Learning to Read Linear B

March 796 U.C., Phezzan

Reinhard puzzled over the package he had received in the mail. By all accounts, it was an innocuous thing. Annerose had sent it, going to great lengths to purchase this thing from a Phezzani vendor and have it sent to Reinhard. It wasn’t so surprising that she would send him something: it was his birthday, after all, but he had no idea why she would send this .

The object in question was a small cube of tungsten, about five centimeters on each side. For all that it was small enough to easily hold in his palm, it weighed an incredible amount, almost two and a half kilograms. He tossed it up and down as he read the letter that accompanied it.

Dear Reinhard,

Happy birthday! I wish that either you were on Heinessen, or I was on Phezzan, so that we could celebrate together, but we really have not been in the same place for your birthday for far too long. You’ll have to make do with my virtual well wishes this year.

I hope you enjoy your gift. I know it’s a bit unusual, but you know I’m always stumped on what to give you, especially since interplanetary physical mail would cost me more than I really could afford, so I had to get you something that is readily available to buy on Phezzan. Otherwise I might have mailed you something homemade.

As for why this particular thing, well, Blumhart (one of my fellow officers in the regiment) has one of these cubes that he keeps on his desk to use as a paperweight, and I’ve always been so fascinated by it. When I was on one of my summer internships, I did spend some time ordering tungsten materials for shipbuilding, but I never actually got to handle any up close. I know that was the LEAST interesting thing that happened to you when you were at Condor, but did you ever feel how heavy all of this was? Maybe if you did, you were in 0G, and a giant sheet of metal floating in space loses some of the visceral realness and surprising density that a smaller piece has.

It’s nice to hold something real, isn’t it? A piece of metal in your hand is realer than futures, realer than I feel like, half the galaxy away.

It’s gauche to talk about how much a gift costs, and given the fact that I did spend time ordering shipbuilding supplies, I really should KNOW how much raw tungsten costs, but I was still surprised at the price. If I had planned ahead, I would have tried to see if the price went down or something. Well, too late now.

I hope you enjoy this very silly gift. If you don’t, feel free to throw it at my head when we get back in the same place (New Year’s? Please tell me you’ll have leave someday…)

Please stay safe and well on Phezzan. I don’t know if we’ll be able to talk much. The Rosenritter are being deployed and I don’t know when I’ll be back on Heinessen. Luckily, my new friend is staying with me, so she can take care of Julian while I’m gone. Or he can take care of her. It’s somewhat unclear who will be taking care of who, sometimes.

But I won’t bore you with any more personal details. Happy birthday again! I love you more than I could ever explain!

Your sister,

Annerose

There was something very, very strange about the letter. For one thing, even though Annerose had supplied a bit of a personal explanation for why she might enjoy a tungsten cube paperweight, it still seemed that a paperweight was an impersonal gift. It was also very unlike Annerose to discuss the price of anything she bought as a gift— a remnant of their frugal childhood. Bills were discussed, gifts were not. The fact that she was calling attention to the price, and calling attention to the fact that she normally wouldn’t, it felt like a message.

Reinhard fished around in his desk drawer for a pen, and read the letter over, circling things that stuck out to him.

“Realer than futures” was another incredibly strange line. If Annerose was just being poetic, she probably would have said that it was realer than THE future. This weird line, combined with her talking about trying to find it cheaper, being aware of the price of it when used for shipbuilding…

It was all screaming out to Reinhard that Annerose wanted him to look at the price of tungsten. Why? Although he made a decent salary now— they both did— it wasn’t as though he was making enough to invest in stocks. (His interest in economics was purely from a governmental standpoint. The idea of actually attempting to play the market annoyed him.)

What did Annerose know? And why was she both so concerned that Reinhard know it, and that it be kept secret, coded as it were in this innocuous seeming message?

