CHAPTER ONE
It was April, but this was London.
Ever since his return several days earlier, Commander Robert Rogers, RSN, had endured chill drizzle and told himself not to think longingly of what the weather was probably like just now in his native Dominion of Virginia. He had also reflected, not for the first time, that it was easy to understand how the Empire had come to be. Small wonder that so many people in earlier centuries had been so willing, if not eager, to leave England.
Today, however, had come a break in the weather. The overcast had thinned sufficiently for the sun to shine through in a pallid sort of way, and a fine mist rose from the still-damp streets of the old city where they were struck by that hazy radiance. So Rogers felt in a more positive frame of mind as he left his lodgings just off the King’s Road and got into his glide car. In fact, as the glide car proceeded through Chelsea on its fixed-altitude grav repulsion (full-capability aircars were, of course, not allowed over central London), he permitted himself the luxury of appreciating the fact that the most direct route to his office through the labyrinth of streets was also a scenic route.
Indeed, although he did not often admit it, he was far from immune to the ambience of antiquity that clung to this old city that was still the capital of the Britannic Federal Empire, not just because of its historic primacy but because it was a good compromise between today’s power centers of North America and India. The gleaming towers of twenty-third century Greater London could be glimpsed through the mist in the distance, but here a sedate reverence for tradition reigned. As he turned left onto Grosvenor Place, he could look to the right and see the rear elevation of what was still called Buckingham House, although the townhouse of the Dukes of Buckingham had, beginning after 1781, been acquired by the monarchy and subsequently remodeled and enlarged repeatedly as the meeting place of the Imperial Grand Council. Presently Hyde Park was on his left, with the Serpentine and Kensington Gardens beyond and, invisible from here despite its monumental size, Kensington Palace, the principal residence of the Queen-Empress. Proceeding north through Mayfair and St. Marylebone, he soon passed to the right of Nassau Park, which had never entirely lost its semi-rustic character and was fringed with villas in the style known as Third Neo-Renaissance. Then he entered a region where the architecture rapidly shaded over into modernity even though the height restrictions were still applicable. This was the home of a number of governmental agencies of non-traditional character, most notably the particularly large and distinctly modern one which was his destination: the headquarters of the Royal Space Navy.
Sliding into the subterranean car park, he alighted and rode the lift to the central lobby, a large hexagonal space, its walls decorated with holographs of illustrious space warships of various generations. It was already thronged by personnel, most of them in RSN black, white and silver, some in the scarlet, black and gold of the Royal Marines. This uniformity of dress was not reflected in the people who wore them, for the RSN was an integrated Empire-wide service. There were numerous representatives of the Viceroyalty of India’s various ethnicities, African-descended subjects of various origins, and the occasional subject from this or that extrasolar dominion whose face and form had been molded by extreme environment and sometimes by genetic engineering into something not quite like any familiar Earthly type.
In fact, not even the dress was altogether uniform, for a fair number of people were in civilian suits—not just civilian employees, but also officers who customarily reported to duty so attired. Rogers was one. He went to the central desk and casually submitted his identification to the duty officer, who knew him well, and then walked over to a particular lift with special security warnings and even more special sensors. He paused and submitted to scanning by those sensors, which confirmed his DNA profile and permitted the door to iris open. He entered the “up” tube and let the tractor beam effect take him. He ascended to a level accessible only to this lift and a couple of others like it, and stepped out into a relatively uncrowded, almost hushed precinct inhabited mostly by people in civilian dress, moving about with purposeful intent. There was little ornamentation here, and nothing to indicate to the uninitiated that this was the nerve center of Naval Intelligence.
Proceeding along a corridor toward his office, he chided himself for the ennui that was steadily eclipsing his earlier good mood. It had been only a few days since he had returned from his last assignment to the Zeta Tucanae system and the leave of absence which had followed it, and he had no business being already bored with paperwork. At this rate, how long could he expect to last?
Besides, after some of his experiences at Zeta Tucanae, there was something to be said for boredom.
He hadn’t quite reached his office when the tiny short-range communicator implanted in his skull dinged for attention. He made the motion with his jaw that activated it. “Yes?” he acknowledged, subvocalizing out of habit.
“The director wants you, Bob.” The speaker didn’t need to identify himself, for the voice in Rogers’ head was the familiar one of Commander Gopal Singh, the chief of staff.
