The Military Contract
Military supply.
It would have been a lie to say Victoria's offer didn't tempt me. This was what I had wanted from the start. In this country, no customer was more attractive than the army.
It wasn't an age of all-out war, but military operations never let up. There were the endless petty clashes with the Tourre Republic, the only state that could stand beside the Britannia Empire, and on top of that the disputes with the elves ran hot. Casualties came just as often.
Nor was Victoria driving the price down in the slightest. The supply rate she named was one thousand thalers a gram.
"Sir Allan. I have heard you say you are not doing this for the money. …Even so, considering the labor you have put into making the morphine, a return of this size is only proper. Formulating it into tablets will require investment as well."
The labor had, in fact, been considerable. The raw materials alone made that plain. Even securing ammonium chloride—used in this world as a cough remedy—had struck me as expensive at first.
But the price Victoria offered made the cost look like nothing. The margin was so obscene it was embarrassing to calculate.
And the risk is on the light side, at that.
Dealers could charge four hundred thousand won a gram for ketamine only because they shouldered a risk to match. I, unlike my sister in my previous life, had no need to thread a maze of distribution just to stay ahead of an investigation, and no need to hire seven droppers and work them anonymously. I only had to deliver the goods.
"I would also like you to reconsider the medal. Once morphine is formally introduced, no one will question your qualifications."
Praise, on top of everything else.
Still, before I snapped at the offer, one thing snagged.
"Your Highness. May I ask how you intend to raise the funds?"
"The funds?"
"Yes. By my rough estimate, the Imperial Military Hospital alone will consume at least twenty kilograms of morphine a year. If it is also issued to front-line units as an emergency medicine, the burden will be anything but small—"
"No. The funds are no cause for concern."
Had a life as an imperial princess simply numbed her sense of money?
Fortunately, Victoria's confidence was not empty.
"I mean to bear it from my private fortune."
"Your private fortune, Your Highness?"
"Yes. And not mine alone. I intend to share the burden with my mother's house. If my uncles put up contributions, the nobles who follow me will show their sincerity as well."
"……."
"You may rest assured I will never force the Ministry of War to divert its budget."
…She actually means it.
Spread as a levy, the sum might not have been so crushing. The strange part was that she meant to open her own purse at all, cost aside. For someone who had met almost no good people in his life, it was a bewildering situation.
"Sir Allan. May I recommend to the Ministry of War that morphine be adopted?"
"Your Highness. How could I answer, here and now."
"Ah. I pressed you for an answer. Coming at this hour was rude of me to begin with. If you need time to consider, I will give it. …Only."
"Please, speak."
Victoria hesitated for a while.
Before long, though, she admitted the military hospital urgently needed a supply. The patients who had been cut off from morphine were, she said, "slightly" agitated. From the look of things, slightly was not the word. They were agitated rather violently.
"What if you delivered the morphine to the military hospital yourself?"
"……."
"See the patients' condition, and you will understand how badly the army needs it. It may even help you reach your decision sooner."
I was already halfway there.
Still, it wouldn't hurt to look at the users once. I took a small quantity of morphine I had kept sealed and set out for the Imperial Military Hospital. Going out at dawn to peddle drugs felt faintly strange.
So she hadn't offered to empty her private fortune for nothing.
"Patients, please, calm yourselves…!"
I arrived at the military hospital to find a sit-in underway. Several dozen hard-liners—the ones who could still move—had occupied the director's office, and the military police stood frozen in a standoff, unable to advance or retreat.
If vagrants had tried the same thing, they would have been beaten and thrown out long ago. These opponents were another matter. Force was a difficult answer. How do you strike a wounded veteran?
Their demand, of course, was only one.
"Mor-phine! Mor-phine!! Mor-phine!!!"
At the front, a patient swung his arms and bellowed the word at the top of his lungs. The others around him took up the cry, morphine, morphine, until the sound piled on itself.
"I'm a sergeant in the Grenadier Regiment, you hear me!? Just give me the morphine—give me the morphine and I'll wreck the pointy-ears and the Republic both, every last one of them…!"
He stressed that he belonged to an elite unit even as he begged the military police, who looked profoundly harassed and kept giving ground.
"…We shall receive morphine again, come what may. We shall meet it. We must. For every cruel death in this world—starvation, crushing, drowning, thirst, a fall, the noose—is a comfortable death beside the want of morphine."