Reinhard spent some time looking at the historical trend prices of tungsten. Overall, the prices seemed relatively steady, jumping only when either side of the conflict announced that they were building a glut of ships (or a fortress, for the imperial side.) This usually happened after battles where huge numbers of ships had been lost, which hadn’t happened too recently, so the price now was quite stable. Was this Annerose telling him to expect a large battle soon? It wasn’t as though she could know if the Empire was about to build a new fortress. And even if they were, unless they were planning to antagonize Phezzan with it, it seemed unlikely to be relevant to the broader conflict. The Empire wasted money building fortresses inside their own territory, just in case certain nobles got a little too many ideas.

Reinhard bit his finger. It seemed somewhat unlikely that she was trying to tell him that there would be a battle. Annerose would have found a better way of telling him that. After all, the jump in price of shipbuilding supplies in the year or so after a major conflict was well understood, and also not really something that Annerose would have cared about paying attention to. It was such an obscure connection that Reinhard though it was too weak. It wasn’t as though Annerose had any particular interest in economics.

Maybe it was her lack of understanding that was the key here. She might be oversimplifying things. She wanted him to watch the price of tungsten. Going up? No, she said she had wanted to see if it would get cheaper.

Decreased demand would lower the price, but Reinhard suspected that there wasn’t some breakthrough in ship engineering waiting just around the corner that would remove the need for tungsten.

Increased supply might lower the price.

But why would she be cagey about some new mine opening somewhere? And what did it have to do with her?

He narrowed his eyes. There would only be a few reasons why someone would need to keep tungsten mining secret, and all of them had to do with the location of the mine. If it was a little too close to imperial territory, that would make it uniquely vulnerable to attack, just like the shipbuilding facility at Condor Base had been. Annerose must have brought that up for a reason, too. Condor Base was right outside the Iserlohn corridor, and it had been attacked. But it wasn’t secret. It hadn’t even been secret during its construction. So something must be closer to the Empire even than that.

It couldn’t be within the Phezzan corridor, or Annerose wouldn’t have mentioned the distance between them. So. Someone was building a new tungsten mine in the Iserlohn corridor, and the Rosenritter were heading there. To do what, exactly, Reinhard didn’t know.

He felt like he needed to confirm his suspicions. The price of tungsten hadn’t moved, but he wondered what kind of equipment was involved in the mining of tungsten, and if an increased demand for that had raised the price by a noticeable amount. Reinhard did some digging.

Unsurprisingly, the prices of highly specialized industrial equipment were not things that were publicly available, which meant that no historical price data was available either. This was frustrating, but not entirely unexpected.

Still, he wasn’t deterred in his investigations. He focused on the most specialized, largest parts. He wished he had more information from Annerose about what type of environment this mining would be happening in, because it could help him tailor his search.

Actually, he figured he could do the reverse. He looked around at existing tungsten mining operations, in the Alliance and in the Empire (this information was readily available on Phezzan, of course) and picked out some representative planets: hot ones, cold ones, ones with high gravity, ones with low, those with toxic atmospheres, those where the mines were under a kilometer of water, ones where the difference between the day and night wreaked havoc on the surface temperature…

Over the next few days, Reinhard called up the customer service line of various Phezzani equipment suppliers, pretending to be working for one of the existing mining companies, and inquiring about the lead times for replacing large pieces of equipment. He made a pretty convincing prospective customer, and was charming on the phone with the sales representatives, enough that he was able to get all the information that he wanted.

The average lead time for one of the huge ore processing machines was four months from order to delivery. The average lead time for giant mining machines was five, but that didn’t count the time it would take to charter a large ship for delivery of the machine to the target planet. All of these seemed like reasonable numbers. But when Reinhard called up vendors that specialized in high temperature mining equipment, he suddenly found that the lead times were shockingly long. More than double the average, as though someone had placed a priority bulk order, and Reinhard’s piddling request for one or two replacement machines would have to go at the end of a long line.

He felt somewhat vindicated, but he couldn’t be sure of anything yet. All of this was a string of conclusions that he was jumping to based on a strange birthday letter from his sister.

Still, there were other things he could check. It was difficult to look at from Phezzan, but he wanted to see the hiring and recruitment pages for various mining companies, especially those with extensive experience on inhospitable planets, and compare their current recruitment efforts to their historical, publicly filed, employment records. There did seem to be a noticeable uptick in hiring among several companies, but again, that wasn’t particularly conclusive.

