A Princess of the Aerie

by John Barnes

  They went on, leaping from cable to cable, springing over slow-moving gripliners, twice more swinging out to pass around the edge of a habitat, and the broad circular lands flashed by in front of them, beginning as disks covering much of the sky and briefly becoming the ground into which they were always about to plunge, just before emerging into a new sky with another bright disk of a world ahead. Kawib worked the controls like a compulsive gambler playing a hundred screens at once, acceleration going from almost two g to zero to minus two g in an endless bounce-and-dance.

  Finally, they whipped around the dark edge of a habitat that a moment before had been a broad plain that they were bare seconds from cratering, and Kawib said, “Well, we’re here. Make sure those belts are fastened.” They moved sideways in a single great swoop and clamped onto the cable; the linducer braked hard, and they hung on their belts for a long few seconds until they were down to arrival speed. This time, instead of flashing by at the last moment, the habitat became more and more solidly land, until finally they passed through the swirling gray fog of the cold lock and emerged into the air-filled space beneath the glass dome of the roof. With what seemed like the painful slowness of an elevator, they descended the last kilometer onto the platform at the station.

  Kawib popped the canopy, and it dilated back into the fuselage. “End of the line. Welcome to Greenworld.”

  “Did you beat your time?” Dujuv asked.

  “I missed by over two minutes. I didn’t find a hole in the traffic within reach, all the way from Disney to Utopia. And I did a pretty shabby job rounding Kamakura—swung at least ten kilometers too wide and had to use a lot of cold jet to get back to a cable. But there’s always another run, masen? Now, if you’ll follow me, we’ll get you to Colonel Mattanga, in the Royal Palace, and after that you’re her problem.”

  “Colonel Mattanga?” Myxenna asked.

  “Princess Shyf’s personal chief for security and intelligence?”

  “Yeah,” Jak said. “We just hadn’t specked who she was. It just feels funny.”

  “You mean it feels funny to discover you’ve been talking with someone who could decide to have you killed, or completely change your life for their convenience? Yeah, I know something about that.” Kawib fell silent.

  Greenworld was a habitat as rich and beautiful as anyone had ever imagined. Houses were shaped from living rock or grew up out of tangles of trees. Greenswards, tough enough for treaded tractors yet soft enough to sleep on, lay everywhere between the tall straight trees. The trees themselves formed a high canopy from which green tubes of light sluiced down into the clearings, where artfully random trails wandered between shops and houses. Hardly anything required any attention, yet a ripe piece of fruit, a trickle of pure water, or a comfortable place to sit always appeared where and when you wanted it. Furthermore, the slowly varying local gravity was about one-third g, the most pleasant grav for human walking—just adequate for traction and keeping the center gliding level, yet requiring little energy.

  The walls of the Royal Palace had been grown directly from the stone base that had itself been made from the slagged materials of the original Greenworld. Checkpoints and guard stations greeted Kawib with flurries of salutes, and they passed through the series of arches and gates into the Royal Palace.

  It was a regular hexagon a kilometer on a side, two kilometers from corner to corner—large because the first few Karrinynyas in the Aerie had needed it as a fortress and rally point. The slagging of the old habitat, and in particular the systematic destruction of every site and monument connected with the old Republic, had proven to be unpopular for some generations afterward.

  But as the prosperity of the Wager-era reconstruction of human space had continued, wearing on into an economic boom that lasted for centuries, people had ceased to care, and the Royal Palace had become valuable real estate. The inner citadel, a clever circular maze on a gently rising hill at the center of the grounds, had been kept for residences, ceremonies, and administration, and the rest converted to ultra-high-priced residential and retail areas.

  When Kawib guided them through the winding green paths of the hedge maze into the inner citadel, late afternoon sun slanted over the hedge-tops into the broader sculpture gardens, where various stone Karrinynyas of the last millennium stood or sat, looking brave or wise or whatever they were supposed to have been. Jak wondered what the statue of Queen Shyf would eventually look like—petulant, or horny?

