Empire Games Series, Book 1(34)
She climbed the front steps slowly and the door opened for her. Jenny the housekeeper had stayed awake. “Ma’am? He’s still up—in the lounge.” Jenny seemed uncharacteristically anxious.
“Thank you.” Miriam nodded. “How is he?”
“Much the same.” Jenny closed the front door and threw the bolt. “Will you be wanting anything?”
“A mug of chocalatl, if you don’t mind. Unsweetened.” Miriam paused outside the lounge doorway as Jenny took her coat, and heard an outbreak of coughing from behind the closed door. “Damn.”
“Are you all right?” she asked as she entered the room.
“I’m”—more coughing—“fine.” Her husband, Erasmus, was sitting in a wingback armchair, putting his handkerchief away. “There’s no blood, if that’s what you were wondering.”
“I was.” She sat down carefully in the armchair opposite him. “It still worries me. And if you don’t promise you’ll see the doctors about it this week, I’ll keep nagging you.”
“It’s not the phthisis.” Tuberculosis, she translated mentally. He briefly closed his eyes, and for a moment looked a decade older than his fifty-five years. “It’s just a winter cough—the humidity disagrees with me. I know the white death well. If it was coming back—”
There were two piles of document folders on the occasional table: one tall, one smaller. She picked the top item off the taller pile. “Progress Report, State Committee on Metropolitan Optical Fiber Cable Infrastructure, March, Year 17,” she said lightly. Year 17 of the Revolution, or 2020 AD, in the old style. “Just think how they’ll manage without you if you die of tuberculosis through self-neglect—thanks to staying up after midnight reading reports!”
He glanced sidelong at the briefcase by her chair: “I’ll give up when you give up, dear.”
A dizzying sense of drifting perspective seized her. “I’ll give up when the Americans—when the United States—when we’re safe—”
“In other words, never.” He spared her a sad smile. “You can’t lie to me: I’ve known you too long.”
Another dizzying look down from the pinnacle of the present into the yawning canyon of the past. “I can’t believe it’s been eighteen years already.”
“But you only said ‘yes’ to me fourteen years ago.” His tone was light, as if he was trying to make a weak joke of it, but the years weighed heavily on them both.
“I was still gun-shy. You would be too, if your previous marriage was anything like my two.” Her fingers tightened on his hand. “Tell me what your schedule is for the rest of the week and I’ll tell you what to drop so you can make room for a doctor’s appointment. Please?”
“You’re going to blackmail me now, aren’t you?”
“Yes. I want you to get your lungs checked out. Erasmus, I make a terrible widow.”
“On one condition, then: I think you’ve been working too hard. If I get my lungs fluoroscoped, will you agree to take a nice quiet vacation with me, my dear?”
The door opened. It was Jenny, bearing a tea tray with two steaming mugs, which she deposited on the table before tactfully leaving them to it. Miriam picked up one of the mugs of chocalatl. “Have you taken your pills?”
“What? The—yes, I have.” Erasmus picked up his mug and blew on it thoughtfully. “Thank you—and I will see the doctor. After the cabinet meeting tomorrow morning. I expect in the afternoon I’m going to be drawing up policy guidelines for how we spin our latest satellite launch. Such is the lot of the Commissioner for State Communications. I should have been more careful what I wished for.”
“Space: the final frontier,” Miriam suggested. “Rockets are exciting, Erasmus. And for propaganda purposes, rockets that don’t kill people are even better than ones that do.”
“Our adversaries are still terrified, though. Wouldn’t you be, in their position?”
“Yes.” She put her mug down and rested her chin on her right fist. “The technology gap is widening all the time—we’re at least ten years ahead of them, more in some areas. They’ve barely begun to develop battlefield rockets beyond the gunpowder stage. They’re testing a turboprop bomber; they’ve got atom bombs. But we’ve got nuclear submarines and sea-launched intercontinental missiles. They can’t even shoot down our reconnaissance planes, let alone our spy satellites.”
“Yes.” Erasmus rubbed his forehead. “So I’m going to push the rockets-for-peace message as hard as I can. Otherwise we risk terrifying the French into starting a preemptive war—especially if they listen to our idiot exiles. Letting the former emperor and his family sail off into the sunset was, I fear, a long-term misjudgment on Adam and the Radical Party’s account. It will come back to haunt us.”
“I’m not so sure,” Miriam countered. “What were the alternatives? Give him a trial and execute him? It would have created a martyr—”
“Another Charles the First, yes.”
“No, it would have been worse. Charles the First was a nasty piece of work: the Rump Parliament only put him on trial and chopped his head off after the third civil war he started. He deserved what he got! But John Frederick isn’t in the same league, and we want to reduce the level of violence in politics, not inflame it. Convince our public that it’s possible to transfer power peacefully. I’ve seen your polling: half of them still don’t understand the idea of a loyal opposition, even after fifteen years of explaining till we’re blue in the face. Executing the King would have set us up for a counterrevolution. His son turns out to be an asshole who sends assassins our way, and he still wants a Monarchist uprising to put his family back on the throne over here. But he isn’t covering himself in glory at the Dauphin’s court, is he? If we hold our shit together for another ten years of building microprocessor factories and jet airliners, everyone’s going to see him for the irrelevant throwback he is. As long as we manage to avoid starting a fourth world war.”