Duchess of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 2) Read online

  “My God,” she murmured, “is Elon Casimir having a crisis of self-confidence?”

  “What?” he asked, taken aback, his body language turning subtly defensive in a way no one other than Annette Bond would recognize, not now that Leanne Casimir had passed on.

  “Morgan said you were afraid I didn’t love you anymore,” Annette echoed the man’s child back at him. “That shouldn’t be a factor, should it?”

  Suddenly, he was no longer meeting her gaze, and the Duchess of Earth laughed like a delighted schoolgirl.

  “You dear, silly man,” she told him. “I didn’t invite you to be on my Council, because I couldn’t decide, after we saved Morgan and you showed up, whether I wanted to kill you or kiss you.”

  “I…was never sure how much of what happened was just pity for a wounded friend,” one of the richest men on Earth half-whispered, his bravado and confidence leaching out of him. “And God knows, you were always one to do the right thing, no matter the cost to yourself.”

  “Look at where we’re sitting, Elon,” she reminded him. “One right thing after another almost led me to blow up a damn sun and kill several billion people.”

  “You never would have,” he told her. “Jean might have doubted, but I wouldn’t in his place. Annette Bond might be tempted, might bluff, but she could never do anything but the right thing.”

  “And what’s the right thing now, if you’re oh so wise?” she asked.

  “If I knew that, Annette, I wouldn’t be sitting here like a teenager with a crush, babbling because I can’t find the right words,” he replied. “If I thought us being apart was the right thing, I’d have sent Nilsson to give the presentation, because I’m not sure I can sit in the same room as you for multiple meetings and not shove my foot in it.”

  “If it makes you feel better, I have decided I don’t want to kill you,” Annette pointed out.

  “Oh.”

  The office was suddenly much smaller and warmer, an entire layer of stress vanishing as Elon interpreted her statement. Correctly. He was a very smart man.

  “I, um, may have packed the rope we bought in Dubai,” he admitted.

  #

  Chapter 26

  Later, once they had become thoroughly reacquainted in the hotel penthouse Annette was currently living in, she watched him study her room with the unstoppable curiosity that had always driven him.

  “What?” she asked.

  “It’s a nice hotel room,” he told her. “A very nice hotel room. But last time I checked, you were the ruler of the planet. This is the best you can do?”

  “I didn’t take the Duchy to enrich myself or for my own benefit,” she pointed out, leaning on her hand and watching him. “The hotel has served our needs so far, though I think we’ve finally concluded negotiations to buy out a building downtown.”

  “That serves the Duchy’s needs,” he replied. “What about yours?”

  She glanced around.

  “Four walls,” she pointed out. “A bed. A four-poster bed,” she noted, with a smile that manage to make Elon blush. “A closet for my clothes. A mirror.

  “What more do I need? I was a starship captain, Elon. This isn’t notably smaller than the Captain’s cabin aboard Tornado.”

  “You, my dear, need to acquire a taste for the finer things in life,” he pointed out.

  “Like nannies?” she asked.

  He sighed.

  “I miss Anna,” he admitted. “Amanda Lovecraft came highly recommended, but Morgan hates her—and for more than just her not being Anna, I’ve concluded.”

  “You have a very American daughter, Elon—and you managed to acquire a very British nanny. I can’t see it working.”

  “No.” Elon sighed. “You know, I hate firing people. Always preferred to arrange for them to be hired away unless they seriously needed a hammer dropped, but I don’t think I’m going to have time for those kinds of games.”

  “No,” Annette echoed. “If I’m pulling you into my Council, Elon, you’re going to be in the center with Zhao and Villeneuve. We have a contingent of Indiri shipbuilders arriving in two weeks for negotiations. I’m planning on keeping our side small, but if you’re on board, I’d be an idiot not to put you in that meeting.”