Almost on a whim, Reinhard spent an afternoon putting together a fake resume and submitting it to companies on his shortlist who did have offices on Phezzan. He made up a degree for himself in structural engineering from PNU, gave himself a reasonable GPA and a scattering of skills, a fake year of experience at a local building firm as an intern, and a cover letter detailing his passion for challenging work in tough environments. He got one call back about it after a few days, and Reinhard showed up to his scheduled interview wearing a tie and a large pair of non-prescription glasses, his fake Phezzani ID card that he had borrowed from the High Commissioner’s office in hand.

As he walked into the monotonically corporate office building, Reinhard wondered if Muller was watching him, and, if he was, what exactly he thought Reinhard was doing. The idea amused him.

Even pretending to be someone else, and without ever having interviewed for any position before, Reinhard knew how to make himself look like a good candidate, and he used the interview as a space to ask lots of interesting little questions of the hiring manager.

“I’m willing to relocate, of course,” Reinhard said with a laugh, “but are you interviewing for a specific mine opening, or would I have choice in my placement?”

The answers he got back were suspiciously cagey. The hiring manager, an older woman with shrewd eyes set in a weathered brown face, said, “All our new hires go through a long training period at a few of our most established facilities, and we assess where they will be assigned after that, usually into more challenging environments.”

“I love a challenge,” Reinhard said.

“Yes, of course."

And he would ask things like, “Now, I saw that you were offering a rather generous company stock option as one of the benefits packages I could choose from. This is just curiosity, but is that likely to be more generous than a standard retirement fund?”

“Oh, yes. Over the next few years, we’re poised for growth— you would be part of our general expansion— and I think it’s a good idea to get in on that option now.”

“I see,” Reinhard said. He was taking notes. The interviewer seemed impressed with his curiosity. “And I was wondering if you could tell me what the company atmosphere is like in these places where I might be working— you know, I’ve lived in the city my whole life, so I’m wondering what the social atmosphere is like? Are there many non-company people around?”

“I think that depends a lot on where you’re positioned, eventually,” the hiring manager said. “Most of our established mines have a very decent town adjoining them, with all the amenities you’d expect from modern life.”

“What about these new mines you say you’re opening? Will they be on the frontier of frontiers? I assume most of this hiring wave will eventually end up in these new facilities, which is why I’m asking.”

She smiled. “During initial construction, there might actually be more people around than usual. It should be interesting.”

“Interesting? In what way?”

“Mr. Kircheis, if you’re trying to figure out if there will be women in these new mines, the answer is yes.” Her smile was wry. When Reinhard’s face reddened, she said, “It’s a valid enough consideration.”

Reinhard had been trying to figure out if the mines would be surrounded by soldiers, but he couldn’t ask that directly, and so he had gotten a completely different answer.

“Er, okay,” he said, thrown off his balance for the first time. “And about hazard pay, do some locations offer more of it than others?”

He kept poking and prodding, and eventually the manager asked, “And do you have any other questions?”

Reinhard finally said, glancing down at his page full of notes, “No, I think my curiosity is fully sated.”

“I do have one more question for you, Mr. Kircheis.”

“Of course.”

“I should have asked this earlier, but it completely slipped my mind until this moment. You submitted your application through our Alliance recruitment page, but we’re here on Phezzan. You are an Alliance citizen, right?”

“Oh, I didn’t realize,” Reinhard said. “I thought that was your only website.” He laughed a little. “And, no, I’m Phezzani. But I’m looking to move to the Alliance.”

“I see.” She offered him a smile, one that was suddenly much tighter than it had been before. “I’m sure I’ll be giving you a call, Mr. Kircheis.”

“Thank you so much for your time and consideration,” Reinhard said. “I look forward to hearing from you.”

He knew he wouldn’t. He had suspected that these new positions would be for Alliance citizens only, and would almost certainly require a security clearance. Still, he had gotten plenty of good information out of this, so it hadn’t been a waste of an afternoon entirely.

