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

  “I do, Miss Robin,” Annette told her. “What can I do for you and GNN?”

  “There are many people with many questions about your new role and what happens to Earth,” Robin told her. “Can you spare a few moments for the public?”

  “I said most of what needed to be said on camera earlier,” Annette pointed out. The younger woman was gorgeous. It was almost a shame that seducing a reporter was, roughly, the worst possible idea the Duchess of Earth could have right now.

  “But there are so many details and questions you couldn’t answer in a short speech. Please, Duchess.”

  “You’ve already pinned me down, Miss Robin. You may as well ask.”

  “Thank you, Your Grace,” the reporter replied. “First, is that actually the right form of address?”

  “Everyone has been defaulting to it, in English at least, but what etiquette has been written for my role applies to other species,” Annette answered. “At some point, we’ll probably pull together a team of experts to write the most informal possible etiquette guide. Not least because how we treat me will also define how we treat senior Imperial officials and other Dukes of the Imperium.”

  “People are inevitably drawing the comparison to old-style feudalism from the title,” Robin noted. “Are we going to be required to provide military forces to the Imperium?”

  “That is at least part of why that translation of the title was chosen,” Annette admitted. “Exact details are going to remain under wraps for now, but yes, we will be contributing to the common defense of the Imperium. There are already Imperial recruiting facilities across Earth, and the Ducal government will be required to make other contributions.”

  Robin coughed suddenly, apparently not a response to Annette’s comment, and the older woman wondered just what question she’d been fed. The first time they’d met, her back office had made her all but outright ask if Annette had slept her way to command of Tornado.

  “If we are looking to a more feudal model,” the reporter said slowly, clearly trying to find the best way to ask the question, “will you be required to produce an heir of your body? What are your plans on that account?”

  Annette couldn’t help herself. She giggled, even knowing that giggling made her sound and momentarily look like the blonde cheerleader she’d once been.

  “That’s the question your boss is feeding you?” she asked.

  “It’s not illegitimate,” Robin protested, but she wouldn’t meet Annette’s gaze.

  “Tell your backroom puppeteers that my private life will remain private,” Annette said flatly, then smiled as an impulse hit her. “As for you, Miss Robin, how would you feel about a job with less strings?”

  “Your Grace?”

  “I need a press secretary,” the Duchess of Earth told her. “Someone who knows the ins and outs of journalism, can field the major networks for me, write press releases, and look gorgeous while telling reporters ‘no comment.’ Want the job?”

  From the cringe in Robin’s expression, someone on the other end of her headset was yelling at her. The young woman rolled her eyes and pulled the headset off, turning it around to face into its cameras.

  “I quit, Reginald,” she said with a broad smile. “For this offer? I so totally quit. Send someone for the headband; I’ll leave it with Hong Kong Tower reception.”

  She hit a hidden button, turning it off, then leveled a devastating smile on Annette.

  “When would you like me to start?”

  “How does right now sound?”

  #

  Chapter 6

  Jean Villeneuve, once more an Admiral and Earth’s Chief of Space Operations, loved Paris. The city had been repeatedly modernized across the centuries, but somehow, the successive municipal governments had managed to keep the tone and feel of “Gay Paree” intact across time.

  Across the fifty-odd years of his career, it had been both different every time he’d returned and the same. Despite not being home, the city often felt more like home than the Normandy beaches he’d actually grown up on.

  When Pierre Larue, the former Franco-German member of the UESF’s Governing Council, had asked to meet him here, he’d leapt at the chance to visit the city. Now he sat in the designated café along the Champs-Élysées and waited for his old friend.

  Larue was a portly man, squat and broad with blond hair trying to turn silver on him. He arrived in a black car that had almost certainly once belonged to the Franco-German government, stepping out to meet Jean with a smile.

  “Get in the car,” he ordered in their shared French, his flat voice in complete opposition to his friendly expression.

  “What?” Jean demanded.

  “Get in the car, Jean,” Larue repeated. “We don’t have time for an argument.”

  Slowly, carefully, Jean rose. Following Larue to the sedan, he tapped a button on his alert bracelet—one that told the Ducal Guard responsible for his security that if he didn’t send a follow-up signal in fifteen minutes, they were to retrieve him with all necessary force.

  Larue got in behind him and closed the door.

  “Drive,” he ordered the woman in the front of the car, and the vehicle took off. “You know where.”

  “What’s going on, Pierre?” Jean demanded.

  “I’m breaking you out,” his old friend told him. “You had four of Bond’s thugs surrounding you to make sure you stayed to the script. I’ve got a safe place waiting for you; we can get you underground and hidden away safely.”

  Jean stared at Larue in shock for a moment.

  “What exactly are you breaking me out from?” he finally asked.

  “The Imperium,” Larue snapped. “They’ve had you under guard since you went aboard Medit!’s ship for whatever insanity was going on there, trapping you into this new ‘Admiral’ bullshit so they can use you as a symbol.”

  “I’m not trapped in anything, Pierre,” Jean told him gently. “I volunteered to go with Tan!Shallegh to talk Annette out of what could have been a major mistake. And I volunteered to take up command of the new militia.

