Sands of the Solar Empire (The Belmont Saga)

by Ren Garcia

  An apple came down from the gallery and landed nearby.

  Stenstrom found himself becoming rather annoyed. His tongue began to wag. “Your pardon, Admirals, a plantain is most decidedly not a banana.”

  So, he’s a chef as well as a lily-livered accountant, is he?

  Here, Paymaster, file this rotten orange in an appropriate place!

  A smelly orange came down and whizzed over Stenstrom’s head. Captain Davage sat there quietly and drank a coffee, nonplussed.

  “Your late mother, Lady Jubilee, may her soul rest at peace, was a lady of Tyrol—that has been previously established,” the Admiral said.

  “Yes, and what of it?”

  “House Tyrol has established roots and ties with the House of Croatoa. House Croatoa is prominent with the current governing body of Hoban. It is that body that formulated the Hoban Royal Navy and unleashed it upon space.”

  “Irrelevant, sir. Again, neither I, nor my departed mother, have ties to the Hoban Royal Navy—I simply liked the coat.”

  The Admiral who had been speaking continued. “Regardless, sir, you come before us, a green-fisted clerk wearing the trappings of a clown, and, I must know, for I can bear it no longer, why in Creation are you wearing a mask?”

  The rest of the gallery began barking.

  “Are you scarred?”

  “Are you monstrous?”

  “Remove your mask, banana-boy!”

  “Give us your coat, so we may burn it!”

  “I’ll wager you are hideous!”

  “How may we take you seriously, sir?” an Admiral from the gallery spoke. “Attired in a fool’s coat, and that stupendous mask? Why wear you such a thing?”

  By this point in the interrogation, Stenstrom was feeling good and salty. “Because I choose to. Because a great personal hero of mine, Lord Terrance of Walther, wore a mask.”

  “Lord Terrance of Walther was mad, a vigilant and censured by the Sisterhood for his bravado. You choose such a man as your inspiration?”

  “I do. The Sisters were incorrect in their assessment. What tea-drinking female or insipid bed-wetter serves as your inspiration, sir?”

  “Hooah!” the Admirals cried in reproach. “Hooah!”

  The proceedings had degenerated into a name-calling and humiliation fest—not an uncommon thing during a contentious appointment.

  Stenstrom removed his hat and pulled his mask off. There he was, a handsome, blue-eyed, black-haired Lord of Belmont. Mixed into his hair were slight wisps of silver—a gift from his mother’s Tyrol stock.

  He began to feel the familiar tug on his soul and quickly put the mask back on. He was enraged. “Standing here, I feel myself as a twelve-point buck upon the path!” he shouted into the crowd.

  “Were you a twelve-point buck, at least you would have some use!” an Admiral yelled back.

  Another outraged Admiral spoke up. “The Lord Belmont must think us sorry or half-witted to ever contemplate him sitting upon the Seeker’s chair.”

  “Do not speak of me as if I am dead, sir!” he replied. “I am not dead—I stand before you. I am alive, sir. I’m alive!”

  The gallery again stirred. “That… has yet to be determined. You have no experience, and apparently no sense.”

  “Again, I commanded the New Faith during the Kestral Affair and am proud to say I did well.”

  “You used your Hoban Royal Navy coat to keep the Captain’s seat warm, whilst he defended his ship from a cowardly, implacable enemy!”

  “Ah,” Stenstrom cried. “Cowardly… a true buzz-word here in the Admiralty.”

  Oh dear … Davage sat there and shook his head.

  Get me a bushel!

  Somebody threw a head of cabbage down and got Stenstrom in the shoulder.

  Huzzah—right in the face! A fine cabbage cast!

  Stenstrom picked it up and started to throw it back into the gallery. A small adjutant ran up to him and held out a collection basket.

  Stenstrom got out his money purse and put the whole thing into the collection basket.

  He’s throwing!

  Stenstrom threw the cabbage back into the gallery. Soon the adjutant returned with a basket full of vegetables. Grabbing two hand’s worth, Stenstrom started throwing in earnest.

  I’m hit! Ah me, I’m hit!