Some of Reinhard’s excursions didn’t go completely unnoticed, though. His CO called him into his office one day.

“Lieutenant Commander,” Blackwell said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m well aware that what you do with your private life is not entirely my concern, but when you start borrowing our limited supply of ID cards to run around and… Look, I don’t even know what you’re doing with them. Please explain.”

“Research, sir,” Reinhard said. His hands were clasped neatly behind his back as he stood in front of Blackwell’s desk, watching the fat goldfish swim around and around behind him.

“Research about what, exactly, Müsel?”

“It’s very difficult to explain, sir,” Reinhard said. “And I’m afraid that you will probably tell me that curiosity can be dangerous.”

“For God’s sake, Müsel. Out with it. You usually do good work, so I would like to give you the benefit of the doubt, but when one of my staff starts to act crazy, it’s almost never a good sign. I’d prefer not to have to ask you to be reassigned, because I like you, and you were put here by people higher than myself.”

“Thank you, sir. This is just complicated to explain.” But he did, and he went through the whole story, starting with Annerose’s coded message and the Rosenritter’s mystery deployment, and ending with his findings about what companies seemed to be under contract to build new mines, and where.

“And you think you have enough information to pin down a planet that this is happening on?” Blackwell asked.

“Yes, sir,” Reinhard said. “There’s a limited number of choices.”

“Well, let me hear your theory.”

“Do you have a starmap of the Iserlohn corridor?” Reinhard asked.

Blackwell humored him and pulled one up on his computer. Reinhard pointed at one star system, a red dwarf with three tiny terrestrial planets orbiting it, quite close. Reinhard pointed at the third one. “Right there,” he said. “Cahokia-3.”

“There isn’t even a navigable route there.”

“That you know of,” Reinhard said. “But maybe one was discovered recently. Or it was discovered a long time ago, and just not publicized, in case it came to have tactical value later.”

“Sure.” Blackwell scratched his chin. “I’m willing to stretch my imagination that far. But you said you did all this just to figure out where your sister was being posted?”

“Not really, sir, no.”

“Explain, then.”

Reinhard frowned a little. “If it were just any front line posting, I would just let my sister be. She can take care of herself. But she sent me that message because she wanted me to do something. She’s probably nervous.”

“About?”

“Well, sir, if I could figure all of this out, it might only be a matter of time before the imperial government finds out about it, as well.”

“Why do you say that? You were only tipped off— assuming this is all true, which I will have to confirm— because your sister has direct information.”

“All of these companies involved have holdings on Phezzan,” Reinhard said. “It might look like nothing now, but money changing hands is going to get back to the Empire, sooner or later, and when they do, they’re not going to just let us set up a base in their faces.”

“Sure,” Blackwell said. “But again, what does that have to do with you?”

“I had to figure all of this out, but now that I have, I’m sure my sister is trying to tell me to keep an eye out for anything that looks like the Empire figuring out what’s happening there.”

“And how will you know?”

“I’m not sure,” Reinhard said. “It depends on how the Empire finds this out, probably. But I can at least keep an ear out.”

Blackwell nodded slowly. “I suppose. Knowing what you’re listening for could make it easier to hear.”

“Precisely, sir,” Reinhard said.

“I’ll confirm this. You have permission to continue to look, but, Müsel, next time you get an idea like this, come to me first, instead of running all over Phezzan.”

“May I speak bluntly, sir?”

Blackwell narrowed his eyes. “Yes.”

“If I had come to you with just a strange birthday letter from my sister, you wouldn’t have listened to a word that I said.”

“I’ll keep that in mind next time you become convinced that someone is leaving you coded messages,” Blackwell said.

July 796 U.C., Phezzan

A week or so after he had mentioned the matter to Blackwell, the commodore pulled Reinhard aside and said, “I looked into that matter you mentioned. You were correct. I shouldn’t need to tell you to be careful with that information.” And that was approximately the end of the conversation.

Although the matter of the mysterious tungsten mines did not slip Reinhard’s mind for a second, not much happened with it for several months. He kept paying attention to the tungsten markets, but there wasn’t anything unexpected happening, and there was no movement of imperial ships around the Iserlohn corridor other than their usual.

