A Princess of the Aerie

by John Barnes

  He led them to Colonel Mattanga’s office. She sat behind the desk, face blank.

  “First of all,” Jak said, “we need to say how sorry we are about the loss of your daughter.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Dujuv said. “I tried, but all I could do was avenge her.”

  The Colonel smiled, her eyes wet. “Thank you,” she said, “but we have things to do before someone remembers to fire me. I have no living descendants and my line is barren.” For a moment her lower lip trembled; she wiped her eyes and made herself go on. “The Karrinynya have no reason to fear me now, so I’m sure they won’t be keeping me. At least it means no more having to do the best possible job to avoid suspicion.

  “Now about your situation. We know that Scaboron was the main target, because thanks to your swift action, and that of Shadow on the Frost, we recovered much of the data from your opponents’ purses before it could self-destruct. So my successor will be much better able to deliver a stern warning to the heir.”

  “So you speck Princess Shyf is behind this.” Dujuv didn’t sound as if he wanted to argue; just as if he wanted things clear.

  “Well, one death was planned and attempted tonight. One was opportunistic. Only one person would have profited by both deaths. That person walked out of danger less than ten seconds before the attack began. And, knowing about the major attempt, she might have whispered a hint to someone about a chance for the minor attempt, as well. That would be my thought about how things might have happened.” Colonel Mattanga was reasoning just as Uncle Sib had taught Jak to do, the way he had studied at the Academy. His mind wanted to assent.

  But his conditioning made him want to scream and slap Mattanga. He wanted to kick Kawib for making him care that Seubla was dead. He wanted to punch Dujuv for agreeing so readily. Most of all he wanted to cry in Sesh’s arms because it was an evil world where his beautiful princess had to have blood on her hands. Not trusting himself to say anything, or even to react, he tried to sit perfectly still.

  “Dujuv, you and I are in somewhat similar trouble. I still don’t know how to thank you adequately, I admire you beyond all words—you did very well indeed—but I have to say that your bravery and coolness under fire is going to cost you dearly. Xil Argenglass, the man who killed my daughter and whom you killed, was an agent of Hive Intelligence.”

  “What? How could—why would he—?”

  “Your intelligence service has a principle of ‘assistance to a friendly monarch,’ with which I’m sure you are familiar,” Colonel Mattanga said. “Obviously, as long as they didn’t get caught ordering it, Seubla’s death was good for the Karrinynya. Now it will be blamed on a ‘rogue’ Hive agent, as will the assassination attempt, and you two will be heroes—also targets, for though Hive Intelligence will write off one stringer agent, the Princess will not so easily forgive the two of you for having foiled the assassination of Scaboron.

  “We need to get you out of here. Myxenna should be safe—she didn’t help save the King, just got into the line of fire. But I’m not going to have my job much longer, and Dujuv, you have done powerful people damage, which they must pretend was a favor—I can’t imagine a more dangerous situation. Jak, you didn’t actually kill a Hive agent but you were vital in foiling the assassination attempt, and you saw too much and know too much.

  “So what we must do, before I’m discharged from this job, is get you both far away, giving everyone time and grounds to forgive and forget. I think I have an assignment that will work. Now, we have some private audiences tonight, first with the King, and then with the Duke. Do you have any questions?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jak said. He swallowed hard. “You speck that Sesh—”

  “Everyone knows that she’s harsher than her father. The republican underground might try to kill her, but never him. There’s a lot of hereditary enmity between Greenworld and Uranium, so I suppose it’s possible that Duke Psim could have been responsible, but why try it on the one occasion on which he doesn’t have an alibi? Theoretically it might have been one of the zybots, possibly Triangle One, or it might have been one of the other habitats on the Aerie, but that would be very high risk, for very little profit, for any of them.

  “But the Princess has made it clear she despises the King. And he doesn’t even try to conceal his distaste for her anymore. Had he been killed, she would have benefited greatly, and there would never have been any successful investigation.

