I told Hunter about his guard, Quewley, killing Sumter and Hunter got into a big argument with Noir on the way to Oasis, when we thought we were going home. Quewley died during the night, and Hunter asked Noir what happened, but Noir just smiled and said that now there were no witnesses. So Hunter’s afraid to cross Noir.
I know there’s probably nothing you can do to stop Noir, but I’m sure he’s going to kill us after he gets rid of the other heirs. After our trip together, I felt we were friends; please save yourself while you can.
Fondly,
Pillow
***
Lord Oswald chuckled behind me. “It certainly ties everything up in a neat little bow. Clever of Noir.”
I spun around, eyes flashing defiantly. “What do you mean by that?”
“Obviously, it’s a fake, intended to keep us from attacking the Raven. They’re probably using it as a command base.”
I shook my head. “No, it’s real. I mean, they probably are commanding from the starship, but the message is real.”
“Come on, Euclid,” Lord Oswald said, pinching his face in distaste, “He even misspelled Willow. Would Lady Vere do that?”
“It’s not misspelled. That’s part of how I know it’s real.”
Lord Oswald looked surprised for a moment, as though he’d just seen a pet roaddog perform a new trick that he hadn’t taught him, then he grinned and sat down in a chair facing me. “Okay, tell me the rest.”
“Euler and Pillow. We were … teasing each other just before she left me here.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Pillow?”
“Technically, she’s a princess, you know. Well, think about it; Princess Willow, Princess Pillow — it was so obvious.”
Lord Oswald groaned. “But … Euler?”
“He was another Old Earth mathematician. The only other person who knew about the joke names we used for each other was our port master here in Oasisis.”
“Who is gone,” my Lord pointed out, “and might have been captured by Noir.”
“That’s true, but what about the content? It says Noir is behind everything; why would he admit to it?”
Lord Oswald considered this. “You’ve got a point there.”
“Also, he knows that I know about Vere’s guard, Quewley, but he doesn’t know that I told Willow, and she says in the message that she told Vere about Quewley. Noir wouldn’t expect me to know that she could tell her husband anything about Quewley.”
My Lord nodded and pursed his lips, a gesture admitting the possibility that my explanation might be true.
But I did have one more point to make. “Finally, there’s the issue of the encryption. If Noir wanted us to think a fake message was real, why would he use one of his private encryption codes? He might have suspected I found them, after examining the decrypted message on the datadot, but why would he think I’d be able to use those codes later? I didn’t have the algorithms on the datadot. But Willow knows I have an eidetic memory, and she knows that I found his codes, so she could send a message with one of the codes and feel pretty sure it wouldn’t be intercepted by anyone else. She’s pretty clever; I bet the Raven won’t even have a record of the message having been sent.”
The prince threw up his arms. “Fine, you’ve convinced me. The message is genuine. So what? It doesn’t expose any tactical advantage or tell us how to defeat Noir.”
I frowned. The prince was right. All the message served to do was give me a little peace of mind where Willow was concerned. Which, of course, was why she would have sent it.
Lord Oswald’s personal comlink chirped with a message from General Zanuck. “Vere’s reinforcements expected to arrive mid-morning tomorrow. Get some sleep tonight.”
***
Eighth Euclid was one of my favorite brothers. Maybe it was just because he was closest to my age, but I always told myself it was his knack for cutting to the heart of a problem, even if it wasn’t obvious what the problem really was.
Once, late in the harvest season, the farm stopped working. Over the course of a day, everything quit. Threshers stopped dead, none of the tractors would start, nothing we used seemed to work that day. By the time we went to bed that night, Daddy was so worried about how much it would cost to get new equipment, I thought he was going to have a stroke. In the morning, just in case it was some kind of bad dream, he sent out One and Two to double check the broken-down machines. They came back confirming that none of them would start up again, and Daddy sighed and called for breakfast.
Daddy explained what had happened, and mapped out our options. We all sat around numbly — except for Five, of course, who was still asleep, his snoring head planted firmly on the tabletop — trying to think of a way out of the jam. Daddy wanted our input, but nobody had any ideas.
I looked at Eight and he had a curious expression, his face all screwed up, his mind far away, thinking about something, which I hoped was our problem. I poked him, and he immediately looked annoyed, but it brought him back to reality.
It turned out Eight was thinking about the problem. He asked, “Wasn’t Five supposed to check power levels this week?”
Daddy blinked and everyone turned to the sleeping Five.
Three woke him up painfully and, after his initial shout, Five calmed down enough to be coherent.
Five had forgotten. Each week, one of us had to make sure all the equipment we needed to use was properly powered every morning, which consisted of checking the individual power grids and adding recharged fuel cells as needed. It was Five’s responsibility that week, and he had forgotten for a couple of days in a row.
The machines we were using had simply run out of power, all of them within the space of that day. In our panic, nobody checked on the machines which we weren’t using — like the planters, since their time was well before the harvest — which all turned out to be fine.
And with the cascade of failing equipment, we all got so riled that we forgot to check the obvious. Since we were used to starting the morning with full power, we naturally figured it was something else.
I didn’t even want to think about what would have happened if Eight hadn’t figured out the real problem.