Even Annerose’s rare letters held no new information. They were exactingly scrubbed by the censors, and, as far as Reinhard could tell, Annerose wasn’t trying to drop any further hints. The only things she talked about were funny stories about the other members of the Rosenritter, which was entertaining, if not particularly enlightening. The rigor of the censors was so much that even mentions of night and day in otherwise innocuous stories were scrubbed out. That would have tipped Reinhard off to the secrecy of Annerose’s mission, if he hadn’t already known. They probably had been instructed to remove such mentions because of the short length of the day on Cahokia-3, a rather identifiable feature when it came to planets. At least Annerose’s letters sounded cheerful, which was the best that Reinhard could hope for.

Life on Phezzan and work in the High Commissioner’s office continued as it always had. There was rarely a dull moment, but there was not much that Reinhard was personally invested in.

On weekend mornings, Reinhard’s habit was to go for a long run, then sit at a cafe and get brunch while either working on his blog or reading. One bright Saturday, Reinhard was sitting in the outdoor seating of his favorite restaurant, a half eaten stack of pancakes in front of him, idly watching the passers-by walk down the sunny street as he flipped through a thick newspaper.

This particular paper, with its large Fraktur font announcing its name, was wholly imperial, one of the ones that was a direct import to Phezzan, rather than a Phezzani-owned newspaper aimed at an imperial expat audience. Both types of papers had their benefits, of course, but Reinhard was partial to the dry, almost acerbic, editorial tone of this paper, rather than the pseudo-friendliness that Phezzani papers, even the ones that were better at replicating the imperial voice, were partial to. It wasn’t as though the tone mattered— after all, propaganda and lies were propaganda and lies regardless of how they were delivered— but Reinhard had a preference regardless.

The big news of the day was nothing special. The bulk of the paper was taken up by reporting on one particular imperial planet’s governance scandal, where the noble family that ruled the planet had decided to stop respecting imperial law (and, perhaps more importantly, was threatening to withhold imperial tax.) The story was interesting, but had little to do with Reinhard, though he made a mental note that when the imperial government did eventually stop dragging their feet and send their fleet to deal with recalcitrant nobles, those nobles might attempt to flee through Phezzan. Although the policy was, of course, to admit all refugees, Reinhard thought that there were plenty of ways of making this difficult, especially if the refugee in question was a noble with delusions of grandeur. The kaiser seemed reluctant to deal with the issue, for some reason, and Reinhard searched the paper for any clues as to why the fleet hadn’t been deployed already, but didn’t find any. That was just another thing to look at later.

Reinhard finished his breakfast, and the relevant sections of the paper. When the waiter came by to clear his dishes, a breeze picked up the newspaper on the table, scattering the pages on the ground. Not one to litter, Reinhard apologized to the waiter and picked them up, ending up with the ‘sports’ section on the top of the stack. Usually, he never read the sports columns, having less than zero interest in which horse races and hockey games were taking place, but at the top of the page there was a listing of upcoming duels of note, and his eyes fell on the top billed listing. Braunschweig vs Littenheim. The names of the actual professional duelists were listed below that, but the sponsoring parties were the ones who claimed the credit. There were never any reasons listed for the duels, just the time, place, and ruleset that would be followed, but Reinhard was fixated on it. He needed to know, immediately, why the two families closest in line for the throne were dueling.

Unfortunately, when he returned to his apartment and started researching the subject in earnest, he couldn’t find anything about it. It seemed unlikely that it was a private insult that had sparked the duel, because such matters would have been handled privately. But if it was some sort of larger, public matter, that should have been a matter of record, or at least of gossip. But there was almost nothing said about the duel other than rumors and wild speculation, which only made Reinhard more and more curious.

He had the sneaking suspicion that this was important. He looked up historical dueling records. The last time that Duke Braunschweig had sponsored a duelist personally was eight years ago. He looked up the statistics of the two duelists they had hired, to see who was likely to win. The two had faced each other several times in the past, and both of them had won about half the times. A coin flip, then.