“On my way.” Rogers turned on his heel and retraced his steps to the Intelligence floor’s central hub. There he made a ninety-degree turn into another corridor. As he walked along a certain segment, he knew that he was being examined by another passive DNA scanner, and that if he hadn’t passed muster his every voluntary muscle would have been instantly paralyzed. It was easy to understand why there was no guard at the corridor’s final door: no unauthorized person got as far as the director’s office. Still, there was one final scan before the door opened and Rogers entered the waiting room. It had two occupants. One was the director’s secretary/receptionist—human, a major status symbol in itself, and in fact a very sightly if somewhat severe female one at that. The other was a sturdily built blond man in civilian clothes who rose to his feet with a smile and extended his hand.
“Hello, Bob,” he said in the only slightly accented English spoken nowadays by practically all citizens of the Dutch Republic. “It’s been a while.”
“Too long a while, Adrian,” said Rogers, taking the proffered hand and trying to conceal his surprise at seeing a non-Imperial subject here. But, on reflection, he decided it wasn’t all that startling. Adrian de Graeff was a well-respected professional colleague who had worked with Naval Intelligence before. And besides, being Dutch wasn’t quite the same thing as being foreign. After all, in addition to be being Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland (the old claim to the throne of France had, somewhere along the line, been quietly dropped), Empress of North America, Empress of India, et cetera, Mary II was also Princess of Orange and therefore ex officio Stadholder of Holland, Zealand, Utrecht and Gelderland.
It was a state of affairs that, like so much else, had its origin in the fact that shortly after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 William of Orange, newly become King William III of England, and his wife Mary had, to the general astonishment of all (especially considering the unsubstantiated but persistent rumors about William’s proclivities) produced a male heir. That heir, after appropriate adjustments to the Act of Settlement, had inherited the English Crown, thus preventing it from going to James II’s childless daughter Anne, which could have had all sorts of unpredictable dynastic effects—possibly even casting the crown to George, Elector of Hanover, as the nearest (however remote) Protestant heir. He had also inherited the Principality of Orange, and his heirs had continued to do so from that day to this, since all concerned had long since amended their succession laws in favor of the first-born heir regardless of gender. Something else that had continued unbroken was the custom of the four principal states of the Netherlands automatically appointing the incumbent Prince of Orange to the stadholdership. (The other states, just to be different, appointed their stadholders from a cadet branch of the House of Orange.) Thus it was that the monarch of the Britannic Federal Empire was also the ceremonial head of the Dutch Republic—and, in theory, the commander in chief of its armed forces, for the Prince of Orange also automatically became Captain General and Admiral General of the United Provinces.
It was an anomalous situation that peoples concerned with logic and systemization—the French, for example—would never have lived with. But it seemed to suit the English and Dutch speakers. And it had provided every coalition against a would-be hegemonic European power—France, for example—with an unbreakable Anglo-Dutch backbone. That backbone had fortunately grown to dinosaurian proportions by the time Russia had replaced France as the power threatening to bestride the continent, as Britain’s overseas empire had grown and knitted together in accordance with the great principle of Imperial Federation. And the special—indeed, unique—relationship had endured to the present day.
Still, Rogers couldn’t help wondering what had been important enough to warrant downloading De Graeff’s DNA profile into the security system.
“What brings you here?” he asked. “Last I heard, you were working in Batavia.” The Dutch Republic had never managed to integrate the East Indies into a federal imperial structure as successfully as the British had integrated India. Rogers rather complacently told himself that it probably had something to do with Dutch stubbornness. After all these centuries, they hadn’t even yielded to persistent demands to change the name of Batavia to “Jakarta.”
“I was—and that’s what brings me here.” The smile vanished. “I turned up something a little beyond our scope. The Council decided your lot needed to be involved.”
Rogers nodded. The Dutch Raad Terrorismebestrijding en Veiligheid (Council for Counterterrorism and Security) routinely worked hand in glove with the various Imperial intelligence and security agencies, which, in the immemorial way of such things, had proliferated and overlapped over the centuries like jungle growth. But one thing in the bureaucratic thicket was fairly straightforward: Naval Intelligence had jurisdiction of matters beyond low Earth orbit, with the various security agencies of the extrasolar dominions subordinate to it wherever it chose to exercise that jurisdiction.
“So,” he said, “you happened onto something with extraterrestrial connections. You must have been nosing around Singapura.” A century earlier, after the invention of the Bernheim Drive, the most challenging part of interstellar flight had been the first eighty-four hundred miles, the distance from Earth’s surface to the “Primary Limit” where the drive could be activated. The obvious solution had been a space elevator, providing cheap transportation to a space terminal at a geostationary point well outside the Primary Limit. An Anglo-Dutch corporation had been chartered for the purpose, and the Dutch had offered as the Earthside terminus the island of Singapura at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, almost exactly on the equator. Then the advent of grav repulsion had rendered the whole concept obsolete. But by that time a great deal of infrastructure had been put in place on Singapura, which the canny Dutch weren’t about to let go to waste. Today the island was one of Earth’s principal spaceports…and a very cosmopolitan place, with all the security headaches that implied.
