The Far Bank of the Rubicon (The Pax Imperium Wars: Volume 1) Read Free

themselves. They need something to unite them, to inspire them. They need a mission. They need a destiny.”
    Cowhill couldn’t hide his scorn. “And you’re the one to lead us there, to this destiny?”
    “I am.”
    The CEO shook his head, his voice a barely audible whisper. “Timothy, you’ll be the ruin of us all.”
    Randall held out his hand. Summers hesitated for half a beat before he put his gun in the hand of his boss. He wasn’t used to being without a weapon.
    “No, Gerald. I will take us to places you can’t go. I will make us great again.”



"Jonas?"
    Squatting in the warm afternoon light, sixteen-year-old Jonas recognized the warmth in his father's voice. His father used neither a concerned nor a corrective tenor, so Jonas continued to squat without acknowledging him. Instead, he adjusted the dial on his monocle style microscope and observed the whooping ant in front of him as it held in its fingertips a fragment of the sandwich Jonas had been eating for lunch. The two-centimeter-long "ant" pulled the offered food toward its front mouth with its forward facing hands. Since he had started his studies of ecology with his tutor at the age of five, the whooping ant had always fascinated Jonas. The individual ant in question seemed particularly adept with its use of the thumb. It was able to grasp the edge of the offered ham and cheese sandwich, and with a twisting motion, pull the food toward its mouth. The ant had the smallest opposable thumb in the known galaxy.
    Jonas' father squatted down beside him. “What have you found?”
    “A whooping ant.” If he could have acknowledged it to himself, Jonas would have admitted that his heart beat a little faster having his father this close to him. He could feel the warmth radiating from the man’s tall muscular frame and smell the scent of the palace laundry on his clothing.
    Jonas’ father fished in several pockets on his hiking shirt before he found an identical microscope and put it in his eye. “What’s its technical name?”
    “The microscope said either Athenian extra-small scavenger thirty-two K point forty-five or forty-six, but that depended upon whether or not it consumed animal protein. Apparently, it’s forty-six because it’s eating the ham.”
    Jonas couldn’t remember a moment in which he had possessed as much of his father’s attention as he did at this precious instant in time. The trip itself was unique. He and his father had traveled by themselves—without attendants or advisers—along with sixty normal families and the court bishop to a remote part of their homeworld, Athena. Only the bare minimum of security had come with them, but if Jonas were honest, he wanted even fewer people. He wished they were alone.
    If he had spoken his wish aloud, he knew that his father would have said that being alone would have wrecked the point. His father would have said the Pilgrimage of the Sun had always been done as a group on Athena on Midsummer’s Day. Jonas knew this because they had discussed the matter several times prior to the pilgrimage, and his father had said those words or something similar each time, but it didn’t mean Jonas wanted time alone with his father any less.
    “Hmmm.” Jonas’ father put the microscope in his eye, and they both silently watched the whooping ant.
    At the palace, whole days would pass in which each step, every bow, and all the words of both the King and his second son had to be negotiated in advance. A misstep here or an indiscreet word there and an interstellar incident might result. Most people had no idea that the news clips broadcast on the nets were so highly scripted.
    Wanting this moment to go on forever, Jonas asked a question. “Dmitri is always going on and on about the fact that on the ancient world, ‘ant’ didn’t mean the same thing as it does on Athena today. It never made sense to me. What was he talking about?”
    “Well, it’s been a long time since I studied historical