Although Reinhard couldn’t find information online, he did have one last resort source of information available to him. One that he was very hesitant about using, and one that Blackwell would almost certainly not approve of. In the letter that Muller had shown to Reinhard, he had mentioned that Captain von Leigh was on Duke Braunschweig’s staff. Muller, then, might have some information. How to get that information was, unfortunately, not going to be easy.

He had had luck getting things out of Muller in the past, but only in trade, with Blackwell’s permission, but Reinhard didn’t think he was going to get permission, and nor did he have any secrets he was comfortable divulging to Muller in exchange.

Maybe he could make it seem like he wasn’t actually asking. After all, Muller had been willing to serve as a go between for him and Kircheis in the past. If Reinhard could pretend like that was all he wanted, then maybe he could extract the information from Muller unwittingly.

It felt somewhat slimy to consider using Kircheis for this purpose, but it was as good of a plan as he had, so he would go ahead with it. And he didn’t think that Kircheis would mind.

So, one evening a few days later, Reinhard slipped out of his own apartment, avoiding the cameras that he knew were around by going up two more floors and leaving through the unmonitored fire escape into the alley, then made his way by bus to the other side of the city, where Muller lived.

Like the Alliance staff stationed on Phezzan who lived there long term rather than having a posting of less than a year, Muller had the option to rent a real apartment, rather than live in housing owned by the Empire’s embassy. He had done so, and was clearly frugal about it, living in a six-story walkup in one of the poorer parts of the city. Not the poorest, but the official imperial housing probably would have been nicer. Reinhard couldn’t really complain, though. The official imperial buildings were under surveillance by the Alliance. Muller’s run down apartment complex was not.

Reinhard made his way to Muller’s apartment, and then simply knocked on the door. Muller didn’t answer, but Reinhard could see the light under the door, so he knew that he was home, and was just being ignored.

Reinhard knocked again.

“What the fuck are you doing at my house?” Muller asked, without opening the door.

“Unofficial business,” Reinhard said. “I need a favor. Open the door.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Muller said, but he opened the door anyway. He was in the middle of cooking dinner, as evidenced by the smell of roasting onions that wafted out into the hallway when he opened the door. “Have you forgotten that we’re enemies?”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t ask you for a favor. May I come in, or are you going to make me beg you in the hallway.”

“You’d beg?”

Reinhard raised an eyebrow, and Muller sighed and stepped aside, letting him in. The apartment was small and dark, with just a kitchen and a single larger room with a bed and couch in it. It was neatly kept, but some of the artwork on the walls indicated that Muller was perhaps a little too attached to his posting on Phezzan: movie posters for Alliance movies were a prime feature, as was a very stupid looking pinup of a Phezzan pop idol group’s lead singer. There was not a single staid imperial oil painting in sight, and only a large photograph of what he assumed was Muller’s family gave any indication that he was from the Empire at all. That, and all the books on his bookshelf and magazines scattered on his coffee table were titled in the imperial language.

Muller walked back into his kitchen. An alarm was going off, and he turned off his stove and dumped out a pot of potatoes that had been boiling, straining them in the sink.

“Are you going to ask me for your favor, or are you going to just stand there?” Muller asked. “Hand me the butter, will you? Top shelf of the fridge.”

Reinhard did as requested, and gave him the milk, too, so that he could mash the potatoes. “I won’t bother you with business while you’re cooking.”

Muller scowled. “Salesmen always come when you’re eating dinner, because you’ll do anything to make them go away so you can enjoy your meal in peace.”

He finished with the potatoes, then pulled the roast beef and vegetables out of the oven. He grabbed two chipped plates from the cupboard, filled one, and thrust it at Reinhard. “Here,” he said. “It’s weirder to have you watch me eat than it is for me to give you dinner.”

“Thank you,” Reinhard said.

There wasn’t really a table in Muller’s apartment, aside from the coffee table, and nor were there chairs. Reinhard sat on the couch, but Muller stood, pacing back and forth with his plate in one hand and his fork in the other.

“Okay, please tell me why you’re here,” Muller said. “You’re really freaking me out.”

