Editing Story:ROAD TRIP! (Warhammer High)/Part Three (section)

===The Gala===

Jake stood before his seat, watching Venus lead a small ceremony at the dinner table.  The rows of Salamander serfs, local bureaucrats, politicos and merchants, and PDF officers were standing as well, and listening to Venus race through the pleasantries and pageantry.  As she concluded, she motioned for her people to sit, and they did.  A muted buzz of conversation began as the food was brought out by servitors and serfs.  Venus was sitting at the head of the table, naturally, with nearly sixty people up and down its length, and a man Jake didn’t know at the opposite end.  He was sitting at Venus’ right hand, with the Governor at her left, and the others of their party were scattered throughout.

As they sat, the Governor, Sralah, leaned across the table, his face grave.  “Lord Seager, I must reiterate my apologies for what happened to you.  I am deeply sorry.”

“Good.  I just hope it doesn’t happen again,” Jake said.  “I was out for over a day.”

“I’m sure it won’t,” Sralah said awkwardly.

“Good.”  Jake glanced to his side to see how the man to his right was acting and aped him.

Venus’ eyes lit upon Sralah.  “Governor.  I thank you for your invitation.”  She switched languages.  “May we speak in Nocturnean?”

“I’m afraid I’m not conversational,” the Governor replied.

“Pity,” Venus said.  She switched back to Gothic.  “I wonder if my father’s messages would imply a nearing return visit on his part,” she said casually.  “I hope so.  He needs to see his people again.”

“We would be overjoyed to have our King back with us, of course, your Highness,” Sralah said.  He lifted his hands as the servitor replaced his drink.  “What are these messages?”

Venus explained.  “We send messages back to Terra every so often.  Status reports, you know.”

The Governor nodded.  His robe of office glimmered against the deep yellow and red lights of the ceremonial hall.  “I understand.  How is King Vulkan?  What is he doing on Terra?”

“His role is to induct new members of the Terran wings of the Legions,” Venus said.  “He keeps quite busy, as you’d imagine.”

“Indeed,” Sralah said.  “We tested his tank prototype on the plains of the Delta today.  Remarkable weapon.”

Venus sipped her drink, taking in the room at a glance.  It was clearly meant to accommodate the table.  The room had the exact proportions of width and length as the table itself, leaving comfortable space behind the seats.  The table itself was stone, grey marble, flecked with tiny gold quartz impurities.


“Governor, under what circumstances did Lord Trader Kimball-Carlin come to be in this system?” Jake suddenly asked.

“Oh, an accident aboard his ship,” Sralah said.  “I invited him to the dinner when he stopped in Clymene for parts.”

“I see.”  Jake tore into some bread, sensing Alex’s bitter glare on his neck.  He couldn’t tell if it was his friend’s anger he was feeling or if Alex was just resenting life itself at that point, but Jake was feeling the awkwardness.

Down the table, Alex was eating as fast as he decently could.  Freya was sitting a few chairs down on the opposite side, trying not to laugh at Alex’s discomfort.  Political Officer Haarlan, who had come down from the ship to attend the dinner for some reason – probably the tank – was chatting with Remilia, catching up.

Alex’s father, meanwhile, was busily talking shop with a number of local merchants.  Two of them looked like administrators from the local crafthalls.  Alex himself was wondering if he could make a break for it when the food was done, and the mingling part began.  For the time being, his father’s capricious sense of humor was keeping the burden of conversation off of him.  At that moment, Joseph was telling some complicated joke about how curses were pronounced on different planets, so it was working well.

Venus was going back to speaking with the governor.  “What measures are being taken against this crime wave, precisely, Governor?” she pointedly inquired.

“Well, we’ve already instructed the Enforcers to begin increasing patrol coverage in the areas below the mining tunnels,” the Governor explained.  “We’ve also begun increasing Customs presence at the ports, to prevent the smugglers from arriving in the first place.”

“And what is being done to address the rise in violence from and against Terran tourists and gangsters?” Venus asked.

“Well, short of racial profiling, there’s really not much we can do,” the Governor hedged.  “Most of them are here under legitimate visas.  We can only hope to catch them in the act and surveillance is in place to that end.”  Sralah looked pained for a moment.  “I know that doesn’t sound like enough.  Do you have any suggestions?”

“No, it doesn’t sound like enough.”  Venus’ eyes glimmered.  “I’d encourage you to confer with your counterparts from the other Sanctuaries to see what measures they’ve put in place.”

“I assure you, we have, Princess,” the Governor said.

Jake coughed.  “Er, Governor, if I may, Terra has a number of novel solutions to this problem; certainly it happens in the hives all the time.  Gangs, smuggling, attempted murder…”

The entire end of the table looked over to him.  “What do you mean, Lord Seager?” Sralah asked.

“Well, on Terra, the problem stems from the gargantuan populations of immigrants from other planets that arrive on-planet and make no attempt to integrate with the local populations,” Jake nervously explained.  The attention was discomforting.  “Of course, you know, there’s only so much you can do about that…but the way the Praetors handled it back home was to install motion-sensitive floodlights at street corners so people couldn’t hide in the shadows. Then, they installed Doppler triangulators to measure the distance of any given microphone from the sound of gunshots, and put a few million of those around.  Then they put surveillance cameras on every outdoor ATM and intersection.”

“That sounds rather invasive,” the Governor noted.

Jake shrugged.  “Welcome to the Hives.”

“Did it work?” an Enforcer officer at the table asked.

“It did.  Violent crime dropped by a significant degree,” Jake reported.

“Hmm.  Well, it’s worth considering,” the Enforcer said, digging back in to her goulash.  “I suppose the people protested?”

“Well, I have no idea.  This happened thousands of years ago, and of course the only thing the historians recorded was that it worked,” Jake said cynically.  He softened the remark with a joke.  “Certainly nobody cared if the criminals disliked it.”

Venus smiled.  “See, this the other reason I keep you around,” she gently teased.

Jake shot a nervous glance at her, as if he couldn’t tell she was joking.  She winked at him and turned back to her own food.

Alex, down the row, finished off his food and tensed, his hands on the armrests of his chair.  His father was turning to a topic he had hoped Joseph would avoid: Alex’s own college plans.  “Well, Alex said he wanted to go to college to play, of course,” Joseph noted.

“Were it only that Nocturne could entertain such a standard of living,” one of the local merchants observed.

“So, Lord Carlin…er, the younger, that is.  What sport do you play?” the other asked, finally turning to Alex in person.

“Rugby, midfielder,” Alex said.  “Imperator High Varsity, Division one.”

“Division?”

“Athletic division, not the military kind,” Alex said.  “There’s so many schools that they get assigned to leagues of equivalent budgets and team sizes and such.”

“I can’t imagine living on a world with so many people,” the first merchant said.

Alex shrugged.  “I had it better than most.  The underground hives are much more densely populated.  My hometown, Startseite, is actually less densely populated than, say, Themis.”

“Truly?” the second merchant asked.  “Interesting.  Do you have any aspirations towards joining your father’s Trader fleet?”

Alex paused.  “I don’t know.  I want to see how far my sports career takes me, and I want to get my degree.  Those take priority.”

“I see.”  The second merchant looked like he was about to say more, when Venus stood at the head of the table.