  By thunder, he’ll be a pair of tongs short of a salad when I’m finished with him.

  Gah!—I just hit Admiral Veng in the back of the head. Apologies, Admiral!

  The gallery howled and returned the favor.

  * * * * *

  Lord Davage sat there and sighed. What was the point of all of this—the appointment was decided and this sorry carnival was simply a side-oddity.

  A lemon came down; he ducked.

  Davage stood, kicking his chair away with force where it toppled over. “ENOUGH!” he shouted, his Vith voice filling the gallery. The cascade of fruits and vegetables from the stands stopped. Stenstrom stood there with two fistfuls of cabbage, ready to let them loose. “What, may I ask, is the point of all of this? You know, as well as I, that this Appointment is decided. You, Admirals, have opened the Seeker’s chair Free boot style and have invited an open appointment. Lord Belmont, despite his Hoban Royal Navy coat, is well-suited to take the chair, and he meets all of your criteria. Additionally I am personally vouching for his skill and his pending success. I gave him my ship in a time of great need, and I felt perfectly at ease doing so. You have no other willing to take the time and spend the coin to sit upon the Seeker’s chair. Let us see reason here and set to the hard work ahead.”

  There was a bit of muttering, but the food-throwing stopped, and the rest of the Appointment passed with much less drama.

  Let him have the chair, and pay his coin. See if he keeps it.

  We can make things rather difficult for him .

  Welcome to the Fleet . Captain Stenstrom . for as long as that lasts.

  * * * * *

  Several hours later, Stenstrom sent a Com home to his father. He’d been Appointed as captain of the Seeker.

  III-An Open Letter from the Fiend of Calvert to the Mad Lord of Walther

  Published February 32, 003119ax—Synthnet (St. Edmunds)

  I am he who was known as the Fiend of Calvert. I trawled the streets and wharfs there, shutting the eyes of drunks and fallen men. As rats are occasionally cleaned from the sewers and other places of refuse, I cleaned the Calvert streets of Elder scum.

  I should be praised. I should be given a key to the city.

  Instead, I was grievously wounded by the coward who calls himself the Mad Lord of Walther. He fell upon me from behind, applied a harassing wound, and then chased me cross the rooftops, laughing throughout the entire ordeal. Though pained, I managed to escape and had to spend a significant amount of time convalescing after the injury he so cowardly inflicted upon me.

  Meanwhile, the filth in Calvert festers and grows afresh. Without the cat to keep the mice thinned, they overrun.

  I have read your memoirs, Mad Lord. A fanciful bit of fiction, I must say. You claim that I am a lady, that you saw me as a woman in gray. I can assure you, sir, I am no woman. Would a woman be capable of doing what I have done?

  If you would care to prove that YOU are no woman, sir, I challenge you to meet me in Calvert, and we may settle our dispute once and for all. Fail to meet me, and I might choose to call on Calvert afresh and resume my art at long last, as there are many throats there needing cutting.

  This time you shall not catch me unawares.

  Signed

  ??????????, the Fiend of Calvert

  IV-Twins

  The heart of the League consists mostly of two planets: Kana and Onaris. There are many more League worlds that have been added over the years, but Kana and Onaris are the principles, the bastions of the League—like two great rocks facing each other on a vast beach. Other rocks might someday be washed up or eroded into view, but these two were the originals, and all others came later.

&nbs
p; They are, in the cosmic scheme of things, neighbors in space—twins almost. To a fast Fleet ship, traveling the distance from Kana to Onaris can, depending on the time of the year, take less than a day, perhaps a little more if the ship is in no hurry. Slower ships, like Fleet merchant-men, frigates, and private vessels might make the trip in two days, perhaps three if they were particularly slow.

  Moving through the patrolled lanes between the two planets is like nothing—hardly a thought went into it. It was a boring trip, a maudlin one at that. Modern vessels, even the unsightly rusty ones, could move at colossal speed, luxurious in safety and all the comforts of home.

  Kana and Onaris: two great rocks facing each other on a celestial beach, awash in the surf and bound together by cosmic sand.

