Happy New Year. Yeah, sure. Buy precious metals: silver and lead. In the meantime, I am beginning book #19: my third short story collection. Especially after my last three novels, there are many, many threads which need to be tied off. One of which is Miss Colour Jansen of Maine, Northern Federation, who Aurie made off with in Regent and we see now and again in Ice Inundation Intelligence. I threw some words at the wall between Christmas and New Years to give her closure, and that’s what we’ll see this week.

After that, I really need to find out what the hell happened in Broken Child, a story in Imperial Entanglements. I’ve seen resentment about Aurie being Fussy’s successor, and I’ve a few other things buzzing in the back of my mind, as well.

My objective is to have all the shorts done by Ash Wednesday. As I’m sure my copyeditor is giving up booze for Lent, he can bill me after Easter. That leaves me the task of one more novel, to be written, edited, cover, published, by June, just in time for Ximaginarium. I can do that.

Enjoy my content? Buy me a beer!

“And that, gentlemen, is about all I can tell you, at least for the first part,” Colour Jansen said to the three Executive Members of the Northern Federation Governing Council in a closed-door session.

“Isn’t that enough?” Dwight Lochnar, at nearly seventy, senior of the three there.  He looked left and right.  “I’d like to hear you fellows’ thoughts before we go farther.”

“So that young gal who showed up at our border with an army ended up running their country for three months, nearly starting a war with Texas and Canada at the same time, before giving you a pat on the shoulder and sending you home?” Tann Marx, to Lochnar’s left, asked, summing up much of what Jansen had said over the past hour.  “And in that time, their Empress Faustina and one of her sons were missing on Mars?”

“And, not to be rude Miss Jansen,” Gage Hill said from the other side, “you obviously left a lot out.  It seems you were very much in the regent’s confidence – we all saw the pictures with you and her at several public events – but I’m hoping this isn’t some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, where you forget where your loyalty lies.”

“Councilman Hill,” Colour tried to smile and ignore the slight, “never once by word or act did I compromise my home here in Maine and the Northern Federation.  While not a scientist or engineer, I was allowed to see things that you would only call science fiction or the product of the imagination of a woman gone mad.  Things which now have your associate, my nephew, Filk Jansen, and his small diplomatic team, at one of the imperium’s lunar colonies.”

“It was the Council’s decision to have that second plebiscite, making a formal treaty of Friend and Ally with them,” she continued but with an edge to her voice.  “And just in time!  The Canadian government collapsed right after.  Without the military potential of the imperium we’d likely be occupied by our northern friends right now.”

“But wasn’t that collapse precipitated by your southern friends and their Russian allies, occupying central and western Canada,” Hill pressed, determined to be trouble.

“The Canadians could not even get to their former provinces without going through the old Upper Midwest first, such is the ice and snow.  Ice and snow I have seen with my own eyes, Councilman,” she retorted.  “And, the small prisoner extraction you refer to was to retrieve a personal friend of the regent.”

She dropped her eyes and shuddered at her memories of the last quarter year.  Head back up, she looked at all three of them in turn.

“The Hartmann family is…I won’t sugarcoat it:  they are nuts about personal loyalty.  Had that Canadian officer, Eloise Patel, been executed, I have no doubt most of Ontario would be irradiated craters right now.”

“So maybe, Gage,” Marx laughed, “maybe you might ease up on Miss Jansen here before we suffer the same.”

“To wrap this up for today,” Lochnar raised his voice before someone said something stupid.  “We appreciate all you have done for your – our – country.  I suspect you have had to walk a very narrow line of that loyalty you mentioned.  With some of the things we are hearing from Montreal and Québec City, as well as our friends in the Maritime Provinces, we’ll have more to discuss tomorrow.  Ten o’clock, Miss Jansen?”

“That’s fine.” She stood and stretched.  “Now, I just want to get something to eat and sleep in my own bed for the first time in what seems like forever.”

The three men also stood and shook her hand.  To his credit, Hill muttered an apology ending with “…it’s just been hectic with all these changes.”

Walking out of the building housing the Council Chambers, she noted the sun low on the western horizon as she walked south, away from the Androscoggin River.  Snow swirled about her in the October air, accumulating on the street and sidewalk to nearly half a foot.

A sign on her right caught her eye:  Sere Punjab Restaurant.  After all that time with Miss Patel, I guess this isn’t a coincidence?  Watching Aurelia rewrite that woman’s mind has me paranoid as to what she might have done to me.  That is just one of the things I don’t think I can tell those three men:  altered minds, some girl they call a prophet of God, time travel for goodness sake!  How did all this happen to me?

Pausing just inside to let her eyes adjust to the dark and thinking how her young, impulsive friend would laugh at her for that, a man with South Indian features stepped to her and asked if she wanted a table or the counter.  After her meeting, Colour preferred to be alone.

Not seeing anything like a bar – so I bet Eloise would hate this place – she ordered some Darjeeling tea and reviewed the menu.  While the smell of unfamiliar spices was a riot to her nose, the seafood Masala looked interesting, with all of the fish sourced just a few miles east, from the Atlantic.  After all that time on legionary rations and then catfish, I’d like something from home.

