David Weber - How firm a foundation

The one good aspect of the entire comic-opera farce was that the dragoons in question were militiamen, not regulars. The bad news was that this particular lot of them had spotted the Charisian boats the previous evening and shadowed them from shore. Working against the current, the boats were actually slower than the horsemen, which was how the Delferahkans had been able to get into position for the ambush. And an unknown number of them had gotten away. By now, they had to be raising the alarm, and Aplyn-Ahrmahk doubted the number of “Charisian invaders” was going to decline when they started explaining how they’d gotten their asses kicked. Which meant every man the Delferahkans could scrape up would be hunting for his people by late afternoon.

So what did he do? If there were more dragoons available, it wouldn’t be hard for them to repeat this bunch’s tactics. And even if there weren’t, the word had to be going out by semaphore (if it was available) and by runner and courier (if the semaphore wasn’t available) even as he stood here. He knew how important this mission was, but if he continued, the odds were overwhelming that he’d simply lead his own pursuers straight to the people he was supposed to be rescuing. And that didn’t even consider those badly wounded men Taibor had mentioned.

He looked out at the slowly flowing water and tried to think. . VI.

Sunthorn Mountains and Royal Palace, City of Talkyra, Kingdom of Delferahk

Lazy wings of snow drifted almost silently on the wind sighing among the peaks of the Sunthorn Mountains ninety-odd miles northwest of the city of Talkyra. The temperature hovered at a brisk six degrees below zero on the old Fahrenheit scale, and the stars showing through the cloud rifts overhead were huge and bright… and icy. Technically, it was spring south of the equator, but at these elevations that meant very little, especially in the small, still hours of the morning just after Langhorne’s Watch.

The single Imperial Charisian Guardsman sat in a lotus position atop an ice-crusted boulder. He’d been sitting there for three days now, ever since his conversation with Baron Coris, and there was snow drifted on his hair-and on his skin, for that matter-but he seemed unaware of it. Because he was unaware of it. He’d allowed his body temperature to drop to that of the air about him, and after he’d caught up on some of the SNARC reports he’d been unable to give proper attention to when they first came in and spent a day or so contemplating future possibilities, he’d actually put himself on standby and taken the equivalent of a lengthy nap. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to be wandering around four thousand feet above the permanent snow line to stumble across him while he was “asleep,” and it would probably make Cayleb happy.

And if it didn’t, at least it would offer him a handy bit of ammunition to toss back at the emperor the next time Cayleb decided to lecture him about the need for “down time.”

It wasn’t often Merlin Athrawes had the opportunity to simply sit and think, which made him value those rare chances even more when one of them came along. For the most part, he was far too visible (aside from those “retreats to meditate” which had become a more frequent part of his life of late) for something like this. If “ Seijin Merlin” dropped out of sight, even briefly, people started wondering where he was and what he was up to and, as a general rule, he tried very hard to avoid having people wonder about things like that.

In this instance, however, it was going to be necessary to explain how Captain Athrawes had gotten to the city of Talkyra. Or, to be more accurate, it was going to be necessary to allow time for him to have made the trip. Everyone knew seijins moved in mysterious ways and at speeds few other mortals could match, so the exact details of his travel arrangements could be glossed over. But it still took them at least some time to make a journey of over six thousand miles, which was why he’d left Tellesberg five five-days earlier.

He’d spent most of that time in Nimue’s Cave, going over reports, discussing the events racing towards a violent confrontation in the Republic of Siddarmark with the rest of the inner circle, refining the propaganda Owl’s remotes were distributing across all three continents, catching up on some reading, and working with Owl on a couple of private projects he’d been unable to give proper attention before.

In particular, he and the AI had the Class II VR unit almost up and running. Owl still didn’t have the specifications he needed to build another PICA, and Merlin was no more enthusiastic than he had been about letting the computer take apart his own cybernetic housing to find out how it worked. But at least if he had to, he now had a refuge for his and Nimue’s memories and personality. A Class II VR wasn’t as big and capable as the massive virtual reality computers the Terran Federation had used as “homes” for electronic iterations of their top R amp;D, military analysts, and pure researchers. It simply didn’t have the memory and the processing power to maintain two or three dozen fully aware personalities in detailed virtual environments indistinguishable (from the inside) from reality. A Class II could handle no more than three or, at the outside, four virtual personalities if it was going to give the VPs a fully developed world in which to live. There’d be plenty of room for Nimue/Merlin, though. If worse came to worst, he could set up housekeeping in there even if “Seijin Merlin” became totally inoperable, and at least one other possible use had occurred to him, although he still wasn’t at all certain that one was going to work out.

In addition, he’d decided it was time to take advantage of Commander Mahndrayn’s work with his breech-loading rifle and the percussion caps he’d developed for it, and he and Owl had used some of the free time to redesign his own sidearms. Those were going to come as a nasty surprise to someone-possibly sometime soon-he thought, and they wouldn’t violate a single clause of the Proscriptions. Father Paityr had already made that abundantly clear, although none of the Empire’s gunsmiths had yet come up with the design he and Owl had built.

The truth was, though, that as much as he’d enjoyed having time to tinker and putter, he’d gotten bored. Unfortunately, he’d had no choice but to go on marking time for at least another five-day or two if he didn’t want to raise all sorts of eyebrows about the truly miraculous, not simply mysterious, speed with which Seijin Merlin could cover distances of six or seven thousand miles. That was why he’d landed here in the mountains after Zhevons’ chat with Coris, sent the recon skimmer back to Owl, ordered his nannies to regrow Seijin Merlin’s hair, and then gone to standby mode for fifty minutes of every hour.

Of course, even with that, if anyone ever started adding up times, they were bound to come to the conclusion that seijins must know some magic spell to give them command of wind and wave.

In theory, he’d sailed from the Earldom of West Harding, the Island of Charis’ westernmost headland, rather than Tellesberg, which had at least reduced the length of his supposed voyage to the Desnairian Empire’s Crown Lands from over ten thousand miles to “only” fifty-seven hundred. He’d actually turned up in West Harding, publically (and noisily) “borrowed” a forty-foot single-masted schooner, and put to sea in order to make sure everyone “knew” how he’d gotten where he was going in the fullness of time.

That schooner, unfortunately, was now on the bottom of the Parker Sea. He regretted that. It had been a sweet little craft, and Nimue had always loved single-handing her sloop back on Old Terra whenever she’d had the chance. In fact, he was increasingly irked with himself for having abandoned the schooner as quickly as he had. With so much time to kill, he might as well have spent some of it doing something he’d always enjoyed so much before.