SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
Twenty-one days after departing Torch, Witch Maiden came over the hyper wall into the Rondelay system, though to those aboard, only seventeen days had passed. The captain had spent the free time between the two systems studying the Solarian Merchant code. It was convoluted, and boiled down to a Solarian company was right, and any Verge or Fringe system that said otherwise was wrong. She went through the code from one end to the other, and every regulation pretty much said a Core World company could do whatever they damn well pleased if they dealt with another system outside the Core; even in OFS protectorates in a lot of cases.
She had known it was bad, but this was absurd. In fact if a core system wanted to ship something into the Manticore system, they legally could have asked OFS to force Manticore to accept the goods, even if Manticore didn't want it. Of course logic did interfere. With dreadnoughts and super dreadnoughts in their fleet, no OFS Admiral commanding a battlecruiser squadron would have been that stupid. But if they had no such ships...
She was reminded of old Earth history. In the 19th century CE when the British East India Company had discovered that tobacco laced with opium was highly addictive, they had made money hand over fist by taking a product that was pretty much banned in Europe and the old United States, and dumped the lion's share of it in the old Chinese Empire. When the Chinese resisted, the Opium Wars began.
The first war on addictive drugs had been fought not to stop the trade, but to force another nation to accept it. Captains of the same company, in violation of their own laws had transported tons of it into Britain and the New World, merely smuggling it in as personal goods rather than doing so openly.
She watched as the recon drones went out. They needed to keep track of the local OFS forces. None of these systems were supposed to have anything larger than a battlecruiser, so if they saw ships of the wall, or more battlecruisers than expected, they could expect that it was the force they were looking for.
"Skipper, we have a Bridgeport class light cruiser coming toward us from in system, distance 2.5 million kilometers, running at 80% of maximum, now up to 1400 KPS." Abigail Carruthers reported. Beside her, Midshipman Krueger was plotting the ship's course. He whispered, the Ensign leaning toward him. "She's coming in hot. Broadside weapons run out, but no radar or lidar as yet- wait one, both coming up now."
Rebecca looked at her tactical plot. Since the transponder read as Golden Dragon of Dragon Lines of Beijing, a Core World, she was curious. If she had come in as RMMS Witch Maiden, it would have made some sense. But as she was supposed to be a Sollie flagged ship... "Tactical, go to alert three. Man every other broadside mount in both broadsides. Prep only."
"Understood." The young woman tapped the loudspeakers. "All hands go to Alert condition three. Gunnery crews, man every other grazer. Do not, I repeat, do not open gunports or run out." Rebecca applauded the girl's understanding. Running out the guns would be a declaration of hostile intent, just as the cruiser's ostentious display most certainly was. Opening the gunports could be read by their radar as well, telling the Sollie tactical officer that she was armed. While any smart Sollie merchant ship that went into the Verge would be armed, only an idiot challenged a Sollie ship in a Sollies system. What she had ordered was not unlike a policeman making sure his holster was unsnapped before entering a rowdy bar.
"Captain, we're being hailed by the SLN Cruiser Markendale. They are ordering us to heave to, and prepare to be boarded."
Rebecca's eyes narrowed. "Put them on, Saya."
The screen came up. In the corner was a time delay for the distance, seven seconds. The man looked at her. "SLMS Golden Dragon, this is Captain Ramierez of SLNS Markendale. You are ordered to heave to, and prepare to be boarded."
"May I ask why?" She asked. "We are a new ship to this run, but our line has stopped here before." She knew, since the shipping line was actually an Andermani cover operation, that all legitimate ships of the line had been withdrawn as of three months ago.
"Your last port of call was the Congo system. All pharmeceuticals from Torch have been declared illegal substances, and are to be seized upon arrival."
Rebecca touched the mute key, and brought up the Merchant Code. She had read something there... She didn't let the smile she felt touch her as she began inputting data. Then she hit the mute again. "Certainly, captain. Sending data now."
Fourteen seconds later the man snarled. "I didn't tell you to send..." He stared at the screen for almost two and a half minutes, first paling, then flushing so red she worried he'd have a heart attack. "You're expecting me to sign this garbage?"
She pretended to be surprised. "Captain under the Solarian Mechant Code, Section fourteen, Seizure of contraband, paragraph seven, sub paragraph four, an officer of a system defense force cannot seize anything not in the previous standard listing of contraband without first notifying the captain of the Solarian vessel that it has been declared contraband, or by specifying that the cargo in question is hazardous under present conditions. Under sub paragraph five, if a League Naval officer gives such a command to a Solarian flagged vessel, he must state, in writing, the reason for the cargoes contraband status, with properly annotated regulations from the code for that determination, and sign the waiver of liability as the local representative."