"Hear, hear!"
Some literary youth was mumbling all this with damp eyes. From the way the others watched him, he seemed to be the one who had led the occupation.
It looked excessive. It wasn't.
These were patients who had tasted, for the first time, a painkiller worthy of the name. The hospital itself was too wretched for the critically ill: anywhere from fifty to sixty patients crammed into a single ward. The finances were relatively ample, so the beds were clean and the place didn't stink, but it was nowhere near a setting in which the severely wounded could pass their days without strain. Morphine had been the savior that washed their pain away.
If the doses were delayed any further, what then? A riot would not have been strange. Let several hundred patients come pouring out of the hospital shouting for morphine, and from that moment there would be no containing it. I had no wish to watch a riot.
I identified myself to the military police officer on the scene and stepped out in front of the patients.
"Hand over the morphine!!"
They went on demanding it as if a man like me were of no interest at all. So I decided to show them what they wanted first. I took out a small bottle holding sixty grams and shook it without a word.
"Here. The morphine you want."
"Ah…!"
Dozens of gazes swung toward me at once.
It wasn't burdensome. None of them were looking at me. They were looking only at the morphine. The literary youth who had led them, the grenadier who had sworn to wreck everyone—both the same. When I moved the bottle, their eyes rolled after it.
"I am the one who made the morphine. I heard the supply I provided free of charge has run out, and that you have been suffering for it."
"H-hurry."
"Of course I'll give it to you. But for that, you will follow my orders. End the occupation at once, return to your wards, and wait there with the other patients. Refuse, and the moment you lay hands on the morphine will be delayed by just as much."
"……."
"Or I could destroy it outright."
"No!!"
"Then move."
At that, the patients suddenly burst into motion.
"We did it…!"
"You bastard, if I could just move snappy— I can't. Take my hand."
"Thanks."
They were patients, so none of it was quick. They only hauled themselves along, propping one another up. It was a wonder they had managed an occupation in the first place.
In any case, the protest ended there.
The medical staff, who had apparently been waiting through the night, came hurrying over to take the drug. Every one of them looked gaunt. They had been through it.
That would do. I had just dropped into a chair in the director's office when—
"Sir Knight? Did you really make the morphine?"
A patient with a fracture came up and caught me.
"You know me?"
"You don't remember. Last year, while I was on perimeter duty at Thames Palace, you struck me in the back of the head. That isn't why I was admitted. …Still, if you truly are the one who made the morphine, the merit of it cannot go unpraised."
Which was to say: please keep the morphine coming. Please don't let this happen again. Please. He spilled it all out with a desperate look, and in the end hobbled off on his crutch.
I watched his back with a sour, complicated feeling. It wasn't that the sight of a military hospital I had nearly thrown into chaos with my morphine had turned me bitter. There was simply someone I was a little worried about.
Sienna's the snag.
I wondered how my esteemed shareholder—the owner of forty-nine percent of the business—would take it. By any ordinary measure, Sienna ought to have welcomed the news. Hadn't I landed a military contract in short order? Better still, we could now gnaw at the money of Victoria and her faction, and half of that profit was due to come to Sienna.
There was no guarantee she would welcome it. She might just as easily resent the half-sister who made a habit of noble deeds.
What choice do I have.
Whatever she wanted, I had no intention of giving up the contract. It was the safest way to dispose of the morphine.
"That's right, Sir Allan. This is your doing. You may take pride in it."
Victoria appeared in the director's office and said as much. She had seen me brooding and misunderstood.
If she thought well of me, there was no need to correct her. The Empire's First Princess—the royal closest to being named Crown Princess. Win her trust, and managing Sienna would be easier, and so would looking after my own safety.
"Thank you, Your Imperial Highness."
"Have you resolved to accept my proposal? If you agree, I will move at once."
The resolve had hardened long ago, but I drew it out on purpose. I needed her to see that the decision was anything but easy for me.
"Yes, Your Highness. I accept."
She let out a breath, as if relieved. She would, she said, "recommend" the adoption of morphine to the Minister of War as soon as day broke, and with that she left—not without a last look at me, full of favor.
"Thank you for making so great a decision, Allan Madoff."
I was the one who ought to be grateful. Thanks to her, I now had the imperial army for a morphine client.
Once the door stood open, there was no closing it.