The screen came alive. In place of a seal, it showed the rolling green hills of Bayern with some very lovely horses grazing peacefully. Then the view panned to a retired admiral.
“I understand that a well done is in order, Your Grace. A very well done, if I may say so myself. None of us here expected anything of the high order that you have achieved. It almost makes me believe that you Peterwalds do have some stern stuff in your bones. At least one of you. Please continue to surprise us, and we will do our best to keep up with you and give you what support we can.”
Here he paused, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. When he began again, his face was stern but loaded with commitment. “When you were last here, we spoke of a certain rag. Matters have gone downhill faster than even our worse fears allowed for. That rag is yours. Feel free to do with it what you may.”
And on that note, the screen went blank.
Vicky leaned back in her chair. She had met the man in the last message only once, during a quick stop at Bayern. They had returned the body of the first officer who died for his error of getting too close to her. She had met with a good score of retired officers and wives. They had debated among themselves whether to kill Vicky, as her stepmother wanted, or return her safe to the palace. It had been a close run thing, but they had agreed to let Vicky live.
All the while, in the background of their discussions had been a rag. Actually a flag. The flag of rebellion. Should it be raised? Should Vicky be used to wave it, and should the Navy back her in that rebellion?
Then, Vicky had been adamant that she was no rebel. Then, the Navy had been sure that, while matters were bad, they weren’t that bad. People were not ready to rebel against the Emperor.
A lot had changed since then.
Vicky had returned to the palace and seen for herself why a shadow Navy staff on Bayern made policy for a Navy staff on Greenfeld that was just too close to the palace to keep any secrets. She had barely made it off Greenfeld with her life.
Even distant St. Petersburg hadn’t been far enough away that her stepmother couldn’t hire assassins to do their best to rid the Empress of one troublesome Grand Duchess who stood between her now-born son and the throne.
Vicky let the content of all three messages roll around in her head. She had permission from the Navy to rebel. With her father’s summons so clear, failure to attend to court immediately would be rebellion, plain and simple. Equally, to attend to court was to put herself in her stepmother’s murderous embrace.
“I must go to court,” Vicky said softly, and to the consternation of all listening, even Kit and Kat.
“However, I can not go to court. That would be my death.”
Those around her settled back into their seats.
“So,” Vicky said, smiling at those around her, “how do I spin out my journey to court for as long as possible? The more time we have to prepare our rebellion, the more likely it is to succeed.”
CHAPTER 2
POLICY established, the Grand Duchess turned to evaluating her options.
“I guess my little message really got to my stepmama.”
“I told you, mademoiselle, zat ze second nipple slip was just too too,” Kat offered slyly.
“You might be right,” Vicky agreed, absently.
“Ah,” Mr. Smith said, delicately clearing his throat, “I didn’t deliver your message.”
Vicky raised her eyebrows in surprise. “My dearest darling stepmom was that far around the bend without a word from me?”
“It may be that your actions spoke louder than words,” the admiral put in.
“Do you think she had time to get the word about us turning around her little invasion fleet at Presov?”
The admiral shrugged. “It is hard to say how fast news travels in these times, but I would strongly suspect that bad news flies to her without delay.”
“Your father was hearing stories about you,” the commander put in. “I doubt if he was reacting to word that you’d been kidnapped and staked out to die of thirst.”
Vicky nodded slowly. “Knowing him as I do, I suspect that you are too right. Me nearly killed. ‘Oh dear.’ Me with just the hint of rebellion. ‘Damn it, you will answer me immediately.’ Or so it went when I was getting into this cookie jar or that boy’s pants. Now, I suspect it will be worse.”
“No doubt,” the spy agreed.
“So, what are your plans?” the admiral asked.
“We will have to somehow buy me time to stay out of the palace’s loving clutches.”
“But how?” the commander asked.
“Maybe ze mademoiselle was more hurt in ze latest mad escapade?” Kat put in.
“Not a bad idea,” the admiral said. “Not a bad idea at all.”
“Considering how bad my feet hurt, I could easily have stepped on something that gave me the roaring heebie-jeebies,” Vicky agreed.
“I suggest you answer the Emperor’s demand from sick bay, after some serious bandaging and, ah . . .”
“I believe I can apply the makeup,” the spy offered.
“We have pictures of all her lovely scratches and bug bites,” Kit offered.
“Maybe the answer should best be taken from a planetside hospital,” Vicky said. “It would be easier for me to claim I can’t take a shuttle ride up here than that I can’t take a starship ride home.”
“Good point,” the spy said. “I will make an operative out of you yet.”
“Thank you, but I think Grand Duchess is dangerous enough for my tastes. So, how are we set for ships?”
The admiral’s shrug was burdened with fatalism. “The Attacker’s damage report grows by the day. It is not that the pirate ship did more damage than we thought but that the ship was in much worse underlying shape than we were led to expect. I find myself wondering what we would turn up if we put any of our ships in the docks here on High St. Petersburg.”
“Is nothing what it seems in the Greenfeld Empire?” Vicky asked, not expecting a reply. She did not get one.