  “You know, Scaboron took the throne late in life—his older sister died childless—and he will be a short-running king for Greenworld, just twenty-eight years so far. Of my four children, now all killed by the Karrinynya, three died in unprovable murders (but murders nonetheless) during Scaboron’s predecessor’s reign. I cried when I found I was pregnant with Seubla. None of her siblings had lived to age six. And yet Scaboron somehow never felt it necessary to take Seubla from me. He has made me really, truly loyal to my King, against all others. After decades of intelligence work, I’ve known a lot about many high ranking aristos, and I know how unusual Scaboron is. I am afraid (for your sakes) that Shyf is a much more conventional princess.”

  “You continue to impress me,” Psim Cofinalez said, “and so there’s a small favor … I’m not sure whether it’s one that I’m doing you, one that you’re doing me, or just a set of favors. Shadow has become persona non grata. Again. If I understand correctly, he offended his own people by turning his status loss around so quickly that it became a kind of coup that he was felt not to have deserved. Or then again he may have scratched his butt with his left hand on Tuesday, thus humiliating his brother’s cousin. I’ve known Rubahy all my life and I’ll be damned if I can speck them.

  “The important thing is that I can’t take him with me on the rest of the Big Circuit; everywhere beyond here, he’d be liable to sudden assault by his enemies.

  “So Shadow on the Frost is extremely welcome to reen-list in my Rubahy mercenaries, if he wishes, whenever I return to the lower solar system, and I’m sorry to lose him, but not as sorry as I would be if he were killed for some obscure reason.

  “Now since Jak and Shadow have again fought together, and their oath-bond is thus fresh and renewed, and since it would be very acceptable—I also verified this with Shadow—for Shadow and Dujuv to also oath-bond with each other—”

  “Highly acceptable to me, too,” Dujuv said.

  “I knew that without asking, but you’re right. I should have asked. Time was short. At any rate, I propose to pay Shadow’s salary to bodyguard either or both of you—it will be up to him to assess where he’s most needed. That means he’s employed, you stay alive, and it’s less than pocket change to me.”

  “It sounds like a great idea,” Jak and Dujuv said, simultaneously.

  “Of course it’s always awkward to thank anyone for saving one’s life, now isn’t it? And yet that does seem to be what I should do. So thank you for saving my life.”

  King Scaboron looked very much like his daughter would have, if she had been twelve centimeters shorter, her red hair dimming to gray, without tanpatterning, and with a small white goatee. He blathered on a while, particularly thanking Colonel Mattanga, which seemed to really precess Sesh; Jak dakked that Colonel Mattanga had called it singing-on—Sesh had been planning to get rid of Seubla’s mother, now—and that the King’s warm approval was going to delay matters.

  “Well,” the Colonel said, when the King had finished blathering, “I have a thought. We shouldn’t waste resources like Jak and Dujuv just standing around the palace on guard duty. They have proved to be very effective, and already have experience operating independently, so I thought perhaps we might put them on the Mercury situation.”

  “By all means! The Mercury situation! The very thing!”

  “Of course they may not achieve anything at all while they are there—the odds are against—”

  “But you know, Colonel, we are so often reminded of Principle 181: ‘Whether you succeed or not is not under your control, but
whether you try is.’ And I dare say that one reason for your choice might be that these two young men are, in your estimation, likely to succeed at resolving the Mercury situation?”

  “I would say their odds are better than many others I could send.”

  “Well, then, the Mercury situation will be their first assignment. Excellent.”

  The King bowed, rose, and left, catching them all in midbow; Princess Shyf waited for them to get secure footing, collected a good graceful bow from all of them, and swept out. Jak had to admit that while she might not be the human being her father was—and he still missed the sweet girl he had thought he knew—she was very good at the royal and majestic side of things.

  Afterward, Jak, Shadow, and Dujuv gathered with Mattanga at her office. She looked drawn and tired, near collapse. Jak asked, “What’s the Mercury situation?”

  “I was just about to tell you, and once I do, you’ll know much more than the King. Since he actually didn’t know anything about it but wasn’t about to let anyone see that, suggesting it when I did assured us of his approval. It gets the two of you far away, and may help Greenworld.

