He took the hand and kissed it. “There is more.” John closed his eyes. “I cannot have children.”
Pia’s fingers clenched over his. He looked up and found her eyes brimming, the unshed tears bright in the starlight—and realized, with a shock like cold water, that they were for him.
“But—”
He nodded jerkily. “Oh, I’m . . . functional. Sterile, though, and there’s nothing that can be done about it.” He turned his head aside. “It was done, ah, when I was very young.”
“Then you too have reason to hate the Chosen,” Pia said softly. “Look at me, Giovanni.”
He did. “You are the man for whom I have waited. That is all I have to say.”
* * *
Jeffrey Farr smiled.
“You find our ships amusing?” the Imperial officer asked sharply.
The steam launch chuffed rhythmically along the line of anchored battlewagons. He’d noticed the same attitude often in Imperial naval officers. Unlike the Army—or the squabbling committees in Ciano who set policy and budgets—they had to have some idea of what was going on abroad. Not that they’d admit the state their service was in, of course. It came out in a prickly defensiveness.
“Quite the contrary,” Farr said smoothly. “I smiled because I recently received news that my brother, my foster-brother, is going to be married. To a lady by the name of Pia del’Cuomo.”
And I don’t think your ships are funny. I think they’re pathetic, he added to himself.
The Imperial officer nodded, mollified and impressed. “The eldest daughter of the Minister of War? Your brother is a lucky man.” He pointed. “And there they are, the pride of the Passage Fleet.”
Ten of the battleships floated in the millpond-quiet bay of the military harbor, flanked by the great fortresses. Lighters were carrying out supplies, much of it coal that had to be laboriously shoveled into crane-borne buckets and hoisted again to the decks for transfer to the fuel bunkers. The ships were medium-sized, about eleven thousand tons burden, with long ram bows and a pronounced tumblehome that made them much narrower at the deck than the waterline. They each carried a heavy, stubby single 350mm gun in a round cheesebox-style turret fore and aft, and their secondary batteries in a string of smaller one-gun turrets that rose pulpit-style from the sides. Each had a string of four short smokestacks, and a wilderness upperworks of flying bridges, cranes, and signal masts.
They’d been perfectly good ships in their day. The problem was that the Empire was still building them about twenty years after their day had passed.
correct, Center observed. roughly equivalent to British battleships of the 1880s period.
Eighteen . . . ah. Center used the Christian calendar, which nobody on Visager did except for religious purposes. For one thing, it was based on Earth’s twelve-month year, nearly thirty days shorter than this planet’s rotation around its sun. For another, the numbers were inconveniently high.
Jeffrey shivered slightly. The period Center named was two thousand years past. Interstellar civilization had been born, spread, and fallen in the interim, and a new cycle was beginning.
“You’re loading coal, I see,” he said to the Imperial officer . . . Commodore Bragati, that was his name. “Steam up yet?”
“No, we expect to be ready in about a week,” Bragati said. “Then we’ll cruise down the Passage, and show those upstarts in the Land who rules those waters.”
Two weeks to get ready for a show-the-flag cruise? Raj thought with disgust. I’d say these imbeciles deserve what’s probably going to happen to them, if so many civilians weren’t going to be caught in it.
“The main guns are larger than anything the Land has built,” Bragati said.
low-velocity weapons with black-powder propellant, Center noted with its usual clinical detachment. the chosen weapons are long-barreled, high-velocity rifles using nitrocellulose powders.
He thought he detected a trace of interest, though, as well. Jeffrey smiled inwardly; the sentient computer wasn’t all that much different from his grandfather and the cronies who hung around him—military history buffs and weapons fanciers to a man. Center was a hobbyist, in its way.
“And the main armor belt is twelve inches thick!”