The man was staring at her, sputtering. "I'm not some Verge neobarb in a rowboat, captain. I am a representative of the League itself! I will not sign this!"
"I am sorry, captain, under sub paragraph six, annotated in 1712, an OFS official is not allowed to seize any articles not previously declared contraband without following through with this section in writing as any other such customs officialis in the Verge or Shell must." She cocked her head. "The Commercial Code is clear, sir. If you do not sign the document I have sent, I am within my rights as commanding officer of a ship of a Registered Core system transtellar shipping line, to refuse your order and depart. Under the same paragraph, you can order me from the system, but I am not required to either hand over any cargo or heave to for boarding. As soon as you have signed the document I have sent; removing liability for failure to deliver cargo already consigned to yet other such lines, I will gladly heave to as ordered."
He glared at her, then turned with his own end muted to talk to someone else. Then he looked down, probably at a screen which had the same data she was looking at. He glared at her, furious, then the screen went blank. The cruiser turned from her approach. "Signal from the cruiser. As of this date, Pharmeceuticals from the Congo system have been declared contraband. We are directed to dock, offload, hand the pharmeceuticals off to the Dragon Lines factor, and begin picking up cargo." She looked up, eyes twinkling. "We are also reminded to notate this stricture in our logs and transmit it to all Solarian vessels we meet. And to remember not to transport future cargoes from the same source."
"That just means we would transport other medicines to Erewhon, the pharmeceutical houses there will then repackage it as Erewhon processed, then deliver it as normal." Rebecca gave her a slow wink. Nothing interferes with profit in the League."
The young woman grinned. "Remind me to never play poker with you, skipper."
"Well as Orwell said, all animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others." The bridge crew chuckled. "Maintain course to turnover, helm. Saya, Contact Rondelay Station, signal for the Dragon Lines representative."
"Yes, ma'am."
When they arrived, Rebecca went onto the station as her crew began offloading the cargo.
She carried a 'ready bag' Os had created for her for this occasion. During the original Age of Exploration on Old Terra, the captain of a ship was usually not merely a hired hand; he was also a partner in the venture. While King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had been recorded as the ones who paid for the first expedition to the New World, they had been just the senior partners of a hundred or more venture capitalists. Christopho Columbo, better know as Columbus had been the junior partner who also happened to be a ship's captain.
But what history did not record was that pretty much every officer who sailed with him were also junior partners, and they had picked up their own personal store of treasure to sell when they returned. That ancient process had returned with a vengeance when man got into space. Of the entire crew only thirty-five; five officer and thirty of the one thousand plus were allowed access to the station in Rondelay. The captain had been draconian in her selection, and every one of the ratings would have been a smuggler back home.
It wasn't punitive, only logical. If a ship the size of Witch Maiden were to be seen as having more than that, alarms would have sounded in the OFS. A Voyager didn't need more than 35 crewmen to operate. A few more, maybe twenty, could be explained as the rare merchant ship that also offered spaces for transport to another system. Or a 'line' ship offering space to others of that line that had to be transported. But once you got beyond that number, there were only two usual reasons to have more than fifty aboard; either you were a pirate, or a privateer.
But a crew for 'Golden Dragon' had to be seen, or there was no logical reason to even stop here. It wasn't like her cargo could offload or load itself. So the ratings that had been chosen became her 'crew' and had canvassed the rest for anything worth selling to the Sollies. Recent holo recordings made in Beowulf or Manticore, trinkets from the Andermani empire or Silesia, souveniers taken from prizes during the war that just ended, or from the Republican crew that had been aboard. All something a crew could have picked up and carried 'off the books' to sell for themselves.
Traveling from the dock space to the Corporate office was an education. The news was both good and bad for Torch. While the League officially applauded the actions of the Torches in freeing their compatriots, Mesa had leaned on all of their suborned personnel on the League's Northeastern frontier. She received instructions to deliver other medical cargo from Torch in the Maya sector, where Mesa didn't have such a hold. There were goods that could be shipped into the sectors they were investigating, so it would only slow the investigation down. There was an imposing list of what could not be transported to Torch she also received.