  “Shipbuilders?” he said. “We have sixteen destroyers. Give me four months and they’ll each be able to take a Kanzi cruiser. There are two XC hulls ‘lost’ in the asteroid belt that we can retrieve once that’s done. They’re empty shells right now, and we can’t upgrade them to the standard Tornado is at, but we can make them stand up to at least that attack cruiser that came through a few weeks ago.

  “Give me a year and I’ll have properly designed modern cruisers laid down. Give me ten, and you’ll be commissioning our first home-built battleship. We’ll have the rest of the Imperium begging us to sell them ships.”

  “Elon,” Annette cut him off. “We need to provide the Imperial Navy eight capital ships in barely ten months.”

  He stopped.

  “Fully crewed and armed,” she continued. “The intent was to force us to sell compressed-matter armor technology to purchase them from the Indiri shipbuilding syndicate, allowing the Imperial Navy to control that tech.”

  “So, we ’re going to sell them Sword and Buckler instead?” he asked.

  “We’ll see,” she admitted. “This syndicate that’s meeting with us builds something like thirty percent of the Navy’s warships and about the same of the ships used by the Duchies. All told, the Indiri build about half of the Imperium’s warships and even more of the Duchy warships.

  “They can sell us battleships, but they’re also the people who will want compressed-matter armor and the Sword and Buckler systems, so I’m hoping we can reach a deal.”

  “You don’t sound enthused,” Elon said, his hand suddenly warm on her shoulder as he looked into her eyes.

  “I’ve only really met one Indiri,” Annette told him. “He had a ship full of human slaves, and he’s the one who gave me this scar.” Her finger traced the thin line from her forehead to her jaw.

  “They’re…damp, and strange, and unpleasant, and the last one I met took my eye. I don’t like Indiri…but we need to buy from them.”

  “Then we buy from them,” Elon agreed. “Seriously? A year to produce eight battleships?”

  “I keep reminding everyone that while it’s to the A!Tol’s advantage for us to be economically and militarily strong, they are not necessarily our friends. They’re in this for the Imperium—upgrading our tech base and uplifting our economy is an investment, one they expect to make the Imperium stronger.

  “But if they think the best way to make something happen is to screw us, they will.”

  Elon sighed.

  “And if we pull it off, shucks, they still get eight battleships.”

  “Exactly.”

  He chuckled.

  “No wonder you’re stressed. Here, let me rub your shoulders.”

  That went exactly where she suspected he’d intended.

  #

  To Annette’s mild annoyance, no one seemed at all surprised when Elon joined them for her morning briefing. The hotel staff promptly added an extra chair to the meeting room where her “inner circle” had gathered, but Zhao, Villeneuve, Robin and Lebrand all seemed completely unperturbed by his arrival.

  “Were Elon and I the only people who weren’t expecting this?” she asked exasperatedly after the staff had poured coffees and withdrawn.

  Lebrand chuckled, the American industrialist grinning widely.

  “Well, I was only expecting him to join the Council and your core advisors,” he admitted, “but from the sounds of it, I missed something more.”

  “Villeneuve and I had a bet,” Zhao told her. If the big man was grinning as widely as it sounded, she couldn’t tell behind the croissant he was eating. “Sadly, he won. I figured one of you would crack and seek the other out about a week ago.”

  “You’re both too stubborn for that,” the Admiral
said calmly. “L’amour overcomes, but with that level of stubborn American on both sides? It takes time.”

  Robin laughed, the press secretary shaking her head. Despite this being a private informal meeting, she still had her hair and makeup done to a level Annette wasn’t sure she could get to. Worse, she’d now discovered that Robin didn’t have a staff. The woman managed it entirely on her own.

  “I’ve had a press release written up announcing Mr. Casimir’s addition to the Council since we learned he was alive, Your Grace,” she said.

  “Great,” Annette drawled at them. “All right, Jess. Throw that press release together with the list of official portfolios for the Council, including Elon as Councilor for Space Industry, and we’ll kill a bunch of birds with one stone.”