  Consider this: take away those modern ships, take away that speed and technology, and suddenly the small space between the two planets widens into a dark gulf full of the foreboding and the unknown—the grains of sand on the beach separating the two rocks now insurmountable and endless.

  Kana is the third planet in the Beta Terragrin system, orbiting an energetic G class star, warm and yellow.

  .2 light years away is Onaris, the tenth planet in the Nu Torriander system, its star a larger A-class globe the Browns called “Ole Scrub” with an outlying class-2 dwarf star companion not far away. Orbiting two slots down from Onaris is Bazz, a terraformed newcomer. Being so far from Ole Scrub, Bazz had pretty tough winters, but it was baked hard in the summer from the dwarf star they called “Lil’ White-Face.” As summers and winters on Bazz depended on planetary positioning rather than rotational tilt, the whole planet was in winter or in summer at once. An extreme place, lots of misfits went to Bazz—the frontier. Lots of people with things to hide went to Bazz in the old EX days before the Xaphans left.

  Kana and Onaris: .2 light years apart. That is quite a lot of empty space between the two, space that isn’t really all that empty. The League engineers have charts and maps detailing the mundane stellar bodies lying between Kana and Onaris: nebulas, comets, asteroid fields, clouds of frozen methane and the like. However, most League charts center on the shipping lanes, the direct path ships use to make the journey from Kana to Onaris and back. Go off the shipping lanes and one enters the wild lands—the unknown where the small spaces truly become huge and engulfing. None other than local daredevils and old hermits riding the frontier past Druries Belt truly knew what was there, and nobody else really cared. What difference did it make? Here and there—gone in a blink and a surge of speed.

  The “sands” of the Solar Empire, forever vast and unknown, stepped over with speedy ships moving entirely too fast to see what was there.

  Part 1 The Admiral’s Pleasure

  1 The Old Dream

  The day before he was to take command of his vessel, Stenstrom returned to his ancestral manor south of Tyrol. His father was there and so were many of his twenty-nine sisters. They sat in the great dining room his mother once loved and toasted to him and his success. After dinner he briefly went out to the hill and stood in front of his mother’s gravestone.

  After all this time, he still missed her.

  That evening he sat in his father’s study with his two favorite sisters, Lyra and Virginia. His father had been a Fleet Captain on the warbird Caroline for decades, and Stenstrom listened to his advice.

  His father, giddy with excitement, thoroughly briefed his son on what to expect in the days ahead.

  “You have an old ship to nurse back to fighting health. She’s a good ship, a strong ship. I expect the next few months shall be rather sedate as you settle into command and oversee the Seeker’s refits. Be certain to take an active role in the refits—do not allow some Admiral or Fleet engineer to run the whole thing un-tempered—assert your command as captain from day one. Put your nose into places where it might not belong. Do not be afraid to ruffle feathers and stand tip-to-tip with those prima-donnas. Next, you shall need to recruit an engineer and a boatswain. Again, do not allow the Admiralty to select one for you—be bold, be aggressive. Go out and make your pitch to those you feel you can trust. If you wish it, I have a list of names that I think would make fine additions, if I may say so. Take them as you wish.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  Stenstrom the Older stood and poured four glasses of fine brandy. “Here’s some of the good stuff. To my son, Lord Stenstrom, captain of the Seeker.”

  “To Bel, my favorite brother!” Lyra said.

  “I hope you’ll let me come aboard and cook for you and your crew sometime, Bel,” Virginia said

  Stenstrom laughed. “My mouth is already watering.”

  They clinked their glasses and drank. “Ah,” Stenstrom the Older said, knocking it back. “Also, though your mother protested and inconvenienced you as only she could, I am certain she would have been so proud of you today, as I am. Your mother loved you very much, and as you know, that love carried with it a bit of an ordeal. Your mother could be overbearing, but she never meant anything not in your best interest. All in all—I think it made you a better man, better ready to lead.”

  Stenstrom stood there and remembered his departed mother. “Elders, rest her soul.” The four of them were quiet for a moment.

  He truly wished his mother could be here to see what he’d become.

  That night he slept in his boyhood bedroom. He had a troubling dream that night—one of those select dreams that reoccurs periodically throughout one’s life. This was a dream he first had as a little boy, and it never failed to come back to him before momentous occasions, like this one.