The list began with weapons, obviously, but by the end of the thirty page list, it had become ridiculous. She understood why they would ban nitrogen based fertilizer because it could be used in the manufacture of explosives. (As if the planet needed fertilizer. They joked on Torch that when you planted a seed, you had to step back smartly so the plant wouldn't knock you on your ass as it grew) The same with fuel oils for the same reason. But personal electronics? Weather sats? Genetic scanning equipment needed because of 'birth defects' caused by Mesa's genetic manipulation? Children's toys? Baby clothes?
It pretty much boiled down to 'if they want it, they can't have it'. That had never stopped Sollie companies from violating Solarian law, of course. If it was something they could profit on, a lot of Solarian Transtellars only cared about what the profit was, not something so unimportant as mere law. Of course a lot of the transtellars couldn't trade with Torch even then. Queen Berry's government had a simple litmus test for any transtellar that came a knockin'.
When a Sollie ship from a registered transtellar came over the hyper limit for the first time, the picket ships would pass across a list of 'Actions Proscribed by Local Authority'. Most ignored it. Every little system this far from the Core of the League had things they didn't want you to do, or things they didn't want in their systems. But the one that sent most transtellars packing was also the first:
'Dealing with Mesa, Manpower Inc, or their subsidiaries in any of the following fields'. With a list of everything from chemical engineering, ship construction, and on to cloning, 'is grounds for a permenant ban'. For example there were four building yards that built the outer 'vanilla' hull, and two that did the internal modification from cargo vessel to slave transport. That last list alone had seventeen lines, then as if being helpful, a list of every subsidiary of the planet or corporation was appended, along with a listing of every Solarian Transtellar in violation. The primary advantages of having both Jeremy X, ex-terrorist and Secretary of War for the emerging nation, and Ruth Winton assisted by Anton Zilwicki as head of local intelligence was that the list of transtellars banned from any commerce with the system was very, very thorough.
Ruderick Corporation of Britain, Old Terra, which owned Stargate shipping lines had everything they had done since Mesa was originally settled, over six centuries of licensing new processes invented in Beowulf which they then had secretly transferred illegally to Mesa. Silkind Pharmeceutical of Singapore, Old Terra, had been almost as bad.
Oh there had been bluster, whining, even threats to contact the Office of Frontier Security to put down the 'uppity' locals. However it was usually before they reached the fifth article...
'Any corporation, shipping line or ship that has requested OFS assistance in enforcing negotiations with an unalligned polity, or used the OFS to assure market share'. That list pretty much banned 40% of the Solarian transtellars right off the bat. Between the two articles, something like 70% of Solarian flagged shipping was effectively banned. The addition 'any threats by an as yet allowed transtellar corporation, shipping line or ship are grounds for a unilateral ban of one T century'.
Just to drive the stake in their hearts even deeper, the last article of that document was a listing of the 'Torch Trade Alliance', where the polities that had signed and agreed wholeheartedly with this local ban started with The Star Kingdom of Manticore, The Republic of Haven, Erewhon, Beowulf, and ominously, Gail Bronson, the acting Lieutenant Governor of Maya sector. All of whom were willing to enforce it with all force necessary.
So threats would not work. A suborned officer in one of the other nearby sectors might consider forcing it, but having his ships seized by another OFS Sector, then returned by that Sector with the admonition of 'hands off' worked like a cross with a vampire. After all, every sweetheart deal OFS personnel had forced over the centuries depended on their counterparts in other sectors not pissing in the same pool.
While something like 70 percent of what a small colony needed would be cheaper if shipped from a Solarian source, even an OFS Protectorate sector where they were still centuries behind the Core, the restrictions meant it was sometimes faster to order it from Beowulf, two and a half weeks away, rather than even the Maya Sector, which was less than two weeks distant.
On the way back, she stopped at the local customs office. Port Commander Thiokol stood as she entered the office, and shook her hand. then asked if there was anything she had brought personally to sell. She opened the bag, and drew out flasks of Fusion Tech Dollaryde's works. Os had saved two and three liter flasks of everything he had made during the two voyages he had made with her. One by one, the man had tried them, and before the fifth (Capwell) he was asking who was brewing them, and where.
Rebecca allowed that a man in the Manticore system had started a new brewery on Gryphon, and when Thiokol reached the Inkululeko barleywine, the official, in violation of Sollie law; but well within the baksheesh mentality of the OFS, was trying to set up a method of shipping in the brews with himself as the local agent. Rebecca allowed that it might be possible, but would have to arrange shipping from the Manticore system. Every drop of her samples was taken by the man to use to convince others to back him in selling it inside the League. As she returned to the ship, she considered how much money Dollaryde would be making in a year.