“I’m not doing anything,” Reinhard said. “We’re having a nice, civil conversation.”

Muller scowled at him.

Reinhard took a bite of mashed potatoes. “I need you to tell me what unit Captain Leigh’s favorite student got assigned to.”

“Gods above, Müsel,” Muller said. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his hand that was holding his fork. “You don’t have to show up at my house for this.”

“It’s not like we get the chance to have our friendly little chats often,” Reinhard said. “I didn’t want to wait for the opportunity to present itself.”

“I have no idea where Sub-Lieutenant Kircheis is. Why does it matter?”

“How do you know that’s who I’m talking about?”

Muller gave him a disbelieving look. “I thought you were trying to send a message to me.”

“What?”

“Every time you use a fake name for anything, you use his. I thought you were trying to tell me to pay attention.”

Reinhard flushed. That had been the complete opposite of what he had wanted. It was a stupid mistake. “I would have used my pen name—“

“Yeah, pass as a girl. Gods, I thought you were doing drag when I saw your sister—“

“She has nothing to do with this,” Reinhard snapped.

Muller, alarmed, held up both his hands, dangerously tipping his plate. Luckily, the mashed potatoes were glued down pretty firmly, and they stopped his vegetables from sliding off onto the floor. “Sure,” he said. “Was that really all you wanted to know?”

“What do you know about Kircheis?”

“Why do you think I would tell you?”

Reinhard narrowed his eyes.

“Look,” Muller said. “You tell me why you’re so interested in him, and then maybe I’ll tell you something I know.”

“He was—“ Reinhard formed as non incriminating of a sentence as he could— “my best friend.”

“Excuse me for finding it hard to believe that you’d go through all of this trouble to talk to someone you last saw at age thirteen.”

“Ten,” Reinhard muttered.

“Oh, even better.”

“What do you think I’m going through the trouble for, then?”

“I mean, there’s obviously some sort of plot going on. You going on about promises. And Leigh seemed to understand whatever coded messages you were sending. I don’t know. It’s not like I have that much information.”

Reinhard squinted at him. “If you think this is part of some kind of plot, then why are you continuing to participate in it?”

“I—“ Muller flushed. “If I’m keeping an eye on it, you can’t cause too much trouble.”

“Glad to hear it,” Reinhard said. “For the record, there is no plot.”

“Well, of course you’d say that.”

Reinhard shrugged. “Leigh told you to stay out of it.”

“Leigh says a lot of things.”

“And you think Leigh is involved in this hypothetical plot?”

“I think I really want to speak with him in person to figure that out.”

“Is Leigh happy with his post under Braunschweig?”

“I don’t know. Why do you ask?”

“Curiosity. I saw in the papers that Braunschweig was having a duel. Think his whole staff is going to attend that?”

Muller laughed. “I literally cannot picture Leigh attending a duel.”

“What’s it about, by the way? An argument over who killed Ludwig?”

“No, some bullshit about land rights,” Muller said, suddenly a little too blasè. “I don’t really have the details.”

“Hunh, I was almost hoping they were trying to fight out the succession struggle while the kaiser was still alive.”

“They’d have to do more than just hire professionals for that,” Muller said. “The results of duels are legally binding, but I don’t think that would apply when talking about the person who then becomes the law.” He gesticulated with his plate again.

“It’s not a civilized system,” Reinhard said. “Bloodsports over a patch of land.”

“Hey,” Muller said, “It’s better than Braunschweig taking his section of the fleet, and Littenheim taking his, and having them fight for real over whatever piece of dirt.”

“Are you following the Capstrop thing?” Reinhard asked, changing the topic, in order to disguise any incriminating interest in the subject.

“Following it, sure,” Muller said. “Doesn’t have anything to do with me, though.”

“It might.”

“Says who?”

“When the kaiser eventually decides to send the fleet in, Capstrop is probably going to run.”

“No, he won’t,” Muller said. “And the prime minister is going to exhaust every possible diplomatic avenue before they dispatch the fleet.”

“Clearly whatever passes for noble diplomacy failed a long time ago, in this case.”

