Beginning Part 2. And beginnings are delicate things, especially this one. We learn the story has moved on a few years. Then, from their report, that there are some odd beliefs about the Demis and Machines starting to arise. Finally, while Graf and Pai are married, there is the question of Alix. And what a question. I am going to have to tread very, very carefully here to not say or do something that is theologically or morally compromised. At least, more than it already is.

So, I being to lay out just what be going on for the rest of this part of the book. I’ll have to put it on hold once I get serious about that other project.

Enjoy my content? Buy me a beer!

“Senior Trooper Brown,” Empress Aurelia said from behind her desk, acknowledging his salute with a nod.  “And two of your team.  Your radioed report indicated you needed a moment of my precious time?”

“Yes, and thank you, Empress,” the older man, a veteran of the legions horse scouts for nearly thirty years, replied, glancing over his shoulder at the other two.  Pai bumped her shoulder to her husband.

I’ve not seen her in almost four years, since that first meeting, Graf thought, stepping up.  They had only arrived in the Paducah area of River Province an hour ago.  The empress with her constant peregrinations happened to be there and summoned them.  She has not aged a day but stories of her harsh rule percolate north and west.  Not technically in the legions, he bowed rather than saluted.

“Empress, in our long sweep from Pueblo to Cheyenne, first Pai and then I noticed unusual behavior from the locals,” he began.

“Unusual how?” she interrupted with little patience for human niceties.

“Posters, drawings on walls, even repurposed buildings,” he continued quickly.  “All about you.  You.  Running this past our troop leader, here, it was decided to report this directly and verbally only.”

“And?  So I’m popular?”

“They think you are a god,” Graf concluded.

Aurelia blinked her golden eyes.

“That’s all?  Trooper Brown?  Dismissed, thank you.” Once he was gone, she went on.  “Such things happen in a low information velocity world.  I would not worry about it.”

“There is something you should,” Pai said, coming to her husband’s side.  “You are not in isolation.  Russians here consider my mother to be a god.  On Mars, it’s a trinity of Alicia, Kira, and Aqua.  And, recently, your flanks of the former upper Midwest as well as Mexico have taken to using icons of your cousin, the angel Ildi.”

Those eyes flared gold.  The empress leaned back in her chair.

“You foresee conflict?” she asked.

“I am a Machine.  I cannot foresee anything.”

Another blink.

“A ranker of mine will take you to a ship.  But clean up, first.  I don’t want half the dust of the Great Plains tracked aboard.  In an hour you will be in Wilmington, with your other wife, Graf Winstead.” She tilted her head.  “Rather remain with me, Pai Mendro?”

“It’s Pai Winstead and I go with my husband,” she said through her now-perfected fake smile.

“I shall look into what you have told me.  We shall speak again in a few days.  Dismissed.”

“She talks crap like that just to piss people off, doesn’t she?” Graf asked as they found a space between two empty buildings of what was once a gaseous diffusion plant for uranium.  Shucking their admittedly dusty riding clothes, they tried hitting them against a wall to shake the dust and dirt out.

“These were white, once,” Pai said, hitting.  “Maybe we can actually launder them someday.  And, to your question?  Yes.  Aurelia is not Faustina.  She does, in fact, remind me of my mother, Reina.  She is ruthless and easy to anger.”

“Hmm,” was all Graf would allow, starting to put his clothes back on.  After the vision of his wife those years ago, she had insisted on white, even though it turned to brown after a day in the saddle.  “Calling Alix my wife was rather rude.”

“She is the mother of your son and daughter, with, I’m sure, many more on the way,” Pai said, also dressing.  Being an android, her appearance had not changed at all from the day she nearly fell out of the sky onto Graf.  “She obviously loves you, to accept this arrangement where she for a legal time-slice gives them up for us to adopt, making them legitimate in the eyes of the spokes of the Polar Alliance, then continues to raise them.  It’s been not quite three months since you’ve seen your children.”

“Our children,” Graf corrected, leaning down to kiss her still-dusty lips.  And “our” covers a lot of ground.

“The aerospace ships are this way,” his wife smile up at him.  “I’ve never been to Wilmington.  This will be fun.”