It wasn't staples machinery or food stuffs that made up the lion share of the money made in shipping from one planet to another. It was luxury goods. In the 15th century CE, the Portuguese had built an empire shipping pepper and other spices to Europe, where it was literally worth it's weight in gold. Tobacco, tea, coffee had all been luxury items worth a lot of money, and the entire British Empire had been funded for two centuries because of tea and Opium from the Far East.
A new beverage would sell well, and be light enough that a ship her own size could make enough in one voyage to set her crew up for life. As the captain of a Manticoran warship, she was appalled by it. As the woman that had gifted the man and his wives with the brewery, and knowing how much her people back home would make off it, she wanted to carol it out throughout the station.
Less than ten hours later, loaded with cargo technically bound for Erewhon, but actually for Torch, Witch Maiden set out.
A Royal Patron
Forty-five days after departing, Witch Maiden came over the hyper wall returning. The Wichita picket had been smaller than anticipated; a squadron of light cruisers and a flotilla of destroyers had been in system, and according to the Dragon line agent, the entire sector only had an additional flotilla of destroyers and two divisions of four battlecruisers. Their connections in the other fourteen systems had reported nothing new added to the deployed ships. Rebecca had chosen the closest and more likely target for herself, neither of her consorts would be back yet.
"Captain? Signal from the station."
"Put it up."
"It's not for us, skipper." Gill turned. "Or at least for us officially. Actually it's a royal request for the Dollarydes to meet the Queen on a business manner."
Rebecca turned the command chair. "Queen Berry wants to see them?"
"That's what they're telling me, ma'am."
"I have to head down with the take from Wichita. Have Ensign Kyle contact the Navy for stores. I know Dollaryde's latest is probably ready, so check with medical. With all of that done, tell him and the twins to prepare to go to Beacon in their dress uniforms." She considered. "Contact Lieutenant Huggins through the Hermes net. Get a report on the situation at the wormhole. We should be able to gather our chicks by now. Number One, you have the conn."
Shuttles blossomed from the ship as they approached orbit. The orbital traffic was heavy. The ships captured in the raid were now carrying transponders as TRMV, with names of abolitionists from centuries of Old Earth history from the Romans onward. The captured Angel Star renamed Torch of Freedom took up one portion of the orbital station. She would be leaving on her maiden voyage in a few weeks. Since the Solarian League had delivered legal papers saying the seizure of all of those ships was illegal without proper adjudication before a Solarian prize court, they would not be heading into the League any time soon.
That had not stopped the liner from being readied, however. The newly incorporated Freedom Lines was almost ready to go. With a capacity of 5,000 passengers, and 750 crewmen, they would be leaving light; only her passengers, the 500 member passenger staff, and fifty of the 250 that would be her operational crew. Thanks to the slaves rescued from Good Times, Torch of Freedom was fully staffed on the service side with the most attractive service crew in space, and had enough crew to run to Erewhon to fill out the ship's crew. Scheduled to run from Torch to Erewhon, then on to Manticore and then to the Anderman Empire and Silesia, she would be followed by others, assuming Torch's rebel front; read the Audubon Ballroom operatives still undercover in the League, could spot the other five liners of the Angel Line, and arrange their capture.
The lion's share of her passengers this first trip however would be the crew of one of the 'Jeep' carriers as yet undecided. Some of them were to fill in on the operational side until they could pick up more crew in Erewhon.
Rebecca stood beside the cutter, waiting for the Dollarydes. She had already heard that by the time the ship set out again, this time taking the Warsaw run, the local LACs would have enough worked up to take over watching the wormhole. There had been another attempt to pass through it without permission; this time a Destroyer. It had come over the wall, sat for five minutes, and had hypered out before they could fire. The LACs had found and destroyed over two dozen recon drones, and had captured two.
Francis and the twins, all in dress uniform came in as a six legged hugging mass. They froze when they saw the captain, snapping to and saluting, but she merely waved toward her forehead, then waved them aboard. As she strapped in, Dollaryde looked at the twins, then at her before passing over a pad. "I just sampled my latest. I found out they have a local analog for cinnamon bark here, and when I tasted it, I asked Yeoman Pankowski to draw this."
