Free 1636: The Cardinal Virtues by Walter H. Hunt, Eric Flint Page B

employer and . . . your previous one.”
    “All right then. But he sent you to talk to me?”
    “Yes. He wanted to let you know that he had not had a letter from you for some time and would welcome one. Or more.”
    Sherrilyn thought about it for a moment, frowning. Before she could frame an answer, Seth ben Adret stepped forward and took her right hand in both of his. She was surprised enough not to react or pull away immediately.
    Sister Amelia, who had seemed to drift off into a nap, was sitting forward, moving to get up. Out of her sight, though, ben Adret had slipped something into her palm: a small square object, perhaps two by three inches. He withdrew his hands, letting them fall to his sides, and fixed Sherrilyn with a steady gaze.
    She didn’t know what to make of it, but tucked the gift—a small, leatherbound book—into her sleeve, and nodded.
    “He is sure that you will do well in your new role,” the Jewish soap-maker said. “He knows that it is trite to say so, but wherever an up-timer goes, the United States of Europe goes with him. Or her.”
    “Thank you,” she said. “And please thank the principal when you communicate with him. I’m glad to hear that he hasn’t forgotten me.”
    “On that,” ben Adret answered, “you can be sure.”
    ◊ ◊ ◊
    De la Mothe’s troopers went out of their way to respect her person and her privacy as they traveled. She wasn’t sure if they were genuinely intimidated by her, by the cachet of an up-timer, or if the comte had warned them of her statement to him regarding broken limbs . . . or if he’d simply told them to be polite. But she was allowed privacy whenever they stopped to rest.
    Late in the afternoon, the first day out from Marseilles, they stopped near a creek to water the horses. She separated herself and went a few dozen yards away to attend to her personal needs, after which she reached into a pocket within her pack and drew out the book that ben Adret had given her.
    It was sixteen pages in length and carefully and beautifully printed in tiny type. The first fourteen pages consisted of a long list of common words that she might use in a letter about her assignment, but which were . . . descriptive, possibly sensitive. Rifle. Troop. Attack. March. Reinforce. Siege. There were hundreds of other, nonmilitary terms, but those caught her eye. Next to each one was another reasonably common word: Shovel. Chorus. Invite. Vacation. Draw. Broil. It was a cipher—not an especially clever one, but something she could use to send sensitive information.
    God damn it, she thought. Ed—the “Principal”—wants me to be a spy . De la Mothe says that Turenne has no designs on the USE, but Ed Piazza wants to make sure.
    The last two pages contained a set of substitution codes, a dozen of them, each keyed to—of all things—TV shows, all seemingly from the 1990s. To indicate which code she used, she’d have to include a reference to a character on the show: Buffy, Mulder, Cooper (that one took her a minute, then she remembered Twin Peaks ); Lois; Sipowicz; Munch; and so on. It was a long way from unbreakable, but without any real computing power it would be hard.
    It could also get her killed. Even having this little book could get her killed. What the hell did Ed Piazza think he was doing?
    But she knew the answer to that question, even as she stowed the little book back in the inner pocket of her pack. He was watching out for the interests of the USE. It was true in a way, what ben Adret had said: wherever an up-timer went, the USE went with it. There were about three thousand up-timers in the world, a tiny little drop in a fairly big ocean, and there weren’t going to be any more of them. In five years, in ten years, that number would be even smaller . . . and not all up-timers felt loyalty to the last vestige of the world where they’d grown up. Some, and she counted Harry Lefferts among them, had really gone native—this was their time not just by