  “And I know about my bodyguards, old friend. You have about ten minutes to start talking sense or an assault shuttle of Ducal Guard in power armor is going to land on this car.”

  “You’re…not coerced?” Larue said slowly. “This mess is exactly what the Weber Protocols were set up to deal with. What do you mean, you’ve given up?”

  “I didn’t give up, Pierre. I realized that the A!Tol are the best of a bad set of options,” Jean told him. “Annette would have told you that too, if you’d been willing to listen to our attempt to recruit you for the Council. I thought it was a good sign when you asked to meet me.”

  “I never thought I’d see the day Jean Villeneuve was a collaborator,” Larue spat. “They must have brainwashed you.”

  “It’s possible,” the old Admiral admitted with a sigh. “I won’t deny the possibility, but nom d'un chien, Pierre, Annette really did get us the best deal we could get. Give us a chance.”

  “France knelt to one conqueror, Jean. Never again.”

  “Stop the car and let me out, Pierre,” Jean said quietly. “I don’t think we’re getting anywhere, but I’d rather not have one of my oldest friends shot by my bodyguards.”

  The two men glared at each other for a long moment, then Larue exhaled a long breath.

  “Merde,” he cursed. “Call off your dogs, Jean. One way or another, there’s someone who needs to meet you. You have my word you will released safely.”

  “You can guess what will happen if I’m not,” Jean said slowly. “But all right. I’ll meet your ‘someone.’”

  The button on his alert bracelet he pushed now gave him two hours. After that, the Guard were still going to come crashing through roofs. He’d give Larue more chances than almost anyone else, but he still couldn’t afford to trust him.

  #

  The black car swung into a block of high-end Parisian townhouses and pulled to a stop in front of a unit that lo
oked the same as the rest.

  “Come on,” Larue said. The ex-Councilor got out of the car and led the way up to the house.

  The door opened before they reached it. Jean was somehow not surprised to find a trio of serious young men in black suits and sunglasses waiting on the inside with a handheld scanner wand.

  The wand promptly found his emergency band.

  “He’s being tracked,” the man announced in English.

  “And I’ve activated an emergency beacon,” Jean said pleasantly in the same language. “If something happens to me, the Ducal Guard will be here under ninety seconds with air support. I suggest, mes amis, that we all play very, very nice.”

  “Tell Miles that Jean gave me his word to hear us out,” Larue told the guard. “We were going to have to abandon this safe house no matter what.”

  The guard shook his head severely but sighed.

  “This wasn’t the plan,” he pointed out.

  “I know.”

  “He’s unarmed otherwise; you can go through,” the guard admitted.

  Larue nodded and gestured for Jean to follow him deeper into the house. The décor had been modernized somewhere in the last hundred years but updated with a careful eye to maintaining the Napoleonic air of the place. Curtains covered the doors and the floors were a light-colored hardwood.

  It was a pretty house, and Jean was somehow not surprised to find former President Miles Hardesty sitting in the couch. The Secret Service guards had been relatively obvious.

  “Mr. Hardesty,” the Admiral greeted the florid-faced man waiting for him. “I didn’t expect to meet you in Paris.”

  “I’ll confess we thought you were in trouble,” Hardesty replied without rising, his voice tired. “This was a rescue, not a kidnapping, though I never expected Bond’s thugs to see the difference.”

  “I also doubt you categorize me as one of ‘Bond’s thugs,’” Jean pointed out. “So, I should probably mention that the Ducal Guard currently reports to me. At least until we’ve managed to separate our planetary ground force from the Duchess’s personal guard.”

  “So, it’s true,” the former President of the United States said. “You’ve thrown in with the aliens. Betrayed your oaths.”

  “I swore an oath to protect the Earth against all threats,” Jean said levelly. “Unfortunately, we are a tiny, tiny frog in a vast pond, and there are hungry predators in our corner of it. We can work with the A!Tol or we can be devoured by other, less-friendly predators.”

  “Damn it all, man, we should be fighting for our freedom, not spinelessly bowing to our conquerors!”

  “We tried that. Do you know how many US Army soldiers were stunned in your show of resistance, Mr. Hardesty? If the A!Tol gear was any less carefully calibrated, we could have had hundreds of deaths—to add to the thousands of our fruitless attempt to resist in space.”

  “Better to die on our feet than beg on our knees,” Hardesty spat.

  “Would you rather die, kneel, or be chained?” Jean asked quietly. “Because in our local galactic neighborhood, those are our choices. Die fighting, kneel to the Imperium, which will at least uplift us to be of value to them, or become slaves to the Kanzi. There are no alternatives, no third options or miracles. Only a question of how many die along the way.”

  “It was your job to protect us!”

  “And I failed,” the former commander of the UESF said flatly. “I failed before the A!Tol ever appeared in our system. If we’d developed the technologies built into Tornado twenty years earlier? We might have had a chance, maybe.

  “Now our only hope is to accept a place in the Imperium and make the best of it.” Jean glared at both Larue and Hardesty. “If you want to fight for humanity, the best place to do it now is on Annette’s Council. Both of you have skills we could use; both of you have people who trust you. If we stand together, we can make the best of our situation.”