Rebecca took the pad. Pankowski had done the nose art for the squadron, and her own ship, a young woman, dressed in a robe that exposed both legs and arms, one hand outstretched in claws toward the viewer, the other at shoulder's height with a ball of fire in her palm. When the Captains of the other two witches had seen it, they had talked him into doing a seal for them as well. Witch Maiden's had a girl just at the point of changing from girl to woman; around seventeen pre-prolong. She had seen holos of the new ones.
Witch Bride had the same woman a few years along, perhaps early twenties. A Bride in a fiery red bridal gown, a bouquet of blood red roses in one hand, the other held before her with flames dancing from her fingertips, and an expression that let you know who would be in charge on the wedding night. Her Motto was 'You will bow before me'.
Witch Queen had the same woman, now looking as if she were in her early forties. She was on a throne in a black gown split up either side that fell between her legs. Her top was a sheath that covered her torso, but plunged to below her navel revealing the inner slopes of full breasts. Her crown was black with silver thorns that arched above her hair, with the hair still falling to below her shoulders. In the left hand was a scepter, in the right a scroll. Both were limned in the same fire seen in the other seals. Her expression was forbidding. This motto read 'Do not stand in my way'.
Rebecca brought up the new drawing. It was of the same three stages of the woman in the seals. They were gathered around what looked like a waist high cauldron, all in the same garb as if three models had merely been moved from one set to another without changing clothes. The youngest held a scroll as if reading a recipe. The bride had a bowl in one hand, the other sprinkling glittering dust into the vessel. The eldest was stirring with one hand, while sipping from a small saucer to test their potion. Beneath it was a logo:
Hexengebräu
"Witch's brew?" She asked after mentally translating from German. Instead of answering, Fengniao held out a two liter flask. "When we got the summons, Unser gatte," she motioned to Dollaryde, "wanted to show Queen Berry what else can be made from here."
Rebecca took the flask, opened it, and sipped. It was almost as potent as the Inkululeko barleywine, with an almost fiery taste like cinnamon on steroids.
"Oh, I think she'll like that."
The cutter dropped to Beacon landing field, and they moved into the aircar sent to pick them up. The same woman with her tree cat met them, and immediately pointed at Dollaryde. "You're the one who used Spider-Wasp honey to make beer? How did it come out?"
"We left a pony keg of it for the Queen." Rebecca commented.
"That was it? Using local honey? We've barely found a way to safely harvest it!"
"It's just, you know, honey." Rebecca commented.
The woman looked at her strangely Her treecat tapped her head, and she looked up. "You're right, Sammie. She doesn't know how impossible that has been up until now." As they walked, she explained.
Insects, primarily bees and ants harvest liquid nourishment from flowers, the bees by sipping the nectar which they processed in the own bodies into honey. Ants did it by raising and herding aphids and the assorted leafhoppers, which drink the sap of plants, and upon a tapping command on their abdomens, exude the sweet nectar for their 'herdmen' to carry back to the nest. The same was basically true on every planet humans had settled on, either they brought the bees for honey, or found analog insects that did the same thing.
The local analog, named the Spider-wasp because they had eight legs and two sets of wings, were limited to a small island chain more than a thousand kilometers from the nearest land mass.
The original discoverer of the insect had immediately discovered that they were highly aggressive even compared to the other wildlife of the planet, which is sort of like saying piranha schools are a bit peckish. Where the 'Killer Bee' of the Western Hemisphere need to inflict fifty or more stings to kill the average adult human, spider-wasps could do the same with as little as five, and since they had a smooth stinger like the wasp of old Earth, only one insect was needed for that lethal dosage.
They also were incredibly persistent; chasing any threat for as much as fifteen kilometers, though that didn't mean they knew for sure what distance was safe; none of the islands in the chain were more than ten kilometers across. Robots had been sent in and brought out the corpse of the 'discoverer' along with samples of the insects and the 'honey' collected for analysis. These electronic minions had survived less than an hour before the insects had forced gaps large enough to crawl inside and short them out.
Just to be safe, they had used a standard open cage used for taking small animal samples. Instead of floating it up to an aircar, they took it straight up initially to thirty thousand meters, where anything living should have suffocated. Five of them had still been alive on camera, and they took it up to low orbit instead where the last of them finally died. It was good that they had.
They used low level observation RPVs to check the half dozen islands after that. That was when even the Mesan scientist became alarmed. Except for the spider-wasp, no other animal even down to the smallest insects lived on the islands. Everything else had been killed by the spider-wasps.