  “Is it too late to ask for ‘anything but the Treasury’?” Zhao asked.

  “Has been for weeks, Li,” Annette told him sweetly. “Ever since you started doing the actual job.

  “Karl, you get Councilor for the Americas. Miyamoto gets Asian Industry, the elder Wellesley gets Europe, and Mandela gets Africa. The four of you will need to coordinate with Casimir on economic and industrial affairs, but you’ve already been doing that.”

  The billionaire nodded seriously.

  “There’s no surprises in the portfolios,” Annette continued. “Everyone gets the title for the job they’re doing. I’ve had the list together for a week; we just haven’t had time to make the formal announcement.”

  She was learning to delegate, but the A!Tol policy to remove all levels of government above the municipal had left the Duchy with a lot of headaches that needed to be argued about and settled.

  “Nash would be with us,” she continued, “but he’s in Geneva right now, laying the groundwork for the elections.”

  “Oh, good,” Zhao responded. “You’re not up for election; who is?”

  “The current round will be for our Representative to the House of Races,” Annette noted. “We need to send our Species Representative and our Duchy Representative by the end of this long-cycle, which gives us four more months to run the election for the House of Races.

  “I’ll be appointing the Duchy Representative,” she said firmly. “We’ll use this as a practice run for global elections, to be followed in the ensuing six months by our electing ten Representatives to the House of Worlds.”

  “One per billion people?” Lebrand asked.

  “Exactly. Once those elections are done, we’ll have twelve people on A!To to represent Terra and humanity at the highest levels of the Imperium.”

  The Imperium ran a tricameral legislature to pass law and advise the Empress. The House of Races had one member per species. The House of Duchies had one member per Duchy. The House of Worlds had one member per billion sentients, with a minimum of one per planet.

  Despite the fact that the House of Worlds outnumbered the other two combined by ten to one, laws had to pass all three Houses and be confirmed by the Empress. It was…clumsy, to Annette’s eyes, but it had worked for about six centuries, as Terra measured time.

  “Who are you planning as the Duchy rep?” Elon asked her.

  “Nash,” she told him. “Don’t tell him yet; I want to see how he handles the Species Representative election…and who runs for that role, for that matter.”

  “I can’t help but feel that we should have some degree of restriction on that,” Zhao pointed out. “Though perhaps that is simply…habit.”

  “I refuse to let the Duchy become a single-party state; no offense,” Annette replied. “The Imperium doesn’t care how we select our Duchy or Species representatives, but the rules around the House of Worlds are ironclad.

  “We’re better off following those rules for the House of Races as well. They require an open, transparent election with a broad franchise among adult sentients. Our only true flexibility is the age required to vote, and we would have to justify any unreasonable divider to the House of Worlds.”

  “It sounds as if that decision is already made,” Elon noted.

  “Eighteen,” she replied. “Most of the world’s democracies had settled on that in the twentieth century, it seems to work.”

  “I see I have a lot of catching-up to do,” he replied. “Do we have minutes of the Council meetings or something?”

  “Jess?” Annette passed the question over to her press secretary, the only person who’d sat in on the meetings junior enough to do something so mundane as take minutes.

  “We do,” she confirmed. “Also recordings and transcripts, all classified and kept under Imperial encryption but available to Council members on request. I can provide you access to the archive.”

  “It seems I’ll need it,” Elon agreed. “Thank you.”

  “In hopeful news,” Zhao continued after a moment of comfortable quiet, “we may shortly be able to move out of my hotel. The owners of Wuxing Tower have accepted our latest offer, and I’ll be heading over to their offices to sign the final paperwork this afternoon.”

  “You’re going to miss the guaranteed cash flow,” Annette told him.

  “A little,” he confessed. “But actually having an office to stick the accountants I’m hiring in will be handy. We’re trying to administer a planet from a hotel. I have conference rooms stuffed full of cubicles, and people working from their homes.”