  They came to a crumbling, dark gray, polished stone stairway, constructed to look weathered, with broad steps flanked by unicorns and spread-winged eagles, ascended to a higher lawn, rounded a zigzag hedge, and entered the Royal Administration Building. Kawib led them through a corridor to a door of very old natural wood, carved in an elaborate faux-medieval frieze of soldiers and flags. “Right here,” he said. “This is where I leave you. Good luck with everything; it’s been a pleasure meeting you.”

  “And you too,” Dujuv said.

  “Thanks for taking so much time from a day,” Myxenna added.

  Kawib smiled. “Before you thank someone for that, you should know what they’d’ve been doing otherwise. In my case, I really should be thanking you. Good luck.” He walked away briskly, seemingly cheerful.

  “Do you suppose,” Myx muttered, “that he was refraining from telling us that we were going to need it?”

  They knocked and Mattanga’s voice called out, “Come in.”

  The office was surprisingly small and spare. Mattanga did not rise; she barely looked up. “Sit down.” She gestured at three chairs in front of her desk.

  She looked them over; Jak was getting used to gray hair, but the wrinkling and cracking of her skin was more apparent in person. “Well. Now I’ve had time to digest some history, and I was able to get a few thoughts from the Princess. I hadn’t realized you three were part of her rescue in the Uranium affair.

  “The message you got was what the communications pokheets call a cowbird. Its front end hid it on our servers here until it detected a message from the Princess to Jak Jinnaka. Then it erased that message and sent itself.

  “The message is a top-of-the-line fake—they did it the hard way. They must have had at least twenty million frames of Princess Shyf, from which they then mixmatched at least a trillion frames for their frame alphabet, making light and background consistent across all of them, and the words, gestures, and expressions they sent were homeosemiotized to at least a ninth degree of comparison, which would be nearly as expensive as that frame alphabet. The only reason we could detect the faking was that the Princess told us it was a fake, so that we were looking for how it was done. Without that we’d never have known that it was done.

  “Now, the kind of facility that can do that is owned either by major media or very high end intelligence agencies. If our Intel people had needed something like this, they would have had to hire it out. And we’re a well-funded national agency, from a rich nation with a lot of enemies.

  “The djeste at the heart of all this is mysterious, and eliminating mysteries concerning the Princess and her security is my job. So what I want to know is who went to all this trouble, for a deception that could only last to this point at most, and what they hoped to gain by it.” The Colonel drummed her fingers on the table. “I am forced to admit I’m utterly stymied, or toktru stumped as the Princess might put it. Does any of you have even a possibly relevant thought, or memory, or piece of data?”

  “Well,” Myxenna said, “this is pretty basic—it’s just right out of my text for Deception and Tradecraft class— but if we assume that they intended the deception to work this far and not any further, then either it has already served its purpose or else having us discover it is part of the plan—”

  Mattanga made a face. “I don’t know whether to hug you or slap you, young lady. I wrote that chapter.”

  Myxenna started, and Mattanga’s eyebrows raised again. “We have many friends in the Hive, you know, and many favors are exchanged. It was an inte
resting chapter to write, I had the knowledge, a colonel’s pay is not much, and it would have been improper for Hive Intelligence to give me a direct assist with expenses. Therefore they happened to find that work for me.

  “Well, anyway, whoever the mystery enemy may be, the most they could have planned for, is that you are here and talking to me. To have penetrated far enough into Princess Shyf’s private affairs to be able to carry out this operation, they would have had to know that she had had no contact with Dujuv, only occasionally old-friend notes with Myxenna, and she was tired and bored with Jak and in process of getting rid of him.” Colonel Mattanga leaned slightly forward, seeming to probe Jak’s face with her gaze. “I do trust that this is not too painful to discuss?”

  “Not a problem,” Jak said, bleeding internally.

  “So the only thing that they could have been certain of accomplishing was this meeting. Do any of you see anything that I don’t?”

  Jak sighed. “Well, weehu, we all kept saying it was too singing-on perfect. So whoever it was didn’t just really study Se—Princess Shyf—they dug up plenty about me and my toves, too.”