The honey, with a unique flavor in each sample due to the different plants on each island, was superb; and they saw a market for it immediately. Being who they were, Manpower had considered robots too expensive to waste in gathering it after getting samples from each island. So they had used slaves in armored marine skin suits to collect it. But they didn't dare to chance the spread of such a danger to where their own thin skins were.
The slaves would go out, hack into the closest nest, and under attack from the moment they arrived, carry the combs of honey into the small shuttles they had come in. There it was packaged in simple wrapping film, and they worked until the shuttle was full, having been told that another would be sent to pick them up. However that was a lie. The shuttles would lift into orbit, and the slaves would be left to die.
It wasn't pretty, and some of the most shocking records gained when the slaves had captured Torch had been of those forlorn slaves. Some had tried to escape by swimming, but RPVs had recorded their failed attempts. After all, there were voracious animals in the sea that considered a man a nice snack. Some made it as far as ten or fifteen kilometers without being eaten, but when they ran out of air, they would have to open their helmets, and the spider-wasps that still pursued would fly into the suit itself, still stinging as they sank out of sight. If they stayed on the islands, it was a choice between merely suffocating in the suits when they ran out of air, open the helmet and die, or wait for the swarms covering you to find the gaps in the armor plates, because their stings could penetrate a standard skinny.
Rebecca had been appalled to discover that those records had vocal tracks not only of the slaves ordeal, but of the people in the command center for the evolution. Hearing someone calmly betting on which one would die first even before landing was almost as bad as the 'play by play' as one by one, the remaining people died. Or the recordings of the slaves as they suffocated or were stung to death.
The suggestion that they could transplant them to the nearest continent in a bio containment facility was immediately shot down, and with good reason. Back in 1957 CE, the Brazilians had tried cross breeding a central African bee with an Italian variety to increase honey production. Despite every safe guard, the hybrid bees had escaped and within sixty years had taken over just about every part of the western hemisphere, stopped only where the average temperature dropped too low for them to remain viable in the winter.
A computer model assuming an accidental escape by even one pregnant queen had the entire continent overrun within as short a time; and nothing but the spider-wasp surviving. Only distance, later estimated at 250 kilometers, would stop the spread if they swarmed, and since there was no open space of water that large except for where they lived, the entire planet except for the polar regions would have been theirs and only theirs within a century.
"We finally checked the data on their temperature range, and the spider-wasps go dormant at 10 degrees Celsius. So tunnels were dug from sub oceanic caves on each island drilled by a two meter tunnel boring machine, until it was five meters from the surface and the entire internal space was sealed with acrylic sealalnt and reduced to -5 Celsius. Then smaller boring machines dug from that cave up onto the island, and artificial hives were slid up with artificial combs similar to those used by the spider-wasps themselves.
"The 'keepers' wait until the combs are full, head to the island in submersibles, cool down the caves, then cool the hives until the insects go dormant. Lower them, trade out the filled honeycombs, and put in empty ones. The crews, usually only two or three, are in skinnies that are twice as thick as normal, almost like the old suits worn in early spaceflight days climb back in the subs, and lift straight out of the atmosphere to a level 7 containment facility in orbit with the interior reduced at zero C until it arrives so we can be sure none of the insects escape." The woman finished as they entered the throne room.
Level seven! back when the top class of medical research with infectious disease was the old American CDC, no one had used anything beyond level five. It was the number of stages you had to pass through to enter or exit the area where the organism was, and each stage was separated by sprayers of progressively more lethal compounds to assure that whatever was inside could not accidentally be released. Level seven had the addition of two vacuum stages, and there was no physical connection to any other facility, so it also included an EVA
"Enough Caroline." They turned to see Berry sitting in a small conversation pit away from the throne. She was drinking a cup of tea. "Our good Professor Carlyle wants to be in the field. And I'm thinking about letting her go just to calm her down." She stood. "You are Francis Dollaryde?"
"Yes, your-"
"Please. Just Berry." Berry raised her hand. "I am going to have the most relaxed monarchy in history if it's the only thing I do in my life." She walked over, taking his hand. "The Barleywine you made; it was all local ingredients?"
"Yes, y-Berry." He handed over the flask. "So is this."
"Good." Berry walked back to the coffee table, and picked up a piece of parchment, rolling it. Then walked back. "Then as a royal command, I am giving you a patent for sale and distribution of the honey in Manticore, provided that you begin a brewery here and make more of that drink." She grinned. "Thank WEB for that; in the modern day, that means a monopoly. You control all sales through the Manticore system."
Dollaryde handed across the flask. "Maybe you should try this as well, Berry."