“The Kamchatka is now in our second newly equipped refit dock,” the admiral went on. “We have replaced it with the Azov and Orsk on patrol above Presov. They are old but serviceable. It appears that we got the old Kami into dock just in time. Her reactors are being torn down and totally rebuilt as we speak.”
“Are the Retribution and the Rostock all we have in port that could respond to anything?” Vicky asked, trying but failing to keep the incredulity from her voice.
“It would seem so. Two laid-up liners are just about through being converted to armed merchant cruisers, but until you got back, we were kind of thin here,” the admiral admitted.
“We will not leave St. Petersburg that unprotected again,” Vicky snapped.
“Yes, Your Grace,” the admiral answered.
Vicky realized what she’d done only after she had done it. It seemed that the admiral also was only now tasting how he’d responded to her coming the Grand Duchess with full intent.
She chose not to apologize, and he chose to move on.
“Will you be dropping down to Sevastopol to meet with the local power brokers?” the admiral asked. “It would seem that they may feel a need for a say if you are intent on using their planet as your base for a slow boil to revolution.”
Vicky sighed. “No doubt I have more politicking to do. Oh, for the days when my father or grandfather could snap his fingers and people would jump.”
“Or appear to jump,” the spy pointed out.
“Ah yes, we do seem to be deep in discovery of how things really went, don’t we?” Vicky agreed.
She left others to do what they did and headed out to do what she did best: listen to people talk and talk and talk until they agreed with her. However, before she headed down, she called a time-out so everyone on her team could take advantage of the new spidersilk armor.
Which turned out to be a lot tougher to get into than Kris Longknife ever mentioned. After much pulling and yanking, use of talc, and not a few n
asty words as hair was pulled out of delicate places, Vicky, Kit, and Kat were ready to dress again.
“I wonder how the men are making out,” Kit said, through a giggle.
“We should have offered to help them,” Kat giggled back.
“But then we’d never have made it down to Sevastopol. At least not today,” Kit insisted.
“We would so jump them,” Kat agreed.
Vicky was only too aware that she had not jumped or been jumped by anyone in far too long. She was trying to persuade herself that a real Grand Duchess didn’t jump men or women at every convenient moment of the day or night.
At least Mannie didn’t seem to behave that way and, so far, Mannie was her best example of how someone with power used it, and used it in ways that got people behind him.
Vicky took a deep breath, suppressed the image of Mannie sandwiched between, among, and within Vicky and her impulsive assassins, and donned her undress whites. She had a lot of work ahead of her.
Mannie was waiting at the spaceport with a limo for her and her team.
“I was expecting you as soon as I got word that fabricators from Metzburg were raining from the sky as fast as those marvelous heavy-lift LCTs could drop. Things must have gone quickly.”
“Your advance men did a lot of prework. My stepmom made her usual threats to do horrible things to people if they talked with me. That didn’t stop them; though it did make them a bit reluctant to shake hands on any deals. Then stepmommy dearest had the usual attack made on my life, and folks on Metzburg got angry. Things moved faster after that.”
Mannie shook his head. “I don’t know what to react to: her trying to throttle anything we do for our own good or her trying to kill you.”
“Thanks for thinking of me a close second,” Vicky said, and pulled what bit of spidersilk armor she could from her throat. “I now have some of Kris Longknife’s miraculous body armor. Nothing’s getting at me now.”
Mannie seemed delighted at that. Vicky searched his smile for any hint that he might have wanted to get at her, even a little bit. If it was there, he hid it well. With them sharing the back of the limo with the commander, the spy, and two tiny assassins, he didn’t so much as rest his hand on hers.
“I have a meeting scheduled in an hour. We need to talk about how things are developing and head off any problems before they get too bad,” the mayor of Sevastopol said. “I’d heard that the Retribution was in system and that you might be available, but I didn’t want to bother you with just our local problems.”
Vicky couldn’t think of anything Mannie might do that would be a bother, but she ignored that for the moment. “It appears that I do have some problems to lay before your committee.”
“Problems?”
“Mr. Smith, run the Emperor’s message to me.”
“Immediately, Your Grace,” and his computer began to project a small hologram of the Emperor in front of Vicky and Mannie. He went through his fatherly concerns again.
“Nice computer you have there,” Mannie said.
“I just had it upgraded in Longknife space,” the spy answered.
“So,” Mannie said, turning to Vicky.
“There’s more.”
Now the spy projected the Empress in all her pregnant roundness and red-faced rage.
“Oh,” Mannie said, when the Empress’s threats vanished back into thin air. “She is not a nice woman. And your father wants you back there with her, huh?”
“So it would seem. There is one more message you should see.”
“I don’t think so, Your Grace,” the commander put in.
“I don’t intend for this message to be shown at the coming meeting,” Vicky answered back, “but Mannie needs to know all the cards that are in our deck.”
“You are risking a lot,” the Navy officer said.
“I have a lot at risk,” Vicky countered.
The commander sat back in his seat, and the spy played the third message.
“I don’t recognize the man,” Mannie said when it was finished.
“I prefer that you don’t remember his face.”
“He seems to speak for the Navy.”
