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

the fathers and sons slept out under the stars.
    However, for Bishop Dominic, religion remained serious business. The bishop for the royal parish was an Apollonian, a group which took its religion seriously enough to once again renew the practice of celibacy among its priests. Skin and bones, he reminded Jonas of a pith spider. The bishop was a weak counselor at court, but a man who had the ear of the King in matters of faith.
    He had hand-picked the parishioners who would be privileged to accompany the king as he hiked the pilgrimage with his second and last son. Most of them were important contributors to the sect. A few were charitable cases. On the whole, they were an austere group, and Jonas found himself both attracted to the boys and simultaneously repelled by their coldness.
    As Jonas and his father joined the back of the group, a nod from the King sent the thin man into full priestly mode. Using a deep reedy voice which Jonas knew he reserved only for the pulpit, the man lifted up his arms and intoned from memory, “In his deepest mind the fool says there is no God....”
    Jonas’ thoughts wandered. When he again picked up the thread of the priest’s speech, he was holding up what looked like a large ball on a stick. The ball was approximately a meter in diameter. “All right, boys,” he said in his normal, high, effeminate voice. “This will be our sun....”
    Jonas looked at the orange colored ball on the stick and wrinkled up his face in a puzzled expression. Interstellar ships sometimes passed near the mainline star which lay at the center of the Athenian system on their way to the Hadris gates. Twice in his sixteen years, Jonas stood on the command deck of his father’s ship while the vast bulk of the star Metis grew until it filled all vision.
    Jonas leaned over to his father and, looking up, whispered, “I thought this hike was supposed to take all afternoon?” His father looked down and nodded. “But with the sun so small we are going to be done in no time. I mean, it only takes at most six days to reach one of the Hadris gates.”
    His father smiled and with a hand on his son’s back, leaned down and whispered, “You have no idea how fast we were traveling. Mass bending technology does incredible things for our acceleration curves.” The priest gently shook the ball loose from the top of the pole and watched as it rose approximately twenty feet in the air and began to hover. Soon after, the hike began.
    Jonas was to remember that afternoon often in the years to come. All of the boys, and many of the fathers, found themselves in a perpetual state of awe as they walked. Balls no larger than a fist stood in for gas giants and nearly disappeared as they floated up into the air. The three inhabited planets of the Athenian system fit together in the palm of the priest’s hand. But it was the vast distances between the sixteen planets which left an impression on Jonas. Hundreds of paces divided the inner planets, and whole kilometers passed by between the outer ones. By the time they reached the realm of the dwarf planets of the outer rim, they were walking for what seemed like hours between them.
    The hike, which Jonas had thought would be over quickly, went on for nearly eight hours, and Jonas was forever grateful for the time. Years later, he found out that, through the priest, the King had given the other participants strict instructions to leave them alone. That day would become one of the rare instances in Jonas’ life where he had his father to himself. For a few hours, he was simply a boy who finally had the full attention of a busy dad.
    By the time Jonas and his father finished, the hike had covered nearly thirty kilometers, and the deep, violet blue sky of Athena moved on to hues of fluorescent green, orange, and purple. For the last couple of kilometers, the hike had been tough, even for the adults. It ended with a five-hundred-meter climb up a steep trail to a bluff which had a commanding