I woke in my palace bed, the sun blinding me with its brilliance full on my face, my eyes still burning with the image of Eight’s face after Five admitted his foible.
Eight had realized we were trying to solve the wrong problem.
As I propped myself on an elbow in my bed, looking out at Oasis for what might be the last time in my life, it occurred to me that we were doing the same. Lord Oswald and I, General Zanuck, the Angels, all of us were trying to figure out how to get rid of Vere’s troops, when that wasn’t the problem we needed to solve.
The real problem wasn’t how to get rid of the invaders — we had already determined that it was too late for that — but how to defeat the invaders.
But defeating them wasn’t the same as removing them from Oasis, and to win this war, we had to accept the possibility of losing Oasis.
Dressing hastily, I rushed to Lord Oswald’s room to tell him my plan, no matter how remote its chance of success.
***
We had a lot to do that morning. Lord Oswald decided to implement my plan, since we hadn’t thought of anything better, but I didn’t think he believed it would work. Still, he had a lot of coordination to do, which meant a flurry of coded messages crossing the planet.
I was thankful my Lord had his Angels. His personal legion’s system of communications used a changing set of codes based on a number of seemingly arbitrary factors, so that it was virtually unbreakable over time. There were no code books or anything concrete like that, but every Angel officer knew the algorithms by heart and how to determine the key values at any given time. Every officer could implement an encryptor and decryptor in ten minutes with a child’s computer.
While my Lord built the framework for our trap, I laid the foundation. The key to my plan was the propensity of the common legions to follow eve
ry command to the letter without thinking too much about the minor consequences.
Willow gave me the answer without meaning to, but I made a mental note to thank her anyway if we both survived. Assuming Willow’s message was genuine, Noir didn’t know his personal codes had all been breached, courtesy my eidetic memory. In fact, he might not even know that I’d decrypted the one message he knew I’d seen. If all that was true, he probably hadn’t changed any of his codes yet.
I knew a little about communications myself, enough to construct a message and broadcast it so it looked like it came from someone else. Where the casual imposter fails with this approach is the signal itself. All messages carry both logical routing and physical routing. I could fake the logical routing — who was sending it, and where it was going — but not the physical routing — where it was broadcast from in the universe. The beauty of the deception was that I didn’t need to fake the physical routing at all. The message was going to look as if it originated from the Raven, which was conveniently parked so close to the palace comlink that, even if someone traced the signal, the variance would still include the starship’s position, so a location search would match.
Even if Vere’s troops suspected it was their enemy sending the message, they would never believe we’d send a message ordering them to make it harder on us. So they’d probably obey the order anyway.
The content of the message was as critical as the timing, and I had to make sure it was perfect. It took a couple of iterations, but I finally was as satisfied as I would ever be by the time Lord Oswald had all his Angels ready.
The palace comroom buzzed with activity when I walked in with my message ready. Lord Oswald was barking orders into the comlink, General Zanuck was upbraiding an Angel officer, several low-ranking Angels were running around.
All of it stopped for a few seconds when I came in.
The prince grinned and motioned me over, then cut his link short while I rushed over. The noise around us started returning to normal.
“It’s ready,” I said, grinning, and handed over a datadot.
Lord Oswald looked up from the comlink and blew out his breath. “Let’s hope luck is with us.”
There were two prongs to our strange attack, and the message I’d labored over was only one prong. The other prong was a message to New Rome, detailing Lord Noir’s crimes and copying Noir’s message from the datadot I’d left on the Phoenix, figuring it was safer there until the battle was over.
But I needed to retrieve the datadot first. I decided to go get the Phoenix alone, and we’d send the two messages at the same time.
Leaving the prince to monitor transmissions and determine if our plan was working, I ran out to the jumper and had it airborne seconds after the hatch closed. Jumping high to avoid any possible fire, I brought the ship down again fast, navigating into the prince’s hideaway jumpport. Burner drawn as a precaution, I leaped out and found the dark port empty, as I’d expected. I made my way to the Phoenix and climbed in, eager to make her acquaintance again.
Retrieving the hidden datadot with Noir’s message on it, I merged it with the lengthy message to New Rome and readied the comlink. At a prearranged signal with Lord Oswald, I sent my message, then pocketed both datadots while I readied the jumper for takeoff, reciting a mental prayer for luck.
At the palace, the prince should have sent the other message to Vere’s troops on Greengarden, encrypted with one of Noir’s secret codes and tagged with a special signature I noticed on each of his secret messages.
All Greengarden legions needed on Oasis immediately. Codes compromised, Raven in danger of capture. Ignore all subsequent messages until personal conference with Prince Vere.
Chapter 23
Engaged
AS A RULE, THE LEGIONS ARE LAZY. Sure, they wake early, train brutally and burn calories at such a prodigious rate a moderately rich man would find himself broke and destitute trying to satisfy their collective hunger. That’s why it’s the wealthy Lords that have legions, not every little farm town council. Fighting men cost money. But in between torching their benefactor’s finances at a shockingly high expense rate, they relax. A lot. Peace changes to War in a heartbeat, and when that happens, the money spigot turns on full blast for the duration. The legions get no rest, then.