  “Mmmph,” Mattanga said, obviously not pleased with the thought. “And none of you is easy to research, as I just found out. After all, Jak, you are the nephew of Sibroillo Jinnaka, and he’s been wrapping you in nested blankets of disinformation since before you were born. And Hive Intelligence starts concealing information about anyone who might be going into their service well before recruiting them.” She nodded at Dujuv and Myxenna. “You would find some interesting things if you were to try to hack into your files.”

  “I already did, and you’re right,” Myxenna said.

  “So all this cost plenty of time, money, and effort. It must be terribly important to whoever it is. And so far as we know, everything they’ve tried to do has worked perfectly so far.”

  Dujuv nodded and said, “So you need to take a spoicke.”

  The Colonel looked at him with sudden interest. “I don’t follow slamball.”

  “When you have to track all seven balls all the time, a lot of times you can see that the other team is doing something complicated but you don’t know what they’re trying to do. So if you’ve got a spare ball at the goal—especially if you’re almost at the penalty bell where you have to throw it—you just use a privileged-catch call to send two or three of your players into the middle of that. The other team has to change what they’re doing, or else take a foul, and cope with a new threat. You don’t always know what you did to them, but at least you probably spoiled their play.

  “So that’s what I’d think about, sitting in your chair. Even just do something real stupid; I sent the ball to my slowest runner, once, with nobody blocking for him, on a spoicke, and they got so mixed up between trying to do their plan and not foul and get his ball away from him and still watch our main offense, that I scored a knockback in the confusion.”

  For the first time since they’d met her, Mattanga smiled. “You just gave me the first idea I’ve liked since this thing came up.” She sat back, tenting her fingers in front of her face.

  An alarm hooted.

  The three toves jumped out of their chairs, floating several centimeters upward, then slammed back into them. Mattanga, who was comfortably gripping her chair, was obviously doing her best not to smile. “That sound is the perturb alarm,” she said. “Keeping all the habitats on seventeen arms at their contracted gravity is occasionally a little much for even the best software—sometimes it’s literally insoluble—and that’s when the software turns on engines on all the habitats and gets us tumbling in a different configuration. Gravity usually drops close to zero, bounces up close to full right after, and then settles back to normal. It happens about twice a day.

  “If you hear a double hoot instead of a single—those are only a couple of times a year—it’s a big perturb, like a slight negative gravity followed by a couple of seconds of one point five g. So always grab something that’s bolted down as soon as you hear that sound. Though even that doesn’t always help—we had a godawful mess in the public fishing pond a couple of years ago because there were four boatloads of kids out there and we got an unscheduled double hoot. No deaths but some scary moments, and people were finding fish in strange places for months.” She smiled. “I did tell Kawib to brief you about life here, but no doubt he was having more fun flying the hopper.” From the way she smiled, it was clear that Kawib was in no real trouble.

  “All right, my decisions: Myxenna will be a lady in waiting to Princess Shyf. The combination will be unusual—a commoner, not rich, foreign—but not impossibly so. And you two boys are joining the Royal Palace Guard. That’s the temporary solution. After that I’m planning to assign each of you to the first unusual duty that comes up, especially duties away from Greenworld. My guess is that they expected you all to be put under house arrest, so that’s what we won’t do. Is that acceptable?”

  “It beats house arrest,” Jak said.

  “Excellent, because that was really the only alternative I had.”

  “You were planning to offer this all along?” Myxenna asked.

  “Oh, of course. Except that I didn’t have a rationale for doing it. And trust me, if you’re sitting in a seat like mine a couple of decades from now, you’re going to find that knowing what you want to do is never enough. You have to be able, in a year or two, to answer that terrible question ‘What were you thinking?’ Which is why I am so grateful to you, Dujuv, for having supplied me with a very nice answer indeed to that question. Spoicke. I have to remember that term. It’s sounds so much more reasonable than ‘I didn’t know what to do but I knew I had to do something.’ ”

  CHAPTER 6

  At the Pleasure of the Princess

  From the outside the Royal Palace Guard barracks looked like a bland hotel. The sprite was making the vivid blue-white figure eight, about half a meter tall, on the door, indicating that they had reached their destination. Jak pressed the bell, and the sprite vanished.