  “We can never afford even a fraction of the agents we need, and sometimes trouble breaks out in a place where it’s been quiet for so long that all we have is a couple of stringers who send in a report every three months. Even a really vital interest like Mercury has to be neglected if you never have any trouble there.”

  Dujuv scratched his head. “This may sound stupid—”

  “There are no stupid questions,” she said, “only undiag-nosed ninnies.”

  Dujuv laughed. “Thanks, I think. It’s just, when I think of a place like Greenworld—all these parks and clear water and trees and so on—I wonder what you could need from Mercury, which is one big hot nasty slag heap.”

  “Greenworld’s wealth is founded on solar power. Our biggest export, both manufacturing equipment and licensing patents. Solar power depends on weird, scarce metals that are easier to get from Mercury—strange stuff like yttrium and lutetium and actinium. You’d have to ask the engineers why they need all that stuff, or what they cook up from it, but it adds up to a lot of money through here, so when the engineers say they need two tons of terbium—that was an actual situation a couple of years ago—then we will get them two tons of terbium.”

  “And Mercury’s the only place they have it?” Dujuv asked. “Sorry to keep asking questions that are probably turning me into a diagnosed ninny.”

  “It’s the cheap source for most lanthanide and actinide metals. First of all it’s easy to get at there—impacts and volcanism left the whole planet honeycombed with veins and splattered with drifts of hundreds of different ores, and then the Bombardment put a lot of deep fractures into that thin weak crust, creating even more pathways down to the core. The Rubahy attack probably did as much as four or five centuries of exploratory mining, in fact—we have a more complete map of what metals are where, for Mercury, than we do for any other planet, including Earth.”

  “Not our intention,” Shadow on the Frost said, “but you’re welcome to any good you got from it.”

  “Then it’s cheap to extract the metal—there’s more solar energy per square meter than on any other planet. And it’s cheap to haul the metal once you extract it—very low delta v for escape, and all that solar power on the sails. Even if the whole solar system were one big free-trade zone or one big socialist economy, Mercury would still be our mining world.”

  “So the way the Mercurial miners get screwed is just sort of icing on the cake,” Jak observed, remembering some Solar System Ethnography and only mildly horrified to realize it was useful.

  “ ‘Getting screwed’ is a little overdone,” Mattanga said mildly. “Most of them are convicts or undesirables from around the solar system, so in the first place, they don’t deserve much. Mercury has been settled for twelve hundred years out of the solar system’s prisons, deadbeat bins, and welfare rolls, so, frankly, who cares? And in the second place, they screw themselves—that anarchist setup they insist on means a corporate free-for-all.”

  “Um,” Jak said, “I don’t know if they insist on it.”

  “Every time someone tries to set up a government on Mercury, the League of Polities pays a handful of mercenaries to organize the Mercurials themselves to overthrow it. That doesn’t look like people who really want a government.”

  Jak was remembering that his test scores hadn’t been very good in that area, so he nodded for her to go on. After all, he’d be there soon enough, and then he could have whatever opinions he wanted.

  “Anyway,” Mattanga said, “in the last few months, prices have gone up, quantities have gone down, a lot of our old suppliers won’t talk to us at all, and we hear about sabotage, unsafe conditions, and a severe labor shortage. Some crime syndicate or zybot is organizing Mercury. It’s not the workers. People who live in a scary environment like Mercury don’t do sabotage.

  “On the whole planet we’ve only ever really been able to afford three stringer agents. Just as the trouble started, two of them stopped reporting and became much wealthier—so we assume they were bought and turned. The third one is Kyffimna Eldothaler, of the Eldothaler Quacco, which works Crater Hamner. She’s been sending us all sorts of wild tales—no wonder the opposition, whoever that is, left her on our side. She’ll be the contact who picks you up but she won’t be an asset; your job in part is to find out what the truth is, as opposed to what she’s been sending us. Once you find out—act in our interests. It’s not at all unlike the assignment Dean Caccitepe gave you.” She smiled at their startled expressions. “Oh, yes, we’ve been in touch. We’re old friends. We share a sense of humor, you know.”