  “What’s our timeline look like?” she asked. Wuxing Tower was the biggest skyscraper in Hong Kong, two hundred and fifty stories tall, the jewel in the crown of Hong Kong’s biggest commercial landlord.

  Which meant, of course, the building was already full of tenants.

  “That depends on how much money you’re going to let me throw at helping tenants move out,” Zhao admitted. “Part of the reason we managed to convince them to sell is that their penthouse tenant just moved out and they didn’t have a replacement.

  “So, we can take over the top ten floors in about two weeks and lock down a quarter of the elevators for our use only. It will take us about a year to clear everybody else out, but…it’s going to take a year to put together the people we need to really run the Duchy.”

  “Do what you need to, Zhao,” she told him. “But if we can have a suitably impressive penthouse meeting room ready when the Indiri shipbuilders arrive in sixteen days, that could save us a lot of headaches.”

  He smiled.

  “My dear, the Party may no longer run China, but it still has friends. Ask, and I shall make it happen! You’ll have something to impress our alien allies.”

  “Good,” she told him. Elon cleared his throat gently and she glanced at him. He arched an eyebrow at her, and a smile flickered across her lips as she realized that she knew exactly what he meant.

  “It’s also been pointed out to me that I should probably acquire a private residence of my own,” she told Zhao. “Suggestions?”

  The answering grin threatened to split the man’s face.

  “I have a list,” he offered.

  “Li…I can guess what kind of list you have,” she replied. “I need something close to Wuxing Tower, securable by the Ducal Guard, and with a proper reinforced landing pad to handle interface-drive shuttles. Pick something from your list and sort it out.”

  He nodded, then coughed delicately.

  “While it is not entirely out of the question for the Duchy to purchase your personal residence,” Zhao said slowly, “it might be wiser if your personal residence belonged to you. I may need to adjust the budget…”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she told him. “Let me know the price tag and it will be covered. In Imperial marks, if you please.”

  Her inner circle’s confused expressions warmed her heart. It seemed that she did still have some secrets.

  #

  Chapter 27

  Stealth in space was difficult at best, though shutting down the interface drive and drifting allowed some degree of it. Stealth in hyperspace was easy if you were willing to use something other than the interface drive to travel.

&
nbsp; The interface drive itself was readily detectable in both regular and hyperspace.

  Somehow managing stealth in either, however, would be undone the moment a ship passed from one to the other. A hyperspace portal was a phenomenally unstealthy thing, but there were ways to mitigate it.

  Normally, the portal was conjured a light-second or more ahead of the ship and made big enough for several ships to pass through side by side.

  Today, Hunter’s Horn conjured the portal less than ten kilometers in front of the cruiser, and with bare meters to spare on either side as the ship flashed through at ten percent of the speed of light.

  “Portal collapsed,” Ides reported, the blue-feathered Tosumi closing his eyes in relief. “Sustained duration, point one three seconds.”

  “Thank you, Lesser Commander,” Harriet told him. She waited for the sensors to sweep the system, the fifth on Shadowed Current’s nine-system patrol path. It had taken two and a half weeks for them to get this far, and it would take three more to get back to Kimar if they couldn’t find the missing ship.

  She hummed softly to herself as she studied the hologram Horn’s computers were filling in. They were well into space that, while inside Sol’s Kovius Treaty Zone, would otherwise have been regarded as Kanzi territory. There was no way they could risk bringing up the drive or otherwise being obvious in their presence until they were sure the system was empty.

  “I am not reading any active energy signatures,” Vaza finally reported. “There may be a stealthed recon platform or something similar floating around, but there are no active spacecraft in the system.”

  “Very well,” Harriet replied. “Standard search pattern, Commander Ides,” she ordered. “Commander Vaza, let’s get some probes of our own out there. Let’s see if we can find anything.”

  They hadn’t yet…but something had happened to Shadowed Currents.

  #

  “That shouldn’t be there,” Vaza announced an hour later, studying the displays at his tactical station.