  “And if I refuse?” Hardesty demanded. “If I won’t bend my knee to this traitor they’d raised over us?”

  “Then I ask you to stay out of our way,” Jean replied. “Follow or get out of the way, Mr. Hardesty.”

  He rose. “Now, if you excuse me, since it seems I won’t be adding anyone to our list of Councilors today, I need to get back to Hong Kong. Some of us have work to do.”

  Jean could hear arguing behind him as he left the room, one of the Secret Service agents materializing to guide him back out. He continued being able to hear the arguing as he made his way to the front door, the volume increasing as he moved farther away.

  “Could you call me a taxi or something?” he asked the guard at the door, listening as the argument behind him faded.

  “No need,” Larue said from behind him, the other man walking briskly out from the interior of the house, his face red from shouting. “I’ll give you a ride to the shuttleport.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You truly believe that this Duchy of Terra is our best hope?”

  “I know it’s our only hope,” Jean said sadly.

  Larue sighed.

  “Is there space on your flight to Hong Kong for one more?” he asked. “I can guarantee Hardesty won’t do more than bluster, but I…I have to do something—and better with Jean Villeneuve than against him, I think.”

  #

  In the Hong Kong hotel room, Annette stared at her old UESF communicator. Their newer devices were Imperial-built, modified to look very similar to the scroll-like devices her crew was used to, but she’d kept the old one for a few reasons—and sentimentality was not one of them.

  Taking the ends of the communicator, she opened up its flexible display and studied the menus. A few gentle taps opened up a specific email in her archive—and the link in that email opened an entirely new menu in the communicator’s systems.

  There were eleven different applications in that menu, but only one actually did anything—and which one depended on the time of day. Checking a clock for the current GMT time, Annette selected an application.

  That linked her to a website, a digital drop box for general access by the Weber Network. Setting the communicator to upload, she started recording.

  “This message is sent under the Weber Protocols to the leaders and members of the Weber Network acting as the resistance on Earth,” she said quietly. “You know who I am. You know I had the same general briefing on the Protocols as any ship’s captain. I can contact you, but I can’t find you—not through these means, anyway.

  “You are wondering why one of your comrades, the Captain sent out to steal the very technology we needed to liberate Earth and find allies to help protect us, has betrayed you and signed on with the A!Tol.

  “While my methods were not what was intended, I did complete my mission,” she told them with a wry smile. “Among the things I have brought back are a complete database of A!Tol technology—more, in fact, that the A!Tol think I have.

  “Given time and resources, we can assemble a powerful local fleet under the auspices of the Duchy of Terra—but we could not assemble a fleet powerful enough to guarantee our safety against the Kanzi.

  “We would need allies—and the A!Tol are prepared to be those allies, for a price.”

  Annette hoped that her former brothers and sisters in arms could see her weariness, her honesty.

  “With their help, we can uplift Earth and defend our people against the Kanzi and any other threats. We will not be independent, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be free. Freedom of speech, of assembly, the right to vote…these are all things we can have as part of the Imperium.”

  She glanced at the Imperial communicator also sitting on her desk, where she’d been working on the briefing for the Council.

  “I could use you,” she admitted. “The resources and data archives we hid under the Protocols could save me months—years—of difficulties. The men and women of the UESF now serving the Network could man the Militia’s entire squadron of warships tomorrow.

  “Join me, and we will defend Ear
th together.

  “I understand if you won’t,” she confessed. “I understand if you can’t yet. What I ask of you is that you let those who are willing to try do so. Give me a chance. Stand aside—and if I fail, strike then.

  “But give me a chance to help our people first.”

  #

  Chapter 7

  Annette Bond, Duchess of Terra, stood at the head of the conference table and looked around at her Council.

  It had taken twelve days to assemble them all. Twelve days in which she’d accomplished almost nothing else, her time consumed with meetings and trips around the world.

  Meeting the Queen of England had been the most surreal of those appointments, though by the standard of bringing entire sections of the globe onto her side, her quiet meal with Li Chin Zhao had probably been more important.

  Now Zhao sat at the front of the table at her left hand, facing Admiral Jean Villeneuve. She knew Villeneuve would have her back, and she thought she could rely on Zhao.

  She wasn’t so sure about the other fourteen men and women at the table.

  There were Hope Mandela and Pierre Larue, former members of the Governing Council. Piotr Jovanovich, the last Premier of Russia, and Janice Philips and Graham Rutherford, last Prime Ministers of Australia and Canada respectively. Karl Lebrand, billionaire titan of American industry, sat next to Malcolm Wellesley, a former member of Her Majesty’s Government.

  Doctor Her Royal Highness An Sirkit of the Thai royal family and Japanese electronics magnate Takuya Miyamoto joined Zhao in speaking for the Eastern portion of the world.

  Last, and Annette couldn’t help but feel silliest, Teddy Nash, a grizzled Hollywood actor who’d captured the hearts of generations of women…and used that attention to help fuel some of the largest and most successful charities in the world.

  If the former members of the US government wouldn’t serve on her Council, she’d find other symbols to bring her countrymen aboard.