Waiting for her tea, she looked around.  Nice enough place.  I should get out more.  Now that I’ve “seen the world,” and been off of it, I think I deserve that.  One thing surprised her:  it seemed smoking was allowed at the counter.  There were what appeared to be three unattached men and two couples.  Doesn’t that ruin the taste of the food?  The man at the end, closest to her, had glanced up when she came in and now was one step away from staring rudely.  After putting up with a demi-human Regent, she stared right back.

“Got a problem?” she asked.

“Non.  No,” he replied in a thick Quebecois accent.  For someone in his late forties, he obviously did a lot of work outdoors.  Rugged, but in a handsome way.  “Yet, lovely miss, you remind me of someone I saw some months ago.  Elegant.”

Quebec is de facto independent now, she thought, so why is he down here?  Politics?  Wait.  He does look just a little familiar…

The waiter brought her tea and took her order.

“Are you from Canso?  In Nova Scotia?” she asked.

“Ah, your older sister must have told you!” he smiled, turning about on the stool.  “I am Loup Ypres, electrician, among other things, and met her and her friend backpacking up there.  Your sister’s friend got a friend of mine into much trouble.”

Good Lord, it’s one of the guys from the table where Jimmy was when Aurie and I walked into Val’s.  But what’s this “sister” talk?  She stood and took the few steps to him, hand out.

“I am Colour Jansen, a local here.  And, Mister Ypres, that was me.  I have no older sister.”

He stood, too, just a fraction shorter than her, and took her hand.

“Impossible!” he said a trifle too loud.  “I recall her very well, catching my eye as she did.  Perhaps my age, but you could be fifteen years younger!  She was very elegant, so there is no reason to lie, Miss Jansen.”

Older from her friend Aurelia, Colour recalled her lesson about Aurie’s mother.  She’s a made thing, Henge is.  Made from nanomaterials and fusion fire, ‘though I think “diamond dust and star fire” sounds better.  Those nanites – and I have some of them, too – are designed to constantly regenerate.  Thing is, they shed off just like human skin.  So, when she touched you, you’re sort of infected.  Don’t make that look!  I bet you will look ten or twenty years younger in the morning!

Over the next two months, Colour had looked at the mirror in the mornings and seen it for herself.  At fifty-two, I looked a little young for that age, having been barren.  But she was right.  I was a spring chicken once it was time to come back home.

“Mister Ypres?” she said, now smiling.  “I swear that was me, sitting right across from my friend who I’m sure you’ve seen in the news?  How about you join me at my table and I tell you a story?  A true story.”

“I would be delighted!” he smiled right back, picking up his half-empty plate.  “And it’s Loup, please.”

“And I’m Colour.”

After dinner, with a “Yes, Loup, I’ll be back to talk to the Council tomorrow.  Perhaps a later lunch?” Colour returned to the red brick building just north.  There was a stable to the west where her borrowed mare was kept out of the elements and reasonably warm.  Blanket off and saddle on, she rode west in the twilight, past the old highway, then northwest along Durham Road.  Her small house was just ahead down a gravel path to her left.

Aurelia said it would be about three to four days before she got her own horse back, who had been taken care of at the legionary fortress outside of Albany, Hudson Province (Provisional), hence her borrowed new friend.  At a trot in the road condition, she thought about her dinner.  And Loup.

“At first, he didn’t want to believe me,” she said to the swirling snow, “but after admitting that, yes, they had followed what had happened to their young friend and co-worker, he had no choice but to.”

“Which led to more surprises.  ‘Jimmy is that girl’s husband?  In the imperial family?’” More laughter to the snow followed by a sigh.  “I noted no wedding band, but seeing me look at his hand, he waved it in the air, telling me of his companion of fifteen years and how she died from some cancer a few years ago.  Sad.”

“I wonder if Aurie’s father could have saved her?” she mused.  “Those people are capable of miracles.”

And since he volunteered that about himself, I told him I’d been divorced a lifetime ago, for barrenness.

Horse secure, watered, fed, she almost broke her nose at the rear door.  “It’s never locked!  This was Filk’s doing.”  Not one to carry keys, it took her a minute, starting to shiver, to recall where she’d hidden it.  She let herself into the mudroom which led to the single bathroom.

“I cannot believe how thin my blood is now.  I was too long in the south.”  Colour twisted the knob for the light, which came on.  “There’s still electricity, so I guess my nephew paid the bill.  He’s finally growing up.”

She passed through her bedroom to the single main room.  Too tired and late to bring in wood and start a fire, she pulled a space heater off the shelf, set it next to the old couch, and plugged it in.  With it making a happy purr, she went to the kitchen and reached past the wine bottles for the Frozen River Vodka and poured some into a tumbler.

A sip and a cough – how does Eloise drink like she does? – before sitting down close to the heater.  Another, slightly larger mouthful, and she leaned back.

“Loup and I said nothing about politics, but he, obviously, knows more about what I’ve been up to than I do him.”  Cold enough inside, her breath made little clouds.  “I wonder why he’s down here?  He did say that from the troubles in Ottawa, there were no planned launches from their little spaceport.  Maybe he’s looking for work?  Hmmm.”

She thought of Aurie’s oath to build one of their high-speed rail lines, the one where the train floats on air, up this way.  That’s got to be something an electrician could do.  Her hand strayed to her satchel and the small tablet inside, gifted to her by her friend.

“No.  It’s late and I know nothing about that man,” she said with the glass at her lips.  “We can talk more at lunch, tomorrow.  It is so cold in here!”  She tossed the rest back and went to bed.