time he barely met her.”
That night, we three sat together again, staring into Pytr’s tiny fire. Celline asked me, “What is it that the motherworld needs from Tressel?”
I told her the whole thing. She knew about the Slugs and the Slug War in an abstract way, like any Tressen or Iridian who knew her world’s legends and kept up with current affairs. When I finished, she looked at us. “Will the motherworld give Zeit a free hand if necessary, in order to get at this Cavorite?”
I sighed. “That’s not our opening position.”
“Even provide him more weapons? To use on anyone the RS chooses?”
“Again, that’s not-”
“But you have to if he insists. You know Zeit will insist.”
Jude said, “Celline, you don’t understand. It’s not just our world at stake. It’s Tressel, too.”
“I do understand.” She cocked her head and cast her green eyes toward the ceiling beams. “But what if Chancellor Zeit were not the only game in town? It’s an Iridian expression.”
I smiled at the duchess. “It’s an American expression, too.”
FORTY-NINE
FOUR WEEKS LATER, Aud Planck was sufficiently recovered to travel. During those weeks, I honed my trident skills without further incident and swapped war stories with Pytr. Meanwhile, the duchess of Northern Iridia and my godson talked late into every night, walked the pools together every day. Eventually and inevitably the two orphans of very different wars became an item.
Our return trip was less eventful than our trip out.
I parted with the others at an Iridian safe house, then reentered the consulate the old-fashioned way, in an upturned-collar coat and turned-down-brim hat, walking like a garden-variety passerby, then abruptly ducked up the steps and buzzed myself in the door before the Ferrents could cross the street and snatch me.
That earned me a lecture from Bill the Spook, which was cut short when the Ferrents showed up demanding that the consulate disgorge the defector and Bill had to go lie to them.
With Bill busy, I slipped up to the Duck’s corner office on the top floor.
I buzzed myself in the Duck’s side door, bypassing his outer office. His inner sanctum was small for his GS grade, plain-furnished with a set of leather desk accessories he had toted over half of Earth and a smaller fraction of the Milky Way. He looked up from his screens and smiled. “Jason!” As he waddled around his desk and shook my hand, he frowned. “What happened? Where’s Jude? What about Planck?”
“They’re both fine. The rest is complicated. Diplomatic progress with Zeit?”
The Duck motioned me to a chair as he dropped back into his, crossed his ankles on his desk, laced his fingers behind his head, and sighed. “They’re slow-playing. They don’t know what we want, but they know we aren’t going to offer anything for it that would strengthen them relative to us. They don’t need much from us.”
“While we wait for Zeit’s permission to mine Cavorite, the Slugs could fry ten planets, including this one. But we have a cruiser in orbit that could fry Zeit first.”
The Duck swung his feet to the floor and leaned across his desk toward me. As he spoke, he poked his finger into his desk blotter. “We’ve been through this together before, Jason, on Bren. We’ve both been ordered to make a deal, not a war. If a public servant can’t carry out an order, his option is to resign, not to whine. You’ll never quit. So quit whining!”
“That’s what I thought you’d say.”
I reached inside my jacket, removed a paper sheaf and pen, signed the top sheet, then slid the sheaf across the desk.
The Duck poked it like it was a dead rat. “What’s this?”
I pointed at page one. “Acceptance of Relief and Retirement. Pre-signed by my boss. If retiree is posted outside the continental United States, Copy A of this document may be delivered to any United States Embassy or similar facility for transmittal to the Army Officer Personnel Directorate without charge for postage. Retiree’s separation will be backdated to the date of delivery to said facility.”
The Duck snorted. “Jason, that just fixes your pension pay start date. You can’t quit.”
“You just dared me to.”
