Jefferson had allowed his voice to drop for a moment, a note of weariness creeping in as he thought of the immense task of the Imperial Navy trying to reclaim the pieces of an Empire lost and shattered in the Secession Wars, the capital itself only reaching for the stars decades ago. His Majesty hoped to knit together the fragments before another war could send mankind staggering back to primitive conditions. There had been no winners of the last war, and the next would be worse. There must not be a next one, he said to himself. Never again. Then he brightened as the raucous humor and obvious friendship of the natives washed over him. Best enjoy it now, he thought. They wouldn’t be so friendly to the Navy after the colonists arrived — but that was years away, and the night was young.
“The funny part, Simom, is that the Temple is worth more to them than the whole bloody planet, if they only knew it! They were right to make it a holy place and preserve it, but if they only knew! Why, there’s a whole Old-Empire subsection library in that rabbit warren they’ve built up around what used to be the Viceroy’s Palace! The Service librarians almost went out of their minds, some of the history books and things they found there. Even a few science books, operating manuals for old Imperial Fleet stuff; you name it, it’s there, or bits and pieces of it are.
“They don’t even know what it all is! Wouldn’t do them any good if they did, no technology to understand it anyway. And my sweet Savior, how they guard that stuff! Thought we’d never get any of it copied for the archives. If we’d taken just one of those cubes out — yeah, cubes, the library was geared to a computer. Not much like your books. Took a lot of work to get that fixed, I’ll tell you. And those priests watched every second we were there. Never did make copies of most of the stuff; we’ll get it some day. Be a great job for some historian. We had to sneak in, convince their bishops we were from the stars — they still haven’t told the people in the city about us. And the chaplain had to get in on the act, convince them we were religiously orthodox, gave them some song and dance about how we, too, believed that God spoke from their archives. The chaplain said it was all right, the first thing they copied was a Bible, so he didn’t lie about it. Couldn’t harm a thing copying the stuff or they’d have boiled up so thick it’d take a battleship to kill them all. Can’t do that, they’re good people. We’ll need everyone in this sector one day. Whoosh, I talk too much, pour me some more. That grua’s the best thing about this planet. Well,” he added, looking at the tall blond girl who stood at his elbow, “one of the best, anyway.”
Lieutenant Jefferson was not the only drunken officer in the Blue Bottle, but he would hardly have recognized the gray-eyed man in a plain kilt two tables away as a member of the officer class. Colonel Nathan MacKinnie, lately cashiered from service to the Committee of Public Safety of Orleans, preferred whiskey in large glasses, and had had almost as many of those as Jefferson had of grua. MacKinnie was tall, centimeters taller than usual for Samualites, but without the remarkably broad shoulders typical of the planetary dwellers. With his straw-colored hair silvering at the temples, he looked more akin to the senior Imperial Navy officers than the natives. He sat quietly, motioning effortlessly for a new drink from time to time, and smoking countless pipefuls of ’robac. At intervals a particularly loud shout from the Imperial table would bring a grimace to his face, but for the most part he sat emotionlessly, giving no sign of the enormous quantities of whiskey he poured down his gullet.
Hal Stark, MacKinnie’s one-time sergeant, now servant, companion, and comrade, watched his colonel anxiously, mentally computing the amount of whiskey Nathan had drunk, the time since they had eaten, and the earliness of the evening, before he turned to his own drink, his second of the day. He was allowing the amber grua to roll back over his tongue when MacKinnie snapped his pipe against the heel of his hand so hard that the stem broke.
“Damn!” he muttered. “Hal, look at those drunken excuses for officers. And those sots are the rulers of Prince Samual’s World, the ‘representatives of civilization’ as they call themselves, the men who can decree what will be done and snuff out the independence of Orleans like a candle in a hurricane. Babbling, shouting, the overlords of everything we’ve ever known.”
“Yes, sir. Begging the colonel’s pardon, but I seem to recall a young lieutenant some years ago couldn’t hold his liquor no better than them, if it’s all right to say so.” It was difficult to tell just how much of Stark’s apologetic air was genuine.
Colonel MacKinnie frowned for a moment, then burst into a loud guffaw. “I sure didn’t, did I, Hal?” He looked at the ruined pipe in his hands, then signaled for the barmaid and bought cigars of genuine Earth Stock tobacco for a price he couldn’t afford. “There were a few times when you had to roll me back to barracks, weren’t there? You never missed, either. What are you best at, Hal? Batman, sergeant, or unemployed striker to a colonel with no command?”
“Best at whatever the colonel wants me at, that the right answer? Where are we going next, Colonel?”
MacKinnie shook his head slowly and looked around the room as if there might be some answer to the question. “They haven’t stopped the fighting on South Continent. Maybe we can pick up something there.” He reached into his pouch, and added, “We’d better find something soon, or we starve. But it won’t be the same, Sergeant. Just something to fight over, get the bills paid. What we do won’t matter anymore. The future here belongs to them.” He waved his cigar at young Jefferson, who held the blond girl on his lap, her hands deep inside his open tunic, while he tried to force a glass of grua between her body and his lips. She squealed.
“Worse for you than for me, Colonel. I never did know what we were after, not really anyway, not the way you did. Long as you know, it’s good enough for the troops.” Stark tossed down the last of his drink, then looked back at his officer. “Drink up, Colonel, there’s plenty to do somewhere. We could raise up a fair-sized regiment of men who’d follow you to hell. Tomorrow, I’ll round up some of the old headquarters company and we’ll go show the Southies what war’s really like.”
MacKinnie grinned momentarily as he methodically warmed his cigar before lighting it. The bar was pleasant, the company was good, and for a moment he forgot the hopelessness, even ordering a small grua to dip the end of his cigar into. He inhaled the strong smoke and leaned back in his chair, his feet stretched out under the table. Stark looked at him again, saw the lines leave Nathan’s face, and ordered another round.
It was no good, MacKinnie thought, but there was no point in upsetting the big man next to him. He’d have to play the game out to the end, but, by all the Saints, he was tired now, tired in a way that the sleep and rest and soft duty they’d had for the last weeks could never cure. It was strange, he thought. Colonel of his own regiment at forty local years, a full citizen of Orleans, inevitably to be senior colonel and then general before his last parade. Not bad for a wandering mercenary soldier whose city-state had been extinguished only months before his graduation from its tiny war-academy, set to wandering in search of a living until he’d ended in the ranks of Orleans’s army. Promotion, merit, recognition, citizenship, a good career. And it was all over when the landing boats came down from the ship that still whirled in orbit above Samual.