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sautéed in Thai-pepper-marinated olive oil. Deliciously hot-spiced smells from the pan cut right through the Stregg fumes in Sten's nostrils. He took another sip from his drink and listened while the Emperor talked.
    "Never used to think much about food," the Emperor said, "except as fuel. You know, the stomach complains, you fill it, and then go about your business."
    "I understand what you mean," Sten said, remembering his days as a Mig worker.
    "Figured you would. Anyway, I was a typical young deep-space engineer. Do my time on the company mission, and spend my Intercourse and Intoxication time with joygirls and booze. Food even seemed to get in the way of that."
    Sten understood that as well. It was pretty much how he had spent his days as a rookie trooper.
    "Then as I went up the company ladder, they sent me off on longer and longer jobs. Got clotting boring.
    Got so the only break you had was food. And that was all pap. So I started playing around.
    Remembering things my dad and grandma fixed. Trying to duplicate them."
    He tapped his head. "Odd, how all the things you ever smelled or tasted are right up here. Then all you got to do is practice to get your tongue in gear. Like this Angelo stew here. Greatest hangover and drunk cure invented. Some old Mex pirate taught me—clot, that's another story…"
    He stopped his work and took a sip of Stregg. Smiled to himself, and tipped a small splash in with the chorizo. Then he went back to the task at hand, quartering four or five onions and seeding quarter slices of tomatoes.
    "Jump to a lot of years later. Way after I discovered AM2 and started putting this whole clottin' Empire together…"
    Sten's brain whirled for an instant. AM2. The beginning of the Empire. What this mid-thirties-looking man was talking about so lightly was what one read about in history vids. He had always thought they were more legend than fact. But here he was having a calm discussion with the man who supposedly started it all—hell, nearly twenty centuries in the past. The Emperor went on, as if he was talking about yesterday.
    "There I was, resting on my laurels and getting bored out of my mind. A dozen or so star systems down and working smoothly. A few trillion-trillion megacredits in the bank. So? Whaddya do with that kind of money?"
    He motioned to Sten to top up the Stregg glasses.
    "Then I realized what I could do with it. I could cook anything I wanted. Except I don't like the modern stuff they've been doing the last six or seven hundred years. I like the old stuff. So I started experimenting. Copying dishes in my brain. Buying up old cookbooks and recreating things that sounded good."
    The Emperor turned and pulled a half-kilo slab of bleeding red beef from a storage cooler and began chunking it up.
    "What the hell. It's a way to kill time. Especially when you've got lots of it."
    The Emperor shut off the flame under the sausage and garlic, started another pan going with more spiced oil, and tossed in a little sage, a little savory and thyme, and then palm-rolled some rosemary twigs and dropped those in on top. He stirred the mixture, considered for a moment, then heaped in the tomato quarters and glazed them. He shut off the fire and turned back to Sten. He gave the young captain a long, thoughtful look and then began talking again, rolling the small chunks of beef into flour first, and then into a bowl of hot-pepper seeds.
    "I guess, from your perspective, Captain, that I'm babbling about things of little interest, that happened a long time ago. Old man talk. Nothing relevant for today."
    Sten was about to protest honestly, but the Emperor held up an Imperial hand. He still had the floor. "I can assure you," he said quite soberly, "that my yesterdays seem as close to me as yours do to you.
    Now. For the crucial question of the evening."
    He engulfed half a glass of Stregg by way of prepunctuation. "How the clot you doing, Cap'n Sten. And how the hell you like Court duty?…"
    Sten did