Free The V'Dan by Jean Johnson Page A

neatly . . . no, that one was twisted. He unbuttoned it, smoothed out the braiding, and reattached it.
    (
Which is just silly, a touch of nervousness at the unknown,
) Jackie continued, (
with no idea how everyone will react to us. Or even if they’ll like our version of “pageantry.” I know that Lord Ksa’an is a bit dubious on how little we have for the moment.
)
    (
Imperial First Lord Ksa’an,
) Li’eth corrected her, checking over his image carefully from head to feet, even turning to check the Imperial posterior to make sure the coattails lay smooth and perfect. (
It’s very important not to skip the Imperial First bit. He’s very proud of his status.
)
    (
Duly noted . . . though I think your people are going to be shocked by how casual we Terrans tend to be. Or at least by how short our titles are. I keep trying to turn and check to see who this “Grand High” Ambassador is. We don’t have different degrees of Ambassadorship, you know.
)
    (
Yet. You may find it useful as you send more and more to the various worlds out here.
) A tug and twitch of his trouser leg made the dark red fabric drape properly over his left, calf-length boot rather than bunch up on the cuff edge. He even had replacement medals, brightly enameled metal disks on pins rather than dangling from colorful ribbons like the Terran ones. The solid steel triangles of his captain-rank pins gleamed at the collar, on the shoulder boards, and at the cuffs of his military coat, large and visible . . . which made him wonder if he was going to retain the lowly Second Tier rank of a captain.
    It wasn’t as if he could hide his true identity anymore, after all. The Terrans in their negotiations had mentioned his identity freely. He couldn’t blame them for doing so, however; Li’eth understood that such things were their way of showing trustworthiness, of honor and integrity.
    That thought made him wonder if he should assert his rank a little, and not the military one. A mere captain couldn’t dictate where a leftenant superior should serve—they wereplaced in command of them, not allowed to pick—but an Imperial Prince
could
command that, say, a certain Leftenant Superior V’Kol Kos’q should serve him directly.
    And didn’t Empress Kah’nia-sun instruct her son, Hi’a’gon, that, “A prince should always strive to have two good friends about him, good enough to be honest and tell him ‘no’ when he needs to hear it,” back in the seventh millennium? Wait, eighth. It was in the mid-7600s . . . somewhere . . . When exactly
did
Great-plus Grandmother rule . . . ?
    He shook it off as unimportant. With forty-five centuries’ worth of ancestors to keep track of, surely even an Imperial Prince could be forgiven the sin of forgetting exact dates of specific reigns now and then. That, and the clock set in the wall by the door said it was nearly time for the semiformal viewing. No time to look it up on the workstation.
    The meeting would take place in the observation lounge, which had a nearly floor-to-ceiling viewing window. Reporters would be few and carefully vetted. Officials would also be few and carefully selected. Questions would be few and carefully prepared in advance. In archaic hydrofluid terms, this was an interview meant merely to “prime the pump” with a splash of information, sharpening the curiosity of the currently available public, and setting things up for a hopefully smooth broadcast to the other worlds. Either by slow mail courier, or by those Terran hyperrelay things.
    It was kind of exciting simply to
be
here and now, at this place and time, knowing that they were making progress on bringing the Terrans into the Alliance and into helping them win the war.
    —
    Entering the observation lounge, Jackie selected one of the center seats in the double row of chairs lining the chamber. With her were nine others selected from the Terran delegation to be the first to meet and converse with locally based