“Yeah, well, Capstrop has some Phezzani tech protecting his planet. He thinks he’s safe, and so does the kaiser.”

“A tool is only as useful as the hand holding it is talented.”

“You sound like Leigh.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Reinhard said. “But regardless, if Capstrop does run here—“

“Are we talking official business now?”

“No, you’re getting my opinion.”

“Your professional one?”

Reinhard smiled, but did not answer the question.

“Okay, what’s your opinion?”

“I, personally, do not want him in the Alliance,” Reinhard said. “Take that as you will.”

“And you have the power to make that policy?”

“Well, Muller, you know that the avowed policy of the Alliance is to welcome all refugees.”

Muller made a face.

“But things don’t always go according to avowed policy,” Reinhard said. “And sometimes things happen on Phezzan that no one can predict.”

“Yeah, that’s the truest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“So, if the Empire should happen to catch someone before they make it across the border, well, we can consider that still very fair.”

“Alright, alright,” Muller said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Excellent.” Reinhard put down his plate on the coffee table. “Then I’ll consider us even for the night. Thank you very much for the dinner.”

“Oh, you’re going?” Muller seemed surprised.

“As you said, we are still enemies.”

Reinhard reported to Blackwell’s office the next afternoon, a folded newspaper tucked under his arm, this time one of the Phezzani ones.

“What’s the urgent issue, Lieutenant Commander?” Blackwell asked.

Without speaking, Reinhard laid the newspaper out on the desk, open to the sports section, where a full color photograph of two duellists with swords took up a majority of the page. “Braunschweig victorious in duel with Littenheim,” the headline read.

“The Empire knows about Cahokia,” Reinhard said. “I think we need to start preparing, if we want to hold on to that planet.”

Blackwell grimaced. “I hate that I said I would give your wild speculations due consideration. Explain your theory.”

Reinhard did, leaving out everything about his conversation with Muller. “Neither of them have duelled in years,” Reinhard said. “This is more than a personal insult. It’s clearly hugely important to them, but the reason that they’re dueling isn’t listed anywhere, and there could only be a few reasons for that.”

“It’s not that one of their daughters got knocked up by one of the other’s cousins? Come on, Müsel, there’s plenty of reasons for nobles to want to shoot each other. They’ve all got blood feuds going back centuries.”

“This was specifically the two heads of the families going after each other. That’s huge. It’s not just a scandal, and if it was a scandal, there would be no way it would be staying out of the papers.”

“And what do you want me to do about it, Müsel? Even if you are right, which, I’ll give you, you. might be.”

“If Braunschweig starts moving his personal section of the fleet around, we should be ready to move.”

“We’re already ready to move,” Blackwell said. “Having a fleet waiting within a few days' travel of the corridor was already part of the plan.”

“Days travel is a long time,” Reinhard said. “Especially when Iserlohn is right there.”

“You know we can’t move them any closer. And even if we could, that’s not a move I have authority to make.”

“So, we’re just supposed to sit on our hands about this?”

“Yes.”

Reinhard scowled.

“I know you’re worried about your sister, but—“

“If the Empire already knows about Cahokia, then we’ve lost any advantage of secrecy,” Reinhard said. “We should send in a fleet now, so that we don’t lose the whole planet.”

“You believe they know about Cahokia. You’ve convinced me about sixty percent. But we need more concrete evidence, and we’re not going to get it until ships start moving.”

“By then it will be too late!”

“I’m sure the Rosenritter can hold out for a few days, for reinforcements.”

“I think we should at least prepare. Send a message to the fleet that’s on standby.”

“I’ll pass your thoughts along,” Blackwell said finally. “But we can’t start moving fleets based on every rumor that comes off Phezzan.”

Reinhard scowled. “What fleet is on standby?”

“The sixth, right now,” Blackwell said.

“May I write a message to Lieutenant Commander Greenhill, sir?”

“You hardly need permission to write to your girlfriend,” Blackwell said. “But let me read it, and I’ll make sure it goes through the right channels.”

“Thank you, sir,” Reinhard said.