That’s not to say they get flabby. Far from it. But they like to kick back and enjoy the sunshine.
Unfortunately, fighting men also get restless when they’re not fighting. Let them enjoy too much sunshine and they start fighting themselves, just for the fun of it. My Lord knew this from his own time in the legions, and Oasis had been at peace for a long time. So, to slake their bloodlust, periodically he’d hire out some of his Angels for someone else’s war, like mercenaries. This had the triple advantage of letting some of the fighting men blow off some steam, providing an added incentive to be chosen for the Angels and adding to the Oasis coffers. It was rare that a mercenary Angel would get badly injured, much less killed, but it did happen occasionally, and was always treated as a great honor.
Nobody thinks it much of an honor to die in a training exercise at base camp. Battle deaths were the only way to go. It’s been the way of the warrior since time immemorial.
Though I’d never been in battle myself, every one of Oswald’s Angels had seen real battle at some point, and they were, to a man, practically vibrating with excitement.
The word went out that a fierce, hopefully short, campaign was starting that would require every single legion, not just the Angels, and that the fate of Oasis hung in the balance, and the response went far beyond my expectations.
After dodging an impotent stray shot, I landed the jumper in Oasisis jumpport to find General Zanuck waiting for me with my sister.
“Han? Why are you here?” I blurted. “Go home. Stay out of the way. I don’t want you getting hurt.”
“Hmmph!” she snorted derisively, and I thought I caught a smirk flash across the general’s lips. “As if. I grew up with nine elephants, you big lunkhead.”
General Zanuck cleared his throat. “As a matter of fact, having met them recently, I’d say the Angels might pick up another eight elephants.” He scowled for a second. “Maybe seven.”
“Five?” Hannah and I asked, simultaneously.
“Lazy bum,” I added. “Please, please, do not make me rely on him for my life.”
“In any case,” the general continued, seriously, “your sister’s managed to mobilize the farmers.”
Hannah beamed. “I went to Z like you told me, and he’s filled me in on everything. It sounded like you might need some help.”
I gaped, slack-jawed. Z? When did my sister get to be so familiar with the general of my Lord’s personal legion?
General Zanuck glanced at my sister and smiled broadly. “Hannah’s absolutely fearless, you know. The other day she went right up to Badass Ballard, told him she didn’t like his condescending attitude toward some of the new recruits, then laid him out flat before he had a chance to argue. Then she yelled at one of the new guys to pick up the back end of a tractor.”
That would be Buster Jenson, I’d bet. One of the farms Daddy had acquired; the youngest son of the previous owner was a hulking beast of a boy who didn’t want to leave the farm. We kept him on with the promise of giving him the farm back after ten years, if the improvements I’d make bore enough fruit to quadruple our investment. It was past that point already, and Daddy made good on his promise early. Buster kept the improvements and even asked for more, which I was happy to oblige. Anyway, Buster liked to impress the girls by hoisting the back of his tractor off the ground. He always said it’s not as hard as it looks, it’s just leverage, really. I certainly can’t do it, but then I’m not built like a rhinoceros, either.
“Damned if he didn’t do it, too,” the general said, incredulously. “Those farm boys have been getting a lot more respect since then. We’ve formed a new Oasisis legion just for them, and we’re doing the same with locals everywhere Vere’s a t
hreat.”
I started to open my mouth to protest using untrained farm boys in a battle with trained legions, but General Zanuck stopped me with a raised hand.
“I know there hasn’t been time to train them. But those boys know how to follow orders, and there’s plenty for them to do that’s not in the line of fire. Blocking egress with trees and vehicles, enabling convenient power failures, cutting of supply lines, fixing damaged equipment, that kind of thing.”
“It’s Lord Oswald’s call,” I said cautiously, “but—”
“I approved it,” my Lord’s voice boomed behind me.
I spun around, grinning. “Good enough for me.”
***
If we were lucky, New Rome had received the messages and now wanted to capture Lord Jagumal Noir and ask him some difficult questions about some of its missing heirs and his plans for the Eternal Empire. If we were luckier, by now Prince Vere’s remaining troops on Greengarden were scrambling to come to Oasis and save him. If we were even more lucky, the Raven hadn’t yet noticed the transmission, interpreting it as a friendly message because of the code and just filing it for reference. If the message had been discovered, anyone who believed that the first message was genuine should consider any counter-orders as proof that they had been compromised.
If luck oozed from every one of our collective pores, Vere’s troops should be suspicious enough to throw them into disorganization while the Angels simultaneously tried to capture every single one of Vere’s starships on Oasis.
The pesky starship that plagued the perimeter of Oasisis jumpport was our responsibility.
The farm legion, which they dubbed The Ancellaries in honor of my sister’s surname, since Hannah seemed to be their de facto commander, sprang into action immediately. Farmers have a lot of work to do, and a limited time to do it, so they don’t wait around when it’s time to work. When Hannah wasn’t consulting with General Zanuck, she was on the commlinks issuing orders and expecting them to get done right now. In other words, Hannah was being Hannah.
Ninth Euclid's Prince Page 28