  He dreamed of himself as a little boy, barely ten years old. He was playing in a vast sand pit behind his family manor along with Lyra and Virginia. Under the warm sun of the afternoon, his black-haired sister Lyra played in the sand along with him. Virginia sat nearby stuffing her face with something from the kitchens, watching them play. Virginia, with her mottled head of silver/black hair, was not near as tomboyish as Lyra was.

  Laughing, he and Lyra wrestled in the sand. Lyra was several years older than he was, and much bigger. She got him in a headlock and then threw him to the other side of the sand pit. He could remember the feeling of flying through the air, a brief look at the sky as he fell into the unbroken sand. The puffy clouds. And he always recalled seeing stars out on the horizon in a squarish constellation, even though it was broad daylight.

  His dream was always the same: the sand, his sisters, the wrestling. He hit the sand, and then, as always, the dream became cloudy.

  There was a great clamor. Something hidden in the sand jumped out with terrifying speed.

  There was a SNAP!

  In his dream, he could see his two sisters standing there, Lyra in the sand with him and Virginia nearby. They were both staring at him. Virginia dropped the thing she was eating; it plopped into the sand. Her mouth was full of food, but she didn’t chew.

  Lyra then turned and ran. “Momma, Momma!” she screamed. Virginia just stood there open-mouthed.

  As always, the last thing he could remember at the end of the dream was Lyra returning to the play area, leading Mother by her hand.

  “Bel? BEL!” his mother screamed. “BEL!”

  And that was all he could ever remember. That was the end of the dream. Whenever he had that old dream, it stayed with him all day long, just on the outskirts of his thoughts, lingering.

  He sighed and tried to put the dream out of his head. He dressed, said goodbye to his father and sisters, and headed south to begin his new life as Fleet captain.

  2 St. Porter’s Day

  Stenstrom arrived at the sprawling Fleet headquarters in the Zenon city of Armenelos bright and early to perform a series of perfunctory duties and take command of his ship. It had been a month since his contentious appointment with the Admiralty. His mentor Lord Davage had long taken his leave and returned to his ship and his loving countess.

  He had an appointment with Admiral Derlith, of the 3rd Fleet. He expected it to be a
formality, for that’s all it should be; after that, he could be introduced to his ship: the Seeker. As he walked through the massive marble corridors framed with statuary under towering rotundas and lush botanicals, he was surprised how largely empty the complex was—he’d certainly expected it to be much more bustling. In the broad common areas, many of the little shops and eateries were closed, vendor stalls were covered with tarps, and the cantinas were also not open.

  Ah! It was St. Porter’s day, of course! Stenstrom had completely forgotten. St. Porter’s day was a special holiday celebrated throughout the League. It was a day to express good will to one’s fellows and make new friends. It was said a friend or new love made on St. Porter’s Day was a friend or love for life.

  With a quick movement of his hand, he produced his small golden locket. He opened it, and there was Lilly’s radiant face painted in genius strokes, fresh and reassuring.

  Fatefully, he had also met her on St. Porter’s Day, four years ago.

  He gave Lilly-in-the-locket one last smile, and put her back into his coat. Today was going to be amazing. This was his day at last.

  Stenstrom took a moment and found a free terminal and sent a com home to Tyrol. There, he greeted his father and his sister Lyra and wished them good fortune, as was customary on St. Porter’s Day. They were all smiles and wanted to know how things were progressing.

  “Hasn’t really started yet,” he replied. “I just got here.” He wrapped up the communication, sat a moment, and then sent a Com to Lilly in far away Gamboa. He wanted to see her. He wanted to tell her he loved her, at the very least he hoped for a hearty “good luck” from her.

  He waited, not expecting the Com to be answered; Lilly hadn’t been responding to any of his Coms lately.

  The Com connected, he was elated. “Lilly!’ he cried, “it is I, Stenstrom.”

  The image at the far end of the Com was hazy and indistinct, full of rattling and odd sounds. He thought he saw a point of light, like a lantern light appear in the distance and then the Com broke. The screen went black.