“In a manner of speaking, he may,” Vicky agreed.
“What is this ‘rag’ he spoke of?”
“Substitute flag of rebellion and how does the message go down with you?”
Now it was Mannie’s turn to sink back into the thick leather seat.
“So, when you dropped down here the first time, you were planning rebellion?”
“No,” Vicky said, as forcefully as she could. “I could not be planning rebellion because I had nothing to rebel with, and I was not willing to even consider rebellion. What I told you that day was true.”
“For that day,” Mannie pointed out.
“For that day, yes. And forever more if I could have managed it. I love my father for all his faults and for all that his middle-aged folly is causing a disaster. I still don’t want to rebel.”
“But you kind of like living, don’t you?”
“Very much. It offers all kinds of opportunities for tomorrows,” Vicky agreed.
“Yes. There is that. And those first two messages, they don’t seem to promise you many tomorrows if you do as you are told,” the mayor said slowly.
Vicky nodded.
“And I don’t see us getting a whole lot of good done for ourselves if you stick your head into that noose.”
“I can’t agree with you more.”
“So, if you go there, you die. If you stay safe out here, you are in rebellion. Did I miss any other option?”
Vicky shook her head.
“Then I think we will have to persuade my associates that we would lose too much if we send you back home as requested and required. We will gain far more by keeping you out here than the Empress can take out of our hide.”
Vicky had never felt so much support and acceptance in her life. She wanted to throw herself into his arms and kiss him. She wanted to, but he had turned away to watch the city flowing by his window, seemingly lost in thought.
Gnawing her own lower lip, Vicky did her own turn away. Civil war was not something covered much in her education. It had also not had a section in the ship’s library on the Fury or any other Imperial ships she’d been on. Civil war was not even a whisper in Greenfeld territory. Now she was left to wonder what a civil war might do to the lovely city of Sevastopol.
“I had planned a quick lunch,” Mannie finally said. “Have you eaten?”
“Not since breakfast,” Vicky admitted. “I’m not really hungry.”
“Love letters like those would kill any appetite. Still, our meeting may go long now that I’ll be adding this to the agenda. There’s a deli I ordered sandwiches from. I’ve reserved a room for us to eat under the watchful eyes of my security team.”
They were taken up the tall glass tower that Vicky had been in before. This time, they stopped a floor below the conference room; she was escorted to a suite of rooms under heavy guard.
The ham and cheese sandwiches waiting for them were quite delicious. The pasta salad that came with it reminded Vicky of something she’d tasted as a kid when Maggie would take her for a picnic on the palace grounds, and the cooks would outdo themselves.
The guards took turns wolfing down sandwiches while staying on high alert. She and Mannie talked about her most recent voyage. He enjoyed the part where the Golden Empress ships turned and ran from Presov.
“I don’t think their 4-inch popguns and 18-inch pulse lasers were ready to take on a battleship,” Vicky said with a laugh.
Several of the local guards shared in Mannie’s enjoyment of that picture. Vicky was prepared to let this go on as long as Mannie was willing, but one of his aides came to whisper in his ear.
The mayor stood. “The meeting is ready to begin,” he said, and offered Vicky a hand to help her to her feet and an arm for the short walk to the elevator. Again, the view from the conference room was beyond impressive.
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This time, some forty men and women sat around the table; the seat at the head was left empty for Vicky. Sadly, that gave her the worst view in the house, looking back at the one wall with only the elevator and a pair of large landscape paintings beside it.
Mannie opened the meeting. “All of you have had a chance to review the agenda. Shall we get started?” he began without mentioning that Vicky needed to add another item.
An agenda appeared on a screen inlaid into the table before Vicky. Most of it was too cryptic for her to make sense of though it helped her follow the conversation.
The industrialists were quite happy with what Vicky had brought back from her “smuggling run,” as they called it. They seemed especially delighted that a Peterwald was doing their smuggling. There was one problem; Kiev would be slow to install and staff several of the fabs they had ordered.
St. Petersburg was only too willing to take the delivery and promised to have them up and running within the week. They were updated versions of fabricators that they had traded for food from Sevastopol during the worst of the troubles. The industrialists from St. Pete promised to let Kiev have their delivery when it came in from Brunswick in a month, two at the most.
Kiev, however, was very unwilling to let go of the machinery. The distrust was palpable from the previously agricultural hinterland for the industrial powerhouse that had kept them as a cheap resource for food and fiber while charging them an arm and a leg for finished goods.
Mannie raised an eyebrow to Vicky.
“I think I can speak for the Navy in this,” Vicky said. “Since it is our heavy landing craft that are delivering the oversized loads for the fabs, I can assure you that the next delivery will go as we now agree to. If we agree today that Kiev gets more of the Brunswick cargo, I can give you my word that that is exactly the way it will be distributed.”
“Is the word of a Peterwald any good?” someone Vicky didn’t recognize opined.
“The word of this one is,” Vicky said flatly.
“That settles that,” said the mayor of Kiev, whom Vicky recognized from his profuse apology for her being kidnapped while visiting his city. He glanced at the industrialists and bankers around him. They nodded agreement.
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