Carnifex

19/7/467 AC, Quarters Number One, Isla Real

With Parilla retired and he and his wife now living in the Casa Linda for the duration of the Presidential campaign, Carrera had had a choice: leave the larger Quarters One unoccupied, which struck him as wasteful, move an underling into larger quarters than he had himself, which struck him as preposterous, turn Quarters One into a Bachelor Officers' Quarters, which struck him as altogether too noisy, or move in himself. He'd chosen the latter, and turned his old Quarters Two over to his favorite legion commander, Jimenez. It had been a toss up between Jimenez and Kuralski. The latter, however, had few social obligations while Jimenez had many.

One really pleasant side effects of having Jimenez for a neighbor was that the stunning Artemisia Jimenez, Xavier's niece, spent a fair amount of time—all the time she wasn't actively campaigning for Parilla—at Number Two, serving as her bachelor uncle's social host.

For his part, Jimenez was lost in the place. He had no family or, rather, his legion, the fourth, was his family. Still the mansion didn't go completely to waste as a very large number of junior officers tended to come by quite regularly whenever Artemisia was in residence.

"And so I ended up with a BOQ next door anyway," Carrera muttered, watching a half dozen of the horny bastards mowing Jimenez's yard while his niece looked on approvingly.

"What was that, Pat?"

"Nothing," Carrera answered Esterhazy. "Just thinking out loud. So what do you think about the gold?"

"Oh, wow!" Esterhazy answered, enthusiastically. "It's . . . well . . . Do you realize what this means, Pat?"

"Yeah, I do," Carrera answered. "You have enough gold for your precious metal certificate scheme even without invading the Legion's existing assets."

Esterhazy rolled his eyes. "Not just that, Pat. You're going to have enough gold to set up your own currency. You can pay your men with your own drachma, pay your bills with your own drachma, buy equipment, bribe, build—whatever the fuck you want to do—in honest-to-God, hard, backed currency. By the way, how much of the two thousand tons will we have to play with?"

"Not all," Carrera answered. "The FSD we're promised won't pay for the full campaign, though it will pay for most of it. We'll need to sell some gold."

"No!" Esterhazy objected. "Sell none of it, except as PMCs. I'm serious about that currency. We can get something designed and a print plant running in a few months."

"Fine. Go back to the FS—or do you think we should go through Taurus or Yamato?—to get it set up."

Esterhazy thought on that for a bit before answering, "I wouldn't trust the Taurans and the FSC's currency technology is . . . substandard, at best. Yamato, then, I think."

"Good. I agree. Denominations?"

"Mmm . . . I think we ought to keep with the drachma-equivalence everyone is used to; peg the value of the Legionary drachma to the Federated States drachma, at least initially."

Carrera thought about that for a moment "I suppose we can always drop equivalency if the FSD starts to drop or increase substantially."

"Whatever's more convenient or profitable," Esterhazy agreed. He was about to say something else when he suddenly stopped and began to laugh.

"What's so funny?" Carrera asked, with irritation.

Esterhazy immediately stopped laughing and explained. "Pat, it just hit me. With this, the Legion del Cid becomes sovereign, as much as any state on Terra Nova. You have your own army. You control your own territory, this island. You have a diplomatic branch, me. Now you're going to be coining your own money. I don't know that there are many, or any, attributes of sovereignty left. Nukes?"

Carrera didn't even think about answering that one honestly. Instead he said, "Well . . . now I have the money to add nuclear power to one of the Suvarov Class cruisers and refit it to support the classis."