“Yes I was.” De Graeff frowned. “But I probably ought to wait to tell you the details, until—”
A bell tone sounded on the receptionist’s desk, and she looked up with an institutional expression. “Commander Rogers, Mynheer De Graeff, the director will see you now.”
The two men passed through an old-fashioned door into a spacious office decorated in the elegant style known as Mauricean since it dated to the reign of Maurice II in the early nineteenth century. Oil paintings of various long-deceased luminaries (and, of course, Her Majesty) hung on the walls, and shelves were lined with old-fashioned books. The furnishings were in the same style, and the large desk was particularly fine, but it incorporated an array of modern equipment, including a computer with the capability of projecting a holographic display, and a communicator link with the powerful lasercom on the building’s roof, linked in turn to the interplanetary-range installation in orbit.
The elderly man behind the desk motioned them toward chairs, peering out from under crusty gray eyebrows.
“Have a seat, gentlemen.” Vice Admiral Sir Angus Fraser, Director of Naval Intelligence, was from the Dominion of Canada, but his accent seemed to owe more to his Scottish parents. “Mynheer De Graeff, I’m obliged for your prompt arrival. I’ll let you explain to Commander Rogers here the reason we requested your presence. Don’t bother with the details—you’ll be able to brief him on those after he’s read your full report.” He busied himself with loading his trademark pipe with genetically engineered noncarcinogenic tobacco.
“Of course, Admiral.” De Graeff turned to Rogers. “As you surmised, Bob, I’ve been in Singapura. We had gotten indications that the Caliphate has been trying an indirect approach to infiltration, through one of their extrasolar colonies.”
Rogers nodded. The Islamic Caliphate’s attempts to stir up disaffection among the Muslim populations of the Viceroyalty of India and also of the Dutch East Indies were a fact of international life (so far on the level of a chronic, low-grade, publicly unacknowledged irritant, inasmuch as the Caliphate’s grimly fundamentalist version of Islam had made little headway among those populations). And over the past generation the Caliphate had managed to rationalize away its own technophobic ideology to the point of planting some colonies among the stars—sometimes bringing it into confrontation with the Empire.
“As you undoubtedly know,” De Graeff explained, “the Caliphate colony in the Psi Capricorni system has begun exporting a significant amount of rare elements, and quite a lot of this traffic comes through Singapura. We’ve gotten indications that they’re trying to use this as a conduit for infiltration, bypassing our usual security measures around the East Indies. Recently, we’ve managed to apprehend a couple of their lower-level operatives—actually more useful to us for interrogation purposes, since the higher-ups almost always have ingenious suicide devices.”
“I know,” said Rogers. “The other side of the coin is that the low-rankers simply don’t know very much.”
“True. But we were able to get a few useful leads about Caliphate activities.” De Graeff paused significantly. “One of which points in the direction of New America.”
“What?” Rogers couldn’t keep the surprised bewilderment out of his voice. “But what possible connection could there be?”
“That’s precisely what we want to find out,” said Sir Angus, who by now had puffed his pipe to aromatic life. “And now you know why you’re here, Commander. I’m sending you to the Tau Ceti system where you’ll investigate this matter in conjunction with the local authorities on New America.”
“Er…that could be a bit awkward, sir. Given New America’s unique and rather ill-defined relationship to the Empire, it won’t be just a matter—”
“Of you walking in and ordering the locals about,” Sir Angus finished for him. “It will call for a bit more diplomacy than that. Which is why I’ve chosen you. Among those who are North Americans, you’re the best-qualified officer currently available. A common background should be of assistance in working smoothly with the famously touchy colonials there.”
Rogers grew expressionless and spoke carefully. “I should point out, sir, that I may not be the most tactful choice for dealing with the New Americans. Given my family history…my very name, in fact—”
“Yes, yes, I know,” Sir Angus cut in with a touch of impatience. “But as I say, all my other North American senior investigating agents are otherwise occupied at the moment, or simply aren’t up to you in terms of qualifications. And after all,” he added in a more soothing tone, “that’s all ancient history, isn’t it? It’s been five hundred years since the First North American Rebellion, and over a century since New America was colonized. I’ll wager the New Americans you’ll be working with won’t even know who the original Robert Rogers was.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Rogers saw De Graeff’s puzzlement.
“Perhaps not, sir. But I understand those people have very long memories.”