  The door dilated, and they stepped through to find Kawib Presgano behind a desk, looking bemused but smiling. “It appears to be the Colonel’s pleasure,” he said, “never to rid me of you. Welcome to the Royal Palace Guard, I guess. Congratulations on being lieutenants.”

  “We’re officers?” Dujuv asked.

  “Oh, we all are. At least. The Royal Palace Guard doesn’t actually guard the palace, so we don’t need any actual fighters to do any actual fighting.”

  “What do we do, besides being not actual?” Jak asked. “Why, we serve at the pleasure of the Princess.” Was there a bitter undertone to Kawib’s voice? Jak couldn’t tell. “You’ll be assigned regular patrol duties in which you follow a sprite around the palace grounds—that includes the residential and commercial areas inside the walls—and there will be ceremonial duties of various kinds at court functions. Should you actually encounter any violent lawbreaking, you are welcome to try to stop it if you like but most of us just call the pokheets.

  “We also have a mandatory schedule of workouts for everyone on active duty, which, since both of you are reasonably athletic, you’ll probably enjoy, though being from the Hive, where people are prudish, you might be uncomfortable about working out in just a thong and shoes, in front of a viewer gallery.”

  “I’m about as immodest as a wasp ever gets,” Jak said.

  “And I have nothing to be ashamed of,” Dujuv added.

  Kawib smiled slightly, looking over the panth’s compact mass of muscle and his handsome regular features, and said, “I predict a slight increase in attendance at workouts for a while—they’re generally popular with ladies in waiting. Remember that any hearts you capture are supposed to be given back.”

  “Don’t forget to warn them about Seubla,” a tall, graceful young man said, coming in to sit on Kawib’s desk.

  “I don’t need to warn gentlemen, such as these, about such matters,” Kawib said, grinning. “They are not the sort of heets that go chas
ing after a pizo’s demmy. Very much unlike certain members of my guard who we may need to neuter, if we are ever to stop them from humping the legs of the young ladies at diplomatic receptions.

  “But I suppose I should explain. Seubla and I have been mekko and demmy since the third year of gen school. The minute I’m discharged from the Royal Palace Guard, she will resign as a lady in waiting, we will get married, and I will drop by the barracks to wang the living shit out of anyone who has ever looked at her with even slightly more lust than he harbors for his grandmother. Is that clear, Xabo?”

  “Yessir. But may your lowly XO point out that your demmy does attend many of our workouts?”

  “Entirely to enjoy the sight of me stripped to the waist, and the sneer of cold command with which I put the rest of you through your paces. Or would you care to discuss it while Disciplines sparring?”

  “Having sparred with you, sir, I’d rather just have you beat me with a plank and trust to your sense of restraint.” Xabo stepped forward and extended his hand to Dujuv. “You must be the new recruits. I’m Xabo Srijesen, second in command around here, and the skipper’s toktru tove and all around factotum.”

  “Dujuv Gonzawara.”

  “Jak Jinnaka. And—pardon me, sir, but you’re the commander?”

  Kawib nodded. “Yes. And I run errands like picking up stray guests. I told you we’re a ceremonial outfit. The greatest privilege I have is that when there’s any real work to do—which is nearly never—I am able to grab it for myself. My official title here is brigadier general, but when I finally get out of here and get my long-delayed commission in the regular Army, I will be entering it as a captain.”

  “Royal Palace Guards can’t resign?” Dujuv asked.

  “Oh, I suppose your embassy would say something if you were held here against your will. It must be nice to have an embassy to talk to, masen? Let’s swear you in and get you into uniform. And fitted with your thong. Workout starts in less than two hours, and when they get fresh meat, they want it on the table as soon as possible.”