  Jak suddenly saw a resemblance in the smile; he didn’t care for it at all. But before he could feel really nervous, Mattanga turned to Dujuv and said, very quietly, “And by the way, for what it’s worth—probably nothing—you made a friend tonight that you can never lose.”

  When they called the hospital, they learned that Myxenna would be unconscious for the next month, while they grew her a new left leg.

  CHAPTER 9

  Which One of Us Is the Princess Here?

  Xabo said that Kawib was on leave for a few days. “He did say to thank you, Jak, for demonstrating that the RPG is not just the Rutty Princess’s Gigolos, and as for Dujuv—well, he couldn’t quite say, even to me, how much he thanks you.”

  “I just wish I’d done something effective,” Dujuv said.

  “You did. If you hadn’t done that, Xil Argenglass would have spent the rest of his life collecting rewards. You put some justice into a universe where it’s hard to come by. If you don’t mind, I’d like to shake your hand.”

  That night, as Dujuv and Jak sat at dinner in the farmhouse restaurant in New Bethlehem, Dujuv said, “I’m not feeling very proud of being a wasp just now. ‘Friendly monarch’—Shyf isn’t anybody’s friend except maybe her own. ‘Assistance’? Murder. And that was a wasp that did that to her.”

  “It was quick,” Jak pointed out, mildly.

  “I can do all kinds of things quickly,” Dujuv said, “leaving you as dead as Seubla. Would it be okay if I did?”

  “I was looking for a good side.”

  “That’s like looking for the straightforward side of Dean Caccitepe, or the chaste side of Myx, old tove. You can walk around in circles a long time but you’re not finding it.”

  “Toktru. Sorry.”

  “Well, you saw what it did to her, and I don’t care that it only hurt for an instant; that had to hurt, and for her mother and her mekko to see her like that … and like I said, that was done by a wasp as a favor to get in good with a hereditary monarch. Doesn’t that seem to you like pretty weird behavior for the biggest republic in the solar system, the ‘mother of republics’? The djeste makes me want to puke.”

  “Duj,” Jak said, “you can get into incredible amounts of trouble for saying things like that.”

  “Is that what you’re w
orrying about, Jak, or is it that you could get into trouble if you listened and didn’t object?”

  Jak had no reply.

  That evening, as he walked his night patrol, Jak’s sprite veered toward the Heir’s Palace, and despite the beginnings of conditioned physical excitement, his stomach dropped to the ground. He felt as if he were about to attend a Christmas morning hanging, but as he neared the Palace, whether it was the sprite urging him on or his own mounting eagerness, he hurried more and more. When the door dilated in front of him and Sesh said “Come in,” he was smiling despite himself. He stepped through.

  His face stung and his ear rang with the force of her slap. The door shuttered closed behind him. She hit him again, backhand, her knuckles scraping across his face. She stood naked before him, a magnificently raging slim redheaded elf. “You stupid side of almost-attractive beef, I really ought to have you killed. You fuck competently, but your real talent seems to be with fucking things up.”

  Sesh grabbed him and gave him a long deep kiss. He had never felt so ill, or so aroused, before.

  “See?” she said. “When the conditioning is fresh, you don’t have any choice.” She pulled his face down and kissed him again; his heart pounded and he felt more excited than ever. Then she pushed him away and slapped him. “You are supposed to be a Royal Palace Guard. Look good and do what I like. You had to jump in and be a hero and everything, and with your silly Disciplines, and your big stupid friend leaped right in and killed the only person in the room who was doing his job. And it might be a decade before I can try again.”

  Jak didn’t know what to say, so he blurted out the only thought in his mind. “But he’s your father. And he seems like a kind person …” He barely avoided voicing kinder than you.

  “ ‘Kind!’ That’s all I hear about him. Kind, kind, kind. He acts like he wants to end up in the official history as Scaboron the Kind! Let me tell you that I feel a lot more for my old nurses and bodyguards than I’m ever going to feel for that silly stupid old sentimental gwont. He actually believes in all that ‘Make sure you appear to deserve your privileges’ crap.”